The Man Who Loved Alien Landscapes by Albert Wendland

Author:Albert Wendland [Wendland, Albert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: space opera, noir, science fiction, alien contact, planetary romance
Publisher: Raw Dog Screaming Press
Published: 2019-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven: Rift Valley

After their escape Ranglen felt no euphoria. He was too worried.

The outside of the hull could not be examined while in light-space so he had no way to see if they dragged in anything with them, like a torn piece of the pursuing object. A probability wave extended beyond any ship during the transfer, and though its value fell exponentially, debris from outside could be sucked into the jumps.

Mileen peered at the instruments. “Did we make it away all right?”

“As far as I know. If it wanted to catch and hold us, it failed.”

That troubled Ranglen. The whole chase, leading up to this last-minute escape, struck him as too coincidental. He believed it was meant more to scare than apprehend.

Like Lonni’s corpse.

Which meant that getting away held little advantage. Indeed, if they were supposed to escape then the reason might be to plant a tracer on them.

Yet that could have been done easily without them suspecting it. Why throw a tumbling mountain at them?

He had not completed his third search of the ship but it was too late to run it now. The hull was compromised by the light-space probability functions.

“Mykol, you said Lonni was on board the derelict.

“That ship you detected probably dropped off whoever was on board, with Lonni, and then moved out of detection range. Maybe it returned just to disturb us.”

“What about the other derelict? Was it controlled, or did it act on its own?”

Ranglen didn’t know and he didn’t want to speculate.

Mileen eyed Ranglen, and he felt her look. He sensed she was suspicious of his unwillingness to talk, probably believing he held something back or else was now uncertain he could trust her. But he was just too deep in thought. Too much had happened, and he was not one to think out loud.

A distancing silence grew between them.

Ranglen downloaded all the data the ferrets retrieved from the computers on the derelict. But just as he was about to decode the star charts and get a location for the world with a Clip, a command-line appeared requiring a clearance code. He didn’t have it. And when he entered queries, an icon for a lifeboat flashed on the screen.

They needed further information, and maybe, the icon suggested, it was on board the RLV.

No one had mentioned this, not Jayne, Rashmi, or Lonni. Had they misread the chart? Or maybe the star coordinates they took were those of the lifeboat world and not the one with a Clip? Did Jayne and the others know this? Or did the files they accessed, and then destroyed, give only the coordinates of the Clip world and not the other?

Ranglen applied himself to finding an answer. For the next two days, he researched everything he could about Clips, but many of the articles had been written by himself. Mileen helped him but she soon grew tired of it. She lolled about the ship, did no drawing or painting. The closeness they had felt on the asteroid seemed on hold, contaminated by the recent events.

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