Dark Planet (3 page)

“Against us,” put in a giant fully six-eight in stature and so black his skin shone over huge muscular implants in his bare arms. Staff Sergeant Grgur Parkpoon, “Gorilla,” was the team’s technical support and Intel specialist. Beneath that shaved bowling-ball head and mass of muscle, I sensed a being normally quiet and introspective with a keen intelligence.

“What’s to prevent it happening again — You Zentadon coming under someone else’s control?” Gorilla asked. “Such as, for example, the Homelanders?”

“Nothing more than what prevents you Humans from coming under another’s control,” I said, attempting to project patience. “The Indowy technology that used taa against us was just as capable of using your adrenalin to control you — on a much less destructive scale, of course. We shall never permit that kind of domination over us again.”

The sniper snorted contemptuously. “Fu-uck.”

The vulgarity, the way he used it in two syllables, made it sound twice as obscene.

“That’s all in the past,” Captain Amalfi interrupted, to my gratitude. “The Indowy are today the most peaceful species in the Tau Ceti Galaxy …”

“Pusses,” Blade muttered.

“And the Zentadon are our … allies.”

I knew from the hesitation and the uncertainty of his emotional pattern that he started to say “trusted allies,” but couldn’t quite bring it off.

“They’re incorporated into the Federation Army of The Republic of Galaxia,” he concluded. “We need their skills against the Blobs.”

“So, this elf is our token,” quipped the Viking with a grin that blunted the sharpness of his observation.

“I am your token,” I admitted.

The female sitting on the couch next to Atlas, the pieces of a dismantled Grav across her lap, studied me out of large blue eyes in a pleasant brown face. Her thick mop of thatched black hair rippled and sprang back into place whenever she passed her hand through it. Sergeant Pia Gunduli, “Gun Maid,” was DRT-213’s communications specialist. I marveled that Humans sent their females into combat. Good breeders must be protected and maintained. Commander Mott said any civilization that used its females in such a manner was not worth defending.

“You speak excellent English, Kadar San,” Gun Maid observed, sounding my name in a way I liked.

“The Human tongue you call English is currently the diplomatic and commercial language in this galaxy and Earth’s,” I said lamely. I did, in fact, speak it well, with only a little clip at the beginning of some words and an occasional hanging diphthong because of my sharper Zentadon teeth.

“And he’s such a cute elf.” She laughed, and that made the others laugh with her.

All except the sniper.

“Good,” Captain Amalfi said. “We receive the Ops Order at 0900 tomorrow. We could be gone up to six months this time.”

“Or longer,” Gorilla added darkly.

“By the time we get back, Ferret,” Atlas gibed, “that little prolie slut of yours will be bedding down with the home guard.”’

“She already is,” Gorilla said.

Sometimes I envied the Humans their easy bantering.

“Sergeant Shiva,” Captain Amalfi said, “make sure our Sen is issued his team gear.” He turned to the others. “Whatever personal affairs you have, take care of them today and tonight. Isolation lockdown begins at 0500. OPSEC, operational security, is in effect. The bell tolls for thee.”

Master Sergeant Chital “Shiva” Huang was the final member of the team and its NCOIC, second in command to Captain Bell Toll. Next to Gorilla, he was the biggest and meanest-looking human being I had ever encountered. He was easily six-and-a-half feet tall, a grizzled old bird of the Human Polynesian wrestler race, with a long jagged scar torn down the right side of his face, and nails rather than whiskers growing out of his cheeks. He didn’t shave his whiskers; he chiseled them. There was no exaggeration in the phrase “one tough hard-core old sonofabitch” when it was applied to him.

“Come with me, fresh meat,” Sergeant Shiva rumbled.

Blade’s cycling the bolt of his Gauss stopped us. I felt the sniper hard and cold inside my head. I turned to find him aiming his rifle directly at me.

“There’s no problem while we’re out there as long as the tailless elf does his job,” he said. “But if he fucks up, he becomes my problem.”

O
fficers and senior NCOs of the Federation Army of The Republic were allowed to live off-post if they desired. Zentadon were excluded from the ranks of commissioned officers, but I was a senior NCO and I desired a cubicle of my own in the city rather than the regimented and sterile environment of living in barracks. After my unsettling introduction to the DRT-bags, appropriately so-called, I thought, I needed a drink before I went home to get my affairs in order prior to the beginning of isolation. Cocktails were something Human to which I had become accustomed. They were delicious and cold, mildly intoxicating and wonderful.

I caught a hovercraft outside the post gates and had the bot controller drop me off at the Starside, a watering hole for upwardly-mobile young professional non-Humans like myself who had acquired certain Human tastes. I took a false tail of golden hair out of my briefcase and attached it to my uniform trousers so that it looked like I possessed the Zentadon’s total number of appendages. Never mind that it lacked prehensile abilities and I couldn’t use it to cop a feel up a female’s kilt if the breeding season suddenly began. Like Commander Mott, I claimed it had been crushed — an old war wound — and therefore dragged out my tracks when I walked. There were some places you didn’t go if you were Human, half-Human, or overly associated with Humans.

A warty Kutaran breeding pair of indistinguishable sexual characteristics occupied a dark booth at this early hour and a convention of four-armed Zutu merchants in on a flight from the planet Nesshoue were whooping it up with squeals and shrieks under the colored lights. It was cool and relatively clean inside the lounge, especially when compared to the hot dry winds that blew down the streets of the Capital, rattling discarded food containers and whipping other trash about like missiles. My eyes still burned from the smog. The barkeep, a Zentadon, stirred up a potato gin cocktail and, after a contemptuous glance at my wilted member hanging off the back of the stool, delivered the drink with his own adroit appurtenance. He grinned his full-blood Zentadon sharp-toothed grin.

Show off.

I was half through the cocktail and already feeling somewhat assuaged toward my unasked-for and unwanted assignment with the Humans of DRT-213 when Mina Li popped through the door. She gave my fake tail a look but kept any untoward comments to herself. Like me, she was golden-haired. Her hair was finely-woven and hung in a snatch down her back. Females had much less hair on their bodies than males. Her face was full with full lips and full green eyes. The end of her tail darted suggestively to her left shoulder and reached out to caress my cheek as she occupied the stool next to me. She assumed I would be available to her when breeding season arrived and urges started roaring.

I assumed nothing.

“I buzzed your locater,” she chirped brightly. “It told me you were here.”

“Lucky me,” I grumped.

“Are you not happy to see me, Kadar? The time is almost near.”

“Time?”

She batted her long lashes and gave me a coy smile.

“Oh.” I snapped my fingers. “
That
time.”

“I have our conjoining bed already prepared. There is a lock on the door that will not open again for nine days once we are inside. The pantry is stocked. I have your cocktail materials ready. Are you ready, Kadar?”

“That is me — Ready Freddy.”

“Ready Freddy? Is that a term you borrow from the Humans with whom you associate?”

“I do not associate with Humans.”

“You are in their military.”

“It is our military as well as theirs.”

“Then why are you not an officer? Answer me that.”

“I do not want to quarrel with you, Mina Li.”

“Yes. Politics is not for lovers. Politics will work themselves out.”

She ordered a Coca Cola from the barkeep. “Coke says it best,” she said.

Humans didn’t need weapons to conquer the universe. Not when they had Coca Cola, Wrangler jeans, Chevrolet hovercraft and Ford Fanger Sky Rovers.
Coke Says It Best
. The slogan was emblazoned on the cloud cover so that when the smog cleared out and you looked up, that was what you saw.
Coke Says It Best
.

What did it say best?

“You are ear-flicking,” Mina Li noticed. “You are excited about our conjoining?”

“Excited.”

She looked disappointed, sipping on her Coke. Her tail waved above her head, then caressed the back of my neck in a sensuous manner.

“I have an appointment next week to remove my tail,” she blurted out.

“Why would you do that?”

“So you will not be ashamed of me. I will look very good in tight jeans.”

“Mina Li, I am not ashamed of you. It is just that …”

“Just what?”

I didn’t understand what it was just.

“Just that you are more Human than Zentadon,” she accused. “I have seen you look at the Human females with their tight little no-tail asses and their round no-ears that they have to move with their fingers.”

Here we went again. I tuned her out. All I wanted was a bracing cocktail and a good mope before I had to prepare for the mission.

“I will conjoin with Mishal,” she threatened finally. “Would you like that?”

“That would be fine.”

“You would let me?”

“How could I stop you if that is what you want?”

“Mishal has a tail and he is proud of it,” she scolded. “He is very brave.”

“He is a terrorist and will likely die before breeding season.”

“He is a Homelander patriot,” she flared. “He has learned to use taa so that it will not destroy him.”

She turned her back to me and sulkily sipped on her Coca Cola. The tip of her tail lashed reprovingly against the back of my head.

“He has dedicated tonight’s mission in my honor,” she added, intending to make me jealous. “He would be exclusive with me if I say yes.”

I snatched her tail away from my head and held it. “What mission are you talking about?”

“It is none of your affair, Kadar. You have turned your back on your people. When the dreadnought explodes at its docking …”

She caught herself, realizing in the middle of the sentence that she had said too much. Mina Lee was never the brightest coin in the fountain. The USS
Admiral Tsutsumi
had arrived earlier in the day. Although not yet official, it was assumed in SpecOps that it arrived in order to transport a DRT to a reconnaissance of a potential or actual Blob base site. DRT-213 was the next intended activation unit.

I looped Mina Li’s tail around in front of her and gave it a yank to spin her face to my face. I gripped her shoulders.

“Mina Li, you are going to tell me about this mission. Understand?”

T
he Zentadon Homeland Movement enjoyed at least the passive support of many Zentadon both on our home planet of Ganesh, now garrisoned by the Humans instead of the Indowy who once occupied us, and here on Galaxia where we flourished as a considerable minority settlement. I thought of going to Commander Mott with the intelligence garnered from my would-be lover, for whom I had little special ardor — I simply found her unappealing as a mate, even a temporary one — but quickly dismissed that idea. Commander Mott would have no other recourse except to take action, which placed me in the unenviable, even dangerous, position of being fingered as an informant. If Mina Li couldn’t keep her mouth shut to me, what made me think she could keep it shut to others? As a half-breed, I was only nominally accepted by the Zentadon to begin with.

Besides, the Homelanders had no way of getting past security to sabotage the
Tsutsumi
. Unless …

I decided to have another cocktail. I liked “Happy Hour,” which is what the Humans called this time of day. While my drink was being mixed and presented to me by the smartass barkeep and his tail, another party of Kutaran joined the mating couple and a stag Ztura stuck his square yellow head inside while the rest of him remained outside on the end of a slender two-meter-long neck. The Market District of the Galaxia Capital, which was all the city was every called, was a port district where anything or anybody could show up and be accorded only a passing glance.

“Kadar, you will not tell Mishal I informed …”

“I will not if you will not. Now hush and let me think.”

I went back to
unless
. The Homelanders couldn’t get past security
unless
, and I had to consider this, unless the Homelanders had a plant, a contact, a sleeper inside military security to provide them with the codes to bypass the various electronic and robotic defenses that shielded the military space port.

I took a sip of my drink, then sat up straight as though jolted by the potency of the alcohol. My ears flicked.

Rumors about a Blob threat had circulated for so long that official statements were now often looked upon as so much government propaganda to keep the populace of restless Zentadon, and even more restless Human prolies pacified and controllable. Menace outside the gates and all that. Homelanders were not concerned with Blobs. Crazies like Mishal were so myopic, so intent on the one issue of Zentadon autonomy that they failed to see the Big Picture, as Human army officers were fond of saying. The Big Picture was, the Blobs would kick our Zentadon tail-dragging butts without the support of the Galaxia Republic military. If the Blobs made serious incursions into the Tau Ceti Cluster, Ganesh would be one of the first worlds to fall under the onslaught. Most Zentadon, like our former Indowy masters of today, were no longer warriors. Zentadon were incapable of killing other sentients without committing suicide in the process. You couldn’t fight a war if you died in the same numbers as your enemy — and there were far fewer of you to begin with.

But Zentadon could make war against objects. Blow up and destroy things. I had to assume, therefore, that Homelanders possessed the intel, the planning, and the contacts to blow up the targeted dreadnought. What disturbed me was the realization that if they sabotaged the
Tsutsumi
, higher-higher in the Galaxia military would suspect another Zentadon as the insider informant. Currently, I was the only Zentadon working on a pending mission, one that involved use of the
Tsutsumi
. Who could be a more likely suspect?