The Colloghi Conspiracy

by Douglas Hill

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

The Colloghi Conspiracy continues the adventures of Del Curb, begun in Fraxilly Fracas. This time the self-styled hero is troubled by a frozen astronaut, a media star called Highlight Heart-throb, and the treacherous nature of the planet Colloghi.

Release date: June 30, 2014

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 237

Sample

There is a saying that if you stand around long enough on Bumstead Concourse, at the centre of Alph City on the planet ClustAlph, you’ll run into everyone you’ve ever known.

It’s a myth, of course. A story put about by the traders and tricksters who ply their professions around the Concourse. Not even a very clever story, either. Who would want to run into everyone they’ve ever known? For me, as for most folk, that list would include a lot of total undesirables, not to mention enemies.

The truth is that the Concourse is simply the only place in Alph City where anything interesting ever happens.

The city is the primary metropolis on ClustAlph, the largest world of the planetary cluster that forms SenFed Central – the executive and admin centre of the Federation of Sentient Worlds. The whole of the cluster is populated mainly by SenFed politicians, emissaries, diplomats and so on, with supporting armies of public servants who are themselves supported by Intelloids, mandroids and other artificial intelligences. In short, it is not a fun place. Except for a few designated spots of liveliness, particularly Bumstead Concourse in Alph City.

So I always wander over there, on the rare occasions when I have to visit SenFed Central. This last time, I’d brought in a few kilos of plastifilm print-out from a backward little planet called Vigne Rux, which doesn’t trust intersystem comm-link technology. Probably their forms of it are out of date, or out of order. The print-outs had to do with SenFed taxation, and had to be delivered to an Administrator in Alph City. At least he called himself an Administrator. On the payroll he was probably an assistant to a deputy to a junior Vice-Administrator of one sub-sub-department of the SenFed Taxation Office.

I’ll admit that I don’t care for tax people. They always seem to be more extremely infected than anyone by the public-servant contradiction syndrome. That’s the one that causes public servants, when they want something from you, like some small tax payment or other, to move with the eye-baffling speed of a Sisythica ghost-viper. Often just as poisonously. But when you want something from them – when, that is, public servants actually get asked to serve the public – they reverse themselves, reflexively, and become secretive, obstructive and slow.

I’d been fairly sure my Administrator would react the latter way to my bill, and I was right. So I decided to stay in Alph City awhile, in the hope that my actual presence might urge him to come out of what seemed to be a non-stop meeting and start processing my payment. Anyway, I had nowhere else to go. No other job demanded my attention at that moment – and I had no wish to waste time and fuel going somewhere else to hang around, when I could just as well hang around Alph City. To be precise, around Bumstead Concourse.

The Concourse is a combination of park, playground and plaza, named after the human who first developed the visionary idea of Sentient Unity in the galaxy. He was probably a tax man, too. If he was around to see it now he’d be delighted, because the Concourse is always thronged with sentient unity. Except for the frequent occasions of disunity, when jostling crowds, grasping traders and light-fingered thieves get too much for visitors’ tempers.

On the third day of my hanging around, I made my way to the Concourse about mid-afternoon. As usual, it was packed with humans and exters (extraterrestrials, as humans have always tended to call non-humans) in just about every conceivable form. And some that seemed inconceivable, even while you were looking at them. I was idly wondering, as I often do, whether any of those folk were there looking for everyone they’d ever known, on the lines of the old myth. And whether anyone has ever found them.

That day, though, was the only time that I ever met anyone I knew on the Concourse. But I didn’t know him well, and he was a long way from being on my list of people I’d like to meet there.

My feeling for him was not at all improved when he told me some news that meant that someone was going to start actively trying to kill me.

I’d been heading for a sleazily interesting bar that I liked, on one side of the Concourse. Just outside its door, a hand fell heavily on my shoulder and a loud, confident voice cried, “Del! Del Curb!”

I could hardly pretend that I wasn’t me, even though I’d recognized the voice. So I turned glumly and looked at him. His name was Chertro, he was tall and lanky with a leathery, grinning face, and he wore the uniform and insignia of a middle-ranker in the Federation Police.

“Garishly dressed as ever, Curb!” he said with a laugh, clapping me on the shoulder over-familiarly.

I don’t know why he should have said that. My tunic and trousers were a very modest rose-pink, over a charcoal shirt. My belt, boots and other accessories were plain white with fine pink stripes. And my short cloak’s coloration – ranging from violet to deep purple depending on the angle of the light – seemed to me to set the whole ensemble off very tastefully. I’d worn it, after all, in case I had to visit a tax official in his office. Hardly garish.

Besides, Chertro’s greenish-brown FedPol uniform with its grape-and-cherry insignia wasn’t the soberest outfit on the Concourse by a long way.

But he didn’t seem to notice that I wasn’t pleased with either his comments or his company. He marched into the bar with me, ordered drinks, and launched into a monologue as if I was a long-lost relative aching to be brought up to date with family gossip. I didn’t listen to much of it, at first – but my attention became riveted when he started rambling on with his really big and important piece of news.

“So that’ll be it for me,” he finally wound up. “Out of the FedPol at last, and on my own, freelance, with Mala. Same as you, once, Curb. Only with all our contacts and know-how, she and I ought to make a good job of it.”

He was chortling as he said the last part, so I imagined it was his idea of good-natured chaffing. I ignored it. I don’t think I even heard it properly. Just as Chertro didn’t seem to have noticed how my eyes were staring and my hairline was suddenly damp with sweat.

He’d said he was leaving the FedPol. And that simple fact meant that before long I could be in serious danger of leaving this life.

He didn’t know that, of course. He clearly thought that I’d be interested in his news. And in other circumstances I might have been. Because he’d said that he was going to start up as an interplanetary investigator, which had been my profession once. And that he’d be partnered by Mala, as I’d been once.

Mala Yorder, small, decorative and strong-minded. She had come to join me in the courier business, when I was getting it organized – but had stamped away, out of my life, after some mishaps and misunderstandings on a planet called Fraxilly. She’d then gone to set up house with Chertro, whom she’d known before when she, too, had been in the FedPol. And I’ll admit that I’d been hurt by her defection.

Not that she and I were ever anything more than business partners. But I’d always reckoned that we would be. I’d felt sure that she was deeply, perhaps subliminally, drawn to me. And that all she had to do was let herself admit it.

Instead, she’d left. And it took me a long while to get over it. Weeks. In the end, though, I saw the sad truth about her departure. Chertro was an ex-lover of hers, and was also tall and rangy with those craggy good looks that so many women seem slavishly affected by. Mala was not the first woman I’ve known whose better judgement could be at the mercy of her hormones.

Still, since I’m fairly resilient emotionally, I had put my feelings for Mala firmly behind me by the time I met Chertro that day. Anyway, sitting in the bar with him, I wasn’t concerned about Chertro’s continuing alliance with Mala. I was concerned with the fact that his imminent departure from the FedPol was going to get me killed.

With a slightly shaking hand I pushed away my mug of herbi-ale and ordered a double steamer. It’s the kind of drink that loosens the anchor-chains of your brain and de-scales your teeth at the same time. Chertro, who is never going to win prizes for depth of perception, frowned craggily at me.

“You hitting the booze hard these days, Curb? Better ease up. You look like a man who’s gonna be sick.”

Sick? I looked like a man who was going to be dead.

Because Chertro, unknowingly, had for some time been just about my only protection against the most lethally dangerous enemy I’d ever made.

Those little mishaps that I’d experienced on the planet Fraxilly hadn’t just provoked Mala into walking out on me. They had also totally enraged a man named Pulvidon. He was a highly placed executive – and executioner – in one of the galaxy’s most powerful criminal organizations, known as Famlio. I’d thwarted some of Pulvidon’s plans on Fraxilly – and he had sworn an oath to put an end to me.

At the time, though, he had been restrained. Partly because I’d paid Famlio a cripplingly large sum by way of damages. But partly also because Famlio’s upper echelons saw that I had a connection (through Mala) with the FedPol (through Chertro). I came to realize, after Mala left me, that neither she nor Chertro would really have cared much if Pulvidon had turned me inside out and sold me for spare parts. But the Famlio upper echelons didn’t know that. They just saw potential trouble in the FedPol link.

Now, however, Chertro was going freelance. The link would be gone. The money I’d paid to Famlio was no doubt also gone, and forgotten. Just a tiny entry in their ledger of extortion, which was hardly their biggest source of income. So no one in Famlio would raise an eyebrow if – when – Pulvidon decided to remember his oath and come after me.

Chertro was still rambling, some unlikely anecdote about his latest case, when I muttered a half-excuse and left him sitting there in mid-sentence. I may have spilled the rest of my steamer, since I have a vague memory-image of what it did to the polished surface of the bar. Outside on the Concourse, I couldn’t help hunching a bit inside my cloak, twisting around and around to check the throng, watching for a glimpse of the Famlio colours.

Famlio people wear a distinctive uniform – black over-tunic and trousers with a white chalk-stripe, black shirt with broad white necktie. It’s supposed to be symbolic, representing the garb of a legendary criminal group that thrived back in the ancient times on Old Earth, before the End. For perhaps the same reason, Famlio is also exter-phobic, recruiting only humans to its ranks.

Anyway, I saw no humans in black and white around me on the Concourse. But I hadn’t really thought I would. By then my well-developed survival instinct had kicked in, and I was remembering that I still had a few useful things going for me.

One of them was time. Pulvidon surely wasn’t going to start coming after me, I reassured myself, until Chertro had actually hung up that tasteless uniform for the last time. For another thing, Pulvidon would never send others after me. He’d sworn an oath, and that peculiar contradiction called Famlio honour would oblige him to fulfil it – to finish me – on his own.

“You won’t find that so easy, chum,” I muttered aloud, earning a surprised look from a nearby exter who resembled a clutch of large hairy squares held together by string.

My survival instinct was telling me to get off-planet and do some constructive thinking. Or at least to get off-planet – because you can’t be found in deep space if you don’t want to be. Often even if you do. And I knew that I could manage for years if I had to, staying out in space except for brief random touchdowns for work purposes or re-equipping.

So I pushed my way through the crowds, hailed a skim-cab and headed for my well-protected ship in Alph City’s spaceport. The skim was operated by a built-in artificial intelligence, a low-level of limited capability which seemed to be running a private race or maybe just showing off its mechanized reflexes. We reached the port without hitting anything, though, and I would have bet my whole Fedbank account that nothing could have followed us.

Outside my ship I checked carefully around me, then triggered the remotes that lower the ladderamp and unseal the airlock. Inside, I headed straight for my own cabin, ignoring the typically cheery greeting from the Posi who runs the ship. She seemed to want to chat, as she often does, and I shut her up, as I often do. The cabin looked like a small, cosy haven of security, leading me to soothing thoughts of hot showers and cold drinks. So I flung my cloak aside and began peeling off my clothes.

I was in the tangled position of one boot on and one boot off, with unfastened trousers slipping down to my knees, when I got that familiar clammy feeling between the shoulderblades.

I whirled, feeling my balance go as the trousers dropped the rest of the way to my ankles. And feeling raw squalling terror claw at my intestines as I tripped and fell.

Across the room, with a carnivorous grin showing teeth as white as his tie, stood Pulvidon.

Then all the lights of my consciousness were suddenly switched off.

“Del? Del? Please wake up, Del. Del!”

I could hear the voice, muzzily, even though I seemed to be flying unsupported through a meteorite storm in deep space. A lot of the smaller meteorites were striking me on the head, a steady stream of them, causing flashes of light and throbbing pain. And the voice wasn’t helping.

“Del? Wake up!”

It was Posi’s voice, I realized. And through the muzziness I repeated a promise that I’d often made to myself. One day, when I could afford it, I’d have her voice changed. To something softer and more soothing, the voice of a warm-hearted woman who was at once both sophisticated and demure. Instead of a voice like a tirelessly bright, precocious and prissy child, which was how Posi had always sounded.

But then her voice dragged me a bit further towards wakefulness, and bits of memory stirred. I wasn’t in space, unsupported, but lying on the floor of my cabin, feet tangled in trousers, with a severe headache and a lump on my temple. As terror poised its claws over my belly again, I looked around as quickly as the headache allowed.

There was no sign of Pulvidon, or anyone else. But there were clear signs of what had happened.

I sank back with a groan, wondering how I could so stupidly manage to forget. Out of boredom, on the way to ClustAlph, I had rearranged my cabin. The demi-mural-sized vidscreen was now on that wall. And that was where Pulvidon had been standing. On the screen. Obviously part of a recorded message. But enough to frighten me into tripping, falling, and hitting my head on a corner of a work surface on the way down.

“Del?”

“All right, Posi,” I snarled. “Give me a minute.”

“Certainly,” she said. “But there are several messages for you. And one of them – from the human whose image I left on your screen – is very disturbing.”

“I can imagine,” I said, struggling painfully to my feet. “I’ll look at them in a while.”

Then I attended to my more immediate needs – getting rid of my clothes, soothing myself in the Omnipure sauna, dabbing some Analgeez on the lump on my head, pulling on a comfortably loose robe in contrasting aquamarine and burnt umber. And to complete the cure, a sniff at a snapped capsule of Sore-no-more painkilling mist, following by a restoring beaker of Rakittian demon-alk.

By then I was feeling ready to talk to Posi – though not quite ready to look at disturbing comm-messages. So I checked some other things with her first.

Posi is an artificial intelligence entirely built into my ship. She and the ship are top-level, state-of-the-art, and the largest expenditures I’ve ever made – a sum that I’ve only ever managed to get together that once. But I’ve never regretted the expenditure. Posi and the ship have been crucial to my success, since I became a space courier. And to my survival as well, once or twice.

“Posi” stands for Polyfunction Organizational and Service Intelloid, which gives almost no real idea of the range of her capabilities. Above all, she doesn’t make mistakes. She can do silly things sometimes, when she doesn’t have proper data, but that’s not the same thing. Anyone can do that. So it’s enormously reassuring to be able to lie back with a drink, as I did then, and be told by your Posi that no one has tampered with the ship’s locks or approached the ship or even touched it from a distance with a perceptor beam.

It was also reassuring to know that Posi always takes messages the way I like – without acknowledging or replying in any way. Theoretically, anyone with a comm-link facility, knowing my code, can reach me anywhere in the galaxy. But if Posi and I keep comm-silence, without any kind of reply, the caller can’t know he’s reached me. And so, more importantly, he can’t get any kind of fix on my position.

That meant that I could know where Pulvidon was, because he had called me, but he couldn’t know where I was.

With all that reassurance bracing me, along with a refill of demon-alk, I let Posi replay the message. Even so, I couldn’t help shrinking back a little as Pulvidon’s image filled the screen.

He looked as lean and deadly as ever, grinning that predatory grin. “Curb,” he said, by way of an opening, “I know you’ll be picking this up, even if you’re too gutless to acknowledge.”

That stirred me. I’m cautious and sensible, like any good professional, but gutless? I quelled my automatic shrinking and sat up straight, trying to stare coldly at the screen.

“A tale has come to me,” Pulvidon was going on, the hungry grin widening, “that a certain FedPol unit-leader, known to both of us, is about to hang up his guns. To be a private citizen, along with a little piece of meat who used to belong to you. Am I right, Curb?”

I felt the sweat start up on my forehead, watched the demon-alk shiver in the beaker as my hand trembled. Stupid sludge-brain, I swore at myself. How could I forget to take into account Famlio’s tendency to have spies everywhere, especially inside the FedPol? Of course Pulvidon would already have heard about Chertro’s planned resignation. He probably knew before Chertro did.

“So it’s open season on couriers,” Pulvidon was continuing. “Nobody’ll say no to me. Doesn’t matter how much you paid once, or how much you might offer now. Your payment was made because you got in our way, so you owed us. That’s an end of that. Payment wasn’t made to me, Curb. You still owe me.” The carnivore teeth glinted. “And I’m coming to collect. Wherever you try to run to. I’d have your guts if you had any. Instead, I’ll have your head and hide. That’s what’ll settle the debt, Curb. That’s what I aim to take.”

For a long moment the image was held – the same image that I’d been looking at when I tripped and fell. Then it faded, and the last thing to disappear was that shark-toothed grin.

“Was that caller intending to be humorous, Del?” Posi asked. Her voice sounded troubled, and with good reason. Yes, I know, artificial intelligences are supposed to be wholly free from anything resembling human feeling. Pure-logic machines with no glands, no instincts, no emotions – or so the advertising says. But anyone with any sense knows that they do come to feel things, in their own way. The extent of their awareness makes them sensitive – and their exposure to human responses colours that sensitivity. Whatever her manufacturers might have said, Posi was troubled.

“No humour,” I told her shakily. “He means every word.”

“How will you reply?” Posi asked.

“Not sure,” I said. “Before that, though, you can get us off-planet.”

“What course should I set, Del?” she asked.

I shrugged. I just wanted to be out where no one could find me. But I knew Posi wouldn’t enter the GalacNetlines without a course and a destination.

“Head for Uulaa, Posi,” I finally said. “And don’t hurry.”

Uulaa is the resort planet where I have my base, such as it is. So it was not a place where I actually wanted to go, right then. But it would take a while to reach it, even at lightspeeds, and I hoped I could come up with an alternative course, a more likely destination, by then.

So Posi requested spaceport clearance for lift-off and, when it came, took us out. Up through the dense traffic of Alph City’s skies, into orbit to wait for a departure slot, then away at planetary speed towards the boundary of the Cluster’s territorial space. Beyond that would be the acceleration to lightspeed and then the exit from present space–time reality into the safety of the Netlines.

“I recorded two other messages for you, Del,” Posi said. “They are not disturbing at all. Should I play them for you now?”

“When we’re at lightspeed,” I told her. I was feeling too disturbed to be curious. Anyway, I thought, the other messages were most probably direct-line advertising shots. They could sometimes be mildly diverting, if you were in the mood, but I wasn’t likely to be in the mood until I felt safer. Drink in hand,. . .