Dark Planet (7 page)

Sometimes, out of loneliness, I entered the Stealth, while Captain Amalfi and the team slept on. I stood by Gun Maid’s time-couch and watched as the VR she was experiencing animated her features. She must be having a delightful time. I experienced a surge of unfamiliar jealousy. I wondered what it would be like to have cocktails with this little brown female, then go to my cubicle afterwards together and watch her undress again. It surprised me to have such desire and it not even breeding season. And for a Human female, no less.

I tried to recall the female I had seen with Mishal at the hangar that night. She was small, like Gun Maid, built well. But I had only seen her in silhouette and, concentrate as I might, I could not correlate Gun Maid in my mind with Mishal and the Zentadon Homeland Movement. Fact was, I didn’t want her to be a traitor to her people. Hers was virtually the only friendly face aboard.

Foolish Zentadon. Part Zentadon, part Human, and neither one nor the other completely.

Instead of six weeks, as planned, the journey took three months because of a chance near-Blob encounter. I attempted to report the cause of the delay when the team revived out of cocooning. However, the Stealth turned into such a feverish hive of pre-mission activity that the Captain had only half an ear for me, figuratively. Everybody jumped out of the time-couches like oversleeping commuters late for work. Nervous energy and excitement flooded the Stealth. Chameleon uniforms were donned but not activated, weapons and equipment checked, then re-checked. Sergeant Shiva supervised the inventory and storage of rations and other gear aboard the tiny drop pod in the Stealth’s nose. Gun Maid had her radios and commo to prove out. As DRT-213’s ops and intel specialist, Gorilla downloaded mission updates, standard news summaries and EEI requirements from the mother ship’s computers, which he condensed on his palm comp for the Captain. It was he who discovered the time discrepancy. He scowled at the miniature screen.

“Captain Amalfi? Have you checked the date?”

The Captain consulted his internal chronometer. His body automatically adjusted it for time, temperature and OpPlan schedule.

“Three months! What the hell happened?”

“Captain, that is what I have been trying to …”

“Right, Sergeant Kadar. Save it.”

He ducked angrily out the connecting hatch into the dreadnought and rushed down the steel corridor toward the mother ship’s bridge and ops center, on his way to confront Lieutenant (advanced grade) Snork, the liaison officer. Ferret tagged along with him, casting back a look of reproval at me. Hey, what did a lowly Zentadon know?

I had already stowed my gear and weapons in the drop pod and donned patterned chameleons. I looked around to make sure I wasn’t noticed, then followed the commander and Ferret. They were already out of sight, but to a Sen, Captain Amalfi’s anger left a spoor as easy to follow as a blood trail for the giant predator fish in Galaxia’s oceans. I didn’t trust Lieutenant Snork, who had constantly gone out of his way during the three months to confront me on small matters. He as much as accused me of communicating telepathically with the enemy, of being the Blob plant who attempted to sabotage the
Tsutsumi
.

“Wherever you go as long as you’re aboard the
Tsutsumi,”
he promised, “you’re going to have a tail. Well …” He glared at where my appendage should be. “Well, you know what I mean. You’re going to have company watching you to make sure you follow the straight and narrow.”

“You are straight and narrow?” I asked innocently.

“Don’t be insolent, Sergeant. Need I remind you that I am a lieutenant, your superior, and that we do not trust you Zentadon?”

“I am half-Human. Do you half-trust me?”

Had my Talent for mind-reading been more refined, I would not have been compelled to sneak up to the door off the liaison office to hear what was being said. It was a distasteful scene inside between the Captain and Lieutenant Snork while Ferret watched. I sampled their emotions. Snork’s deceit and disingenuousness made me nauseous.

“The creature is weird,” he was saying. “He hardly said a word to anyone on the ship for three months. He just went around reading everyone’s mind. One of the sailors called him out on it. The Zentadon sneered the way he does, turned his back on the sailor and walked off. Later, in full view of everybody, he went down to the gym and started bench-pressing nearly five hundred kilos. Like it was nothing.

“I don’t think we realize how powerful the Zentadon are, being no bigger than that female of yours. But he bench-presses half a ton! He regularly worked out in two or three gravities. That’s eerie. But it’s not half as eerie as reading people’s minds.”

“What does all this have to do with the delay, Snork? Get to the point. I’m in a hurry. We’re preparing for an insertion.”

“I’m getting to it, Captain. There was another big clash in the sector between Blob fighters and some of our armed scouters. We had to break out of the trough and do a non-tunnel jump.”

“Why didn’t you get back in the trough after the threat was over?”

“Because that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you … I went to the commander about it and he agreed with me that it would be safer not to. Let me ask you this, Captain Amalfi: How did the Blobs know we were coming through this sector? The obvious reason is … your Zentadon.”

Captain Amalfi started to protest, but Snork cut him off. “Hear me out, sir. Your Zentadon is a Sen, right? We watched him. He would go out on the enclosed observation platform and meditate for hours. We know the Blobs communicate by telepathy. So … Who was the Zentadon mind-talking to all the time? You figure it out, Captain.”

“That’s no proof that Sergeant Kadar …”

“Sir, I’m just reporting the facts.”

“These are assumptions, not facts,” Captain Amalfi snapped, to his credit.

“Sir, this is not a formal caution and no record will be made of it. However, the commander and I felt your team should be made aware of it. I know one thing — and I’m no superstitious coward, sir — but I wouldn’t insert on that planet with the Zentadon. Mark my word, Captain, if you take him you won’t be coming back. If he makes one false move, I’d get rid of him. That’s what I’d so, sir. Get rid of that elf.”

Through Ferret, the entire team would soon be apprised of the gist of the conversation. Suspicions, once nurtured and attended, grew like strangler vines. I would have to watch my back and keep my senses tuned to the changing moods of my own teammates.

O
nce slung past the two moons and into orbit around Aldenia, we had two Galaxia days aboard the Stealth before we established the correct angle and transferred to the pod for entry. Entertainment packages aboard the ship provided diversion, as there was little actual flying to do and duties were minimal. Gun Maid and Gorilla read books, real paper books with covers, while Atlas and Ferret were partial to holographic games involving miniature soldiers and bots, ground armor and space ships engaged in bloody battle with lots of shooting and screaming. Captain Amalfi and Sergeant Shiva, the team’s leadership, had more to do and kept themselves occupied with planning and cross-planning. Blade made me nervous, his suspicious nature further fed by the relayed warning from the wretched Lieutenant Snork. Every time I attempted to read his emotions, to sample his thought patterns and thus forearm myself, it was like he felt me probing and slammed the door shut so hard in my face that it left me feeling bruised inside my head.

He would look up in a glare and growl, “Fu-uck.”

The others said Blade was too mean to breed, so the next best thing for him were his weapons. He spent hours with the sniper rifle, caressing it, ministering to this high point of infantry technology. With the M-235 Gauss he could punch ten rounds into the X-ring at one thousand meters as fast as he could squeeze the trigger, using the iron sights, too, instead of the weapon’s holographic. Then he would back off two thousand meters and do it again. On the day I was introduced to the team, Blade had just won a hundred credits in a bet with Atlas on the firing range. Ferret had gone to Blade’s target and, in amazement, placed a single thumb over the entire pattern; the rounds had struck that close together to tear out the man-target’s tiny heart.

Sergeant Gunduli — it seemed ludicrous to call such a pleasing creature Gun Maid — maintained vigilance in front of a bank of radio and crypto equipment while she read her books.

“Apparently, the Blobs are either under tactical radio silence, they have systems I can’t penetrate, or they use telepathy for even long range and intergalactic communications,” she reported to Captain Amalfi.

“There’s one further option,” Gorilla noted.

“What’s that?” Captain Amalfi asked.

“There’s nothing there.”

Captain Amalfi shook his head. “Energy emissions picked up by sensor bots before they vanished during the previous recon may or may not have originated from Blobs,” he cautioned, “but this we do know: there is something there, whether it be free colonizers, pirates, or even another unknown species. The Republic leadership is betting on Blobs and that’s good enough for me. Sergeant Kadar?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Are you receiving anything from the planet?”

“Am I receiving any ‘vibes?’” I could get into this Human lingo with practice. “Negative,” I amended quickly when I saw the Captain unimpressed. “I don’t do intergalactic telepathy. I have to at least be on the same planet with a source.”

“Humph! Keep trying, Sergeant Gunduli.”

“Yes, sir. There’s … I don’t know …”

“What?” Captain Amalfi prompted impatiently.

She looked puzzled. “I … it’s a feeling …”

“Leave the feeling to Sergeant Kadar. Stick with the comma.”

“I’ll keep running the bands, even in alternate time bands.”

The crew became edgy, a condition that grew with the passage of relatively idle hours. It was like edginess recycled through the ship’s rebreather system. My ears twitched. I sensed general hostility, like one detected noxious gas issuing from a contaminated spring. I noticed it first in Gun Maid when I thought to ask if she and Atlas were a breeding pair. I stumbled and pawed around the words, trying to get the question out, until sudden ice blocked all mental contact with her.

“Let sleeping dogs lie,” she flared, which I took to be an old, old Earth expression meaning shut up, it’s none of your business.

Curiosity was a common Zentadon trait that, I understood, could sometimes kill the cat.

Next, it was Captain Amalfi and Sergeant Shiva.

“Team Sergeant?” The Captain’s voice rose uncharacteristically. “Team Sergeant?”

The scarred old NCO battle horse slowly came to attention. The snap was gone. “What do you want?”

“In two days, Sergeant Shiva, in less than two days, this team may be in battle with the Blobs.”

“We’re the Blobs’ worst nightmare.”

“Shiva, these DRT-bags are slow, they’re sloppy, their breath stinks and they don’t love Jesus. Do you catch my drift?”

“No, sir.”

“I want these soldiers whipped into shape, Team Sergeant. Now, do you catch my drift?”

“What do you suggest, Captain? Double-time them around the bridge?”

“Your sarcasm is unappreciated, Team Sergeant.”

“I’ll whip them into shape, Captain.”

“Very well.” That seemed to satisfy him.

I tried to pass the atmosphere off as pre-insertion jitters. DRTs were, after all, superb soldiers, the elite Special Forces of the Galaxia Republic. They were focused and ready, like gladiators about to enter the coliseum. They were, well, edged.

But there was more to it than that. I cautiously explored my team members’ brains and emotions, using my special Talent, and found aggression and suspicion, much more than before, along with little black worms of fear and unspecified anxieties. Since they had not been that way pre-orbit, I assumed it had something to do with Aldenia. While I ate, I studied the Dark Planet on the view screen, trying to figure out what there was about it that could cause such a sudden transformation. Lightning boils in the dark crust popped and flickered.

I picked at my food, since I utilized very little energy while inactive in orbit. Special rations had been prepared and packed for me: water vine, a type of lichen, and other plants. Zentadon were once exceptional predators, but that was in the distant past. I now found it disgusting the way Blade and Gorilla, and even Sergeant Shiva gorged themselves on the near-raw flesh of the mammoth Galaxia quadropod. Indowy and Zentadon had reformed basic aggressive traits in our genetic signatures. Because of taa, the killing and eating of meat could even be dangerous to us.

“Are you occupied?” Sergeant Shiva asked gruffly. “You aren’t meditating again or something?”

I set aside my plate, the nuked plants half-eaten. Children in China, wherever that was, were probably starving. “I am listening for Blobs,” I said.

“You can hear them?”

“Mostly I hear inside myself.”

“With myself” was the best conversation I could expect while attached to DRT-213.

Grumpy and out of sorts like everyone else, Sergeant Shiva took the seat next to me in front of the viewscreen. He was a huge man, even sitting. The scar jagging down his cheek appeared etched in relief. He apparently had something to say.

“That is one ugly ball of dung,” he said, indicating Aldenia.

I couldn’t quarrel with that. I waited.

“Shit!” he said. He got up in exasperation, walked around the seat and sat down again. “Okay, let’s get it over with. Call this your leadership briefing, although you ain’t ever going to need it if there’s anything the Captain and I can do about it. This is just in case he and I and Sergeant Gunduli all get it. If that happens, you’re fourth in the chain of command, behind Gun Maid and before Gorilla. The chain of command goes like this: the Captain, me, Gun Maid, you, Gorilla, Blade, Ferret and Atlas, in that order.”

“I am a specialist, Team Sergeant, and a Zentadon. Zentadon specialists normally do not assume leadership positions. Besides, I know I’m not trusted.”