Page 4 of Stellar Drift (Central Galactic Concordance)
Houyen waited for the doors blazoned with the Makaan Nature Reserve Ranger Service logo to slowly iris open. They seemed as tired and achy as he was.
The attached hangar behind him, where he’d parked the surplus military aircar, smelled like someone had spilled a dekaliter of overheated lubricant, then doused the area with astringent antifungal to mask the odor.
As he trudged into the base’s main building that held staff living quarters on one side and the working offices and command suite on the other, a lesser version of the oily antifungal smell followed him down the hallway.
The duffle bag’s strap cut into his shoulder like he was carrying rocks instead of the usual extra clothes, wilderness gear, and sampling kits.
The ringing in his ears nearly drowned out the echoes of his footsteps.
His assigned quarters were too close to the hangar entrance for his liking, but he was grateful for the proximity now.
Once inside, he sealed the door behind him and dropped the bag, then headed for his private fresher.
It was a much-preferred alternative to the aircar’s dropseat compost toilet or the great outdoors, where bloodthirsty insects zeroed in on exposed tender flesh in a heartbeat.
A glimpse of himself in the mirror wall startled him.
Based on the way he felt, he should look like an animated corpse, but he didn’t look anything other than exhausted and muddy.
Ever since awakening in his aircar, he felt untethered, as if he’d been drifting in some interstellar void and was just coming back to civilization.
Four hours ago, he’d woken up hot, groggy, and disoriented. Ringing in his ears swelled and ebbed with each breath. His upper center chest ached like he’d been punched. The ripe, sour-sweat scent from his clothing nearly set his nose hairs on fire.
Once enough of his brain cells were firing, myriad mysteries presented themselves.
He was webbed into the pilot seat, but it was swiveled to face the back.
The aircar door was open, but covered by a stiff and sturdy tarp he recognized as having been made of tough jungle plants by a clever weaver in Axolotl Bend.
His head was covered with a colorful town-crafted bug net, rather than the standard-issue version that he had a dozen of in the aircar and his bag.
A generic water pouch was in his vest pocket, where he never put them because he didn’t like condensation wet spots on his chest. His percomp gauntlet was on the wrong arm.
His boots, pants, and the hem of his tunic were caked with dried mud.
His scalp itched, and his hair felt stiff and greasy.
More critically, four days had passed that he couldn’t account for.
He confirmed the galactic date and time from the planetary net and the local time from his percomp and aircar console before admitting no multi-tech failure or coworker prank could explain it. He really had lost four days.
He wrestled with that conundrum as he ran diagnostics on the aircar’s systems, twice just in case, then took off and let the planetary traffic control system send him back to the Makaan Ranger Service base in Ryaksha City.
Thank the gods of technology for a working autopilot system.
He needed the ninety minutes it gave him to think.
Technically, his first order of business should have been contacting Base Command, but he didn’t know what to tell them.
The last clear memory he had was lifting off in his aircar from Irakat Collective’s flitter pad.
He’d been in an intense meeting with the administrators for three river towns about their recent surge of fever cases and his idea on the possible disease vector.
After that, his memory was a shattered mess, like the one disastrous time he’d tried a hallucinogenic chem.
For example, he was reasonably sure he hadn’t teleported back and forth between the polar ice cap and a volcanic lava flow. Teleportation only happened in science fiction serials. And his dreams, apparently.
For another, he couldn’t fathom why he’d dreamed about multiple conversations between an unknown male and the local woman named Sairy, or why her pet gargoyle was licking his face.
Sure, Sairy had caught his attention from the first day they’d met, and they’d seemed comfortably compatible in later interactions, but she remained elusive.
No one in the three little towns along the Kalkajalka River knew where she lived, but she visited all of them sporadically.
He didn’t even know her full name, so why she’d turned up in his dreams was another mystery.
Well, maybe not that much of a mystery, since he’d dreamed about her before because she was sexy and made him laugh.
But his recent dreams of her felt much more real.
He remembered fragments of singing and nonsensical conversations.
Something about mapmaking and siphoning milliseconds from the planetary communications net.
The male voice wanted to add compounded electrolyte powders to a shopping list, then complained that body mass calculations would be unattainable in null-G.
Sairy wished that whatever drew wannabe crime lord Falco Joro and her dumb-as-dirt enforcers to build their retreat for the wealthy in the Makaan Nature Reserve would draw her away again soon.
As specific as those memories were, even sharper memories all seemed to center around smells, like something had cleared his sinuses. Antiseptics. Persian roses in full bloom. A salty and fruity liquid. Moist dog breath.
The dream visuals made the least sense of all.
Wide doors that his dream-self interpreted as a starship airlock.
Drifting in the void in an all-white emergency escape capsule through an indifferent universe.
A basalt cave with hundreds of rainforest and riverine plants growing all along the horizontally striated walls, like an abandoned hydroponic farm gone wild.
Plants were usually like sparks and flashes to his plant affinity talent, but in his dream, each spark was actually a collection of tiny lights, with unique color combinations for different plant species. Very confusing.
Right now, just standing felt like too much effort.
Sticking his head in his fresher basin, he splashed cool water on his face and head, then pushed his hair back, trying to smooth down the unruly spikes.
A wave of exhaustion washed through him.
His future self would be grateful if he took a shower before sleeping, but he wasn’t sure he had the stamina.
He wished he knew what he’d been doing in the missing four days. Maybe he’d become drowsy, landed the aircar to take a nap, and inadvertently joined a wilderness exploration marathon. He hadn’t sleepwalked since he was six years old, but he didn’t have any better theories just then.
Both the shower and the bed in the back room were singing their siren songs, but he needed to check in first. He took a deep breath, then blew it out quickly because he still stank. Maybe he really had run a marathon. In a moldy swamp.
Trudging back to the front room, he woke the deskcomp and pinged Barken, the Command Administrator.
“Hey, Albasrey, I was just about… is your display acting up again? I’m not getting a visual.
” Barken sounded peeved, but he often did these days.
His position was supposed to be operational administration and base logistics, but the Ranger Service had an ever-increasing number of unfilled positions.
Barken kept accumulating additional duties without increased rank or pay.
The Citizen Protection Service kept cutting its budget contribution.
The Qal Corona planetary government had no incentive to make up the difference.
“My display is green go. I’m using just audio because I’m filthy. Was anyone looking for me?”
“No, why?”
Houyen frowned. “I’ve been gone for four days.”
Barken’s silence stung. No one had noticed his absence.
He started to make the point about basic personnel safety procedures, then hesitated.
They’d want to know what happened, and he had no satisfactory explanation to offer.
The CPS, for all it liked to pretend otherwise, was still a military branch of the galactic government. The military didn’t like mysteries.
“Huh,” said Barken finally. ”You didn’t miss much, except the finsec system went chaotic again and froze our accounts for a day. At least it wasn’t thirty-three days, like last time. Besides, Delacallo said you were liaising with the locals.”
Houyen rolled his eyes at the in-house code for having casual hot-connect sex with a local civilian. From what he’d seen, it was Delacallo’s primary hobby, so she likely assumed everyone did it.
Houyen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose. Regulations in writing and in practice were two different things, at least as far as this command went. Why waste his time bringing up the protocols for keeping track of their field staff? It wouldn’t change anything.
“Well, anyway,” said Barken, “ Matsurgan is headed north this evening and wants to see you before he leaves. Can you get here in five minutes?”
“Better make that fifteen minutes, unless the Chief wants mud all over his new carpet.” Houyen and the other rangers rarely saw their boss in person because he covered two ranger stations, and preferred the base in the high plains part of the reserve, a thousand kilometers to the north.
The locals there managed horses, which suited Matsurgan’s equine-focused animal-affinity minder talent far better than the plant-, reptile-, and bird-infested rainforest.
“I’ll tell him.” Two brief tones ended the conversation.
Cleaner and better smelling, but no less tired, Houyen sat upright and forward in the guest chair that Matsurgan had indicated.