S’maak-Captain looked at her, and there might have been a faint flicker of amusement in one of his ears.
“I do not like giving up before we land, any more than my impulsive daughter,” Orion growled. “I agree that we should land. And that we should strike the pirates before they can strike us. Enough to cow them, though Kzin are not easily cowed. Valiant, I would think it a prudent move to have some sort of back-up made of your present identity, and give copies to us and instructions for restoring you, should you be subverted.”
Valiant answered. “Done, my lord. The ship application on your phones now contains the present state of my linguistic knowledge together with instructions for restoring me should I fall to the enemy. I have also set up some subsidiary identities with which you may communicate to assist you.”
“Then I have your orders to land on the planet, my lord? And then to take such action with Silver as I deem appropriate after we have landed?”
“Yes, S’maak-Captain. And I thank you for your devotion to duty. My Sire shall get my recommendation of your ability and character when we return. As we shall, one way or another!” Orion-Riit turned to me. “Peter, what you did in the meat-locker was also most commendable. You showed courage and resource. I see why my daughter counts you as a friend.”
I blushed. I didn’t think I had done anything brave or clever, in fact I had been competely deceived by Silver, which was foolish. Still, even Marthar had been fooled by him, so maybe I was not an utter idiot.
We came out of hyperdrive and, after a relatively short (but for me, and I am sure for the other human leaders, dreadfully tense) passage through the system, prepared to land on the planet. The landing site was to be close to the tower that had been featured in K’zarr’s notebook which we had got from Skel. We had its precise coordinates relative to the planet as well as the galactic coordinates of the lime-green sun, so it was fairly straightforward to identify the place. There was only a handful of planets of any size, although there were several rings of asteroids right out to something like Sol’s Kuiper belt. I wish we had seen more of the system when we had emerged from hyperspace, but we had been too busy, with Marthar and Valiant. Fortunately, Silver had been kept busy and we hadn’t seen him.
I talked to Marthar about what it would be like when we landed. We, or at least I, would need some sort of protection from the world, which had a rather thin atmosphere, although the pirates of K’zarr’s band had survived well enough, it seemed. Marthar explained to me that they might well have been wearing some sort of protection, it was very light and skin-tight and unobtrusive these days, and we would have to get them constructed for us, but Valiant could do that. First Valiant would have to analyze the environment by sending out probes to measure everything from radiation levels to oxygen pressure, along with every other gas and particle in the vicinity, in case there were poisonous gases or phages. This was standard operating procedure when making planetfall, not to mention measuring things from space to make sure the surface actually had the structural strength to support the ship. Although the gravity-planer technology helped there: The Valiant could be pretty close to weightless if she chose.
When we broke up, Marthar and I went off together with the same objective. We wanted to look at the information in the updated ship app; we wanted to know how to restore Valiant if she got corrupted. It was as well we did.
PART THREE
THE
PLANET-FALL
ADVENTURE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The planet was named Garth in the human astronomical catalogues, and the green sun was called Vanity. Garth was quasi-sun-locked, evidence of an old solar system, first generation. The planet took about two-thirds of a year to rotate, so the same side was shown to the sun for much of the time. Mercury and Venus do something similar around Sol. The tower we wanted was not directly under the sun, but in the daylight side, about a quarter of the way around the planet from the sub-solar point, and from orbit it flashed away pretty quickly. S’maak-Captain ordered us into L1, the first Lagrange point. This was between the sun and the planet, and of course as it is only stable in the plane perpendicular to the line joining planet to sun, it is not really stable, unlike L4 and L5, two of the other five Lagrange points, but it would do for the short time Valiant would be there. It is relatively close to the planet, so it was possible to see the place close up, at least through telescopes, including the lines of canals and the many, mostly heavily-eroded meteor craters.
A first-generation sun has no heavy metals in it, so the planet Garth, although a fair size—bigger than Earth—had less gravity than Wunderland, and had lost some of its atmosphere over time in consequence. It could not have developed intelligent life, I thought; certainly not space-travelling life, because you can’t even have an iron age without iron, and there wouldn’t be any, but hundreds of millions of years ago it might have had oceans and been warm enough to have evolved some lifeforms. And it might have looked like a dream planet to another species. The sun wasn’t very bright, and Garth was fairly close to it; the year was about half as long as Wunderland’s. All my knowledge of other worlds up to now was based on reading about them and watching documentaries at school, which I’d always loved, but of course it isn’t at all the same as being there. There were the new game rooms in Munchen, where you could play in a simulator, but my family was too poor to go there often. Anyway, you’d be bound to know it wasn’t real.
The crew were in a very bad mood as we moved slowly into L1. Valiant showed us some of them, and there were growls aplenty. Even the crew we thought still loyal were less than anxious to respond to S’maak-Captain’s orders. In fact, the best and most agreeable of them was Silver, who, when he got an order relayed by Valiant, would salute the invisible voice and call “Aye, aye ma’am” and set about the task with energy. The general air of tension was palpable. I suppose that most of the bad ones were like Claws: wondering why they hadn’t had a mutiny yet, and impatient for it. The bad feeling seemed to spread to the whole crew.
“This doesn’t look good, S’maak-Captain,” the Doctor observed. “They are almost ready to blow.”
“I observe that, sir,” S’maak-Captain said stiffly. He was never comfortable talking to the humans. “And I also observe that Silver is our ally just at present; he too is trying to keep them under control and would do so better had he the opportunity. I propose to give it to him.”
S’maak-Captain ordered over the public address system that some of the crew would go down to the surface in landing craft to take some more measurements of the stability of the ground near the site. I have a suspicion that he had actually decided not to put the Valiant down at all, but to handle everything with the small landing craft. That would stop us loading any very big treasure but allow an easier job of leaving with a reduced crew.
The announcement cheered the crew, many of whom seemed to be under the impression that the surface was full of treasure and they’d find handfuls of valuables as soon as they stepped out. There were to be two landing craft: the scarlet one led by Silver and a green one led by the human couple, Sam Anderson and his wife, Ursula. It looked as though there would be about twelve beings in each boat, which would leave something like the same number of crew back on Valiant, and of course us as well. In fact, it rather looked as though the strategy was to keep us all on board Valiant until the strike against the crew was made, and Silver was safely dead. When we worked this out, Marthar and I looked at each other. We were in the rec-room watching everything happen on screens, and trying out our surface gear in a simulated planet landing. The air in the rec-room was a good indication of what it was like on the surface; the temperature was pretty much the same as at the contact point, and we had no trouble breathing or staying warm with the micro-packs we wore. Drones had already gone down and relayed information back, and Marthar and I had realized at the same time that there was some sort of segregation going on and we were on the losing end.
“Come on, Peter. I r
efuse to stay here when man and kzin are going down to the surface. I want to go too. Let’s stow away. There’s plenty of space. And we’ve got all the landing gear, we can go out on the real surface instead of this pretend one.”
I looked around. The rec-room was doing a pretty good simulation and the view stretched into the distance, even if it was all faked. We could clearly see the broken tower we had visited on the memo pad, and the sun high in the fake sky. There was more vegetation around than I had remembered; maybe it was a different season, although what seasons were like here didn’t bear thinking about. When the landers returned images from the surface, the rec-room simulation could be made practically identical to the actual surface, but it was a sight safer here since we could switch off the simulation any time we wanted. However, there was no point in even trying this argument on Marthar.
“Valiant will know, she knows everything,” I pointed out.
“Unless it’s going to cause damage, she can’t stop us,” Marthar said optimistically.
“I want to go in with the Andersons’ lander,” I told her. “I can’t stand the thought of being anywhere near Silver.”
“No, it might not be altogether advisable,” Marthar said thoughtfully. I don’t know if she’d guessed S’maak-Captain’s plan, but it wouldn’t surprise me; they had similar minds. I found out just how similar later. Considering Marthar’s subconscious, or wherever the ideas came from, it’s amazing how nice and kind her conscious can be. Sometimes.
“Come on, then, I have the map to get us to the lander bay, and if we’re quick we can sneak in before the rest get there. Bring your wtsai, the one Silver gave you; we may have to hunt.” Strange, I had got so used to thinking of Marthar simply as a friend. I had almost forgotten she was a kzin until I heard her pronounce the word correctly.
We managed it rather well, we thought at the time, and without a murmur from Valiant. This was because Silver had the same sort of mind as Marthar and S’maak-Captain and had also worked out the likely consequences of going down to the surface. So Silver struck first, and we never knew until later.
We thought we’d hidden very cleverly, but the Andersons found us. They just smiled at us, as if they rather admired our enterprise, so we wound up in regular coffins along with everybody else. There was the usual weightlessness as we moved away from the Valiant and fired our engines to start the fall down to the surface. I could see the graphics on the inside lid of my coffin, so I was ready to jump out as soon as we were down and then it opened. We were on the surface of another planet, the treasure planet!
Marthar was there even before me. Everybody else was still emerging. The lander was running standard checks on the atmosphere, and our external packs were charged and ready. The crew were busy checking the readouts on each others’ packs. Marthar and I had already checked each others’, but we were double-checked by Ursula Anderson. The exit light flashed green, telling us it was safe (orange is the kzin color for safety, which can be confusing), and it opened to the inside of an airlock. Pressure was lower outside, and we didn’t want to waste our internal air by flushing it out, which in any case was forbidden because it would have contaminated the treasure planet with our own phages. We were immune to them, of course, by millennia of coevolution, but they might be deadly to any indigenous life forms. Six of us got into the airlock, the inner door closed and the air cycled out, leaving us in vacuum for a fraction of a second, which made my eyes water a bit even though I followed instructions and closed them, then the alien atmosphere was let in. It stunk a bit at first. There was a faint tang of ammonia and a smell of acetone, but it was okay to breathe it in, and we did, in my case with excitement at the thought that I was breathing the air of another world. I knew the oxygen levels were lower than on Wunderland, but the pack was feeding oxygen straight into my blood stream, so I didn’t feel as if I were choking. I grinned at Marthar, who flipped an ear at me casually.
Then the outer door opened and I had my first glimpse of the world. It was silent, the sky was a light orange color on the horizon and a brilliant indigo at the zenith, with faint clouds. The ground was ochre, like Mars, and there was a lot more vegetation than I had expected. There were no trees, but lots of scrubby-looking bushes, the leaves the green of chlorophyll. It was mostly perhaps a darker green, like holly, possibly for the same reason holly is so dark. There was quite a lot of variation though, including orange leaves, like vegetation on Kzin. I didn’t see any animals; if there were any they were small and hiding. I suppose the lander might have frightened them away. Then I saw some birds; more like winged lizards than the birds of Old Earth or the various flying things of Wunderland, flying in groups. They didn’t make any sound. The banks of a canal were visible in the distance, with some stringy-looking bushes standing up from the middle of it, a long streak of dark green cutting across the red of the landscape. It was warmer than I thought it would be, and also more humid than one would expect.
The steps unfolded from underneath the door, and the Andersons led the way down, Marthar and I following. Then we saw the other lander descending about quarter of a mile away, much nearer to the tower which spiked in the distance. That was Silver’s lander, and Marthar and I glanced at each other and made a run for the bushes.
“Hey, kids, come back,” Ursula yelled at us, but we didn’t. We wanted to be out of sight of Silver, so we hared into the wild. It wasn’t difficult to run and be out of sight of the rest of the crew within minutes. We stopped running and walked a while. I took sightings of the sun, to make sure we could find our way back, although the phones should guide us. There was no GPS on this world, of course. But there was a perfectly good tracker which homed in on a signal from the lander, but who knew what was about to happen?
Marthar pulled out her phone. We had the lander as a local station, of course, and she dialed zero to talk to Valiant.
There was no answer.
“Uh-oh. I have a nasty feeling. I’d say S’maak-Captain’s plan was to send down two landing craft to the surface; I’d guess he had decided to put Silver and the obvious baddies in one of them, while the other would take some of those we thought were still loyal, those who Blandly had hung onto. Then I reckon he was going to get Valiant to destroy the bad guys’ ship in such a way as to make it look like an accident to the pirates still on Valiant. It’s what I’d have done, and I am pretty sure it was what S’maak-Captain was going to do, and I would guess Silver thought so too. So Silver struck first. He disarmed Valiant somehow; I think she’s probably dead. It would account for her not answering the phone. I’ll try calling Daddy and see what he says.”
She dialed another single-digit number and waited. She listened for half a minute before giving up. “There’s a dial tone, but that’s just local and doesn’t mean we’re getting through. Somehow the whole communication system is shot.”
So we were alone and isolated on a strange planet.
The sun didn’t move in the sky, at least not noticeably. We walked steadily.
“Marthar, where are we going?”
“I’m heading towards the tower, and incidentally, Silver’s lander. I’m going in a curve so it won’t be obvious to anyone tracking us.”
“Can they do that?”
“I don’t know. Our packs may have some sort of RFID transmitter buried in them, and we’ve both got our own RFIDs buried in our skin. I don’t know how far away they can be to be quizzed, but the only answer is to be far away from any possible quizzer.”
“We can’t stay away indefinitely, we need to eat,” I pointed out.
“That’s why I told you to bring your wtsai. We may need to live off the land,” she said happily. Marthar was really enjoying herself. She didn’t actually claim the planet for the Riit Clan, probably because she felt that she owned it personally.
“But what makes you think we can eat the local protein?” I objected. “It will be totally different from what either of us have evolved with. Probably toxic and with no nutrition in it at all.”
“Oh, pooh. Humans and kzin can eat each other for quite a long time and have, often enough, in the past. You can eat lobsters, squid and even insects at a pinch, which are pretty remote from you genetically. Proteins that are toxic are pretty rare, animals secrete them by way of defense. I don’t say that everything is edible, but I loaded my phone with pictures of the native species we can’t eat. Everything else we can.”
“They might be a bit nippy. And also small. I haven’t seen anything bigger than a bird so far, I haven’t seen any insects, and the birds look pretty reptilian.”
Marthar looked pityingly at me. “You humans have been happy to eat crocodiles, you’d have eaten tyrannosaurus rex if you’d been around at the same time. Oh, he’d have eaten you if he could catch you, but humans are ingenious. You’d have come out from behind a boulder and waved at him, after digging a nice big pit between you and covering it with sticks and straw. Then he’d have fallen in and you’d have dropped rocks on his head, then skinned him and eaten him. Brains wins every time. If you can predict your enemy better than he can predict you, you eat him. That’s the evolutionary pressure to develop intelligence. The more of it, and the more you embrace it, the higher the intelligence. That’s why I’m smarter than you.”
“So you reckon intelligence is just about being able to predict others?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s what it’s for. Although I suppose if you are smart, you can also use your smarts for deceiving others into being food. But that involves a bit of prediction, so you can figure out what might work. We can regard this little excursion as a sort of intelligence test. Are you going to eat the local lifeforms, or are they going to eat you? It’s the ultimate test of competence.”