CHAPTER ONE
Kai heard Varian’s light step echoing in the empty passenger section of the shuttlecraft just as he switched off the communications unit and tripped the tape into storage.
“Sorry, Kai, did I miss the contact?” Varian came in out of breath, her suit dripping wet, carrying with her the pervasive stench of Ireta’s “fresh” air, which tainted the filtered air of the shuttle’s pilot cabin. She glanced from the unlit communications panel to his face to see if he were annoyed by her tardiness, but a triumphant grin cut through her feigned penitence. “We finally captured one of those herbivores!”
Kai had to grin in response to her elation. Varian would spend long hours tracking a creature in Ireta’s damp, stinking jungles; hours of patient, obstacle-strewn search which, all too often, proved unproductive. Nevertheless, short of resorting to Discipline, Varian found it nauseatingly irksome to sit still in a comfortable chair through a Thek relay. Kai had wagered with himself that she would manage to avoid the tedious interchange with some reasonable excuse. Her news was good and her excuse valid.
“How’d you manage to capture one? Those traps you’ve been rigging?” he asked with genuine interest, though those same traps had taken his best mechanic from completing the seismic grid his geologists needed.
“No, not the traps,” and there was a hint of chagrin in Varian’s tone. “No, the damned fool creature was wounded and couldn’t run away with the rest of the herd.” She paused to give her next statement full emphasis. “And Kai, it bleeds blood!”
Kai blinked at her announcement. “So?”
“Red blood!”
“Well?”
“Are you a biological idiot? Red blood means hemoglobin …”
“What’s odd about that? Plenty of other species use an iron base.”
“Not on the same planet with those aquatic squirmers Trizein’s been dissecting. They use a pale viscous fluid.” Varian was fleetingly contemptuous of his failure to recognize the significance. “This planet’s one mass of anomalies, biological as well as geological. No ore where you should be striking pay-dirt by the hopper-load, and me finding creatures larger than anything mentioned in text-tapes from any planet in all the systems we’ve explored in the last four hundred galactic standard years. Of course, it may be all of a piece,” she added thoughtfully, as she pushed back the springy dark curls that framed her face.
She was tall, as so many types born on a normal-gravity planet like Earth were, with a slender but muscularly fit body which the one-piece orange ship suit displayed admirably. Despite the articles dangling from her force-screen belt, her waist was trim, and the bulges in her thigh and calf pouches did not detract from the graceful appearance of her legs.
Kai had been elated when Varian had been assigned as his co-leader. They’d been more than acquaintances on shipboard ever since she had joined the ARCT-10 as a xenob-vet, on a three galactic standard year contract. While the ARCT-10, like her sister ships in the Exploratory and Evaluation Corps, had a basic administrative and operations personnel who were ship-born and ship-bred, the complement of additional specialists, trainees and, occasionally, high echelon travelers for the Federated Sentient Planets changed continually, giving the ship-bred the stimulation of meeting members of other cultures, sub-groups, minorities and persuasions.
Kai had been attracted to Varian, first because she was an extremely pretty girl and second, because she was the opposite of Geril. He had been trying to end an unsatisfactory relationship with Geril, who had been so insistent that he’d had to change his quarters from the ship-born to the visitor area of Earth-normal section of the compound ARCT-10, in order to avoid her. Varian happened to be his new next-door neighbour. She was gay, bubbling with humour, and intensely interested in everything about the satellite-sized exploratory vessel. She infected him with her enthusiasm as she chivvied him into taking her on a guided tour of the various special quarters which accommodated the more esoteric sentient races of the FSP in their own atmosphere or gravity. She’d been planet-bound, Varian had told him, on how many diverse planets did not signify, so that she felt it was high time she saw how the Explorers and Evaluators lived. Especially since, she added, as a xenob-vet, she often had to correct some of EV’s crazier judgments and mistakes.