Mission: Harbeasts of Mars Read online

  “So you're committed to terraforming Mars, then?” He nodded, his face taking on a more serious expression.

  “So long as it is lucrative for me to do so. I've positioned Triskelion as a leader in providing the growth eco-systems and will eventually spin that part of the organization into a separate company and sell it off to others who will eventually be moving here. I plan to concentrate on big game creation after this year.”

  “And while you're doing all of this wheeling and dealing, there's a war brewing out there. The biggest clash of societies humans have ever faced. One of our own planets, Mars, is already colonized by aliens? And many that are coming are hostile.”

  “If all comes to naught, I have what I want out of the project here at Triskelion. I have all I need to survive and thrive, whatever may come. I'm a hunter. I'm ready for the wild, Mr. Astor. Every man and woman for himself.” He seemed to grin even wider at my discomfort.

  “I possess them in abundance, otherwise I wouldn't have the power and the means to do what I do here. I fear no coming war, Mr. Astor. I fear nothing and neither should you. Should you display these qualities you may find life very pleasant here.”

  “You aren't afraid of anything at all? I find that hard to believe.” He laughed.

  “Believe what you will. Mars and space itself is not for the faint-hearted or the cowardly. When you've been through the darkness I've been through and survived it, it breaks the chains of fear. Fear is for the weak and the stupid.” His blue eyes turned an odd dark color again that disturbed me. They had an intensity that made me squirm as if they told of the depths of depravity this man had swam through and reveled in. And he seemed to know this because they danced with amusement as well.

  “I find you interesting. Genetically. Nothing more intrigues me than the collection, research and experimentation of the exotic, the original, the interesting. I have traveled to many places and seen many things. I don't like to be bored. Continue to be interesting and perhaps I won't kill you.” A shock of energy shot through my spine, a painful tingling signaling that my blood pressure and anxiety was dangerously high. He seemed to luxuriate in my discomfort.

  “Come. I invite you to dinner.” He gave me a satisfied smile as if he were a cat playing with a mouse. He had that odd combination of superciliousness, easy charm and hidden malevolence, a lethal combination which hid a very wicked mind.

  I wondered if I should have told him the particulars of my changed state. Would it help me or make my life worse? I would have to suss out the situation during dinner. A little voice in my mind told me to keep silent on the matter.

  “Do come now,” he demanded in that winningly, gentleman-like manner, as he lifted his rifle, aimed and shot another hapless creature hiding in the bush. Its pitiful wail rang in my ears as it died.

  “All is well. You are my guest.”

  10

  I found myself living in a weird, parallel universe in the mansion for the next few days. All of the comforts he'd promised me, he gave. I lacked for nothing except my freedom, which was what I wanted. The only thing that had changed was the scenery and luxury. The threat of harm still loomed whenever I saw his cursed snagar, who often growled and bared her long, curved fangs at me. I had to make do and decided to use this opportunity to observe and gather as much information as I could.

  This night we were in the “minor” dining room, called the Smalls Room, with a table spread with a feast of smoked salmon, halibut, shrimp, lobster tails with lemon butter sauce and steaks with horseradish sauce, green bean foam, beef blood foam and wasabi foam, pearl onion and flounder aspic, beet compote and quite a few other more exotic, alien dishes that I didn't recognize at all, nor had the courage to taste. I wasn't particularly hungry. I watched Lafayette and thought of Dr. Mengele, that evil fiend two centuries ago that worked under the Nazi regime, famous for his cruel and revolting experiments on children. The thought made me sick. What was the game, here? Was I being fattened up? Singled out for some special evil later on? I was still a prisoner here, no matter the silken cords I was now tied with. My collar remained.

  I saw a familiar face there as well. The young man who was sometimes seen walking the property with Thomas. I also recognized him as one of the men in Lafayette's hunting party that tracked me down. He was wearing a different soft, suede green suit, tailor made. It was also a different shade of green. He was flirting with one of the male guests there. And he seemed pleasant enough toward me now that I was staying in the mansion. He must live here. I thought. Though, I didn't see much of him and had never spoken to him since that day I was attacked in the gym. When he smiled at me I thought I detected an expression that was truly genuine. I nodded my head, acknowledging him. His eyes smiled, unlike Lafayette's. But the smile was quick and his eyes nervously darted back and forth between me and Lafayette, who was busy regaling one of the other guests of some hunting exploit years ago. Dr. lafayette had a slim, young blonde dressed in a tight fitting silver suit, draped on his arm.

  I'd noticed that like the many female companions Lafayette kept company with, Patrick didn't wear a collar, but I'd noticed what looked like very faint burn marks around his neck. They were very slight as if perhaps he once did wear one. I wondered how he escaped his primitive confinement and landed into the manor house. He lounged lazily in an egg-shaped lounge chair, coyly playing with his hair, training his attention to another male guest who seemed mesmerized with him. I then understood why. He was every bit as seductive and flirtatious as the ladies around here. Lafayette played both sides of the fence.

  There were many others arriving, minor dignitaries, mostly human, but a few aliens as well, business magnates, and I presumed, big game hunters. All looking for something more interesting to hunt than mere earthly animals. Wealthy, adventurous types with too much money, too much time on their hands and not enough principles. Of all the people gathered, none paid much attention to me. There were a few cool stares and brief, fake smiles, but I was an outsider. An interloper. Besides that, I was most interested in the young brown haired man, Patrick, as I sensed a genuineness and a nervousness under his pleasant, playful exterior that I didn't pick up from anyone else. They were mostly cordial (some just barely), like Dr. Lafayette, but I thought they were all hiding something evil underneath all that cordiality. Most of all, Lafayette.

  One of the kitchen attendant mechs signaled that dinner was about to be served. Some gathered around the table. Lafayette placed himself at the head of the table.

  “Eat! Enjoy yourself, Robert!” Lafayette turned to his guests, clasping his hands together. “My friends, this is Robert Astor. I found him while tagging other specimens in the desert. He was about to be killed by a madman, a raider from one of the various gang hideouts in the desert caves. I rescued him out of the desert.” Strange. I never got the feeling that Furat truly cooperated with anyone. And I sensed an odd, chilling feeling in the room after his announcement. A surprised murmur rose around the table. There were about fifty people gathered. They gave me sly looks. I wondered. It was as if he'd given all in the room some coded message. What it was, I had no idea, nor did I have any proof of such a thing. But just the same, I felt as if something about me to them had been signaled. The hairs on the backs of my arms stood up.

  Furat mentioned that he knew this man. Surely, Lafayette knew Furat? After all, Furat seemed to be at one time working with him for bone marrow production before he went off on a tear and completely lost his mind. I wondered what kind of information exchanged between them before things broke down.

  “Yes, Dr. Lafayette rescued me in the nick of time,” I said. There was light laughter around the table.

  “How nice for you,” said a woman with the barest concealment of disdain.

  “Good. No sense in dying out in the red waste,” said another man, and then they turned back to their own private conversations, even Lafayette seemed engrossed in conversation with a woman sitting next to him who looked very much like a wealthy prospector. He p
ushed the silver-suited woman away and she slinked off toward the courtyard. Good. I thought. It gave me time to try and speak with Patrick. He happened to be sitting directly across from me. I lowered my voice a bit, keeping an eye on Lafayette, who was no longer paying any attention to me.

  “So, how did you get here?” I asked. A small courtesy mech came and offered a platter of oysters on one arm and a platter of some kind of Erautian crustacean that looked like pulsing blowfish on the other. I shook my head. Patrick took up one of the alien sea creatures, still in its purplish, luminescent shell and placed it on his plate. He glanced at me at first as if he didn't realize I was speaking to him.

  “Are you talking to me?”

  “Yeah. How did you get here?”

  “Ah, well,” he said softly, peeling the creature out of its shell and swallowing it. He looked thoughtful. “I came with him. I met him at a bar on a station near the inner planets. A place called Hedonism Venus, a rather famous bar just outside the orbit of Venus. Fitting, for the planet named after the goddess of love.”

  “And he brought you here in chains or bound?” I asked, lowering my voice. He laughed lightly but gave me a sharp look.

  “Certainly not. I'm not in your position if that's what you mean. He,” he paused and indicated to one of the serving mechs coming round that he wanted a shrimp cocktail. However, I detected stalling. Patrick was all light grace and breeziness on the surface, but I could feel that he was nervous about talking about Lafayette. I sensed that clearly. I think my ability to pick up on subtle things others didn't see was growing stronger each year. Patrick wanted to talk, that much I could feel. “he brought me here after we met there. I like the luxurious lifestyle and he offered that,” he said evasively. “I've lived here ever since.” His eyes flickered around the table and he smiled winningly at a few of the guests at the who glanced at us from across the room.

  “Business must really be booming around the research he does. I got a look at the gardens, the zoo and the personal hunting grounds he has. Impressive,” I said, taking a bite of a radish and jicama salad that was set in front of me.

  “He's into quite a few things. The research lab is merely one among many. All of it supports the lifestyle,” he took a sip of sparkling rose, “of hunting. His reason for living.” He gave me a sidelong look. Things were clicking into place in my mind. Lafayette was not the original owner and researcher of this place. He either bought it from someone or took it over by some other means. I had a hard time believing such a man would care about terraforming a planet and the workings of the wondrous unfolding of life and the complex discoveries and issues such a vast project would bring. He cared about his own personal goals. He worshiped the Self. Power. Strength. He'd told me as much. And with the lavish things he surrounded himself with out here on a desert planet, it told me that he cared a great deal about money and luxury. A corrupted, human, mirror image of the god-like creature, Ancus.

  Perhaps this was where he and Furat parted ways on similar ideologies: money.

  “Did he ever make you wear a collar like mine?” He gave me a level stare.

  “I asked because I noticed the burn marks around your neck, faint though they are.” He seemed to flinch ever so slightly after I mentioned that, as if struck. The color in his eyes grew darker. I touched a nerve. He didn't answer. That was all the answer I needed.

  We continued on with the lavish dinner and I must say that I decided to enjoy the exotic meals set before me and the entertainments, even the light and superficial conversations. And what I gathered was that everyone here had ties to smuggling, piracy, were either shipping magnates, venture capitalists or belonged to some privateering outfit. I worked hard to remember snatches of conversation, to match names with faces and those faces with the names of companies, groups or outfits spoken about. I filed all of these bits of information away for future use. If I survived this experience someone out of this cabal might prove to be useful in the future.

  . . .

  The dinner party spilled beyond the indoor courtyard and out into the connecting agave, wildflower and cactus gardens outside. The air was cool and balmy. Several baobab trees dotted the cactus garden, their huge canopies reaching out to the sky like flat, outstretched hands.

  I made my way down a narrow walkway near an unusually large plant that took on the shape of a wicked, curved scimitar. It's fat stalks glowed faintly in the red Martian evening, and seemed to slowly grow brighter as the sun sank down behind the mountains. One of the little moons had just appeared on the horizon, pale and delicate like a fingernail in a deep rose sky. The walkway was paved with pearly white jewel stones that gave off faint light for walking in the gardens at night. A small winged insect with brilliant red wings flitted by and disappeared into a flower bed.

  I carried a glass of sherry with me and just as I finished my glass, a gracious, womanly-shaped courtesy mech appeared.

  “Would you like another glass of sherry, Mr. Astor?” She asked in a posh, British accent.

  “I'm fine, thanks.” The mech disappeared around a wrought iron bench toward a small crowd of guests close by the patio. I turned to see Patrick approaching me. Someone was calling to him. He turned.

  “Don't worry, Giulio. I'll be by tonight. I'm not going anywhere. Later,” he said, smiling. I heard a disappointed exclamation from someone, I assumed it was Giulio. Patrick shook his head.

  “You'd think he never saw me, the way he behaves,” he said. Once he approached a large cactus partly shielding him from most of the guests milling around the patio, his expression turned serious.

  “Perhaps we should talk. But not too loudly. See those little black insects there among the baobab trees to the right?” My eyes followed the direction and I squinted to find two little black insects there among the branches of one of them.

  “I see them. They're spy mechs?” I asked. He nodded.

  “Yes. I managed to partly disable some of them but he restarts and reprograms them by remote nearly every month.”

  “What's your name? Your real name?” I asked. He seemed to relax a little as if now in safer territory. I wanted to feel more relaxed as well but for the snooping devices around, neither one of us could truly let our guard down.

  “My name is Patrick. Patrick Leffert.” I wanted specifically to ask him about The Game and about the experience I had recently been put through. but I didn't want anyone to overhear that. I decided to ask around it the best way I could.

  “Why is he keeping me here, Patrick? I mean, in the mansion?”

  “He's fascinated by something in you. He's studying you. It won't last. He enjoys lulling people into a sense of comfort before pulling the rug out from beneath them.”

  “Why?”

  “He's a sadist. He enjoys seeing people in misery. He loves to keep you off balanced.”

  “Will he keep me here in the mansion a long time? Will I be free to roam around here like you?”

  “No. And I'm not free. You've sussed that out already.”

  “When I'm taken back to my cell, do you think there's a chance of me being removed from it permanently?” I asked. He gave me a suspicious look.

  “It's is very likely.” I didn't like that answer. But it was an answer.

  “Lafayette seemed surprised that I had a gun that day when you all chased me out into the desert,” I said and watched him.

  “You made good use of it and managed to get a second one. And you killed one of his most enthusiastic partners.”

  “I didn't want to kill him.” He gave me a grim smile.

  “He isn't missed. Trust me on that.”

  “If I have to die, I want to die fighting on my feet. Not be fodder for experiments, Patrick.”

  “I don't blame you and if I can do something to help or ease your plight, I'll try. And yes, it was me that put the gun there in the air passage behind your cell.” He looked around before speaking again.

  “I've seen this game played out many times and it always ends in
the same awful way. I wanted you to have a chance to kill your attackers.” That sentence was pregnant with all kinds of meaning.

  “But you were sitting right in the buggy with Lafayette.”

  “I had no choice. He forces me to go with him, forces me to watch his kills. He knows I hate it. I pretend to enjoy his exploits. If I didn't, he'd find someone else to enjoy them by his side and I'd become the next animal he hunts as prey.”

  “Has he gone from hunting big game animals to hunting humans?”

  “He made that transition a long time ago. And he enjoys hunting the aliens too. He and some of his hunting friends are planning to build a huge, secret game reserve on Mars and the most expensive game to hunt will be humans and Erautians and a new breeds of animals he plans to create. Some of them may contain dinosaur DNA.” I was aghast. Where would he even find such DNA specimens? Patrick gave me a pointed look. “And with the DNA you possess, he wants to create a super predator. He sees wealth and hunting joy beyond imagining from your tissue samples.”

  “I see. The most dangerous game of all.” I felt deflated. “Are you. . .special to him?”

  “You could say that. In the way that a pretty blonde woman with a great figure is special to him. In that way.” He guided me toward a small waterfall near a man-made pond scattered with water lilies.

  “Dr. Lafayette sees the universe through a binary worldview. There are two kinds of people, the worthy and strong and those that are weak, damaged and unfit to live. He's a Social Darwinist in its most literal sense. Quite unlike the scientists who first founded Triskelion.” He glanced around and raised his arm to look at a tiny data pad strapped there under his sleeve. He tapped the screen and then rolled his sleeve down again.