by Ivan Cat
Jenette negotiated the crawler up over a mound of resin boulders. To her distress, when the vehicle's nose and headlights swung back down, the beams highlighted four startled Guards in a copse of trees. One of them, as wide as he was tall, staggered and fell across the rutted road. Jenette jammed on the brakes, cursing.
Of all the bad luck.
The other Guards rushed to their fallen comrade. Two were as stupefied as he and not much help. The third, a melancholy Corporal, stood at a wavering attention and barked at them. "Out of the road you Scourge-bait. Get out of the road before we pull shit shift for the rest of our lousy, short lives!"
Jenette relaxed, recognizing the voice, and leaned out of the cab. "It's all right, Corporal Toliver."
"Oh, false alarm," Toliver declared, slouching woozily.
The other Guards attempted, ineffectually, to get themselves into a semblance of order.
Jenette looked around to make sure no other Guards were in the area. There weren't any. And there were no domestics present, either. That was expected. Guards were under strict orders to keep their domestics locked in the military kennels, the theory being that that way Guards would not get too friendly with creatures they had to kill on a regular basis. Of course it did not work out that way, like all the rest of her father's hypocritical rules. The only practical effect was that because Guard domestics did not mix with the regular population of domestics, these Guards knew nothing of Jenette's underground conspiracy. Jenette knew them anyway. She had done them a lot of favors in anticipation of a time when she might need to be on their good side. Like, for instance, at that very moment.
"Jenette!" The three loudest Guards thrust their fists in the air. "Mook, mook, mook!" they roared in greeting.
"Shshsh," hissed Jenette.
The Guards fell shamefaced and silent.
One known as Skutch, an explosives expert, became overly serious. "You don't hate us, do you...? We try not to hurt the little beggars."
"Yes," slurred Liberty, a musclebound female with a crew cut, all wide-eyed and weepy. "We really do. We don't even frag the big ones if we don't have to."
Like all Guards, these four were required to run Deep Recon Missions—a euphemism for kidnapping, as far as Jenette was concerned—into Feral territory to satisfy the Enclave's demand for young Khafra. It was a despicable practice, but they, like Jenette, were just trying to make the best of a bad situation. And, as Liberty had said, they made a particular effort not to hurt the young Ferals or kill their parents.
"Of course I don't hate you," Jenette said.
"Oh, good," said Skutch, greatly relieved.
"We're blasted," the square-built Guard said in an exaggerated whisper.
"Maggot, Maggot, Maggot!" the squad chanted.
"Grubb! It's Grubb!" the square-built soldier protested. The others chortled. Quickly forgetting the snub to his family name, Grubb conspiratorially held up a flask for Jenette to see. "This is popskull."
"Really?" said Jenette, impatient to be gone.
"Yeah," Grubb confirmed. "Want some?"
"No thanks."
"Oh." Grubb considered, drunkenly. "Well, it's an acquired taste."
"Yeah," said Liberty, taking a long swig from the flask. "And we all acquired it!"
"Fuck, fight, hold the light, and carry out the dead!" Skutch chanted.
"Except no fucking," said Toliver.
"De-fin-ate-ly not," Skutch leered. "Fuck, drink, and be merry and tomorrow we will die!"
"Speak for yourselves, shitheads," Liberty taunted, good-naturedly.
"Rub it in, bitch!" the men retorted.
Strained laughter.
Jenette noted that one of the Guard's number was absent. "Where's Mok?"
"Standing graveyard duty on Gate Four," Toliver answered. "Stupid bastard."
"Dumb-ass, stupid bastard just about got us on shit detail, too," Liberty interjected.
"Got caught whacking off," Grubb slurred.
"No more monkey-spanking for him," Skutch agreed. "He's wearing the stiffy-detector."
In the uncomfortable silence that followed, Toliver dug a forgotten pill out of a small box and washed it down with more pop-skull.
"Limp noodle!" Grubb laughed. "Limp noodle pill!"
This time nobody else laughed.
Jenette didn't find it funny either. She put the crawler back in drive, "Bye guys," and applied power to the crawler's wheels.
"I got a limp noodle, too!" Grubb half-laughed, half-cried as Jenette drove away from the painful scene.
Gate Four.
Jenette steered for that remote post. Mok was there—sleeping on duty—but he woke at the sound of the crawler and let Jenette through the gate without asking any questions or recording it in the official log.
The gate ground open and the crawler rumbled down a ramp, out from the protection of the battlements, and splashed into the dangerous open ocean. The vehicle's six hollow wheels buoyed it up. The large studs on the wheels spun like paddle wheels for propulsion.
"Where do you want to go?" Jenette finally asked.
Arrou looked up at the sky, then down at the horizon where the shooting star had disappeared.
"Find Tears."
"Okay, find Tears."
Arrou was referring to the Tears of the Burning Heart or some other such Feral fairy tale and did not understand that the meteorite would have long since sunk to the bottom of the ocean by now, but Jenette supposed it was as good a direction as any. Expecting that they would find tears enough wherever they headed, she angled the crawler in the direction Arrou indicated and set it churning off into the night.
4
VI
Pilot Academy transcript from visual recording, Planet of Industry, 6.17.3508.
Document status: CLASSIFIED.
File name: Conscription.
(Five-year-old Lindal Karr, a soft-looking child, cries as black-uniformed men drag him from a faceless warren of domicile cubes. He has just tested positive for fugue resistance. His worker-class parents stand in the narrow alley watching. His sorrow-eyed mother shooes Lindal's five siblings back into the cubes.)
Lindal: I don't want to go! I don't want to go!
Father (hecto-carbon grime blackens an impassive face): Don't be a crybaby.
Major Vidun (a short, arrogant man, standing beside a windowless security transport): You're destined for great things, Lindal. You're going to be a Pilot.
Lindal: I don't want to be a Pilot! I want to stay home! (He reaches for his mother, but the soldiers hold him tight and load him into the transport.) Momma!
Mother: Be a brave boy. Try to make us proud.
(Dr. Uttz, a thin old man, meticulously seals Lindal into a hermetic sphere. Lindal's weeping muffles. The transport doors slide shut.)
Father: When do we get the money?
Major Vidun (eyes narrowed with disgust): It's already in your account.
Decades after Bob died, Karr was still fighting the madman's deadly legacy. Long Reach shuddered as it ground against the abrasive atmosphere of an unknown planet. The super-heating friction caused bitter squalls of wind to moan through the ship's innards. Gravity was askew because of Long Reach's rakish angle relative to the planet below. The cockeyed g-forces pulled Karr toward the corners between walls and ceilings.
Karr scrambled along a fuel-bladder gallery, his adrenaline pumping. Calling on years of training and experience to stay level-headed, he carefully adjusted the Gattler to its slowtime setting and shot qi needles into the base of each bulging fuel-bladder sack. Flow ducts swelled in response, like sausages, and carried fuel out of the storage bladders toward unseen bilge-pores on the fugueship's external flanks.
Must make one hell of a fireworks display on the planet below, Karr thought. The mother of all shooting stars. Atmospheric friction would ignite the fuel into a long fiery tail. Not exactly standard procedure upon arrival at a planet, but then again this was not exactly a standard arrival. If Karr did not get rid of the
reserve fuel, the whole ship might soon become a flaming smear across that unknown planet's sky.
It had all begun shortly after Bob's death. Karr had left the brainroom with a plan to undo Bob's damage. Still aching from the madman's attack in the dreamchamber, Karr had sidled through narrowing passages, and then crawled on hands and knees as the ship's internal spaces pinched together near its bow. Karr was very close to Long Reach's fusion core at that point and it was very hot as he squirmed toward the ship's forward-most airlock. Karr had not dosed up on fugue yet; he was in slowtime, so he was getting the most possible use out of each individual realtime second. On arrival at the airlock, he donned a kilnsuit from a storage locker, rigged pinch-cleats to his hands and feet, attached a descender rig to his belt, and cycled through the airlock's standard double iris-portals.
Outside, it took a moment to get oriented. Karr clung to the narrowing shaft of Long Reach's engine pinnacle, which projected down from the ramfunnel maw above, like a handle under a red-hot umbrella. Below Karr, pillars of fire erupted from four nozzles spaced around the tip of the pinnacle and thundered into a bottomless black void lined with stars. It was a daunting view. And the fact that the ship was braking, creating the dizzying sensation of gravity pulling Karr down toward that bottomless void didn't help matters. But between those engine nozzles, at the very forward-most point of Long Reach was where Karr's objective lay, and so he was going there.
Karr attached a safety line, set the torque on his descender rig, and went down headfirst. The initial hundred feet were easy, but as he neared the huge engine nozzles Karr was careful to set the pinch-cleats extra firmly. A slip at that point would have sent him careening out on the safety line and into one of the pillars of engine thrust. There, even the kilnsuit, with its ceramite tiles specifically designed to operate in extreme heat and pressure, would vaporize. Life support mechanisms labored hard inside the suit as Karr reached the narrowest point between the nozzles. A temperature sensor under his chin read one hundred and thirteen degrees internal. Karr didn't look at the outside reading. It was too scary. Remember the ship. He pressed on as fast as prudence allowed and disappeared under the very front of the pinnacle.
Karr's impression of being on the pinnacle's forward end was that of being a bug, clinging to the underside of a round table that had four immense pillars of flame for legs. Internal kilnsuit temperature dropped to ninety-three degrees—not much cooler, but at least he was not boiling in his own sweat. Crawling upside-down—again, like a bug—Karr made his way toward the only two features on the circular prow. The nearer feature was a rust-and-white colored metallic knob, two yards in diameter, which was one protruding end of the superconductor that generated the fugue-ship's ramscoop field. Karr ignored it and headed instead for the upside-down teepee directly in the center of the bow space.
It was, in fact, a tent of sorts. Karr pulled back a flap of its light-impervious material and uncovered a ten foot wide, highly reflective shallow bowl that was recessed into the body of the ship above. A ropy stalk grew down from the center of the bowl and that was capped with a torus of bug-eye receptors: it resembled a radio telescope dish. And that is what it was: a living telescope, Long Reach's eye. Light bounced off the broad dish and focused on the receptor torus where different sensory organs responded to, and analyzed, different segments of the electromagnetic continuum: ultraviolet and visible light, radio frequencies and x-rays, red shifts, Fraunhofer lines, and probably a dozen other things humans hadn't discovered yet.
Left to its own, Long Reach would chew over what it saw, somehow pick a star, and go there. However, when humans first captured four adolescent fugueships feeding on Saturn's rings, three thousand years ago, scientists had quickly figured out the purpose of the eye-dish array and devised an easy way to trick the huge creatures into going wherever their would-be human masters wanted them to.
Karr called it the carrot-on-a-stick method of interstellar navigation.
Attached where the poles came to a point, on a remote controllable arm, was a translucent sphere that glowed warm, yellow light: the starlure. The starlure simulated types of starlight that Long Reach found irresistible. It was only about eight inches in diameter, but because it was so close and so bright compared to real stars, the fugueship inevitably preferred it and tried to move in the direction of the decoy star. Move the lure one way, and Long Reach went that way. Move the lure the other way, and Long Reach went that way. The blackout tent eliminated any possible distraction. It was simple and effective.
And thanks to Bob, broken.
Karr leaned in and pressed colored studs on the back of the crystal globe. Different types of starlight strobed in a test pattern. The lure itself was unhurt, but the articulated arm was jammed. Long Reach was mindlessly following a misplaced starlure into deep space. Karr knew that the regulation-approved solution for this situation was to fix the mechanism.
Instead, he pushed the mess aside.
Before coming outside, Karr had pored over star charts, searching for a new star to set course for, a star within one degree of Long Reach's present disastrous trajectory, which also had a colony. According to the charts, half a dozen stars beyond Evermore were candidates for colonization, which lessened Karr's anxiety a bit. The human race was obsessed with expansion. If stars could be colonized, they would be colonized and there was a decent chance that another fugueship had already made a run through that area, planting colonists wherever it could. Unfortunately Karr's charts had been compiled a century ago by long-range observation; the slow speed of interstellar communication deprived him of more recent information about which of those stars now had colonies and which did not. Karr fretted long and hard. Any choice he made was necessarily a stab in the dark and an unlucky choice would find his beloved Long Reach trapped orbiting a star barren of planets, without even a gas giant to refuel from. That would be a death sentence.
So Karr removed the blinder fabric completely from the tent poles. He would not choose a destination at all—he would let Long Reach choose. Karr had great faith in the beast. It had a certain headstrong simplicity in the way it liked to do things: easily, directly and—quite frequently—correctly. Long ago Karr figured out that the less he fought its instinctual behavior, the better things turned out. And while no one had ever handed over the reigns before, whatever natural methods fugueships used to select a destination had to be better than Karr's wild guess.
He hoped.
For half an hour nothing happened. Karr hung from the cleats and forced himself to be patient. He patted the lumpy hide overhead. "That's all right. Take all the time you need." More time passed. Karr was looking down at the small slice of stars visible between shafts of engine fire and feeling the intense vertigo, when the living reflector dish flexed, then flexed again. It focused on one star, then another and another.
"That's it," Karr encouraged, fascinated. "Now you've got the hang of it."
Long Reach cycled through the candidates, narrowing from many to few. Eventually three patterns repeated. Long Reach pondered these for a long while, apparently confused.
"Come on, you can do it." Karr held his breath. Finally Long Reach eliminated one of the three. After that it didn't take long to make the cut from two down to one.
The eye focused and held in position.
"Yes!" exclaimed Karr.
He felt a gentle flexing of hide above him and saw a change in engine output. The nozzle orifice on the galactic core side contracted, decreasing that column of thrust, and the opposite orifice widened, increasing proportionally. Long Reach was turning. Karr did not let up his death grip on the pinch-cleats, but a small portion of tension relaxed its grip on his muscles. For better or for worse, his ship had made its choice.
The outdated star charts identified Long Reach's selected destination as CG-423, a third-rate yellow sun circled by planets in habitable orbits. It was far beyond Evermore and would lengthen the remaining portion of the mission to seventeen years. Karr checked the radio w
aves for signs of a colony beacon. There was only static. So far CG-423 didn't sound great, but again he forced himself to be patient. Maybe a colony had recently been seeded there and transmissions just hadn't made it out far enough for Karr to pick them up.
With no further time trouble, Karr went back to his quarters and dosed up on fugue. After that, the years ticked off at the subjective rate of one per day. Karr fixed the starlure. He did not turn it on, but he had to fix it; broken things drove him crazy. After that he kept busy tending his ailing ship. He had become very attuned to its life rhythms over the centuries and those rhythms were far out of balance. Cycles of creation and destruction, which resorbed old tissues to make room for new ones, were fighting one another, new tissue destroying new tissue, old layering on top of old. Karr had never seen the likes of it. Entire regions were dying.
"We're going to make it. I'll keep you going," he would say, pouring his heart into his work and somehow he did keep the ship going during the seventeen-year detour, which was testimony to his skill as a Pilot, although Karr didn't see that in his self-recriminating mood.
When Long Reach slowed to the point that its electromagnetic ramscoop could no longer funnel up interstellar hydrogen and therefore switched to internal reserves, Karr's worries abated a bit. Operating long range interferometers from the brainroom, he identified several Jupiter-mass planets orbiting CG-423. And, CG-423-B, a small planet in the habitable range, showed spectra for nitrogen, oxygen, and methane, good indications of life. No beacon as of yet, but Karr focused on the good news.
Later, when Long Reach decelerated into the CG-423 system, Karr was downright relieved. There, nestling eighty-seven million kiloyards close to the warm yellow sun, was a silvery-blue orb flecked With white clouds. CG-423-B was a habitable world. Upon seeing it, no fugueship Pilot could pass by without planting a colony. Karr was certain of that.