Stardogs (2 page)

The planet the masters had visited here had never been a potential colony. It was too wet and too high G, to be worth it. But it had a sentient alien species on it. The Denaari had been observing this species.
Homo sapiens
had not been space-traveling at that time, but, as the nest-minders always said, it was better to withdraw warmth from the egg, than the new hatched chick. The Stardogs rarely visited this system. Without their beloved masters the Stardogs preferred hotter suns, with far more sweet ultraviolet to bathe their back-cilia in, or systems more cluttered with tasty Lanthanide-rich fragments. Still, it had been one of the last posts abandoned, so still they came, once every half century or so. Lonely. Miserable.

Then they would drift away again, star-surfing back to the once crowded inner Denaari worlds. Only this time… The Stardog who came, planning on drifting the asteroid belt for something tasty… saw a bright-metal asteroid. An asteroid under power. Joy stirred and leaped along with her hopes. Along the far edge of the Stardog, the chemical reactions for rarely used flatulent rocketry began. With the consummate precision achieved by having several billion nerve inputs feedback-looped through half a million nerve nodes, the ten kilometer diameter bearskin rug accelerated toward the Mars-exploration vessel
EU Gloria Mundi
. Maybe if the Stardog had encountered the
US Ronald Reagan
instead, the future might have been very different. As it was the EU and their friends to delight in reducing the US and its allies to second-class powers. The US was subsumed into the world and then galaxy spanning Empire that this chance incident caused. Her people — or at least those that dreamed of freedom — moved or were transported out to the colony worlds like New Texas. Their dreams of liberty were suppressed, but not destroyed.

People and their pets tend to resemble each other. Usually in outlook, but often even physically. This is particularly true when the bond is close. Joan Cheng, the life support engineer of the EU sponsored Mars-explorer, had kept and adored a St. Bernard. A big, lugubrious-eyed, slightly overweight St. Bernard bitch called Matilda, who was terrified of thunder and quite a lot of other things. It said quite a lot about Joan. And right now she was lonely and miserable to the absolute core of her being. She had gone from the heights of happiness to the depths of despair. A week ago her cup had been overflowing. She, a deaf, too bright, Eurasian girl, had won a place on the long-delayed Mars exploration voyage. Yes… she had two PhD’s, but studying had meant escape from the misery of a home where cultures had clashed and used her as their pawn. She’d never thought she’d get accepted… Then, she’d been in love. She had been deliriously happy, the happiness transforming her normally stolid face. Captain Johannes ‘Hans’ DeMari Wienan. Handsome. Blond. Smooth talking. Captain of the vessel. He was a political appointee, true, but he was a rising man in the European Parliament. And he, in one of the few private spots on a crowded ship, had introduced her to sex. It had provided that physical contact she’d desperately needed for so long.

Looking back now, she was sure it hadn’t been love. Not from Hans, the idol of thousands of girls, Earthside. Just incidental lust. He’d popped into her hydroponics room on a routine inspection, or perhaps seeking the one place on the ship that you didn’t have to share with three others. They were forced close by the high-racked narrow corridor between the plant-racks. As she had tried to step past him, terribly aware of his presence, his hand had brushed across her breast. Or maybe she’d brushed her breast across his hand… Anyway, her eager response had been electric and unplanned. She’d been ashamed, embarrassed. He’d been aroused. And he’d known exactly what to do. It had been a heady couple of weeks. A secret couple of weeks… but not secret enough in that tight community. They all thought that because she was deaf they could say what they liked.

She could lip-read.

The heat had got to politically sensitive Hans too. He’d avoided her, suddenly and without explanation. At first she’d rationalized his behavior… still believed he loved her. A catty exchange with the girl from the reactor room changed that. It was a cruel, barbed interchange, between a jealous ex-conquest, and an emotionally insecure deaf girl. Joan didn’t know how loudly she was shouting. Half of the solar system must have heard her, never mind the fifty thousand cubic feet of the ship. The inevitable
letter
, on a ship whose living space you could cross in a sauntering two minutes, had come, appearing mysteriously on her tiny desk. Her tears had obscured the stupid, mundane, noncommittal words with which he’d buried their pyrotechnic physical relationship. “
I hope we can still remain friends
…” How do you say that to someone whose life you’ve just ruined?

Then, when it seemed that the blackness could get no deeper, in the routine two-hourly radio coms with earth had come the news that her Matilda was dead. Just that. You don’t waste off-planet radio coms with details of unimportant irrelevancies like ill pets.

She stared into the void in the bleakness that precedes suicide. Her eyes were cried dry now. Looking out at the too clear unblinking stars she tried to face the question: How do you kill yourself when your death will mean that 23 other people must die, slowly and cruelly, as the fragile life support system fails?

She couldn’t hear the alarm bell. She was so absorbed in her relentless peering into space that she didn’t see the panicky flashing of the warning lights. Condition red lights. All she saw was that the emptiness outside her tiny viewport was full of an eye, a huge beer-brown soft eye. Deeper than oceans. Full of care. And she could feel the love, the unquestioning love of a lost dog who has found its most important person.

People who don’t know dogs are often frightened by really big dogs. This merely displays their ignorance. When you’re breeding animals the size of a small cart horse you’d better selectively breed for gentleness. For real trouble, medium-sized dogs-German Shepherds, Dobermans — that sort of thing — are more dangerous, and for sheer-nasty mindedness the little snappers take the lead. A Pekinese is infinitely more likely to bite you than a St. Bernard is. Owners of crocodile-jawed bull-terriers can actually describe the monstrous beasts as ‘soppy old things, really’ with perfect accuracy. Toddlers can take sticky-fingered liberties with walk-underable Great Danes that would have a Toy Pom in snarling apoplexy. The toddler’s greatest danger is either being knocked over by accident, or being licked to death. Of course, you don’t threaten the big dog’s owner, or the owner’s territory, unless you’re tired of life. The only thing that could possibly be more dangerous is to hurt the dog. Then the besotted
owner
will probably kill you.

Those in the control room of the
Gloria Mundi
didn’t know much about big dogs. They were frightened. Frantic messages to Ground Control with a twenty minute delay weren’t going to help, and the
Gloria Mundi
carried no weapons.

Joan Cheng, however, knew a big soppy dog when she saw one. The panicking crew failed to notice an airlock being cycled, as they tried to move and assemble a geological-laser, which the Stardog would have found rather pleasant. The first the crew knew of it was when someone caught sight of the tiny white-suited figure actually climbing up between the Stardog’s eyes.

At first they thought it to be some suicidally brave hero. It was only when someone thought to switch into the suit radio frequency that they heard her say in flat, nasal, yet adoring tones “You beautiful, gorgeous girl. Oh, you beautiful, beautiful girl,” as she lovingly stroked the filaments. If the ship had been further off they would have been able to see the ten mile long creature ripple and squirm with pleasure. The control room began frantically signaling to her. She ignored the LED display frenetically flashing across the top of her suit’s vision plate.

Telepathy is little understood, and both the League and the Empire have long quashed any research into this area. Evidence of its occurrence existed long before humans encountered Stardogs, however. The evidence was fragmentary, the manifestations of the phenomenon diverse. The one common thread in all the scattered bits of information about the subject, is that it is inevitably tied to emotional states. Many dog owners will swear their pets are telepathic. Well, Stardogs are. They were bred that way.

Stardogs aren’t very intelligent, but their diffuse minds have billions of gigabytes of storage and processing ability. Human telepathic output was different from that of the Denaari nest minders, but not so different that the Stardog could not understand that it was getting the love it had missed so badly. Communication had begun. Image to image at first. The adored new master wanted to go to that red planet - it would oblige. Well, not that red planet, but a similar one. The Denaari star routes imprinted in her hadn’t included the nearby red planet, but there was one in the vicinity of Centaurus that was similar, at least in color.

The terrified crew of the
Gloria Mundi
found their ship enfolded in the outer mantle of the Stardog. Seated between the huge eyes, Joan Cheng rode the starswirl and became the first human to ever experience the mind jarring beauty and terror of wormhole surf. She wasn’t frightened out of her wits, for the simple reason that the Stardog wasn’t. Fortunately it was not too far, as distances in theta-space go. Her suit-tanks and suit insulation held out, although she was cold when they arrived. The red planet below them was indeed like Mars, in color, if not in potential for human habitability. This desert world had a humanly breathable atmosphere. It also had extensive ruins, of such size that they were even visible from space. The Stardog wriggled in pleasure at her amazement. It was much
better
than the other red planet, wasn’t it? The old masters had liked this world very much. They used to bring the Stardogs such delicious little mineral titbits up from the gravity well…would she? Pleeeze?

Hans Wienan looked down on the alien world and was filled, not with wonderment and delight as were his fellows, but with chagrin. Why couldn’t this have happened a week ago when he’d had the dummy under his thumb? Here was the key to ultimate power. He had to grasp it. He turned on one of the ooh ing and ah ing crew. He selected a slight Indian girl, with whom the dummy had a vague friendship. “Go out there. Get her to come in. She’ll freeze if she stays out there.”

The girl looked at him with the faint disdainful curl to her lip which was, eventually, in another story, to get her killed. “Why should you care?” She turned away to the viewports again.

He grabbed her roughly by the shoulder. Turned her to face him, and snarled quietly into her frightened eyes. “Because, you fool, I’ll bet she is the only one who can control the creature. So, if she dies out there, we all die here. No way of getting home. Do you understand that?”

She nodded, silenced and frightened by the tiger that had slipped out from behind his normally smooth mask.

“Good. Now go.” He thrust her away.

Shaken, she turned and went to the suit-locker.

The captain walked over to the ship’s doctor and escorted that individual to his cubbyhole office.