James Gardner - Radiant

I took a shuddering breath. "Captain Cohen. Sir. The Balrog isn’t going to misunderstand our presence. The Balrog timed its arrival exactly to catch Pistachio and reel us in. You yourself said we’re the only non-Cashling ship in the star system."

I looked around. Nothing but blank faces. "The Balrog wants us to come," I said. "It’s been waiting precisely for this moment. It could have hit Zoonau anytime, but it held off until we were near… because it knew the Cashlings would demand help, and we’d have no choice but to get involved."

"It wants us?" Ubatu whispered. "Why?"

"We’ll have to go down and ask."

"What if it’s… hungry?"

I looked her in the eye. "Just hope you’re not the one it wants to eat."

Paticcasamupada [Pali]: Inter-connectedness. The principle that nothing exists in isolation.

Cashling authorities claimed the Zoonau dome was completely sealed off. They were wrong. Satellite photos showed that the Balrog had shut down Zoonau’s transit ports — five conduit-sleeves connected to orbiting terminals, plus an iris-lens hole in the dome that let shuttlecraft enter and leave — but there was one access point the spores had left open: a door leading out of the city into the surrounding countryside.

I wasn’t surprised the Balrog had left us an entry. It wanted us to come. It was waiting.

I also wasn’t surprised the Cashlings had overlooked the open door. They simply wouldn’t consider it a possible option. Cashlings never left their closed environments; if they wanted to travel from one city dome to another, they used shuttles, conduit-sleeves, or some other means of transport where they could shut themselves in metal cocoons. They never ventured outdoors… because the entire Cashling race had become agoraphobic: afraid of open spaces.

The ground entrance to Zoonau had been built centuries ago, likely as an emergency exit. True to form, the Cashlings had forgotten it was there. In a human community, such a casual attitude toward civic safety would be a crime. With Cashlings, it was probably better for them to stay inside the dome, even if the city was endangered by fire, flood, or some other disaster. If Zoonau’s inhabitants fled to the wilds, they’d soon die from their own ineptitude.

Not that the wilds outside Zoonau were hostile. Satellite scans showed a temperate region of trees, meadows, and streams. Clear skies. Late spring. A few minutes after noon. You couldn’t ask for a more pleasant landing. We didn’t even have to worry about animal predators: according to navy records, all dangerous wildlife on Cashleen had been driven to extinction millennia ago. (Likely by accident. If the Cashlings had deliberately set out to exterminate unwanted species, they would have botched it the same way they botched everything else.)

So nothing prevented us from landing a negotiating team, flown down in Ambassador Li’s luxury shuttle. The ambassador himself took the cockpit’s command chair; he seemed more excited about the chance to play pilot than to talk to an alien superintelligence. As for Commander Ubatu, she arrived in the shuttle bay wearing her best dress uniform: form-fitting gold leaf, almost like a reverse of Tut (her face unadorned, but her body sheathed in shining metal). Li made some remark about the ridiculousness of formal navy garb, especially if Ubatu thought her wardrobe would impress a heap of alien moss. Ubatu replied she had to come along because she couldn’t trust Li to handle the Balrog on his own.

Of course, Li wasn’t on his own. Tut and I were there too. In the grand tradition of the Explorer Corps, we were required to thrust ourselves into the jaws of danger so that more valuable lives could remain safe. We’d been ordered to enter Zoonau, make first contact with the Balrog, and set up a comm relay for the diplomats outside. Li and Ubatu could then "engage the Balrog in frank freewheeling discussion" while Tut and I tried to keep the Cashlings from doing anything stupid.

Considering that Zoonau contained two hundred thousand people, Tut and I had no chance of controlling the city if things went sour. Our very arrival might set off a riot. I could imagine being mobbed by the first Cashlings who saw us. "Help, help, O how we’ve suffered!"

But if Tut and I were lucky, we could contact the Balrog without setting foot in Zoonau itself. What I’ve been calling a ground-level door was actually a type of airlock: a tube ten meters long passing through the dome, with one end connecting to the outside world and one to the streets of the city. If Balrog spores had spread into the tube, we could walk right up to them without being seen by Cashlings in the city proper. Even if the moss had stopped at the cityside door, we could get close but still stay in the tube, out of sight of Zoonau’s residents.

At least that was the approach I suggested to Tut. He said, "Anything you want, Mom," as if he wasn’t listening. When I asked if he had a better idea, he told me, "We’ll see when we get there."

That set off warning signals in my head. I feared deranged notions had captured Tut’s fancy, and he’d pull some stunt I’d regret. But he was my superior officer. I couldn’t make him stay behind.

Despite his disdain for Ubatu’s gold uniform, Li had dressed up too: donning a jade-and-purple outfit of silk, cut to make him look like a High-Confucian mandarin. Tut and I wore tightsuits of eye-watering brightness — his yellow, mine orange, to make it easier for us to keep visual contact with each other from a distance. I didn’t plan on straying more than a step from Tut’s side, but better safe than sorry.

The name "tightsuit" may suggest such suits cling tightly to one’s flesh. Just the opposite. A tightsuit balloons at least a centimeter out from your body; it’s "tight" because the interior is pressurized to make it bulge out taut, as if you’re sealed inside an inflated tire. This is important on worlds with unknown microbes: if your suit gets a rip, the high internal pressure won’t allow microorganisms to seep inside. It’s only a temporary measure — if you’re leaking, you’ll soon deflate — but the pressure differential may last long enough for you to patch the hole.

That was the theory, anyway. The pressure hadn’t protected Kaisho Namida from the Balrog… and I was more afraid of mossy red spores than the germs in Cashleen’s atmosphere. I’d been inoculated against Cashling microbes — I’d been inoculated against all unsafe microbes on all developed planets — but there was no known medicine to hold the Balrog at bay.

Inside my suit, my feet itched… as if they could already feel themselves being pierced by spores.

Explorers seldom touched down lightly on alien planets. Our usual method of landing packed a much harder wallop than being flown in an ambassador’s shuttle. Therefore, I’d scarcely realized we’d arrived before Tut bounded out to reconnoiter.

Li had set down on a small creek overgrown with Cashling soak-grass: a frost green reed that could grow profusely in shallow streams, forming deceptive "lawns" that hid the water beneath. A childish part of me wanted the diplomats to step out for a stroll in the "meadow." There was no real danger, since the stream was only knee deep, but I would have liked to see Li and Ubatu cursing at sloshy shoes. Instead, they both stayed in their plush swivel seats, not even glancing toward the door as I slipped out into the creek.

Water surged up my calves, but didn’t penetrate the hermetically sealed fabric of my suit — not the tiniest sense of dampness. This particular suit could cope with temperatures from -100° to +100° Celsius, had a six-hour air supply, and was tough enough to withstand low-caliber gunfire. I felt foolish hiding inside such extreme protection when Li and Ubatu just wore conventional clothes. However, tightsuits were compulsory for Explorers in uncontrolled situations, and our foray into Zoonau definitely counted as uncontrolled. Besides, without the suit I wouldn’t have had storage space for all the gear I wanted to carry. The suit’s belt pouches and backpack let me bring every Exploration essential: my Bumbler, a first-aid kit, a few emergency supplies (light-wands, rope, food rations, a compass)… and my stun-pistol.