by R. A. Nargi
I felt my bones break and my chest explode with pain and all of a sudden I was airborne. Hot, fetid air enveloped me as I tumbled back off the cliff, falling in slow motion.
I tried to breathe, tried to scream, but I couldn’t get my lungs to work. Darkness crowded my vision. But not before I glimpsed the scorpion creature flying at me, claw-like arms ready to tear me apart.
And then, mercifully, I woke.
“It’s okay, Jannigan. You’re okay.” Chiraine was there on the ground with me, cradling my head against her chest.
I felt her heart beating against my cheek, and then my own heart beating twice as fast.
“What was it?” she asked.
“Nightmare,” I said. “It felt so real.”
I told her about the volcanic landscape and the scorpion creature.
“It spoke to me,” I said. “Telepathically.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah. Very weird.”
Chiraine helped me to my feet and I took a couple of deep breaths to clear my head. My heart was still beating really fast. I could definitely use some glace right now to take me down a notch. But then I’d be dead to the world.
“Any luck with finding an interface?” I asked.
“No. We may have to try to fab something. And by ‘we’ I mean Narcissa.”
We decided to return to the bridge and see how she was doing, but instead we found her in engineering with the Rhya.
“Uh oh,” I said. “Bad news?”
“Actually, no. Just the opposite. The mimonite’s been extracted and I found the patterns for the discharge retainer, so that’s cooking now. Once it’s done, we’ll send in a wombat and get the module swapped out. If all goes well, we’ll be ready to leave in an hour or two.”
Chiraine’s face brightened. “That is good news.”
“Yes, I can’t believe how fast everything is. Back on the Valerius we didn’t have half the automated systems you have, and our fabbers were B3s.”
“B3s? You serious?” I remember my dad brought home a B3 nanofabrication forge when I was a kid and I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
“I’m perfectly serious,” Narcissa said. “It would’ve taken us a take a full day to create a module like this, and—”
She was interrupted by the Rhya floating past her and out into the corridor.
“Where’s it going?” Narcissa asked.
“No idea,” I said. “We were hoping there would be something in the inventory we could use as a comm interface so we could talk to it, but no luck so far.”
“I scoured the KB, but I don’t really know what I’m looking for,” Chiraine said.
“We need some sort of electromagnetic inductor. Once we’re underway I’ll check myself. In the meantime, someone want to show me how to work the galley? I haven’t had a decent cup of moxa in nearly twenty years.”
A voice at the doorway said, “A cup of moxa sounds damn good right about now.” It was Ana-Zhi.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Chiraine asked.
“Leg cramp,” Ana-Zhi said. “Initially. Then I wanted to make sure Qualt hadn’t succeeded in hijacking my ship.” She hobbled into the room.
“Technically, it’s his ship,” I said. “But I get your meaning. You don’t have to worry. He’s back in the brig.”
“Thanks to some fancy shooting by Ms. Narcissa here,” Chiraine said.
We got Ana-Zhi up to speed about what had happened while she was in the MedBed, including the news that we were an hour or two away from being able to leave.
“It begs the question,” Chiraine said. “Where exactly are we going?”
“Good question,” Ana-Zhi said. “The second we fly out of this cavern, we’ll light up the Mayir’s scanners. And there’s no way we’ll be able to outrun a squadron of stingrays.”
“So, what? We fight our way out?” I knew that wasn’t really an option.
“Does it make sense to just wait it out down here where we’re shielded?” Chiraine asked.
“No, eventually they’ll figure out where we are,” Ana-Zhi said. “The Mayir don’t give up easily.”
“I might have an idea,” Narcissa said.
Ana-Zhi turned to her. “Well? We’re listening.”
“Moxa first.”
Ten minutes later we were all seated around the table in the galley, which smelled of fresh-ground moxa. As I took a sip from my mug, I could tell the moxa wasn’t as good as what we had on the Freya, but it wasn’t the powdered crap either. We helped ourselves to Qualt’s breakfast stores as well, nibbling on muffins, seedcakes, and wellfruit.
After checking the Aura that she taken from Qualt, Narcissa announced that the fab would be done in twelve minutes.
“Well, you better talk fast,” Ana-Zhi said.
“Okay, how much do you all know about the topography of Yueld?”
“We really don’t have time for this, lady,” Ana-Zhi said. “Spit it out.”
I had a fair bit of knowledge about the planet implanted in my memory as part of the mission briefing. “We know that almost ninety-eight percent of Yueld’s surface is covered by water,” I said. “A little less than a quarter of that ninety-eight percent is wetlands: swamps, bogs, fens, and so on. Only two percent is habitable land.”
“The mesas,” Chiraine chimed in. “Like the one we are inside of now.”
“Exactly,” I said.
“Yeah, we know we’re on a swamp planet,” Ana-Zhi said. “What are you proposing? Hiding in the mud?”
“Not mud exactly,” Narcissa said. “Mist.”
I remembered when we first found the cavern, the thick mist had messed with our scanners.
Now Narcissa explained why. “It’s not just normal water vapor. We tested it during our mission.”
“Oh?” Ana-Zhi said.
“There are microscopic silicate chondrules suspended in the mist. That’s what messes with the scanners.”
“So we stay in the mist and the Mayir can’t see us?” Ana-Zhi asked.
“Probably,” Narcissa said. “Any orbital scans won’t be able to penetrate. They’d have to run IR scans within a couple hundred meters of us.”
“What about low-frequency?” I asked.
“Sure—if they had it. I don’t think the Mayir will be setting up any LF installations any time soon.”
“Guys, are you forgetting about the wildlife down here?” Chiraine said. “Last time we barely made it through alive.”
“Well, I can’t speak to that,” Narcissa said. “But if we can get to Umbanor, we’d be able to lay low for a while. Maybe get that comm interface set up.”
“Umbanor?” I racked my brain to try to recall what she was talking about. Then it came to me. The Coliseum of Umbanor was one of the first Yueldian sites studied when the Rhya opened the world up.
“There’s nothing there,” Chiraine said. “It was cleared out in ’22.”
“Yes,” Narcissa said. “By Viatani, for the MCP.”
“And didn’t Allegro go back there in ’29?” Ana-Zhi asked.
Chiraine said, “That was a Shima expedition. I spent several months combing through Allegro’s reports. It was a big goose egg. There was nothing left to find.”
“Exactly,” Narcissa said.
“I don’t get it,” Chiraine said. “Then why go there?”
I understood Narcissa’s logic. “That’s exactly why we should go there. The Mayir know that there’s nothing of value in Umbanor, so they won’t waste time looking.”
“Unless they are looking for us,” Ana-Zhi said.
Narcissa popped a piece of muffin into her mouth. “Which is why we have to stay in the mist.”
“Again, I have to bring up the megafauna,” Chiraine said. “We’ve already had run-ins with a cthulian and a K’Lortai Dragon.”
“I’m with the princess here,” Ana-Zhi said. “How far away is this Coliseum?”
“We’d have to plot it out,” Narcissa said. “But it’s in this hemisp
here. What do you say, Captain?”
Everyone was quiet for a moment. Then Ana-Zhi looked at me and said, “Well?”
I took one last sip of my moxa and said, “I don’t think we have a choice.”
Narcissa ran full diagnostics on the power weave and pronounced the ship good to go. The discharge retainer had been refabbed and installed and was working fine.
“I’m just going to run some more preflights and get the lay of the land and we should be ready to depart soon.”
She had plotted a course to Umbanor, which was located in a deep valley in a mountainous area approximately fourteen hundred kilometers away. Flying through normal atmosphere, we could make it in less than 90 minutes. Dodging dragons and cthulians and navigating through mist-obscured chasms would add a lot of hours to the journey.
But we were out of options.
“What are we going to do with Qualt?” Chiraine asked.
“Feed him to the dragons,” Narcissa offered.
“No,” Ana-Zhi said. “He’s an asshole, but he doesn’t deserve a fate like that.”
“Then what? A quick bullet to the head?”
“I’m inclined to leave him here,” Ana-Zhi said. “Maroon him, like the old pirates used to do.”
“What old pirates?” Narcissa asked.
“You ever read Treasure Island?”
“Never heard of it.”
Ana-Zhi rolled her eyes. “Savage.”
“What about you, Jannigan?” Chiraine asked. “How do you feel about marooning Qualt?”
Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. It was almost certainly a death sentence. Unless the Mayir came down the shaft and found him, he’d starve to death—or be eaten by a wandering cthulian. Still, we couldn’t keep him imprisoned forever.
“Let’s do it,” I said. “We’ll leave him some food and water. No weapons.”
“It was traditional for pirates to leave their marooning victims a pistol,” Ana-Zhi said. “In case they wanted to take the easy way out.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to happen.”
Once Narcissa confirmed that we were ready to set off, I accompanied Ana-Zhi to the weapons locker, where she picked out a particle carbine with some tranq rounds. Then we made our way to the brig.
“Holy shit,” Qualt exclaimed when he saw me. “Remind me not ever to get in a scrap with you again, kid. You’re a freakin’ monster. Where’d you learn to tussle?”
Then he caught sight of Ana-Zhi’s weapon.
“What’s going on, A.Z.? You here for a little payback?”
“Something like that, Qualt.”
“I would never plug you with anything stronger than a trembler, darling. You know that. You and I are professionals. We’ve got a code.”
“Uh huh.” She raised the carbine, clicked it into single shot mode.
“Seriously, Ana-Zhi. You do not want to do this.” His face blanched with fear.
“Hey Qualt, you ever read Treasure Island?” I asked.
“What?”
Then Ana-Zhi tranqed him.
The Vostok glided off into the mist. When I left the bridge, Ana-Zhi sat in the pilot’s chair, Narcissa was glued to the multiband, and Chiraine kept watch on the main viewport and optical scanner array. The Rhya was nowhere to be found. We had all decided to let the Inspector be until we had some way of communicating with it.
Moving quickly, I climbed the ladder to the gun turret, and scrambled into the swing seat.
“You in place?” Ana-Zhi’s voice sounded in my earpiece.
“Yeah—just extending into firing position.” The turret ratcheted out. Under normal conditions, I might have a pretty good view of what was in front of the ship, but all I could see was dense white mist.
My heart thundered in my chest as I checked the weapon controller. Despite being a Scout, the Vostok was armed to the gills with a void cannon array, ion lances, and kinetic torpedoes. I readied everything, and double-checked the daisy-chain targeting system for each of them. Thankfully, everything was working in sync and the AI-assist confirmed that all weapon systems were locked and loaded.
I’d hold the void cannons and ion lances in reserve, because their energy signatures would be most obvious to anyone scanning the area—even with the protective cover of the mist. The torps were our weapon of choice, but still, I was hoping we wouldn’t have to use them.
“Are we there yet?” I joked.
“Almost,” Ana-Zhi replied. “Just ten or twelve more hours.”
She was exaggerating, but not by much. When Narcissa plotted the course to the valley which held Umbanor, she estimated that it might take half a day to reach it.
I didn’t envy Ana-Zhi. She was basically flying half blind through the thick mist. And even though the plates were fully-charged, we knew how bad a collision with a cthulian or a K’Lortai Dragon would be.
That was why she had to take it slow—and why I had to be ready to blast anything big coming our way.
During the first several hours, we only saw a handful of gigantic creatures. The two cthulians on our scanner kept their distance from the ship, thank Dynark. The other creature we encountered was a 200-meter-long armored gastropod known as a Jarnaq worm. Thankfully, it was a slow-moving creature more interested in eating slime from the surface of the swamp than paying attention to the Vostok.
We were almost at our destination when we picked up a K’Lortai Dragon. It was feasting on another large reptile, so we steered around it.
“I’m almost tempted to get close to it and take a peek,” Narcissa said in my earpiece. “I’ve never seen a big one before.”
“Uh, that’s a negative,” I replied.
We had run into K’Lortai Dragon soon after we arrived on Yueld. The winged saurians were native to Gilaa, and Ana-Zhi speculated that the dragons here might have been illegally introduced by the Gilaan expedition of 2539.
“We’re coming in on sector 92,” Ana-Zhi announced.
“The trick will be finding a way in,” Narcissa said.
“That’s your job,” Ana-Zhi said.
I had a datapad running topographics which I was using to monitor our progress. Sector 92 was filled with a maze of mountains. Somewhere in the middle of them was a deep valley which contained the Coliseum of Umbanor.
It took us another hour to find an entrance to the valley. If we didn’t need to worry about being scanned, we could have just flown up over the mountains, and then down into the valley, but we were still trying to fly under the radar—literally.
There were a few tight squeezes through tall narrow canyons, and once we found ourself in a dead end and had to backtrack, but eventually we made it to the valley.
If anything, the mist was even denser here. All I could make out through the hyaline panes of my turret enclosure were the faint shapes of trees.
“Be patient, kids,” Ana-Zhi said. “We need to find a clear spot to set down.”
She circled the valley for another ten minutes, before setting us down on a rocky outcropping five hundred meters below the Coliseum itself.
I felt the landing gear make contact with the ground and we all let out a spontaneous cheer.
“Well done, Ana-Zhi,” I said. “I need to buy you a beer or something.”
“Beer? Try a bottle of Iorlian green. Maybe even a case.”
“Done.”
I retracted the turret back into its normal position and rejoined the others in the bridge.
Since it had been over 24 hours since everyone but me had time to sleep, I took the first watch, slumped in the pilot’s chair, while the others slept in their cabins for a few hours.
Chiraine relieved me three hours later. Her hair was tousled and her eyes were still heavy with fatigue, but she smiled at me anyway. Some people were just like that. Happy on the inside. No matter if they were stranded on an alien world three billion light years from home.
Lir definitely was not that way. She was on the high-strung side—pretty much always cranked u
p to eleven. Even when she was asleep, she was like a bomb ready to go off.
But Chiraine was different. Way different.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.
I felt my face flush. “Sorry. Just zoning. Sleepy.”
“Well, that’s why I’m here. Get some rest.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I napped for a while before we left.”
“Yeah, from what I saw, that wasn’t a particularly restful sleep. Go ahead. I’ll come get you in an hour.”
She was right. I was exhausted.
“Thank you.” I left Chiraine in the bridge and headed down to the crew cabins. Before crashing out, I checked on my father again.
Once we confirmed that the Vostok’s power weave was stable again, Narcissa had helped me hook up his exosuit to auxiliary power.
The displays all looked good, and my father slept peacefully in his suit, cradled in the bunk’s webbing.
I gently touched the visor.
“I’ll get you out of this, Dad. I swear.”
I still wasn’t sure how or when, but I would.
The cabin next door was empty, so I stripped off my clothes, stretched out on the bunk, and closed my eyes. Sleep didn’t come immediately, but I was used to that. Sometimes even when I was dead tired, I had a hard time falling to sleep. Especially without drugs.
I was also a little freaked. What if I had that dream again? I wasn’t eager to relive my encounter with that giant telepathic scorpion creature. That was for sure.
Fortunately, I managed to doze off into a dreamless sleep. At least, I didn’t remember any dreams. I just kind of passed out and stayed that way, until a gentle hand on my shoulder woke me.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Chiraine said.
I blinked away the sleep from my eyes. “Hey.”
“So, good news.”
“Oh yeah?” I forced myself to sit up.
“Narcissa built a comm interface for the Rhya.”
“What? When?”
“It only took her four hours.”
“How long was I asleep?”
She checked her Aura. “Nine hours. Well, closer to eight and three-quarters.”