In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (17 page)

“It was a resources colony,” Hadley explained. “After
the northern plains turned arid and the planet was mined out, they had no
reason to stay. Even so, it took them a long time to abandon the planet.”

“It’s hard to imagine anyone farming with the kind
of animals that live here,” I said, recalling my experience of the previous night.

“They almost exterminated the planet’s wildlife,”
Emma said, “except for small breeding populations they kept alive in nature
reserves. They got away with it because there were no proto-intelligent species
on the planet.”

“Hardfall’s officially classified as a dead end world,”
Hadley added.

The appearance of intelligent life was random and
didn’t occur on every habitable planet, but where it did, it was protected by galactic
law.

“The Tau Cetins called them the Birali,” Emma
said, “but that’s all they’ll tell us.”

Maybe they’d been one of Meta’s Precursor
Civilizations. It was hard to know with the Tau Cetins drip feeding us information
based on rules they wouldn’t explain.

Hadley used his prosthetic arm to activate the
next recording. When he noticed my gaze, he flexed his black claw arm
demonstratively. “Lost it to a sawtooth more than ten years ago. Gun jammed.
Lucky it didn’t cut me in half.” He pointed to the dark brown head of a square
jawed beast mounted in pride of place on a wall of hunting trophies. “Good
thing for me it took time swallowing my arm. I cleared the breach one handed
while it had me pinned!”

“Why don’t you get a full cosmetic job?” I asked.

“Then who’d know I’d looked death in the face and
survived?” He grinned mischievously. “People respect that kind of thing around
here. I’m Hardfall, pure and simple.”

“‘We fall hard but always get up,’” Emma said,
quoting a local saying. “Just ask them, they’ll tell you!” She glanced at her
father’s prosthetic, shaking her head. “Sometimes I think he fed his arm to that
sawtooth on purpose, just so he could wear that hideous thing to show how tough
he is.”

Hadley grinned. “Old A.M. lost a leg. He hobbled
around on a metal stump for years before the colony got a new one sent out from
Earth. It’s a family tradition.”

“Not a tradition I’ll be following!” Emma declared,
every bit as tough as him, but without the bravado.

Hadley grinned and leaned towards me. “She says
that, but she saved me that day. Tied off my arm and kept me alive until the
evac arrived. Old Doc Tanner couldn’t have done better himself, and she was
only a kid at the time.”

She avoided his eyes, almost embarrassed by his
praise.

“So you live under a burning sun on a dying
planet,” I said, “mined out by aliens, swarming with creatures that’ll eat you
on sight, with gravity too heavy for most humans and nothing but planetary
extinction to look forward to?”

Hadley chuckled. “That about sums it up.”

“Ever thought of moving?”

“This old rock’s seen better days, no doubt, but it’s
home and it’ll be here long after we’ve turned to dust,” he said
philosophically, then started the next recording.

* * * *

Hadley’s men returned late
in the afternoon with Jase and Izin, having smuggled them in Hiport’s vehicle
crane down to the Prairie Runner for the cross country drive back to Hadley’s
Retreat.

“How’d you get past Metzler’s men?” I asked when
we met in the trophy room.

“Izin took care of it,” Jase said absently, passing
me the fresh ammo I’d requested as his eyes wandered over Hadley’s collection of
snarling animal heads. “Are they real?”

“Oh yeah,” I replied. “The big one in the middle bit
Mr. Hadley’s arm clean off.”

Hadley held up his prosthetic arm proudly.
“Swallowed it whole. Didn’t even thank me.”

Izin removed his pressure suit helmet, revealing
his streamlined features and the vocalizer over his mouth, much to Hadley’s
surprise. “The arrival of Mr. Hadley’s men provided a useful distraction,
Captain.”

“Are Metzler’s men dead?” I asked.

“Merely unconscious,” Izin replied.

“And locked in a VRS container at the spaceport,”
Jase added.

“The auto timer should release them before they suffocate,”
Izin said, “unless my air consumption calculations were incorrect.”

I glanced at Hadley. “We’ll give you the container
number. You can let them out in a day or two.”

“If I remember,” Hadley said indifferently.

Emma entered with two of Hadley’s men. Jase locked
eyes on her immediately, flashing her a smile as she approached.

“And I thought they called this place Hardfall
because of the gravity, not the girls!” He took a step toward her. “Jase Logan,”
he said, taking her hand. “Starship pilot, soldier of fortune, lover
extraordinaire of beautiful women.”

She smiled, flattered by the attention. “Emma,”
she said, introducing herself.

“Pleased to meet you ... Emma.” Jase glanced at
me. “No wonder you stayed out all night, Skipper!”

“Emma’s Mr. Hadley’s
daughter
,” I said with
a warning look.

“And I’m a very protective father,” Hadley added,
snapping his prosthetic claws meaningfully.

“I’m still very pleased to meet you, Miss Hadley,”
Jase said with an admiring look.

“Been in space a long time?” she asked, intrigued
by his attention.

“You have no idea.” He sighed, reluctantly
releasing her hand.

She turned to her father. “They just changed the guards
down at Loport Station. Next change won’t be until morning.”

“We’re going somewhere?” Jase asked, clearly
preferring to stay and try his luck with Miss Hadley.

“We’re paying the Merak Star an unexpected visit.”
I turned to Hadley. “Have you got somewhere to put the station guards?”

“We’ll lock them in the vehicle park storeroom. No
one goes down there but our people.”

“Good,” I said, sliding a gelslug mag into my gun.
“They won’t be alone.”

* * * *

Four guards wearing URA
uniforms lounged inside the Loport cable station paying scant attention to the street
outside. Hadley and his people stayed hidden to avoid future reprisals while we
made our way along the cliff wall out of sight of the entrance.

“Are you sure about this, Izin?” I asked. “They
might shoot you on sight.”

“Ardenans are unused to tamphs,” Izin replied.
“They won’t shoot if I’m unarmed.”

When we reached the terminal, he handed me his
shredder pistol, removed his helmet revealing his face, then stepped into the
station’s entrance.

“I still think we should have tossed one of your
fancy stun grenades in there,” Jase whispered.

I’d suggested it, but Izin had argued one grenade
wouldn’t take them all out, giving the survivor a chance to summon more guards
than we could handle.

When Izin had their attention, he walked
unhurriedly into the station while Jase and I waited outside, guns drawn.

“Hey, isn’t that one of them fish men from Earth?”
one guard asked in surprise as Izin approached.

Another laughed. “It don’t look so tough!”

“Hold it right there, fish head,” one of the
guards said, casually aiming his weapon at Izin.

“I seem to be lost,” Izin said, continuing past
the guards to where the cables ran out toward Loport, drawing them after him.

“I told you to stop!” the leader yelled.

Izin turned to face them, “I’m looking for the ocean.”

One of the guards laughed. “It wants to go
swimming!”

“That’s five thousand kilometers from here!”

Ocean was Izin’s signal. We stepped into the
entry, Jase with a fragger in each hand, but under strict instructions not to
shoot unless I missed. Fraggers were rapid fire gunfighter weapons designed for
killing only. They couldn’t take the nonlethal gelslugs my P-50 was loaded
with. The low kinetic energy round popped an elastic polymer moments after
leaving the barrel, turning it into a short range haymaker ideal for taking
down targets you didn’t want to splatter across the room.

Holding my P-50 two handed, I put gelslugs into
the heads of two guards before they knew what was happening. The third guard dodged
sideways, avoiding my shot and bringing his penetrator around to fire. He got
it halfway up before Izin darted forward, snatched the weapon from his hand and
kicked out his legs. A moment after he hit the floor, Izin slammed the weapon’s
stock into the guard’s head putting him to sleep. I switched to the fourth
guard who was running for the comm panel. I aimed low, put one into his back knocking
him down followed by a second into his head ensuring he didn’t get up. All four
would wake up in Hadley’s storeroom with concussion, but they’d still be
breathing. Good for them, good for me, as I had no desire to leave a trail of
corpses behind. I was here for information, not a bloodbath.

I motioned at the entrance, then a solar powered delivery
van emerged from a side street and drove up to the terminal. When it stopped, Hadley
and his people climbed out. They loaded the guards and their weapons into the vehicle,
then drove off leaving Hadley and Emma behind.

“Give us time to get down there and take the
ship,” I said to Hadley.

“We’ll head out past the Dahlia tonight, swing
around and come up from the south. We’ll be there in the Runner about two in
the morning.”

If everything went according to plan, we’d control
the
Merak Star
by then, but they weren’t the only eyes down on the low mesa.
“What about Loport Battery’s sensors?”

“We’ll stay beyond the horizon as we circle out,
then come up in the mesa’s blind spot. They won’t even know we’re there. We just
got to be gone by dawn so Citadel don’t see us, otherwise they’re likely to open
up on us with their big guns.”

“I understand.”

A spherical cable car was gliding up from the
south. It was half the size of the Skylink gondolas with only a single door
each side and transparent walls. While it offered no cover, it would be dark
when we got to Loport. With
Merak Star’s
bridge crew relying on Metzler’s
men to keep the landing ground secure, I hoped they wouldn’t be paying too much
attention to the gondolas.

Izin moved up to the boarding platform while Jase struck
up a last minute conversation with Emma Hadley. From the look she gave him, his
charms weren’t lost on her.

“Jase, we’re going,” I said, heading toward the
platform as the cable car slid to a stop and its automatic door opened.

Jase talked fast and she smiled, touching his arm
lightly, then he raced up to the platform, jumping aboard just before the door closed.

“I thought we were going without you,” I said as
the gondola glided out over the low cliffs for the long ride south.

“Hey Skipper, you know I never miss a party!” He
said, looking back toward Emma Hadley standing hands on hips watching us go.

“You know she’s genetically engineered?” I said.
“Tougher, stronger and probably smarter than you.”

“Yeah,” he agreed philosophically, “but at least
she’s human. The last female you introduced me to was an alien robot!”

* * * *

The cable support tower on
Lone Peak, between Hadley’s Retreat and Loport mesa, was equipped with a small maintenance
platform and a narrow ladder down to the ground. During the long climb toward
the tower, Loport was increasingly obscured by the pillar of rock, only coming
into view once we rose above the summit. The
Merak Star
was now clearly
visible, perched on top of the low mesa with hatches sealed. The only signs of
life were the two man foot patrol pacing the cliff tops and the rotating dome of
the surface battery standing alone on the low plateau’s eastern promontory.

“We’ll lure the guards into the cable station,” I
said as our gondola approached the maintenance platform, “then take the Merak
Star after dark.”

“Is attacking a ship on the ground considered
piracy?” Jase wondered.

“Depends if we keep it.”

“Technically, Captain,” Izin said, “attacking a
noncombatant ship, whether on the ground or in space, is a crime punishable by
death.”

“Then we better not get caught,” I said as the cable
car reached the maintenance platform and came to an unexpected halt. A moment
later, a small metallic disk crashed through the window and shot into the
center of the gondola. The device hovered at eye height, blasting a piercing, rapidly
increasing tone at us, then it emitted a brilliant white flash.

I didn’t remember hitting the gondola floor, but when
I came to, my bionetic clock told me I’d been out for only seconds. While the
stun itself had been short lived, the after effect lingered. A persistent white
fog pervaded by a monotonous tone filled my mind. I wanted to open my eyes, but
couldn’t remember how. I’d been stunned before, but never like this, never so
completely isolated from my body. I gave up trying to see and forced my
scrambled thoughts to form a single word.

Analysis
.

After what seemed an unusually long delay, my
threading responded as best it could:

NEUROLOGICAL AREA EFFECT WEAPON, TYPE UNKNOWN
.

My biological senses were out, giving my threading
nothing to amplify. No hearing, no sight, no touch. All my addled mind could do
was fall back on its training, requesting a mode switch.

Bionetic receptors to direct input.

My listener wasn’t as effective without my body’s
auditory inputs, but it was all I had. I now heard the click of metal on metal
through the monotonous tone, the sound of heavy boots approaching across the
cable car’s metal deck. My threading automatically analyzed the sound and fed
its conclusion into my mind.

KRAILO-NIS HUMANOID CONTACT, 74% PROBABILITY
.