Free Dark Planet by Charles W. Sasser

that, Team Sergeant, when we have such stimulating conversations among ourselves?”
    As for Blade, his unblinking, indecipherable stare dogged my every movement. His hostility toward me became palpable. You didn’t have to be a Sen to feel it.
    “Elf?” he said, cornering me.
    “My name is Kadar San.”
    “Elf, is it true that taa camps weren’t the only Indowy construction on Aldenia?”
    “Don’t you know? You were there.”
    “Don’t be a wise ass, elf.” He sneered at me. “This is going to be a long mission. Anything can happen.”
    I sighed and said, to keep peace in the family, “It was centuries ago that the Indowy were here.”
    “True, but always something remains. For example, the spawn of human whores and tailed monkey-elves, like yourself. If I were a woman, I would rather screw a dog or an ape as a Zentadon.”
    “I am sure you would.”
    He wasn’t listening.
    “The Indowy built experimental research and development laboratories on Aldenia,” he stated. “A man could get rich if he stumbled onto some of that stuff.”
    “Greed precedes the fall.”
    He looked like he wanted to twist off my head.
    “It is an old, old Earth expression,” I said.
    Maid, who overheard, later found the opportunity to caution me. “Blade can be a dangerous man. Don’t deliberately provoke him, Kadar San.”
    “It does not have to be deliberate.”
    Atlas, wearing a disapproving look, snatched her out of my presence and piloted her into the ship’s bay where I saw them in heated argument. Whatever was happening on the ship was affecting everyone. I felt like I might chew off my own arm but for the Zentadon control I exercised over myself.
    I targeted the planet through the viewscreen with the full force of my concentration, which was considerable, and scrubbed the atmosphere telepathically. As far as I could tell, there was simply nothing there. Except, I still experienced a feeling of menace, of …
    “Evil,” Maid said over my shoulder. I gave a start. I had been so focused that I hadn’t felt her approach.
    “You did not give me a penny for my thoughts,” I scolded mildly.
    “But that was what you were thinking, Sergeant Kadar.”
    “I thought Humans abandoned concepts of good and evil once they discovered the vastness of space and found no God living there.”
    “Not all Humans.”
    She watched the viewscreen with me. Lightning storms popped and erupted on the forbidding surface.
    “Have you picked up something?” I asked her presently, sensing how troubled she was. “A signal?”
    She frowned. She sat down next to me in front of the screen and lowered her voice.
    “I don’t get anything from it except silence.” Her voice cracked with strain. “What does it mean? Our listening devices can hear the footfalls of an ant crawling across the surface of a moon. We should be able to comb something from the planet — atmospheric disturbances, electrical energies, force fields, something. We should be listening to all that lightning, if nothing else. Our gear is designed to sniff out any disturbances. Yet, it’s as though we are flying through a tunnel …”
    “We are being jammed. Is that the term?”
    She nodded, still focusing on the screen. I felt her shudder where her shoulder touched mine.
    “You’ve surely noticed how everyone’s started to change since we went into orbit,” she said. “It’s almost like the atmosphere from Aldenia is permeating the screen into the ship, isn’t it? The feeling I get is of something dark and …” She couldn’t think of a more appropriate word. “… and evil.”
    That was, I agreed, the right word for the Dark Planet.
    “Sergeant Kadar, why did your people and the Indowy abandon Aldenia after you had colonized it?”
    “We did not colonize it,” I corrected. “The Indowy colonized it and brought Zentadon here.”
    “I stand corrected,” she snapped, then caught herself. “The Group Commander during mission briefing said something about