"Assholes," Festina muttered. We were all sitting in the bridge’s Visitors’ Gallery, watching as Jacaranda slowly approached the Fasskister habitat.
"What’s wrong?" I asked.
"Do you know why they left some stripes clear… even though they could collect more power if they covered the whole damned surface?"
"No," I said.
"They did it so you’d know the orbital wasn’t spinning," she told me. "Anyone flying up can see the stripes are holding steady… so the Fasskisters can’t be producing gravity with good old centrifugal force."
"They don’t have gravity in there?"
"They have it; they just use some flashy fancy artificial field that guzzles energy twenty-four hours a day. This close to the sun, they have solar power to spare… but it’s still waste for the sake of waste."
"Admiral," Prope said, turning around in her command chair, "they aren’t answering our requests to dock."
"Can we dock anyway?" Festina asked.
"Affirmative.," Prope answered, "but they probably won’t like it. Docking without permission can be interpreted as intent to commit piracy."
Festina made a face. "Send them a message in English, Fasskister and Mandasar. Say we’re worried about their status because they’ve gone incommunicado. If we don’t get a reply in five minutes, we’ll assume they’re in trouble and come to give aid."
"Begging the admiral’s pardon," Prope said, without an ounce of begging in her voice, "but that’s a standard tactic for pirates too. Even if the target is broadcasting like mad, the pirate ship says, ‘We can’t hear anything,’ and keeps coming in. Naive victims think their radios are broken and let the pirate come aboard. More experienced sailors think they’re under attack and take defensive action."
"What kind of defensive action?"
Prope shrugged. "The Fasskisters believe they can’t leave this system because the League considers them non-sentient. Under such conditions, they may have decided they have nothing to lose by arming themselves with lethal weapons. Especially with warring Mandasars nearby. The Fasskisters could legitimately argue they were afraid of being attacked."
Festina drummed her fingers on the arm of her chair. After a few seconds, she said, "Send the message and go in anyway. Take any precautions you think necessary. I’ll assume responsibility."
"Aye-aye, Admiral," Prope said. She tried to make her voice sound icy — full of misgivings… but if I knew Prope, she’d lived her whole life hoping to luck into an honest-to-God space battle.
We docked without incident — sliding up to a hatch on the orbital’s dark side (the half that wasn’t facing the sun), and dropping our Sperm-field so we could stretch out a docking tube. Prope hated cutting the field; star captains feel kind of naked when they can’t go FTL to get away from trouble. (It must have mortified her when the black ship had ripped away Jacaranda’s, field back at Starbase Iris — like getting her clothes torn off in public.) Prope kept telling Festina, over and over, "One hour on the orbital… not a second more, if you expect us to reestablish the tail and get back to Troyen by 23:46:22."
I could tell Festina wasn’t too happy with the time limit; but considering the circumstances, she couldn’t argue. One hour would have to do.
Festina declared our jaunt to the orbital would be Explorers only. The Mandasars grumped, but the admiral held firm — with all the bad feeling between Mandasars and Fasskisters, it wouldn’t help to take the hive along.
Kaisho wanted to go too. "Why?" Festina asked.
"You’ll see," Kaisho told her.
"Come on, Kaish," Festina said, "cut the inscrutable-alien crap. Either give me a straight answer or stay on Jacaranda."
"Sorry," Kaisho replied, "but the Balrog loves watching lesser beings get smacked in the face with surprises. Just between you and me, the damned moss really gets off on human astonishment."
"Shit," Festina growled. "Just once I’d like to meet an alien who enjoyed giving clear explanations of what the fuck is going on."
We didn’t wear tightsuits this trip; apparently Fasskisters found the suits grossly offensive, though they never said why. With any group of aliens, there’s always some area where they just mutter, "Can’t you see it’s indecent?" and refuse to go into details. Anyway, the dock hatch reported good air on the orbital’s interior, and we didn’t have time to get dressed up. There could still be nasty germs wafting about… but if the Fasskisters ever wanted to regain their claim to sentience, they’d make sure we weren’t exposed to anything that could hurt us.
"All right," Festina said, as we hovered weightless in front of the dock’s airlock. "In we go."
She pressed the button to open the door. One by one, we passed over the threshold; and immediately gravity clicked in, twisting around so that the outside of the cylinder was down. If I’d been taken by surprise, I might have fallen right back out into the docking tube… but lucky for me, Festina went first and I could watch how she grabbed the support bars just inside the door.
I got in without too much trouble, followed by Tobit and Bade. All three of the others tapped their throats as soon as they were inside, activating the radio transceivers implanted in their necks. It made me feel a bit bad, to be an Explorer without a throat implant… but then, I wasn’t a real Explorer, was I? Meanwhile, they did the usual, "Testing, testing," and Lieutenant Harque back on Jacaranda answered, "Receiving loud and clear." Marque’s voice came in on receivers we’d clipped to our belts. The receivers could also transmit if you pushed the right button, but there was no need for that if you had a throat implant.
Festina worked the airlock while the rest of us stood back trying not to look nervous. The far door of the lock had a tiny peekaboo screen that wasn’t working — either the Fasskisters had deliberately blinded the cameras, or the system had broken down sometime in the past twenty years and nobody bothered to fix it. From my days on the moonbase, I knew the Fasskisters only got supply ships once every three years… so maybe they didn’t care a whole lot if the dock-area cameras went out.
"Are we set?" Festina asked, just before she pushed the button to open the inner door.
Dade tried to draw his stunner, but Tobit slapped the boy’s wrist. It was pretty unfriendly to be carrying guns at all; having them drawn and ready was going too far.
The door whisked open. A second later, the smell of buttered toast filled my nostrils. In front of us, a ramp led up at an easy slope; and the ramp was covered with glowing red moss.
31
GETTING TO KNOW THE FASSKISTERS
"Kaisho!" Festina roared.
Laughter came over our receivers. "A problem, Festina?"
"You knew about this!"
"Of course."
"And you didn’t tell us."
"As I said," Kaisho answered, "the Balrog adores surprises. The nice thing about precognition is knowing when someone else will step on a banana peel."
"We’re not going to step on anything," Festina growled. The four of us stared at the ramp again. It was completely crammed with moss, at least ankle deep, starting a few paces beyond the airlock door. No way we could go forward without getting it all over our boots, unless we could crawl across the walls like bugs.
Kaisho spoke again from our receivers. "If you like, I can ferry you over in my hoverchair."
"No," Festina told her. "I don’t want you anywhere near us. You’re hard to trust at the best of times, and recently you’ve been a real pain in the ass."