The Complete Aliens Omnibus, Volume 6 Read online

  Her enthusiasm and confidence infected him. The creatures inside, the contraband tissues inside, they were all dead. Some rich nose-picker probably fancied to hang them on his wall and pretend he hunted them. So what? Who would it hurt?

  And he knew… the manipulation he’d done on the codes and locks and overrides, the hiding of combinations inside other combinations, the blurring of identities between these containers… what he had done, nobody would ever know. In a gross violation of every regulation ever invented, two of the containers had the same identification protocol. At first, the idea had just been a challenge. Rockie had dared him to do it. She pretended she didn’t believe he could, and he hadn’t been able to sleep until he did it. He had to prove to Rockie that he was worthy of this marriage. How else could a man like him hold a woman like her?

  The container panel and the bosun’s box abruptly began to flash a bright chartreuse clearance code—identical numerals, identical letter codes. Done! It worked!

  He dropped sideways against the container, pressing his shoulder to its cool side, the locking panel flashing softly on his face. You did it, did it, did it…

  His fingers clenched on the bosun’s box, now vibrating softly as it reconnected with the ship’s mainframe, pretending it had nothing to report. In the glow of Rockie’s gaze, he swallowed a couple of times, and found his voice.

  “It is just once.”

  2

  With its dark passages, looming escarpments of stacked containers, and dim pathways lit only by energy-efficient blood-red lamps, the belly of a transport ship was an unsettling place, almost nightmarish. The pathways were nothing more than metal bridges, hooded by the bridges overhead, each one completely movable, so there was access to the containers, no matter how high they were stacked. Preparing for an autoload, this cave-world was as bright as it would ever get—generally the containers reposed in near-darkness, because so much was automatic and machines didn’t need eyes.

  Despite the difficulty in seeing very deep into the hold, Nicholas Alley enjoyed watching the gantry cranes, rotating winches, and grav-floaters move house-sized containers along the centerline bulkhead of the self-trimming holds, using drums and mooring cleats, chafe gear, self-adjusting winches, drum ratchets, lock-downs, and tricks of gravity efficient only in space. Because of the gravity tricks used in heavy-load transfer, and the constant pressurization and depressurization of the hold as the automatic shifting went on, the crew was able to take most of this time off. No humans were allowed into the hold during auto-transfer, so the system was free to change pressure, increase it to crushing strength, or drop to the vacuum of space as needed to move and stack the giant containers as if they were children’s building blocks. Only Jonsy and a couple of bosun’s mates were at work in their various cockpits, overseeing the transfer. The two ships would automatically coordinate with each other, making sure that the bulk cargo was exchanged in a way that maintained balance so the ship could hold her course without straining against her own mass. Imbalance caused thruster stress and wasted energy. When balance was no longer possible, when more cargo needed to be moved off one ship than was compensated for on the other, the ships would begin a process of artificial compensation with computerized tricks of imaginary ballast.

  “Everybody ready?” Alley flopped into the comfortable chair that had been saved for him. Around him, his crewmen were chipper and pleased with themselves, having survived their close shave this morning. Usually, those things happened only in safety drills, and today had been the payoff for drilling.

  The crew on a ship like this was a total of twenty, but ten of those attended to the forty passengers on the upper decks of the ship. Even in space, people liked the idea of “upper” and “lower,” though those concepts didn’t really apply, and some of the “upper” decks were technically lower than the “lower” decks. Still, the VIPs were given the idea they weren’t riding in steerage, even though space was at a premium and the cabins were small. Elegant, but small. The stewards and other attendants ran that part of the ship like a hotel, and seldom did the two crews mesh.

  The crew that tended the ship, those Alley felt were the real crew, those who didn’t rotate off every season, had grown into a family typical of the ancient bond between shipmates. They were more than just people who worked together, more than just people who traveled together. They were people who had to work in close quarters, under situations of dullness and duress. Even if they hated each other, they had to work as if they didn’t, and they had to trust each other with their lives. After all, you had to sleep some time, and that meant somebody else was driving.

  The normal ebbs and tides that happen between people, especially those living in tight quarters, were suspended today for the sake of enjoying the autoload and having a sort of in-house picnic. This was official time off, not just off-watch, and tensions of all sorts were eased for now. There were only a handful of them, counting Alley and Clyde as the two commanding officers. The others each had his own specific duty and skills. There was some crossover, of course, but spaces were limited and each person was of particular value for the sake of his or her own job. Three of the crew were bosun’s mates, all stationed in critical positions in cockpits to oversee the load. They all reported to Jonsy, who was in his cockpit right now, and probably Roxanne was with him. Those two were a little weird. Clingy.

  The ship’s cook, Keith Kavanaugh, was doing his chef imitation, wearing a big white piece of paper rolled into a tube as a hat, handing out trays of bread glazed with a red-and-white substance.

  “What’s this?” Alley asked.

  “Sourdough rolls drizzled with peppermint,” the big bearded man said. In another life, with more white than gray hair, he could’ve been Santa Claus.

  “Ah… more cuisine from the dark side,” Colleen said. She was their coxun, a small-engine specialist who ran and maintained the pumps, motors, drivers, and a hundred winches, windlasses, gantry motors, and all the motive power that pushed things other than the ship itself. It was a big job on a ship that moved heavy loads internally. In preparation for this autoload transfer, she had been on the job twenty hours a day for the past three days. This was her reward—to sit and watch.

  Keith gave her a double helping of the drizzled rolls. “I consider this a signature dish.”

  Dave LaMay, a platinum-blond surfer-type, the ship’s second mate and extra-vehicular specialist, intercepted the second roll Keith was handing to Colleen. “I thought the salad with chocolate chips was your signature dish. You lied to me, didn’t you?”

  “That was last week.”

  “Okay, kiddies,” Alley continued, touring the happy faces around him, “today we’re moving the equivalent of forty-seven working farms, ranches, and zoos, as well as fundamentals for sixteen wildlife sanctuaries, campgrounds, and controlled natural habitats. Entire food chains from algae on up. Clyde, let’s hear that manifest.”

  “Starting with the ones closest to us, the red containers with the gold ‘XG’ have ten thousand Merino sheep and a couple thousand Highland cattle and Texas longhorns, right along with sixty border collies.”

  Two by two, enormous boxes, beautiful in their way, floated by on gantry cranes and rotating cranes, up ramps and down the centerline travel system as Clyde gave the crew the tour and their imaginations did the rest of the work.

  “There goes a pack of macaque monkeys, some specially bred alligator/crocodile hybrids, ninety or so various pit vipers, tree snakes, mambas, and the mice and moles to feed them, some cobras to eat the other snakes… And that one with the orange markings, it’s carrying three million micropods.”

  “Three million?” Dave “Gunny” Gunn, sitting between Voola and Clyde, was the ship’s engineer, responsible for the smooth running of the main engines and all the thrusters that maneuvered the Virginia, both in space and in close quarters. He had a boyish face under a cap of auburn hair, and a welcoming personality that they all appreciated. He had sweated through the bumpy rafting m
aneuver this morning and had been only nominally relieved to find out that none of it had been because of a mechanical fall-off. “Three million of what?” he persisted.

  “These would be… silkworms.”

  “Silkworms! They’re serious out on Zone Emerald, aren’t they?”

  “Oh, they’re serious,” Alley assured. “They’re planning to manage all this wildlife on separate ranches, and gradually build an ecosystem. They’ve been transplanting bugs, plants, and birds for about five years now, and they’re moving on to larger animals.”

  “How can they do that?” asked Voola Vendini, a comedic name for a no-nonsense woman. As the ship’s nurse, she was responsible for the crew’s general health, but was, even more crucially, the ship’s interior maintenance chief, the one responsible for making sure the ship’s transport decks were clean, orderly, well-appointed, and even, in some places, sterile. To her, cleanliness was both science and religion. Her large-boned body and the barrel of extra pounds she carried belied the fact that she could clean the whole ship in half a day and was untiring in her fastidiousness. Every ship in the merchant fleet wanted her, and Virginia was lucky to have her. She was everyone’s mother—or at least their silver-haired auntie from the old country. Almost never completely at rest, she sat here now mending a fabric-sheathed bone splint with a micro-stapler.

  “Whole-planet ecosystem is too complik-kated,” she insisted, “to put on some Noah’s Ark. It won’t not work.”

  “That’s right,” Colleen confirmed. “Two at a time, and all… two butterflies, two mealybugs, two congressmen…”

  Dave LaMay leaned toward her, tucked his chin, and gave her a look of intense inquiry. “Voola… you’re Dutch.”

  “I am not Dutch,” Voola declared without looking at him. “I am an American.”

  “She’s Eastern-European,” LaMay injected. “It’s got to be Romania.”

  “Turkey,” Clyde contributed.

  “Or,” Captain Alley invited, “maybe it’s none of anybody’s business. Just ignore them, Voola. You have the captain’s permission to spit on them if necessary.”

  “I will no spit. I am an American. Dat’s all dere is toot.”

  “She’s got a point about the animals,” Colleen caught up the previous conversation. “They’ll fiddle till they get some kind of hybrid that’ll destroy everything. Like the hooved imports in Australia that finally had to be hunted out before they wrecked everything.”

  “Those weren’t hybrids,” Clyde said. “Those were imports.”

  “Still. L’Dave, hand me some more of those yum-yums.”

  “Yum-yums on approach… Incoming!”

  “Zone Emerald’s a haven of scientists and geniuses,” Alley explained. “The best brains Earth could produce. They’ve got naturalists, animal husbandry guys, whatever they need. It’s a long-term plan. Ranching and farming and hunting, controlled natural preserves… and they’re ready to see what evolution does on its own once they turn it loose. They’ll end up with whole new species in a hundred years, like the Galápagos Islands or Australia.”

  “Sounds like playing God to me,” Dave said.

  Gunny snorted, “So what?”

  At the same time, Clyde elaborated, “Mankind’s been playing God since we learned to control fire.”

  “Somebody always says that!” Alley protested. “Every time technology makes a leap forward, somebody says, ‘Oh, no, we’re playing God! Eeee!’ They keep oh-noing until they need their particular disease cured, then it’s a ‘modern miracle.’ People always say that. It’s a ‘modern miracle’ if it comes out good, but it’s ‘playing God’ when they don’t know how it’s going to turn out.”

  Dave put his chin up vauntingly and shook his blond hair from his eyes. “Captain, are you calling me a hypocrite?”

  “Are you being hypocritical?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll certainly check my files and report back to you.”

  “We can spit you out an exhaust lock and not notice.”

  “I’m an EV specialist. I can live in space. I have a snorkel.”

  “Hey, here come the elephants,” Clyde interrupted. He pointed at four white containers moving on collapsible boom davits, swinging elegantly together, emblazoned with giant green pine trees and the name of their parent shipping company, “FOREST CARTAGE.” “Twenty-nine African elephants. Probably a whole family.”

  “Right behind them are the four hundred thoroughbred horses, some Arabians, Fresians, and… Clydesdales. Wow, Clydesdales… they’re big, aren’t they?”

  Alley nodded and swallowed a sip of punch. “There’s a Scottish nobleman who’s moved his entire estate there from the Borders, rock by rock, house and all, and he’s establishing his own mini-Scotland.”

  “No kidding.”

  “I’ve met him a couple of times. He’s one of the main sponsors of the cultural and strategic operations on the ship we’re going to meet up with.”

  “The Umiak.”

  “Such beautiful name for ship,” Voola said, wistfully pausing in her work. “Umiak.”

  Alley smiled. “He made the connection with the travel agency on Earth that’s supporting a whole scholarship program for teenagers to gain spacefaring skills.”

  “Is he a former spacefarer?” Colleen asked.

  “Nope. Just a former dreamer. Now he makes other people’s dreams come true. I love rich people.”

  Keith made a face. “You love rich people?”

  “Sure! Only a wealthy and productive society can explore and expand. I love expansion! Besides, when’s the last time you were employed by a poor man?”

  The cook paused and stood to his full height. “That’s true… I never thought about that! Now we know why you’re the captain.”

  “Be proud. Virginia is going to be known as the ship that helped supply a new Atlantis, a dream colony. Well, not a colony for long—they’re working on a new constitution, with the goal of becoming an independent republic. Limited government, maximum freedom, property rights, individual rights, and the only things in herds will be the animals. They’re doing it on January seventh, the colony’s seventy-sixth year. Zero one, zero seven, year seventy-six. It honors the year 1776 on Earth.”

  “How do they get seventy-six years?” Gunny asked. “That colony’s been there for almost two centuries.”

  “The first century was eaten up just with terraforming. This coming year marks the seventy-sixth year of their colonial charter.”

  “That’s nice. I like that.”

  “Imagine this,” Clyde went on. “We, fellow shipmates, are carrying no less than five woolly mammoths. Real woolly mammoths from the Ice Age. Check that!”

  “I guess they’re partially cloned and partially bred, using African elephants,” Alley said.

  “What are they going to do with mammoths and all these other big animals?”

  “Beats me. Maybe use them for big game hunting or who knows what.”

  “Oh, brilliant,” LaMay commented. “Bring back prehistoric animals so they can be hunted to extinction again?”

  Everybody laughed.

  “Either way, they’re dead,” Colleen said.

  Alley sat forward. “Hey! Are these in the same container as our elephants?”

  “No,” Clyde said, “but the same shipper.”

  “I’ll bet we’ve got mammoths and their mommies! Sure, that makes sense! How about us—sitting here on the cusp of scientific advancement, bringing the Ice Age to the Galactic Age!”

  As the crew applauded merrily, Colleen asked, “So what’s the capital of Assyria? Because we’re all dying to know.”

  “Chicago,” La May said.

  “Nineveh,” Volla offered.

  “The correct answer,” Alley told them, “is ‘I don’t know,’ followed by a scream.”

  Laughter rolled through the observation deck as the crew kicked back in their lounges and appreciated themselves and the infectious humor of their captain. But even humor and contentme
nt didn’t cloud his alertness. He sat up, peering at one of the monitors. “What’s that?”

  Clyde tilted sideways. “Got a blip?”

  “One of the test containers. Why’s the loading code amber instead of green?”

  “Might be a system infection. I’ve seen that before.”

  “It’s not an alert about clearance?”

  Dave leaned forward to look. “That would show up in red or orange.”

  “Maybe you’d better have a look,” Alley said to Clyde. “Do it quick, so we can get cracking.”

  “Having a look, aye.”

  Clyde got up, briskly stepped through the tangle of his shipmates’ legs, and disappeared into the companionway.

  * * *

  “This is so dangerous… I should ring the bell on myself right now before I jump out the airlock and put myself out of my misery. The captain could lose his license… if this gets out, we’re just dead—just dead—”

  No longer in the main starboard hold, Jonsy and his wife were now up in the safety of the bosun’s cockpit, a protected bubble where the loading master could oversee operations. Now they looked down at the rows upon rows of stacked spaceworthy containers, each of which would soon be dancing on cranes, one after the other. Only the three test containers, down there to the left, would be left in repose, having already been transferred. Jonsy kept glancing at that one container, the hot potato in his pocket, as if he expected it to suddenly come to life.

  Rockie closed her hand on his arm and pinched off his tirade. “What do you care about the captain? He’s nothing to us.”

  “Everybody likes him,” Jonsy sputtered. “Everybody wants him for a friend. That dope Colleen and Gunny and Dave, even my stevedores. They want to listen to him more than to me. That’s not the chain of command. They’re supposed to listen to me first. How does a captain do that? All my other captains, they were bastards. We didn’t want to be around them so much. How does he act so friendly and stay a captain? How does he keep discipline?”