Writers of the Future, Volume 29 (9 page)

I ran the ship close to the planet's sun and baked it rotisserie style, in case any of the plankton was still alive on the outside of our ship. I did not want to take these guys home.

Diego arrived at Base a few months before Lester. Diego was a scrappy little guy. He liked to play a mean game of slap tag with Lester. Diego would sneak up behind Lester in the gym and smack him one good above the waistline where the skin is really sensitive. Then he'd run off trailing an insane, cackling giggle.

Lester would chase him around the exercise area cursing like a proper miner's son. Lester was generally too slow to catch him. It was good for the big guy to learn his limits. Lester would end up with hand-shaped bruises all over his back. Occasionally Diego would be outwitted, but more often he'd slip in a puddle of Lester's sweat and get tackled. Lester would sit on Diego until he nearly passed out. It was great fun to watch.

Jack and Diego got their mission before us. A discovery ship had found signs of technology on their target planet. Nothing definite. They were supposed to confirm or deny intelligence. Turned out the natives were extremely intelligent. They ambushed Jack and Diego. The natives figured out the latch system of their suits and extracted them. Then the creatures carefully, minutely, dissected them alive with razor-sharp stone tools. Diego's suit camera recorded everything until it was splattered with blood. Suit mikes continued to transmit their ongoing screams.

When the ship confirmed that they were dead, it sterilized a kilometer around their bodies to ensure they didn't contaminate the native population. Then it returned to Base.

I suppose it should have made me feel better knowing that the ones who got Jack and Diego were fried. It didn't.

Lester and I cleaned up their rooms. Diego had piles of clean clothes on his bunk and a basket of dirty laundry in the corner. His desk was covered with pictures of his five-year-old daughter, the large brown eyes and ready smile engaging and harrowing. He'd hung the walls of his room with her drawings. Lester told me that Diego had joined the Scouts so that he could support her. We put together some of his things so the girl would have a remembrance of her father.

Jack's room was orderly. We found his will under a paperweight on the top of his desk. In all the years I'd known him, I'd never heard Jack talk about family. He left everything in trust to Diego's daughter. He'd never met the girl.

It's times like this when I envy women. I remember when Miyuki lost a friend. She went on a two-day crying jag and felt better afterward. Lester and I didn't have that option. So we went to the bar that night. We ordered shots of Ouzo, made morbid toasts, downed the shots and remembered times with Jack and Diego. I helped Lester back to his room. He threw up and crashed on the floor. I sat propped in my bunk, world-spinning-around-my-head drunk, unable to sleep. We barely made the memorial service next day.

We sat on the bridge of the Scout ship and studied our next planet. It was blue. Not blue, green and brown—blue. What land there was barely registered on a planetary view.

Lester gazed at the globe openmouthed. “Why are we checking this place out? There's no land for humans to live on.”

I zeroed in on the designated area of interest. “There's an undersea plateau. If the planet's suitable, they'll haul in a couple of asteroids, orbit them around the planet, break them into pieces and use the pieces to build up the land level. I've seen it done before.”

“Why go to all that effort?”

“Aquaculture. They introduce Terran fish into the seas and harvest them later. It's risky, but it can make huge profits.”

“What about the native lifeforms?”

“That's where we come in. We've got to determine if there's any chance of intelligence in this ocean. If we don't find anything, they'll introduce nonnative species and probably destroy any native species that prey on the ones humans want to farm.”

“So unless we find something intelligent, this whole planet becomes one big fish farm?”

I patted Lester's shoulder. “You can't get too involved in these planets. We don't make the ultimate decisions. You want to get involved in that, go into politics. But you'll have to wait till you've finished your twenty-five.”

There were a few small islands in the area of interest. We landed on the largest one. I've been in bars that were bigger. The surface of the island was bare. It was too small and insecure to develop a unique ecology. Other than sand and rock, there was only seaweed along the shore.

We disembarked from the ship and started sampling the life on the shoreline. It was slimy. We kept falling down. We were both on the ground, laughing our heads off, trying not to slide into the ocean when the first tentacle emerged from the water. It rose nearly ten meters into the air and waved around, as if viewing the scene. We froze. A few dozen other tentacles joined it and made for the ship. They latched on and started pulling it toward the water.

The ship is not small. They were not making headway until the tentacles started oozing slime, which greased the path. Our ship rapidly went underwater.

Lester's voice was on the verge of cracking. “Aidan, what do we do now?”

The tip of a tentacle reemerged from the water. “Make for the highest point—on the double.” We ran for the peak of the island as fast as the slime would let us. The tentacles reacted to our movement. Seeing one coming, I stopped Lester. “Lock arms. Turn on your static field.”

The tentacle reached within a meter of us and got a jolt from the field. It backed off. We sidled closer to the peak, arm in arm.

Tentacles came at us in waves. Our field held. They retreated.

Lester was breathing hard. “Ok, how do we get the ship back?”

“The remote will work through water. Keep looking for tentacles.” I called up the display for the ship's remote control. It responded instantly. The ship was 300 meters below the surface. I told it to kick in the antigrav. There was initial resistance. It broke the surface with a huge tentacled passenger. I stopped it a few meters above the water. The passenger decided to give up and dropped back into the ocean. I maneuvered the ship close to us.

That was when the tentacles attacked again. I initiated the static field on the ship. That blocked us, as well as the creatures, from approaching it. The tentacles probed the edges of the fields, searching for a weak spot. A few tried to dig under only to find the field extended below us into the sand.

“Aidan, this is draining my power pack.”

“Mine too.”

“You make a run for it, I'll cover you.”

“Don't get brave, Lester. That's how people die. We'll both make a run for it.” I opened the outer hatch on the ship and waited.

After a couple of minutes, there was a brief lull. I cut the ship's field. “Cut your field and run.” We dove into the hatch just as the tentacles took advantage of the absence of the field. The tentacles dragged the ship partway to the water before I got the hatch shut and the field back on. I engaged the antigravs and was in orbit before the decontamination cycle completed.

Lester flopped into the copilot's chair. “Do we ever get one that's boring?”

“I've heard of a couple; only a couple.” There was a lull while both of us caught our breaths. “Thanks for offering to cover my ass. It wasn't smart, but it was brave.”

Lester shrugged. “Isn't that what partners do?”

“Yes and no. They watch each other's backs but try to make sure that both of them make it out alive.” I walked over and put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks, partner.”

Lester smiled.

I pulled up the video from the ship's sensors. What had gone on beneath the water's surface interested me. The video showed a concerted attack. The creatures were trying to either bend the ship or bang it against a rock in order to break its shell. The rock had been worked to a sharp point. They must have thought something that big had a lot of food inside. The work was methodical.

Lester leaned forward. “Look at the colors and patterns on their skins.”

The undulating bodies were covered with spots that changed shape and color. “Communications, tools and coordinated actions; there's at least a modicum of intelligence.”

Lester smiled. “So this planet will be off limits.”

“Looks that way.” I shut off the video. “You seem mighty happy.”

“It didn't look like the kind of world we should be messing with.”

“Well, you win this time.”

I started the preflight sequence. An alarm went off. I turned on the navigation displays. The landing gear was damaged. It couldn't retract, so the ship couldn't go into hyperdrive. “We're stuck. Let's contact the
Mercury
.”

The
Mercury
is a tiny hyperdrive ship. It's more a messenger to the gods than a messenger from them. Since you can't get past the Einstein limits in regular space, communication at stellar distances is either deadly slow or works something like a message in a hyperbottle.
Mercury
is the hyperbottle. We leave it in orbit above the planets we explore so we can send it back home with an emergency message no matter what happens.

I recorded a message and sent
Mercury
off to Base. We now had three weeks before a rescue vessel would come. I went to my bunk and got a deck of cards. “Okay, kid, gin rummy, centicredit a point.”

Lester pulled out a tray between the two pilot's chairs and gave me a wry smile. “You sure you want to do this again? At the rate you're going, you'll have to get a job after your twenty-five just to pay me back.”

“You've been having a run of good luck. That'll change.”

Lester had never played cards before he met me. He was adaptable. By the time we got back, I was down another twenty credits.

During the lull, the passenger liner arrived. A chamber orchestra was on board and the folks in charge of Base managed to talk them into doing a one-night stand. This generally involves sizable sums of cash. That seems to be one thing the Scouts have plenty of.

The orchestra was great. I sat next to Lester, who spent the evening with Marina tucked securely under one of his big arms. There was an empty seat on the other side of me. I remembered the last time I'd heard Mozart—Miyuki sat beside me. We'd held hands discreetly (partners aren't supposed to get involved). Now, as the haunting, perfect strains of late Mozart swept over me, I felt alone.

T
he big brass called us in for a talk before the next mission. That's almost always a bad sign. They shoved us into a debriefing room and left us for close to an hour. I knew the routine, so I'd brought a pack of cards. The arrival of the two officers saved me from a five-credit loss. Lester was getting too lucky.

We stood and saluted. They told us to sit, but the tension in the room didn't fade.

The older of the two officers was a full colonel. I could tell with my artificial eye that he was about half bionic. Some folks never give up. “This mission is somewhat delicate,” he said. I tried not to groan. “You will not be setting foot on the planet.” I perked up. “We've already determined the planet has intelligent life. The planet was explored around a hundred years ago. At that time, the local culture was using gunpowder weapons.” I wanted to ask why the hell we were going to a hostile planet with advanced technology, but kept my mouth shut. “We recently sent out another probe to see how far they'd advanced. The locals destroyed that probe while it was orbiting their planet.”

I gave a little whistle. “They've gone from cannons to rockets in a century?”

The colonel nodded. “That took humans close to five hundred years. What was even more worrying was that the impact weapon that destroyed our probe was made of depleted uranium.”

I looked at Lester, who shook his head, then back to the colonel. “My chem lectures were a couple of decades ago.”

The younger officer, a captain, but also a veteran of his twenty-five, I judged by the level of spare parts, took up the lecture. “Uranium 238. It's one of the densest naturally occurring materials. Makes a great impact weapon. But U238 doesn't show up in nature by itself; it's always mixed with a couple of other isotopes. The only reason you'd go to the trouble of separating out U238 would be to concentrate the U235 isotope, which is the one used in primitive nuclear fission reactors and bombs.”

Lester's eyes were wide. “You're sending us to a planet where they've already knocked out one of our probes and they have rockets and nuclear bombs?”

The colonel sat back and let out a long sigh. “Yes. At the rate they're progressing technologically, they could have hyperdrive in another hundred years. The last probe managed to send out the information it had gathered before it self-destructed, and it indicates a highly dysfunctional civilization that is fractured and xenophobic. We need to know how far along they are and what kind of civilization they really have.”

I looked at the captain. “Didn't the probe have some kind of shielding?”

“Just basic. We weren't expecting the natives to have anything more advanced than telescopes.”

“What are you sending us in with?”