Alien Game

by Rod Walker

  Mr. Royale laughed. “I appreciate a man with a firm grasp of the facts. You leave for Arborea tomorrow with another of my employees, a man named Winston Tanner. He knows his business, and I want you to assist him however he sees fit.”

  “What are we supposed to do?” I said.

  “Two things,” said Mr. Royale. “First, make sure the Safari Company is a success. Second, investigate any irregularities, because there have been a lot of questionable irregularities. I suspect one of the other investors is trying to sabotage the project.”

  “I will, sir,” I said.

  At the time, I was pretty excited. A new world! I had never thought I would leave New Princeton, but the prospect of traveling to another planet was exciting.

  Though if I had known how much trouble there was on Arborea, maybe I would have stayed on New Princeton.

  Chapter 2: Environmentalism For Fun And Profit

  First, I had to get my shots. Arborea had a wide variety of microorganisms and viruses, all of which regarded humans the same way Theresa viewed a vegetarian KwikBreet when she was ravenous. Mr. Royale sent me to the nearest clinic, and a doctor pumped me full of a dozen shots and made me swallow three or four handfuls of pills. I spent the rest of the day feverish and sweating, but once the side effects wore off, I was supposed to be immune to the various diseases spawned in Arborea’s jungles.

  That was the theory, anyhow.

  The next day I took a taxi to Wilson City’s spaceport and met Winston Tanner for the first time.

  Tanner was waiting for me in the observation lounge. He was middle-aged and bald, with an impressive beer gut, but he had arms as thick as my legs, and the hard expression I had come to associate with men who had left the Security Ministry for more lucrative employment in the field of private practice. When I met him, he was cracking walnuts with one hand, popping the nut into his mouth and tucking the shards of the shell away into a waste bag.

  He looked up as I approached. “You’re the kid with the spray paint?”

  “Um,” I said. “Yes. My name’s Sam Hammond. You must be Mr. Tanner?”

  “Just Tanner,” he said, finishing off his last walnut and getting to his feet. We shook hands, and I had the suspicion he could have crushed my hand like one of those walnuts shells if he had felt like it. “You’ve got your stuff?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. Everything I needed was in my backpack and a wheeled suitcase.

  “Right,” said Tanner, grabbing his own bags. “We’re taking a shuttle to the orbital platform, and then a warp liner out to Arborea. Let’s get a move on, Spraycan.”

  It seemed I had just acquired a nickname. I can’t say I was enthusiastic about it, but it could have been worse. And I couldn’t pretend I hadn’t earned it.

  We checked in the counter, presented our tickets, and boarded the shuttle, and a few minutes later I had my first experience with spaceflight.

  I confess I did not care for it. As I kid I had from time to time thought about joining a merchant ship, flying the circuits between the various colony worlds founded by the scores of human governments scattered across the galaxy, as not all the governments were as restrictive with their colonization policies, but there were so many legal hoops and requirements that I abandoned the idea. Plus, as it happens, taking off hurts. The shuttle lifted off with a roar, the acceleration pressing me into my seat, and for a few moments, I thought I would explode like a tomato squished beneath a car wheel.

  It did get more pleasant once we got loose of New Princeton’s gravity well and into orbit, allowing the shuttle’s artificial gravity systems to compensate for inertia and generate an illusion of planetary gravity. I gaped wide-eyed at the curvature of the planet, at the green continents and blue oceans and white clouds. It was so huge! Wilson City and Uncle Morgan’s farm had been my entire world, and I had thought Wilson City vast beyond reckoning.

  On the face of New Princeton, Wilson City was just a glowing smudge… and even New Prince was just one world among thousands.

  “It’s so little,” I heard myself.

  “Yup,” said Tanner, not looking up from his reader. He was reading a magazine about hunting firearms. Most of the article seemed to feature a bikini-clad woman holding the hunting rifle in question.

  “I mean… I never realized it was so big out here,” I said. I realized that sounded lame, so I decided to stop talking.

  For the first time, Tanner looked up from his reader. “First time up here?”

  I nodded.

  Tanner grunted. “Well, I told Mr. Royale to find me a farm kid for this business and looks like he came through. Have you ever been off the farm before?”

  “I lived in Wilson City for a while,” I said.

  “Right,” said Tanner. “Wilson City. If that isn’t the big bad universe, than nothing is.” He took me a minute to detect the sarcasm. “Still, the entire planet of Arborea has as much people as maybe one Basic Income housing block in Wilson City. So long as you can handle yourself outdoors, you’ll be up for the job.”

  “About that,” I said. “What exactly will we be doing?”

  Tanner grunted. “My title is Security Director. That means I’m responsible for all forms of security. Yours is Indentured Worker to the Security Director, which means you do what I tell you, make yourself useful, and don’t get yourself eaten by a tromosaur.”

  “Tromosaur?” I said. “What is a tromosaur?”

  “Apex predator in Arborea,” said Tanner. “One of them, anyway. Don’t worry. You’ll find out soon enough, assuming you don’t get eaten.”

  That was not a reassuring thought.

  “Can I ask another question?” I said.

  Tanner nodded, not impatient, but not exactly interested, either.

  “What does Mr. Royale want us to do?” I said.

  Tanner considered that for a moment. “He’s a major investor in the Safari Company, but he’s not the only one.”

  “He mentioned some internal issues. Is that a form of security?”

  “Yeah. Our main objective, whatever our official responsibilities might be,” said Tanner, “is to make sure that the Company isn’t sabotaged from within. We’re going to check into irregularities and things like that. Make sure that Mr. Royale doesn’t waste his money.” He tapped his reader to turn the page, revealing an article topped by an image of a woman in a very small swimsuit holding a very large gun. “But this isn’t the place to talk about it. We’ll discuss it more later.”

  With that, he returned his attention to his reader.

  It was a four-hour flight to the orbital station. We disembarked from the shuttle, and I looked around with wide eyes at everything. The station was shaped like a big metal doughnut, with concourses across its circumference. The concourses themselves looked kind of like a combination of a dock yard, a cargo bay, and a shopping mall. Thousands of people went about their business, and I even saw my first aliens, creatures that looked vaguely like ambulatory humanoid elephants. Evidently, they came from a star system a long distance away and traded rare ore for certain forms of fungus that only grew upon New Princeton.

  Tanner and I then boarded a starliner, a hyperspace-capable passenger ship called the Kennedy. The ship had dozens of luxurious staterooms, opulent restaurants, and even a casino with card tables. Alas, Mr. Royale did not believe in such extravagances, so Tanner and I shared a cabin in third class. At least it was clean, thanks to the ship’s housekeeping drones.

  An hour later, the Kennedy activated its hyperdrive, setting out on the circuit of a hundred worlds it covered, and I learned something unpleasant about myself.

  “Ah, don’t worry about it,” said Tanner, clapping me on the back once I had finished throwing up the last of my breakfast into the toilet. “The first jump is tricky for everyone. Could be worse. I knew a guy who crapped himself in front of his fiancée the first time he was on a ship that went to hyperdrive.”

  “Thanks so much,” I croaked, rummaging through the basket of compl
imentary toiletries to find some mouthwash.

  “Take these,” said Tanner, lifting a little vial of pills from the basket. He slapped a memory card next to the pills. “Then start reading these. It’ll help get you up to speed on Safari Company and Outpost Town.”

  “Outpost Town?” I said.

  “The Company’s headquarters on Arborea,” said Tanner.

  I had hoped to explore the ship, at least the third-class portions of it, but my stomach did not agree with hyperspace travel at all and I felt terrible. So instead I camped out in my bunk, plugged Tanner’s memory card into my reader, and read up on Safari Company and its operations on Arborea. To my surprise, all the manuals were actually useful. I had read enough tractor and engine manuals to realize that not all technical writers were created equal, but whoever had written Safari Company’s manuals had done a good job.

  So when the Kennedy exited hyperspace above Arborea we rode the shuttle down to Outpost Town, I wasn’t completely disoriented.

  Arborea looked… well, from orbit, Arborea looked amazing.

  It didn’t look anything like New Princeton. Arborea looked mostly green from orbit, with white at the polar ice caps. The green of the continents was a harsh color. The seas were mostly green as well, though they faded to blue at the center. According to the manuals, the green came from the algae that grew in the waters, algae that supported a wide variety of sea life. The Safari Company let more enterprising guests rent boats to go fishing, though this was dangerous because some of the sea creatures could swallow the boats in one gulp.

  That is one thing I should mention about Arborea. I had never heard the term “megafauna” before reading the manuals, but that was an accurate description of many of the native species on Arborea. It means “really, really big animals.” When Mr. Royale had described the Safari Company to me, I had a mental picture of a bunch of rich guys getting in a jeep, driving out in the countryside of New Princeton, and shooting fangwolves.

  It had never occurred to me that some of the predators on Arborea would make fangwolves look like cuddly little puppies.

  We rode the shuttle down from the Kennedy to Outpost Town on Arborea’s central continent, which did not as yet have an official name. I noticed that most of our fellow passengers appeared to be wealthy, possibly wealthy enough to afford their own suites in first-class. After that, I stopped paying attention to the passengers because my stomach did not approve of atmospheric reentry. I took some pills that Tanner gave me and closed my eyes until the nausea passed.

  “I told Mr. Royale to find me a farm kid,” said Tanner, “and he came through.” For the first time since leaving New Princeton, he sounded amused. “You’re such a farm kid that you don’t like to fly at all.”

  “Flying’s fine,” I said, the shuttle shuddering with reentry, fire flaring past the windows. “I don’t mind it. Now if you can convince my stomach of that…”

  Fortunately, our flight soon leveled out, the pilot switching on the antigrav drive, and I watched through the windows as we flew over miles of vivid green jungle until Outpost Town came into sight.

  It looked… well, it looked like an expensive resort.

  It was laid out like a little town, with the main street lined with hotels, restaurants, and fancy shops. Behind the hotels, discreetly out of sight, were lower, blockier buildings that housed the staff quarters and the offices and the mechanical plants. One side of Outpost Town faced the green waters of the ocean, though with the microflora count in those waters, no one in their right mind would want to swim in it. The rest of the town faced the jungle, and the trees and the plants had been cut down for a half mile in every direction. At the edge of the cleared land stood a fence of black posts topped with sonic alarms every thirty yards. From what I had read, the tromosaurs hated ultra high-frequency noises, and so the sonic alarms emitted a constant whistle inaudible to human ears. If a tromosaur pack tried to breach the fence, the sonic alarms would increase in volume and radio back to Outpost Town, and a security team would go out in a hurry.

  I wondered if the tromosaurs were really that dangerous.

  Our shuttle touched down on the landing pad, and the rich passengers got out first. Tanner and I gathered our bags and disembarked after them. A small army of sleek white service drones manufactured to look vaguely like women, attended to the passengers. The part of my brain devoted to mechanics pointed out how inefficient using two legs was for robotic locomotion. A set of treads would really have been more efficient, though it would have ruined the aesthetic. Another part of my brain noticed that it was much hotter and humid than on New Princeton, and I probably wouldn’t need the coats I had packed.

  The rest of my brain noticed the pretty woman heading towards us.

  She was somewhere in her thirties, and even though she was wearing a loose blue jumpsuit, I could tell that she was in good shape. She had long coppery red hair tied back in a tail and bright blue eyes and a wide smile went over her face as she saw Tanner.

  “Winston!” she said, and for the first time, I saw Tanner smile. He dropped his bags and swallowed her in a hug. “You were gone too long.”

  “The problems of business, my dear,” said Tanner. “You know how Mr. Royale likes to talk.”

  “The only thing he likes more than talking is making money,” said the woman. Her eyes shifted to me. “He sent you that assistant?”

  “He did,” said Tanner. “Sam Hammond, this is my wife, Kayla.”

  She smiled at me, and my brain froze up a little. Fortunately, my mother had been a fanatic about drilling proper manners into me, and I was grateful to fall back on them now.

  I wished I could have thanked her for that.

  “Ma’am,” I said, sticking out my right hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Tanner.”

  Kayla shook my hand. “Likewise. You can call me Kayla.”

  I saw Tanner staring at me. Suddenly I remembered him crushing those walnuts in the spaceport, and I had a brief vision of him doing the exact same thing to my head.

  “Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” I said.

  Kayla laughed, and Tanner nodded approvingly.

  “Well, Mr. Hammond, I hope you are helpful to my husband,” said Kayla. “We have a lot of work to do here, and not enough hands for it all.”

  “Yes, Mrs. Tanner,” I said. That seemed like a safe answer.

  “Hopkins wanted to see you right away,” said Kayla.

  Tanner groaned. “I suppose he wants to complain.”

  “Now, now,” said Kayla, slipping her arm through his. “He’s good at his job.”

  “Fine,” said Tanner. “I’ll talk to him. And then I’m spending the rest of the day with you.” He gestured at me. “Come on, Spraycan. We’ll find something useful for you to do. You can start by carrying our bags.”

  Tanner’s stuff was heavy, but it was a lot better than spending time in prison for something as stupid as vandalizing Acadarchy property, so I didn’t complain. I suppose in the distant past men made stirring speeches when stepping upon a new world for the first time. I spent my first moments on a new world dragging Tanner’s baggage behind me while he discussed dinner with his wife. We stopped by Tanner’s suite in the staff barracks to drop off Kayla and Tanner’s bags, and then I followed Tanner to the administrative building.

  Despite Outpost Town’s outer glitz and shine, there was a lot of work still to be done. I saw bundles of wires hanging from the ceiling here and there, or walls pulled aside to reveal ductwork and conduits. All the buildings were the sort of cheap prefab stuff that the automated factories on New Princeton could turn out in a hurry.

  Tanner turned a corner, and we stepped into a small office. A half-dozen computer monitors sat on the office’s L-shaped desk, and stacks of paper covered the rest of its surface. A bug zapper hung from the ceiling in the corner, drawing odd green-shelled insects with twelve legs. At the desk sat a fat man in a short-sleeved shirt, bald and red-faced, his expression a massive scowl as he glared at a monitor
displaying a spreadsheet.

  “Hoskins?” said Tanner. “Kayla said you wanted to see me.”

  “Ah!” said Hoskins, heaving himself to his feet with a grunt. “You’re back! How was the trip?”

  “Uneventful enough,” said Tanner. “Royale and the other investors are on board, so we’ll have time yet.”

  “Good,” said Hoskins, producing a soiled handkerchief and mopping his brow. “The construction is having trouble hitting dates. This is the sixth time we’ve had to revise the schedule.” He seemed to see me for the first time. “Who’s this?”

  “Tom Hoskins, meet Sam Hammond, my new deputy,” said Tanner. “Royale insisted.” Hoskins stuck out his hand, and I shook it. “Best part is he’s indentured for eighteen months, so we just have to feed him. We don’t have to pay him.”

  “Splendid,” said Hoskins. His eyes narrowed. “Why are you indentured?”

  “Nothing very exciting,” I told him. “I spray-painted a sign on the EcoMin campus.”

  Hoskins blinked, and then laughed. “Ha! I heard about that! That was funny. Stupid, but funny.” He clapped Tanner on the shoulder, circled his desk, and sat back down with a sigh. “Don’t try that here. Else Mr. Charles will have a word with you.”

  Tanner groaned. “That lunatic is still here?”

  “He’s Chief Guide now,” said Hoskins. “He’s a little peculiar, but he’s very good at his job. Anyway, I’ve got bigger problems. That load of construction drones? Defective, the lot of them. No one’s qualified to fix them, and New Princeton Robotics refuses to honor the warranty…”

  Tanner grunted, and then jerked a thumb at me. “The kid’s supposed to be pretty good with mechanical stuff.”

  “You are?” said Hoskins, heaving himself out of his seat again. “Then follow me.”

  I started to follow him, but Tanner caught my arm.

  “Keep a careful eye out,” he said in a quiet voice. “Watch for anything unusual.”

  And that was my introduction to life at Outpost Town.