The Loranth (Star Sojourner Book 1) (2 page)

“Wait a minute!” He gripped my arm. I shrugged it off. He gave me a long look. “If I let you do that, buddy, an' you don't show up, it's gonna be my huevos.” With his jaw set like that he seemed older than his thirty-six years.

“That should make Annie happy.” I grinned, but his lips remained pressed. “Where would I go, Sergeant?”

He glanced at the distant ridge I'd been studying. “You know the land better than any offworlder on this planet, though I got to admit, I wish you'd take the local wildlife more seriously.”

“I said I'd come in tomorrow.”

I began to develop my plan. I'd call the research institute from an offworld ship tomorrow and tell them they needed to send someone with experience to tend my patients. Small freighters, cruisers, space liners, and private yachts lifted every day off Tartarus. I'd pay for passage, probably with my last creds, and eventually find an Earthbounder in some port and go home.

Really home. I should have done it long ago. Could I be extradited from Earth? I didn't think so. I hoped not. At least I'd see Althea and Lisa one more time. After that, I'd play it by ear.

“What's wrong with today?” Jack said and leaned against the door frame, blocking the exit.

“You know I don't like flying, Sergeant, and Gretch is off hunting. I'll leave when she comes back.” It's a twenty hour ride into Leone. I flicked him a look as he entered the hut and tightened my right hand into a fist. Sweat seeped down my hairline.

“Finish treating your patients, Jules, then get into the manta. You can keep your eyes closed if you want. It's a short flight.”

I swallowed hard. I had one card left to play. I lifted my gaze and locked onto his. “Jack, when did you stop trusting me?”

“Every time I put on this uniform, buddy. Finish up,” he said softly, “and get into the manta.”

There was still a joker up my sleeve, though I kept a straight face. “Do you have a warrant for my arrest?”

He lifted brows. “An' I don't have a written invitation for you from the Big H either. He only wants to
talk
to you.”

I backed a step. “I'm sorry, sergeant, but I know my rights.”

What I really knew was that Jack could get a warrant printed out from HQ on his manta's comp. Wouldn't take him ten minutes.

He shook his head. “You're a stubborn bastard an' you'll never change.” He glanced again at the ridge I'd been studying and shook his head. “Tomorrow?”

He was giving me a break! One, unfortunately, he'd be sorry for. I felt guilty about it, but not guilty enough to walk into Hallarin's arms. “Tomorrow.”

He nodded and unclipped a metal bracelet from his belt.

I thought he was going to try to cuff me and I backed again. He dangled the bracelet. It was a transmitter. As he turned it on a small light flashed and it emitted locating beeps to some home base. I guess he had a last card too.

“They use that for criminals, Cole,” I told him.

He nodded. “An' animals that stray.”” He unlocked it. The metal cuff sprang open.

I thought on cages that close so softly at our backs we never feel the sigh of air or hear the click of the lock.

I might've been out of cards but I still had a file in a cake. My Cape Leone Institute clearance badge, still valid, would get me into the Institute sites. They held some very sophisticated state of the art beam technology, sophisticated enough to slice through this puny manacle.

And after I mangled the manacle and slipped it off, I'd bring it to Flo's Groats 'n Eggs, leave it beeping, hidden in the rest room, and get my ass to the spaceport.

“Sure,” I said. “Why not?” I extended my left wrist.

He looked surprised as he clamped it on. “I owe you a drink, Julie. Look me up when you finish talking to Hallarin.” He sniffed. “You smell like rotten almonds.”

I shrugged.

“By the way, we had the tags at the Institute test this unit to destruction.” He shook his head. 'It just wouldn't destruct.”

Son of a crotemunging slimefucking mother of a…a mudsucking bitch!

“Make it a small bottle, Cole, it might have to fit through bars!” I walked to the medicine cabinet with my skin already itching under the damn thing.

“Jules!”

I hate when he uses his spiker tone. I stopped and turned slowly.

He scratched the stubble on his chin. “Don't force me to track it down in the wilds, OK?”

I nodded curtly and felt heat rise in my cheeks as I turned and slammed open the door of the cabinet.

He turned and walked out to his manta. I heard it whine as he started the engine. I sympathized. I felt like whining myself.

I had a seriously ill feathered herbivore in an isolation cage in the shed. He cried in response to the manta's motor.

I took a bottle of ultrimune antibiotic, a syringe, and went to a counter drawer for a hammer. “Slime lumping bastard!” I hit the bracelet's radio unit. The hammer bounced off harmlessly. The light continued to wink.

The herbivore reached out a forepaw between bars. I went to his cage and stroked his paw. “It's OK, lil' scrabbler,” I said softly. “You're getting better.”

He wasn't.

I cleaned his cage, then fed and watered him. I spent some time stroking him while he ate. He licked my hand with a slimy tongue.

I took a drill off a shelf. “If I decide to run, Cole,” I muttered and turned on the drill, “you'll search till hell freezes over!” The drill bit slid off the metal without scratching it. “OK,” I said. “On to Plan B!”

Gordan Montaigne could crack a code faster than you could saw through a lumptoad's egg.

I stood upon a rocky shelf and gazed down at the clustered buildings in the red valley below that was the town of Cape Leone. To the north and southeast of the only settlement on Tartarus, the sheer walls of a rift valley formed a natural fortress against the onslaught of the planet's great reptilian predators.

You owe me, Gordie,
I thought.

I took a drink from the canteen and wiped my tongue on my collar. I'll never get used to this slimestone water, but imported Earth acqua is way above my head.

So Plan B…

I'd call Gordie from Flo's Groats 'an Eggs and tell him to meet me there in a hurry with his little bag of tricks. If Institute security knew Gordie's real background as an industrial spy on the planet Bismarck, his clearance papers would be part of the sewerage system.

Then it was a call to the Institute to get help for the sick animals, and I would take a circuitous route to Earth. I hoped I was right about non-extradition to Tartarus.

Old Earth. I shook my head as Gretch made her way between ruby fire bushes. Tamed Earth. Stripped of its lush forests, its natural habitats and their inhabitants, ancient and impotent as it labored around Sol, serving only the overpopulation of mankind.

I'd treated my patients and left them food and water. I didn't have time to spring the live traps for possible mammalian types. Gordie could drive out and do that for me.

Other astrobiologist would claim my sanctuary while I studied the behavioral machinery of creatures confined to zoos back on Earth, where most of the lonely members of remaining species are safely tucked away.

There was a sinking feeling in my stomach as I gazed at the mighty Chablis Sea, perhaps for the last time. A clear pink sky, full of iron particles in the upper layers, had turned the sea into rosé. An offshore breeze kept its glassy surface stirred, and sent breakers to crash against granite cliffs.

I took out my holo of Althea and Lisa and brushed off lint.

Lisa's hair is blonde, her eyes the color of Earth's blue skies. He skin is light and flawless. Perhaps too pale. There was a downward turn to her lips that makes me think she broods a lot. No, I couldn't deny that she was mine. Al knelt beside her. Her dark eyes, though she squinted in sunlight, still held a demure look. But the tilt of her head implied a challenge, a gauntlet thrown down that represented love, and responsibility. Yeah, definitely responsibility.

“I'm trying, Al.”

That's news to me,
my conscience replied. I'd written. Four months ago.

Coming home, Al.
I kept putting off the trip to Leone, though, to 'gram the letter back to Earth. My excuses were many, and they always seemed reasonable. I scratched my wrist under the transmitter.

Insects scurried around a translucent pod of stickers on a ground plant, lapping off smaller insects. I wondered what the smaller insects ate. “C'mon, Gretch.”

She raised her head, still chewing roots, and flicked her leathery tail as though debating the necessity to submit to this alien's desires. I don't know why I bother with this obstinate grunithe. Yes, I do. I don't like flying vehicles, haven't for a long time. Anyway, I'd grown accustomed to the obstinate beast. I would miss her. Would she miss me? I hoped so.

“C'mon, Gretch,” I said impatiently and nudged her flanks. Anything more than a nudge and I'd be limping to Flo's Groats an' Eggs.

She turned her leathery neck, peered up at me with yellow eyes, and raised her lip.

“Oh, dammit. OK.” I fished out an Umber Tree pod from my shirt pocket and extended it to her, then squeezed my eyes shut as razor teeth sliced through the woody ball as though it were a wad of crumpled paper. Her mouth drooled pulp.

“You're so damned ugly, Gretch.” I clamped my teeth as she licked my palm with that raspy tongue that rakes like jellyfish tentacles. Salt from my skin for her food? Finally I scraped a parasite off one of her mucoid ears and urged her west along the canyon ridge. If she ever meets up with Saint George, she's going to be in real trouble

A sudden growl in the brush.

Gretch flattened to a crouch.

“What is it, girl?” I whispered and hung on.

Her shoulder muscles bunched, her neck swayed and craned toward a ramble of thick talonfern. The branches shook and the roar lowered to a continuous growl held by many throats.

A hunting pack!

I lifted the stingler from my hip holster and caught a musky smell, a heavy padding of feet that rustled foliage. Gretch hissed and raised neck spines. I stared at the bushes, every cell of me on red alert. There isn't much in these wilds that scares Gretch.

A flash of white within the rustling bramble. Ferns ripped. A flock of harmless white vranns burst squawking from underbrush, stubby tails wagging, gauzy wings flapping clumsily. Behind them a pack of hunting brawns slashed through vines and leaped, jaws snapping.

“Crotes!” I glanced back. Five good running strides to the edge of the canyon and a very direct shortcut into Leone.

The vranns bleated and clung to a lump tree with beaks and claws while pale liquid seeped from the trunk. A large green brawn, more than a meter high at his sinewy shoulder, leaped to the trunk and clawed toward a branch that sagged with vrann weight.

One of the bird-like creatures rolled his eyes and shrieked. He shook out his wings, fumbled into the air, flapping desperately, and beat a path to the shelf we stood upon.

“Oh, no, dammit! Not here!” I shouted as Gretch pounced on him. The vrann screamed and sent aloft a white spray from glands. It hung like a cloud puff. But my seasoned steed, unfooled by instant replays, snapped up the real vrann. Bones crunched and the vrann's screams died.

“Gretch, you dumb bitch!”

The brawn leader, blending there amid thick foliage, sprang to the ground. His tongue flicked as he watched Gretch lick blood off her mouth. I released the safety catch on my weapon, spun it to hot, one of the laser settings, then saw the dark battery light. “Oh shit!” Drained batteries. I'd never noticed. Maybe someday I would take these predators seriously.

Maybe today!

Gretch showed the hungry pack fifty eight sharp teeth.

They didn't seem impressed.

Her claws scraped the rocky ledge as she backed and hissed at the pack. Well, dammit, Gretch was a glider.

I glanced down at the thirty-meter canyon drop.

“Attack!” I commanded, leaned over her neck and swung the stingler like a club. And was almost thrown as she turned and swatted a charging brawn with her tail.

“You stupid -“

She vaulted from the cliff.

“JesusLotus!” I screamed, squeezed my eyes shut and locked my teeth. My stomach was somewhere behind my tonsils.

I clung to the blanket strap as we plummeted. The stingler went its own way down. There was a rush of wind, a feeling of nausea, the realization that I had to draw up my clamped legs, they were interfering with her skirts of membranous gliding skin stretched tautly now between fore and hind legs. I did, and groaned out a long breath.

We slowed as her sails caught the updraft. The wind tamed to a sigh. Goddamn! She was doing it. Jack had said Leone was growing. It was, from my perspective.

“Goddamn!”

We brushed past treetops on a hill. I was jolted as she hit the ground hard. She ran down the slope to break her speed, slowed to a lumbering lope, and then a walk.

I laughed, though my arms burned from the white-knuckle grip and I felt dizzy from the drop. “Gretch, you're beautiful!”

She snuffled, forced a path through tall brush and plodded to a stream where she plunged her muzzle and slurped water, snails and mud.

I let out a long breath and wiped an arm across my forehead, then noticed a boy sitting on a log, dangling a pied pipehook into the stream. Beside him was a pail of water with fish. His freckled face was tilted up at me, pink mouth open, eyes round, looking like a hooked fish himself. Grunithes are rare and I guess he'd never seen a flying reptile. Funny, ancient Japanese sci-fi disks were all the rage with juvies.

“Hi,” I said and blinked to focus. It was good to be alive, aware of my own heavy breathing, the blood pounding in my head, the dizziness. “Catch anything?”

The line slipped from his loose fingers and the pipehook drifted downstream, whistling now to alert its owner.

“Hey, your line!”

He held the dead-fish look while I dismounted, slid to my feet, and then my knees. I pressed my temples as the trees, the boy, the stream, Gretch, the police manta that had just bounced down to the gravel road, all appeared to do a slow spin.

The officer who strode toward me with his stingler unholstered, batteries charged, I'm sure, seemed to be moving sideways as well. “What the hell!” he exclaimed. “We thought you were some kind of a man-eating flying dinosaur. Don't you know the air space over Leone is restricted? We almost shot you down!”

“There are no dinosaurs on Tartarus,” I told him, squeezed my eyes shut and lowered my head to my knees.
You dumbshit spiker!
I mentally added, and waited for the world to return to normal.

Maybe someday it will.

As I passed a utility pole on the outskirts of Cape Leone, I swung my arm and slammed the transmitter into it. It bounced off. I glanced over my shoulder. The manta still hovered there, insurance that I'd find my way to police headquarters. I felt like a rat in a maze.

I kept walking.
Play it by ear for now, Rammis.
But I gave in to a sullen mood as I led Gretch alongside the newly paved road.

The fenced spaceport was to our right. Gretch bolted when a private ship leaped into the sky.

“It's OK, girl, it's only technology.”

They had added two new launching pads, I noticed as I patted her neck. She crowded against me and stepped on my foot. I strangled a curse and pulled my foot from under her broad paw.

Red dust swirled beneath the lifting ship and smeared the north view of mesas where four of the Institute's site buildings are located.

I watched robots finish unloading a round three-legged cargo pod from some orbiting factory or freighter. Boxes of materials, processed from a metal-rich asteroid belt, were packed on board a hauler marked Leone Electronics, a manufacturing plant that supplied hi-tech component parts to the Science Institute. As I paused to watch, the robots reversed the procedure and began loading crates from the hauler aboard the pod.

I gripped the chain link fence and studied the pod.

They finished quickly, closed the ship's hatch and rolled away. The drone pod lifted and blazed upward to rendezvous with the mother ship and continue its deliveries to other Terran and alien worlds. Probably Earth, too.

Sure, Earth too. Without the transmitter I might have stood a chance of stowing away on some pod.

“Damn you, Hallarin. You too, Cole.”

The spiker tapped the manta's siren, a signal for me to keep moving.

“Fuck you too. C'mon, Gretch!”

Leone had grown, and seemed to be enjoying an exuberant adolescence. My uneasiness grew in proportion to the density of things as Gretch and I walked into the quickening beat of this human and alien hive. Specialized robot construction workers, mostly ant-shaped models, crawled over the skeletal beginnings of new buildings. The noise was distracting. The smells, alien.

South of the road we walked, the Styx River meandered through town. Narctressus and cypods cradled its bed with a green fringe to the sweet forgetfulness of the sea. The picnic tables and benches lining tree shade were occupied by humans and aliens.

Must be Sunday.

A Cleocean child slithered across the road after a spiral of violet fluorescent light that rolled to my feet. He reared up on twin tails, webbed toes spread when he saw Gretch and me, ruffling the soft down under his chin. He shook himself and his short white fur settled slowly against his flanks. I smiled and tried to pick up the spiral. My fingers swept through it and encountered only warm resistance. Gretch grumbled in her throat. I caught an odor of rotting vegetation, either from the Cleocean or his toy. There came a slight psychic tug, a tingling in my mind. The spiral lifted and drifted to the child's outstretched fin. His violet eyes blinked, all six of them. I felt a quivering laugh run through my mind as he slithered back to his parents, the eight adults grouped around an octagonal table, sucking mauve liquid from a common bowl wherein dark things jetted.

I wondered as I walked how non-humans viewed Tartarus. Were we all clinging to this sphere in space only to be hopelessly isolated by our own overlay of subjective reality? I thought of Althea, and of self-imposed isolation.

The only way I got Gretch stabled was with a promise to feed, water and clean her stall myself. She was not happy over her confinement. Neither was the stable boy. Until I eased his constipated expression with five Interstel real greens stuffed into his manure-spattered back pocket.

I wasn't exactly ecstatic myself as I walked toward the police station on Main Street in the shadow of my hovering guardian.

I wished I could read the Big H's mind, and wondered if he'd mellowed since our last confrontation. It would've been nice to follow the river, glimpsed now between narrow streets, to that wild sea beyond. What creatures moved through its silty depths?

The secrets of Tartarus' land animals were locked in early fish patterns beneath that shifting surface.

I sighed to ease the solid lump that had settled in my stomach and came up short in front of Stol's Expedition Outfitters.

Let the manta wait. Hallarin too.

The display window hadn't changed. Only the signs were different, announcing this bubble tent at half price, that deluxe camp alert system on sale. Those same hiking boots, lanterns, more expensive now. Strange how memories so carefully buried are triggered by small things that suddenly hammer at the shell of time. I rubbed a hand over my eyes, saw the scene again…

Randy's stiff body draped over Gretch's back. A dark foot showing beneath the blanket. People gathering as I led Gretch into town. The blanket slipping when Gretch bolted…