Genellan 03 First Victory Read online

  Dedication

  In memory of Miss Marion McQuesten

  Acknowledgments

  To Dr. Dan Perkins, my first reader, editor, and accomplice in learning to write.

  To Ms. Alice Chan for her Chinese language assistance.

  Prologue Prisoners of Time

  Pake descended into a furious haze. She hauled on the bleating packer’s lead, her rag-wrapped fingers stiff with cold. Iron dust gusted sideways, scratching her weather-beaten skin. The wind tugged at the woman’s head wrapping, a dingy rag giving feeble protection to high cheekbones, buttresses to Mongoloid eyes of black adamantine. The bloodred sun slanted downward, groping for a demarcation of land and sky, but there was no horizon, only a nether distance of fiery orange.

  Marking the valley’s bottom was the furred glow of the smelter. Its roaring hellfire, rattling conveyors, and thundering ore-crushers were enfeebled by the wind’s jealous scream. Pake’s growling stomach served its own notice. She pulled a flapping hide about her distended belly and yanked the packer’s lead. The animal balked, planting its hooves. The dusky beast tucked its stubby, red-crusted muzzle into the lee of its cargo of cactus wood. The dull, fat-humped species had survived eons by turning from the wind.

  Wielding a truncheon, Pake beat the brute, her exertions allowing the wind to rip the ragged scarf from her face. The packer, ears drooping, relented to the human’s superior purpose. Pake, spitting grit, leaned on the rope to keep the animal plodding forward. A tress of gray-streaked jet streamed in the gale.

  She was almost home. The terrain moderated, rounding to broken flatness. Plaints of other packers drifted on the wind. Her animal lifted its head, cracked open lash-filtered eyes of rheumy white, and gave a sand-stifled honk. It increased its pace, no longer needing tension on its lead. Animal and master came to a sandy-bottomed wash. Pake hugged its rising lee, the cold, burning wind blasting over her head. She walked in a dim tunnel of hissing dust. A wrist-thick sand snake sidewindered from her approaching feet.

  Pake came at last to an erosion defile. She clambered up the smooth cleft through which water had not trickled for longer than she could remember. The sweet spring’s precious yield, captured at its source, was used to irrigate the village box gardens. Thoughts of water made Pake’s throat well. She spat into her filthy hand and rubbed saliva on her crud-crusted forehead. Thus anointed, she prayed, and climbed.

  Gone almost two days, Pake was exhausted. She had scaled the valley wall, higher than ever before, gleaning deadfall from cactus groves in the vales. She had climbed above the swirling sands, above even the range of the cactus, high enough to glimpse hardwoods on the mountain ridges. Precious hardwood. She had seen rock goats bounding across the sheer faces, and in the night she had heard banshee screams.

  A brooding cluster of adobe huts materialized, their low profiles dominated by a dragon-backed ridge, dimly silhouetted against the sanguinary twilight. Another form, an unnatural shape contrived of technology, sublimated from the dust-ridden dusk—an Ulaggi field station. Its streamlined tractor was huge, its great studded treads higher than Pake was tall. Not an ore hauler, this tractor pulled but a single unit. It was an inspection module.The burbling rumble of an auxiliary lifted above the wind. Pake smelled its exhaust. A searchlight flashed into being, a coruscating tube of light, fixed at its source, its brightness textured with driven dust. The light tube ended in an oblong of white light, a dazzling ellipse that darted unerringly over red gravel. Helpless in its glare, Pake shielded her eyes. After several seconds the search light shut moved away.

  Ulaggi mobile stations came every ten days. Pake grunted with irony; ore shafts were not the only tunnels into which the Ulaggi peered. In the morning, all fertile women of the village would obediently present themselves to the alien medical technicians. The arrival of this particular tractor aggrieved Pake’s soul; this visitation promised an ominous milestone, for Little One’s menarche was arrived. Her oldest daughter would be expected to join the women. Pake trembled, not with cold. She fervently wished, for the thousandth time, that she had had the courage to murder her offspring.

  In darkness Pake stumbled up the village alley. Knees protesting, she arrived at her own nodule of mud and straw. Swirling gusts could not purge the odor of cook fires fed with cactus and packer dung. Her demanding stomach, a constant in a life of unremitting misery, growled again. Her packer bleated, anxious to join its herd mates, and anxious to be fed. Hunger—the curse of the living.

  Pake threw her bedroll and rucksack over her shoulder. Where was Little One? Little One always came out to help. Pake untied the bundles and allowed the precious fuel to fall against the mud wall. She released the packer’s girth strap and lifted the cross-tree from the animal’s hump. She hefted it toward the door. She would not leave the hardwood frame outside, certain to disappear. Growing angry, Pake ducked into the lee of the hut, lifted the latch, and pushed open the door with her scrawny buttocks. She dragged the saddle frame inside.

  "Feed the packer," Pake grunted, her throat protesting its coating of dust. "Bring the wood inside." Overhead, hides interwoven between thin roof beams fluttered softly.

  "Mama," Li-Li sobbed.

  Li-Li, her youngest, never cried. Pake turned, suddenly frightened. She caught their sweet, musky scent. A wall of dark-helmeted Ulaggi hulked between the mother and her daughters. Four squat forms with massive shoulders and wide hips filled the cramped room. Three were black-suited guardmales. The fourth wore the tan ground suit of a reproduction technician. The technician seized Pake in a viselike grip. Pake averted her eyes and sucked back a scream. Time froze. Small things became suffocatingly acute. Red dust sifted downward, motes dancing in the flickering candle. Drifts of russet powder dusted the thick plastic table, its once garish sheen abraded over time to sanded buff. Ulaggi boot marks—obscene, fan-shaped imprints patterned by hobnails—overlapped the floor of her home. There was grit in Pake’s teeth, the taste of iron in her throat; anger welled in her heart, but the emptiness in her belly dominated all sensation.

  "Move you!" thundered the technician in a ghastly parody of her language. Pake retreated, falling back into the biting wind. Her head covering streamed into the gale, loosening her hair to thrash her face. The wind was not loud enough to mask Little One’s sobs, but Pake dared not look back. Collecting her tresses and twisting them under control, she stumbled downhill. They came to the hulking vehicle. The boarding ladder was not deployed. The technician boosted Pake roughly to the hatch landing. She crawled along a grit-filled catwalk, taking shelter in the lee of the entry lock’s weather baffle. Wind howled through the railing. Dim amber lights flooded on. A guardmale clambered up onto the landing, using one arm to hoist himself. In his other arm, clasped to an obscenely broad chest, was her frightened daughter. Pake held out her arms, but the guardmale knocked the mother aside and strode past. The technician came next, pushing Pake before him.

  A blast of warm air emanated from the lock, exploding dust from the enclosure. A translucent membrane clamshelled over them, its bearing surfaces protesting. The inner door whooshed open. Pake was pushed forward. Once inside, the guardmale and the technician disappeared through an interior hatch. Pake’s last glimpse of her innocent daughter was a dangling bare foot.

  A guardmale yanked on her packer hides. Pake disrobed, as she had done many times before. Compliant as a whipped dog, Pake hung up her rags and sat on the cold bench. They were always made to wait naked. More guardmales stood near, leering and joking.

  This time there was no wait. A guardmale stood her up and pushed her into a sanitation closet, slamming the thick door. A hard spray exploded on her filthy body, needles of steaming caustic. Pake kept her eyes closed. The acrid assault
stopped. A mist encompassed her, slippery and warm. But the warmth was quickly lost as the spray assaulted her again; this time it was water, precious water. Stinging jets combed her body, starting at her head and working to her feet. Shielding her breasts with her elbows, Pake grabbed her hair and wrung out the bloodred water.

  Too soon the water stopped. The door opposite hissed open. Pake moved against a flow of cold air into an examining room, her skin puckering into goose flesh. A reproduction technician, no taller than she but as wide as he was tall, awaited. This technician had large eyes with brown irises marbled with putrid blue. His skin was a translucent nacre, with veins and pulsing arteries prominently revealed. Muscle mass was also clearly distinguishable, constantly shifting beneath thin dermal layers. An older male, Pake perceived; she could tell by his milky eyes and sagging features; his nose was a drooping slab of mottled flesh. His expression was not unkind.

  Pake steeled herself, finding courage. "Why now? Why not in morning?"

  "Emergency," the technician muttered, pushing her onto her back. He spoke her language, horribly accented.

  "Emergency?" she asked, emboldened.

  "Shaft explosion. Mine Three. Injuries," the technician said more loudly and with less kindness. He probed her body, fondling her with thick fingers, but gently and swiftly. He positioned her before a machine.

  A rush of static came from the box on the wall. And then some Ulaggi words. A guardmale moved close to the box and growled in response. More words crackled back, some she understood.

  "Why you wait for me?" she dared to ask.

  "Boy child," the Ulaggi grunted, touching her distended belly.

  For this Pake was perversely glad. They would take the boy from her. Mothers never saw their sons die, only their daughters. Daughters became mothers, and mothers died many times—a death for every stolen male child; a death for every daughter cursed too soon with womanhood."Also, better you here..." the technician continued, "when daughter is sowed."

  The cycle starts anew. Pake had been the youngest of five daughters, and only a child when they took her mother away for the last time. She could not remember her mother’s face, but Pake knew her mother’s stories, repeated as litany by her older sisters. Wondrously, her mother had known another planet, another world, another life. But even those magical tellings had grown dim.

  "Wait you," the technician grunted. "For daughter."

  Pake dropped to the bench and closed her eyes. Another rush of static came from the wall box. Pake winced and lowered her head into her callused hands. Her oldest daughter, no longer a child, would be pregnant. With her first baby. Of many.

  Pake would take Little One home. She would hug her. It was all she could do.

  Section One

  Living in Fear

  Chapter 01 To Kiss a Tiger

  "Make ship ready for jump exit," Eire’s watch boatswain droned. "Tether down. Tether down. Now jump exit."

  Fleet Admiral Runacres, on the mothership’s flag bridge, monitored a kaleidoscopic array of status screens. The Tellurian Legion First Fleet task force, eight motherships and three auxiliaries locked in gravitronic matrix, approached destination coordinates, designation Pitcairn System.

  "Jump exit thirty seconds," the tactical watch officer barked.

  "All ships alpha-alpha," Commodore Wells boomed, a little too loudly. Even Runacres’s imperturbable operations officer was showing the strain of being this deep in the Red Zone.

  "Very well," Runacres replied, floating into his acceleration tethers. He rechecked battle armor integrity on his helmet headup. A metallic taste flooded his throat—a familiar sensation, felt prior to every jump exit. Not fear, but something proximate, a precursor to the inevitable flood of adrenaline.

  "Ready to launch corvettes," Captain Wooden, the corvette group leader, reported. "Screen command is Eagle."

  "Carmichael’s got the point again," Runacres remarked.

  "Best pilot for the job," Wooden replied.

  Runacres had no dispute; Jake Carmichael was the ace of the fleet, in fact a double ace, with eleven kills: six konish interceptors and five Ulaggi—the only two-race ace in the fleet.

  "Launch on my command," Runacres ordered.

  "Aye, aye, Admiral," the group leader responded.

  ***

  On the cramped flight deck of Eagle One, Commander Joyman K. Carmichael monitored screen tactical, interrogating unit status telemetry. A steady stream of controller chatter cluttered the flight ops circuit.

  "Osprey," Carmichael demanded over the command grid-link. "What’s happening with your number Two? I’m reading a main power lock."

  "Roger, Eagle," returned the sharp voice of Mick Wong, Osprey Squadron skipper. "Two is down. My Five bird is spinning up. Give me twenty seconds."

  "Negative. Peregrine will take Osprey’s screen sector," Carmichael commanded, simultaneously revising assignments on the tactical order of battle. "Osprey is now Alert Five. Acknowledge."

  "Peregrine, screen sector six," answered Tonda Jones, Peregrine Squadron’s commanding officer; her rapid reply cracked with anticipation. Osprey acknowledged electronically.

  "All systems on line, Skipper. Energy reservoirs at maximums," Carmichael’s second officer reported. "All screen units are marshaled."

  "Very well," Carmichael replied. "Setting six gees."

  "Six gees," his copilot acknowledged.

  Carmichael tightened his tethers and tried to relax. The image of Sharl Buccari, green eyes glowing like fired emeralds, coalesced in his mind. Carmichael wanted to hold her strong, warm body.

  Would he live to touch her again?

  ***

  From the flag bridge mezzanine, Runacres scanned the flagship’s operational bridge. Captain Sarah Merriwether, ensconced in the command station at the center of T.L.S. Eire’s control deck, was surrounded by her battle watch. All hands moved with calculated deliberation. Runacres used his retinal cursor to bring up the flagship captain on his secure channel—a jump exit ritual. A ritual indeed; how many times had they jumped into a new system? Leaping blindly from hyperlight, logically anticipating yet another solar system barren of life’s spark, yet hoping to chance upon intelligence, and fervently praying that whatever intelligence they found did not annihilate them.

  "Jump exit twenty seconds," the tactical officer reported.

  Three standard years had lapsed since the Legion’s last contact—at Hornblower, where Runacres had lost eight corvettes to the screaming Ulaggi horror. And two years before that at Oldfather, where a task group of Legion motherships had been destroyed, along with the entire Oldfather Three colony—over two thousand spacers and colonists murdered. But the worst collision had been the first, over three decades earlier—at Shaula, where the Asiatic Cooperation’s hyperlight fleet and four thousand souls had been annihilated, without a survivor to explain how or why.

  The humans kept trying; Runacres’s standing orders were to make contact with the malevolent aliens and to establish peaceful intercourse. Units of the Tellurian Legion Fleet had penetrated ever deeper into the Red Zone, slicing hard across the U-radial gradient. To no avail. Even with hyperlight translation capabilities, the galaxy was immense. Human exploration had spanned but a sliver of its encompassing expanse.

  "You’re looking a mite peaked, Admiral," Merriwether drawled.

  Runacres shifted his gaze to Merriwether’s image. Through the transparent perfection of her visor the Rubenesque ship captain’s varicose cheeks were cheerfully rosy. Crow’s-feet exploded with droll profusion from the corners of her eyes.

  Runacres grunted.

  Merriwether’s attention momentarily left the vid lens. "Weapons," she barked, her matronly visage turning hard as steel. "Battery Four optics are still low temp. What are you doing about it?"

  Runacres, not up on weapons tactical, was not privy to the reply.

  "Look smart, man!" Merriwether commanded.

  "What say your bones, Sarah?" Runacres asked.

 
"At the moment it’s my bladder that’s talking," Merriwether replied gruffly, her softening gaze returning to his.

  "Old age," Runacres muttered.

  "Speak for yourself, space-sailor," she huffed. "All due respect."

  Runacres harrumphed and attempted a smile. They silently stared into each other’s eyes.

  "Godspeed, Sarah," he said at last, his usual plea.

  "Smooth sailing, Admiral," she answered.

  "Jump exit ten seconds," the tactical officer reported.

  The ten-second advisory tone sounded. Runacres switched to flag tactical and reestablished vid-link with his ship captains, their helmeted visages forming a grim constellation. All mothership skippers electronically acknowledged fleet sequence; all ships were programmed into the battle plan.

  The five-second tone sounded. There was nothing more to do or say. Would it be the disappointing sterility of a dead system? Or a fight for their lives? Four seconds...three...two...one...

  A familiar nausea gripped Runacres. And then came the high-pitched vibration set against a deeper, wallowing oscillation. His peripheral vision swam with gray. He forced his eyes to remain open and focused on navigation parameters, fighting to quell the panic that always lurked just beyond reason. Outputs were nominal. It was just another jump. Just another jump.

  "We’re out," Commodore Wells announced. "All ships alpha-alpha. Impulse drives are engaged. Grid matrix is secure."

  The formation was stable. Ship’s status boards processed a flood of data. The first tangible reference to sublimate from the sensory chaos was the planetary icon for Pitcairn Two.

  "Launch communication buoys," Runacres commanded. "Commence full-spectrum broadcasts. Science, all sensors full active."

  "Broadcasting on all frequencies, all sensors active, Admiral," the duty officer replied.

  "Very well," Runacres muttered, studying the gathering signal data. Minutes ticked by. Would the Ulaggi heed their pleas?

  "Launch the screen," Runacres commanded.