Super Extra Grande (11 page)

And if he succeeds… he’ll get paid a prize of… would ten million solaria be okay?

Or maybe, since I’m such a surprising, amazing genius, I should ask for a little more?

*

That, basically, was how my secret meeting went with the Head Honchos of Operation Negotiator Rescue.

End result of the interview?

They convinced me. Though I was already set to go before we started.

As a consequence, here I am, stuck in this ship and barely able to squirm, what with the hydraulic bucket seat, the g-force cushioning capsule, and all the extra equipment I stashed on board.

Lots of weight. As if it weren’t enough to be carrying a regulation complement of God-knows-how-many missiles, which the sarcastic Kurchatov insisted they didn’t have time to unload from the magazines. Typical top-brass bureaucrat brain… Or maybe he’s holding on to his trump card, the ability to destroy me by remote control if anything goes wrong?

Deal with the military and…

I’m starting to sound paranoid…

Which doesn’t mean they aren’t really out to get me, you know.

But in any case, I’ll have to dump all this ballast before returning to orbit or there won’t be room in the cabin for the pair I’m rescuing. Besides, the engines couldn’t take the added weight.

I insisted on using a human vehicle on my exotic mission, not a Juhungan ship. It’s more familiar—and all metal and glass, with nothing organic to whet a laketon’s appetite, not even if the bug is starving.

And they humored me.

I took command of this three-seater, with its military design and atmospheric aerodynamics (can’t divulge any more details; still top-secret) and christened it
Beagle
after the ship on which Darwin circumnavigated Earth back in his day, when he was still working on the theory of natural selection that would make him immortal.

I hope the little homage will bring me luck. I’ll need it, and how.

I’m hoping to show certain people a few things.

Show Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly that I bear them no ill will. And that I always appreciated them…

Though, as I’ve finally realized, I was just too shy to make sexual advances.

Well, if I rescue them, maybe we’ll get a second chance.

I seriously need to rethink mixing business with pleasure…

My father, who has the most flexible morals ever, always says there’s nothing wrong with having strict principles, so long as they don’t lead you astray.

And since I’ve heard so many interesting things lately about how Cetians give incredible head…

I also want to show all the military types—really want to rub in their big fat faces (or the anatomical equivalent thereof, whether human, Cetian, or Juhungan)—that I can keep a secret, too, even if I am a civilian. And that calling myself the “Veterinarian to the Giants” is more than a cheap publicity slogan and empty bragging; it’s a title I earned the hard way, case after case.

I’m especially determined to make that fact crystal-clear to a certain contemptuous reformed alcoholic and former classmate of mine from Anima Mundi who’s now a puffed-up general in the Army of Earth and acting like he’d really love to see me fail…

I’ll never understand why some people find it so hard to recognize a drop of talent or ability in people they were once pretty close to. I imagine Jesus of Nazareth’s neighbors used to say dismissively, “Turn water into wine? Joe the carpenter’s kid? C’mon, you gotta be kidding! When that brat was little he played in the mud down at the creek in front of my house, just like all the others!”

As for Cosita, the second largest cell in the galaxy…

Truth be told, I hope it never finds out I exist.

I’m so modest, aren’t I?

Well, this job won’t be easy, but as Jack the Ripper would say, let’s take it one piece at a time.

First step in any rescue is getting to where the captives are being held.

Which mean getting to Cosita, on the surface of Brobdingnag. Easier said than done.

Understatement of the year.

The number one obstacle to exploring the surface of a giant planet is its monstrous gravity, of course. Just landing on and taking off from the surface of an Earth-sized world subjects you to accelerations several times normal gravity. Only young, resilient, and very fit bodies can take it without getting hurt.

And that’s not me today, if it ever was. I don’t have to look in a mirror to know it.

Up until now this has never gotten much in my way. If the González drive opened a doorway to the stars, space elevators have been almost as important. They brought the doorway down from the twentieth floor—too high for old folks and non-athletic types, who otherwise would still be stuck up there—and put it at ground level.

“Orbital elevators—the cosmos for everyone,” went one optimistic twenty-first-century ad.

Trying to land on a world like Brobdingnag in a shuttle with ion-propulsion engines would multiply its already exasperating gravity, six times that of Earth, by a factor of seven or eight. And I don’t have the slightest intention of getting my bones pulverized, not by forty-two
g
’s, and not by forty-eight.

For all the difference it makes…

On the other hand, it would take weeks and weeks, at a bare minimum, to build an orbital elevator.

That’s time we don’t have.

So after racking my brains for a few minutes, I came up with a way to jerry-rig an emergency space elevator.

Am I or am I not a “surprising, amazing genius”?

Get thee behind me, modesty!

Now, some things turn out to be quite easy. When they give you carte blanche to use practically all the resources of the Galactic Community Coordinating Committee, that is.

Not six, but eight mother ships have been placed at my disposal. Not exactly human Tornado-class frigate carriers (Hurtado prudently noted that he would just as soon let the army under his command learn as little as possible about the matter) but their Juhungan equivalents:
Indisputable Glory to the Most Correct Hegemony
-class forward command posts. A little larger, but with slightly less powerful engines. Thus, eight instead of six.

Assembled, the titanic octet formed the orbital anchor point from which I began my descent in my
Beagle
, dangling like a spider from its thread: five hundred kilometers of carbon nanotube cables, made rigid by piezoelectric effect as it unspooled.

Standard orbital elevators are made of the same material. The difference is that elevators are normally designed to carry a huge volume of traffic weighing much more than my light
Beagle
, so the cables used on the most densely populated planets are four, even five meters thick.

Whereas I’m clinging to a cable barely ten centimeters in diameter. Basically a single hair, thin and light. The five hundred kilometers equal a little under five hundred tons. A weight that my eight Juhungan plow mules can handle with relative ease, though only if they all pull together with their ionic engines.

The crew of the
Fancy Appaloosa
, who had to make do with viewing the surface of the planet they discovered from orbit, would have died of envy if they had seen this.

Descending to a planet’s surface by elevator is easy, but mind you, nobody ever said it’s quick.

Not in the slightest.

I started the descent six hours ago. Making a virtue of necessity, I’ve put the time to good use by reviewing everything I know, not only about laketons in particular but also about the internal structure of eukaryotic cells in general. Just in case.

After all, the giants of Brobdingnag are nothing but hypertrophied eukaryotic cells. I mean, if they were just a zillion times smaller they’d be hard to tell from your average garden-variety amoeba.

Kilometers and kilometers of rigid cable stretching out,
Beagle
descending, and me inside with my database, micronucleus this, macronucleus that, mitochondria here and Golgi apparatus there, and on and on, with the ribosomes and the chloroplasts and the whatnot.

Then the experiment in which Helmut Walpurgis used fifty tons of dye to test for the existence of endoplasmic reticula and sol-gel processes in laketon cytoplasm. And the one by Morph-Khulrry, a brilliant Cetian researcher (credit where credit’s due, human or not), who employed radioactive markers to establish the digestive vacuole cycle…

And so many more details, which only convince me of how little we know about Cosita and its species.

I repeat, the major defect of orbital elevators, improvised or not, is that they’re much slower than self-propelled vehicles. No such thing as a free lunch. Avoiding acceleration forces means losing time in return for gaining comfort.

In Brobdingnag, with its enormous planetary radius, I face an additional problem: Stationary orbit would put me more than a thousand kilometers above its surface—so the descent would take nearly an entire day, far too long given the urgency of this rescue effort.

I chose instead to be “dropped off” from just 510 kilometers up, an altitude at which there’s practically no atmosphere—though you can still feel the tug of gravity, and then some!

As a result, the entire planet is revolving under my
Beagle
. And if I don’t keep my eyes peeled, I might end up dozens of kilometers from Cosita and its prisoners.

This planet is
BIG
.

Make that
IMMENSELY HUGE
.

But for now everything’s running like clockwork… with a little help from the four laketon observation ships.

The veterinarian biologists (two humans, one Parimazo, two Amphorians, and one Laggoru) now stationed in orbit had to be let in on the operation, whether the secrecy-obsessed military brass liked it or not. Eight of the largest Juhungan ships flying in formation in this sector? And letting down hundreds of kilometers of cable from which a small human-made ship is dangling? No observer could miss that, no matter how sleepy or myopic.

Of course nobody told them I’d be involved. Or who was being rescued.

Quit while you’re ahead.

Compartmentalization, they call it.

The military officer hasn’t been born who’ll willingly reveal anything he can keep under his hat.

Some eleven kilometers above the surface, and fifty-five kilometers north of Cosita, I figure it’s time for my
Beagle
to let go of its silk tether and turn from spider into glider.

Crunch time.

That’s the message I send to the eight mother ships—but not over the airwaves: secure communications only, over the same cable I’m hanging from. Better not to broadcast the inner workings of this rescue. I’ll have to maintain strict radio silence until it’s time for me to ask them to let the fishing line down again and get me back into orbit. If everything goes well, not just me but Enti Kmusa and An-Mhaly too, all aboard
Beagle
.

I release the grappling hook and go into free fall for less than a picosecond. Then the on-board computer, which might not be an AI but knows its stuff, finishes calculating the optimal silhouette and wing profile for gliding under six Earth gravities through an atmosphere at least three times as dense.

The result is a very long, needle-nosed fuselage with a delta wing that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a supersonic fighter in late twentieth-century Earth.

Not sure if it’s more like a Su-27 or an F-15A… I’m no expert in military history.

The missiles complete the picture… I really feel like getting rid of the extra weight by firing them all right now, but better not risk it. I don’t even know what kind of explosives they’re loaded with. What if the explosions are so powerful they rouse Cosita, or startle it? What if I try to fire them and they blow up in my face?

Of course, no twentieth-century fighter jet would fly this smoothly. But the aerodynamics of a hyperdense atmosphere and high gravity calls for moving as gently as possible. No sudden swerves, no rapid nosedives at sharp angles. Not even all the hydraulic overload-absorption systems I have on board could handle the incredible acceleration caused by abrupt maneuvers.

That’s why I just glide down in an almost cowardly way, reducing my velocity kilometer by kilometer with the aerodynamic brakes while overflying the desolate surface of Brobdingnag, dotted here and there with the mobile bluish seas that are its only inhabitants… And right down below me comes Cosita.

Perfect timing, indeed.

Shit. You have no idea how huge it is until you see it close up.

It fills the horizon, even from this altitude. Of course, there’s almost two hundred kilometers of it…

Laketons? They could just as well have called them megaislands. Or minicontinents.

Impressive.

Very, very impressive.

After this inevitable moment of respectful astonishment, I activate my taste-and-smell camouflage. Since laketons have no eyes or ears, the only way for me to trick this one into engulfing me in its digestive vacuole is by pretending to be much tastier than I really am. Play with its senses of smell and taste.

Liquids spray from nozzles located at strategic points along my
Beagle
’s fuselage. A mixture of water and hydrocarbons coat it in a thick soup of substantial nutrients, no doubt in quantities never before witnessed by this enormous extraterrestrial amoeba.

Carbon à la carte. I’m a piece of bait no laketon could pass up—and Cosita doesn’t disappoint. I veer smoothly to one side to make sure it’s not just waiting to get hit by its food. But no, there’s the pseudopod, stretching out to catch me.

I think back to when my mother used to take me to the stadium on Sundays, back in Coaybay. Now the analogy seems more fitting than ever: the laketon looks like a baseball player waiting to catch a pop fly, reaching up with its pseudopod-mitt to trap the ball at all costs.

I’ve cut my speed to under fifty kilometers an hour. Impact is imminent.

I activate the acceleration-absorption system. Half a ton of soft elastic gel fills every gap between my body and
Beagle
’s cockpit. The abrupt reduction in velocity that awaits me won’t be fun, but I’ll hold up a lot better if I can make myself one with my ship.