Scott Sigler - The Rookie

Denver backed away, slinking back into the Sklorno locker room. Quentin didn’t know much about alien behavior, but Denver seemed like she’d just been severely rebuked for some untoward behavior.

Quentin turned and ran out the tunnel. He didn’t have time to worry about it. He had a game to win.

FROM SPACE, Whitok’s upper atmosphere looked a lime green. As the shuttle sliced into the soupy air, Quentin saw the all-encompassing cloud cover was actually a sulphurous yellow. The blazing light of the blue star at the center of the Whitok system reflected off the yellow outer atmosphere, the two colors combining for a peaceful green. That peaceful sensation faded away as the shuttle dove towards the planet: the closer they came to the surface, the darker it became. Miles-long bursts of lightning rippled through the dark sky, illuminating the ubiquitous clouds in milky-yellow explosions of light. Within minutes of the descent, all sunlight faded away, the shuttle coursing through Whitok’s perpetual twilight.

“Is it always this dark?” Quentin asked Shizzle, who fluttered about the small cabin.

“Is, and has been for the last 145 years,” Shizzle said. The little creature fluttered to a stop on Quentin’s shoulder.

“Find your own seat, pal,” Quentin said as he gently brushed Shizzle away. The Creterakian fluttered twice, then landed on the seat’s armrest.

“The Sklorno navy used relativity bombs on Whitok in 2524. They fired about fifty dense projectiles at near-light speeds. At that speed, the projectiles literally punched right through the core and out the other side. The entry and exit points alone were the sources of devastation like nothing the galaxy had ever seen, the shock-waves destroyed surface life for thousands of miles in all directions. But the projectiles also mixed up Whitok’s inner molten nickel core, and the outer layer of molten iron. That caused huge shifts in the tectonic plates. Whitok suffered decades of massive quakes and volcanoes. Gasses from the core filled the atmosphere, killing any life that survived the initial impacts.

“Whitok’s climate was forever changed. It was seventy-five years before the tectonic plates settled into relative stability. The key word is relative , mind you, because the surface is still plagued with volcanoes that reach as high as five miles into the air. Some estimate it will be another five-hundred to a thousand years before the crust settles completely and the volcanoes become dormant.”

“How come Ionath isn’t like that? The Sklorno also sat-bombed Ionath, right?”

“They did, but they didn’t use relativity bombs, which caused so much damage to Whitok that they’ve never been used again. The results even scared the Sklorno, who wondered if such destructive weapons might someday be utilized against their home-world. For future wars, they instead developed the massive nuclear bombs that were used on Ionath and Gritchlik.”

“Wow,” Quentin said. “That was awfully nice of them.”

“They are a one-minded species,” Shizzle said. “They’re part of the reason we Creterakians took over. We feared that if left to yourselves, the warlike races of Human, Ki, Harrah and especially Sklorno might completely exterminate one another.”

Quentin looked out the window at the blank darkness. “Save me the lecture, Shizzle. I’ve heard it all before.”

“The amazing thing is that despite the almost complete destruction of Whitok, and the fact that the planet is among the most hostile places in the galaxy, the Quyth managed to successfully develop permanent cities. Ah, we’re coming out of the clouds now — behold, the Port of Whitok.”

Quentin pressed against the view port, eager to see his second alien city. As the lightless clouds thinned to nothing, however, he briefly wondered if he’d been tricked — it looked like a smaller version of his new home. The domed downtown looked the same, and the roads radiated out in the familiar spoke-like pattern.

“It looks like Ionath City,” Quentin said.

“The Port of Whitok was built well after the success of Ionath and Gritchlik,” Shizzle said. “The Quyth’s first pioneers landed fifty-one years after the relativity bombing, but the planet’s surface was still so violent they could barely survive. It was another fifty years before they built an actual port that allowed large-craft landings, so the city is really only about sixty years old.”

The shuttle swooped down towards the huge dome. Just like Ionath City, the dome’s surface seemed to open just for the speeding shuttle. Inside the dome, right at the city center, sat a perfectly round stadium.

“It looks bigger than ours,” Quentin said.

“EA&M Stadium,” Shizzle said. “Seats 181,500, every game is a sellout. There’s no sunlight on the planet’s surface, which hinders outdoor activities. There’s not much to do, so beings on Whitok take football very seriously.”

“More seriously than Ionath?”

“Last week there were five murders involving tickets for the game against the Bigg Diggers.”

The shuttle banked a landing pad atop a building attached to the stadium. Even the buildings looked very similar to Ionath City’s. As the vehicle lowered for the landing, Quentin stared out the window at the field. Here the surface wasn’t blue, but a pale yellow with black lines and numbers. He had read up on the stadium in his effort to prepare as completely as possible — the plant that made up the field was reportedly a bit oily, making for poor traction and quickly stained uniforms.

How would he run the offense in such poor footing? How would that affect the patterns of his receivers? Shizzle’s history lesson faded away. Quentin’s mind switched into full-out strategy mode, even before the shuttle touched down.

QUENTIN WALKED OUT of the Holy Light bar and onto the streets of Port Whitok. The Holy Light was similar to the Blessed Lamb back on Ionath, a Purist-only place where you could get heaping helpings of good food, religion, and reasons to hate every being except those that hailed from Purist Nation space. He ate politely, made friends. At the end, he asked if they could help him track down his parents. The people in the Blessed Lamb acted exactly the way Father Harry had, offering to help him unconditionally. Quentin still had trouble believing that Nationalites liked him and wanted to help him, even though he was an orphan. Being an orphan, it seemed, had little meaning to people who had fled the home planets in fear of their lives, leaving behind family, belongings and culture.

Warburg had taken him to the Holy Light. Quentin excused himself shortly after dinner. Warburg meant well enough, but Quentin grew tired of the man’s constant verbal attacks on anyone and anything that was not Nationalite. Quentin hated the sub-races too, sure, but he didn’t need to talk about it every second of every day.

The street outside the Holy Light might as well have been in Ionath City’s Human District, save for the fact that Port Whitok was perpetually under the blanket of night thanks to the huge volcanoes that spilled fumes into the upper atmosphere. Earthquakes, too, were a daily occurrence. But here, he’d learned, every building — even the huge stadium — rested on a mag-grav suspension system. So did the streets and any utilities like pipes, power transmitters or atmosphere processors. Quakes hit four or five times a day: things shook, everyone waited, things stopped shaking, everyone went on about their business. Port Ionath sat in the center of a tectonic plate, so significant ground cracks seldom posed a problem.

The fact that 8.0 quakes shuddered the ground on a regular basis and that poisonous gas filled the air outside the dome didn’t bother the Quyth, 1.2 million of whom lived outside the curved downtown dome. It seemed these beings could live just about anywhere, and therein lay their advantage. For all his countrymen’s talk about being the High One’s “chosen people,” Humans couldn’t survive for ten minutes on the surface of Whitok.