Chapter 3: Phaon

"It's kind of beat up, isn't it?" Thorn suspiciously eyed the weapons vendor.
"Well, what do you expect?" he protested. "People come, they go. Spacers in a need of cash, they don't dump their best."
Thorn nodded. It seemed a logical arguement.
"So what do I get for my eighty credits?" She pressed him.
"You get what you see, a slightly used laser pistol with a depleted cell."
"How many shots?" she asked.
He shrugged. "Maybe two, maybe three. Who knows? Maybe four." He shrugged again.
"A laser's not my weapon of preference," she noted aloud.
"Hey, for eighty credits, you can't be choosey. Just be thankful I'm in a good mood."
Thorn handed over her Id card, soon to be surrendured to the Phaonic officials for use of the pistol planetside.
"If thing doesn't work," she warned him, "I'll find one that does, and I'll be back."
"Hey, am I not Smiling Yani?" he protested, "Do I look like the kind of guy who would cheat you? Look, for you, I will even throw in this nice hunting knife, eh?"
Yani handed over an equally dilapidated blade to match the laser pistol.
Thorn humourlessly took it also. He had said beggers couldn't be choosers and he was right. But she wouldn't always be a begger. Thorn promised herself that.

(Joe Grange, deduct 45 credits late charges to access locker storage)
Not happy about having to pay Onzlo's late charges, Joe removed his Id card and fumbled the cardkey into the lock while Leon kept a nervous lookout, jerking his head back and forth, trying to anticipate interception or some other imagined danger.
"You know, there's nothing wrong with getting contents out of a locker. People do it all the time," Joe reminded his companion. "Don't act so nervous."
"What if we're being followed?" Leon asked him. "What if the police know about Onzlo's find, or what if he talked and this is all just a trap?"
"If that's the case," Joe opened the locker, "then there's nothing much we can do about it. There." Joe pulled out a number of objects. "Let's see, vidporn, that figures. Some very raunchy holographs, an empty blaster cell, ticket stubs, a small portrait of the Emperor. Hmm, Onzlo didn't impress me as the orthodox type," Joe mused.
Leon could smell something terrible coming out of the locker.
Joe grimaced and pulled out a mouldering festering bag of what was once food of some sort. He carried it gingerly over to a nearby disposal access and dropped it inside, wiping his hands on his pants.
Leon then looked inside the locker and fished out a small file disc. When Joe came back, both of them looked, first at it, then back inside the locker. It was empty.
"I guess that's it," Leon stated, looking at the disc. Disc was a generic term. This file was rectangular, looking no different than an unmarked Id card.
Raymont, from his vantage, could see the two of them talking a bit more before Grange carefully put the filecard into his vest pocket. With a little too much care, Raymont thought. These two lacked the ability to not seem self-conscious. Their every action marked them to someone who could read such things. When they left, Raymont followed them from a discreet distance. He was surprised when Leon and Grange, rather than heading back for Dicey's, went looking around the various shops in the lower parts of the Downport. Transportation and equipment sales seemed to hold most of their interest.
Joe ran down the list of rental costs. Phaon didn't offer much and what it did offer was very expensive.
A groundcar suitable to carry the party beyond Avalon's paved roads would cost 82 credits/day plus a good credit standing, which neither Joe or Leon had. Failing that, the rental company was willing to attach Joe's investment income as a deposit, but the daily fee would be due in full on return, on pain of full transfer of Joe's income. Furthermore, the company wanted 10 days rental fee up front.
A-gravs were unavailable. It turned out that only a few existed planetside and they were privately owned.
GEV or GEM cars were also available under the same conditions and one suitable for the party would run 102 cr./day.
Thopters (helicopters) were available, but their 1800 cr./day cost was prohibitive, especially as the largest thopters available could only carry four. The 10k/day rental cost of the one available shuttlecraft was well beyond reckoning and Joe couldn't possibly qualify for the deposit, and the rental agency would have insisted on a company pilot at a surcharge unless Joe could find one with a high enough rating to be acceptable to the company.
Thanking the clerk, a disappointed Joe and Leon left the Colonel Klinker's Rent-a-Klunker agency, not even bothering for the more mainstream agencies as being well beyond their means.
Raymont followed the pair to the food court where he bought a tasteless meal from a vendor far from theirs and watched them eat their lunch, while hardly conversing.
During lunch, Leon had talked Joe into going back down to the locker area before they left. Raymont watched Leon pull a large weapon case from a locker and also pocket what looked like a knife. Then the two headed for the inner Spaceport exit, back to the outside dregs of the Downport hotels, bunks and dives like Dicey's, and then back to Avalon.
Joe, being a native and Raymont, having lived long enough near Avalon, both noticed how dark and artificial the decor was inside the Spaceport. Avalon, with it's hillside villas overlooking the bay, quaint smells and sounds of birds and the ocean, seemed to sprout from the land being blessed by both earth and sea. Fountains and murals greeted travellers around many bends. Except for the rundown Imperial territory of the outer Spaceport, which was the closest Avalon had in the way of a slum, stark whitewashed cleanness, burning in the bright Phaonic sunlights mixed with the spicy aromas of outdoor cafes. A jubilant polyglot of lively discussions in Talyo and Americ contrasted harshly with the uniform enforced Galcom of the Downport. All three men found themselves wanting to drop their load at Dicey's and, after seeing what it contained, head for Avalon. It was as if they could not breath fully inside the Spaceport. They were suprised to find themselves longing for the bright air of Avalon.
As they entered the customs booth separating the enclosed inner Spaceport with that of the outside Spaceport slum where Dicey's was located, each in turn had to wait in line to be checked through. In the press of incoming Firenzan and Lamarine immigrants, Raymont almost lost Joe and Leon, whose line moved faster than the one he ended up in.
Leon, who was ahead of Joe in line, came up to the customs checkpoint. He deposited his weapon case, which was opened, though Joe could not see what was inside it.
"Bringing this into Avalon?" the customs official seemed to need to state the obvious.
Pushing ahead until he came up to a scowling and powerful Atlantean immigrant, Raymont could only just catch the gist of the conversation.
"Just into the outer Spaceport," Leon replied.
"That still counts as bringing it on Phaonic soil," the customs clerk snapped sharply. "We'll send it along to the Hall of Records. You can pick it up there when you surrender your Id card." The tone of the woman's voice suggested that the dialogue was over and that she was done with Leon.
Nevertheless, Leon persisted. "But, I"
Annoyed, the customs clerk turned from Joe back to Leon. "All you have to do is surrender your Id card at the hall. You can pick it up again when you leave."
One of the Avalon policeman stationed at the customs point walked over. "Is there some problem here?" she asked Leon directly.
Leon looked at her and then shook his head. "No, I'llI'll just pick it up at the Hall of Records, like she said." Satisfied, the policeman walked away only to turn around when Leon set off the sensor alarm.
Searching his body, another customs clerk pulled out Leon's knife. "We'll have to send this on with your gun, sir," the clerk told him.
"But he could buy that knife out on the street," Joe protested for Leon, "What's the point of taking it from him."
"No weapons beyond this point. They all go to the Hall of Records."
"It's alright," Leon stated. "I'll just pick it up later at the hall."
Raymont noted, as he passed Joe, who recognized him, that the people behind Leon and Joe were starting to get annoyed at having to wait. Leon, having forgotten his Id card, had to fill out paperwork so that he could be properly identified when he picked up his weapons.
Outside again, Joe accosted Raymont. "You were following us," he accused the young man.
"Just backing you up," Raymont retorted. "Cmon, let's get that disk back to Dicey's."
"You two go ahead," Leon told them. I'm going to take care of business in Avalon first. Waving, Joe and Raymont watched Leon disappear into the crowd of immigrants, then walked off to the bar, the grime of spilled garbage clinging to the heels of their soiled boots.
(All characters mentioned in this sequence, deduct 3 cr. for lunch).

"If you want to borrow a filecard, I'll need to see your Id card, sir" The librarian's whiny insistence irritated Leon immensely, touching upon some part of his aggressiveness in a way that he couldn't control - almost.
Leon's hand shot out so quickly that the librarian didn't react until he saw it laying on the filecard, seeming to appear from nowhere. The startled librarian gasped and moved back.
"Perhaps I could just view it here?" Leon asked, trying to be disarming. Damned programmed reactions. How could he account for them when he didn't know what they were.
The librarian stared at Leon but then, as if coming out of a trance, nodded quickly and pointed to the corner of the library where the viewers could be found.
Leon smiled warmly and thanked the man, who seemed to relax slightly. Other customers had come up and Leon and his unnaturally quick reactions were forgotten.
Retreating back to the series of viewer cubicles, Leon once again had come up to the Id card wall. Not having one was tripping him up every time, even on this backwater world. Fortunately, the librarian would assume that he was just another offworlder whose Id card was at the Hall of Records, kept on file as a promise for good behavior while planetside.
Leon sat down next to a college student whose viewer volume was too high. No doubt one of the librarians would be by to remind her to turn it down. She had dark hair and eyes, and brazenly appraised Leon's muscular build and short cut hair as he sat down. Though the smile she gave him was warm and friendly, Leon's brush with the librarian had made him edgy and he tried to ignore her as he turned on the viewer. Soon, his preoccupation with the vidfile absorbed all his focus. He fell into superthink input mode, a program he had encountered and used before. Pages and pictures flashed before him. He wouldn't necessarily understand it all, but he could hopefully retain most of it for reflective study later, trying to sort it all out in his head. Maybe, if it took enough time to get there, he would actually know enough to pass himself off as a construction engineer - at least to the other members of his party.
When he had finished his books and turned off the viewer, he turned around, and was startled to see that the student, or whoever she was, had been watching him from behind. She was chewing on her Id card and stared, unblinking, into his own eyes. Leon swore silently, almost ashamed at his own carelessness. When in superthink mode, his perceptories had been turned off. He should have planned for that.
"I've never seen anything like that." Her Galcom was touched by a bit of a Talyo lilt. "You read that sooo fast. How did you do that?"
Her own vidfile droned on loudly about Phaonic terraforms.
Leon felt something that he guessed was panic, a dry tasting pasty feeling in his mouth and a sinking of his abdomenal cavity as it contracted slightly. Rather than answer her, he picked up his file and rushed off. He managed to compose himself by the time he reached the front desk, dropping off the file and giving the librarian a warm thank-you as he left. The man, having forgotten Leon's strangeness, smiled at him as he left. Leon had just cleared the front door when he heard a voice behind him.
"You forgot something." It was the young woman.
Leon stopped and looked around. The young woman was holding onto a slip of paper. Leon didn't recognize it but she held it out to him as if it were definitely his.
Pensively, Leon reached his hand out and warily took it. On it were scrawled some numbers. It was a vidphone number.
"This isn't mine," Leon tried to hand her back the paper, but she shook her head.
"No, it's mine." She walked up to him and he realized how tall she was, taller than he was in fact. "I wanted you to have it." She told him, her eyes capturing his.
When Leon didn't respond, she went on.
"Do you want to have a cup of Janava? Or Coffee maybe?" She nodded down the empty street. "I know a place nearby. My treat."
"I don't have time," he replied brusquely. He turned away from her and walked as fast as he could, trying to seem in control. Her voice called out to him and stopped him in his tracks.
"My father's a policeman," she told him.
Leon knew that by reacting, he was making himself more obvious. But that fearful feeling had come back and was holding on to him tighter than before.
She walked up and took pinched at his coat arm. "Come on, I think you'll like this place." Leon found himself following, his strength of purpose sapped.

Later, when they had done, she turned on the light, her eyes but not Leon's squinting at the sudden brightness. She reached for a drink and then ran her fingers along the contours of his arm.
The question that Leon had wanted to ask her all night now seemed to present itself.
"What are you going to do?"
She smiled at him. "Fix you dinner."
It wasn't what he expected. He hated this meandering around the issue. He decided to bring it out in the open.
"You know what I am, don't you?"
"You're a very good lover. A fast reader." She paused, thinking. "I'm more interested in who you are, but that I really don't know." She looked at him intensely, as if trying to read him.
"What are You going to do?" she finally asked him.
A dark suggestion came into Leon's mind from some primeval place. This woman was threatening his freedom, his very existence. He knew what he really should do was
"Are you going to kill me?" she calmly asked him.
It was as if she had plucked the thought from his mind. Shocked, confronted with his naked self exposed, he had to look at his thought as she had so coldly expressed it. He had to look at himself, ugly and raw, and he didn't like it.
"No," he shook his head, "That's not what I'm about."
"I'm glad," she smiled, herself relieved.
Now he looked at her, trying to read her. She was not like anyone he had ever met, nor like any programmed memory he had ever been given.
"Why?" he finally asked.
"I don't know," she confessed. Leon didn't know why, but he believed her.
Leon smiled. One of the few times he had done so in his life. His expression was mirroured in her own face.
"You really should be more careful," he chided her.
His peripherals saw her left hand move from under the sheets. A mini one shot blaster, a one shot kill, was held tightly in her hand.
"I am," she informed him.

As they parted, her last kiss on his lips, both she and Leon found that they had nothing to say, though Leon at least wanted to say everything. He was lacking an expression program. He would have to learn it.
"What's your name?" was all he could ask.
"Talia." She stood staring at him and then looked down and started to walk away.
Now, he was the one to call after her. "Will I ever see you again?" he asked, somehow afraid of either answer.
"I hope so," she replied and continued on. Not until she had gone from sight did Leon start back for Dicey's. It was not a measurement he could register by caliber, but to Leon, both the large and small twin suns of Phaon seemed brighter.

"You know, maybe I do know you from somewhere," Tesse giggled and suggestively bit the tip of her finger as if lost in vacuous thought. The effect was not missed on the police clerk, Rincarlo. Smiling now that they were alone in the office of police records in the Avalon Hall of Records, Police Private Rincarlo Bwenterr dropped the official demeanor that had been steadily eroding since Tesse had arrived, and assumed the more natural stance of a single young adult on the potential make.
"So, what's your interest in the ship," he asked, though it seemed to Tesse, in a way that was only intended as polite conversation.
"Oh, I don't know. I thought maybe I'd like to travel. My brother, Bill, is a pilot you know."
"Oh really," Rincarlo smiled a smile to mirrour Tesse's. "And what do you do?"
Tesse giggled. "I like to watch boys," she mocked a confession, which, judging by Rincarlo's reaction, was having the proper effect. It was all enough to make her gag. It wasn't as though the young policeman was unattractive. But he seemed obviously of the type who were insecure enough to want their women dumb and pliable. Sensing this, Tesse had tried her best but it was getting to be a chore. She decided to cut to the heart of the matter.
"How much do you think that smuggler's ship will sell for?" Tesse asked directly.
Rincarlo shrugged as if uninterested. "Oh, I don't know. In an auction like that, maybe two, two hundred and fifty thou."
"Credits!" Tesse gasped.
"No," Rincarlo shook his head, "pounds. It's only a shuttle. It's not worth that much and besides, it's a piece of junk."
Tesse composed herself quickly. "I suppose it's guarded. Do you think you could show it to me. I'd love to sit in the seat of a real spacecraft."
"Hmm, maybe. Maybe I could get you in.," Rincarlo brazenly allowed his eyes to follow Tesse's figure, uncaring how obvious he was. Tesse was starting to feel uncomfortable. She was really unused to this type of game.
"Are there any other impounded spacecraft that are coming up for sale or auction soon?" She wasn't sure why she was asking. If Onzlo's piece of junk was going for a quarter of a mill, then how could her companions afford a real ship?
"There's the Valkyrie. That's a pirate ship that was captured, but it's not for sale."
"How come?" Tesse blinked vividly, her apparent "stupidity" acting as a come on for the cop.
Again, Rincarlo shrugged, uncaring. "Viscounts orders. He has plans for that ship."
Tesse felt she had learned all she could. After Rincarlo handed her a vidphone card number, she got up from her seat. "Got to fly! Bye now." She blew him a kiss.
"But wait!" he yelled after her, "How can I call you."
"I'll call you," she said, hoping it was a promise she would never have to keep.

"There, you like?" Dr. "Slime" pushed a button and Bill's seat turned so he could face a rotating holographic projection of his head. It was an eerie feeling to be staring at what looked like a decapitated specter of himself, floating in front of him. One thing though, Bill Solo was satisfied to note, his face looked better than new. Even old scars had been removed.
The Aeomaran doctor flowed its protoplasmic body over to another console, which hovered over to it like an a-grav platform. Bill couldn't see how the Slime summoned the instrument panels it needed, but all through the operation, they would float over while the slime's "voice" emmitted the usual medical banter from voicebox transmitters all around the room. Bill surmised that it was supposed to be soothing, but the surround sound dialogue coupled with careening instrumentation had been incredibly unsettling, even to Bill, who always prided himself on a cool demeanor.
The doctor's human nurse came over as Bill got up, finally released from the chair. Sixty credits had been deducted from his account.
"You know, most of your wounds would have healed by themselves," Doctor Slime, he called himself Dr. Hampel, droned on. Bill thought that the Aeomaran probably did better business advertising under a human name. Certainly Bill hadn't known that his doctor would be an alien until he had been strapped in, having dealt with the nurse.
"You could have saved yourself sixty credits if you had just given it time. Really, I don't understand this vain thing humans have."
Bill chuckled, wondering what beauty would be to a formless piece of shiny translucent plasma. "I'm starting on a new job," he told the doctor. "I know it sounds funny to you, Doc, but I just wanted to be at my best, right from the start."
The doctor had done a good job and had done it cheap. Though he couldn't afford it, Bill plugged in another 10 credits as a tip and left the doctor's office, heading back out of the inner Spaceport for Dicey's. Hopefully, that Grange flower, and Raymont would be back. He heard that Leon was going to go too. If the Flower worked out, Bill decided, they just might have the beginnings of a fine crew in the making. Whistling, Bill passed through customs into the strong sunshine of the outer Spaceport, the blinding white homes and villas of Avalon dotting the hills in the distance.
(Deduct 70 credits from Bill Solo's account.)

After Joe returns with the disk, Dicey insists that everyone be present after closing to view its contents. Shakes brings out a vid projector, almost dropping it in the process while Bug sets it up. "Ken," as usual, guards the door.
The information revealed is as follows: (see subsequent mailer)

The ship is either a medium or heavy cruiser, probably on the order of 300 plus tons.
At least 40% of the ship is intact, mostly the inner chambers.
Hull metal is of an advanced, energy absorbing design.
The ship apparently plowed through a valley and impacted on the side of a crater lake, becoming buried in scree as a result of the impact.
No significant life forms were registered onboard. Readings probably indicate scavengers and maybe mould growth.
Breaching an underground pool that is fed from the lake, a new river now flows over the crash site, joining the previous river on its way to the sea, probably another reason the site was never found.
Onzlo had excavated a tunnel to a hatch on an intact portion of hull. He had also hidden an earth mover and explosives in a nearby cave. He had not yet breached the hull.
He had hidden his access tunnel with a camouflage webbing. The tunnel is in the stream and one must wade to get to it. Water is kept out by a small plasticrete dam that diverts water around the tunnel entrance. Onzlo had tried to move rocks around the tunnel to make the diverted water seem more natural. He had also taken efforts to remove any trace of the ship from the surrounding area, though he admits in this excerpt from his log, that he certainly could have missed objects.
Dicey is ready and plugs in another file, superimposing general information about Samnia onto the screen. Coupling the geo disc with that from Onzlo's log, the party is able to plot a possible course.
The lake is named Tramsamere. It is a crater lake, evolving from the filling of a very old impact crater. Part of the Draaksama mountain range, Lake Tramsamere is in high altitude rugged country. Glaciers from some of the higher peaks in the Draaksama range tower over the lake. Pictographs from Onzlo's file show a beautiful, yet dry alpine region with sparse lichenous vegetation, patches of snow and barren jagged rocks. The crash site is on the downhill slope of the crater lake's edge.
The Draaksama range is the major range of the Samnian continent. It runs for over a thousand kilometers. To reach Lake Tramsamere by land would involve driving and taking rail transport as far as Darbyville, and then either driving or walking on the underdeveloped road system to the nearest town, which is Ballynena. From there, one must travel approximately another thousand kilometers of relatively unexplored wild country to the lake. The total journey from Avalon is 3222 kilometers by air and significantly farther by land.
From Ballynena, a terrestrial group would have to travel through dry temperate forest becoming gradually more hilly as one neared the Draaksama range. Eventually, the forest would break into dry upland plateau region that would remain relatively flat until the broken mountainous region about 60 kilometers from the lake was reached. Then, strenuous hiking up to the lake, over ridges and through broad valleys until reaching Tramsamere river, after which one would follow the river's course. The crash site is located where a subsidiary river joins the main Tramsamere flow. This second river is only indicated from Onzlo's file and is not indicated on Dicey's out dated geo disk. The main outlet of the lake is several miles farther upstream, near the head of the valley, where the lake spills over in a spectacular cascade of waterfalls to form the river.
Vegetation along the rivercourse is varied from the more dryer fauna found elsewhere, being composed of trees and plants more common to a cooler and wetter region.
Flying, a group's best course would be to fly to Darbyville, then to Ballynena, roughly following the terrestrial course since a direct flight would bring them nearer a military training base and therefore make it more likely that their flight be tracked. Alternately, a wide detouring southerly route could be attempted, flying around the continent and then flying low through the Draaksama peaks. Any pilot attempting this should be well skilled.
Shakes had done some research for the party at Dicey's behest. He reports that rail tickets to Darbyville from Avalon will run 290 pounds (Pound value varies to the credit. Generally, it is higher, generally around the 6-15% mark.). Dicey reports that Joe said he would check out some other transport alternatives.
As Bug cuts off the vidscreen, Dicey pours drinks.
"Now what?" Bug starts things off.

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