Page 5 of Stellar Drift (Central Galactic Concordance)

The new plush carpet in soothing waves of blue, green, and tan highlighted how mismatched and utilitarian the rest of the furnishings were.

The bare, windowless walls and the subtle odor of construction adhesive didn’t improve the office’s ambiance.

Matsurgan wisely held any important meetings in the base’s well-appointed conference room, which had wide windows that offered a view of a nearby well-tended, naturalized waterfall garden.

Matsurgan opened a transparent display that showed several flat graphs. His large and expressive facial features made all his reactions seem exaggerated. His current grimace reminded him of a pre-flight castle gargoyle. “Why don’t I have your ten-day reports?”

“Which ones are you missing?” Houyen asked politely, stalling for time as he tried to remember if one had been due while he’d been off visiting dreamland.

No, luckily, he’d submitted the last one nine days ago.

It was disheartening to realize his boss would notice a missing report sooner than he’d notice a missing employee.

“All of them.” He stabbed a control. “Barken, send me Albasrey’s ten-days for the last standard year.”

“They’re in your meeting dataspace, where you told me to put them.” Barken’s tone came perilously close to snappish.

“Huh,” Matsurgan grunted sourly, ending the comm.

He made surly growling sounds as he displayed the reports as a row of cubes, then opened the last one. “What have you been working on?”

Houyen hid his exasperation. Chaos forbid his boss might make use of the top summary section, helpfully labeled as such.

“I planned and scheduled the quarterly botanical surveys. I did upkeep visits to two of the remote ranger stations in my sector. I met with the local towns in the upper rainforest area about the source of the disease that’s been recurring—”

Matsurgan interrupted. “What?” His frown returned. “Not your ‘infinity fever’ nonsense again.” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Did you put that in your report?”

“No, sir. It’s not due until tomorrow.”

Matsurgan’s hand curled into a fist. “I’m not having those farkin’ CPS researchers crawling up our collective asses looking for imaginary diseases.

They don’t know shit about our mission and don’t care.

They’ll play the ‘keep the galactic peace’ card and destroy our rapport with the locals.

” He blew out a noisy breath. “And it’ll come out of my budget. ”

That last was the real reason, Houyen suspected.

The incident had been a decade before Houyen had been transferred in, and before Matsurgan had been saddled with the additional rainforest district to manage.

The CPS had brought in pharma company researchers to investigate rare plants for a promising new enhancement drug for minders.

Houyen struggled to keep a tight rein on his temper. A drug to benefit a tiny percentage of minders was not even in the same solar system as a serious, possibly contagious fever that killed people, but Matsurgan wouldn’t care.

“Not one word of that ‘fever’ horseshit goes in your report. You’re a botanist with a mid-level minder talent for plants, not a trained and registered medic.

Or an epidemiologist, or anything else. You need to be doing your job and following policy, not freelancing.

And not enabling a few crackpots to spread ridiculous rumors and getting the rest of the locals riled up about something that doesn’t exist. That’s the problem with letting civilians live in the Reserve.

Sure, they can be useful at the ground level, but practicing ancient pre-flight Earth indigenous ways of life makes them superstitious.

‘Cooperators,’ my ass. The locals are self-dealing parasites who only cooperate when it suits them.

But they scream like pissed-off peacocks if their cooperator payments are late. ”

Houyen suppressed a sigh. Apparently, Matsurgan was in a mood to swing at everything he disliked about his life, and Houyen was the unlucky punching bag.

Without locals and their willingness to monitor the ecosystems and manage resources responsibly, the CPS would have to hire millions of employees across the galaxy to do the job.

Or answer to the Central Galactic Concordance’s High Council as to why the nature reserves were failing.

Houyen agreed with the CGC foundation laws that established and maintained the nature reserves and preserves on each of the five-hundred-plus member planets.

He wouldn’t have a career, otherwise. And allowing biodiversity to flourish in the semi-controlled environment of terraformed planets made good sense, especially since it was key to future successful terraforming when they discovered new suitable planets.

But he’d never understood why responsibility for them ended up with the Citizen Protection Service.

“Find something better to do with your time. Something on your official list of duties.” Matsurgan glared. “Obsessions are dangerous. They’d be grounds for a mandatory evaluation by the CPS mind shop in Eolium.”

“Yes, sir.” He pasted a penitent look on his face.

Houyen had been recruited by the CPS at age seventeen, so he had nearly thirty years of experience placating commanders and chiefs with a seemingly respectful and compliant body demeanor.

It tanked that he’d needed to hone that skill to keep his career, but life was full of tradeoffs.

Such as having a meaningful job even though it precluded anything more than fleeting relationships, let alone a family.

Even though he dreamed of leaving the service, and had even looked into how to just disappear, the CPS would never let him go.

He’d tested too high in his minder talent, even though an affinity for plants was about as benign an active talent as there was.

A talent so useless to the CPS that they didn’t even bother developing enhancement drugs for it.

Besides, Matsurgan wouldn’t follow through with the threat unless Houyen openly defied him.

As far as he could tell, Matsurgan had jetted past burnout into cynically numb a couple of decades ago.

The man either didn’t notice or care that ranger morale was setting new lows with each passing year of understaffing and underfunding.

As a consequence, rangers in the Makaan Nature Reserve could pretty much do — or not do — as they pleased.

If Houyen's intuition was right, several of them were engaging in self-enrichment and self-indulgence at the expense of the Reserve's resources and residents. At Ryaksha base, Ranger Melekir was so close to retirement that she was counting down the hours. Ranger Torishi was probably harvesting and selling rare plants to unregulated pharma startups for profit. Delacallo liked pursuing her hot-connect hobby far better than she liked patrolling the reserve. Polar glaciers moved faster than Ranger Brannezzo’s audit of Falco Joro's construction plans, though that could be malicious compliance to protest a task that wasn’t supposed to be his job. The permits said Joro was building a resort for the ultra-wealthy, but satellite images made it look more like a fortress. Brannezzo, who made no secret of detesting field work, practically lived in Eolium, the north continent’s megacity, where the planet’s regional planning office was located.

Half the ranger station’s budget probably went to Matsurgan’s trips up north and Brannezzo’s hotel bills.

Houyen wished that whatever part of him noticed these things and drew these usually accurate conclusions would just leave him alone. He had a few scars from learning the hard way that, unless he acted to protect himself, coworkers who got caught would drag everyone into their maelstrom.

Houyen gave himself a mental shake and tried to catch up with what Matsurgan was saying.

“...and I want to see your report before–”

Two tones sounded, and Barken’s voice came through the deskcomp. “It’s seventeen-thirty hours, sir.”

Matsurgan all but pounded the control. “Yes, Admin Barken, I know what farkin’ time it is.

” He turned his glare on Houyen. “Dismissed. If you need a project, fix whatever is wrong with the hydroponics demonstration room. Whatever you did before didn’t last. Now it looks like it got frost-bit or something. ”

“Yes, sir.” Houyen rose and nodded respectfully, then pivoted on one foot to make a smart, military-style turn and headed toward the doors, which irised open quietly.

With an equally respectful nod at Barken as he strode past the man’s desk, he kept up his purposeful march until he got back to his quarters.

He waited until the doors closed to release his control. Exhaustion slammed like a bucket of cold water, making his shoulders sag and his eyelids droop. He barely had enough energy to set the do-not-disturb seal on his room, kick off his boots, and tumble onto the bed.

He awoke to the gentle sound of birdsong and a coppery taste in his mouth. As he rolled onto his back, he draped an arm over his head to protect his gritty, sticky eyes from the bright overhead lights.

The chirping became louder and more insistent.

“Okay, okay,” he mumbled. “I’m awake.” That was a lie, but it got the bedroom’s wallcomp to fade out the morning wake-up sequence.

It felt like breaking out of a cocoon just to fight free of the light blanket so he could swing his legs off the bed and sit up.

Every joint in his body felt like he hadn’t used it for a month.

He fumbled in his bedside drawer for the pack of pain patches and slapped one on his neck, hoping it would kick his headache’s ass and take names.

According to the clock display, he’d lost another twelve hours of his life. At least this interlude was explainable and hadn’t brought more dreams.