Token of Esteem

"OK and thanks," answered Pook before resealing the portal. Now he was on his own until the Louie sent help. He remembered the earlier feeling, like a worm on a hook, writhing around, attracting attention. Not him, oh no, and he wasn’t getting out of his suit, either. Mully was sentry clad and he was dead, covered with blood and unused weapons. Pook wouldn’t do anything that Mully had been doing and that included sitting and listening to Jandia. It was one of the first rules he learned in the planet business; don’t unsuit too quickly.

He knew he couldn’t relax for an instant. It would only be an hour and, except for Mully, it was just routine grunt work. Pook’s problem was that he didn’t know this particular routine. "I’ll have to improvise, like it says in the manual," said Pook to the room. "Shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out." He studied the equipment in the console. The scopes, scanners, spectralyzers and sensarrays were all standard things he knew how to use. The response mechanisms were another matter. These were special designs and he was smart enough not to touch them without instructions. If the elaborate machines isolated one or more of the rats, Pook was left to his own resources to deal with the problem. Undoubtedly the equipment is on automatic. The assumption seemed reasonable enough.

He was staring at the pyramid on the console imager when a moving presence was detected and depicted in bright colors on the screen. Pook focused and zoomed on the creature, crouching at the controls rather than sit in Mully’s chair. As he suspected, it didn’t look like a rat. In fact, it didn’t look like anything he had ever seen, except that it had four legs, a head and a tail, all covered with what looked like black, strandy hair. It did not seem to sport any lethal armaments in the viewer, not even fangs or claws. Pook recalled the file titles, while staring at the creature’s unimposing, un-rodent-like features and attributes. Deducing data from the image, Pook decided the rat was not much larger than a common house dog, about the size of a beagle.

"OK, little guy," he said aloud to himself as a kind of reassurance, "CP4 and electricity don’t work; neither do remotes, audio weapons, chem combinations or bullets. Really? You must be a lot tougher than you look. What’s the real deal here, little fella? What’s got you so interested in the pyramid that you’re willin’ to fight through all kinds of human bullshit to get there?" Pook relapsed into an old habit of trying to humor himself, not worrying about the circumstances.

The only thing he knew about the military base was its initial function, to prepare selected areas for colonization. The Cydonian Mesa was a prime site because of the ancient ruins. The materialists didn’t want anything, creature or human, to disrupt their plans. The sentry post was set up to dissuade errant colonists from entering the mesa, already claimed and mapped out by four corporations. The soldiers were also instructed to eliminate any Martian or other pests that might disturb the area. Usually these were hybrids, taking on some mutated form of stowaways from a Luna shuttle, like transport rats, shuttle lizards or the occasional planted virus. In this case, Pook didn’t know what he was dealing with, other than the fact that the computer identified the unknown undesirables as non-indigenous and alterable.

"Shee-it!" stated Pook out loud. "I’m fuckin’ alterable. Don’t mess with me you little rat fucks or I’ll change you into something permanent. Dead, ya hear?"

The com startled Pook and made his heart jump a beat.

"Hey, soldier," said the medico. "This is Zeke. Interesting commentary."