Tropic of Creation (2 page)

There were things in her favor. Even if she could have repaired the giant fighting ship, it had no launch capacity from the ground. She had pulled off a minor miracle just negotiating an atmospheric entry and controlled crash-landing. So she wanted a clean bill of health exonerating her of sabotage, not an ambiguous report that would dog her career … and by God, he would give her that respect. It wasn’t as though he had better things to do. Here he was, thirty-seven years old, a captain of the Sixth Transport Division—advancement prospects slim to none—with a grimy kettle of a ship and a crew that said his name like a wad of spit shot out. He wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone, least of all Luce Marzano.

“ ’Spose there’s ahtra bodies in this one, sir?” Willem asked.

“That’s what we’ll find out,” Eli answered.

Willem’s eyes were flat. He hadn’t been talking to Eli Dammond, and probably didn’t like being answered by an alpha captain who wore the blue of Transport while better men wore the brown of battle.

From the exposed section of the vessel, Eli could see the ship was a miniature of an ahtran warship, at least in its shape, with six sides, sloping slightly toward the top. The craft, like the others Marzano’s crew had found in the vicinity, was big enough for two ahtra, maybe three
in a tight squeeze. The intriguing difference with this particular hexadron was that beneath a coating of dirt, it might be of recent origin—might even be in working order.

Since his arrival here Eli had seen several of them, and like Marzano, he took them to be landing craft. But they found no vestige of the late enemy, no electromagnetic signature as they scanned the planet. Nothing odd about finding implements of war strewn about, Eli admitted. Half of known space was littered with skeletons of metal and bone from thirty years of mayhem. Except here there was no sign of battle. Add to that, some of these craft were old—weathered, time-battered carcasses slumping to ruin. And some were newer.

It was as though ahtra had been coming here for hundreds of years. By twos and threes.

A slap of wind came out of nowhere and grazed sweat from their faces, cooling their skin just when they felt they might see flesh split open from the heat. Turning into the breeze, Eli scanned the horizon where puffs of clouds massed like suds—a rare sight, Marzano commented. She’d had crew set out basins against the possibility of rain for the last five days. But each afternoon the sun struck the clouds back with hammer strokes of 115 degree heat, and the basins lay hot and empty. The only water was beneath the ground, sucked up by the nearby stand of desiccated pillars that passed for trees: the copse the enlisteds called the Sticks. The trees hoarded the water inside, in cisterns. From these, the crew tapped and rationed out water, pure as snowmelt, hot as geysers.

Sascha was prying on the hatch door of the hexadron.

“That will do, Sascha,” Eli said.

She obeyed, stepping back from the alien craft. She bumped her hat off her head, letting it hang down on her
back by its straps, and allowed her black hair to escape its long braid in sweat-soaked strands. The freckles her mother so hated were popping out by the minute.
Pocks
, Cristin Olander called them, the same as the enlisteds called the ahtra.

Corporal Willem released the hatch covering. As Eli peered into the dusky interior, he thought he caught a whiff of the ahtra smell: sweet and sour, fermented. A thread of memory released sounds, like birds startled from a bush … deep, throaty shouts and distant screams. Even the ahtra could scream, though they showed no fear, not even with a domino gun shoved into a pocked cheek.

But it was empty.

Eli hoisted himself into the craft, sitting on the edge of the curved seat to gain headroom. The interior had a spare look, despite the characteristic ahtran patterns over every square inch of the bulkheads. A simple control panel faced him on one wall, showing quirky instrumentation with depressions where switches should be. Forty-five years of contact with the species, and Congress Worlds still had no clue why they covered their ship walls with concentric squares … where they came from … why they lived in world ships … how they functioned with bicameral brains … or how their star drive got an extra twenty percent of speed out of pulse engines.

In the end it was that twenty-percent advantage that forced CW to bend knee—in what was euphemistically called an armistice—so ahtra kept the riches of the Neymium Belt for themselves, ceding a pauper’s share to CW, and the warring parties backed off, licking their wounds.

Eli’s grandfather could remember the days before the Great War when, for the first time, fast ahtran ships made trade between the human worlds worthwhile, but the honeymoon was soon over.

“Captain Dammond,” he heard from outside. Marzano was crouching and probing under the hexadron. “This is curious.”

He joined her to look under the craft. The underside contained a plate, stuck in a half-open position, revealing a round mechanism within. Marzano reached up to pull the plate fully open, but it didn’t budge.

Eli crawled under the craft, lying on his back in the dirt, staring up. Willem handed him a lamp from his kit, and Eli aimed its beam into a circular maw of metal teeth. He lay there, absorbing this view. As he reached up to touch the serrated edges, a whisper of soil tumbled into his face.

His brothers would know what this was. Hell,
he
knew what this was.

Marzano’s face was in shadow as she crouched next to him. “What do you make of it?”

Getting to his feet, Eli slapped the dirt from his uniform. “Where did you say the other hexadrons were found?”

She shrugged. “They’re everywhere. In the Sticks. The wadis. Buried in hillsides, embedded in the dunes.”

“And you never noticed anything like that mechanism?” He gestured to the jammed, half-open plate.

“No. The others were smooth-sided. Or we assumed they were.” Defensively, she offered: “We’ve had more pressing matters. Like surviving.”

Marzano gestured Willem to take Sascha up the wadi, and the corporal left with the girl in tow. Sascha looked back to where the action was, pleading with great blue eyes for the captain to countermand the order, but he didn’t.

Looking down at his feet, Eli sorted the possibilities. Two shadows, one faint, one dark, spread out from the soles of his feet, as though there were two of him standing there. He squinted up into the beady eye of the dwarf sun.

“What is it, then, Captain?” Marzano asked.

“They’re not landing craft.” He looked at her straight on. “They’re burrowing craft.”

Luce Marzano pursed her lips and frowned, as though unable to reverse her opinions on the instant. Then, with Eli, she looked down at the baked soil of the wadi with a long, appraising gaze.

L
uce Marzano and Master Sergeant Ben Juric leaned over the screen. The soundings showed an underground tunnel with a side branch to the east. So far, readings were showing a uniformity in dimensions, fueling speculations about mining shafts, a secret arms cache, and lava tubes.

In this case, one was half the size of the other.

“A natural system of tunnels isn’t proportional,” Eli said.

Ben Juric looked at him, gracing him with a crumpled lip. Juric didn’t talk unless he had something to say, so Eli had learned to read his face.
Tell me something I don’t know
, the master sergeant managed to convey.

From outside the tent, the noise of grinding gears erupted, as the techs put the craft through its paces, digging down a yard or two; digging back up. The engineers cracked the control system easily. The controls were simple; hardest were the calibrations for depth, and the techs were closing in on that.

Techs had been swarming over the craft since the gradiometer reading had revealed the tunnels earlier that
morning. The soundings crew were now some half mile up the wadi, still following the main tunnel, measuring the gravity-gradient changes that implied subsurface structures.

“Ahtran tunnels, I say,” Marzano concluded. Maybe she hoped they
were
. He couldn’t blame her if she was eager to fight the war she’d been denied, eager to forget the past year’s truce with the enemy.

At the mention of ahtra, one side of Sergeant Juric’s face hardened—the alpha side that still bore normal expression. Eli would have welcomed his assessment, but the sergeant was wary of him. There was no history between the two of them, no loyalty. Like the general’s daughter and granddaughter, Juric was merely hitching a ride on this quick run down through Keller Space.

Only now the shuttle run had taken on a different complexion. They both wished he could radio for orders. Armistice or no, if you had a cache of arms down here, and God knew what ahtra surprises, you damn well got your orders from Command, especially if you’re just a stinking tub of a transport with a tarnished officer in charge, occupying a post a better man would have had if most of them weren’t dead or in regen baths. But radio was down, as Marzano had told them. If they hadn’t discovered her Mayday beacon in orbit, they would never have found her—even though they
had
been looking for her. The satellite wasn’t broadcasting—whatever electromagnetic interference disrupted the surface transmissions also extended well into the planet’s exosphere—but on retrieval the ship’s techs had decoded its message.

Eli caught Sergeant Juric’s eye, just long enough to lock on. “We get the kinks worked on that digger, I’m sending someone down,” Eli said.

Juric nodded. In the three months of their acquaintance, Eli had never seen Juric show surprise. If you were
a veteran of battle, you
didn’t
show surprise, not at an officer’s order. If Eli had said,
Take a spoon, Sergeant, and dig your way down to that tunnel
, Juric would have nodded in just that same way.

“Let me send one of my people, Captain,” Marzano said. It was her plea, maybe, for a chance to salvage something from Null. Maybe she looked at Eli and hoped to God she’d never fall so low. He didn’t think she would. Patrician Luce Marzano, of good family, of the right connections, looked a little different to Command than up-through-the-ranks Eli Dammond with top scores, no connections, and a worse crime, by some lights, than desertion.

“We’ll see who goes. We’ll see if we
can
go.” He turned to Juric. “Sergeant, keep the tech teams working here. Give them some backup for a complete scan of the tunnels. See how far they extend.”

“Yes, sir. And the ship?”

Luce Marzano’s ship, the
Fury
, was still out there on the flats with Eli’s crew combing its systems for evidence—one way or the other. “Keep working,” he told Juric, and Marzano nodded, relieved no doubt that her situation wasn’t upstaged by a more interesting one. “Box up what you have and transfer it to the
Lucia”
The
Lucia
, a sweet name for his ship of command, which was little better than a bathtub with fusion drive. And it’d be a full tub once its complement of 157 lifted off.

He heard a gentle cough outside the tent.

Juric cocked his head toward the flap. “Mrs. Olander, sir. Shall I send her in?”

“No.”

Juric’s face said
,
Got the balls to snub the daughter of the general, do you?

“I don’t think she likes to camp,” Marzano said, managing a wry smile, even as Eli ordered all her crew’s damning evidence boxed and loaded up.

He hardened his heart toward Luce Marzano and strode out of the tent to deal with his civilian passenger.

“Let’s walk, Mrs. Olander,” he said, according her a nod, and then striking out at a brisk pace across the floor of the wadi, toward the hexadron. But it was no good acting busy—and damn it, he
was
busy. Cristin Olander attached herself to him like a burr, matching his long strides, jumping to the point:

“Captain, we don’t need all this.” She waved at the crews at work in the wadi. “You’ve done your mission, and it’s got nothing to do with these … balls of junk. I’ve got business at home. We’re overdue.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m well aware.”
I have my duty
, he wanted to remind the daughter of the general. A duty to bring her home and also to swing into the binary system—where the
Fury
was known to have been headed when last heard from—and look for clues to the ship’s fate. Now, with the leisure of the armistice, MIAs were a priority to the army—if not to this general’s daughter who had the wealth to earn a doctorate in math and the leisure to present a paper at a seminar of alphas with more neurons than they knew what to do with.

“If you were
well aware
, we’d be halfway home by now.” She stopped with Eli some paces from the hexadron, eyeing it with loathing.

The engineering team—Marzano’s crew—were stripped down in the heat to undershirts and fatigue pants, flaunting their regen forearms, deltoids, fingers. They waved desultory salutes at Eli.

“There she is,” Cristin Olander said, pointing into the distance where Sascha could be seen with her father, silhouetted against the caustic blue sky, scrounging in the dirt for specimens. “She’ll be ruined by the time we get home. No matter what I do.”