Page 16 of Stellar Drift (Central Galactic Concordance)

“Phen said they probably live underground near deep roots for years and only come up when they’re ready to reproduce.

No need for brilliant colors in the dark.

” He slid the sample vial into his sling bag.

“Since they’re mostly a periodic nuisance and don’t destroy valuable crops, they haven’t been studied much.

” His tone said he was still salty about the careless negligence of the rangers who came before him.

Not that she blamed him. A high number of systems failures she’d run across in her former career could have been prevented by regular maintenance. But as she knew all too well, pointing that out too often was a quick way to get reassigned to a new command.

She considered the curtain of roots that draped over the rocks, then thought back to her first days of exploration near their landing spot. “Could we be looking for a cave?”

“Maybe? To be honest, I’ve only ever paid attention to insects that harm or help plants.” He plucked the bug net away from his face to dislodge several black flies. “Or that want to eat me.”

“Or the aggressive, territorial flying kind. Poor Kyala got swarmed once when she dug into a fallen tree trunk. Took two days to get all the bee stingers out of her muzzle.”

As if excited at hearing her name, the gargoyle shook herself to get rid of excess dampness, spraying both her and Houyen with fine droplets of lake muck.

Sairy laughed. “Thank you, darling, but humans prefer clean water.” Her sneaky imagination produced an image of Houyen in a shower, naked.

She’d given up trying to suppress her increasingly inappropriate thoughts about him.

Her long-neglected hormones didn’t care about the impossibility of any future between them.

All they cared about was how well his pants defined his muscular thighs.

She was totally out of practice trying to sense if he was interested in her.

Kyala leaned against Sairy’s thigh, reminding her to get her brain back in charge of things. “Do you need more samples?”

“No, I have plenty.” His gaze followed the bottom ledge, then flicked to the sky. “The weather-sat images show rain clouds are forming to the north and probably headed our way. I don’t want to be up this high in a storm.”

He took the lead and started toward the route they’d determined based on what her cameras could see. Sairy connected mentally with Kyala to ask her to help her companion pick the best footing, then followed behind them.

As she walked, she rubbed her jaw muscles, trying to get them to relax. The constant sense of unseen danger was making her crazy. Although she was risking giving the gods of chaos an irresistible challenge, she wished that the Brannezzo situation would hurry up and happen.

The hike to the ridge was work, but the plentiful thick roots offered decent support for the steepest parts. Stepping onto the ledge required pushing through the curtain, plunging them into deep shadows.

Houyen touched controls on his gauntlet to provide a light.

Sairy had been afraid the ledge would be too shallow to go more than a few meters, but she was wrong.

“Amazing,” said Houyen.

A cave yawned in front of them like the open mouth of a gargantuan viper. Cracked vertical columns of basalt on the sides looked like long teeth, adding to the illusion.

Sairy turned on her own wrist light and played its beam across the cave floor. It was surprisingly wet and smooth, and covered with the hard, pale shells of hundreds of dead wuzzy-bug corpses. At least she hoped they were dead.

“Well, now we know where the nymphs in the lake came from.” He aimed his light toward the back of the cave and turned it to full brightness. The dead bugs made a river pattern that appeared to continue into the darkness. “They washed through here and into the lake below.”

“Yes, but I don’t think they lived here. Phen said they feed on roots, and there aren’t enough here for that many mouths.” She tried not to think about what that would look like.

Unexpectedly, Kyala made a low whine and stared intently at the back of the cave. When Sairy connected with her, she saw what had caught her eye. “Houyen, let’s kill our lights for a moment. Kyala saw something blinking.”

In the semi-darkness, Sairy shut her eyes and connected deeper with Kyala’s senses. “She’s still seeing it. Plus, unless you know of something natural that emits three-tone stutter beeps at ten-second intervals, there’s human tech back there.”

She turned her light back on, and so did he.

“Like I said, this is out of my starlane.” He blew out a noisy breath. “Far, far out of my starlane.”

His gauntlet chimed with the tones she’d come to recognize as signaling contact from Brannezzo.

She jumped a little when Elkano’s tone sounded in her earwire a second later. She turned and moved several steps away so she wouldn’t be distracted by Houyen’s conversation.

“Go,” she subvocalized.

“I found a match for your location and our records.” His voice sounded unhappy. “But not in the entry images.”

“Where, then?”

“In the exodus instruction set, under a subtag named ‘Target.’”

She stilled as her mind raced. They’d been over those records a hundred times and never found any images. “Why haven’t we seen it before?”

“I don’t know. Because you needed it fast and I wasn’t busy, I did a comprehensive image-compare across all the records.”

Ordinarily, he’d never have devoted full resources for one task, but as he’d said, he’d had nothing else better to do. “Anything else under that subtag?”

“One other image and a thirty-character string, and a partial ref-key that I’m tracing now.”

Behind her, Brannezzo’s baritone voice sounded increasingly querulous.

Sairy slid away one more step. “Send me what you’ve got.”

Behind her eyelid, a momentary flash of a blue symbol signaled that her controller had received the records.

As much as the implants made her as experimental as her ship, she was grateful for their superior capabilities.

“We’re near the top of the mountain in a small basalt cave.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, see if the new image pattern-matches to any other untagged images, or that ref-key fragment. ”

“Will do.”

She used her percomp to display the image, which was a one-angle still holograph of a large, shiny-smooth metal door.

It reminded her of an old-style airlock with fanciful design references to ancient submarine hatches.

The glowing keypad embedded in the smooth wall next to it was boringly utilitarian by comparison.

The code string looked like random numbers and letters to her, but ferreting out possible meanings was more Elkano’s specialty than hers.

She flicked off the display, then turned to listen to Houyen.

“...still not following, Brannezzo. You lost some dogs?”

“No, damnit, they’re not mine. The team that came with me got lost following them, and I don’t know where they are. Why weren’t you here at the geomarker to meet us? Where are your airsleds?”

“I told you before, it’s not my expedition. The locals just let me tag along on theirs. You didn’t call this morning, so we split up for the day and planned to meet tonight at sunset. I don’t know where the airsleds are, and we haven’t seen any dogs. You said you came up by flitter?”

“Yes, the small one. Hang on, I’m getting another comm.”

Houyen muted his comms, then caught her eye. “Can you check in with Koda and Phen? I’ll listen, but I have to answer Brannezzo when he comes back.”

She nodded, then tapped the team earwire and subvocalized after the alert tone. “Having fun, subcaptains?”

“A blast.” Koda’s prompt response suggested she’d been expecting the call.

“Ranger Brannezzo truly detests the outdoors. The spider webs at the geomarker warped his calm so bad that he shut himself in that flying deathtrap of a flitter. Whoever had their bets on his two pals being Joro mercs gets to split the prize. They’re rigged up for urban warfare, so we decided to give the rainforest goddess a little help.

” She chuckled. “One of Charuuk’s woolly dogs knocked one merc into a mudhole.

The other one fell in during the rescue.

Once they got out, the dogs played runaway pups and got them so turned around that they don’t know which way is up.

Charuuk says they’re three kilometers from the geomarker and don’t know how to calibrate a compass. ”

Sairy pictured the area in her mind. “There weren’t any mudholes when we hiked up.”

Koda laughed. “There are now.”

“So they’re after the treasure?”

“Yeah, we think so. This might be a side-gig instead of being sanctioned by Joro. One of the mercs was talking about buying a joy palace with her share. Enforcers don’t get bonuses like that.

The flitter has an empty crate strapped to its ass, presumably in case the treasure is portable.

And fits inside. And it’s not too heavy for the flitter to lift.

” She made a rude noise. “Slick slice-and-haul specialists, they ain’t. ”

“We’re near the top of Jalkapanga, in a cave with a river of rotting wuzzy-bug nymph corpses. Houyen took plenty of samples for Phen. It’s not the breeding ground, though. Should we come back down?”

“Nope. Keep looking. You’re safer up there for now. Let us know if anything changes, and we’ll do the same.” A brief chirp ended the comm.

Sairy didn’t mind the implication that she and Houyen would be a liability in a skirmish because it was true. He was a watcher and a thinker, and her best skill was slipping out the back by the time bellowing drunk fathers started kicking in the front door.

Moments later, Brannezzo came back online. “That was Matsurgan. He wants to know where you are and how soon you can get here.” The man sounded noticeably more stressed than before. “I’m not supposed to leave without you.”

Houyen rolled his eyes. “Okay, but I’m twelve hours away from the geomarker, and I’m not hiking at night.

You should probably go back down to Irakat Collective to wait.

I think I can be there by noon or so. I left my flitter on Irakat’s landing pad.

” A sharp smile flashed across his face.

“Or you and the two locals you brought — I didn’t catch their names — could camp tonight where you are at Spider Rift and help me find my airsled in the morning. ”

“We, uh, didn’t bring any camping gear. We’ll meet you in Irakat.” Two chirps signaled the end of the conversation.

Sairy exploded with suppressed laughter. “Spider Rift?”

Houyen grinned. “It needed a name.”

“How long has he been a ranger?” She shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone so unsuited for his job.”

“Me, either.” Houyen shrugged. “He’s a greedy ass who thinks the universe owes him, but he might not have started out that way.

From what I’ve seen, the CPS’s policy is to keep control of all high-level talents, even if they have no use for them.

Terraform companies and agricultural corps would start a salary bidding war to get his insect-affinity talent.

” He looked down as he scuffed one boot in the gravel.

“The only upside to the CPS having forgotten we exist is that even top-level talented rangers don’t have to go on the so-called ‘enhancement’ drugs.

They’re poison, no matter what the CPS says. ”

“Yeah, they are. Lucky for me, patterners don’t get the drugs, either. My uncle retired from the CPS and hovered around death’s door for nine miserable years.”

Kyala made a whining sound and crowded next to Sairy’s thigh. The gargoyle had picked up on Sairy’s sadness and was trying to comfort her. She contained her emotions as she stroked the sweet creature’s broad head and fondled one dusty ear. “Sorry.”

Houyen took out a deep breath, then let it out forcefully. “How about we check the back of the cave, see what Koda and Phen say, then find a place to camp for the night? Not here, though.” He wrinkled his nose. “And nowhere near the lake. The stench would kill me.”

“Kyala agrees with you about the smell.” She waved toward the back of the cave. “Your light is brighter, so I’ll follow you.”