Joaquin leapt up with alacrity, abandoning all his cronies’ most prized possessions except his co-leader’s new alloy inciser, which he judiciously seized and dropped into his own vest for bargaining purposes later on.  Rocco’s eyes twinkled as he lead the way off-stage and ushered the boy into the vacuum wisk.  As he fastened the airlock behind them, a powerful surge of air shot them upwards through the great tunnel, watching as they flew above the crowd through its crystalline sides all the fete growing antlike at their feet.  Eye-controlling the machine, Rocco stopped them at the upward door and pushed the boy ahead of him onto the catwalk, which had been fashioned mostly as a mechanics’ way-station but on this evening served as an excellent vantage point for the entire floor below.  For a moment the two stood in silence, surveying the scurrying folk below.  The great curving space of the meeting of the ways between all the passages was jam-packed with participants decked out in their showiest (and, on an outpost planet, least-used) clothing.  For a while it seemed a senseless mish-mash of glittering bodies, swaying this way and that.  But after a few moments enjoying the spectacle, Joaquin realized that there was some internal sense to the movements.  People would coalesce toward the refreshments table, then fan out across the floor toward the westward viewing patio, where the moonsrise was fabulously on display.  After a time they would sweep again inward and toward the eastward patio, where the glittering expanse of Primus itself rivaled the natural landscape; a jewel in the dark enclosure of the surrounding hills.  After a time, the entire assembly swept, as if of one thought, toward the stage, where preparations were beginning for the speeches.

 “Don’t you have to go down, Uncle?”  asked Joaquin, suddenly concerned that Rocco’s friendliness in giving him this little side-trip treat would make him late.

Rocco laughed.  “They’ll spend a boring long time introducing me and puffing themselves up,” he said.  “No need to waste our time standing at attention and listening.”  He nodded toward the floor.  “You see the patterns?”

“Yes.”

“Not so easy to understand them when you’re down there, is it?”

“No.”

“What do you think they think of us, up here?”

“They could hardly see us, even if they looked up – and people seldom do.”

“True, boy.”  Rocco put a heavy hand on Joaquin’s shoulder and gave him a half-turn.  “And if you look up, boy?  What do you see?”

 Joaquin looked into the starry expanse through the clear dome, which from where they stood was only a scant twenty feet away.  Already risen far above the moons was the nearest planet of Deluna’s solar system, a shimmering greenish orb.  Beyond that was the swirl of the neighboring galaxy, its vast beauty paling in the growing light of the moons.  And directly overhead, seemingly larger than the rest of the heavenly bodies, was the gleaming red of the Assembly’s local planetoid.  The two looked at that symbol of power, prestige, and watchfulness for some time.

 “Know what we look like from up there, boy?”  asked Rocco, almost absently.  He knew without asking that Joaquin had internalized the message.

 “’mo-fike,” he muttered obscenely, dragging himself out of the cloying bedding, it being Delunan habit, apparently, to require sleepers to encase themselves beneath the blankets in a winding-sheet-like wrapping which strangled in the night and tripped one up impossibly on rising.

Emerging baggy-eyed and unsteady from the bathroom, he propped his Wristwright on the dresser tuned into the local ‘Net while dragged himself into clothing.  The hubbub of the previous evening’s news about Co-Planetary Coordinator Jimal Sebastian had subsided from shock, outrage and intense speculation into the usual muttering from those who were paid to comment and feign either professional or personal interest.  It was called a murder, but as a murder unmotivated by known forces it was quickly fading into the background.  The more pressing scandal this morning was the wildly heralded departure from Rocco’s presumed extramarital bed the transvestite prostitute Shade D’Nuit, an aging ingénue whose youthful exploits McLadden remembered from various Assembly planetoids.  His lip curled in a sneer as he sat heavily to pull on his boots.  Even the infamous Shade had apparently fallen on hard times, out here raising a ruckus in the planetary outback.  His/her voice, alternately strident, aggrieved and aggressive, pulled a real guffaw from McLadden, emphasized by final vicious tug at the fashionable but damnably difficult-to-don thigh-boots.

 “McLadden.  JOE.  Get out here.”

 Flicking off Shade’s voice in an instant, he was at the door and fumbling with the catch. 

 “Tweed?  Tweed?  What’s going on?”  he flung wide the door.

 Tweed stood there absolutely stark naked, hands raised to her face, eyes enormous.  Behind her, Gorbach was staggering across the room, stripping the sheeting from his equally nude form.

 Instantly dismissing the ridiculous thought that this was some absurd assignation gone wrong, McLadden looked beyond them to the three gaping doors of the other chambers, and leapt to the immediate conclusion.

 “Where’s Ari?”

 “She’s gone,”  Tweed gulped.  McLadden had never imagined to see her so distraught; so completely unable to come to grips with a situation.

 “How can she be gone?  Didn’t you invite her into your…..”

 “Yes, yes.”  Tweed waved a hand limply.  “We settled into the same bed, and she went to sleep well enough.  But damnit, Jon, those ness-fikin’ winding sheets got us all tangled up and she kept kicking me.  Plus, she snores.  So finally I just toddled off into her room.”

 “You slept in her bed and she slept in….”  mouth suddenly dry, McLadden touched his wrist and found it bare.  Leaping back into the room, he seized his wristwright and dialed while strapping it on.  “How long?”

 Tweed wrung her hands.  “I don’t know.  Five hours, planetary time?  Six?”

 “Turn off the occluder, Jon, please, and sound the main alarm.”

 Gorbach, his sheet in tatters on the floor and oblivious to his own nudity, was already at the main airlock performing these tasks.  A dull, almost visceral thrumming ensued as the status alarm went off outside their quarters.  Gorbach unhitched the inner door and keyed open the outer.  By the time these tasks were completed the local enforcement had arrived, with whom Gorbach, again completely focused on the task at hand rather than his bare skin, which the outback policemen had trouble ignoring, started to go through the story.  Tweed, equally oblivious to her appearance, continued to flutter in McLadden’s periphery while he notified the nearest Assembly craft and made other contacts.

 “Oh, Joe. Joe.  Is there any chance the men who killed Jimal…….”

 “Yes.  No.  Yes.  I don’t know.”  McLadden was scarcely listening, scarcely concentrating on her need to know.  “We can only alert all the right contacts and hope for the best, at this point.  I need to make some calls.”

 He withdrew into a corner of the room.  Tweed stumbled backwards and collapsed on the sofa she’d shared with Ari the night before, huddling, a mass of soft flesh, temporarily completing incompetent.

 McLadden, hunched over his Wristwright, initially found his hands shaking so badly he could scarcely control the device.  Calling up resources he’d seldom employed, jaw clenched, he stilled his trembling fingers and entered several codes in quick succession.  Raising the device to his lips, he eyed the miniscule screen.  The grainy vid was indistinguishable from background noise, but the halting, crackling voice unmistakable.  Floating in his mind like an unattached quotation he found himself thinking:  “Most important words I ever spoke.”  He cleared his throat and stretched his tight neck, but even so he could barely speak.

 “One of my teammembers has been kidnapped.”

 “Kidnapped……..yes.”

 “It was the youngest one – Ariel Smith.”

 “The youngest?”

 “Yes.  She’s a strong, healthy young female but under the circumstances….”

 “The strong, healthy young female…?”

 “Yes.  She was sleeping in the older female’s bed when she was taken.”

 “She was not in her bed?”

 “She was in a bed, but not in her assigned bed.”

 “I understand.”

 Another voice gently interrupted.  McLadden jumped and looked up.  Gorbach was right beside him, as were several members of the local force.  McLadden spoke a few more words and closed his connection, standing.  The local sergeant, bug-eyed with the pressure, started to recite.

 “Standard procedures require that the premises are searched, we download all records of internal and external communications in the preceding diurnal/noctural cycle, and all the victim’s personal effects are examined.”

 McLadden stood, nodding.  Gorbach laid a hand on his arm.

 “For the time being I think it would be appropriate to suspend the formal activities of the IGAT and consider ourselves closely-guarded guests.  Assuming Ari is found, we’ll resume the schedule at that time.  If not….”  Gorbach paused, then went on delicatedly, “If not, I expect the team should be reconstituted.”

McLadden nodded again.

Excerpt 3:  Kidnap

Ari dreamt she was being carried by her mother, carried by her mother as the delicious, sole focus of her complete adoring attention.  Held tight to her mother’s warm body in a sling, she sighed and squirmed closer, surrounded by the sheer delight of full-body contact.  Slowly, through the warm and entirely satisfied feeling, she became aware that she was dreaming.  Clinging to the shreds of that warmth and sense of complete safety, she gasped aloud, and came violently awake in a context so outré it took her many minutes at full analytical tilt to come to any hypothesis regarding her whereabouts.

Panic rising, she flicked into virtuality, attempting to put into play all the significant analytical capacity of her CCS.  To  her horror, she achieved very little greater result.  Her system found the substance encasing her alien to its significant databank, although it verified that she could safely breath it in, which was welcome although not surprising news since the dream-feeling of safe enclosure had not completely vanished despite her confusion.  Attempting to contact outside sources, including the local ‘net, failed utterly without explanation.

At this point Ari opened her mouth and took a deep breath, crisis training coming to the fore.  And as she drew in, the supportive substance roiled, funneled, and swept into her.  Continuing to breath with open mouth, she literally inhaled her prison.  It swept, with all its glowing, living gold, into her being and suffused her with that deeply satisfied sense of well-being of her dream; a sense of being completely at rest, completely fulfilled, completely safe.  This stood her in good stead as the last of the yellow substance vanished into her gullet and she fell, abruptly, about three feet onto a yielding but rigid surface.  It was only then that she realized she was completely nude; bereft of any protection or weapon whatsoever.

Still buoyed – it didn’t seem right to call it ‘drugged’ – by the substance, Ari scrambled to her feet without any sense of urgency.  She was now in a darkened room – or something resembling a room.  It appeared to be a natural enclosure, with rough volcanic walls, a curving ceiling, and some dark, soft substance underfoot.  It was comfortably warm.  Looking up, she gasped again as she discovered what illuminated the room.  Hanging from high, domed ceiling were tens of glowing yellow ovoid shapes – indeed, precisely like cocoons.  As she watching, mouth open, two of them began to shift, coalesce, merge and diminish.  A dark shape became evident within them, growing darker with every passing moment as the encasing gas grew smaller.  Almost simultaneously the two shapes dropped to the floor as she had done, lay for a moment as she had done, and then slowly unfolded and rose to a height somewhat greater than her own.  Only then did a flood of unease break through the calm she’d felt since her own emergence.

They were not human.  They were hardly even humanoid, with their great wing-like carapaces towering over squarish tops dominated by antennae-like protrusions, their multiple appendages, their dark chitinous thoraxes and pointed tail-like rears.

They were, in fact, CiCi’s, or as they were originally cruelly dubbed at first discovery in the human media, “Cockroach Creatures;” the only other sapient life-form currently known to the Assembled Galaxies.

 Her crisis training took over as that externally-induced sense of calm and peace diminished.  Moving slowly, Ari raised her hands and held them palms outward. Speaking quietly and slowly, she said:

“Greetings.  I don’t know why I’m here.  Can you tell me?”

The two CiCis turned toward her, but her previous study of their background and public appearances gave her no clue as to how to read their inscrutable ‘faces,’ nor the slight movement of their antennae.  One of them emitted a few faint clicking sounds, but otherwise there appeared to be no response.  Instead, they stood back slightly against the walls, tilting themselves slightly upward.  Belatedly doing the same, Ari scrambled aside only just in time to avoid being hit by another newly-hatched CiCi as it tumbled from its vanished cocoon…….

Excerpt 2:  Death

He had not been an old man; significantly under fifty certainly, and perhaps not yet forty.  The blood-soaked hairline was thick and low around the bruised forehead; no grey evident except the grey-white of cranial matter.  As was usual in violent crime, the perpetrators had attempted to remove his Cranial-Cyborg System. Obviously, however, the slayers were both inept and disturbed too rapidly to be successful; although there was plenty of post-death trauma none had opened a hole large enough to successfully remove the unit.

Swallowing involuntarily, Ari set her jaw and moved closer over the body, where Tweed, her knitting and other accessories uncharacteristically neatly stowed, lined face unsmiling, examined the hands and ankles with a professional’s eye.  

“Significant trauma prior to death,” she said at last, terse for once.  “Fought off the attackers with feet and hands – see the scrapes and abrasions here and here – “ she pointed to the dirt-encrusted hands; the bloody and unshod feet.  “Tied up, apparently – “ pointing to marks about both wrists and ankles.  “You’ll be taking note of any foreign materials, of course.”  The local professionals all nodded, moving in as we moved back.  Ari took another look at the man’s face before leaving her place to the scapel-wielder.  His eyes were wide open, jaw set.  He had not gone willingly, nor unknowingly.  She’d never really understood the essence of ‘fighting to the last’ before.

As the forensics went on with the human remains, the team followed the ‘borg specialist into the next room – equally steely and echoing, but outfitted with far more accessories, including enough soft chairs on rollers to accomdate the team.  Ari sank into one gratefully, then sprang up again to assist Gorbach, whose chair had skidded as he also attempted to sit, nearly spilling him.  Biting her lips to hide a completely inappropriate smile verging on a hysterical giggle, Ari murmered a few words about chairs that always trip you up, huh, and steadied his arm.  McLadden, also hovering protectively, nodded approvingly as they both seated themselves. 

The byplay with the chairs meant everyone could avoid viewing the insertion of the bloodied, brain-encrusted CCS into the analytical equipment, and by the time they’d situated themselves all there was to see was the wallscreen with its bits and pieces of data and the flying fingers of the technicians as they scanned, sorted, catalogued and searched.  Finally, one spoke in an unexpectedly bass voice.

“Okay, everyone.  Here’s what we have on the last 30 minutes of life.  Unfortunately there’s no actual perking during that time period, but a few notes-to-self and one brief vid, including the actual death.”

Ari made an involuntary movement.  “The CCS is integrally linked and dependent on brainwaves and heartbeat,” murmered McLadden sotto voce, “but Assembly-level technologies now permit certain standard computing protocols to overtake the cyborg-driven system in the crisis state.  It can’t last long, but it’s my understanding that as long as the body’s warm…”

“Yes,” said the technician, as McLadden’s voice rose into audible question as he ended, “that’s the general characteristic of this specimen:  latest technology, definitely crisis-mode-enabled – the host wouldn’t even have to be aware and capable enough to activate it.”

Objective:  One Very Bad SciFi Novella in 30 Days (sic NaNo)

Excerpt 1:  Arrival

The hoses sucked hard; sucked every last bit from every orifice, slurped in every smidgeon of humanity she had.  Then they released with that characteristic suddenness, leaving her limp, bereft of all bodily fluids and staggering through the airlock.

McLadden put a warm arm around her shoulders, saving her just in time from a serious bruise on the bulkhead, handing over a foaming glass of the best whipped Orcusian Stim.  She inhaled, laughing with that high of the first oral intake.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it.  I downed mine already, or I’d be in Gorbach’s state over there.”  He nodded in the direction of the faded plush seating that ringed the domed observation tower, high above the landing field.  Their team leader was barely upright, his half-finished glass slanting at a dangerous angle, slumped in his seat with his eyes closed.  He appeared to be engaged in the deep breathing exercises generally taught in one’s first landing class – and dismissed thereafter by most as completely useless.

Ari, having drained her own glass and regained her own two feet, accepted another less abrasive Stim from a solicitous staffer with a murmured word of thanks.  Feeling somewhat the old trooper compared to their elderly superior, she exchanged glances with McLadden.

“I thought he was an old hand?”

McLadden shrugged.  “We were on a few teams together about twenty years ago, but other than that I think Jon sticks to his own cold planet, frankly.  He’s a potterer in the garden and a writer and a thinker.  His publications are very highly regarded, and of course his Planetary Collision Theory is still the toast of every physicists’ banquet at the Assembly level.  But I expect he’s forgotten how tough landing is.  They don’t call it ‘downfall’ for nothing.  It doesn’t get any easier with age, either.”  He gave her that wide trademark grin known in the Anthro graduate student lounge as  “The McLad-Glad.”  She grinned back wholeheartedly, squashing the hero-worshiping squiggle in the pit of the stomach without mercy.  She was a professional now, and he was a hand-picked member of her team.  And wouldn’t her fellow grads have been green with envy, had she been free to let any of them know!

She looked around the lounge, taking in the scenery for the first time.  The thick burnished glass of the dome, which began at thigh height, reflected the dim lights over the bar and the airlocks, but above their heads it vanished into breathtaking invisibility while the great starry expanse of Deluna sparkled overhead.  In that thin, virtually dust-free atmosphere the great spinning top of the galaxy seemed closer than she’s ever seen it on any of the twenty or so planets in her history.  Certainly the cloud-shrouded skies of her natal world would never have offered such a vista.  Gazing then over the horizon, she saw beyond the shadowy spikes and lights of the sprawling landing field the dim curve of rocky hills and the distant glow of Cité Primus.  Then, as she watched, the dual moons that gave this planet its name seemed to leap over the far horizon – one small and burnt orange; the other great and glowing white.  She drew an involuntary gasp.

“Impressive, eh?” murmered McLadden at her elbow, and they stood shoulder-to-shoulder in simple, silent wonder for some moments while the moons sailed free of the hills and the stars faded in their light.

Then Ari shook herself of dreams and forced her thoughts back to the task at hand.

“Where’s the fourth member of the party?”  she asked, almost to herself.

“I haven’t seen her,” said McLadden. 

“I hope she didn’t have any Downfall trouble."  Ari was suddenly worried from a logistical standpoint -- losing the fourth would be a problem.  "She seemed cocky enough before liftoff.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call Tweed ‘cocky,’ exactly.  She’s a caution, that lady!”  McLadden’s deep baritone laugh filled the lounge.  “Tweed never met a downfall she didn’t dominate yet, and I doubt she will for decades to come.”

A sour wisp of jealousy stirred.  “Well – then where IS she?”

Ari’s remark was overtopped by another laugh from across the room: female, excited, and just as penetrating as McLadden’s, although not, to Ari’s ears, nearly so pleasant.

“I expect we’re about to find out,” said McLadden, as a short bulky shape advanced on them, accompanied by a much larger but equally bulky form.  “Tweedledum and Tweedledee, indeed, if I’m not very much mistaken.”

Jealousy gave way to an admonitory hiss at his presumption as the fourth member of their evaluation team, digging in her voluminous purse and speaking a mile a minute, dragged her larger companion their way.

“….is Ariel Smith, of course,” said Dr. Tweed Dumble, still purse-hunting, “the youngest and prettiest of all of us, but definitely an administrative and authorial power-house in her own right, Rocco, don’t ever forget it.  And you know Dr. McLadden, I’m sure.”  Pausing only to draw breath while McLadden shook their host’s hand warmly, Tweed went on, “Over there’s Dr. Jon Gorbach, the famous physicist.  Have you met….”

“Not at all, delighted, delighted, delighted to finally make your acquaintance!”  said her companion, leaping over to seized both Gorbach’s hands in his own.  Fortunately their leader had managed to shake off his aftereffects and was on his own feet, smiling somewhat wanly into the fleshy twinkle of their host’s bright eyes.

Speaking over the continuing flow of introductory chatter from Tweed, Rocco Dean, Deluna Planetary Coordinator and aspiring Settlement President (depending on the outcome of their evaluation), launched into his obviously well-rehearsed opening remarks with a few preliminary coughs.

"We're equally delighted to welcome every one of you to Deluna........".