The Seeds of War- Omnibus Edition

by T S Hottle

  If you only knew who we contracted with, thought Kray. “My people have been working with another concern this season. I think we can weather it. It’s the farmers in Harlan and Rangne Townships I worry about.”

  “Well, make your deputies available to Constables Parker and Nupalli. If their farmers are broke during the winter, it’s going to get hairy until the cool weather crops come in. Croix out.” Croix’s image disappeared, briefly replaced by the seals of Amargosa and Mars, then the logo of Amargosa’s data service.

  Kray headed to the outer office where he found Saja doing paperwork. “It’s about to begin. Contact our Juno rep in Lansdorp and have our volunteers start harvesting the creeper.”

  “When will it happen?” Saja asked.

  “Any day now. Gilead has already been seized, and the governor is scared.”

  Saja smiled. “He should be. Of you, anyway.”

  ***

  JT and Parker arrived at the maglev station just as a train was making another unscheduled stop. Approaching from the Dagar Township side, they could see crates being offloaded into bat wagons. JT recognized one of the drivers as the big man who led the chase after him through the woods.

  “That one,” he said. “The day I ran into the gosalope. He was watching a bunch of other people fire KR-27s into moosalo carcasses and old vehicles.”

  Parker watched as workers loaded crates into the back of each bat wagon. “I’m going into Lansdorp. I may be back tonight or tomorrow morning.”

  “What can I do?” asked JT.

  “Go back and take care of that weed that’s growing into our fields. Get the tractbots to tear it out. Burn it if you have to.”

  “Could take all night.”

  “Then have Sarah pack you a dinner.” Parker got out of the runabout. “We’ll talk tomorrow evening.” He left, strolling over to the train and flashing his badge at the conductor.

  ***

  JT returned at sunset to find a moosalo steak dinner waiting for him in the warmer. His muscles ached, and his clothes reeked of burned creeper. That part had made the late afternoon miserable. Even though he had mounted torch units onto the tractbots, he had to restart the fires again and again. The creeper produced fruit as well as grains and vegetables, which made the plant harder to light. Eventually, he got the invasive stuff to burn. Then he had to throw down lime, which would have to be scooped back up before that section of the field could be replanted.

  Even though his mother worked from home or in an office, never doing anything remotely as physical as farm work a day in her life, he now understood what she meant by “a bad day at work”.

  “Good news,” said Sarah as she walked in the kitchen. “Mr. Parker says you get tomorrow off. Happy birthday.” She reached into the oven and pulled out a pie made from some local fruit JT had grown to like. Cutting him a thick slice, she placed it in front of him with a dollop of ice cream made from moosalo milk. “I suggest you take a book or your tablet up to the Harlan Reservoir. Lizzy likes to do that during warmer winter months when she’s out of school.”

  JT took a bite of his pie and decided that home cooking was better than anything his mother’s personal chef could concoct. The Parkers might all disagree, but JT would have copped to being a picky eater with a wealthy mother to spoil him until recently.

  “Thank you,” he said, trying not to yawn as he spoke. “Are you sure there isn’t anything I need to do tomorrow?”

  Sarah laughed. “Oh, I think Quan will enjoy having a break from you.”

  That made JT laugh.

  After dinner, he went upstairs to his room. Lizzy had her door closed and, he suspected, locked. In his own room, however, he found a green flower lying on his pillow along with a nano-fiber paper. He picked it up to find a video image of Lizzy inside. In it, she wore a silly hat and blew a noisemaker at the cam.

  “Hey, Earth man,” she said. “Happy birthday. I’ll try to make it special for you.”

  He might not get to be alone with Lizzy anytime soon, but the card made his day. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow.

  ***

  Brendie answered the door as Kray ate his dinner. When she returned, two uniformed Marines and a woman in a business suit appeared behind her.

  “Constable Lucius Kray,” said the woman, “Frant Mol, Colonial Attorney’s Office. I have a warrant for your arrest.”

  “Careful, Ms. Mol,” said Kray, barely looking up from his food. “I am the only law enforcement between the local townships and the foothills.”

  Mol pointed a device at a blank wall. Text appeared on the wall. “You are charged with forming an illegal militia in violation of the Citizen Protection Act and Article 9 of the Martian Code of Colonial Conduct. You also are charged with allowing unlicensed GMOs to grow within your jurisdiction. You will come with me where you will stand before the governor to answer the charges against you.” She clicked the device. “This is a Compact-level rider. The Office of Colonial Development has some questions for you as well.”

  So, it’s gotten back to OCD, thought Kray. And where was Leitman in all this? Jail? Perhaps he would come and take the creeper off-world at without needing to pay any Amargosans.

  Brendie began to cry as the Marines flanked Kray and hauled him to his feet, binding his arms behind him. They marched him out to a waiting transport and shoved him inside. Mol and the Marines climbed into the back with him.

  “Ms. Mol,” said Kray as the transport began to move. “May I call you Frant?”

  “You may call me Ms. Mol,” said the Colonial Attorney’s rep.

  “Very well,” said Kray. “Let me ask you something. What you would do if you knew the world would end in the next few days?”

  Mol laughed at him.

  EPISODE 6

  Kray sat in his jail cell, stripped of his badge and any other symbols of his role as constable. Saja would automatically take over the position, he knew. His confinement to a jail cell, however, put Amargosa in greater danger by the second.

  Maybe they would exile him to the core world. The law banning unsanctioned militias came directly from Mars. Kray could likely could find himself spending years in a cell with less than half the gravity of Amargosa. He would spend those years underground in a world left cold because it was easier to adapt to lower temperatures than heat the air above 12 Celsius degrees. Just the thought made Kray shiver.

  Particularly since Mars was not much better than Earth, a relic of the pre-Compact days when the bulk of humanity lived on the two planets. Now Earth was no longer humanity’s most populous world. And Mars? When its people had gone out into the stars, they looked for similar worlds they could terraform and remake into its settlers’ image. Now the planet spared itself the expense and looked for Class E worlds like Amargosa, planets that could quickly produce food. Oh, the Martian overlords still fancied themselves a terraforming race. They even named their latest project “Farigha," an old Arabic word the Caliphites translated as "the big empty. Farigha was to be an empty canvass for the terraformers.

  But Farigha had gone silent before Gilead had, probably before Kray ever met Marcus Leitman. Now, sitting in his jail cell, Kray wondered if the man had another agenda. Of course Leitman had a hidden agenda: Make money. The creeper, if it could be contained, would make his employer very wealthy. A plant that could produce roots, fruits, legumes, and grain? And grow with almost no tending? Kray wondered how he could get a piece of that action. Perhaps, when Amargosa was liberated from its still-unseen enemy, he could demand a cut of the profits. After all, he now sat in a jail cell because of the creeper. And Leitman.

  These were the thoughts weighing on Kray’s mind when the man himself suddenly appeared outside his cell. “Hello, old friend. I’m sorry I couldn’t be here sooner. I might have stopped this from happening to you.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Kray. “Meanwhile, the farmers of my township are giving you the greatest bumper crop in human history. Plan to retire by forty, Mr. Leitman?”

&nb
sp; Leitman smiled, the lines around his mouth giving evidence of prior rejuvenation. “Retirement has never been in my plans, Lucius. I might take a few years off here and there, but I’ve never seen the point of being idle. We live too long for it anymore.”

  “Well, must be nice to live on the core worlds where they can reset your biological clock back to twenty-five or thirty every few years. Out here, we live short, hard lives, and we work hard to enjoy them.”

  Leitman tilted his head as though studying Kray. “I think when this is over, Lucius, you should take your lovely wife and both get rejuve. But do it before you turn fifty. Afterwards, you’re just freezing the ravages of time into place.” He grabbed the bars and leaned in toward Kray. “But you have to get out of here before any of that can happen. You need to get out today.”

  Kray looked around his cell. “Sure. Just go get a key, and we’ll be on our way.”

  “I can’t help you,” said Leitman. “It’ll arouse too much suspicion. You have friends here, though. When the time comes, follow their lead. But you must be out of Lansdorp by tonight.”

  “What happens tonight?”

  “Amargosa falls.”

  ***

  Sarah made JT a big breakfast of eggs, moosalo sausage, and biscuits, then sent him off to the reservoir. He went off on foot with a packed lunch, his tablet, and a dusty printed book, Alone: The Story of the First Mars Colony. He intended to spend the entire day at the reservoir, or at least until late afternoon. It had been a while since JT had read a printed book. He had to remind himself that he had to physically move the paper when he swiped the page.

  The sun moved east, rising high overhead and making it hot enough for JT to swim. He stripped off his clothes, folded them neatly on the water’s edge, and ran into the water. Leaning back as soon as the water came up to his chest, he swam face up away from the shore. The water, sun, and breeze relaxed him. He let himself float on his back and stared at the clouds in the Amargosan sky.

  When he first arrived, he noticed the clouds had a yellowish tinge to them that made him think of toxic gas. It had made him nervous when Constable Parker had started working him outside. Now he knew it was just a trick of the atmosphere, no different than dozens of other oddities in the skies of Earth or Etrusca, his mother’s homeworld, or even Demeter, where his father had spent his childhood. Watching the clouds had an amazing mind-clearing effect. Away from Seattle, away from the clatter of the local farm equipment, the reservoir was almost like a sunlit womb.

  “Looking good Earth man.”

  JT splashed around and struggled to get himself in a position to tread water. On the shore stood Lizzy, his shirt draped over her finger.

  “Didn’t bring any swim trunks,” she said. “Did you?”

  “Um… Lizzy?” He wasn’t sure if his stammer came from nerves or catching his breath. “I… er… I’m not dressed.”

  “No kidding,” she said, then tossed his shirt into the bushes. Then she tossed his pants into another thatch of bushes. “You want these?” She held up his undershorts. “Come and get them.” They went over her shoulder.

  “Lizzy,” he said, “I can’t come out of the water with you there. I’m naked.”

  “Oh.” Into two different bushes went his socks, followed by his shoes. “Then how about I come in there, and you go look for your clothes.” She began to peel off her top.

  JT quickly spun himself around to face the far side of the reservoir. The distant peaks of mountains beyond Dagar Township to the north rose in the haze along the horizon. “Focus on the mountains. Focus on the mountains. Focus on the mountains…”

  He heard splashing behind him, then the more rhythmic sounds of someone swimming. Moments later, as small waves washed over his shoulders from behind, a pair of arms wrapped around his chest.

  “Oh, Earth man,” said Lizzy, whispering in his ear, “everyone skinny dips here. You have nothing to be afraid of unless…” She pushed away and grabbed his arm to spin him around.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” said JT.

  “I’m playing hookie. And I’m going to get into trouble for it.” She smiled, her wet hair framing her face in dripping tangles. “But I’m sixteen, JT. Now, so are you. But if you leave before we get a chance, I’ll never get to spend that day with you, never get to know what it’s like to be with a man.”

  “I’m not really a man,” said JT. “I’m just a kid, as much as I pretend I’m not.”

  “Want to be a man?” Lizzy pulled him against her, keeping their legs apart so they could kick in the deep water.

  Then she kissed him in a way no mere girl should have been able to do. “Do you want to be a man?” she repeated, her voice going soft and husky.

  He knew what Lizzy wanted, but he would not just take it. “What do you want, farm girl?”

  She bit his nose. “That’s cute. What do I want? We’re both sixteen JT, legally able to do what we want. And I want you to take me back to the shore and make me a woman. I don’t want to wait anymore.”

  They swam toward a nearby dock.

  ***

  The sample of creeper landed with a splat. Governor Croix leveled at hard stare at Kray.

  “It didn’t take long for the local OCD lab to identify this,” said Croix. “It’s an invasive species, approved only to grow on The Caliphate, and only in vertical farms.” He slammed his palm down hard on the table. “And now it’s infesting your entire township. Kray, what in the hell is going on out there?”

  Kray said nothing. What could he say? The creeper was illegal, and his fellow constables had not only caught him in the act, they had suffered damage because of it. And Kray had allowed it.

  Croix looked down at his palm and swiped it. “It is an impressive organism. It produces a root vegetable, fruit, and grain. But it leaves the ground unusable until it’s purged. Lucius, that flies in the face of every GMO protocol we’ve had in place since the World Wars. Did you know this … What’s it called? Juno? That they’ve been denied every flatland permit they’ve ever applied for? Only Jefivah has taken a chance on them.”

  “I was assured everything was in order,” said Kray.

  “Is that so? Where are your official inquiries to the local OCD office? How about my office?” Croix looked down and swiped at his palm again. “And then I received a disturbing message from Rajeesh Chakresh from Riverside.”

  An unnatural cold enveloped Kray’s body. The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees instantly. He tried to remain stoic, but Croix’s expression told him he had failed.

  “Seems you came to him looking for weapons,” said Croix. “KR-27s and enough ammo to take over most of the Central Plains. Did you go ahead and start your own militia after you were specifically told not to do so?”

  So this was it. Chakresh had sold him out. The game was over. “Governor, all I can say is that you have no idea what’s headed our way. It could happen before we even leave this room.”

  “What is your evidence?”

  He could give the governor Leitman, but that man was smoke. No sooner did he appear than he disappeared. Oh, Saja could find him well enough. She was the one to discover his aliases, all legal. But pinpointing Leitman’s location at any given moment was next to impossible. And the man always seemed to know more about Kray than Kray himself might know about a person of interest. Even with all the requests Kray and the farmers of Dagar Township had put through to Juno’s offices in Riverside and Lansdorp, no one with the genetic modifier had ever mentioned his name. “Think about Gilead. Do you think that’s isolated? I’ve also heard rumors that Mars lost a terraforming project not too long before Gilead went silent.”

  “Much of this started before Gilead,” said Croix. “If you have information as to why another colony went silent, you’d better give it up now.”

  Only Kray knew no more than Croix about Gilead’s silence. He knew nothing about who had destroyed the colony, what the enemy looked like, or even if they had any real i
nterest in Amargosa. For all he knew, Leitman had used the threat to con Kray into growing the creeper, just to see what it could do outside a vertical farm.

  “That man who visited my cell this morning,” he said. “Leitman. Ask him. He knows something’s about to happen.”

  “Mr. Kray, we have no record of anyone visiting your cell this morning,” said Croix. He fingered his palm, and seconds later, two Colonial Guard soldiers entered the room. “Take Mr. Kray back to his cell. Get him ready for his trip to Mars tomorrow.”

  ***

  “That was… interesting,” said Lizzy. “Not quite what I expected.”

  They lay on the dock in their underwear, which allowed them a degree of modesty.

  “You didn’t like it?” said JT. “I even stopped so I wouldn’t…”

  She put a finger over his lips. “I know why you did that. It’s just… It’s all new to me.”

  Rolling onto his side, JT took in the lines and curves of Lizzy’s body. Her face was unreadable, as though she wasn’t sure what she felt.

  “Did I hurt you?” he asked.

  Finally, a smile appeared on her lips. “A little. It’s just… I’ve never done this before. It was scary once we started.”

  He fell back flat and threw his arm across his eyes. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you that the first time is a little…”

  Her mouth over his stopped him.

  “That tell you what I really think?” she said. “Earth man… JT, you were wonderful. You listened to me, listened to all of me, not just my voice. You knew how to move, what to say to me, where to touch me. If this is why they want to leave you on Amargosa, then I hope it’s a life sentence. And I want custody of you as soon as possible.”