The Great Planet Robbery

BOOK I

THE TREASURE MAP

Chapter 1

The Planet of The Cannibals

Welcome to the Stone Age, fellas. The planet of the cannibals. Hearing his own words made the pilot of the Merlin crack up. Next to him, the navigator, wearing a pair of earphones around his neck, chewed gum anxiously and smoked a cigarette at the same time, although it had been a soft landing. The men had just parked the spaceship on a grassy plain next to a four-kilometer-high heap of rock.

You know your orders, Marines, he added, addressing the two men before him who were pulling on their atmosphere suits. But I will repeat them so there is no question as to your duty on this operation. He cleared his throat. Your orders are to take—to take over the entire planet! The pilot had tried to say this seriously, but succeeded too well and began to crack up again anyway, arms wrapped around his ribs.

Sergeant Major Lawrence Dobbs, pulling on a boot, glanced sideways at Sergeant Major Timothy Muldoon, who stared somberly at the pilot. Dobbs was short, slim and blond-haired, almost elven in appearance especially when he smiled and his blue eyes twinkled (which wasn’t happening now), while Muldoon was tall, beefy and wore a massive black handlebar mustache flecked with gray. Together, they reminded people of a fox and a bear from picture books about Earth. It had been an odd six months for them. Gunnery sergeants in the Colonial Marines, they had landed their first cushy assignment in eight hard years, only to be pulled out of their beds and sent to pacify this dump of a border planet for annexation into the Federation. While such a job normally would have taken a fleet of ten ships each dropping three hundred men, only Dobbs and Muldoon were sent in this lone ship.

The pilot’s laughter echoed around the room, down the empty halls, the empty mess hall, the empty armory and the other cramped chambers of the ghost ship.

What’s that laughing? the Doctor’s voice hollered nervously from the rec room on an upper deck, a distant muffled tone. Who’s laughing?

The pilot of the Merlin began to cool off, rubbing tears out of his eyes. Listen, seriously, just go on out there, make it look good for the cameras, then high-tail it back so we can get the hell out off this rock. This is obviously some sort of joke, and a hell of an expensive one at that—this mission is costing a million a day. You don’t stand a chance for five minutes out there in the bush. According to Recon’s probes, Doreen’s natives are four meters tall on average, big hairy monkey-looking bastards. Each is strong enough to bring down one of those big woolly herbivores on the planet with a single blow to the head with a bone. He made a karate chop motion with his hand. And if they haven’t found a mastodon and they find you instead, they’ll cook you for supper, I swear. He started to chuckle again. I don’t know who you pissed off, but—well, see if you can make it back in one piece.

He watched the men check their weapons and give the thumbs-up to open the door to the airlock. Hey, did you hear what I said?

Dobbs and Muldoon looked at each other from inside their bubbles, their heads inset in the elastic padding of the suits. Turning back to face the pilot, Dobbs raised his hand and tapped his helmet, shaking his head and smiling. His eyes twinkled.

The pilot sighed and opened the hatch. That’s what I get for being nice. Bastards.

Sound check, said Dobbs.

Get off my ship!

Reading you loud and clear, said Muldoon. Prepare to disembark.

The Marines entered the airlock, closed the door and waited. The chamber filled with a hissing noise. When the gauge said go, they turned the wheel on the outer hatch door and pushed it open. Weapons at the ready, they walked down the ramp onto the charred circle burned into the savanna by the ship’s rockets when they retrofired for the landing.

Bloody, Dobbs thought aloud. Any number of people would have finished the sentence nicely.

That doctor’s a good man, though, his large comrade answered him over the com link. Giving us a cyanide gas cylinder in case we get ourselves captured.

Dobbs snorted. All we’d have to do is take our helmets off and breathe deep if we really wanted to go that bad, he said. But I’d prefer a simple zap between the eyes. The Marine way.

I’ll do the honors at the appropriate time, Muldoon assured him.

Thank you, Sergeant Major. Dobbs looked up at the soupy sky colored with a greenish tint due to the local sun that was a Class K star, about four thousand kelvins in temperature and therefore of an orangish hue. It was now rising in the east, a large disc. What a god-awful ugly planet. I’m sure the Governor’s people picked it carefully.

Muldoon, the fatalist, shrugged. Let’s conquer the place, then we can figure out what we’re going to do to him. He looked left, then right, then looked left again and settled there. I say we go that way.

Dobbs looked up at his comrade miserably. You do know what time dilation is, eh, chap? It took us more than two years in cryogenic sleep at near light speed to get here. It’ll take us the same to get back. By the time we do, the Governor will be dead for about seventy-five years. In fact, at least a hundred years will be gone in all the places we call civilization.

Muldoon’s eyes smoldered as this hit him. Ah, who gives a damn! he exploded.

Dobbs looked around. Did you hear that? It was like a rumble.

Probably my stomach, Muldoon said blackly. The way that pilot lands a ship, it’s—

The men froze.

The shadow of a large object had stabbed into their leftward peripheral vision. Being experienced spacers, they knew to move their entire torsos to get a good look through the bubbles of their helmets.

The shadow belonged to a giant monster, remotely gorilla-like with grotesquely large arms covered with thick matted hair sprouting from where the shoulder blades should have been if it were in fact a gorilla. One of the planet’s hairy natives, one of the cannibals. It walked—rather, it shambled on four legs—through the spiked plants just outside of the charred circle that still smoked in spots, looking with childlike awe over its massive shoulder up the entire length of the cigar-shaped metal spaceship that rose twenty-five stories over the plain.

The monster slowly dragged a hand off the ground that held a club-like bone and wiped its nose with the back of its wrist, then sniffed the air. Suddenly, its squat bullet head faced the Marines. The head tilted sideways, tusks chomping.

Muldoon spared a quick glance at his rifle’s gauges, then aimed it at the creature, squinting down the barrel. Should I put him down with a round, Sergeant Major?

The monster flinched, staring at the humans.

No, he seems like a reasonable bloke, said Dobbs. Maybe he doesn’t want to scrap. We’ll try diplomacy. Give him a friendly wave, Sergeant Major.

Muldoon lowered the rifle and raised his hand in greeting, grinning in his most friendly way.

The creature roared and fled fifty meters in an amazing burst of speed, loping using its four legs and two arms, until it suddenly stopped, grabbed its chest and collapsed.

Dobbs and Muldoon exchanged a glance.

So much for contact, Muldoon said. If I had known that was going to happen, I would have shot him instead. The poor bastard.

Like those Earth beasts we read about in school, Dobbs told him. In the colonial schools, learning about Earth was as vital for children as reading, writing and computers. Rhinoceros. Mean as a Kiki, but you get them scared and running, and they drop like a meteor.

Damn, I’ve got an itch in my suit! Muldoon exploded.

Dobbs brought his hand up to rub his chin, ended up touching the bubble. I’d like to get back to the topic of the Governor, if you don’t mind. I was thinking, if we look at this the right way, we could be in a right spot of luck if we manage to get ourselves out of here alive.

Muldoon frowned. How do you figure? Are you looking on the bright side, as in the spacer saying, ‘The air tank isn’t half empty, it’s hall full’?

No, I’m being literal, chap, Dobbs told him. Think about it—the Governor will be dead for scores of years by the time we see our native stars again.

Yeah, a good hundred years will be gone, so you say. If we keep up with this damned space travel, too much time’ll go by on us and we won’t recognize the place when we get back. We’ll be helpless. It’s happened to us once before. Damn, I wish I had a good cigar!

I’d go to the Magellan Clouds and back if I thought it’d make sure the old bugger was dead before we set foot in Federation space again. You may want to get revenge, but I just want to get rid of him. This is as good as making a clean get-away. Time will do the job nicely.

Muldoon considered this, then nodded sagely in his bubble. A wise assessment. It’s a fair trade. The logic appealed to him, who was the type of man who broke responses to bad situations into fight or run.

Dobbs said, Although there is one possibility we haven’t considered.

Oh? Muldoon was irritated now. What’s that? I thought we had it settled.

The Governor may have made arrangements in case we got back alive somehow.

Brilliant, Muldoon said blackly. His dying wish will be our execution. Or maybe we’ll end up prison guards on Cantor V. Nobody can be that cruel! What do we do, then?

Dobbs grinned at him. We conquer this godforsaken planet.

Rich we were supposed to be! Muldoon inhaled deeply, smelling the rubber helmet lining, and sighed. We’ll take the rover, then?

Aye.

They drove the rover south in silence across the grassy plain until they found a ridge. Looking for some nice scenery to go with lunch, they rode to the top and admired the view of a valley cut by a forked river and forested with strange-looking trees that were as wide as they were tall. An exotic insect as big as a rat landed on the windshield and studied the men through the glass with wide, intelligent eyes. Its mouth opened and its mandibles clicked excitedly, as if it were urgently trying to communicate with them. Dobbs flicked it off with the wipers. After lunch, Muldoon got out and put fresh oxygen tanks into the cells.

You didn’t have to be cruel to the poor thing, he told Dobbs.

They moved on until they found another cannibal skinning a herbivore near the river. The monster roared, pounded its chest in defense of its supper, then fled thirty meters into the water, grabbed its chest and collapsed. This went on for two weeks. Each time Dobbs and Muldoon returned to the ship to re-supply after giving more natives cardiac arrest, the pilot had only shaken his head and hadn’t said a word, his silence an apparent punishment to the Marines for having ignored him when he was being nice. Terror spread among the natives about the invading witch doctors who slaughtered hundreds with a glance, and they fled the choice regions into the colder mountains. Probes were launched to study the atmosphere for terraforming, the mountains for elements to mine, the land for cultivation and colonization.

Within twelve weeks, Dobbs and Muldoon had conquered the planet.

Chapter 2

Their New Home

Sergeant Major Dobbs saw red. Red dirt, red rocks, a sky filled with swirling red dust. A red world. And it was about to get even redder. A dust storm was coming, the kind that covered half the planet Siren for months at a time. Visibility was already down to only a dozen kilometers through the big window. The dust closed in silently like a veil over the vast empty spaces. It was so fine, it penetrated the cracks in the dome. He could taste its iron grit between his teeth. Bitter.

Sergeant Major Muldoon knew a big dust storm was coming. Although there was no dampness, for some reason he felt it in his leg, which had been skewered by the barbed tentacle of a lobster-headed Kiki a long time ago on another planet. Muldoon sighed, sat and listened. There was already wind—eighty kilometer an hour wind—but he couldn’t hear it. Instead, he heard the domed building groan and creak.

There’s a storm coming, said Muldoon. A big one.

Aye, said Dobbs, who didn’t feel like small talk. He was busy with his brooding.

That’s the second damned one this year. You know that.

Aye.

Muldoon clenched his fists on his knees. I hate this godforsaken place. You don’t understand. I like the company of living things!

Don’t worry, said Dobbs. His eyes narrowed. We’ll see who gets the last laugh.

●

When Dobbs and Muldoon had returned from Doreen, the Prefect of Waldo himself pinned the medals onto their chests in a small ceremony and saluted them as heroes. In about eight years, the news would reach Earth and cause a minor sensation throughout Capital Province. But Dobbs and Muldoon had only wanted to know if the Governor had any further revenge planned in the memory banks of the government computers.

What are our orders, sir? Dobbs had asked sunnily, wringing his hands.

You boys sure like the tough assignments, don’t you? the Prefect had answered.

Muldoon had turned purple.

Siren orbited a dying sun called Gamma Hades. In a sense, a star is a giant furnace, burning up fuel and leaving behind ash. Gamma Hades had burned up enough of its hydrogen that it had begun to die. In time, it would cool enough to glow a rich red, and expand enough to envelop Siren and its sister satellites. Even later, Gamma Hades would collapse into a tiny black hole. But that was still billions of years away.

Siren, the third planet, had once been a healthy world completely covered with water that over billions of years had built up an atmosphere and had been home to millions of species of aquatic life and plants. But when the sun began to die, the temperature changed, then the atmosphere thinned thanks to the impact of a few large meteoroids. The oceans evaporated, leaving behind valuable deuterium, and the fish died, leaving behind organic material in the rocks. In short, the planet became a barren ball of dirt, and the only water left was now frozen in rocks or below ground in aquifer pockets.

When the Federation explorers landed, they chose Vesuvius Mons, the planet’s biggest volcano, as the ideal spot to mine for minerals and organic materials left behind by the long-dead fish that were used at the time as an ingredient in cryonic embalming fluid for long-range space flights. Vesuvius Mons measured two kilometers high and three hundred fifty kilometers across. It was surrounded by cliffs about two kilometers tall that had been formed millions of years ago by lava flows. The six mining camps were built there among the grotesque hump-backed sand dunes shaped by winds averaging twenty kilometers per hour and cruising up to more than three hundred at the height of a sand storm. The base and landing strips were set up ten kilometers away on a plain pockmarked with small craters.

The planet was a dump. In fact, the entire solar system—the Province of Good Hope—was considered by the rest of the Federation as little more than a low-tech industrial park.

It was also their new home.

●

Dobbs stared out the window and brooded, while Muldoon leafed through the premiere issue of Davy Jones, a comical astronautical magazine. Suddenly, he flung it down in disgust.

What time do you have? said Dobbs.

It’s almost three.

Well, we may as well go and see the bugger now, then. He said three.

Muldoon stood up stiffly. All right. Let’s see what the man wants. Then let’s go and see if Cook rustled up those synth-pork chops. I can’t take one more spoonful of bean curd!

They approached a nearby door that read COMMANDER and knocked.

A voice called them in.

Boots clocking crisply on the floor in time, Dobbs and Muldoon entered the Captain’s office, removed their caps, and saluted in perfect sync. They were infantry, and they knew the drill. The Captain, wearing field fatigues, leaned back in his chair and inspected them. Dobbs noticed the man’s olive-green shirt was open to reveal a brown T-shirt and his bar-coded dog-tags, and that his steel-rimmed round glasses were slightly askew on his handsome young face. His name-tag read WILLIAMSON for George Williamson. From the smell of bourbon in the room, Dobbs concluded that Williamson had been tipping the bottle again. Something about the shame of being assigned to a miserable outpost on a boring dump of a planet, protecting ungrateful dirty miners from giant sand monsters, and all that.

Reporting as requested, sah! Dobbs shouted.

The Captain gave them a bored wave. At ease, Sergeant Major Dobbs, Sergeant Major Muldoon. Originally a Navy man, he spoke like a Terran-American as Muldoon did, while Dobbs had acquired the traditional Marine manner of speech. I’m glad you could come. I wanted you here to ask you a question, because I’m hard on facts.

We’re at your service, sir, Muldoon assured him.

Williamson folded his hands on his stomach and smiled. Good. Tell me about time dilation. How does time dilation work?

Muldoon’s grin evaporated and he glanced at Dobbs, chewing on his mustache.

Well, sir, it’s like this, Dobbs said. Time and space are of the same fabric, like a blanket, as it were. You put an ion grenade on the blanket, and it makes a depression. That’s gravity. The grenade has mass. Say it’s a planet or a star. Now you put a bowling ball on the blanket, and it makes a deeper depression. Say that’s a black hole. When you’re in space flight, you approach infinite mass as you near the speed of light, so your ship, normally a ping pong ball relatively speaking, turns into a bowling ball itself. The deeper the depression in the blanket, the slower time goes by relative to the objects making a smaller impression. That gives us the Twin Paradox, where a spacer can get off the grenade and onto the traveling bowling ball, come back after a flight of about a year and find his twin and everybody else on the grenade fifty years older while he’s only a year older. Why, me and Sergeant Major Muldoon are almost eight hundred Earth Standard years old ourselves, what with zipping around in space for so long and all.

Williamson sat wearing an amused expression, waiting patiently. Suddenly, he grew as red as Siren’s dust. I’m a Navy Captain, you morons. I know how time dilation works!

He began typing furiously into a laptop on his desk. I just got a broadcast from the Commission on Space Trade and Supply. It says you chartered a ship on New France to load fifty tons of brand-new scotch and fly it around at near light speed for a few months, then had it brought back and pass a loophole in the trade regs as twenty-year-old scotch. Because of the time dilation. As we both know, it’s not really twenty-year-old scotch. This forced him to laugh. Jupiter, you increased its value a hundred times!

The Captain then scratched his head, studying the screen which cast his face in a bluish glow. That flight must have cost a pretty penny. Did you really make a good buck off this?

Dobbs smiled sheepishly. We made a modest profit. It was there and we took it. Can you blame us? I mean, technically, it was twenty-year-old scotch, at least as far as New France was concerned. Who cares how old it really was? A rule’s a rule. Next to him, Muldoon stared stonily ahead at the geographical and geological charts on the wall behind the Captain’s desk, there for show.

Williamson shook his head, starting to stew again. Well, you’ve got to know that the Commission’s pissed as all hell, and it’s reflecting poorly on me. I’ll never get off this rock now. I’ve got my own share of enemies. He sighed. So then I figured I’d do some checking on your records. I should have done it when you got here, but I don’t ask a lot of questions about the people they send here, for obvious reasons. I mean, I’d really rather not know. He went back to the screen. It’s a weird soup. Numerous decorations for courage in battle. Part of the unit that saved those settlers on Kilroy from the Kikis. Muldoon here fought against the Xerxesians in War VI. Some good soldiering, what I’d expect from Marines. And so on and so forth. Oh, I like this one—single-handedly conquered Doreen. He chuckled. Yeah, right. Oh, but this is where it gets tasty. In the Yokohama Province, you tapped into the Data Flow out of Capital Province just ahead of the local stock market and used the information to buy and sell technology stocks. Couldn’t prove it, but it’s here. Says here you ran contraband goods to the black market at a religious commune on the Boxer Dyson Sphere. And what’s this about Halifax?

Halifax as you know is a small world in the Wolfshead Province, Dobbs explained. We had some information for the Prefect that might have been something of an embarrassment to him. That man had no heart, what he did to his ol’ Mum, and we had him dead to rights that he was a lousy bastard. We got away with some hush money and tried to make off, but he had a change of heart and sent the Gimps after us. Natives.

Muldoon couldn’t maintain his composure anymore, and started to laugh out loud.

Now those Gimps are fast and deadly, but not too bright, Dobbs continued.

They lived only on the side of the planet that faced the sun, you see, always migrating, Muldoon explained, blinking tears.

They followed their orders to the letter, they did. They chased us to the dark side and dropped dead right at the border!

Muldoon began to howl. Williamson smiled patiently, drumming his fingers on his desk.

Sorry, sir, Dobbs said. As you can see, we did nothing wrong.

He had it coming, agreed Muldoon. What he did to his poor sweet mother.

All it says here is you killed members of an endangered alien species, the Captain told them. I didn’t need to know the rest. But whatever you did, you ticked off Governor Mandela enough so that even seventy-three years after his death, he still made sure you ended up somewhere unpleasant when you got back from your last mission. And now you’ve got yourselves in hot water all over again. He leaned over the desk. Listen, you’re good soldiers. You’re not the criminal type because to be honest you suck at it. So why make trouble? If Mandela hadn’t had a poetic sense of justice, you’d have been court-martialed or worse, made prison guards on Cantor V.

None of those charges have ever been proven true or accurate in a court of law, Dobbs reminded him.

They shouldn’t even be in the record, Muldoon agreed indignantly, back to staring at the wall, but inwardly he shuddered at the idea of Cantor V.

They’ve got proof on this scotch scam you pulled.

But that wasn’t exactly illegal, since there was the loophole, Dobbs countered. Then he rubbed his chin, realizing that Williamson was not his enemy. In fact, he could easily understand them. Sir, I’d like to ask you something. Why did you sign up for the Life?

For the adventure, of course. I wanted to do something for my home world. I was a younger man then.

Aye, and so it was for us. And still is. But we need to think of our future as well, when we’re older men.