Spacer Tales: The Explorer Read online

evolved high growing plants which tended to be thin and flexible, bending in the wind. The site where the Astrover team had landed had been on the shore where a vast forest bordered a shallow ocean. The forest mostly looked like gigantic cress, with thin pale stems supporting an umbrella of leaves right at the top. On the forest floor, colourful moulds added splashes of orange and luminous green. Hundreds of different species of bugs had been discovered, the largest of them a crab-like critter, several centimetres across, which grazed on the orange mould.

  ‘It was Cinthy’s turn to pick a name.’ Amil explained. ‘And she chose ‘Camilvald’, Camille’s World, naming it after her niece. We had a little ceremony doing that, then got down to exploring and picking names for the critters we saw. The rule is you can only give it a name if you see it with your own eyes.’

  ‘Were you naming critters, too?’ One of the kids interrupted, wide eyed with amazement at meeting someone who had actually discovered and named new species.

  ‘Sure!’ Amil laughed at that. ‘The Wobbly gets to do a lot of that. The others have already been on expeditions, see, and named lots of stuff, but it’s all new to you so they often let the Wobbly do that kind of thing. I named lots of stuff on Camilvald. My favourite was the shufflebum bug. I called it that because it shuffled its rear end in the soil as it went along. It wasn’t me who named the xamphy, though, no. Naming the top critter, top of the food chain, is the mission commander’s privilege.

  ‘The xamphies are amazing. They live on the shoreline, eating seaweed. We landed close to a beach where there were hundreds of them, eating seaweed which had been washed up by the tide. Camilvald has two big moons; big and complicated tides. Anyway, we were able to go right in amongst the xamphies. They took no notice of us at all. Never having seen anything like people before, they just didn’t recognise us as any kind of threat. They hoot and whistle to each other all the time. A beach full of them sounds like a really bad orchestra trying to tune up. They stand about knee high when they’re up on all six legs, and most of the time they waddle along lifting all the legs on one side, then on the other. If they’re being threatened by another xamphy, though, they kind of throw themselves sideways and tuck all their legs in and roll away fast. Sometimes that knocks other xamphies over or seeing another xamphy rolling at them makes them throw themselves into a roll, so if one of them does it you get a whole load of them rolling madly over the beach. We stood there just watching them, you know? With the rain coming down and the cress-trees waving like gigantic grass, seeing things that no humans have ever seen before, and it was just one of the best times of my life.’

  There were appreciative murmurs from the spacers, there with the explorer in their imaginations, but one of the older kids, a boy of twelve or so, was looking at Amil suspiciously.

  ‘Is that really all that you found?’ He asked, with heavy significance on the ‘all’. It was a common conspiracy theory amongst groundsiders that Excorps covered up the discovery of worlds with intelligent life, for fear of causing panic. The discovery of Marfik, sixteen hundred years before, had unleashed a terror on the galaxy which humanity outside the borders of the mighty League was still suffering from. Even now, humanity’s relationship with the genetically engineered and entirely peaceful people of Quarus was, while officially admitted to, being kept very low key. Quarians were not permitted to enter human space, and only spacers knew much about them.

  The difference between groundsiders and spacers, however, was that while groundsiders suspected government cover-up of contact with other species and called it conspiracy theory, spacers knew for a fact that it was true. Not all spacer yarns about alien encounters were made up.

  Amil grinned.

  ‘If I told you,’ he joked, ‘the LIA would shoot you, and me, and anyone else we might have told.’

  That got a laugh – the League Intelligence Agency could not prevent spacers from talking to one another, finding things out that the authorities were trying to keep secret and passing them along as their ships met out in space. They couldn’t even stop them telling stories about things they’d heard about in spacer hangouts like Kluskey’s. All they could do was try to manage the situation by asking spacers not to tell those stories to the general public, and by spacers themselves having such a reputation for spinning tall tales that any story they told would not be believed.

  ‘Come on!’ The boy insisted, not at all impressed by the explorer dodging his question. ‘What did you find that they’re not letting the media know about?’

  Amil considered for a moment, and grinned.

  ‘Well…’ He said, lowering his tone to confidential level, and as the audience leaned in closer, told them, ‘There was one thing. Not on Camilvald, but Agantor, the slimeworld we’d surveyed before that. I didn’t say anything because this is, you know, top secret.’ He looked meaningfully round at them, and saw amusement on most faces, while the kids and the credulous looked awed.

  ‘When we surveyed Agantor,’ the explorer said, ‘there was this weird cave near the equator which had a stream of gas pouring out of it. Our first thought was that it was some kind of geological vent, but the gas analysis made no sense. It was mostly methane but with nitrogen, hydrogen and sulphides, not matching any geologic process on record. We couldn’t make any sense of it with probes so we went in to investigate. There was this pale green gas flowing out of the cave and spreading out into a cloud. It was warm, too, much warmer than the atmosphere. We had to go down into the cave to find out what it was.

  ‘It was huge, inside, with long tunnels and caverns. Pitch black, with a yellow algae growing from the walls and the roof, hanging like wet slimy curtains. Water was dripping everywhere, and all the time this warm green mist was flowing over us. On and on we went, deeper and deeper. My heart was thumping as we could see that we were coming up on something enormous and warm, so big it was filling a cavern. We had no idea what we were going to find. We were all on our toes, nobody talking much, creeping on and down into the dark. And then…’ Amil paused, leaning forward and lowering his tone even further, glancing around as if checking for journalists or LIA agents. ‘And then…’

  ‘What?’ Several of the kids demanded, one girl grabbing Amil’s knee, holding her breath with fearful thrill.

  ‘We found it.’ Amil’s tone was deeply impressive, and had the kids agog.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Was it an alien?’

  ‘You mustn’t tell anyone.’ Amil cautioned. ‘This is strictly between us, right?’ Reassured on that point, with many of the kids crossing their hearts and promising not to tell, he leaned forward again and told them, ‘The thing that was making the gas flow out of the cave, the thing that was down there, deep in the dark, was…’ A pause to build up the suspense, ‘was…’

  ‘What? What?’ The kids clamoured.

  ‘A space dragon,’ Amil told them. ‘which had just farted.’

  As the hangout exploded with laughter, Tam Kluskey leaned on the bar with a contented chuckle.

  You could always, he thought, rely on an explorer for an entertaining yarn.

  ______________________

  Skipper Alex von Strada and his corvette Minnow are sent on a makework mission after a disastrous PR mess up. Inspector Mako Ireson goes with them, still trying to work out which is the front end of the ship as they hurtle into deep space. The last thing anybody wants is for them to get caught up in a real mission. A lighthearted space adventure by the author of Spacer Tales.