The Hundred Worlds

by J. F. Holmes

  He’d just taken it when a grunt of effort behind me alerted me to the sudden danger. I turned the handshake into a yank, pulling the smaller guy forward into me. I gathered his shirt in both hands and shoved him toward the big miner, who’d pulled a half-meter long riot-control shock wand out from behind his back. Electricity crackled up and down the business end, and the admin type made a pained noise as he hit his companion, and by extension, the wand. Both men jerked as the charge hit them, but I didn’t take the time to appreciate the humor in it as I turned and pulled my pistol.

  Cal grappled with another jump-suited miner. He had both size and reach on her, but he was too busy fending off one of her knives to take advantage of it. A second miner writhed at their feet, one of Cal’s other knives jutting from his thigh.

  Atta girl! I thought in appreciation as I leveled my .45 at the big miner. I opened my mouth and prepared to bark an order at him, but then the shock wand slammed into my back and I lost control of my limbs.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid!

  I slammed to the deck, trying to push past the pain, but to no avail. Another pair of orange-suited thugs loomed over me. If I’d had the ability, I’d have shaken my head. The two in front were a diversion. The real threat had come from either side, and I’d made the damn rookie mistake of not checking the corners.

  Cal made a better showing of herself, taking down the second man as she had the first – maybe they weren’t expecting a woman to be so downright vicious – but the last thing I saw before I blacked out was her writhing body collapsing to the deck as one of the other two brutes shocked her into submission.

  ***

  All things considered, a shock wand hangover is pretty awful. I’ve had some doozies in my day, but usually, I’d at least had some fun to make up for the aftereffects. Not so lucky here.

  I cracked an eyelid open. While I’d been unconscious, they’d strapped me into a straight-backed chair. I didn’t know how big the room was, but what I could see was about as wide as a small bedroom. A lone door centered in the bulkhead in front of me was the only visible means of access. Other than that, the bare metal walls offered no clue to where I was, exactly, or how long I’d been out.

  The door eased open. They must have been monitoring me somehow.

  I recognized the first person to step into the room almost immediately. Connor Johnson, he of the good-but-not-great fake ID. That made sense, at least, but the second person into the room did not.

  Sara wore one of the ubiquitous orange jumpsuits, though it was far cleaner than the ones our greeting party had worn. Whatever she was up to here, it didn’t involve working in ore processing, I supposed.

  “Your people are safe,” she said, and I resisted the urge to raise an eyebrow. “Even your lady friend, despite the hurting she put on our people.”

  “What can I say,” I shrugged as well as I could with my arms tied to the chair. “She is volatile.”

  Connor leaned against the wall and gave a grunt of amusement. Sara’s demeanor was far more serious. “So you say. Why are you here, Mr. Dyson?”

  If she knew my name, and she knew I had more than one friend, they must have taken the ship. Not surprising they’d dug through the data systems or done an old-fashioned toss of my stuff. “Your uncle hired me. He had concerns.” I gave Connor a pointed look.

  “He is not my uncle. He’s my aunt’s second husband, and –” She closed her mouth and took a deep breath to compose herself. “But that’s beside the point. Despite how he may have presented himself to you, he’s family in name only. And if it weren’t for my master’s studies, he couldn’t have cared less about me disappearing.”

  I stared at her for a moment, and it clicked. The scent in the air. It was the smell of growing things. And Sara was a botanist by trade. “You’re doing something with plants, aren’t you?”

  Connor cursed, and Sara gave him a triumphant smile. “Told you he was a sharp one.” She turned back to me. “Got it one, Mr. Dyson. Botany, genetic engineering, hybridization experiments. There’s still a little mining going on, but that’s for cover and fundraising.”

  “So, what is this then?” I tried to keep the demanding tone out of my voice, but I didn’t entirely succeed. “Why all the cloak and dagger stuff for a greenhouse?”

  Sara smirked. “It’s a rebellion, Mr. Dyson.”

  I scoffed. “You realize that David and Goliath is a children’s story, right? And the rocks the UN can throw are a hell of a lot bigger and badder than anything you can whip up in the middle of a lousy little asteroid mine.” I glanced sidelong at Connor and added, “No offense.”

  He remained silent. He might not have appreciated my attempt at humor, but at least he didn’t seem overly offended by it. Sara plowed ahead.

  “Fine, call it the seeds of a rebellion, then. We’re not making weapons. We’re working on something better. They hold food over the heads of the member worlds like the sword of Damocles. We’re trying to fix that.” She looked at me, expectant. I just maintained eye contact and tried to figure out where she was coming from. “If the outworlds don’t need the UN for agriculture, an organized resistance becomes more palatable. A world won’t starve to death because of a few rebels.”

  “Rebellion is a fool’s errand,” I murmured. “Uncle owns the skies, sister. Even if you could hide from them, there’s no way for a planet to stand alone without their agricultural support. No seeds, no plants, no way to feed livestock, and goodbye rebellion. It’s been the same story for decades. Unless you’ve found a planet fully compatible with terrestrial biology, fomenting rebellion is a great way to get a bunch of people killed.” Despite the rising tone of my voice, she smiled slightly,

  “I figured it out. I engineered an apple hybrid that will grow pretty much anywhere with oxygen and water, and the seeds breed true. It’s not much, but it’s a start. But we need people, Mr. Dyson. Most of us are scientists or support people. We don’t know how to get into places where we shouldn’t be.”

  Flabbergasted, I said, “So what – you want to recruit me?” I shook my head in disbelief. “Honey, I just told you that your uncle, the citizen might I remind you, hired me to find you. And now you want me to turn coat and come work for you?”

  “Something like that. Tell me. Have you ever heard about Johnny Appleseed?”

  “You want me to smuggle fruit?” I tried not to laugh, but I couldn’t help the faint thrill that ran through me as I looked at all the angles. It was a long-unfamiliar feeling, but as it swelled in my chest, I recognized it for the old friend it was.

  Hope.

  “No, sir. I want you to smuggle seeds. We’re going to grow trees, Reed. It won’t be next year, or even five, but at some point, the children of the outer systems are going to have a chance at life without an oppressor’s boot on their neck.” She fixed me with a stare, and the energy in her eyes was undeniable. “Tell me – are you in?”

  _____________________

  Daniel Humphreys is the author of the Z-Day series of post-apocalyptic sci-fi thrillers and the Paxton Locke urban fantasy series. His first novel, "A Place Outside the Wild", was a 2017 Dragon Award finalist for Best Apocalyptic novel. Dan enjoys sci-fi movies, target shooting, and tinkering with computers. He has spent his entire career in corporate IT and suffers from elevated blood pressure due to a lifelong love of the Arizona Cardinals. Daniel lives in Indiana with his wife and family.

  Miracle Machine

  by Bart Kemper

  ______________________

  Present Day

  “Watch. This is the mission. You need to understand why you’re risking your life. More importantly, you’ll understand the importance to the Resistance. You cannot fail.”

  The news report showed a standard headshot with the name Margaret Karsten, Assistant Deputy Secretary for Commerce’s face. The words scrolling underneath said she was killed by “off planet terrorists, alien ties suspected”. News video showed the balcony from the vantage point of a renowned biologist,
who was telling the cameras how he’d seen masked men kill some obscure bureaucrat no one had heard of. Drone cameras gave the balcony a once over, showing a bloody sheet over a figure. Broken glass from the windows sparkled, blasted outward onto the balcony. Planters gaped open, dug up and excavated as if in the middle of replanting. The police and investigators studiously avoided looking up at the camera.

  A deeply-lined, black-skinned face looked back across the table into the courier’s eyes. Both men were seated. The handler had worker’s overalls, dirty and worn in all the right places to fit the man. They were probably his, along with the deeply-embedded body odor slowly seeping from the other side of the table. The courier was dressed as an executive. Traveling first class was a good way to avoid some of the scrutiny, if your cover was good enough.

  The handler had an odd accent, but that wasn’t uncommon when global work and commuting was trivial. The courier automatically catalogued features indicating outdoor work, possibly orbital, but not recently. No ink. No mods. Natural brown eyes. The handler’s code name was Mohammed, which could be East African, or just another misdirection.

  This was big. Usually it was dead drops with pre-arranged instructions. He never knew what he was running or why. It had been frustrating for the courier. He’d joined to fight the UN front of the corporations. He sat up straighter.

  “What do you think of this, Lee?” The courier’s Asian features blended in almost anywhere, as did his alias. Perplexed at being asked his opinion, the courier went with what everyone knows.

  “Um, it’s a lie, right?”

  “Of course, but what’s the lie? It matters,” Mohamed said.

  The courier shrugged. Mohammed beamed.

  “Good,” a woman’s voice said. “You’re not trying to bullshit. Listen up.”

  A blonde woman, clearly the security element, spoke up. She’d been off to the side in the small apartment, back to the wall, watching surveillance monitors. A shotgun was within reach. An automatic pistol was clipped to the belt of her dirty blue maintenance overalls.

  “The Deputy was killed in an “Uncle’s” Community Services raid, not by us. The biologist had called security because of some suspicious plants,” Mohamed said.

  “What was suspicious about them?” asked Lee.

  “Vegetables that normally sprouted, flowered, and bore fruit within months. Tomatoes, cucumbers, that sort of thing. It was only three weeks.”

  Lee’s mouth dropped open, then clicked shut. Understanding farming and crops was central to the conflict. What had been esoteric knowledge for city dwellers had become important politics, as well as the key to Earth/Colonial strategy. This would change the economic calculus all by itself. For Earth, it would be less reliant on off-world grown foods. For the Colonies, it would change, well, everything. The handfuls of non-sterile seeds that been gotten smuggled out could be propagated far faster.

  “Wait. Why are you talking to me about this? If they catch me, the scans will –”

  “Never happen, Lee,” Mohammed said. “That will never happen. You’ll be outfitted with a cap equipped with a skull shot. It’s winter, no one will notice. If you’re separated from your package, it explodes. If you say the suicide phrase, it explodes. If your vitals indicate you’re unconscious, it explodes. And until you get to your drop site with its broadcasted kill code that deactivates your cap, if you take it off –”

  “It explodes. No brain, no deep scans for residual data. Got it. So no live interrogation under scanners, no poking around inside my skull if I’m dead. OK, I’m in,” Lee said.

  Mohammed nodded. The cerebral scan tech was limited to a few places on Earth, and brain examinations required rapid transport to one of those CS facilities. Freezing or even chilling the brains defeated the scans, as did normal cellular decay. They were less than twenty minutes from such a facility. In the convoluted logic of counter-intelligence, it was determined CS assumed no one in their right mind would operate so close to a scan facility, so they established their safe house there.

  “The biologist is a government crop specialist. That’s one of the government high-rises. He noticed the deputy’s gardening habit and knew what to expect. When he saw the accelerated growth, he called it in. Fortunately, we got there first,” the blonde continued, her American accent not quite local to New York City. She hadn’t offered a name, and the courier knew not to ask.

  Confusion clouded Lee’s face. Mohammed picked up the thread.

  “Deputy Karsten had come over to us. Apparently she had seen too much footage of starving kids. One of the black bag sections in Agriculture had developed a method for rapidly accelerating growth. It’s a combination of a sequence of electromagnetic radiation, nanobots, and what amounts to a virus infection that tweaks the DNA. Our boffins think captured alien tech could be involved,” Mohammed said.

  “Karsten was away on official business for over two weeks. We caught the alert and were able to get the equipment out. They’re small, highly portable, and easily camouflaged. None of the components show up on any tox or weapons scans. The nanobots appear to be standard commercial-grade products until given the right activation codes.

  “We were skeptical. Karsten was supposed to be growing grain samples in her bedroom, out of sight. Those would have been her ticket for us risking extraction – not only heirloom seeds, but ones that grew four times faster than a normal crop,” Mohammed said.

  “I guess she didn’t think about her balcony garden,” Lee said.

  Mohammed beamed again, encouraging the nervous courier. “Exactly. She wasn’t a technical expert and probably mistook ‘effective range for optimal growth’ for ‘has any effects on plants’. We don’t know. We do know that within hours of returning from her trip she was killed by Community Services. The apartment is being taken apart as we speak. The plants have been dug up, but we don’t think CS knows their significance – there’s nothing to mark the plants as different, particularly once you take away the acceleration system.”

  Lee jumped to his feet, excited. “So, we have the system? This would completely change the balance of power. This is a miracle!”

  “It’s more than that, Lee. It’s a chance for peace. This could end it all if we leverage it correctly,” Mohammed said, his accent making “correctly” seem a moral imperative.

  Lee looked from his handler to the blonde and back to Mohammed. “What am I carrying?”

  The blonde protectively held up a small container. Her short hair framed her severe, pale face as her actinic blue eyes locked onto Lee’s. “What they called ‘the virus’. Simple, bland term, nothing to stand out in surveillance footage, so don’t call it anything else. It looks like just a package of batteries. They’re uncoded – blank. It’s what ‘infects’ the target plant life and prepares it for acceleration through nanotech, but by itself it does nothing. If you open this, the bugs will merge with whatever they find and blend in. Without the other components active, it’s almost impossible to separate them from anything else.”

  She handed the container to Lee. “The people on the other side have the activation components and will know what to do. We have tickets to get you to the West Coast and your drop. There will be a broadcast bubble, same as we have here, so you can slide off and dust your tail. Miss your window and all you’ll have to worry about is a quick headache.”

  Lee held the container up to the light, squinting, turning it slowly. “So,” he said, “where’s my hat?”

  ***

  Mohammed methodically scrubbed down the table, the ammonia crawling up his nasal passages to make his eyes water. The blonde had already packed up her surveillance gear and had cleaned out the other room. She picked up her shoulder bag. They both wore black knit hats, camouflaging the skull shot.

  “OK, we’re clear,” she said.

  “Let’s go,” said Mohamed. She opened the door, slammed it, and thumbed a switch on a box in her hand.

  “OK,” she said. “Any pickup embedded in the environment
al systems is getting white noise, as if we’re gone. Once Community Services works backward, they’ll know to dig through the noise to find the environmental pickup and filter for the meeting’s voices. They’ll get the whole story. We have a few minutes before we leave for exfil.”

  Mohammed slumped into a chair. All the positive “we can do it” energy drained down his suddenly limp legs. He glanced at his wrist.

  “He’ll be boarding now,” he said. “He’s on the way. We’d have heard if it was otherwise. We’re at the final decision point. Run this down and see what we’ve missed.”

  She nodded, ticking off the points as she spoke.

  “The professor never realized we were replacing the plants with more mature versions. When he called it in, we spiked the plants with protein husks and inert nanobots. They won’t show up until they look, but because there’s nothing there, they won’t find anything. ‘No Prisoners’ Donovan was queued up for the raid; he lived up to his name. He’s gunning for promotion, probably Citizen. Deputy Secretary Karsten was killed; the zealous nature of Donovan’s squad will provide the cover needed during the CS investigation. If anyone digs too deep, it’s the self-righteous asshole who takes the fall, as if they’ll prosecute war crimes. It’s all lined up. No gaps as far as I can see once we exfil.”

  Mohammed nodded wearily. “Good. The courier?”

  “He’ll be captured at the drop point. They’ll be waiting. The skull shot will misfire. It’ll cause damage but won’t kill him. One way or the other, they’ll get inside his head. They’ll believe him, once they get the captured feed and find the evidence we planted,” she said.

  She looked at Mohammed, the weight of the decisions clearly pulling him down more than the foreign planet’s gravity. “It was a tough call, boss. The sacrifice is worth it. We had to plant the story in a way they’d believe it – in the head of a proven operative. They’ll get other stuff, too, but we’ve already plugged those holes. Once they’re all in, they won’t stop chasing their tail –”