Expendable

Part V LANDING

Our Robing Chambers

The Jacaranda had four robing chambers for Explorers. This was a matter of prestige. A frigate was equipped with only two robing chambers; a light cruiser had to surpass a frigate in all possible ways, so it had three chambers; and a heavy cruiser like the Jacaranda was obliged to be better still, so it had four.

All three types of ship carried only two Explorers. There was no prestige in having extra Explorers.

Suiting Up

Each of us suited up alone — Yarrun and I in our usual places, Chee in one of the dusty surplus chambers.

Suiting up was a simple procedure: I stood passively, wearing nothing but a light chemise, while robot arms did all the work. Tightsuit fabric was extremely stiff and difficult to handle. Every six months, I had to go through an emergency drill where I wrestled in and out of a suit without robot help, and it always left my hands aching with exertion.

As the suit was being sealed around me, Chee shouted through the wall, " 'And from the tents, the armorers, accomplishing the knights, with busy hammers closing rivets up, give dreadful note of preparation.' What's that from, Ramos?"

"Shakespeare… Henry V," I replied, glad that I happened to remember; but I hoped Chee wouldn't quote from Timon of Athens. I had skipped Timon in the Academy Shakespeare course; Jelca had actually said yes to going on a date, and it put me in such a dither, I couldn't concentrate for three days.

The tightsuit continued to assemble around me. As it came together, robot eyes scanned every joint and seam, checking for flaws. There were eight such eyes, each as wide as my thumb, each on the end of a metal tentacle that curled through the air with the nonchalance of a cat's tail. Yarrun had given each eye a name: Gretchen, Robster, Clinky, Fang… I forget the rest. He swore they had different personalities, but I think he was putting me on.

The eyes swirled about on one last inspection-peering into my suit's crotch, armpits, the ring around my neck that my mother always claimed was dirty — then the tentacles retracted into the walls and the sterilization process began. I saw none of it; the visor in my helmet opaqued in response to the opening salvo of microwaves. However, I knew I was being bombarded by heat, UV, hard gamma, and several more exotic forms of energy the League of Peoples contended were necessary to cleanse all possible contaminants from the skin of my suit.

We followed this procedure meticulously whenever landing on unexplored planets — especially ones where there might be intelligent beings. It was a dangerous non-sentient act to introduce foreign microorganisms onto someone else's planet.

The sterilization bombardment was another reason why we always let the robots seal us into our tightsuits. If you touched the exterior of a suit with your bare hands, the resulting fingerprints turned a burnt-looking brown under the onslaught of the sterilization energy. You ended up looking like some smear-handed child had wiped chocolate on your crisp white outfit.

Fellow Explorers didn't tease you about that, but the Vacuum personnel always snickered.

Limbo

When the sterilization was complete, a bell chimed and a blue sign flashed PLEASE EXERCISE. For five minutes, we were supposed to get used to moving in the suit, by stretching, picking up small objects, doing deep knee bends, and so on. The Admiralty called this the "Limbering-Up Period." Explorers shortened the name to "Limbo."

It was a point of pride that Explorers never limbered up as specified. The prescribed exercises were invented by an Admiralty consultant who tried on a tightsuit and found (to her surprise) she couldn't get the hang of it right away. Never mind that Explorers spent much of their four years at the Academy lumbering around in tightsuits. Never mind that by the time we graduated, we felt more at home in a suit than in street clothes. A consultant came in for a day and found she was clumsy; therefore, the Admiralty immediately agreed that her ideas about tightsuits should become official Fleet policy.

The de facto Fleet policy was more mundane: instead of exercising, Explorers used their five minutes of Limbo to empty their bladders. Tightsuits had extensive facilities for handling waste, recycling the liquids into coolant water and compressing solids into cubes that could later fertilize mushrooms; but actually using these facilities required painstaking attention to the alignment of valves, tubes, and bodily orifices. It was better to relieve yourself in the quiet safety of the ship than to try it under more stressful conditions planet-down.

Besides, thinking about the mechanics of pissing took your mind off the Landing. And if you let yourself get sloppy, your suit would stink of urine for the whole mission. An Explorer could pay a severe penalty for inattention; it didn't hurt to have that kind of reminder in your nostrils for a few hours.

One Minute Warning

The PLEASE EXERCISE light went off. That meant we had one minute left. One more minute of Limbo.

During this minute, some Explorers prayed. Some sang. Some discussed final details of the Landing over their radios. Some talked to themselves about the great or mundane regrets of their lives.

Some screamed.

I don't know what Yarrun did. He never told me. I never asked.

If he had asked me the same question, I couldn't have told him what I did. I just waited. I just waited the full minute.

The Admiral's Worth

But this time, I somehow couldn't bring myself to wait in silence. Instead, I tapped a button on my throat to turn my transceiver implant to "local."

"Admiral," I said.

"Hey! What?"

"Admiral, tell me something you've done that you're proud of."

"Christ, Ramos, you should know better than to distract a man at a time like this."

"Tell me something you're proud of. I want to know what you've done with your life. I'm going to die for you; I want to know who you are. If there were a point to any of this, would you be worth dying for?"

Chee didn't answer immediately. I could hear Yarrun's breathing over the headset in my helmet. It was a little like snoring; his lip fluttered slightly when he inhaled.

I wondered why Yarrun had his transceiver turned on. Had he intended to say something too? And would he have spoken to me or to Chee?

Something to be Proud Of

"The thing I'm proudest of," Chee said at last, "is my spy network."

"Spy network?" I repeated. "What's the point? The League of Peoples enforces peace throughout the galaxy. We have no wars. We have no enemies."

"We have incompetents, Ramos," the Admiral answered. "On every planet, colony, and Fringe World, the civil administration suffers the same malaise as the Outward Fleet: the people who rise to positions of leadership are the Propes and the Harques. Administrators like Prope funnel citizens' money into glamorous projects like erecting public buildings so big they change the course of continental drift… and no one remembers to order toilet paper. Or food. Or air. Administrators like Harque spend their time in petty political maneuvering, snubbing rivals, acquiring perks, and generally feathering their own nests… but the results are the same. No toilet paper. No air. While all the tinpot tyrants backstab each other for an office with its own pressure pot, no one minds the store. Supply schedules get botched; atmosphere plants break down; water purification levels slide into the red zone.

"So on every world of the Technocracy, I put a spy. A retired Explorer, actually. Explorers are the last bastion of competence in our civilization, Ramos, and I don't mind saying it. They're the precious few of our citizens who aren't comfortable — the only ones in the whole Technocracy who work completely without safety nets. Everyone else these days has the luxury of indulging in melodrama: of pretending that they're the stars in some story where there are good guys and bad guys, winners and losers. Everyone else can pretend it's a game. The streets are safe and the government is forbidden to let people starve, so whatever non-Explorers do isn't survival… At heart, it's just amusement. Explorers are the only ones who know deep down that death isn't kept at bay by luck or posturing, but by constant attention to necessary details.

"Therefore, my Explorers finked to me when the tap water turned brown, and when the air turned to smog, and when there weren't enough oranges on the shelves to prevent scurvy. Those warnings gave the Admiralty a fighting chance to do something about the situation… because you know what the civilian authorities are like on most planets. Power-hungry vermin whose only talent is winning elections, not making good decisions. When something goes wrong, you can be damned sure those administrators would rather see their whole worlds starve than report that they'd personally fucked up."

"You talk about your spies in the past tense," Yarrun observed.

"I'm past tense now," Chee answered. "When I'm gone, who'll take over for me? A Prope? A Harque? I'm going to god-be-damned Melaquin because I finally ruffled one too many important feathers. The High Council will replace me with some VIP's unemployable nephew… and a lot of planets will start drowning in their own sewage."

Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. Explorers never asked, "What happens next?" The question was always, "What do we do now?"

The door to the transport bay slid open.

Our time in Limbo was over.

Bold Grace

Walking comfortably in a tightsuit made a person look bowlegged-the fabric was thickened on the inside of each thigh so that one leg rubbing against the other wouldn't encourage the material to fray.

Once we were planet-down, it didn't matter what we looked like; but our walk along Sterile Corr-I was different. The corridor led from our robing chambers to the transport bay, and Vacuum personnel watched us on monitors, every step of the way. Each time I walked that path, I felt the eyes following me. For personal vanity and for the pride of the Explorer Corps, I forced myself to stride along with bold grace.

Learning to walk so cleanly had taken three months of hard practice at the Academy. Resisting the force of the fabric required strength in thigh muscles which were rarely used for other purposes. (Rarely used by me, at any rate.)

I let myself stride into the corridor with consummate poise. Yarrun stepped out of his own chamber and matched my stride. I hoped Prope and Harque were watching… even though I didn't give a damn about either of them.

Chee, the Explorer

A moment later, Chee emerged from Chamber C. He moved with slow, straight-legged dignity. His suit showed no chocolate-colored fingerprints.

"So, Ramos," he said, "do I look like an Explorer?"

"Yes, sir."

"Well, I don't smell like one!" he snapped. "When you radioed me without warning, I fumbled my damned tube and pissed myself. Let's get down to the damned planet so I can take this helmet off."

Three abreast, we strode into the transport bay. The door closed behind us, and a metal safety hatch slid up in front of it.

With a tap, I switched my throat radio to full transmit. "Ramos to Jacaranda," I said. "Is the tail anchored?"

"Affirmative, Explorer." The voice coming over my headset was Harque's perpetual smirk. "Pressurizing now."

The ship's Sperm-tail was now in position at our chosen Landing site, establishing a tube of hyperdimensional space from here to there. In effect, here was there; no physical space separated us from the planet's surface. The Jacaranda would increase air pressure in the transport bay, just enough to exceed the pressure at the planet's surface. Then, when the Bay Mouth opened, we would be squirted forward, down the tube to the planet, making the passage in a real-space time of zero seconds.

The subjective time would not be zero seconds. Human brains are perfectly conscious of the time they spend in hyperspace, even if the outside world perceives the transit as instantaneous.

Harque's voice sounded again in my headset: "Ejection in ten seconds."

I jerked my head around to glare up at the mezzanine, where Harque loomed behind the control console. He was supposed to wait for my signal before starting our ejection countdown. Insulting to the last, the petty bastard.

Yarrun nudged my elbow, and shook his head.

Fuming, I turned back to face the huge aperture in front of us: the Aft Entry Mouth, which was irised tightly closed for the moment. From this vantage point, the Mouth seemed immense-four storeys high and ready to eat us. Yarrun, Chee, and I, stood tall, shoulder to shoulder… and that mouth could swallow all three of us in a single gulp.

I closed my eyes. I had thought that perhaps this time, this last time, I would keep my eyes open. But I didn't.

"Ejection," Harque said.

Down

Down was the pull of ship's gravity beneath my feet. There was a sharp hiss of sound as the Mouth opened.

Down was behind me. Down was back where my stomach still wanted to be. I flew forward like a straw in a hurricane.

The world squeezed as I plunged down the gullet of the Worm, the Sperm. The squeezing was gentle, but unstoppable. My body compressed obligingly.

Outside the Sperm, the compression would have killed me: bones would snap and poke splinters through internal organs; eyes would burst; muscles would be kneaded to thread. Inside, however, the laws of physics were daintily overruled. I was a thing infinitely malleable.

Down was inside me, a point halfway between navel and groin. The Chinese call that point the dantien, the center of the soul. I fell toward my center like rain.

The center of my soul. The center of my soul. If I conceived a child, this was where it would grow. When I died, this was where I would run.

Down was everywhere around me. I flew outward. I exploded into my body. My skin snapped taut like a sail catching a gust of wind. I felt blood surging through my brain. The world burned red outside my closed eyelids.

Down was the vector of my descent. My eyes flickered open.

I rolled with the impact of my landing. Grass lashed wet streaks across my faceplate. In that moment, I remembered how grass smelled on summer afternoons, when I was young and would live forever.

But I didn't smell the grass; I smelled only my own sweat. My tightsuit and I were a closed system.

Breathing the odors of my body, I stood up.

Down was the pull of gravity beneath my feet. Melaquin.

Melaquin Without Stories

Overhead, a cloudless blue sky surrounded a yellow sun. Around me, a grassy field danced with wildflowers. Black-eyed Susans. Daisies. He loves me, he loves me not.

A few paces to my left, Yarrun scrambled to his feet. Green grass stains were streaked across the white of his suit. He shrugged off his backpack and began to rummage through it.

I powered my throat transceiver to maximum strength. "Jacaranda, do you read?"

"Loud and clear, Explorer," Harque answered, with just the faintest tone of insolence.

"Christ, I love that ride!" Chee's voice said over the com-set.

I looked around. A few meters away, Chee lay spreadeagled face-down in the grass. He made no effort to get up, but his feet kicked enthusiastically like a gleeful child. Good — no damage to his spinal cord. "Jacaranda," I said over the radio, "the Drop was successful. Proceed to record."

"Roger. Recording."

Idly, I wondered if Harque was lying; but I had stopped caring. I would do my job, I would make my reports, and I would be professional to the very end.

Formally, I announced, "Explorer First Class Festina Ramos, TSS Jacaranda, reporting initial survey of Melaquin, AOR. 72061721, Inter-date 2452/9/23. Other party members: Explorer Second Class Yarrun Derigha and Admiral Chee. Any comments for the record, Admiral?"

"The High Council of Admirals can kiss my—"

"Thank you, Admiral. On a more immediate note, Melaquin appears to be an extremely Earthlike planet with local weather and flora similar to the temperate zone of New Earth… the Lake District of Novatario, I'd say. Thick grass growing calf- to knee-height. Wildflowers highly reminiscent of daisies and black-eyed Susans. About a hundred meters away, this meadow falls off into a ravine with deciduous trees on its side. And in the opposite direction, we have bluffs descending to a sizable freshwater lake.

"There is a good deal of insect activity apparent here: I can see several on the wildflowers around me. They are highly reminiscent of terrestrial bees." In fact, they were exactly like terrestrial bees, big fuzzy bumblebees in yellow and black… the kind we all ran from as children, even though adults told us not to make sudden moves. "I can also see three butterflies not too far away. Two are a greenish-white, wingspan about three centimeters; the other is highly reminiscent of a Monarch butterfly."

It was a Monarch butterfly. Orange and black, landing on a milkweed plant whose pods spilled creamy floating seeds.

"In short," I said aloud, "one's immediate impression of local flora and fauna is that they are visual duplicates of Earth species. Do you concur, Admiral Chee?"

"The High Council commits unnatural acts with poodles."

"Duly noted, Admiral. Thank you."

The Bumbler

"Bumbler operational," Yarrun said with exaggerated diction. (He was always self-conscious about having his voice recorded. A typical exploration report from the two of us consisted of a steady stream of blather from me, with infrequent one- or two-word interjections from Yarrun.)

The Bumbler — officially our "Portable Wide Spectrum Amplification and Analysis Datascope" but only called that by quartermasters — was a hand-held scanning device about the size and shape of a flat-topped coffee pot. It served two functions:

A. Its screen could be tuned to display any range of the electromagnetic spectrum in a visible form… handy if you wanted to check the neighborhood for the IR glow of warm-blooded fauna, or take an X-ray shot of some animal specimen's skeleton.

B. The machine was constantly analyzing incoming data for hints suggesting the approach of hostile lifeforms. The Bumbler broadcast an alarm if it detected anything moving toward us. It had saved my life at least twice, and I was grateful; I was not, however, overwhelmed with the Bumbler's acumen. It was a kindly little machine that meant well in its bumbling way, but it was not as bright as one might hope — it took so long to do a risk analysis that the alarm sometimes went off after the first attack.

Surveying

"Infrared scanning," Yarrun said, turning a careful circle with the Bumbler in front of him. "Cat-sized creature," he said, suddenly pointing off to my right; but almost immediately, he lowered his hand and muttered, "Went down a hole."

"Another rabbit?" Chee asked. He was sitting up now, working at the release catches of his helmet.

Yarrun didn't answer. He completed his sweep, then reported, "Negative warm-bloods now."

"Then we'll begin standard sampling," I told him. I reached into my own backpack. On top of everything else lay my stunner, and I slid it into my hip holster. In entertainment bubbles, donning a weapon is always a portentous affair; but that's because in entertainment bubbles, weapons have a more tangible chance of stopping whatever is trying to kill you. In my case, I was only moving the stunner out of my backpack because it lay in the way of the plastic bags we used to hold samples.

Yarrun traditionally took plant samples while I dug up packets of soil. I wasn't particularly interested in dirt, but I had sat through four soil analysis electives at the Academy because geology was one of Jelca's majors.

My own major was zoology. It meant that whenever we shot an animal, Yarrun made me decide what to do with the carcass.

"Ahhhh!" Chee sighed, inhaling deeply as he removed his helmet. The sight of him, naked to the planet's microbes, filled me with envy and anger… like the time when I was a teenager, and watched girls with normal faces go skinny-dipping as if it were the height of erotic sophistication. I knew it wasn't, and I knew it was.

"It smells wonderful out here!" Chee cried in delight.

"Could you please describe the smell, sir?"

"It smells real. Grass. Air that hasn't been through anyone else's lungs. Glorious."

"And you feel well?"

"Better than I have in months." He arched his back in a happy stretch. "Forget the damned samples, Ramos. Let's go for a walk."

"Begging the admiral's pardon," I replied, "but we are conducting a survey mission here."

"You're conducting an execution, Ramos. The survey is nothing but horseshit."

"Any information we gather may assist other parties who land here," I insisted. "No Explorer is an island."

"Don't give me that John Donne crap," Chee grumbled. "Do you know what he said about Shakespeare?" Turning his back on me, the admiral headed in the direction of the lake, taking ostentatiously deep breaths.

"Admiral," I called out, "please don't wander off. You don't understand how risky—"

"I understand fine! I'm just going to look at the water."

I considered tackling him. Or shooting him. But the edge of the bluffs really wasn't far for him to wander. If our goal was to use him as bait for whatever danger lurked on Melaquin, I had to give him his lead.

It took real effort to watch him walk away from me. Explorers don't let go easily.

The Worm

The first soil sample I took contained an earthworm. Technically speaking, I suppose it was a Melaquinworm, but it looked like an earthworm to me: brown, annelid, roughly ten centimeters long, with the familiar thick clitellum band partway along its body.

"Greetings," I said to it, feeling ridiculous. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality."

"Find something?" Yarrun called.

"A worm," I told him.

"You're talking to a worm?" Chee cackled over the com-set.

"I am talking to an alien lifeform that may prove to be sentient. Don't be so narrow-minded!"

"I bet it's just a worm."

Almost certainly, Chee was right. On the other hand, you never know when you might be scoring goodwill points with the League. They supposedly keep constant watch on all human activities.

I let the worm crawl for a moment, then nudged a stone into its path. It bumped its nose into the stone and seemed confused.

Proof enough for me. It was stupid; it was just a worm.

I shot it with my stunner and put it in a plastic bag.

The Bird

As Chee walked toward the cliff, a bird suddenly dashed out of the grass near his feet with a great panicked chirping. Yarrun and I both drew stunners and aimed. But the bird simply scuttled several meters away and made no gestures we could interpret as a threat.

In fact, it ran clumsily, one wing drooping.

"I didn't touch it!" Chee said with aggrieved innocence.

"I'm sure you didn't," I told him. "Stay where you are, please."

Carefully, I walked toward Chee. The bird flopped about, squawking loudly.

"What's wrong with it?" Chee asks.

"It's a… it displays the appearance and behavior of a mother killdeer. She's pretending she has a broken wing. She wants us to chase her rather than snoop around her territory." I searched the grass near Chee's feet. Autumn seemed late in the year for what I expected to find, but every species has individuals who are out of step with the times.

Two paces away, I found the nest the killdeer was protecting. There were three eggs in the nest, their shells dirty white with brown speckles.

Three beautiful eggs.

Eggs

I took the Bumbler from Yarrun and crouched beside the nest. Melaquin's atmosphere blocked most of the X-rays emitted by the local sun, Uffree; but the Bumbler was extremely good at amplifying what little there was.

Inside each egg was a tiny bird. (Their mother squawked frantically at me from a distance.) The Bumbler showed only their skeletons, curled into positions that seemed impossibly cramped. The little birds filled the eggs completely; within hours, they would hatch.

"Greetings," I whispered softly to them. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality."

The mother squawked in anguish, dashing back and forth with her feigned broken wing.

Gone

"Where's Chee?" Yarrun asked suddenly.

My head snapped up. Yarrun and I were alone in the meadow.

"Admiral Chee, come in, admiral," I called over the radio, keeping my voice calm.

No response.

"Maybe he fell off the bluffs," Yarrun suggested.

"You check." And while Yarrun hurried toward the edge of the bluffs, I switched the Bumbler to IR, and did a fast circle. Nothing showed up anywhere near Chee's size. He wasn't hiding in the grass. "Admiral Chee, please respond. Admiral Ch—"

A force closed on my windpipe like a strangling hand. I stopped talking mid-syllable. I could not breathe, I could not speak.

Oh shit.

Oh Shit

My throat transceiver. Was that it? Was that all?

Oh shit.

It was something in my throat implant. It was killing me. How stupid. How mindlessly stupid. Shit.

No monsters. No sentients. No deadly physical phenomena. Just crude treachery.

And I was fool enough to feel disappointed. I had a little Prope inside me who thought death should come glamorously. How juvenile. How stupid.

Shit.

Where had Chee gone? Over the bluffs? Did it matter?

A few paces in front of me, Yarrun was ripping off his helmet. He hadn't figured it out yet; he must have thought his suit had a malfunction.

I turned the Bumbler on him, its sensors still keyed to read X-rays. Yes, his transceiver had twisted itself around his windpipe. And now he understood — he turned to me with a look of bitter sorrow.

Shit.

They must have built the implants to kill us. Did the choking mechanism activate in response to some natural transmission generated on planet? Or did someone somewhere turn a dial? Had Harque pushed some button, just following orders? Did he know what he'd done?

Shit.

Yarrun's hands reached for his throat. I wondered if he would try to pull off the transceiver assembly. No good, I could see that on the X-rays — the mechanism was wrapped so tightly in place, he'd just rip out his larynx.

Shit. Oh shit. Yarrun was tapping out SOS in Morse code. Tapping on the transceiver itself. Gazing hopefully at the sky. And he couldn't know if the transceiver was still broadcasting, and he couldn't know if any of those goddamned Vacuum assholes on the bridge had even heard of Morse code, and he was still trying the only thing he could think of to save our lives.

Shit.

I blasted him with my stunner and he went down in a spiraling slump, as if he was turning to look at me one last time.

Forget it, forget it. I dropped to my knees beside him, upturning my whole backpack in search of the scalpel from the medical kit.

Maybe I could stay conscious long enough to perform an emergency tracheotomy. Cut through Yarrun's throat into his windpipe, below the point where the transceiver was strangling him. Open a new breathing passage.

I had done a tracheotomy once before. At the Academy. On a cadaver. I couldn't remember what grade I'd received.

The first cut had to be vertical — less chance of hitting a major vein or artery. Blood spurted as I worked the knife, but after that it slowed. I hoped that was a good sign.

My vision was clouding. Didn't matter. If I screwed this up, what was the difference?

No. There was a difference.

The medical kit contained no tracheotomy tube, but it did have an esophageal airway. The airway was so wide. Who had the nerve to cut a hole that big in someone's throat?

I did. I had the nerve.

My head was spinning. My eyes wouldn't focus. I pulled what I hoped was an ampoule of blood coagulant from the medical kit and sprayed it around the incision. I didn't know if I'd killed my friend. I'd die without knowing.

I thought, Yarrun, don't hate me. I don't want to be hated.

Then I thought, Shit, here I go.

Oh Shit.