In Earth's Service (Mapped Space Book 2) (13 page)

“I wouldn’t want to be in one of these things if it
fell,” Jase observed, leaning against the window, looking down.

“I’d rather we not discuss that possibility,” Izin
said, sitting as far from the windows as he could. He wore a one piece coverall
over his pressure suit with his helmet set to opaque to hide his amphibian
features. The locals would know he was an alien off a ship, but not what kind
of nonhuman, reducing the risk of some trigger happy redneck shooting him
simply because he was a tamph.

Jase took on a mischievous look, remembering
Izin’s aversion to heights. “If we fell, how many seconds would it take before
we hit the ground? Ten or eleven?”

“Less,” Izin said, “considering the higher
gravity. Perhaps you should try jumping to put it to the test.”

Jase and I exchanged amused looks, leaving Izin to
suffer in silence.

When we approached Citadel’s rust colored cliffs,
I directed Jase’s attention to a gun platform jutting from the rock face close
to the ground. It was manned by a group of uniformed troopers. One sat behind a
short barreled field gun mounted on a metal column while the others scanned the
plains with biscopes looking for targets. A narrow ladder led down from the gun
platform to a ten wheeled, armored recovery vehicle waiting to tow their kill
to the nearest vehicle hoist. A track led out from the cliffs to a bait trap
containing a tankosaur calf. The creature had a nasty wound in its side,
inflicted by the hunters so the smell of blood would attract their prey.

Jase studied the surrounding dry plains and shook
his head. “No meat for dinner tonight,” he said, unable to spot any approaching
predators.

“They’re out there,” I said, “you just can’t see
them.”

“In that case,” Jase said lightly, “I’m glad I’m
up here.”

As we neared the cliffs, the gunner started
firing, sending tracer screaming out into the plain. While Jase tried to
discover what the hunters were shooting at, my attention was drawn to two of
the dome-shaped surface batteries covering Hiport. They were perched on the
cliff tops five clicks apart, scanning the sky now that the
Silver Lining
had been assessed as no threat. They were heavies, designed to kill large
targets at suborbital ranges and beyond, but would struggle against fast moving
targets at close range. It was a strange choice for a colony so close to the
Acheron where Drakes often used small, fast raiders rather than frigate sized
warships.

A couple of Union Regular Army troopers were
visible guarding the nearest battery. They were tall lean types, definitely not
Hardfallers. Considering the gravity, I’d expected the URA to have trained
local militiamen to man the guns, not station offworlders here. Maybe the colonists
would rather farm and hunt than subject themselves to military discipline? It
wouldn’t have been the first time freewheeling frontier types had eschewed
military service.

We passed over a low wall encircling the city and
came to a halt inside Citadel North station. Passengers and cargobots exchanged
places for three minutes before the transparent doors sealed and we were moving
again, this time over crowded, narrow streets wedged between neatly ordered buildings,
some ten stories high. Above the frenetic streets, flat topped roofs joined by
a network of foot bridges were filled with gardens and entertainment areas,
serving as refuges for the local residents from the press of the city.

Stocky colonists and small solar powered vehicles
filled the streets, although curiously for a frontier world, no one wore
weapons. It was a custom they’d developed celebrating the safety of their high
mountain fastness. The fact that Jase and I wore our guns openly was not lost
on the other passengers, who gave us suspicious looks but otherwise ignored us.

We stopped once more, this time at the station on
the south side of the city, before gliding out over the cliffs for the long ride
down to Hadley’s Retreat. Far to the south, beyond a few grazing tankosaurs, a six
wheeled armored beetle raced across open ground, kicking up a dust trail that
hung in the air long after the vehicle had disappeared into the distance.
Eventually, the low island of Hadley’s Retreat took shape as the cable car carried
us in a long sweeping arc over the plains. It was a slender mesa with a bulge
in the middle filled with sun bleached, one story stone buildings and a
thinning tail pointing south toward an even smaller and lower mesa in the
distance.

The Skylink ended in a terminal building at the
northern end of Hadley’s. From there, a dirt road led south through the town to
Loport Link, the colony’s second suspension system joining the smaller
inhabited plateau with the backup landing ground further south. Unlike Citadel,
which loomed in the distance like an urban giant against a cloudless sky, Hadley’s
dusty little town was dissected by broad avenues and open plazas, had no street
vendors, few vehicles and scarce signs of life.

As we marched south, I realized the gun
emplacements perched above Citadel’s southern cliffs commanded Hadley’s Retreat,
but none of the smaller town’s weapons had line of sight back to the city. It
was as if whoever had sited the colony’s defensive firepower had intended for
the micro-city to dominate the rest of the colony unopposed.

“What’s up?” Jase asked, wondering what I was
staring at.

“It’s probably nothing.”

The few inhabitants of Hadley’s Retreat we saw viewed
us with even more suspicion than those on Citadel. Their eyes followed our
every step, then as we approached, they retreated, closing doors and shutters
as we passed. Only once we’d moved on, did they reappear behind us, whispering and
staring.

“I feel like every shadow’s watching us,” Jase said
as we entered Hadley’s central bulge.

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“At least they’re not armed.”

“They’re all armed,” Izin corrected, “and there
are snipers in the windows.”

“You can see them?” I asked, noticing that some
shutters were open but the interiors were impenetrably dark.

“Yes, Captain. Their weapons are primitive, but
heavy caliber. Starting a fight here would be inadvisable.”

The town’s main square was paved in stone with a
stand of small Earth trees providing shade at its center. Several children playing
among well tended flower gardens were ushered out of sight by their mother as my
DNA sniffer warned we were being followed. He was easy to spot, a stocky
colonist with a weather beaten hat, leathery skin and an ugly black metal
articulated claw for a left arm. His prosthetic must have been a local device,
but from the ease with which he rubbed the back of his neck with it, its neural
interface was as efficient as any Earth-made attachment.

Jase followed my gaze. “What’s Clawhand up to?”

“He’s their leader,” I said.

“How can you tell?” Jase asked.

“The others watch him, waiting for a signal,” Izin
said, having seen the same signs I had.

Clawhand leaned against a wall, waiting for our
next move. I considered approaching him, but decided that might trigger a
response I wasn’t ready to deal with, so we continued on, never passing out of
the gaze of our one armed shadow.

At the southern tip of the mesa, the paved avenue ran
out along a tongue of land flanked by stone walls and sheer cliffs to a
decrepit cable station. A pair of cables ran off toward a rocky promontory
called Lone Peak where a support tower took their weight before they passed out
of sight for the second leg down to Loport.

I produced my monoscope and zoomed in on Loport
mesa, visible beyond Lone Peak. The summit was barely twenty meters above the
plains, low enough for predators to have been a constant threat before engineers
had sealed it off. There were no ships on the landing field, only two URA uniformed
guards patrolling the cliff tops, too tall and slim to be genetically modified Fallers.

“What are all those bones, Captain?” Izin asked, pointing
toward a large expanse of bleached white skeletons in the distance.

I lowered my scope, glancing in the direction he’d
indicated. “That’s the Boneyard.” I pointed to a dull gray shape lying in the
baking sun toward the south eastern horizon. “And that’s the wreck of the Dahlia,
the first colony ship. The landing broke her back, cracked her hull wide open.”

Jase borrowed my monoscope for a better look,
whistling slowly as he studied the hundred and sixty three year old wreck.
Beside him, Izin polarized part of his helmet to give his naturally telescoping
eyes a better look.

“They fought their way here,” Izin said, correctly
interpreting what the animal bones meant.

“That’s right,” I replied slowly. “When she came down,
she attracted a lot of attention. The colonists didn’t realize what they’d
walked into until the fleshrippers were inside the hull. By then it was too
late. They fought for three days before abandoning ship. Some women and
children got here in ground vehicles, most came on foot. By the time they
started across, the smell of death had attracted every meat eater for a hundred
clicks.”

“Nowhere else to go, I guess,” Jase said, studying
the horizon, realizing Hadley’s was the nearest elevated land to the wreck.

“A third didn’t make it, but that was just the
beginning. Their supplies and equipment were on the ship and the plains were
crawling with death, all kinds of creatures fighting over human and animal
corpses alike. They nearly starved.”

“They were lucky,” Jase said, handing back my
monoscope.

“They were stupid,” I said. “If they’d surveyed
the planet properly from orbit, they could have landed up here, or on Citadel,
and lost no-one.”

“A costly mistake,” Izin observed.

“Ready for another ride?” I asked, starting toward
Loport Link station.

When we reached the entrance, four URA uniformed
guards appeared carrying heavy assault weapons. None were Fallers.

“The Link is closed for maintenance,” a guard with
sergeant’s stripes and an Ardenan accent snapped.

I looked past our welcoming committee to the small
control room and the spherical gondolas crawling along the parallel cables. There
were no mechanics in sight, no sign of any breakdown.

“For how long?” I asked.

“Five days.”

The obvious lie immediately irritated Jase. “Since
when does maintenance require an armed guard?”

“Since we said it did,” the sergeant replied with
an arrogance that Jase instantly took as a challenge.

I placed a restraining hand on his arm. Starting a
fight without knowing who we were up against wasn’t what I was here for. “We’ll
come back in five days,” I said, nodding for Jase and Izin to follow me.

Once we were out of earshot, Izin said, “We can return
after sunset. They’ll be no challenge at night.”

“They’re no challenge now!” Jase snapped. “Did you
see the look on that grunt’s face?”

“Did you see the weapons they were carrying?” I
asked.

“Yes, Captain,” Izin replied, “Vel penetrators.”

“That’s Indo gear,” Jase said, puzzled.

“Republic standard issue,” I agreed. Named after a
Hindu war god’s spear, Vels were high end infantry assault weapons. They were
just the kind of thing the
Merak Star
was feeding the Drakes on Novo
Pantanal, but not a weapon the Union Regular Army used.

“So those troops are …?” Jase asked uncertainly.

“Imposters.”

Hardfall might have a Union mandate, but it was at
the ass-end of nowhere. It would be years before anyone on Earth had any idea
the colony was under criminal control and it would take at least another year
before anything could be done about it. No wonder the local colonists viewed
outsiders with suspicion!

“Captain,” Izin said, motioning subtly toward the
southern sky. His remarkable eyes had been the first to see it, a long silver gray
slab dropping from orbit on a power glide toward Loport. “It’s the Merak Star.”

I watched through my monoscope as the freighter
came down, braking all the way. When she was over the tiny spaceport, she flared
on thrusters, then settled onto the shaved rock landing ground. No hatches
opened, no one went to meet her and the two guards continued pacing the
perimeter as if she was a common sight.

“What now?” Jase asked.

“You two get back to the ship,” I said. “Calculate
the firing envelopes of those big guns in case we have to bust out of here. I’m
going to check who’s got landing rights on Hardfall.”

We headed back to the Skylink terminal, watched
every step of the way by Clawhand. When we boarded the transport capsule back
to Citadel, he took a seat at the opposite end, making no secret of his
interest. All through the long climb back, I felt his eyes on me as I wondered
if we were about to be arrested. When the gondola stopped at Citadel South, I waited
until the doors were about to close, then jumped out. Clawhand hurried after
me, but the doors slid shut in front of him, trapping him inside. He gave me an
irritated look, then produced a communicator and spoke rapidly into it as the
gondola carried him away from the station.

While Jase and Izin continued on toward the ship I
hurried down into Citadel’s narrow, crowded streets. My threading’s map of the
city was almost a decade out of date due to infrequent Earth Navy surveys, but
the Society’s offices hadn’t moved in half a century. They were located in a
relatively modern looking five story building with the usual security
precautions that required me to surrender my gun at the door.

The Exchange was small, just four terminals on the
ground floor offering Society underwritten contracts, mostly off world fetch
and deliver type deals, but as this was high threat space close to the Acheron,
the completion bonuses were sky high. Most were sponsored by the Union colonial
administration, although a few were put up by local farmer co-ops desperate for
spare parts. Some were many months old, indicating few traders visited the
planet, which in itself helped drive up prices. Hardfall might have been the place
to come for fast money, but only for those few willing to run the Drake gauntlet.