B00BFVOGUI EBOK (7 page)

Propelled ahead with his
kidnappers, Jamie squirmed.
They’re
taking me to the whirlibang! They’re taking me away!

Jamie began screaming again,
indifferent to any threat. He saw the supply ’box tethered ahead and clawed for
it — something familiar, something from home. Maybe some of his so-called
bodyguards were inside!

The leader in black made a
beeline for him, yanking him free from those holding him and slamming him
against the side of the supply ’box. An ebon fist struck Jamie squarely in the
nose, drawing blood.

“Stop!” a voice called out from
behind. The brute turned his head to see what Jamie saw: Bridget in her
environment suit, her magnetized boots holding her to the inside wall of the
Shaft. “Don’t be smacking our trader like that,” Bridget yelled. “Not before
I’ve had the chance!”

Kolvax looked back in surprise. It was
the human woman from the airlock — and she wasn’t alone. Other soldiers emerged
from the hatchways, climbing out onto the skin of the vast tube, weapons drawn.

He didn’t hesitate. Many of his
followers had come from the Xylanx Stalker units he’d
once led. The Severed could fight, he knew. He shoved his captive aside, the
human’s bright red blood still on Kolvax’s glove.

“Stay here, stripling,” he barked
at the human. “Faithful, attack!”

What
the hell are these guys?

Bridget sidestepped as a burst of
energy flashed past, striking the Shaft wall next to her booted feet. She’d thought
her teammates were big, but Jamie had found himself a gorilla
army — or they had found him.

She’d seen the massive silver-armored
figures when Trovatelli got the station’s
surveillance system unlocked. Some tall, some beefy, all big — and whoever they
were, they weren’t worried about damaging the depot. On the black-clad
puncher’s command the flying people had opened up on her comrades with energy
and missile weapons. Bridget hadn’t understood their leader’s words, but she
had a good idea what he’d said.

Bridget figured the missile
weapons weren’t going to hurt the station this deep inside, but they could
certainly do a number on her. She slid her legs back
into the hatch she’d emerged from. Twisting, she snapped a tether from her suit
to an anchor inside the hatchway. “Get back in the hatches and strafe with
pulse weaponry,” Bridget called into her mouthpiece.

It was the craziest combat
setting she’d ever encountered: flying enemies in zero gee shooting at her
people, who were attached like flies to the cylindrical wall. But the hatchways
provided cover, enough to turn the tables and transform the place into a
shooting gallery.

The only needed to give Geena Madaki time. And the pilot
was already in motion.

There was chaos all around. But
Jamie only saw the blood from his nose, coalescing into droplets and bobbing in
front of him. He had already felt sick from the weightlessness and panic. Now,
he felt weak and disoriented. The armored bully had turned his back on him, but
it didn’t matter. Jamie couldn’t see anywhere to go — and increasingly, he
couldn’t see at all.

Helmetless head lolling against
the collar of his environment suit, Jamie thought he saw a metal monster coming
toward him, its claws extending. Confused, he also thought he saw the face of Madaki, their shuttle pilot, in the mouth of the machine. A
tug on his leg was the last thing he felt before he blacked out.

Damnation!

Kolvax spun to avoid a shot from one
side — and then from another. This was no good. By keeping her people in the holes
like rodents, the dark-hair had put the Xylanx in a crossfire. He was sure his people could take the humans in
close quarters, but that effort would take time — time in which more humans could
arrive. But it cut to his spine to leave a fight unfinished.

Tellmer scrambled frantically around the
corner of the tethered container he was using for cover. Kolvax’s
aide had parted from the company long enough to flash-freeze his severed limb
at a prep station. Tellmer looked around, worried.
“We should go, Great Kolvax!” He waggled his detached
limb — hard as a rock. “You said we shouldn’t leave anything for them to study.
If any of us fall, that’d be something indeed!”

Damn
it all again
, Kolvax thought. Yes, the original plan was the right one.
His captive would still be of use as a hostage, and then back home. He fired
his backpack jets and darted around a floating cargo container.

The sniveling human was gone. An
airborne cargo tender was backing away under its own power,
a body slumped across two of its robotic arms. The station had several of them
in this chamber — and evidently the humans knew it, too. Kolvax
saw a human woman with a brown face at the controls inside the cab of the
tender. The tender fired its thrusters, coasting away from him.

Rumber saw it, too. She looked at him.
“Should we go after them?”

Kolvax started to say something…

Then he stopped and looked at his
hand. “No. We go to the transit ring — all of us. Hurry!”

The Xylanx
turned as one on Kolvax’s transmitted command.
Weaving in between the blasts, the silver behemoths rocketed toward the
cylinder’s center and the egress that led to the whirlibang.
It took them out of range of the humans.

Kolvax saw through the tunnel the
access leading to the passenger container. It had sat there for months,
taunting them with the possibility of a return flight home. Now Rumber paused, not wanting to go further. “We don’t have
the human,” she said, anger rising. “The Dominium will kill us if we return — you
know that!”

“It’s all right,” Kolvax said. He looked at the back of his glove, encrusted
with the human’s blood.  “I think we have
our pardon right here!”

Jamie opened his eyes to lights.
He was on one of the middle decks, with just enough simulated gravity to keep
him on the ground — but he wasn’t going to be moving anywhere. Perhaps
ever. “I’m…dying,” he said, gasping. “Blood…loss. Help me…”

Kneeling over him, Bridget rolled
her eyes. “Just breathe,” she said, placing a mask over his mouth. “You’ve just
got a bloodied nose.”

“But…”

“The air along the center line of
the Shaft cylinder isn’t as dense as it is out where the station’s rotating,”
she said. “The floors farthest from the axis have the most oxygen. I don’t
think the Regulans intended for humans to work in that
area.” Bridget stood. “Your new friends remembered their helmets.”

Jamie sat up, throat dry.
“They’re not my friends,” he said, coughing.

“Are you sure?” Bridget stepped
to a counter in the medical clinic and pitched Jamie a water flask. “I thought
maybe in all your scheming you hired a mercenary army
to bring you home.”

“Hardly! They weren’t even human!” Jamie
drank thirstily. Wiping his face, he glared at Bridget. “You saw them!”

“Armored guys, strange weapons?
Check. They were just bigger than you. That’s not a tall order.” She turned to
see O’Herlihy and Trovatelli
sliding down the ladder from above. “What do you have?”

“Jack and squat,” O’Herlihy said. “They took off in that one ’box that was
loaded up in the Echo ring — wherever that goes.”

Bridget looked to Trovatelli. “There’s no record in the database of it,” the
young tech explained. “The logs say it made the handshake with the whirlibang wherever they were going. That’s all.”

“Shut it down,” Bridget said.

“Already done.” Their visitors wouldn’t be able
to return using the way they’d left.

Bridget ordered O’Herlihy to lead his squad on a sweep of everything — including
the south bell of the station, which had never been occupied. “Give me
everything,” she said. “Fingerprints, eyelashes, the works.
If these guys spit on the floor, I want to see it.”

“Loogie patrol.
Fun.” O’Herlihy cracked a
smile and went off.

“I’m telling you, they weren’t
human,” Jamie groaned, lying back down on the floor. It was cool and
comforting, and he appreciated the Regulans for
putting it there. “Not human. Not. They were speaking gibberish!”

“You think every human speaks
English?” Bridget glanced at her Q/A and clicked her
tongue scornfully. “Yes, you probably do.”

Jamie rubbed his nose. “Look, I
can read a bottle of wine. But these guys weren’t talking in anything I’ve ever
heard.”

“Wait. They were in environment
suits?” Trovatelli asked.

Jamie rolled on his side and
looked at the young woman, stunned that anyone was finally taking an interest. “Yeah. They had public address speakers or something — same as
you guys in your armor.”

Trovatelli looked at Bridget. “They’re oxy
breathers.”

“How do you figure?”

“Because you heard the leader speak,” the younger woman said. “If they couldn’t
breathe the air, why would they need public address systems to talk? They’d
talk via their helmet mics, like we do when we’re in
space.” She looked down at Jamie. “They must sometimes take them off.”

“You see?” Bridget said, again
impressed by her new recruit. “Oxygen breathers. Maybe
one of the pirate outfits.” While no one could make unauthorized use of the whirlibangs in the Solar System, there were other entry
points across the Orion Arm and more than enough human settlements to generate
a crime problem. Where there was commerce, there was piracy. “Maybe they grew
up in low-grav and grew tall,” she said. “But human
enough.”

“Maybe,” Trovatelli
said. “But maybe not. The database interfaces weren’t set to Regulan or anything in our knowglobe.
That’s why I’ve had so much trouble with it. Do pirates have their own
language?”

Bridget stared. Stepping over to
a console, she took a look at the characters on the isopanel.
“Huh.”

“You see?” Jamie looked over at
the Q/A. “Thank you—”

“Lissa,”
she said, nodding pleasantly.

“Lissa
believes me.”

“I didn’t say that,” Trovatelli said. “Just that all the
evidence isn’t in.”

Bridget turned. “Okay,” she said.
“Check the security logs. Surveillance recordings. Everything.”

Trovatelli rubbed her chin. “If they locked
me out, they could easily have purged—”

“Which should be no problem for
you,” Bridget said as the tech walked out. “I have faith in my staff.”

Seeing the man Trovatelli passed in the doorway, Bridget blanched. “On the
other hand…”

“
You!
” Jamie turned to see the
orange-haired Osakan in uniform. It was Hiro Welligan, the squad leader
who had abandoned him — ultimately leaving him to the kidnappers. Jamie stormed
toward him. “You nearly got me killed, you son of a—”

Welligan smiled broadly and held up his
hands. “Hey, we did shoot at them for you.” His eyes lit up. “Thanks for
finding them for us.”

“Thanks for…?” Infuriated, Jamie
grabbed for the trooper.

Bridget interceded. Breaking them
up, she glared at her underling. “You did leave him, Hiro.”

“He called me a jackbooted thug!”
Welligan said. He looked at Jamie. “Er…what’s a jackboot?”

“It’ll be the thing up your ass
if you ditch him again,” Bridget said.

Jamie thought she looked serious
about it. The trader had watched the team long enough to know Welligan’s role: he was the clown of the crew, right down
to the spectral hair. Hiro had gone for the EndoSys follicular implants, which took the whole
skin-printing thing a step beyond. The guy’s hair went from orange to a cool
and calming blue as he dipped his head and grinned in embarrassment before his
boss. Jamie had known guys like Welligan on the
bourse. They tried too hard, and their jocularity was usually covering up for
an inability to make a sale. Jamie was glad to see that Bridget didn’t seem to
be buying it, either. The grin fled Hiro’s face, and
he seemed to wilt under his superior’s scrutiny.

Duly chastened, Welligan passed Bridget a packet. “Bangbox
just in from Altair,” he said. “Falcone’s gathered
the logistical crews from ASPEC — they’re heading here soon. He wants the first trading
mission underway before he arrives.”

“Trading mission?” Jamie goggled.
“I just got kidnapped!”

Welligan’s hair changed to an inspiring
white with flowing, animated red stripes. “Got to save our
jobs, ace.”

“That,” Jamie said, glaring,
“presumes you were doing one in the first place.”

Looking tired, Bridget just
shrugged.

Alabeyd hadn’t really felt like another
world to Jamie. He hadn’t ventured outside the ASPEC facility onto the
asteroid’s surface, and he already knew from the shuttle’s approach run that
there wasn’t anything to see out there. Apart from the heap of debris that had
once been his future, that was.

Stepping out of the transport
onto Baghula, however, finally felt like the real
deal. The red dwarf Struve 2398A loomed freakishly large overhead, a muted
tangerine in the chlorine-rich haze. Baghula was
closer to Struve than Mercury was to the Sun, but Struve was enough past its
prime that it wasn’t doing much, even with this face of the planet always
toward the star.

Struve and Baghula
were at the near edge of their expedition’s sales territory, but Jamie already
felt like it was the deep end. Survey reports shared with humanity by other
Signatory members said there was an intelligent life-form on the planet, but it
was so exotic that it had resisted all trading attempts. Jamie thought
humanity’s neighbor trading species were strange enough as it was. Anything too
weird for them to handle was something he didn’t want to mess with.

Mercifully, the trip in from
Sigma Draconis had been his shortest hop yet.
Struve’s whirlibang station didn’t require human
attendants to run, but Falcone would send some anyway
if it proved to be the hoped-for link in a logistical chain. Comprising two
crew ’boxes, an engine, and the general store, the shuttle
Prospector
had made the short trip from the Struve whirlibang to land at coordinates sent up by a local survey
team. The explorers had sounded surprised to get their hail; it didn’t seem
like they got many visitors here.

Setting his briefcase down on Baghula’s surface, Jamie understood why. He didn’t know who
or what had installed the whirlibang in the system,
but it seemed a waste of effort. Bridget had said the place looked “pleasant
and calm” just before she and her squad had left on their recon minutes
earlier. “Calm” he agreed with — but he could hardly call the place “pleasant.”
Generated by the local life-forms and the briny lakes they lived in, the
chlorine in the atmosphere contributed to a greenish-yellow fog that both
limited visibility and made everything else look like a mirage.

Jamie checked the seals again on
his SoftSHEL environment suit. Apart from the
circulation pack, it wasn’t much more than a jumpsuit, gloves, boots, and a
fishbowl helmet. No wonder the traders needed guards if Quaestor
dressed them like this. On the shuttle, Jamie had carped that Bridget’s team
got to be in its regular battle gear. She’d retorted that the trader needed to
look nonthreatening — although she added that their particular trader probably
didn’t require the extra effort.

Jamie stood around for a minute
before he looked back at Welligan. Hiro’s squad had remained to form a safety perimeter around
the shuttle, but Jamie still wasn’t talking to him. But now he was growing
impatient. He raised his arms. “What am I waiting for?”

Welligan pointed behind Jamie to a
sloping rise leading off into the haze. Something was moving there, something
big. Jamie started to turn, but Welligan wasn’t
looking alarmed.

Jamie didn’t understand why. A
giant wheel, three meters tall, rolled over the hill toward him. Through the
haze, Jamie could see jagged, angry teeth around the wheel’s circumference
biting into the green-stained sand and propelling it along. Four robotic arms
extended from either side of the wheel, helping to pull the contraption ahead.
The rolling monstrosity rumbled toward Jamie.

“Stop!” Jamie yelled, unaware if the
thing could hear him over his mic, since he had never
tested his public address system. But before the trader could
turn to run from the wheel, its robotic arms closest to the ground plunged into
the muck, halting the vehicle’s advance.

And it was a vehicle — for the
unseen alien that rode inside the egg-like passenger compartment that was the
wheel’s hub. “I’m so sorry to have startled you, sir,” a female voice cooed over
his headset.

“Bridget!” Jamie yelled.
“Bridget, I’ve got a native over here! And it’s talking!”

Bridget stepped through the fog,
rifle slung. She smiled. “That’s not a native. That’s our tour guide.”

“Oh, dear,” the wheel said,
tilting left. Jamie could see the spongy alien peering through the egg’s
viewport now. It wasn’t much more than a gray mass. “I’m sorry to have
disturbed your friend, Chief Yang.”

Jamie stared at the thing,
startled. “Er…not a problem.”

“Welcome to Baghula,”
the frothy voice said. “I hope you’ll have a wonderful stay here, Mister—”

“Sturm,” Jamie said. He tugged at
the ridiculous identification badge on his chest.

“Oh, a trader!” The wheel bounced up and down
excitedly. “None have come for so long. I am just sure the Baghu
will greet you warmly this time.”

Jamie looked with concern. “What
do they
usually
do?”

The wheel giggled — and Jamie took
a step back, never having heard a wheel giggle before. “The Baghu
are perfectly harmless, silly. They’re just…particular about who they welcome
into their community.” The wheel pivoted back to face the hill, and the thing
inside its hub gave something that sounded to Jamie like a sigh. “I’ve been
here for years researching them — to little avail, I’m afraid. You can call me
Lorraine.”

Jamie stared.
The big alien wheel was named Lorraine.

Bridget chuckled and walked past.
Welligan’s team was unloading the knowglobe
from the shuttle. Hip-high and dodecahedral, the database held all the shared
knowledge of the member Signatory Systems — including their languages. Every
traveling party in the pact carried one, an all-purpose travelers’ aid. And it
was already aiding now, Jamie learned.

“Lorraine is a Sheoruk,”
Bridget explained. “Your suit’s aural sensors are picking up Lorraine’s words
and putting them wirelessly back through the knowglobe.
You’re getting the translation in your headset.” She patted the speaker outside
Jamie’s helmet. “And any alien who talks to you is getting your words
translated, as well.”

“Oh,” Jamie said, realizing for the
first time that when he spoke to the wheel, he was hearing a strange whispering
echo that was not his voice. He was speaking Sheoruk;
his uniform’s system was doing its best to muffle it from his own hearing.

Bridget nodded to the knowglobe. “We’ll be thankful for any help you can give,”
she said.

“Certainly.” Lorraine wobbled toward it and
wiggled a robotic arm. “There,” she said. “Synchronization
complete. You now have everything my mission has found about the Baghu — including their language. I do hope you find our
research of use.”

Jamie shook his head,
flabbergasted. The alien sounded so chipper. “Okay,” he said, still back on the
name. “You’re
Lorraine
?”

“You don’t know
anything
about what we do here, do you?”
Aggravated, Bridget gestured to the giant wheel. “The knowglobe
has translated her name to a human cognate, and it’s selected a speaking
persona it believes is a good match for her.” She stepped over and patted the
metal frame of the alien’s odd vehicle. “It appears the knowglobe
has decided Lorraine would sound best as a nineteen-fifties
flight attendant.”

Jamie gawked. “Are you joking?”

“No, it’s for real. The knowglobe has billions of bits of recorded human speech in
it.” Bridget checked a display in her helmet and continued with a smile. “Lorraine
Buchwalder of Passaic, New Jersey, lives again as a Sheoruk xenobiologist on the
planet Baghula.”

“Whatever.” Jamie rolled his
eyes. He found his briefcase and picked it up by the handle. “Let’s get to it.”

“Thank you for flying Pan Am,”
Lorraine said. “Please step this way.”

Flanked by O’Herlihy,
Dinner, and Bridget’s other troopers, Jamie and the chief followed the wheel
through the green mist to a brown lagoon. The body of liquid was a soupy brine so dark nothing could be seen within it. The
brown mud resolved into lighter, almost golden sands as the party approached
the lakeside.

“Jesus!” Jamie yelled, dropping
his case. Behind the troopers, a massive beast rose from the water. And then
another, and another.

“The Baghu,”
Lorraine said.

“Uh-huh.” Jamie stared, mystified — and
glad that his space suit had ways of dealing with what had just been scared out
of him. Because there were more now, rising from the nasty
surf — and because the Baghu looked like nothing more
than walking versions of the human stomach.

Bulbous two-meter-tall flesh bags
waddling on pairs of gummy legs, the Baghu had large
slimy tentacles extending from their midsections. And up top, instead of heads,
the giant sacs tapered off to drooling nozzles.

One of the creatures tromped from
the lagoon and onto the shore. “It’s missing an esophagus,” Jamie said,
repulsed. “And everything else.”

“Isn’t it fascinating?” Lorraine
chirped. “That upper valve handles sensory perception, eating, respiration,
elimination—”

“Elimination?” Jamie asked. “It craps through
its mouth?”

Lorraine tittered, amused by the
slang. “I’ve never seen that, of course. But it breathes and sees through it,
for sure. In fact, we’ve nicknamed them Breathers — I think you can hear why.”

Jamie could. The Baghu leader — if that was what it was — expanded and
contracted like a blood-pressure bulb. Its loud, wheezing respiration made
Jamie glad he’d skipped lunch on the shuttle.

Lorraine prodded at Jamie with a
robotic arm. “Speak,” she said.

“I don’t speak Baghu,” Jamie said. But what came out of his uniform’s
public address system was something altogether different: a warbling series of
gurgles and squawks.

“Splendid!” Lorraine said,
rolling happy circles around Jamie. “You’ve just done it!”

Jamie looked back at Bridget. “The knowglobe, right?”

Bridget winked. “You’re getting
it. They have a rudimentary language. You have it now, too.”

He shook his head. “I hope it’s
not making me sound like a Baghu fashion model or
something.”

“Just talk,” she said, laughing.

Jamie picked his briefcase back
up, faced the Breather, and took a deep breath. “Greetings,” he said, trying to
ignore the creepy echo from outside. “I’m Jamison Sturm, representing the Sigma
Draconis expedition on behalf of Quaestor
Corporation. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?” Instinctively, he put forward his
gloved hand.

He immediately thought to pull it
back — but astonishingly, the Baghu moved first,
plopping a dripping tentacle onto his hand. “I am Baghu,”
the alien said in a breathy basso voice that Jamie suspected the knowglobe must have pulled from old recordings of sexual
criminals.

Then Jamie realized the tentacle — and
now his hand — was covered with a gooey slime. He quickly pulled his dripping
hand back. “Ew!” he said, flicking his wrist madly.

“Mr. Sturm!” Lorraine called out,
alarmed. The alien wheel ground its gear teeth into the sand. “Please, watch
your behavior.”

Jamie looked up at the Breather.
If it was offended, he had no way of telling. He tried to restart. “You said
your name is Baghu? Don’t you have an individual name?”

“They do not,” Lorraine said.
“They know who they are.”

“Maybe you’d like to buy a name?”
Jamie said, finally overcome by the absurdity of it all. “Here’s one for free.
I’ll call you Bob.”

The Sheoruk
tut-tutted. “So disrespectful!”

Jamie snapped back at the alien
scientist. “You’re a glob in a wheel named Lorraine! You’re one to talk?”

“
Well!
”

With that icy response, the Sheoruk pivoted and rumbled away, heading over the hill to
its survey vessel.

Bridget shook her head. “There
goes our help.”

Jamie took another look at the
big Baghu wobbling indifferently on the beach before
him. Then he looked back at Bridget. “Sorry,” he said, chastened.

“No, you’re off to a fine start,”
Bridget said, resigned. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”