B00BFVOGUI EBOK Page 10

  The Indispensable! The team’s Prospector-type shuttle was in the air, descending through the billowing chlorine fog. Retro thrusters glowing, the massive vessel swung low over the crowd of aliens. Some dove back into the lagoon, but others simply ran in circles.

  Its pilot evidently realizing the crowd wasn’t going to disperse, the Indispensable moved in toward the fabricator instead. The door to one of the bangboxes that made up the shuttle opened. The ship descended to a point in midair just meters above and to the side of his metallic perch. For a moment, Jamie feared being roasted by the rockets — but instead the ship stopped its turn in exact alignment with the edge of the fabricator. It dipped gently, leaving a long leap between him and the hatchway.

  “Come on over,” he heard Geena Madaki say in his headset.

  “Lower and closer,” Jamie said.

  “Not with those things on the ground,” she said. “Jump for it!”

  Jamie looked down. The Baghu were still there — and the arrival of the ship seemed to have agitated the braver ones. Breathers were climbing over each other now, clambering to reach him atop the device.

  “Gah!” Jamie said as a tentacle wrapped around his booted foot. He leapt into the air, freeing himself from the creature. On touching down again, he made a bounding leap for the ship.

  Jamie reached out for the open hatchway, even as Madaki chose that moment to bank Indispensable closer. Jamie’s chest slammed against the bottom of the doorway, and his arms clawed for a handhold inside the vehicle.

  “I’ve got you!” said an occupant from above. Lynn Stubek, one of the members of Welligan’s squad, locked onto his wrists. “Madaki, we’re clear!”

  Jamie thought he heard the pilot say something then, but his mind was in no position to process information. Indispensable lurched back over the mass of Breathers and banked and rose, Jamie’s body still hanging out of the vessel. He looked up at Stubek in panic. But the woman had him tight in her servo-assisted grasp. Within seconds, he was aboard — and panting for air on the floor of the shuttle.

  “Welcome back,” Madaki called back from the pilot’s seat. “Seem to be making a habit of hauling you away from trouble.”

  Jamie looked at the monitor with the feed from the shuttle’s underside. He thought the ground had vanished beneath the fog for a moment, but on closer inspection he realized that what he was looking at was a living carpet. It was as if the whole undersea population of Baghula had come up to see him off, both bobbing in the lagoon and writhing on the beach.

  Stubek helped him to Madaki’s side in the compartment. “Bridget’s team,” he said, wheezing. “Pulled under—”

  “Chief’s fine,” the dark-skinned woman said. “I expect they’re all having a nice rest down there.” She looked back at Jamie. “But our Hiro isn’t doing so well. Check channel seven.”

  Jamie had forgotten about Welligan. But he remembered quickly when he tuned his suit’s receiver — and heard frantic, confused yelling and more of the blasts he’d heard before.

  “That’s not good,” he said. His eyes widened — and a thought occurred. Jamie didn’t want to be here: he’d made that plain at every turn to anyone who’d listen. The security guys, meanwhile, seemed to lap this stuff up — Bridget’s leaderly reluctance notwithstanding. If Jamie hadn’t brought them here, they would have been tussling with something somewhere. But Hiro Welligan hadn’t seemed like the typical muscle-brained danger seeker. Was he here because he had to be, too?

  Jamie looked again at the monitor depicting the tsunami of Baghu. He gulped. “I guess we should—”

  “Already on my way,” Madaki said. She put Indispensable into a roll, heading back toward the original landing site.

  Jamie took a deep breath. “Thanks for the pickup, I guess.”

  “It’s not personal.” The pilot smiled primly. “You’ve got the badge.”

  15

  Like most expeditionary spacecraft in the whirlibang era, Indispensable was a disappointment to model makers and others interested in indexing the starships of the galaxy. It could look like darn near anything, depending on the needs of the journey. While the current configuration linking the two troop ’boxes, the “general store,” and the engine mount in a horizontal chain was standard for most sales missions, the crew could attach practically anything that came with them through the whirlibang.

  In fact, Jamie had learned, the only thing that gave the collection of shipping units its name was his presence. Like an admiral transferring a flag, Jamie made any vessel he traded from Indispensable. It was a tough, positive-sounding name, and he’d been pleased to get it: most of the other Quaestor trading ships followed the corporate policy of reusing East India Company names, resulting in would-be professionals having to call Constant Friend, Happy Entrance and Trades Increase home.

  Then Bridget had told him why the name had survived on the list so long, unclaimed: the eighteenth-century Indispensable was a convict ship charged with carrying prisoners to Australia. That is, when it wasn’t engaged in stabbing whales, a barbaric practice banned decades earlier. The name had been another joke on him by the members of Surge Sigma — but he hadn’t objected. He’d felt like a prisoner during the whole ordeal since Venus.

  Now, however, he was one of the few members of the crew who was free. And it had dawned on him that with Chief Yang out of contact, he might just be in charge. So why was Indispensable racing back toward the mass of crazy aliens?

  “Slow down!” he yelled, clutching the back of Madaki’s pilot seat. He couldn’t see the Breathers through the fog below, but the ship’s sensors had picked up no fewer than a thousand charging inland. They had engulfed Indispensable’s original landing site and were now pursuing Welligan’s team into the uplands. And the shuttle was heading right back into the fight.

  Looking out the forward viewport, he could make out the mass of aliens on the move. His stomach started to crawl up his throat. He could visualize how any landing might go: Baghu swarming over the vessel, just as they had the fabricator. Thoughts of Welligan, of rescue, of anything, fled from his mind. The blood drained from his face, and he felt his fingers going numb. “Put…put us back over the lagoon,” he mumbled.

  “What?” Concentrating, Madaki didn’t look back.

  Now he found his voice. “Put us back over the lagoon!” Jamie yelled.

  “Calm down, Jamie,” Madaki said. “If you’re hyperventilating, your suit will add CO2. Just breathe.”

  Jamie could only hear the creak of the shuttle descending. “Bridgie’s team. We get them back — they’ll deal with this!”

  The pilot spoke in even tones. “We’re out of contact with Bridgie’s team. I’ve got to make a decision.”

  “I thought you said Yang’s squad was fine!”

  “I don’t think a bunch of slimies can kill my Bridget,” the older woman said. “But I’ve got one squad under assault and another underwater. We save the one under assault.”

  Jamie sat down on the shuttle floor as the ground below raced toward them. He tugged at his silly badge. “Does this count for anything?”

  “Don’t worry,” she said, smiling. “My responsibility to you is to keep you clear of trouble, and I will.” She put the vehicle into a steep decline.

  Jamie cringed as Indispensable leveled off meters above the surface and then turned its nose upward to match the slope of the hillside. The shuttle was no helicopter or Coandăcar: it was designed for short hops on-world, not aerobatics. Yet Madaki was neatly following the contours of the land, not even grazing the snouts of the ascending Baghu.

  O’Herlihy had told him that Madaki was flying space missions before he was born: she, at least, had seemed competent. But Jamie had to wonder how typical these sorts of scrapes were if they needed an ace in the first place.

  “Finally!” At the sound of Welligan’s voice in his headset, Jamie looked up The members of Surge Three — Welligan’s squad within Bridget’s command — appeared as glowing figures on the shut
tle’s tactical display.

  Behind Jamie, Stubek — still in her space suit, as he was — headed to the port hatchway and opened it. She looked back to Jamie. “Get by the other airlock!”

  The notion of removing the metal barrier between him and Baghula’s denizens didn’t interest Jamie at all. But after a moment’s hasty reflection, he decided he’d rather have the guys with the guns inside with him. Cycling the hatchway, he looked down at the windswept plateau.

  Clinging to the inside of the starboard airlock’s external doorway, Jamie saw Welligan and his other eight squad mates in a narrow circle facing outward and pointing their rifles at the ground around them. Baghu were charging up toward them, about to overrun their position.

  “Ride’s here, people,” Welligan said, looking up at Indispensable and then back at the advancing wave of Breathers. “We’re still on Regulation Three. Sonic bursts, ground sweep!”

  At his command, the troopers fired at the surface meters in front of them. Unseen energy jackhammered against the ground sending wet dirt flying upward in clumps. The aliens skidded to a stop, evidently startled. As a group, Welligan and his companions began expanding their circle, clearing a Breather-free zone large enough to admit the Indispensable. The shuttle swung toward the surface. From her doorway, Stubek fired sonic blasts from a large shipboard weapon over her fellow troopers’ heads. Her shots weren’t even moving dust at that range, but the sound kept the Baghu from advancing as Welligan and his team backed toward the ship.

  Five surge team members entered the airlock on Stubek’s side, and Jamie helped three aboard on his. Welligan was the last to take Jamie’s hand up. “I told you I’d send somebody.” The soldier smiled, but his spectral hair was now white.

  “Uh-huh.” Jamie didn’t even think about the headcount and slammed the hatch closed. Before it finished cycling, Jamie felt Indispensable lurch heavenward.

  “Take us to sea,” Welligan called out to Madaki. Then he looked at Jamie and exhaled. “Enjoying your trip so far?”

  Jamie gestured toward Welligan’s rifle. “What was that sonic business down there? You guys have tougher settings — I expected to see bodies everywhere!”

  “It’s Quaestor’s general orders for expedition security,” Welligan said, undoing his helmet. “Regulation Three: Don’t kill the customers!”

  Jamie sputtered. “These guys aren’t customers! They’re trying to drown us!”

  “It happens. I take it you’ve never made cold calls before?”

  * * *

  “This is crazy,” Dinner said in Bridget’s ear. “I’m willing to let them have the armor and swim for it.”

  Bridget chuckled. True, Arbutus was a world-class swimmer — but that method of escape required getting free to start with. And they all knew that the brine wasn’t that hospitable — nor was the air breathable once you got out of the lagoon.

  Which made Bridget think of something. She was in intimate contact with the Baghu, after all, with the tentacles smashed against her helmet. She’d noted the residue from the leader’s “handshake” with Jamie earlier; now, her visual and spectrographic sensors could get a really close look. And she really had nothing better to do other than watch her armor’s power and oxygen waste away.

  “Huh,” she said, looking at the readout. There were concentrations she wasn’t expecting. She struggled to remember her alien biochemistry lessons.

  She was working her way through an onboard tutorial when she heard a faint whisper, not from any of the other prisoners. For a moment, she thought the Baghu had said something. But then it grew louder and clearer.

  “Yeah, I heard it,” Bridget said into the transducer. An extremely faint ultrasound signal was coming from somewhere above. A few minutes of adjustments on her part improved the signal. A buoy had been dropped into the lagoon above them, trailing a heavy sensor pack on a cable. Her team was out of contact no longer: Indispensable still existed.

  “…okay down there?” Bridget could barely make out Madaki’s voice.

  “Just bumming around on the beach,” Bridget replied. “Well, under the beach — and a ways out.” The colleagues quickly compared notes on the situation topside and below. “How’s the team?” Bridget asked.

  “All secure, dear,” Madaki said. “As is your trader.”

  “Hello,” Bridget heard Jamie say.

  “Hello.” Why does he have to be the one loud and clear?

  “This isn’t my fault,” Jamie said.

  “Now, why would you think I would think that? No, I’ve always wanted to spend the day at the bottom of a lake getting hugged by aliens. Thank you.”

  A pause. “You’re welcome.”

  Bridget would’ve given anything for enough range of motion to put her head in her hands. “Put Welligan on,” she said.

  Hiro recounted the evacuation for Bridget. They hadn’t harmed any Baghu, but he didn’t see how they’d be able to avoid doing so if they needed to forcibly enter the lagoon. “There’s a good line of them six or eight deep on the shore — and more bobbing in the water. We were lucky we didn’t clock one when we dropped the buoy.”

  “We’ve got a couple of hours’ margin here,” Bridget said. “See what the Sheoruk think. They’re back at their camp, I’d bet. Maybe they know something about how the Baghu are acting. Maybe there was some etiquette we blew — something we did to set them off.”

  “And then?” Welligan asked. “I mean, what if that doesn’t work?”

  “Then you extract us however you have to. Just don’t let them get close to you with those tentacles.”

  “Only one way to prevent that.”

  “I know,” Bridget said somberly. “Surge One out.” Then, having had a thought, she signed back on for a postscript. “And don’t let Jamie piss off Lorraine again!”

  16

  Night never fell at this location on Baghula’s surface, and it seemed to Jamie that the planet’s natives never slept, either. Three hours had passed since the aliens went berserk, and their endurance seemed without limit.

  Jamie had been known for his stamina on the trading desk. Sleeping was overrated when one market on Earth or another was always open. He’d driven brokers on the Ops floor to distraction by banging his cowbell at all hours, proclaiming his trading successes. Now all he wanted in life was to stay in the passenger seat of Indispensable and never move again.

  But everyone else aboard was in motion. Madaki had parked the shuttle safely away from the stampeding Baghu hordes on a quiet mesa — and that had been the cue, evidently, for Welligan’s team to begin rushing about the vessel. Some of the troopers were adjusting their weapons. Others were fiddling with crates from stowage holding metal tubes Jamie had never seen before. Some kind of ordnance, he imagined.

  Boots off and helmet in his lap, Jamie felt like he was watching one of his immerse-goggle sitcoms. He was physically there, but he wasn’t a participant. That was fine by him. He yawned.

  “Glad to see you can keep a cool head,” Lynn Stubek said from her seated position at the communications panel.

  “Somebody has to.” He opened his eyes and forced a smile. With buzz-cut red hair, Stubek was one of the youngest members of Surge Sigma — and one of the few that hadn’t given him a hard time yet.

  “I’ll wake you up if I need the rest of my squad killed,” she said.

  “Roger.” Well, there goes that. He directed his attention to her viewscreen, which was filled with static. “You still haven’t raised the Sheoruk expedition?”

  Stubek shook her head. “They’re reporting the same crazy business we are. The Sheoruk rolled for their lives as soon as the Baghu started moving. They’re locked in their compound now, but the Breathers have knocked down their external transmitter.”

  “I didn’t think they were that intelligent,” Jamie said.

  “I didn’t say they were. I think they’re just running around and knocking stuff over.” She worked a control. “Wait,” she said. “I’ve got something.”
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  A wave of revulsion gripped Jamie as he saw the image on the screen. Pulsating nodules of red and brown soaking in a blood-colored sauce. It looked like a close-up of someone’s abdominal surgery. “Eww!” he said. “What the hell is that?”

  “That’s the biologist you met earlier,” Stubek replied. “Lorraine.”

  “No, no,” Jamie said, standing up before the monitor. Going in for a closer look was a mistake, and he immediately backed off. “Lorraine was a big wheel thing. That’s just gross—”

  “You’ve got your space suit, I’ve got mine,” Lorraine said over the communication system’s speakers. It was the same feminine voice he’d heard earlier — but now it was coming from a greasy blob, burbling pus from folds of flesh.

  Jamie forced down a swallow. That’s our stewardess? No wonder Pan Am went under!

  Lorraine’s voice had lost its lilt. “Really, I don’t know why the humans decided to send such an insensitive being to work with other races.” The mass on the screen quivered. “And I don’t know what you said to those fine, peaceful creatures out—”

  “Hey, those peaceful creatures were trying to kill me!” Jamie slapped his chest with his hand. It had been a long enough day already, and he wasn’t going to take insults from something that looked like the middle of an oyster.

  Lorraine’s form rumbled back and forth, sacs quivering with what even Jamie could interpret as anger. “Now, listen here, you — you — human! I’ve been here for seven years. And never in that time have I seen the Baghu agitated in this manner!” Alien organs blushed a furious red. “They’ve been swarming our camp, looking for you! You must have done something!”

  “I showed them a teddy bear,” Jamie said, still not believing the episode. “They ate it.”

  Lorraine paused for several seconds — doubtless, Jamie thought, checking in with her knowglobe to see what a teddy bear was. Her next comment, a calmer one, confirmed it. “Interesting fellow, this Teddy Roosevelt,” she said. “He seems to have had great respect for other species — unlike some humans. I should like to learn more about him.”