Immediately, his audio channel erupted into an incomprehensible mass of noise. Voices, music, klaxons, static—all of it crashing senselessly together at a deafening volume. Tagen switched off the audio feed at once, and then leaned back in his chair and wondered just how the humans were transmitting at all.
The Far-Reacher’s records, which he had been reading as he listened to his N’Glish language discs, had been very clear on the point that humans were in their technological infancy. At the time of the quarantine, only a few of their hundreds of civilizations had even mastered the process of alloyed metals. To broadcast sound into space required transistors and electricity at the very least.
Tagen’s sense of unease only grew when his ship brought him close enough to see the garden of debris in orbit around the human homeworld. Logic tried to tell him these were the leavings of smugglers, but he could see nothing that looked to be of Jotan make. The So-Quaal, then. He was less familiar with their designs and he knew that human slaves had a way of contributing to the So-Quaal’s endless quest for what they called ‘research’.
Perhaps the smugglers who preyed on this planet were responsible for the radio noise as well. Some sort of monitoring system, perhaps. It had to be so. No one went from laboring to forge alloyed metals to launching satellites in five hundred years. All the same, Tagen found himself deeply unsettled and he did a thing any other Jotan might find unthinkable: He scanned for interceptors.
There were laser defense arrays and nuclear reactors in low orbit all around the planet, but none of them were scanning for him or even aimed outward. Incredible as it seemed, the weapons appeared to be solely for Earth’s own destruction, leading Tagen to conclude that the smugglers who had placed them there intended at some point to wipe out the supply from which they drew their captives. But the scan had turned up something even more surprising to Tagen’s way of thinking. Faintly traced beneath the thin corona of Earth’s upper atmosphere, his instruments had detected an ionic disturbance in a straight line. It was scarcely measurable, but it was there, and any ion trail at all had to be a recent one.
Tagen considered the matter, idly capturing a few images of the planet spinning below him (particularly of the synthetic glitter of what seemed to be very large cities in several places), and making records of some of the noise blasting across his audio channel. Let the Human Studies division sort it all out later. He only hoped it would be enough of a gesture to satisfy vey Venekus and his colleagues. The ion trail was his main concern now; he had no intention of turning this mission into a science-day field trip.
It could have been caused by a meteor, he knew, or be any falling chunk of rubble that decayed out of the orbiting mass of like wreckage, but (and he might as well admit the possibility), it could have been left in the wake of a stolen prison transport vessel.
Until now, Tagen had not really considered the possibility of E’Var’s survival. The prison ship had been a tremendously old one, and the Gates themselves were showing the evidence of time. Mid-Gate failures were becoming more common, much as the council might like to deny it. It was far easier to believe that E’Var had met with his well-deserved death in one fiery instant than to face the unpleasant prospect that a Fleet officer had, for whatever reason, aided him in his escape.
Looking at the dimly-etched ionic distortion, Tagen grimly realized that he was going to have to investigate Earth as though E’Var were really on it. Out of the hundreds of thousands of human life-forms walking around on Earth, Tagen was going to have to try and find one Jotan. On foot.
Damn it all, why had he ever joined the Fleet?
Oh yes. Because his father told him to. Well, as long as that was settled.
Tagen powered down for entry, tracking the faint smear of disrupted particles down through the layer of aurora and ozone, until it vanished under the sudden blast of Earth’s climate. He continued along the direction the trail had indicated, aiming for the surface and making his landing quick. It was broad daylight on this side of Earth, and even though the planet was not well-populated, that did not give him an open ticket to attract attention.
There was a vast forest below him, which in itself was significant. Most of Earth was covered with an eerie, blue ocean. That the ion trail seemed to lead to land was a coincidence that smacked heavily of deliberate steering. The forest was good cover for a predator like E’Var, too. It was spotted here and there with small outcroppings of human habitation, but not so much that one couldn’t travel undetected.
On foot, Tagen reminded himself sourly.
He found an empty place to touch down and then only sat there with the shift-shield on, invisible to the physical eye. He had never been alone in the field before and he hated the idea of leaving a Jotan vessel on an alien planet while he marched around the woods looking for a fugitive. From a purely mechanical standpoint, he knew it could be done. The ship’s power cells could support the prime computer systems and the shift-shield for up to five years, undisturbed. Provided his locator didn’t fail, or that he remembered where he parked if it did, Tagen had plenty of time in which to execute his investigation. There was nothing he could do but trust that no humans would come along and bump into it before he returned.
Hell, and that raised another problem. If E’Var was here, and if Tagen did take him into custody, how exactly was he supposed to find E’Var’s stolen ship and tow it back through the Gate to Jota? He couldn’t just leave the fool thing on Earth, if for no other reason than because it was Fleet property and they’d want it back. And there was no way Tagen’s star cruiser could drag a second ship up through Earth’s gravitational pull, even assuming that E’Var were amiable enough to simply tell him where it was. What did that leave? Well, he could blow it up. That would go over well back at Fleet Headquarters.
Ah, the glamorous life of a sek’ta. Just knowing that any decision he made would be the wrong one and everyone back home expected him to die anyway made his whole life worthwhile. He didn’t even need the extra sixty crona increase in pay. His work was its own reward.
Tagen strapped his pack to his waist, holstered his stunner and his plasma gun, took one last look around the ship’s interior, and then stepped out the airlock and onto an alien world.
He stopped right there, his hand still on the locking panel, and drew in a slow breath as though he could physically taste the temperature.
A cool planet, the Far-Reacher’s notes had said. Widely-divergent eco-systems, but generally quite cool.
Without moving from the airlock, Tagen pulled his pack off and looked closely at the contents. A full medical pack, vey Venekus had promised, and thank the gods, he had delivered. There were eighteen suppressants in a pouch strapped right to the lid of the pack. Eighteen. Surely the same overcompensation that had inspired the scientist to pack five doses of a sedative Tagen should not, in all likelihood, need to use. But it was nice to see it all the same. Tagen chewed one and then took a swallow from his canteen to wash the bitter taste from his mouth.
He hit the lock at last, and shut the ship away from any curious eyes. The sound of the door locking into place was the last indelible cue. He was on duty. It was time to represent.
A plan. That was what the name of Pahnee was famed for, after all, meticulous planning. And, gods knew, if Tagen could devise a plan to enable him to locate E’Var somewhere on all this Earth, he would earn a little of that reputation instead of borrowing it from his father. So. A plan.