FOUR
On the GS Frag, a Class III Leapship that could haul eighty people and all their gear in relative comfort eighty light-years at a Leap, and twice that many people in a pinch, Jo Sims stood at the head of the conference room table. Seated around the table were Gunny, Gramps, Doc, Formentara, and Kluthfem. Colonel Cutter leaned against the carbon-fiber inner wall near the room’s primary hatch.
“All right, folks, listen up. We are on our way to Ananda, half of a binary system with Om, planets circling a class G2V star, FHND 31-Epsilon—that’s Flamsteed-Halley New Designation for those of you not planning a second career as an astronomer.
“Informally, the system is called Lance. Mid-rim, Orion Arm, turn left at the Dagger Nebula and straight on ’til morning.
“Ananda is an E-type world in the ninety-eighth percentile for atmosphere and gravity, a little more oxy, a little less nitrogen. Your circulating antibacterials and antivirals have been updated to deal with the local bugs.
“Twenty-two-hour days, 369-day years, climate range Within Terran Standard Limits, but shading more into tropical, save toward the poles.
“Activate your sunblocks and drink a lot of replenishment fluid.
“There are no indigenous intelligent species. Eight-tenths of the place consists of saline seas, landmasses clustered mostly around the equator, with small-continent-sized islands farther north or south.
“The usual—trees, mountains, lakes, plains, like that. Lots of trees where we are going, so expect to see a lot of wood construction.
“Population nine hundred million, originally settled by wealthy immigrants from TerraIndia, the local businesses are chiefly agro- and aquacultural, mining, and assorted light industry. Largely self-sufficient, their unique exports are medical-grade Rhodopsin, a visual-purple substance extracted from a local fish, used in military vessel viral-molecular computer-memory systems, and Heavenspice.”
“Ooh,” Gunny said, “Heavenspice. Doubles the cost of a good meal for one sprinkle of that. Worth it, though.”
“Good meal?” Gramps said. “When’s the last time you ate anything other than field rats or vat-grown mysteryburger burned to a crisp? Dusting those with Heavenspice would be a crime against nature.”
“You’d know all about crimes against nature, wouldn’t you, old man?” Gunny said. She smiled.
Jo ignored them. “The reason we got this job is because TotalMart has a couple of big stores on the world, plus being an exporter. They work long-term contracts with both the Rhodopsin fish processors and the Heavenspice Growers Union, and they want to keep the Rajah happy, so they recommended us. We need to move somewhat cautiously, so as not to—”
She stopped. “Am I boring you, Doctor?”
Wink looked at Jo. He faked a big yawn.
“Truth, fem? I confess, I am pretty much somnambulant.”
She lit her Stress Analyzer aug, just because she could. Always useful for PsyOps to know when somebody was lying. She scanned the heads-up display—another direct send to her optic nerves.
Heartbeat. Respiration. Blood pressure. Myotonus. Perspiration. Conductivity. Eye movement…
Given his stats, the yawn wasn’t fake. He was pretty much relaxed enough to be on the edge of nodding off.
The fucker—
“And that’s different than usual how, Doc?” Gramps said. “You the only man I ever knew could go to sleep sucking a bulb of hot soup while falling down a flight of stairs.”
There was a soft whicker from Kay. They didn’t laugh loud, the Vastalimi, but they did laugh a lot, and they seemed to understand human humor just fine, even if they didn’t always agree with it. A typical Vastalimi joke would feature a punch line in which half a dozen people might be dismembered in a particularly hideous fashion, with the resulting gore put to some use that would make humans go pale and excuse themselves from the room while the Vastalimi whickered themselves silly laughing.
And he slipped in the blood and smashed his nose against the wall, then fell and cracked his skull, and his sister said, “That will teach you!”
Whicker, whicker, whicker…
Different species, different ideas of what was funny.
Next to Kay, Formentara. Jo thought hir expression was slightly amused, but with hir, it was, like most everything else about Formentara, hard to tell.
Cutter did like disparate characters on his teams as long as they were competent.
She shook her head. Yes, there probably wasn’t any real need to learn about stellar classes and where the planet stood in relation to the galaxy, but you never knew what might be useful, so she was thorough in her coverage of new operations. Better to have it and not need it than the other way around.
Nobody ever bitched about having too much ammo in a shoot-out.
“If I might continue?”
Wink offered a theatrical shrug and a shit-eating grin. Don’t mind me.
“Our client is named Ramal, he’s the Rajah of New Mumbai. His daughter, Indira, has apparently been kidnapped by a person or persons undetermined. Our mission is get her back, preferably alive. Which means we’ll have to figure out who took her first.”
“Ransom demand?” That from Gunny.
“Not thus far. The political situation is mostly fine, but at a continental level is apparently less than copacetic. There are several…rajahnates? rajahdoms? that run most of what goes on on-planet. They don’t all get along. Plus the usual malcontent insurgents, who would seem to be the obvious suspects.
“Indira is engaged to be wed in the next month, they are big on single-partner, different-sex coupling locally, a major celebration attached, and this has put a crimp in those plans.”
“We sure she didn’t just run off?” Gunny asked. “No ransom demand, how do we know she was kidnapped? Some of these old-style societies still go in for arranged marriages and such. Maybe she didn’t want to connect with her mate-to-be?”
“That has to be considered,” Jo said. “We haven’t seen all their data yet.”
Kluthfem made a sharp tongue-click sound.
“Kay? Something?”
The Vastalimi said, “If the female’s departure was voluntary, are we obligated to return her if we locate her?”
“No. She is an adult by local and GU standards. If she left on her own and we find her, we report that to our client. Up to them to work that out.”
Kay chirred. There came a pleasant, faint musky odor, a pheromone that Vastalimi females sometimes emitted when they were pleased.
They had had some interesting moral codes, the Vastalimi. Apparently on Kay’s homeworld, females had been held more or less in thrall until the last hundred years or so. The females finally got tired of it. There had been a short and fairly bloodless revolution. Females refused en masse to have sex with the males. Any male who attempted rape was hunted down by cadres of females and castrated.
At some point, the males saw the light. Which probably made them a little smarter than human males, she figured, who still tended to think of themselves as God’s gift to women…
The female Vastalimi were still touchy about such things. If Indira had left on her own, and somebody wanted to make her come back, Kay wouldn’t have any part of that. Or maybe she’d get in somebody’s way, a not-inconsiderable obstacle. It was good to have a Vastalimi as your friend, bad to have one as an enemy.
Jo glanced at Cutter. “Colonel?”
Rags said, “Jo has pretty much covered it, but my contact inside TotalMart has let me know that local biz folk tend to be insular and suspicious of outsiders. Oh—and the GU Army’s Ex-Tee-J-Corps has a base in New Mumbai, just outside the capital city.”
There came a chorus of groans at that. XTJC fielded some good officers and troops, but in Jo’s experience, they also always had more than their share of total assholes. Most GU military didn’t have any use for mercenary cadres, but Jaycore really didn’t like them. She’d never met anybody in any of those units who called the Cutters anything other than “cutthroats.”
A couple of times, she had come close to pulling a blade, and offering, “You mean like this?”
“You know the drill, people. Live with it,” Rags said. “With any good luck, we’ll be in and out of there in a hurry, and spending our bonuses during a nice thirty-day liberty.”
Jo nodded at this, but the truth was, she wasn’t much on liberty. Too much trouble she could get into in the civilian world without even trying.
She picked it up: “Rest of it is in your downlinks, read over it, we’ll hit n-vac at 0800 ST and arrive in the vicinity in seventy-two hours. Back to full gee once we finish the Leap, so better hit the myostim. If you are wheezing and dragging two minutes after we exit the ship, you can stay here and collect base pay while the rest of us divvy up your bonus.”
Gunny laughed. “You hear that, Gramps? I’m gonna be spending your bonus NDs on my spa vacation in Bali.”
“Sheeit, Chocolatte, I’ll give you a two-minute head start in a four-minute race and still run your skinny brown butt into the ground.”
“What, you went and got jet augs installed in your ass?
“Come by my cabin, I’ll show you what I got augmented.”
“You wish.”
“Nah, it’s your loss.”
Jo shook her head. Gramps was the oldest guy in the room, but he was only fifty-one SYs, beating Rags by six months. Still, that made him fifteen or so years older than Gunny, and eighteen older than Jo. They liked to razz him about being an old fart, but truth was, he was in pretty good shape for a man his age. And given the back-and-forth with Gunny, Jo wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them wind up in the sleepsack together. Military foreplay was often combative. Gunny could shoot the nuts off a minifly at five meters, and Gramps could have them weighed, measured, and sold for a profit before the fly’s nads hit the ground. She’d seen stranger pairings.
“That’s it, we’re done. Try to stay out of trouble.”