Four on the Run

by Jeff Deischer

  It didn’t take long for the entire population of tavern goers to become embroiled in the brawl.

  Except for the lone human, who crawled out of Agrittii’s, and getting to his feet, stumbled into the crowd of pedestrians in the main concourse of Halo City.

  Noomi Bloodgood returned to the Vishnu a few days later with news. She and Indri had been making regular visits to Halo City, hawking what personal items had been left behind by the crew, with varying degrees of success. The cloth that they had managed to salvage was the most popular item, with many asking if other colors were available. They were not, of course.

  “Well, they shut down those mines,” the Tatar girl told her compatriots Tully and Indri. Rastheln’iq was still secluded in his workshop, immersed in his work. “We have the opportunity for some quick cash.”

  “Oh?” asked the Delph.

  “Some equipment was abandoned in a few of the mines,” explained Noomi, “and they need people to go out and retrieve it. I gather that not many miners are keen on the idea.”

  “What is the pay?” inquired Indri.

  “A hundred stellars an hour in store credit,” answered Noomi. “That’s more than what the workers make.”

  “And no one is coming forward?”

  The Tatar shook her head.

  “There’s a reason no one’s coming forward,” Tully reminded.

  Ignoring him, Noomi said, “There are about a dozen machines of varying types. I think we could bring back one an hour. More if we all four worked.”

  “Wormwood won’t leave his work,” Indri said.

  “And I’m not going anywhere near the disappearances,” Tully announced.

  “The machines are practically self-driving,” Noomi said confidently, ignoring the human’s negativity. Her enthusiasm for the project was obvious.

  “It would allow us to restock our stores without spending any money,” Indri pointed out. Turning to the Earthman, he asked, “Are you certain you won’t join us, Tully?”

  He laughed. “I’ve got all the cash I need from cards. And I can always get more when I want it.”

  “Until they find out you cheat,” Noomi said menacingly.

  “You wouldn’t ….”

  “Don’t give me a reason to.”

  “Okay,” Tully surrendered. “No more cheating. But I’m still not going with you.”

  The next morning, Indri and Noomi showed up for work, reporting to Pyatt Berbeck, the mine manager. They had contacted him the day before to accept the standing offer.

  Looking at then, Berbeck asked, “Have you two ever done this sort of work before?”

  “No,” admitted the Delph.

  “But I’m an experienced pilot,” Noomi Bloodgood put in quickly.

  “Then you’ll be fine,” Berbeck told them. “The machines are made easy to operate. Most workers are uneducated, you know, so everything is pictograms.” This practice wasn’t uncommon among laborers. “And if you have any trouble, just contact the foreman.

  “You take a ferry out, find a machine in the designated area, drive it onto the ferry, bring it back here, unload it and you’re done. There are fourteen left in total, some corers, some separators … every machine used in a mine. I’ve already got another crew working.”

  Berbeck gestured to a map of the nearby objects in the asteroid field. “This is the section. Your ferry has the map with the designated area already input. You’ll have to do the flying but you said you can handle that.”

  “I can,” Noomi said enthusiastically.

  “One last thing … you wreck anything, you’re fired. Those machines cost tens of thousands of stellars each. If they didn’t, we’d leave them where they sit.”

  “Understood,” said Indri.

  It did not take long for the ferry to take the pair to their destination. It looked as though Noomi’s estimation of one machine per hour would be close to accurate. Of course, that was without having yet actually gotten one back onto the ship. The first one would doubtless be the most difficult and time consuming.

  In order to keep the path from becoming congested, they had decided to take whatever machine lay nearest the surface first. Noomi and Indri got two of them back to Halo City in just under three hours, the second quicker than the first. As the Tatar girl climbed up into the cockpit of the third machine – this was a corer, one of the larger types used in the operation – Indri’s voice came over the atmosphere suit radio. It was strained, surprised.

  “Noomi, there’s a presence here.”

  It took the Tatar girl a moment before she responded, for she could not believe her small pointed ears. “What do you mean?”

  “There’s a consciousness here in these passages,” elaborated the Delphian priest.

  “What? What kind?”

  “I’m not sure,” Indri answered. “I’ve never sensed this type before. It is immense, but I can’t discern much about it. It must be shielding its thoughts from me.”

  “I don’t recall anyone saying anything about ‘consciousnesses’ being out here,” Noomi said, starting the corer’s motor.

  “Wait!” Indri said impatiently, which was unlike him. “I want to know more.”

  “I’m guessing that whatever you sense has something to do with the disappearances,” the girl said tartly.

  “That is a reasonable conclusion,” agreed the Delph.

  “If we stay here long, it may get us,” Noomi warned.

  “I may be able to communicate with it. I am a fourth level theodat.”

  The Tatar did not know what a theodat was. “How many levels are there?”

  “Five.”

  Noomi decided that Indri must know what he was doing, though she worried that he was enthralled by the idea of this unknown consciousness. Wormwood had proven himself to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal. She did not know if Indri Mindsinger was, as well.

  And now was not the time to find out.

  Shutting off the corer’s motor, she hopped down from the cockpit, landing lightly beside the Delph. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

  But Indri did not answer. His eyes were closed, and he was attempting to communicate with the consciousness that he sensed.

  It was curious, he found – surprised by his own mind. The Delphian priest felt it probing his mind – in a primitive, clumsy way. It was puzzling. Whatever the creature was, it was not skilled in psychomancy. But he sensed immense power behind the probe.

  Indri tried to communicate his intentions. He could not discern if these had been received, understood. Surely they must have been, for the mind he sensed was incredibly powerful – but he received no response.

  The Delph cried out. He was under psychic attack.

  Noomi Bloodgood, not being psychically aware, did not perceive this. To her, Indri suffered an unexplained pain. She took hold of him, keeping him upright as his legs gave out. “What’s wrong?”

  “Something’s coming,” the Delph uttered through gritted teeth. “It’s here.”

  The Tatar became aware of the presence just as Indri Mindsinger announced its arrival. A large shadow fell across the pair and the corer behind them. Noomi looked up: An enormous amorphous shape loomed over them.

  Emitting an instinctual warning growl, Noomi drew her H.E.L. gun and fired at the thing; she had left her non-lethal Zammers behind, wanting to be as well armed as possible for whatever they might encounter, and the atmosphere suit possessed but a single holster.

  The cinnamon-hued blob was not difficult to hit. It was quite large and moved clumsily toward the pair.

  The first blast seemed to have no effect. Noomi shot it again, realizing that the creature was actually quite pale, and its coloring came from cannebec spice – it was covered in the stuff! But her attention was focused on stopping the thing before it made her disappear, for she had concluded that this was the source of the missing men.

  Beside her, Indri writhed in pain. “No! Flee.”

  Grabbing the Delph, Noomi Bloodgood dra
gged him away, behind the corer.

  From around one of its giant wheels, she watched the creature advance. It neither walked nor slithered over the rocky floor of the passage, but rather undulated. It almost seemed to be swimming, as strange as that sounded.

  Indri Mindsinger struggled to get to his feet but was unsuccessful. He pulled at the Tatar’s atmosphere suit. “Ferry … ferry.”

  “Okay,” Noomi agreed. She didn’t believe she could stop the creature, and certainly not while protecting her companion.

  Hefting him onto her shoulders – Delph were slightly larger and heavier than humans – she made her way toward the ferry, not hesitating to look back over her shoulder as she ran. Once on board, Indri found his pain receding. Still, he spoke slowly and deliberately. “The creature meant no harm ….”

  “But it attacked us … didn’t it telepathically attack you first?” asked Noomi, guessing her companion’s improved state having something to do with the distance from the creature.

  “Not precisely. Its mind was so powerful that I was overwhelmed. It wasn’t an attack at all, really.

  “And you shot at it when it appeared. It lashed out psychically then, which I bore the brunt of.”

  “Mmm,” the Tatar mouthed noncommittally.

  “It was protecting its food – cannebec,” Indri explained. “Now, I need to meditate.”

  With that, he fell silent until the ferry arrived back at Halo City.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” Pyatt Berbeck told the Delphian priest when Indri had related what he had deduced. “You think these things that attacked my miners will just go away?”

  “I am certain of it,” the Delph said. “I believe they are pupae of harberis.”

  Harberis were strange creatures that lived in open space, feeding off raw protium, it was thought. No one knew for sure. The only creatures known to inhabit open space, they grew to enormous sizes and were very hard to kill. They had been declared off limits for hunters by Concordat Federation law centuries earlier, though this didn’t always stop poachers, who valued nodules produced within the harberis body. Dubbed pearls, these were extremely rare and quite valuable.

  “No one’s seen infantile harberis,” Berbeck countered. “Only small ones that everyone presumes are young.”

  “I have come to believe that is because they lay eggs among cannebec rich asteroids,” explained Indri. “The pupae feed off cannebec until they are mature enough to fly, forming their own pod with their siblings.”

  “So you think when these are done feeding, they’ll just fly away?” Berbeck asked skeptically.

  “I do. All you have to do is wait until all have hatched and departed, then you may resume your mining with no loss of life,” said the Delph. “They have no reason to disturb your valuable machines, either.”

  “So I’m just supposed to forget about the dead men and the shuttered mines ….”

  “Your miners were killed because the pupae were frightened and instinctively defended themselves. It was not the men that frightened them, but the machines. The machines are something completely unknown to the pupae. They were loud, destructive – threatening. And probably most importantly, they possessed no soul. Your machines were, in children’s parlance, monsters.

  “I daresay you would have done the same.”

  “Maybe,” Berbeck answered skeptically.

  Indri had not sensed the miners, which meant that they had been killed by the harberis. Once he had processed the brief glimpse he had gotten into the alien mind, he understood what had occurred: The men had been devoured, not as food, but as a threat to the pupae’s safety.

  “Look at it this way: You either have to abandon those mines or kill the harberis pupae. You would find the latter very difficult with the weaponry you have here, so you will be forced to do the former. In some months’ time, the pupae will be gone, and you can resume mining those asteroids. This will happen whether you happily accept the fact or not.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” the manager agreed reluctantly.

  “You can also explain what caused the disappearances, assuring your workers that they are in no danger. Nothing is moving toward Halo City,” said Indri. “The eggs that were laid last are closest to Halo City and have just hatched. The closer asteroids have already been thoroughly surveyed and you know there are no eggs there.”

  “It looks like I owe you a favor, Mindsinger,” said Pyatt Berbeck.

  “I shall keep that in mind,” replied the Delph. “Now, if you’ll arrange the store credit for the two machines we did retrieve, we’ll be on our way.”

  As the mine manager set about doing this, Indri and Noomi left his office. The Tatar whispered, “You wouldn’t make a bad detective.”

  Let’s Make a Deal

  The T-shaped Republic of Earth Ship Vishnu tumbled back into real space rather than sliding into it gracefully as it should have. The five thousand ton vessel shook as if being manhandled by a giant. Rivets threatened to pop, welded seams to split. The ship rattled and rumbled like an old locomotive.

  Finally, the ride smoothed out and all seemed well again, to the relief of its four passengers, or rather, crew, for everyone participated in one way or another in the operating of the Vishnu.

  “We survived,” Indri Mindsinger, a sturdy bald male with gray skin, pointed out needlessly, relief evident in his tone.

  “I’m damned tired of that,” spat Noomi Bloodgood, an animal-human hybrid, her furry face scrunched up in annoyance.

  “I think I lost a filling,” put in Tully, formerly Ensign Joseph P. Tull of the now-extinct Republic of Earth stellar navy.

  “As I have explained on numerous occasions, there is nothing to be done about it immediately,” said Rastheln’iq, a plant man from Viridium. “It was difficult enough to mesh the two operating systems of the shuttle and the Vishnu. The shuttle does not possess the software for Overdrive, and that of the Vishnu is faulty. You may recall it sent the Vishnu off course on its trial run fourteen centuries ago.” He referred to the fact that the ship had disappeared on its maiden voyage as a result of a faulty operating system. No one needed reminding, for that accident had saved the lives of the alien escaped convicts when they had stumbled across the derelict ship, where they’d found Tully in cryo-sleep.

  “Any flight that you can walk away from is a successful one,” boomed Pal, a robot built to service the Vishnu. Programmed to interact with the crew, he usually sounded boisterous. Physically, he resembled an elongated pot-bellied stove with arms, no two of which resembled one another. One was a flexible tentacle, another possessed a facsimile of a hand, a third a clamp, and so on. He possessed six in all.

  “There is Commerce,” interrupted Indri Mindsinger, indicating with a mottled gray hand a planet shown on a view plate on a wall. Being descended from cetaceans, his skin was hairless. “Alfred, please display library data about Commerce at the main console.” This was a squarish table in the center of the bridge, the edges of which were lined with various controls. Each of the four organic beings was seated around the control console, where a holograph of Commerce appeared and hovered above the table’s concave surface. It rotated in proportional time, with noteworthy features highlighted. Text floated beside the points, explaining their importance.

  Alfred, the Vishnu’s artificial intelligence, complied with the Delph’s command. Named after a famous twentieth century butler, according to Tully, Alfred was the interface with the ship’s autonomic and regulatory functions, such as life support and the like. Ship operations, that is, the Vishnu’s mechanical systems, was the domain of Pal. The two did not get along, Alfred thinking Pal, performing, in essence, manual labor, to be lowbrow, while the robot opined that Alfred was a snob.

  The crew of the Vishnu had high hopes for their visit to Commerce, which lay just inside the treaty-defined boundary of the Borderlands nearest Earth. Earth had still been an important planet when the Borderlands were first colonized by humans in the twenty-fourth century. It
became less so when the capital of the Republic of Earth was moved to New Chicago, a system of milk and honey that had been whimsically named after a city in a popular fiction story from the twentieth century. The settler who discovered the system was named Rogers, and he claimed to be related to the protagonist of the novel in question, though in somewhat tongue in cheek manner. When the Tatars took control of the Concordat Federation seven centuries earlier, they moved the Imperium’s capital to Shallon, one of the Delph Consortium worlds that was closer to the center of the sphere of influence they claimed, leaving Earth a backwater planet. This outraged the Delph, who considered Shallon to be a holy place.

  Colonization of the area that had come to be called the Borderlands as a result of a treaty between the two major governments of the Orion Spur, the Imperium and the Layeb Instrumentality, composed of reptilian religious fanatics, had not occurred by Humans, Delph, Vir or Tatars in any great numbers. The region was home to strange phenomena as well as a number of primitive races that did not like neighbors. And the Layeb were colonizing it, as well, leading to conflict between it and the Concordat Federation, the democratic predecessor of the fascist Imperium. So the Borderlands remained a wild place with few inhabitants, relatively speaking.

  Commerce had gone through a number of names since it had been colonized, but none except “Commerce” had stuck. As the major jumping off point into the Borderlands for the rimward region of the Concordat Federation, it quickly became a market world. It was a large, hot, dry world that had little going for it, not even a gas giant in the system at which to re-supply the catalyst needed to keep the faster-than-light Overdrive engines running. This meant that protium was sold at exorbitant prices from a refueling station in orbit above Commerce, tanked in from neighboring Hazeltine, which, with its amenities, was much more suitable as a gateway to the Borderlands, but life is not always reasonable or fair. Especially not in the Borderlands.