Dave Duncan - Wildcatter

“You’re not the type to buckle under when a fat old bully shouts at you. Galactic’s not the type to run away from danger. I sure as hell aren’t, either. But I like to cover the bases. Let’s talk about firearms.”

Jordan nodded quickly, as if she’d expected the question. “All according to GenRegs. I have a stun gun coded for captain’s use only. In the shuttle you have one plus a blazer, neither of which will work inside the ship.”

“And JC Lecanard supervised the building of the ship. Don’t tell me he didn’t add a few little secrets. That champagne he produced last night wasn’t in the manifest. Where’s he got the guns hidden? Have you looked? Control tells me there aren’t any.”

“It tells me the same.”

“But?” He knew her well enough to know that there was more.

Her smile was thin. “There’s a table in his stateroom with a thick top but no drawer in it—wasted space. I can’t find a hidden catch.”

Seth desperately wanted to hug her. “Thank you… ma’am.” JC’s big cabin was the one place he had never been inside and could never enter. All the others had, but the door wouldn’t open for him. “Ask Hanna to take a look, mm?”

“I already did, love. Says she can’t find anything either.” Jordan spun around and walked away. She turned at the door. “I did make a mistake tonight. To reverse it now would make it worse. I’m sorry, lover, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. You are by far the best stud aboard, you know.”

That wasn’t much of a compliment when his competition was two herms and a man forty years his senior.

By the time the crew trooped in for a breakfast, Seth had shaved and showered and dressed. Shorts and tops were color-coded, and his were green. The others were still looking more than a shade under last night’s weather but too excited to sleep longer. Instead of eating in the mess, they carried their food into the control room to listen to Control’s commentary and stare at the holographs while they ate. Maria guessed at the odd axial tilt the moment she saw the cloud patterns, which were all wrong. Much jabber about sideways worlds followed. Apparently several planets with freaky axial tilts had turned out to be profitable, Lorraine especially.

Seth’s excitement was back. Now he could admit that there was fear mixed in with it, but it was the thrill-fear he knew before fights, and it felt good. Having already eaten, he wandered around with the coffee pot, just listening to the chatter. Even old space hands JC and Reese were bubbling. Jordan seemed to have forgotten their worries for the time being.

He knew them all well by now and respected most of them very much. JC, Jordan, and Hanna were superlatively good at what they had contributed so far. JC was still a bully and insecure enough to demand formal respect, but he had done an incredible job in organizing the expedition, sneaking advance notice of the hot prospect, and ramming through the preparations in time to use it. He had even been shrewd enough to buy the Armada license as a secondary target, and few entrepreneurs would have managed to talk hard-bitten backers into that. Seth knew Jordan better than he had ever known anyone, and if it were possible to think of marriage to a herm, he would be dreaming of that now.

Hanna? Hanna was a brilliant navigator. She had a temper, but would always apologize ten minutes after losing it, and she had a needle-sharp wit. The other two had not had a chance to apply their skills yet. Maria he liked very much, and Reese he detested.

As a bed partner Maria demanded a lot of work and took sex too seriously. She was a fireball when she got going, after all the babble about respect and commitments. And yet, for sheer animal fun, Jordan beat her hands down. Random sex in so small a group should have triggered mayhem, but Jordan’s skill and training kept them all one reasonably happy family.

Reese, the biologist, was the proof that every family tree has its sap. They were as snobbish as JC and as waspish as an August picnic. They were hypocritical, too. When male, he expected sexual favors, when female she refused to give them, at least to Seth, although JC claimed to have bedded her.

JC laid down his fork and put the planetologist on the spot. “Maria? Obviously there is life on Cacafuego. Nothing else could put that much oxygen in the atmosphere. So what can possibly have inspired Galactic to declare it dangerous and post a yellow beacon?”

She stabbed at him with eyes dark and dangerous as obsidian daggers.

“Radioactivity?” she said. “Cacafuego is abnormally dense, the second densest planet ever recorded. The core is denser than iron, meaning it must contain siderophile elements.”

“You saying Cacafuego has a heart of gold?” Hanna inquired mildly.

“Gold is only one element that combines easily with iron. I was thinking of high-weight radioactive elements. If the core is rich in those, then we may expect to find such material in the crust also, exuding radon gas into the atmosphere, making it toxic to terrestrial life. Or the stellar neighborhood may be dangerous—there’s an unpredictable Wolf-Rayet star within a parsec. Or the element mix at the surface may be non-standard: arsenic, cadmium are both toxic and carcinogenic, to name two. There are too many wolves in the forest to start speculating now, Commodore.”

JC sank back, muttering that none of those factors would endanger a very brief visit. Given half a chance he might start retelling his story of the man-eating mushrooms found by Goede Hoop . “Reese? Any theories?”

At times the biologist seemed to hold the commodore in almost as much contempt as he did Seth. “Far too many. I could list a hundred factors that can create biological problems on a life-rich world. We don’t have a canary with us. That’s what prospectors are for.”

Very funny! No one smiled.

Reese’s sullen grumpiness suggested he was apprehensive—that was a snob word for scared. If Seth agreed to brave the killer planet, the astrobiologist should go with him. Failure to do so might void their contract. Or possibly Reese had decided to change gender and was already having changeover pains, for shrinking a penis by drug-induced apoptosis was no mean ordeal. Why would they do that now? Then Seth saw that JC might find it harder to order a woman into danger than a man. A sneaky cop-out, but only to be expected of Reese Platte.

As Seth was refilling his coffee cup, JC said, “How does it look to you now, Prospector? Think you can handle that 1.6 gee gravity?”

“Yes, sir. For a short stay. But the weather bothers me.”

“Weather?”

“Storms. Dense atmosphere, high insolation gradient, fast rotation.”

JC asked what the length of the day was, and Control became pedantic, as it did when human language was exposed as imprecise. The length of the day varied with latitude, for at the poles it was the same as a year, 250.3 terrestrial days. The sidereal period was 19.4 standard hours, so roughly 315 rotations per planetary year.

“Fast!” Maria said. “And high insolation because it’s closer to its primary than Earth is to Sol. Is why it has all those cyclonic storms.”

Reese barked, “Oh, damn! Control, what sort of surface winds do you calculate?”

—Preliminary measurements suggest velocities in excess of 200 kilometers per hour are commonplace, roughly equivalent to Category Four hurricanes. Higher winds are certainly possible.

“Ha! You can’t put the shuttle down in that, can you, Muscles?”

“I can put it down, sir. Keeping it down will be the problem.”

Reese pouted. At some time a surgeon had put a few tucks around their mouth. It looked fine when they were female, but their male lip curled in a perpetual sneer.