Starpiercer Sunlight's Edge.pdf - Nathaniel Acharya

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0 FORWARD ON TECHNOLOGY Feel free to skip this, though one is encouraged to give it a once-over. Sunlight's Edge and other works set in the Starpiercer universe are written through the perspectives of a variety of characters in a variety of locations. Being hard science fiction, every calculation and piece of technology was thought up in accordance with the scientific understanding of today, with an emphasis on technology currently in development, such as biological quantum computers (Cogitators) coilguns, known as Masers (shorthand for Mass-Accelerated- Slug-Electromagnetic-Rail) and spacecraft, with their speed measured in Gs of acceleration. Note also that, given highly divergent biology, most aliens cannot speak human dialects and humans likewise cannot speak theirs. Thus, the development of Glossic, via language engrams, an interstellar-mandated program of mapping understood linguistic concepts to alien languages. Invariably, some things are lost in translation when alien characters speak. Italics or [] in speech indicate an otherwise incomprehensible language (often a combination of both physical and audible signals) being deciphered through a language engram. Space ships and most other craft, to cross the vast distances that span spacetime in Starpiercer, must have their speed measured in acceleration and time, and so the standard system of charting speed is not at knots, or miles per hour, but at Gs (Gravities) of acceleration, with 1 G being roughly the equivalent of earth gravity. Given she sheer heat put out by fusion engines, they must take time to cool down, bleed off heat and radiation and replace their fuel stores, and so engines generally cannot be kept burning for more than a few hours at a time, and when moving, the crew must be secured, as they would rapidly lose consciousness with the force of acceleration acting on their bodies otherwise. This work is written as part of a two-novella-long prequel series entitled A High Tower, to the first book of the proper Starpeircer story, entitled: A Dark Frontier. Several characters from Sunlight's Edge are mentioned or appear in A Dark Frontier. All Images drawn, sketched or rendered by the author, including paper & photorealistic 3-d format Upcoming installments of the High Tower series Sunlight's Edge Midnight's Reach Short Story: A Pale Horse 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS VOLUME ONE: A CHARIOT PROLOGUE I. LIEM I II. TOMAS I III. CARCOSA I IV. TOMAS II V. LIEM II VI. TOMAS III VII CARCOSA II IIX TOMAS IV IX CARCOSA III X TOMAS V XI: CARCOSA IV XII: TOMAS VI XIII: LIEM III XIV: TOMAS VII XV: INTERLUDE: CRISIS XVI: TOMAS VIII XVII: LIEM IV: XVIII: TOMAS IX XIX: CARCOSA V XX: TOMAS IX 2 3 4 A HIGH TOWER VOLUME I SUNLIGHT’S EDGE 5 PROLOGUE 6 7 PROLOGUE “I’m going to toss that bastard in a pot and eat him alive.” Jaemus ignored Mercator, and stamped his feet together, huffed on his raw, red hands, and wished for probably the eighth time today that he’d brought a damned hotsuit, as he lay here freezing among the long, wind-tousled strands of coarse grass. He blew on his hands again. This grass was the thousandth generation of it’s kind that had been grown locally on the planet. Why they couldn’t grow something more comfortable to hide in was anyone’s guess. Mercator touched his shoulder and he looked up. “He’s here.” Jaemus squinted into the distance. Half a mile away, in a long, much-filled groove cut into the mottled greenish copper-rich substrate half a century ago, the shuttle touched down. It’s glowing hot belly settled into the lichen-choked swampy inlet, steaming in the brackish water like a winded animal against the yellow-blue backdrop of the twisting sky. He grimaced. He’d never really liked the sky near Vikkenhill. It looked sickly, and made him feel like every breath he took was laden with copper particulate. But then again, that’s why people flocked to the place. Copper was half the reason Sundari mattered at all. 8 “I wonder how Parlons taste,” Mercator went on, clearly still indulging in his overblown satire, which, today, seemed to revolve around eating their pilot. Jaemus rubbed his hands together, and thrust them deep into the chest pockets of his coat, glancing both ways and rising to his knees. The shuttle off in the distance flexed its wide, glowing radiator fins, and it’s wings slowly telescoped upwards. It was nearly five minutes before Jaemus figured it was cool enough to approach. He and Mercator rose out of the long grass, and trudged over the loamy, mineral-rich ground, work boots sinking into the thick mud and then squelching when they pulled them up, a lurid sucking sound that accompanied each step. “Oi!” shouted Mercator, cupping his own hands, gloved, like a sensible person, around his mouth and hollering up at the bulk of the shuttle. “Hap, you bleedin’ idiot, lower the ramp! You’re late!” Jaemus glanced around reflexively and fought down the urge to tell Mercator to keep his voice down, even though the shuttle’s roar would have carried much further than any organic hollering. In the distance, the city lights of Vikkenhill, habitation and searchlight both, threaded through the mist and fog of the predawn, playing about the clouds. On instinct, he pulled his hood closer to him. They wouldn’t see them this far from the mine-city. And anyways, they wouldn’t care, probably. Compact business was business not to be disturbed. The hiding was just a precaution. After nearly thirty seconds of Mercator’s irate bellowing, the shuttle hissed, leaking pressurized air in a long, slow blast, while the smooth, white surface at its bow split open. A long ramp thudded anticlimactically into the filthy runoff water. “About time,” grumbled Mercator, sliding down the flooded groove’s edge, and wading up to his knees in the slurry to clamber onto the ramp. Jaemus made a face and followed, with one last look back at Vikkenhill. Good riddance. “Six bloody months of sitting around in the darkest furtive corner of Sundari’s muddy colon,” Mercator was saying loudly, as Jaemus followed him into the shuttle’s dark hold. “For what? A bloody rock.” “Artifact,” corrected Jaemus, as the hatch closed behind them. For a moment, they were plunged into darkness. 9 Then the interior lights came on, and the hold of the Expatriate was bathed in a harsh, white glow, that shone off of the silvery wall plating of it’s cramped, narrow, and empty cargo hold, about the size of a residence’s hallway. Jaemus patted the shining titanium alloy plate nearest him fondly, and looked up at Mercator. The man was taller, as all Sundari natives were, but he looked like hell. Half an hour of belly-crawling through mud flows, swimming through exobio ponds and wading into the flooded pits of copper strip-mines had turned his usually pristine long hair and beard into a wild, matted tangle that made him look like the way people thought of the progenitor of mankind when they had still lived on the Lost Homeworld. They stood there, dripping like sentient mud-men, before Mercator reached up to squeeze a stinking lump of filth from his hair. “Next time,” he complained. “We walk through the front gate and just flash our Compact tats if anyone takes an issue.” “Next time,” Jaemus pointed out, starting for the ramp that led to the upper deck. “We won’t have to be absolutely sure we’re not spotted. So we won’t have to crawl through slime.” “Sure,” the other one grunted. “The Compact better look for its next ancient treasure on Mundran or Cyrene or somewhere warm and nice.” He scowled at his own distorted reflection in the mirrored wall paneling. “I’m going to the steamer, I need to clean off all of this gunk.” “I’ll see you abovedeck,” said Jaemus softly, trudging the rest of the way up the ramp, and into the Expatriate’s cramped little cockpit. She may have been one of the newest and most cutting-edge ships in the Compact of Exiles’ tiny, ragtag naval fleet, but she was a bit…small. He glanced at the mirrored titanium, and his own grey eyes looked back at him. His hair, the electric blue streak down the side usually visible, was matted with caked slurry. He frowned. It didn’t feel right letting it be obscured by mud. He’d clean it later. For now, they needed to prep to leave. He slid a hand lightly over the cockpit door panel, and it hissed open soundlessly. “You certainly took your time, Hap,” he greeted the alien at the controls. The Parlon, tucked into the sunken, oval-shaped acceleration pod at the front of the ship, it’s long tendrils caressing the controls as it keyed through the preflight maneuvers, whistled a songbird-like apology. [It was delayed. Security concerns. Curious customs officials. Important to the mission.] “It’s alright,” said Jaemus, easing into the seat just above and behind the Parlon. “Though Mercator did say something about cooking you.” He sighed. It was nice to take the weight off of his feet. 10 [Yes. It represents the shellfish of your lost homeworld. It has heard this often. It does not worry. Tristaine Mercator will not eat it.] “Right.” Jaemus fished into his pocket, and produced the little cargolith. The hexagonal piece of hardware, that held the artifact they’d spent so long looking for. “This little thing should be worth a lot of money.” [Indeed. A piece of a LUMAR. It recently conferred with command. To the right buyer, this artifact will capture for our organization a sum enough for at least two more ships, and their crew.] Jaemus looked back down at it. “And it was just lying there in the bottom of that drillshaft?” [Thus so.] He looked back up, and pocketed the cargolith again as Mercator entered the room, shaking his head like a damp hound and sliding into his own seat. He threw a look at Jaemus’s mud-spattered coat and waders, and then sighed and strapped in. Jaemus followed his example. The Expatriate was a Parlon design, and reflected their long, segmented bodies, ten-spectral vision, and aquatic building style, with long, narrow corridors, shiny metal walls, and much more resistant to onboard humidity than most human ships. The cockpit was built like the front of a submersible, a slung bubble, jutting from the fore of the ship. He’d noticed a while ago, how human shuttles mimicked birds, or Yovian vessels were all suited to three-dimensional movement and efficacy of space. The Expatriate, an Ondaprapar class shuttle mimicked a Parlon, replete with a sensor mast jutting right out of the cockpit, like their own fluted proboscis. Slowly, with methodical precision, Hap took them through preflight, and then keyed on the engines with a flex of one claw. Within minutes, the shuttle rose, it’s belly dripping, out of the the lichen-clogged mud-river, wobbling on belching VTOL thrusters like a drunk in the early hours of the morning, and lurching upwards into the sky. “Watch your flying,” grunted Mercator, without really paying attention to the Parlon as they slowly rose up, following the progress of the big craggy hills, all shot with visible veins of dull green and mottled brown copper “So, what is it?” asked Mercator, nodding to Jaemus’s pocket, as they rose into an obscuring fog of clouds, blackened by the soot produced by the smelting towers. 11 Jaemus smiled and pulled it out of his pocket again. “Maker tech.” He held it up and rattled it around. “Probably around half a million to a million years old. It’s amazing it hasn’t deteriorated.” Hap turned one eyestalk around from his command pod to regard Jaemus. [The Most Eminent Mathemeticians could understand equations it is impossible for a being that lives and dies to contemplate. It would be no great feat for them to construct something that would last this long. Do you recall the topless towers that fix the very plates of Steelfall, or the great sunken cities of Destro, the red sands of Morning’s Bell, that life quivers to behold?] Jaemus shifted uneasily in his seat. It was true that, of the things the Makers had created, not a single one of them was without a corresponding sense of awe as well as practical application. But the reverence some peoples showed them flew in the face of the recorded histories. “You talk like they were gods.” [The Parlons have no gods. But the humanist concept is adequate to describe the Tripartite of the Elder Scientists. The Eminent Mathematicians, the Venerable Sociologists, and the Engineers of Life.] Jaemus blinked and shielded his eyes as the rising Expatriate burst through the cloud layer in a spray of white, and skimmed above the moist blanket, riding under the brilliant daylight of Sunduset, which burned far above. Jaemus reached up to flick on the temperature control, and cool, slightly damp air washed across his face. He couldn’t do anything about the damp. Parlons always built their ships to be damp. He stood. “Well, whatever it is, it’ll fund the war effort.” He jerked a thumb back belowdecks. “I’m going to the steam closet to wash all of this mess off.” By the time he had finished washing off and returned to the cockpit, he knew that they were above much more pleasant landscapes. The cloud cover had broken, revealing below them the empty and mostly-untouched wilderness of Sundari. Down below, it’s ecosystem, still relatively fragile after three hundred years of terraforming, was thriving. Every homeworld animal that could be engineered to survive the purified atmosphere and thrive in the bare, craggy sunlit peaks, and stark shadowed gorges of the world was doing its best to populate the planet to its fullest extent. And by the reports he’d seen coming in, the world’s terraforming initiative was well on schedule. Sundari was experiencing an explosion of life, imported from right before the Lost Homeworld had become lost, and stored from the Lost Homeworld’s prehistory as well. He 12 shuddered for a moment, remembering how he’d had to rappel down into the trilobite-filled waters below the drillshaft to get at the artifact. Jaemus rubbed his scalp with a quick-absorb quick-dry towel, and looked down through the cockpit floor. A mile beneath, the coppery crags raced below them. He glanced over at Mercator, whose head was lolling. The man was dozing in his seat already. “Hey,” he woke him up with a soft word, doing his best not to disturb Hap’s concentration. Parlons, it turned out, loved to fly, for such naturally aquatic creatures. “What?” groaned Mercador, straightening upright. Jaemus’s rig beeped loudly. “I need a detox. I feel like all that copper near Vikkenhill got in my aerix or something.” The man nodded and blearily passed him a tiny translucent capsulet. In a long-practiced motion, he pushed the capsule into the little metal ring embedded just underneath his collarbone. It took just a moment for the toxin filters to cycle. A small price to pay for twice the piss. “Now,” said Mercador. “It’s a three hour flight all the way around the planet, so please don’t wake me up unless you have to.” Jaemus frowned. “You can sleep at the base. We’ve got our next assignment.” He indicated the rectangular metallic device strapped to his wrist. “Check your rig.” “God, why is freedom fighting such exhausting fucking work,” grumbled Mercador, straightening up and checking his instruments. “Oh, great, meet with some colonial ass-sucker on Tylo, huh? The hell on Tylo is useful at all?” Jaemus checked the rig too. It was a simple -and rather odd and succinct message. “Do we even have a Tylo branch?” asked Mercator. “I mean why? there’s nothing there but a bunch of sand and dune bumpkins.” Jaemus shrugged. “Maybe the Tralfarians are operating clandestines in the system, and the Colonies want us to check it out.” Mercador grimaced. “The Colonies have a whole military for that, not to mention way better intelligence. We’re what, a hundred thousand pissed off refugees with century-old freighters?” He looked up at Mercator. “What happened to Azure Dawn can’t happen to Tylo too. It’s just one system over from us at any rate, it shouldn’t take too long to swing by.” “Buddy,” said Mercator, straightening up further. “Tylo’s already worse off than Azure Dawn, and they didn’t even have an extinction-level shipping accident pop off in orbit.” 13 Jaemus felt his brow furrow angrily, and he tried to calm it down. “It wasn’t an accident. The Tralfarians-” “Look, I know you’re Azurene, it’s hard to forget, what with the blue hair and constant fervor” groaned Mercator. “But I didn’t join up with the Compact for Azure Dawn, and I sure as hell didn’t sign on for Tylo.” He leaned back. “They threatened Sundari. This is the system I signed on to protect.” Jaemus sighed. “Merca-...Tristaine. You can’t just pick and choose your battles based on what benefits you personally. We have to fight for the good of everyone the Tralfarians menace, or Azure Dawn’s destruction, Ravest’s blockade, Sundari’s disarmament...or some other atrocity will go down on Tylo. And it’s our duty to stop it.” “What, two humans, a Parlon, this ship and a couple of off-brand masers? Stop the whole Tralfarian kingdom and the Royal Navy? Want to throw in the Junior Guards too, for that matter?” Jaemus could tell that Mercator’s heart wasn’t really in the bitching though. “Come off it, I didn’t say that. Just that we do our job.” “Hey,” grumbled Mercator. “I hate the Tralfarians as much as the next guy in the Compact, but I seriously think we’re getting rolled into some weird shadow war branch of the Colonial military, with how much we’ve been cozying up to them lately.” He gestured at his rig. “Tylo isn’t even in the Sundari Gulf DMZ. It’s in the Colonies. This is a job for the Colonial Defence Fleet, not us.” “What if there were Compact partisans in the system that need saving?” He frowned. “Maybe that’s what’s going on.” “That would be a different story,” grunted Mercator, turning back to his instruments. “Compact stays together. But I’m not exactly excited about the idea of setting up a permanent base in Colonial territory. Sounds too much like we’re being turned into their unofficial attack dog.” Hap whistled something, and Jaemus blinked. “What?” Hap whistled again, more urgent this time. [It registers a ship approaching from orbit. One thousand kilometers out.] Jaemus leaned back into his acceleration chair and pulled his scopes into place. “Yeah. Pullo type cargo shuttle. It’s in combat configuration.” He frowned. “The Colonial Entente mostly uses Pullo types, right? We should be in the clear. Transmit our Compact codes at them, 14 they’ll give us a pass.” Hap whistled an affirmative, and his tendrils snaked over several other knobs and dials, and the one solitary touchpad in his pilot’s pod. Mercator kept glowering into his scopes. “They got our codes, but that shuttle’s still on an approach run. It’s pulling one G.” “That’s pretty leisurely, yeah?” asked Jaemus. He didn’t know a ton about spaceflight. They were a recon team, not a combat group. Mercator nodded, and then looked again. “They’ve picked up to two Gs. they’ll be on us in five minutes.” Hap whistled again. [It is receiving a tightband transmission. Direct from the shuttle.] “Where the hell did it come from?” demanded Mercator, shifting his scopes wildly. “There’s no launch ship I can see.” Hap honked a deep, bass reply in the Parlon speech. [The Shuttle must have came from around the penumbra.] Then it repeated it’s whistling wheedle [They are still hailing us. They are jamming long range communications as well]. Jaemus blinked. This was utterly baffling. Was the shuttle pursuing them? He nodded at Hap, who had one of his compound eyes swung all the way around to regard him. The alien stroked a bump on the rim of his pilot pod, and a no- nonsense, harsh voice filled the cockpit. “Shuttle Expatriate. This is Colonial Guard Demilitarization Enforcement Shuttle Six- Four-Zed. You will land your craft immediately, or you will be fired upon. Repeat. You will land your craft immediately, or you will be fired upon.” There was a long silence in the cockpit. A pair of brown eyes, a pair of grey eyes, and a trio of iridescent compound eyes locked with each other in turn, before Mercatore nodded. “Put her down. It was all the Parlon needed to hear, apparently. Jaemus opened the tightband again. “Alright, Shuttle six-four-zed. We’re putting down. Transmitting landing coordinates now. But be advised, we’re a Compact shuttle. We have an agreement with the Colonial Secretariat-” “We are aware. You will put down, shuttle Expatriate. Now.” The tone brooked no further dialogue. Jaemus sank back into his seat, the first twinges of fear clenching his gut. Fifteen minutes later, Hap brought them into a low bank over a flat section of crag. Jaemus checked the long-range scopes. No habitation or signs of population for three hundred 15 klicks. The closest dwellings were at a tiny little macroplankton-tending farming community perhaps four hundred klicks away. [It is not familiar with landing on solid ground,” protested Hap. “Parlon ships are meant to land in water-] “We know,” said Mercator. “Just set her down wherever you can. These guys sound pissed. It shouldn’t take too long. Probably just a routine search.” He exchanged a look with Jaemus. Colonial troops weren’t supposed to search Compact ships though. They had an agreement. The Expatriate thudded it’s way over a grassy sward on a highland crag, well lit by sunlight. Jaemus saw a few lizard breeds, seeded on this world two centuries ago, scuttle out of the way of her VTOL jets as she touched down, and the landing struts, only meant to be used in emergencies, clattered against the bare rock and thin grassy soil of the cliff. The three of them gathered at the base of the ramp, Jaemus, taller Mercator, and Hap, nearly the size of a horse next to them both, crouched on his many legs. The Colonial shuttle settled into a pristine, military-style landing not half a hundred meters away, the two big maser cannons swiveling to track them. Jaemus stared them down, trying to feel brave. And then, still hovering, it’s belly hatch opened, and three CEDF guardsmen hopped out, their bulky, rounded armor obscuring their gender and form, and tinted faceplates covering their faces. All that he could tell was that all three of them were human. “On your knees,” called the lead man. Behind his faceplate, Jaemus could just make out a strong chiseled jaw, and a bristly moustache. Absurdly, as he sank to his knees, Jaemus wondered how Hap, with his many joints had interpreted it. The Parlon’s segmented legs buckled nonetheless, and he sank onto his lower carapace. “Konrad,” called the lead man, to another. “Pull a dump from their main cogitator.” “On it, sir.” One of the three sidestepped them, and vanished up the ramp, boots clanking on the metal. The other two looked them over for a long moment. “You were just now ordered to Tylo,” said the lead man. It was a statement, not a question. Jaemus felt one of Hap’s eyes on him. How could they have known? Unless they’d been eavesdropping. This didn’t feel like such a routine search anymore. The rocky earth dug into Jaemus’s knees awkwardly. He looked up at the two soldiers, confused. 16 “Answer the question,” barked the second soldier, hefting the lethal rectangle of a maser carbine. Jaemus felt the worry increase. These guys weren’t acting like Guards. They were acting like something else. They had a looser chain of command. “Yeah,” said Mercator, slowly. “We were.” Jaemus’s mouth felt dry. “Yeah, these are the guys,” said the second soldier. “Compact agents. They confirmed it over the comms too. And one of them always has encrypt codes. Memorized, probably. I doubt they just gave them a datalith.” A datalith...was this about the cargolith? Jaemus reached into his pocket, and instantly regretted it. Both of the soldiers snapped their masers up to point directly at his head. “This is the cargolith we found. If you’re looking for it.” He held it up like a peace offering. They must have been dispatched to retrieve it. It must be more valuable than they had thought. The lead soldier reached down to snatch the cargolith, and then opened it, dropping a tiny oblong of dark stonelike material into his hand. The size was deceptive. Jaemus saw his hand drop just a little bit with the weight of it. “The hell is this?” He pocketed it anyways, stowing the cargolith somewhere in one of the many pouches strapped to his matte-beige armor. “No, we want the encrypt data.” Jaemus frowned. “What?” “Encrypt codes. Encryption codes for secure Compact transmissions. Now.” Mercator and Hap both looked at him. He nodded. “I know the encrypt codes. If I tell you, will you let us go?” The man locked his faceplate with Jaemus’s. “Spill ‘em.” Jaemus said nothing. Why did they want them? he looked at the other two. Mercator shook his head slowly. Jaemus kept his mouth shut. He hoped they didn’t realize that they kept encryption codes in the main cogitator. The lead soldier raised his rifle and fired point blank. Mercator never even had the chance to widen his eyes. In a snap-clack of magnetic rails and a flash of blue-green fire, the top of his head vanished in a shower of goo, scorched chunks of skull, the hair still clinging to it, hitting the nearby rocks and the white shuttle armor, sticking there. Some of it sprayed onto Hap’s exoskeleton. The Parlon honked in distress. Jaemus stared, and Mercator’s body pitched 17 forwards, the truncated, empty head hitting the earth with a sickening crunch. Blood and some half-cooked soup of liquified brain oozed out to run freely in the brittle grass and stain the rocks. The lead soldier peered down at Mercator’s truncated head and shattered braincase. “Well look at that, the codes aren’t in there,” he said, his voice smirking. Then he turned to Jaemus. “The encryption codes. Now. Or the Parlon gets it next.” Jaemus stared, mouth working soundlessly. Just like that. Just like that, Mercator was gone. Just like that. [It does not wish you to give up the encrypt codes-] Jaemus snapped out of it at the Parlon’s whistle. “Don’t be an idiot, they’ll just pull them out of the cog-” he caught himself. [These are not Colonial Guards. They are masquerading as-] Five more shots turned the brightly lit mountaintop into double the charnel house it already was. Jaemus stared. The Parlon lay on the ground, segmented legs twitching weakly, most of its upper body blasted into chunks of iridescent carapace and wet meat. One of it’s compound eyes had been detonated by a maser-slug. The second soldier put one foot on the Parlon’s thorax, and fired another trio of shots into the still-writhing body. But...Parlons are peaceful by nature, he thought. Why would they do that? Some other part of him knew he should be having a greater reaction at it, but it was like he was viewing this whole scene from a great distance. “Aimes?” called a voice from inside the shuttle. “I’ve pulled the dump. The encrypts were in the main cogitator.” The lead soldier nodded brusquely. They didn’t even need to do it. They could have just gotten them all along. He stared hollowly. “You never planned on letting us live, did you?” It wasn’t much, and it certainly didn’t feel like triumphant last words. If anything, it felt almost misplaced. Anticlimactic, even. The lead trooper looked down at him. “Smart kid.” Jaemus wondered just what in Solace these mockingbird killers would do with the encrypts now. He certainly wouldn’t be alive to find out. He looked up. “You’re going to Tylo,” he said, dully. He was looking into the barrel of a maser rifle. 18 The death squad said nothing. Their tinted helmets impassive, shadowed by the sunlight behind them. Somewhere, he heard grass rustle, and a distant insect chirp. A bird called it’s high, plaintive wail far above, in the bright and sunny sky. He focused on the maser, and the armored hand that held it. He saw a finger twitch on the trigger, squeezing, tightening- 19 Chapter I LIEM I The early noontide sun beat down onto the terraced settlement with a heat and intensity that rivalled what it must have felt like to stand a few feet from a burning house, and Liem wasn’t supposed to be out here. In fact, he was supposed to be working. Everyone else was finishing up their lunch in their sealed habitats, or going back to their stations, but he’d hidden himself away in the shaded, leafy solitude of a tomato growpit, adding a few extra minutes onto his meal break. He knew he shouldn’t be out in direct sunlight this close to noon, but he didn’t care. He was almost fourteen. He’d go back to work when he felt like it. Besides, the fertilizer room stank to high heaven, and didn’t make for a very appealing dining place. “In your last message,” he began, holding his rig up close to his mouth. “You said that you would like to see real sunlight someday.” He glanced up and squinted. A quarter of sky was taken up by the star Tyluset and its blazing corona. He sat down, his back against a low wall of white glassine, and reached down to idly pick at the dirt as he talked. It was nice and cool in the shade “I’d wager it wouldn’t be too much to your liking. The sunlight here almost hits you like a brick.” Above, Tyluset glowered down at him like the eye of an angry god. He scooted a little further into the shade. My grandfather said once that when our ancestors first came to Tylo, it was from Cyrene. He said that there, the sun was warm and pleasant, and the breezes cool.” As if to punctuate his point, the tomato plants around him, walling him off in his private little world 20 of dirt and leaves rustled, and a hot, dry breath of wind, like a gust from a smelting furnace grated across his face, tousling his hair. “Not really the case here.” The rig strapped to his wrist dutifully turned his worlds into text as he spoke, and he turned his arm slightly, to check the word count on the screen. He wiped a bead of sweat off his forehead. “Right now, it’s the middle of the day. Work just started, but it’s too hot to be outside.” He paused. A few feet away, an imported housefly, no doubt also sheltering from the oppressive heat of Tylo’s too-close sun landed on a tomato, and rubbed its forelimbs together. He shooed it away, but made sure not to hurt it. Bad for the ecosystem. “Honestly, it feels like we live in two different universes. You told me that you’d never seen real sunlight, and I’ve never seen a real city. I couldn’t imagine what it’s like on Steelfall. Towers everywhere. People everywhere. Ships coming and going. Sounds exciting.” He paused, and sifted a hand through the dirt as he talked. It was cool with moisture, and soothing on his skin. “Then again, Tylo probably sounds exciting to you. Sunlight, plants...the cities at the north pole even get pure rain every couple of years. Not that it really does anything.” He smiled sadly at the plants around him. “They say that it’ll take another four hundred years to get the terraforming really going at this rate.” He paused, He didn’t want to talk about work. Tracy, even though she was light-years away, was the only girl he’d ever spoken to that he hadn’t spent his whole life around. He could count the number other girls his age in Filhab Seven on both hands and still have a finger left over. And having known them his whole life, it made the idea of having any sort of interest in them…strange, to say the least. He’d kind of liked Rara, but she’d spent every last chit she’d earned since joining the workforce for a ticket offworld. He hadn’t heard from her since. “It’s really not that bad here though. Kind of nice. Only three hundred people in our habitat, so it’s got a nice sense of community. But I’d sure like to see a city someday.” He paused. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. I’ll send you a picture, and you can send me a picture of Steelfall. It’ll make the message a bit shorter, but you know what they say about pictures.” Some ancient proverb from the Lost Homeworld, half-remembered from lessons he’d always slept through. Something about a thousand words. 21 He would have liked to send a video, so she could get more of a feel for his arid little home, but the data limit would be strained enough with a picture. He raised his wrist again. “Rig, link.” The little plasticine rod slipped out of the rig’s dispenser, and he raised it, trying to get a good shot. There. The tops of the tomato plants protruded just over the grow-pit’s edge, and he could get a good picture of Filhab Seven’s amphitheater-like structure without having to leave the shade. He squeezed the link, and it beeped, downloading the visual to his letter. He peered at it. The tiered levels that made up the down-pointing cone of Filhab Seven, the various grow pits outside of the habitation modules on this level, the level above, where the habitation cone’s supplies were stored, then the high wall that kept them safe from dust storms. He was pleased that the photograph had also got just a bit of the water-pool at the floor of the cone, housing the indescribably precious ecosystem of precious macroplankton -the cornerstone of any terraforming project. “Well, that’s Filhab Seven.” He said. “That’s what Tylo looks like. Inside the habitats anyways” He loved his planet. Too bad it was known as something of a joke to the rest of the Colonies. He couldn’t be mad at his family for moving out to Tylo when the system’s L.U.M.A.R had activated. It was an opened star system. An appetizing place to go for a poor family. Jobs were easy to get, and everyone had planned to work hard to terraform their new world, no matter what mean-spirited jokes that passed for humor on the other Colonies were traded behind their backs. No matter that some worlds on the Frontier already had breathable atmospheres after only a century of terraforming, and Tylo’s had taken three hundred years to aggregate this far. His family had been Dusters for four hundred years, and proud of it. “Alright Tracy, I’m near my data limit. Talk to you later. Liem.” He sighed and hit the rig’s send key. Whenever the skiff network got the message to Steelfall, a good hundred light years away, Tracy could start reading it. Probably a few weeks at least. It would be the new year by then. He glanced up again into the blue, empty sky. Eighteen-hour days and one orbit around the star every three hundred rotations. Just at the inner edge of the life zone, Tylo was no easy place to call home. But it was 22 home, like it or not. He thumbed off the recorder program, and his rig cooled down imperceptibly against his arm. “Still moping?” Liem blinked and started, nearly tripping and falling into the nearest fragile cluster of tomato plants. He turned and looked up. Temba’s long, dark face was peering over the edge of the grow pit above him. “Moping, dustie?” “Yeah,” said his cousin. “You been mooning your way all around Seven since you started talking to that Corporate girl.” Liem frowned, and made his careful way through the plants to the grow-pit’s ladder. “Chug piss, dustie,” he advised as he climbed. “Just because she’s from Steelfall doesn’t make her corporate.” Temba shrugged and offered him a hand to pull him out of the pit of soil and tomatoes. “Hey little man, don’t get your wires crossed. I’m just trying to make sure you do your job.” Temba crossed his arms and gave him a wide grin. Liem had always been short and broad, while his cousin was tall, and long-limbed, with the family’s high cheekbones. His skin was a deep, dark teak, the color of rich soil, and his thick curly hair was tied up in a bun behind his head. He was the absolute picture of a duster workman, and he let everyone know it. “I can do my job just fine,” said Liem, crossing his arms. “I’m almost fourteen.” Temba said nothing, and merely tapped his rig, and displayed the local time. “Workers who’re almost fourteen shouldn’t be thirty minutes overdue at their station.” Liem rolled his eyes. “We’re not exactly on the most important work here, you know. Making sure we all have an even coating of bugs in our shit isn’t high on what I’d call my priorities.” Temba shook his head in a way that his cousin probably thought made him look sagelike. To Liem, it just made him look pompous. He was only four years older than him anyways. So what if he’s supervisor? It’s only because he was born earlier. 23 “Liem,” he said. “You know just as well as anyone that this is important work we do here. BE is just as important as working on the hydrogen separators.” He shrugged. “And I’m Overseer. I’ll give you a few minutes, but you can’t be shirking this much dustie. What’ll the other filhabs think when they hear about it?” “Bacterial Ecosystems Overseer. You’re the king of shit,” pointed out Liem, his voice flat. “And I’m your one subject. I don’t mind it, but it’s not like anything will happen if I step away from the station for a few minutes.” What’s the worst that would happen, the bacteria would stop fucking? Oh no. Even so, he stood up, and began zipping up his environment suit. It got too hot to wear it without coolant-filled robes over the top during the day, and it wasn’t like he was going to sacrifice his clean robes in the shit-room, so he’d opened all the closures to come outside. Temba had done the same, and nodded towards the lift that would take them down into the bowels of Filhab Seven’s upside-down cone superstructure. Liem followed, and made a rude gesture at his cousin’s back. He would have liked a few more minutes to himself. Just enough time to sit and think. “You know,” his cousin said, pulling a clear plastic hood over his dark curls. “I don’t mind that you have a net-friend. God knows there’s not exactly a lot of girls my own age here. I did the same at your age. You’ll outgrow it” Liem didn’t reply, and checked his rig instead. They both stepped into the decaying old lift and Liem touched the activation pad. “Level Four,” he said loudly. With a metallic groan, the old platform began to chug haltingly downwards. Rust- stained walls slowly rose on all four sides as they descended into dimly-lit darkness, the same as forty generations of dusters before them had, and forty more probably would after they were dead. “But, net-friend or not” his cousin went on, probably oblivious to the fact that Liem was still a little mad at him for finding his hiding spot. “You can’t let it get in the way of your work.” “We’re the joke of the Colonies,” grumbled Liem, pulling on his own plastic hood as the ancestral elevator creaked to a stop. A pair of equally rusted doors stood before them, a red bar over the top of it reading “LEVEL FOUR: WASTE PROCESSING” A small biohazard alert sigil flashed warningly next to the words. 24 Liem reached for the plastine rebreather mask at his waist, and his cousin grabbed his arm. “they mock us because we’re the only real frontier planet in the Colonies. Don’t let it get you down, they’re just jealous. You remember your meds?” He hadn’t. How had he forgotten? “Sorry, no. Slipped my mind.” “Boyo,” warned Temba, his face disapproving. Liem reached into a suit pouch and pulled out his pill cannister. Collicidals. Anti-cancer meds. Every Duster alive had to take them daily, what with their work in the harsh, direct sunlight, under a meager magnetosphere. He popped one, and Temba nodded approvingly, and tapped his head with a long finger. “Stay on your ball, daywalker.” Both of them donned the thick plastine rebreathers that would filter out the worst of the smell and prevent fecal contamination, and pulled their long waders up to their chests. The room was only marginally cooler than the outside. Their heavy rubber boots clanked on the grated metal floors as they both stepped up to the immense steel pit at the room’s center, where fourteen tons of human waste steamed below them like a foul sea. Liem took his place at one of the two stations and keyed in the startup sequence. His voice was muffled as he responded to his cousin, and he had to speak over the groaning metallic din of the huge mechanical arms that sank into the waste and churned it, mixing it with local sand. It hadn’t been hard to get sand. Everything outside of the habitation cones scattered across Tylo’s surface, and it’s three walled cities was either endless, trackless sand dunes or hard-packed earth with little water to speak of. “I think I can let it get me down as much as I like,” he protested. “We all know the terraforming project’s stupid anyways. Everyone on this sandball works on it, and what do we have to show?” “Breathable atmosphere,” pointed out Temba. His cousin moved a joystick this way and that, showering the mixed dung and sand with little packets of fertilizer containing the eggs of microbial lifeforms, either donated from the larger farms in the cities, or imported from offworld. Liem shrugged. He’d grown up in the supposedly-new atmosphere. He hadn’t seen any change in his lifetime. Out in these dust plains, so far from the polar cities, they still couldn’t grow plants outside their filhabs, what with the high winds and persistent dust storms. “Not much of one,” he said, voicing his thoughts. “No moon, we’ll never have tides if we ever get oceans. Not even an Orbital to get goods from the outer system. Our air’s as thin as we can breath, and people still die 25 sometimes.” He scowled. “Face it, we’ll never complete the terraforming. Is it so bad to want to live somewhere where people don’t have to wear an oxygen tank when they sleep?” In a nearby corridor, he heard someone pass by on some errand or another. His older cousin looked up at him, eyes sparkling. “That’s where you’re wrong.” Liem checked the saturation levels, shut off the sand-mixer and turned on the sprinkler, which came to life with a squeak and a hiss. That he had to be careful with. Water was always a commodity on Tylo. Essential for both the terraforming and for just plain living. They only saw thin clouds a few times a year. “What do you mean, dustie?” Temba grinned cheekily, saying nothing, and checked the display on the console he stood in front of, and then shut his own mixer off. With a clunk, a pair of metal floor sections ground out and closed over the stinking tub of dung, sand, water and microbes that would eventually become fertile soil. It didn’t feel right that they were only allowed to use a little bit of it for their grow-pits, and had to ship most of it off to the poles or the big cities so the greenies could use it for their stupid municipal gardens. There was an immense sucking sound, and the huge fans on one side of the wall spun up, pulling all of the fecal matter still floating in the air into their intakes, where it would be sprayed out onto the sand wastes outside of their little Filhab. That part always gave him a little bit of the trembles. Sometimes he felt like the big intakes would suck him in and chop him up. He enjoyed the breeze, though, despite the fact that it literally smelled like shit. When the blades had stopped churning, his cousin took off his filter mask and opened a zipper, pulling out a little pebble of mixed nicotine salts, antinausea drugs and amphetamines. Leim held out a hand and Temba passed him one. “Truth be, I don’t like these pillies,” said Temba. “But better’n starving or sleeping on the job, I guess.” He popped it into his mouth. “Bet greenies don’t have to take ‘em. Dusters be drugged up our whole lives so the Greenies can built their rockshaw cities.” Liem pulled his own mask off and lowered his hood, swallowing the pill before the smell of the room hit him, and hit him it did. He didn’t really mind it at this point, but sometimes on a 26 bad day he’d feel queasy. The pills helped with that, not to mention they kept you awake and stimmed up in the exhausting heat. “You changed the subject.” Said Liem suspiciously. “What was that about me being wrong?” His cousin’s smile had that self-assured type of happiness in it that only came from withholding information. Liem loved Temba, but sometimes he was an ass. “You watch news lately?” Liem shook his head and checked the pressure gauge inside of the now-sealed waste basin. Still just fine. “Ah, cuzzo you gotta keep up to date. You know the man Saelus Percival?” Everyone knew about Secretary Percival. The Duster who talked like a Greenie. The representative secretary of Filhab Four-Nine, down by the south pole. “Yeah? What about him?” “He presented this theory, got himself an asteroid specialist. There was a vote. Full planetwide, you ain’t seen it?” Liem shook his head. “I can’t vote for another two years.” Temba grinned. “Well they say that the Secretariat had a meeting. There’s gonna be a mission soon. Out to the Asteroid Belt. Half a year long.” He showed his teeth in a proud, atavistic smile. “They bringing us the biggest rock out there, parking it in orbit. Turn it to a space station.” Liem couldn’t believe it. That had been the biggest bar to their terraforming project to date. They had no space station in orbit, no moon, nothing but a few satellites and one lonely observation module. The nearest dock in the system -the only dock in the system- was just a skiff station at the LUMAR array, five and a half million miles away. “Are you serious?” “As a sandstorm,” said Temba. “They gonna build it right in orbit. Drag the biggest rock from the belt right back here, put some quarters in it, some docks, you know? Once they do, we’re gonna have trade. We’re gonna be able to make our own ships. Start grabbin’ ice and 27 metal from the belt. Uranium and copper and such. No more imported water from other systems.” Liem blew out a breath. Wow. This was big news. “Are the Colonies sending ships to help bring it in?” Temba shook his head. “Nah, think we’re important enough for that? With everyone moving out to the Frontier? Who wants to develop this little corner of the Colonies? No, the Secretariat’s doing a contract with the Corporate Alliance. They’ll send us some big-rig rock hauler.” Temba grinned at Liem, and he felt his own excitement at the prospect begin to stir. “We’re gonna be green boyo. After all these years.” 28 CHAPTER II 29 Chapter II Tomas I It’s name was 86-Trager, by designation, but as of now, Tylo’s greatest project still lacked a name for it’s most valuable actor. Tomas Gallenhorst only stared, as it spun in the darkness of the void, a huge black bulk, rotating so slow he couldn’t even perceive it. The ancient Scharpon II that was the Caroline Rowland had matched its orbit and speed, and it no longer appeared to be hurtling around Tyluset at an orbit of five and a half hundred million kilometers, instead, it simply appeared as though it was reclining languidly in the void, an empress of the Lost Homeworld in one of the old reproductions of prehistoric paintings. A sovereign of the dark. It had taken so long to come out here, but that spinning lump of silicate would change everything. “Amazing,” he whispered to the void. “Long trip for a big rock,” said captain Colemon, behind him. “I still don’t really get it.” Tomas stretched out his limbs, reaching against the pull of his mags. In the zero-gravity of the Caroline Rowland’s observation deck, he was fixed to the floor by the U-shaped metal strips on the bottom of his boots. His fingers reached up to the ceiling, and stroked a panel above him lovingly. They were finally here. “Yes,” he agreed. “It did take a long time. But it’s still cheaper than pulling something of any sort of comparable mass straight out of Tylo’s gravity well. We’re working on a tight budget already here.” He tried not to sound petulant. The captain simply couldn’t understand how momentous of an occasion this was for a Tyloan. He couldn’t have understood how much it had taken Tylo to get this far. To pass the legislation, to drum up enough money out of their nonexistent GDP to hire a ship of the Caroline’s size, and even for everyone on both sides of the secretariat to agree on something at all. If not for Saelus Percival, they might not have gotten underway at all. Thank God for bipartisan politicians. 30 “Not arguing with you, professor,” said the captain. “Just saying…I never spent so long in the void before. Pretty sure this is the furthest I’ve ever been from anywhere settled. Or gone without real gravity.” Tomas turned around to get a look at the captain. He didn’t particularly relish the periodic stretches of time where he was forced to come out of his cabin to interact with the eclectic crew of the Caroline Rowland. They were here doing a job, not because they actually cared about Tylo or solace. For them, it was their bottom dollar. And they were a tight-knit and strange bunch. It didn’t help that he’d been utterly disappointed by Colemon when he’d met him. He was no picture of the dashing void-captain that he’d expected. Tomas had spent a good two years preparing for this adventure, and had hoped that the Caroline Rowland and her captain would live up to his expectations. Instead, the man looked much like his ship. Powerful, but old. Creaky and oversized, and leaking everywhere. While the aging rock-cracker looked and felt like it was well past scrapping age, Colemon looked like he should be on Cyrene or Nineveh, fixing someone’s plumbing. Short and sweaty, he was a heavily-built man, his hefty paunch and jowly face softened by the lack of any gravity to pull down on them. The effect would have made him look ten years younger, had he not had a greasy bald spot on the top of his head that matched his stained blue jumpsuit. A perpetually-burning rollie was clenched between stained teeth at all times, and now was no different. The tube of synthetic tobacco hissed and spat, acrid-smelling smoke drifting in all directions as he watched it. He ignored the odor. “True,” he agreed. “Tyluset’s Fringe Worlds aren’t charted of course, but I wouldn’t be so sure that no one lives out here.” The Fringes of any system were always the most lawless, so far from the light of the local star, and the ordinances of the local Transit Authority or systems government. “There are stories, after all.” “Stories are stories,” grunted the captain. “You’re just jumpy. Happens on long hauls.” Tomas frowned, and looked out at the distant asteroid again. “It’s just…a lot to consider.” The man nodded. “It’s a big deal for you people, isn’t it?” 31 Tomas looked up. Neither the Caroline Rowland, nor her captain or crew were Tyloan. They were under contract from the Gavelorn Merchant Fleet, and paid for by Altikane Frontier Development, both client monopolies of the Corporate Alliance. Or, at least, those were who paid their salaries, and whose logo was stamped all over their ship. On loan for eight months. Long enough to drive out to Tyluset’s asteroid belt, grab their target, and burn slowly back starward. He clasped his hands behind his back and looked out at the starfield again. Billions and billions of balls of nuclear fire. Out there, beyond known space. “How much did they hire you for, captain?” Colemon’s reflection in the glassine shifted. The bright light of his rollie flared against the backdrop of space beyond. “About ten times the regular long-haul fee, considering the risks involved. Enough to refit the old girl and pay some fat expenses when we get back to Corporate Space.” Tomas nodded. “Tylo’s Global Secretariat had to pay quite a lot to the Mercantile Fleet to get them to loan us a ship.” He glanced at the man’s reflection, making eye contact through the medium of the dark mirror of the viewscreen. “Even one as old and dusty as the Caroline Rowland. That’s why we had to go through AFD as well. Compared to even the poorest worlds of the Frontier, Tylo makes an absolute pittance every year. Every bit of wealth we can squeeze from transit through the one LUMAR in the system, every drop of water we import, every bit of iron silicate we can pick from the southern mountains…All of it poured into our fruitless terraforming project. We export nothing. We are the most destitute world of the Colonies.” He saw the Captain’s eyes flicker in the reflection. Another glow of the rollie. He couldn’t know what it was like. He had no idea. Kind of a big deal for you people indeed. “We lost a lot of money hiring you, Captain.” The reflection faded as he focused on the asteroid beyond it, drifting in space. His eyes settled on a wide crater in the void-borne mountain. I’ll put the docks right there. He turned back around. “And unless we manage to bring this Asteroid back to Tylo, it will be money spent in vain. So yes…it’s a big deal.” Colemon shuffled his boots with a scrape of metal and shifted the rollie to the other side of his mouth, puffing as he did so. Above them, an air filter slowly clanked into high gear, and 32 the smoke that had begun to drift off in all directions in the zero-G, was pulled up to the ceiling, where it vanished into the small metal grille. “Well, hope you don’t take it too personally, but for us, it’s just a contract with good hazard pay.” He had the grace to look bashful, though. “But I respect your vision.” Tomas resisted the urge to frown. He appreciated the Captain’s candor, but as for the rest of the crew…he didn’t particularly enjoy them. Uncouth spacers, wholly mercenary, the lot of them. As if he’d been able to read Tomas’s thoughts on the crew, Colemon stuck two thumbs into his belt, sucked down another nicotine-laden breath and jerked his head towards the bulkhead hatch that led out of the little observation deck. “Come on. Time for the prep meeting.” Tomas nodded sharply and kicked off the floor, drifting across the room. Over the past three months of intermittent zero-G, he’d gotten used to it. Tyloans were creatures of their world. Their hot little planet produced very few void-jockeys, but he’d done his homework. One of the oddest things about living in such an alien environment as space was that voidships were never designed with a ‘floor’ in mind, except one particular wall kept clear of handholds that became the floor when they latched onto ring stations, or drifted through Middlespace. He grimaced, lost in thought. Tylo’s LUMAR. It’s access point to middlespace, so far in the inner system it was almost at the edge of where the heat of Tylust, their star, started to burn the hulls off of ships. Most worlds had a more sensibly-placed LUMAR than Tylo, but the enigmatic Elder Peoples had deigned to program their machine to set up in the least useful place imaginable Another thing to blame them for. The briefing room of the Caroline Rowland was only a little bigger than the poorly- maintained observation deck. The Secretariat certainly got what it paid for. It rankled that what the people of Tylo considered outrageous funds, other worlds considered pocket change. 33 He floated into the briefing room behind Colemon. An octagonally-walled chamber, the only feature was eight acceleration chairs on their platforms, all facing a single projector in the middle of the room. Tomas grabbed a handhold on one of the walls, arresting his momentum. There were only two other people of note here. The ship’s Salvage Chief, Paravel Carcosa, a squat man with sallow skin and thin muscles from a life in space, but an oversized bone structure, clearly the result of too many poorly-measured doses of Stretch. To hear the captain speak of him, he’d been an old hand at this for years now. Carcosa had lost all the hair on his head save for his bushy red eyebrows, and his baggy, oversized voidsuit hung off of him like fur hung from a mangy dog. He looked almost bored. Grey eyes barely seemed to register Tomas as he entered, and then turned to the captain, expectant. Colemon’s first mate and the ship’s drone operator, however, was utterly alien. It turned its flat, spear-shaped head and slowly regarded him with four expressionless black orbs. Transparent membranes flickered over those soulless eyes, one after the other. It floated in the vacuum like a horrible huge squid, all eight limbs spread out, with only one of it’s hand-like ten- digited ‘feet’ clutching a railing next to the projector. A Yovian. Tomas suppressed an urge to grimace. It made him feel a little rude, but they’d always creeped him out. He hadn’t met many. “We all here?” asked Coleman, settling into a mag-locked position where it looked like he was lying down on the ceiling from where Tomas floated near one of the chairs. “Good.” He tapped his rig, and the projector lit up, displaying a visual of the asteroid outside. “By tomorrow morning, our fore engines will have cooled down enough to do a full-team excursion.” He nodded at Carcosa, who returned the nod amiably. “That means you. I want your team working double shifts, you got that?” “We get paid for those?” drawled Carcosa. Tomas couldn’t place his accent. Something from the Frontier, probably. All those poorly-connected worlds developed strange cants and affectations. “Of course you get paid for any extra hours, I’m not a taskmaster.” Colemon waved off the comment. “Just mark it down on your mission log.” He nodded at his second mate. “Roolu, you got the drones prepped?” 34 The Yovian cracked its impossibly wide mouth and gurgled out an approximation of Glossic from its long throat. “Walkers, Fliers. All Accounted for. Forty-six. Exactly.” It’s voice sounded like some strange combination of wet burps, bullfrog croaking and a bird’s caw. “Excellent.” Colemon waved a hand over his wrist-rig and the asteroid projection became backlit in a pale yellow. He motioned to Tomas. “You’re the rock expert, want to go over the plan again?” Tomas nodded. “Of course. I think I’ve explained it relatively well to both of you over the past few months, but it never hurts to rehash.” The Yovian made a belching sound deep in its thorax and then flexed its multi-jointed shoulders. “Indeed.” It croaked. It looked like a bad stop-motion puppet when it moved. Tomas blinked hard, staring at the alien’s jerky, unnatural movements. Carcosa grinned insolently up at him. “Still not used to Roolu, eh?” Tomas bit back a response. He wanted to tell him that he’d just never seen Yovians, but he knew what that would sound like. It would be a lie, too. He just wasn’t comfortable around them. “I’ve seen my fair share of aliens,” he said. “We don’t get many Yovians on Tylo. Not enough moisture in the atmosphere, they don’t do well there.” That was an understatement. The mangrove-dwelling creatures would start to mummify alive almost instantly in the dry blast of natural heat and thin air. “We Do not Enjoy such Waterless, Saltless worlds,” said the Yovian. It talked without moving it’s flat beakish mouth much. “And we Prefer the Frontier. Its planets Are Less Abhorrent.” Tomas nodded carefully. It looks like something sailors on Vortex would dredge up from their deep-sea nets. Very far down, he knew it was just an ingrained opinion, and the result of growing up in a human-favorable biome. But it didn’t make it feel any less like he was speaking to a hyper-intelligent tarantula-monkey. “Thank you, uh…” he wracked his brain, trying to remember the pronunciation. “Rooloo-oolie?” 35 The alien stiffened. “Rooluulweiloowool” it warbled, body shuddering and rippling in complex physical language. “It Cannot be Related in Glossic. This is Why we Prefer Nick- Names.” The creature’s strange, hopping pronunciation of Glossic didn’t do it any favors either. “Sorry.” “I will say Again, you may Refer to Me as Roolu. It is Polite.” “Sorry.” Tomas shook his head, banishing the momentary embarrassment. He wondered how spacers could get so used to working with the strange aliens. They were fundamentally different. They spoke different, they lived different, they thought different. If not for the Parlons, who at least had the decency to look like something familiar, and not move about like puppets on strings, all the Thirteen Peoples would still be breathing different air. “Mister Gallenhorst?” asked Captain Colemon. Tomas rubbed his forehead. He’d been getting lost in thought more and more often. That wasn’t acceptable. It was the Fear. The further they went from the star, the more he overthought things. A classic human anxiety response. “I’m sorry,” he said, shaking his head again, clearing the cobwebs of the Fear from it. “I was just going over the plan again in my mind.” He knew that his wandering thoughts had been mistaken for mental calculations before. Half of the crew thought of him as an eccentric genius, the other half thought of him as dream-lost, a perpetually befuddled space cadet. He’d heard the whispers on the rare occasion he left his room. “Yes. Right. Here’s the plan.” He tapped the rig on his wrist. On the holographic asteroid, half a hundred little red lights flashed. “This asteroid is called Tylo-Belt 86-Trager. This is the closest any living creatures have been to it on record. Officially, the last ship in this area of the asteroid belt was the Knave, a five- man chartist vessel from about forty years ago. It’s very rich in natural resources. Iron, lithium, titanium, copper, gold, uranium.” He pointed at a scattering of areas on the holographic asteroid that pulsed with a soft red light. “Here’s the main deposits. When we bring it back, we’ll use these deposits to help develop 86-Trager into an Orbital, and then turn the mine shafts into transit tunnels between locations.” He moved his hands, and the asteroid spun around on its axis. “The most important thing right now, however, is to get it back. We don’t have enough money or 36 reason to buy a real PSI ring station, but we have just enough to slapdash our own using 86- Trager as a base. It’ll be a bit messy, and it won’t have full gravity, but we’ll be able to turn it into a space station at a third of the price of a Pseudenor-brand Orbital. This asteroid will provide a framework for it” Tylo couldn’t afford a real Orbital. They’d have to make do with a repurposed lump of silicate. He tapped a few more holographic buttons on his rig, and the image widened to depict the entire Tyluset system. There was Tyluset, the life-giving G-type star of Tomas’s homeworld in the center. Uncomfortably close lay Tylo, cooking quietly on the innermost edge of the life zone. Nearby, at a local stellar lagrange point, sat the icon that designated the L.U.M.A.R array, with the usual three or four small ships clustered around it. Very, very, very far away from all of those objects of interest, near the thick band that displayed the asteroid belt, almost as far away as the fringe planets of other systems, was a small, almost invisible sigil labelled ‘Caroline Rowland’. Tomas tired not to let the sheer scale daunt him, and cleared his throat in a way that he hoped was commanding. “As you can see, right now, we make a sort of scalene triangle. If Tylo and Tyluset make the bottom points of the triangle, we make the top.” “I can see that,” drawled Carcosa, running a hand over his bald head. “What’s the point?” Tomas pursed his lips. “Orbital dynamics is the point. We need to get our anchors tunneled in at least two hundred feet deep, then run the tow cables around the back of this asteroid and secure them all down before the end of the week.” Carcosa scowled, not at Tomas, but at his captain. “Within a week? Hell, we don’t need to do double-shifts, my team can do that in a few days.” Colemon puffed the last of his rollie, then stubbed it out on his mag-boot, stuffed the butt into his pocket, and reached for another one from the pack at his belt. When he’d lit it with a spark from his wrist-rig, the captain answered. “We’re a long way from anywhere right now.” Somewhere out of sight, another shutter clanked into high-gear to filter out the smoke again. You 37 could sometimes tell where Captain Colemon was, Tomas had noticed, by listening for the metallic whine of overclocked air filters. The captain went on. “Sure, if this was a normal run in any other star system we could stay out here for a long time, get it just right, and then burn back. If we ran out of fuel, well we could just comm some service station and they’d send a refueling skiff out, right?” The big captain looked pointedly down at the map of the star system, or, more specifically, at the vast, empty, three-month stretch of travel time between them and the nearest ship, and gestured with his rollie. Carcosa’s scowl softened. “Oh, I see.” “Yeah,” grunted Colemon. “Like the professor said. This belt’s as far out as the fringe worlds of some other systems, and the closest ships are all based at the LUMAR, which is a hell of a lot closer to its sun than most others. We’re doing this run on the fuel we brought with us.” He sucked down another breath, and blew out a cloud of smoke. It rolled into a ball and dissipated against the far wall in a splash of grey. “We got a window. About a week before stellar orbit takes this asteroid too far away. Might have a few extra days, but any longer than two weeks? Considering we gotta tug this whole asteroid’s mass, we might not have enough fuel to pull this thing, pick up speed, then make a decel burn with the distance we have to tangle with.” He shrugged. “Caroline’s a tough old gal, but she can’t work with no fuel if we run out halfway home.” “Do we Have a Contingency Plan?” asked the Yovian, it’s four upper arms flexing, and each one of its forty fingers bending this way and that. Tomas would guess it was mild worry, but perhaps it was just a natural idiom indicating contemplation. “Yeah,” grunted Colemon. “We drop the plan, and burn right back to the inner system, lose the contract, forfeit our hazard pay. Or we wait for a full year unpaid, and hope someone shuttles us food and fuel while this thing makes the rest of its orbit back to where we are now. Maybe our dried-up skeletons’ll get the money.” Tomas winced. He’d wouldn’t have phrased it so…brusquely. 38 “Alright,” sighed Carcosa. “I’ll tell my teams.” He tensed his muscles, as if he was about to push off the floor, and Tomas held up a hand. “Wait.” “Oh great,” grumbled the older man. “There’s more?” Tomas nodded. “86-Trager isn’t just an asteroid, it’s very big. Current theory is that it’s piece of a failed planet from when the Tyluset system was still forming. This is going to take a lot of effort, and very quickly. I’ll need the tethers planted and set in three days, not a week.” Carcosa’s mouth dropped open. Tomas decided to hang onto the initiative while he still had it “We have a very tight schedule. Two weeks at the most before our orbit takes us out of return range. I want to make sure this happens as fast as possible. Once we have the tethers set on the asteroid, we’re going to need to deploy thrusters on its surface, then the solar sail, and fire it all up by the end of the week.” The man blinked. “Let me get this straight, mister Gallenhorst,” he said, slowly. “You want me to deploy enough cables to circle an asteroid…” he glanced at the holograph. “…ten kilometers in diameter, then tether them to our ship within three days. Okay, fine.” Tomas nodded. “But you want me to set up twenty different powerplants on its surface, connect each one to a thruster, then just fire them all up and start burning back towards Tylo? In a week?” Tomas nodded. “I mean, one and a half weeks…at most. But more or less…yes.” Carcosa blinked, and then smirked. “You got some serious stones on you, professor. Your planet too. This is a real leap of faith you’re taking here.” Tomas gave the man a wan smile. “Terraforming is what Tylo is. Our world, our culture…it’s all a leap of faith.” He nodded at the asteroid. “Without a station in orbit as a jump- off point to this asteroid belt, we’ll never have enough supplies or money to actually continue the project our ancestors started to any meaningful degree. This asteroid will be that station. The future of Tylo.” 39