Page 57 - The Perpetrations of Captain Kaga

Serving the Chocolate Eclipse

Kaga wearily switched on the ComSet and viewed the arid wastes
of Somogo two meters above. He saw the landing pad in the
foreground; deserted, of course. The next freighter was due in three
days. Kaga hoped he would still be alive when it arrived.
He was holed up in a PKU Onsite Shelter, a small subterranean
structure set up for emergency use by deepspace crews if their ship
became stalled on a planet without repair facilities. It had few
amenities, being intended for temporary occupancy at minimal rates
of food, air, and energy consumption. Kaga was hot, dirty, and
scared. He cursed his luck in drawing Somogo at the time of an
eclipse.
Following the difficulties he had encountered in his earlier
assignments, he had taken care to verify all the reports on Somogo
once he was there. Everything was as he had been instructed. Many
PKU representatives had preceded him, and endless detail
concerning the lives of the Mulo—the intelligent species—was
recorded and analyzed.
Captain Kaga turned off the viewer and lay back on a gritty
mattress. Sand! He grimaced. Sand everywhere. It had gotten into the
pocket emergency transmitter, rendering it useless. He had
discovered that too late, finally throwing the device out of the staff
car as he fled into the desert from Joktu.
He sighed and blotted his sweaty brow with his sleeve. Joktu: the
old walled capital, citadel of the Mulorg, the ruling clan of Somogo.
Kaga’s base had been a kilometer outside those wind-eroded mud
brick walls; by now, he reflected, it has been trampled by the
macropods into two dimensions. It could have been worse, though.
He could have been inside.
Kaga’s mind wandered back to his early days on Somogo. The
relations between the Mulo and the PKU had seemed good enough.
The original trade agreement continued in force: synthetic chocolate
bars from NesLersh were delivered every forty sidereal days, received
by the Mulorg in exchange ten kilos of plastinium nuggets. The PKU
representative, in order to conform to local custom, acted as a lone
trader, bringing the chocolate in small quantities into the fortress
whenever the Mulorg desired. This practice, as ethnologically-inclined

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