In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) Page 11

  “It’s a bait trap.”

  Jase gave me a curious look. “That thing’s bait? For what?”

  “Dinner. There’s no farming on the plains but there’s plenty of meat, if you can kill it before it kills you. There are gun platforms set into the cliffs to shoot whatever takes the bait. It’s good training for the local militia and it helps feed the colony.”

  Dark blood stains surrounded the bait trap from decades of slaughter while a well worn track led back to the foot of the cliffs. Above the track was a giant crane, used to lower the armored recovery vehicles to the plain and hoist the catch up to the city.

  We flew over the bait trap, then began our descent onto Hiport’s flattened crest. The summit was long and narrow, only wide enough for ships to berth side by side. A group of small aircraft were parked near the spaceport building at the southern end, close to a cable car station linking Hiport and Citadel. A small orbital transport and an old intersystem ferry, both overdue for the scrap heap, were parked north of the aircraft. When the guide beam finally dropped and the spaceport’s crude docking system took over, we were ordered to land north of the old ferry, then the Approach Controller’s voice gave us the obligatory warnings.

  “Hardfall is a Union Mandated Colony subject to all Earth Council directives. As such, Access Treaty violations are punishable by death. Should you choose to go onto the flatlands, the colonial government accepts no responsibility for your safety and will not mount rescue missions. Freelance hunters will assist you for a price, providing you pay in advance using a valid Earth Bank vault key. Be advised, conventional side arms with less than Union Regular Army level seven armor piercing projectiles are ineffective against some indigenous species. The people of Hardfall welcome you to the colony and hope you enjoy your stay.”

  URA level seven? My P-50, even with hardtips, was only L5.

  “Friendly bunch,” Jase said. “I don’t suppose there’s much night life here?”

  “If there is, I’m sure you’ll find it. Just remember, if you fall down drunk, the gravity’s going to hurt.” His initial eagerness wavered, then I added. “Finish the shutdown and you’ll see what I mean.”

  When he killed the ship’s inertial field, we sank into our acceleration couches. “Ooh, that is kind of heavy,” he said lifting his arms, testing the planet’s pull.

  Humans normally didn’t settle worlds with gravity more than ten percent above Earth normal. Hardfall was an exception, but only because the first colonists didn’t have the option of moving on.

  “Plus forty three percent,” I said. “Not enough to put you in g-braces, just in hospital if you stub your toe. And remember, the woman are genetically engineered.”

  “So they’re what? … Stronger than me?” A curious look crossed his face as he wondered what it might be like to be dominated by a Hardfall woman.

  “Increased bone density, muscle mass, enlarged heart, improved lung efficiency and reduced body height,” I said.

  “Oh, so it’s a planet of dwarves? Izin will fit right in!”

  Izin’s synthesized voice immediately sounded from the intercom. “I’ll have you know, I’m considered tall for my kind.”

  I leaned towards the intercom. “How are you finding the gravity?”

  “Mildly unpleasant, Captain.”

  “Better get used to it, there are no powered walkways here,” I said, easing myself onto the deck and testing my weight. Ultra-reflexed or not, I’d have to be careful in Hardfall’s gravity. “And cover up, I don’t want you spooking the locals.”

  “Considering the creatures humans hunt on this planet,” Izin said, “they’re unlikely to be frightened by my appearance.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, feigning uncertainty, “tamphs are a lot scarier than fleshrippers.”

  “I find that comment strangely gratifying.”

  Jase gave me a wary look. “Fleshrippers?”

  “Piranha with legs,” I said with a grin, then went to prepare to reconnoiter Loport.

  Now that we were here, I was wracked with doubt. Had I guessed wrong? Was there another Loport? Last time I’d been here, Hardfall had been a toothless backwater. Now it was a fortress with fangs. So how did a gun runner and a Drake raider expect to land under the noses of Hardfall’s space guns without getting blown to bits?

  Why would they even try?

  The Skylink terminal at the southern tip of Hiport plateau was a simple white building beneath a massive cable support tower. We bought three tickets from an automated vendor, walked up a metal ramp and caught the next southbound capsule to Citadel. It was an eight kilometer journey along a gently sagging polysteel cable through still air to the colony’s only city. Far below, armored herbivores appearing no larger than black dots grazed dry grassland in scattered groups.

  “I wouldn’t want to be in one of these things if it fell,” Jase observed, leaning against the window, looking down.

  “I’d rather we not discuss that possibility,” Izin said, sitting as far from the windows as he could. He wore a one piece coverall over his pressure suit with his helmet set to opaque to hide his amphibian features. The locals would know he was an alien off a ship, but not what kind of nonhuman, reducing the risk of some trigger happy redneck shooting him simply because he was a tamph.

  Jase took on a mischievous look, remembering Izin’s aversion to heights. “If we fell, how many seconds would it take before we hit the ground? Ten or eleven?”

  “Less,” Izin said, “considering the higher gravity. Perhaps you should try jumping to put it to the test.”

  Jase and I exchanged amused looks, leaving Izin to suffer in silence.

  When we approached Citadel’s rust colored cliffs, I directed Jase’s attention to a gun platform jutting from the rock face close to the ground. It was manned by a group of uniformed troopers. One sat behind a short barreled field gun mounted on a metal column while the others scanned the plains with biscopes looking for targets. A narrow ladder led down from the gun platform to a ten wheeled, armored recovery vehicle waiting to tow their kill to the nearest vehicle hoist. A track led out from the cliffs to a bait trap containing a tankosaur calf. The creature had a nasty wound in its side, inflicted by the hunters so the smell of blood would attract their prey.

  Jase studied the surrounding dry plains and shook his head. “No meat for dinner tonight,” he said, unable to spot any approaching predators.

  “They’re out there,” I said, “you just can’t see them.”

  “In that case,” Jase said lightly, “I’m glad I’m up here.”

  As we neared the cliffs, the gunner started firing, sending tracer screaming out into the plain. While Jase tried to discover what the hunters were shooting at, my attention was drawn to two of the dome-shaped surface batteries covering Hiport. They were perched on the cliff tops five clicks apart, scanning the sky now that the Silver Lining had been assessed as no threat. They were heavies, designed to kill large targets at suborbital ranges and beyond, but would struggle against fast moving targets at close range. It was a strange choice for a colony so close to the Acheron where Drakes often used small, fast raiders rather than frigate sized warships.

  A couple of Union Regular Army troopers were visible guarding the nearest battery. They were tall lean types, definitely not Hardfallers. Considering the gravity, I’d expected the URA to have trained local militiamen to man the guns, not station offworlders here. Maybe the colonists would rather farm and hunt than subject themselves to military discipline? It wouldn’t have been the first time freewheeling frontier types had eschewed military service.

  We passed over a low wall encircling the city and came to a halt inside Citadel North station. Passengers and cargobots exchanged places for three minutes before the transparent doors sealed and we were moving again, this time over crowded, narrow streets wedged between neatly ordered buildings, some ten stories high. Above the frenetic streets, flat topped roofs joined by a network of foot bridges were filled with gardens and
entertainment areas, serving as refuges for the local residents from the press of the city.

  Stocky colonists and small solar powered vehicles filled the streets, although curiously for a frontier world, no one wore weapons. It was a custom they’d developed celebrating the safety of their high mountain fastness. The fact that Jase and I wore our guns openly was not lost on the other passengers, who gave us suspicious looks but otherwise ignored us.

  We stopped once more, this time at the station on the south side of the city, before gliding out over the cliffs for the long ride down to Hadley’s Retreat. Far to the south, beyond a few grazing tankosaurs, a six wheeled armored beetle raced across open ground, kicking up a dust trail that hung in the air long after the vehicle had disappeared into the distance. Eventually, the low island of Hadley’s Retreat took shape as the cable car carried us in a long sweeping arc over the plains. It was a slender mesa with a bulge in the middle filled with sun bleached, one story stone buildings and a thinning tail pointing south toward an even smaller and lower mesa in the distance.

  The Skylink ended in a terminal building at the northern end of Hadley’s. From there, a dirt road led south through the town to Loport Link, the colony’s second suspension system joining the smaller inhabited plateau with the backup landing ground further south. Unlike Citadel, which loomed in the distance like an urban giant against a cloudless sky, Hadley’s dusty little town was dissected by broad avenues and open plazas, had no street vendors, few vehicles and scarce signs of life.

  As we marched south, I realized the gun emplacements perched above Citadel’s southern cliffs commanded Hadley’s Retreat, but none of the smaller town’s weapons had line of sight back to the city. It was as if whoever had sited the colony’s defensive firepower had intended for the micro-city to dominate the rest of the colony unopposed.

  “What’s up?” Jase asked, wondering what I was staring at.

  “It’s probably nothing.”

  The few inhabitants of Hadley’s Retreat we saw viewed us with even more suspicion than those on Citadel. Their eyes followed our every step, then as we approached, they retreated, closing doors and shutters as we passed. Only once we’d moved on, did they reappear behind us, whispering and staring.

  “I feel like every shadow’s watching us,” Jase said as we entered Hadley’s central bulge.

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “At least they’re not armed.”

  “They’re all armed,” Izin corrected, “and there are snipers in the windows.”

  “You can see them?” I asked, noticing that some shutters were open but the interiors were impenetrably dark.

  “Yes, Captain. Their weapons are primitive, but heavy caliber. Starting a fight here would be inadvisable.”

  The town’s main square was paved in stone with a stand of small Earth trees providing shade at its center. Several children playing among well tended flower gardens were ushered out of sight by their mother as my DNA sniffer warned we were being followed. He was easy to spot, a stocky colonist with a weather beaten hat, leathery skin and an ugly black metal articulated claw for a left arm. His prosthetic must have been a local device, but from the ease with which he rubbed the back of his neck with it, its neural interface was as efficient as any Earth-made attachment.

  Jase followed my gaze. “What’s Clawhand up to?”

  “He’s their leader,” I said.

  “How can you tell?” Jase asked.

  “The others watch him, waiting for a signal,” Izin said, having seen the same signs I had.

  Clawhand leaned against a wall, waiting for our next move. I considered approaching him, but decided that might trigger a response I wasn’t ready to deal with, so we continued on, never passing out of the gaze of our one armed shadow.

  At the southern tip of the mesa, the paved avenue ran out along a tongue of land flanked by stone walls and sheer cliffs to a decrepit cable station. A pair of cables ran off toward a rocky promontory called Lone Peak where a support tower took their weight before they passed out of sight for the second leg down to Loport.

  I produced my monoscope and zoomed in on Loport mesa, visible beyond Lone Peak. The summit was barely twenty meters above the plains, low enough for predators to have been a constant threat before engineers had sealed it off. There were no ships on the landing field, only two URA uniformed guards patrolling the cliff tops, too tall and slim to be genetically modified Fallers.

  “What are all those bones, Captain?” Izin asked, pointing toward a large expanse of bleached white skeletons in the distance.

  I lowered my scope, glancing in the direction he’d indicated. “That’s the Boneyard.” I pointed to a dull gray shape lying in the baking sun toward the south eastern horizon. “And that’s the wreck of the Dahlia, the first colony ship. The landing broke her back, cracked her hull wide open.”

  Jase borrowed my monoscope for a better look, whistling slowly as he studied the hundred and sixty three year old wreck. Beside him, Izin polarized part of his helmet to give his naturally telescoping eyes a better look.

  “They fought their way here,” Izin said, correctly interpreting what the animal bones meant.

  “That’s right,” I replied slowly. “When she came down, she attracted a lot of attention. The colonists didn’t realize what they’d walked into until the fleshrippers were inside the hull. By then it was too late. They fought for three days before abandoning ship. Some women and children got here in ground vehicles, most came on foot. By the time they started across, the smell of death had attracted every meat eater for a hundred clicks.”

  “Nowhere else to go, I guess,” Jase said, studying the horizon, realizing Hadley’s was the nearest elevated land to the wreck.

  “A third didn’t make it, but that was just the beginning. Their supplies and equipment were on the ship and the plains were crawling with death, all kinds of creatures fighting over human and animal corpses alike. They nearly starved.”

  “They were lucky,” Jase said, handing back my monoscope.

  “They were stupid,” I said. “If they’d surveyed the planet properly from orbit, they could have landed up here, or on Citadel, and lost no-one.”

  “A costly mistake,” Izin observed.

  “Ready for another ride?” I asked, starting toward Loport Link station.

  When we reached the entrance, four URA uniformed guards appeared carrying heavy assault weapons. None were Fallers.

  “The Link is closed for maintenance,” a guard with sergeant’s stripes and an Ardenan accent snapped.

  I looked past our welcoming committee to the small control room and the spherical gondolas crawling along the parallel cables. There were no mechanics in sight, no sign of any breakdown.

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Five days.”

  The obvious lie immediately irritated Jase. “Since when does maintenance require an armed guard?”

  “Since we said it did,” the sergeant replied with an arrogance that Jase instantly took as a challenge.

  I placed a restraining hand on his arm. Starting a fight without knowing who we were up against wasn’t what I was here for. “We’ll come back in five days,” I said, nodding for Jase and Izin to follow me.

  Once we were out of earshot, Izin said, “We can return after sunset. They’ll be no challenge at night.”

  “They’re no challenge now!” Jase snapped. “Did you see the look on that grunt’s face?”

  “Did you see the weapons they were carrying?” I asked.

  “Yes, Captain,” Izin replied, “Vel penetrators.”

  “That’s Indo gear,” Jase said, puzzled.

  “Republic standard issue,” I agreed. Named after a Hindu war god’s spear, Vels were high end infantry assault weapons. They were just the kind of thing the Merak Star was feeding the Drakes on Novo Pantanal, but not a weapon the Union Regular Army used.

  “So those troops are …?” Jase asked uncertainly.

  “Impo
sters.”

  Hardfall might have a Union mandate, but it was at the ass-end of nowhere. It would be years before anyone on Earth had any idea the colony was under criminal control and it would take at least another year before anything could be done about it. No wonder the local colonists viewed outsiders with suspicion!

  “Captain,” Izin said, motioning subtly toward the southern sky. His remarkable eyes had been the first to see it, a long silver gray slab dropping from orbit on a power glide toward Loport. “It’s the Merak Star.”

  I watched through my monoscope as the freighter came down, braking all the way. When she was over the tiny spaceport, she flared on thrusters, then settled onto the shaved rock landing ground. No hatches opened, no one went to meet her and the two guards continued pacing the perimeter as if she was a common sight.

  “What now?” Jase asked.

  “You two get back to the ship,” I said. “Calculate the firing envelopes of those big guns in case we have to bust out of here. I’m going to check who’s got landing rights on Hardfall.”

  We headed back to the Skylink terminal, watched every step of the way by Clawhand. When we boarded the transport capsule back to Citadel, he took a seat at the opposite end, making no secret of his interest. All through the long climb back, I felt his eyes on me as I wondered if we were about to be arrested. When the gondola stopped at Citadel South, I waited until the doors were about to close, then jumped out. Clawhand hurried after me, but the doors slid shut in front of him, trapping him inside. He gave me an irritated look, then produced a communicator and spoke rapidly into it as the gondola carried him away from the station.

  While Jase and Izin continued on toward the ship I hurried down into Citadel’s narrow, crowded streets. My threading’s map of the city was almost a decade out of date due to infrequent Earth Navy surveys, but the Society’s offices hadn’t moved in half a century. They were located in a relatively modern looking five story building with the usual security precautions that required me to surrender my gun at the door.