In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Read online

  Sorvino’s aleph-null warning was now ringing loudly in my ears. The Tau Cetins had suspected Izin of espionage, because he was descended from Intruders, but they’d missed the most obvious answer. The spies might not be tamphs at all, but humans! There were plenty of scum sucking lowlifes rotten enough to be working with the Brotherhood and their alien-tech suppliers, people who’d sell out all of Human Civilization for a mountain of credits no matter what the consequences.

  Whoever they were, I had to find them fast before this whole dirty business blew up in mankind’s face.

  Jesorl left Meta and I alone for several hours. She wouldn’t comment on how Izin’s interrogation was proceeding, leaving me to pace anxiously while she kept me company in silence. When night fell, the forest became immersed in a misty darkness broken only by the distant lights of neighboring estates. Occasionally, other members of the household appeared, glanced at me curiously, then withdrew when our eyes met. Eventually, Jesorl returned late in Ansara’s thirty hour day, greeting me with a short burst of avian chatter.

  “Intermediary Jesorl says Izin Nilva Kren’s questioning is complete,” Meta announced.

  My heart pounded in my chest. “And?”

  “He has not been in contact with the Intruder Civilization.”

  I knew he was innocent, but I breathed a visible sigh of relief anyway. “So he’s free to go?”

  “He is being returned to your ship as we speak.”

  “What about the exotic matter container?”

  “We have decided to keep it.”

  “That wasn’t part of the deal.”

  “There was no deal, Ambassador.”

  “But it’s mine.”

  “Technically you stole it, negating any lawful ownership right, whereas we have the authority to retain it for further analysis and as evidence in any future Forum Inquiry.” She hesitated, perhaps asking permission to speak further. “There is another reason why this material should remain with us.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Whoever produced it would be able to detect it aboard your ship. That could pose a danger to you.”

  I hadn’t thought of that. The last thing I needed was a glowing sign over my head warning some teched up alien spy I was onto them. “Consider it a loan, but I may want it back some day.”

  “We make no promises,” she replied. “We are however prepared to transport you and your ship to Earth should you wish to make an immediate report to your Earth Council.”

  “No thanks.” Whatever was going on, the answer lay out here a thousand light years from Earth. Anya and Nazari had mentioned meeting at a place called Loport. The only Loport I knew of was far enough off the space lanes that it made an ideal spot for shady deals beyond the reach of Earth’s long arm.

  “If you intend to continue your investigations in this region,” she said, reading my expression with unnerving precision, “Intermediary Jesorl requests you provide him with a report when you have finished.”

  “Sure thing,” I said, deciding it was better to work with the Tau Cetins than trying to freeze them out, although they’d only get a cut down version of what I sent Lena Voss. “Tell him Earth will deal harshly with anyone working against our mutual interests.”

  Jesorl considered my assurance before answering. “You are entitled to resolve matters relating to tamphs or humans internally, Ambassador. However, the extent to which other species are adversely affected by members of Human Civilization will determine the scale of our intervention.”

  It was an ominous warning and there’d be no getting around it. If there were traitors in our midst, if humans or tamphs had betrayed the Tau Cetins, it would go very badly for us. “I understand.”

  “Any action you take on behalf of your government to mitigate the situation will, of course, be given due consideration by the Forum.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was a ray of hope. I considered telling Jesorl any humans or tamphs involved in betraying the Alliance Fleet were dead men walking, but I figured he’d interpret that as my primitive need for revenge, so I tried to sound ambassadorial instead. “I can assure you, Earth will meet all its Treaty obligations in full.”

  “If that is true, then we are indeed on the same side of the galactic fence,” Meta said.

  Now that I was leaving, I realized she was only minutes away from being reprocessed. It seemed a harsh end to such a short existence. “I hope you’ll still be around if I ever get back this way.”

  “Anthropomorphizing me again, Ambassador?” She smiled with simulated human amusement.

  “Call me a sentimental primate.”

  “Intermediary Jesorl has decided that considering how rapidly your species is expanding, he will need a permanent liaison for future human contact.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, genuinely relieved. “I guess that means you owe your continued existence to humans.”

  “Goodbye, Ambassador,” she said with no sign of appreciation.

  I took the elevator up to the landing platform. A small TC transport was parked on one side, the twin of the craft that had carried us out to the medical station. Jase and Izin had already exited and were about to board the Silver Lining.

  “Izin!” I said. “Good to see you in one piece!”

  “Thank you, Captain,” he replied, “but the Tau Cetins did not dismember me.”

  “They might as well have!” Jase snapped, “Keeping you hanging up there like a lab rat!”

  Izin glanced at Jase. “It was not an experience I care to repeat, but thank you for being there.”

  “Hey, we’re shipmates!”

  Izin considered Jase’s reply, as if seeing him in a new light. “Indeed we are.”

  Whether Jase knew it or not, Izin had his back from now on in a way he never had before, the same way he had mine – the way I had both of theirs.

  “What did it feel like?” I asked.

  “I was a bystander, aware but powerless, reminded of every memory I ever had … It was a remarkably irritating experience.”

  “Well, let’s get out of here before they change their minds,” I said as we headed up into the ship.

  When Jase and I reached the flight deck, a synthesized TC voice sounded from the intercom. “Prepare for relocation to interstellar space.” The belly door sealed shut without any action from us, then the wraparound screen filled with white noise.

  “This is one place I’m in no hurry to come back to,” Jase said as we took our positions on the acceleration couches, waiting to get back control of the ship.

  “It’s a beautiful planet.”

  “If you like trees,” he said sourly. “The best thing down there was the android.”

  “They’re keeping her intact.”

  Jase gave me an intrigued look. “Hmm … I wonder how good a simulation she is?”

  “I’m sure she’s perfect in every way.”

  He looked thoughtful. “I guess I could do worse.”

  The screen flickered to life revealing we were back where we started and the TC tow ship was already gone.

  “Not ones for chit chat, are they?” Jase said.

  “They chatter a lot, just not with us.”

  “So did you get what we came for?”

  “More than I wanted,” I replied grimly, entering our destination into the autonav.

  “Captain,” Izin’s voice sounded from the intercom, “I’m detecting the same magnetic anomaly we saw on Novo Pantanal.”

  I glanced at Jase. “Anything?”

  He checked the sensors and shook his head. “There’s nothing out there.”

  “It’s approaching the port airlock, Captain,” Izin said. “They mean to board us!”

  Would an Intruder ship risk revealing itself so close to Ansara? I guessed it depended on how badly they wanted us. I considered hailing the Tau Cetins for help, but if they had no ship nearby, it would be hours before our signal reached the nearest prism orbital. And if Intruder spy ships were as sneaky as Jesorl had i
mplied, the TC system defenses might not even see it once it locked onto us.

  “Pull sensors!” I ordered, pushing the maneuvering engines to their maximum inertially shielded acceleration. Thirty-five g’s was nothing for a ship with TC level tech, but we only needed a few seconds to button up. I rolled the Lining hard away to starboard, hoping our engine blast caught the prowler by surprise.

  “Go!” Jase said the moment our delicate sensors were safely stowed.

  I released the autonav, praying we weren’t about to get a nasty surprise. A moment later, the bubble formed and the screen filled with telemetry confirming we were superluminal.

  “How’s it tracking us?” Jase asked.

  No signal could penetrate a bubble’s quantum distortions. That’s why we always flew blind when we were superluminal. As far as I knew, no one – not even the TCs – had a way around it. It made tracking another ship through interstellar space a physical impossibility, yet somehow, Izin’s magnetic anomaly had followed us from Novo Pantanal.

  “Izin,” I said over the intercom, “check every system diagnostic we have from Novo Pantanal to now.”

  “What am I looking for, Captain?”

  “That bastard’s tracking us. I want to know how. You’ve got ten days before our next stop.” I exchanged wary looks with Jase. “If I’m right, they’ll be there waiting for us.”

  Chapter Four : Hardfall

  Union Mandated Colony

  Lornat System, Outer Draco

  1.43 Earth Normal Gravity

  939 light years from Sol

  58,000 humans

  Moments after we unbubbled half a million clicks out from Hardfall, eight long range surface batteries began tracking us. The speed with which they had us target locked and the size of the energy spikes emanating from the planet warned that we weren’t facing a bunch of half trained farm boys. It wasn’t the reception I was expecting from a tiny colony on a dying world.

  “No one here but us,” Jase reported after a quick review of the sensors.

  “Izin, are you picking up that magnetic anomaly?”

  “Not yet, Captain,” Izin replied from engineering. After a week and a half reviewing every system log in the ship, he’d found no clue as to how we were being tracked.

  “Give them the transponder,” I said, eager to land before we had company.

  If the grunts on the ground didn’t like the look of us, we’d never know it. Any flash from the surface batteries would reach us the same moment the blast did, giving us no time to run. Being only eight light years from the Acheron Abyss dark nebula, a known Drake hot spot, I couldn’t blame them if they were a bit twitchy. Hardfall was a Union colony so they rated some protection, but the firepower aimed at us looked more like it belonged guarding a military base than a bunch of dirt-loving freeholders.

  A cluster of threat indicators appeared on screen over the southern hemisphere, marking the space gun’s location on the planet’s only substantial land mass, a super continent known locally as Prairieland. It stretched from the southern pole to the northern tropics, occupying a third of Hardfall’s surface area, with the remainder taken up by receding oceans and isolated island chains. Large river valleys snaked from towering mountains in the east, across vast plains to the desolate west coast, although only the great rivers of the south still held water. Their northern cousins were now dry and barren scars across a once fertile land.

  The decline was due to Hardfall’s dying star which grew imperceptibly in luminosity each century, slowly transforming the planet into a hot, dry wasteland. It was why Hardfall’s previous inhabitants had abandoned the planet long before humans had arrived. Now only the crumbling ruins of a great megacity sprawling unbroken along Prairieland’s vast northern coast remained as a monument to their faded glory. The equatorial city had flourished when the tropics had been dominated by lush rainforests and monsoonal rains, neither of which had been seen on Hardfall for thousands of years. In their place, baking desert had consumed the northern lands, turning to arid plains at the mid latitudes and rolling grasslands in the far south.

  After Hardfall’s original rulers had departed, the planet’s predatory wildlife reclaimed what was left in a desperate fight for survival that triggered one last evolutionary gasp of adaptation. As the northern grasslands dwindled and competition increased, the hunters grew in ferocity and size while the hunted become tough, armored creatures ready to trample any attacker. Land that had once been frozen tundra became the last grasslands Hardfall would ever know, drawing the dwindling herds of bone-plated herbivores south, followed by the fiercest predators that had ever walked the planet’s surface.

  It was then that humans arrived.

  They found the predatory wildlife so aggressive that they were forced to live in fortified communities atop defensible plateaus, veritable island fortresses amid an ocean of hostile land. While their weaponry could defeat any single animal, they couldn’t defeat them all, especially not at night. Every attempt to set up farms on the banks of the surviving southern rivers had ended in disaster.

  More pervasive than the dangers of the lowlands was the high gravity. The colonists had endured broken bones and fatal falls for three generations before the Union had provided genetic enhancements that turned the colonists into a stocky, thick boned offshoot of mankind. It was partly the gravity that gave Hardfall its name and partly a salute to the first colony ship, the Dahlia, which had landed hard and never flew again.

  Hardfall was one of the few defended locations close to the Acheron, inhabited by people adapted to their environment, yet with no chance of surviving their dying star. It was the lot of mankind – latecomers to the galaxy – to pick up what no-one else wanted and make something of it. Watching the brown-blue planet floating on the screen, I felt a twinge of regret that it wasn’t a few billion years younger, but then it wouldn’t have been abandoned and we wouldn’t have a colony there now if it were.

  “Silver Lining,” a woman’s voice sounded from the flight deck communicator, “proceed to Hiport. Our guide beam is enabled. Do not vary your flight path or activate your weapons. Shields are permitted for atmospheric insertion. Be advised you are entering Union controlled space and will be fired upon if you deviate from these instructions. Acknowledge.”

  My listener told me her accent was East Euro descended, not a native of Earth or Hardfall, but from Ardenus, a large Core System world a hundred and forty two light years from Earth. Ardenus had been colonized by the Democratic Union centuries before the Embargo and had resumed a loose affiliation with the Union after contact had been restored a thousand years later. Both Earth Navy and the Union Regular Army recruited from there, but as neither stationed unmodified humans on high gravity worlds, her presence here was somewhat surprising.

  “I don’t suppose she’ll let us land at Loport?” Jase asked.

  “She wants us under those big guns in case we’re not who we say we are.”

  Four of the colony’s surface batteries had direct line of sight to the Hiport Landing Zone, while Loport had only one battery and it covered the approaches, not the landing field itself.

  “Hardfall control, acknowledged,” I replied, then followed the guide beam down.

  The approach path kept us squarely in the firing envelopes of all eight batteries, making sure we did exactly as we were told. A thousand clicks out, we began passing over outlying plateaus that had been leveled and sealed off from the plains by the colony’s engineers. They were all covered in rows of tightly packed green houses, providing the colony with its only source of agricultural produce. Homesteader families operated them, guarded by sheer cliffs and linked to the main settlement by air. Some had armored ground vehicles strong enough to withstand attacks from the larger predators, but the distances were great and vehicle hoists were expensive.

  After dropping through a cloudless blue sky, Hardfall Colony came into view. It comprised one large mountaintop city known as Citadel, a smaller flattened plateau called Hadley’s
Retreat and two landing grounds perched atop leveled ridges, Hiport, which was almost as high as Citadel, and Loport, which rose barely above the plains. They were joined by heavy cables supporting capsule-shaped transport pods that shuttled passengers and cargo between them, safely out of reach of the dangers below.

  Since the colonists arrival over a hundred and sixty years ago, every natural path to the mesa tops had been destroyed, ensuring the only way up was by air, internal elevator or aboard one of the massive vehicle cranes that reached out over the cliffs. The cranes had been brought in by the Union in an effort to make access to the plains easier, but old habits die hard. Most colonists still preferred flying to riding, even though their multi-wheeled vehicles were armored and mounted automatic weapons.

  Citadel was perched on a flattened mountain top surrounded by sheer cliffs. We passed to the north of it, riding our thrusters down to Hiport, tracked all the way by dome-shaped turrets that looked like they’d still be firing long after the city had been reduced to a molten slag heap.

  “No wonder the Drakes steer clear of this place,” Jase said, suitably impressed.

  “They look new.” Considering Hardfall exported nothing of value and had gravity high enough to discourage migration, someone must have had good political connections to convince the Union to invest so heavily in the colony’s defense.

  “What’s that on the ground?” Jase asked, motioning toward a large rectangular cage between Hadley’s and Citadel. Inside the cage was a four legged creature the size of a small elephant. It was covered in shingle-like bone plates, had a massive angular head and a thick stump where its horn had been sawn off.

  “They call them tankosaurs.”

  “I can see why.”

  “It’s a harmless herbivore,” I said, “unless you make it mad.”

  “What happens if you make it mad?”

  “It’ll disembowel you with its horn and trample your body into mush.”

  “Why’s it in the cage?”

  I hadn’t been to Hardfall in years, but seeing the tankosaur staked out like that told me when it came to this, little had changed.