Dark Planet (13 page)

I recognized its reflection in the faces of the others as we ate, helmets on the floor at our sides. Rain splashed in sheets outside the open door and lightning flashed hard shadows and light, transforming Human features into ghoulish masks. Atlas glared at me for no discernible purpose, considering that I might have saved his life, twice. While I didn’t expect him or my other teammates to throw themselves at my feet in supplication for what I had done, considering their mistrust of me, I had thought someone might at least acknowledge it. Instead, exhausted from the long, continuing trek and the constant strain of environment, we huddled together in individual isolation.

Sergeant Shiva, his scar ragged and gorged like a war leech, snarled at Gorilla. “You eat like a pig.” He issued a dry and raspy chuckle, an echo of that we had suffered aboard the pod. I half-expected him to burst into maniacal laughter.

Even Maid’s tanned and pretty face was not so appealing in the presence of the Presence. I couldn’t stand to look at her.

“Fu-uck,” Blade said. He stood up, looked contemptuously at his teammates, replaced his helmet and went out into the rain to rummage around in the running dark water that had cut gullies, ditches, and channels among the ruins.

“Are you trying to get rich by finding Indowy war treasures?” Gorilla chided him through his helmet intercom.

“Fu-uck.”

It was a cold and silent camp. I lifted my head once, thinking I heard the eerie chuckle of the Presence. It seemed I could never focus on it, study it, because the moment I became aware of it, it was gone. There was nothing there except Ferret at the door taking his monitor watch.

Perhaps it was only my imagination and rain washing relentlessly off the dome and skeining the open door.

It was against military regulations for a soldier to scrounge planetary artifacts with the intent to black market them for personal gain, but sometimes the temptation proved too strong to resist. Especially here on Aldenia where the Indowy war technology had once flourished. Greed was a difficult drive to resist. For some.

Curious about Blade’s rummaging around in the old camp alone, I slipped out of the domed shelter. It was not yet dark, but rain fell in such layers, drumming hard, that vision was reduced to a matter of yards and the only sound was of the downpour. Lightning crashed on the Blobs’ mountain. I picked up Blade’s spoor telepathically. He seemed to have left his thoughts and emotions momentarily unguarded. Within him I also sensed the Presence, whose repugnant signature I was beginning to recognize. It was almost like they were one. Conjoined, as Mina Li might have put it.

Something about the place, undoubtedly its sordid history, at least in part, gave me the jitters. Among these now-rotted remnants of walls and spires, domes and towers and degraded electronic barriers, the Indowy had kept Zentadon herded and confined under deplorable conditions while they experimented on them like laboratory animals. The entire galaxy suffered the result: tailed devils of superhuman strength under the complete control of a madman race intent on sacrificing the Zentadon population in order to eradicate populations and dominate the planets. The Zentadon had been a large and prosperous people prior to the Indowy death camps.

I almost walked up on Blade before I actually saw him. He wore his helmet as protection against the rain, but his chameleons were deactivated. A monster dragonfly materialized out of the wet gray, but Blade jumped up and waved his arms and the insect skidded across the sky, swirling water, and made a few curious circles before making its retreat. At least the dragonflies had proved, so far, not to be a direct threat to us.

I crouched out of sight behind a crumbled wall. Blade returned to digging and pilfering among the rubbish. He seemed to be frantically looking for something. I picked up his thread of impatience and ill temper. Then, to my surprise, I actually received his thoughts, they were so powerfully projected. I couldn’t read them completely, but enough fragments came through for me to understand. It was almost like my Talent received a boost once we landed on Aldenia. I had first noticed it in exchanges with Gun Maid.

Blade appeared to be having a thought quarrel with himself. With a shock of understanding, I realized he was communicating with the Presence, but in such a way that he likely wasn’t even aware of it. He probably thought the conversation originated within his own fertile mind.

…
Was here … know it was here …

Fu-uck … idiot … know where it was when I get …

I saw him … buried it here … Right here. Fu-uck!

…fucking lizard got him …

Not the lizard … fed him to the lizard … Killed him and …

Fu-uck. Stanto … Stanto dug it up again … Stanto wanted … for himself … Cheatin sonofabitch … He took it. What did he do with it?

… Buried It … buried … on high ground near base camp … before killed Stanto …

Horror wracked my body. Blade and the Presence had encountered each other before and found themselves compatible. This Stanto must have been a member of the explorer mapping team Blade accompanied here years before. Apparently, the team had found something important, something valuable here in this camp. The impression that came in strong was of quarreling and bloody fighting that decimated the team. Violence and death spurred by greed and emcee’d by the Presence.

Just as the Presence now choreographed dissension within DRT-213.

I assumed this Stanto Human ended up with the treasure, whatever it was, and reburied it elsewhere. Blade didn’t know where it was because Stanto was dead. But the Presence knew where it was.

… On
the high country east of here … Remember …? Near the explorer camp … If I hadn’t killed …

The Presence was trying to tell him, but Blade listened only to himself. I felt the Presence’s slimy tentacles burrowing deeply into Blade’s soul.

It’s there! That’s where it is … near where I dumped Stanto off the cliff …

It’s not here … It’s there, damn you …

It was difficult to distinguish which voice was whose. What I now knew clearly was that the fauna of the Dark Planet had not entirely destroyed Kilmer’s mapping team. The members had got to fighting among themselves and killed each other. Blade Kilmer was the last man standing.

Now he was back and still seeking the “treasure.” The Presence apparently intended to assist him as much as it could.

I glimpsed movement from the corner of my eye. Blade also sensed something, for he immediately clamped down on his thoughts. He snapped erect. The globe of his helmeted head ran with water and his face was barely visible through the glass as he peered intently through the rain.

Off to my right, a figure in deactivated chameleons flitted behind an outcropping of weathered stone and darted into a maze of standing walls. It was a small figure that could belong only to someone like Ferret or Gun Maid. It occurred to me that I was being followed even as curiosity had sent me looking for Blade.

I eased away from Blade without being spotted, then ran an intercepting course to cut off the spying DRT-bag member. Few Humans were as fleet as a healthy Zentadon, even without our use of taa. I leaned casually against a wall, arms and legs crossed, looking as nonchalant as possible. Maid sneaked out of the dilapidated buildings, concentrating on her back trail. She jumped and gave a little startled cry when I spoke up.

“Looking for me?”

She recovered quickly. She straightened herself. After another glance back in Blade’s direction, she responded with her own question. “Why should I be looking for you? Can’t a lady go to the john?”

I must have looked puzzled.

“The john,” she clarified. “The bathroom.”

“Did you find it?”

“Close enough. I’m going back to shelter now. I’d advise you to do the same. I saw Blade out using the john also.”

“Blade
is
the john.”

She chuckled.

“Why were you following me?” I asked bluntly.

“Why were you following Blade?” she countered.

For a fleeting moment, it occurred to me that Blade was the second Human form I saw with Mishal at the hangar, along with the female Human that might have been Gun Maid. Blade and Maid, conspirators with the Homeland Movement? Conspirators now in attempting to recover some unknown treasure?

Preposterous!

Yet …

I probed her mind, finding it remarkably clean and centered now only on getting out of the rain and finding a place as dry and comfortable as possible. Was she so good at mind control that she could project to me the thoughts she wanted me to hear while covering up all others?

He’s a Zentadon …
she thought.
He’s a Zentadon …

As though she had to keep reminding herself that a Zentadon could not be trusted. I was thinking the same thing in a slightly different context. Whom among the Humans could I trust?

“Walk back with me,” she invited. “I thought you didn’t read other people’s thoughts without being invited.”

“Lying is sometimes a fault of mine.”

“Do you often lie?” she asked.

“Only during the breeding season,” I quipped to divert her.

I was wrong about some things. Politics, prolie problems, Homelanders, traitors … DRT-213 brought it all with us to Aldenia. It still mattered, more than ever. The team was falling apart. And in this harsh and inhospitable land an individual alone had about as much chance of surviving as a live organism shot into an airless vacuum.

R
ain almost stopped during the short night, but the paradiddle of sprinkles gave way in a bang of lightning to a serious drumming once daylight arrived. Everyone had been pushed hard mentally and physically. I was as anxious as the others to complete the mission and return to the pod waiting in the black river. Even the cramped confines of the Stealth seemed luxurious compared to living in a waterfall.

We located the Blob base at midday.

We were traveling the military crest to avoid silhouetting ourselves. Gorilla deployed one of the bots to the top of the ridge to check out the valley and the side of the ridge facing the valley. The robot relayed feed to a miniature monitor. The screen displayed the narrow glacial valley heavily forested, revealed where it curved abruptly back to the north. At its bend were caves — and definite movement among the caves.

“Captain?” Gorilla said in a low voice.

The way he said it was an alert. The rest of the team immediately deployed into a security perimeter. I huddled with the command element — now Captain Amalfi and Sergeant Shiva — around the monitor with Gorilla.

“The base?” Sergeant Shiva asked.

“It has to be,” Gorilla acknowledged.

Gorilla manipulated the robot to climb a tree and zoom in on the caves with its close-up lenses. The rest of the team breathlessly viewed the scene through their helmet monitors. Curiosity consumed us as the camera uncovered intense activity. None of us had ever seen the enemy before other than in rare photos, and now Blobs seemed to be everywhere in the valley. Higher-higher was apparently correct in their assumption of an advance Tslek base on Aldenia.

Verti-form maintenance robots coasted about checking and repairing an obvious force field around the base. Roving security balls flew back and forth above combat bots unlike anything I had ever seen. These were huge tracked machines bristling with weapons protruding from various orifices. Gorilla’s tech gear also exposed transmissions from placed sensors and smart mines, along with low-level energy transmissions from aerial space defensive weapons.

“It’s heavily fortified,” Captain Amalfi murmured appreciatively, “and so sophisticated it’s virtually undetectable except at very close range.”

A phalanx of Blobs on patrol appeared on the screen, moving in wedge formation around the outer boundary of the fortification. They were huge individuals, fully Gorilla’s height but even bulkier. They appeared solid and heavy. They were gray to black in color, wore no clothing, and appeared to be forming and reforming themselves to the terrain as they oozed rapidly, covering territory. Each individual carried several strange looking weapons in retractable appendages.

“Good God, they’re ugly!” Ferret breathed through the intercom.

“You haven’t seen a mirror in awhile,” Atlas responded with a trace of his old humor.

Gorilla was engrossed in the screen. “Record it, sir?” he asked.

“In detail,” Captain Amalfi concurred.

The monitor transmitted the recordings directly to the waiting pod’s memory system, so that a record would be made in the event something happened to the team on the way back and the pod took off without us.

“Sir, we’ve got it all confirmed on tape,” Gorilla reported directly. “We got what we came for. I suggest we return to the pod via the most direct route.”

“Hallelujah!” came Ferret’s voice. “I’m going back to my baby!”

The news revived the team’s morale. In a moment, everyone except Blade was laughing and bantering and the helmet intercoms were buzzing. Blade looked preoccupied, nervous.

“At ease!” Captain Amalfi said sharply. “Your assessment now, Sen?”

My ears prickled. Why couldn’t I sense that these beings were even Blobs? Had I somehow lost my extrasensory abilities?

“I sense one Tslek, sir. One.”

Captain Amalfi looked at the Blobs on the screen. He looked at me. “One?”

“Sir. One.”

His brow creased. The scar-faced Team Sergeant squatted in front of Gorilla’s monitor. He jabbed a thick finger.

“Are you crazy, Kadar? Look. You can see at least a hundred or more,” he growled.

I said nothing. My ears twitched.

“Fu-uck,” snarled Blade’s voice in my helmet. “If the only DRTs to return from a Blob patrol had a Sen along, it’s a cinch it wasn’t one like this fucked-up elf.”

“The Blobs divide and reproduce themselves,” Captain Amalfi speculated. “Could it be that the reproductions don’t communicate, don’t think or feel so that you can pick up their thought patterns?”