Mech

Eleven

Captain Dorman returned to the spaceport aboard a rescue-lifter. He was set down on top of the parking garage and managed to walk unaided into the terminal building. His head was ringing and his left shoulder was sore from the ride down into the jungle canopy strapped unconscious to the ejector seat. He refused the medical team, however, and headed directly into the security center to meet the new governor. Jarmo met him at the door, and after a cursory inspection allowed him through. Another intimidating giant named Jun followed him wherever he went in the center.

“Hello Captain,” the Governor greeted him warmly, clasping his hand. “I hope you’re all right, quite a hairy mission as it turned out. Frankly, I’m amazed that a pirate spacecraft could do battle with two Stormbringers on equal footing. I’m anxious to hear your report on the matter.”

“That wasn’t just a smuggler, sir,” replied Dorman, marveling a bit at how easy it was to fall into the subordinate role with this man. It was clear he was used to giving orders and seeing them obeyed. “It was a combat ship, as good as anything the Nexus fleet has.”

The Governor nodded. Dorman believed that he had already reached these conclusions.

“Jun, could you bring up the current scene on the holo-plate?” asked the Governor.

Jun worked a keyboard with over-sized fingers, punching up an image on the holo-plate that dominated the conference table. The image was a fuzzy, military-spec holo of the jungle where the smuggler had first appeared. A line of trees was down where the ship had ditched its cargo. “This is where they dropped their load and ran for it,” said the Governor.

“What were they carrying? Did we recover the cargo?”

“No,” the Governor said, shaking his head and frowning. “There was nothing there but a tunnel leading into the mountain. The lifter we sent out to investigate put in a recon team, but they found that the tunnel dead-ended into solid rock half a mile into the Polar Range.”

“A tunnel?” said Dorman perplexedly, rubbing his sore temples.

The holo-plate image shimmered as the camera landed in the newly made clearing. Floating just above the heads of the recon team, it followed them to the mouth of a huge black hole in the fresh earth.

“A very large tunnel, big enough for men to stand upright in. The payload landed right in the middle of it.”

“It would take a week to dig such a thing,” marveled Dorman. “Seems amazing that they could land the payload that precisely under combat conditions.”

The image on the holo-plate dimmed then flickered out.

The Governor shrugged. “A mystery. I’m very new to my office, and was hoping you could shed some light on it.”

“I also wanted to speak to you about that, sir,” said Dorman, straightening in his chair. “About your new office, that is.”

“Proceed.”

“As a Nexus officer, I offer my support to you, sir, provided you can produce proof of your identity.”

Without a word the Governor ran his ID card through the terminal embedded in the conference table and waited as Dorman convinced himself that the data was genuine.

Dorman sighed at the end of it. “It seems that your claims are legitimate.”

“You disapprove?”

“This planet is my home sir, and I’m don’t relish the idea of a civil war.”

“In your view the Colonial Senate will oppose my inauguration, then.”

“Yes, most vehemently, Governor. I will assist you in gathering what forces we can that will stand loyal to the Nexus. We must mobilize before they do.”

The Governor nodded, and together they began to place a series of scrambled calls. Sergeant Manstein joined them, and soon they had a working defense strategy sketched out.

The culus emerged from the black treeline flying very low. The blue-green disk of Gopus had sunk beneath the horizon, leaving the cloudy night skies overhead pitch-black. Heading toward the sparkling streetlights the culus entered the city in the hilly residential section of Hofstetten. She glided silently among the houses, passing over fences and hedges, swooping down unlit streets and winding lanes.

The offspring flittered down into the center of town, where the tallest buildings on the planet stood. She passed the sixteen-story First Colonial Bank and she skirted the low, old-fashioned masonry walls that surrounded Fort Zimmerman, the militia headquarters. After that she entered the river district and ducked down between the moored barges that plied the river, hugging to the surface of the water like a seafloater skimming for jump-fish. Following the river down to where the spaceport edged up against it, the culus reached the cyclone fence around the compound and alighted atop a cement pipe.

The pipe was a sewer outlet that disgorged its steamy contents into the waterway. With a controlled vomiting action, the culus brought up the contents of her stomach, which consisted of the indigestible shrade. The long snake-like body of the shrade wriggled out of her mouth and slid immediately and stealthily up the pipe. The culus then rose up into the air, soaring back up the river on its leathery wings as silently as a giant hork-forest owl in search of prey.

A full six feet in length, the shrade was as thick around as a man’s arm. She slithered up the pipe encountering relatively few obstacles. Little more than a long narrow piece of muscle, the shrade compressed her body and wriggled through holes in grates smaller in diameter than a five-credit piece and slid underneath the edge of barely open valves. Swimming against the steady flood of raw sewage she encountered a colony of large rodents, which scrambled out of her path while emitting high-pitched cries of alarm. The shrade was tempted, but passed them by, ignoring the possible food source, as she needed all of her stealth and speed to achieve her objectives. She did, however, mentally mark their location as a resource for later nourishment.

Finally reaching the main buried tank beneath the spaceport, the shrade encountered a maze of pipes leading up to the surface. After a few exploratory efforts, the shrade found a convenient exit.

In the men’s public restroom on the arrivals floor, the toilet in the third stall suddenly seemed to flush itself. Water erupted, bubbling and splashing the tiled floors. Whipping her head about, the shrade struggled to extricate herself from the tight confines of the sewer pipe. The toilet seat clattered and walls of the stall were sprayed with soiled water. The shrade paused her thrashing for a moment to listen. Sensing nothing, she continued her efforts, finally managing to grip the base of the toilet and pull herself through, escaping from the cold depths of the sewers. Sliding out underneath the door of the stall, she determined that the restroom was indeed empty.

With a ripple of sucking, popping sounds, she extruded twelve short stumpy legs on each side of her body. From beneath her large single eye a spreading array of tentacles blossomed. With a peculiar humping gait, she moved rapidly to the restroom door. Using her tentacles, the shrade opened the door and surveyed the scene in the terminal with her single optical orb. She peered out into the baggage-claim area, immediately noting the presence of numerous active vertebrates.

The spaceport was in fact a scene of furious activity. Armed vertebrates marched back and forth about the building, gesticulating and making loud sound modulations. This immediately confirmed that the vertebrates communicated primarily through sound and visually detectable movements. Even as she took in this information, the shrade transmitted the scene using the radio crystals located in her tail-section, thus forming a living video pick-up for the open receptors of the Parent.

From the nature of the activities of the vertebrates, it seemed clear that they were preparing for a defensive military operation. Logically then, the offspring could only deduce that the vertebrates were now aware of the invasion and their impending peril. Worse, they had obviously predicted that the spaceport was strategically a key target and therefore would be one of the first objectives of the attack. Further, the fact that the rest of the city appeared so tranquil suggested that the vertebrates were quite capable of subtlety themselves and were perhaps laying a trap for the forces of the Imperium.

Heavy disappointment came to the offspring and was relayed to the Parent at this news. They had greatly hoped to take the spaceport by surprise as easily as they had the outlying food production zones. Somehow, they had been inefficient, incomplete, in their efforts to close down all information of the invasion. It was obvious that the vertebrates were preparing to do battle. Surface observations wouldn’t be enough to counter this enemy’s operations. All major targets had to be penetrated and compromised by shrades if reconnaissance was to be relied upon.

This changed the objectives of the shrade’s mission. No longer was it so mission-critical that the shrade’s presence go undetected. Having completed her check upon the enemy state of readiness, the shrade propelled her wet body at a slapping gait toward the janitor’s door to the left of the stalls. Flattening herself and squeezing beneath the door, she found a ventilation duct in the janitor’s closet and removed the wire grate. She slithered into the open duct, vanishing into the depths of the terminal building.

Finding a bank of tentacle-thick glowing tubes, the shrade delicately wrapped her snake-like body around them. The tubes carried the spaceport’s data-net, one of the old-fashioned optical liquid networks that had gone out of use in most colonies. Due to budgetary restrictions imposed by the Colonial Senate, however, the system was still in place here. With an oily sucking sound the shrade exuded one egg shaped pod onto each of the slick-surfaced tubes. The moment they were in place, the glistening pods flattened themselves a bit and then punctured the tubes with their eight-tined data-forks. A few droplets of milky fluid dribbled into the darkness before the pods sealed the holes they had created and began soaking in data.

Transmitting at a very low frequency, the pods were quickly monitoring and relaying virtually all transmissions over the spaceport’s datanet. A steady information dump fed the Parent’s newly grown computers. It would take a considerable amount of time for all the information to be compiled, digested, cross-referenced and analyzed by the computers, they were really a bit young for this, but once the job was finished the Parent would have a diverse wealth of information concerning the enemy.

Late Friday morning Militia Dispatch finally got around to investigating the reports from Hofstetten of gunfire and screaming jaxes. A ground car pulled up at Dev’s place with militia officers Kwok and her partner Friedrich. The cruiser rolled up the gravel drive, engine idling softly.

“I don’t see anything,” said Friedrich, “let’s just call in and get back to town.”

Officer Kwok glanced over at her partner in disdain. She was the senior officer and Friedrich’s lack of respect for procedure often rubbed her the wrong way. “We’ll check it out, then go back.”

She stopped the cruiser in front of the house and they both got out. Friedrich climbed out with a grunt, grumbling, “damned waste of time.”

It was when they rounded the side of the house and saw the mess in the yard that they both became fully alert. Bloody tracks and the few bits of meat left by the trachs covered everything. An empty shoe lay on the porch steps.

“What happened?” demanded Kwok, dragging out her pistol.

Friedrich pulled his weapon out smoothly and stepped into the open, eyes sweeping the scene. “Can’t be just an early slaughter, too close to the breeding season. See the barn door? It’s wide open.”

“But where are all the jaxes?”

“Dev wouldn’t have sent his jaxes into the high pastures this time of year, not with all the landsharks hatching in the woods.”

Kwok nodded, heading toward the shoe on the porch. “The screen door’s been crashed in. It looks like the boy’s shoe, here. Call in and report. Request a backup cruiser.”

Friedrich tapped his earphone and called headquarters.

“Could be someone hurt in there. We have to go into the house-now,” said Kwok. She looked Friedrich in the eye; both were scared.

Together they entered the house, following the odd trail left by the killbeast the night before. The three-clawed holes in the kitchen tiles were particularly disturbing.

Neither of them saw the culus that had flattened itself out against the roof of the barn, camouflaged to match the color of the shingles. When they moved out of sight, the culus rose up and dived from the roof, disappearing into the forest.

Down in the cellar, the two officers and Sarah came within seconds of shooting one another in the dark.

Daddy ordered a second platter of roasted air-swimmers while Mudface picked at his first. The waiter took the order with a forced smile, tactfully waiting until he had turned away from the men before putting a perfumed hanky to his nose.

“I won’t have this kind of thing. I don’t like coming down here and there’s going to be hell to pay,” said Daddy. Bits of roasted meat jetted from his blubbery lips.

“Yeah,” said Mudface. He picked at the black scabs on his forehead. “Looks like she ran out on us.”

“At the very least she screwed the pooch and lost our shipment,” expounded Daddy, shaking a large forkful of meat at his son. “We can’t let people get the idea that we’re soft. Nobody pulls one over on the boys from Sharkstooth.”

“I kinda liked her though,” complained Mudface. “A young man has plans, Daddy.”

Anger brewed on Daddy’s face. His fatty jowls pulled down in deep folds. “I won’t have no backtalk from you, boy.”

“So we’re just gonna kill her?”

“No, we’re gonna do more than that,” said Daddy, his mood lifting. He munched another forkful of air-swimmer, then grinned. Dark flecks showed on his teeth. “First, we’re gonna have a little fun with our shotguns, some cameras and her pretty little behind. We need plenty of pictures to hand around to people who might be getting funny ideas.”

After dinner the two men moved into the bar and once the maitre’d told the bartender who they were, they were served two foaming mugs of beer. A news update on KXUT interrupted the rayball highlights.

“Hey, that’s the bitch now,” exclaimed Daddy, blowing beer all over the bar.

Sarah and Bili were both shown in a news snippet concerning the mysterious disappearance of an entire farming family. The announcer explained that they had been connected with the failed smuggling attempt on Wednesday and were being held at the Hofstetten detention center for questioning. The cameras did a slow pan of the house, the yard and the bloody mess in the barn. Militia officer Choy came on for about three seconds, saying that a rogue landshark was probably responsible, that perhaps the family had tried to harbor landshark hatchlings and had paid the ultimate price.

Mudface whistled and squinted at the holo-plate. “What the hell did she get herself into? They said something about another smuggler. Could we have some competition horning in on us here?”

“We’ll find out,” said Daddy, blowing the top off another mug of beer. “We’ll find out everything.”

A long low limo pulled off the cross-colony highway and slid into Hofstetten’s main street. Governor Hans Zimmerman himself rode in the back, fuming. The limo floated up to the gates of the militia detention center and was quickly admitted.

Irritably, Zimmerman brushed past the guard at the door, shoving his ID card at the duty Sergeant. Surprised, the Sergeant ran the card through the checker and nodded him through to the Captain’s office. The Captain, having only just gotten word of Zimmerman’s visit, was still busy shoving papers, holo-disks and bottles into his desk.

“What a pleasant surprise this visit is, Governor,” he said, rubbing his hands together and snapping the top buttons of his uniform.

“Cut the crap,” Zimmerman commanded, making a sweeping gesture. “I’m here to take custody of that woman and her kid.”

“The ones from Dev’s farm?” asked the Captain, surprised.

“Yes, yes, be quick about it, man.”

“I must say, Governor, this comes as a shock.”

“Yes,” sighed the Governor. “It’s a bit of a surprise for me, too.”

“But our magistrate hasn’t even set bail yet, sir. They haven’t even been charged yet, although it looks like they’ll at least get smuggling and resisting arrest. We haven’t figured out what they had to do with the murders of the family of farmers.”

“Murders? I thought the family had simply disappeared.”

“Yes, well, the evidence shows that the family members were indeed killed, along with much of their jax herd.

“I’m too busy for such nonsense just now, Captain.”

“But we haven’t even set bail yet, sir,” repeated the Captain with emphasis.

Zimmerman glared at the man for several seconds. “So you want money, is that it?” He stifled the man’s protests with upraised hands, pulling out a checkbook. He keyed in his code and the device instantly spit out a 5000 credit voucher. “This will have to take care of it.”

The Captain eyed the amount critically.

“Well? Are you going to get them or do I have to order my deputies into your cellblock?” demanded Zimmerman.

“I will get them, Governor,” said the Captain stiffly. “I must point out, however, that the amount is certainly less than what the magistrate would set for charges of such gravity. I assume, of course, that your office would be good for the difference in case anything, ah-unexpected should happen.”

“Of course,” said Zimmerman. He made a dismissive gesture. “I must say that I find your demeanor less than cordial, Captain.”

Tucking the credit voucher into his breast pocket, the Captain manufactured a smile. “If you would be so good as to wait in the outer office, I will have the prisoners delivered to you. The duty Sergeant will handle the required processing of codes. Oh, and by the way, do you wish them to be under restraints?”

“Yes, certainly. Magnetic cuffs should be sufficient.”

Sarah and Bili were hustled up the stairs and through the security gate. There they were greatly surprised to meet Governor Zimmerman, whose face they recognized from the holo-plate news snippets. He had with him three burly men wearing autoshades set to extra dark.

Governor Zimmerman flagged a second limo, which pulled up behind the first. “If you two will excuse me,” he said, “I’m late for a dinner engagement.” He gave Bili an absent pat on the head and graced Sarah with a smile and a nod before climbing into his limo.

The deputies still gripped Sarah’s elbow. She twisted her hands, but the magnetic cuffs held as if welded. “Where are you taking us?” she demanded. Loose strands of hair hung down into her face, matted with sweat.

“Right this way, madam,” said one of the deputies, his eyes invisible behind midnight-black shades.

They were escorted to the second limousine and shoved into the back. Seated comfortably in the plush interior was the unmistakable fat form of Daddy. Mudface was driving, wearing a peaked driver’s cap. His idiot grin spread wider at Sarah’s expression of despair. He touched his cap to greet them.

The doors slammed and the two limos floated away in opposite directions.

The culus that had followed Sarah and Bili from Dev’s farm detached itself from an exhaust chimney and slid through the air in silent pursuit.