The mining colony took its toll. Star Command was rigorous, but the Guild that employed them was downright merciless. Exhausted, two guardsmen took their furlough on Exum, eighty-seven lightyears out in the R180 Pictoris system. Its sweeping hills were charming, but equally haunting in their silence. Both men had been accustomed to the soundlessness of space, but here they expected the usual rustle and chatter found on most habitable planets. Exum was sparsely populated, and only recently inducted into the Federation as another eye on the edge of colonized space.
From out of the quietude, their “scenters” blipped; neural emissions spiked, indicating the presence of sentient behavior. The guardsmen froze, thinking they were alone. Someone might have followed them, possibly a rival to the miner’s guild. But no human, or members of any non-terrestrial race, ambled into range that would have explained the cause for alarm, except a flock of birds that passed overhead, their wings giving their presence away in the cloudless sky. The guardsmen grew puzzled.
“’Nother bad upgrade,” one presumed with a subtle twist in his mouth. “We oughta have a word with the channel ops about those gateway glitches.” He frowned with notable discontent. The entire military department was under the aegis of the Ishimoro Guild, a union-cartel who oversaw the mining operations in federated territories where both troopers were currently assigned. They grumbled. Their retreat from the belts to a provisionally deemed pleasure world might have been cut short, a blow to their hope of some needed R&R. Star Command would owe them big time.
The other guardsman, more circumspect in his decorum, fixed his eyes on the target of interest, watching the birds slowly flutter toward the pass. “Could be. I’m not so sure, though. Running a diagnostic.” The system logs scrolled through his heads-up display. “Far as I can see, there’s no channel static, no temporal flux, and our BCI’s at optimum.” He flicked his eyes between what he saw in his natural vision and the data spewing from the brain-computer interface.
The first guardsman kept aloof. “No glitches then? I don’t get it. They’re just birds, Manus. I’m certain they’re all over Exum.”
Manus glowered. “Hear that, Braunsun? It’s the sound of an empty planet. Fauna’s scarce here, birds in particular.”
“So? You never know. Anything can pop out from under a rock.”
“Some soldier you turned out to be.” Manus remained locked on the target, his mind churning through rekindled memories he had long dismissed for matters of greater importance. “Know much history?”
The question took Braunsun off guard. He sidled his eyes toward Manus, hooding his brow. “Studied most of the Fed campaigns during the Periphery’s pioneering days, and everything that led up to it, including old Terra. Why’d you ask?”
“Gonna dig deep. Ever hear of th’ Great Snip?”
“The what? Can’t say that I have.”
“It officially goes by a different name. Does ‘T-Rift’ ring a bell?”
Braunsun grunted, shaking his head at the question.
“The Taxon Rift? The Schism? When our pets dumped us and escaped into the void?”
“Mm. Think I heard something about that. Sounds apocryphal. After so many wars, any little skirmish tends to get drowned into obscurity.”
“I wouldn’t call it ‘little.’” Manus pinched his thigh, feigning an irritation. “The old Zoic Wars. One of our most pivotal events. They don’t even teach it anymore. Musta been the empire’s biggest embarrassment, so they covered their hides and omitted that part of history. Woulda been fun to learn about. You’d figure we’d know something about our little hitchhikers all the way back from the mother world.”
Braunsun observed the flock tip to the side in unison, banking over a thermopile. “So you’re saying there’s a remote possibility the scent’s picking up anomalies we should be aware of—?”
“Wait. There!” Manus jutted forward. Another spike. The scenter captured an unnatural frequency modulation, a syntactical deviation too complex for a mating call. “Come on! Come on!” His forehead tensed in beads of sweat as he waited with bated rage.
“I see the reading. But I don’t see any repetitions.”
“Give it time. It should match our first detection. Hey, what’s this?”
The HUD gently tingled as if doused in a vat of fuzz, then cleared. The guardsmen stared for a couple of minutes without seeing another flux in the reading. In the meantime, the birds were practically over the hill.
“Coulda been noise seepage. Happens with cosmic ray damage.”
“Pipe down!” Manus grated, watching the birds shrink into the great blue dome. To him, their retreat paralleled the story of the Schism, and the animals’ disappearance far beyond the Periphery and into unknown galactic corridors. But he was losing himself in daydreams. He took another sweep before they finally vanished over the pass. He scowled. Once again, the scents were silent.
“No changes on my end,” Braunsen observed.
“Nor here.” The HUD flashed through a list of old-world avians. “Just a bunch of black birds, if that’s what they call ‘em.”
“Any other signal?”
Manus reviewed the stochastic fingerprints. Nothing indicated behavioral prediction, probability of deviation or individuation, neural signal complexity spikes, or self-referential patterns revealing enhanced consciousness. “None.”
“Weird. Outer surveillance picked up nothing in orbit except EM oscillations. No illegal entries on Exum, and nothing inside R-Pic aside from stationed personnel.”
“I’ll be. Then it musta been a glitch. At least I hope that was the case.”
“Heh. Gotta take it up with Ishimoro. They’re the purse string, and now they’re rattling us for a bigger cut.”
“Where there’s war, there’s risk, so protection’s gonna cost. The Guild doesn’t potter ‘round, which is why I can’t stand ‘em. Nor can anybody in Star Command.”
“But I guess it pays. The hell with it,” Braunsun concluded in his usual nonchalance. “Mission aborted. False alarm. Now, getting back to our discussion, I know a few hostels over in the port.” He jabbed a thumb behind his shoulder and furtively smirked. “A few personal hook-ups, too.”
Manus barely paid attention. He finally tore his gaze from the horizon and rejoined his comrade, but with a firm purse in his lips, unable to shake the feeling they weren’t alone, that another potential enemy lurked in the shadows, watching, planning. Shifting his attention, he pulled out a flask of hard ale and swilled, rubbed his mouth, and passed the rest to an eager Braunsun.
They strutted down the path, heading toward the port.
The gusts were brisk, and the slipstreams eased their flight. The rangers beat their wings over the sylvan buttes jutting from the landscape like the shorn burls of petrified trees. But in spite of the dazzling scenery, tension abounded.
“Another sneeze like that, Lorn, and you coulda blown our cover!” One said icily, slightly tilting his head and sidling his eyes.
“Sorry, Fen,” came the response. “Not used to the local pollen.” He snuffed. “Boy, this stuff really gets in your nares.”
“You see that?” a third flustered, his physical expressions broader and more phrenetic than the others. “We were right in their sites!”
“Expect it, Carlyx,” replied another, breaking into the lilt of a savvy advertiser and bobbed his head to the beat of each line. “But hey, we cancelled out their sweep, thanks to our handy-dandy sniffer-snuffer, overmatchin’ the guile of the peskiest saps! The most they’ll see is a couple o’ swingers prettying up the sky.”
“I hope you’re right, Addy. They reckon we’re up here scoutin’ around and BLAM!” Carlyx splayed out his appendages, nearly scuffing another bird. “We’re blasted into a cloud o’ feathers.”
“Watch it! Will ya?” One bird chastised.
“Sorry, Renz.”
“Don’t think there’d be any feathers left,” Fen added, rivaling the other’s sarcasm, his eyes half-lidded. “We’d just be atoms scattered in the winds, merging with the atmosphere.”
“You said it,” Carlyx affirmed. “And let’s face it. Exum’s at the tip of human settlement, and it’s pointin’ at Doradus. Draw a line far enough yonder an’ you’ll get a B-line to Eden Spring!”
“Oh, quit flappin’ that beak of yours!” Addy retorted. “It ain’t that simple gettin’ back home.”
“Addy, I’m gonna docket that ol’ beak o’ yers inside a mouth of a particle rifle if ya haul me out on the carpet like that again! You know them space marines were ont’ us. I’ll tell ya. Spacin’ and spyin’s gettin’ harder by the day.”
The wind picked up. They held their wings and soared, veering slightly leftward and keeping afloat with the current. So far, to their solace, no beams of energy split the air.
“Maybe team-falcon will lend us a feather,” Lorn added, then pondered a little more deeply. “Then again, team-owl has a wing up on us when it comes to cloak and dagger. Maybe we could—awe, stuff it.” He started flapping his wings once out of the swell.
“Carlyx, just relax,” the burlier of the flock cut in, defusing the tension. “I compiled our data and relayed it back to the hub. With all our bickering, I’d say mission accomplished…pro tem, of course.”
“Good work, Big Charot,” Fen said, “While those two clowns get their fix in Suwanna’s Lagoon, we’ll be adding a lit-tle more wild life to an otherwise barren world, if you catch my drift. Just better be sure those sniffer-snuffers are working overtime!”
Please visit my other sites:
Robert Garron on X
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.