The Dark Between The Stars

SEVENTY-NINE
TOM ROM

After purchasing medical records of the Ildiran genetic misfits on Kuivahr, Tom Rom stopped at the Ulio transfer station to stock up on supplies and refill his ship’s expanded tanks with stardrive fuel.

When he finished at Ulio, his funds were depleted, but he didn’t have to worry about money, and Zoe Alakis never begrudged a single credit he spent. Nevertheless, he would have to go to the trouble of obtaining more prisdiamonds. He set course for Vaconda.

He knew his ship inside and out. The vessel had been built to his specifications, modified, reinforced, and expanded over the years. It had emergency fuel reserves, triple backups of computerized navigation systems, spare parts, and a separate self-contained quarantine laboratory with its own generator systems and independent in-system engines; the quarantine chamber could be used as an evacuation pod under extreme circumstances. Tom Rom did not require luxuries, but he needed the room and facilities to do his work.

He was a self-sufficient man who spent much of his time imagining how things could go wrong and preparing for the eventuality. Tom Rom was not paranoid; he was diligent and reliable.

During the flight, he noted some anomalous flickers on his long-range scans, but he found nothing, so he recalibrated the sensors.

As he orbited Vaconda, the continents looked pale and ghostly, covered with lichentree forests, tall spiky growths of lavender and white. According to legal Hansa paperwork, which had been grandfathered into Confederation rules, the forest watchstation on Vaconda belonged entirely to Zoe Alakis. He supposed that on other parts of the continent there could be outlaws or squatters. Nobody cared. The planet was basically uninhabited.

More than twenty years ago, he had incinerated a swath of forest, per Zoe’s request. Together, they let the fires rage uncontrollably until nature itself shut down the blaze, but in only a few years, the fecund jungle had subsumed the area, erasing any remaining scar. Now there was no hint of the watchstation where Zoe and her father had made their home for so long.

Even without familiar landmarks, Tom Rom knew the exact location. In the years since, he had returned here often to retrieve prisdiamonds, and had deposited tremendous fortunes in numerous planetary banks in Zoe’s name.

When she decided that her goal in life was to create a disease library and research installation, Tom Rom had set aside all the funds she could possibly need. Following in her father’s footsteps, she offered to partner with other research teams, join her wealth to major facilities, but they took her investment, put her name on a new research wing, and then politely—then less politely—told her to go away and let “professionals” handle the important matters.

They viewed Zoe as a backward, socially maladjusted girl who had grown up on a wilderness planet, little different from a feral child. She was innocent of commercial and academic politics, accepted promises at their face value (Tom Rom was her only example of a man who was true to his word), and she did not fit in well among them. She funded huge projects that were swallowed up in bureaucracies and regulations, with results lost in delays or obscurity. Other people took the fruits of her teams’ research and called it proprietary information that became lost in a deep gravity well of “development” and “profitability assessments.” When she tried to take the discoveries she had funded, they shut her out, ousted her from their boards, but graciously kept her name on the research wing she had built.

Afterward, Zoe abandoned all thoughts of kindness and cooperation. She decided to do it herself, her own way, with all results under her control.

In preparing to build Pergamus on her own terms, she came to regret her impetuous decision to burn down the forest watchtower station along with all records and research her father had compiled during his years on Vaconda. When Zoe poured out her feelings of guilt over destroying her father’s work, Tom Rom had stared at her, his expression flat. Finally, he admitted that out of a sense of obligation to Adam, he had backed up her father’s data, preserving it despite her instructions. She had wept, then thrown her arms around him. Tom Rom could not recall ever having been so moved.

Zoe spared no expense in setting up her complete private facility on Pergamus—and even that depleted only a small fraction of her wealth. She wanted it, and Tom Rom made it happen. He arranged to build the domed research facilities and orbital research stations for her. Zoe tracked down the best scientists in a variety of fields—medicine, biochemistry, genetics—and sent Tom Rom to approach them discreetly.

Her first order of business, of course, had been to develop a cure for Heidegger’s Syndrome. It felt like a twist of the knife when the cure did not even prove to be difficult, once researchers applied resources and time to the problem. If only someone had been able to do that for her father…

While she lived, her work would be her own obsession, her own masterpiece. She agreed to share all her results after her eventual death, not because she was generous, but because she didn’t care what happened afterward. She had no interest in fame, or history, or making any mark. She didn’t have to explain her priorities to anyone.

Now, as Tom Rom descended through Vaconda’s atmosphere, he caught a strange echo on his sensor map, but lost the flicker again when he reached the lichentree forests.

The thick spiky treetops did not mesh into a solid canopy, and the forest floor was too dense and cluttered for him to land his ship there. Rather, he dropped a pontoon tarpaulin that self-inflated and expanded, anchoring itself to the lichentrees. This gave his ship a tough temporary spot to land.

Settling down on the suspended tarpaulin, the craft swayed, then stabilized. He collected specimen cases and extraction tools, filled the fuel tank in his torch gun for clearing underbrush. Wearing a headlamp and two shoulder-mounted lamps to penetrate the murk, he strapped everything to his back, emerged from the hatch, and looked around the pale and silent forest. After activating the locator beacon on his ship, he strung his cables and rappelled down the hollow-sounding trunk of a lichentree all the way to the forest floor.

The lower levels were lit by ghostly sunlight filtered through a mist of fine spores. The ground was a chaos of deadfall. Large-eyed salamanders scuttled away, leaving faint trails of phosphorescent slime behind. Mushroom globules jittered and wobbled as if in secret laughter as Tom Rom crashed past.

The lichentree forest seemed to be closing in around him, but his locator gave him his bearings. Down here in the gloom, everything looked the same, but he knew where he was going.

He unshouldered his torch gun and began blasting. A large blue slime mold tried to slump away, shrugging and rolling at glacial speed. Tom Rom played bright flames over the area, igniting the lichentree deadfall and the squirming mosses. He continued to focus the torch, burning the vegetation, then burning the ash. The heat itself activated the prisdiamonds, which made them easier to find.

Putting on a breather mask and thick gloves, he cleared away the powdery residue to reveal sparkling clusters like geological ice crystals bursting out of the rocks. He struck them with a rock hammer, snapped off the valuable gems, and scooped up the glittery debris until he had filled his satchel.

The torch gun’s fuel chamber was empty, and Tom Rom discarded it, not wanting to bother carrying it back up to the treetops. Tired and sweaty, he stripped off his heavy protective gear and dropped it on the ground so he could make good time back to the ship. He followed the signal from his locator.

When he reached the rope at the base of the tall lichentree, he could see the bright fabric of his pontoon tarpaulin high above and the shadow of his waiting ship. He secured his satchel of prisdiamonds, clipped onto the rope, and activated the climber, which scrolled him back up to the treetops.

Reaching the spore-hazed daylight above, he blinked in disoriented surprise. Another ship had landed adjacent to his own vessel. It was a battered, disreputable-looking craft without any markings. Tom Rom reached for his torch gun, but he had left it down on the forest floor.

Four men in ragged jumpsuits were waiting for him, two had Roamer clan markings that had been scuffed and covered. He did not recognize the men. He did recognize their type. They might well be Roamers but they were definitely outcasts, better labeled as pirates. The men crossed a metal gangplank from their own ship to his pontoon tarpaulin.

“See? Told you he’d come back,” said a thin man with sideburns so long he clearly had poor judgment in shaving.

“And I told you it was better just to wait here than to go looking for him,” said a second man.

All four withdrew hand jazers.

Tom Rom regarded them. “I think I saw you at Ulio. You must have gotten lost on your way here.”

“No, we followed you just fine,” said the man with the sideburns.

“I should be more careful, then.”

The men chuckled and kept the weapons trained on him. “Yes, you probably should.”

Tom Rom did not like to feel so helpless. He could fight, but he had no weapons. They would cut him down.

“Let’s just see what he’s got in that case,” said the quietest man, who seemed to be the leader. He had a head of thick red hair combed back away from his forehead. He looked at Tom Rom. “We ransacked your ship, but didn’t find much of value. So we figured there must be something more important here.”

“Yeah,” interjected the man with the sideburns. “Who ever goes to Vaconda?”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have come here,” Tom Rom said.

They relieved him of his case, and when they opened it to reveal the prisdiamonds, they nearly fell off the pontoon tarpaulin. “Prisdiamonds! Where the hell did he get those?”

“Obviously down there.” The quiet leader pointed toward the forest floor.

“We could each buy two starships with this load,” said Sideburns.

Probably three, Tom Rom thought, but he kept the comment to himself.

“This will be very satisfactory,” said the leader. “Well worth the trip.”

“We’ll have to remember this place,” said Sideburns. “We should just kill him now and get it over with.” The other pirates muttered in halfhearted agreement.

Tom Rom looked at the quiet leader without blinking. “You’ve already proved yourselves to be thieves, but not all thieves are murderers.”

The leader apparently wasn’t. “Go inside his ship and wreck the control panels, smash the engine conduits. He won’t be going anywhere.”

“You mean you’re just stranding him here?” said Sideburns, as if that were a more horrendous fate.

“I can survive,” Tom Rom said in a quiet voice, stating a fact.

“Good enough, then,” the leader said. He turned his comrades loose inside Tom Rom’s ship, where they destroyed the systems. When they came out, their expressions were aglow with the satisfaction of vandalism.

The quiet leader held the satchel of prisdiamonds, pleased with the haul. “I assume there’s more down there?”

Tom Rom didn’t nod, but the answer was clear enough.

“We’ll be back, maybe rescue you. If you survive that long.”

“I’ll survive,” Tom Rom repeated.

Carrying the prisdiamonds, the four Roamer outcasts walked back across the makeshift gangplank and pulled it up before climbing aboard their battered vessel. Sideburns gave Tom Rom a taunting look before sealing the hatch.

He didn’t wait for the pirates to leave before ducking into his own ship. With a fast glance, Tom Rom scanned the damage: a few smashed power blocks, a peeled-off circuit film, a navigator control overlay, cracked instrument plates, two shattered viewscreens. His engines were quite durable, and he doubted they had sustained serious damage. The men had no organized sabotage plan, simply let loose with random destruction. Good, that would be easier to fix.

As he heard the Roamer ship priming its engines to leave, Tom Rom opened a locker, rummaged around, and withdrew a boomerang limpet. He’d never had occasion to use one before, but he came prepared. It seemed simple enough.

He stepped back out onto the uncertain surface of the pontoon tarpaulin and watched the battered pirate ship lift off. It accelerated into the sky, curving south as it climbed above the tops of the lichentree forest.

Tom Rom gripped the curved handle of the boomerang limpet, bent over to coil his muscles, and hurled it up into the air. It spun with a soft whistling sound, gathering speed until its motivators fired up. The limpet’s sensors cast a wide net, then the device altered its trajectory, accelerated, and rose up to strike the bottom hull of the pirate ship. It clamped on to the metal plates and started its timer.

Tom Rom had set the countdown for forty seconds, which should allow the ship to fly high enough and far enough away that he wouldn’t be bombarded with debris.

He counted silently, then watched a blossom of flames and shrapnel expand outward as the boomerang limpet detonated. Wreckage rained down into the pale white treetops, far from his position.

Tom Rom went back inside his ship to start the repairs. He knew how to jury-rig most of the systems, and he had spare parts and replacement circuitry for the vital components. He was able to tap into the independent propulsion system linked to the quarantine chamber/lifepod, which would give him the boost he needed. He could implement the rest of the repairs once he got back to Pergamus. Despite the inconvenience, he never had any doubt that he would make it.

The repairs took him three days.

Before flying away from Vaconda again, though, he had to return to the forest floor, using his spare protective suit. After so much trouble, he wasn’t about to leave without a load of prisdiamonds.