Propelled ahead with his kidnappers, Jamie squirmed. They’re taking me to the whirlibang! They’re taking me away!
Jamie began screaming again, indifferent to any threat. He saw the supply ’box tethered ahead and clawed for it — something familiar, something from home. Maybe some of his so-called bodyguards were inside!
The leader in black made a beeline for him, yanking him free from those holding him and slamming him against the side of the supply ’box. An ebon fist struck Jamie squarely in the nose, drawing blood.
“Stop!” a voice called out from behind. The brute turned his head to see what Jamie saw: Bridget in her environment suit, her magnetized boots holding her to the inside wall of the Shaft. “Don’t be smacking our trader like that,” Bridget yelled. “Not before I’ve had the chance!”
10
Kolvax looked back in surprise. It was the human woman from the airlock — and she wasn’t alone. Other soldiers emerged from the hatchways, climbing out onto the skin of the vast tube, weapons drawn.
He didn’t hesitate. Many of his followers had come from the Xylanx Stalker units he’d once led. The Severed could fight, he knew. He shoved his captive aside, the human’s bright red blood still on Kolvax’s glove.
“Stay here, stripling,” he barked at the human. “Faithful, attack!”
***
What the hell are these guys?
Bridget sidestepped as a burst of energy flashed past, striking the Shaft wall next to her booted feet. She’d thought her teammates were big, but Jamie had found himself a gorilla army — or they had found him.
She’d seen the massive silver-armored figures when Trovatelli got the station’s surveillance system unlocked. Some tall, some beefy, all big — and whoever they were, they weren’t worried about damaging the depot. On the black-clad puncher’s command the flying people had opened up on her comrades with energy and missile weapons. Bridget hadn’t understood their leader’s words, but she had a good idea what he’d said.
Bridget figured the missile weapons weren’t going to hurt the station this deep inside, but they could certainly do a number on her. She slid her legs back into the hatch she’d emerged from. Twisting, she snapped a tether from her suit to an anchor inside the hatchway. “Get back in the hatches and strafe with pulse weaponry,” Bridget called into her mouthpiece.
It was the craziest combat setting she’d ever encountered: flying enemies in zero gee shooting at her people, who were attached like flies to the cylindrical wall. But the hatchways provided cover, enough to turn the tables and transform the place into a shooting gallery.
The only needed to give Geena Madaki time. And the pilot was already in motion.
***
There was chaos all around. But Jamie only saw the blood from his nose, coalescing into droplets and bobbing in front of him. He had already felt sick from the weightlessness and panic. Now, he felt weak and disoriented. The armored bully had turned his back on him, but it didn’t matter. Jamie couldn’t see anywhere to go — and increasingly, he couldn’t see at all.
Helmetless head lolling against the collar of his environment suit, Jamie thought he saw a metal monster coming toward him, its claws extending. Confused, he also thought he saw the face of Madaki, their shuttle pilot, in the mouth of the machine. A tug on his leg was the last thing he felt before he blacked out.
***
Damnation!
Kolvax spun to avoid a shot from one side — and then from another. This was no good. By keeping her people in the holes like rodents, the dark-hair had put the Xylanx in a crossfire. He was sure his people could take the humans in close quarters, but that effort would take time — time in which more humans could arrive. But it cut to his spine to leave a fight unfinished.
Tellmer scrambled frantically around the corner of the tethered container he was using for cover. Kolvax’s aide had parted from the company long enough to flash-freeze his severed limb at a prep station. Tellmer looked around, worried. “We should go, Great Kolvax!” He waggled his detached limb — hard as a rock. “You said we shouldn’t leave anything for them to study. If any of us fall, that’d be something indeed!”
Damn it all again, Kolvax thought. Yes, the original plan was the right one. His captive would still be of use as a hostage, and then back home. He fired his backpack jets and darted around a floating cargo container.
The sniveling human was gone. An airborne cargo tender was backing away under its own power, a body slumped across two of its robotic arms. The station had several of them in this chamber — and evidently the humans knew it, too. Kolvax saw a human woman with a brown face at the controls inside the cab of the tender. The tender fired its thrusters, coasting away from him.
Rumber saw it, too. She looked at him. “Should we go after them?”
Kolvax started to say something…
Then he stopped and looked at his hand. “No. We go to the transit ring — all of us. Hurry!”
The Xylanx turned as one on Kolvax’s transmitted command. Weaving in between the blasts, the silver behemoths rocketed toward the cylinder’s center and the egress that led to the whirlibang. It took them out of range of the humans.
Kolvax saw through the tunnel the access leading to the passenger container. It had sat there for months, taunting them with the possibility of a return flight home. Now Rumber paused, not wanting to go further. “We don’t have the human,” she said, anger rising. “The Dominium will kill us if we return — you know that!”
“It’s all right,” Kolvax said. He looked at the back of his glove, encrusted with the human’s blood. “I think we have our pardon right here!”
***
Jamie opened his eyes to lights. He was on one of the middle decks, with just enough simulated gravity to keep him on the ground — but he wasn’t going to be moving anywhere. Perhaps ever. “I’m…dying,” he said, gasping. “Blood…loss. Help me…”
Kneeling over him, Bridget rolled her eyes. “Just breathe,” she said, placing a mask over his mouth. “You’ve just got a bloodied nose.”
“But…”
“The air along the center line of the Shaft cylinder isn’t as dense as it is out where the station’s rotating,” she said. “The floors farthest from the axis have the most oxygen. I don’t think the Regulans intended for humans to work in that area.” Bridget stood. “Your new friends remembered their helmets.”
Jamie sat up, throat dry. “They’re not my friends,” he said, coughing.
“Are you sure?” Bridget stepped to a counter in the medical clinic and pitched Jamie a water flask. “I thought maybe in all your scheming you hired a mercenary army to bring you home.”
“Hardly! They weren’t even human!” Jamie drank thirstily. Wiping his face, he glared at Bridget. “You saw them!”
“Armored guys, strange weapons? Check. They were just bigger than you. That’s not a tall order.” She turned to see O’Herlihy and Trovatelli sliding down the ladder from above. “What do you have?”
“Jack and squat,” O’Herlihy said. “They took off in that one ’box that was loaded up in the Echo ring — wherever that goes.”
Bridget looked to Trovatelli. “There’s no record in the database of it,” the young tech explained. “The logs say it made the handshake with the whirlibang wherever they were going. That’s all.”
“Shut it down,” Bridget said.
“Already done.” Their visitors wouldn’t be able to return using the way they’d left.
Bridget ordered O’Herlihy to lead his squad on a sweep of everything — including the south bell of the station, which had never been occupied. “Give me everything,” she said. “Fingerprints, eyelashes, the works. If these guys spit on the floor, I want to see it.”
“Loogie patrol. Fun.” O’Herlihy cracked a smile and went off.
“I’m telling you, they weren’t human,” Jamie groaned, lying back down on the floor. It was cool and comforting, and he appreciated the Regulans for putting it there. �
��Not human. Not. They were speaking gibberish!”
“You think every human speaks English?” Bridget glanced at her Q/A and clicked her tongue scornfully. “Yes, you probably do.”
Jamie rubbed his nose. “Look, I can read a bottle of wine. But these guys weren’t talking in anything I’ve ever heard.”
“Wait. They were in environment suits?” Trovatelli asked.
Jamie rolled on his side and looked at the young woman, stunned that anyone was finally taking an interest. “Yeah. They had public address speakers or something — same as you guys in your armor.”
Trovatelli looked at Bridget. “They’re oxy breathers.”
“How do you figure?”
“Because you heard the leader speak,” the younger woman said. “If they couldn’t breathe the air, why would they need public address systems to talk? They’d talk via their helmet mics, like we do when we’re in space.” She looked down at Jamie. “They must sometimes take them off.”
“You see?” Bridget said, again impressed by her new recruit. “Oxygen breathers. Maybe one of the pirate outfits.” While no one could make unauthorized use of the whirlibangs in the Solar System, there were other entry points across the Orion Arm and more than enough human settlements to generate a crime problem. Where there was commerce, there was piracy. “Maybe they grew up in low-grav and grew tall,” she said. “But human enough.”
“Maybe,” Trovatelli said. “But maybe not. The database interfaces weren’t set to Regulan or anything in our knowglobe. That’s why I’ve had so much trouble with it. Do pirates have their own language?”
Bridget stared. Stepping over to a console, she took a look at the characters on the isopanel. “Huh.”
“You see?” Jamie looked over at the Q/A. “Thank you—”
“Lissa,” she said, nodding pleasantly.
“Lissa believes me.”
“I didn’t say that,” Trovatelli said. “Just that all the evidence isn’t in.”
Bridget turned. “Okay,” she said. “Check the security logs. Surveillance recordings. Everything.”
Trovatelli rubbed her chin. “If they locked me out, they could easily have purged—”
“Which should be no problem for you,” Bridget said as the tech walked out. “I have faith in my staff.”
Seeing the man Trovatelli passed in the doorway, Bridget blanched. “On the other hand…”
“You!” Jamie turned to see the orange-haired Osakan in uniform. It was Hiro Welligan, the squad leader who had abandoned him — ultimately leaving him to the kidnappers. Jamie stormed toward him. “You nearly got me killed, you son of a—”
Welligan smiled broadly and held up his hands. “Hey, we did shoot at them for you.” His eyes lit up. “Thanks for finding them for us.”
“Thanks for…?” Infuriated, Jamie grabbed for the trooper.
Bridget interceded. Breaking them up, she glared at her underling. “You did leave him, Hiro.”
“He called me a jackbooted thug!” Welligan said. He looked at Jamie. “Er…what’s a jackboot?”
“It’ll be the thing up your ass if you ditch him again,” Bridget said.
Jamie thought she looked serious about it. The trader had watched the team long enough to know Welligan’s role: he was the clown of the crew, right down to the spectral hair. Hiro had gone for the EndoSys follicular implants, which took the whole skin-printing thing a step beyond. The guy’s hair went from orange to a cool and calming blue as he dipped his head and grinned in embarrassment before his boss. Jamie had known guys like Welligan on the bourse. They tried too hard, and their jocularity was usually covering up for an inability to make a sale. Jamie was glad to see that Bridget didn’t seem to be buying it, either. The grin fled Hiro’s face, and he seemed to wilt under his superior’s scrutiny.
Duly chastened, Welligan passed Bridget a packet. “Bangbox just in from Altair,” he said. “Falcone’s gathered the logistical crews from ASPEC — they’re heading here soon. He wants the first trading mission underway before he arrives.”
“Trading mission?” Jamie goggled. “I just got kidnapped!”
Welligan’s hair changed to an inspiring white with flowing, animated red stripes. “Got to save our jobs, ace.”
“That,” Jamie said, glaring, “presumes you were doing one in the first place.”
Looking tired, Bridget just shrugged.
11
Alabeyd hadn’t really felt like another world to Jamie. He hadn’t ventured outside the ASPEC facility onto the asteroid’s surface, and he already knew from the shuttle’s approach run that there wasn’t anything to see out there. Apart from the heap of debris that had once been his future, that was.
Stepping out of the transport onto Baghula, however, finally felt like the real deal. The red dwarf Struve 2398A loomed freakishly large overhead, a muted tangerine in the chlorine-rich haze. Baghula was closer to Struve than Mercury was to the Sun, but Struve was enough past its prime that it wasn’t doing much, even with this face of the planet always toward the star.
Struve and Baghula were at the near edge of their expedition’s sales territory, but Jamie already felt like it was the deep end. Survey reports shared with humanity by other Signatory members said there was an intelligent life-form on the planet, but it was so exotic that it had resisted all trading attempts. Jamie thought humanity’s neighbor trading species were strange enough as it was. Anything too weird for them to handle was something he didn’t want to mess with.
Mercifully, the trip in from Sigma Draconis had been his shortest hop yet. Struve’s whirlibang station didn’t require human attendants to run, but Falcone would send some anyway if it proved to be the hoped-for link in a logistical chain. Comprising two crew ’boxes, an engine, and the general store, the shuttle Prospector had made the short trip from the Struve whirlibang to land at coordinates sent up by a local survey team. The explorers had sounded surprised to get their hail; it didn’t seem like they got many visitors here.
Setting his briefcase down on Baghula’s surface, Jamie understood why. He didn’t know who or what had installed the whirlibang in the system, but it seemed a waste of effort. Bridget had said the place looked “pleasant and calm” just before she and her squad had left on their recon minutes earlier. “Calm” he agreed with — but he could hardly call the place “pleasant.” Generated by the local life-forms and the briny lakes they lived in, the chlorine in the atmosphere contributed to a greenish-yellow fog that both limited visibility and made everything else look like a mirage.
Jamie checked the seals again on his SoftSHEL environment suit. Apart from the circulation pack, it wasn’t much more than a jumpsuit, gloves, boots, and a fishbowl helmet. No wonder the traders needed guards if Quaestor dressed them like this. On the shuttle, Jamie had carped that Bridget’s team got to be in its regular battle gear. She’d retorted that the trader needed to look nonthreatening — although she added that their particular trader probably didn’t require the extra effort.
Jamie stood around for a minute before he looked back at Welligan. Hiro’s squad had remained to form a safety perimeter around the shuttle, but Jamie still wasn’t talking to him. But now he was growing impatient. He raised his arms. “What am I waiting for?”
Welligan pointed behind Jamie to a sloping rise leading off into the haze. Something was moving there, something big. Jamie started to turn, but Welligan wasn’t looking alarmed.
Jamie didn’t understand why. A giant wheel, three meters tall, rolled over the hill toward him. Through the haze, Jamie could see jagged, angry teeth around the wheel’s circumference biting into the green-stained sand and propelling it along. Four robotic arms extended from either side of the wheel, helping to pull the contraption ahead. The rolling monstrosity rumbled toward Jamie.
“Stop!” Jamie yelled, unaware if the thing could hear him over his mic, since he had never tested his public address system. But before the trader could turn to run from the wheel, its robotic arms closest t
o the ground plunged into the muck, halting the vehicle’s advance.
And it was a vehicle — for the unseen alien that rode inside the egg-like passenger compartment that was the wheel’s hub. “I’m so sorry to have startled you, sir,” a female voice cooed over his headset.
“Bridget!” Jamie yelled. “Bridget, I’ve got a native over here! And it’s talking!”
Bridget stepped through the fog, rifle slung. She smiled. “That’s not a native. That’s our tour guide.”
“Oh, dear,” the wheel said, tilting left. Jamie could see the spongy alien peering through the egg’s viewport now. It wasn’t much more than a gray mass. “I’m sorry to have disturbed your friend, Chief Yang.”
Jamie stared at the thing, startled. “Er…not a problem.”
“Welcome to Baghula,” the frothy voice said. “I hope you’ll have a wonderful stay here, Mister—”
“Sturm,” Jamie said. He tugged at the ridiculous identification badge on his chest.
“Oh, a trader!” The wheel bounced up and down excitedly. “None have come for so long. I am just sure the Baghu will greet you warmly this time.”
Jamie looked with concern. “What do they usually do?”
The wheel giggled — and Jamie took a step back, never having heard a wheel giggle before. “The Baghu are perfectly harmless, silly. They’re just…particular about who they welcome into their community.” The wheel pivoted back to face the hill, and the thing inside its hub gave something that sounded to Jamie like a sigh. “I’ve been here for years researching them — to little avail, I’m afraid. You can call me Lorraine.”
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