Go Tell the Phoenicians

By Matthew Hughes

The primitive aliens' advanced technology makes no sense—but if Kandler can't solve the mystery, job loss will be the least of his problems.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wildside Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781479465859

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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

GO TELL THE PHOENICIANS, by Matthew Hughes

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 2005 by Matthew Hughes.

Originally published in Interzone, May-June 2005.

Published by Wildside Press, LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

GO TELL THE PHOENICIANS,

by Matthew Hughes

The K’fondi were driving Livesey and his BOOT team three stops past crazy, but that was not why the station chief hated me at first sight.

Mainly it was my record, which was laying itself out as Livesey tapped the panel of his desk display. I held myself at something like attention, set my lumpy features on bland, and looked over the chief’s regulation haircut to where the window framed the unknown hills of K’fond.

If Sector Administrator Stavrogin wasn’t biting my backside, you’d never have set down on my planet, Livesey said, "but I promise you, Kandler, while you’re attached to this establishment, you’ll go by the book. Or I’ll chase you all the way back to Earth and bury you in whatever stinking kelp farm you oozed out of."

There was more, but I had heard the like from the ranking Bureau of Offworld Trade field agent at just about every assignment I could remember. I was a foreign body in the Bureau’s innards, a maverick among a tamer breed, tolerated only because I was also BOOT’s best exo-sociologist. But wherever I was sent in, it was a sign that the field agent in charge was out of his depth. If I turned out to be the reason a mission was successful, a corresponding black mark went into the file of the BOOT bureaucrat who had screwed up.

They sent me in because I got results. But the day I stopped getting results, the uneasy symbiosis between me and the Bureau would fall apart. With luck, I might land at a Bureau training depot, lecturing batches of budding Liveseys on the intricacies of the ancient alien cultures they’d be rehearsing how to loot.

Without luck, I’d be back on Argentina’s Valdés Peninsula, stacking slimy bales of wet kelp, just as my father had done until he wore out and died. So I kept my mouth shut through the chief’s opening rant, and watched a gaggle of K’fondi boost each other over the station’s perimeter fence. They frolicked across the clipped lawn like teenagers at the beach.

Livesey turned to follow the direction of my gaze, swore bitterly, and punched his desk com.

Security, he said, "they’re back! Get them herded off