“Rare earths?”
Snow grunted. “Yeah. Only thing is, rare earths ain’t. Depending on where you are. Something out there’s worth some startup, though. Look at the height of that tower feeding the smelters.” He drew the triangulation of the solar concentrator’s height and shadow, then punched in trigonometry based on standard heights for the warehouses. A number appeared. They all gave a low whistle. “Plus or minus, either way, if they went in legal, they did this fast. You either need big payback quick, or a guaranteed long haul to make that investment worthwhile. And no overhead.”
They looked at each other. Snow was old and good. He was also old and—old school, to put it politely. No overhead was a euphemism. It pretty much meant slave labor.
They asked him some questions, but Chief Snow was done. “Told you what you need. Your job to figure it out.” He stumped off down the hall. They began waking up geologists. One of them slipped out, and woke up Renner himself.
Bonneville, New Utah
Zia stared at the ceiling with red-rimmed eyes. She was too cold, or she was too hot. She couldn’t decide. She threw off the blankets, and shivered in the breeze that soughed gently through the carven shutters. The muezzin lulled her to sleep. The muezzin woke her up. The soothing white noise of the fountain trickling in the courtyard beyond her window was drowned out by the plunk of a faucet dripping two floors above on the opposite side of the compound. Marul was a comfort. Marul was an impossible burden. Her children were dead. Her children were alive. She had grieved passed caring. If she could not find them, she would die.
She grilled Ollie daily for another detail; another sign. She walked Marul through her steps again and again, until she herself walked the path through the early morning frost. She remembered her own role on that morning. She arose. Ollie arose. Hugo arose. The little ones rose. Again and again they sat to table in the last breakfast of her mind.
Hugo left to make morning pickups from the warehouse. In a jocular display of big-brotherly good temper, Deela and the boys went along for the ride. Ollie left to open the market stall that served as office, grocery, and teahouse. Zia left to fight her way through the traffic and trash; dead dogs and severed signposts that pointed to the dreary procurement ledgers at Orcutt Land and Mining.
As dawn broke, exhausted by her nightly march from home to office; warehouse to tea stall; daily routine to the horror on Philosopher’s Way, Zia finally drifted off. Doves cooed in the eaves. Sparrow cheeps and kitchen clanking echoed in the courtyard. The Stirling thrummed with a whisper of vibration that the Lads had been unable to fully banish. Good Lads. Ollie had hired them off the loading docks.
Zia sat up, her head full of echoes and clanking and thrumming and loading docks and all the other sounds and smells of a warehouse. Their warehouse. Number 27-A. Mostly used for security equipment storage. Handy to the market supply bays in Lane 26, and also to the guarded, leased commercial storage on Lane 28, with rear bays that loaded directly onto the SunRail spur. Location was everything, said Ollie. People need to be able to chat with you, anywhere, all the time. Put your office in the market. Store your equipment where you’ll need it most. Save money. Save time.
It suddenly occurred to Zia that she’d lost track of that. Really, she didn’t really know who she’d worked for, at the end when OLaM had changed hands yet another time. Just the general meeting; the announcement of a consortium buyout; but no transfer of property and equipment since they remained registered to the company. Just a minor aside, from her administrative standpoint—the movement of durable goods from TCM Lane 29, on the opposite side of the tracks, into the leased commercial lane. Most of Orcutt’s stores were held on-site, but TCM had warehoused one lot in transit pending movement out to the mines. Months had passed since they’d sold off the claim, and they wanted to clear their warehouse. She’d been on the run, and signed the work order on the fly one morning, in the middle of a mountain of other paperwork. The warehouseman already had the cipher keys.
“Just sign here, please, ma’am,” he’d said, in a bit of a fluster. “An’ me an’ dese pelas get going.” She could see his coveralls. She could see his cap. She could see his calloused hands and his sacks-of-melons muscles and his wraparound shades. She scrubbed at her memory, but she couldn’t see his name, and she couldn’t see his face. Authorization for six loaders, two FLIVRs, two cargo handling teams. To transfer contents TCM Warehouse 29-C to Leased Warehouse 28-A. Lessee: Van Zandt Mining. She’d drawn a stroke through Van Zandt, wrote OLaM, initialed, and signed. It now occurred to her that maybe the clerical error was right the first time.
Zia rose, and dressed, and woke Michael.
Founder’s Retreat, Oquirr foothills, New Utah
It was a gala affair, and Jeri LaGrange was supremely pleased that she’d been invited. It was a working invitation of course. Five hundred years ago, Founder’s Day had begun as a solemn procession from the Tabernacle in Saint George to the Founder’s Retreat in the Oquirr foothills, where the Saints would sing a sunset prayer of thanks for the bounty spread before them in the valley below. Now, the Temple procession kicked off a parade, the singing kicked off a city-wide festival, and the Founder’s Day Ball was the annual event.
Crowd and traffic control always required weeks of preparation. Given current tensions, security coordination had become an absolute nightmare, particularly since the Retreat itself no longer fell directly under Zone administrative control. Finding it increasingly difficult to subsidize the expense of maintaining Retreat properties year-round, the True Church had found an ideal tenant in the person of Lillith Van Zandt, Margravine Batavia, who pledged her household delighted to give over Retreat facilities as needed to continue tradition. To Captain LaGrange’s immense frustration, the Margravine’s security team showed no evidence whatsoever of sharing in that delight.
Four security organs managed the chaos. Saint George civil police were fully occupied with city traffic management and crowd control. LaGrange’s own TCM Zone security company was called out in force to control Zone access, secure the Temple, and patrol installation boundaries. The Maxroy’s Purchase True Church Militant Saints Battalion served a ceremonial role as the leaders and official escort of the processional parade, whence it marched on in orchestrated fanfare to man formal posts on the Retreat’s approaches. It was the highlight of their Mission on New Utah. TCM Contract Security provided backup to everyone, filling gaps, patching holes, and providing rotational relief so that most could nip in for a bit of the festivities. The Margravine’s generosity had extended to bearing the expense of maintaining household security via the offices of her private bodyguards. They were an odd bunch: professional, tough, inflexible, and exceedingly visible. The overbearing presence of their bulging Plate was only slightly mitigated by the Delft blue of the household livery donned for the occasion.
LaGrange’s favorite place was not the airy opulence of the ballroom, nor the lofty sweep of the grand staircase and reception hall. Rather, it was the cramped bustle of the cloak room, rendered fabulous by the bright splashes of satins and sabers; gild and glitter that adorned the outerwear and inner linings of capes and greatcoats; kepis and saucer hats worn once a year, on this day only, by every institution on New Utah. Colonels and Primates; Guild Masters and Police Chiefs; Surgeons and Attorneys General; junior officers, senior community leaders, and the Saint George Mayor himself rubbed arms and twisted shoulders as frantic ladies scanned tags and issued chits in a hopeless effort to stem the tide of fabric slithering across the counter. It would be a long night, most of it spent checking in and out with security posts and security counterparts, but the cloakroom was a magical snapshot of what it was all about.
Colchis had seen the phenomenon before, but never failed to be impressed. Lillith Van Zandt fairly glowed with charm. Whomever she greeted—her hands in a warm clasp, her couture hairstyle betrayed by one floating wisp, her smile jovial as she made a conspiratorial half-bob of favored recognition, her Delft blue sash sparkl
ing in both the icy cluster clipped below her shoulder and the depths of her periwinkle eyes—felt drawn in to a private circle of exquisite friendship, when in reality, each was only one of hundreds plowing past in the receiving line.
The Margravine graced the role of Guest of Honor, each citizen handed forward by the Mayor and her husband with an accompanied name and position uttered by the ceremonial aide-de-camp appointed from the Saints Battalion. Trippe looked the part and played it well, back straight, regalia pressed, voice clear without shouting. She greeted each with no trace of condescension; as if genuinely surprised by joy at the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet water reclamation department heads, gunnery sergeants, and cheese mongers.
Lillith’s smile broke like dawn as Barthes approached. “Colchis! How wonderful! I’d no idea that anyone else was here!” Anyone else being a euphemism for anyone else like us. Anyone else from Court. Which Barthes knew was bollocks on two counts. Firstly, Saint George was by now fairly crawling with unofficial advance teams of every description, most of them holed up in the same less-than-satisfactory hotel, but what could you do? Secondly, there was very little that Lillith Van Zandt did not know, if she cared to, and the composition of the advance team for the accession delegation would certainly be something that she would want to know.
“Dame Lillith! Imagine my joy!” He swept a hand to encompass the holographic plinths that lined the stairway and dotted the room beyond, forming convenient conversation points. “Your usual flair! It’s what brings you here, I suppose?”
The projections had an eerie physicality. Some of the nearer plinths sparkled with crystals; others looped images of working machinery dating back to DaVinci. Notably absent was any reference to asteroid mining.
“Oh, yes!” she gushed. “And all done with local technology! Isn’t it divine? The Mayor is quite enthusiastic about an exchange! She’s promised some exquisite examples of opal meerschaum folk art! ” Meaning a cultural exchange; specifically, a curatorial exchange with the Imperial Museum of Minerals and Mining, of which the Margravine of Batavia was a noted patroness.
“Really Colchis, we must chat when I’m done with the line. We need to get our people together to go through your archives!” Meaning the New Utah archives. Meaning to establish precedent for what was, and what was not, allowable portrayal of technology.
Which, thought Colchis, should have been done well before I ever entered this receiving line. My, my Lillith. What are you up to this time?
It was autumn crisp on the evening mountain. Clegg shivered. To Tanith skin, the brisk air was Siberian, and to Tanith eyes, the valley view was grey. Rather, Clegg’s body shivered. Clegg himself was not acutely aware of physical sensations. Like breathing, they existed somewhere in a vague background noise of physiology. Notions like discomfort had no easy purchase in his mind. As the light faded, and the torch lights that lined the processional Way winked on far below, Clegg’s attention was occupied by his eyes and ears, not his gooseflesh. While those organs did their jobs, his mind wandered, pondering the utterly asinine bullshit that meant he was outside wearing shadowflage, not inside wearing Delft.
The bullshit had a name, and its name was Major Johannes Trippe. Clegg had no time for Trippe, because Clegg had no time for pomposity, heroes, or heroics. Heroes were for the most part nave, bombastic rogues who failed to coordinate their actions and called attention to themselves. This made them difficult and dangerous to protect, if you worked for them, and dangerous to be around, if you worked with them. You accomplished the mission by focusing on it and training people to task, not by encouraging heroics. Heroics just got people killed. Take guard mount that evening. There’d stood Trippe, the pompous ass, blarting on about proud traditions and The Saints Battalion and The Mission on New Utah Making Men out of Maxroy’s Purchase Boys. Get on with it, thought Clegg. Quit filling their heads with tripe, or they’ll wind up wearing it just like that boy down below.
Which was why he was out here in the cold, listening. His contract guaranteed the personal security of Dame Van Zandt, her household, and her guests. Trippe-the-hero could bluster away all he liked about Clegg’s so-called mission post beginning at the mansion’s doors, but in practical terms, that’s where Clegg’s brief ended. If Clegg let an external threat pass through those, he hadn’t done his job. If Dame Van Zandt was threatened by her own staff; by her own guests, that was her problem. Clegg’s problem was that Trippe’s brats were uselessly manning fixed posts while visions of sugarplums danced in their heads. If some Mormon-tea-addled guest went after the Margravine Batavia with a cocktail toothpick, the household goons in Delft would handle it. Clegg was concerned with forces rather more sinister.
Clegg’s philosophy was simple. People who shot at you were your enemy. Things that tried to eat you were your enemy. Those that did neither were, for the moment, not your enemy, until they got pissed off or hungry. That pretty much summed up life on Tanith. The only way out of that vicious state of affairs was to buy your way out—which, for Harlan Clegg, was never going to happen unless he got paid out on this contract. He vaguely imagined an alternative reality where people just got on with their lives, whatever that meant. It was hard to picture, since he’d never seen it, but it lurked back there in some racial memory of a home and a farm and domesticated animals. Nothing drastic. Nothing idyllic. Long days of work and short nights of sleep just fine. Just a bit less kill-or-be-killed.
So he’d appreciate it, thank you very much, if half-assed heroes would quit complicating his business, act moderately professional, and leave his people the fuck alone. Like that Ollie Azhad character. His lads were good. Shitty business about his kids, but there you were. Trippe had this fucked-up notion that Azhad needed a reminder of who was running the show. Clegg wasn’t so sure. Maybe that cowboy shit worked out here—who knew where the fuck they were?—but on Tanith pissing off a guy with eyes in every neighborhood was not an attractive path to career success. Or that TC Zone Captain. No drama. Just kept those dicks-for-brains kids from fucking up in some wise spectacular, which is about as good as it got with amateurs.
Branches snapped. Clegg concentrated. On Tanith, things ate you if you couldn’t figure out how big and where they were. On the subject of Azhad, thought Clegg, it’s that fucking Sauron dinosaur. All brawn, no brains, like something crawled out of a fucking swamp. Clegg listened. Three people, one big—that would be the Sauron—two average, moving away, downhill towards the FLVR pool. Off to spike the fireworks. Clegg shrugged. That was Trippe’s call, for better or for worse. Not his problem if Trippe’s nasty little buddies played at heroes—at least not until these lunatics pissed off enough people that they figured out who to come after to get even.
All the same, it was a shitty business about those kids.
North Badlands, Borrego Springs (Swenson’s Valley), New Utah
Sargon struck. If the swarms of humans meeting on the mountain were nothing to do with these vermin in the sand hills, there was no reason not to. They had no interest to defend. They might even be allied. Sargon’s orders to Enheduanna were simple. “Return them where you found them. Have them muster if she speaks the truth. Kill them if she lies.” With that, Courter and Quinn’s incarceration abruptly ended, and they were swept back up the trail they’d descended by Porters, Runners, and Warriors moving at the double-time.
Then Sargon struck, in the late afternoon, when half the camp was blinded by the solar field of light. Sinkholes appeared in the barracks floors. Chittering creatures poured forth like roaches from night-time drains. Half-dressed men sleeping off the night shift dove from windows and doors, sweeping fire behind them, running their weapons dry, abandoning the buildings to horrific-looking six-legged rat-like things with nasty teeth and voracious appetites. The monstrous sand miner reeled and waved as cutting beams severed its primary arm. It toppled to one side, the operator dangling from the cabin, stranded seven stories high. Guards boiled up from everywhere, shouting and running and firing until dust de
vils burst from the sand at their feet, when they grunted and died, their brief, last memory a high-pitched whine. The heavy weapons platoon fell back on the smelters. Most of them were burned alive. The cooks formed a valiant but doomed defensive line, shielded with skillets and brandishing butcher knives.
It was over before it started. Within the hour, Farmers were demarcating toxic zones, and Miners were swarming over the concentrator tower, calculating lines-of-sight. Cleanup teams were searching every facility, with Accountants to assess and tally anything of value for salvage. Assay teams were already working their way through piles of crystal samples from the smelters. By nightfall, the poisoned ground would be vitrified into an inert, multi-hued sea of glass. By morning, the disassembly squads with their legions of miniscule, four-armed helpers would depart, leaving wind and sand and glass and gutted buildings.
Perhaps it was providence that Hand Four were descended from the Household Grip Lagash’s Own. Perhaps it was only to be expected: these wastes lay in a desolate corner of Lagash’s old ar. The Grip was Sargon’s now, but they’d had their history from the ancient Keeper: who better to know their lines? And with it, they’d heard from Lagash himself about the strange conversations between the human Master, the manna-eyed one, and Enheduanna. “Because,” doddered the old Keeper with over-dramatic flair, “Lord Sargon would know the enemy.” Unmoved by Lagash’s voice, inwardly they yawned.
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