Salvage Conquest Read online

  * * *

  Our little shuttle burned down the amber-streaked sky, and Chark settled it roughly onto a rock-strewn plain, jostling us all around pretty good in the process. I picked myself and my duffel bag up off the floor, and I started to inquire as to the nature of the atmosphere outside, but before I could get a word out, the hatch slid right open, exposing us all to this strange and alien world.

  “Hey,” I called out, and the others emitted similar expressions of surprise and warning at the same moment. What was Chark thinking, just opening right up? What if Eightball had acid for air—or no air at all?

  But Chark simply strolled on out of the cockpit area, moving right past us and on down the ramp, as carefree and nonchalant as you please. He wore black and brown frontier synthetics including heavy boots and a black high-brimmed cowboy hat, and he had one of our supply and equipment packs slung over his shoulder. A pistol of some sort sat holstered below his belt, but I couldn’t make out the design. He motioned impatiently for the rest of us to come along.

  “Don’t worry,” he said without bothering to look back. “It’s breathable. Not great-smelling, mind you, but breathable.”

  Reluctantly at first, but with growing confidence, the rest of us grabbed our equipment packs—each filled with a variety of tools, survival equipment, containers of water and energy bars—and we trotted along after him. I took a tentative whiff of the air as I walked, and instantly made a face; the others were doing something similar. The smell of rotten eggs rode on the weak breeze. Rotten eggs…sulfur... and something worse. Whatever it was, it was terrible.

  “How did you know that?” Inga Lans asked. In addition to being my team’s keeper of financial accounts, she was a pretty fair science specialist and technician. In other words, she was sharp, observant, and not inclined to suffer fools or miscreants. And she’d made it pretty clear along the way that she didn’t trust Chark at all. Not that the rest of us did, either. For her, though, it was as much a sense of looming monetary disappointment as it was personal: She was of the opinion this excursion wasn’t going to net us much of anything in terms of financial returns.

  “How did I know we can breathe the air?” Chark shrugged without looking back, as he took a few more steps across that rocky, barren, mournfully gray landscape, moving carefully around obstacles that varied in size from pebbles to boulders. A few stubborn plants sprouted up here and there, but they didn’t appear particularly healthy. “I just knew, that’s all,” he said.

  Inga scowled at this, clearly unsatisfied by it.

  “It wasn’t a safe thing to do, though,” Chin Yun, our resident xeno-archaeologist, noted. “What if you’d been wrong?”

  “I knew I wasn’t wrong.”

  I frowned at Chark. “Because you’ve been here before,” I stated.

  Now Chark halted in his tracks. The rest of us brought ourselves up short behind him. He turned slowly, and his dark eyes met mine. For a moment there was tension, hanging there in the air—tension tempered with a strange hint of impending violence. I readied myself to fight, though I wasn’t sure why. But then he just shrugged. “Sure. Once or twice. That’s how I knew about the treasure,” he said.

  “You told us this planet was unexplored,” Chin said with a frown. “Have you lied about anything else?”

  “It is unexplored,” Chark snapped. “I’ve been here—alone—a couple of times recently. Just enough to find out about the beacon, the air, and the treasure. But I couldn’t handle everything by myself.” He faced us all squarely, impatiently, hands on hips. “Now—if you all want to turn around and go back and spend another two weeks in the void, and all for nothing…” He gestured toward the shuttle. “Then say the word.”

  Nobody wanted that. As happened time and again on that journey, it came down to a choice of blindly going along with Chark or bailing on everything, losing all the time and money we’d invested already, and facing our creditors with empty bank accounts. So, again, we reluctantly went along with him. It wouldn’t be long before I would deeply regret that.

  Satisfied that we were all still on board, Chark nodded once and then gestured to his right. We all turned and looked. There, partially hidden by rocks at the base of a low cliff face, sat a rusted or corroded metal cylinder about half a meter in length and half that size in diameter. Red lights flashed in places along its surface.

  “The beacon,” Chark noted. “This is the place. We just have to find it.”

  “What exactly are we looking for, again?” Chin asked. “I think we probably need to know that before we go looking.”

  “I’m not totally positive,” Chark said. And before we could all object to that, he continued, “It’s supposedly some kind of alien cargo pod that got ejected here during a battle. The story is that it contains extremely valuable objects—though whether that means jewels, money, weapons, rare metals, or whatever, I don’t know. But I do know it will be worth our while.”

  “And you needed all of us for that?”

  “Well, it’s supposed to be pretty big,” he replied. “And also, I’d like to be able to open it up and see for sure what’s inside, figure out what’s valuable and what’s not, before going to all the trouble of loading it onto my ship and transporting it back into our part of the galaxy. I figure having a xenolinguist and a tech wouldn’t be a bad idea for helping with that. Not to mention the extra muscle.”

  Again, we didn’t entirely buy it, but we couldn’t find a specific objection, there on the ground and with the alleged treasure so close by.

  He motioned for Hardy Odamo, our muscle guy, to come over to him. “We’ll pair up. Odamo, you come with me. The place I’m planning to look, we may need to move a few big rocks out of the way.”

  Hardy pursed his lips and then shrugged. “Sure.”

  “Wait,” I said. “Split up? Is that wise?”

  “The sooner we find the thing, the sooner we’re out of here.”

  “Makes sense to me, Chief,” Hardy said to me.

  Chark gestured vaguely at us. “I’ll let the rest of you decide how you want to split up. But we need to do this quickly. Night comes fast on Eightball.”

  “Is that bad?” Inga asked.

  “Do you want to find out?” Chark answered.

  We all shrugged and agreed. I opened a case and handed out earpiece comlinks to my teammates, and everyone stuck them in one of their ears. We hadn’t been able to afford any extras, so Chark didn’t get one. I took a handheld sensor for myself and gave the other two units to Hardy and Inga. That done, I nodded, and without another word Chark set out across the rugged landscape, Hardy alongside him.

  I wasn’t thrilled with how this was going, and I didn’t love Chark basically assuming command of my team. But that lure of massive treasure once again outweighed my probably-selfish objections, so I motioned to our linguist. “Ragesh. With me.” I pointed in a direction different from the way Chark and Hardy had gone. “Inga—you and Chin go that way. We’ll go this way.”

  And so, the three pairs of us moved out in different directions, radiating outward from the shuttle at the center.

  The wind was picking up as the deep-red sun sank toward the horizon. That helped a bit with the rancid stench in the air, though not nearly enough. Together Ragesh and I trudged along, the ground beneath us dry and crumbly and dusted over with a layer of loose rocks big enough to cause a fall or break an ankle. The terrain angled upward in a slight, but increasing, incline; a line of rough hills lay some distance ahead in our path, barren save for the occasional patch of alien scrub here and there.

  I glanced down at the sensor unit in my left hand occasionally. If it was working properly—and that was always a gamble, given the quality of equipment my team and I usually got stuck with—it would keep track of our shuttle behind us while also scanning for interesting objects ahead of us. But after twenty or thirty minutes of hiking, it hadn’t pinged once.

  Before I could mention that fact to Ragesh, who had wandered a few dozen me
ters off to my right, the dark-haired linguist shouted over at me: “This can’t be the right direction, can it, Chief?”

  “I was just starting to wonder the same thing,” I called back to him.

  I stood there like an idiot, raising the sensor up over my head, waving it around, as if maybe another couple of feet of elevation could somehow make the difference between it sensing something and missing it. Ragesh started huffing his way back to me then, so I lowered the device and squinted at its surface, now covered—as we both were—in a thin layer of the planet’s seemingly ubiquitous gray dust.

  “Still nothing,” I said, frowning.

  “And nothing from the others?” he asked as he drew up next to me.

  “Not a word. Speaking of which…” I tapped the comlink in my left ear and sent, “Kanadee to team. Everyone okay? Report in.”

  There was a long moment of silence, broken only by the low hum of weird electromagnetic interference that had plagued our comms ever since we’d landed. Then, finally, Chark’s voice came over the link. I frowned; this struck me as odd, since I hadn’t given him one of our transceivers.

  “This is Randall Chark,” he said, his tone calm and casual. “Your Mr. Odamo has suffered a bit of an accident. He’s unconscious.”

  My frown deepened at this news. I glanced over at Ragesh as I asked, “What kind of accident?”

  “I wasn’t watching him when it happened,” Chark’s voice replied, crackling over the link. “He must have slipped, or tripped, over a rock and knocked himself out. He’s lying partway down a steep incline.”

  “Alright, we’re on our way,” I said. But then Inga’s voice cut in. “No need, Chief,” she said, addressing me. “We’re closer to them, based on Hardy’s transponder signal, and I have a med pack with me. You two keep searching. Chin and I will look after him.”

  I hesitated, uncertain. I felt a level of responsibility to the other members of my crew—particularly one who was injured. And, on top of that, something else was making me antsy. Something. I just wasn’t sure exactly what.

  “Mr. Chark did say nightfall comes soon,” Inga pointed out over the hum and crackle. “Let’s find what we came here to find so we can get going.”

  Reluctantly, I nodded to myself. “Roger that, Inga,” I sent back. “You two go see to Hardy. I’ll check in again soon.”

  I clicked off and glanced over at Ragesh, who was wiping dust and sweat off his face with a handkerchief. He’d followed the conversation and shrugged. “Works for me, Chief,” he said.

  And so we continued along the same path for another few minutes. But my feeling of antsiness only grew worse and worse, and soon I brought us both to a halt and clicked open the link again.

  “Inga,” I called over the crackling channel. “Come in, Inga. What’s your status? How’s Hardy?”

  Nothing. Just more static.

  “Inga?”

  Crackle and hiss.

  “Dammit,” I growled. Then I looked at Ragesh, who was already covered in dust again and appeared about as worn out as I felt. “Let’s go see what’s going on,” I told him.

  I knelt down on one knee, so I could focus on what I was doing, and carefully switched the sensor unit from general scan mode to tracking mode, asking it to locate the specific transponder Hardy was wearing. The tiny screen flickered but nothing appeared on it.

  “What the—?”

  Ragesh looked over my shoulder. “Hmm,” he said. “That’s weird. Maybe his battery died?”

  Growling low in my throat, I clicked over to Chin’s transponder frequency. Still nothing.

  “Two dead batteries at the same time?” I asked.

  Ragesh’s brows knitted together. “Yeah, probably not.”

  “Probably not,” I agreed. I clicked over to Inga’s frequency. And this time the sensor beeped.

  “There she is,” Ragesh said. Relief was evident in his voice, but I didn’t feel much, myself. Nevertheless, I nodded, getting the bearings on the location of Inga’s flashing dot. “Let’s go,” I said, and we hurried off as fast as the godawful terrain would let us.

  * * *

  Ragesh and I rounded one last outcropping of rock and came upon Chark standing at the edge of a very steep ravine—almost a cliff. He had his hands on his hips and was gazing down into it but turned and looked up as we approached. The horrible smell was worse here than anywhere else we’d gone, and thunder rumbled from far away.

  “Gentlemen,” Chark said in greeting. Then, likely noticing the looks of concern on our faces, he asked, “Whatever has you in such a state?”

  I was still carrying the handheld sensor device, and I waved it at him. “Chin and Hardy aren’t registering,” I snapped, looking all around. “Where are they? And where’s Inga?” I was puzzled. Her transponder signal indicated she was here, but unless she had turned invisible or hidden herself in a hole, I couldn’t spot her.

  “Ah,” Chark said, a half-smile flickering about his mouth. “Your friends. Yes. They’re over here.” He nodded toward the ravine.

  “What?”

  Frowning, I moved closer to the cliff, keeping a healthy distance from Chark, for whom my level of trust was diminishing by the moment. Ragesh came along behind me, being equally cautious. As I drew up to the edge and could see at least part of the way down the rocky, boulder-strewn slope, the sensor I was carrying started to beep again. Multiple indicators appeared now—Inga, Chin, Hardy. All three of my missing crew.

  “They all fell over?” Ragesh asked, and surely realized how ridiculous that sounded as soon as he uttered the words.

  But the transponders were definitely somewhere down there. I leaned forward, trying to see.

  “No,” Chark was saying. “Only their packs are down there.”

  I looked over at him, and for the first time, I saw that the terrain behind him was different. Instead of the harsh angle of the open cliff face, he stood in front of the oval-shaped opening to a cave or tunnel of some sort. The mouth was slightly lower than the level where we stood now, such that it was only visible when you came right up on it.

  Almost involuntarily, I moved a step toward it. The cave was hypnotic. It glowed—it pulsed—with a bright orange light that emanated from somewhere deep within its depths. The thunder I’d heard before sounded again, but this time I realized it was coming from down inside that cave, and it very likely wasn’t thunder at all. And the rancid smell that wafted from the opening was nearly overpowering.

  With great effort I tore my eyes away from the glowing entrance to the cave and tried to focus on Chark. I did not like where this was headed, but my thoughts had become slow, sluggish.

  “How did their packs get down there, then?” Ragesh demanded.

  “Like this,” Chark said. He drew his pistol and leveled it in our direction. Ragesh was closer to him, and the stun blast caught him full-on, while I only took a fraction of it.

  Ragesh went down like a sack of flour, gurgling incoherently. I stumbled backward, my right leg and right arm mostly numb, my left side all pins-and-needles, and my mind disoriented somewhat. As I sank to one knee and shook my head, barely keeping from passing out, I watched Chark approach Ragesh, kneel down beside him, and strip off his pack.

  “It doesn’t like this kind of thing,” he said then, holding up the backpack, though whether he was speaking to me or to Ragesh or to some other party, I had no idea. “Gives it indigestion, I suppose.”

  He tossed Ragesh’s pack over the cliff’s edge, where it tumbled down into the rocks, lost along with the others. Then he came back to my paralyzed teammate, stooped again and lifted him up on his shoulder. Just a few steps and they were at the oval mouth of the cave. Ragesh gurgled again, louder, frantically, but couldn’t move. With a heave, Chark hurled him over the edge and down, down. I never heard him hit bottom, but the thunderous roar intensified, and the orange light flared brighter for a few moments.

  “Looks like your friend there was pretty tasty,” he chuckled.

  H
orrified, barely able to process what I was seeing, I fought to regain my footing. Clearly there was no saving Ragesh or any of the others. Chark must have stunned each of them in turn and tossed them over, starting with poor Hardy. But why?

  My speech was slurred, at first, and I could barely move without falling onto my face. I needed to buy a little time to recover, to think of some kind of plan.

  “Why are you doing this, Chark?” I asked through numbed lips. “Did you kill all of them?”

  “Oh—I didn’t kill any of them,” the maniac across from me replied. He still waved the stun pistol around in his right hand, but I had at least succeeded in getting him talking instead of shooting. “I merely supplied them. The thing in the pit did the rest.”

  I staggered another step back from him. “What thing in the pit?”

  He grinned, gesturing at the open cave mouth. “Down there.” He chuckled. “You’ll see soon enough.” He raised the stunner.

  “Why?” I asked, still playing for time. The pins-and-needles were gone from my left side, and my right side was getting better, too.

  “Because the thing in the pit is hungry,” Chark said. “And because it promised me substantial rewards if I occasionally feed it.”

  I tried to move but succeeded only in stumbling back a step. “It talks?” I asked. “It talks to you?”

  “It did,” he said. “When I was here before. When I left the beacon. I came across it while doing a survey. It tried to convince me to step over the edge and down into that cave—into its lair. But I resisted just enough to make a suggestion.”

  “Which was?”

  Chark shrugged innocently. “I merely suggested if it allowed me to live, I could bring it back a lot bigger meals than what it would get just from little old me.” He grinned. “It thought that was a perfectly fine suggestion.” He spread his hands wide. “So here we all are.” He pursed his lips at that. “Well—here we all were. Now it’s just you and me. And in a minute, it will just be me, and I’ll be enjoying my reward.”

  I stumbled back another step. “And what reward is that?”