by Mark Wandrey
“We track everything we can. I’ll get the data pulled and sent to you.”
“What about Starbright?” Alan asked, feeling some dread. “Was it destroyed?”
“Destroyed? No. Shot to shit, yes. She’s grounded over there on the far side of those industrial buildings.”
“Grounded? She can’t land.”
“Only 0.2 of a G, remember?” Jill jumped a little and sailed over a meter up before landing. She bowed and spread her arms, making Alan laugh. “We can get her off again, but she’s barely functional. The Pushtal have six missile corvettes, and the Zuul a cruiser. It’s chewed up, like ours, but it’s still in the fight. We wouldn’t stand a chance.”
Impossible for her to see him nod in the CASPer, and he couldn’t open up in this lack of atmosphere. “Pretty fucked up situation,” he said.
“Alan…” His second’s reluctance was clear in the slow drawing out of his name. “The Zuul here might trump whatever agreement you had with the Zuul you rode in with. You know how loyal they are to their own, and I get a feeling the captain here is somebody big in their circles.”
“They’re loyal to what’s right.” Alan considered all he’d learned of the Zuul, between raising his children and the time he’d spent with A’kef and I’kik, and so many of their crew. “The captain stayed behind to make room for another member of my crew.”
“And they’ve seen that you had CASPers made for their kind.”
“They wouldn’t…” Alan stopped, considering. I’kik and A’kef would take nothing that belonged to his children. There was some sort of importance to them, something that interested the other Zuul. He trusted in that as deeply as he trusted in the quality of his company.
But these new Zuul, the ones under contract to the Cartography Guild…the ones Jill had been fighting so long. He didn’t know them. They might be nothing like A’kef and I’kik at all. Entropy knew, Humans could break any kind of way, and Zuul were no different.
Five Zuul CASPers in a fight balanced on a knife edge. Five Zuul CASPers that could give the secrets of the Human weapon to a race that outnumbered them easily.
Shit.
“So who runs this show, the Engineering Guild?”
Jill gave a grunting laugh and shook her head. “You aren’t going to believe it.”
* * *
Alan followed Jill as she headed toward some nearby buildings, moving in a graceful hop/slide motion that spoke of how long she’d been on the dwarf planet. For himself, he used the CASPer’s computer to recalibrate motion, letting the machine do most of the work. He cast a single glance at the medical team tending to Ripley, four reverse-kneed CASPers following close behind.
At one point in their walk, they passed a trio of large, turtle-like beings towing equipment sleds. Their heads regarded the Human and CASPer curiously. “What race is that?” he asked her.
“They’re called the Aku. I suspect our employers bought them as slaves, but I can’t confirm it.”
“Huh,” he said as they left them behind. Eventually the pair reached a building with a largish sealed room, allowing for removal of cold weather and breathing gear. It was big enough to allow Alan to get out of his CASPer and pull on the uniform tunic and pants he’d stowed in the armor’s leg. Of course, the uniform was as cold as the planet, leaving him shivering. He pulled it right over his haptic suit for some extra insulation.
“You okay?” Jill asked as he pulled on a duty hat.
“I’ll survive.” Being from Australia, the jacket he’d packed would be woefully inadequate to the task.
“Meet our employer.” She opened the door into a command center staffed entirely by Zuparti.
“Oh, this just keeps getting better.”
* * *
Shadow stared unblinking at the monitors reporting on his sister’s condition. Easier than studying the medics, trying to determine what this action or that speed said about her prognosis.
He lost count of how long he stood there, crowded against his siblings in their CASPers, surrounded by the scents of familiar unit members in a most unfamiliar setting. A sharp huff of breath made him blink for the first time in what might have been days.
“She’s going to be ok,” Sonya said, her ears pointed directly toward the long bed the medics were clustered around.
“How do you—”
“Breathe, idiot.” Sonya bumped him, though his CASPer kept him from feeling it.
Blinking again, he took a deep breath, parsing the smells around him. Sonya, Rex, Drake, normal and steady as ever, the sharp spike of anxious adrenaline fading from their edges. Then, over the smell of the Human members of Silent Night working on her, Ripley’s scent, cleaner, losing that ragged undercoat.
She had smelled like his vision. The realization would have staggered him if he hadn’t had an enormous metal suit holding him in place. Had it been warning him—that Ripley would—that they could…
No. He shook his head, eyes still focused on Ripley. She wasn’t dying, not anymore. And Zuul didn’t see the future. He’d extrapolated something, his senses putting together a story his conscious mind hadn’t finished reading yet, and whatever that last one had been was much, much bigger than his siblings, no matter how much each mattered to him.
Something was still coming.
“She’s going to be ok,” he echoed Sonya, flattening his ear toward her in acknowledgment. “Will you stay until she wakes up? I have to talk to Dad.”
“I’ll come with you.” Rex held up a hand before Shadow could form a protest. “A lot’s happened since you missed muster, but he won’t have forgotten. If you want to get to a point before you have to do laps, or I guess hops, around the whole dwarf planet, you’ll need backup.”
Shadow had to agree with that, though Drake’s snort of amusement didn’t help.
“I should tell you all, before we dropped out of hyperspace—”
Drake shook his head, gesturing toward the door. “Tell us after. Tell Dad, we’ll wait on Ripper, then you can tell us all at once.”
“Ripper?”
“She wouldn’t let us nickname her when we were little,” Sonya said, jaw dropping in a grin. “Feels like she’s earned it now.”
“Ripper,” Rex repeated, drawling it. “Yeah. That’ll do. She’ll be apples.”
“I don’t want to interrupt,” the chief medic said, “but would you mind losing the CASPers? It’s a little crowded in here.”
Shadow looked around and realized four CASPers in the medical bay were probably four CASPers too many. “Sorry,” Shadow said, and they shuffled out.
* * * * *
Chapter 5
Classified Engineering Guild Holding—E’cop’k System
Alan scanned the various Tri-V screens, trying to get a sense of what was going on. There were maybe 30 or so Zuparti sitting and standing next to displays, working on slates, or seemingly waiting to do something. Alan had never seen so many in a room at one time. Every one of them looked up when he came in, jerkily examined him, and went back to whatever they were doing.
You couldn’t run a merc company in the Tolo arm and not be employed by the Zuparti at one time or another. The Zuparti purchased a massive number of merc contracts and were widely considered shifty and paranoid. Silent Night had worked two contracts for the Zuparti during Alan’s tenure as CO. One was an escort job for offloading some mineral or another. There’d been some risk, but it had gone off without a hitch. The other had been a garrison on a rare earth mine on the most boring planet in the galaxy.
The biggest threat on the latter contract had been falling asleep on guard duty and having one of the planet’s mildly venomous tiny snakes crawl into your CASPer’s cargo compartment and lay eggs. The Zuparti had been convinced the whole time that they were about to be set upon by hordes of ravenous Tortantula shock troops. The reality was, the mining operation was so borderline profitable, Alan doubted even the Pushtal would have tried to claim jump it. After they’d completed the contract, he�
��d wondered how the Zuparti could afford so many mercs if their business acumen was as horrible as it seemed.
However, if they controlled the galaxy’s supply of Astatine-222, that answered a lot of questions. First off, where they got all their credits. The mine probably made millions of credits a day, or more. Second, why they were generally so paranoid. Should anyone find out about the secret stash—well, now they could see what that would mean first hand.
“Who’s in command?” Alan asked Jill. His second in command gestured to an older Zuparti reading a report on a slate.
“Her name is Ifka,” Jill said. “She’s called Guildmaster.”
“Not taking herself too seriously, is she?” Alan asked. Jill gave him a jaundiced look. The one thing he’d learned about the various races in the galaxy was how seriously they took their positions within guilds, regardless of how powerful or even profitable the position was. Jill stepped ahead and addressed the alien.
“Guildmaster Ifka, this is my commanding officer, Colonel Alan Porter.”
To most Humans, the Zuparti resembled big, bipedal weasels. Many races in the Galaxy bore some resemblance to terrestrial animals and insects. Some seemed fusions of multiples. Of course, in many cases, it was simply the Human mind looking for the familiar. The Zuparti were a wonderful example of this. Because they had a rather long torso, short legs, and a pointy face, the Human brain immediately said, Weasel! When you really examined the Zuparti, you saw there were more factors to them that weren’t weasel-like than those that were. Their fur had a strange, wool-like quality about it. Their eyes were black on black, with no irises, and a novel feature allowed them to go opaque without an iris. Their ears were hairless. The arms were disproportionately long compared to their legs. They didn’t have whiskers. The disparities went on.
Ifka looked Alan up and down and gave him a most Human-looking frown before speaking. “I believed Jill Anderle to be the commander.”
“I explained I was the senior officer in charge,” Jill corrected.
“You accepted the contract,” was her rebuttal.
“And you made it clear if I didn’t, we’d be imprisoned for the duration of this conflict. And, well, you offered a lot of credits.”
“Yes, you Humans love credits.”
“As do the Zuparti,” Alan said. “Good to meet you, Guildmaster.” Alan finished with a respectful bow.
Ifka returned the bow, a tiny smile on her face. I can play the game with the best of them, Alan thought.
“The guildmaster approved our rescue op of your dropship once we picked up its IFF transponder,” Jill explained.
“May I inquire why you were aboard a Zuul ship?” Ifka asked. “You realize there are Zuul working for the Cartography Guild in their illegal attempt to take over our mine?”
“Well, the Zuul were with Insho’Ze, which I understand is the unit that opposes you. I also understand this situation was not an existing contract, but happened because of ongoing hostilities here in E’cop’k?” The Zuparti nodded slightly. “We were working with Insho’Ze when we were…” he searched for the words, “brought here by the stargate interdiction.”
“What were you doing with them?”
“Looking for both our lost ships, both of which happened to be in the same area at the same time. We came across the Pushtal and their holding at Klbood, which led us to pass near here, and we were snagged.”
“I understand now,” Ifka said. “The Pushtal, with the assistance of the cursed Vergola, were equipped to take Klbood from us. Afterward, we had no link to the outside world. We’d long had an arrangement with the gatemaster in Klbood. A profitable one. However, once Klbood was taken…”
“The Vergola made the gatemaster a better deal?” Jill offered.
“So it would seem,” Ifka said under her breath.
Alan and Jill exchanged knowing looks before Alan spoke. “I don’t suppose we’ll be allowed to leave?”
“I think not,” Ifka said, as if she were denying someone an extra slice of pie. “The contract with your Silent Night is extended to all of your allied forces in the system. The Zuul ship was disabled and has slunk off to lick its wounds further outsystem. Two other dropships escaped and have since rendezvoused with enemy forces.”
“I have people on those ships as well,” Alan said, his brow wrinkling in concern. “Another squad and technical staff.”
“Then they are either dead at the hands of the Zuul or Pushtal, or prisoners of the Vergola.”
“I don’t believe the Zuul commander would allow my men to be killed,” Alan said, as much to assuage the look of alarm on Jill’s face as to inform Ifka of his take on the matter.
“Then they are at least prisoners. You may hope as much. The Pushtal are like Tortantula or Besquith, I fear; they enjoy killing more than profit.”
“I’m amazed you’ve kept this facility and your guild a secret for so long,” Alan said.
The Zuparti gave a tiny smile again. “We have been careful. We’ve had to be careful, as we are not a merc race, and despite the vast wealth the Astatine-222 mine provides us, it is small in scale. A massive assault would make us vulnerable.”
“It would make anyone vulnerable,” Alan mused. Ifka heard him and nodded his pointy head in agreement. “So that’s why the Cartography Guild came with just a bunch of Pushtal? They don’t want anyone else to know?” Ifka gave a half nod, then Alan wondered, I bet the Vergola were thinking about how easy it would be to liquidate the Pushtal after they’d taken the mine. After all, who’d really miss them? Which made him wonder about their status.
The Lumar were no threat to the Zuparti. Bloody hell, most days the Lumar were more dangerous to themselves than anyone else. The Lumar were over two meters tall, with big, broad chests and four arms. They could be mistaken for a Human on a dark night, except their heads were more rounded, they were all thick and muscular brutes, and their darker skin was more akin to an Australian bushman.
“Guildmaster,” Alan began, “we want to go home. What can I do to get us there?”
“And get paid, I’m sure,” Ifka added.
“Of course, that goes without saying.” Alan was less concerned about the pay than bringing his people home, but there was no need to make his negotiating position weaker.
“Give me an hour to finish this meeting,” Ifka said, gesturing to the other Zuparti who was holding the slate, looking at the two Humans with eyes narrowed.
They don’t like us, Alan thought. Well, the feeling is mutual, since you kidnapped us. “No problem,” he said aloud and turned to Jill. “Why don’t you take me to the barracks and fill me in on our force status.” She nodded and gestured to one of the other doors in the command center.
The big, fancy buildings near the starport, where the Zuparti had their operation, turned out to be the best in the facility. After a series of well-lit corridors leading to different offices, housing, and industrial areas, Jill let him into a tunnel that had been clearly cut with a laser, and only simply finished afterward.
“We going into the mountain?” he asked Jill.
“No, we’re just cutting through a hill. Some of this used to be the test mines sunk into the planet, God knows how long ago.” They passed a heavy door with a standard Union green warning sign for danger. “One of the bore shafts is in there. It goes down kilometers into this rock to where they found the stuff.”
“If Astatine-222 is the key to hyperspace travel, this place must be really old.”
“Yeah, it seems old. But I don’t know if it’s a hundred thousand years old. Of course, there might be other mines on the planet. I got the impression from Ifka the Zuparti got this mine somehow, and they don’t want to let it go.”
“I can only guess how valuable it is,” Alan said as Jill led them onward. “How much of that Astatine do they haul out?”
“Don’t know,” Jill said. “They were under siege by the time we were drawn in. I know there are pallets and pallets of it over in the warehouses, but
not how much is in each box. Could be 100 kilograms, could be a few grams.”
“The whole setup smell like a dunny,” Alan said, shaking his head. “Stinks. So, what’s our force level stand at?”
“We have three companies and a platoon remaining,” Jill said.
Alan almost tripped, coming to a shocked stop. His jaw dropped in surprise.
“Yeah, you bring us back up to a battalion. We’ve been bleeding pretty regularly. The Lumar just aren’t up to a stand-up fight. They can hold the rear, and that’s about it.”
“An entire platoon gone?” Alan asked, unable to bring himself to understand—to fully accept—that 20 of his men were gone.
“Well, not all dead, no. Sorry, I need to be more specific. We lost 22 CASPers and nine drivers. We have more men than suits.”
“Nine dead is much better than 20,” Alan said.
They’d reached a door, a lot like an airlock, separating the rough-hewn tunnel from a new section. It opened automatically as Jill and Alan approached, then cycled quickly once they’d entered. He looked at it curiously.
“I don’t know either,” Jill said, and shrugged.
On the other side a pair of Lumar were standing a casual guard duty. They looked up at the pair with dim eyes, then gave the sloppiest salute Alan had ever seen.
“We hears da Human commander is here,” one said. “More fighting is good!”
“Yeah, good!” the other agreed.
“At ease, men,” Alan said. The two nodded and went back to whatever conversation they were having. The corridor here more closely resembled the ones near the command center. There were doors leading in both directions with programmable signs. One read, “Big Strong Fist,” and the other, “Silent Night.”
“Lumar company names are so creative,” Jill said with a chuckle.
Alan nodded; he remembered serving on contracts Lumar were involved in several times, and all of those Lumar outfits were Fist this or Strong that. He shrugged. They were loyal and dependable; just don’t ever expect tactical acumen or leadership from them.