In Every Eden an Apple
To lure us into sin
And with the serpent to grapple
A battle we can‘t win
-Montrief, Caleb “Eden Calls”. lines 1-4; 3492
Chapter 1: Racing Toward Eden
Innes' Star was a small star, as stars go. A little more than a third the mass of humanity's home Sun, it was a tiny red dot in the sky, almost invisible to any other star system, even the very closest. But size is a relative thing and from the orbit of the sole planet in its habitable zone, it burned huge and angry, like a bonfire backlighting the silhouette of the world.
“The Universe must love M-class stars...” Hector Rukh's voice came over the comm system from the other shuttle.
“...'Cause it made so goddamn many of them.” Morgan Gannis finished the quote with a chuckle. It was an old spacer's joke, but a true one.
They were coming up on the planet Itzamna. Tide-locked with its star, the cream colored cloud-cover made the planet look placid from the direction they were approaching it from. Morgan had heard that the other side was single, perpetual storm centered on a massive hurricane that would rival anything back in the home system, except the Red Spot on Jupiter. Two moons were visible, one, Xbalanque, large and dark lurked around the planet's far edge, the other, Hunahpu, small and bright with reflected light, formed a target at the center of their scanners, their destination.
“Hey Morgan, remind me again why we're hauling all of this shit all the way from the system limit to the goldilocks zone ourselves, when they've got a perfectly serviceable Outstation they could be picking it up at?”
“One, because all of the colony's shuttles are busy doing other stuff. Two, because I promised Khadi we would if we could. And, three, because there's an extra cartage fee in it.”
“Well, shit, Earthside, why didn't you start with that one? That's all I needed reminding of!” Hector's thin, rapid-fire laugh rang tinny through the cheap comm speakers. “Won't be long now, we'll be planetside. Can't wait!”
“Since when? You hate going down planetside, remember? You told me that it makes you agoraphobic.”
“Claustrophilic. I just prefer small spaces. I'm not phobic of anything!”
“Whatever you say, pal.”
“Besides, I don't care if it's the magma fields of Apophis, old buddy, as long as it's shoreleave. What's it been, since, what? Mithras?” When Morgan didn't immediately respond, Hector just kept talking.
“Don't even see what they need all of this shit for, anyhow. This is terraforming gear, and they're just a mining colony. Why do you need to terraform a mining world? Just strip out the goodies and get out, like they do it back home.”
“Because there's a lot more on a planet, or even a moon like we're going to, than one of those asteroid mines you've got back home. And a terraformed planet can give back a lot more than just mineral wealth. The problem with you Centaurians is that you never take the long view.”
“And you Earthmen got more history than you know what to do with. And look where that's gotten you. I could probably tell you all kinds of shitty stuff that's happened to the old Homeworld because of looking back if I'd ever paid any attention to it. Listen, it's like that saying we got back on the Exchange, 'Next Quarter is the Only Quarter', you know? Hey! Race you to the dock!”
“Not going to happen. We're working. There's not going to be a race.”
“Ah, the big, bad Earthman scared he's going to lose? That it?”
“Scared hell!” Morgan snorted a laugh. “There ain't going to be a race because you don't got a chance and you know it.”
“Not this time, I been working on this shuttle while we were in transit and, let me tell you, buddy, some of these modifications are pretty sweet.”
“Nobody's denying that you're a hell of an engineer, but leave the piloting to the stick jockeys, huh?”
“Then you shouldn't have any problem putting a bit of credit where your mouth is, big fella. Easy money, right?”
“Hector old son, you ain't got no credit to bet and you know it. Or did you hold something back from that planet-hunting scheme back at Vela?”
“That’s how you’re going to be? Sure. Fine by me, pal. So if we're not competing, you won’t mind showing up second, right?” He whooped and cut the line. On Morgan's scanners, the other shuttle started to pick up acceleration, dragging the massive cargo containers it was towing behind it.
“Like hell,” he was talking to himself now. “Not today, kid.”
He reached out to crank up the power to the thrusters with one hand while the other sped up the spin of the solenoids on the tractor assemblies to pull the containers he was towing in closer.
Morgan took a quick glance at the navigation plot and broke out into a grin. Hector's shuttle was flaring like a small star on his scanners, and accelerating hard, all of which must be drawing power like crazy. But the heat vanes on the intra-system tug were glowing bright, which meant that a lot of that power was going to waste. He wasn't getting nearly the bang for his buck that he could be. And no wonder. Checking the course, he could see Hector brute-forcing it for the Hunahpu Skyhook, in as close to a straight line as you could get in orbit of a planet.
Laughing, he checked his previous incoming arc and nudged it a little so that he was, effectively falling into the planet with a little help from his thrusters. Just like Hector to focus in on the machine and forget the big picture. It made him a hell of an engineer. But not much as a pilot.
Hector's shuttle kept pulling away from him at first, but he wasn't falling behind as fast. There was another flare from Hector's jets as he pushed it a little faster. Wasn’t enough for him to win, was it? Oh, no, Hector Rukh had to win completely. Morgan nudged his throttle a little faster and started to match accelerations with the other shuttle. Maybe he couldn't beat the raw power of Hector's shuttle in the short run, but he had a sneaking suspicion that he didn't have to. He just had to keep Hector upping the ante.
He did some calculations and drew a red line on his plot across a part of Hector's projected path.
Hector was nearly at the red line when they got the call that Morgan had been waiting for. The terse warning from Hunahpu Skyhook.
“Transports, call-signs Kublai Khan-a and Kublai Khan-b, you just broke with your logged courses. Do you require assistance?”
“Nope, just excited to get there, Skyhook. Over.”
Hector's shuttle crossed the red line on his plot and the Skyhook squawked over the broad band.
“Kublai Khan-b! You are making a prohibited approach. Cease your assault and arrest your acceleration now or we will open fire!”
Morgan turned his communication band to Hector's.
“What? I got a load for the Skyhook here! How am I supposed to get to the...”
“This is your last warning, Kublai Khan-b! Kill your velocity and prepare to receive boarders or we will shoot you out of space!”
There was a soft curse before Hector shut down the channel. On the scanners the shuttle remained glowing, but now the glow switched sides as the retro-thrusters kicked in, fighting against the hard-won momentum the ship had just built up.
Morgan couldn't keep the grin off of his face as his shuttle, unopposed, cruised easily past the red line and in towards the Skyhook.
2: The PlanetaryMorgan was waiting for Hector with the Colonial Militia when the patrol ship towed his shuttle and its cargo into port. Hector was escorted through the airlock into the spartan disembarkation lounge by a pair of calm, professional-looking militia officers. Hector was anything but calm and broke into a run towards Morgan the moment the airlock cycled open, pointing an accusatory finger at him.
“Gannis! You cheating son of a...”
“You keep my momma out of this, Rukh, you want to brush the same number of teeth tomorrow as you did today.” He raised a fist that ended up right under Hector's chin.
“You set this up, didn't you? I don't know how but you must have queered this with the port authority somehow. That's pretty low, even for a dirtwalker like you!”
Morgan laughed in his face, which darkened a shade.
“Hector, old son, nothing happened that you didn't do to yourself.” Morgan nodded to the side, where the officers from the patrol ship were conferring with the deck officers and all of them were shooting suspicious glances in Hector's direction.
“You're going to make attack runs on the Skyhook, you're going to have to figure you'll get yourself some attention, you know?”
“Attack run? What are you talking...” Hector stopped in mid-sentence and rolled his eyes as he put together the pieces. Then he lunged into Morgan's face, waving his finger again.
“You knew!” Hector hissed and narrowed his eyes. “You knew they'd interpret that as an assault!”
“And you didn't. Can't see as that's my fault.” Morgan shrugged.
“Ha! Nice play, Gannis.” Suddenly, his frown was gone and he was laughing. Morgan wasn't surprised. That's just how Hector was. “Shit, I'll get you next time, Earthside.”
“You wish, floater.”
Still, laughing, Hector threw his arm around the shorter man's broad shoulders and they walked, together, towards the customs offices at the opposite end of the concourse.
After a brief chat with the relevant authorities, they rode the thin spidercarbon tether from the Skyhook to the moon below. The bloated gray-white bulk of Hunahpu's parent world, Itzamna, loomed large in the sky, making the ground of the moon below them look all the darker. The gravity, however minimal, of Hunahpu, crept up on them bit by bit, starting as a gentle tug 'downward' and ending by planting their feet on the floor, like it was a proper surface.
Hunahpu swelled up beneath them, finally engulfing them with an abrupt shift from the ruddy natural glow of Innes' Star to the steady white artificial lights as they dipped beneath the surface of Hunahpu and into the pit that housed the other end of the skyhook tether.
Morgan stepped through the lock and into the cold, dry air, which smelled of dust and ozone. Officers in the familiar khaki of the Colonial Militia turned their heads and started to saunter over in no kind of hurry, hands resting casually on the butts of the bulky, black military lasers hanging from their belts.
“Morgan Gannis!” A big voice boomed and a big woman followed. Tall, dark and statuesque, she towered nearly half a meter above Morgan, almost as tall as the gangling Hector. She wore the same Militia uniform as the officers, but hers was older and had more patches and decorations. The customs officers stopped what they were doing to salute her and call her 'Planetary'.
She stopped just out of arm's reach from Morgan and shook her head.
“Morgan Gannis, I always pray that someday you're going to come around and I'm not going to hear about from the Patrols first. But this isn't that day, is it?”
“Afraid it ain't. Although, to be fair, it isn't my fault this time.” He flashed her his best, white-toothed grin and Khadi just shook her head with an imploring gesture towards the implied heavens.
Behind him, he could hear Hector swearing loudly as he stepped out of the elevator car.
“Not your name on the security report, that's true. That it's not your fault, that's yet to be seen.”
She glared angrily at him for a moment, then broke into a lop-sided smile as wide as it was sincere. She lunged forward and embraced him in a hug.
“There's the Khadi I know.” He held out at arm's length, his hands on her shoulders and took a good look at her.
“You're getting fat, Khadi. Life of a Planetary must suit you.”
“You're still a flatterer, it's all clean living and real food.” She laughed and patted a hip. Then she reached up, put hand up against his face and her smile disappeared.
“You aren't though, and you've gotten pale, even for you. Too much time away from honest suns and good air. That's what does it. You're turning into one of them.”
She nodded over his shoulder and he turned his head to see Hector leaning against the half-open door to the elevator with a nauseated grimace on his face.
“Nah, you know me. I got too much clay on my feet and dirt on my hands to be anything but a poor, dumb dirtwalker.”
“Never should have flown off with that Ngn woman. Spacing's got to be done, sure, but it's no kind of life for an honest man.”
“Susan and I go way back, you know that. I owe her. And since when have I been an honest man, Khadi?”
“Shit, Morgan, you're the most honest man I know. Even your lies are honest.” They both laughed and she slapped him on the shoulder.
“Sweet Prophet, I hate to admit it, but it's good to see you again, Morgan. Didn't know if I ever would again. We'd heard that... well, that's not important now, what's important is that God brought you back alive.”
“Just luck is all.” He shrugged. “Hell, I didn't know any better, I'd say you were almost as glad to see me as you are that cargo.”
“Don't flatter yourself. It's just a matter of economics. Scarcity. There's plenty of places I can get terraforming materials. But old friends, they're in shorter supply these days.” She scowled, twisting her scars into new patterns. It struck Morgan in that moment how much older she looked when she wasn't smiling, and he noticed a few silver strands in her dark hair. But only for a moment. Then her face arranged itself back into a smile.
“Come on, you want to see the use we're going to put all that stuff you brought us?” She stepped towards the door and nodded for him to follow. Beneath her, through the metal grating that served as a floor, he could see men and machines unloading cargo from the main section of the elevator car. The passenger lounge was just a detail on top of that.
“Always. It's been too long, Khadi. Hey! Hector, getcher ass over here, will ya?”
Hector was still looking a little green around the gills, but that didn't seem to stop his mouth from going. He split open his face into his usual grinning mask and came up behind Morgan.
“Hey, who's this? Another one of your... ow!” Hector rubbed where Morgan had just punched him in the shoulder.
“This is an old friend, try and show a little class, huh? Hector, this is Planetary Khadija Sufawa. She was just a Regional back when I knew her. We worked the terraforming crews on Oclla together. Khadi, this thing here is Hector Rukh, he's chief engineer back aboard the Kublai Khan.”
“Yeah, I figured him for one of your spacer crew, alright.” They shared a doubtful look and then a chuckle.
“Glad to meet you, Planetary. You know, Gannis, I wouldn't have figured it, but it seems you got some fancy friends out on the Frontier. Always a good idea to know people.” Hector surged between them, hand stretched out. Khadi looked at the offered hand for a long moment before deciding to take it. Her big hand enveloped Hector's long, thin spacer's fingers and he squawked in her grip.
“Well, any crewmate of Morgan's is welcome here, Mister Rukh. We're just going to go put all those materials you brought us to use. Want to come?”
“Hey now! Wait a second, work order I saw said nothing about installation, lady. We've gone above and beyond just spending the fuel to bring this stuff in-system, much less...”
“Installation! As if! Only one of you spacedogs I'd let at my terraforming rigs is Morgan. And that's only because I've seen him at it. You're strictly spectators on this run.”
“Hey, listen, Hector, buddy, I don't know if you'll find this interesting, so...”
“Are kidding me? I been gagging for a chance to see the place up close, so sure! Thanks for the opportunity, ma'am.”
Morgan raised an eyebrow in question and Hector just answered with a small shake of the head.
Right, come on you two.”
3: Boots on the GroundKhadi led them to a lift. The lift went to a garage. From the garage they got into a spider-like, six-wheeled vehicle that they drove out onto the surface at last. Chalky white dust billowed up from under the wheels. Here and there ropy black vines with broad leaves cast a wide net over the ground. A thick bluish haze covered the sky and blurred the pale bulk of Itzamna that filled it.
“Geez, look at the foliage. That all standard groundweed or you growing something special out there?” Morgan whistled low as he pressed his face up against the dust-pitted glass.
“Just groundweed. It'll be awhile before it's made any proper soil for anything else.” There was an automatic option on the little crawler, but Khadi was using the manual controls, skipping them off dunes, just to make Hector squeak a little, it seemed.
“What the cold, unloving void is that?”
Hector pointed out the window as a gargantuan form loomed out of the blue-tinted haze of dust. A moving mountain crept forward on legs ending in massive treads, rolling over the ridge in a rising bank of dust. Towers reached up from the wide, flat top of the crawler, where squat towers pumped out thick gouts, hiding their own tops in the smoke.
“A Malka platform! Shit, that takes me back, Khadi, it surely does.”
“That's a terraforming platform? I mean, I've seen pictures, but...”
“I know, Hector, nothing really prepares you for the reality of one of these big boys, and the only thing bigger than the platforms is the job they do. These things make worlds.” Morgan's voice was low, barely audible over the hum and rattle of the engine.
“If that's your idea of a big thing, sure.” Hector snorted back a laugh and the crawler swerved as Khadi turned her head to glare at him.
“What, I'm kidding, geez, you dirtwalkers. A guy would think you don't have a sense of humor or nothing, huh?”
Khadi laughed as she turned her attention back to driving.
“Sure, a Terraformer needs a sense of humor to survive. Got to when you know it'll be generations before the work is done. Just didn't know you spacers had any.”
They drove the little crawler into the shadow of the massive platform, a city on tank treads. They drove past the front set of treads, which tore great gouges in the dry, cracked earth, sending up fragments of gray stone and sprays of water, leaving behind strips of dark, wet clay.
“Hey, Khadi, with the soil the way it is here, I'd be surprised it doesn't clog up the nozzles something terrible.”
“Who says it doesn't? You weren't here as a guest, I'd have you down here with a wire brush cleaning those out. Then there would be no question whether you still had any clay on your boots, Morgan.”
“Ha! I didn't know any better, I'd say I was getting a recruiting speech, Khadi.”
“You're a damned soul of an infidel and a bastard if there ever was one. But I'll join you in hell if you aren't also the best damn terraformer I ever worked with. And it just seems a shame to waste a perfectly good man on a starship. That's no kind of a life, being frozen like a corpse most of the time.”
“Hey!” Hector's head popped up over the seat behind her, wearing a look of indignation.
“No offense to those who got the temperament, of course.” She turned her head so that Morgan could and Hector couldn't see the amused smile on her face.
The little crawler started to rise unsteadily off the ground, traveling along with the massive platform. Morgan didn't have to be able to actually see it to picture the hook that had latched onto the top of the vehicle and the thick steel cable that was winching it upwards.
The ground fell away and they rose into the machinery at the bottom of the platform, it scrolled past and they found themselves at last in a polished steel bay, filled with crawlers and small aircraft that were more engine than body. A transparent ceiling showed more of the over-muscled aircraft buzzing overhead, with massive containers attached to them.
“Those look familiar, spacers?”
“Are those ours? Hey! Yeah, those are Consortium marks, hey, Gannis, I think those are the concentrates we brought in with us!” Hector tapped Morgan on the shoulder and pointed upwards.
“Well, the crates are model PL-23's, which is what we brought in, sure. But I couldn't swear those were ours. 23's are pretty common containers.”
“Your crewmate is right, Morgan. The gas concentrates are being shipped to all of our platforms right now to refill the reserves. That shipment of yours will keep the smokestacks pumping for quite a while yet.”
“OK, now if I'm remembering this correctly, Planetary, we also brought in some parts for the chemical refineries. Batch 70 filters, cyanobacteria cultures and... some Omnichemical 'Beta' class regeneraters, as I recall.”
“Just so.” Khadi nodded, maybe a little impressed with the spaceman's recall. “Morgan, am I losing my hearing or does this space-hound know more about the cargo you've been hauling than you do? That's not like you.”
“Well, he is ship's cargomaster, it is his job.”
“Thought you said he was the engineer.” Her eyes narrowed just a bit.
“Lady, the mass of what I know that this dirtwalker don't should have its own gravity well!”
“Ah, float off, floater.” Morgan dismissed Hector with a wave of his hand and turned back to Khadi. “The Khan's a four-man operation. We all wear a lot of hats.”
“So, we going to be seeing any of that stuff here? I mean, is this one of the platforms getting the upgrades?” Hector stared straight up, his eyes darted quickly from aircraft to aircraft.
“Upgrades? Upgrades, hell. This is just enough to keep us going. What kind of operation you think we're running here? We're lucky the government back on Dushara gives us enough of a budget to keep operating, the way the war is going.”
“Eh, that's the 'Jaya, right?” Hector shrugged.
“Sure.” Her eyes had narrowed a bit more and her lips pursed. She was silent for a moment before going on. “Anyway, those parts are going to repair the refinery on the Mount Safa. Stopped working on us just after we put the order in for those parts. She's several kilometers to the North west. Come on, follow me and I'll show you.”
“The Safa! You're still using the old lady, huh?” Morgan laughed and his whole face lit up.
“No use wasting a perfectly serviceable terraforming platform. Packed her up from Oclla and put her together again here. You want to see her?
“Do I? Shit. Felt like I must have replaced every part on that old junkheap myself at some point! What are we waiting for?”
Khadi led them up a ladder from the bay and into a clear dome on the surface of the massive crawler. A couple of workers in coveralls looked up from their work and cried out “Planetary!” at the same time. Whatever they were looking at was forgotten and they stood up straight to salute as Khadi entered.
“At ease you two, you don't work for me, you work for the job.” She saluted back and they both hid the same small smiles as Morgan did.
“Hey, Planetary, there's a message for you. As soon as you got back, we were supposed to tell you that Mister Vasca...”
“...is looking for you. Many thanks, but I think I can be telling her myself. You and I, we must speak, Safawa.” There was a short, stocky man leaning in an open hatch leading to other domes on the platform. He was shorter than Morgan, but more than half-again as broad, massive knots of muscle nearly bursting out of a deceptively well-tailored jumpsuit, like a workman might wear only better-fitting and without a sign that it had ever seen work. Quick, observant eyes looked out of place in his broad, coarse features.
“Well, I'm here.” Khadi sighed and rolled her eyes. “What is it you wanted to say?”
Hector put his smiling face back on and interjected himself between them, hand held out to the squat man.
“Vasca? Like Carlo Vasca? You're the head of the Innes Mining Conglomerate's operations on the ground here, right?”
Vasca just looked at the hand, looked at Hector's face and back to the hand.
“I'm sorry, have we met, friend?”
“Not in person, but I was supposed to meet with you here. My name's Hector Rukh. I'm cargo officer aboard the free driver Kublai Khan?”
“Rukh? Oh, wait, yes, I am recalling a message from you. Good to be meeting you, Mister Rukh.” Vasca relaxed visibly and took Hector's hand, carefully, like he was handling fine china.
“It is unfortunate, but I have business with the Planetary that must not wait, but I’ll be glad to talk to you after that. Lens me later and we'll set something up.”
“Sure thing, Mister Vasca.”
Khadi exhaled loudly and drew Vasca's attention back to her.
“Alright, so what's this important thing you need to talk to me about, Carlo?”
Vasca turned his attention back to Khadi and the smile became a scowl.
“You are the Planetary here, Safawa. You've got to do something about the Xbalanque delegation. These new prices are a violation of the last set of agreements with the Conglomerate. We can't afford them without cutting into our own profits, but without those grain shipments, we don't have..."
Khadi held up a hand and Vasca paused for a moment. She turned towards Morgan and sighed.
“Hey, Morgan, we're having a bit of trouble with the other inhabited moon here. This is going to take a while, it always does. Morgan, you remember where the observation tower is on a 'Malka', right?”
“Like I could forget? Amount of time I spent in one of those?”
“Right. Why don't you take your crewmate there up and get a look at the Mount Safa. I'm going to be busy for awhile.”
“Sure!” He nodded towards another of the hatches. “Come on, Hector, looks like the grown-ups need some alone time. Follow me.”
He waved and Hector hesitated for a moment before scampering after him.
“Alright, from the top, Vasca, what's Eber done this time?” Khadi said. She was rubbing the bridge of her nose with a weary hand.
“We had a deal! I tried to explain this to him...” Vasca was gesturing up at her with both hands.
Their voices faded into echoes as Hector and Morgan closed the hatch behind them.
A short, covered passage led between the undocking dome and the observation tower. It was of the same carbon-reinforced glass as the dome. From here, they could mostly just see more of the platform, the squared off, unadorned industrial machines and the gigantic, rounded storage tanks that only looked short because of how wide they were. A network of clear domes and passages between them, wherever they would fit. And above all of it, the wide-mouthed smokestacks belching engineered gases into the atmosphere.
A trio of jump-suited figures, stinking of ozone, hurried past them, arguing furiously about chemical mixes in different accents almost thick enough that they almost couldn't tell what they were arguing about. As they passed, Morgan almost asked if they'd tested it against the pH of the local soil and then realized that he had no idea what the soil pH was on Hunahpu. For the briefest moment he'd felt like he was back on Oclla, still riding in the Mount Safa.
A sinking feeling nested itself in his stomach. He felt as if those two were living his life and him? He was living this one, although he didn't know who's life it was. Maybe Khadi was right. Maybe he did belong with his feet on the ground.
“What's your damage, Gannis? You tuned out on me for a second there.” Hector's high, nasal voice snapped him back out of his head.
“It was nothing.” He shrugged. “So, what were you, before you signed on aboard the Khan? Back on the Exchange. A mechanic, right?”
“Beta shift technician third class with a portside docking Corporation. Had contracts to service incoming and outgoing transports.”
“You ever miss that?”
“What? Nah. It was a nothing gig. I wasn't going anywhere, physically or career-wise. Nobody ever got rich drawing a salary right? So I signed on the Khan because I was looking for my chance, my big score, you know? And I can do that best on the move, right? You got to keep moving, you know? You stop going forward, you start to die. Like a shark. The shark is our closest cousin, you know.”
“The shark is... Hector, do you even know what a shark is?” Morgan raised an eyebrow and fixed him with a sideways glance.
“Sure, 'course I do. It's a... you know, it's a thing that has to keep moving, right?”
Morgan didn't bother to answer that. He only shook his head. Spacers.
They didn't exactly walk in silence the rest of the way. Hector kept talking, big plans, big dreams, but Morgan had stopped listening. It wasn't until they reached the ladder to the observation tower and had started climbing that Morgan broke into Hector's chatter.
“...no offense to the Captain here, she's a good Captain and all, but if she'd just let me...”
“Hey, Hector?” He stopped climbing and Hector was forced to stop below him. They were half-way up the narrow ladder that led to the observation nest.
“What? What's wrong? Why did you stop moving?”
“What's all this about?”
“What? What are you talking about? What's all what about? You aren't getting all existential on me, are you, buddy?”
“All of this. Raj or Suze could have piloted that shuttle in just as well. But you insisted this time. And you hate going planetside. Except today. And then that thing with Vasca just now. What are you up to, Rukh?”
“Up to, who says I'm up to anything?”
“You do. All the time. You won't shut up about how you've always got some plan in the works. So what is it this time? What's between you and Vasca that you were so eager to get down here and meet up with him?”
“Alright, alright, no need to get all touchy about it. Void! Listen, the Innes Conglomerate is a member of the Centauri Consortium, right? So, I asked around last time we were in port at the Exchange, I know a guy who put me in touch with one of their Factors there. Way I got it figured, the Frontier States are where the ore is, but the Pact controls most of the big markets, so smaller outfits like the IC are getting killed by 'war tariffs', right? So my thought was that we pick up a load of ore here, carry it around unmarked for a couple of stops, then offload it in the Near Colonies and make a bundle. It's win-win, we profit, the Conglomerate profits, everybody's happy but the bureaucrats.”
“Captain know about this?”
“Ah, come on, better than anybody you know how she is!” There was an edge of a whine to his voice now. “Everything's got to be her idea, all of the time. Maybe that's OK for you, Gannis, but that's not for me. So I was going to make sure it was a done deal before I put it on her desktop. Then she couldn't say no, not if I had it already sealed and tied up with a bow, right?”
“Sure. I suppose.” Morgan sighed. “But what do you think she'll do when you tell her you've been playing around behind her back?”
“Nothing. She won't be able to say a void-damned thing, is what it is. I'm bringing in credit, is what I'm doing. Which is a damn sight more than she's done these last couple of runs. I mean, seriously, even with the cartage fee, this terraforming shit is barely covering our debts and expenses. And Susan's too much a businessperson to argue with that.”
“Nothing? Really? Rukh, old son, if you think Susan Ngn is going to let this by without saying anything, well...” Morgan snorted a laugh. “...maybe you don't got the Captain as figured out as you thought.”
Still shaking his head, Morgan started back up the ladder. The crawler rocked slightly and Hector swore. Morgan looked down and saw Hector hanging by his hands, his feet dangling in the open air, kicking for footholds.
“You OK down there?”
“Gimme a... yeah, I'm good... hold on...” He finally hooked a rung and grunted with effort as he started to pull himself back up after Morgan.
“Man, this gravity can jump right into the void and die!”
“This? This is nothing. You think this is bad? This is barely detectable. Shit, I can't imagine how you'd make out on a proper planet.”
“Yeah, well, who says I'd want to, huh?”
They climbed the rest of the way up and came, head first, through the floor of the tiny observation nest on top of the tower. It was nothing more than a transparent bubble of carbon glass on top of the thin spire, just below the level of the billowing smokestacks. The fumes formed a blue-gray ceiling of haze just above the bubble. Morgan could almost feel the weight of it pressing down on top of him.
Below them the platform spread out, a rectangle of industrial machinery and beyond that, the gray and white earth rolled past, cut into squares by the regular crosshatching of the groundweed.
“Hey, Gannis, listen, about all that stuff I told you back there, about this deal with Vasca, are you going to tell the Captain about all of that?”
“Nah. The damage is done. One way or another she's going to find out. Best thing you can do is make this work. You hearing me?” Morgan reached up to grip Hector by the shoulder and gave it a reassuring squeeze.
“Yeah. Heh. Thanks, you're a real pal. I'm just trying to get ahead, you know?”
“Sure.” Morgan squinted as he gazed out at the horizon. “Hey, I think I see it!”
He pointed to a dust cloud rising from a black dot on the horizon. He reached out and touched the glass, which flickered to life. A square of light appeared on the surface, and magnified the view within it. The black dot became the silhouette of a structure, a twin to the platform they were on.
“There she is, Hector, old buddy, the Mount Safa, spent some of the best years of my life on that old heap. Khadi has been skipper of her since before the war. This is the third planet she's brought the Safa to serve on.”
A hint of a smile wrinkled the side of Morgan's mouth.
“She might have been out of operation for a while, but she's going to beat the band now, isn't she?” Long streams of white smoke and blue haze came up out of the Mount Safa's smokestacks. “Look at that thing go!”
“Yeah. Nifty.” Hector sounded less excited than Morgan.
“You know what it's doing? I don't mean just the chemical reactions there, but what it's really doing? It's making the sky, that's what. Every world needs something different, but those gases you see rising up there, those are going to be what the kids look up and see generations from now when they stand outside for the first time.”
“That's.... wait, a good thing, right?”
“Ah, seal it up, you!” He took a playful swipe at Hector, who ducked back out of the way, laughing.
“So, I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about how this stuff's supposed to work, but why's the emissions coming out of that one darker than the stuff this one is pumping out?”
Morgan turned his attention back to the Safa. Great clouds of dark smoke, nearly black, had started coming off the platform in waves, mixing with the blue-tinted haze that was still rising above it, and blotting it out.
The sight struck him with terrible familiarity. His muscles had tensed and his breath started to get quicker by the time his mind had raced to catch up and led the word to his mouth.
“Fire! Those aren't normal emissions. That's smoke! Those refineries are on fire!” He was already sprinting for the ladder.
“Wait? Where are you going? What do you think we can do?”
“Don't know what you're going to do, but I've got rescue training.” He grabbed the sides of the ladder and slid down using the sides as poles. His feet hit the floor lightly. He spun around and sprinted down into the hall.
Khadi was approaching from the other end of the corridor, followed by a pair of officers in Militia uniforms. She closed the distance between them with a handful of long, quick strides. He almost opened his mouth to tell her but one look at the ebony mask of her face told him that she already knew.
“Khadi! I just saw! Get me on a flier and I might be able to help, you know I've got the training.”
“I do. But you're not getting on a flier or going anywhere else. You're under arrest, you and that crewmate of yours.” She stopped in the middle of the hallway, blocking his way. A nod of her head and one of the other officers sprinted off to intercept Hector as he scrambled off the ladder.
“Hey! What's going on here?” Hector was dragged down to join them, the officer's hand clamped tight around his skinny arm.
“What? Why?” Morgan was having trouble making sense of the individual words, this was all so quick.
“On the charge of sabotage.”
Khadi finally gave Morgan the flier he'd asked for. He was put aboard in cuffs, with Hector and their guards. They cruised over the surface from the darker gray of the cultivated lands, with their checker-board of groundweed, to less worked areas where the chalky white ground reflected the incoming sunlight almost as well as the standing water that pooled wherever there was the slightest depression.
They barely got a glimpse of the vast, dark forest of heat radiating panels rose up through the ground above Irkalla Habitat before being taken down into the underground city.
They were briefly, and roughly, transferred from the fliers, their formal charges were barked at them and they were thrown in a holding cell to 'await the Pleasure of the Adjudicator'.
The cell was dark. Apparently nobody had thought it worth while to waste the power on illumination. Stripped of any electronics, they had no way of knowing how much time had passed. There was one meal, but without better knowledge of what time measurement was used locally, that was no help. There was nothing to do but try and get some rest.
“Hey, buddy, hey, Gannis, hey” Hector whispered in the dark. “Do you think that..?”
“Ah, do me a favor and give it a rest, will you?”
And he did.
Morgan awakened later, no telling how long, by a light as the door cracked open. Three guards, two held stunners at the ready, a third to put the manacles on them.
They were taken down halls of the same dull metal plating as the cell. Eventually, they were brought to a door they were and shoved into a brightly lit room. They had to squint against the glare.
As they adjusted to the light, they could see this was the chamber of no Adjudicator but they were definitely, if unofficially, on trial.
Khadija Sufawa sat at one end of a long table forged of the same native metal as the rest of the city. Harsh artificial lights shone down on her, hi-lighting every line and scar on her face. To her right, the short, broad figure of Carlo Vasca whispered something in Khadija's ear, but she shook her head 'no'. Opposite Vasca, on Khadi's left, a long, thin figure of a woman was hunched over the table, her mouth was drawn up in a lipless scowl. As they entered, she climbed to her feet and glared at them from under hooded eyes.
“Suze.” Morgan gave her a nod.
Her eyes narrowed.
“Captain! There you are, thank the void! Hey, there's been some kind of misunderstanding or something, listen, you're the Captain, you were the one signed off on this deal, you can...”
“You seal it right up, spacer. Not another leakin' word out of you, Rukh. Not even one.” She leveled a thin line of a finger at him. Her head turned towards Khadi, while keeping the finger pointed at Hector.
“Now listen, Planetary or no, these two men, for better or worse, are on my crew and you can't just hold my crew without some kind of solid proof. We got rights of free trade in the Frontier Systems, and I won't have them locked up on your say so, with no Advocate or anything.”
Khadi's face didn't move, but her eyes swiveled up to fix themselves on the Captain's face.
“I was you, Captain Ngn, I'd be more careful about bringing attention to myself. This thing stains your whole ship, and like your man there says, you're the Captain. If there's going to be a conviction, it'll be your name tops the list. In fact, if it wasn't for Mister Vasca's intervention you'd be sharing a room with your crew there and I'd be submitting the files to impound your ship.”
“Now you wait one leakin' second, I don't know who in the cold, sucking void you think you are, lady, but...” The Captain leaned in and snarled in Khadi's face. Khadi held up one large, calloused hand to stop her. The Captain hissed something under her breath and lowered herself back down into her seat with the peculiar care of those raised in low-gravity.
“I know who I am. I am Planetary of Hunahpu and the people of Hunahpu know who I am. What I don't know is who in God's Creation you are, 'Captain' Ngn, outside a name on a license. And neither does anyone else. You spacers. You come and go without a connection to anyone or anything. You think you can do whatever you like because you can always outrun the consequences of your actions. Well, not here and not now. This is Hunahpu and I'm not some penny-ante License Agent. On this little moon, actions have consequences. That's our law and my duty.”
“Sure.” The Captain said. “Only, and there's the thing, way I recall it, the law in the Frontier States says that me and mine get to have a hearing before the Adjudicator with Advocates and a bow on top and everything. I don't see any Advocates here and while this is my first time in Irkalla, I've got the feeling this isn't the Adjudicator's chambers, is it?”
A lazy smile spread itself wide across the Captain's face. The lines surrounding Khadi's mouth deepened with her scowl.
“Trust me, Captain, nothing would make me happier than to see this all out in the open. But we're having some trouble at the port with a dispute over grain prices and a colony this size only has the one Adjudicator. As for Advocates, the only ones here work for the Conglomerate and they've few enough of those. And I think defending their own contractors would be a conflict of interest. So, unfortunately, you're going to have to fend for yourself there.”
Khadi smiled and showed all of her teeth. The Captain just leaned back and regarded her with half-closed, almost sleepy, eyes.
“You can't hold us, or you would, and you can't try us. Then what are we doing here? When the law's away, why should we stay?”
“Like Hell I can't hold you!” Khadi slammed a hand down on the metal table and it rung like a bell. “I can hold you until the Rise of the Mahdi, floater! The only reason any of you are walking free is that Vasca has interceded, but I'm getting less convinced by the word.”
“Please, let's not let this get out of hand, let's all be reasonable here. There are matters of business at stake after all.” Vasca gestured with his hands, drawing all their attentions. Khadi closed her eyes and muttered something to herself, while the Captain just chuckled under her breath and shook her head slightly. Hector broke the silence.
“Hey, what's all this? Don't we get a say in our own...?”
“Seal it and keep it sealed, Rukh!” The Captain cut him off with a swipe of the hand. “This isn't the time. I can make that an order from your Captain that makes it any easier for you.”
Hector paled a bit and swallowed his next words, although Morgan could see them squirming to be let out with the working of his jaw muscles.
“Planetary, a word.” Vasca's voice was lightly accented with just a hint of his own homeworld in the Crescent. “Any outside contact, even a tramp driver like Captain Ngn's Kublai Khan, is rare enough these days. Any trade from outside the Frontier is an opportunity that can't be wasted. We should be careful before we blow that particular bridge, do you not think?”
“I don't care if this the last driver to dock here this year, this is a matter of sabotage! Facts are facts, Mister Vasca, and I don't know what you think you can do to change that. We're only here as a courtesy to you, and only that because of the central part the Conglomerate plays in the moon's economy.”
“Well, I've got one idea,” Susan said slowly. “How about you tell all of us what the actual charges are?”
“You know damn well what you've done. I've already told you once. I shouldn't have to tell you again.” Khadija Safawa crossed her arms and glared across the table at the crumpled figure of Captain Susan Ngn.
“And I was busy getting my drink on when you called me. I shouldn't even have to be this far down the gravity well. So it appears we're all having to do things we shouldn't have to. And I want my boys to hear it too.”
Susan nodded towards Hector and Morgan, both of whom decided, as one, to stay silent.
“This seems to be a fair thing.” Vasca nodded his head quickly.
“Fine. It changes nothing. The crew of the free driver Kublai Khan, registered out of Tau Ceti, are hereby bound to Answer before Judgment by my authority as Planetary of Hunahpu, by the will of the Frontier States Assembly to the following charges. Sabotage of Frontier States equipment, Conspiracy to Willful Damage to an Emergent Ecosystem, Illegal Importation of Dangerous Cargo and whatever else I can think up.
“Oh, well, is that all?” Susan turned so that both Morgan and Hector could see her roll her eyes.
“The facts in this case are clear, Captain. It is provable that the parts you brought us were sabotaged. The regenerators we installed on the Malka-class terraforming platform Mount Safa appeared to be fully functional but when installed were designed to set up a chain reaction that led to the fire in the primary refinery of that platform. Upon further inspection we also found widespread and aggressive viral contamination in the cyanobacteria cultures. While nothing has been found in the chemical concentrates, we have recalled them until further tests can be completed as a safety measure. And before you protest normal malfunction, Captain, those regenerators were in good enough shape to pass first inspection, which should have caught anything that wasn't specifically designed to evade detection.”
“Are you leakin' kidding me?” Hector just couldn't keep his mouth shut. “That could mean anything! I demand...”
“Rukh! Let me handle this” The finger was out and pointed at Hector again. The Captain spun around a couple times in her chair and ended up pointed at Khadi.
“He may not have put it best, but Mister Rukh's asking the right question here. Not that you've proved shit, mind you, but even if those parts were deliberately sabotaged, what's it got to do with us? The Khan's just a driver, we never even see most of the containers we ship. Nothing to do with us.”
“No.” Khadi shook her head once in the negative. “I'm not buying it, Captain. Now I'm no spacer myself, but even I know that any driver worth their steel knows every rivet and circuit of their cargo before they ever leave port. Hell, your man Rukh there can recite the manifest backwards and forwards. I don't believe you didn't know exactly what you were bringing us here.”
“Believe what you like. You can't prove it either way. Could be I wasn't paying attention this particular cargo.”
“Then more fool you.” Khadi had peeled back her lips to show all her teeth in something that could be easily mistaken for a smile. “Because the cargo is still your legal responsibility. You signed for it, it is your problem now. So you see, beyond that, I don't have to prove a thing.”
The Captain's eyes flickered from Khadi to Vasca and she raised her eyebrows in supplication.
“Ah, now, be that as it may, perhaps we are being hasty here, Planetary. If nothing else, should the good Captain and her people not be guilty, I cannot believe that you would want to let the actual saboteurs go free. That does not seem like you, old friend.”
Khadi glared at Vasca, but didn't contradict him. He looked across the angry Planetary to address the Captain directly.
“Listen, this cargo, it came from the Centauri Exchange, no?”
“Originally. We took control of it at Vela. Needed a neutral port for entry into the Frontier States. But basically, yeah.”
“Thought so. The Conglomerate has offices on the Exchange. It is possible for me to check our contacts there and confirm the provenance of this cargo. A courier can be dispatched this very day, but even so, it will take time. Will this be agreeable to all?”
“Suits me. Take your time, I got nowhere to be.” The Captain shrugged.
“I suppose,” Khadi said through clenched teeth. “But I'm continuing my investigation on this end while you do. If you think I'm going to sit on my thumbs and wait for word from your people on the Exchange...”
“Of course! I would expect no other from such a Planetary as yourself. You have in all things always been most thorough. Besides, it would be prudent to continue looking, if it so happened the perpetrators were somewhat closer by, no?”
“Now who has no proof?” Khadi's lips compressed into a dark line.
“This is granted. Proofs are your business, Planetary. Mine is business. And in business, we abide by the fine old motto 'Cui bono?'”
“Who profits?” The Captain translated with a nod of her head. “It's always a good question, even when it's not just business.”
“I know what you're getting at, Carlo, but there's nothing I've seen that connects the settlers over on Xbalanque to any of this. Your dispute with them was going on long before this.”
“So you say, but I think the timing, it is too good. Just after they announce another rise in price? Too me, this is too much coincidence.”
“Well, seems to me you two have got some things to discuss. If you're not pressing charges at the moment, I can take my people and go now?”
“You are free to leave here. Yes. But not to leave this moon. I want all three of you on site while I conduct my investigation. Are there any of your crew left on your driver, Captain Ngn?”
“Of course. My Exec is minding the shop.”
“Then you had better give that exec of yours a call and tell them to expect company, because the next thing I'm doing here is calling out to the port Militia on Pacari Outstation to search your ship.”
The Captain choked back a silent snarl for a brief moment before she forced her face back into the insolent smirk she'd been wearing for most of this conversation.
“Sure, why not? Raj loves company.” She stood up and took a step away from the chair. “As for me? I think I've had my fill of it. Now, I'm taking my crew and finding a drink or nine. Unless you have an objection, Planetary?”
She did a mocking little bow.
Khadi just shook her head and turned her back on the Captain to talk with Vasca. The Captain's eyes flashed with anger but she said nothing. She turned and strode over to Hector and Morgan with a few of her long-legged strides.
The guards unlocked their cuffs and the Captain grabbed them by the collars and drug them out into the hallway. The door shut behind them and the Captain stepped out in front of them, blocking their way, thumbs looped through her belt.
“Alright, you two, what's really going on here?”
Morgan crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall, fixing her with a pair of raised eyebrows.
“Hey, nice to see you too, Suze. How you been? I'm good. How about you?”
“I'm barely sober enough to be hung over and I'm down here at the bottom of the gravity well trading evil eyes with that overgrown traffic cop in there is how I am, so you'll excuse me I don't feel much in the mood for niceties at the moment.”
“Hey, we don't know anything, Captain, all were doing down here was...”
“I know what you've been doing, Rukh. I already talked to Vasca.”
“Oh.” Hector's mouth snapped shut.
“And we're going to have words about that later, you can bank on that. But I don't care about it now. Right now, the only thing on my mind is what is really going on down here. What do you know? How much of this backwash is true?”
“We don't know anything more than you do, Captain, we just dropped off the...”
“Hector, no offense, but seal it up, I'm asking Morgan right now. You may know everything there is to know about drives and shipbuilding, but you don't know shit about planets.”
“Be surprised what I know, Captain.” Hector muttered it under his breath.
“Doubt it.” She snorted and turned towards Morgan.
“Alright, Morgan, tell me true, how deep in the shit are we?”
“Deep.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “The sabotage was real, that's for certain. I've worked with Khadi before and she's a top shelf terraformer. She says it's sabotage, it's sabotage. Trust me, nobody is more thorough than Khadi and her people. If I know her, they checked and double-checked what they had for breakfast this morning, much less any strange parts they were putting into a girl like Mount Safa.”
“And there's no chance they just forgot this time? No chance this really is an accident?”
“Suze, understand me, Khadi and most of her people might be Great Hajj Muslims, but Terraforming is their religion. I know how they feel. It's hard not to get swept up in the scale and grandeur of what they're doing here. This is genesis for a whole new world, a new chance for humanity, and they're the ones turning on the light. Terraformers who don't care that much don't stay terraformers. They checked. Bank on it.”
“Shit.” She hissed obscenely through clenched teeth. “Then we're breached well and good. Unless... unless...”
She wasn't looking at Morgan or Hector anymore. She lost all her posture at once, yielding to the unfamiliar pull of gravity as she slumped back against the wall. She was chewing on her lip, worrying at it as she worked the problem through in her mind.
“Hey, hey, Captain, you're looking at this all wrong.” Hector flew up, filling the space between their faces with gestures. “Nothing's breached. This isn't a problem, this is an opportunity. We're in the high orbit over this. You saw how they were in there, Sufawa's got the badge, but Vasca pays the bills and we've got a deal brewing with Vasca. It's in his interests as well as ours to see we get out of here, and he's the one with the power. He's the one really calls the shots around here. Now all we've got to do is...”
Hector paused of his own accord and blinked a couple of times.
“Aren't you going to tell me to 'seal it up'?”
“Not when you're spouting sense. I might be less angry with you than I thought, Hector. But only if this works!” She unfolded from the wall, draped a hand across his shoulder and pulled him along towards her.
“We need to find someplace to sit down and work out some details. You coming, shortpants?”
“Nah, you go on, highpockets, I'll catch up later. I've got something I've got to see to.” Morgan forced a grin and stepped up to slap Susan lightly on the shoulder.
She looked over at the closed door and back to Morgan with a raised eyebrow. He just smiled and shrugged. She shook her head and kept walking.
“Come on, Rukh, let's get some drinks down us and you can tell me your side of this whole scam with Vasca, alright?”
The two of them disappeared down the hallway.
Soon after, the door opened and Khadi emerged in conversation with Carlo Vasca.
“Alright, Carlo, I'll look into it, but I can't promise you anything. For what it's worth, my gut says you're still wrong. This isn't their style.”
“So you say, but my gut, it says the opposite. It is proof we need to settle the difference, no?”
“And one way or the other, I'll get it, count on that.” Khadi caught Morgan's eye. “Listen, I'll contact your office the moment my people turn something up.”
“As you say. And I have business at the spaceport yet. Good day, Planetary.” Carlo Vasca nodded his perfectly coiffed head and continued on the way Susan and Hector had, with a speculative sideways glance at Morgan as he passed.
Khadi watched him go and then turned to Morgan, her eyes shrouded and unreadable.
“Thought you would have been long gone with your crew.”
“I needed to talk to you, Khadi. Figured we might be busy later.” He shrugged again and let the corner of his mouth test out a small smile.
“You think so?” She snorted out a laugh despite herself. “I had forgotten that Earthman's talent for understatement.”
The laugh was only on her face for a moment and then it fell away.
“If you're hoping to talk your way out of this, save your breath. What I said in that room still holds. The facts are the facts.”
“Damn it all, Khadi, this is me! I know how much the Work means. You've got to know I'd never do anything against it.”
“Got to? You telling me what to do on my own moon?” She stiffened visibly and her scowl got deeper.
“Come on. What is all this? It's me, Khadi. Morgan Gannis. Look at me. Just look at me. It's still me. I'm as the same as I ever was.”
“Yeah. Same as you ever were.” She closed her eyes and sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose with her fingers. She seemed to deflate a little bit, bringing out her deep lines and the scars on her face, the lines a little deeper and the scars a bit more numerous than he remembered under the harsh artificial lights.
“And that's the problem. You say to look at you? Well I am, and you know what I'm seeing? The same man I worked Oclla with ten years ago. The very same man.”
“And that's a problem?”
“Morgan, look at me. Then look at yourself again. I'm older. Don't bother flattering me, I am and I don't mind it. Well I don't mind it most mornings anyway. But you aren't. How much of the last ten years have you spent in the Sleep, in the long dark between stars?”
“I... I don't know. A fair bit, I guess.”
“Let's try it another way. How many years subjective has it been for you, huh? Two, maybe three?”
“I suppose. Yeah, about like three.”
“That's two-thirds of the last decade you just slept through, Morgan. Well I've lived every minute of the last ten years. And lived them hard. The war's not going well, and we're down to drafting kids who hadn't been born when the first shots were fired. I’ve commanded them myself, children young enough to be my own, for two tours in the Crescent Systems. That's why I've been jumped from platform skipper straight to Planetary, because there's nobody else with any experience left.”
Morgan opened his mouth again but this time no easy answer came rolling out, so he shut it and let her go on.
“So you see why my problem isn't that you've changed, but that you haven't. And the rest of the universe has. I have. That's what makes you one of them. You share their time.”
The hum of the city's life-support systems filled the empty silence between them.
“Well if I'm still the same man I was then, ask yourself this, Khadi: would that man, the man you knew, ever do anything against the Work?”
She narrowed her eyes and gave him a long, hard look. Then she closed them and took a deep breath. When she spoke again, there was a hint of a laugh in it.
“Damn your blue eyes, Morgan. Just stupid enough to cut through to the basics of things, just like always. No matter how long I live I will never understand that.”
“Well? You going to answer? Would he?”
“No. No, he wouldn't. Not the Morgan I knew.” She opened her eyes and shook her head. “Or thought I knew. I've never known all of you, have I?”
“Who does? But you know enough. Let me prove it to you. Give me something to do with my hands. If we're going to be stranded here, I'll need something to keep me busy anyway. Words are just words, so let me do it with actions.”
Suspicion lived in her glare.
“You're plumb crazy if you think I'm going to go straight from accusing you of sabotaging my platforms to putting you on one.”
“Then I'm crazy, what's new about that? You said yourself, I'm one hell of a terraformer. And with the Safa down, the other platforms will have to pick up the slack. You can't tell me they won't need extra hands.”
She sighed.
“I will regret this. I know it. But I guess I'm starting to get senile at last.”
“So, you'll let me help?”
“Because you are a hell of a terraformer and...” she stopped for a moment and then continued, softer. “And because I guess I want you to prove yourself to me as much as you want to.”
He waited for her to continue.
“Alright. Report to the labor office in the morning. I'll fix it up with them. Truth be told, it will be good to see you with dirt under your nails again. It's where you belong.”
“I belong where I'm at, Khadi. That's all. You should get to know my crew, they're good folk, underneath it all, spacers or no.”
“They are what they are. And I am what I am. And the day is going to come when you're going to have to decide which you are, Morgan, or life is going to decide for you.”
She shook her head and chuckled and didn't say goodbye as she walked away.
He wondered where Susan had got to. A mighty thirst had suddenly come upon him.
It was the end of the day cycle, but Morgan couldn't help but think of it as the “Morning After”. Morgan had all the signs of a night well misspent; the dry mouth, the throbbing head, the burning behind the eyes. It didn't matter. He was still more excited for this morning than he had been for a long time. Maybe it was the old familiar scents, the methane and the ozone, maybe the familiar sounds, the low rumble of engines as big as a house idling deep below his feet, and the high, warbling wail of the before-shift prayers of the Great Hajj Muslims. Maybe it was the chance to prove himself to Khadi, or maybe it was just the chance to play the game for real stakes again, with real consequences. He felt a thrill in the soles of his feet at the thought. He knew that this could be real trouble, sure. But he liked trouble. Trouble gave him something to fix.
“Never seen rain like this. Not on any world I've been on.” He was leaning on the front railing in the forward observation dome of the terraforming platform Beloved Aisha, as it sat just inside the open doors of the half-kilometer tall docking garage, watching solid sheets of water cut the air and flatten the earth.
“Left it too long.”
An old Hydrian terraformer stood next to him. Most of the crew was Great Hajj and at prayers. That left them the only two in the dome. She had the look of a career terraformer, hard brown skin wrinkled and weathered by the touch of a dozen suns, and the slow, steady back and forth eyes that took in everything in their own time.
“Say again?”
She nodded out to the rain and by extension, the moon it fell on.
“Left it too long after cometfall. They didn't get the water down into the soil soon enough and now it's in the air. No mountains, no oceans, nothing to regulate the flow. And the ground, she's not yet fit to receive it. So, soon as any energy enters the system, up it goes and...”
She raised her hand up into the air and then brought it down again onto the safety railing with a loud crash.
“Sheetstorm.” She was shaking her head slow and staring angrily at the water coming down as if it had wronged her personally. Which, Morgan supposed, it had. Any terraformer worth their salts and minerals took any harm to their planet personally.
The sheets of water darkened until they couldn't be seen, only heard as the whole of Hunahpu moved from light to darkness. Just as Itzamna was tide-locked around Innes' Star, Hunahpu and its sister moon Xbalanque, were tide-locked around Itzamna. During its day-cycle the 'sun-side' faced the rays of Innes' Star, and the 'off-side' was bathed in the light that was reflected off the thick, light-colored atmosphere, filling nearly the whole sky with almost the luminosity of its parent star. As Hunahpu passed into Itzamna's shadow, night covered whole of the moon.
Then, as sudden as it started, the sheetstorm ended, like someone turning off a faucet. Shallow streams snaked among the rocks, flowing over ground that wouldn't absorb it. From down the connecting tunnel, he could hear the last few notes of the prayers trail to a halt and the one unified voice of the faithful broke into a thousand shouts and laughs.
The very deck plates of the platform vibrated as they conducted the booming, godlike voice of the skipper addressing the whole crew. Her voice filled the air and vibrated up through their feet and into their bones.
“Alright, you groundhogs, you dirt-makers, you life-breeders and world-shapers. Come on, my beautiful, dirty, wingless angels! You've given Him His prayers, now it's time to give Him His dues. There's God's work to be done!”
Morgan didn't know if he believed in anyone's gods, here or elsewhere, but it was hard not to believe in this. There was nothing harder to deny than a world.
The Hydrian had already pushed off the railing and was ambling with a swaying, bow-legged gait towards her work station. `The engines shuddered to life and the behemoth platform surged forward with a shake. It took Morgan by surprise and he had to grip the railing to stay upright. The Hydrian kept walking like nothing had happened. There was a time that would have been him.
“You! New guy! Come on! Make the moving! Now! You are on Kembu's work gang now!” Thin-faced and sour voiced, the little man gestured him on and he let go of the railing and staggered after him, stumbling with every shake of the platform.
The great machine lumbered forward, fighting the planet with every meter, great steel claws in the treads tore up the ground, breaking up the hard, chalky soil and folding in groundwater, followed by nozzles that forced seeds and the nutrients they would need to start growing into the lifeless earth. The plants, once started, would do the real work of terraforming, absorbing toxins, producing oxygen and changing the dirt into something like real soil.
It took him half a shift to get his ground-legs back, more or less. He stayed out of the way and prepped their equipment, cleaned and whatever other support work he could do while he watched them and remembered the skills he'd learned during his days in the Work.
At mid-shift break, he helped another infidel, this one a tall, pale figure of indeterminate gender from Kapteyn's Star, lay out the mid-shift rations while most of the crew, were rolling up their carpets from mid-shift prayers.
Kembu of Astarte, the boss of the work-gang, even as he intoned the prayers, had also been rubbing the incomprehensible fetish of his native faith that still hung at his belt. The lines on his face, which already held a look of perpetual worry, were a little deeper.
“New Guy! Bread. Now! Mid-shift is not forever. The work will not do itself!” He barked and snatched the wax-paper packet of rations from Morgan's hand.
“Geez. What's the boss' grief?”
“What isn't?” The other infidel laughed and dropped another cube of rich, textured bread into another wax-paper packet, along with dried strips of protein-rich legumes and squeezetubes of some kind of condiment.
“Kembu is a worrier. Today it just so happens that he has cause. You heard what happened on the Safa last shift, right?”
“Yeah, I, ah, might have heard something.”
Morgan found something to do where he didn't have to make eye contact with his companion.
“The Mount Safa was an unlucky platform always. Always. Too many worlds. Too many Jenny Locks. Now she's out, who they play with, huh? No good, no good at all.” Kembu gnawed at his bread cube and shook his head.
“Jenny Locks? In a squig's ear!” The Kapteynian made a face. “You mark me, it's no boogy-men or planetary goblins that are at the root of these 'accidents'. It's plain to anyone with eyes, it's sabotage. Sabotage, pure and simple.”
Before Morgan could open his mouth to get out the question another member of the crew, another terraformer, a girl with broad shoulders and big hands, asked it for him.
“Sabotage? No. It can't be. Who'd want to sabotage terraforming? That's like... like... swearing during a prayer!” She was young, younger than she looked, Morgan judged as soon as he heard her voice. Almost too young, maybe.
“You're holding the answer in your hand! That's their bread your eating. All from Xbalanque. Like all the food here. They know that someday this world will be able to grow its own food and break their monopoly. Shirt-sleevers! Peh! Never trust anyone who just had their world handed to them by nature, that's what I say.”
Kembu grunted for their attention and gave the Kapteynian hard look through squinting eyes.
“Enough of this talk! Planetary has said, quarrel is between farmers and miners, is none of ours. We do the Work. The soil in front of us. The air above us. No more, no less. Nozzle assembly on leg nine is silted up. Next one starts on this, is one clearing it.”
There was a mollified silence punctuated by the sound of eating.
Morgan ate fast and finished first.
“Hell, if nobody else is going to step up, I can do that, I don't mind.”
“You sure?” Kembu squinted up at him from where he sat.
“Yeah, sure, why not?”
“Not hear me before? Not safe. Jenny Locks be loose and hunting.”
“Ha! Listen boss, even if I believed in the angry native spirits of the worlds we 'formed, and I don't, I've worked in space. Ain't got no demons down here like the demons they got out in the Void!”
Kembu sighed and shook his head.
“Then you don't know this world. This world is bad fierce. I done worked worlds from the sky mirrors of Thor to the work farms of Kuara and I never seen a world fights back like this one.”
Morgan hooked his thumbs in his belt and just kept looking down at Kembu.
“Fine. New guy wants to go, new guy goes.” He jerked a thumb towards the next room.
“Don't you go worrying, boss, you'll ruin your youthful looks. Don't care how much this pony bucks. I ain't had a chance to get in the saddle yet!”
But as soon as he was through that door, out of sight of the work boss, and had his breather on, Morgan took a bit of bread he had saved out from his lunch, opened the hatch and sprinkled the crumbs down in the night.
Just in case.
The sheetstorms started falling again just as the terraforming platform Beloved Aisha rolled into the parking garage. The garage where the platforms, mobile factory complexes over 20 meters high, were lined up like beasts in a monstrous stable, was an enormous man-made cavern dug into the soil of Hunahpu.
Caked with mud, too tired to feel his feet and too tired to care, Morgan stumbled down past the techs swarming up the boarding ramp to start the off-shift maintenance. The Kapteynian, who’s name Morgan thought was Joan or Jonah or something like that, although he still hadn’t figured its gender, clapped him lightly on the shoulder and gave a tired laugh.
“A good shift’s work, eh?”
“No accidents, anyway.” Kembu, the work boss, muttered from behind them.
“No sabotage, you mean!”
“Meant what I said.”
“None of your boogy-men today, either, I noticed!”
“What you know of Jenny Locks? You don’t know shit.”
“Sure I know shit. I have to smell you all shift, don’t I, boss?”
A wave of exhausted laughter swept back through the work crews and Morgan found his own braying voice joining them. His muscles ached and his mouth tasted of mud and grit, but he was as content as he could remember being for a long time. Honestly tired from an honest day’s work and the satisfaction that brought. He could almost forget the reason he was here, just work with his hands and be happy.
And then he saw them.
A pair of Militia officers were waiting for him at the bottom of the ramp. The ache in his limbs turned to a leaden weight and the contentment drained away, leaving him feeling empty and tired.
They greeted him politely, asked how he his shift was and wished him a good evening. Their presence was message enough. He was at liberty, but only for the moment, the message ran.
The bars in Irkalla Habitat were always open. The mines and refineries were always running and there was always one shift getting off work and another headed to the monorail stations to start their ‘day’. Only the terraformers, who worked on the surface, were tied to one time period and when they got off shift, they packed the bars and businesses to capacity.
‘The Pit’ was exactly what it sounded like. A tiny space, barely big enough to fit a bar, at some point the floor had been removed and it now extended down vertically. Tables were bolted to the walls on both levels, connected by metal catwalks and a maze of ladders. A bar island hung in the center of the room, suspended by cables that wouldn’t have held it in any greater gravity. It was near enough to the monorail that the cables swung and the tables rattled as the trains went by.
Not that Morgan could hear the trains, or much of anything else, over the noise of the crowd.
“What was that?” He shouted across the table at the Captain. She and Hector were taking turns taking hits from a clear bag of white vapor they had filled from the big vaporizer at the bar island. There were bags like it at most of the other tables. The Great Hajj majority among the terraformers had some pretty strict prohibitions against intoxicating drink, but Great Hajj Islam was somewhat less definite on the subject of things smoked and breathed.
“You have fun?” The Captain cupped her hands and shouted.
“Wasn’t out there play… ah, never mind.” He started to shout back but the Captain just shook her head. Her eyes were too wide and serene to bother explaining anything to her. She took a pull off the bag and passed it towards him. The smoke drifting around this hotbox already had his head spinning and he held up a hand to refuse. Hector took it next.
Hector leaned over and started babbling into Morgan’s ear.
“Alright, well, hey, buddy, hey… hold on…” Hector stopped to take a hit from the bag, and started talking again before he’d even closed it.
“Anyway, like I was saying, what was I saying? Oh, yeah, so, while you were out there making mud pies with the locals and whatever, me and the Captain, we, okay, what? Oh, right, me and the Captain were in here working, making real things, like plans. Plans! And have we got a plan? Just ask me, pal. Have we got a plan? Man, do we have a plan. And it’s a real doozy, you know? So simple it’s fool-proof, even you-proof. Right? Right? So what say… Hey, Captain! You want to tell Gannis yourself or…?” The theory was that theece slowed people down, although for Hector Rukh, about all it seemed to do was take the limits off his mouth.
The Captain just smiled, took a long draw off the bag, clasped her hands behind her head and leaned back, eyes drifting lazily upwards towards the ceiling, which Morgan only now noticed danced with a projected image of Itzamna slowly filling the skies above the city.
“Alright, Hector, so what’s this…?”
“The plan! Right! I gotta say, it’s an awesome plan, perfect, well, just about, I mean, you’re going to love it…”
Morgan narrowed his eyes at Hector and the taller man seemed to speed up just a touch.
“Right, right, right, you want to hear it, right? Of course you do, of course. Alright, so the thing is that we got an advantage, an ace in the hole. We got some powerful friends here, well not friends, exactly, but business partners, well partner anyway, a business partner who has a financial interest in our freedom and well-being, which is pretty much better in every way, if you know what I mean…”
“Partner. You mean Vasca, right?”
“You know it, buddy, he pretty much runs things around here and with your old pal Sufawa turning on us, it’s good we got at least one friend on this mudball here…”
“Hey! Khadi hasn’t turned on us, exactly, she’s just…”
“Well, she hasn’t turned on you, anyway.” The Captain leaned across the table and fixed Morgan’s gaze with her wide, black pupils.
“Suze, come on, she’s an old friend of mine. And you know I’d never do anything to hurt you or the ship. We go back too far for that.”
“Know you wouldn’t. True enough. Your old pal, the Planetary? Her I’m less sure about. She's got this idea we're to blame. And you know how dirt-walkers are when they get an idea in their head.”
“Hey! I’m a dirt-walker, you know!”
“Nah. Not anymore.” She dismissed the idea with a vague wave of the hand.
He could feel a tension building up behind his jaw muscles. With a deep breath, he turned back to Hector.
“Right. This plan.”
“Oh, yeah, the plan! Yes! What was I…? Oh, yeah! So, Mister Vasca controls, well, the Innes Conglomerate controls, half, maybe more than half of the transports from here to the outstation, right? And what’s it mean? Means he can sneak us and the shuttles out to the station in one of his ore barges. Sure, he’ll have to break them up a bit, but still, we get back to the Khan, we just pick up Raj, wham, bam, take the rest of the cargo and, zoom, we’re out of the system before the Planetary even knows we’re gone. What do you think? Huh? Huh?”
“It won’t matter how she rages. Won’t be able to hear it through all the space between us. It’s a solid plan, even if Hector did set it up. Won’t be coming back here anytime soon.” The Captain’s smile was slow but broad.
“So, wait, the plan is just to take off on out of here before there’s any fallout?”
“You do get it!” Hector brayed right in his ear.
“That’s the beauty of flying the stars, Morgan old pal. Whenever things get too grim dirt-side, we just fly. Our troubles are limited but space is infinite.”
She waved her hand in the air to vaguely suggest a bird flying away.
“That’s it? We just fly off without trying to clear our names?
“Why?” The Captain shrugged.
Morgan could feel his face start to flush hot. Just looking at the two of them, long, attenuated frames native to the low gravity of space stations and moons, draped bonelessly over their chairs, taking hits of theece and laughing at the clumsy, silly dirt-walkers. It made his throat tighten and brought the blood to his face, although he couldn’t explain exactly why.
“But we can fix this, Suze, I mean all we have to do is…”
“Whoa, slow down there. Where’s all this coming from? I would have thought that you of all people would know we don’t have the best of history with planetary security. After all, you’re the only one of us that’s actually done time.”
“Yeah, come on Gannis, think about it. We stay here, your buddy the Planetary will pin this thing on us. We fly, she can’t. Do the math, it adds up. Nothing personal, just business, right?”
“Damn it! This isn’t about business or numbers or whatever you’re talking about. It’s a matter of…” He almost said the word ‘honor’ but the looks in their eyes, Hector amused and Susan concerned, stopped him.
“…matter of friendship. Khadi’s a friend.”
“Some friend!”
Morgan was up out of his chair and had Hector’s collar in his fist. The Captain reached out with exaggerated deliberation and brushed her fingers along his arm.
“I get it.”
He let go of Hector’s collar. Hector opened his mouth to say something, but the Captain silenced him with a shake of her head.
“I do. You owe her. You’re loyal and I’m the last person to discourage that in you.” Her head moved in a laugh he couldn’t hear. Then her face arranged itself into the almost child-like seriousness of the theece. She leaned in until her nose was centimeters from his.
“You take the time you need to do…” A pause like a skip in an audio file. “…whatever it is that you need to do. But you keep in touch, we might have to leave here fast.”
“Yeah, that would be a shame.” Hector leaned back and sneered. “If the dirt-walker got left…”
“Seal it, Rukh.” She didn’t even spare him a glance.
“Yes, Captain.”
“Sure, thanks, Suze.” He brushed her fingers aside and spun around before any of the words building up behind his teeth burst out. On his way up the ladder, it dawned on him suddenly that he was running away from a confrontation about running away. Everybody on both levels could hear him explode with laughter.
The ventilation in the hallway outside the 'Pit' functioned better than it did inside and the air felt cool and clean by comparison. Out of the smoke-filled hotbox of the 'Pit', Morgan could feel his head begin to clear.
His head was clear enough to realize that he had no idea how he was going to accomplish any of the things he told Susan he was going to do. Clear their names? Prove himself to Khadi? Maybe even catch the true saboteurs?
No idea.
“Hey there, 'former. Looking to shake some of that dirt loose?” Tall and dark and heavy in all the right place, she wore her Conglomerate sex worker's license strapped to her thigh. And it was a hell of a thigh. All the way around and then some.
He smiled with real regret, patted her leg and informed her that he had no ready credit. She returned the smile, no charge, shrugged and walked away, giving him quite a free show.
She paused halfway down the corridor to chat with a pair of Militia officers lounging there. As they talked, first one officer, then the prostitute, then the other officer, took it in turns to take a surreptitious look down the hall at him. Morgan wasn't at all surprised. He'd never been in a mining colony yet where the prostitutes weren't in the pay of the law or visa versa.
Morgan turned his back on the lot of them, stuck both hands in his pockets and started walking, whistling an old song from his childhood. Let them follow, if they wanted. He didn't have have any more idea where he was headed than they did.
He walked in the general direction of 'away'. One corridor became another. He turned corners often so that he could catch a glimpse of the khaki-clad Militia officer who always seemed to be strolling about half a hallway behind him.
He enjoyed the stroll. It was an easy walk. His feet bounced off of the metal floors, launching him into long, lazy strides in Hunahpu's low gravity. He passed small knots of miners, with a sampling of every color and build, but predominately of short, but heavily-built heavy gravity natives of the Libran mining worlds, like their boss Vasca. They barked at each other in a creole of Spanglish and Euskara that Morgan recognized but only partially understood. Those words he could make out in passing were the sort he expected from miners, work and food and drink and money and violence.
As he walked and he whistled, he thought. It seemed to Morgan that proving he hadn't done something would be just as hard in the here and now as it had been proving it to his mom when he was a kid. Of course, when he was a kid, the only way he'd ever really gotten out of it was to put the blame on one of his brothers or sisters. But all of them were at least forty light years distant, so that strategy was no good.
The problem was, it was the only plan he could think of. To find somebody else to pin it on. The ones who had actually sabotaged the Mount Safa for preference. He had a lot of history with the old girl and he was feeling a powerful urge, mellowed only a little by the contact high off the theece he'd breathed in the 'Pit', to give whoever had done it a proper kick in the teeth.
Of course, catching the saboteur or saboteurs would mean out-thinking people clever enough to sneak destructive materials onto a platform under the nose of Khadija Safawa and her hand-picked crew of career terraformers.
He missed a step and stumbled. He should go back to the 'Pit'. Get Susan or Hector. They were the ones with the brains.
Only problem with that was, the ones with the brains didn't care.
He was backed into a corner. It was Morgan or it was nothing.
And with that, a sudden weight lifted from his shoulders. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but he liked being backed into a corner. Forced to fight. Fighting for something meant that it mattered. And he missed things that mattered.
He didn't know why anyone would sabotage a terraforming project but what he did know was that they hadn't managed to stop it. Yet. Which to his mind meant they would try again. Or at least he hoped so, it was the only idea he had right now.
He cracked his knuckles, spun around and ran up to the startled Militia officer following him. The guard's eyes went wide and he reached for his pulse laser, but not fast enough to avoid Morgan's enthusiastic bear hug. He released the man and gleefully asked where the spare terraforming supplies were kept. The officer, caught entirely off-guard, told him they were under guard in the industrial docks of the monorail station.
He planted a big, manly kiss on the officer and bound off towards the station.
As he got closer to the station, the knots of miners got bigger and louder. The speech was shifting too, with 'Xbalanque' and the words for 'grain' and 'violence' showing up in their conversation. The miners traded furtive glances and nodded reassurances to each other now. They slapped each other on the shoulders, building up and then borrowing each others' courage. He could feel the familiar electricity of a crowd building to action.
A tall, corpse-pale figure in faded military fatigues slapped him in the chest with a leather drinking bag that stank of spoiled milk.
“Kumis?”
“I... what?”
“Kumis, lad! Courage! Warmth in your veins and courage to your loins. Blood and milk and courage.” Morgan looked down at the drinking bag and realized that it was still sealed. What he smelled was blowing out of the man's mouth like a foul wind. The words were in a standard pigeon, but garbled almost beyond recognition in a thick accent that would have marked him as Tritonian even if his unique drink of choice had not.
“And what am I needing courage for? What's the brawl, mate?” Morgan gripped the drinking bag in one hand and punched the Triton in the shoulder as hard as he could.
The Triton winced and grinned.
“Don't you shit a shitter, son. You got the fight in your hands and the fire in your eyes. You're on your way to the big scrum same as me. The damn Circle-jerks from over the other moon are holding back the grains and our lads is set to take it. There'll be blood and light 'afore this is settled and I mean to have my share, one way or 'nother.”
The Triton's smile was the most unpleasant one he could manage. He tore the bag out of Morgan's hand hard enough to chafe it and drained a long stream of fermented milk, pink with blood just as he'd said, down his throat. He slapped Morgan on the shoulder hard enough to bruise, gave him a broad wink and ducked into the gathering crowd.
Morgan could hear the general grumble of the crowd building on the other side of the hatch, then there was a shout, the low whine of stun weapons and the sudden roar of a great beast made of a thousand voices. The knot of miners that he was packed into the corridor with roared back and surged into the monorail station, carrying Morgan along with them.
He could feel the heat of bodies pressed in around him, and of the blood rising in his own face. In other words, a riot.
A riot.
An opportunity.
If he had been looking for a distraction for the Militia, he couldn't have asked for one better. Slip in, get the goods, slip out. This was going to be easy.
Morgan's fist slammed into the man's face and he fell over backwards, trailing a thin stream of blood droplets from his mouth. He fell slow in the low gravity. Two other miners burst out of the crowd and slammed into Morgan, knocking the wind out of him and driving him in a broad, muscular back covered in a gray company jumpsuit.
The back turned and Morgan, deprived of his support, slid to the floor. The man the back belonged to swung an artificial steel arm over where Morgan's head had been a moment before and connected with one of Morgan's attackers. The limp figure joined Morgan on the ground.
Morgan lay on the ground, staring upwards and letting his ribs hurt. Then the ceiling was darkened by an enormous boot and he rolled aside in a burst of animal adrenaline.
He scrambled up to all fours and crawled off between the legs of another rioter. Pain shot through his ribs with every sudden move, but they hurt a lot less than if they had been stomped on by that big steel-towed boot.
So far, he reflected as he crawled, his plan to slip quietly through this riot wasn't quite working out the way he'd thought.
It was the city that had fooled him. Irkalla Habitat, although buried underground instead of floating in space, resembled a space station more than an actual city and against all evidence, he'd prepared himself for something more like one of the disciplined protests of habfolk, who would never imperil their delicate artificial environment over anything as trivial as a matter of principle. What he'd forgotten was that the miners were planetfolk nearly to a man and the already rowdy protest had quickly devolved into an old-fashioned brawl.
And Rosie Gannis hadn't raised any of her children to back down from a fight.
A strong hand grabbed his collar and pulled him to his feet. Morgan didn't stop to see who it belonged to, he just grabbed the sleeve and yanked it in towards him for a headbutt. Stars flashed in front of his eyes and the hand lost its grip. He staggered backwards.
Somebody was shouting. Everybody was shouting, but Morgan got the feeling that there was somebody shouting at him specifically. He spun around, but his eyes were still filled with lights. A shove knocked him aside just as his eyes started to clear. Apparently they got tired of shouting. A wedge of gray jumpsuits pushed roughly past him, in a hurry to be someplace. Morgan followed them with his eyes and looked where they were headed to.
Far up ahead, near the boarding platforms, where the Militia was lined up trying to separate the rioters, some miners had started fighting with a knot of tall, rangy figures in rough brown clothes. The khaki forms of the Militia had clustered around them to try and break it up, leaving a gap further down their line.
A gap! Morgan put on the speed, springing with long, distance-eating strides, leaping forward in the low gravity.
He pinballed his way through the crowd, spinning out of the way of the powerful miners when he could, shoulder checking them when he couldn't. A discrete kick or well-placed punch moved people just enough for Morgan to sprint out of their arm's reach before they could realize what was going on.
“Where do you think you're going, scab?” A big, scarred hand snatched him out of the air and pulled him up to a big, scarred face.
“Say what again?”
“Don't you come the innocent with me, scab. You was headed to the shops, wasn't you?” The bulging, high-gravity muscles under the jumpsuit flexed and shook him violently.
“What's it to you if I was? And what's with calling me a...?” His question trailed off as his eyes were caught by the light glinting off the badge of a mining union shop steward on her monumental chest.
“Rumbled, you are, boy.” She bore her teeth. “Vasca send you or you just freelancing?”
“Vasca? What?”
“The truth! You're going to get your beating either way. Tell the truth and beat the devil as well! Company knows damn well this here demonstration's got union backing, there'll be no work done until they fixes it with these damn farmers.”
“And they don't, we will!” There was an ugly chuckle from behind her and Morgan now noticed the ring of muscular miners, all wearing union badges, around her.
“Means you, son. No work.”
“Whoa! Hold up, you got the wrong idea here lady, I'm no...”
“Yeah, that's what they all says. But talk's cheap. It's an example we'll be making of you, scab.”
The semi-circle of miners behind her grinned and cracked their knuckles.
“Hey! I'm no scab!”
“Says you.” She balled her free hand into a fist and pulled it back.
“Says my ID's!” He reached for his pocket but her hand unclenched and locked around his wrist painfully hard.
“Nuh-uh, handsome. That's not playing fair, that's not.”
“Fine. No problem.” He forced the words through clenched teeth. The pain on his wrist was unspeakable, he felt as if his bones were breaking, but very slowly.
“You take them. In my pocket.”
She let go of his wrist and took his memory card from his pocket. Lights flashed across her eyes as she read its contents on her data lenses.
“I'm a terraformer.”
“You're a convict.”
“I'm a suspect. There's a difference.”
“You've been a con, though. You talk like a jailhouse lawyer. Can smell them a kilometer off.”
“Can you now?” He forced out a grin. “And where did you do time, huh?”
“Do time?” She snarled and pulled him in so that their noses were nearly touching. “I look like a filthy convict to you? Guard. Tanngrisnir.”
She craned her neck so that he could see the stylized goat tattooed there.
She nodded to his arm and he rolled up the sleeve to show the arabic numerals stenciled on.
“Apophis, huh? What you do?”
“Claim-jumping.”
“Do it?”
“Yep.”
“And they still let you on the terraforming crews?”
“I know the trade.” He shrugged best he could in his position. A sharp pain in his upper ribs turned the shrug into a wince. “A year local on Astarte. Three serving with the Planetary on Oclla.”
“Huh.”
“You believe me now?”
“Might just. If you're really pulling down outdoors money, there's no need for you to be doing scab work for the Conglomerate...”
There was a roar like a wounded animal and a blue blur and suddenly Morgan fell from her grasp and onto the floor like a ragdoll.
There was swearing in at least four languages that Morgan recognized. Suddenly there were fists and boots everywhere, but none of them seemed aimed at him.
He scrabbled to his feet. A flare like a laser torch caught his attention. The pale form of the Tritonian he'd met before stood over the unconscious form of the shop steward, holding her people at bay with a lit laser cutter that he swept through the air like a lion tamer's whip. They were surrounded by a circle of clenched fists and snarling faces.
“Days of blood and light, lad, Blood and light!” He cackled and swigged Kumis from the drinking bag in his other hand.
“What the fuck was that?” Morgan edged back from the miners until he was back to back with the Trito.
“Least I could do. Outsiders together! All against all!”
“But I was just...” He sputtered and turned his head to glare back at him. The Trito's eyes were bright and glazed and he was grinning wide, showing his teeth to the gums.
So he did the only thing he could think to do in the situation.
He punched the son of a bitch in his crazy mouth.
The Tritonian staggered backwards and dropped his torch. He was blinking in confusion.
So Morgan hit him again.
The blow almost knocked him over and he stumbled back another couple of steps. Around them, the miners had drawn back a step, letting this play out.
“So, that's how 'tis, huh? Try to do a mate a good turn.” The Tritonian was swaying, his words were slurred and his eyes were unfocused.
“A good turn? What did you think you were...?”
“No! No chinning now, too late for that. You called the tune, ducky, now you dance the steps.” The Trito spat at Morgan's feet, drained the last of the kumis from the drinking bag, tossed it aside and smashed a fist into the side of Morgan's head while his attention was momentarily on the bag.
Morgan stumbled sideways and nearly toppled over. A second blow landed in his side and a spasm of white hot pain rippled out from his bruised ribs. He was certain he heard himself scream.
He reached up and grasped the cold flesh of the Trito's neck just as a third blow struck him in the side. His vision went red and he collapsed to the ground, dragging the Tritonian down with his greater weight.
They rolled on the ground, wrestling and punching. The Trito got his hands around Morgan's neck, but Morgan drove his thumbs into the man's wrists, breaking his grip and tossed him off in an adrenaline fueled surge of effort.
He scrambled to his feet before his body could realize how much that hurt. The Trito was only a moment behind him, but it was a moment too long. Morgan drove a fist into his gut and sprinted away.
There was the sound of retching behind him. Then, a moment later, a strangled cry and a mad, animal whoop.
He fixed his eyes on the gap in the line. It was starting to fill. A few stragglers from the tall strangers had drifted in, to get away from the miners. A flash of blinding light went up from the lone khaki figure on this part of the line, a stun blast fired into the air.
The crowd flinched back, like wild animals drawing away from fire. Somebody threw something and another flare exploded into the air.
Morgan was drawing close, pushing his way around miners who were stepping in the opposite direction. He had no idea what he'd do after he got there. The Militia officer would be a problem.
A blow caught him from behind. He tumbled forward, carried by their combined momentum, into a gray-clad miner.
He was on the floor again, struggling with the Trito. The Tritonian had hit him from behind with a flying tackle. They rolled forward, grappling and kicking.
The Trito bit him on the arm.
He slammed his head into Trito's chest.
The Trito's grip slackened and Morgan threw him off. He sprung to his feet and slammed a boot down onto the Trito's head.
“Hey, get out of the...” Someone shoved him and, without thinking, Morgan spun around and punched the figure in the throat, sending the miner (it wore a mining jumpsuit) to the floor.
A tall figure in rough brown cloth pried itself up off the floor where the miner had been kicking it. It locked eyes with Morgan. Its face was painted with green and red circles.
“Come on! Anybody else? Anybody else want to try coming through me?” Morgan shouted at the top of his lungs, turned outward, fists clenched.
And found himself staring straight into the twin barrels of a police-grade pulse laser with stun attachment, held in the hands of the lone Militia officer.
“You! You are under...”
“Connection.”
Long, big-knuckled fingers gripped the barrels and pushed them down. The officer yanked the weapon out of their grasp, but at least it was no longer pointed at Morgan.
“We claim this one. It is one of ours.”
“What?” Morgan and the officer said it at the same time.
“The connection is made. It was not ours, now it is.”
A pair of the tall, rangy strangers flanked Morgan, one on each side. They were dressed in the same rough woven cloth and had the same colorful circles on their faces as the one who Morgan had just inadvertently saved from a beating. And they cradled crudely-welded metal implements in their hands. Tools? Weapons? Both?
Morgan gaped up at them, opened his mouth and closed it again without thinking of anything to say.
“What in the hells is this?” The Militia officer was having no such problem coming up with something to say.
“This is an offworlder and a suspect in a serious crime against the Frontier States. He's no more from your devil-damned Xbalanque than I am!”
“Not from. But of.” The first one, who was now standing, nodded.
“These Frontier States you invoke. Allow they member states to determine their own citizens. Is a member state, is the Nine Circles of the Jaguar Sun.”
Morgan looked over his shoulder and saw another wave of miners, walking with purpose, oversized mining tools swinging from their fists, closing fast.
“Maybe so, but that's a diplomatic privilege, and you're not ambassadors.” The Militia officer cleared the rioters back with another plasma burst into the air.
“We are Green.” The Xbalanque, there were several now, began to cluster around Morgan. The implements in their hands, whatever they were, were definitely being held as weapons.
“We are the principle Greens on Hunahpu. We speak for our Circle. We have the right, in the law of the Jaguar Sun, to say what is Green, what is not.” The one standing to Morgan's right, placed a hand on his shoulder.
“So what? He's still under arrest, and you too, if you get in my way.”
The first Xbalanque stepped between Morgan and the officer.
“Green is many, you are one. Green offers sanctuary. Green protects its own. The Planetary must counter such an action. The Planetary, one should think, is busy.” The first speaker swept an arm to indicate the riot still going on elsewhere in the monorail station. More of the Xbalanque had gathered in the gap, holding the gray wall of miners at bay with the threat of their mysterious implements.
“Sanctuary?” Morgan repeated the word. From the look of the fuming Militia officer's face, it seemed to be for real.
“We leave this now. Disconnect. Send forward the message.” The circle closed around him.
Morgan had no idea what was going on, but when the group started to move, he moved with them.
Morgan saw very little of the corridors as they fled the monorail station. He saw a lot of the backs of his tall escorts. They made short, fast strides to let Morgan keep up, if only just.
Morgan attempted small talk a couple of times while they walked, but the Xbalanque farmers only answered him with silence. So far 'sanctuary' felt a lot like 'prisoner'.
The lighting shifted from the bright whites of Irkalla's corridors to a dim red that resembled the natural light of Innes' Star. He heard a metal gate slam shut behind them.
“We are within our circumference now. Xbalanque is here.”
Morgan stopped walking and crossed his arms. His threshold for mystery had just been crossed.
“OK, hold up, now I'm not going anywhere until I get some answers. What the hell is going on here? What's Green when it's at home and what's it got to do with me?”
The circle turned inward, all at once, like human clockwork, and stared at him for a long moment. Each face had a unique pattern of circles and lines painted or tattooed in a variety of colors. But no matter what the mix was, each of them involved at least one circle of green somewhere in the pattern, from a tiny dot to a loop that encircled half the face.
The lead speaker stretched her mouth into a thin line in something similar to a smile. Morgan noticed that she and the man next to her had the largest green circles on their faces. They had talked up 'Green' pretty hard while facing down the Militia, so Morgan had a feeling that was somehow important.
“And yet, you will learn nothing if you do not move. Do you see the paradox?”
Morgan raised his chin to her and spent a moment sizing them up. Tall and rangy, low-gravity builds from a low-gravity moon, although not so spindly and delicate as the truly space born. He could see long, toned muscles move under their loose fitting garments but he still had the advantage in raw strength and with his lower center of gravity he might still be able to knock over enough of them to break through the circle and make a run for it.
Only two things stopped him from running. One was that he still didn't know what the bulky, crudely-welded implements in their hands were or what they did. And the other was pure curiosity. Something was going on here, that much was obvious, even if he didn't know what it was. And Morgan was getting dead tired of no knowing what was going on. His momma had always told him that his curiosity was going to be the end of him one of these days, and he had always believed her. But if he didn't follow his curiosity, he would have never left Earth's orbit in the first place.
“Sure. Why not? Lead on, chief.” He broke into a big, all-teeth, grin that seemed to push the farmers back a step. The second speaker, the man, reached around the first speaker's back to touch her on the left shoulder.
When her head snapped around, he glared at her with wide, unhappy eyes. She shook her head in a gesture almost too small to be seen.
Morgan got the impression that a whole conversation had just taken place with the gesture equivalent of strong language. This made him happy.
“You will follow Evgeny?”
“Yeah, 'course I will. I am 'Green' after all.”
“Not yet. But you will be.” That straight-lipped, not quite a smile danced across her face for a moment.
The second speaker, 'Evgeny' apparently, nodded, first to the first speaker, then to Morgan. Wordlessly, he turned and began to walk away.
Morgan started to sprint after him and when nobody stopped him, he guessed that it was the right thing to do. He didn't have any other way to judge things at the moment.
The man led him down the twisting, red-lit corridors. For the first time, Morgan had a chance to get a good look at where he was.
The halls were eerily familiar and yet not. They possessed the same utilitarian basic design as the rest of Irkalla Habitat, and just about every other colonial settlement Morgan had ever seen, all dull metal and right angles. And yet, there would be no mistaking the Xbalanque enclave for any other part of the city. Long, geometric patterns stretched across the walls in a rainbow of different colors, mixing and intertwining with each other, sometimes painted in complex, almost celtic-looking knots with a half-dozen different shades.
The standard-issue doors, built on the same lines as spaceship hatches, were covered with decorative tapestries woven from the same coarse-fibered cloth as the farmers' clothes.
Again, Morgan noticed a single green pattern that branched and wound and came back together again along the walls on the route they were following.
Evgeny pushed aside a curtain, opened the door behind it and nodded for Morgan to enter. He stared straight forward, over Morgan's head as Morgan slipped under his arm and into the room. It was obviously a storage room of some sort, filled with crates, barrels and empty sacks that smelled a lot like fertilizer.
“You know, I didn't know any better, I'd almost say you didn't like me much.”
There was a flicker of a reaction on the other man's face.
“Now most folk, they wait until they know me better to come to that conclusion.”
“It is not you that I do not like.” He mumbled the words under his breath, his lips barely open enough to speak.
“Wait, 'it's not you, it's me'? Yeah, usually they wait on that, too. Listen, Evgeny, buddy, what am I getting myself into here? C'mon, let me in on the game, will you?”
Evgeny opened his mouth, hesitated and then closed it again with a slight shake of his head.
“You are not Green. Not yet.”
“Yeah, and that's another thing. Not that I ain't grateful for your mob keeping me out of stir and all, but I still don't even understand that. That just as payback for hitting that guy who was kicking the lady, what's her name?”
“Oyibo.”
“Yeah, her. Is that it?”
“You truly do not understand, do you? You are not of the circle.”
“And I won't understand if nobody explains it to me.”
Evgeny considered him, still and unblinking, for a moment, then nodded, as if making a decision.
“You spoke.”
“What?”
“Action alone would not have sufficed. Words without action would have been meaningless. But actions with declared words, they form...” He paused, his jaw working as if trying out different words.
“...intent.” A small shake of the head and doubtful tone indicated that even this wasn't quite the right of word for it.
“But I didn't say nothing, I don't think. Maybe some trash talk, but I don't remember what.”
“'Anybody else want to try coming through me?'” Evgeny quoted him word for word.
“Ah.”
“Connection.” There was no uncertainty in how Evgeny said that.
“I, ah, see.” He didn't.
The door cracked open an two more men entered, carefully closing the door behind them. One of them held a bundle of the rough clothing that all the Xbalanque farmers wore. Morgan noted that among the patterns on their faces, the green circles were smaller than those on Evgeny and Oyibo.
“Time moves quickly.” Morgan was learning to read the small, restrained expressions the Xbalanque used and he caught a tightening at the corners of Evgeny's mouth.
“Preparations must be made.”
Morgan shied back as one of them started undoing the buttons on his shirt.
“I gotta?” He gestured down at his outfit.
A nod.
“Fine, I'll do it my own damn self. I can do that, at least.”
He stripped down and let Evgeny and the other two dress him in the clothes they brought. They were like all the clothes they wore and obviously made for one of them, too tight in the chest and too long in the cuffs on Morgan.
Over this they draped a kind of intricately embroidered poncho, very like the curtains over all the doors. As soon as it was on, they opened the door and one of the attendants held aside the curtain while Morgan, Evgeny and the other went through.
Evgeny led them, without much ceremony, along a route marked by a continuation of the same green pattern they had followed before, to another door. The same attendant as before (at least Morgan thought he was the same one) held aside the curtain while the other held open the door.
Evgeny ducked into the doorway and gestured for Morgan to follow. He did. As soon as he entered the doorway, a hand touched his chest. The attendants slipped past him, letting the curtains drape over his back. They took their places in the room beyond, in which something like two dozen men and women, all with some touch of green on their faces, were scattered, all standing in well-described semi-circles stretching to the back of the room.
A voice boomed out.
“Do not enter! This space is Green. Nothing that is not Green may enter here.” It was the woman, Oyibo, who had been doing most of the talking before. It was her hand on his chest and she was right up in his face. Evgeny stood next to her, both their faces held in perfect, emotionless masks. He had a chance to study their face paint in some detail. Her large green circle with an only slightly smaller red one inside it, off-center so that it encircled her left cheek and his, the green circle the same size as hers, was crossed with smaller orange circles and dots of blue like uneven Venn diagrams.
A low, rhythmic hum, like a chorus of indecisive schoolboys began under her words.
“Hey now, wait a second lady, you invited...”
A small shake of the head from Evgeny silenced him.
“What is Green?” Evgeny intoned in a flat, sing-song monotone which reminded Morgan of priest at the church they'd attended when he was a boy.
“Green connects to Green,” came the answer from Oyibo. “Green is a Circle and a circle is One.”
“Who is to say what connects to Green?”
“Green connects to itself. It knows its own, for it is already connected to them.”
The chanting was growing louder now, stately and regular, a babble of nonsense that Morgan's ears strained to make words of, even though he knew better.
“I speak for Green.” Oyibo reached down and lifted Morgan's chin with two fingers, to look directly into her eyes.
“I speak for Green.” Morgan risked a glance over at Evgeny, but no trace of the doubt he had seen before remained.
“Begin the Logon.”
“Begin the Logon.”
The Greens behind them took up the word in their chant, changing the emphasis until it lost its meaning, melding seamlessly with their previous nonsense in an almost hypnotic rhythm.
“Name.” It took Morgan a moment to realize that Oyibo was talking to him.
“Morgan Christopher Robert Gannis.”
“Place.”
“Earth,” he answered without thinking.
“Occupation.”
“Uhm. Spacer. Terraformer. Thief. Pilot. Take your pick.”
“Circle.”
Morgan realized that there was only one right answer here.
“Green.”
Both Oyibo and Evgeny nodded as he said that. The chanting suddenly stopped.
From a pouch at her belt, Oyibo took a small, flat canister and dipped her fingers in it. They came up with green tips. She traced a circle with them on Morgan's face, encircling all his features.
“You are now Green.” Evgeny nodded his head again, and kept it down, eyes averted.
“You are only Green. You are closest among us. You speak for Green now.” Oyibo inclined her head, like Evgeny.
Morgan had no idea what the right answer here was.
After the ceremony they took Morgan, still a bit stunned and more tired than he'd realized to yet another room where they'd set up a cot. A cot that Morgan was more than happy to collapse into.
He awoke aching in the darkness. The sleep had drained the adrenaline from him and he was paying the butcher's bill for every hurt his body owed him for the last few shifts. His ribs pained him with every breath, it still burned where the Tritonian had bit him, there was a pounding in his head and his knuckles stung something awful. It was this last that struck him as particularly unfair. After all, wasn't hurting the other guy the whole the point of punching him?
The sleep had given his body time to bruise, but his mind time to clear. He lay on his cot, eyes open to the darkness, thinking. The phrase from the ritual still haunted him. 'You speak for Green'. They had said something similar while facing down the militia. Maybe it was just a coincidence, a bit ritual nonsense. Maybe. But Morgan doubted it. There was a stink all over this situation. Local affairs.
'Let them that walk on the dirt crawl in the mud'. Like Susan always said. Of course he was the one who always protested when she did, but this one time he agreed.
Motivated, he pried himself up off the cot with a groan. His bruises were crying out the loudest, but every muscle in his body had something to say. He didn't know precisely what was going on here, but he did know that he needed to be out of it.
He felt his way around the walls of the tiny room. Morgan could almost touch opposite walls with arms outstretched, barely enough room for a cot.
The door was latched, but not locked, and opened on the second try, even fumbling in the dark.
A tall outline of a figure filled the open doorway, silhouetted black against the ruddy light of the hallway. It spoke politely enough, asking if there was anything that he wanted, but Morgan's eyes dropped to the bulky, irregular shape in its hand. Whatever the original function of those implements they carried, the locals seemed to treat them a lot like weapons. Which meant that this was a guard as well as an attendant.
Morgan squinted up to see the small green circle around the right eye that he was looking for. He 'spoke for Green' and Green told the guard to go get him some water. Even Morgan was a little surprised that it worked.
As soon as the guard had disappeared around the corner, Morgan spun around and sprinted in the other direction.
He teased the thread of green they had followed here out of the murals that covered the walls. He traced it back to the entrance, a big sheet of metal placed across the middle of the corridor. It was locked with a metal beam, simple and effective. It was set a little higher than he might have liked, but nothing he couldn't shift.
He reached up, gripped the bar and paused. Maybe he shouldn't leave quite yet.
Grateful as he was to 'Green' for fishing his fat out of the fire, he hadn't forgotten that these were likely the same people who had sabotaged the terraforming and framed his crew for it. And that looking into this was why he'd ditched the Militia in the first place.
He carefully traced the green pattern back to the room where they'd originally dressed him before the ceremony. It was exactly the way they'd left it, down to his original clothes, folded on top of a metal barrel in the corner. He stepped over a pile of flattened sacks and moved a barrel to get at them. The barrel moved easy, empty if Morgan was any judge. He took his clothes from off the second barrel and wrinkled his nose at the sharp tang that came off of them.
Ammonia, strong and unmistakable. The lid of the barrel lay upside down on top of it. What were they keeping in this thing?
The label gave a chemical formula, NH4 NO3. Ammonium Nitrate. Unsurprising. Ammonium Nitrate was a commonly-found chemical and commonly-used fertilizer. He searched further down the label and saw the two black crescents, one on either side of a stylized red sun, the symbol of the Innes Conglomerate. Also not a surprise. Ammonium nitrate's other major use was in industrial explosives, like those used in mining, and it was found in desert environments like Hunahpu used to be before cometfall. What would have been surprising would have been if a frontier mining operation like the Innes Conglomerate on Hunahpu hadn't branched out into every possible market for their byproducts.
It was also the perfect material for sabotaging a terraforming reactor. The only thing was that for Ammonium nitrate to be explosive, it had had to be mixed with fuel oil petroleum. Petroleum was only found on planets with naturally occurring organic elements. Hunahpu had no organic elements not introduced by humans over the last few decades, and certainly not for the few million years necessary to form petroleum. However Morgan remembered something that one of his fellow terraformers had told him. Xbalanque was a 'shirt-sleeve' world, one of those rare gems where humans could survive unaided. And without exception, it took a long history of life to craft such a place.
Xbalanque would have petroleum. They could make fertilizers into fertilizer bombs.
His head was buzzing with the information he had just learned. He headed down the hall, tracing his hand along the mural, back towards the main entrance. He knew he had to tell somebody, but who? Khadi? Would she believe him? The Captain? Would she care? His fast walk turned into a jog, into a canter, into a full-on run.
He bolted around a corner and almost rammed his head into the sternum of the leader of an oncoming column of Xbalanque farmers. Evgeny.
“Morgan, who speaks for Green. We have been seeking for you. There is a meeting, your place is there.”
“Yeah, well, I was looking for you too, pal!” Morgan crossed his arms and bluffed. “I want me some answers and I want them now! You hearing me?”
“Of course. One must be given words to speak them. And one shall. But the voice is needed to speak for Green.”
Evgeny plucked at his sleeve and nodded down the hallway.
“Oh yeah? And if I say I ain't moving until I get some straight answers? Or what if I just decide that 'Green' ain't speaking today?”
Evgeny reared back, eyes blinking rapidly in confusion.
“Those that can do, must do.”
“Oh, 'must' they?”
“Of course.” Evgeny's face pinched up and a couple of the farmers behind him stepped forward, hefting the implements in their hands.
“And what about my questions? You can answer them, so you must, right?”
“Of course.” Evgeny smiled, only a touch broader and a touch less unpleasantly than Oyibo.
“We all do what is required, do we not?” Evgeny took a step backwards and turned outwards, gesturing down the hall.
“Alright, sure, I suppose.” Morgan nodded his head slowly. “You'll do your job if I do mine, huh? OK, that's fair, I guess. Let's get this show on the road. But you talk while I walk, get me?”
He charged ahead and past the Xbalanque farmers, who slipped out of his way and into step behind him. Evgeny beside him.
“Alrighty, first question. Everybody's been saying I speak for Green and they've been great about it and all, but what in the name of the Devil's burnt balls does that even mean? I thought you and Oyibo spoke for Green?”
“We did.” Evgeny bobbed his head in agreement. "But you are Only Green.”
“Oh-kay...” Morgan stretched the last syllable out until Evgeny cut him off.
“I am Green.” He pointed to the large green circle on his face and then moved his finger around to the smaller orange circles overlapping it.
“But I am also Orange. And the one here who speaks for Orange, is also Gold. And the one who speaks for Gold is also Red...”
“And, let me guess, Red is also... whatever. I think I get the pattern.”
“No.” What little of his lips that were still showing disappeared entirely.
“Who speaks for Red speaks for all Xbalanque on Hunahpu. Eber, Red Primary of the Third Circle is Only Red.”
And this, Morgan added silently, was some kind of sore spot for them.
“Alright, let me make sure I've got the right end of the stick on this, but you need me to 'Speak for Green' because except for this 'Ever' guy...”
“Eber.”
“Sure, him. But except for him, I'm on the only one who doesn't answer to somebody else so I can say what I like. That about the size of it?”
Evgeny paused for a moment and then gave a slight shrug of his narrow shoulders that was nearly hidden under his loose garment.
“It will suffice.”
“So, tell me this, did my decking that guy make any difference or would any outsider have done?”
“To become Green, connection was necessary.”
“The punch that was felt 'round the system, huh?”
Evgeny looked at him with eyes empty of understanding. Morgan just shrugged and turned his attention to the patterns on the walls.
“So, what you're telling me is that you came to fetch me back because you need me to jaw at this Red guy, right?” Morgan could only hope he sounded calm without letting any of the tension that was balling up like a fist in his guts show. Talking wasn't his strong suit and politics even less so. That was Susan's thing. He was fighting a powerful urge in his feet to just break out running and find her. Or Khadi. Or Hector. Or really anyone else that wasn't him.
“Ambassador Eber. Yes.”
“And, uhm, what does Green think I should be saying?”
“Oyibo is already in council with Eber.”
“Ah.” He had no doubt she would tell him what he thought.
Evgeny gave him a look he could imagine to be sympathetic.
“Well that's, ah, good. I suppose. Listen, she already speaks pretty well for Green. Maybe she can get on without me there all...” As soon as the words left his mouth, the answer rose up in his head, a picture of Oyibo's unsmiling face with the smaller red circle inside the larger green.
“Oyibo is Green. However...”
“Oyibo is also Red. Yeah. Got it. Shit.”
Evgeny's chin dipped in a minuscule nod and they walked in silence.
The farther they went into the Xbalanque enclave they went, the more complex the murals along the walls became, as more and more colors were woven in, like tributaries flowing into a great rainbow river. Green into Blue into Gold into Orange into Violet into Red. It all came together in a painstakingly detailed pattern that bloomed like labyrinthine rose in a matching tapestry of startling intricacy hanging over a door seemingly no different than any other.
One of the other farmers sprinted forward to hold aside the curtain and opened the door. The door opened and quiet voices echoed out into the hall, one he recognized as Oyibo's insistent monotone, the other voice cold and cutting. The Xbalanque farmers were around around the room in rough semi-circles, like in the ritual, with an older man in the center, a red circle drawn around his sunken features. Oyibo stood closest to him, head inclined respectfully.
Morgan took a deep breath, brought up his courage from the pit of his stomach and strode forward to the doorway.
And stopped.
He hadn't planned on stopping, he just reached the doorway and couldn't go any farther. His feet refused to take another step forward. Everybody was looking at him, a room full of tall, strange-looking, androgynous figures, eyes wide and expectant, just like that first day of school when they moved to orbit.
The breath caught in his throat and the moment froze while he waited for them to start laughing, just like they had at school. Except that they didn't. The moment stretched out indefinitely as they just kept staring, the ones with green on their faces arranged in arcs behind Oyibo stared in expectation, the others with puzzlement.
“You must speak for Green.” Evgeny hissed in his ear.
It didn't help, He could feel his breaths start to come in fast and shallow. He didn't know what to say. He knew that he didn't know what to say. He knew that they all knew that he didn't know what to say. Oyibo's eyes widened with anger and impatience, like his old teacher's. He shouldn't be here and everyone knew it. He could feel their eyes piercing through him, judging him, finding him inadequate.
“What is this, now? This is the Green, is it?” The old man in the middle sneered and broke the spell. The eyes that he had been so sure were filled with judgment returned to being just veiled and alien. He remembered that he wasn't one of them and wasn't trying to be. These people were hostile, were saboteurs, and had shoehorned him into this situation for their own, not his, purposes.
To put it more simply, he remembered that he had no skin in this game.
The thought was freeing. The fist in his guts unclenched and his legs started forward with a low-gravity skip and an Earthman's swagger.
“I repeat, this is Green?” The older man, Eber no doubt, stepped up into Morgan's personal space and towered over him.
“Me? Brother, Green is all I am, apparently. So back it right up before I back you up.” He responded by stepping in towards Eber until his nose was just about at the old man's sternum and poked him hard in the chest. Stunned, Eber staggered back half a step.
Morgan took a moment to take a look around. Evgeny's eyes were wide with surprise, Oyibo was quietly incensed, rage working the muscles of her usually placid face. The non-greens behind Eber were shocked, gaping openly, but the Greens he saw spread out behind Oyibo, and now he was looking there were quite a few of them here, a lot of them were nodding their heads and nursing secret smiles in the corners of their mouths.
“Are you indeed? What is your proximity? I stand in the Third Ring in Red. Primary for Hunahpu.”
Morgan blinked at him. He understood each word individually, but together they meant nothing to him.
“He stands in the Fourth Ring in Green. Primary for Hunahpu. Placed by unanimous consent of the Fifth Ring of Green on Hunahpu.” Oyibo's voice was as level and without affect as always, her face again a well-composed mask. Evgeny had joined her shoulder to shoulder. A unanimous group of two. Morgan realized that he had never seen Evgeny openly disagree with Oyibo.
“Yeah, what she said.” He jerked his thumb back at Oyibo. He exaggerated the gesture, went big with it, and chuckled to see them all jump just a bit.
“You are not of Xbalanque.” The wrinkles around Eber's scowl deepened.
“That I ain't. Earth. Boston, Quito and all points south.” Just saying the name of the world of his birth put a bit more steel in his spine and he straightened up a centimeter or two.
“By what right is he brought into a Circle? He is, by his own admission, not of our soil.” Eber was glaring over the top of Morgan's head at Oyibo and Evgeny. Especially Oyibo.
“By right of...” Evgeny started to say, but was silenced by the steady pressure of Eber's gaze. The old man's eyes swiveled to fix on Oyibo.
“You, you answer it, as you are Red.”
“Yeah, answer the man, as you are Green, too.” That bought Morgan a glare from Eber but he just shrugged in response. In his own way he was just as curious as Eber was to hear Oyibo's answer.
Oyibo changed her pose, with her chin lifted just a little to display the circles on her face to best effect, eyes fixed on Eber's, arms akimbo with palms held out, like some kind of actor. Truth be told, everything about this, from the way everyone was so carefully arrange to the stilted, formal speech they used, reminded Morgan of the theater.
“A connection was made. Hear me, for I am Oyibo, who stands in the Fifth Ring of Green, who Stands in the Seventh Ring of Red, who is head of the fertilizer technicians here and who is bound to speak what is known. By stated intent and decisive action, of his own free will and without outside influence, He That Now Speaks for Green did intercede between this one and violence done by Hunahpu.”
At a strategic moment she lifted her jerkin enough to show up the massive purpling bruise on her side from where the miner had been kicking her and the appropriate gasp went up around the room. Morgan's sense of having walked onto some kind of stage was only getting stronger.
Oyibo paused dramatically and bowed her head to Eber in mock respect.
“He was already networked in, all that remained was define his place within our Circle.”
“Circumstance?” This time, nobody shut Evgeny down. Apparently these were his lines in whatever script Morgan hadn't been shown. “What is the context of this act? From whence came the violence that was the cause of this?”
“As well you know, Evgeny, who stands in the Fifth Ring of Green, for you were there in the monorail station where the Hunahpu were much angered against the Xbalanque for the raising of the price of grain and the withholding of the same.”
“This is our policy. The embargo was agreed upon. If the Conglomerate will raise the price of fertilizer, we will raise the price of the grain grown with it. This is the only way.” Eber pulled himself up to his full, impressive height and projected his voice into the far corners of the room. Morgan was content to listen and let them play out whatever weird drama they were doing here.
“And as I am Red, I was bound to support it.” Oyibo's head bobbed slightly in slight agreement. “But as I am Green, I am closer bound to support Green's plan.”
Her eyes fixed on Morgan now and he felt as if he was caught in a white hot spotlight.
17: Green's Gambit“Green's plan? We have heard no plan from the one you say speaks for Green. What is Green's plan?” It was Morgan's question but it was coming out of Eber's mouth.
“Have you not been listening, Eber? He speaks not with words but with actions. He who speaks for Green is a man of action and he stands for action. Direct action.” When she was speaking in here, Oyibo was more polished, less abrupt than when she was berating Morgan.
“No! That was discussed and it was discarded. What would would gain by that way is far outweighed by what we would stand to lose, were it uncovered.”
Morgan was getting interested now. 'Direct action', huh? He played his cards right, he might score himself a confession out of this, at least some evidence, a chance to clear his crew's name and win back Khadi's trust all in one go.
“But action is required. All did agree, something must be done.” Oyibo's tone was respectful, but even Morgan wasn't fooled.
“And it is! It is necessary to raise prices to make up for our losses. This was agreed. The embargo is the best way to make the Hunahpu agree to them. This also was agreed.”
“Agreed by Red. Yes.”
“But not Green? Is that it? Remember that proximity must be respected. All now present, save this one, were present when this course was agreed on. All lay fully within the bounds of the decision. This course of action...”
“Ain't gonna work.” Morgan found himself blurting out. He didn't know where he was going with this. Only that he wanted to stir up some shit up.
“Sorry, man, but I was in that monorail station getting my teeth kicked in and let me tell you, those miners out there ain't afraid of the rough stuff to get what they think they need. You cornered the badger when you threatened their food supply and it's going to bite, take my word on that.”
“Badger?” Somebody behind Morgan muttered.
“The meaning is clear enough. And we take it gladly.” Eber demonstrated to Morgan where Oyibo had learned that thin, joyless almost-smile.
“Such disruptions only serve to provide Vasca, who speaks for the Conglomerate, incentive to agree more quickly to our terms.”
“Agree quickly or resist strongly,” Oyibo said. “While Red negotiates, Green suffers. Our people are attacked in the halls while Red takes action by doing nothing.”
“Do you forget, Oyibo of the Fifth Ring, that you are also Red? And as you are Red, you will not speak. I speak for Red. And I deny it!”
“If Red cares so little, I would be Red no more!”
“How dare you? You defy our law!” Eber roared, his mask broken, this show of open emotion forced the others around him to recoil a few steps, as if physically struck, disrupting their neat arcs.
“I dare because I can. And those who can do, must do. That is the law.”
Eber made a quick gesture with his head and a pair of figures with prominent red circles on their faces emerged from behind him and started to close in on Oyibo. Evgeny stepped forward and a few other Greens came up to join him.
All of a sudden the usually placid Xbalanque farmers exploded in shouting, Gold yelled to Gold, Orange to Orange, Red to Red, Green to Green. Their faces were transformed, twisted up with emotions, fear and rage and whatever else. The orderly circles on their faces distorted into lopsided oblongs. They hardly seemed like the same people.
Morgan was so set aback that he almost didn't notice when Oyibo tossed a punch at one of the oncoming Reds. The Red let go of her arm and stumbled back. The second Red came in swinging at Oyibo.
Morgan charged in with big, distance-eating leaps, and slammed his shoulder to the woman attacking Oyibo, and she dropped to a sitting position on the floor.
The first Red swung at him and Morgan intercepted the fist with his palm and squeezed it hard enough to elicit a sharp cry.
Evgeny surged towards the Red and ran right into the meaty finger Morgan jabbed into his chest.
“Green,” Morgan said.
Evgeny put his hands and stepped backwards.
“Everybody, cut that shit out!” Morgan shouted and realized with a start that the room had gone silent. In the next moment, he realized that they were all looking at him.
“Green desires settlement?” Eber was composed again, his face a craggy, unyielding, granite cliff.
“Sure.”
“So Green calls for a consensus?”
“Green so does,” Oyibo said.
Eber looked to Morgan.
“Yeah, what she said.” Things had moved fast enough to leave Morgan a little behind and he was more than happy to ride this out. After all, what did it matter to him who won this?
As calm as if the brawl had never happened, the farmers migrated back to their original places, leaving Morgan and Eber alone in the center.
“Consent!” Eber called out and turned to face Morgan.
Morgan jumped at the touch of a hand on his right shoulder. Oyibo stood over him. She nodded at him and gave him a slight shove forward. He let her push him forward a step and then she gripped his shoulder and stopped him. Then, eyes still on Morgan, she padded deliberately around Eber and touched him on the left shoulder. Eber's eyes went wide and he glared, unblinking, at Oyibo before taking a grudging half-step backwards.
Evgeny came up behind Morgan, repeated the gesture. A touch and a gentle shove forward on the right shoulder. Then a tap on Eber's left, which prompted him to take another step back.
As Evgeny returned to his place, one of the Red Circle who Morgan had been brawling with just a few moments before, walked up to Eber, placed a hand on Eber's right shoulder and he took a step forward. She came over and put a hand on Morgan's left. He took the hint and took the step backwards.
It kept up like that, each of the Xbalanque farmers coming up to touch one of them on the left shoulder and the other on the right. One step back for the left, one step forward for the right.
They moved back and forth in this strange, slow dance, until finally each of the farmers had a turn and Morgan stood in the center of the room and Ebert out in the First Circle.
“Green has the consent. So, what is Green's plan?” Eber's voice was smooth and level, but his eyes flashed in anger, directed at Oyibo, not Morgan.
“Green's plan is know, Green will...”
“Green's going to work on it for a bit, is what Green's going to do.” Things were moving a little too fast for him now. He wanted to hear that plan, but he also didn't want to start some kind of war. He especially didn't want to lead one.
“But once we do get it assembled, trust me, you'll get the message. After all, you just agreed to it, right?” He grinned and Eber frowned. He looked back over his shoulder to see that the Greens, even the ones with just a dot somewhere on their face, had assembled behind him, emphasizing how many more of them there were.
“It is agreed.” The words hissed from between Eber's clenched teeth.
“Yeah, you remember that, pal. There's a good boy.” Morgan spun around and marched back to where Oyibo and Evgeny were standing at the head of the other Greens.
“So, seriously, what is Green's plan?”
“Not here, not outside the Circle.” Oyibo looked over Morgan's shoulder at Eber. “But there will be time and enough for that later.”
“Relax!” Evgeny clapped Morgan on the shoulder. “You have won a great victory for Green this day, my friend. And a great victory means a great celebration. Come!”
“Morgan, who speaks for Green!”
Morgan felt as if there was red hot spike piercing his temple and each word was the blow of a hammer driving it deeper into his skull. He instinctively turned over, away from the voice, and instantly regretted it as his stomach also turned over.
“Morgan, who speaks for Green!” Morgan couldn't tell if the words were actually getting louder and more insistent or if they just felt like they were.
A hand shook him and his stomach turned over again. He pressed his eyelids as tight as they would close and decided to ignore the hand and see if it would go away.
It did not.
“Morgan, who speaks for Green, your voice is required.” The hand shook him harder this time. He turned back over with a slow groan and pried sleep-glued eyes open. His vision was filled with the blurry image of a face with a large red ring on it.
He immediately closed them again.
“Can you speak?”
Morgan muttered something under his breath that started out as “I don't know, can you fuck off?” and came out as a series of unintelligible grunts with only a passing resemblance to words.
“He cannot speak for Green if he cannot speak.”
“Green will speak, for Green must answer!” A different voice, this one low and gravelly. Morgan thought he might recognize it if he was capable of caring.
A fist gripped his collar. Without thinking, he grabbed it and ground his thumb into his wrist. It let go with a snarl.
Morgan pushed the hand away, leaped to his feet and immediately vomited on Ambassador Eber's shoes.
He stood back up and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. Eber's lined face glowered down at him, quietly furious behind the Red Circle.
“Yo. Wha'?”
“You speak for Green.”
“'pparently.” Morgan's eyes itched now that they were open and he kept rubbing them. His mouth tasted like a toilet, unsurprising, and he could only imagine how it smelled to Eber when he spoke.
“You must answer for the actions of your Circle!”
“Ah, Ma, can't no one else talk for Green today? I don't feel so good.”
“No! No one else can speak for Green because no other Green is present! What is going on? What is Green's plan?”
Morgan had his mouth open when he realized he had no more idea than Eber did.
His memories from after the meeting were pretty fuzzy, although he did have a vague recollection of wanting to get them to reveal their plan of 'Direct Action' out of them at the victory party afterwards. But then somebody put a homemade clay mug full of a homemade booze in his hand and after that, he didn't remember a goddamn thing.
A part of him was sorry he didn't remember it. It must have been one hell of a party. He hadn't felt this sick the morning after since that going-away party he'd had before leaving the Home System, and hadn't gotten properly black-out drunk since that time on Astarte when he'd drunk that blue shit on a bet.
Thinking back to his time on Astarte he felt a deep and sudden sadness settle over him, mourning days that he'd expended and would not see again.
Meanwhile, Eber hadn't gone anywhere and was getting impatient.
“Well? You speak for Green. What have you to say for your Circle?”
“Uhm... ah, what's it to you, anyhow?”
Something Eber had just said drifted up to the surface.
“And what do you mean there's no Greens left here?”
“None of rank in the Green Circle is left in the enclave. And now I, who speak for Red and Xbalanque, am woken by the Planetary. Her officers have been called to the industrial docks. And much of Green is missing. I am an elder of a great Circle and no fool. What am I meant to think of this?”
The industrial docks! The thought pierced the fog that surrounded Morgan's brain. Where he had been headed when all this began. Where the terraforming supplies were kept. It was happening now!
He lunged for the door, shoving Eber and the other Red out of the way. His head spun one direction, his stomach the other. He fell past them and into the doorway. He gripped the doorframe to stop the room from spinning and lurched out through the hanging curtain into the hallway.
Eber was shouting and the other Red made a grab for him but Morgan shrugged the hand off without much effort and continued stumbling down the corridor.
His abused stomach heaved and he doubled over, carried forward onto his knees by his momentum. His insides contracted in a series of powerful spasms. His bruised ribs screamed out and he followed suit, his cry drowned by the bitter, almost medicinal bile that was all his stomach had left to give up.
Rough hands gripped his arms and pulled him to his feet. He heard Eber's voice shouting at them down the hall, but didn't stop to listen what he was saying.
He flexed Earth-born muscles and shrugged easily out of their grasp and continued on. A fever was rising in him, drying the sweat to his skin. His head pounded, like the drums of far-off Mithra, in an irregular beat that matching the racing of his heart. His eyes were no longer itching, they were burning.
This was like no hangover he'd ever had, even that time on Astarte. What had been in that drink?
He forced himself forward, step by tiresome step, and the hallway started to tilt. Or was that him? Lights danced in front of his eyes and the intertwined patterns of color seemed to swim across the walls. He had to trust that his feet knew the way.
Behind him shouts and orders echoed down the halls, muffled a little by the tapestries over the doors and muffled more by the thundering of his blood in his ears.
A wall of metal came out of nowhere and smashed into Morgan's face. He staggered backwards, the lights in his eyes exploded into a single red and yellow sheet. He groped in the light-blindness and found the metal beam that barred the door. He raised it out of its cradle and over his head. Red waves of pain ran in lines down his arm and he imprisoned a cry behind clenched teeth. His arms gave way and the bar clattered to the floor behind him. There were cries from the farmers who'd been following him as they jumped out of the way.
He hurled his weight against the door with all the strength left to him and it gave way without much of a fight. His remaining momentum carried him past it, stumbling into the hallway beyond.
After the dim Red light of the Xbalanque enclave, the full illumination of Irkalla stabbed him the retinas with daggers of bright white light.
He threw the door to the enclave closed and steadied his back against the cool metal.
“Hey, you! Gannis! You!” He didn't move. Laying against the metal the fever began to drain away from him, leaving only shuddering chills that wracked him every few seconds.
“You! Stand still! Don't move!”
Morgan blinked a few times and the lights started to clear a little. A pair of figures formed out of the swimming lights. Dark skinned and khaki clad, militia officers. The too-bright lights glinting off of the lenses of their lasers like a pair of white, hot stars, too bright for Morgan to look at directly. He muttered something and waved them away. He flinched and accidentally hit the back of his head against the door.
“I said don't move! Don't! You're under arrest!”
He staggered forward, trying to form his lips into a reasonable explanation but he was cut off as the Militia officers both fired at him.
Bursts of plasma from the underbarrels of the police-issue weapons shown so bright that the rest of the the hallway looked dark before being swallowed up in the blue glare of the after images. The plasma hit him like a pair of fists, slamming him back into the door.
The pain of being stunned was worse than the pain of the morning after. For a moment every nerve in his body burned as if it was on fire. But at least it ended quickly and he returned to the welcoming black arms of oblivion.
It didn't even occur to him that he'd come to until he was done vomiting. Someone or something was holding his head up over a drain, rough metal set into stained tile, once white. He certainly wasn't holding himself up. Shocks and spasms from his stunning still rippled through his body, sending his various muscles into painful seizures in some strange sequence. Every seizure was a double pain as bruised ribs sent aftershocks through his torso.
The hand holding his head up turned him over and his eyes cleared enough to see Khadi's face staring down disapprovingly, her dark, curly hair forming a halo against the harsh white ceiling lights.
“You know what this reminds me of? That time on Astarte. No, I take that back. You weren't this much of a mess even after Astarte.”
“Ever goin' let me forget?” His voice was a hoarse croak.
“I wasn't going to bring it up. But then you show up a wet mess, still half-drugged, dressed in Lord only knows what, yelling crazy at one of my officers.” She tossed a towel down onto his chest.
“Drugged?” His eyes still itched and a chill that came from inside shuddered him, but his eyes and head were clearer than they'd been, although he hurt about twice as much. His limbs were as heavy as lead, drained by all the shakes and spasms.
“The meds tell me it's some kind of native nightmare juice from Xbalanque. Anyone else that might make me suspicious. You? I figure they just dared you to drink it. Got it mostly out of your system now. You got most things out of your system.” She nodded towards the drain in the floor.
“I swear before God Itself, Morgan Gannis, you are trying to send me to an early grave.”
“Hey! I'm the one's been shot.”
“You've been stunned.”
“It still hurt.” He tried to grip the towel to wipe himself off but another spasm caused his fingers to seize up and the towel dropped out of his grasp.
“Good! Maybe that will help you listen this time! What is it you thought you were...?” She stopped her own question with a raised hand and pinched the bridge of her nose as if she had a sudden pain her head.
“No. Wait. Don't tell me, you were trying to clear your crew in some damn fool solo mission, weren't you? Never could leave anything to anyone else, could you? What were you thinking?”
“It'...” His teeth rattled together. “'swasn't us. Didn' do it.”
“If you and yours are so damned innocent, then why did you have to go running off making trouble on your own? Didn't you think it might be best to wait and see what we came up with? If you didn't do it, the truth would have likely come out, and without you causing an incident.”
She went down on a knee and looked him straight in the eyes.
“Thought maybe you would have trusted me, Morgan.”
“Why? You didn't trust me, Khadi.”
He tried to hold her gaze but a nerve in his left eye just wouldn't stop twitching.
“I'm in charge of security, I did my job!”
“My crew...” He grunted as he propped himself up on unsteady elbows, bringing his nose within millimeters of hers. “My crew had to go over your head just to get you to give us the benefit of the doubt. You never even thought we might not be guilty! What kind of loyalty is that?”
“I have a job to do! I've been following the evidence. I can't afford to play favorites.”
“Then what did it matter if you trusted us or not?”
She stood up with a suddenness that suggested she'd been struck.
“Damn you.” Her voice was soft and level as she swore. “I've got a duty here to the law as well as my people. And damn your infidel soul to its own special hell for making it a choice between them.”
His hands still trembled, but he'd gotten them under enough control to curl them around the towel and start wiping the the sick and green paint off of him. His vision was clearing as well. He could see shower stalls and mirrors along one wall. A locker room, likely for the Militia troops. Several of them lounged against the lockers, hands on their lasers but eyes on their boss.
“So, you want to trust me?” He caught her gaze and raised an eyebrow in what was meant to be a questioning gesture, but just triggered a painful muscle spasm across his forehead.
“You want to trust me, ask me what I've found out. Go 'head.”
She stared at him and took a heavy sigh.
“C'mon. You know you want to.” He was smiling at her, although he could still taste the bile from vomiting. It couldn't have been attractive.
“I don't. But I will. What did you think you found, Morgan? Besides trouble, that is.”
“Xbalanque.”
“Not you, too...” She rubbed a callused hand over her face and groaned.
“'Too'? Wait, you mean the Conglomerate, right?”
“I mean Carlo-damned-Vasca which comes out at much the same thing. Goddamn it Morgan, last thing I needed today, I mean the absolute last thing, was you adding any more fuel to that fire.”
She knelt back at his side, and starting helping him wipe off his clothes.
“But if they...”
“Don't talk, just listen to me for a moment, alright? Xbalanque is barely a member of the Frontier States and that only on a technicality. There's been tension with them ever since the Conglomerate first moved in and started mining Hunahpu without their approval. They were the original settlers and figure the system is theirs by right. They would say it was within their 'circle', their territory, and that's everything to them. It's come to blows more than once. Now, if you're going to make accusations that might start a civil war in this system, you better have gathered some damned impressive evidence. So you want to make a point here, you best not leave anything out.”
He didn't. When he was done, Khadi was shaking her head slowly.
“No. I don't think so. Even in the most generous light, it's circumstantial. Before the Adjudicator, it'll look like nonsense. It could be used to incriminate you just as much as it could the Xbalanque.”
“But what else could it be? Why were they sneaking around the industrial...?”
“Try and see this from my perspective, Morgan, just this once. I got laws to uphold and I have to have evidence to put in front of the Adjudicator.”
“But think about it, Khadi. Who else has the motive?”
“Who else has the...?” She covered her mouth as she laughed tiredly. “Morgan, you forget that beyond the Frontier there's a war going on? We been at war for damn near a generation now, against enemies who didn't think we'd survive a season. You really think there's anything that they wouldn't do to hurt us?”
“I...” He wasn't sure what word came next.
“Didn't think of it. Yeah, I know.”
“Listen, Khadi, maybe I don't have the evidence yet, but I know it was them. You've got to give me a chance. Maybe with your help, I can get back into that enclave and...”
“No.” She stood up to her full height, looming over him, hands on her hips like an angry deity. “We're done with amateur hour. I'm putting an end to this little adventure of yours. You're a friend, Morgan and it breaks my heart to not be able to trust you, but I won't be the Planetary on who's shift we opened up another front.”
“Damn it, Khadi! You've got to...”
“What I've got to do is what I'm going to do, Morgan. I'm locking up you and your Captain and your crew and you're going to sit the rest of this out. You're going to have to trust us to do our jobs.”
“And if it turns out it's your job to let us hang to keep Xbalanque in the Frontier States? Should I trust you to do that too?”
She reached down, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him upright.
“This conversation is over, Morgan. I swear on the God of the Prophets that you're going to stay where you're put for the first time in your life. I'm keeping you under wraps until I have a case for the Adjudicator.”
Morgan didn't feel that there was anything else to be said. Apparently, neither did Khadi. A long silence hung in the air between them. She kicked the towel towards him and turned to leave.
“Get him cleaned up and then get him right into a cell. I'm not taking any chances with Morgan Gannis this time.”
20: Inside and OutMorgan scrubbed down and dressed himself in the ill-fitting jumpsuit the guards threw at him off and shoved him unceremoniously into a cell. The bars generated a plasma field between them. A blue shimmering field that made a harsh buzz and left a strong smell of ozone in the air.
He settled carefully into the lower bunk. He still shook, although not as bad as before, and the metal frame of the bed, cheap as only furniture built to hold up in low gravity was cheap, rattled fiercely.
His head was buzzing, and not just from the last shuddering effects of the stun. Too much had been happening, he needed to think it out. In a way he was almost grateful for the cell. At least it was quiet.
“Whoa there, Earth, that you?”
A grinning face appeared from the bunk above.
“Void! You look like recycled waste, buddy. And that smell, is that you?”
Hector Rukh. So much for quiet.
“Ah, seal up, will you, Hector? I've had me a day.”
“Yeah, I'll bet you did. Void, from what I heard, you had that and then some. You've been flying off sensors for a couple of shifts now. When the Militia came for the Captain and me they said they lost your as during those first riots down by the docks. And the Captain was a all worried about you and shit, but I was like if there's anyone can handle himself in a riot, it's Earthside. Shit, Morgan Gannis loves a good riot, you know...”
“Yeah, a little.” He chuckled and then winced as pain shot out from a rib. “Less fun than if looks, maybe.”
He closed his eyes and let Hector keep talking while he unraveled the tangled weave of words coming out of his mouth.
“...and these Militia guys, no sense of humor. I mean, these guys are supposed to be your buddies, right? Well, with friends like those, let me tell you...”
“Wait, hold up a moment, Hector. What did you mean by 'first' riot?”
“Well, you see, and this might be a little complicated for a dirtwalker, so try to follow along, huh? But where I learned numbers, 'first' generally indicated the part of a sequence that came before 'second'. We're dealing with single digits here, so you shouldn't have to take your shoes off to count, which is probably a good thing, because if you smell like this with them on... ow! Hey!”
Morgan slammed a hand into the underside of Hector's bunk.
“So there was second riot, huh?”
“Wow, where you been hiding out these last couple of shifts? Yeah there was. A bunch of those guys from that other moon...”
“Xbalanque. The Jaguar Sun.”
“Yeah, them. Well last sleep shift, they broke into the storage warehouses, you know, just past the monorail docks? Anyway, they cleaned out a whole storage unit before the Militia busted them up. A whole bunch got nabbed and the miners started a little 'welcome party' for them here, it was quite a bash, before the Militia stunned them all. A 'bash', get it? It's a bash, see, because...”
“Yeah, got it.” 'Direct Action' huh? What had they taken? What were 'his' Greens up to?
Morgan picked another thread from the word tapestry.
“So, Suze got picked up too, you said? And if she ain't here, then where is she?”
“'She'? You mean your beloved Captain? Well, while you two have been loafing here at the Planetary's expense, she's been out working tirelessly for her crew's interests, just like always.”
The Captain was standing just outside the cell, arms crossed and smile akimbo. A Militia trooper frowned at her left elbow. Her image shifted and wavered through the field.
“Hey! Captain! About time! We getting out of here or what? You cut us a deal?” Hector leaped down from his bunk and sprinted right up to the bars.
“Got it in one, Rukh. We've been released to the custody of... of...” She leaned around Hector to take a look at Morgan, who still lay aching in his bed.
“Morgan? That you? I'd heard that they had brought you in. You alright?”
“Ah, it ain't nothing that won't grow back.” He raised his head and managed a thin-lipped smile.
“That's what I like to hear.” Her grin looked even more lop-sided than usual through the rippled field of plasma.
“Rukh here figured you were done for when he heard they'd lost you, wanted to make a run for it then and there, but I told him that if there was anyone who could take care of himself in a riot, it was Morgan Gannis. I know how you love a good riot, shortpants.”
“Hey! I never...” Hector looked offended without any hint of guilt.
“Figured.” Morgan's laugh rumbled low in his throat and his ribs paid the price. But it was well worth paying to be back with his crew. After several shifts spinning in Circles among the farmers of Xbalanque, there was a comfort in the familiar, even in jail. Maybe even especially in jail.
“So what's the deal with this... ah... deal?”
“You do have a way with words, Rukh.” The Captain laughed then tossed her head at her militia escort. “This friendly representative of the law is here to take us to our new keeper. We're on parole.”
The officer's datalenses lit up her eyes and the blue field disappeared from between the bars, although the stench of ozone remained.
“Vasca?” Hector asked.
“Vasca.” The cell opened and the Captain gestured them out. Morgan groaned as he slowly levered himself up off the bunk.
They walked ahead of the Militia trooper's laser, out of the cell block and into the long, sterile hallway beyond. There were troopers hurrying across a t-intersection at the end of the hall. An official in a Conglomerate jumpsuit was arguing passionately with someone wearing the insignia of an officer in the Militia.
A door opened down the hall from them and a trio of figures emerged. Two wore the khaki of the Colonial Militia, standing behind and to the sides, weapons out and at the ready, focused on the middle figure. Tall, lanky, with a complexion so pale as to nearly by an albino, dressed in the faded blues of a uniform of some sort. Morgan knew him. The Tritonian from the riots.
“Oy, lad! No hard 'uns, boyo, see you 'round.” The smell of spoiled milk came off him as he and his escorts passed going the other way.
“Three of us and we only got one guard and that one guy has two? What, are we not dangerous enough or something?” Hector followed them with a resentful glare.
“Fire your retros and back it up, spacer.” The Captain put a hand on his shoulder. “Not everything is a competition, Rukh.”
“I don't know, does seem a bit unfair.” Both Hector and the Captain turned around and looked at Morgan.
“What? It's a matter of principle. I beat that guy at least once, you know. Figure that should be worth something.”
The Captain shook her head.
“Hopeless, the pair of you. Besides, you're both forgetting something.”
While she was talking, their guard stopped them and walked around to open a door.
“We're not prisoners anymore. We're on parole. Who's winning now, boys?”
21: Pleas and Bargains“Thank you very much, officer. I will be taking responsibility for them from here. You may now leave us.” Carlo Vasca gave the guard a brisk nod. He stood behind a utilitarian metal table in the tiny briefing room. The Militia officer stood fast in the doorway, arms crossed and face closed.
“Officer. Thank you.” Vasca repeated each word individual word slowly and with emphasis. The guard locked eyes with him for a moment, then averted them, turned around and closed the door with a will behind her.
“Well, well, now that we are alone, my friends, I believe we have business to discuss, do we not, Captain Ngn?”
“That we do. Although it's Mister Rukh here that you've the deal with, as I recall.” The Captain threw herself into a chair across the table from Vasca and folded her hands behind her head.
Hector, for once, was struck speechless. He looked to the Captain, then to Vasca, then back to the Captain, his mouth working like a fish out of water.
“Go on, it's your hustle, you run with it. Don't worry, you say anything I don't like, I'll be sitting right here to shut it down.”
She smiled and threw Hector a nod to soften her words. The doubt melted away from Hector's face and he was his usual grinning, cocky, corridor rat self again. He put both hands flat on the table and leaned forward until he was almost eye level with Vasca.
“Good. Excellence.” Vasca's smile was all teeth. “There is much to discuss and very little time in which to do it. Circumstances, I think you must agree, are much changed...”
“Changed? What's changed? You still got ore, and we still got a driver to get it to market, so what's changed?”
“Ah yes, what you say, it is true. When we first come to this accommodation there was no bar to your leaving this world, to say nothing of this system. But now, now your ship is watched, your crew are prisoner. This has changed.”
“So what?” Hector stood back up to this full height and shrugged with a wide, expansive gesture that showed off the full, attenuated, length of his arms.
“So there's a bit of an extra shipping charge. Big deal. Price of doing business, am I right or am I right? Besides, if you didn't still want to do this deal, you wouldn't have bailed us out like this. You opened negotiations the moment we left that cell.”
“Ha!” Vasca didn't actually laugh, he just said the word 'Ha' as he reached up to slap Hector's shoulder. Hector winced and rubbed the spot where Vasca hit him.
“But to be serious, this situation, it does not get better before it gets worse. And every shift that passes, it grows more difficult to got you off-world. The sooner you are gone, I would think, the better for all of us.”
“You'll get no argument from us on that, Mister Vasca. Didn't know why we're even still here...”
Morgan glanced over at the Captain, She was smirking proudly and nodding in agreement.
“So this is it, we're just going, huh?” Morgan wasn't happy about how much he sounded like a petulant child.
“Yeah, we are. Morgan, old buddy, I think we call call our welcome here on Hunahpu has officially worn out, don't you?”
“You said I'd have the time to...”
“And you did.” She cut him off with a shake of the head. “But we all saw how that worked. No offense. You tried it your way, now we're letting Hector try it his. Hey, hey, don't look so down, shortpants, you gave it your best. But first rule of the spacer, never let yourself get involved in local affairs, you know?”
She gave him a small, but authentic smile and patted him on the shoulder.
“Oh yeah, and what about you on Mithra, huh?”
The smile shrank to a non-committal scowl.
“Mithra was different. Mithra was business.”
“And that's what's important, right? Business.” There was a lot of feelings warring to make it out, but he wasn't sure what the words for them. Things you had to feel to understand.
The Captain held him in a curious gave, under eyebrows arched in question.
“Morgan, what's going on with you? You've never been shy before about moving on when the time came for it. And this won't be the first planet you left one step ahead of a bad rep or worse. Why now?”
“Won't be the first time. Sure.” He repeated the words slowly. “Don't you ever get tired of it, Suze? The running? Never standing our ground and fighting for something?”
“Standing their ground is for people who stand on ground.”
“Don't you think if we just keep leaving our problems behind us, we might someday we'll run out of places to keep them?”
“I don't know about that.” The hand on his shoulder gripped a little firmer. “Cheer up. As long as I've been on this road, I've yet to see an end to it. This deal Hector's cutting for us, it leaves us with a ship and crew to work it. Take care of that and you can take on anything.”
“...got us a deal, then?” Hector was stretching a hand for Vasca to take.
“The shipment, Mister Rukh, is being assembled, and your shuttles disassembled, at the skyhook as we speak here. I took it as my liberty to begin the preparations as soon as your Captain made with me contact. It is most unfortunate that you will be unable to return to this system. There would be much profit in it for both the Conglomerate and your vessel in such an arrangement.”
Susan laughed and started to unfold from her chair.
“Well, be that as it may, I can't imagine that free driver crews with an eye for the main chance would be exactly hard to come by, even this far out. Still, it's been a pleasure doing business, Vasca. Now seems we should get going.”
Susan inclined her head to him and started turning towards the door. She gestured for Morgan and Hector to follow. Hector turned after her, but Morgan stood and stopped for a moment.
“So, and maybe I got this wrong, Mister Vasca, but are you saying that if the Planetary could be convinced that we weren't the saboteurs, it'd be good for your business, right? If we were free to come back here?”
Susan stopped in her tracks and mouth 'what?' at him.
“Mister Gannis, you are sounding like a man having an idea.” Vasca inclined his head towards Morgan like a cue. “Are you a man having a specific idea on this matter?”
“Sure do. And the way I hear it, you got the same idea I do. Listen you know and I know that it's got to be one of the Circles of Xbalanque at the heart of this. There's nobody else makes sense for this, you know? But Khadi, the Planetary, she needs proof before she can let us off the hook. And the way things seem to be going out there, she can't gather the evidence she needs witout starting an interplanetary incident.”
“Morgan!” The Captain spun on him.
“No, no, Captain Ngn. This is good business sense he is showing. Find a need and fill it, that is all business is. He sees a need, for evidence to clear your name, and a gap between our mutual friend the Planetary and this evidence. Yes.”
Vasca came around the table, placing his squat form between Morgan and the Captain.
“Indeed, I have thought much the same thoughts about this myself. To take matters into my own hands. After all, what effects Hunahpu effects the Conglomerate. We have a stake and a right. And now our connection with the universe to which we sell is imperiled. No, this will not stand. Something will be done.”
“Could you use a hand?” He held his out to Vasca.
“Once again, the thoughts we are having are the same thoughts, Mister Gannis. Of course. It would be my honor. And I am a man of honor.” Vasca took it and Morgan bit back a cry as Vasca's vice-like grip closed around his hand.
Susan glared over the top of Vasca's head, and gave him a look to remember.
“What, in the name of the cold and hungry Void, do you think you're doing, Earthman?”
“Trying to do what you and Khadi and everybody's been telling me I can't do since I got here. Save the ship and serve the planet at the same time.”
22: The Company You Keep
Carlo Vasca raised his hands above the crowd and the howl of the great beast subsided to a low growl.
“Friends, friends, listen to me, listen. We are impatient, yes, but we must also be strong, we must wait. Learn patience with the law. I know how you feel. How could I not? Did not Vascas starve during the Great Winter Wars, along with the Garzas and Ximenis and Azenari?”
A section of the crowd roared with rage and recognition as he said each name.
“Did I not swear, as many of you did, that I would never see my people starve again? Are you, as members of the Conglomerate, not all my people? And am I not, as a Vasca and as a Syndic of Thor, not a man of my word?”
“You damn well better be!” A heckler shouted from somewhere near where Hector and Morgan stood at the back of the crowd.
“Leakin' colonials. What a bunch of savages. Why are we here again?” Hector shook his head in disgust.
“You know damn well why we're here. We need Vasca to get us in to see the scene of the raid. And Vasca said to meet him here. So here we are.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all that, I was there, remember? No, I meant, why are we still here?” Hector gestured vaguely towards the ground.
“Instead of, you know, already out there?” He nodded upwards.
“Hey, it's a free universe, buddy. Nobody's forcing you to be here.”
“Tell the Captain that.” Hector rolled his eyes. “Besides, leave this investigative stuff to a dirtwalker like you? Yeah, that's a good idea. No, you need somebody with a trained pair of eyes on this, like an engineer, and you know it, pal. And I'm the only engineer we got, so here I am, like a chump.”
“Thanks man, I knew I could count on you.”
“Don't push it.”
Still smiling, Vasca stepped down off of the flatbed cargo hauler he had been using as an impromptu stage and strode purposefully over to Hector and Morgan.
As he drew close, the smile on Vasca's face evaporated like the sheetstorms on Hunahpu's surface at the end of the day cycle.
“Ungrateful curs.” Vasca's eyes darted over to the milling crowd, which had broken up into small knots of miners talking loudly and taking frequent jabs at the air with fists and tools.
“The Conglomerate, it provides everything for them, food and jobs and even air. And at the first sign of trouble, they begin to foam at the mouth like rabid animals. Thor! Pah! We are like whipped dogs to whom the hand has been so often raised that now we bite at every hand, even the one that feeds.”
Vasca shook his head, back and forth, several times. His perfectly coiffed hair never moved.
Morgan was keeping an eye on the slowly moving groups of people, the gray clumps in Conglomerate jumpsuits and the solitary khaki of the Militia officers watching the miners. There was something like clockwork to crowds. A machinery of situations that he could feel in his bones. And this one was ticking.
“You know, they ain't all wrong. Until Hunahpu can support its own crops, its food supply will always been vulnerable.”
“Vulnerable? You do bravely to accuse a man of Thor of vulnerability.” Vasca gripped the front of Morgan's shirt and effortlessly lifted him off the ground. Morgan tensed his legs to start kicking. Vasca's laugh came out of nowhere and Morgan found himself standing on his own two feet again.
“You are fortunate that I like bravery. And also that you are right. We will never be truly secure here while still we rely on others for what is necessary. It is one of the hard lessons Thor teaches a man. Many have helped teach this, Jovians, the Starlords, even the accursed tyrant of our neighboring planet, Baldur, may he freeze in the coldest parts of hell.”
He spat casually on the floor.
“Well, it's not like you can not be interdependent.” Hector did another of his big, space-filling shrugs. “That's just how things are. Now the key, the key is to be able to manage your supply streams, you know?”
“And what do you know from anything, Rukh? You've never starved," Morgan said.
“Because where I'm from we know how to manage our supply streams, I told you. You got to remember, I'm station folk, our supply streams are all we've got. We can't just find food lying on the ground like you planetsiders, you know?”
“Station? Hell, Hector, you're not from some tin can in an asteroid belt. You're from the goddamn Centauri Exchange, the largest single structure ever built by man! Even if you didn't have a small belt of hollowed asteroids filled with hydroponic farms orbiting the damn thing, its owned by interstellar corporations that also own or control every resource the place could ever want or need. I'm from Earth and we don't got resources like you!”
“So we're just really good at controlling our supply streams. So what? You got something against success?”
“Well said, my young friend, well said!” Vasca slapped Hector companionably on the back and nearly knocked him over.
Morgan had his hands jammed deep in his pockets, eyes scanning back and forth over the heads of the crowd, mostly broadly-built, low-slung heavy-gravity natives like Vasca, and the few dark, khaki-clad forms of Militia officers drifting around the edges of the mob, fingering their double-barreled police weapons, sleek pulse lasers with bulky plasma stunners stuck on beneath.
Morgan's body twitched with the memory of having been on the receiving end of those not so long ago.
“So, Mister Vasca, you rigged it with these Militia guys or are we going to have more excitement than we signed on for?” Morgan made a show of cracking his knuckles.
“Wise up, Earth!” Hector said. “If he could just traipse in without trouble from the law, he wouldn't need us, would he? We get caught, he can always claim we got away from him. We're selling our deniability, right Mister Vasca?”
“You might certainly be thinking that, but I could not possibly comment.” Vasca was smiling as he said it. He nodded towards the metal shutters at one end of the station, beyond the crowd.
“The storage units are that way. 26-A is the the unit that was raided. The Planetary has sealed it against the public. Were I you, I would not let me see you go there.”
He turned away pointedly and headed back to the ad hoc podium. His voice rose and filled the station even over the hiss of the passing monorails.
“Please, please, my friends, I beg of you once more, You have grievances. I understand them, for they are my own. But we are on a Frontier world, we must respect Frontier law. And we must be patient with the law!”
“Bread is the only law!”
“Only the Dead are patient!
A tide of shouts and slogans rose up from the crowd and washed over Vasca.
Vasca backed down off the stage, head hung down in an attitude of defeat. The milling crowd came back to life, roaring, chanting and pumping fists into the air. He backed off and somebody threw an empty drinks tube in his general direction.
Only the wink he gave Hector and Morgan gave the lie to his hang-dog expression.
He sprinted, with the distance eating almost-leaps of a heavy-gravity native on tiny Hunahpu, over the metal shutters beyond the boarding platforms and knocked wildly. The shutters lifted and a uniformed Militia officer answered. They talked with emphatic gestures for a moment, then the officer sunk back out of sight. When the officer re-emerged, it wasn't alone. A flock of khaki-clad troopers followed and spread out, hands on the butts of their lasers. They fanned out to support their fellows already doing crowd control.
The gears of the situation suddenly clicked in Morgan's head and without saying a word he started striding towards the shutters, where Vasca stood restlessly next to the door controls.
“That's it? A distraction? Really? Shit, we could have done that on our own, couldn't we, Gannis?”
“Don't matter. We're doing this now. Try to keep up, Rukh.”
Hector couldn't see Morgan's mouth curl up into a feral grin. The rush of energy to his limbs overcame the aches and damages of the last few shifts. He was back in action, doing things again.
23: The Truth in Empty PlacesMorgan could hear Hector stumbling along behind him.
Vasca made a point of abandoning his post just before they arrived. Nobody was looking their way. Something close to a hundred angry heavy-gravity natives did a great job of focusing the Militia's attention elsewhere.
The door controls were blinking when they arrived. Morgan slapped the controls and the shutters came up. Hector slipped under the rising door and Morgan followed, closing it behind them.
A long, dark, empty hall greeted them. It was a simple matter to find 26-A. Hector waved Morgan back and his eyes lit up as his datalenses activated to access the security lock on the room. A few false starts and a few false passwords and Hector had the storage area opening hungrily for him.
It wasn't much to look at, an empty warehouse space like any other. A big, dark room with nothing in it, just some big metal canisters piled up in a back corner. The lights came on and Morgan took a look around at what was left.
Or rather, he smelled it. The distinctive stench of Ammonium nitrate, just like back in the Xbalanque enclave. Fertilizer or bomb, he still couldn't tell.
Hector called out from the corner.
“Hey, Gannis! You reading this?”
Morgan turned around and started sauntering over to where Hector was looking over the barrels, eyes still flickering with active datalenses.
“Hector, tell me something. You smelling what I'm smelling?”
“I smell a lot of stuff. This place is an armpit. Void, I can't even smell you over it.”
“A sharp smell, kind of like, I don't know, cat piss, right?”
Morgan met Hector's blank stare.
“You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?”
“The whatever-animal-urine thing? Don't know, don't care. But yeah, if you're talking about the subtle notes of NH4 NO3 on the air, yeah, I smell that. Listen, buddy, as much as I could get into a good game of 'name that smell', the clock is ticking until the Militia gets back and we have another impromptu reunion with your old friend the Planetary, so how's about we skip it, huh? Now come on over here and take a look at this.”
He nodded towards the barrel he was inspecting. Morgan started circling the container, looking at the markings. Nothing out of the ordinary yet, just the usual Innes Conglomerate markings.
“Not like that, with your eyes on, huh? Man, are you even wearing your lenses?”
“Not since the first time they arrested us.”
“And you never asked them to get them back when we were released?”
“Why would I?”
“For real? I... neverevenleakingmind...”
“What? Just tell me, what am I looking for here?”
“Nothing you can see, apparently.” Hector sighed and breathed a barely audible 'dirtwalkers' under his breath. He leaned on the barrel and Morgan saw it move slightly.
“Alright, so let's try it this way. Morgan, what strikes you as weird about these canisters here, huh?” Hector didn't pause for an answer, he just kept rolling on. “They're the only thing that didn't get stolen, right? Right. Now why do you figure that is? The answer has get to be that...”
“They're empty.” Morgan rapped his knuckles against the side and it echoed like a drum.
“Wait? What? But the seal hasn't even been...?”
“Sure it has, look!” Morgan ran his finger around the black sealant on the rim of the barrel, which lay as a second layer over a slightly lighter layer of older sealant.
“I am looking! And according the system, there's been no access to these seals since...”
“Turn those lousy things off and take a damn look!”
He reached up, grabbed Hector's collar and yanked it down to eye-level.
“Ow! Hey watch it, dirtwalker, this shirt...”
“Makes you look like a pimp, but only because you're not pretty enough to be a whore.”
“You know, you can be a real slow leak when you put your mind to it.” Hector sighed, blinked off his lenses and glared sullenly at the top of the barrel.
“Alright, I'm looking, I'm looking. I'm looking and the seal looks fine, like a nice, normal... holy space! Waitasecond! ...like a nice, normal, class 3, semi-organic polymer sealant, alright, but on barrels that are marked as... as...”
He tore out of Morgan's grasp and blinked again, turning the flickering multicolored lights back on in his eyes.
“...as class 5 formic acid concentrate. Which would eat right through this shit here like a laser through flesh.”
“They use it to scour out the tanks of organic matter after the platforms return for the night.”
“Be a hell of a weapon. But why seal it up like this? Thought terraformers were supposed to be thorough and shit?”
“Because this ain't never been any formic concentrate, I'll bet good credit on it.” Morgan stepped back and scratched his head.
“Hector, I got me some kind of powerful bad feeling about this. Gimme a hand popping that open, will you?”
“Sure, no problem...” Hector shrugged and took a tool from a pouch at his belt, and started running it over the sealant.
“Heh. So you made them give you back your tools too, huh?”
“Mine. They're mine.” The tool he was holding gave off a subsonic hum, more felt than heard. The sealant curled up like it was recoiling from his touch. As he worked, he looked up at Morgan curiously.
“So what do you want this open for, anyhow? What with it being empty and all?”
“Just keep... There. That ought to be enough.” Morgan squeezed his fingers between the lid and the rim and pulled, tearing away the rest of the rest of the weakened seal.
As he did, a slight scent of phosphorous wafted up from the open barrel. It reminded him of his days working the fields on Astarte.
“Smell that?”
“Sure, that's, what? Ca(H2PO4)2 right?”
“Yeah, Monocalcium phosphate. Used it a ton on Astarte. Some weird soil chemicals on that world. But it sure ain't no formic acid concentrate.”
“So, then where's the formic acid if these were barrels of Monocalcium phosphate?”
Morgan's eyes snapped open.
“Hector, if these barrels are marked 'Formic Acid' in the system, somebody must have changed the registry on them, right? What happened to the real formic concentrate? Can you crack into the system?”
“Hey, Morgan, buddy, these are government supplies. They've probably got the best system security on the planet on this.”
Morgan raised a disbelieving eyebrow.
Hector grinned.
“Of course I can, what is this, beginner's school? Day I can't crack any code on a backwater dirtball like this is the day I go into design school like my momma always wanted me to. Alright, gimme a second here.”
Hector talked to himself as his fingers flipped through the spaces where his lenses showed him icons in front of his face.
“Yeah, c'mon, yeah, there it is, come on you slippery little.. yeah, there you are, give it to Hector, give it to me, yeah! Boom! There it is.”
“You got something, Rukh?”
“Yeah, I got something, somebody was in here, alright. Somebody good. Either your farmers have a prodigy of unexpected skill working for them, or they got their hands on some professional level tools. This is solid work.”
“But you cracked it?”
“I'm Exchange, Morgan. I grew up in the biggest information hub in Human space. I don't care how good their local best thinks they are, any twelve-year old with a bargain basement set of lenses could crack this where I'm from.”
He gave a derisive snort and shook his head.
“Skill maybe, but they ain't clever, that's for sure. Simple ID swap. They attached the formic concentrate tag to a shipment of Monocalcium phosphate, and visa versa.”
“So wait, the Xbalanque raiders thought they were stealing the fertilizer and left what they thought was the formic concentrate? That seems... I don't know. But if I was going to do some serious sabotage, I'd take what I thought was powerful organic acid. But that's just me, maybe.”
“Nah, it wasn't... You know, I could just show you some of this stuff if you had the sense to have some lenses in, but anyway, I wouldn't lose any sleep trying to get into the tiny minds of the locals, they didn't get it. The Monocalcium phosphate reads as having been taken out on the last resupply before the raid hit.”
“But that means they took the acid thinking it was the fertilizer, right?”
“I... yeah, I suppose so.”
“So they're going to be sowing that acid instead of the fertilizer. It'll spoil the whole batch! We've got it! This is sabotage, come on! If we hop it, we might even stop it before it does any damage! Quick, which platform took that shipment?”
“The FSTP-131, the Beloved Aisha, but what are you...?”
Morgan had spun around and was already sprinting for the door in great leaps.
“Hey, Gannis, hold up will you...” He could hear Hector calling out behind him but he had the momentum now.
He threw open the door and was out into the hall when the darkness broke into a bright rectangle at the end. A figure was waiting in the open doorway.
The Militia? He came to a stop on the floor, sliding forward a few steps with his momentum.
The figure was shorter than Morgan and broader about the shoulders . The lights flashed on. For a moment he was blinded and then his vision faded back, to see Carlo Vasca, hands in his pockets.
“Mister Vasca? We've found the evidence, we...” Another gear clicked in Morgan's head. “Wait, what are you doing here? What if the Militia...?”
“The Militia? They are all busy. For you see, there has been another act of sabotage. The platform Beloved Aisha. You have evidence? Good. It is about to become very important indeed, do you not think?”
24: The AdjudicatorThe air was clean and cool in the office of the Adjudicator of Hunahpu. It was on the top level of Irkalla, as close to the surface as anything in the underground city, just beneath the layer of purification plants that generated the atmosphere, and it reaped the benefits.
The slight breeze ruffled the red and black flag of the Frontier States that hung on the wall behind the massive crescent of polished stone that served the Adjudicator as a desk. The only adornments were a pair of actual leather-bound books, something Morgan hadn't seen since his childhood on Earth, one emblazoned with the striped seal of the Frontier States and the other marked with the elaborate abstract filigree distinctive of Great Hajj Islam.
The Adjudicator himself, a Dusharan like Khadi, sat behind it, his hands folded and his face was a dark pool of calm. He was absolutely still except where the circulating air stirred his gleaming white robes. Morgan found the entire effect very serene.
Which put it in direct opposition to the rest of the room.
“...square kilometers of prime growing ground rendered unsuitable for at least this season! At the very least!” To the right of the desk, a small group of younger people, mostly Dusharans, seemed to be taking it in turns to harangue Khadi, hands furiously cutting the air in front of her face. They wore terraforming patches, including those that marked them as platform skippers.
Khadi stood with arms crossed and an eyebrow raised to make it clear that they were only talking to her like that because she allowed it.
“You! Syndic Vasca! You represent the Conglomerate! You represent us! You must be the one to do something!” To the left of the desk, a short, scarred plug of muscle in Conglomerate grays shouted and jabbed a finger at a visibly less patient Carlo Vasca, who worked his jaw in time with the opening and closing of his fists. Morgan thought he recognized the one doing the pointing as the union steward he ran into during the first riot. He may not always recognize a face, but he never forgot a fist.
Hector and Morgan stood uncomfortably in the eye of the storm they had started.
Vasca had been quick to hustle them straight from the industrial storage areas of the monorail station up to the offices of the Adjudicator. Morgan didn't remember seeing Vasca's datalenses turn on, but he must have made a call because everybody was already there when they arrived: the Adjudicator, Khadi, with a couple of grizzled older Militia officers, several platform skippers for the terraformers, Conglomerate employees and union representatives.
And when Vasca had them present their evidence, the clouds that had gathered here broke open into full storm.
“As Planetary, you have a responsibility to act on any...”
“Any threat!” An even younger platform skipper pushed past the first one into Khadi's face. “No matter how politically inconvenient. Or have you forgotten that you are...?”
“Girl, I've forgotten more about The Work than you will ever learn.” Khadi stepped forward, forcing the younger woman back.
“If they,” the union representative shouted and tossed a thumb back towards the Adjudicator and Khadi. “Don't do something about the circle-jerks, you do. And if you don't, we do!”
Morgan stood up on his tiptoes and muttered into Hector's ear.
“Think we might be in some kind of trouble, Rukh old son.”
“Ah, don't sweat it, Gannis. There's trouble here alright, but it ain't for us.” Hector was grinning wide enough to split his face wide open.
Morgan just nodded and lowered down on his feet. He didn't mention that while 'Morgan Gannis' might not be in trouble, 'He Who Speaks For Green' might be in a lot of trouble, if he was reading the mood of the room right.
“Silence! We shall have order.” The Adjudicator took advantage of the deliberate acoustics and his deep, authoritative voice carried without having to shout.
There wasn't silence, but the roar receded to a low grumble.
Carlo Vasca stepped around the union steward and presented himself to the desk, standing squarely in front of the Adjudicator.
“Indeed. There will be order. Order based on the facts, your Honor. The information, it is most clear. The Xbalanque, they betray our contracts. The Xbalanque, they sabotage your terraforming. Actions must be taken. And if the Planetary, our Planetary, will not finally take the required action, then you must compel...”
“That is twice,” the Adjudicator cut in.
“I am being sorry?”
“Twice you have said what I 'must' do in my own chamber of judgment. This, no man may do.” He rose to his own full height, taller than Khadi, almost as tall as Hector, but more massively built, and towered over Vasca.
“Only this...” He slapped his hand down on the book of Frontier states law.
“...and this...” His other hand came down on the desk next to the Quran.
“...may tell me how to judge.”
Susan had once told Morgan that while it was possible that the Frontier States had heard of the separation of Church and State, they obviously wanted nothing to do with it. The Adjudicator was not the first holy man Morgan had seen in high office, a Librumist Deacon had been Stationmaster on Oclla and all the officials on Astarte had been de facto shamans in the local spirit cults.
“As it should be.” A Conglomerate employee in a gray suit was tall and thin for a Thorean, nearly Morgan's height, although still short for an Earthman.
“And within that book,” he paused here to nod at the book of Frontier States law. “It states clearly that an Adjudicator must, not 'might', but 'must' you understand, when presented with reasonable evidence of threats to planetary security, make judgments to be carried out by the Planetary...”
“And this book, honored Advocate,” there was a wry smile in the Adjudicator's voice if not on his face, as he patted the desk near the Quran. “Warns against hypocrites who cite scripture. Evidence of threats I have seen. But proof that is it is Xbalanque's fault, I do not see. Not enough. Planetary Safawa what do you say?”
“I say that it had best be some damned solid evidence before we make a direct move against nationals of another Frontier State. The Assembly's inability to relieve Xbalanque economy after the last harvest has left their leadership jumpy already. If we do take action...”
The 'if' set off a wave of grumbling among both the Conglomerate and terraforming officers.
“...if we do, we must tread carefully, Xbalanque joined the Frontier States by invitation and that was conditional. There's no telling how they'll react to these accusations. I don't know to be responsible for opening up another front. I've seen enough of that to last me a lifetime.”
The terraformers behind her nodded in quiet agreement, and the Conglomerate personnel barked in protest.
“Then we will discover it.” The Adjudicator glided around the desk to stand next to Khadi.
“You say there is no telling how they will react. Then let us discover this. Let us go and confront Ambassador Eber with this information and see what he has to say.”
He turned his head to face Vasca.
“Is this agreeable to the Conglomerate?”
Vasca hesitated, then turned back to his own people. The union steward shrugged carelessly and the Advocate nodded his head enthusiastically.
He turned back to the Adjudicator and nodded once, if curtly, in the affirmative.
“Come, the sooner this is settled the better.” The Adjudicator strode forward in long, unhurried steps, drawing forth the others into his wake as he passed.
As he passed Morgan and Hector, they turned to joint he outgoing crowd, but a pair of wide, brown hands stopped them.
“Not you two.” Khadi shook her head.
“Not this time. You're going down to the Militia station to fill out depositions on what you found.”
“But...” Morgan started and Khadi cut him off with another shake of the head.
“No. You can help through your evidence. And if you're very lucky, I may even forget how you got it.”
Hector turned a little paler and hurried to accompany the Militia officer who guided him gently but firmly towards the door.
Khadi made to follow him but hesitated for a moment, so Morgan did as well.
A Militia officer grabbed his arm. He shrugged him off.
“Sir, I'm going to have to insist...”
“No, let him stay. For just a moment, anyway.”
The officer raised a questioning eyebrow.
“I'll take responsibility.”
The trooper shrugged and retreated in the other side of the door.
“C'mon Khadi, I can help. I got an inside track on this, I'm...”
Khadi started laughing.
“What?”
“You...” It was a big laugh and shook her whole body. “You just can't... can't stop yourself, can you, Morgan?”
“Stop myself?”
“From helping, Always got to be doing something.”
She wiped tears of laughter from her eyes and reached down to cradle his face in her big, calloused hand.
“You really haven't changed, have you?”
“Nope.” He gave her his biggest, dopiest grin.
“Well, just this once you're going to sit this out. I need those depositions and I need them by the time we're done meeting with Eber. They're my only hope of keeping this from being a complete political disaster.”
“But Khadi, I really can...”
She took her hand from his face and crossed her arms.
“I'm sure you can, but you're not going to. You're going to go out that door, follow Watcher Mbowe down to our station and fill out that deposition, like a good boy. And you're going to restrain your helpful impulses in the service of something that actually helps.”
She grunted out another laugh.
“Call it a lesson in growing up. A down payment on all the maturing you missed out on.”
He opened his mouth but looked up and saw Khadi's face. He knew that face and knew that was not the face of Khadi when she expected to be argued with.
He just nodded and turned towards the door.
“Oh, and Morgan?”
He stopped and craned his neck to peer back over his shoulder.
“You were right. I should have trusted you.”
Morgan felt his mouth curve up at the corners. He couldn't think of anything to say to Khadi that would say more then going through that door and following Watcher Mbowe.
So that's what he did.
25: Drawn To The Distance
The Captain was waiting for them in the tiny debriefing room where they had been sent to fill out their depositions.
“Smell that, crew?” She welcomed them with open arms and an open smile.
“Sanitizer?” Hector sniffed the air.
“Freedom, you dope! Void, you really don't have a drop of poetry in you, do you?”
She glared, Hector shrugged and Morgan laughed.
“At any rate, Vasca's mouthpiece just lensed me, and this is it. All we have to do is for yu two to fill out those forms and we can wait the rest of this out on the Khan until the Planetary gives us the all clear. Vasca's even arranged for us to ride out with the cargo he's sending us with. Looks like he's going with your proposal, Rukh. That's nice work.”
Hector just smiled and shrugged again.
“Yeah, I know.”
“Well, get to it, will you? Sooner you finish your homework, sooner we can shake the dirt of this place off our boots.”
She slumped into a chair and placed her own boots up on the table.
Hector sat down and Morgan followed suit, sitting across from him. A pair of standard data-entry devices lay in front of them on the table. Hector ignored them and his eyes lit up as he started to submit his deposition via his lenses.
Morgan picked up his data-entry pad, looked at the blank screen, realized he didn't know where to start and put it down again.
“Oh, hey, almost forgot.” The Captain pulled a hand out of her pocket and held it out to Morgan. In it was a small bundle wrapped in soft cloth.
“If you were looking for your datalenses, I got them back from the Militia for you. Seems like I'm always finding these. Swear on all the empty spaces, shortpants, I didn't know better, I'd almost think you lose them on purpose.”
Morgan took the packet from her hand.
“Yeah, thanks.”
The Captain leaned a little farther back in her chair, hooked her hands behind her head and fixed Morgan with a piercing look.
“So, what's eating you, Morgan?”
“What? Nothing's bothering me.” He tore the bundle open and the datalenses clattered to the table. He swore under his breath and fumbled to pick up the tiny contact lenses.
“Sure. Nothing. Morgan, old son, you did everything you set out to do these last couple of shifts. You cleared our names, fingered the saboteurs, all of that. And proved me wrong in the process. That's something I don't often admit. And yet here you sit, about as excited as the day your dog died. Void, you haven't even met my eyes yet. Yeah, nothing wrong here.”
“Loved that dog.”
“I know you did, Morgan, I know. But he never did adjust properly to microgravity. Some creatures were just never meant to leave planet.”
“What's a dog?” Hector's attention never wavered from the view in his datalenses.
The Captain leaned forward and glowered at him under lowered brows.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, 'seal it', right?”
“Right.” She swiveled her head to face Morgan again.
“No, you're right, Suze. I ought to be laughing. It all turned out pretty well, I guess.”
He shrugged and picked the data-entry device back up.
“Lenses?” There was a chuckle under her voice and Morgan sheepishly took up his datalenses and put them in.
“After all that, unbe-leaking-lievable.” Hector snorted through his nose and shook his head.
They worked in more-or-less silence as they filled out their depositions, with Susan throwing out the occasional comment and Hector muttering to himself.
When they were done, they contacted the Militia front desk, which logged their observations and dispatched an officer to fetch them out and escort them from the Militia base across Irkalla to the monorail station. There, a train waited to ship them out to the space elevator and then up into orbit to meet a shuttle to the Outstation.
As they boarded the monorail, there was what seemed to be a disagreement between Morgan's internal workings. There was what felt like a lump in his stomach at the thought of leaving. He hated to leave Hunahpu like this, with work left to do. But he also felt a lift in the soles of his feet at the thought of being back aboard the Kublai Khan. Since leaving Earth, it was the closest thing to a real home that he had known.
“You're drifting again, spacer.” The Captain reached a long leg across the aisle of their monorail car and poked his shin with the toe of her boot.
“Was I? Sorry, Suze.”
“It's OK. I think I get it.”
“You do?” Morgan sat up straighter. His feet started to tap out a staccato rhythm on the floor. Was Susan coming around to his way of thinking? Would she help?
“Sure I do. You never got to say good-bye to your friend, Khadi. I remember all those stories you told me about her from your terraforming days.”
“Yeah.” It wasn't the whole of it, but it was close enough that Morgan didn't feel like contradicting her.
“Ah, so what? So you call her from the skyhook, or maybe the Outstation, or better yet, like Vega or Fomalhaut or something. The farther the better.”
Hector shuddered and made a face.
“Leakin' terrifying dirtwalker if I ever met one.”
“That she is.” Morgan couldn't help but grin at how happy that description would make Khadi.
“He is right, you know.”
Hector cocked a questioning eyebrow at the Captain.
“When you're right, you're right, Rukh. And you've been right a fair bit on this trip. You keep this up, I'm going to start expecting that out of you regular.”
She reached over next to her and ruffled Hector's hair. He stiffened up and put on his best offended look, but couldn't suppress the ghost of a smile peeking out at the corner of his mouth.
Morgan couldn't help it, he just had to laugh.
“There we go!” The Captain smiled. “That's my Earthman. And like Rukh said, in his own charming way, you'll be able to lens the Planetary as soon as we're on the skyhook. Maybe before that, depending on how long it takes for her to wrap all this shit up.”
Morgan opened his mouth to argue but the Captain silenced him with hands patting the air.
“I know, it's not as good as doing it in person. For you, anyway. But we can't always have everything we want. Besides, you'll be able to say 'hi' to her again the next time we're back this way, which we'll be able to do now, thanks to you two.”
“In another year or ten,” Morgan muttered under his breath. The lump in his stomach was back, weighing him down.
“What was that?”
“Nothing.”
A moment passed and the lump was still there.
“It's just that, I don't know, I was kind of hoping to see this through all the way to the end, you know?”
The blank looks Hector and the Captain gave him told him that they didn't know. But he had gone this far, so Morgan just bulled on forward.
“I just don't like feeling like I'm taking the easy way out on this.”
“Easy way? 'Easy'?” Hector squealed, outraged. “You call this easy? After all the shit we had to pull? Are you leakin' kidding...ow!”
The Captain elbowed him in the ribs to shut him up.
“Trust me on this, Morgan old pal, nobody's going to accuse you of that, not after what you did. You did your part and then some, now it's time to let the bureaucrats and diplomats do theirs.”
He must have looked doubtful, because the Captain kept pressing him.
“Let me put it this way: you trust your buddy, Safawa to do her job, don't you?”
“I... yeah. Of course. No, you're right.” He found himself agreeing with her reasons, just like always.
“Besides, there's another lady who needs you now.” She softened her tone and nodded upwards.
“The Khan. You going to let her down, crewie?”
Alright, Suze, alright, I give. I'm coming along quiet, ain't I?” He laughed tiredly and shook his head slowly.
“That's what I like to hear.” The Captain was smiling. A tone sounded around them and the blurred sides of the tunnel they saw through the windows slowed until they could make out individual rivets on the wall.
“And just in time, looks like we're pulling into the elevator platform. Look alive, crew. The Void's been waiting for us and She'll take those who don't want it badly enough.” She openly made a complicated hand gesture upwards and even Hector muttered something almost sacred under his breath when he didn't think they were listening.
“Come, this is you.” The Militia officer opened the door and nodded them out.
The monorail station at the bottom of the space elevator was like the one at the Irkalla end, only smaller. It was between shifts and the passenger level was empty, except for stacks of empty crates and unmarked barrels. The Captain, Hector, Morgan and their Militia escort were the only living souls present. For a moment it was totally silent and Morgan felt the emptiness he always felt in places of transit; docks and stations and ports.
Then there was a hum that vibrated through every surface and toppled a box or two from the highest stacks. An electric energy filled the air, making the short hairs on the back of his neck stand up, as a building-sized elevator car, a mobile warehouse really, rode its magnetic charge down the beanstalk cable that ran down from space.
In his mind's eye, Morgan could see the thin silver thread of spidercarbon reaching up like a single pointing finger, into the black and infinite heavens above.
The elevator car whizzed past the loading platform, a moving wall that slowed to a stop with a final clang ringing up the shaft from the floor of the warehouse levels below them, followed up by the sounds of men shouting and machines moving as they started to load the massive cargo section.
Lights danced in the Militia officer's eyes for a moment before they were nodded forward again.
“This way, if you please.”
The doors to the tiny cargo compartment on the top of the elevator car were ahead of them of them now, sitting more or less even with the loading platform.
The doors hissed open and the officer beckoned them forward.
“Sorry to be leaving?” The Captain put a hand on Morgan's shoulder and muttered softly into his ear.
“A little, yeah.” He admitted with a small nod.
“No shame in that. But now it's time to go home.” When she said 'home', he heard 'the Kublai Khan'. And when she said it, it was.
He took one last look around at the stacks of crates and boxes. It was as if Hunahpu itself was packed up and ready to leave.
And maybe he was, too.
Together they started forward, towards the open doors.
And stopped as the Militia officer cried out and gripped his shoulder as he staggered backwards, leaving a trail of blood droplets.
The Captain's hand grasped at the belt that wasn't there. Hector just stood there, mouth opening and closing dumbly, without uttering a word.
Morgan propelled himself forward, sprinting at speed towards the Militia trooper.
The officer reached across himself clumsily trying to grab at his own laser with his good arm, but as he fumbled for his weapon, tall, dark figures emerged from behind the stacks, holding bulky objects cradled in their arms. They drifted silently past the Militia officer, one pausing to drive the butt of their implement down onto his head and drop him to the floor.
The Captain and Hector started to charge forward to join Morgan but were stopped by lines gouged out of the tiled floor by long, hissing jets of compressed air from the implements.
With a strange calm, Morgan's first clear thought was 'at least now I know what those things do'.
He was focused on the tapered tips of the 'farming implements' pointed at him. After a moment, he raised his up to look at the faces of the figures holding the weapons.
All of the faces bore circles of green.
“You are needed to speak.” Evgeny.
“Those who can do, must do.” Oyibo raised her weapon to his head to make her point.
Her face was a still pond, placid and reflective. But her eyes were a little too wide and jumped from side to side like a cornered animal.
“Who in the cold, sucking Void are these jokers supposed to be?”
“Answer the man, Morgan.” Susan's voice was low and wary.
“These?” Morgan's eyes never strayed from the hands holding the make-shift weapons.
“These are Green.”
26: On the Rise“I blame you, shortpants.”
“I know.”
“Because this is your fault.”
“Yep.”
Morgan and the Captain stood side by side ahead of the Xbalanque farmers and the muzzles of their compressed air weapons.
Behind them, Hector was strangely silent. Likely the weapon Oyibo had pressed to his neck had something to do with it.
It had been a silent ride up the Hunahpu beanstalk into orbit. Too many weapons in close proximity for conversation. Even for Hector. He had opened his mouth once and just for long enough for Oyibo to threaten it shut again.
The car began to silently slow its ascent. A readout in the door showed its speed.
Morgan turned his head to Evgeny.
“So what's the score? Those who can do, must do, right? So what is it I can do?”
“You must speak for Green.”
“You what for who?” Hector squealed behind him.
“Oh, Earthboy, what did you get yourself into here?” Morgan didn't need to look over at the Captain to see her slowly shake her head.
“Only one may speak for Green and you are not Green!” Oyibo snapped, there was a taut edge to her monotone, like a string pulled too tight.
“Right. And what's Green got for me to say? You know, all's of you are pretty good for telling a guy that he's got to do something, but you got a lot to learn about telling him what he's meant to be doing.”
“You must speak for Green. Against Red.” Evgeny managed to shrug without his weapon wavering.
“We took direct action! At last!” A sudden burst of emotion cracked Oyibo's voice.
“And how's that working out for you?” Morgan rolled his eyes.
“Gannis! Don't aggravate her, this chick is... urk!” Hector squawked as Oyibo jabbed him with her weapon.
“Rukh. For the love of all the empty places, will you seal it?” A choked urgency undercut the Captain's shout.
“The action was a success!” Oyibo was insistent now. “All went according to the plan. Green, and Green alone, acquired the fertilizer from the terraformers' stores. It was successfully shipped to the skyhook to await pick up from the Greens of Xbalanque by its friends within the Conglomerate. All was as it was in the plan!”
The Captain caught Morgan's eye with a lift of the chin and gave him a questioning look. All he could do was shrug in reply. It was certainly the first time he'd heard this plan.
“So everything went according to plan, huh? So why are we talkin' here?”
“The plan was agreed upon. Green outvoted Red. And as Eber speaks for Red, he was bound by it. But as Eber is Ambassador for the Circles of the Jaguar Sun, when the Hunahpu came for us, he ordered us to submit to them. Only He That Speaks For Green has the voice to disagree.”
“I, ah, see...”
He stretched out the last vowel long enough to buy himself a moment to think. Something wasn't right about all this. A piece missing although he couldn't put his finger on it. He tried to assemble some kind of question only to realize that he didn't even know what he didn't know.
Fortunately the Captain was there to pick up the slack this time.
“So, and maybe this is just me, but if Morgan here is some kind of...”
Evgeny shut the Captain's mouth by driving the tip of his weapon up into her chin, forcing her jaws to close. The Captain just kept talking through clenched teeth.
“...some kind o' special boy for yeh, how much 'is words goin' t' count wi' one o' yeh pop guns at 'is 'ead?”
“Ca-a-aptain.” It was Hector's turn to whine out a warning.
“Silent! Both of you. You have no voice here. You do not speak for Green.”
“I speak f'r He who sp'ks f'r Green. Righ'?”
She opened her eyes as wide as they would go in a silent prompt to Morgan.
“Oh, yeah, that's right, she does.”
“She is not Green. She is not even of the Circles.” Oyibo's voice was actually wavering now, and Morgan could hear the echoes of her outburst during the confrontation with Eber straining to break loose. He didn't dare respond to that just in case when her temper broke it took her trigger finger, and Hector's head, with it.
And then a reply came to him.
“Connection.”
“What?”
“We got a connection, her and me. You know how Oyibo there's both Green and Red and has to answer to Eber when he's around? Well I'm both Green and part of the crew of the Khan and this here's my Captain. She's connected to me and I'm connected to you, right?”
Silence descended over the car for a moment.
A tone sounded as the elevator car docked at the skyhook.
“Hey, don't give me that look. These are you guys' crazy rules.” Morgan shrugged.
There was muttering and tiny nods among the other Greens as the doors slid open,
Evgeny looked to Oyibo, whose lips were pulled tight into a thin line, and she nodded almost imperceptibly. He shrugged with equal restraint and took the weapon away from the Captain's chin.
“That's better.” The Captain was wearing a hint of a smile that fit in perfectly with the slight expressions of the Xbalanque farmers.
“Time grows less. Come, we will speak of this, but we must move quickly now, before Hunahpu can respond in force.” Oyibo dragged Hector with her towards the door.
“Mmm, no.” The Captain stood in the open doorway and shook her head..
“Suze...?”
“Don't worry, shortpants. I got this.” She gave him a broad wink. It was just like old times. And despite it all, Morgan found himself smiling. After having to deal with all this Circles crap alone for so long, it felt good to be back working as part of a crew again. Having the Captain shoulder the politics took a weight off of his.
“Before we go anywhere, there's something we need to get clear. The question still stands, how much weight will Green's words have against Red if he says them with a gun to his head?”
“Green must be free to speak.” Evgeny was nodding along with her words.
“Right. Sort of what I thought. Which means you need to put down those pop guns of yours if you want to deal. Green has no voice with a gun to its throat.” She nodded towards Hector.
“It would be improper for any Green to threaten He Who Speaks for the Circle.” Morgan noticed that while there were a lot of weapons, none were pointed at him. Hector, certainly, the Captain as well, but not him.
Oyibo looked around at the faces of her own people and her jaw worked as she released Hector from her grip. He scurried over to place the Captain between himself and Oyibo.
“However. Unless he speaks for Green, he is not He Who Speaks for Green. And you two would have no context within our Circle.”
All the weapons were up and pointed at the Captain and Hector.
“What can be done must be done.”
“And we're hostages to make sure it gets done.” The Captain sighed. She sounded more disappointed than scared.
“Not so long as you posses context architecture.” Oyibo's smile was small but exceedingly nasty.
“And what you want for me to do is stand up to Eber again for you, right? Well, if you need me for that, means you're still following the rules, which means you got to honor them for my crew, right?”
Morgan stepped forward so that he was between the muzzles and the Captain and Hector, arms crossed.
“This is so.” Oyibo sounded puzzled, as if she couldn't imagine any other option.
“Good. Right.” Morgan was back to the part where he felt like he was missing something.
“Then all He Who Speaks for Green needs to know is what he is defending.” The Captain smoothly came around to stand beside Morgan.
“He protects Green.”
“Yes, got that. But for what?”
“From Red, and through Red, the diplomatic privilege to defy Hunahpu law.”
“Yes, we covered that. I guess I'm not making myself clear, or rather not making him clear, what we mean is...”
The lost piece suddenly dropped into place in his mind.
“Is 'did you do it'?” Morgan blurted out. The Captain looked down at him and he just shrugged in answer. She paused for a moment, nodded and stepped out of his way.
“These are your monkeys in your circus, Earthman. Make your play.”
“This we have already told you. Yes, the direct action was a success.”
“See, and this is what I was talking about when I said you don't tell people stuff. No, I mean all of it, stealing the fertilizer, switching out the formic acid barrels and all the other sabotage against the terraforming project...”
There was a collective gasp from the Greens.
“No!” Oyibo cried out with surprising emotion. “We claimed the fertilizer, yes. It was just where our Conglomerate contacts said it would be. But for the rest. To hurt the terraforming...”
She shook her head in a surprisingly emphatic gesture.
“Terraforming is like farming, the bringing forth of life from the unliving ground, on a massive scale. We are farmers, above all things. This is our calling. We would never... no...”
Evgeny stepped forward and made a complex holy sign with his hand.
“It is an offense against the Demiurge to prevent new life from rising up, a bar to reincarnation.”
“Hold on, wait a second, are we taking this seriously?” Hector snorted from behind Morgan and the Captain. “Are we really buying any of what they've got on offer here? Really?”
“I think Morgan might be right about this one. They wouldn't be so vague and use so much ritual to cover it if they were going to just lie. If they were, there would be easier ways to than this to get what they want.”
“So, what? All of this, its just the fertilizer? All of this is just for that?”
“Just fertilizer?” Oyibo seemed genuinely offended. “You do not understand. The native biochemistry of Xbalanque is toxic to humans. It has always been necessary to add certain chemicals to Xbalanque's soil to grow food edible to humans. In times past, we would have to have them shipped in, at an expense that enslaved our people.”
Evgeny joined in.
“It was a gift from the Demiurge in disguise when the Conglomerate moved to this system. We did not welcome them at first. Outsiders are always suspect. But they offered fertilizer from closer and at a much lower price that freed us...”
“Until this season!” Morgan could read the rage in Oyibo's toneless voice. “The harvests have not been good this season. We could not pay the Conglomerate what they ask. And they will not lower their prices. But our need is still great. That old fool Eber believed, still believes, he can force a settlement by withholding our grain shipment, but while he waits, Xbalanque's next crop withers in the ground. Action must be now! The action that Green has taken!”
“See, this is what comes of not properly managing your supply streams.” Hector clicked his tongue.
“But nothing else. Only the fertilizer, right?” Morgan pressed the point.
“That is all we want. We have friends within the lower circles of the Innes Conglomerate. They told us where to find the fertilizer and helped us get it up to the Skyhook. We only need to get to the shuttles here and launch for Xbalanque to be protected by our laws from outside persecution.”
Oyibo nodded and the other Greens started to pass through the door, weapons tracking so that they were still pointed at Hector or the Captain.
The Captain shrugged and jointed the stream of people headed out. Morgan and Hector joined in behind her, into one of the featureless metal corridors that led out from the elevator hub. The Captain stuck her hands in her pockets and strolled next to Oyibo.
“Protected from outside persecution, huh? Sounds pretty good. Speaking for He Who Speaks for Green, in fact, I've got to wonder why you need Him to Speak for you at all? You've got a pretty solid plan here. Got the goods and the getaway, right?”
Morgan was jogging to keep up with the long-legged pair and from behind them he saw Oyibo's head twitch in the Captain's direction.
“If the command comes through from He Who Speaks for Red to turn back and submit ourselves, it will be necessary to Speak against him.”
“And you'll be protected from outside persecution, like you said, huh? And what about insider persecution? Aren't the folks back home going to side with Eber on this?”
“Why? We bring necessary supplies. This will be a great advantage for Green.”
She turned her head to look directly at at the Captain, there was a smile in her voice that didn't show on her face.
“Besides, there are laws for this. The Jaguar Sun has a long tradition of raiding between Circles from before recontact. It is lawful.”
Morgan jumped as a light flashed in his eyes. It took him a moment to remember that he was still wearing his datalenses. The light unfolded into a transparent line of text running across his vision.
[Don't sweat it. Just lensed groundside. They already know. Help is on the way. Don't say anything. Keep walking. -HR]
He glanced over to see Hector give him a broad wink.
27: The Hand That Holds the MatchThe primary shuttle bay on the Hunahpu skyhook occupied a fat wedge in the outermost ring, curving out of sight into its own horizons in either direction. Rows of tugs, shuttles and other intrasystem craft lay firmly affixed in their launch cradles. To Morgan it was a reminder of why they had to be fixed down, to keep them in place when the bay was opened to space, a reminder that this whole bay was one big airlock, a push of a button away from the void.
They sped in a pack across the open space between the door and the ships. Most of the Greens formed a moving circle around them, while Oyibo and Evgeny stayed in the center, weapons lowered but always present near Hector and the Captain, and in the middle of all of it was Morgan. It wasn't where he wanted to be, but in a weird way, it was on the way there.
“Hey, Gannis, check it out.” Hector nudged him and pointed beyond the heads of the tall farmers of Xbalanque. Morgan couldn't see anything from his vantage.
“It's our tugs!”
“The Xanadu and the Samarkand.” Morgan still couldn't see them but he could look up and see the the half-smile on Susan's face as she said the names.
“That shit again.” Hector snorted. “They're leakin' tugs, Captain. The registration says Kublai Khan-a and -b. You know, when you took over the ship from Vik, I figured you'd drop that sentimental...”
“You been right a lot so far, Rukh, don't break that streak now.” Susan's tone stayed light but Morgan could see a miniscule tightening at the corners of her smile.
The Captain turned her attention to Oyibo and nodded over the shoulders of the farmers ahead of them.
“These ones coming up here, these are your contacts in the Conglomerate, then?”
“No.”
The pack came to a sudden stop. Morgan pushed ahead to get a better view. Several figures in Conglomerate grays were approaching from the direction of the shuttles. At first glance they looked like dockworkers, but at second glance, Morgan noticed the pulse lasers dangling from their tool belts.
A movement in the the corner of his eye caught Morgan's attention. He turned his head to see a wall of gray jumpsuits with the precisely groomed Carlo Vasca leading them from around one bend in the shuttle bay.
“Halt, in the name of the laws of the Frontier States!”
He spun around, and saw a tide of brown and khaki coming from the other direction. Khadi strode ahead of a mixed group of Militia troopers and Xbalanque farmers, Ambassador Eber strode just behind her, and the white robes of the Adjudicator flowed next to her.
“Alright, game time, shortpants. You wearing your warpaint?”
Morgan reached up to his own face and took a bit of the hastily-applied green paint on his finger. Then he looked back at the Captain and nodded at her.
The two tides closed around them, stopping just short of the protective line the Greens formed, weapons held low, but out where they could be seen.
“Oyibo, Fifth Green, Seventh Red and Evgeny, Fifth Green, Eighth Gold and Twelfth Orange, along with confederates to be named hereafter.” Khadi paused to cover the rest of the Greens in a single, sweeping gaze, making it clear who she meant.
“As citizens of a member state of the Frontier States Alliance, you are bound to submit yourself to the authority of the Colonial Militia of Hunahpu to answer for judgment to the charges of Sabotage of Frontier States Common Equipment and Conspiracy to Willful Damage To An Emergent Ecosystem and any crimes uncovered in the course of the inquiry.”
Morgan looked from Khadi to the Greens to see their reaction. They were all staring at him. He remembered suddenly that he was one of 'them'. That, in fact, he was supposed to be the spokesman for 'them'.
“Listen, I...”
“Morgan?” Khadi took a look at him with his green-painted face and raised both eyebrows. “What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on...”
She shook her head.
“No. You know what? Never mind. I don't want to know. Just stay out of this, you've done your part, now let me do mine.”
She stepped past him to face the Greens. The Militia started to spread out, lasers drawn and at the ready. A roar went up from Vasca's people.
“You have no right!” Oyibo stood in front of her people. “We are of the Green Circle of the Jaguar Sun. We do not answer to the law of Hunahpu.”
“Yes, you do. As Planetary of Hunahpu, I have the permission from your own Ambassador, the voice of Xbalanque on Hunahpu to proceed. Your own government calls you to stand down.”
Oyibo opened her mouth to make an answer but the flat, projecting voice of Eber echoed across the shuttle bay, cutting her off.
“I am Eber, who stands in the Third Ring of Red, who speaks for Red, who speaks for the Jaguar Sun. And this is what is spoken by the Jaguar Sun. That the Jaguar Sun is a Frontier system and we abide by the laws of the Frontier. And you will submit before its agents. Thus, it is Spoken!”
His voice started as a low drone and rose to a peal of thunder that filled the whole of the shuttle bay. Oyibo and Evgeny stood fast but some of the other Greens started to step forward out of line.
Morgan put out an arm to block them.
“Nah, you guys stay where you are. We got something to iron out, me and Eber here. Because he speaks for Red and I speak for Green and some of you are Red but all of you are Green. And we ain't figured who you're supposed to be listening to.”
Khadi placed a hand against his collarbone and leaned down to hiss in his ear.
“Morgan! What are you doing? What's your connection to all of this?”
“I speak for Green.” He shrugged. Morgan stepped past her towards Eber.
“I do not speak only for Red. I speak for the Jaguar Sun and all its Circles. If you are of your Circle, then you must heed the voice of all Circles!”
Eber responded to him by matching his step forward to glare down at Morgan.
“Yeah, this is a Circles thing, alright, which makes it, ah....” He looked back to The Captain, trying to remember exactly the way she'd put it. It had made so much sense when she said.
“I am She Who Speaks For He Who Speaks For Green.” The Captain stepped past her Green escorts and up to just behind his right shoulder.
“And what the Speaker here meant to say is that this is a purely internal matter between Circles, and thus, your position as Ambassador? Not really relevant here. Now, as it's been explained to me, and somebody correct me if I'm wrong here, but while you stand in the Third Ring, while he stands in the Fourth Ring, this is only really relevant to your own Circle. So for all intents and purposes as the heads of your own Circles you are, in this situation, effectively equals. Am I wrong?”
Eber raised his eyes to fix the Captain in his unblinking glare.
“Yeah, I didn't think I was.”
“What she says goes for me.” Morgan jerked a thumb at the Captain. “And anybody tries to nab these boys before we get this straight get's the back of my hand. You reading me?”
“Sure that isn't a bit too far, shortpants?”
Morgan could only shrug at the Captain for a response.
“You will submit or you will be made to submit.” Eber gestured and his Red followers hefted their weapons and started picking targets among the Greens.
“You and what army, big red?” He crossed his arms and glared up at Eber.
Khadi inserted an arm between the two of them.
“This army.” Khadi nodded back at the Militia troopers moving around to set up clear lines of fire at him and the Greens. She looked down at Morgan and sighed.
“Damn it, Morgan, will you, for once, just this once, back down on this?”
“Ah, Planetary,” there was a chuckle in the Captain's voice. “You know Morgan better than that, don't you? And when does Morgan Gannis back down from a fight?”
“It is said!” Oyibo came up to stand next to him, weapon in hand.
“It is done.” Evgeny came up to stand on his other side.
“I will not allow this! Seize them!” Eber shouted and pointed a long, bony finger at them and a pair of Reds approached Oyibo and Evgeny.
There was a sharp click from her implement and Oyibo lowered her weapon at the approaching Red.
“Do what the man says, Gannis. Don't make me make you. Neither of us would enjoy it.” Khadi had her own pulse laser out and her people had theirs up and aimed.
“They're not guilty, Khadi, you've got to listen...”
“No, I don't. If they're not guilty, it'll come out in the inquiry. But right now? Right now they've got to stand down, one way or another. I give you my promise, they'll get a fair trial.”
Morgan stared at her, confused.
“'Fair trial'? What's that even mean? Nicked is nicked. Nuh-uh. Only justice in this universe of ours is what you can hold in your hands.” He curled his own hands up into fists.
“Not to tell you what to do here, shortpants, but as your Captain, might I suggest cranking it down a notch? We don't want to get too far in...”
“You never do, do you?” He could feel his jaw start to clench and the blood roared in his ears. Everybody was telling him to walk away and pack it in and stay out of it. It might not have been his world, his fight, his cause, maybe he didn't even know what was at stake here, but he was tired of the feeling of quitting, of leaving jobs undone. 'You don't chose your work' his father had once told him, 'but you can chose how you do it, that's what being a man is, boy'.
And the Reds continued to advance.
A hiss broke the silence and ceramic tiles cracked on the deck in front of the Reds. The Red skidded to a stop and raised his own weapon to take a shot. Morgan didn't remember launching himself off the deck, only slamming shoulder first into the midsection of the Red, driving him to the ground.
“Morgan, no!” He could hear the Captain cry.
As he rose to his feet, everything seemed to be happening at once. Khadi barked orders, air weapons hissed, plasma pulses crackled, boots rang dull off the ceramic deck, and there was the grunt of somebody hitting the floor.
28: The Chains of Necessity“Stop This!” The classically trained voice of the Adjudicator filled the shuttle bay, even to its most distant corners, and they did stop. All eyes went to him. Caught in tableau, Morgan could see Eber pointing, Oyibo crouching in firing position, Evgeny with his implement raised to strike a Militia officer, one of the Reds was gripping her shoulder, blood seeping through between clenched fingers and a Green lay twitching on the floor from a Militia stun.
“This brawl is no road to the peace we seek. This disorder will not bring justice. Planetary, it is our judgment that you pull back your people. You who apparently Speak For Green, will you do the same?”
Morgan hesitated. Seemed the time for talk had just passed. There had been talking enough and where had it gotten them? Nowhere. Fast.
Khadi's eyes flickered towards the the Adjudicator, then to the Greens, then back to the Adjudicator. Her mouth turned down into a scowl but she lowered her weapon none the less.
“Stand down troopers.”
The Militia lowered their weapons at her command.
A chorus of growls emitted from the miners, who had rushed forward towards the fray. Low voices muttered dark phrases in Thorean pidgin. Only Vasca, at their head, was silent, glaring from under lowered brows.
“I am She Who Speaks For He Who Speaks For Green, and I assure you he does agree.”
“Is this truly Spoken for Green?” Oyibo was still crouched to aim, her weapon balanced on her arm. Her tone made it clear what she thought the right answer was.
Morgan opened his mouth to agree when the Captain put a restraining hand on his shoulder and bent down so that only he could hear.
“Whoa there, Earth. Break your orbit around this. Eye on the prize, right? Remember, the game is still getting clear of this gravity well. And stirring up the natives isn't helping that. You hearing me?”
He hated to back down. It tasted like failure on his tongue. It might not be his fight but he was in it now. He could almost hear his father's voice telling him that while a Gannis didn't always start a fight, they always finished it.
But as the Captain talked he started to see the sense of it. His head won out over his gut for once. He nodded in slow agreement.
“Yeah, you're right, Suze.” He turned around and nodded to Oyibo.
“Alright guys, you heard the Captain, step back, huh?”
The Greens put up their weapons, faces unreadable. As ever.
“There you go. This is no time to be getting your Irish on.” Her eyes wandered to the air guns of the Xbalanque farmers and the police lasers of the Militia.
“Come, we must discuss this,” the Adjudicator continued. “If we are to reach a fitting compromise to...”
“Compromise? Ha!” Carlo Vasca emerged from the background to face the Adjudicator backed by a solid wall of gray and muscle.
“There is right here and there is wrong here. Any 'compromise' is being nothing less than a betrayal of that justice you that you are so easy in the naming of.”
“This a volatile situation, citizen. Compromise is a necessary component of any reconciliation.”
Shouts and growls came up from the miners.
“This is not a matter of peace but of justice! They have done theft! They have done sabotage! And now they have resisted the lawful arrest. They should be taken by force!”
His voice rose to a crescendo, where it was joined by the miners, shouting their support and striking the air with their fists.
“You tell them, Syndic!”
“Vive Thor!”
“If you don't, we will!”
“You forget yourself, citizen Vasca! You are here as a courtesy. You have no official position here.”
“I have the only position that matters!” Vasca's shout was a roar now. “I represent the Innes Conglomerate, the workers, the true people of Hunahpu! We reside here and will not be constantly threatened by this... this... alien menace!”
“Alien?” It was the Captain who was first to protest. “Pretty strong language to use for the original settlers of this system. Especially coming from the Conglomerate. It's the terraforming operations that have been sabotaged. Your mining has been untouched.”
“What effects Hunahpu effects all of us who live here. And I am surprised to hear you defending them, Captain Ngn. This is not your world, nor your system, nor your problem. Especially since it is the Conglomerate who has given you a cargo. A cargo that is already loaded. All you need do is claim it. Go now and we part as friends. Is this not so, Planetary?”
Khadi, who was watching Vasca closely, just shrugged.
“They're not under arrest.” She turned to look directly at Morgan. “You're free to come and go as you like.”
The Captain considered Vasca for a moment, then gestured to Hector and Morgan.
“Well, if that's the case. Never let it be said that I stood in the way of justice being done.”
Hector rushed up to join her.
“Suze! We can't just...” Morgan swung an arm in the general direction of the whole situation.
“Can and should. Come on. We done enough damage here.”
“But these people...”
“Can solve their own problems. Not asking now. I'm still your Captain.” She nodded towards the nearest Green, which was Oyibo. “Sorry, sister, but He Who Speaks is going to go. You'll have to Speak for yourselves after this.”
“They have resisted the law! They must be taken! Is this not the law?” Vasca was at the top of his game and his volume now.
The Adjudicator looked remorseful but he nodded his head with quiet dignity.
“Planetary. Do your duty.”
Khadi took one step forward before Oyibo, moving with blinding speed, leaped forward, threw a wiry arm around the Captain's neck and put her weapon to the Captain's temple.
“We pass freely or the outlander suffers!”
“Captain!” Hector skittered backwards, eyes swiveling back and forth as if trying to watch every weapon in the room at once.
“End this nonsense, now!” Eber thundered and began striding forward, his Reds behind him. “As you are Red, you will obey!”
The Reds had their weapons up. Evgeny and the other Greens had theirs up as well. Without Morgan's command, some of the Greens who also wore the Red circles on their faces had turned and were pointing their weapons at Oyibo. And the Captain.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa! Alright, back up off them, alright?”
“Do you still Speak For Green? Do you take responsibility for this?” Eber was still advancing in long, dignified steps.
“Yeah. I guess I do.” He stepped in Eber's path and crossed his arms. He spun around and barked back in Oyibo's direction.
“You're Green and Red, right? Well as you're Red Eber told you to let her go and now as you're Green, I'm telling you. Unless your planning on leaving the Circles when you leave this skyhook.”
Oyibo let go of the Captain. But none of the weapons lowered.
“Now we must act! They are a disruption! The presence of these outsiders, these anachronisms, endangers the rule of law. The Xbalanque must be seized! Hunahpu demands it!”
A roar of cheers rose up from his miners and they started surging forward. Corporate security had moved to the front of the crowd and Morgan was sure he wasn't the only one who noticed how many pulse lasers there were among them.
Suddenly, everybody was making noise. Eber was roaring commands, as was Oyibo, the Adjudicator was bellowing something, but Morgan couldn't quite make it out. Morgan opened his mouth to try to add his voice, but whatever he was going to say was lost in the din.
The Xbalanque, Red and Green, had formed up into a defensive ring and the Conglomerate security were drawing their lasers from their belts.
A burst of light exploded in the air above them, blinding everyone. Then, as their visions began to clear, another exploded. When the lights faded this time, Khadi was standing between the two groups, the center of a single-file line of Militia troopers, weapons out, pointed in both directions.
“Alright! This is done! Next person, no matter what planet they're from, so much as sneezes funny, they're sleeping the rest of his off in stun. Do we understand each other!”
Khadi glared around the room, apparently taking the silence that answered as a 'yes'.
The Adjudicator took Vasca aside and they started talking in low tones, hands moving fiercely in the air between them.
Khadi, weapon still out, marched over to Eber and Morgan, and gave them both stern looks. Oyibo and the Captain joined them.
“Alright you two, I am done playing. Ambassador, while I apologize for...”
“It is meaningless.” Eber shook his head. “The great circle that is all Circles has been threatened. I cannot be what I am and not act against it. This is no longer just a matter for Green. Green will be dealt with within the Circles of the Jaguar Sun. It cannot be otherwise.”
Khadi closed her eyes, pursed her lips and shook her head.
“Damn it all, Eber. Your people have been messing with the terraforming...”
“No they ain't!” Morgan spoke up. “They're guilty of some theft, sure, but they're not the saboteurs.”
“Even if that is so, I've still got to take them in. Nothing for it. Irkalla will blow if I don't. You see how Vasca's got them whipped up. I've got to keep the peace here, understand?”
“This is not possible.” Eber shook his head. “If I give up our people under such threat, I will not be acting as an Ambassador for Xbalanque and thus, will cease to be that Ambassador.”
Khadi sighed and opened her eyes. She glanced sideways over to Oyibo and Evgeny.
“And if your people give themselves up?”
“I would still be acting as Ambassador.”
“Never! We stood for the good of our people. Our Circle will be absolved in the Gathering of the Nine. Red will fall and Green rise for this!” Oyibo's voice was quiet but intense.
“So, that does not sound like a 'yes' on that, Planetary.” The Captain was edging in the direction of the shuttles.
“Do you really need us here, or do you think we can take off now?”
“Nobody goes anywhere until this is settled, spacer. First one of you who tries gets the stun.”
The Captain opened her mouth, Khadi pointed her pulse laser, she closed it.
While they talked, everything they said bounced around in Morgan's head. The pieces slowly fell into place until they started to form a picture in his mind.
“Sure, I'll do it.”
“What?” He wasn't sure if it was Khadi or the Captain who said that. Maybe both.
“Take me in, Khadi, I'm giving myself up.”
“Morgan! Have you lost your void-sucking mind?” The Captain's hands were both on his shoulders and squeezing hard.
“I hate to agree with your spacer friend here, but you're the one person who we're sure has nothing to do with all this.”
“It's the only way. You can't take the Xbalanque by force without starting a war. You can't not take them without starting a riot. And Eber can't give up any of his people. I Speak For Green, right? Means I'm responsible for what they did. Even if I didn't know it. So take me in. It'll calm Vasca's people some, and keep Xbalanque in the Frontier States.”
“Sucking Void! This is crazy, Earthside. As your Captain....” There was a choked edge to the Captain's voice. “I lost you to prison once and I'm not doing it again!”
“We ain't on the ship, Suze. And I've done time before. I'll be OK.” He sighed and stuck his hands in his pockets to keep everyone from seeing how they were trembling. He looked up into her uncomprehending eyes.
“Told you I wasn't going to leave this fight until it was done. One way or another.”
“I don't understand what you think you could...”
“And I can't explain, not really. We're just made from different stuff, I guess.” He shrugged and turned to Khadi, who still hadn't spoken.
“So, what about it, Khadi? I've giving myself up. Guess you got your wish. Looks like I'll be staying put for quite a while this time, huh?”
She closed her eyes and muttered what sounded like a prayer under her breath. When her eyes opened again, they belonged to the Khadi he had known, sad at the corners but gleaming with something like pride in the center.
“If it's acceptable to the Ambassador.”
“What is done freely cannot be constrained.” Ambassador Eber held out his hand. “Confirm.”
“Yeah, sure.” Morgan took a hand out of his pocket and was surprised to find that it wasn't trembling at all as he offered it to the Ambassador and even less as Khadi placed the restraints on him.
29: Devil in The Dark
That night, in his cell, Morgan dreamed of Apophis. The narrow tunnels that twisted endlessly through the black stone. The ever-present din of men crying out and machines grinding that echoed down those tunnels, coming from everywhere and nowhere all at once. The gravity that pushed down and fought one for every step. But most of all, the heat. The oppressive, baking heat, even in the so-called 'cool' zones, the habitable regions between the magma flows below and the sun-seared surface above, drying out, burning up, flaying the moisture from the body.
Moisture, he woke up covered in it, a cold sweat that set him to shivering. In the moment of his awakening, he was nowhere, afloat in the cool, the darkness and the silence. He didn't know where he was and panicked, flailing blindly until his arms got caught in the sheets he had forgotten were there. And then he remembered, he was on Hunahpu, where the air was cool and the gravity was low. Apophis had been nearly seven years ago subjective, maybe fifteen objective? Hard to say.
He still couldn't see any light. Something here was wrong. He could feel it. But he didn't see anything, couldn't hear anything, he couldn't even smell anything. And that's when it occurred to him that was what was wrong. There was no familiar blue glow from the plasma field generated from the bars, no low hum, no faint smell of ozone.
“There you are. Awake now, mate? Good. We've had our differences, but you seem a right human. And a human deserves the chance to stand on his two feet when he looks death in the eye. So up you come, old son!”
A strong hand grabbed him by the collar and pulled him out of his bunk. Eyes glowed yellow with night vision lenses. In their soft yellow glow he saw the glint of a laser's lens. He could smell spoilt milk.
Morgan's forearm lashed out and struck the laser just as it fired. A thin line of light flickered past him and burned itself into his retina.
“Hold still and take it right.” A hand grabbed his collar and slammed the back of his head against the frame of the bunk bed. The darkness in his eyes filled with dancing lights.
A forearm pinned him against the bed frame and he heard the whine of the laser charging.
He lashed out blindly with a leg and struck something. There was a grunt as the arm fell away.
He lunged forward into a solid wall of Tritonian. Unseen hands grabbed him and turned his lunge into a fall. His own momentum drove him into the floor. The lights exploded anew in his eyes.
A blow struck him in middle of the back, knocking the air from him. Followed by another too fast for him to react. Then another. Each blow sent a shock wave of pain through bruised muscles and ribs.
He grunted and the lights in his vision turned red as he flipped himself over and the next boot hit nothing but tile floor.
He reached up and grabbed the boot the next time it came down to find him. He strained and pushed it off him. He could hear the Trito swear and stumble.
He clambered to his feet and threw himself in the direction of the sound, fists clenched.
His charge hit another fist coming from the other direction and it was his turn to stumble backwards. Before he could collect his thoughts, a boot hit his chest and he dropped to the ground.
A knee pressed into his back, and he whimpered with pain as his vision went red. The Tritonian grabbed his hair and pulled his head up to meet a cold metal object he assumed was the pulse laser.
“This is the end of it, lad. Any last words?”
His head stopped swimming just long enough for him to realize that this was where he died.
“Hey! What's going on down here? Why are these cells depowered?”
A new voice spoke from the darkness.
“Damn me!” The Tritonian swore and there was a quick staccato strobe flash in the dark that showed just enough to illuminate the Militia officer's shocked face as the Trito shot him dead.
The weapon was away from Morgan's head for a moment and he elbowed back and struck something. The distracted Tritonian cried out, surprised. He felt the pressure from the knee let up long enough to tear himself out from under it.
He crawled forward and scrabbled to his feet.
He didn't even give himself a chance to think about it. He swung open the cell door and ran for it. Every breath was a red hot knife into his chest, but he couldn't stop running. Another set of laser pulses crackled behind him and scored the wall next to him.
Morgan Gannis didn't run from fights.
But Morgan Gannis also didn't want to die.
The hallway was as dark as the cell. He slammed into a wall at the t-intersection at the end of the hall, bounced off and kept running in a direction, any direction, really, just as long as it was 'away'.
Behind him was the low, electronic buzz of the laser firing and the pop of the miniature thunderclap that followed.
His ribs throbbed in time with his running and every breath was a torment. He kept running.
But he had taken too much damage, pushed himself too hard the last few days. He knew he couldn't keep it up. He could feel his legs ache and buckle as he pounded them mercilessly against the floor.
He grunted as his thighs drove into something hard with sharp corners.
A desk? Felt like it. An office? Maybe. There was still no light to see. He didn't know and didn't have time to find out. Heavy boots were echoing closer.
He scooted around the other side of the object, pressing himself along the edges, and forced himself into the space beneath, of which there was precious little.
“Oh, you are a rare beast, laddie. And a rare hunt. But I'm a rarer hunter yet. And I've got the scent of you now. I heard you stumble, boy. I can almost feel the heat and fear off of you. Trapped you are. Almost. But not quite. You've one choice left. Hide away and you die slow. Come out and it's quick, clean and honest.”
Morgan held himself very still. He'd beaten this man before, but under different circumstances. He wasn't so sure this time.
Boots struck the floor slowly, lingering long enough to echo. He was toying with him. So far that's what had saved him. But the time was running out for that. And for him.
The stuttering hum of the laser as it pulsed. And the smell of ozone and burning upholstery.
“Fine by me, meat. I got nothing but time and power for the old burner, I do.”
He was getting closer.
Morgan reached out with glacial slowness for the desk chair that must be there and when he reached it, gripped and froze in place, holding his breath.
“Is that a squeak, my little mouse?” A nasty little chuckle brought him around to Morgan's side of the desk.
“That's the last mistake you get to... gah!”
Morgan suddenly swung the chair around into where he thought the Tritonian's knees should be. There was an angry bark and the clatter of something dropping to the ground.
Homing in on the sound, Morgan pounced, like an animal, seizing the pulse laser in both hands. He rolled over onto his back, still gripping the pulse laser, pointing it up at the gleaming golden cat's eyes of the Tritonian's night vision lenses.
“Yeah, but it's the last mistake I need to make. I got the laser now and you're d...”
He curled his finger around the trigger, but something swept the weapon from his hands and the pulse went wild, disappearing into the darkness. The lights that were the Triton's eyes were there and suddenly they weren't. Morgan tried to scramble to his feet, but a knee slammed down into his chest and there was a thin line of cool steel along his neck.
The dim yellow suns returned, close to his face. Too close, just shy of the blade at his throat. They gave off a pale illumination that revealed the wide, predatory grin of the Trito in shades of gold and white.
“You done your kind proud, boy. You've put up a fight. Any normal man would be felled. But unfortunate for you, I'm no normal man. I'm Elite, me. You've just an Earthman's own luck, lad.”
Morgan tensed himself to move but the knee pressed him to the ground, pinning him down.
“Don't you know it? You're already dead, son.”
The blade started to slide, slowly, across his throat, cutting a warm line into his skin.
And then there was light.
An explosion like the beginning of the universe blinded Morgan. He heard the distinctive crackle of plasma bursts and the high pitched scream of the Tritonian as he spasmed and fell off Morgan.
“An 'Earthman's own luck', huh? Maybe so, but he's got awful good taste in friends.”
Morgan's vision cleared to see the Captain. A lightstick in her right hand, a laser in her left and a smile on her face.
“Hey there, shortpants, what are you doing down there?” Captain Susan Ngn stuck the lighttube in her belt and reached her hand down towards him.
“Could ask you the same, highpockets. What are you doing here?” He took her hand and let her help him to his feet.
“You know, that's what I was asking.” Hector had appeared behind the Captain. He was also holding a pulse laser, although there was no evidence that his had been fired.
The Captain's head snapped around and her mouth opened to tell Hector to 'seal it'.
“What? He asked it first!” He pointed to Morgan.
The Captain shut her mouth into a scowl.
“Question still stands. Not that I ain't grateful and all, but what are you guys even doing here?”
The Captain's grin reappeared and she gave the unconscious form of the Tritonian, still twitching on the floor, a kick.
“Thought that would have been obvious. We're here to rescue you.”
“I... guess. But how'd you know that I was in trouble? Didn't know it myself until...” He collapsed into the desk chair with a grunt of pain.
“Wait. Hold up. Don't tell me. You didn't know a damn thing about the Tritonian. You two came to brake me out. That's it, ain't it?”
“It was her idea.” Hector jerked his thumb at the Captain.
The Captain just shrugged.
“'Course it was.” He glared up at the Captain. She avoided his gaze. “Damn it all, Suze! I told you I was doing this of my own free will!”
“Your will to get arrested? On purpose?” She snorted out a laugh. “I get that you did what you thought you had to, but seriously? No way you'd have agreed to it if you didn't think you'd get sprung. You had to know we'd be coming for you.”
She looked down into his eyes.
“Didn't you?”
He took a moment and let his eyes run over Susan's face. Her eyes were open and begging, like a child's. Maybe it was just the fatigue and aches he was feeling, but he felt old looking at it. And maybe he was, compared to her. All that time he'd spent on Astarte and Oclla and Apophis and the other worlds he'd lived and worked on, she had been in space, in the dreamless sleep between the stars.
When they were growing up together, in Earth orbit, she had always been the leader, the older local kid taking the newcomer under her wing. Realizing that he was the older one now, it was like the end of childhood.
“I should have. Looking back I really should have.” He laughed once, tiredly, the weight of his extra years weighing down the buoyancy he usually felt in low gravity.
“No reason you wouldn't have come, is there?”
“You're crew.” Susan crossed her arms and made it final.
Morgan wanted to argue, but he could see from the look on her face, even in the dim glow of her lighttube, that there was nothing he could say that she would hear.
“So, Gannis, who is this guy?” Hector nudged the Tritonian's body with his toe. The body stirred and gurgled. “You ain't even been boxed up that long. How you manage to make friends so quick, huh?”
“He wasn't in the box with me. Last time I saw him, we were beating the snot out of each other.”
“So, points for consistency, then. He was looking for payback, then?”
“Couldn't tell you on a bet. What I woke up, the lights were off, the cells were powered down and sleeping beauty here was trying to put me to bed. Permanently.”
He looked back up at the Captain.
“Hey, did you guys see anything on your way in to tell you how come the Militia station is all empty and powered down?”
Hector and the Captain both cleared their throats and looked to each other.
“It was you.”
“It was Vasca, actually.”
“But it was for you.”
“It was part of the plan.”
“The plan.”
“My plan.”
“Of course it was.”
“To rescue you. Asked for a way in, and Vasca helped us by killing the power.”
“To rescue me.” He put his head in his hands and made an inarticulate noise in his nasal passages. “When I didn't want rescuing, damn it! You could have undone everything I was trying to...”
“Hey! That's some gratitude. Hey you would have been in a pretty mess if we hadn't already been on our way! Our plan just saved your stumpy butt!”
“Oh, yeah! From a mad bull Trito who wouldn't have gotten in the first place if you hadn't cut the damn power!”
He was up out of his seat now, his shout echoed.
“Whoa, whoa, hey, guys...” Hector was hissing loudly.
“We came here to save you!” Susan's volume ramped up to match his.
“Listen, as much fun as it is...”
“I gave myself up! What do you think you're saving me from?”
“...having front row seats to this...”
“Yourself! What else!”
“We don't actually know when the Militia...”
“And who asked you?”
“...will be getting back...”
“Shouldn't need to ask, I'm still your Captain, spacer!”
“...from the little party Vasca's throwing them upstairs?”
“Damn it, I'm not a kid anymore, Suze!”
“So maybe we should hold this down or...”
“Then act like it! You're actions effect more than just you, you...”
“..take this show on the road...”
“You think I don't know that! That's why I had to do it. I don't just have an obligation to the damn ship!”
“...don't you think?”
“I won't lose you to this again!”
There was silence in the room. Both Morgan and Susan averted their eyes in an unspoken 'time out'. Morgan looked out and to the left and Susan looked down towards her feet.
“So? We going or not? Clock's counting here.” Hector was jumping from one foot to another, eyes darting everywhere but the two of them.
“He's right. You two should go. You don't want to get caught here.”
“I don't leave crew behind.”
“What about that Vik guy?”
“You weren't here. He left us.”
“And so am I.” He reached up, put his hands on Susan's shoulders and looked straight into her eyes. “Listen, Captain. Susan. It there's one thing I learned doing time is that it ends. Way you guys travel, I'll be out before you know it.”
“Not the point.” It was a small voice that had always sounded strange to him coming out of such a tall woman.
Her eyes dropped to the ground, looking at her feet.
Morgan turned away and started walking before she could change his mind.
“C'mon, Captain, we've got to jet. What's keeping you?” Hector's voice had a bit of a whine to it.
As he walked away, the light from Susan started to fade and the world around Morgan got a little darker.
“Hold on, Rukh, this guy's lenses are still on.”
“That's great, really, I'm quivering with excitement, can we just go?”
“Just a second, spacer. I want to take a look at this...”
Morgan choked back a sniff and turned to it to a wry smile. That was his Susan, alright, still trying. Maybe that was why it was so hard to make her care, because once she did, she could never give it up.
“Hey, Morgan!”
He didn't turn around. He didn't dare.
“Do the words 'Mount Safa' mean anything to you?”
He turned around.
“What?”
Susan's eyes shone in pale gold from the Tritonian's night vision lenses.
“This guy's lenses are still on and he just received a message. The sender is encrypted but the message isn't. 'When you are being finished taking care of our friend in the jail, be proceeding to the platforms to assist in operation on Mount Safa'.”
Susan leveled her lit gaze at him.
“Any of this mean something to you?”
“The Safa? Sure.” Morgan was a little taken aback. It hadn't occurred to him that she wouldn't already know this, although there was no good reason why she should.
“That's Khadi's old platform. She was the first one sabotaged. Kind of the flagship of the terraforming platforms. A lot of the other skippers and work bosses came up on her crew. It's still the one a lot of them would consider their home.”
As he spoke, the things she was telling him started to fall together, filling the empty parts of the situation in his head. If the Mount Safa was damaged again, the backlash might be beyond even Khadi's ability to control, and everything he had done, the peace he was trying to preserve for her, would be for nothing.
He must have said some of that out loud, or Susan had guessed it, because Susan was nodding her head in slow agreement, the glowing spots of her eyes bobbing up and down.
“Afraid so. It was a good try, Morgan, but you can't win every spin. Not much point in you being here now, is there? You know there's only one thing left to do now.”
He was only half listening to her. His mind was racing, digesting everything.
“You're right, Suze! There is! You just got this message, right? So this is happening now! Come on, if we act now we can catch the real saboteurs in the act and end this now!”
He gripped her arm, let go, grabbed the Tritonian's pulse laser off of the floor and looked up expectantly.
Susan blinked and the lights in her eyes flickered.
“Come on! We've got to hurry!” He spun around and started out into the darkness towards the exit, or where he thought it should be.
“Not our fight, shortpants.” She stopped him with a touch of her hand on his shoulder.
“Not ours, maybe. But it is mine.” He shrugged and her hand fell away.
“Ah, what the Void, why not?” Hector broke the silence and came up to stand next to Morgan.
“Really? You?”
“Sure, why not me? You're going to go anyway, aren't you? Well, you could use the help. And me?”
His grin was a crescent moon reflecting Susan's light.
“I could use the action.”
Morgan laughed and looked back up at Susan.
“Crew's voted, Captain. You coming?”
“No. I'm against it, spacer. So I'm not making it that easy for you. You two do this, you do it without me and over my protest.”
The second of silence between them seemed awfully long.
“Come on, Rukh, let's get going. Like you said, clock's counting on this.”
Morgan was the first to turn away and sprinted out into the darkness.
And immediately barked his thigh against a desk he did not see.
“Hey, Earth!”
He turned his head back to Susan. She took the lenses from her eyes and tossed them towards him. They fell slowly in Hunahpu's light gravity and he easily snatched them out of the air.
“Don't forget your lenses. Again.”
The room went from dark to light as he put them in. And he saw Susan's sad half-smile before he turned away.
The room was immediately outlined in golden monochrome, all shades of yellow, from as pale as to be nearly white to as dark as to be almost black. The only real relief from the unremitting yellow was a a line of glowing, unnatural red that appeared in his vision, marking out the path to the platform garage, shifting to accommodate him as his moved. A guide attachment, whoever had sent the message apparently didn't trust the Tritonian to find his own way to the garage.
To Morgan, it looked like a streak of blood in urine.
He sprinted on ahead, following the virtual thread around the desks and out into the hall. Hector loped beside him with a long, distance-eating stride. In the hallway's light, the night vision went dormant and the warm, sickly yellow faded to the cool, muted shades of reality, mostly the flat gray of the metal in the hallway. Whoever sent the guide attachment knew Irkalla and it wasn't many corridors until they emerged into the wide open of the garage where the terraforming platforms were lined up, side by side, like a block of unfinished buildings, all naked girders and open latticework.
It was the day shift and the big chamber was empty except for the two of them. The mad drumming of the sheetstorms beat furious on the metal doors, and a low thrumming noise could be felt through the soles of their feet.
He looked down the line and saw one of the massive platforms was shuddering with the force of the powerful engines that drove it. To anyone unfamiliar with it, it looked, barring the placement of a few struts, the arrangement of smokestacks, like the rest of its neighbors. But Morgan, like anybody who'd lived aboard it for three years of his life, there was mistaking it for anything but the Mount Safa.
A dark figure appeared at the edge of the platform, a tiny spot against the Safa's enormity. It disappeared back into the Safa before Morgan could recalibrate the magnification on his new lenses to get a better look.
The red guide application disappeared suddenly from his vision and the Mount Safa started to rumbled audibly over the rattling echo of the rains.
“Shit! They just made us. C'mon, we gotta hurry!” Morgan bet his legs and launched himself into a series of bounding leaps, setting Earth-born muscles against Hunahpu's lesser gravity. He passed the space of the garage in a few jumps, a few more to propel himself up the boarding ramp.
The Safa had broken with the ramp and had started to pull away. Beyond, the garage door was starting to rise with a slow, grinding noise.
“Ah, we, huh, we missed it. Void!” Hector came panting up behind Morgan, pushing out words between labored breaths. He was out of breath from trying to keep with Morgan.
Morgan eyed the growing gap, calculating force and distance.
“Stay here!” He crouched low and launched himself backwards. Everything hurt at once as he landed, but the adrenaline was thundering in his ears and even the pain seemed distance and unimportant. He charged back up the ramp in vaulting steps, building up momentum.
Hector's spindly form was growing larger n his vision.
“Take my hand!”
“What?”
“Do it! Now!”
He took a final leap and all his momentum took him off the ramp and out of the grasp of Hunahpu's gravity.
Hector thrust a long-fingered hand up into the air just as Morgan glided over his head. He gripped the hand and pulled Hector along with him.
They hung in midair, seemingly motionless while the universe moved past them. Then they crashed to a landing on the edge of the platform.
Hector stumbled as they landed and almost slipped off. Morgan reached back, grabbed his shirt and drew him back from the brink.
“Hey, I told you to watch the shirt, man.”
“Some gratitude. It's an ugly shirt, anyway.” Morgan snorted. “C'mon, we should find some shelter. It's about to get seriously nasty out here.”
He nodded forward, to the wall of water that the platform was accelerating towards, beyond the open garage door.
He scanned the narrow ledge, spotted a service hatch (usually used for cleaning, they called it the 'bowel door' or 'back passage' back on Oclla), and dragged Hector over to it.
The door was heavy, but the hinges swung easy. The Safa had been cleaned recently, refit and ready for duty.
Inside, they were cloaked in the soft bio-luminescence from the glowtubes installed in the ceiling. The might drives of the platform vibrated the deck below their feet and the platform shook as its leading edge hit the sheetstorm outside.
“...the Void is that?” Hector shouted over the growing percussion of the rains.
“Sheetstorm! It'll tear this old girl apart! We've got to move fast! Rukh, can you hack her controls from here?”
Hector's eyes flickered for a moment, then he shook his head.
“Earthman's luck! No offense, buddy.”
“None taken.” Morgan hadn't thought to be offended until Hector had mentioned it.
“Whoever took control of this thing knew what they were doing. They've shut down the platform's mesh, pretty much the whole thing, the wheels are moving, but there's no system to do the guiding.”
“Can you turn it back on?”
“Sure, I'd need admin access, but if the info security is on par with the rest of the moon, that shouldn't be too hard. But with the network down, I'd have to do it at the main server. Which is kind of a pain. Void, I don't even know where to begin looking for it in this old relic...”
“It'll be in the core, down two levels, end of the next passageway after that.” Morgan waved in the general direction of a hatch in the floor that covered the ladder down while he himself made for a door opposite the one they'd come in.
And where do you think you're headed to, huh?”
“Command bridge!” Morgan had to shout to be heard. “See if I can get my paws on the manual controls. This baby needs back in the barn or the storm will tear her apart.”
“A'ight! Sounds like a plan!” Hector called after him as Morgan left him behind.
Morgan was smiling a little as the hatch slammed shut behind him.
It did sound like a plan, didn't it? The thought put a bounce in his step as he sped down a corridor and up the ladder in an access shaft to the command bridge.
He felt at home. His feet were taking turns before he realized which way he was going. Directions long forgotten consciously but still in his muscle memory. Every step was deja vu.
As he climbed up to the bridge, he kept wanting to shout ahead, so Khadi would know he was coming, only to have to remind himself she wasn't there. He felt like he'd returned to an old home only to find everyone gone. And given the amount of time he'd lived here, that wasn't that far off.
Pulling himself up two rungs at a time, buoyant in Hunahpu's light embrace, he catapulted to the top of the access shaft and landed in front of the hatch to the command bridge.
The door opened as he reached for it. Without thinking he brought his laser up into the smiling face of Carlo Vasca.
32: The Storm BreaksA sound like thunder rolled from behind Carlo Vasca. The sheetstorms outside pounded hard on the observation dome, turning the command bridge into one big drum.
“Good day to you, Mister Gannis.” Vasca shouted over the din.
Morgan stood stock still. He couldn't think of what else to do except keep the pulse laser pointed at Vasca's face.
“I must be saying, I am being impressed with your persistence, Mister Gannis. I have been making it as easy as I might for you to be leaving.”
“You.”
“Yes, Mister Gannis?”
“You sent the Tritonian.”
“This, it is unfortunate to be admitting, is true.”
“You tried to have me killed.” He felt his finger tighten just slightly over the laser's activation trigger.
“This also is being true.”
“Why?”
“Because you got in the way. I am being fond of you, personally. We are much alike. We do not give up. A good thing. But this is not being personal. This is being business.”
“I could kill you now, you son of bitch.” He forced his hand to relax.
“You could try. It is only fair, I am thinking.” He shrugged his massive shoulders and kept grinning.
“Why? How'd I get in your way? Hell! We worked for you, damn it!”
“And most obliging you were being, yes.” Vasca nodded his head enthusiastically.
“Only reason I let myself get nicked was to stop...”
“A war. Yes. A war I have been working most hard to start. You were quite helpful in this until, most suddenly, you were not.”
“Wait! A...?”
“War. Yes. The test of men. The forge of civilization. I have seen this thing closely. You...”
Too fast to follow, Vasca swatted aside the hand that held the pulse laser and grabbed Morgan's throat, driving him easily to the floor.
“...have not, I am thinking.”
Morgan pulled the trigger, but too late and the laser pulse burned into the floor.
“I am being glad for the failure of the Tritonian. This is being better.”
Morgan opened his mouth but only a croak emerged. Vasca was straddling him, had both hands around his throat and was pressing down with all his considerable weight. The world was swimming red before Morgan's eyes.
“Yes, this is being better. To be having your body found aboard the wreckage of this beloved platform. There is being poetry to such an arrangement. Yes.”
Poetry, hell! Morgan kicked up and it hit something soft. Vasca grunted and his iron grip slacked just long enough for Morgan to slide out from under him. Vasca snarled and lunged down at him but Morgan brought up a hand and smashed the pulse laser into the side of Vasca's head. He tumbled to one side.
Morgan rolled the opposite direction and scrambled to his feet just as Vasca was doing the same. This time he didn't hesitate before pulling the trigger.
Nothing.
Sparks leaped out of the crack in the casing where it had been smashed against Vasca's head.
Vasca laughed and hurled himself at Morgan. Instinctively, he dropped to the floor. He cried out as Vasca's shins drove into him at full speed. Vasca's own momentum drove him face first to the floor.
Adrenaline thrummed in Morgan's veins and adrenaline got him to his feet, still holding the broken pulse laser.
“Why are we even doing this? Can you tell me that?” He was pointing the useless weapon like a totem.
“Because my Tritonian, he failed to be making you dead.” Vasca climbed slowly to his feet, wiping the blood from his nose.
“Right, 'cause you're trying to start a war. Got that. But what the hell for? I mean, you already run this place? Why queer a good deal?”
Vasca stopped and nodded upwards.
“Do you hear that? Do you hear the rains begin to break this machine? Listen to them. They will tell you.”
With each word Vasca took a step closer and Morgan stepped backwards, farther into the command bridge. The savage drumming of the rains beat louder with every step, forming a driving back beat to the strangely even, almost conversational tone Vasca took. Underneath it all was a wet hiss and the ominous ozone smell of rain, as the sealant that kept the poison air of Hunahpu out began to give way under the brutalizing sheetstorm.
“It is being so much like the ice storms back on Thor. Cut a man to pieces they would. But after the winters come the springs. After the rains comes the terraformers. They are the universe when it is being its most obvious. It sweeps away what stands still, what is old, what does not anticipate. This is being as it must be. They make the room that something new, something that can survive them might be erected. Without them, entropy is slow and we do not change, do not build.”
“Listen to yourself, Vasca. You're talking crazy talk. You're a miner, man. The miner.”
“Yes. I am. Before anything, before I am being an administrator, before even I am being a soldier, I am being a miner. And I do what a miner does. To be facing the universe, and to take from it what is being needed.”
“But Khadi said that a war would bust the Frontier States wide open. That wrong?”
“As always, the Planetary, she is having the correct answer, yes. It will. The States of the Frontier is a structure that is being unable to stand. It is being a dream, too many hands, too many voices. Thor is being one thing. It's people are being real. What is strong is being one voice. And what it builds will stand. But first the Frontier States Alliance, it must be dying. The war, it is being everywhere else in the universe. Why not here? And when it comes, Thor will be waiting. My people, we will be ready. If the colonies are to stand the storms which are coming, we must being standing as one, not many. Thor has been tested, Thor has been tried and Thor has proven that it, perhaps it alone, can be standing.”
He nodded his head without ever moving his eyes from Morgan.
“It is fitting you should be knowing this. You are being the first casualty of this war. All birth is being in blood, Mister Gannis.”
He took another step and Morgan backed into a control panel. He'd run out of room to retreat.
“There is being a sadness here. You have been a good soldier, but you made the first mistake of the soldier. You became more. A symbol. And to be killing the symbol, I must be killing the man. It is being time for you to stop.”
Morgan looked straight across into Vasca's eyes. He saw nothing there. He took a loose stance, shoulders squared, feet apart. He looked down at the malfunctioning pulse laser in his hand and threw it aside. It clattered along the metal of the deck.
Like that was a signal, Vasca roared and charged him. Morgan stepped aside and let Vasca crash into the instrument panel. He must have hit something, the massive structure rumbled and shook. A thin stream of foul-smelling water sprayed from where the clear dome met the metal walls of the command bridge.
Vasca spun around and Morgan delivered a quick blow to his throat. Vasca staggered backwards and Morgan threw another punch at him.
A punch Vasca caught easily in his powerful vice-like grip. Morgan's vision blurred with the pain as he squeezed.
“I have tried to be explaining this to you. Will you not being understanding this?”
Vasca started putting pressure on him, driving him down to his knees. He tried to lock his knees, stay standing, but he couldn't. Vasca was strong. Too strong. As strong as only a man who grew up as a manual laborer on a planet three times the mass of Earth could be strong. If he kept matching Vasca strength for strength he was going to lose.
“Nope.”
He went slack and fell backwards, letting the force Vasca was exerting push him down and back. He rolled with it and on to his back, using Vasca's own strength to carry him over into a throw that landed the big man on his back next to Morgan. A lifetime of getting into fights in nearly every port in human space had taught Morgan a little something about fighting guys stronger than him.
Morgan was the first one up and he used the high ground to his advantage, bringing his boot down in a classic curb stomp on Vasca's head. He cried out so Morgan stomped him again. This time he went silent.
Walking stiffly as the adrenaline started to drain from him and his various aches and pains returned, Morgan went over to the manual controls to turn the Mount Safa back around before it was too late. Rivulets of water were starting to run down the panel and there was an ominous cracking noise from the dome above him.
“Eh, no offense, but I think maybe you should stand back from those controls, don't you think, man?”
Morgan felt a sense of profound relief when he turned around and saw Hector standing in the doorway.
“Hey, you're a sight for sore eyes, buddy. You got that network back up and running?”
“Nope.”
“Well, you win some, you lose some. Get your ass over here and give me a hand, huh?”
“C'mon, Gannis, man was right. Time to go.”
It was only then that he realized Hector had his pulse laser drawn.
33: Worlds Collide“Well, you going to give me a hand with this or not?” There was another wet hiss and a fan of water fountained from a seam.
“C'mon! Clock is counting here, pal!”
“Ah, get off it, Earth. You got your guy, you can't do any more damage here. I found us a flier, we can...”
“Like Hell!” Morgan snarled and spun around to address himself to the controls. Rivulets of dirty water, clouded with silt, streamed down the panel, streaking the dials and displays.
“I didn't come all this way and take multiple beatings just to leave the Safa to die here! Not today!”
“Wasn't a question, man. We've got to go and we've got to do it now.” Over the increasing roar and hiss of the sheetstorm's assault on the observation dome, Morgan thought he heard something alien in Hector's voice, a note of what sounded like regret.
On an instinct he turned his head back over his shoulder to look at Hector.
Hector was still standing in the open doorway.
Hector was still holding his pulse laser.
It was pointed straight at Morgan.
“What the hell is this?”
“This? It's a pulse laser. What's it look like?” Hector's eyes and mouth tightened up. “Means we're going. Now.”
“Hector, this is me, buddy. You ain't going to shoot me.” He turned the rest of the way around to face Hector. “And you're going to have to, you want to stop me. I'm seeing this through.”
Hector's eyes went wide and a staccato buzz accompanied a bright line that flickered through the thick, increasingly humid atmosphere. Hector didn't move except for the almost imperceptible twitch of his trigger finger.
Without wanting to, Morgan traced the straight line of the laser bolts from the winking lens of Hector's weapon to the tight cluster of holes steaming in the control panel and realized how close they had come to him.
“You missed.” Morgan stuck his hands in his pockets to look casual and hide how they were trembling.
“Didn't have to.” Hector turned his laser just a little bit to the left. This time, Morgan calculated, if he fired, he wouldn't miss.
“Yeah, I, uh, see that.” He narrowed his eyes at Hector. “What's your hurry? And what's with the firepower?”
“Void! You really still don't get it, do you Earthside?” He laughed and put up his laser. “Listen, how about you just grab Mister Vasca there and I can explain the whole thing on the way to the flier, huh?”
Morgan felt something 'click' in his head.
“Get Vasca? You've been working with him this whole time. You've been working for him too, haven't you?”
“Well, sure. Vasca's big money, he's going places, how could I refuse?” Hector shrugged helplessly.
“He tried to have me killed!” There was a cracking noise from the dome as Morgan shouted. There was a dusty, stale smell growing and Morgan's head was starting to feel fuzzy.
“Hey. Hey! I didn't even know about that. Not until afterwords, anyway. And what's done was done, right? Come on, man, this place ain't going to be around much longer and I don't know if Vasca's flier will hold up all the way back to Irkalla. So, let's hustle, huh?” Hector was shifting his weight nervously from one foot to the other and eying the dome with growing concern.
“You take him.” Morgan turned his back on Hector. “Me? I'm taking Safa home.” He gripped the water-slicked handles. He could feel himself starting.
“Void take it! No! You're still not listening, Gannis! This rust bucket's got to go! That's part of the plan... I mean, Void! If you knew the money he was offering...”
“Don't matter.” He pulled at one of the directional controls, but it wouldn't give. Something was already jammed.
“What? What do you mean?”
“This isn't about the money.”
“What in the cold, sucking Void are you talkin' about? Of course it's about the money. What the Void else would it be about? Get real, Gannis...”
“Leave or help.” He grunted and used both hands on the recalcitrant lever. It ground and gave, if only a little.
“Got a third option, you know?” The laser hummed dangerously and a second grouping burning into the rain-slicked panel, sending up a thin whisper of steam.
“I'm in this, Hector, in it all the way. Now, if you ain't gonna help...” He caught his breath as a white needle of pain shot through his shoulder and a tiny hole appeared in the window opposite him, hissing and bleeding rain water. It was an exact mirror of the hole in his shoulder, which was beginning to bleed. The laser pulse bored through flesh too fast to cauterize, but more than enough to do tissue damage.
He gritted his teeth and gripped the handle with this one good hand.
“Swear on all the empty places, you really are too dumb to live! What are you thinking you dumb dirtwalker? You're going to make me do this, aren't you? You really are.”
“Nobody,” Morgan grunted through clenched teeth, head spinning with the shock and the declining air quality. The musty, acrid smell of Hunahpu's atmosphere filled his nostrils.
“Nobody is making you do nothing. You got a choice.”
He pulled back and felt it start to give, slowly at first, and heard the mechanisms creaking deep beneath as the battered machine began to turn. The platform shook again and Morgan had to grip harder to keep his balance.
“Who's got a choice? I'm too far into this now. You don't understand, do you?” Hector's voice was getting higher and he was pleading with Morgan now.
“Now you? You got a choice, man. Cut this shit out or I will... I will..you know...” There was a trembled in his pleading now. “I did it once, I will do it again.”
“Jesus, Rukh...” The room tilted, only he couldn't tell if it was the room or it was him. He let go of the lever and clutched his shoulder where it hurt, the sleeve was soaked, damp and warm with his spreading blood.
“Shit. You fucking lased me.”
“You made me! Why'd you do that? What is with you and this stupid rock? You see? This is why I didn't let you in on this scam from the beginning. 'Cause I knew you couldn't be trusted not to get all crazy about this kind of stuff.”
There was a strange echo in the room, making Hector's sound even higher than it was. The whole scene seemed distant and a bit unreal. A combination, he suspected with surprising calm, of blood loss and shock and the decreasing oxygen content in the room.
“From the beginning, huh? Khadi wasn't wrong, was she? You really did bring in those altered gas concentrates. You and Vasca were the saboteurs all along, huh?”
“I did? Nah. We did, man. You didn't know it but you helped. You're in this as much as me. Yeah, we brought in those tainted additives. Us. The whole ship. Yeah, this whole time, you've been as guilty as me. More so, probably because you figure there's something bad about all this, although I can't figure why.”
“Why?” He tore a strip of cloth off his sleeve to bind his wound, then forgot what it was for and stared at it for a long moment.
“Have you not been listening? The money! It was a condition of the contract that Vasca gave me. Had to smuggle in some altered chemical concentrates. It was no big thing, especially given the potential payout this ore trading gig could get us, and more than that, the important connections this gets us. We could finally start making some real money at the trading game. I had to it, you know?”
“So, for the ship, huh?” Morgan went into a choking fit on the dust and gases he took in with the deeper and deeper labored breaths he was having to take in. He struggled to tie the strip of cloth around his shoulder, but his fingers felt slow and clumsy. It was a messy binding and he knew it wouldn't last long.
“For me, man. I mean, this was my big break, I had to take the opportunity. I didn't have a choice. I mean, you got to do what's best for you, right?”
His eyes were stinging now. The atmosphere, or at least water in it, of Hunahpu, was slightly acidic. Hector, who had the laser, was still talking.
“What I don't get is you, man. Why can't you just give this shit up? Just give it up. I mean, sure, maybe I'm getting a bigger piece of the pie than you, but you've got to believe me, there's going to be plenty of trickle down in this thing for everyone, you and the Captain. Now, you keep getting in the way, the only things you're going to get is wet and shot. What do you think you gain from this crazy shit of yours?”
It wasn't just the growing effects of the shock that was making all of this alien to Morgan. It was Hector himself. On a ship, it was all too easy to identify with the people you lived and worked with shift-in and shift-out, to think they were just like you, and all too easy to forget they were all from different places, different worlds.
A terminal crack echoed like thunder from the dome above, followed by the soft but increasing tap-tap-tap of the relentless, invading rains.
It was like the striking of a clock, announcing that they were out of time. Whatever was going to happen needed to happen now.
“Nothing I could explain to you.”
Where he was from, on old Earth, the long history that Hector had teased him about drowning in had taught them that results were fleeting, it was the effort that mattered. 'A man is judged by the shadow he casts, not where it falls,' his father had told him shortly before he had died. His life, and his death, had been a testament to that.
He reached out and wrapped a determined hand around the other directional lever, the one that would, hopefully, complete the Mount Safa's turn back towards Irkalla. Covered in grime and water, it was both slimy and gritty to his touch.
“Don't you do it, Gannis!” Hector was screeching now. “You pull that lever, I'll pull this trigger! I swear I will!”
He would, too. Morgan knew that. Hector Rukh was from the Centauri Exchange the largest, most competitive marketplace in human space. They existed by and for the mechanisms of capitalism. In that cutthroat world, greed was a virtue and success was a moral duty. And in his own, strange, Centaurian, way, Hector Rukh was a man of principle.
Knowing what he knew, Morgan was certain of the consequences of not doing what Hector said. But being who he was, there was only one thing he could do.
He leaned back, putting all his weight into it, and pulled the lever.
34: Epilogue: East Into Nod
It was Khadija Safawa who first broke the silence.
“You blame me, don't you?”
Susan Ngn was a long time in responding. When she did it was almost too quiet to hear.
“Yes.” Her eyes never left Morgan's face.
“Thought you might.” Khadija paused and waited for an answer. When none came, she continued.
“You have to know it was all his choice to get involved in all this. I tried to turn him aside from it. But you knew Morgan, he never would be told, would he?”
“'Won't' be told. Will not. Present tense. He's not dead.” She reached out to lightly brush her fingers along the contours of the still mask of Morgan's face.
“No, I suppose not.” For the first time since she had entered the hospital ward Khadija let her eyes sink down to Morgan. He looked peaceful. But for the tubes in his nose and mouth, and the exaggerated, mechanical rhythm of his breathing, she would have thought him asleep.
“Perhaps it would be kinder if he was.”
“What? Say that again.” Susan's eyes snapped up to lock with Khadija's, red-rimmed but dry.
“No. If you're looking for a fight, keep looking. I won't fight you over this. Not here. Not now.” Khadija put up one hand, palm out. Susan rose up to her full height, no longer stooped over Morgan's bed, looking down at Khadija with eyes as black and empty as the space she would return to.
“So, its not enough for you, what you've already done. You want to finish it.” There was nothing of the question in her tone.
“I already told you...”
“I know. I heard you.” Her hand twitched down to the empty holster at her belt. Khadija tensed up, by instinct, although neither of them had brought weapons with them into the ward.
“But it was because of you, that he got involved in all this in the first place. He thought he had something to prove to you.”
“And you.”
Susan Ngn stiffened up, but was silent.
“You know, Morgan always defended you to me. He wanted me to get along with you, so I'm making the effort. For Morgan. To honor one of the best and worst men I've ever known.”
“He's not gone.” It was an awfully small voice to be coming out of a grown woman.
“Yes. He is.” Khadija forced herself to look at the face that used to be Morgan's, empty of anything that would have made him Morgan Gannis.
“The medicals say that they don't know if he'll ever wake up. And even if he does...”
She shook her head.
“He would have hated been like this. Helpless. He liked action. He was a...”
“Survivor.”
Khadija bit back on her reply and let silence reign.
“I'm his Captain, it's my decision.”
“Yes.”
“And I say he lives.”
“If you call this living.” She hadn't realized she'd said it out loud.
“I do.”
“Don't you think he should be free to take the next step? Free his soul to begin it's next journey?”
“There isn't one. We get one trip and I say that Morgan's trip keeps going. You owe him that.”
“We do owe him a great debt. Thanks to Morgan, the Mount Safa was close enough to Irkalla that our fliers could reach it in time.”
She reached out to put a supportive hand on Susan's narrow shoulder, but Captain Ngn shrugged it off and turned slightly away that seemed like ritual.
“And to you, I'm a little reluctant to admit. If you hadn't given Morgan those datalenses set to record and transmit, we wouldn't have known what was happening there in the first place. And I'm not certain we would have gotten those convictions, either.”
A shadow had been falling over Susan's face as Khadija spoke. She was bent back over Morgan's bed, although she wasn't looking directly at anything Khadija could see.
“You're thinking about your other crewmate, aren't you?”
“Hector Rukh's no crew of mine. He stopped being crew the moment he drew iron on Morgan.”
Khadija was patient and waited for her to continue.
“What are his charges?”
“Besides Assault and Attempted Homicide? Conspiracy to Willful Destruction of an Emergent Ecosystem, Sabotage to Frontier States equipment, both physical and electronic, and Illegal Importation of Dangerous Cargo. Just for starters.”
Khadija shook her head.
“I'm afraid that with the evidence we've got now, he's going to be breaking rocks on Julunggul for quite some time.”
“And Vasca?” Susan hissed.
“Orders.” She spat the word out like a curse. “The Innes Conglomerate has a lot of friends at the capital. He's to be sent back there for judgment, possibly extradition.”
“So. Nothing.”
“Nothing. That's how it always is with his kind. All I know is that he won't be back here again. I'm sending word back with him to my superiors that if I ever see the son of a dog again, I will send him to God myself!”
There was a venom in her voice that surprised Khadija herself.
Susan looked up, an eyebrow cocked in question.
“Oh, yes, I can do that much. Now that he's been proven himself an official Threat to Planetary Security, I can do any damn thing I please if he ever comes back to my world. War Powers, if you can believe it. Turns out they are good for something after all.”
They shared a brief laugh that had nothing of humor in it.
“I hate to leave him here.”
“Does your ship have the facilities to take care of him like this?”
“No.” Again, the significant little half-turn that turned her face away from Khadija. “You take good care of him. I'm coming back for him. I always do.”
Susan Ngn turned the rest of the way and started taking careful, measured steps towards the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Don't know yet. Only that I've got a long way left to go.”
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