Northern Star

This chapter doesn't really deserve to be uploaded, but I managed to write myself into a corner. I feel like the final passage needs a little more story in it, but basically if I don't upload this and start on a fresh chapter, I may never carry on because I'm totally stuck.

Probably butchered me some Japanese on this chapter. I'm not trying to imply that people on Hielodar actually speak Japanese, I'm just trying to make it obvious that they speak a different language from the one NS speaks. Using a real language makes it read in a more authentic (less retarded) way.

To all you newsletter recipients: The part I previewed isn't in here. Sorry.

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The tiny, volcanic world of Pyrus was a convenient stop on the way to Hielodar, both to allow Northern Star's near-lightspeed engines to rest, and to allow for battle training. The ship settled into a low orbit around the planet, and the drop team practiced planetary landing and open-world combat using the seemingly endless supply of vaguely man-shaped drone robots the ship had brought.

As each exercise started, the dropship New Moon would fly over the operational area at ten thousand feet. The drop team would then use the exit ramps, built directly into their seats, to leave the ship. When the drop time came, their seats would open up beneath them and the floor would drop out. Their harnesses would disengage, and the soldiers would simply fall out of the craft. The jets on their battlesuits would right them into a skydiving X, and from there they could carefully jet to change the exact point of impact.

The impact was different every time. Sometimes, they would use their jump jets to slow down before the hit. This was called a flared landing, and this way, they could land on their feet with their weapons ready. In this fashion they could land in the middle of an enemy zone and eliminate their foes before they knew what was happening, thanks to the artificial intelligence controlling the robots and its ability to accurately simulate panic and confusion.

Other times, they would simulate dropping into zones with witnesses. In these situations, there could be no slowing, as they had to look like a genuine shooting star, and so they would hit the ground at terminal velocity - what was called a greased landing. The suits, being works of art, could handle the imact effortlessly, at the expense of their energy shields being voided for a few seconds. There was danger in both landing types, and all the kinds in between. So they practiced.

New Moon's engine humming increased slightly in pitch, and Marcus knew it was time. They were braking slightly to allow for the drop. This time it was him, Haegr, and Eversor, with Emendi piloting. They would rotate pilots each time, except for Marcus. As he had no experience, he was made to participate in every ground mission.

With no warning other than a loud buzzer in Marcus' helmet, New Moon disgorged her passengers. He, Eversor, and Haegr rotated into drop formation and went over the final plan using the last twenty seconds before touchdown.

"Remember - we have no intel for this mission. We're supposed to find the blue robot and bring it back intact. Everything else is expendable. No brakes. Upon impact report ready-op," Captain Eversor said over the helmet radio. Above Marcus' eye level, an electronic counter started at eight seconds and began counting down. This was the point at which he was normally supposed to engage his jets to slow his descent. He would not be doing it this time. Below him, the tortured surface of the planet, pocked with craters and wracked with constant vulcanism, grew larger and closer with frightful speed. It took incredible nerve not to activate the brakes, with millions of years of instinct screaming at him to slow down.

The trick to a fast landing was the timing of the rotation. If timed perfectly, one could land on his hands and feet and collect himself quite quickly. If the timing was not perfect, as Marcus had found out several times, one would land either face first or on his back, having rotated too early or too late. He had lost count of the number of drops they had done in the preceding week, but he knew he had done it enough to get it right.

With three terrific crashes, the planet was given three new craters, and before the dust had cleared, the three skydivers had deployed, checked their weapons, and cleared their immediate surroundings. They checked in, in the order they had rehearsed.

Eversor. "Star Six, ready op."

Haegr. "Star Three, ready op."

Ranek. "Star Four, ready op."

"This is Star Six," said Eversor, "reporting North Star ready op."

"Roger, Star Six," came Emendi's voice. "Mission local time is 0533 hours. Nav markers have been uploaded. Proceed to Nav Alpha, watch for enemy activity. They're within three kilometers and they may have seen your drop. New Moon out."

Marcus was torn between paying attention to the mission and taking in the astonishing scene. As he climbed the lip of a crater, he looked about to see lava flows running along faults ripped open by the violent tectonic activity of this planet. Near branches in the lava flows certain minerals had accumulated and crystallized, making shockingly large formations, almost like gleaming, multicolored trees. Some forty or fifty kilometers in the distance, a massive volcano was undergoing a catastrophic eruption, spraying beautifully luminescent lava almost a kilometer straight up. The low gravity magnificently increased the scale of the crystals and eruption. In the sky above, the planet's small moon was full and glowing red from the light of the planet itself, like an angry eye. Though it was technically nighttime, the moon and lava lit the scene for dozens of kilometers in every direction, while the low-density atmosphere allowed an incredible view of the stars. The small planet was the most beautifully alien thing he had ever seen. He had learned of Pyrus in astronomy class so many years ago, but the books and probe images simply could not capture the majesty of actually standing on it. Even the grey dust beneath his feet sparkled with tiny shards of fluorite and gypsum.

By the gods, Marcus thought, if my suit ruptured right now, I would die happy with my life!

His feeling of incredible completeness was jarringly interrupted by a laser pulse that flashed over his head. He dove to the ground and readied his weapon, but a staccato of soft, distant-sounding cracks told him his assailant had already been dealt with.

"There's going to be a lot of stuff on Hielodar you're going to want to stand and admire," Eversor's voice crackled over the radio. "Here's a tip. Don't."

Haegr's voice followed Eversor's. "What our fearless leader means is that you need to give everything equal attention. Situational awareness, lad. Don't let one thing escape your notice just because you're interested in another."

"Yes, sir," Ranek intoned unenergetically. There had certainly been a lot of tips. He readily accepted them, as he didn't want to be a hinderance when they were on the real mission, but being new was wearing on him. There was so much to learn, so many commands and strategies and tactics...

He barely noticed that his squad was leaving him behind. He activated the speed enhancer in his suit and began to lope furiously, the suit moving his legs at speeds that would surely break them had he not been trained in its use. Within a few seconds he had caught up, taking his position near Haegr, with Eversor some fifty meters to their left. They were nearing a valley between two craters with a lava channel ten meters wide cutting through the middle.

"Remember, Ranek, your suit's jets have been turned down so they'll behave like they will on full power in Hielodar's gravity. Don't undershoot."

Eversor was already flying over the lava as he said this. That man was getting hard to keep up with. Haegr and Ranek hit their jets a meter short of the lava and easily flew over, Haegr taking the time to flip himself over a full turn before landing. They landed with their feet already moving, taking off at high speed.

"Two groups of two. Deal with 'em quiet."

Ranek and Haegr removed their large, slightly curved swords from their thigh mounts and activated the active camouflage of their suits. The active camo was not true invisibility, but it was close enough for the pair to approach a pair of humanoid robot sentries atop the opposite crater lip and slice their heads off in two identical, brutal slashes.

"Bet Super Guy's already done his pair," Haegr said. "Let's move up to support him. Keep low and quiet." Ranek and Haegr got on their bellies and crawled to the very edge of the crater, where they could see a robot encampment below. The campsite was perfectly detailed and amazingly realistic. Ranek saw tents, supply crates, trucks, antenna arrays, and even piles of metal that were obviously supposed to be campfires. The computer systems the ship used to control the robots and imitate human behavior were incredible - Ranek observed robots moving supplies, robots in conversation, robots cleaning their weapons - he even saw two robots on what appeared to be a smoke break. Were it not for the alien terrain and the obvious inhumanity of the robots' bodies, the scene below could have easily passed for an early morning at a military campsite.

"Most of them will be asleep," said Eversor. "Haegr, give Ranek the coilgun. Our blue robot is probably asleep; I'm gonna go tent to tent." As a blurred shadow slid into the entrance to the first tent in the camp, Haegr took the massive sniper rifle from his back and gave it to Ranek, who promptly got on the scope. The multistage coilgun was another magnificent work of art courtesy of Gaia's secret engineers. When the trigger was pulled, a thumb-sized iron slug was pulled through a series of charged copper coils, accelerating it to whatever speed the gun was set on. It could be set for subsonic shots to silence the weapon completely, or for hypersonic shots that needed to pierce the thickest armor. Ranek gazed down the device's scope, sweeeping around the campsite while Eversor searched.

"Why exactly are we training for kidnapping here?" Ranek asked Haegr.

"We've had to do it before," Haegr said indifferently.

"You mean in the twenty years you've been with Northern Star..."

"I've been on fourteen missions. There's always something on the brink of collapse in this universe."

"That's...amazing. You guys, all by yourselves, keep these worlds safe."

"Well, none of them are as perfect as Gaia, nor will they ever be. None of them have the Emperor. The only good to come out of those worlds is what we do."

"How backwards are they, really?"

"Hell. Rape, murder, war, theft, slavery, and everything from here to there. They don't know how to manage disease. They don't know how to stop social stratification. Their economies are astonishingly backward. Some of them believe in the paranormal with such conviction that they would kill someone to prove their own faith."

Ranek did not know what slavery was, and he had only the vaguest idea of what was meant by rape. "So...why would we even help people like that? If they're so terrible, why not just let them destroy themselves?"

There was a long pause. Finally, Eversor keyed up, grunting slightly. "Because, kid, if we do what we can to make things easy on them, they might one day be able to fix themselves. We don't stop them from making mistakes. It's the only way to learn. But we do try to make sure their mistakes don't destroy them before they get the chance to learn from them." There was more grunting.

"Something disagreeing with you, Eversor?" said Haegr.

"I got our robot. He's not coming quietly, though. Hang on." A brief pause. "Alright, I had to EMD him, he shouldn't be any more trouble." Electromuscular disruptors were wrist-mounted weapons in the suits that fired a short-ranged burst of a material like ball lightning that caused numbness, unconsciousness, and short-term retrograde amnesia - perfect for innocent witnesses. Obviously it would not work on shielded robots, but as they were imitating humans, they played dead upon being hit by it.

"Ranek, I'm gonna head up the southwest crater wall. There are three in my way."

"Got 'em," Ranek said, steadying the rifle.

"Give me a go when they're taken care of."

Assassination shots were tricky. The targets had to be shot in such a way as they would immediately drop, and it had to be done while no one was looking. It meant somehow keeping the target, and everyone in the vicinity, in the scope.

However, Haegr had taught him well, and Ranek had learned the patience the task called for. For several seconds he watched and waited, until-

Click. Click. Click.

With three precise shots that made no more noise than the click of the trigger, the sentries were slain, with large parts of their heads strewn across the crater floor. As Ranek looked at the ruined circuitry and shattered metal, he wondered what it would be like to do that to a human.

"Six, the road's wide open. Let's get our blue robot back to the ship," Haegr said. As Eversor ran out of the camp with a limp blue-painted robot over his shoulder, he kicked up some of the detritus from the slain robots. The shards of silicon and germanium glittered slightly in the air.

Marcus was suddenly overcome with a powerful sense of dread for the future. The rifle's bullet was gigantic, and ripped through robots with ease. He realized with a sinking feeling that soon he might have to use it on a living, breathing man.

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Dominic Cypress was back on his feet sooner than his attending physician would have liked. He only asked to be released once. When his doctor did not allow it, after he gave his statement to the police, he acquired a spare set of scrubs from a closet while wheelchairing himself to the lunchroom. He used the disguise to walk right out the front doors, even stopping to triage a couple patients on his way out.

For whatever reason, the hospital they had taken Cypress to and the Pokemon center they had taken Minerva and Loki to were seven blocks apart. The stout walk afforded Cypress time to call Dana, who was at the lab with Celia and under police protection. Dana had wanted to stay by both their sides, but couldn't for two reasons. The first was that they were in different locations. The second was that neither the Pokemon Center nor the hospital had tolerated the heavy police guard that followed Dana and Celia around. They were stuck at the lab until the police were satisfied they were safe, which was usually three days - the amount of time it took for the police administators to get bored. As it was, Dana insisted that Cypress go straight to Minerva, as neither of them had been assigned a guard, and neither Cypress nor Dana knew Minerva's condition. Repeated calls to the remarkably unhelpful Pokemon Center had revealed only that she was recovering from surgery.

By the time Cypress entered the building, it had just gotten to the point in the day where the windows could no longer be seen out of for the reflection of the fluorescent lights. He was sweating in spite of the cool air and he had resurrected his throbbing headache. His knife wound had seeped a bit, and joints felt like they were on fire. He entertained the possibility that he should have done as his doctor said.

"Good evening," he announced himself to the receptionist. "Here to see Gardevoir ID 6122479 and Kadabra ID 6842611."

She typed on her computer. "Miss Redwood and Mr. White?"

Since when did they start calling Pokemon mister and miss? "Yes."

"Mr. Ames has already been discharged. His owner picked him up this morning."

"This morning? Wait, when was he checked in?"

The receptionist gave him a strange look. "Yesterday, sir."

Cypress had had no idea an entire day had passed. He must have been more badly hurt than he had realized. "Okay. Where's Minerva?"

"The Gardevoir is recovering from surgery, sir. Right this way."

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Cypress slipped noiselessly into Minerva's room, closing the door behind him. She laid on the bed, asleep and secure in crisp white linen.

A strip of her hair above her left sensory radial - the fanlike structure that could not truly be called an ear - had been shaved away, and the exposed skin was held together with a series of stitches. It had been carefully cleaned and sealed with surgical glue, but Cypress could still see flakes of crusted blood in her hair. Her left eye was covered with a gauze patch, and around its edges he could see that her eye had been thoroughly blackened. He heard a soft whistling from her slightly-open mouth, and he was furious to see that both of her left upper bicuspids had been knocked out. Her left cheek was peppered with small adhesive bandages, and Cypress reached up and felt the left side of his own face to confirm his suspicion. The bastard had been wearing a ring, and had strongly favored his right hand - Minerva's right side was almost undamaged.

The head injuries frightened him. It usually took a lot of damage to cause brain injury, but Cypress had seen cases in humans where a simple injury treated on an outpatient basis, such as a bicycle crash, had caused bleeding in parts of the brain. Undetected and uncontrolled, this could lead to what was known as a subdural hematoma, which was a pooling of blood on the surface of the brain - indeed, the term itself translated to mean "brain surface bruise." A bruise in the highly pressurized brain cavity could cause fluid overpressure, leading to moderate to severe brain damage. He had seen simple bumps on the head damage the brain's memory cores and sensory centers, causing grave conditions such as traumatic epileptiform seizures, serious memory loss, blindness, and paralysis. If her brain had been damaged by the beating, the Pokemon who had become his close friend might not recognize him when she woke up.

He gently clasped one of her hands and ran his other hand through her hair. Giving her a kiss on the forehead, he turned to go find a meal so he could wait for her to awaken. As he turned to leave, a warm hand grasped his.

"Dominic..." Her psychic voice was not the pained whisper he would have expected - she sounded almost normal. He wheeled around and held her hand.

"Are you okay?"

"Do I look okay?"

Cypress paused. "Alright, if you want to give me an attitude, we can be clinical. Where does it hurt?"

She smiled. "Well, the whole left side of my head hurts."

"I imagine so. You look like someone used you as an anvil."

She shot him a dirty look before speaking up. "The doctor said I had some broken ribs, and one of them had torn my lung. Blissey and the floor surgeon fused them back into place and fixed the lung, but it all still hurts."

"That's normal," Cypress said. He was beginning to breathe more easily. Just a couple of questions and then he would be sure. "I need you to answer me a few questions." At her confused look, he carried on: "I need to check for amnesia. First, what is your owner's name?"

"I consider Dana Redwood more of a roomate," she said.

"How old are you?"

"Nineteen. Speaking of, has she called or stopped by?"

"Cops won't let her leave the lab. She called me and told me to check on you; I'm supposed to call her back. Your experience level?"

"Forty-one. And I make a great Psybeam."

"Fair-to-middling. ID number?"

"6122479, which is the number of days you'd be laid up if I shot one at you."

"Now to check for retrograde symptoms. What events led up to your injuries?"

"Oh." She paused. "Well, we were in the break room." She flushed red. "And we were there for a while. And then we followed that man down the hall. You confronted him, and then..."

"That's fine. You're fine." She smiled, and sat up in the bed, grimacing slightly.

"But I remember something I saw before I blacked out."

Shit, thought Cypress, here it comes.

"When you..." she swallowed, "when you made it end... you remembered something. And..." she was trembling now, looking down at the floor, "I want to know if it's true."

If it's true, thought Cypress. She knows it's true. She's giving me a way out, but I can't lie like that, even though I want to.

"My brother was my hero," Cypress said quietly. He steeled himself, and carried on. "When our mother died, we had no one left. He led a small gang in our shanty. I was only seven when it happened. Suddenly, she was gone, and my brother was all I had left. He was fifteen at the time. She got sick, and the preacher told us it was because the supply of medicine that Hoenn usually sent had not come. I didn't know then, but during my schooling I figured out that she had been a diabetic. She needed insulin to regulate her blood sugar, and after Hoenn shut down trade with Sevii, that was that. Her blood sugar got out of control, and that was the end. That's why I became a doctor. I mean, I know I'm a researcher, but I've been to medical school. I never wanted to be powerless like that again. If I saw someone sick or hurt... well, I can make it better now."

Cypress took a deep breath. "But it didn't do me any good back home. My brother took care of me, and he let me be in his gang. I was five years younger than the next youngest kid there, but he let me tag along. He was tough on me, because he couldn't let the rest of the crew think he was soft. But he didn't ditch me like Dad did to both of us, so there was that."

Cypress looked out the window at the fading sun for some time, and the story finally came forth.

"A couple months after Mama died, the spring tourism rush hit. My brother and his friends would wait in the corners of the marketplace and mug tourists who wandered off the main road. They would just slap them around and take what they had - hell, why not? We had nothing to lose, not a warm bed nor a pot to piss in. We didn't give a fuck. So the lads were showing me how it was done. How to set up an ambush, how to stalk, how to recognize the ones carrying the most money. How to scare them into just giving up. I was blooded a few days after my eighth birthday, and they gave me an axe handle and told me to go make some money."

At this point, Minerva interrupted him. "Blooded?"

"The two biggest members beat me for a minute. If you were still standing after a minute, you were tough enough to be a member. And I was," he added, almost arrogantly.

"Anyway, I cornered a rich tourist in the marketplace, and I told him to hand over his money. He laughed at me. He told me to go back to my mother and play with my toys. Well, I didn't have either of those, did I?"

Minerva gasped. "You didn't!"

"I didn't fucking mean to!" Cypress snapped, his voice cracking. "It's just... the preacher had told us all that it was the white man's fault that we were poor, that we were dying... When he taunted me, I thought... I thought he knew, or something, that he was just rubbing it in. I beat him with the axe handle, and I got carried away."

He expected Minerva to recoil, or teleport away. He did not expect her to reach up and wipe the tears from his eyes.

Cypress took another deep, shuddering breath. "I don't know how long it went on for. My brother pulled me off of him and brought me back to the clubhouse. The whole gang had been hiding, watching me. They couldn't believe what I had done. My brother had hidden a bottle of high-dollar liquor he had stolen from a beach resort, and that afternoon he brought out that vodka and we all drank. I was a hero. After we went back to our shanty, I cried all night, and my brother just held me, and told me he understood, and that it was okay." Minerva hugged him tightly, and Cypress dried his eyes on the sleeve of his stolen hospital scrubs.

After a few moments, Minerva said, "He was right. It wasn't your fault."

"Thank you," Cypress said quietly. "It feels good to hear it from someone."

"What do you mean?"

"You're the only person I've ever told about this."

She smiled sweetly. "That means a lot."

There was nothing else to be said, and they were already in each other's arms. Kissing seemed like the natural thing to do.

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"Alright, Ranek. Haegr, you too, I'm pretty sure this is your first time using an entry cradle, right?"

"Aye."

"This is much easier than the way we were doing it previously. We don't use the cradles normally, since it's more tactically sound to drop without them, but what the psychics say, goes. So, here's how it works." With that, Eversor roughly pushed Marcus backwards. He fell into a slightly reclined body-sized cushion, and Eversor pressed an exterior button to close the hatch. Marcus suddenly found himself encased in a one-man drop pod. He felt a sickening tug of terror when he realized it was the exact size and shape of a coffin.

"The pod will do all the work, kid. The thing about these drop cradles is they enter a lot faster from a lot higher orbit than we could with just our suits. Twenty-four miles in six minutes becomes thirty-eight miles in two minutes."

Thirty-eight miles in two minutes. If his math served him right, that was almost 1200 miles per hour. This was suicide.

"Just to let you both know," Eversor said, shoving Haegr into the next cradle as he had done with Marcus, "it's gonna be the most exciting damn two minutes of your life."

They were now communicating entirely through the radio. Bellatrix keyed up from the bridge of Northern Star. "I'll be tracking you all on your way down. Sampson, darling, are you ready to go? We have less than a minute now."

"We're go for drop here. Just relax, men. The pods will do all the work for you." As Eversor spoke, Marcus' pod began to quickly fill with a strange green gel.

"It keeps the pod from collapsing," Eversor said, heading off any questions. "There won't be a countdown, it causes too much stress. The pod will just go when it goes. Remember, when you land, the pod door will blow off. The pod will ionically disintegrate five seconds after the door's gone, and you had better be clear of it by then, because you don't want to be in contact with it when it goes."

"Twenty seconds."

"Upon touchdown report ready op. Remember what I showed you about clearing the area around you. Go invisible as soon as you've got your head on straight. And above all else..."

"Ten seconds."

"...do not vomit in your helmet."

There was a strong rumbling as the airlock doors beneath the pods opened, and the pods shivered like leaves in a strong wind. Marcus was glad there was no abort button, because if there was, he would have pushed it.

"And off you go, heroes!" cried Bellatrix over the radio, and with a gut-wrenching launch, they were off.

Marcus' vision flashed red, and a halo of air cushions inflated inside his helmet, squeezing his head. He tried to scream, but there was too much blood in his head for vocalization. Within a few seconds, the brutal force of the acceleration was gone, and he felt totally weightless for a heartbeat before his weight began to return, lightly at first but with greater pressure as the moments passed. He began to feel terrifically heavy.

"Clean vehicle separation. Approaching barrier boundary. Altitude one-three-five-thousand. Barrier cross at mark."

A moment later, at the exact moment Bellatrix said "Mark!" Ranek felt the slightest tingle in his head. Suddenly, he felt a bone-wrenching twist and shudder in his pod. His suit tightly squeezed his lower body to prevent him from passing out. Marcus would have vomited, but his body couldn't force the bile up against the terrific G-force. He moaned slightly, the most noise he could make.

"Something's wrong. I've got a course deviation on Ranek's pod. Stand by."

There was a pause that seemed to last an hour, during which Ranek became heavier and heavier until his own weight was unbearable.

"Report," croaked Eversor.

"Damn. Ranek had a braking thruster cut early. He's stable, but he's built resonant yaw. Projected landing zone is seventy miles off-target."

"Emperor help us," Eversor said with difficulty.

"He'll be alright. He's not falling on a populated area. Looks like..." There was another painfully long pause. "Oh, dear. Hope you're ready for a swim, Ranek. Impact in five seconds."

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Something had been bothering Cypress for a while, but he had been too occupied with their little make-out session to bring it up. Their minds were as close as their bodies, however, and Minerva saw it.

She drew her mouth away from his. "It's just a game to us," she said quietly.

"How do you mean?"

"We're not nearly as interested in death and destruction as humans are," she said. "We play along with the Pokemon battles because we love you and we love to make you happy. What you see during a Pokemon battle isn't a real fight. It's a game, with rules between the Pokemon just as there are rules between the Trainers."

That explained his question, and a lot more. If Pokemon could fire beams of energy and balls of fire at each other and simply be knocked unconscious, how was it that a man with some rings had put Minerva in the hospital so gravely injured? For the Pokemon, there was an implicit agreement that they were battling for the sake of a game, and that they would not really hurt each other. Humans, however, were ruthless. There were no rules in human battles.

"Don't think about it right now," Minerva said quietly, and she kissed him deeply.


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There was no sensation of impact. The rumbling of the pod simply stopped, and the immense pressure he had felt on his body suddenly lifted. The suit gripped his lower body for a moment more before releasing, and Marcus was filled with relief. For better or for worse, the ride was over.

The edges of the door panel flashed, and the whole door was blown away from the pod. Marcus was immediately waist-deep in water. He leapt free of the pod just as the pod and the door flashed brightly and were consumed by chemical fire. Barely a second later, there was no evidence that his pod had ever existed.

He waded through the water and up a small embankment, sizing up his situation. He had landed in a small clearing in an old-growth forest, with trees a hundred feet tall all around. He assumed that the depression in which his pod had landed was the impact crater, but it was too cool and smooth. Noticing fish-like creatures wedged in the trees, he realized it was a small lake that had been mostly drained by his impact. The force must have been terrific.

"Star Four, ready op."

His announcement was met with static. He tried twice more, with no success. Despite wearing a suit of armor that was a thousand years ahead of anything this planet could produce, he momentarily lost his head.

Trembling all over, he deactivated his visor, and the wings of his helmet and his respirator slid away from his face, exposing him to the air. It was cool and humid, heavy with the glowing mist that was settling in the trees. He could hear a pattering from the trees all around, and it might have been the lake water, but he was fairly certain it had just rained. Light dissipating clouds shone gold and orange in the dying evening light, and the trees were richly green and lush. The ground beneath his feet was spongy, moist, and dark. He exhaled slowly, and drew his sidearm, checking it for seventh time in the last hour. Routine had always calmed him, and as he slid the weapon back into its holster, he realized something.

Hielodar was beautiful.

He exhaled heavily, releasing tension he didn't know he had been carrying. Hielodar was beautiful, just like his home planet, and he knew he would make it, even if there was a temporary communications loss. There was a plan for this, of course - head for high ground and attempt to establish psychic contact in the event the radios stopped working. He clicked his helmet shut and activated his jump jets, soaring a hundred feet straight up before falling back to the ground. He had seen a glimpse of a hill or small mountain of some sort to his extreme left - he had no idea of its distance, but it was his best bet. He landed with a thump and wheeled around to face the direction he had seen the mountain in.

A child stood ten feet away, gaping at him.

Ranek almost howled with frustration. A minute on the ground and he had already been seen? He observed the belt laden with six large red-and-white beads and recognized the child from his briefings as a "trainer" - one of the individuals who collected specimens of the local animals and made them to fight each other. His mouth went dry - the child was probably one of the many bloodthirsty violence-junkies that roamed the planet. What was he supposed to do?

The child began to tremble, and two trails of tears ran down her face. At least, he assumed it was a girl - it was wearing a skirt. She was too young for him to be completely certain, definitely not older than eleven.

"Wa-watashi ni kega wo shi nai!" the little one squeaked.

He was fairly certain she was begging not to be harmed, but his command of their language was, in Haegr's words, "piss-poor." He was unable to form sentences because he did not know their structure, or exactly how their words changed when used in different capacities. He decided to try stringing together some friendly talk while he decided what to do with her.

"Gai wa nai," he said slowly. "Tomodachi. Heiwa."

She stood up a little straighter. "Anata ga heiwa no uchi ni kuru?

"Hai."

She managed a smile, though she still looked unsteady. "Deoxys to onaji basho de aru hitsuyō ga ari masu." He smiled slightly. First contact.

Then he remembered his EMD.

A flash of light later, the child was flat on her back, completely unconscious. That was that. Ranek turned to leave, but then hesitated as a thought stuck him. He was going to leave an unconscious child in the middle of the woods at night? Of course, her parents, wherever they were, had allowed her to roam the woods, which seemed unconscionable to him. Did it mean the woods were safe, or that the people were simply barbaric? He remembered Haegr's words. Left to the world, the child might be raped, or slaveried, or even robbed. Hearing a long, chilling howl, he jetted above the treeline looking for artificial lighting, which he found after a couple of tries, and resolved to take her there. He carefully picked her up and started through the woods.

The trees were well-spaced, and the ground was mostly clear, making his trip easy. He enjoyed glimpses of pretty purple sky between the dark branches, and carefully observed the animals he saw wandering about. There were shockingly large wormlike creatures, brightly colored and slow-moving. A small, black dog nosed its way through a pocket of underbrush to stare at him. A creature he had trouble describing even to himself, one about two feet tall with foxlike ears, orangish skin, a tail, slits for eyes, and heavy body sections that looked like armor stared at him passively. Marcus felt a slight tingle when he looked at it. Whatever it was, it was psychic, which intrigued him greatly. Animals here could be psychic. Were they even animals? Perhaps there were some that were like humans.

He turned his attention to the child in his arms. He had expected to see scars on her, marks of a tough life on a tough planet. He did not. Her skin was white and smooth, and her hands were not those of a worker. Her knees were knicked, but no more so than he would expect from an average child. He had expected to see signs of a dye job at the roots of her hair, but didn't - her hair really was naturally blue like her eyes. She wore a large white cap with a silhouette of an animal collection capsule, and a red scarf. Marcus had been imagining the planet to be covered with some sort of prehistoric warriors, but this girl was positively dainty. She had been forthcoming when she was conscious, not aggressive as he had expected. He felt a pang of guilt when he remembered that he had been the one to initiate an attack.

Hielodar had seemed safe up to that point, but Marcus reasoned that Northern Star would not train so rigorously if there was no reason to. He took a deep breath and carried on.



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