He only failed to hate the corporate swine was when they paid him. Otherwise, they were strictly the scum of the earth. He held manure in higher esteem – at least it was useful.
Derek Davis had for the past eight years proclaimed himself a freelance pilot. He distinguished himself from corporate pilots, mercenaries, and cargo haulers by virtue of providing all three functions. As far as he was concerned, businessmen sat around tables, never leaving the ground, manipulating politicians into regulating his playground for their personal benefit.
His playground was space. The great emptiness that, if you understood all the scientific talk, was not as empty as advertised. Derek was at peace with the stray ion. After spending his savings to get a junkyard spaceship from the Eldrandii, he was at peace with anything not firing at him. His six foot six form was more comfortable in a spaceship than in the latest car model, which the manufacturers still insisted on improving in completely useless ways.
Space was his home, a fact totally unconnected with his status as the clumsiest man alive in all but zero gravity. Nor was the ex-wife with an uncanny ability to hunt him down and make him suffer anywhere on Earth the reason behind his exile. Or her claim to half his money – the money he used to buy the ship.
No, he was just the space type. He exhibited rugged looks – in other words, a lack of good looks and a propensity to delay trimming any hair whatsoever – and an intelligent thinness, making him prefer cannon talk to fist talk. More importantly, he was utterly self-involved and unjustifiably confident. Altogether, as he strode down the corridors of Baxter Interstellar like the king of the jungle overlooking vermin, he drew contemptuous stares, which he took to be jealousy.
“Hello, you must be Derek Davis,” the corporate head said once Derek made it into the office. Derek could not tell whether the man was a CEO or President or whatever. On one level, he considered the question with utter indifference. On another, he wanted to know how much these people respected him – how important a man they sent to deal with him. The man had a full head of brown hair, indicating that he climbed the corporate ladder quickly. No self-respecting corporate man wore a wig. Some spare fat circled him; he was likely the type that jogged every morning to keep it in check. Derek sat down in the pleather armchair opposite the man without being invited to. “I assume that, when you were informed of this job, you were only given the address and office number?”
“That’s right.”
“Too bad. I hate the impersonality of the whole thing. Would you like a drink?”
“No,” Derek replied by reflex.
“But I insist,” the businessman decreed. As he poured from a jug some clear, bubbling liquid and handed the glass to Derek, the mass manufactured businessman smile stuck to his face.
“There’s very little alcohol in it, but it’s fairly good. I forget what world we picked it up form. I have people trying to find out what it’s called,” the man quickly explained, “speaking of which, I’m Patrick Namen.” Namen extended his right hand over the desk; Derek shook it awkwardly, being left-handed. “I don’t keep a nameplate on my desk – I have no idea why.”
Derek sipped from the glass. It tasted otherworldly, without question. He detected the hint of alcohol, but the main taste was silky – a chocolate, honey, spicy, bubbly taste surprisingly smooth. He gulped it down. Namen did not drink any himself, though judging from the six-cup jug that now stood empty, Derek guessed the man had consumed his fill.
“I hear you don’t make yourself well-liked.”
“I’m not paid to. Tell me what you’ll pay for and I’ll do it.” Except for direct flattery, Derek had short patience for unnecessary talk.
Namen understood the sentiment. “Yes, well, it’s nothing exciting – just a cargo delivery. There’s a small sentient community on Porrima Two – a few thousand sentient are standing in our way from developing the place. So, we want you to give them this gift on our behalf to smooth things over. You won’t have to do much talking; they’ve already been informed of the gift. Just go, drop it off, and that’s that. Porrima is within your working range, right?”
“Well under. I work up to fifty light years from Sol.”
“Good. I hate these types that won’t go outside the Interstellar Community – no sense of adventure. There will be a clear landing pad and beacon when you arrive.”
“I’d hope so,” Derek said, wondering what kind of backwoods they were sending him to. Derek knew every system on the normal routes as well as he knew Sol; other worlds were truly alien. Porrima Two could have spawned gargantuan bloodsucking heptapeds for all he knew.
“There’s a hitch, though,” Namen said. Derek, hardly surprised, stared into the empty glass he still held and wondered whether he could get a bottle of the liquid to take up with him. He filed a mental note to inquire about it after he finished the job. “The Eldrandii are a bit fanatical about this place and its people. They believe that our arrival would defile the place. You know the Eldrandii, brilliant as space-farers but excessively superstitious when it comes to their beliefs.”
“Are they serious enough about this to fire at me if I get too close? I’m good, but they’re the originals – they were flying while we were just learning to walk.”
“They don’t usually take violent action – you know that. We doubt they’ll interfere to that extent. However, they may hound you all the way to Porrima, spewing out their nonsense over the space waves – just don’t read too much into what they say. If they didn’t have this religious fixation, they would have colonized long ago. Frankly, I think they’ve cooked this thing up just to prevent us from expanding while they get their ships ready.”
Derek shifted in his seat and set the glass down on the desk with a rough thud. Not a spiritual man himself, he still kept some respect for the beliefs of others. That the man in front of him lacked respect was discomforting but, again, unsurprising. Derek made no comment.
“So,” Namen continued when he realized that Derek intended to remain silent, “you’ll get the normal fees, and everything’s settled. Please sign here,” the standard contract form was extended to Derek, “I’m required by law to tell you that, along with the basic hiring agreement, you also release this company from any costs or liabilities this mission may entail other than those specifically listed in the agreement.”
“Standard stuff,” Derek mumbled as he signed, “can’t remember if I’ve every had any costs beyond the normal repairs, but you business-types like to cover yourselves whenever you can.”
“Good business practice,” Namen concluded. “Once you have delivered the gift, the Porrimans will inform us, and you can come directly to this office for your fee. Thank you for doing business with us.” Namen handed Derek the pickup slip, which gave directions for the pickup location, and shook the pilot’s hand briskly. Derek rose from the pleather chair and shut the door behind him as he left.
At the pickup point, a half dozen disgruntled workers sluggishly loaded the cargo into his ship’s hold. Though his craft was perfectly capable of reaching the launch way under its own power, the port authorities had some prohibition against use of taxi engines and the ship had to be tugged over. After that, he was space bound and carefree. Piloting he could deal with. People he couldn’t.
People had a bad habit of encroaching on his blissful solitude, though. This time, the peace lasted for a few hours. Well away from Sol system and preparing for the first hyperspace jump – his onboard computer calculated that it would take three jumps to make it safely to Porrima – another ship pulled alongside, matching his speed a mile off the port side. Despite the curvaceous design that marked it as a craft of Eldrandii make, he had no way of knowing what species piloted the ship. Derek himself was piloting an Eldrandii ship, after all. From the stories he had heard, Derek knew that pirates preferred the swift surprise strike, but there was no room for assumption. He set his weapons to arm and locked onto to mysterious ship.
The ship hailed him. “I mean you no harm,” a computerized voice said. A translator, no doubt. “I am here to warn you.”
“Who are you?” Derek asked with every trace of the hot hostility pounding in his ears. Whoever it was, he had some gall to pull a stunt like this.
“I am an agent of Eldrand central government tasked to protect Porrima.”
“Protect Porrima? From what? I’m just delivering some cargo, a gift to seal a deal between an Earth corporation and the planet’s inhabitants.”
There was a hesitation at the other end, then: “We have records saying, quite simply, that Porrima must be protected against outside contact. We have a group of texts called “pleas,” and we believe it is our sacred duty to fulfill them. This is one of the most impassioned pleas – no one must land on Porrima. The writer was desperate, moving, deeply committed to his purpose, so we respect his wishes. So I warn you, do not go to Porrima. We do not know why the plea was made, but some danger may lurk on that planet. The writer did mention that Porrima was pure at one point, but we have no idea what that means. Purity is something to be sought, not avoided. It is to be learned from.”
“How did you know I was going to Porrima?”
“We have been keeping an eye on the company you currently work for. We have warned them as well, but they will not listen. Their interests blind them. Or perhaps they know something we do not. I would wonder why, for such a mission, they decided to hire you instead of a dedicated cargo vessel, which would have been cheaper.”
“Maybe they knew you’d be here, that you’d try to attack whatever vessel went to Porrima.”
“No Eldrandii would ever do such a thing, you must know that,” the voice answered. The translator wiped out whatever hostility might have been in it.
“I can’t tell whether you’re an Eldrandii or not,” Derek countered. Thoughts were flying through his mind at light speed. He was caught between a customary distrust of the corporations he worked for and intense skepticism of oddball religious beliefs. There was no way to tell whether the person in the other ship was who he said he was, and no way to determine through the emotion in his voice whether he believed what he was saying - the pitfalls of the isolation space provided.
“Your translator should indicate the language it is translating from,” the person in the other ship reminded.
Derek checked the translator and it did indeed indicate Eldrandaiz, but that proved nothing. “Just because you speak the language doesn’t mean that you’re Eldrandii. I know plenty of humans who can speak your language fluently.”
“True. I have no further way of proving anything to you. I was tasked by my government to protect the fulfillment of this plea. I cannot do more than I have done. The choice is yours. You have been warned.”
The ship broke off and jumped into hyperspace a safe distance away, leaving Derek without a guiding voice for his thoughts. Namen had warned him about the Eldrandii religious beliefs about Porrima, but Derek had dismissed it as so much drivel at the time. If the Eldrandii did something, they did it for a reason. The kind of mentality people like Namen applied to the reasonable beliefs of other species – superstition they called it – showed the insensitivity that those who only believed in profit called realism. Then again, the Eldrandii agent’s warning did sound irrational. Maybe it’s only a glossy myth that the Eldrandii are more reasonable than other species - a natural benefit of being an older, more advanced race.
He recalculated the first jump and made it. Nothing was pursuing him. He had been warned. This was not the M.O. of the fanatic – a true fanatic would have busted him into space debris by now. His ship was of Eldrandii make, for heaven’s sake; there wasn’t a ship in their main line that couldn’t take him out. It was to the galaxy’s benefit that they weren’t a hostile people. Maybe it was only the Earth fanatic that blew things up to prove his point. Burning villages in order to save them from communism, right. He knew too much Earth history and too little Eldrandii history to figure this one out. So, that left him with a simple truth – he had been contracted for a job, had accepted it, and would carry it through. He’d have to take extra care, but hey, that was the name of the game in the first place. He wasn’t armed for nothing.
There was also the fact that a people existed on the planet’s surface. Supposedly they knew he was coming, and he could contact them before landing. If anything particularly menacing lurked on the surface, he’d find out then. His hands flew over the panel as the ship cruised to the next jump point. He entered hyperspace for a second time, wondering about the physics behind what he was doing. All he knew was that it worked. If he studied how it worked, the facts’d probably scare him out of flying for good.
Back in normal space and rocketing into position for the final jump, an unpleasant thought occurred to Derek. What if there was some disease on the planet? Something the people are immune to, but outsiders are not. But the Eldrandii would have had better records if an exploration mission was decimated by disease. A survivor would have been the writer or the plea. Did he write it to make the prohibition sacred?
Well, there was only one way to find out. Derek made the final jump. The system’s star stood behind the planet, leaving its surface dark, but ringing it with an eerie glow, with a pearl of light on the right side, around midway between equator and pole if the planet had no tilt. Looking at the planet for the first time gave Derek no comfort and answered no questions. Not that he had expected, from half a million miles away, to fully grasp the situation. An inviting blue-green planet would have been nice, though.
He searched for the nav beacon, and found it ten thousand miles away. He followed the series of beacons, spaced apart at greater distances than he was accustomed to. The distances were variable, too, showing that there had been some drift or malfunction in a few of them. If this prevented him from reaching the port on the planet’s surface, all the better. Any legitimate way to get out of this was welcome. He expected no such luck.
All too quickly, he reached the point where, if there were people below, he could contact them. Just outside the planet’s atmosphere, he sent a standard automated hail.
The response came instantaneously. “We have been waiting for you. It has been a long time since we have had visitors. We will upload a landing program for you to follow. We apologize there weren’t better beacons for you to follow, but according to our legends, they have not been needed for twenty thousand of our years.”
“Thank you.” Twenty thousand years? These Eldrandii were serious about keeping people away from this planet. Its year could not have been much less than that of Earth at this distance from its sun. Checking the readout on the translator, he noticed that the language being translated was Eldrandaiz. Had this planet been a colony of Eldrand? Was there a trap waiting for him? He doubted that at least. He didn’t buy the idea that the Eldrandii were putting all this on to grab the planet ahead of an Earth corporation. Religious obsession, yes, greed, no. If the Eldrandii had wanted the planet, they would have had it, no problem – two hundred thousand years ago.
As the skin of his ship bore the friction of atmospheric reentry, he marveled at the idea that he would be the first outsider to land on this planet in twenty thousand years. Their legends might have been a bit off, but the point was clear – it had been a long time. Was that even possible? Whatever. His concern was bent on what devilish virus might be lurking on the planet below, not on how long people had remained safe from it until now.
It was nighttime. At least they had electricity. Even so, landing had been a study in suspense, with the surface hidden somewhere below waiting to either greet you or kill you. The lights from the space port were only clear starting from a height of four thousand feet, by which time Derek was beginning to have serious doubts, fingering the eject button. But it turned out all right. The lights were there, and there was enough of a clearing to make a graceful landing of it without using the drag chute. Skidding to a stop, he decided it was probably unnecessary to taxi to some kind of terminal. Judging from the crowd gathering around his ship, he guessed they wanted to speak to him right away. They were Eldrandii all right – slender graceful humanoid bodies with wings. Birdlike features were hidden by the darkness, but Derek knew they were there.
Moment of truth time. He pushed the button to over the cargo bay and lowered the delivery to the ground. He waited to see if they would be content to take the gift, and let him takeoff without getting out. No such luck. Not a muscle was moved. They waited their first face-to-face contact with another being. That was the real delivery to them – a fact that the businessman bastard had neglected to mention. They had contacted this bunch from space, afraid for their skin on the off chance things got messy, then contracted someone expendable.
Well, the Eldrandii breathed only a slightly different atmosphere from humans, so that hurdle was clear. He pulled the handle to lower the boarding plank, unbuckled himself, grabbed a portable short-range translator, stood up warily, and then descended to the dusty ground. On his appearance in front of the crowd, they began shaking their folded wings, creating a rustling sound and a slight breeze that tossed his hair a bit. It was some kind of applause, and the expression on their faces was unanimously pleasant and excited. He felt honored for the first time in his life, and perhaps the last time if he was not careful. His last hope was to avoid physical contact.
He spoke into the translator while adjusting the headset. “I have come to deliver this cargo. I was told you would be expecting me.”
“We are grateful,” the translator relayed the words of a seven-foot male at the front of the greeting pack. His face was hawk-like, only replacing the beak with a mouth. He was young, but his eyes contained wisdom enough to make him their leader. “We have long awaited visitors. We do not have the capability to build spacecraft, and so have been isolated for a long, long time. We have forgotten so much. The records you bring will help us restore our past.”
“Records?”
The hawk-like male cleared his throat before saying “you were not informed of your cargo, then. It is a copy of what is called the Universal Compendium, a copy of the complete archives of the Interstellar Community. A kingly gift of knowledge for those desperately seeking it.”
“Do you know why you have been isolated for all this time?”
“No,” the leader said, hands massaging his throat uncomfortably. “We know that the last visitors here withdrew after a great plague that killed most of our population – those that remained were the ones who had been kept apart from the rest of the population for various reasons – some criminals, other researchers in distant areas. We sought each other out and gathered here. We have lived afraid that we were considered unwanted, impure.”
“A plague . . . that killed most of your population? You were worried that you were impure?”
“Yes,” the hawk-like male croaked. He cleared his throat forcefully then, seeing Derek back away slightly, he said clearly “Don’t be afraid, please. Your people assured us that you were in no . . . in no . . .”
The voice trailed off and Derek increasingly understood what was going on, backing away from it all in a horror that ached over his entire body. Many more in the crowd were clearing their throats now. On some faces there was a dawning awareness of the situation, and they immediately bolted for their homes, desperately suppressing their own signs of illness on the way. Derek reached the flight deck of his ship just in time to see the leader fall to the ground.
With a trembling and sweaty hand, he grabbed the controls and taxied the ship around, away from the gathered populace, shut the boarding plank and the cargo bay, with the delivery still inside, and ignited his rockets a safe distance away. Whatever he had already done, he did not want to contribute to it by frying some of them in panic. What had he done? He focused on getting himself into space and away. The thundering blast of his engines deafened him, and kept him from hearing his own thoughts. He left the ground and punched through Porrima Prime’s atmosphere with every bit of the haste travelers twenty thousand years ago must have felt.
He tried his best not to let himself calm down enough to think. In the repositioning between jumps he poured on every ounce of power his engines could muster, making a beeline for Namen’s office. Once in space, though, ideas came to him despite his efforts. The first was the most obvious – he had been used to kill the people down there. That was the “gift.” When that damnably vague Eldrandii made his plea those years ago, calling Porrima pure, he meant they lacked this disease and the defenses against it that other species had gradually developed. And, of course, he had not wanted to admit that he had been responsible for the deaths of . . . who knows how many.
Derek made the final approach with a kind of carelessness that could have gotten him killed, but it was his lot to survive to confront Namen. The time between his landing and his entrance into the corporate building was a vaccum. It was like he had beamed over. Then he found himself marching in and through, leaving a wake of workers trying to ask him what he was doing, where he was going, and whether he wanted to be arrested for trespassing. At some point they dispersed, called off by some mysterious overlord. Probably Namen.
The door to Namen’s office stood open. Part of Derek’s mind told him that Namen had everything planned and there was nothing to be done about it. This information did not slow Derek’s pace. He entered the office panting, slightly sweaty, and still trembling. If Namen handed him something to drink , he’d end up spilling most of it.
“How did you know?” was his opening question. “How did you know when even the Eldrandii didn’t?”
“Close the door, please,” Namen said casually, leaning back in his seat with affected confidence. Derek slammed it and immediately regretted his childishness. Namen continued, “Just in case you had a bright idea, which is highly doubtful, this room is outfitted with devices that will interfere with any recording equipment.”
“Do this often?”
Namen shrugged. “Not really. Better to take precautions, though. To answer your first question, there was a Plani on board the last time anyone visited Porrima Prime. Unlike the Eldrandii, the Plani are less interested in guilt and denial. The company the Plani belonged to kept the information on Porrima, along with a copy of the virus, in a sealed vault. The company is now on the verge of collapse, so they sold the secret to us for a hefty price. That’s basically it. Most species off Porrima already carry the virus, and only that world’s isolation made the effects of the virus so dire.”
“Are . . . are they all dead?”
Namen nodded with mock solemnity. “The virus can only survive a day, but in bodies without immunity against it, it multiplies quickly, spreads by breath, and practically any dose at all would do the trick. Really, there was no alternative. If anyone had met with them to make a deal, the results would have been the same. At least your conscience is clear – you didn’t have a clue what you were doing. Would you like a drink?” Namen offered the same otherworldly drink as the last time.
Derek stared at it mutely. “You couldn’t have been absolutely sure that I was a carrier, or that I would spread it quick enough. You put some sort of concentrate of the virus in that drink, didn’t you?”
“Very good. This one’s clean though,” Namen held it up for the standing Derek, who refused incredulously. “I won’t insist this time,” he said as he gulped down the glass’ contents himself.
Derek had to satisfy his remaining curiosity. “Why were the people on Porrima Eldrandii?”
“That’s the best part. It was an Eldrandii colony in the deep past. Eldrand itself had lost contact with it for a long time, while occupied with a major war. During the war, colonies shifting alliances and the widespread destruction of documents made them forget where their colonies were. It took them hundreds, maybe thousands, of years to get back to Porrima, as part of a joint exploration venture with the Plani, and by that time the virus had developed. It was only a minor nuisance on Eldrand, like the common cold, but on Porrima – well, you know the rest. The best part is, you’ve got to figure that the other species had to have visited Earth in their explorations, too. After all, we definitely have the same immunity. I find that fascinating.”
Derek did not. “And so now you plan to colonize Porrima and exploit its resources.”
“That’s the plan. If you’re thinking of suing us, you mind want to remember the contract you signed. In fact, if you reveal any of this to the public, we have enough evidence to lay complete blame on you, or declare it an accident. If you push it, we’ll destroy your credibility. Paraphrasing an old saying, you’ll never work in this galaxy again.”
To that list, Derek mentally added that he couldn’t write a plea that would carry religious weight, since Earth had no such traditions. Namen’s smugness and total aloofness shocked Derek, who had expected at least some measure of dignified denial. There had to be something he could do. A possibility Namen and his cronies couldn’t plan for.
“If you send a ship to Porrima, I’ll shoot it down.”
Namen paled a bit. “You’ll be a criminal.”
“Here. I think there’ll be some Eldrandii who’ll be interested in this story,” Derek said on pure inspiration.
“They won’t believe a man who just walks in, especially if he’s a known criminal.”
“We’ll see.”
“And you can’t possibly protect the planet forever. How long can you hold out before we move in? Weapons cost money, Mr. Davis, and we have more than you.”
“Sabotage doesn’t. Once I’ve used up my weapons, you’ll have to be worried about sabotage. You’ll also have to worry about anyone I can convince of the story. The question will be how much money you’re willing to loose before you give up. You have a lot of money, but a ship costs a helluva lot more than a missile.” With no clear idea of the implications of what he was saying, he meant everything. He would remain a man of his word.
“Get out!” Namen’s face was suddenly fierce, and he was quickly thinking of the troubleshooting that would be required to return the smugness to his face. He was confident it would, though. It was just enraging not to have things turn out exactly the way he had planned. Damned freelancers, they always had way too much ego for their own good.
Not needing to hear it twice, Derek bolted out to make his own preparations, understanding that there were only two ways this could turn out, and his own fruitless demise was the more likely of them.