Haze and the Hammer of Darkness

by L. E. Modesitt Jr.

  “Where are you off to now?” asked Sung.

  “Another river reading. Then I’ll check on the repair shop over on South Bluff.”

  “You’re wasting your time on the river. It’s got to be geothermal.”

  “I’m taking full water chem readings this time. That should tell me. Then I can compare them to the geothermal composition. If they come close to matching, you’ll be right.” He wheeled the bike out of the office and down the corridor.

  From the FSS building he rode down to the tram station, where he folded the bike, boarded the tram, and rode out to the Red Cliffs station. Then he rode to the Middleton wash path and down it to the parkway, where he got off the bike and walked down to the river.

  Roget took out the monitor, then flicked the sampler fiberline across the water, letting it sink and ride some before reeling it in.

  After making sure that he had the data, he walked downstream to where there was a narrow footbridge over the river. He crossed and walked back upstream, but stopped short of a point opposite where he’d taken the first sample. He repeated the process, then reeled in the line and slipped the monitor back into its belt case.

  He almost reached the bridge when a wave of dizziness washed over him. He staggered to the bridge and grasped the railing, steadying himself.

  Then the blackness rose, blotting out everything.

  15

  18 MARIS 1811 P. D.

  Once they left the Ministry of Education and Culture, Lyvia walked straight toward the central square of Skeptos, striding past the building she had said housed the Ministry of Transportation.

  “We’re not going there?” asked Roget. “Isn’t that the Transport Ministry?”

  “No. That’s just offices and the few administrators necessary to keep track of matters. You won’t see anything useful there. We’re going to the central subtrans center for all of Socrates. I would assume that you’re interested in the technology and operation of our transport system.”

  “You assume correctly.” As the amber outside light flickered slightly, Roget glanced skyward, but there were no clouds and no aircraft visible beneath the omnipresent gray haze, not that he expected aircraft any longer. “Do all towns and cities have access to subtrans?”

  “Towns, cities, and villages. Either to a local system or a regional system, depending on a number of factors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Distance and imputed total costs, for starters.”

  “What if the costs will always be prohibitive?”

  “Then … there’s no town, unless it’s a protected recreational area like the Machiavelli Peninsula. The costs there are paid by taxes levied as a benefit on all inhabitants.”

  “Just like that?”

  “No. The House of Tribunes had to approve it, as did the House of Denial.”

  “With a House of Denial, I’m surprised anything gets funded.”

  “Many things don’t, but the worthwhile ones do, sooner or later. We don’t exempt politicians from the libel, slander, and misrepresentation laws. In fact, the penalties are higher for them.”

  “And people run for office?” Roget’s words came out sardonically.

  “A different kind of people.”

  Were people really that different? Again, Roget had his doubts.

  When they reached the walkway that ran along the northern edge of the square, Lyvia turned eastward. At the next corner she turned south. Before long, the two were descending the ramp down to the subtrans concourses.

  Roget wondered where they were headed, because the tunnel was clearly leading down to the subtrans concourses, and he didn’t see any other tunnels, and he didn’t recall seeing any on the way into Skeptos. He assumed that there must be an entrance to wherever they were headed somewhere off the concourses. Instead, Lyvia walked to the side of the tunnel just short of the point where the larger tunnel for the local access joined the regional tunnel. There, she came to a halt. The section of one of the curved side panels where she stood looked slightly different to Roget, although he could have sworn it hadn’t a moment before. As he approached, an oval area glowed, then slid aside.

  “Come on,” said Lyvia.

  Roget stepped through the doorway with her, noting that almost no one looked in their direction. The metal sections closed, leaving them within a niche no more than three meters by two. After a moment, the back of the niche, also metallic composite, opened.

  A muscular blocky man stood in the short arched tunnel, waiting for them, but how he had known when exactly to expect them, Roget didn’t know, except that it had to be something Lyvia had done, even though he had sensed absolutely no communications and no energy flows.

  The stocky man wore a singlesuit of royal blue, without a vest, and his dark hair was less than a centimeter long. “Welcome to the subtrans operations center, Agents Rholyn and Roget. I’m Tee Tayler. Please follow me.” Although his words were heavily accented, Roget could understand them.

  Less than thirty meters along the tunnel, Tayler turned through an archway on the left and led them into a chamber some ten meters wide and five deep. The only other person in the space was a woman seated behind a console set some three meters back from the wall—on which was displayed a floor-to-ceiling projected image.

  Their escort gestured to the wall screen. “This provides an overview of the Socrates continental system, as well as the deep-tubes to Thula and to Patagonn.”

  Deep-tubes? Roget stepped closer. The map represented the continent. From what he could tell, there were three separate systems. The red lines represented local subtransit; the blue ones regional links; and the dark green ones the deep-tubes under the oceans. He mentally calculated. Assuming the map was to scale, Socrates was over nine thousand klicks from east to west at its greatest distance, and a good four from south to north.

  “How much of the southern peninsula is ice-covered?”

  “None of it,” replied Lyvia. “Because of the shields, we get more even heat and light diffusion, and Dubiety’s axial tilt is only about seven degrees.”

  “I know it’s not transit, but … ocean stagnation?”

  “We’re closer to the sun, and the oceans are shallower,” said Lyvia. “That provides more solar tidal movement than one might otherwise expect.”

  “But not enough for life to evolve originally.”

  “Life evolves everywhere that there’s water or something that fulfills that function. It may or may not be large or intelligent … or it may be surprising.” She pointed to the wallscreen. “Questions?”

  Roget turned to the blocky man. “You have to be maintaining a vacuum in the tube tunnels.” There was no other way that the subtrans could reach the velocities that Roget had calculated without a buildup of air that would stall or halt a high-speed tube train.

  “Precisely. There is a slight leakage when the car doors open at each station, but we use that to cushion the stops.”

  “How?” asked Roget. “The tunnels look to be open.”

  “We create partial deceleration shields as the subtrans nears a station. They’re an adaptation of space shields. After all, we’re in a vacuum in both places. The stray atmosphere builds up against the shield, and we use the decel pressure to force the air through filters as a boost to the ventilation in the stations.”

  “What’s the propulsion system?”

  “Oh … it’s just a grav-twist system set into a maglev, shield-contained, bottle effect.”

  “How do you manage to work that in a planetary gravity well?”

  “That’s why we have a completely integrated system,” said Tayler. “It’s actually locked into the planetary mass distribution.”

  Roget didn’t see how that was possible, but then his physics background was fairly basic. Once more he was faced with the fact that the Thomists were doing something that the Federation either couldn’t or hadn’t. Whether they were doing it in the way they claimed or otherwise didn’t make much difference from a practical poin
t of view. They had subsurface transport as swift as most planetary air travel, and if one considered other factors, probably as fast, if not faster, in point-to-point passenger and freight delivery as any powered orbital or suborbital craft could manage. As deep as the tunnels were, they would be difficult to block or destroy with any normal weapons.

  “What’s the system capacity?”

  “We can transit up to six cars in a given subtrans train. That’s based on the size of the concourses, not on the system itself. We could easily run trains with twelve cars in an emergency, but it would take two stops at each destination to get the passengers or cargo out. Each local car will hold forty-two seated passengers with room for another twenty-eight without freight or crowding. So … say 350 a train. The regional and deep-tube cars are configured for thirty-two passengers, and two cars on each run are usually reserved for freight, except on holidays when we may only run one freighter. We also run six-car freight runs on off-times, and the system is designed so that we can run them to special freight concourses. Those are the green triangles on the system map.”

  “No separate freight system, then?”

  “What would be the purpose? To waste resources?” asked Tayler, not quite scornfully.

  “Are all the lines dual tube?”

  “Yes.” Tayler gestured to the system overview. “Also … you can see that every major city or large town can be reached from at least two other points on the system through redundant lines.”

  “That’s quite an engineering feat.” And a substantial resource commitment, noted Roget.

  “It makes sense,” Lyvia pointed out. “We don’t worry about weather. The ecological effects are minimal, especially compared to the alternatives, and the materials used are impervious to just about anything. That doesn’t count the shielding effect of the ground itself, and that’s considerable, given the depth of the lines.”

  Lyvia was just confirming that the transit system could operate unhampered even under full-scale attack.

  Abruptly, Tayler turned and walked toward the woman at the console.

  Roget listened, although he couldn’t catch every word of the low-voiced conversation in what seemed to be, he now recognized, a clipped and faster version of old American.

  “… car three on Principia alpha … field strength fluctuations … decel…”

  “… personnel at Matera … empty … run as a fiver … have Falcon station bring up a replacement…”

  The woman nodded and Tayler returned. “Equipment replacement. Do you have any other questions?”

  “What’s the empty weight of a car?”

  “Passenger cars are … roughly fifteen tonnes. A full freight car is three times that in length and weight. There are special cars that can carry three times the mass of a standard freighter.”

  “What’s the mass the freight cars can carry…”

  “How long is a car’s service life…”

  “What’s the materials composition…”

  Roget fired off as many questions as he could think of, and for close to a standard hour Tayler answered most of them.

  Finally, Roget shrugged. “I think you’ve addressed everything I can think of.”

  Tayler smiled. “It’s fair to say that I haven’t had to recall so much in years. I’m surprised I remembered so much.”

  “Thank you.” Roget inclined his head.

  “I’ll escort you out.”

  Despite Tayler’s words, Lyvia and Roget walked back along the tunnel, followed by Tayler.

  Once they were back in the subtrans tunnel, Lyvia turned to Roget. “Are you ready for something to eat?”

  “That would be good.” He wasn’t particularly hungry, and that might have been because his system was anything but used to a twenty-two-hour day. He did want a chance to sit down and talk. “You pick the place.”

  Less than fifteen minutes later, they were seated in a small establishment off a walkway running north and south two blocks east of the central square. The decor inside Lucasan wasn’t anything that Roget had ever seen. On the wall opposite their table were two crossed sabers, but their blades were not metal but shafts of light, one bluish white and one a sullen red. Occasionally, a burst of static issued from one saber or the other. Set on a pedestal between their table and the next was a cylinder set at a slight angle on tracked wheels with a domed top, its metallic finish in silver and blue.

  Roget glanced toward the sabers.

  “Nostalgia for a time that never was in a galaxy far, far away.” Lyvia laughed softly. “At least we’re honest about our nostalgia.”

  Roget didn’t pretend to understand and picked up a menu, looking over the short list of unfamiliar names. At least written Dubietan was far easier to puzzle through than the spoken version.

  “What do you suggest?” he finally asked.

  “The Crepes Jedi are good. So is the Filet Leia.”

  In the end, Roget settled on Veal Mos Eisley, which seemed to have an interesting conglomeration of spices, and an amber Yoda Lager.

  A server arrived, wearing an ancient and severe black and gray uniform of a type Roget had never seen, took their order, and returned almost immediately with their drinks.

  Lyvia took a sip of something vaguely ruby in shade, before asking, “Why do you think you were chosen for this mission?”

  Roget knew her words weren’t as casual as their tone suggested. “I could guess, but I couldn’t say that I really knew.”

  “It might be wise to guess.” The faint and almost sad smile indicated her words were a suggestion and not a threat.

  “I’ve had a fairly wide range of experience, both on- and off-planet, and in- and outsystem.” He couldn’t help but think about the hack/razor job required in his assignment on Khriastos station, which had amounted to being a cyber thief reinserting data deleted from the station’s archives so that the Federation Finance Monitors could find it.

  “What else?”

  “What are you suggesting?” countered Roget.

  “What is the cultural background of the average Federation Security Agent?”

  “Our backgrounds vary.” Even as he spoke, Roget saw where she was pointing him. “You’re suggesting that … FSA Operations knew Dubiety had an AmerAnglo cultural foundation.”

  “Don’t they send you where you’ll fit in?”

  “Or where we’ll fit a role.” Roget thought back to his mission in Taiyuan, where only an AmerAnglo would be considered “degraded” enough to deal in grayware. So degraded that no one had any problems with Sulynn’s trying to kill him once she’d gotten what she wanted. Had that all been a setup for her next assignment? Roget wouldn’t have been surprised.

  “Ethnic stereotyping. A pity it hasn’t gone away.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that. From what I can see, everyone here is AmerAnglo descended.”

  “Not really. Everyone’s light skinned, but that was a necessity. Otherwise, the genetics vary widely.”

  “The shields? Vitamin D?”

  “Precisely.”

  The server returned with Roget’s Veal Mos Eisley and Lyvia’s Crepes Jedi, each accompanied by a small side salad of mixed greens, except that the greens—again—were almost blackish green. He took a small bite, but he didn’t notice any great difference in taste from the “greener” salads he’d had on earth.

  As they ate, Roget listened to the conversations around them. He was beginning to be able to catch words and phrases, but the total meaning of most exchanges eluded him.

  “You’ll pick it up.” Lyvia finished the last sip of her drink. “What else would you like to see this afternoon?”

  “What about the local spaceport … or orbital shuttle system?”

  Lyvia smiled. “We can’t. We don’t have anything like that.”

  He didn’t believe that, but there was no point in protesting. “All right. What about a manufacturing facility? Or a composite formulation mill? Surely you don’t replicate everything, not as con
cerned as you all seem to be about the environmental costs.”

  After a moment, Lyvia nodded. “We can manage that. Both, in fact. We’ll start with the composite facility.” She paused. “Are you done? Or would you like dessert?”

  “I’m fine.” Roget glanced around.

  “I’ve already paid.”

  “Direct link?”

  “Yes.” Lyvia stood.

  Roget did as well. “How do you manage that?”

  “You mean, without stray radiation that your implants can detect? It’s a very tight beam, a form of coherence that classical physicists said was impossible. Our scientists have been very good at doubting pronouncements of impossibility.”

  “Your whole society is impossible,” he said with a laugh as they walked out of Lucasan.

  “Magic is impossible, too, but an old Anglo scientist—I think he was a scientist, but maybe he was a writer—said that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.”

  “How does this coherence work?” When Lyvia didn’t answer and continued walking westward toward the central square, he added, “I know. It’s not your field, and you don’t intend to give me a simplistic and misleading reply.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I could use a few simplistic but misleading answers.”

  “You only think you could.”

  “Where are we going now?”

  “We’ll take the local subtrans south three stops to Coventral.”

  After they reached the southeast corner of the square, Roget was surprised at how long it took them to get down to the local concourse. Unlike the regional concourse, the local concourse was shaped like an L, with the north-south section a good fifteen meters below the east-west section and joined by another tunnel ramp. As far as appointments went, both sections of the local concourse looked almost the same in layout as did the regional one. When they stopped before an archway, waiting for a train, he asked, “Why are the local concourses so deep?”

  “They all aren’t, but it makes a certain sense here in Skeptos. That’s because we get more regional travelers, and if they have luggage, it’s easier for them. Also, it puts the local concourses on the same absolute level.”