Alien Game Read online

  I spent the rest of the day and a good chunk of the night fixing the construction drones. There were twenty-five of the things, big boxy yellow drones with treads and a rotating turret on their back that held a variety of earth-moving tools. I had spent most of my childhood and teenage years helping first my father and then Uncle Morgan fix autonomous tractors, and these things were no different. As it happened, it was an easy fix. Someone had disconnected the computer core from the engine on every single drone, so I just had to re-solder the connections and restart the drones. Uncle Morgan’s tractors suffered that breakdown due to jostling, but someone had deliberately broken the connection in the construction drones.

  I might not have been the brightest guy in the universe, as my little misadventure with Theresa proved, but even I recognized sabotage when I saw it.

  And there was a lot of sabotage at Outpost Town.

  Tanner later told me that he had a theory there were two rival factions at war inside EcoMin. One wanted to see Safari Company and Outpost Town fail. This faction did things like sabotage the construction drones, load defective software on the computers, misplace shipping schedules, lose paperwork, and so forth. It seemed this faction wasn’t quite powerful enough to hit Safari Company with crippling fines and put it out of business, but EcoMin had enough power that individual members within it could easily cause all kind of trouble.

  The second faction, the more powerful faction, wanted to see the Safari Company succeed, and it was easy to see why.

  It turned out that really rich people from throughout the Thousand Worlds were willing to pay enormous sums of money for the privilege of hunting alien game.

  Hunting on New Princeton was one thing. Humans had lived there for fifteen hundred years and the ecosystem had been more or less tamed. As I read through the Company’s files, I found that as mankind had spread into the Thousand Worlds and founded colonies, there had been no less than five colonization attempts upon Arborea. The first attempt had failed due to lack of funds, and the second had failed because of political strife among the colonists.

  The remaining three efforts had failed when Arborea’s predators had eaten every single one of the colonists.

  Because of some combination of the atmosphere, the vegetation, and the distance from the local star, Arborea hosted enormous, well-armored herbivores and vicious, deadly predators. Hunting a fangwolf on New Princeton might get you killed. Hunting a tankstrider or a platewhale or one of the other huge herbivores that roamed the jungles required helicopters, heavy explosives, and tactical expertise, and an angry tankstrider could probably trample Outpost Town into dust.

  EcoMin controlled the hunting permits on Arborea, and the permit to hunt a tankstrider was twenty million credits. Twenty million! And that was one of the cheaper ones. The permit for a platewhale was fifty million, and the pay scale just went up for the larger animals. EcoMin was making money hand over fist from Safari Town, and I guess if the average official had to choose between preserving planetary ecologies and a raise, most of them would choose a raise. The Safari Company also made money hand over fist, even though the ministry took two-thirds of the license fee. Of course, there were other ways to make money—the restaurants, the souvenir shops, the luxury hotels, the high-end guns and ammunition, the personal helicopters and hunting guides, and all the other services Outpost Town offered.

  Mr. Royale might have suffered any number of business failures, but this time, it seemed like he had picked a winner. It also helped that Safari Company didn’t have to worry about lawsuits since every guest had to sign a mountain of paperwork indemnifying both Safari Company and EcoMin from every possible form of liability.

  The reason for that was made quite clear to me by Senior Guide Hiram Charles.

  Tanner might have been Director of Security, which meant he was in charge of security within Outpost Town and the perimeter of the sonic fence. As Senior Guide, Charles was responsible for overseeing the hunting trips into the jungle and managing the guides, and he took this very seriously.

  Though to be fair, I think there wasn’t a subject under the sun that Charles didn’t take seriously.

  “What is the number one killer of Safari Company employees and guests?” demanded Charles during the first hour of my mandatory three-day training session with him.

  He glared at me. This was intimidating, but Hiram Charles glared at everyone. He was a short, blocky man, with lots of muscle, close-cropped black hair, and features that looked as if at least one of his grandparents had been descended from one or another of the Asian nations that scattered across the Thousand Worlds after the discovery of the hyperdrive. I had never seen him wear anything but combat fatigues and body armor, and I suspected he slept in them.

  “The tromosaurs, sir?” I said. The tromosaurs were dangerous. The tankstriders and the platewhales and the other herbivores generally ignored humans unless they were provoked, and when provoked they could bring down helicopters and wipe out an entire hunting party. The tromosaurs, on the other hand, actively hunted humans. They didn’t fear us in the slightest, and almost always shadowed hunting parties. I suppose compared to an armored tankstrider, humans had to be a lot less work to kill.

  “No!” barked Charles. “The tromosaurs are deadly, yes, but there is a deadlier foe by far.” He paced back and forth at the front of the conference room, his shadow flickering across the wall as he stepped into the projector’s field. “Can you guess it, Indentured Worker Hammond?”

  He always called me that. It would have been weird, except he called everyone by their title—Security Director Tanner, Managing Director Hoskins, Technical Writer, Pilot, & Assistant Business Manager Kayla Tanner, and so forth. Sometimes I wondered how he could get through an entire sentence without running out of oxygen.

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Inattention!” said Charles. “That is the deadliest foe of all. Arborea is an unforgiving world, and she repays inattention with death. Constant awareness, Indentured Worker Hammond, constant awareness! These must be our watchwords.”

  With that, Charles decreed that I was ready and would accompany him on a hunting party tomorrow.

  “You’ll be fine,” said Kayla when I told Tanner about it.

  Kayla Tanner had taken me under her wing, much to her husband’s bemusement. The Tanners didn’t have any children. I never worked up the courage to ask why not, but I suspected there was some sort of genetic problem. I would have thought my criminal past would have put off Mrs. Tanner, but she didn’t seem to care. Based on what I heard, she was the oldest daughter of a farm family on New Princeton and had gotten her start in piloting by flying her father’s crop dusters, so she would have seen the hard hand of EcoMin on a regular basis. And since she’d been the oldest, she was used to telling younger people what to do.

  She could cook too. Mr. Royale’s KwikBreets are well and good, but there’s no substitute for a good home-cooked meal.

  “Hiram knows what he’s doing,” said Kayla, setting a pot of stew upon the table and seating herself. I sat across from her and Tanner, and I didn’t eat until Tanner and Kayla had served themselves. I was always on my best behavior at these dinners, partly out of gratitude, and partly because I was still a little frightened of Tanner.

  “The man’s an obsessive,” said Tanner.

  “Maybe,” conceded Kayla. “Probably. But he’s very good at his job. Listen to him, follow his lead, and you’ll be fine.”

  “Remember,” said Tanner, pointing a thick finger at me, “always watch out for tromosaurs.”

  I nodded. “Watch for the telltale ripples, if I see one, assume there are two others that I can’t see, keep my sonic alarm ready at all times, and if cornered do not let them get me down on the ground.”

  “See?” said Kayla. “You’ll do fine.”

  Tanner grunted. “I give you a fifty-fifty chance.”

  I was a little unsettled, but Kayla laughed, so I decided he was kidding. Maybe.

  The next m
orning I flew out with Charles’s hunting party, escorting a Safari Company client named Lucius Rogson.

  He was the single most annoying man I had ever met in my entire life.

  Lucius Rogson was a short, somewhat doughy fellow, and insisted on dressing in expensive double-breasted business suits despite the fact that Arborea’s climate made him sweat through both shirt and jacket in about five minutes. He had a habit of asking questions of everything, which Charles was happy to answer, seeing them as demonstrating a valuable quality of diligence. Unfortunately, Rogson invariably misinterpreted the answers, reached erroneous conclusions, and ran with them. Apparently, Rogson was the finance director for some massive interplanetary corporation or another, and after watching him attempt to put on his own body armor, I decided then and there that if I ever came into money, I would never invest any of it with his company.

  Rogson had two aides that were almost as annoying as he was—a prim, tight-lipped lawyer type in a suit who looked like he had a running spreadsheet of deductible expenses in his head, and a burly ex-Security Ministry guy like Tanner. Unlike Tanner, Rogson’s bodyguard put on a big show of carrying expensive weapons around on his belt, and while I was no expert on military hardware, I knew just enough to realize that his pistols looked scarier than they really were. They had a lot more chrome and attachments than were strictly necessary.

  We took one of the Company’s quadcopters and flew off into the jungle. I wondered why the Company just didn’t use antigrav-equipped transports for hunting expeditions, but evidently, some kind of fungal spore in the jungle played havoc on antigrav engines. The quadcopters were safer and cheaper anyway. The particular quadcopter we used looked sleek and deadly, its four rotors housed in metal rings jutting from the fuselage. A pair of large-caliber chin guns jutted from beneath the pilot’s canopy.

  The quadcopter carried Rogson and his two assistants, who in my head I had dubbed the Lawyer and the Bodyguard. The pilot sat alone in the cockpit, while Charles and four of his guides sat with Rogson and his assistants in the passenger compartment. I sat next to Charles, shifting uncomfortably in the hard plastic seat and trying not to look nervous. I wore a full guide’s kit complete with body armor, water bottle, utility belt, and survival gear. It was heavy, it was awkward, and I was not as familiar with the equipment as I should have been.

  However, I quite liked the gun Charles had assigned me. It was a Mordecai Avenger .323 rifle, military-grade, with a fifty-round magazine and capable of both semi-automatic and fully automatic fire. Charles knew I could handle a gun, and his customary scowl had even evaporated momentarily when he saw my marksmanship scores. Thanks to my father and Uncle Morgan, I had grown up handling rifles, and I had taken to the Mordecai Avenger quite well. Granted, it was a bit more gun than I was used to, weighing about a kilo more than my trusty old Monster Hunter .224, but the basic principles were the same—stance, sighting, aiming, and then pull the trigger.

  “Listen up, people!” shouted Charles over the roar of the quadcopter’s engines. We all had an earpiece in our right ears and a microphone on our collars. It would have been easier to hear him with headphones, but walking around the jungles of Arborea with a pair of headphones was a stupendously bad idea and a great way to miss an audible warning that might save your life. “We are three klicks out from the target—one mature male tankstrider, no mate, and no attendant young. This is our designated kill for this hunt!”

  “Ha!” said Rogson, his eyes glittering. “Time to shine, gentlemen! One shot, one kill!”

  “Finance Director Rogson has chartered this expedition,” said Charles, taking the long black tube of a rocket launcher from its rack on the wall. A rocket had already been loaded in the launcher, jutting from the business end like a diamond of gray metal. “Therefore Finance Director Rogson will fire the killing shot. Remember, the weak spot on a tankstrider’s exoskeleton is directly behind the cranial fan, where the head joins with the thorax…”

  “Yes, yes, I know all this,” said Rogson. “I read the briefing packet.”

  Charles stared at him. Before the intensity of that disapproving gaze, the wealthy corporate executive swallowed, nodded, and gestured for him to continue. Or maybe it was just the sight of Arborea’s wild jungles blurring past outside the window. The danger lurking in the leafy green depths had a way of putting one’s mortality into perspective. All the money in the thousand words couldn’t save you from an enraged stonesteer or the venom of a slabsnake… but it could hire the right men and equipment to deal with them.

  “The pilot will line up the shot,” said Charles. “If it goes amiss, we shall employ one of our contingency plans. Once the tankstrider is down, we shall land, collect trophies, harvest the meat, and… take pictures, I believe?”

  “Very much so,” said Rogson. “A group picture. I definitely want to be holding the rocket launcher in the picture. Think how it will look in the board room!”

  “Yes,” said Charles. “Pilot Hobson, our ETA?”

  Hobson’s voice crackled over my ear pieces. “Four minutes. I’m taking us down below the upper canopy.”

  “Stations, people!” said Charles.

  I shifted in my seat, checking the Avenger one last time, and the pilot steered the quadcopter below the upper canopy of the jungle. The jungles of Arborea are just as immense as the animals, and some of the larger trees could easily reach fifteen hundred feet tall. From a distance, they looked like small green mountains. Consequently, there were multiple layers of canopies, with different winged predators lurking on each of the levels. Two of Charles’s guides moved to the side doors of the quadcopter, rifles ready in their hands. Most of the winged predators would stay away from the noise the quadcopter generated, but some of them would not, and occasionally a really ambitious tromosaur clambered its way up a tree to attack its prey from above, and nothing except sonic alarms or a hail of bullets would drive them off.

  Our descent was uneventful, and the quadcopter slipped through a gap in the massive branches to reach the lowest level of the jungle, just two hundred feet above the ground itself. It was gloomy down here, with occasional shafts of sunlight stabbing through the gaps in the canopy, and most of the vegetation let out a pale green glow. Frankly, it looked like a bizarre and badly misplaced city nightclub. The vegetation somehow produced its own light for photosynthesis or something. I had absolutely no idea how that worked, but then, I was a mechanic, not a biologist.

  The tankstrider lumbered through the jungle a hundred meters in front of us.

  The first time I saw a tankstrider, my first thought was that it was a building that had somehow grown legs and decided to go for a stroll through the jungles of Arborea. It was a huge creature, nearly a hundred meters long, with six thick legs and a fat tail that dragged along behind it through the foliage. The tankstrider kind of looked like a combination of an armadillo, an army ant, and a triceratops. Because of the vicious nature of Arborea’s ecology, a tankstrider possessed both an internal skeleton and an exoskeleton of gleaming black and brown armor, armor that could shrug off anything short of ship-mounted railguns or missiles.

  Which was why we were hunting it with a rocket launcher, not our Avengers.

  Even with a rocket launcher, a tankstrider still had only one vulnerable point. Like an ancient triceratops, it had a massive bony frill rising from the back of its head that shielded its neck. Beneath the frill, where the head joined to the neck, was a vulnerable point full of nerve clusters and blood vessels, and a hit there could kill a tankstrider in short order. Of course, even without the exoskeleton, a tankstrider’s hide was tough enough to shrug off most bullets. Something like a .50 caliber minigun or a plasma rifle would have been able to chew through the tankstrider’s hide, but the noise or the heat would draw the gargantuan creature’s attention and likely prove fatal long before the bullets or the plasma shells did any lasting damage.

  So, a rocket launcher. A well-placed rocket was the only way, short of orbital bombardment, t
o take down a tankstrider. Of course, if the rocket missed the weak spot, it would only enrage the tankstrider, and if Hobson didn’t get us out of reach quickly enough, the tankstrider would take the quadcopter down and smash it to bits with little difficulty. We had one shot to kill the tankstrider or the hunt would be a bust.

  And we were trusting Lucius Rogson to make that shot.

  Sweat trickled down my back as I watched him fumble with the rocket launcher, and not just from the constant oppressive humidity of Arborea. We were trusting in Rogson to make the shot, and Rogson was kind of an idiot. To be fair, he had paid an enormous sum of money for the privilege of killing a tankstrider, but I wouldn’t have trusted Rogson to cut bread for me, let alone to shoot a rocket at a tankstrider.

  Fortunately, Charles did everything he could to stack the deck. He told Rogson how to hold the rocket launcher, how to aim it, and in the process more or less aimed it for him. He shouted directions to Hobson, and the pilot got the quadcopter as low as he dared and as close as he dared without drawing the tankstrider’s attention. The beast continued its leisurely stroll through the jungle, leaving a trail of crushed vegetation in its wake, though Arborea’s insane ecology meant most of those plants would have regrown within a day or two.

  “Steady,” said Charles. “Steady… steady… fire!”

  His voice cracked like a whip in my earpiece, and Rogson squeezed the trigger.

  There was a whooshing noise, a roar, and the rocket erupted from the black tube on a plume of white smoke. I watched in frozen suspense as the rocket hurtled from the quadcopter’s side door and covered the distance to the tankstrider. For an instant, I was utterly sure that Rogson had missed, and I only hoped the rocket would miss the tankstrider entirely and explode in the jungle without drawing the creature’s attention.

  Then the rocket slipped past the edge of the bony frill, vanishing against the back of the tankstrider’s neck, and exploded with a flare of fire.

  “Get us up!” shouted Charles. “Up! Up!”