Rough draft, excerpt 12: "The Long Watch, volume I," part 4

4.

The Orrkuttssh culture is distinctive in its aesthetic primitivity.  They have an appreciation for visual art, but their paintings and sculptures are abstract and stark, rough yet colorful, suggestive of blood, meat, entrails, mud and water.  There is comparatively little representative display in a static sense, although they do have a dramatic tradition of stage plays and cinematic and televised programs.  Where other species have a popular culture, Orrkuttssh have mythology and history and genealogy, and have built a certain amount of pageantry around these.  Their music consists of little more than the recorded, processed and combined sounds of the oceans, swamps and damp forests where their ancestors roamed:  winds, water, animals, and the groaning of the earth beneath the tides.  Dragons do not dance publicly, nor do they play musical instruments; and they do not sing, except during courtship or mourning.  But they tell many stories, and they write much poetry in their elegant, simple script.

They have a powerful tradition of religious devotion, and their wide-open belief system permits a number of parallel religions to coexist within the same theological framework.  That framework states that their lost ancestors have joined the Gods, and become like them, each watching over a particular area of a given sphere of influence.  In the oceans, the Currents are all-powerful (marine counterparts to the Winds, which are omnipotent on land), with the Volcanoes a much more episodic, and so slightly less feared kind of deity, and the Prey a more benign but more capricious kind.  The Large Predators, confined to the seas, operate at a level somewhat below these, as direct overseers of life and death.  On land, the Weathers rank just below the Winds in supremacy, with the cold, calculating Stars highest of all, overseeing affairs both on land and in sea.  Jhohvaa, the Sun, the brightest and most powerful of all Stars, had been granted special license over the Weathers, Winds and Currents, and none could move without his motive power.  Ahpshuu, the River, was a water spirit inhabiting the riverine environs in which the first Kuttssh city was retaken from the firm grasp of Kissharr, a local incarnation of Nature.  Their Gods travel with the People, wherever in the universe they go, but Their true homes have never moved from their original sites on the homeworld…though that world itself has been lost for generations, presumably removed by the Gods themselves to some trans-dimensional, netherworld existence.

The underworld Gods lived in volcanoes and deep-sea fissures, and each governed the release of hellfire over a certain region of Erkhott.  Marrdukk ruled a volcanic island that Orrk migration routes had bypassed, and whose frequent changes of coastline and sudden lava flows had substantially regulated their travel.  Sokharr dwelt within a tall tower of flame marking the high point of the island where Kuttssh civilization first grew.

The great Eyes of the Gods, Waa and Kaa, each ruled over half the world, each above the horizon for half of a full day.  The Eye of Night, Waa, a red giant star, was said to rule over the sleeping soul, the soul of darkness, the soul of dream; aliens with lips, with their funny pronunciations of things, would come to know it as Ba.  Kaa, a blue supergiant, was said to rule over the waking soul, the soul of awareness, the soul of action.  Every Orrkuttssh carries within himself a coordinate system, notionally residing in a resonating chamber between his hearts, wherein a spiritual representation of Erkhott dwells.  And over every diurnal cycle, that coordinate system unconsciously tracks the positions of Waa and Kaa.  Every female Dragon knows when she is ruled by darkness, and is thus inauspiciously disposed to reproduction; every male Dragon knows when he is ruled by dream, and therefore inauspiciously disposed to combat.  Variability in these parameters is provided by the hour and the place of the Dragon’s hatching, which are supposed to shift the horizon between Waa and Kaa to a proportional degrees about the individual’s sphere; a cottage industry of star-reading has arisen in which practitioners calculate these parameters and offer advice on how to proceed on a day-by-day basis.  In practice, Orrkuttssh have a tendency to adopt the diurnal rhythm of the environment in which they live, largely overriding that internal clock, but almost none have completely forgotten that Waa and Kaa take turns influencing their desire and effectiveness.

In Sobek’s clan, there was a tradition of meditating for extended periods in order to prolong the influence of the favorable star.  He remained in orbit over Aten III while completing meditation, purifying the influence of Waa from his system. 

He had contacted the research station during orbital insertion, and they were presumably prepared for his landing.  The formality of the communication was irksome, as it was slow and overly polite, and he got the impression that the communications officer was using the odd idioms of the conversation as code, perhaps to signal unknown parties, on the scene but out of sight.  Because he was dealing with a primate who couldn’t understand Orrkuttssh, Sobek had to silence his own microphone and allow the chestbox to transmit his translated speech via radio; his own voice simply overwhelmed the audio output of the box, and the microphone couldn’t distinguish the two.  He never knew when the translation was failing to convey his mood or tone, but the primate on the other end of the communication seemed cheery and cordial enough.  He couldn’t understand its language either, but his main screen provided a realtime text readout, which was rife with vegetarian, tree-hugging sentiment. 

“Please remember to set your translator to Uleni,” said the cheerful pink-warm-and-fuzzy at the other end of the link, just prior to signing off.  “That is the language spoken in our part of the world.”  The signoff translated euphemistically to something like “Have a nice day!”  There is no word in Orrkuttssh that translates directly to “nice,” so the translation program chose a word that renders variously as “tasty,” “crunchy,” “juicy” or “mouth-watering,” depending on the object’s phylum (neonate, vertebrate, invertebrate, or therian).  Sobek wasn’t sure whether his day would turn out to be crunchy or juicy, but he was suddenly in the mood for some raw therian, and unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how the mission worked out), that was the kind of being that seemed to be populating the science facility.

He had never heard of Uleni, but the ship’s encyclopedia informed him that it was a spacefaring dialect used in the western outer territories by the Ydlenni, a relatively new subspecies of the Eldenni species, mammals from a system that had originated at a white star in this region of the galaxy.  The Ydlenni had racially differentiated from their homebound kin shortly after their first wave of space migration had begun, and were a galactic exemplar of a race adapted to space travel.  They were more likely, per capita, to be found living in permanent orbital colonies than on any planet’s surface; Sobek had worked with them before, although that was some centuries prior, and they had evidently spoken a different language then.  Sobek downloaded Uleni into his PDD for his chestbox to read, and then downloaded a half dozen other languages used in this region just to cover the possibilities.  He also got in some last-minute study on the geopolitical relationships between the various races he knew to people this sector and the economic histories of the companies involved in the mining operations.  He meditated until he was sure he felt no Waa.  Then he deorbited and glided to the facility’s landing site.

It was gorgeous here.  The oxygen level of this world was high, as was the carbon dioxide level.  It was hot and wet and lush, and the vegetation appeared in a bright variety of colors (mostly shades of green, to which the Orrkuttssh visual system is particularly well attuned).  The landing strip was lit, and fully automated, but wasn’t in perfect repair; some of the landing lights were out, and some rocket damage to the landing pad appeared to have gone unrepaired for quite some time.  The surrounding swamp and a muddy lagoon encroached on the landing grounds, and Sobek wanted to remove his boots and walk through the mud before reporting to the gate.  It was evening and the colors were fading, but there were many reptilian and insectile sounds coming from the tall grass and from the trees, and the pleasant scent of flowering plants was cloying and slowing to his gait.  The landing pad and main strip were flanked by structures, one a traffic control tower and the other a security shack.  Neither was currently manned; the Talon’s computer and the control tower had coordinated his descent, and he’d guided it in.  Automated air traffic control was just as good as organic, for Sobek, as long as his paws were on the stick.  But a lack of security made him unhappy.  The Talon could secure itself against incursion, but he didn’t want to feel responsible for defending the whole facility.

The grounds were spread over a broad area, secured behind a high solid security wall of compressed earth, topped with electrified fencing.  No one met him at the gate, but it too was automated and didn’t impede his entry.  He announced himself to the security intercom, and the system admitted him without demanding identification.  Presumably it had silently coordinated his entry with his PDD, which was all the ID most on-duty Orrkuttssh carry.  His uniform was currently fitted with his favorite one, the rather archaic model he’d gone to Sleep with.  The one given him by Ibliss was serving back on the Talon as a temporary backup, one he expected he would return at the completion of the mission.

Once within the compound, he got a good look at the facility’s southern exposure.  Most of the grounds seemed to be given over to natural habitat, here and there broken up by fences and walls and screens.  The laboratories and quarters appeared to be mostly or entirely underground; the only aboveground structures he could see appeared to be maintenance shacks, observation hides, and emergency facilities.  There was, however, a decent path worn into the grass, leading from the gate to the nearest outbuilding, and he took this to be the facillity entrance.  The grounds in the vicinity of the wall appeared well kept, but he could not tell whether the grass was mown by machine or by herbivore.

An elevator brought him to a vestibule, some three levels belowground.  It was made of clear, thick plastic, which afforded him a view of the cavernous excavation all around, but was sealed airtight and provided just a few basic privacy-oriented amenities.  This was the quarantine, in which Sobek would have to remain for several hours while his body and exhalations were electronically scanned for pathogens and symptoms.  It was designed to contain at least four animals the size of a mature Orrkuttssh, but the ergonomics were still less than optimal, and he found it uncomfortable.  He understood the requirement for this sort of thing, but he always felt like a prisoner while having to wait it out, and that is never good for an Orrkuttssh’ mood.  He supposed they were probably expecting him to utilize the latrine in order to provide additional samples for scanning, but he was loth to oblige.

Outside the boundaries of this vestibule he could make out the surroundings, which were open in sort of a foyer configuration, with a few areas partitioned off into work cubicles in the distance.  The wall to his left was thick glass, the outer surface of a huge aquarium in which swum some of the local marine fauna.  In the water was a shadowy bulk that flowed toward that wall:  a Slurghh.  It regarded him with idle curiosity, weird colors playing over its surface as it watched him watching it.

He saw to the necessities of his acclimation, such as modifying his mode of expression.  From a uniform pocket he withdrew two metal cuplike discs, each a combination of noise-cancelling speaker and microphone-transmitter.  These he situated on his throat flaps, where their rims self-adhered to his skin.  This was common practice when interfacing directly with primates; the mufflers, each tuned to a specific portion of the audio spectrum, would dampen his neck and skull resonators somewhat, and attenuate his exhalations to bring his voice down into a more bearable register.  To compensate for the resulting vocal distortion, which would confuse his chestbox translator, they transmitted a representation of the raw voice signal directly to it:  one transmitting the drone tone, the other transmitting the high-frequency modulations.

At the end of the scan process, a small delegation of Ydlenni drove up in an electric cart, and the airlock opened, releasing him.  They were clothed, in tan and brown jumpsuits, each with variously-colored insignia indicating rank and specialty.  They were hairy, but other than on the backs of their paws, the backs of their necks and the tops of their heads, the hair was cropped short.

The Ydlenni were ridiculously small, less than half Sobek’s height, and had to look almost straight up to address him.  Their cart was equipped with a hydraulic lift platform, and this brought them up to eye level.  “Greetings, officer.  I am Lucipher.  I am the Executive of Operations of Eden Station, and this is my staff.”  His chestbox translator piped a translated audio stream to a headset, with a small speaker directly above his right auditory meatus; the translation finished a second or so after the primate was finished, as it did in turn for their translation, introducing a short pause in between all responses.

“Greetings, Lucipher,” replied Sobek, as nearly as he could.  Primates.  They seemed to revel in making lip sounds that were impossible to imitate.  He couldn’t pronounce fricatives, but he could snap his jaws together to simulate a plosive; mammals tended to flinch most satisfyingly at the sound.  “Lucipher” could be rendered as “Loose hipper,” and the chestbox at least was capable of recognizing things like personal names; it registered “Lucipher” upon his first use of the word and would then substitute an audio sample appropriately, whenever he slurred it.  “I am Sobek, a Captain in the Territorial Guard, on assignment from the military governor of this system.”

“Sobek.  It is good to meet you.  My staff:  Belial, chief of Environmental Studies; Liliath, chief of Genetics; Bastet, chief of Natural Medicine; Bahamut, chief of Zoology; Akhamet, chief of Botany; Alzhor, chief of Ecological Systems; Elghul, chief of Perimortem Studies.”  Each little monkey stepped forward in turn and bowed briefly, and he nodded to each in turn.  He would never remember their names accurately; he couldn’t even tell who was which gender.  All mammals looked the same to him.  They all looked like food.

When introductions had finished, he spoke.  “I am here to perform a routine Safety and Security inspection of the Premises, to ensure the Health and Welfare of its Residents.  I am here on the authority of the governor, and appreciate being granted full access to your facility.”  That was probably more words than he’d spoken in a single breath during his entire time Awake.  Primates are a chattery bunch, and they seem to inspire chattiness in others. 

Lucipher nodded and did something funny with his face.  “I understand, Captain, but this is a civilian operation.  We are not under the authority of the Territorial Guard; we report directly to the Empire’s Science Ministry.”  Sobek was not good at reading facial expressions.  A reptile has only two expressions:  mouth closed, and mouth open; teeth hidden, and teeth exposed.

“Acknowledged…Lucipher.  This is not a Ministry matter.  I am investigating reports of piracy in this system, and my information has led me here.  You are not yourself under investigation, but  your facility may be in a position to be victimized, if the reports are true.  I simply wish to gather what information I can from any potential witnesses, about the facility, its neighbors, their interactions, and anything else of value in case this facility becomes a target, at which point Territorial armament may be emplaced here to repel pirates.  With your permission, I’d like to question your personnel.”

Lucipher’s face changed again.  “If this is a criminal investigation, should we not expect Imperial police instead?”  This was a valid question.  Ordinarily a planet of the Empire, and its various territories, would maintain their own geopolitical jurisdictions and various tiers of law-enforcement structures, although these would not be expected to unilaterally investigate interplanetary piracy.  There being no real civilian government here, the only jurisdictions were the metropolitan areas around the resort towns, with inexpensive, perhaps poorly-trained security forces maintained by the townspeople to protect their own interests and no others.  In the absence of local infrastructure, many settler communities believed they were entitled to Imperial protection, and would prevail upon the cities for emergency aid when that failed.  However, obviously the Edenites didn’t regard themselves or their property as being at risk, as they didn’t appear to have any kind of security force.  Either they were cozy with the neighbors or they had effective autodefenses.

“There are no Imperial police in this sector.  For the moment, I am the only individual with any investigative power available to you.  I will be coordinating my efforts with any local police in the resort towns”—the primate’s face changed again, inscrutably—“and with your security personnel here, of course.”

“Captain, we’d be happy to assist in any way possible, but there has been no pirate activity on this planet, as far as I know.  We’re a self-sufficient facility, and we produce all the food and power we need.  So we have very little interaction with the…cities on the other continents, and we receive very little news.  It might be more to your benefit to start with them.”

“I have already deployed my assistants to the various cities here,” he lied.  He never felt good about misrepresenting the truth, but lying in the defense of military intelligence was officially a noble pursuit, and he had undergone Kuttssh training to improve his deceit skills and his willingness to use them.  The primates here had no need to know he was alone.

“Very well.  I would be willing to be interviewed.  There are forty-eight other members of the facility.  Will you wish to see us individually?  We will have to schedule time for each member to meet with you, and will have to arrange quarters for you.”

Almost fifty people.  This planet’s diurnal cycle was longer by about thirty percent than his native Erkhott’s, and the locals divided its time into thirty-six equal hours.  With a quick bit of mental arithmetic he determined that what the People call an hour is roughly equivalent to what these primates call two, and based on his prior experience, that would be the typical duration of an interview…two hours, local time.  Assuming their workday would ordinarily require a third of the diurnal cycle, he could try to get in three or four interviews per day, but it would still be at least half a lunar month (local time) before he could work his way through the entire crew, and he’d have little time for anything else.  Maybe he should contact Ibliss and requisition some assistants.  “It will probably eventually become necessary to address your people as a group, but while time permits, I would prefer the more detailed approach of individual interviews,” he finally replied.  “I will require only some space for an office.  I have quarters and a laboratory on my ship.  I believe your people would be more comfortable being questioned here on the premises.  If you cannot set aside space for the interviews, however, we can conduct them on my ship.”  He liked that prospect because it could permit him to get his computer to present a questionnaire to the little beasts several at a time, each in relative privacy. 

But getting crews of unarmed apes to willingly board his ship would involve building more trust than he was probably capable of.  This Executive could expect the Talon to have a quarantine airlock of its own, and every primate coming in for questioning would have to spend a few hours there.  Neither he nor they would regard that situation as optimal.  “No, that will not be a problem,” he replied.  “We have spare offices.  And of course we have a vast inventory of equipment that we can make available to you, should the need arise.” 

“Very well, thank you.  If you could provide a list of the personnel and their positions, that would help me prioritize the interviews.  I will need as many as two hours per person, with an hour of preparation time prior to each appointment.”

“Done.  If your PDD can autolink to our network, we will upload all requested materials.  Will you also require sustenance while you’re here?”

“I have provisions on my ship, and can also see to my health and medical needs there, thank you.”  Although their quarantine airlock had granted him access, confirming that he presented no danger to the inhabitants, it did not perform the same service for him.  He would have to be quarantined and scanned by his own ship before resuming residence there, and eating any of the local food would complicate matters.  In addition to the standard pathogen risk, which was dealt with by simply eradicating every nonnative microbe that it could, and tracking every other that was found in his system, it would also present a parasite risk, and his ship’s medical computer may or may not be up to date on known macroorganisms from this planet.  Some parasite-removal systems were notorious for mistakenly targeting anomalous organ growths, benign tumors and fat deposits, and he didn’t want to engage the Talon’s system unnecessarily.  He liked all his organs.

“Excellent.  Then perhaps we should begin with a tour of the facility.  I’ll have my secretary prepare an interview roster for you, and it will be available in your office whenever you’re ready to set up.”

His shipboard quarantine scanner detected hundreds of microbial species it could not identify, and he had to remain in the airlock as samples were vacuumed from his scales and uniform, exhaled on his breath and drained from samples of bodily fluids extracted by machinery while he waited.  The Talon’s laboratory was quite smart, and coordinating with the airlock, it set up growth environments (using tissue cultured from his own previously-donated blood) to get a quick idea of the germs’ dietary interests while he waited.  He spent two days in the airlock, after which the lab was satisfied enough to give him a quick spritz of X-rays and alcohol mist and readmit him. 

He was hungry.

He microwaved a dinner of frozen rodent and reviewed his physical security.  This was not a war zone, not a military theater of operations; as a courtesy to the locals, he did not carry a sidearm when off the ship.  But the ship itself was thoroughly beweaponed, and carried a platoon’s worth of small arms in the armory.  And his uniform also hid several small, embedded lasers and electromagnetic pulse stunners, mounted front and back, which could be activated manually or via voice command.  The chestbox was of course much more than a communications device; it provided a handy docking surface for his weapons, survival gear and data devices, provided a secure voice command link to the ship, and tracked his geolocation on a map of the surrounding terrain via a heads-up display that could be projected holographically from his headset.  It was also an integral part of his uniform’s armor, and served as a mounting point for the attachments that converted the uniform to a space suit.  Under no circumstances could the uniform, or any part of it, be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone else.  The helmet he would do without unless it was absolutely called for by spacesuit conditions; it was simply ridiculously difficult to handle, and got in the way of day-to-day operations.  Short-faces got reasonably-spherical helmets with a reasonable center of gravity and reasonable bulk.  Long-faces got long-domed elliptical monstrosities that took a three-man team just to attach and remove properly.

However, should it become necessary to detain anyone, he would have to secure them on his ship, and would have to leave them in the ship’s custody when not aboard.  This called for special arrangements between himself and the ship’s computer, which he would have to program himself.

He had never actually been a law-enforcement officer, but he did have power, as did all Stellar Navy personnel, to intervene in piracy and terrorism.  He did not have any awareness of local customs and laws, being guided in etiquette and conduct only by his training in military courtesy and his understanding of the Arch’ unchanging outlook on order.  But, having been unofficially Awakened, he had received no briefing on how matters had changed since his last interment.  He had been rushed from tomb to duty station, with insufficient time to get fully caught up on current affairs.  That was still a major gap that would have to be addressed via intensive study.

He relaxed in his quarters, wearing nothing but his scales, watching a recording of a Ydlenni soap opera, trying to get a feel for their vocal mannerisms and body language.  This mission was already bothering him.  The kinds of questions he would have to ask would be difficult to gauge veracity with, given his problem with reading primate faces.  It would be doubly difficult since his questions would be ostensibly focused on piracy, but intended to detect terrorism.  The idea was to detect any omission, dissemblance or evasion that would indicate the concealment of criminal activity.  His best option would be to record every interview and have the computer analyze speech patterns and vocal waveforms for stress.

But there were other issues beyond the mere technical.  He wasn’t sure that he’d been adequately prepped for the mission.  Ibliss hadn’t provided a team for him, which on the one paw was reasonably consistent with a clandestine mission, but which on the other left him woefully understaffed.  It would have been much better to have at least one man for each population center on the planet, and at least one squad in reserve to deal with arrests and any other events that required dragonpower.  At the time, Ibliss’ mention of sending a followup assault force had seemed reasonable, but here on the scene, it seemed like a monstrous oversight.  And the more he thought about their meeting, the more hazy and dreamlike his memory became.  He began to doubt that he clearly remembered the entire exchange; his ready acceptance of the mission, absent any real intelligence, was not characteristic of him.

Had he been drugged?  Or subjected to some kind of pre- or post-suggestion?

He hadn’t eaten much on Dread, just enough to silence his stomach.  Dragons don’t frequently drink intoxicating beverages, and in fact tend to get most of their required water, and intoxicants, from their prey.  But they do often incidentally ingest water while swimming, and they absorb water through their skins; and Sobek had spent some time in the pool at the athletic complex aboard the station.  If there was something in the food or water on the station, then Ibliss’ invitation to make use of the recreational facilities might have been intended to strengthen the dose.  And if he’d been given a psychotropic of some kind, then he would quite likely have been subject to an enhanced suggestibility, but that would have worn off along with the effects of the drug, while en route to Aten III.

Unless, of course, the Talon’s stores had been adulterated as well.  In that case, he would have been ingesting the drug during the entire flight here…perfectly placid and accepting of what would seem to him, under any other circumstance, to be an absurdly risky and undermanned mission.

The more he thought, the clearer he became.  He’d spent the better part of the day touring the Eden facility, and then had spent two more days in the airlock of his own ship.  If a psychotropic was present in his food or water, then it could have worn off by now, making his current clear(er) state of mind possible.  However, having finally regained access to the ship’s galley, he would have exposed himself again with that first meal of frozen rodent.  If so, he might rapidly lose clarity again.

He quickly dictated a program to the ship’s computer, to mind the ship for a couple of days while he isolated himself from all mission-critical systems.  He also drew samples of the water and of the food stores to be tested in the lab.  Finally, he dressed in his uniform again and left the ship, heading to the muddy lagoon.  There, reasonably sure he was secure from prying eyes, he undressed again, took a swim, and did some hunting in the waters.  He ate his catches at first, and then accumulated a small pile of fish and reptiles on the shore, to be hauled back to the ship for snap refrigeration.  He used an outboard water supply to shower off before entering the airlock, but as a consequence of his muddy adventure was compelled to spend another day in quarantine.  He resolved to customize the outdoor shower by adding an alcohol / peroxide mist, to shortcut the process in future.

He locked himself in the lab with some refrigerated prey, drew blood samples from himself, and prepared to wait it out.  He would have to be late for the first few appointments.  The ship’s computer would have to act as answering service to anyone who came calling or attempted radio contact.  He could not trust himself to deal appropriately with them until he knew he was free of external influence.

Four days later, he felt reasonably certain the drug, an adulterant that was found to be present in all his water and all his food stores, had largely left his system.  He’d undergone a day of illness and fatigue, and had kept a voice log of observations on his condition.  He had regurgitated much of his lagoon catch, and half his crop stones besides.  There are few formalized bodily taboos among the Orrkuttssh, largely because of the tight coupling between their bodily functions and their instincts.  But no self-respecting Orrk would re-swallow stones, although supposedly it was a common practice among the Kuttssh.  He was obliged to return to the lagoon at some later point and find fresh ones.  In the absence of certainty about possible drug interactions, he hadn’t treated himself with anything.  He seemed healthy now, if a bit bleary-eyed.  He now had a number of other unpleasant and tedious chores to contend with, such as completely replacing the ship’s supplies with local consumables.

Before launching into anything particularly physical, he underwent a thorough inspection and inventory of the ship.  He also handwrote some programs to hunt through the ship’s computer for any other programs or data that would suggest tampering or a reason for the deception.

He paid special attention to the armory.  He usually carried two sidearms:  a repeating internal-combustion projectile pistol, and a battery-powered laser.  The laser was powerful, but the power supply was small, and could generally fire about twenty shots before the clip had to be replaced; his uniform could pack forty such clips.  The pistol used chemical propellant to launch small, dense bullets, which came in solid and explosive, dumb and tracking varieties.  It had eight barrels and eight chambers, and could be set to fire them individually, in simultaneous clusters of 2 or 4, or in sequential bursts of 2, 4 or 8 rounds.  Reloading a new chamber assembly was as fast as reloading the laser, but these were heavier and bulkier than batteries, and he typically stored fewer in his pack.  The armory stored twenty revolving pistols and twenty hand lasers, and Sobek was obliged to inspect these and test their ammunition.  There were also forty powerful laser longarms, each with portable power sources good for thousands of shots, but these were bulkier and heavier still, and he rarely carried more than one power pack in the field. 

There were also fifty long-barreled, rifled combustion firearms, fed by magazines of one hundred or drums of one thousand rounds; he did not care to lug the drums around, but could pack ten or fifteen magazines in his uniform.  Finally, there were high-powered, high-capacity versions of each kind of longarm, mountable on tripods and requiring a two-man team to operate in the field.  There were four of each of these, engineered toward the defense of a platoon perimeter.  The machine guns could knock lightly-armored fightercraft out of the sky, and do serious damage to more heavily-armored bombers.  The laser cannons were tunable to wavelengths between soft gamma and microwave, and could be used to dismantle enemy troops, armored carriers or hardened bunkers with equal ease; but for sustained use, they required a dedicated generator, and the cooling requirements, depending on climate conditions, were often prohibitive, given that a small refrigerator had to be carried around with them.  The energy and cooling requirements could be met via an umbilical connection to the Talon, if he didn’t move it more than a few paces offboard.  A Talon on the ground doesn’t have the fully three-dimensional fields of fire available to it that one in the sky does, so a grounded ship can always use a fortified perimeter…if you have enough personnel to man the guns.  The onboard computer can manage fire control, but only after a somewhat tedious process of calibrating the guns’ positions to the local geolocation and orientation.

It all seemed in order, but there was also the question of the Talon’s own weapons.  There were machine gun ports to check for obstructions, function checks to perform on firearms, missiles to run diagnostics on, sensors to calibrate and explosives to examine for defects.  That would take more than a few hours.  He needed to contact the researchers and postpone his return still further. 

He also needed to figure out an excuse.  “An infection” would probably suffice.  He would undoubtedly come down with something anyway after having eaten some of the local cuisine raw.  That was a risk he was simply going to have to take at this point, but he resolved thenceforth to thoroughly cook his prey.  He hoped that the infirmary’s broad-spectrum antibiotics could cope with any local flora once they’d become fully-established in his system.

When he checked the ship’s message log the next afternoon, there were three radio calls from the Ydlenni leader, two from the supervisor of ecological studies, and one from the spaceport maintenance staff.  He played back the messages without paying much attention.  The executive was wondering when Sobek would be back onsite; the maintenance staff wondered whether he was having any mechanical or communications problems on ship; the ecological boss had some pointed questions about his having hunted in a wildlife preserve.  So much for privacy; evidently even the hinterlands of the facility were under observation.  The security here was better than it appeared.  After shaking off what he presumed to be the effects of withdrawal from whatever Ibliss had adulterated his supplies with, he did not become sick again.  Evidently the local microbiota were not a problem for him.

He would return the call that evening, and arrange for another visit in the morning.  He wanted to review what he’d learned before taking any further action.

Item 1:  Ibliss was indeed hiding something, and although Sobek couldn’t fault him for keeping some intelligence under wraps, it seemed likely, given the magnitude of the omissions, that there was Need To Know information that he was lacking, and whose absence would interfere with the mission.

Item 2:  Ibliss had gone so far as to drug Sobek, either to keep him from realizing the magnitude of the intelligence blackout, or to render him more amenable to undertaking an extremely clandestine mission without proper backup or preparation, or both.

Item 3:  When both of the first items were combined, they confirmed that Sobek was ultimately disposable, dispensable, and disavowable.  This in itself was not unreasonable or unexpected; he had been Awakened for such missions before.  He’d done commando work, demolitions, organizing and training locals for insurrection all on his own.  But never something like chasing down pirates alone, and never under any kind of mind control.  None that he’d ever become aware of, anyway.  Ibliss had tracks to cover for something, and he was using Sobek to do so.  He growled unconsciously when thinking about this.  It was hard not to regard this as a personal betrayal, but more than that, it was a potential waste of an Immortal.  Sobek had been taken from his tomb and rushed into service in a way that probably guaranteed the secrecy of the move for a short time, but eventually his absence from the family crypt would be noted, and some accounting would have to be done.  He’d love to see what arrangement the sub-commander had put in place for that.

Item 4:  He wasn’t here to chase pirates, but to find terrorists.  The locals weren’t hiding pirates, but he was sure they were hiding something.  He couldn’t read faces very well, but he could smell fear on a thousand planets.

Item 5:  The name of the facility was Eden.  This had produced a number of hits while searching the ship’s encyclopedia, although he’d had to play back a recording of Lucipher’s introduction for the computer in order to get the pronunciation right.  He couldn’t find a direct match, but there was a fairly close one.  “Elden” was a general word for paradise in the Uleni dialect and in its parent tongue, derived from an ancient name for their homeworld...the same name from which the Eldenni took their name.  Presumably because of the Ydlenni cultural influence, it was a very common trope in local literature, a mystical paradise associated with the birthplace of the Eldenni people.   There were other deathless realms to be found in the literature, realms that weren’t necessarily any original paradise, but which existed materially or which could be discovered, merited by heroism, or retired to in life or in death; realms with varyingly obscure associations to Elden and the galaxy’s primordial past.  He made a list of those names and committed the sounds of their transliterations to memory.  Even if he couldn’t pronounce them, he could listen for them.  Mystical motivations could flag ecoterrorist sentiment, as surely as they could flag ideological action.

Item 6:  Eden’s security setup, while appearing suboptimal, was pretty robust, at least here around the spaceport.  The simplest explanation, of course, was that they might just be protective of their research, or of the wildlife they were observing.  Either way, he couldn’t count on going unobserved if he took any unauthorized tours, and it seemed unlikely he’d be able to secure permission to examine any of the non-public areas.  If he were to find the weak points in the system, it would have to be done through the relatively risky technique of digitally radio-probing the site from his Talon.

It was an interesting situation, at least.  Other than while being trapped in airlocked quarantines, he hadn’t been bored.  But the implications of the scenario went well beyond his immediate circumstances.  If Ibliss was indeed involved in some kind of power play, then there was evidently something wrong with the Imperial apparatus out here on the fringes.  It was unthinkable that he would be promoted and handed a second Fear station without any additional oversight; there should be some kind of accountability, unless the Empire was crumbling from within and unable to mount the proper bureaucratic effort.  And that wouldn’t jibe with them cranking out another station and handing it off to Ibliss…unless it had been appropriated from some other command, or Ibliss had friends in very, very high places willing to look the other way.  Either way, whether by neglect or by corruption, something was rotten here.

Another possibility occurred to Sobek.  Assuming Ibliss’ oblique speech had in fact been hinting at a growing schism between Orrkuttssh and Capstone, then perhaps the Grays were playing along, giving Ibliss enough rope to reveal what he was up to. 

He took note of the unexpected files that the computer’s security sweep had produced.  Among them were programs that suppressed sensor input, under certain circumstances, and which partially crippled his communications system under other circumstances.  A picture was emerging in which the Talon had been modified in order to respond to remote control, overriding the pilot’s input.  That in particular made Sobek angry.  It might not even have been personal; for all he knew, all of Ibliss’ Talons had undergone similar modification.  To have accomplished it so quickly on this one—during the three days he had been indisposed while waiting for his summons—suggested a certain amount of practice.  But it galled him to think about the prospect of being reduced from a highly-skilled pilot to a ballistic missile at someone else’s whim.