The frozen alien was from a race I’d never seen, a species my threading could find no optical match for. He had a squarish head covered with taut, light brown skin, with large round eyes deeply inset below a protruding brow. Below his eyes was a flat nose with a single horizontal nostril and an almost human-like mouth, although his ears were little more than vertical slits in his bony cranium.
Over his body, he wore a dark flexible body suit with matching boots and a belt that had been stripped of attachments. Several thin rectangular plates lay beside him, having fallen from his suit, although there was no clue as to their purpose. I retrieved one of the plates and wiped it clean of frost, revealing a column of finely engraved symbols that my threading couldn’t identify. Whatever the language, it wasn’t from a species the EIS had ever encountered. The symbols appeared to be control points, but when I touched them, there was no response, indicating whatever the device it was, it was as lifeless as its owner.
At a guess, his brain to body mass was close to man’s, so if he was ahead of us on the evolutionary ladder, it wasn’t by much. I considered trying to revive him, but the metallic click of the pressure door unlocking sounded behind me. I quickly pocketed the rectangular plate, closed the cryochamber and took cover among the VRS containers at the back of the hold. A moment later, Anya and Captain Nazari stepped through the aft pressure door and started across the cargo deck toward the open door.
“I won’t use marked navpoints,” Nazari said in his slurring Cali accent. “It will allow me to avoid Earth Navy inspections. I just hope your Drake friends know enough to leave me alone.”
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Anya replied as they approached the stasis cradle. “Rix is a secretive bastard. He hardly tells me anything and I’ve been with him five years.”
“If I’m attacked, I’ll tell them I work for the great Captain Rix.”
“They wouldn’t believe you. And even if they did, they’d kill you just to stop you telling Rix what happened.” She gave him a meaningful look. “He’s not the forgiving type.”
“So, I’m on my own,” Nazari concluded nervously.
“You’ve got fast bubble. You’ll be OK.”
They stopped close to the white hemisphere to study it a moment. The two slugs I’d fired were on the opposite side, out of sight, and were slowly being expelled by the stasis field.
“You don’t know what it does?” Nazari asked without noticing where I’d wiped frost from the cryochamber’s transparent surface a few meters away.
She shook her head. “Only Trask and his technical advisor know, and they won’t even tell Rix.”
They continued on toward the open cargo door. Nazari produced a small red stimhaler, pressed the spout to one nostril and breathed deeply, then exhaled a crimson vapor.
Anya stepped away with a scowl on her face. “Be careful with that stuff, you’ve got a ship to fly.”
“It calms my nerves. You saw how the skinny one looks at me? Like he is waiting to slit my throat! On my own ship!”
“Do you have a gun?”
“I have three,” Nazari said, “but I am no fighter.”
“You won’t be if you fry your brains with that stuff,” she said, nodding toward his stimhaler.
He sniffed, wiped his eyes, then grinned mischievously. “You want a try? First one free!”
Anya scowled. “No thanks, I like to keep a clear head.”
“I’ll be glad when this is over and I’m back running contraband through Ursa.”
“Over?” Anya gave him a surprised look. “This is just the beginning.”
Nazari looked miserable. “See? They tell me nothing. I am less than dirt to them.”
One of my slugs finally reached the edge of the stasis field surrounding the alien-tech machine and fell to the deck, landing with a reverberating clang.
Anya spun around, drawing her gun. “What was that?”
Nazari turned more slowly due to his tranquilized reflexes and waved dismissively. “Ah! This old ship is always creaking!”
Anya studied the cargo hold, missing the remaining slug floating high in the stasis field. She holstered her gun and turned back to him. “I’ll see you at Loport in four weeks. Don’t be late.” She studied his bloodshot eyes, adding, “And lay off the stims. They’ll kill you!”
The Merak Star’s captain nodded weakly. “Maybe, when they let me go back to Ursa.”
Anya strode down the door-ramp, then Nazari ambled back across the cargo hold and passed through the forward pressure door. When the hold was deserted again, I crept from my hiding place to the cargo door. Anya was walking up the vehicle ramp into the black hulled Cyclops behind a laden cargobot. When she was out of sight, I jumped down to the ground and hurried back under the Merak Star, then slipped back through the Permian proto-forest to the tent market.
Once back on dry land, I headed for the Silver Lining through narrow tent alleys, past endless black market stalls, careful to keep the bottle of ball lightning well hidden inside my jacket.
Once aboard the Silver Lining, I went straight to engineering and handed the alien-tech cylinder to Izin for analysis. He turned it over curiously, then placed it in his particle analyzer.
“Do you have any idea what it’s used for, Captain?” he asked, watching the output screen.
“That’s what I want you to tell me.”
After the analyzer had completed several passes, he said, “There’s a containment field surrounding the material. Whatever it is, our analyzer can’t penetrate it.”
“Can we open it?”
“I wouldn’t recommend it. If the substance is highly reactive, there may be an energy release of unknown proportions. If you must open it, Captain, I would do so in a remote location, such as the other side of this planet.”
While I was still deciding what to do, an alarm sounded.
Izin turned to his console, searching for the cause. “It’s the Rashidun,” he said. “They’ve declared a general evacuation. The Souk is over.”
“Stow that thing in our smuggler compartment!” I said, pointing at the cylinder of ball lightning as I ran out.
By the time I reached the flight deck, sixteen ships had already launched and were climbing into the sky, brilliant points of light on divergent trajectories. Among them was the Cyclops, which had abandoned whatever of its cargo remained unloaded. The energy levels of the remaining ships were all spiking as they powered up to lift off.
“Jase,” I said over the communicator. “Get up here, we’re leaving.”
The belly sensor had him in its sights. He was engaged in animated discussion with two Republic dealers. In one gesture, he terminated the negotiation, scooped the niskgel containers from the table and charged up the ramp. Before he got to the top, I ordered it to lift and seal.
By the time Jase got to the flight deck, I’d finished a rushed preflight. More than fifty ships had now launched. Most were activating their maneuvering engines as soon as they left the ground with no regard for the down blasts that were tearing the flimsy tent city apart.
Jase slid onto his acceleration couch holding a sculpted bust of a demonic creature. He placed it at the top of his console. When he saw the direction of my gaze, he said, “That’s Kogol, Lord of the Syrman Underworld. It’s a rare art treasure.”
“What did it cost?”
“Eighty grams. The republic dealer told me it’s worth half a million credits to an Earth museum. All we have to do is get it back to Earth!”
I didn’t have the heart to tell him he’d been conned, but I shouldn’t have been surprised. His cabin was already overflowing with rare ‘treasures’ that were just waiting to make him rich.
“There’s only one ship outside the gravity well,” Jase said, quickly checking his sensors. “It’s a merc escort broadcasting the alert.”
“That’s a picket ship.”
It was right where I expected it to be. It had been stationed in the outer system, then had bubbled in to the planet to soun
d the warning when unwelcome company had arrived. It could be hours before the newcomer’s signatures reached Novo Pantanal if they kept their distance, or they could be here any minute if they jumped in after the picket.
Jase saw that preflight was complete, but we hadn’t started powering up. “What are we waiting for?”
“The Merak Star.” If they were recording profiles and we launched, they’d know from our Society registered energy signature we were here. I had to wait until she was gone so we could slip away unnoticed. High above us, the Cyclops cleared orbit and began racing toward minimum safe distance.
“There she goes!” Jase said at last, as the Merak Star lumbered into the air. At fifty meters, her big engines came to life, pushing her into a powerful vertical climb. “The Rashidun escort just bubbled out.”
True to their word, they’d given us one warning, then saved themselves – contract fulfilled.
We watched on the big screen as the remaining ships launched, completing the destruction of the tent city and leaving the Silver Lining alone on the ground. When the raging wind storm finally ended, collapsed tents and tables littered the ground, strewn with valuables abandoned in the rush to evacuate, while high above, several hundred brilliant white stars filled the sky, scattering in all directions.
“Who do you think it is?” Jase asked, wondering what had triggered the end of the Souk.
“Navy or UniPol.” We still weren’t showing any ships in orbit, indicating whoever they were, they were cautious. If they were still out near the edge of the system, they’d have no idea the Rashidun Souk had been abandoned. Only when they jumped in close and started picking up all the energy signatures would they know what had happened.
One by one, the brilliant points of light winked out, then when the Merak Star finally vanished, I turned to the intercom.
“Izin, light her up, we’re going!”
“Right away, Captain.”
Once we had enough power for thrusters, we started climbing. Below us, the Rashidun trading post looked like a tiny village surrounded by a patchwork quilt. Incredibly, for all its notoriety, the floating black market had come to a successful conclusion with no arrests made.
“So, no payback?” Jase asked.
“Not yet, but I haven’t given up.”
He nodded approvingly. “I wouldn’t want to be them.”
“They were Ories,” I said. “O-Force turned merc.”
Jase looked impressed. “Wow, you’re lucky to be alive!”
“Domar Trask is their leader. Ever heard of him?”
“No, I never had much to do with O-Force. Saw them exercise a few times. Crazy bastards,” he said with a touch of admiration. “Maybe you should let this one go.”
“Good advice. If I was smarter, I’d take it.”
“I always wondered how I’d go against those O-Force types,” Jase said thoughtfully. “Guess I’m going to find out.”
“Captain,” Izin’s voice sounded over the intercom, “are you tracking any other ships close by?”
Jase checked his sensors and shook his head. “We’re all alone.”
“I’m detecting a powerful magnetic field a thousand meters to starboard,” Izin said, “and a friction avoidance shockwave from the same area.”
Izin routinely monitored ambient influences we didn’t, especially anything that could interfere with energy and propulsion systems. If he was picking up a pressure wave, something had to be generating it, something our navigational sensors couldn’t see.
Jase double checked his command console while I angled our optics to starboard, filling our screen with nothing but clear blue sky.
“Zero neutrino emissions,” Jase said, confirming if there was a ship out there, it wasn’t running on reactive energy. That meant they’d progressed beyond nuclear physics as a power source, putting them way up there with the Tau Cetins!
“It began following us as soon as we launched,” Izin said.
“Maybe they’re just curious,” Jase suggested, knowing advanced civilizations sometimes buzzed human ships without contacting them just to have a look at tech they’d abandoned long ago, but those were always chance encounters at deep space nav points. This was different. We were inside a planetary atmosphere far from any choke point. Whoever they were, they’d come looking for us.
“Izin, give me a marker,” I said.
A contact icon appeared on the flight deck’s wraparound screen, indicating the anomaly’s position as we continued to climb.
“Time to say hello,” I said, deciding to let them know we weren’t as blind as they thought. I rolled the Lining sharply, threw hard g’s at our internal acceleration field as I opened up the engines and headed straight for the invisible contact.
Jase braced, startled. “Skipper!”
The contact marker flashed off to the side of the screen with a burst of super acceleration, easily avoiding us. “That’s what I was afraid of.”
“What?”
“They’re too fast to ram.”
Jase looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “I’m glad of that!”
“Izin, are they still matching us?”
“Yes, Captain, same distance, same aspect as before.”
I nosed the Lining up, putting her back on course for our bubble out point. “Enough games.” Whoever they were, we couldn’t catch them or stop them following us. I figured they’d let us know what they wanted when they were ready to talk.
We continued climbing out of the atmosphere, pursued by our invisible shadow, then three new contacts appeared beyond minimum safe distance.
“There they are!” Jase said as their signatures appeared on screen. “No transponders!”
They couldn’t be Earth Navy or UniPol, both of whom broadcast who they were to ensure law abiding ships heaved to when ordered to do so.
“Let’s see them,” I said, angling our trajectory away from the new contacts.
Jase refocused our optics, putting the three incoming ships on screen. They were chevron shaped vessels, painted in elaborate red and orange livery, each individually larger than the Rashidun escorts.
“Shivas?” Jase said surprised.
They were the Rashidun’s main rivals, a Republic syndicate who objected to the success of the floating black market. They would have seen us the moment we saw them, but they made no move toward us. Instead, the three Shiva gunships headed for geostationary orbit above the trading post. As the distance between us widened, I relaxed, certain they were going to let us escape unmolested.
“So now what?” Jase asked.
“We find out what’s in the bottle.” He’d caught a glimpse of it when I’d returned, as mystified by it as I was.
“How are we going do that?”
“Ask the alien-tech experts?” I said, entering our destination into the autonav.
When Jase saw where we were headed, he gave me an incredulous look. “They’ll never let us in!”
I grinned knowingly. If a lowly human trader had been doing the asking, he’d have been right, but an Earth Ambassador was a different matter.
Just before we bubbled, the three Shiva raiders began bombarding the surface from orbit. Jasim Hajjar and his people would already be safely in their shelter, riding out each earthquake sized blast far below the surface. When they emerged in a few weeks, they’d find all that remained of Kedira Town would be a field of steaming craters. In six months, another Kedira would exist close to the remains of the first, ready for the next Souk.
It was the Rashidun way.
Chapter Three : Ansara
Restricted System – Non-Communication Class
Pelani System, Outer Ursa Minor
0.89 Earth Normal Gravity
904 light years from Sol
Tau Cetins
The Silver Lining exited superluminal flight at the edge of the Pelani System’s heliopause, the outer edge of the system’s physical and legal boundaries. Our sensors extended into space as bubble heat rapidly bled from
the hull, then Pelani’s tiny yellow orb appeared in the center of the flight deck’s wraparound screen. A single circular marker indicated the location of the only planet in the system, while concentric rings of indicators identified the locations of thousands of artificial objects orbiting the star. It was a view few human eyes had ever seen, because only our diplomatic ships ever approached restricted systems. Like most Forum members in contact with mankind, the Tau Cetins refused to allow us open access to their inhabited worlds while our probationary status remained.
“There’s only one terrestrial planet orbiting a hundred and forty million clicks out,” Jase said as he studied the sensor data. “No moons, no asteroids, no gas giants, but lots of optical contacts, none of them natural. And the only neutrinos are from the star.”
No surprises there. The TCs had moved beyond reactive energy sources long before Homo sapiens’ distant ancestors had begun roaming the plains of Africa.
“Just your run of the mill Tau Cetin system,” I assured him, knowing from my diplomatic training that all TC systems we’d visited looked like this.
The Pelani System was no mere colony. It had been transformed long ago into a fully developed home for the Tau Cetin Civilization, following a pattern they’d developed over millions of years. The TCs didn’t terraform single planets, they reengineered entire systems to support their way of life. In a real sense, they had home systems rather than home worlds.
The solitary planet was called Ansara, a blue-green orb devoid of natural satellites with an engineered biosphere ideal for avian life. Once, other planets and moons had orbited Pelani, along with billions of pieces of rock and ice circling far out into the frigid depths of interstellar space, but no more. Now nothing larger than a grain of sand remained within a light year of Ansara’s yellow sun. In their place, precisely positioned in concentric orbital rings beyond the planet were thousands of silver hexagonal prisms: two equal flat sides connected by six square surfaces. Each prism was hundreds of kilometers across with a circular hole at its center for ship docking. They’d been constructed from Pelani’s now vanished planets and moons and from material drawn from nearby star systems. Some orbitals floated alone, others were mated side to side forming massive honeycombs in space or were joined end to end creating long multi-segmented super prisms. It was a simple, infinitely expandable design that had served the Tau Cetins for eons.
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