Her Brother's Keeper - eARC (8 page)

There was no way to transmit messages through the naturally occurring transit corridors that connected stars. While in a star system, messages could be sent at the speed of light. Across interstellar distances, the only practical way to deliver messages was to upload them to a ship. Courier ships were therefore common across inhabited space. These stripped down, high-speed vessels were designed specifically for receiving and rapid delivery of information. They had a minimal crew, powerful engines, and huge reaction mass tanks.

Couriers were so fundamental to interstellar communication that the ships themselves were afforded something akin to diplomatic immunity. Interfering with a courier ship, regardless of what colony it hailed from, was outlawed by custom and treaty, backed up by the threat of force from most spacefaring societies. Even oppressive regimes like the Orlov Combine generally left the couriers alone, as they themselves relied on them for communications and trade.

After a moment, Catherine’s tone lightened. She smiled at her crewmen. “I think that’s everything, then. For God’s sake, both of you, try to get some R and R while we’re here. I for one am going shopping. I know you’re both married to the
Andromeda
, but you’re not cheating on her if you take a couple of days for yourselves. Go to a brothel or a nightclub and find yourselves some companionship. You both need it.”

Mazer Broadbent cracked a smile. Wolfram von Spandau only grunted and complained about the weak local beer. Catherine couldn’t help herself this time; she giggled.

Chapter 6

Zanzibar

Danzig-5012 Solar System

Equatorial Region

I hate this place.

Cecil Blackwood thought this to himself, the same as he did every day when he first woke up. It was worse when he’d been dreaming that he was back home on Avalon, and that his ill-fated expedition to Zanzibar had all been a bad dream. There was nothing worse than waking up to discover it was the other way around. He sat up in bed and swung his feet over the side, moving slowly so as not to wake up Bianca. On the stand next to his bed were a bottle and a small cup. As he did every morning, he poured himself a large shot of the ghastly local booze and knocked it back in one gulp. It tasted like some kind of cleaning solvent and burned all the way down, but the alcohol helped him hang on. It kept him sane.

Yeah, that’s it. It keeps me sane.

Standing up, Cecil poured himself a cup of coffee from the machine in his room. Like the booze, the coffee was strong and coarse, but it, too, helped him get through the day. Cup in hand and naked as the day he was born, he stood in front of the large bay window, sipped his coffee, and studied the dusty, desolate street four stories below him. The local sun, Danzig
,
was low in the sky, bathing the town in its characteristic pale orange light. The locals were already out and about, milling through the streets, doing whatever it was these people did every day. Even after a year on Zanzibar, Cecil still wasn’t sure. He couldn’t remember how long it had been since he’d cared.

The dusty town below him was called Lang’s Burg. That wasn’t its original name. If the town even
had
a name, it had been forgotten. Much about Zanzibar had been forgotten, Cecil mused. So much so, that if he’d have known the awful truth about this place, he’d have stayed home.

Before the Second Interstellar War, Zanzibar had been a remote, but thriving, independent colony. The planet itself was a lifeless rock; even its core had long since cooled. There were no plate tectonics on Zanzibar, no seismic activity of any kind. Once the planet had been volcanically active. Once, they said, it had oceans. At one point this world had been alive. It had supported life. Now the only life on Zanzibar was what mankind brought with it.

The funny thing was, planetary scientists and geologists still couldn’t figure out what had happened, what had killed Zanzibar. There were numerous theories and none of them could be proven. What was known was that about four million years before humanity set foot on the planet, something happened that had scoured it barren. Now, the air was thin and unbelievably dry. The oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere was nominally breathable to people, but the atmospheric pressure was so low that it was like being high up in the mountains. Some stout locals had adapted to the thin air, but off-worlders like Cecil relied on respirators. They also filtered out the Zanzibaran dust, which in many areas was so fine you could put it in a cup and swirl it around like water. It played hell with the respiratory system, too. Cecil imagined he had a rock of dirt in his lungs at this point.

There was ice on Zanzibar, which created a supply of water. Before the war, a stubborn group of colonists had been determined to live on this Godforsaken rock. They pressurized their buildings or lived underground. They grew crops in hydroponic greenhouses and not only survived, but thrived. Off-world investment money poured into Zanzibar for a time. The planet was seen as a launching pad for colonial expeditions far beyond it. Numerous potential colony worlds had been identified back then, when the Concordiat was at the height of its expansion. Soon, the philosophers promised, a second Diaspora would begin, and humanity would spread even further across the galaxy. Zanzibar, they said, would be a critical logistics hub for this envisioned age of exploration.

So they said,
Cecil mused. He’d read everything there was to read about Zanzibar before he’d begun this expedition. That was before those outward-bound expeditions had discovered the Maggots. When the war began, humanity was unprepared. Never before had a sentient, spacefaring species been encountered, and the encounters soon turned violent. When the alien invaders reached the Danzig-5012 system, they wiped out the small defensive fleet protecting it and blasted the scattered colonial settlements from orbit. They were remarkably precise in their targeting, only hitting human settlements with enough force to destroy them. Later in the war, on other worlds, they would use mass orbital bombardment techniques, but on Zanzibar they were very careful.

There were many theories about that as well, but Cecil fancied that he had that one figured out. There
was
something of value on Zanzibar, and it wasn’t the usual natural resources that attracted human settlement. This world had once been alive. It had once, long, long ago, supported an alien civilization. Whatever had killed Zanzibar didn’t leave many traces of these aliens, and little was known about them. If you wanted to find traces of them, you had to know where to look, and you had to dig. Cecil figured that even the Maggots valued that kind of knowledge.

Before the war, the colonial government had strictly controlled information about the long-dead alien civilization, referred to as the native
Zanzibari
. Even simple artifacts were extremely valuable, and some of the artifacts that had been found weren’t so simple. It was feared that if the archaeological/paleontological expeditions weren’t conducted in a controlled manner, outside interests would swarm Zanzibar and loot it of its invaluable alien treasures.

Much of that knowledge was lost in the war. Zanzibar’s infrastructure was destroyed, and the shattered colony was all but abandoned as the war raged on. The Maggots never came back, but very little help arrived. The survivors of the onslaught banded into tribes, based around whoever could control the precious resources needed to produce food and water, and keep the necessary machinery running. And so it went, for over a hundred standard years. Even today, the small population of Zanzibar was fractured, divided, and usually under the thumb of one warlord or another.

Warlords like Aristotle Lang, who had been holding Cecil captive for the better part of Zanzibar’s four-hundred-and-eighty-day year. The fact that those days were only nineteen and a half hours long hadn’t helped much.

There you go again, Cecil, thinking too much. Just get through the day. One day at a time.
Depressed, he walked back to his bed and poured a shot of the awful booze into his awful coffee. The combination was surprisingly good, and he finished the cup quickly.

Bianca stirred then. She sat up, yawning and stretching. Long, black hair cascaded over her shoulders and complimented her smooth, walnut-colored skin. She looked up at Cecil with dark, playful eyes and smiled. “Good day, Mista Ceecil,” she said, with the gruff accent the inhabitants of the Zanzibaran wastes all seemed to have. Her ample, bare breasts bounced as she planted her feet on the floor and hugged him. Bianca was a concubine, given to Cecil by his captor many months ago. It would help him focus on his work, the old warlord promised, and would take his mind off foolishly trying to escape.

Old Aristotle Lang liked Cecil, he insisted. He really didn’t want to have to kill him. For her part, Bianca insisted that she wanted to be with Cecil, and that she was “his” woman now. She didn’t just screw him (though she did that eagerly and often, Cecil thought with a grin, and had none of the cultural inhibitions Avalonian women were saddled with); she cooked for him, cleaned their flat, washed his clothes, took care of him when he was sick, and rubbed his temples when he was hung over. She made for a better, proper Avalonian wife than half the Avalonian women he’d known ever would have. He couldn’t imagine being apart from his sweet Bianca, and hated himself for it.

It was another one of Old Man Lang’s methods, giving him something to care about. He knew that if he ran, not only would he probably die, but the bastards would probably kill Bianca too. Cecil couldn’t bear that thought, he just couldn’t bear it.

Bianca’s skin was warm against Cecil’s. He stood by the bed as she sat on it, arms wrapped around him, her head resting against his belly. She began to kiss him all over, her hands caressing his back and butt.

“I need to get to the work site soon,” he managed weakly.

She grinned devilishly. “Mista Ceecil says he hasta go, but Little Ceecil says he wansta stay.” Bianca did that thing she liked to do, and Cecil lost what little willpower he possessed.

Old Man Lang can wait a little longer. It’s not like I’m going anywhere anyway.

* * *

“Zak! My main man! How are you this fine day?”

Zak Mesa, historian and amateur archaeologist, rolled his eyes behind his gaudy, gold-rimmed smart glasses. “Not as good as you, Cecil,” he said, not looking up from what he was doing. “You’re late.”

Cecil beamed stupidly. “Yes, well, a man has business he needs to take care of, as it were. At any rate, where are we at?”

Annoyed, Zak took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Same place we were yesterday, Cecil. We’re being held hostage on Zanzibar.”

“True enough, my friend, but not what I meant. Have you uncovered any more possible dig sites? Lang is getting impatient.”

“Impatient? I’m trying to make sense of what’s left of records that were kept secret before the Maggots bombed this planet back to the stone age. It takes
time.
”

Cecil looked around conspiratorially, then leaned in close to his unfortunate partner. “That’s the idea, man. Give Lang enough to keep him happy, but not so much that we outlive our usefulness, yeah?”

“That’s what I’ve been doing, Cecil. We’re still alive, aren’t we? Well, you’re still alive because you said your rich family would pay for you. I only get to live as long as I come in handy.”

“Zak,” Cecil said, trying to sound reassuring, but coming across as condescending, “it’s not like that. I hired you. You’re my responsibility, you and your assistant both. I’ve been bargaining for all of our lives. I wouldn’t abandon you two just to save my own skin. You may think I’m a blue-blooded rich man’s son, but I’m not a coward.”

We’ll see when the time comes,
the frustrated historian thought bitterly. He scratched his bald head and showed Cecil his tablet. “I’ve found more references to a vault where the prewar colonial government kept a lot of the more interesting artifacts. I just haven’t found one yet listing where it is. I figure there’s about a fifty-fifty chance it was blasted in the Maggot bombardment.”

“I don’t think they would’ve done that,” Cecil insisted. “I think the Maggots knew about the species that had been here. I think the reason they were so careful in their attack on this world is that they didn’t want to destroy any of the artifacts.”

“I actually agree with you,” Zak replied, “but they had no way of knowing about a secret government vault. It might’ve gotten destroyed by them, unknowingly.”

Cecil furled his brow. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to have the vault out in the wastes, closer to dig sites and away from the cities?”

“Yes and no. Less prying eyes in the immediate area, but construction out in the middle of nowhere would’ve been more suspicious. People would’ve gotten curious, thought something was up. An underground construction project in the city wouldn’t have drawn that much attention, and they could’ve just hauled the artifacts in nondescript trucks.”

“Bloody hell,” Cecil muttered with resignation.

“Honestly though, it’s not like we’ve had a bad run here. The stuff we have found is probably worth millions on the open market. Like this,” Zak said, holding up a strangely smooth, angular stone, and handing it to Cecil. It was twelve centimeters tall, and had seven sides. Each side was engraved with a glyph that seemed to shine or even glow if it caught the light just right. Whatever it was made out of, it wasn’t stone. It was perfectly smooth and weighed so little that it felt like it was made of aluminum.

“What is this?” Cecil said, examining the piece in awe. He’d seen them before, of course, but Zak hadn’t shown him
this
fine specimen before.

“I have no idea,” the historian admitted. “Neither did the Zanzibaran archaeologists. My spectrometer can’t even identify what it’s made out of. I don’t want to risk damaging it by doing a more invasive procedure. I found it cataloged in the original dig site archives.
They
had no idea what it was either, but judging from where they found it, they estimated it to be about four million years old.”

“Four million years,” Cecil repeated. “That’s about when they estimated that Zanzibar lost its magnetosphere, isn’t it? My God. It just boggles the mind, Zak. What happened here? Who made this thing? What purpose did it serve?”

Zak raised his eyebrows. “I’d be curious to know how it sat unused for four million years and still looks new. It said that when they found it, after they cleaned the dirt off, they thought it was much more recent at first, or that it was an anomaly.”

“Most of what we’ve found on this planet is anomalous,” Cecil said. “So…not to be crass, but how much is this thing worth?”

“Well, there isn’t much of a network on Zanzibar, and it doesn’t get updated very often, but according to the latest information, a generic alien artifact of this size and condition from just about any extinct species could fetch up to one-point-five million credits on the market, potentially more if it was auctioned off. And that’s generic. Stuff from Zanzibar is exceedingly rare out there. We’re definitely sitting on a fortune, Cecil. I just hope that Lang doesn’t end up selling all this stuff off for the money. These are priceless relics from an unknown civilization. They need to be studied.” He took the object back from Cecil, holding it delicately. “This belongs in a museum.”

Cecil patted Zak on the shoulder. “I admire your passion, mate, but I’ll be happy enough if we manage to get off of this rock alive.”

Zak nodded in agreement. It was something they tried not to dwell on. Aristotle Lang appeared to be a jovial man, and he had, truth be told, taken very good care of his captives. They were never physically abused, they had plenty of food, and could do whatever they wanted as long as they didn’t try to flee. But for all his pretenses of being a gentleman rogue, Lang was a stone cold killer and they both knew it. You didn’t rise to the top of that particular dung heap without being willing to slit a few throats.