Star Trek(3)

Garos sneered. “While you waste time playing seduction games with relics like these.”

“You know better than that, my friend,” Navaar told him, turning back to watch as both the crime lords finally acceded and affixed their thumbprints to the document of alliance. “This is a small piece in a much larger puzzle. And other, far more important stratagems are already in motion.”

February 25, 2164

Patorco Harbor, Narpra, Sauria (Psi Serpentis IV)

Patorco had made Antonio Ruiz fall in love with darkness.

The harbor city was built into a vast, partly submerged lava tube on the edge of Narpra’s largest island, its homes and businesses carved into the living rock of the walls. Dozens of tiers of dwellings arched over harborside paths worn smooth by eight millennia of webbed footsteps, and over heavy wooden piers that could be pulled up to serve as dikes when Sauria’s frequent, fierce storms flooded the cavern. Far overhead, Ruiz could glimpse the mesh of carefully bred, broad-leafed plants that spanned the gaps in the roof, filtering the sunlight during the day to shield the Saurians’ vast nocturnal eyes while storing its energy in a calorie-rich vegetable oil used as both a fuel and a culinary staple. But at this time of year, Psi Serpentis A was in the sky for only a third of a day at this latitude, and only the faint illumination of its distant red-dwarf companion, about as bright as a crescent moon on Earth, currently showed through the leaves.

Yet the water shimmered, its bioluminescent algae casting a gentle blue glow up from the harbor. Overhead, highly polished sheets of gold, silver, and bronze, plus more modern mirrors, caught and redistributed the light from the harbor, while streetlamps full of bioluminescent insects added a mix of gentle hues to the light. It was dim by human standards; Ruiz and his fellow Federation consultants carried night-vision visors as a matter of course, and he made sure to spend a few hours a day in a bright room and take daily melatonin supplements to stave off darkness-induced depression. But in his months on Sauria, he had learned to make do with the crepuscular lighting the Saurians favored, so that he could see this city’s beauty the way it was meant to be seen. Everything about this place was a triumph of engineering, both mechanical and biological. As an engineer himself, Ruiz had to appreciate that.

Of course, the company was the other main draw. Narprans were an exuberant, friendly people, and they evoked those qualities in others. Ruiz certainly found Narpra more agreeable than M’Tezir, the first Saurian nation where he and his fellow mining engineers had been sent to teach environmentally sound techniques. The geological forces that had created the narrow M’Tezir continent—essentially one vast mountain range thrusting out of the ocean—had also brought the dilithium, duranium, and rare earths in the planet’s mantle closer to the surface there than just about anywhere else on Sauria, making it the main focus of Federation mining efforts. But the new wealth the deal had brought to the formerly impoverished land mass had yet to trickle down to M’Tezir’s commoners, whom Ruiz had found furtive, somber, and wary of outsiders. Their ruler, an old-style warlord called Maltuvis, was making nice with the Federation and the Saurian Global League in order to profit from the trade agreement, but that hadn’t yet extended to improving the way he treated his subjects—people who hoarded what little they had and saw outsiders as potential competitors, a xenophobia that Maltuvis readily encouraged. Ruiz had been much happier upon relocating here to Narpra, a Global League member whose constituent islands arced between M’Tezir’s northern tip and the west coast of the planet’s largest continent. Not only was the cooler climate more comfortable for Ruiz—still tropical by Earth standards but not too different from his native Cuba—but the social climate was far warmer. He and his colleagues had been readily incorporated into their Narpran protégés’ social lives.

Ruiz grinned as Redik’s, the miners’ favorite sauna bar, came into view. The local miners had been bringing the humans here for weeks, and Ruiz had taken to it readily. The Saurians were already famous across the stars for their brandy, whose potent charms Ruiz appreciated, but he’d developed a particular liking for Narpran rum, a dark and flavorful spirit distilled from a seaweed cultivated by local divers. He also had a definite fondness for the hot spring–fueled sauna and steam room facilities in the back, particularly since Laila Alindogan partook of them regularly—and was considerably more comfortable with the local custom of group nudity in saunas than Ruiz was. On more than a few occasions, the two of them had ended up going home together after a few lively hours drinking and sweating with their friends. (Not that Saurians sweated, of course, but they benefited from the heat and humidity in their own way.)