Page 5 of Stellar Drift
Both the shower and the bed in the back room were singing their siren songs, but he needed to check in first.He took a deep breath, then blew it out quickly because he still stank.Maybe he really had run a marathon.In a moldy swamp.
Trudging back to the front room, he woke the deskcomp and pinged Barken, the Command Administrator.
“Hey, Albasrey, I was just about… is your display acting up again?I’m not getting a visual.”Barken sounded peeved, but he often did these days.His position was supposed to be operational administration and base logistics, but the Ranger Service had an ever-increasing number of unfilled positions.Barken kept accumulating additional duties without increased rank or pay.The Citizen Protection Service kept cutting its budget contribution.The Qal Corona planetary government had no incentive to make up the difference.
“My display is green go.I’m using just audio because I’m filthy.Was anyone looking for me?”
“No, why?”
Houyen frowned.“I’ve been gone for four days.”
Barken’s silence stung.No one had noticed his absence.
He started to make the point about basic personnel safety procedures, then hesitated.They’d want to know what happened, and he had no satisfactory explanation to offer.The CPS, for all it liked to pretend otherwise, was still a military branch of the galactic government.The military didn’t like mysteries.
“Huh,”said Barken finally.”You didn’t miss much, except the finsec system went chaotic again and froze our accounts for a day.At least it wasn’t thirty-three days, like last time.Besides, Delacallo said you were liaising with the locals.”
Houyen rolled his eyes at the in-house code for having casual hot-connect sex with a local civilian.From what he’d seen, it was Delacallo’s primary hobby, so she likely assumed everyone did it.
Houyen closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.Regulations in writing and in practice were two different things, at least as far as this command went.Why waste his time bringing up the protocols for keeping track of their field staff?It wouldn’t change anything.
“Well, anyway,”said Barken, “Matsurgan is headed north this evening and wants to see you before he leaves.Can you get here in five minutes?”
“Better make that fifteen minutes, unless the Chief wants mud all over his new carpet.”Houyen and the other rangers rarely saw their boss in person because he covered two ranger stations, and preferred the base in the high plains part of the reserve, a thousand kilometers to the north.The locals there managed horses, which suited Matsurgan’s equine-focused animal-affinity minder talent far better than the plant-, reptile-, and bird-infested rainforest.
“I’ll tell him.”Two brief tones ended the conversation.
Cleaner and better smelling, but no less tired, Houyen sat upright and forward in the guest chair that Matsurgan had indicated.
The new plush carpet in soothing waves of blue, green, and tan highlighted how mismatched and utilitarian the rest of the furnishings were.The bare, windowless walls and the subtle odor of construction adhesive didn’t improve the office’s ambiance.Matsurgan wisely held any important meetings in the base’s well-appointed conference room, which had wide windows that offered a view of a nearby well-tended, naturalized waterfall garden.
Matsurgan opened a transparent display that showed several flat graphs.His large and expressive facial features made all his reactions seem exaggerated.His current grimace reminded him of a pre-flight castle gargoyle.“Why don’t I have your ten-day reports?”
“Which ones are you missing?”Houyen asked politely, stalling for time as he tried to remember if one had been due while he’d been off visiting dreamland.No, luckily, he’d submitted the last one nine days ago.It was disheartening to realize his boss would notice a missing report sooner than he’d notice a missing employee.
“All of them.”He stabbed a control.“Barken, send me Albasrey’s ten-days for the last standard year.”
“They’re in your meeting dataspace, where you told me to put them.”Barken’s tone came perilously close to snappish.
“Huh,” Matsurgan grunted sourly, ending the comm.
He made surly growling sounds as he displayed the reports as a row of cubes, then opened the last one.“What have you been working on?”
Houyen hid his exasperation.Chaos forbid his boss might make use of the top summary section, helpfully labeled as such.“I planned and scheduled the quarterly botanical surveys.I did upkeep visits to two of the remote ranger stations in my sector.I met with the local towns in the upper rainforest area about the source of the disease that’s been recurring—”
Matsurgan interrupted.“What?”His frown returned.“Not your ‘infinity fever’ nonsense again.”His eyes narrowed in suspicion.“Did you put that in your report?”
“No, sir.It’s not due until tomorrow.”
Matsurgan’s hand curled into a fist.“I’m not having those farkin’ CPS researchers crawling up our collective asses looking for imaginary diseases.They don’t know shit about our mission and don’t care.They’ll play the ‘keep the galactic peace’ card and destroy our rapport with the locals.”He blew out a noisy breath.“And it’ll come out of my budget.”
That last was the real reason, Houyen suspected.The incident had been a decade before Houyen had been transferred in, and before Matsurgan had been saddled with the additional rainforest district to manage.The CPS had brought in pharma company researchers to investigate rare plants for a promising new enhancement drug for minders.
Houyen struggled to keep a tight rein on his temper.A drug to benefit a tiny percentage of minders was not even in the same solar system as a serious, possibly contagious fever that killed people, but Matsurgan wouldn’t care.
“Not one word of that ‘fever’ horseshit goes in your report.You’re a botanist with a mid-level minder talent for plants, not a trained and registered medic.Or an epidemiologist, or anything else.You need to be doing your job and following policy, not freelancing.And not enabling a few crackpots to spread ridiculous rumors and getting the rest of the locals riled up about something that doesn’t exist.That’s the problem with letting civilians live in the Reserve.Sure, they can be useful at the ground level, but practicing ancient pre-flight Earth indigenous ways of life makes them superstitious.‘Cooperators,’ my ass.The locals are self-dealing parasites who only cooperate when it suits them.But they scream like pissed-off peacocks if their cooperator payments are late.”
Houyen suppressed a sigh.Apparently, Matsurgan was in a mood to swing at everything he disliked about his life, and Houyen was the unlucky punching bag.Without locals and their willingness to monitor the ecosystems and manage resources responsibly, the CPS would have to hire millions of employees across the galaxy to do the job.Or answer to the Central Galactic Concordance’s High Council as to why the nature reserves were failing.
