Dark Planet Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Afterword

  Dedication:

  For Donna Sue.

  Published 2005 by Medallion Press, Inc.

  225 Seabreeze Ave.

  Palm Beach, FL 33480

  The MEDALLION PRESS LOGO is a registered tradmark of Medallion Press, Inc.

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment from this “stripped book.”

  Copyright © 2005 by Charles W. Sasser

  Cover Illustration by Adam Mock

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Sasser, Charles W.

  Dark planet / Charles W. Sasser.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 1-932815-13-9

  1. Life on other planets–Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3569.A76D37 2004

  813′.54–dc22

  2004027451

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  ONE

  It was my first time operating with Humans. Not that I had anything, much, against Humans. I was half-Human myself, a misfortune of birth I might have disavowed were it not for certain unmistakable physical characteristics which identified me with that contentious tribe. The simple fact was that I had been assigned to DRT-213 — a Deep Reconnaissance Team. I accompanied only because the Humans required my special talents as a Sen to follow the Blobs’ telepathic spoor in the galaxy, to sniff them out like a trained sensor before they built up sufficient forces to launch their campaigns of destruction and death. While Humans were starting to make strides in extrasensory perception, telepathy, and all the other mind-bending and mind-stretching disciplines, no Human was as accomplished at it as we Zentadon who possessed the Talent.

  Humans placed most of their faith in technology, as the Indowy once had before their fall. They replaced their God with it. They ventured into space to see and what they saw instead of the face of God was merely a larger and grander mechanical molecule. I sometimes pondered how my own genes were influenced by the presence of Human DNA.

  It was a sobering thought.

  The insertion began with the Stealth undocking from the mother ship and being whipped around Aldenia’s two moons, using their weak gravity to place it — and us — into an elliptical orbit around the Dark Planet. The craft depended upon the accuracy of the mother ship’s computer calculations until orbit was established. Space flight had long ago relegated most vital matters to computers and artificial intelligence.

  The Stealth automatically hard-braked beyond the two moons and slung back toward the planet’s far side, decelerating by about sixty gravities. Deceleration forces were offset by the crew’s snugging ourselves into the form-fitting couches with their padding and pressure controls. As G-forces rapidly bled off and the Stealth settled into orbit, all external electronic systems shut down and the crew resumed control of the ship to some limited extent. Hopefully, if the Blobs were scanning, they would mistake us for merely another piece of space debris.

  “Locking in for final maneuvers and microgravity,” Captain Amalfi said through the craft’s intercom.

  “Piece of cake,” Atlas said.

  “Another old, old Earth expression?” I asked Gun Maid. She laughed, but the men ignored me.

  We dismounted the time-couches and assumed our stations. The control bridge was crowded and busy for awhile in the pale red panel lights of gauges and dials and the blue glow of computer screens running systems checks. Communications among the crew of eight — seven Humans and one Zentadon — were minimal and had to do with technical adjustments and duties. Air whispered through ducts. The hull vibrated reassuringly through our feet. We felt the comforting thrust of the powerful wind engines.

  Real-time graphics on the view screen were excellent in wraparound techno-vision. We seemed to be watching from a detached third point of view because of a system of refractory camera angles that revealed the Stealth, us, in orbit around the planet. Everyone gathered for a first hushed look at Aldenia.

  I had seen Earth once from a similar perspective. I had not landed, but I saw it and marveled. Even after all the wars Humans engaged in among themselves, all but destroying their own sources of life, the planet remained a translucent blue-and-silver-and-green pearl, more beautiful than anyone could imagine.

  There was little about this planet, however, that might be called beautiful. I experienced an indefinite sense of foreboding. Surely its sinister appearance had more to do with my people’s collective remembrance of it in the time of the Indowy ascendance than to any inherent quality it possessed.

  The sun star Ceti, around which the Tau Ceti Cluster revolved, and the bright sun star of an adjoining cluster, worked at cross angles to provide almost constant light shining on Aldenia. There were two separate nights within a day’s cycle, one lasting about two hours and the other four. Even with almost continuous illumination, however, little sunlight penetrated the dark condensation of clouds that crusted the planet. Lightning storms snapped and glowed at various points, like painful inflamed boils about to burst. Noah in the Human Earth Bible built an ark to float out forty days and nights of rainfall. On Aldenia, forty days of rain was a mere sprinkle. Rain fell virtually all the time, cycled by a system that wasn’t quite understood. Water covered two thirds of the globe. Where water could be seen through the clouds, it was black, and the land masses were even darker. It made an ideal setting for the VRs young Human prolies savored.

  I shuddered looking at it on the view screen. My ears twitched. Two separate DRTs had previously attempted to recon the planet. None of the members had returned. Blobs were blamed for their disappearances. DRT-213’s sniper, Sergeant Darman “Blade” Kilmer, was the only known recent explorer to survive Aldenia. That was before the Blobs were spotted here and before the
disappearing DRTs, when Blade had been a low-ranking member of an explorer mapping team. He was the sole survivor.

  “The rain will drive you mad,” he explained. “If that’s not bad enough, lightning bolts fill the air with enough electricity to power Galaxia for a century. Bolts strike trees constantly and will make a crispy critter out of you when they can. Everything has teeth or thorns or both. The fauna has switched places, so that bugs are the size of land rovers and houses, and mammals are no bigger than mice and shrews. Lord knows what other monsters might inhabit that dreadful place. Fu-uck. Higher-higher might as well take us out and shoot us now and save us all the misery of dying there.”

  “You were the only survivor of a mission,” Captain Amalfi pointed out. “Why don’t you apply for hardship transfer and stay behind?”

  “Fu-uck,” Blade scorned. “I have my reasons.”

  The planet’s hostile appearance, sinister ambience and foreboding reputation were all reasons why it had remained uncolonized except for a brief period during the taa camps of nearly eight centuries previous. Although the Indowy managed to exist here long enough to build their great slave camps, laboratories, and war factories, its discoverer and explorer, the Indowy Xctplm, nonetheless called it a parasite on the galaxy, a malignant place where, if evil had a source, evil must dwell.

  C·H·A·P·T·E·R

  TWO

  All races, all species, are possessed of a certain amount of selfishness and self-interest. Certainly that was as true of we Zentadon as of the Indowy, the Terrans, the Kutarans, the Tslek or the Humans. So far as we knew, among all the fantastic forms of life that occupied the universe — two heads and six eyes; eight legs and antenna; blobbish chunks; shadow forms; intelligent insects and civilized amphibians — we Zentadon and the Humans were the most genetically alike, notwithstanding that most Zentadon had tails and Humans didn’t. Origins of both peoples could be traced back through DNA to a common pair of ancestors the Humans looked upon as their Alphas, whom the spiritual called Adam and Eve. It was more than probable, however, that Adam and Eve came to Earth from space and had tails. Humans were undoubtedly a genetic offshoot of Zentadon, not the other way around. The universe, as the Humans liked to say, turned out not only to be stranger than they imagined, it was stranger than they could imagine.

  They had been sailing the vast, dark seas of space for only a millennium. Less, actually. Humans were of a contentious and warlike nature. They fought over race, ethnicity, religion, sex, land, and simple greed. They would likely still have been swarming over the crust of their home planet, further defiling it and fighting among themselves, had not the nuclear-proton Earth wars of the twenty-second century Earth-time made the planet such an unpleasant and polluted place that it drove them to seek new unspoiled worlds. Among the Humans were those who truly believed extraterrestrials, if we existed out here, were above all Human vices.

  It turned out their God had a dark and ironic sense of humor. The universe was full of beings of a contentious and warlike nature, who fought over race, ethnicity, religion, sex, land, simple greed, and specieism. In fact, Earthlings had to play a lot of catch up. They proved to be quick understudies. After barely three hundred years of subjugation by the Indowy and we Zentadon, they revolted and ultimately controlled space. At least this part of the galaxy in the Tau Ceti Cluster neighboring their own Earth Cluster.

  The Tslek, or the Blobs, as the Humans called them for obvious reasons of appearance, were the most threatening invaders to penetrate the system since the victorious Humans established the Galaxia Republic to govern the Tau Ceti Cluster. If the Humans were to the Zentadon the most genetically similar form of life, then the intruders were the most dissimilar.

  Rumors about the strangers nosing in through the Posleen Blight had been circulating for nearly a half-century, but it was not until the nomadic Tchpt discovered the recent remains of a ship crashed on a barren Magya satellite that their presence was confirmed. The ship contained dried, featureless “puddles” of what was unquestionably a form of intelligent life. The Tchpt called the dead trespassers Tslek; humans called them Blobs.

  Blob aggression intensified into open hostilities. Galaxia survey and commercial ships flying the edges of the Blight began vanishing. Blob kinetic strikes obliterated entire colonies, Human and otherwise, on planets out toward the Tau Ceti tail. Blob fleets probed the perimeter of the galaxy, sniffing around for prey and advantage. After a Republic Battlestar ship survived an ambush by a squadron of gigantic meteor-like craft, President Carl Oboma dispatched a Galaxia combat fleet from IV Corps Sector Command to engage the invaders. Although the fleet defeated the Tslek in a major month-long battle, it had not been a victory without significant losses.

  Since then, the “war” had ebbed into a cat-and-mouse game of probe and counter- probe, with frantic frontier colonists suffering most in the fledgling conflict. Ready Reserves were activated and thrown into up-training mode. DRT scouting teams were dispatched into enemy space to dig for every scrap of intelligence they could find on what kind of beings these Blobs were, what their ultimate intentions were, and what strategic, tactical, and technical capabilities they possessed. Several DRTs had already turned up “missing, presumed lost.”

  President Oboma declared a galaxy emergency and placed the support superstructure on the capital planet of Galaxia on a war footing. Manufacturing of battle material — “beans and bullets,” as the Humans quaintly put it — went into overdrive thirty-two hours a day. The threat of invasion generated a renewed interest in the superior Indowy war technology which the Indowy had destroyed after their civilization imploded and the survivors turned pacifists. Shifts of scientists labored continuously in hopes of unraveling Indowy secrets of antimatter, molecular displacement, and time-mass travel. Enterprising entrepreneurs could literally earn millions of credits and become unbelievably wealthy by successfully mining Indowy arms and battle technology.

  It was amidst this feverish atmosphere of War! War! War! that Commander Mott chopped me from my instructor position at the 4156th Interstellar School to assign me to DRT-213. The reason I was selected, as it turned out, was because I was the only Sen available on short notice, and because I was half-Human and therefore could be at least half-trusted.

  “Kadar San,” he said, “the Humans say that when you have only seven — now eight, counting you — on a DRT team, you get close working asshole-to-belly button for months at a time out there, way out there where their God does not go without per diem.”

  “Zentadon do not get that close to Humans,” I said.

  As a minority of one with seven Humans, I faced the prospect of a long and perilous mission with beings who distrusted me, and whom I distrusted, from centuries past. We harbored suspicions of each other that were almost as much a part of our genetic makeup as the coloring of our hair and eyes and, well, the length and fullness of our tails, for those of us who still possessed them.

  Trust between Humans and Zentadon was certainly not enhanced by the Zentadon Homeland Movement, a rapidly growing organization of separatists agitating for the dissolution of Human hegemony over the Zentadon home planet of Ganesh. Cells of young Homelanders conducted underground war against the Human power structure. While I sympathized with the goals of the Homelanders to some extent, mine was a voice against their methods. For the first time since the Indowy days of infamy, Zentadon were utilizing taa against Humans. Taa used in this manner usually meant suicide missions.

  Commander Mott regarded me with his enormous cat-pupiled eyes. Zentadon had two basic eye colors; purple or green. His were purple. Mine were emerald green. Commander Mott was among our most sensitive Sens; he actually read thoughts and communicated via the mind alone with others of equal achievement in the science. I envied him. Like most rank-and-filers, I sensed emotion, sentiment, passion in other beings, especially if such feelings were strongly represented, but rarely could I catch and hold onto another’s well-formed thoughts.

  I suspected the part of
me that was Human limited my abilities. I assumed Commander Mott suspected the same thing about me. He sat behind his great gnarlwood desk and studied me with his penetrating purple eyes. He stroked the thick fur of his tail resting across the creased tan uniform of his lap. He had injured the tail in his youth while under the influence of taa, it was said, so that it now hung lifeless from the opening in his trousers. It was a habit of his to pull it out of his way when he sat down, lay it across his lap, and absently stroke it.

  “The Tslek penetrations have provided a sterling opportunity to prove that we can work together in a mutual purpose,” he said. “The Zentadon, the Humans, and …”

  He hesitated. You didn’t have to be a Sen to finish the thought.

  “And we who are both and are neither?” I said.

  Although it was against the law of both peoples to cross-mate, I was proof that some Zentadon would screw anything when the breeding heat came upon them.

  “You are of both worlds, Sergeant Kadar San,” agreed Commander Mott. “That is why you and others like you, rare that you are, have been selected to work with the Humans in their first major joint effort between our peoples. As you are half-Human — your mother was Human, I understand —?”

  “She died when I was born. From the shock of seeing me, I suspect.”

  I was a Zentadon of a different sort, as Commander Mott was pointing out. While some of the younger Zentadon had their tails surgically removed in order to suck up to Humans, because Humans believed tails were remnants of beast ancestry, I had never had one. I was born with a mere tiny button at the end of my spine.

  My teeth were also less sharp, less predatory than full-bloods. I had the Zentadon hair, however, just much less of it. Zentadon hair came in either black, silver, or gold. Commander Mott’s was silver — not gray, silver — and flowed thick back off an intelligent forehead and down his neck and spine underneath his Republic uniform to reappear with his invalided tail. I naturally preferred gold, as my own hair was of that hue. I possessed relatively little of it on my body, certainly no more than the average human prolie stevedore working the space docks.