Dark Planet (2 page)

Blob aggression intensified into open hostilities. Galaxia survey and commercial ships flying the edges of the Blight began vanishing. Blob kinetic strikes obliterated entire colonies, Human and otherwise, on planets out toward the Tau Ceti tail. Blob fleets probed the perimeter of the galaxy, sniffing around for prey and advantage. After a Republic Battlestar ship survived an ambush by a squadron of gigantic meteor-like craft, President Carl Oboma dispatched a Galaxia combat fleet from IV Corps Sector Command to engage the invaders. Although the fleet defeated the Tslek in a major month-long battle, it had not been a victory without significant losses.

Since then, the “war” had ebbed into a cat-and-mouse game of probe and counter- probe, with frantic frontier colonists suffering most in the fledgling conflict. Ready Reserves were activated and thrown into up-training mode. DRT scouting teams were dispatched into enemy space to dig for every scrap of intelligence they could find on what kind of beings these Blobs were, what their ultimate intentions were, and what strategic, tactical, and technical capabilities they possessed. Several DRTs had already turned up “missing, presumed lost.”

President Oboma declared a galaxy emergency and placed the support superstructure on the capital planet of Galaxia on a war footing. Manufacturing of battle material — “beans and bullets,” as the Humans quaintly put it — went into overdrive thirty-two hours a day. The threat of invasion generated a renewed interest in the superior Indowy war technology which the Indowy had destroyed after their civilization imploded and the survivors turned pacifists. Shifts of scientists labored continuously in hopes of unraveling Indowy secrets of antimatter, molecular displacement, and time-mass travel. Enterprising entrepreneurs could literally earn millions of credits and become unbelievably wealthy by successfully mining Indowy arms and battle technology.

It was amidst this feverish atmosphere of War! War! War! that Commander Mott chopped me from my instructor position at the 4156
^th
Interstellar School to assign me to DRT-213. The reason I was selected, as it turned out, was because I was the only Sen available on short notice, and because I was half-Human and therefore could be at least half-trusted.

“Kadar San,” he said, “the Humans say that when you have only seven — now eight, counting you — on a DRT team, you get close working asshole-to-belly button for months at a time out there, way out there where their God does not go without per diem.”

“Zentadon do not get that close to Humans,” I said.

As a minority of one with seven Humans, I faced the prospect of a long and perilous mission with beings who distrusted me, and whom I distrusted, from centuries past. We harbored suspicions of each other that were almost as much a part of our genetic makeup as the coloring of our hair and eyes and, well, the length and fullness of our tails, for those of us who still possessed them.

Trust between Humans and Zentadon was certainly not enhanced by the Zentadon Homeland Movement, a rapidly growing organization of separatists agitating for the dissolution of Human hegemony over the Zentadon home planet of Ganesh. Cells of young Homelanders conducted underground war against the Human power structure. While I sympathized with the goals of the Homelanders to some extent, mine was a voice against their methods. For the first time since the Indowy days of infamy, Zentadon were utilizing taa against Humans. Taa used in this manner usually meant suicide missions.

Commander Mott regarded me with his enormous cat-pupiled eyes. Zentadon had two basic eye colors; purple or green. His were purple. Mine were emerald green. Commander Mott was among our most sensitive Sens; he actually read thoughts and communicated via the mind alone with others of equal achievement in the science. I envied him. Like most rank-and-filers, I sensed emotion, sentiment, passion in other beings, especially if such feelings were strongly represented, but rarely could I catch and hold onto another’s well-formed thoughts.

I suspected the part of me that was Human limited my abilities. I assumed Commander Mott suspected the same thing about me. He sat behind his great gnarlwood desk and studied me with his penetrating purple eyes. He stroked the thick fur of his tail resting across the creased tan uniform of his lap. He had injured the tail in his youth while under the influence of taa, it was said, so that it now hung lifeless from the opening in his trousers. It was a habit of his to pull it out of his way when he sat down, lay it across his lap, and absently stroke it.

“The Tslek penetrations have provided a sterling opportunity to prove that we can work together in a mutual purpose,” he said. “The Zentadon, the Humans, and …”

He hesitated. You didn’t have to be a Sen to finish the thought.

“And we who are both and are neither?” I said.

Although it was against the law of both peoples to cross-mate, I was proof that some Zentadon would screw anything when the breeding heat came upon them.

“You are of both worlds, Sergeant Kadar San,” agreed Commander Mott. “That is why you and others like you, rare that you are, have been selected to work with the Humans in their first major joint effort between our peoples. As you are half-Human — your mother was Human, I understand —?”

“She died when I was born. From the shock of seeing me, I suspect.”

I was a Zentadon of a different sort, as Commander Mott was pointing out. While some of the younger Zentadon had their tails surgically removed in order to suck up to Humans, because Humans believed tails were remnants of beast ancestry, I had never had one. I was born with a mere tiny button at the end of my spine.

My teeth were also less sharp, less predatory than full-bloods. I had the Zentadon hair, however, just much less of it. Zentadon hair came in either black, silver, or gold. Commander Mott’s was silver — not gray,
silver
— and flowed thick back off an intelligent forehead and down his neck and spine underneath his Republic uniform to reappear with his invalided tail. I naturally preferred gold, as my own hair was of that hue. I possessed relatively little of it on my body, certainly no more than the average human prolie stevedore working the space docks.

It was said that in first encounters between Humans and Zentadon, some of the Humans slew Zentadon for our fine and woven hair because they thought it really
was
gold.

“I see,” Commander Mott resumed, then finished his previous thought. “Being half-Human, you are anticipated to have a better genetic understanding of them. It is to our mutual benefit that we cooperate against the Tslek. For, if the Tslek prevail, they will ultimately destroy all within the galaxy.”

“I am being sent out to save the galaxy!”

“No, Kadar San. You are being dispatched to do your job as a Zentadon Sen.”

I
n DRT-213’s team room, music throbbed contrapuntal and over scored, synthesized, jagged, and loud the way it was in the VR clubs off-post. Life-sized holographic cartoons populated the room like squads of ghosts, producing a dark military humor involving smashed hovercraft, bent rocket howitzers, crushed bots with mechanical, near-life-like heads, and other battle-damaged robots that resembled rusted hydrogen cans still used in the smoky high-rise prolie tenements occupied by the lower levels of human and Zentadon society. One of two Human holos in a VR bar filled with every form of fantastic life to occupy the edges of the Posleen Blight was saying to another, “Have you ever seen so many foreigners in your life?”

Captain Shinkichi Amalfi, team commander, entered the room with me close on his heels like a loyal pet grafette and clapped away the music and holograms, leaving only a translucent gray light emanating in soothing tones from sources in walls, floor, and ceiling. The mission warning order had already been issued, accounting for the tension I felt among the assembled team members, but the hostility and resentment could only derive from my addition to the operation.

“They issuing elves now, sir?” growled a stocky man whose eyes in his fair skin were black like twin holes in space.

We Zentadon, especially one half-Human like myself, did in fact bear resemblance to the mythical fairies and elves of Earth lore. It amused me sometimes to think that Zentadon visiting Earth may even have been the source of that Human whimsy.

There was some muffled laughter, which seemed to please the stocky man. The team had apparently spent much of the day at the rifle range, firing Gravs. The M-91 Grav, the Galaxia Republic’s main battle rifle, was a real bitch to clean. Due to its incredible muzzle velocity, 30,000 kilometers per second, carbon and uranium sublimed and coated the breach and bore with a substance so hard to remove that it was like chipping off glazed nickel. While the Humans had stolen enough Indowy technology to construct certain weapons systems such as chameleon-camouflage combat uniforms, protection force fields, ordnance, and energy transference, they lacked facilities and know-how to perfect them. As a result, munitions and other sophisticated items gummed up barrels, overrode each other, or failed at inopportune moments. The present Indowy were no help in correcting problems, as they no longer practiced war and depended upon their former serfs, both Human and Zentadon, to protect their limited sovereignty in the Tau Ceti Cluster.

The stocky man must be the team’s sniper; he cleaned an M-235 Gauss while the others worked with Gravs. He had the eyes of a sniper and handled his weapon in a sensuous way that suggested sufficient arousement to breed with it at any time. He was not a tall man compared to the others, but he was solid and muscular from body enhancements. He stared in an unblinking, indecipherable way that was like the stab of a dagger’s blade, which, I assumed, accounted for why he was called “Blade.” Sergeant Darman Kilmer was undoubtedly a dangerous Human to have as an enemy, and perhaps even as a friend.

“Sir,” he sneered, “couldn’t you have at least got an elf with a tail?”

“At ease, DRT-bags.”

Captain Amalfi was tall, but then all Humans, or at least most of them, were tall compared to Zentadon. He was gaunt, a Nordic greyhound that appeared built for speed and stamina. A victim of that easy familiarity among Humans that bred nicknames and malapropisms, he was known as “Captain Bell Toll.” As from the Human literary phrase, “Never ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” “It tolls for thee,” he would say whenever he had to pick one of his soldiers for a particularly unpleasant detail. Unlike the others, however, all of whom had nicknames, never was he referred to as “Bell Toll” to his face.

“This man …” Captain Amalfi began.

“Man?”

Blade the sniper made it difficult to ignore him. If I were Human, if I were more Human, my pointed ears would not twitch and give me away as they did whenever I was nervous or excited, uncertain or uncomfortable, or even sexually whetted during the annual Zentadon breeding season. The Captain fixed Blade with a level gaze. Blade shrugged, opened the breech of his Gauss and sneered into the bore.

“This man is Sergeant Kadar San,” Captain Amalfi continued. “He has been assigned as Sen to DRT-213 for the duration of the Mission. As a member of the team, he will be treated as such.”

I wore the Sen badge on the chest of my new Republic khakis. Our Zentadon’s cat’s eyes made Humans anxious, especially if we were Sens and they thought we were reading their minds. It was to my advantage to let them think I could do exactly that.

Tentatively, I mind-tested the mood in the room, reaching out for a collective sampling first and then testing individuals one at a time. Reaction to my presence ranged from mild suspicion on the part of the female to almost a blow in the face from the hulking sniper.

“Clear, DRT-bags?” Captain Amalfi barked.

“Do you trust him?” asked a wiry soldier with short-cropped black hair, a dark olive complexion, and a face like the rusted edge of a hatchet.

“He’s a Sen, Ferret.”

“That’s not what I asked, sir,” Ferret said. “I was thinking about the Homelanders.”

Sergeant Taraneh Ferreira, called Ferret, the team’s scout and point man, seemed as small and quick and inquisitive as the Earth creature from which he acquired his name. I was to learn that implanted battlefield sensors made him supersensitive. He could smell game from a hundred meters away and feel with the soles of his bare feet the heat from the tracks of whatever entity passed ahead of him.

“The only DRT to make it back from any Blob recon mission had a Sen along,” Captain Amalfi pointed out.

Humans were a superstitious lot.

“What about this … this drug?” asked a fit-looking Viking-type with cropped yellow hair. Staff Sergeant Florian Ronnland, “Atlas,” a designated hitter, a grunt in the crude military parlance of the Humans, glanced at me, then glanced away. He sat so near the female that I assumed they must be a breeding pair.

Captain Amalfi looked to me to answer the question. Humans who had had little association with Zentadon always asked about taa. Zentadon with the same ignorance of Humans inquired about how it was that Humans could have sex all the time.

“The drug, as you refer to it,” I replied, my left ear twitching, “is called taa. Strictly speaking, it is not a drug at all. It is a hormone manufactured involuntarily, or voluntarily within our bodies during stress.”

“You aren’t stressed out now, are you?” Atlas asked, and they all laughed again.

“The Zentadon are dangerous when you do this … this taa thing, aren’t you?” Ferret accused. “Two Zentadon Homelanders on drugs blew up themselves and a munitions plant two weeks ago.”

The Captain had obviously considered the same question. I felt his misgivings.

“Taa is similar to adrenalin manufactured by your own endocrine system,” I explained. “Adrenalin is your Human reaction to stress.”

“Yes,” Ferret admitted, “but when I have an adrenalin attack, I can’t leap over tall buildings, run faster than a speeding bullet, and get stronger than a Battlestar. And I don’t eat raw flesh.”

My ears twitched harder.

“Such stories come from centuries ago when the Indowy developed a technology to turn taa in our bodies on and off against our will,” I said, “and to induce us to use it for their will.”