Expendable - James Alan Gardner [13]
The terminal beeped out the first bars of “Happy Birthday” and Tobit roared in triumph. “Yes! It’s going to be my birthday again tomorrow. See, on the screen? Come on, come on, look at it.” He tapped the words on the glass and read, “HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PHYLAR, YOU OLD SOT. TODAY YOU ARE 41 YEARS OLD AS YEARS ARE MEASURED ON…Hot shit, I’m forty-one on Melaquin! How about that?”
He looked at us proudly, as if he’d done a trick. Jelca frowned. “I’m not familiar with Melaquin, sir.”
“Not familiar with Melaquin? Not familiar with Melaquin! And you call yourself an Explorer! Melaquin is the big one, cadet, the haughty naughty virgin. Discovered fifty years ago and she still has her cherry.” We stared at him blankly. “Jesus Christ!” he bellowed, “she’s unexplored!”
“You mean they’ve never sent Explorers there?”
“Dozens. Every one went Oh Shit within two hours. Or missing, anyway. Permanently out of communication, which is as good as Oh Shit in my book.”
“What’s so dangerous on Melaquin?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? No one has a clue.”
“If so many Explorers die,” Jelca said, “why do they keep sending new parties there? The High Council can’t be so criminally irresponsible….”
“You don’t know the council,” Tobit replied. “Besides, Melaquin looks perfect for colonization: ocean, forest, grassland…more like Earth than Earth these days. It’s fertile, it’s temperate, the atmosphere’s breathable…. Everything’s lovely, except some mysterious something that’s lethal. Could be microbes, could be plants or animals, could be sentients for all we know. Wouldn’t that be a kick?”
“But surely,” I said, “a significant culture of sentients would be detectable from orbit. Towns, irrigation canals, campfires….”
“Don’t lecture me on exploring, cadet—I teach that crap,” Tobit snapped. “Melaquin breaks the rules, all right? Melaquin breaks all the rules.”
He fell silent as if he had spoken a truth deserving long contemplation. When he began to snore a minute later, Jelca and I tiptoed out.
Melaquin—Yarrun’s Story
“I had a friend in the Academy,” Yarrun said. Several minutes had passed, the medical team had persuaded the admiral to undergo a physical, and Yarrun and I slouched against a bulkhead outside the infirmary. The time was 04:50 and the entire ship seemed deserted.
Yarrun kept his voice low. His face muscles hurt if he went too long without sleep, and he was ashamed when his diction degenerated. “My friend’s name was Plebon. Did you know him? He would have been a freshman when you were a senior.”
I shook my head.
“His face was like mine. Mirror images, we called ourselves, though he was African and I South Slav. We couldn’t help but be close.”
“Of course.”
“When we graduated, he was assigned to the Tamarack, a frigate doing search and rescue in the Dipper Group. Only one Landing in his first year.”
“Easy service.”
“His letters said it was boring…but I think he was grateful. In the middle of his second year, the Tamarack secretly took aboard one Admiral O’Hara—over 140 years old and no longer helped by YouthBoost. Plebon said the man had begun a mental decline.”
“A suspiciously familiar situation,” I commented.
“Plebon and his partner were ordered to take the admiral to Melaquin. They’d heard of the planet’s deadly reputation so they pulled some strings to demand a Mission Justification Statement.”
“And?”
“The Council claimed that a Landing led by someone with an admiral’s experience would have a better chance of success than a normal Explorer party.”
I gaped at him, speechless. An admiral couldn’t possibly contribute to a Landing. Outward Fleet policy manuals claimed that admirals could rise from any branch of the service—but admirals weren’t deformed, were they? I was sure they were all