The hail went out on the open channel, flat and procedural, like a thousand before it.
“West L6F, control station for 54-6UE2, this is the Faul Fender. Requesting descent to your adjacent open sector. TG-6.6, vector 0.65, grid 732 by 1432.”
The reply came thinned by distance. “Understood, Faul Fender. Conditions look acceptable. Your reported information appears to have been filed with us by your organization. You are cleared.”
Trascott leaned toward the console with the easy warmth of a man who had never once been told no. “Ah, thank you. I’m grateful for that lovely, courteous little speech of yours.”
Silence on the other end. When the controller spoke again, something had come loose in his voice. “Ah. Yes. Well. We wish you a pleasant visit.”
“Much obliged, officer.”
The channel dissolved into static.
Beyond the viewport the planet turned. Green country ran across it for hundreds of kilometres, and threaded through the canopy stood structures that refused to resolve into anything. Not settlements. Not ruins, exactly. Shapes the eye kept sliding off. Between the green lay patches where nothing grew at all, dark and flat and wrong in a way the light could not explain.
The station hung in orbit, the furthest the Faul Fender was permitted to go. From here it would have to be a shuttle.
The shield was the reason. A skin of blue energy wrapped the planet, seamless, anchored to the station itself, with exactly one way through it in either direction.
Soldiers waited for them at the dock. Not a token guard. A posting.
“We’re entering the classy establishments now, ladies,” Trascott announced. “Prepare yourselves.”
“Understood, Captain,” Fellin said.
“Sir,” the helm officer said, “we’re boarding the shuttle.”
Two soldiers took them aboard. Neither offered a hand.
“Evening, gentlemen, ladies.” Trascott ducked through the hatch. “My documents were approved on the way in. Is there a problem?”
The soldier asked for their location. Then he took the documentation tablet and tossed it aside like a wrapper.
“Give them the location, B,” Trascott said.
Brandon Fury kept his eyes on the datapad. “TG-6.6, vector 0.65, grid 732 by 1432. That’s the descent we requested. Barren ground. I assume you know it.”
The second soldier put a hand on Trascott’s shoulder and steered him toward his seat. That ended the conversation. The one at the controls sealed the doors and put the shuttle on its heading.
Through the windows the approaching surface was far from empty. Other military shuttles had already set down, scattered across the landscape at camps with no obvious relationship to one another.
“Not the friendly sort, apparently,” Trascott said.
Fellin kept her eyes on the window. “Neither are we. Doesn’t bother me, T.”
“I am extremely friendly,” Trascott said.
The soldiers said nothing for the rest of the descent. Not to them, not to each other.
“Wuuf. Look at that,” Trascott murmured. “They’re actually doing the whole cool-guy thing.”
“Mm. Yes. Sure.” Fellin turned back to the window.
The ground came up.
Trascott lasted another minute before the silence beat him. “Sooo. Gentlemen. Ladies. How’s the work? You don’t seem to be enjoying yourselves much. Don’t they give you enough leave?”
Nothing. Not so much as a shift in posture.
“Ooh. Silent mode.”
“Do you ever stop talking?” Fellin said.
The shuttle touched down. The door opened with a hiss.
“Now and then,” Trascott said, grinning.
The soldier who had stood the whole way stepped down first and waited.
“I think that’s our cue.”
He went down the ramp and kept walking, and the others followed. Behind them the soldier reboarded and the shuttle lifted without ceremony.
Past the edge of the barren ground the green started. Further out, water.
“B, call the ship down here so they stop looking at us from above,” Trascott said. “You did tell them we weren’t alone, right? Although they had a good look at her. They’ve counted our people already.”
“Ah, yes sir,” Brandon Fury said. “I believe our crew were the last thing they went over.”
Trascott shaded his eyes. “Is that ours coming in? Looks like they sent her down.”
The ship came. As she settled, the evidence sat plain on her hull. Panels a fraction out of true. Nothing broken. Everything touched.
“My entire cool entrance, ruined,” Trascott said. “You see this, Fellin? I’m going to make a sad face.”
“They dug around a bit, sir,” Brandon Fury said. “Searching, I’d say.”
“If they put hands on my things,” Fellin said, “they’ll wish they hadn’t.”
Whatever they had been looking for, they had not found it.
“Wuuf. This one gets aggressive sometimes,” Trascott said.
“Yes sir,” Brandon Fury agreed. “A bit.”
Trascott turned on the nearest crewman. “You. What’s your name?”
“Rapson, sir!”
“Rapson!”
“YES SIR!”
“What in the hell happened here? What were these people after, laser charges? Something like that?”
“I don’t know, sir.” Rapson’s eyes stayed forward. “But they looked everywhere.”
That was the strange part. The weapons had not interested them. Not the racks, not the crates. They had come for something specific.
An object.
“They didn’t even glance at the weapons, sir,” Rapson said. “It was like they were after something else entirely.”
“Hmm.” Trascott rubbed his jaw. “That’s odd. Maybe they were looking for my missing heart. Eh, Rapson? Eh?”
“Ah. Er. Yes sir.”
Trascott collapsed into laughter.
“If you’ve found your heart, let’s move, cowboy,” Fellin said. “That’s enough noise. We have work.”
“Right you are. Super mission woman.” He fell into step beside Rapson and lowered his voice. “How was the joke?”
“It was good, sir. Ehe. Ehe.”
They started toward the green.
The forest showed itself as they closed on it. The trees were taller and considerably denser than they appeared from the air. Whatever light pierced the canopy did not reach the ground.
“Greenery and forest in the middle of a desert,” Trascott said. “Would you look at that. I’m starting to love this place already.”
“Every planet has its own flora, Tras.” Fellin did not slow down. “This is normal. You’d think you’d never left home. Compared to the purple ice cap and the yellow rain, this is practically a garden.”
Trascott’s whole body twitched. “Ugh. Yes. That. I was sick for a week. If I’d had epilepsy I’d have died out there.” He recovered instantly. “No, this place is good. Wait, wait, everybody wait.”
Everybody waited.
“Before we go into the spooky forest, while we’ve still got the desert behind us. Fellin. Come here.”
“What now.” She came anyway.
“Rapson!”
“Sir!”
“Take this.” He pressed a camera into the young man’s hands. “B, put the ship in frame.”
“In frame, sir.”
“Shoot, Raptor.”
He threw an arm around Fellin and struck a pose.
“It’s Rapson, sir. Not Raptor.”
“Beautiful.”
They moved on toward the trees.
Along that stretch the desert began to bother them, though it took time to work out why. From orbit it had been round. A near-perfect circle of dead ground with green closed around it on every side, and no feature of the terrain explained it.
Nothing had ever grown here. Not recently. Not ever.
Closer in, grass ringed the forest, if grass was the word. It came up past the waist, coarse and grey-tinged, and nobody reached out to touch it.
“What in the world,” Trascott said. “Was it like this before?”
“No sir,” one of the troopers said.
“Fellin?”
She had her tablet out. “There are roads here according to this. We’re heading toward a settlement.” She frowned at the screen, then put it away. “Don’t worry about it. There’ll be an explanation.”
“Did anybody happen to bring a lawnmower?”
“Stop talking and help me open this up.”
The troopers went at it with lasers.
The grass parted under the cutting, and as it parted, a path revealed itself. Not cut by them. Already there.
The talking died out. Hands moved to weapons without an order.
“I don’t like what I’m feeling,” Fellin said.
“What is it? Cobra?” Trascott’s shoulders shook. “The really big kind?”
“I TOLD YOU NEVER TO BRING THAT UP.” She rounded on him. “And that thing was half the size of the ship. It wasn’t a snake, Tras, it was a beast.”
“Alright, alright, calm down, it was a joke. Fun to hunt though, wasn’t it?”
“Oh, tremendous.”
Above them, branches moved.
Trascott’s hand went flat in the air. “Did you hear that?”
Everyone stopped. Every weapon came up.
Shadow owned the upper reaches of the canopy. Through it, high in the branches, hung the soldiers. The same uniform as the ones at the station. Suspended by the neck on cord spun out of laser.
“This place is a horror film,” Trascott whispered.
“Could you be quiet. Please.”
“Ha. Shit.”
“What happened here?” Fellin said.
“B.” The music had gone out of Trascott’s voice. “Can you get word to those very cool friends of ours upstairs that several of their people are currently swinging from the trees?”
“Of course, sir. Attempting to connect.”
He tried for a while. The canopy ate transmissions whole, and the deeper in they went the worse it got.
“Sir, communication is impossible. Not a single device here is finding a frequency.”
Up in the branches the shadows moved. Not with the wind. Along the line of the path, ahead of them.
“Fellll,” Trascott said. “Should we maybe go baaack?”
“What’s wrong, super hunter Trascott.” Fellin did not turn around. “Frightened?”
“Ha. No. Obviously not.” He laughed. “I mean, ahaha, obviously not. Keep cutting, gentlemen, come on.”
The troopers kept cutting. The path widened.
“We have equipment,” Fellin said, more gently. “If there’s a primate out here that managed to string up a few men, we have spent years hunting exactly that. Don’t work yourself up.”
“Yes. Yes, I know. What haven’t we been through.” His eyes went up again anyway. “It’s just, those men were so cool, and then I saw them in the tree, and it gave me a moment.”
Fellin smiled.
The grass thinned as they advanced, and it stopped being empty.
They found the rest of the soldiers. Crushed under stones rigged to fall. Dropped into pits and left on the stakes at the bottom. Torn open. Burned. Most of them, whatever else had happened, had arrows in them.
“Well, damn.” Trascott stared. “They got sacrificed to a tribe or something?”
“This is clearly not a primitive tribe,” Fellin said.
“Yeah. No. The arrows aren’t primitive.” He crouched by one of the bodies. “Nobody take this the wrong way, but I like their style. That’s pretty cool work.”
“Sir,” a trooper called from further along. “More dead over here.”
Fellin had already picked up one of the shafts. The head was cut smooth, cleanly enough to end the argument. Laser work.
“A lot of blood went into this ground,” Trascott said.
“These are custom builds. Technological.” She turned the arrow in the light, and her voice changed, the way it did when she was on her own ground. “This is my field. This is Tul-Ji work, or something out of Ash-Beta. I’ve bought a great deal from both. They make the finest bows and arrows anywhere.” She paused. “Though there is always something better than the finest.”
“I don’t know a bow from an arrow,” Trascott said. “Bring me a decent explosive and some nice toys.”
He spotted the mark. On the trunk of one of the trees, cut deep and old, stood a shape.
A swan.
“Ahh, there’s a little swan up here. Somebody carved their sweetheart into the tree.”
Fellin gave him the look. The full one.
“You should consider commenting less, Tras.”
She stepped up to it. “This probably tells us more about the people here than anything else we’ve seen. B, run the scanner over it. Let’s see what the universal database has.”
“Of course, sir.”
The scan came back quickly, and what it came back with was old. The mark was territorial. Far back, it had been the way to say this ground is claimed, and someone was still cutting it into trees, which made the claim worth something to them.
“Hm. So they mark territory.” Fellin nodded slowly. “Primates do it. We do it. It’s one of the few things everything has in common. That’s useful.”
“Great, wonderful, we have the useful thing,” Trascott said. “Now what do we do?”
“We keep going.”
Up in the branches, something opened its eyes.
“We stay focused on why we came,” Fellin said, in a voice doing a great deal of work.
The troopers formed a circle without being told, putting Trascott, Fellin and Brandon Fury at the centre of it.
“Sir, there’s something out here!”
“Yes, thank you, I’m not blind, trooper.” Trascott’s head kept moving. “Feeeell?”
“Everyone calm down. We’re going to try talking to them.”
The watching went on long enough to stop being a suspicion.
“Sir.” Brandon Fury kept his voice low. “These look like killers to me. You’ve seen what they did to those men. Instead of talking, perhaps we speak to them in their own language.”
“B, I appreciate the input, my friend, but this is an absolutely terrible moment to start a war, so I’d like you to shut up.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I agree with Tras,” Fellin said.
Something came down out of the tree.
The branch it left stood high enough that a fall from it would have broken a soldier in half. It landed without effort and without sound, and straightened up in front of them.
Twin short blades crossed at the back. Hood up and drawn closed. Nothing inside it but the eyes, and the eyes were lit.
Fellin pushed forward through the troopers. “Everyone stay behind me. I’ll try to make contact.”
Trascott moved up beside her anyway.
“Ah. Hello.” Fellin raised both hands, empty. “Do you speak my language? Or can you translate?”
“Sir, shall I bring the universal translator?” Brandon Fury shouted from the back.
She ignored him and took a slow step closer. Trascott went with her.
The voice, when it came, belonged to a woman.
“Vedui’.”
“Our reason for being here is straightforward,” Fellin said carefully. “We have no ties to anyone on this planet. You have my word on that. We’ll do what we came for and we’ll leave.”
“That’s the plan, anyway,” Trascott muttered.
“Vedui’.” Fellin exhaled. “Wonderful.”
“I agree, wonderful,” Trascott said. “What is she saying?”
“We don’t speak your language.” Fellin reached into her jacket. “But I have something.”
She drew out a small device and fitted it into her ear.
A hand came up. Stop.
“Whoa,” Trascott breathed. “Gems just keep coming out of you.”
“I know your language, stranger.”
It arrived in a register that was not quite sound. Fellin took the device out of her ear and put it away.
The voice was young. Something sweet ran under it.
“Forgive us for entering your territory uninvited,” Fellin said. “We’re very much strangers here.”
“She has a lovely voice,” Trascott whispered.
“We haven’t seen much to like since we arrived,” Fellin went on. “Although I can’t say we cared for the soldiers who received us on the way in, either.”
“Cool,” Trascott said, “but joyless. Boring. I can confirm this.”
Fellin turned to him. Her face gave him nothing at all.
“What?”
The figure took two steps forward into the light and dropped the cloak.
She was black. Not dark. Black the way an absence is black. Set into it were the two lit eyes, and a smile that opened on two bloodied fangs. A red ran beneath the black of her skin. Horns rose from her head, and her ears tapered to points below them. Tattoos climbed out of her collar and across her face, branching like something growing, and they clearly continued down the rest of her.
At her throat hung a swan on a chain, worked in a metal none of them could name, worth more than the shuttle that had brought them down.
“Look at that.” Trascott’s voice went up an octave. “That is my ex, that’s Millenna all over again, there’s a resemblance, but this one is genuinely something else.”
“Will you shut up,” Fellin hissed.
The closest thing any of them had a name for was an Elf. That was the shape of her. But the differences were not subtle, and nobody volunteered what they meant.
“Ahem.” Fellin straightened. “We’ve met Elves before, and races close to them. We’re a company that takes travelling work. But I don’t believe we’ve encountered anyone of your people.”
She studied them. Not answering. Studying.
“I’d remember,” Trascott said. “You can be certain of that.”
Fellin stood still.
“Study away,” Trascott said. “I’m a superb specimen, and my respect for women is infinite, ma’am.”
“Ah, Tras.”
“What?”
“Speak.”
She had begun to circle them, and the word came from somewhere off to the side.
“Me, or her?”
“Sir, I can explain,” Brandon Fury shouted from the back.
She circled Trascott now.
“If one person back there makes a sound,” Fellin said, “I will hang them myself.”
“Ah. Hello. Yes. Allow me.” Trascott spread his hands. “We’re a company. Fellin and I founded it. My name is Trascott. This is Fellin, the men behind us are mine, and that is my helm officer, Brandon Fury.”
She kept circling.
“We take contracts. Finishing work, mysteries, that sort of thing. Forty-three heavy cruisers on the books, seventy-five mid-class ships, five terrain crawlers.”
The hand came up again. Stop.
