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There's something about the smell of a planetside spaceport. There's a tang of space—an oily scent you don't find anywhere else on a planet, or even in the closed confines of a station ring. The ships on the enormous pad have been out in the Vasty. We used to discuss it in the Marines; what it brought to mind when we smelled it. For me, it evoked a sense of impending freedom.
But not today.
Spidery, triple-jointed fingers cut shadows across the sudden flood of sunlight inside the aircar. I ducked beneath them and slid out. The Endar guard hissed, seized my upper right arm, and jerked me upright in a grip meant to make me pay for my slippery maneuver.
We stood at the base of a boarding ramp that led to the open hatch in the side of a ship. It was an immense, deepspace jobber, the towering curve of its bulk blocking my view of everything to the left, right, and ahead of me.
A flashback of memory, of ripples distorting the stars of the Vasty, flooded through my brain. Panic that I had controlled thus far despite the situation threatened to break through my composure. I had only seen a black hull like this in one place and it had done its best to kill a child and me.
But the Zeek had identified the Obega as Tabi.
What did I actually know of the Tabi Empire and its politics? I considered Saurubi my best friend as well as my business partner. That didn't mean I knew anything about the billions of her fellow beings and their relationship with the rest of the Whooex Union. We assumed we had a solid alliance against those species we considered a mutual enemy.
Yet, two Endar were freely walking me onto a Tabi ship.
To hell with this! The Obega was not taking me off this world.
But I couldn't make my escape yet. With the open area of the spaceport around us, there was no place for me to hide. My escort would simply kill or maim me, then carry out their orders. I had to wait until they deposited me inside the ship.
I tried to connect with the world link again now that I was out of the aircar. Nothing.
Inconvenient, but that wouldn't stop me.
I submitted, docilely allowing one of the Endar to pull me along for several meters before I twisted in his grip to look out over the port behind us.
A wave of vertigo rolled over me.
No fabricated structure in space can mimic a planetside horizon, no matter how large it is. That perspective is always enclosed or curving out of sight, which limits the range of view. A planetary horizon, with its unlimited expanse, sickens most spacers into immobility. Space Corp training and my early origins on a ball of dirt helped me manage my reaction, keeping it to a momentary disorienting rush.
Everything popped back into balance and I could see this was a massive spaceport. A major planetside spaceport. Hulks of ships, many of them bigger than the Obega, studded its vast, flat surface. Some of the smaller ones were luxury yachts, the caliber of which I'd only heard in rumors. I saw ships of a hundred colors and worlds, from shiny new to ancient, battered hulks squatted on a dark surface that stretched off into the hazy distance. And that was only what I could see on this side of the ship's towering hull.
Beyond the port's edge, I saw a further, hazy horizon with the darker jag of city-shapes against the sky. A glimmer of blue caught my eye. A faceted jewel of pure blue sat face-upward inside a filigreed setting like a rare gemstone in a ring. Considering the distance, the thing had to be immense. Immense and breathtaking.
The second Endar guard moved to block my view. If he was concerned I would recognize the place, he needn't have bothered: it didn't resemble anywhere I'd ever seen.
But I'd be able to find out where I was now, after seeing that blue jewel.
I had no doubt of my immediate destination, however, and the lack of port facilities on this side of the ship told me there were no witnesses to observe this passenger transfer.
The Endar hauled me into the dimly lit passageway. They moved quickly now, as if maybe this ship was ready to launch and they wanted off before that happened. Despite their rush, I began to feel a burn of confidence. I'd spent two of my young years on a ship similar to this. Disregarding the flat black hull, it was like a million other tubs moving through the depths of the Whooex Union, and I was familiar with the basic layout.
I could escape this thing.
But I was on a timer, dependent on how long it took these two to march me to my destination, settle me in, and exit. That was how long I had to get back off.
Helped along by a shove, I stumbled through a side hatch and into a long, narrow chamber. We'd reached our destination.
Towering walls rose to shadowy heights on both sides of us. The place was a cryo, or life storage, chamber. Racks of horizontal containers extended upward, row upon row, penetrating several decks. In space, where the loss of crew could mean no one to hit a button at a critical moment to save an expensive ship, life got stowed in the safest area possible. We had reached the guts of the ship.
The absence of green lights on the sides of the suspended animation containers, or SACs, caught my attention as I scanned the racks high and deep down the aisle. No green outside meant no life inside. There was no crew cryoed here.
This ship was highly automated.
As if to confirm that, a bot attendant glided forward to greet us. The meter-and-a-half tall mech had black, hard-edged facets covering most of its shape. Four multi-jointed arms extended up and out toward us as it floated up. I'd seen images of cryo attendants from other Whooex members, but nothing as streamlined and stark as this. The thing resembled the two black-clad creatures grasping my arms more than it did a Tabisee.
Despite its strange appearance, the sight of the bot eased some of my apprehensions: at least my escort couldn't slip it a few creds to set my life monitors wrong.
"I am held against my will," I told it in Union Basic, the patois of ships and spacers across the Whooex. A Tabisee attendant should understand and respond to help me.
I don't know if my captors understood what I said, but one jabbed me hard in the gut with the back of a bony fist.
The autobot did not react to my statement or his action.
While I gasped in pain, the two Endar wrestled to get past the bot in the narrow passage, their plan, apparently, to put me into cryo themselves. Obviously they were not familiar with deepspace ship protocol. The mechanical attendant could not concede its role to them: its programming in such a life-critical process did not allow that. Nevertheless, they persisted in their efforts.
I watched as they snarled, shoved at the bot, and tried to feint their way past. It stayed stubbornly in place at the mouth of its domain, blocking their every attempt to maneuver into the passage beyond.
Meanwhile, unsure of its intended subject, the bot tried to prep the Endar on my left for a SAC. Precious time passed while the Endar spat back and forth in their hissing, hacking language in what must be rising frustration, until they finally realized they had the means to redirect the bot's activity.
They pushed me forward.
The bot attendant instantly refocused attention. It whirred and extended some sensors to scan me, then flashed a few lights.
"Help me," I said in a low voice, hoping its programming would respond to the universal plea.
That earned me another hard blow, this time to the back of the head and the autobot still did not respond.
It continued to fuss over me for another minute, then abruptly paused its activity.
I'd been cryoed many times during my service in the Marines, so I was aware the Endar had not yet completed one last crucial action in the process. The attendant and I both waited.
There was a lot more spitting and snapping from my black-clad escort before the solution occurred to them.
The sides of its face darkening with what I hoped was fury and embarrassment, my left-side friend searched his leather pockets, withdrew a data chip containing my travel clearance, and extended it to the bot. It whisked the thing away with one of its appendages and sprang into action again. Snatching the bag containing my awaysuit from my grasp, it sped several meters down the chamber aisle to where a long, coffin-like box rolled out of the rack lengthwise, foot end toward us. The transparent lid rolled open.
The mech shoved the chip into a slot on the SAC, dropped my pack into a compartment on the end, then whizzed back to stop in front of me. It dispensed a small packet of sensor pads from a slot in its front and began to place them at critical points on my body.
The placement of the pads went awkwardly, as if it had never encountered Human anatomy before. It finally paused, servos whirring quietly, readjusted its position, and raised another appendage to the level of my eye. It blinded me with a quick flash of light, then clicked and whirred some more. The lights flickered on the end of the SAC.
The bot resumed placing pads, this time more accurately. If it remained in control of the situation, I might survive this cryo experience.
I didn't intend to bet my life on that.