by Lucas Bale
‘I know where to go,’ Jordi whispered.
‘I know you do,’ his father said and hugged him tight. ‘So take us there.’
Jordi began to run again, ducking under branches and climbing over fallen trees. They all followed. He couldn’t remember how long they’d been running. It seemed like all night.
And still they ran.
CHAPTER TWO
Pushing Tin
THE DREAM was always the same.
It began with Shepherd gazing down at a small boy, who stood in swirling dust on the outskirts of an unfamiliar border township. The place wore the desperate facade of every other feral backwater near the Wall, but behind the faded signage and weathered wood it was barren, recusant and hopeless. A lawless outpost on the edge of humanity’s conscience. Far enough from the Core to be considered free. Yet simmering beneath the illusion, there was something familiar about it. Something he could never quite catch, like clutching for a leaf in the wind.
For years he had tried to delude himself that it was just a dream; he was never one for superstition. But eventually he’d come to believe it was more than that.
The small boy was him.
This time it was no different. Behind a bowed wooden fence around a dry grass field, a stallion cantered in the wind, its mane pitching and flowing. The blazing sun beat down hard and hot. The boy’s willowy legs bore ragged shorts, and a flailing, striped t-shirt hung off his bony shoulders. The t-shirt had once belonged to someone he cherished, and it still carried their familiar scent, suffusing it with an intangible sadness and guilt. He held his hands over his eyes to shield them from the sun and dirt, and studied the horse as it moved gracefully across the cracked earth. The stallion continued its games for a while, kicking up dust and stone, and then it stopped, dropped its long head to the arid grass, and began to search out something to chew. As it did, the boy could feel its big black eyes watching him.
All he wanted was to ride that horse. The desire made him heedless of the danger. Someone had already told him, he knew, that it was way too big for him. He couldn’t remember who. It was an angry animal, he’d been told. Unwilling and stubborn.
Kindred spirits shared an understanding.
There always had to be a loser.
He moved carefully towards the beast, all the time whispering to it and hunkering low. When he reached it, on tiptoes, he leaned in and stroked its neck, feathered his cheek with its rough hair. Its skin was warm, and he could feel the huge animal’s sonorous heart pumping blood through its powerful body.
Slowly, using the fence, he climbed. Then, in one swift movement, he slid onto the stallion’s back and grabbed its mane in two drawn fists, knuckles white. Startled, the animal began to gallop and buck. It thundered around the field, the boy holding on with all the strength his scraggy arms could muster. For seemingly endless seconds, the sweetness of fear and pride tingled in the boy’s heart. But he couldn’t hold on forever; the stallion was too strong. After only scant seconds, he was thrown.
He was always thrown.
Shepherd’s eyes flicked open.
Disoriented, he glanced quickly around. His face was damp from sweat and he was panting. His mouth was dry; blood throbbed in his head. His eyes gradually adjusted to the muted light cast by the stars, which seeped through the sole window. Just above him, slid between two straps on the underside of the roof of his bunk, was his hunting knife—an arm’s length away as he slept. The tension bled from his muscles as his mind cleared and he remembered where he was: within the comfortable familiarity of his quarters aboard Soteria. His home.
He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and rubbed away the sweat and tiredness. Then he swung his legs over the edge of the bunk, reached for the tin cup on the table beside him and tipped back the desalinated water in one long swallow. It was cool and soothing on the back of his throat.
He could hear the gentle hum of the ion drives—Soteria was still hurtling through the tunnel. Shepherd glanced at the readout on the wall above his small corner desk. He’d been asleep for an hour. Enough time left before breach to sleep more, and he needed it, but he would never drift off again. He never did once he woke from the dream.
The tunnels always left him stale and tired, and the dream only came to him within them. As if something deep within those subspace passageways was an unknown catalyst for the nightmares of the human subconscious. He pulled on a jacket from the chair at his desk and shambled to the cockpit, craving a mug of hotleaf.
The airlock door to the cockpit wheezed as it slid open, breaking its airtight seal. Shepherd stood in the doorway for a moment and watched the stars blur into a wash of white and blue as Soteria pushed through the tunnel. The desolate emptiness beyond the tunnels was as foreign and malignant to him as whatever lay beyond the Wall. He had no desire to explore either. Some things should remain forbidden. Humanity didn’t need to know everything. He didn’t need the Second Concession to see that.
The preachers whispered from the shadows that there had once been a single planet with human life on it, and that life then had been truly free. Maybe it had been that way once, before the tunnels had been mapped, and before the Second Cataclysm, but Shepherd wondered how cramped that place must have felt. All of humanity shoehorned onto one, tiny planet. The very concept was foreign to him; the tunnels had become such an entrenched facet of humanity’s existence that to imagine a time before them was virtually impossible.
As Shepherd settled into his chair, he scanned the instrument panel. The cockpit was bathed in that familiar pastel glow that radiated from the streaks of blue and white on the tunnel’s rim. The swirling iridescence soothed him. He saw no sense in wasting the ship’s energy—and, truth be known, he’d come to appreciate the softness of the light—so the only other illumination came from the flickering displays.
Although each system ticked within acceptable limits, Shepherd felt a fresh bud of anxiety forming. The tunnel stresses on Soteria’s hull were considerable, and once they were out of subspace—and after the systems had cycled through the processes to acclimate to Herse’s system—they would still need to punch through Herse’s upper atmosphere. Soteria was limping towards a long overdue recondition, and Shepherd could ill afford complications.
He leaned over to the nav system. A single destination was recorded alongside the tunnel breach co-ordinates, and a holographic projection of the system unfurled and hovered above the panel with the sublight route traced in red. The Herse system was made up of three gas and ice giants and a clutch of diminutive moons, all of which slowly cycled through their relative orbits within the display. The township of Herse, on the far side of the only habitable rock in the system, was in the thrall of a gaseous mass of whorled chestnut and crimson—which made dusk the only beautiful thing about the place.
Shepherd pulled up the Customs Tunnel Licence, almost subconsciously, to check his authorisations. Every licence he’d ever applied for would still be stored within the system, if he cared to look, but they would all be stripped of the tunnel breach co-ordinates and therefore useless for navigation. Which was precisely the intention—to control access to superluminal travel and restrict free movement of citizens. Any tampering with the nav system, Shepherd knew well enough, would result in immediate banishment beyond the Wall—the Third Concession.
If it were discovered.
Some of the Concessions had workarounds, and the Bazaar demanded flexibility. The border space near the Wall nurtured smugglers like Shepherd. What the Core could not provide, the Bazaar generously supplied instead. For a fee.
A scattering of townships and communities were spread out around Herse, in the steppes of a mountain range that stretched halfway round the moon. Shepherd’s interest lay in just one of them: a small hamlet called Panis. In a concealed shadow of Soteria’s hold, behind a few dozen drums of unrefined oil, sat a cargo of medicine that Shepherd would sell to the hamlet for a profit—albeit a meagre one. Enough to keep him going. Enough to give
him time to find a few more contracts for the rest of the season and, hopefully, to service Soteria.
Of course, it wasn’t a cargo he held an official licence for.
He took another sip of the steaming hotleaf, enjoying the burn on his tongue, and turned his mind to the next contract. Ideally, he wanted a cargo from Herse. Perhaps even passengers. If not, there were a few busy communities he could tap to see if there was any work to be had.
Shepherd bore mixed feelings towards the busier settlements. House Rules varied by community, and some were easier to deal with than others. Thieves, brigands and hucksters plied their nefarious trade everywhere—and always would. From what the preachers said, crime had existed for as long as man had cultivated desires. That made sense to Shepherd, but preachers unnerved him. Their devotion to blind faith was alien to him and to everything the schoolteachers from the Core had taught him. Human history, short and beleaguered as it was, no longer permitted belief in a divinity—too much senseless blood had been shed in humanity’s past, they said. This was the First Concession, the foundation of the Consulate Magistratus and the governance of its Republic.
And whilst Shepherd sometimes saw the truth in the preachers’ words about freedom and hope, he also knew that violence and faith were intertwined, as he’d been taught. He carried a pistol and had taken the lives of men with it, but each time he handled it, he felt a small part of him inside grow darker. Whatever faith men had, whether it was in money or freedom, it was always wed to violence.
For a while he sat, sipping the hotleaf and thinking, until the nav system klaxon unceremoniously hauled him back to the cockpit. Soteria was about to breach. He ran a final check of the systems and took hold of the freighter’s controls.
Soteria was no beast. She was agile and fleet-footed when called upon, but too often Shepherd encountered her intemperate disposition. Like any vessel with more seasons behind than in front, her mood slid more often towards cantankerous than predictable. He didn’t pull in enough to source himself a top-of-the-line vessel but, secretly, he wasn’t sure he would part with Soteria even if he could. Like most freighter-tramps, he’d grown attached to his partner. It wasn’t an unnatural way to feel about a thing that was both home and livelihood, especially for men who ran them alone. Freighters developed idiosyncrasies, characters.
Sometimes, Shepherd would even talk to her.
When Shepherd first acquired Soteria—way back when, and from a man he didn’t mind leaving in a gutter—he had spent every last coin on making her as fast as hell and untraceable. Maybe he could have spent more elsewhere, and maybe even a little more recently. Because with any temperamental bitch came tantrums, and lately Shepherd could feel her temper fraying.
As he took the controls and together they breached the tunnel, he could feel the vibrations of an old problem returning to haunt him: a fluctuation within the avionics circuitry. Of course, he’d once had the chance to get it repaired—he’d even had the scratch in his pocket. But the unfamiliar weight of that affluence was something he hadn’t been ready to relinquish straight away. He’d known it was a mistake, even then. And he was paying the price now.
As the warning light blinked red on the control panel, and another alarm pealed, he knew his stay in Herse was about to be extended. Either he’d have to fix the problem himself or, if he was lucky, there’d be someone more qualified on the ground. He hoped no other problems would rear up during the landing. It would be a rough ride down, but that was payback, he supposed.
He drew the harness over his shoulders and around his waist and clipped himself in. He cinched the straps until they were tight. I’m sorry, girl.
He gripped the controls tightly and his hands dampened. As the tunnel breached, Soteria’s nav system devolved flight control to the main systems. Shepherd felt the ship begin to buck and pitch as Soteria vented her fury through his hands. The muscles in his arms twitched as he wrestled the freighter towards the sublight path.
His chest tightened as the controls shuddered in his grip.
Another warning light blinked red and Shepherd angled Soteria port side to compensate for the confused avionics systems, then reduced thrust from one of the starboard nacelles. She yawed and rolled so he compensated again. Behind him, deep within the bowels of the propulsion system, he heard something work loose and carom around the drive room. He shut the airlock door to the cockpit.
‘I said I was sorry,’ he muttered. ‘That not enough for you?’
Soteria answered with another savage yaw to port. He fed her more power and punched in fine adjustments to the avionics systems.
And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was finished. Tantrum over; equilibrium. She evened out, fell into a gentle arc around the anonymous gas giant, and powered towards Herse on the other side. Shepherd sighed slowly, closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back in his chair. This time, he promised her, he’d get it fixed. No matter what the cost.
When he opened his eyes again, Herse had begun to float into view from its hiding place behind the leviathan sphere of crimson flame. He never tired of gazing at a planet that could sustain life. He’d always felt that the atmosphere of a planet—when infused with oxygen and nitrogen and whatever else the terraformers did to make places habitable—appeared intensely wild and beautiful from above. Framed by the stars and the deep blue and black of space, the maelstrom of vivid colour left him breathless.
But beauty too, he had found, was so often wed to violence. As he broke left and poured on thrust, readying to punch through the upper atmosphere, Soteria again began to roil, the turbulence slinging her from side to side. At least this time she behaved and responded to his commands. But even so, Shepherd was relieved when at last they dropped through the final layers of the atmosphere and Soteria slowly began to level out and relax. He brought her down low and easy and just above the sea to cool her down, carving a wake of white froth behind him.
Herse was a coastal township that stretched back towards dense forest. This time of year, it would be knee-deep in winter. Beyond the leagues of grey-green woodland lay an immense massif of obsidian and slate-grey rock, shrouded in glacial silver and blue névé. Turbid, charcoal cloud seemed to permanently veil the summits. Panis lay well away from even the thinning outskirts of Herse. It was a small community—perhaps a hundred people. The prospects of picking up a mechanic, or at least someone handy with a wrench, would be reasonable only in Herse proper.
The port itself was some way out of town, on a natural shelf that jutted out from the mountainside and then broke off sharply down into the sea. A single track led from the Port into the main township, and the Praetor had licensed a shuttle service that, Shepherd knew, was operated by an old terraformer with a gammy leg. He had never known the man’s name, but the shuttle had always looked in need of a mechanic’s love. Maybe you could do wonders with spit and tape.
Shepherd manoeuvred Soteria upwards and into an arc, easing the stern into a gentle quarter turn, then leaned forward towards the radio.
‘Herse Port, this is freighter Soteria, requesting a landing platform.’
The static on the radio hissed for a few seconds, then crackled to life. ‘Freighter Soteria, this is Herse Port. Landing Platform Seven, then proceed directly to Customs to file your licence and nav data.’
‘Received, Herse Port. Soteria out.’
In the end, he thought, sometimes you had no option but to take what was on offer.
CHAPTER THREE
Herse
SHEPHERD STEPPED off the ramp leading down from Soteria’s hold, the thick fur collar of his longcoat hitched up and the buckles tightly fastened. From the warmth of Soteria’s embrace he emerged into a hostile, frigid wind that stripped the skin from his face. His pistol was strapped to his thigh, a necessary burden. Most communities bordering the Wall tolerated the overt carrying of weaponry, and in those that did not, concealment was usually enough. But strangers to Herse would be foolish to walk through the township without protection.
Despite the glacial cold, the Port still functioned. Shepherd could only just pick out the feeble glow of the main hangar’s interior lights seeping through the mist of tumbling snow. Beyond the hangar, at the perimeter of the Port, was a border of flashing orange strobes that marked where the cliff’s edge fell away into the raging sea below. Each of the landing platforms was outlined with further strobes, which flashed red and green intermittently.
Two other freighters stood on the adjacent platforms. Both were in the process of being loaded. Tractor units, driven by hunched shadows shrouded in heavy longcoats and goggles to protect them from the spindrift, deposited cargo into the loading bays. Behind them, the slate-grey rock of the mountain’s flank climbed upwards and melted into the charcoal fog high above.
A tall figure, bent against the wind and thinly veiled by the swirling mist, stalked the circumference of one of the freighters, carrying out pre-flight checks. A freighter-tramp, Shepherd thought, making to leave. The man moved efficiently, but Shepherd noticed an urgency in each movement. Suddenly, as if he was aware Shepherd was watching him, the tall man turned and peered through the mist. For a moment he stared at Shepherd, then shook his head grimly. He glanced sideways towards the main hangar and then back again, before jabbing a finger towards Soteria. He didn’t wait for a response before he went back to checking his ship.
What the hell was that about?
Shepherd turned and thumped the switch to raise Soteria’s loading ramp, then keyed in the code to seal her. He gazed at his vessel for a moment, his eyes tracing the smooth, grey lines leading to the cockpit. She always looked so graceful to him, settled into her landing stance. Like a feline on its haunches, but arched forward, tensed and ready to pounce. His hand lingered on the bulkhead next to the keypad for the ramp as he considered the tall man’s curious behaviour. The outer rim was full of crazies. You’re the only one I trust in a place like this, old girl. ‘Let’s get you some attention,’ he whispered into the wind. ‘Show you how much I love you.’