The Forgotten Planet

Two of Vance’s men that were still in mostly working order pulled recliners and an end table in front of the window that had the best view of Palance below. After that, the hired goons were dismissed for the night. One had to be carried off on a stretcher and another wobbled away with an obvious concussion and an arm bent at a funny angle.

I was invited to sit in a recliner, and moments later a serving man placed two hi-ball glasses on the end table that separated our chairs. The glasses contained a clear liquid, ice and sprigs of a fragrant green herb.

Vance picked up his glass and took a sip. “Have you ever had a mojito, Mr. Castell?”

“No sir,” I answered. “And please, call me Galen.” No one had ever called me Mr. Castell before. That was my dad.

“Very well,” he replied, “Then it’s only fair that you call me Mitchel.”

I nodded and took a sip, and then another. It was sweet and minty. “Is this mint Mr., um, Mitchel.”

“It is indeed. You had it before?” I shook my head. Fresh food was a rare luxury. Fresh herbs were unheard of. “The drink either originated on a small island called Cuba, or in the city of Miami where Cuban refugees fleeing communism settled in the 1900’s.” He swirled his drink and said, “I’ve heard it both ways.”

We were well above the cloud line now, nearing the edge of the atmosphere. The windows were no longer tinted, and the major cities were nothing more than clumps of light.

Mitchel took another sip and said, “You impressed me this evening, Galen.” He turned away from the view and looked at me. I turned and met his gaze. “Would you have opened the airlock or vented the oxygen?”

That started me, but I did my best to hide it. “The oxygen. A slow drift into euphoria rather than decompression and abject terror.” I drained the rest of my drink. “You have an implant?”

“A much better one than your old Mercury Seven,” he said with a grin. Pretty good indeed if he could read the signature on my gear. “Still, you hacked circles around me, and trying to navigate your firewall gave me a migraine. Another?”

“Please,” I replied. The edge hadn’t quite been taken off yet. That’s probably why it took me so long to realize this next point. “Wait, if you knew I was going to take you out with us, why weren’t you willing to negotiate.”

“Like I said earlier Galen, I don’t bluff, and I don’t back down,” Vance answered. A moment later a man arrived with fresh drinks and left with the empties. When the server left, Vance asked, “Is there any point in trying to get you to join my organization?”

I sighed. “No, but I am actually flattered.” I answered honestly. I didn’t feel like a full-blown discussion on the merits of Palance’s two-headed oligarchy of crime lords and corporates would necessarily help our current situation. “I just need to get off this planet and start a new life.”

“I understand completely,” he replied. “Palance is a cesspool.”

“Then why do you stay?” I asked.

“As it turns out, cesspools are my personal niche.” I wasn’t sure if it was a joke or not, so I smiled politely. “Anything on that record pair well with a suborbital sunset?”

The sun was falling behind Palance, and most of the surface was in shadow. The stratosphere at the far rim of the planet was cast in an amber glow, and above that, the upper atmosphere flared a vibrant blue. I kicked the session off with Johnny B. Goode, and we both bobbed or heads to the music. I followed up with the Brandenburg Concerto and then The Magic Flute, and we listened in silence and sipped our drinks.

As the last notes of Mozart drifted away, Vance said, with a tongue slightly thick with drink, “You know, I grew up on Earth.”

I turned and looked at him quizzically. The math for that statement just wasn’t right. We hadn’t been drinking that much, unless he was a complete lightweight that is. Earth was nuked by the Servine well over a hundred years ago, but Vance looked to be no more than fifty or so standard years. He did have some grey in his hair and mustache, and a fair number of fine lines around the mouth and eyes, but for the age he was talking about, I would have expected him to look more like a shrunken prune.

He smiled. “I’m much older than I appear, son. My genes were enhanced when I was a child, which was a standard in-vitro procedure back then. Between that and the nanites that coursed through my blood my first half century of life, I looked and felt like I was in my twenties for eighty or ninety years.

I blinked and thought about that statement for a moment. “I take it you couldn’t find replacement tech on Palance?” I said finally. Nanotechnology was heavily regulated, probably because the lizards didn’t want a bunch of Terran super soldiers on their hands.

He shook his head. “No, once their little batteries crapped out, that was it. And since my gene therapy tune-ups never occurred, I’ve begun to age normally since then.”

“Then how old are you?” I picked up my empty glass and stared at it, surprised that it was empty again. I was starting to lose track of time.

Vance swirled his drink and drained the contents. “I’m one hundred and seventy-two.”

“You don’t look a day over one-twenty,” I said with a smile. I know. Very bad joke, but I am, in fact, a lightweight.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said, with a courtesy chuckle. “Cartilage re-growth is easy enough to find, so my joints don’t ache, but the cellular damage is a bitch. The skin and organs just don’t want to cooperate.” He frowned and pulled at the loose skin around his jaw. “After all, these bodies weren’t made to last forever.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” I answered. “I’m not even eighteen, and my back is sore when I wake up most mornings. Plus, my right shoulder goes in and out of socket on a whim.” I had just begun to imagine what a century and three quarters of living could do to various organs and appendages when something obvious dawned on me. “You must know where Earth is?” I asked, barely believing the words coming out of my mouth.

“Well, I know it’s in Orion’s spur,” he answered. “I couldn’t tell you which of the thousands of star systems in that sector that Earth is in though. I wasn’t a stellar navigator after all.”

That was at least confirmation that I was on the right track. My program had settled on an area within Orion’s spur – which is a minor arm in the lower galactic quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy.

“That means you were on Palance before the occupation,” I said, as the ramifications of Vance’s age slowly began to dawn on me.

“I was indeed,” Mitchel said with a smile. “And what a beautiful world it was... one with so much promise. A stable orbit in the Goldilocks zone, plenty of water and a temperate climate. An asteroid field full of metals. And a dynamo. The latter item was why Mars had been such a bitch to terraform. Internally, it had been a dead planet since early in the formation of the solar system. Without the enveloping magnetic field that a dynamo supplies, the atmosphere just washes away. Ah, but I’m rambling.”

“No, this is great,” I said, meaning every word of it. “What did you do back then? I know you wouldn’t have been, well...”

“Before I was a crime lord?” he said with an amused smile. “No, back then I was a diplomat, if you can believe that. I was helping to get the local government here up and running. The plan was for Palance to be our launching-off point into the edge of the long bar.”

The long bar is the general term for the billions of stars packed into the center of the Milky Way. The stars are so dense in the core, that from a distance it resembles a cylindrical bar of light. It’s also the home to the bulk of the Salarian Empire.

Mitchel continued, “Unfortunately, the Empire didn’t want the company, and Palance was one of the first colonies to fall. I guess it was fortunate that we didn’t have much in the way of defense built up, because there wasn’t any need for much orbital bombardment. That left the infrastructure of the planet basically intact. The downside was that now all the system’s resources ended up in our enemy’s coffers.”

“I thought the lizards killed everyone in the government during the invasion?” I asked. “How was it you survived?”

“They certainly tried to kill everyone who worked in a leadership position. A few of us made it out of the Capitol in time, though for safety’s sake we didn’t stick together. At first, I tried my best to assimilate into the system. I changed my name, bought a new identity, got a job. I became a middle manager in a corporation that supplied the Vox with off-world farming equipment.

“Right from the beginning, the Vox swooped in and took control of the starport and reopened the asteroid mining operations. They even helped us get the farming and manufacturing centers up and running again – though I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that it wasn’t for humanitarian reasons.”

“No, I get it,” I answered. “Humans are cheaper to produce and maintain than programmable labor droids, and AI...” The Depository was filled with the individual failings of every version of the positronic brain as well as the horror stories of the inevitable AI rebellions. Earth fought its fifth world war against a machine army of its own creation and barely survived.

“That seems to be a universal constant among all the sentient races,” he added. “Everyone gets burned by that particular devil. Do you like jazz?”

“I don’t not like it,” I answered carefully, “but my experience with the genre is fairly limited.” I was pretty sure that the all-electronic synth-jaz they played in lobbies and elevators wasn’t what he was talking about.

He nodded and his eyes glazed over, and a moment later the music switched... to a sound that that started with a light piano-rag before cutting to an instrument I couldn’t initially place. Whatever it was, it was so beautiful that I felt a chill run down my arms and a knot form in my throat. I looked over at Vance and my mouth opened, but I couldn’t form any words.

He smiled and nodded. “That, young man, is Miles Davis. You like?” he asked, already knowing the answer.

“It’s beautiful,” I replied finally, “but I can’t place half the instruments they’re playing.”

“Well now, that’s the great John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley layering their saxophones, Paul Chambers is on the double bass and Miles himself is playing a trumpet. The pianist is Bill Evans, who Miles said in an interview, and I quote, “plays the piano the way it was meant to be played.”

“I can’t say I disagree with him,” I replied.

“Kind of Blue was a landmark Jazz album when it came out in the mid twentieth century,” Vance said, “and in my humble opinion is one of the five greatest artistic accomplishments in the history of humankind,” he sipped his drink before adding, “along with Beethoven’s 9th symphony, the Sistine Chapel, Starry Night and Michelangelo’s David.”

Thus began an hour show and tell. Vance used the car’s built-in projector and his implant’s memory stores to show, among other things, paintings from a time in Earth history called the renaissance, architecture from Europe’s baroque period and a twenty-first century city called New York with buildings made of steel and glass that stretched high into the clouds. I in turn, interspersed video and audio files from the golden record – which included a number of strange animal pictures and sounds, various planets in the Sol System, and a number of stunning geological formations.

By the time we finished, countless mojitos had been consumed, and my eyes were blurry and my brain was working at a quarter of normal capacity. Plus, my inhibitions were long gone – which makes me think that there’s something to EHO2 as a treatment for social anxiety. Regardless of the reasons, I felt comfortable asking a dangerous crime lord probing questions. Adan wasn’t available to save me from myself.

“So, Mitchel,” I started, “in a vacuum you seem like a chill dude, and I’ve had a great evening and all, but honestly, I’ve spent my whole life trying to bring down guys like you.”

“Is there a question in there, son?” Vance asked.

“Why, I guess?” I asked. My brain felt like I was trying to run through knee-deep water. I drained the last of my drink, for all the good that did. “I just don’t understand how you could end up working for those assholes.” I’d planned a treatise of sorts, but the liquor had robbed me of the eloquence that somehow existed only in my head. Thankfully, the porter arrived with fresh drinks, since my train of thought seemed to have run out of tracks.

Luckily Vance chuckled rather than yelled. “Galen, I have a feeling you’re more of a black or white thinker.” I shrugged. “The universe in a great big grey void, and I’m operating smack dab in the middle.” I frowned and he added, “Look, I realize that I’m referred to as a crime boss, but really the crime portion was mostly done in my younger years, and even then, the things I did were more for self-preservation than anything else. There were some real sociopaths running things back in the early days after the invasion. People like that don’t just walk away when you decide to liberate their slaves and humanize their factories’ working conditions. So yes, I got my hands dirty dealing with more than a few small-time tyrants.”

“I’ve heard that sometimes you throw people out of airlocks too,” I added before I could stop myself. Luckily, he didn’t take offense.

“We all have job duties we don’t necessarily enjoy.” He smiled and continued, “These days I’m mostly a CEO. I keep my companies running efficiently and my workers happy. I pay well, provide medical and retirement benefits.” He pointed a finger at me and said, “Happy workers do good work. Remember that.”

“Yes sir,” I replied. I was pretty sure that was the right response.

“I answer to the Vox,” he continued, “who are essentially my Board of Directors. If meet their quota’s, they stay out of my business. I know I can’t completely change humanity’s situation, but I’m trying to at least improve it.”

Adan and I have made a living doing jobs and running cons against people we considered to be the problem. The thing was, until today I thought guys like Vance were part of that problem. After speaking with him, it sounded to me like Vance was actually more of a solution. What he was doing would never free humanity from our current predicament, but at least he was helping to make people’s lives a little better.

The clock on the wall said, nine PM, and I couldn’t believe four hours had passed in a drunken haze. Gravity had begun to weaken, and the floor of the elevator car had already started to rotate. As a result, the room no longer quite lined up with the windows on the wall. By morning, I knew the interior of the car would complete it’s one-hundred-and-eighty-degree rotation on its tracks, and we’d be looking up at Palance.

Suddenly I remembered that I knew Vance, at least tangentially. “Mitchel...” My voice had suddenly become weak, and I found the need to swallow take a deep breath before continuing. Even that slight sliver of hope was playing havoc with my nervous system. He looked at me with inquisitive eyes. “Have you ever heard of a man named Martel? Paul Martel?” I finally asked.

A momentary flash of recognition showed in his eyes, but it disappeared just as quickly as it had appeared. He stared at me for a long moment, and I felt the spark of hope welling in my chest. Did he know where Martel was? This could change everything. All the other worries and hopes in my life fell away in that instant. This was all that mattered.

Finally, he spoke, “May I ask why, Galen?”

I’m quick on my feet and I came up with three lies off the top of my head, but in the end, I went with the truth.

“He killed my father,” I said evenly.

Vance started to speak, and then stopped himself. He leaned back in his chair and starred at the planet below. I was fairly well lubricated at this point and my inhibitions had long since disappeared. And so, for the first time in my life, I confessed to a crime.

“I hacked your system a few years back,” I admitted. “I was new to Oasis, and the rumor was if anyone knew where he went it would be you. I didn’t find anything though.”

He nodded slightly. “That’s what I was wondering. I remember that incident because it’s the only time my system has ever been compromised.”

I wanted to pepper him with questions but figured it was better to give him time. I knew enough about the car’s system at this point that I could hail the kitchen directly. I sent a desperate message for fried carbs and water – even though I knew it was probably too late to stave off the hangover I knew was coming.

Finally, when I thought he might never speak again, he cleared his throat and said, “Martel was a friend of a friend, and he needed a favor. You know how it is – we were all in the same business.” I nodded, unable to speak. He continued, “Martel was being pursued,” he nodded in my direction, “by you apparently, and he needed to get off-world.” He drained his glass and placed it on the table. A new drink replaced it almost instantaneously. “Have you heard of Richi?”

My heart was just about beating out of my chest now, and I was having trouble catching my breath. I shook my head no.

“It’s a black-market trading outpost in an out-of-the-way little system. You won’t find it on any of the standard star charts. I put Martel in touch with a man here in orbit named Oppenheimer. He runs a pawn shop in the inner ring. I’ll let him know you’ll be in touch.”

The man in the white coat arrived with a plate of French fries covered with melted cheese and bits of bacon. It smelled incredible, but somehow, I’d lost my appetite.

“What do you plan on doing with Martel when you find him?” Vance asked.

“Adan’s going to kill him,” I answered evenly.

“I have a request and a suggestion,” Vance said. “Will you contact me when you find Earth? Oppenheimer can supply you with the equipment.”

“I’d be happy to,” I answered. “On one condition.” He arched an eyebrow at me and I smiled. “No, you’ll like it. It will make you some money, and I think you’ll appreciate the irony.” I explained, and he did in fact like it. When that task was done, I asked, “Ok, so what’s your suggestion?”

Vance put his hand on my arm, and when I looked at him, his dark brown eyes met mine. “Be the one to pull the trigger on Martel,” Vance said. “It’ll be much more satisfying that way.”