by Lewis Shiner
FRONTERA
LEWIS SHINER
www.headofzeus.com
PRAISE FOR FRONTERA
“Lewis Shiner’s Frontera is an extraordinarily accomplished first novel…his pacing is brisk, his scientific extrapolation well-informed and plausible, and his characterization nothing short of outstanding…This is ‘realism’ of a sort seldom found in either commercial or literary fiction; to find it in a first novel makes one eager for more.”
—Roland J. Green, ChicagoSun-Times
“Frontera is hard-edged and colorful and relentless, and altogether a compelling read. Shiner paints his picture of the day after tomorrow with a gritty realism that makes you believe every minute of it.”
—George RR Martin, author of A Game of Thrones
“Well written…inspired…a breezy, terrific read.”
—Heavy Metal
“Frontera is a heroic saga (literally) in which Promethius’ inspiration is a kaleidoscopic mix of his own desires and the subliminal whisperings of a microchip implanted in his brain. The ‘fire’ is a teleportation device developed by an abandoned Mars colony. The gods are represented by a multinational corporation and the Soviets…But Frontera is much more than this standard SF plot. It’s a well-written telling of the conflicts of intelligent humans.”
—Lili Dwight, Forced Exposure
“Strong plotting in the political thriller vein is the hallmark of Lewis Shiner’s Frontera…Shiner wraps the story in a compelling package…its raw energy holds your interest and keeps you turning the pages.”
—Frank Catalano, Amazing
“One of the genre’s more arresting books.”
—Mikal Gilmore, Rolling Stone
“A well-written first novel in the action-adventure vein, principally set in a lost colony on Mars. Frontera rises to literary art, first because several viewpoint characters are rendered with skill and sensitivity as complex people, and second because Kane, the central combat-capable figure, is a poor bastard who’s had his head screwed with in various unpleasant ways, so that he is both hero and victim, doing his deeds of derring-do as best he can with a headful of broken glass.”
—Norman Spinrad, Science Fiction in the Real World
“Combine[s] classic hard-SF structure with a harrowing portrait of postindustrial society in the early twenty-first century.”
—Bruce Sterling, Mirrorshades
Finalist for the Nebula Award
(Science Fiction Writers of America)
Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award
(Best paperback original SF novel)
First published in the United States in 1984 by Subterranean Press
This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd
Copyright © Lewis Shiner, 2019
The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (E) 9781789541281
Cover Design: Ben Prior
Author Photo: © Orla Swift
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Contents
Welcome Page
Praise for Frontera
Copyright Page
Dedication
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Author’s Note
By Lewis Shiner
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
ONE
WITH LESS THAN five minutes left, Kane tugged nervously at his shoulder harness and tried to remember gravity. The feel of his arms dragging by his sides, the blood pooling in his legs, his head jerking forward in fatigue—it all seemed distant, clumsy, irrelevant.
“You’ve gone soft, Kane,” Lena whispered, but her eyes were afraid of him. She locked her cleats into the gridded floor, peeled the plastic sheath from a hypo, and pushed 15 milligrams of Valium into his left arm. “You look like hell. You’re about nine-tenths crazy and you haven’t got any muscle tone at all. I don’t think you’re going to make it.”
“Four minutes,” Takahashi said.
“I’ll make it,” Kane said.
Not just gravity, he thought, but eight Gs, wrenching, crushing, suffocating him while the ship threw off 10,000 feet per second of velocity by diving into the thin atmosphere of Mars. The ship’s computer would sail them through a narrow, invisible corridor, balancing air drag against the strength of their reinforced carbon-carbon aeroshell, slowing them just enough to put them into a high, elliptical orbit around the planet and not send them crashing into the frozen Martian wastes.
All because the corporation didn’t have the booster stages to slow them down any other way.
He knew Lena had put him off, not caring if she had time to give him the shot, not caring if his muscles had the elasticity to ride out the re-entry. Reese had been first, of course: the senior astronaut, the father figure. Then she’d taken care of Takahashi and after that herself, floating where Kane could see her, easing the needle into the soft flesh of her thigh.
In the first weeks of the mission, she and Kane had struggled through a brief, sweaty affair; it ended when Lena, fingers stiffening in orgasm, drew blood from Kane’s chest and triggered his defensive reflexes. Kane’s erection had vanished, and his hands had closed around her wrist and neck in a killing grip.
Within a second he was in control again, but Lena had panicked. Nerves, he’d explained, but she was already dressing, afraid to take her eyes off him. The next day they’d both started taking sex suppressants.
Kane had gone off them two days ago, hoping to clarify his muddled thoughts and desires. Now he found himself remembering her thin, angular body, the bones like negative shadows under the darkness of her skin, her breath moving against the underside of his jaw.
“Three minutes!” Takahashi said. “Kane, you’d better punch in.”
Kane’s CRT swam with concentric circles, the ship’s path projected onto the vortex of Mars’ gravity well. He reached for the bank of knobs and switches in front of him, as familiar now as the M37 he’d carried in North Africa, and hit Control-C on the keyboard. At least once a week for the last nine months he’d been strapped to this couch or one of the others, working through endless computer simulations of the landing.
He remembered the morning he’d drifted in to find Reese buckled into one of the slings, jacked out of his skull on psilocybin, banging his massive fists into the con
trol panel and screaming, “We’re crashing, oh Jesus, we’re crashing!” They had been six months out of Earth at the time, weightless, drifting, lights rheostatted down to save the fuel cells. Plague-carrying buboes on Reese’s neck would have been no more terrifying than his hysteria. Kane had fled from it, back to the wedge-shaped coffin of his quarters, and spent two days in a tranquilized fog.
And now, he thought. Were they really braking for orbit? Or was this just another simulation? lf he turned this switch, would it fire a braking rocket or would it just force a branch in the computer’s program?
He remembered childhood nightmares of sitting in the back seat of a moving, driverless car.
“One minute,” Takahashi said.
The Valium washed over him like a lullaby. The blinking time display slowed as he watched, and the muscles in his shoulders and neck began to loosen.
An attitude jet, fired by the computer, went off with a noise like a machine-gun burst. Kane’s heart stammered for a second, then recovered as his brain identified the sound.
And then he was falling.
The air of Mars whimpered and then screamed as the aeroshell started to burn. Kane’s Valium calm vaporized, and he was sure he was going to die. He’d looked at death before, sometimes gone out of his way to see it, but he’d never had so little control over the outcome. He felt as if he’d been thrown out of a helicopter with a mountain tied to his back. His vision narrowed to a gray, viscous tube, and he prayed he wouldn’t have to take manual control of the ship because he couldn’t lift his arms back up to the keyboard.
One minute, he thought. I only have to take this for sixty seconds. He tried to see the time readout on his CRT, but his eyes refused to focus.
The screaming turned into a metal icepick, driving into Kane’s ears. He fought for air, imagining his windpipe collapsing like a soda straw. His lungs burned and he tasted blood.
He kept waiting for it to be over, and the pressure kept getting worse. He felt thumbs gouging his eyes, blood pumping into his feet like water into balloons. And then something stabbed him in the chest.
A rib. I just lost a rib.
He felt the second one break. At first it was just the pressure, focused, inexorable, bearing down over his heart. Then he felt the muscles ripping and the sudden jerk as the bone snapped and bent inward. The pain knifed through his chest and for a long moment his own scream melted inaudibly into the shriek of the burning shield.
The G forces pushed the broken bones deeper into his flesh. He wanted to pass out, but the pain was too intense. He could visualize the points of the ribs, the claws of some giant roc from mythology, digging deep into his heart. Killing him.
And for nothing, he thought. For a rescue mission that’s ten years too late and too screwed up to do any good anyway. A broken-down ship full of losers, raving across 40 million miles to add their dead, burned bodies to the corpses of the Martian colonists.
He was convinced that something had gone wrong. The computers had lost control and the ship was obviously dropping straight out of the sky like a meteor. The deceleration had gone on an impossibly long time, could only end in blazing ruin.
And then the pressure fell away and the gray tunnel closed down into darkness.
When he opened his eyes again, the CRT showed that two minutes had elapsed since orbital insertion. They were weightless, and the air was stale and flatulent. Above the time hack an irregular blue egg, dotted with four or five major craters, filled the screen.
Deimos, Kane thought. They were alive, then. In orbit around Mars.
He sucked a careful breath through the hot bands of pain around his chest. He could hear the ship creak softly as it cooled, the rattle of an off-balance fan in the vent over his head.
“Kane?” Lena’s voice. He managed a grunt in reply.
“Keep still,” she told him.
He knew that. They weren’t even supposed to try to move for two hours. “Broke something,” he managed. “Ribs.”
“Oh Christ. Any blood? From the lungs, I mean?”
He wasn’t sure. He had blood in his throat, but it could have been from his nose, which was still blowing a fine red mist when he exhaled.
He couldn’t seem to sustain any serious interest in the source of the bleeding. It was nothing compared to the shrapnel fragment that had opened the back of his skull near Dongola and left him nearly helpless between bouts of surgery. Now he was tired of complications, of moods, of dealing with Lena. He felt like a coiled spring that had been carrying a maximum load for nine months, the strain building beyond all tolerance levels, the coils starting to fray and shift out of line.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I can manage.”
“I’ll get to you when I can,” Lena said. “Anybody else?”
“I’m all right,” Takahashi said. “Reese is still out.” Of course Takahashi had come through, Kane thought. Three to five hours every day at the treadmill and the bicycle and the rowing machine had kept him precision-tuned, lean and rippling with health. Kane thought him deranged, obsessive, a robot programmed for masochism. Takahashi had been spit out of the factories of the New Japan, gleaming and flawless, blaming his ancestors’ suffering on their excessive spirituality.
“Like Reese,” Takahashi had said once, three months out of Earth, bent over the rowing machine, his muscles flowing like sine waves down his arms. It was the only image Kane had of him from the entire outward flight: there in the wardroom, the air alive with pinpoint dots of his sweat. “All that Ch’an crap of his,” he had said. “Zen. Looking for illumination or cosmic purpose in this. It’s a job. It’s work. That’s all there is to it.”
And now his hands were moving over the keyboard in swift, precise gestures while Kane lay hostile and broken. “Is somebody going to call Houston?” Takahashi asked.
“Go ahead,” Lena told him. “You’re in command.”
“You want to tell him about Kane?”
Him, Kane noticed. It wasn’t Houston they were talking about anymore, it was Morgan. Morgan: Chairman of the Board of Pulsystems, economic king of Houston, the man who had bought all this slightly used hardware from the foundering US government.
“No,” Kane said. “I’ll be okay. Just leave me out of it.” It wasn’t that he was worried about Morgan delaying the mission. It was all the history between the two of them, between him and Morgan. Morgan had raised him since Kane’s father died, ostensibly the benevolent uncle, in fact a ruthless business rival, more concerned with the block of stock that Kane had inherited than with the boy himself.
Kane worked for Morgan, had fought for him in North Africa, but their private struggle had never let up.
Takahashi’s fingers kept rattling on his console as he dictated a mechanical report: “Orbital insertion at 1823 Zulu…”
Kane let his eyes drift back to the bright husk of Deimos on his CRT, cold, malformed, impassive. Mars was Ares to the Greeks, the god of war and mindless brutality, running red with blood. They hated him, and they hated his bastard sons, Deimos and Phobos, Fear and Terror. Mars had sired them on Aphrodite and they followed him like vultures over the battlefields to burn and mutilate the dead and dying.
He’d come to know the Greeks better than he’d wanted to, five impossibly long years ago, studying mythology at Rice University. They’d read meaning into everything they saw, humanized an inanimate universe with bloodthirsty zeal. What did they know, Kane wondered, that we don’t?
As Takahashi droned on, Kane drifted in and out of a hazy, painful sleep. When the beeping of an incoming transmission woke him, he saw that he’d lost another half hour.
The cratered oval of Deimos faded into Morgan’s face, the two images nightmarishly superimposed for an instant. Morgan’s hair, dyed unnaturally black, stood straight out from the back of his head where his fingers had repeatedly pushed it. His face was webbed with deep lines and his mouth couldn’t seem to hold a smile. It was early afternoon in Houston, but he had obviously been up th
e entire night before.
“Our telemetry says you have a successful Mars insertion,” he said. The 18-minute time delay each way gave him the awkwardness of someone speaking into a telephone recorder. “Congratulations, uh, a little late.” Behind him Kane could see five or six white-shirted techs at their consoles in the trench in Mission Control. The picture flickered and Morgan seemed to shift his attention back from something just beyond the camera. “Nothing really to say except we’re all proud of you here, and we’re hoping for good luck ahead, an operable lander, and a safe touchdown.”
The screen flickered again and Kane felt a chill. Subliminals. The son-of-a-bitch was putting subliminals in the broadcast. He jerked his eyes away from the screen and looked around, but no one else seemed to have noticed it. What was Morgan up to? What the hell was going on?
“I, uh, guess that’s it for now. We’ll be back in touch after we hear from you.” Kane heard him clear his throat, then saw the screen darken at the edge of his vision.
Morgan had, Kane thought, a lot to be worried about. The lander, for one thing. There hadn’t been a complete Mars Excursion Module left anywhere on Earth or in orbit, and even if there had been, there weren’t enough propellant stages to get it to Mars. Morgan had been willing to gamble that at least one of the abandoned landers on Deimos could be refitted. If not, it meant a nine-month trip back to Earth, empty-handed, and Kane didn’t think they’d make it without at least one murder or suicide.
Whatever their individual strengths, they didn’t seem to be able to function as a unit. Takahashi was distant and patronizing; he seemed always to be taking mental notes of the crew’s behavior, comparing them against some hypothetical limits of social and biological disrhythm. Kane felt he’d been singled out for the worst of it. He suspected paranoia on his own part, but couldn’t convince himself.
Lena considered the trip out just another nine wasted months to be added to the five years she’d spent looking for a chance to practice medicine again. She’d been the first to lose interest in the NASA regime of exercise and simulations; her moods shifted unpredictably within a narrow range of emotions. The one constant, since that early incident, seemed to be her fear and distrust of Kane.