by Mark Kalina
"Look, convoy leader," she said, trying to keep her tone reasonable, "you people lobbied the Defense Force to have this convoy escorted. If you get in trouble out here, we risk our asses to save you. So the other side of the coin is, you listen to us when we try to keep you safe.
"There've been improvised mines out here before. And ambushes. Your convoy represents a lot of wealth to the refugee gangs. Not just the goods you're planning to hand out anyway; your vehicles, your personal weapons, and your people as hostages for ransom.
"So you will pull those damned trucks back when I tell you to. Now," Tara said, putting a snap of command into her voice. "Clear?"
"Clear," came the woman's voice, sounding sullen enough that Tara thought that she could perfectly imagine its owner's expression.
"I don't even understand why they keep sending these convoys," her gunner griped quietly.
Tara said nothing, but she was inclined to agree.
This convoy, like many of them, was organized by the United Christian Alliance, a powerful political block on Arcadia. The UCA had a lot of support for their humanitarian missions. Not many people liked the refugees, but most of people didn't want to see them starve or die of thirst, and lots of people were willing to donate money, and pledge votes, to see that the refugees got humanitarian support. And UCA, as the focus of much of that support, was a powerful organization, in terms of wealth, influence, and politically.
Arcadian politics was minimal, but that didn't make it simple. Government had very few roles, but what it did do was run by a unicameral Assembly. Anyone who had served in the Defense Force could vote for a list of Assembly Members, and any voter who wasn't in active military service could run for election. Any candidate who got enough votes was in. If a vote was excess to the required percentage, it went to the next candidate on that voter's list.
In turn, the Assembly selected one of their own as President, to chair the Assembly. On those matters that fell within the narrow scope of government, a majority vote of the Assembly carried the day. And that was it, unless one counted local town politics.
But though there were no formal political parties, there was no shortage of voting blocks, horse-trading and political bargains. And the Defense Force was one of the things the government emphatically did run.
So that put Tara and her battalion here, in the southern wastes, escorting a humanitarian convoy to the refugee camps. The UCA pushed hard to have the Defense Force "earn its keep" by escorting their convoys, and the Assembly, eager for the votes that the UCA could influence, tended to agree.
Somehow the UCA never seemed to notice the irony of the fact that they were feeding the same people who the Defense Force spent most of its time protecting them from.
The fact was, the so-called refugees were dangerous. The camps were improvised fortresses, and the leadership of the refugees, if it could be called such, was nothing more or less than bandit-lords, brutal and ruthless. And it was all, Tara thought with some justice, all, the UEN's fault.
***
Lord Wang Li Hu watched the convoy come closer with a mixture of fear, greed and hate. Even from a kilometer away, he could see that there were dozens of DF tanks escorting it. Dozens. And he had no illusions about what even one of those sand-colored monsters could do to him and his men.
At the same time the dozen trucks of the convoy represented wealth, life and power. Sure, the stupid fuckers were going to be giving out food, new clothes and new, clean water purification filters. But they weren't going to be giving it to him. They'd be passing it all out to the scrubs. His boys would collect a lot of it later, but never as much as if he get if he could have taken it all at the source. Besides which, there was power in giving things out.
That was a lesson that a lot of would-be lords never figured out. They figured that if you were strong, you took... anything you wanted, everything you could. But giving made you stronger. If he was the one to give food and water to his scrubs, then they would be his. When the Arcky charity pussies did the giving, then the scrubs looked to them, and not to him.
A lot of his gun-boys didn't get that. A few were just happy to see the convoy. Food wasn't too short, right now. And not at all short for him and his boys. But supplies could be better. Fresh food would be good, and fresh water filters were life itself. The fucked up water of this world —sea water and well-water both— wasn't drinkable without being filtered. But the filters didn't last; they wore out, or got mucked up by the shit they filtered out of the water. The water in the camp was beginning to taste pretty funky already, and even he didn't have anything better than what the scrubs got.
"Man, all we got to do is grab the charity pussies when they come in close to hand the shit out! I'm telling ya!" said the man to his left.
Jakey had been going on about this bullshit plan for days now. It wasn't, Wang thought, much of a plan. Kidnap the staff giving out the goods and use them to grab a big ransom. Jakey had his eyes set on grabbing a machinegun from one of the tanks. As far as Wang could tell, nothing about the plan had any cunning, or smarts, or any ghost of a chance of success. But Jakey would not fucking shut up about it.
Jakey had arrived a few months ago from another camp, a little turd of a place that had been supplied by the UEN instead of by the Arckies. For some reason, the UEN had stopped sending the goods, and the camp had broken up in faction and fighting. Jakey had made it out of his old camp, and he'd had been tough and resourceful enough to make it to Wang's camp. And Jakey was a fucking vicious fighter. All of which made Wang figure the man was worth a place among his gun-boys.
Right now, though, Wang was beginning to think he'd made a mistake with Jakey. From what Jakey had let slip, his old outfit had tried a move like that with a UEN convoy, and gotten a lot of good loot from the soldiers in charge of its security. But those had been UEN soldiers, not the stone-cold motherfucking Arcky DF killers that were riding those tanks. Maybe Jakey didn't know the difference, but Wang sure as shit did.
"Shit, man, all we got to do is cut one charity pussy up a little bit, and those soldiers will fucking give it up to us. They got to keep the charity pussies safe, man. It's their fucking job. If the charity pussies get hurt, the soldiers get fucked up when they get back to their boss, man."
"Shut up, Jakey," Wang said, not taking his eyes off the oncoming tanks. "That shit won't work with these DF motherfuckers. They're not the same as those UEN fuckers."
"Fuck," Jakey said, "soldier-boys is soldier-boys. They all the same. They all follow orders, man. And they got orders to keep the charity pussies in once piece. It's fucking simple, man."
"You fucking follow orders, Jakey!" Wang growled, turning to face the other man. "My orders!"
Jakey was a lot bigger than Wang. The man was dark from the fucked up red sun that this fucked up place had, and hard as stone... and well armed with blades and a good, camp-made, 9mm zipper.
"I follow a fucking lord, Wang. If you ain't got the balls to..."
The gunshot cracked out across the desert and the sand behind Jakey was suddenly spattered with fragments of bone and splashed with blood and brains. Jakey's body crumpled at Wang's feet.
"Tanks have stopped, Lord Wang," said one of his gun-boys, in a tone of proper respect that Jakey had never learned.
"Wave to them," Wang said, holstering his pistol. "If they ask, we can tell them the truth. This shit wanted to attack them, and we stopped him."
One of his gun-boys waved broadly, arms over his head. The others made a point of slinging or holstering any weapons they were holding.
"That was well done, Lord Wang," said the new man. He called himself Ren, but Wang knew that just meant "man" in Mainland Chinese.
Whoever he was, he was Han-Chinese, like Wang, and he talked like a pussy. But his eyes were as hard and sharp as a good steel fighting knife and Wang was fairly sure the man was a lethal fighter. It showed in the way the new man looked at things, and the way he moved.
"That was nothing," Wang said. "M
y gun-boys do what I say, is all."
"Discipline," the man, Ren, agreed. "Real discipline, not play-soldier nonsense. Yes."
"How long," Wang asked, without looking at the new man, "till those crates you brought start making us new guns?"
"Soon, Lord Wang. It's all a matter of power. Your camp's solar power array is in bad repair. My men and I have done what we can, but with so little power, production will be slower than we had hoped. Still, you'll have the first rifle tomorrow. And the first rockets in a week."
"It's still fucking crazy," Wang said, "that you can make rockets from food and human shit."
"Chemistry, Lord Wang. Just chemistry. The real question is, when the rifles and rockets are ready, will your men be ready too?"
"My men..." Wang said. "Yeah, my men will be ready. You get me the firepower, and I'll provide the men."
Wang was looking at the convoy and the tanks. They were moving again, slowly, their machineguns tracking his boys as they rolled closer. But Wang barely saw the tanks. In his mind he could see his gun-boys... changed. Changed into his men; into trained soldiers with military grade rifles and anti-tank rockets; changed from his gang into his army. And all the new man wanted for it was some help killing the DFs and the Arckies. That made it better than free.
8.
The screening procedure at the UEN side of the Arcadian Tannhauser Gate was perhaps the most onerous that Aran had ever dealt with. It seemed like half the UEN security operatives didn't know what they were doing, and the half that did didn't seem to be the ones in charge.
The facility itself was nothing like the ones that led to Elysium, or even to Mars; those facilities were gleaming, bustling, full of passengers and commerce, styled, like the most cutting edge airports, to give their passengers a sense of the romantic and the exotic. This facility was more like a derelict warehouse on a stupendous scale. Only the vast scale of the place, and the delays caused by the seemingly endless, pointless waits, were impressive.
The delay was more than just annoying. In another few hours, the traffic along the single rail line through the gate would switch directions, receiving from Arcadia instead of sending to it. If that happened before he and Ulla had made it through the gate, they would have to wait another week. The Tannhauser gate to Arcadia was only open for ten hours, once a week; five hours for transit to Arcadia and five for transit from Arcadia. The Arcadians didn't have the power generation infrastructure to run it for any longer.
"Why don't they just run the gate longer?" Ulla asked him as they waited in yet another short but utterly unmoving line.
"The Arcadians don't have any real power sources, except solar power. No nuclear fuel, no fossil fuels either. I suppose they could try wind power, but I've never heard of them doing it on a large scale; not economical."
"So?"
"So, well, a Tannhauser gate takes an enormous amount of power. They have to charge up banks of capacitors for a while to build up enough power to open it. And when the capacitors are drained, the gate closes," Aran explained.
"Why not put the gate generator on this side, then?" Ulla asked. "They still have reactors in the FSNA, don't they?"
"Well, that's a bit of a long story," Aran said. "Short version is, the gate generator used to be on this side, but that meant joint UEN and FSNA operation, and the UEN had a lot of problems with smuggling. So they moved the gate generation equipment to the other side, more or less. Or rather, they set up new equipment on the other side and then removed the UEN-owned setup on this side. It gave the UEN full control of the gate, you see."
"Ah."
"Yes, and when the Arcadians took over the gate facility, it gave them full control of the gate. Though UEN forces did manage to sabotage the reactor power system before they left, so the Arcadians have to use their own now. Hence the schedule we're on."
"You've studied this?" Ulla asked.
"I spoke to some Arcadians about it, last time I was there," Aran replied. "Ah, here we go," he added as a new UEN official arrived and the line finally began to move.
The trip through the Tannhauser gate wasn't any different from the previous trips, for Aran, but it was still something worth seeing. The designers of the train cars must have agreed, since the passenger windows were curved out in a shallow bulge, allowing the passengers to see, more or less, what was ahead of them.
Multiple rail lines entered into the concrete dome and converged on the huge steel sphere of the central chamber. Approaching it, one could tell that the gate building's concrete dome extended as far underground as it did above ground. The sheer volume of the space enclosed by the concrete dome —concrete sphere, rather— was on a scale that inspired a certain degree of awe. The steel sphere, a hundred meters across, was in the exact center of the concrete sphere, held up by huge steel pillars and struts. The rail lines ran towards it on massive elevated truss tracks, and from the window of the pressurized train car, Aran could see down to the bottom of the outer, concrete sphere; a dizzying, vertiginous view. The feeling of ominous vertigo was magnified by the lighting; just a few powerful projectors cut the darkness, casting cavernous shadows. The effect was, Aran thought, more than a little gothic, bordering perhaps on the nightmarish.
The train ran slowly, each car separated and pulled along by a motors set into the track. There were a dozen tracks leading towards the vast steel sphere from all sides. Only one of them had been active, these last seven years, but the others looked clean and intact. Aran seemed to recall the other tracks had looked somewhat dilapidated, the last time he'd been through the gate to Arcadia, but he hardly paid it any mind.
Each track ran to a huge airlock, so that it was as if a crown of airlocks surrounded the enormous steel sphere. A mad scientist, Aran thought, would have been delighted with the visual effect.
There were another dozen passengers in the train car, along with Aran and Ulla, but there were still seats to spare and he'd made sure to sit next to the German reporter.
"That's the inner gate chamber," he told Ulla. "It's a hundred meter sphere of steel. Strong enough to survive a nuclear blast, I've been told. It's maintained in a state of vacuum, and the actual gate is generated inside."
"Right," she said, nervously, and Aran took the chance —and the opportunity— to put his hand on hers. She smiled briefly at the reassurance, which made Aran smile in turn. But the truth was, the Tannhauser gate was uncanny and he couldn't blame Ulla for being a bit scared.
The airlock in front of the car just ahead of them cycled open, admitted the car, and cycled closed.
"Our turn next," Aran said.
Ulla just nodded, and gripped his hand more tightly.
The airlock opened in front of them, and the car rolled forward on its rails. There was a clanking sound as it crossed from the outside rails to the rails inside the airlock, and then the airlock closed.
The sound of the airlock's vacuum pumps was loud but not overwhelming. But still, no one in the train car said a word. The airlock pumps finished their job and the inner doors opened, and he could see the actual Tannhauser gate.
The Tannhauser gate looked superficially like a 10 meter wide mirrored sphere, save that whatever it was reflecting was somewhere else. Or maybe it was the reflection of a reflection... or perhaps an infinite series of reflections. If one looked at it out of the corner of one's eye, patterns of light that seemed hauntingly coherent seemed to crawl across the surface of the sphere. Aran had heard that some people claimed to see faces, or symbols... though he never had. Looking at the gate for more than a moment tended to make him dizzy though, as if the his eye —or his mind— could not quite process what it was seeing.
"It's beautiful," breathed Ulla, still holding his hand.
"Yes," he said.
The car slid forward, into the perfect, incomprehensible sphere.
There was a brief feeling of tension, intense and almost unbearable, but over after only a few seconds. And then the Tannhauser gate was behind him, and he was looking at
the inside of another huge steel sphere, none too different from the one they had just been in. But this one was better lit, and the structure of the elevated railways was different. And it was more than seven light-years away from where they had just been.
"Welcome to Arcadia," said the official. At least, Aran was pretty sure it was an official. The man was wearing a loose, red and orange patterned shirt and baggy shorts. Other than a modern Japanese data terminal, the man looked like a prosperous tourist in some tropical resort. On the other hand, Aran had expected something of the sort. Ulla was more surprised.
"The UEN requires all visitors to record their names and public identification numbers on this terminal," the man said, speaking to a gathered crowd of about fifty passengers. "You can do that if you like, or not. But if you don't, you may not be allowed to return to Earth. Allowed by the UEN, that is. We don't care either way. I'm sorry to say that there's just the one terminal, so if you ladies and gentlemen would form a single line, we can get you registered and on your way. Anyone who wants to bypass this registration can proceed through the doors behind me."
"Is this some sort of joke?" Ulla asked, "or a trick? A trap to get gullible fools in trouble with local authorities? I bet there's a huge fine for anyone who believes that line."
"No... no, that's not the way the Arcadians work," Aran said. "They don't really care who comes in. I've heard speculation that they have some first rate facial recognition systems aimed at us, but that's only to make sure that certain specific people are noticed if they try to come in. Otherwise, as far as I can tell, they don't care."
"But that's crazy. Anyone could just come here and..."
"That's just it. Anyone can, but then what? There's nothing the government does for the people here. There's not even a system of IDs here. No ID cards, and no central ID recognition system either."
"No ID? But how can that work? How do they keep people from cheating on their social welfare receipts, or exceeding their quota for educational services. Or medical care?"