Alien Cradle, Jeff Inlo [graded readers .txt] 📗

a planet, but he was hungry enough to eat. If Rath wanted to buy him a meal, he'd be happy to take a break.

"Fine."

Rath showed no sign of hurry or anxiety. He waited patiently for Lar to shutdown the terminals and lockup the store front, but once they walked on lonely streets below the hum of skimmer craft, his tone and expression changed as if pressed by a gust of arctic wind. He looked around again, but this time with nervous apprehension, wary of any passing strangers. When he was sure they were alone, he spoke in a cold whisper.

"You have to know this, I owe it to you, so don't argue."

Lar blinked at the change in manner, felt more than a little uneasy. He caught himself looking over his own shoulder, then questioned the sense of alarm.

"Argue about what? I don't even know what you're talking about."

"I know you don't, but I don't want you to cut me off in the middle. You have to listen to the whole story. If you don't, I won't forgive myself." The scout steadied himself as he grunted the revelation. "They lied about the Fenrites. They lied about me missing them. They weren't there, not during my first scout anyway. I can't honestly tell you I know what's going on, but I know one thing. Nothing alive was on the planet. No plants, and no Fenrites. Fenrir was as barren as I thought it was when I made my initial scout. And don't doubt it, because I'm sure."

Lar just buried his face toward the ground as he kept walking. He wasn't going to stop, wasn't about to take this conversation into some public place. For whatever reason Rath felt the urge to talk like this, it would be in the streets, alone where no one could watch or hear. He figured that's why Rath wanted them out of his warehouse in the first place.

"This isn't some kind of excuse on my part," Rath assured. "I'm not making this up because I think I look bad. I don't care if I missed them or not, but I didn't miss them because they weren't there."

"But we saw them," Lar pleaded. He wanted to end this discussion as quickly as possible. Rath might have been fixated on missing the Fenrites, but he didn't care. He wanted to end this contention, now. "Remember? We went down together; you, me and that Jack guy. We landed exactly as you landed and we didn't spot any Fenrites. I didn't think there was anything there, either. It wasn't until we went back up and went looking for them that we actually saw anything."

Rath grunted with a sense of disgust as well as disapproval. "Yeah, I know all about, a great choreographed move on their part, but it's just part of the show. We landed in the desert and there was nothing but rock. Just like when I landed. Makes perfect sense, convince us that we think nothing is there and then show us the alien. Makes everybody think that it was easy for me to miss them. But that's just not the whole story, that's just what we see. It's not what really determines the scouting of the planet. The sensors do that. The landing just explained why I had no visual contact, but the shipboard sensors do the full job."

Lar jumped right back with another explanation. "There was a control malfunction, a problem with your scout. You had a narrow beam."

The middleman stopped, held his breath as a freighter pilot walked by. When the stranger disappeared into a nearby tavern, Lar continued with a lowered voice, but with greater determination.

"Your scanners weren't working. You didn't get a reading of the Fenrites when I was with you, but we both know they were there."

"Yeah, I know. Problem with the controls. That's bull. My guess is that they set that up."

Lar let a heavy sigh of frustration escape his lips and Rath felt a sense of urgency to explain, to convince the middleman.

"Look, you may not believe this, but you haven't heard everything yet. Just stick with me. Everything I'm saying is easy to explain. If they wanted to mess with my controls, they had the opportunity. While I was under the custody of the health techs, they had all the access to my scout they needed, to set it up so the beam would narrow even though it was set on wide scan. Why? To convince us there was a problem with the scanners. That's why they brought you and me on that little ride back to the planet. They weren't checking a theory, they were setting us up, trying to make us believe that the controls were broke all the time."

Lar couldn't keep up. He couldn't understand what Jack was trying to say, or why he was saying it. "But they were broke. They didn't pick up the Fenrites even though we saw them. We went in low, I saw them myself. Your sensors didn't pick them up until you turned control over to the computer."

"That was the second time," Rath insisted. "Not the first time, not when I was alone. I'm betting those bastards adjusted the controls before we took our ride, made it look like that was the true cause. Then, they took my ship so I couldn't test the sensors myself to see what they did."

"If you can't test this, how can you be so sure it wasn't really broke?"

"Because I just took a look at the maintenance schedule at the freighter pads. I had the robots do a full maintenance check of both my scout and the freighter before I went out to Fenrir the second time. That was immediately after I came back from my first scout of Fenrir. There was no indication of a problem with the scanner controls. They found other problems with other controls. Nothing severe, but little things that they listed on a repair suggestion docket. So if the sensors passed maintenance check, that means they were working during my first scan of Fenrir, when I was alone, before anyone else had access to my scout. I downloaded a copy of both the docket and the system check into my portable. Want to see it?"

Lar waved a hand in refusal. "I believe you, but couldn't there be another explanation. What if the controls were just starting to go bad, you know flickering on and off? I'm not an engineer or a repair tech, but I know these dumb things go on and off line as easily as a buyer changes his mind. Jeez, the terminals in my office seem to be working fine one day, then they go on the blink, not for long, sometimes just for a minute or two. I bring in a tech and I get funny looks after he tells me they're working perfectly. The same thing could have happened with your scanners."

Rath nodded. "I thought about that, and I had to admit it as a possibility, until I considered something else that's been bothering me. Did I or did I not come back with a load of rubies and emeralds?"

Lar paused for a moment as he did not follow the purpose of the question. Finally, he spoke the obvious. "You did, but what has that got..."

"How did I find them?"

"I don't know," Lar admitted with a fluster.

Rath accented the truth like a prosecutor nailing home a verdict of guilty. "I scanned the planet. Nearly the whole damn surface. If my sensors were on a narrow pattern, I would have been scanning for a month before I could have got the information I needed. Think about it. I'm a scout, but I don't make anything from the scout bid. I make my money from selling what I can scavenge, but I've got limited cargo space. Don't you think I'm going to make sure I find the most valuable resource before I commit to a load? I found sources of all kinds of metals including gold, as well as gems like the rubies and emeralds. That was no narrow pattern. How long do you think it would have taken me to scan the planet and find all of that with a beam covering just twenty square kilometers? That's absurd and you know it."

Lar fell silent. Rath wasn't the only scout with which he had business dealings. He knew how they operated, knew that their true source of income came from finding and scavenging the right resources. He also knew Rath had come back with a full load of both rubies and emeralds. How could he have found both with just a narrow band? He would have known right then had there been a problem with the scanners.

"Think about it," Rath pressed, "it all fits. Look at this coordinator, Jack. Think about everything he did. He once called himself a manipulator. That's what he did to us. It's so damn clear. He set us up every step of they way. He took us on that little joy ride just to explain why I didn't find the Fenrites on my first scout. He wanted to convince us, because if he did that, he could convince anyone. But the truth is that I was able to scan the whole planet. I found the emeralds, but I didn't find any life signs. How is that possible? It's because the aliens weren't there. And if Jack lied about the Fenrites, that means he could have lied about everything."

Rath watched with a wave of relief as Lar grudgingly accepted what he now knew as fact.

Lar, however, held to his doubts; if not to the facts, then at least to the motives.

"Why would they do such a thing?"

Rath was ready for this question. "I was the first person on Fenrir; I was there before the Fenrites. He had to convince me I missed them. And you, you were the person I sold the emeralds to. It had nothing to do with my plans to steal anything. I had the scout bid. They had to find a way to shut me up. I guess they could have just kept me in prison, but that would have raised suspicions. I think they wanted me around in case anyone had questions about the first scout. I had the bid rights and that's public knowledge. You gotta figure some media investigator would check once word got out that it was Fenrir with the aliens."

"But why?" Lar implored. "Why would they have to go through this elaborate hoax? What's the reason for making it look like you missed them?"

"I've been asking myself that same question," Rath admitted. "I keep coming back to one thing. The Fenrites weren't there when I got there. That means they showed up afterwards, like they're colonizing worlds just like us. Maybe that's what they're afraid of. They want to keep that a secret."

"Why would they be worried about that?"

"I don't know," Rath frowned. "Maybe they don't want to start a panic."

It didn't add up for Lar and he kept throwing his skepticisms out like old garbage. "Then why admit that they even exist? Why bring us to Fenrir and then let us go? Why did the chair of the General Exploratory Council admit to the media that the aliens exist in the first place? That doesn't make sense, not to me. You don't admit to something if you're trying to cover it up. None of this makes sense."

Rath threw up his hands.