by Alex Lamb
The tunnels on this side of the wall were very different from the ones they’d been in before, and not just because of the lack of breathable air. On this side, the tunnels were cathedral-sized. The carts trundled down a narrow apron of printrock that had been laid through the ruins, past open vats the size of swimming pools and curving columns like supertower supports. Great pieces of ceramic machinery had crumbled away from the walls and now lay in scaly heaps on the floor. The carts took them to a ramp glued into the side of a vertical shaft wide enough to park a shuttle in. They spiralled down into the inky depths.
Venetia saw Mark staring at the walls.
‘We’re in the pumping system,’ she said. ‘The Fecund drew water from the ocean for hydraulic transport, then boiled and filtered it for use.’
‘What that you saying?’ said Kal. ‘No talking on the sled unless you want to praise God and the Prophet and his mighty works. All talk that is not godly is vile. And vileness must be crushed in the name of the Lord.’ Kal’s collar chimed.
‘Yeah!’ said one of the others. ‘To strike in the name of the Lord is a service that adds to the greatness of the Lord!’
He waited for his collar to chime. When it didn’t, the others laughed at him.
‘Work harder, Nid,’ said Den. ‘God give no coin to the lazy.’
‘What’s with the bells?’ said Zoe very quietly while their captors guffawed.
‘SAP-driven rewards for pious speech,’ Venetia whispered back. ‘Gamified religion is a big deal for this group. Try not to let it spook you.’
Mark grimaced in disgust. Was that how the Leading kept them in line?
‘You still talking?’ said Kal, jabbing his gun into Venetia’s side. ‘You blaspheming? For God is great and the godly do not hesitate to strike down the blasphemer in his name!’
Kal’s collar chimed again. Even in the dark and with masks on, Mark could tell that Nid felt put out.
‘The blasphemer must suffer but the heretic must be put to the torch,’ said Nid darkly. ‘For thou shalt seek out the heretic in his hiding place even if that be thine own house and thou must burn him.’
Nid’s collar chimed twice. He sat back with arms folded in satisfaction.
Mark couldn’t help noticing how the Flags’ English improved for religious speeches. He guessed they must be quoting from some kind of prayer book.
‘But those who work against the name of the Lord must be slaughtered as cattle,’ said Kal, fixing Mark with a cold gaze. He tapped the long, ugly-looking mono-knife on his belt. ‘For the Lord is goodness and peace and those who work against him are the bringers of war.’
His collar chimed again.
‘Enough,’ said Den. ‘You got plenty time for scripture later, and scripture say nothing about messing up a hostage.’
Kal slumped back against the edge of the cart with a sullen frown.
The tunnel ended at a massive circular intake duct. Grit from the dead ocean beyond had spilled in to cover the floor. Parked in the centre of the duct, looking like a toy against the immense curving walls, was a rover. Mark had never seen a design like it. A habitat pod large enough to hold his New York apartment crouched low on six independent wheels. A flat, oversized roof almost twice as wide as the vehicle itself hung over the top of it with curious metallic strips dangling from the edges. A ramp lowered out of the back of the rover as they approached. The carts rolled up into a dusty storage bay, where the Flags jumped off to secure their vehicles.
‘Sat-cloaked rover,’ whispered Zoe. She sounded somewhat impressed. ‘I heard about these. It’s invisible from above in all wavelengths. You need to be probing with a laser to an accuracy of a metre in order to spot it.’
‘Inside,’ said Den, pointing to the airlock at the far end of the bay.
On the other side lay a utilitarian cabin lined with dust-spattered windows. Empty drinking bulbs littered the floor. The air smelled of sweat, sand and the plastic reek of burning scrubbers. Passenger couches lined either wall. At the front sat a manual driver’s seat. Religious slogans played on the twitching wall-screens at the back.
‘Nid, you drive,’ said Den. ‘Kal, hang up your gun. Don’t want you messing up the nice people.’
Mark watched in disbelief as Nid took his place at the front. He’d never seen a ground transport with an actual human driver before. That kind of thing was straight out of a Surplus Age drama.
‘Hostages on the floor,’ said Den. ‘You don’t get seats. Seats only for those who toil righteously in the name of the Lord.’
Mark joined Zoe and Venetia on the rover’s filthy decking. The others sat around them and chatted in their private language, making remarks that Mark strongly suspected related to Zoe’s physique. Occasionally, they all burst into laughter.
Mark saw Zoe’s expression darkening. She stared firmly into the middle distance and shifted a little closer to him. He put an arm around her and he felt her relax a little. Mark dearly hoped Venetia’s assessment of the Flags was going to hold true. He didn’t want to have to start killing people.
The rover set out across the barren plain as the first light of dawn started to tint the horizon. They drove for two hours towards what Venetia informed him was the edge of the legal claim limit, beyond which IPSO law kicked in and the Flags’ settlement couldn’t be locally contested.
Mark’s stomach ached from hunger. He tamped down his metabolic responses, forcing his body to draw from fat stores. Zoe and Venetia lacked those kinds of augs. He could only imagine how famished they must be feeling.
Ahead of them, a cluster of domes and scaffolding grew steadily. Unlike the colony at New Luxor, the Flag settlement appeared to be in a state of robust growth. Two multi-storey construction mechs stood idly outside what looked like the beginnings of a supertower. The local conflict clearly hadn’t done much to deter Earth’s billions from arriving, but that was to be expected. Given the choice between low-grade asymmetrical warfare and the threat of extinction, Mark would have chosen warfare, too.
As they neared the closest dome, he noticed some curious scaffolds standing beside the track they were following, almost like old-fashioned power pylons. Curious, limp sacks hung off them.
On closer examination, Mark realised they weren’t sacks. They were bodies. In the dead, frozen air, they’d remained eerily intact, and Carter’s thin, oxygen-free atmosphere didn’t support the kind of bacteria needed for decay. The purple, bug-eyed faces of the asphyxiated corpses stared blindly at them as they passed. Mark’s gut clenched. His hopes of finding help in the settlement dropped another notch.
‘Who are they?’ he asked the raiders seated around him.
‘Heretics!’ said Kal enthusiastically. ‘Them who don’t listen to the word of the Lord and his one true Prophet and work against his name!’
‘Nah,’ said Nid. ‘More like hostages who don’t get paid for. Those who stand against the purity and love of the True Light should breathe some other air than God’s.’
His collar chimed. He pointed an index finger like a gun at Kal and made a shooting noise.
The others chuckled in dark amusement.
‘You all stupid,’ said Den. ‘You want to make us sound like a bunch of savages? Those corpses were thieves and killers,’ he assured them. ‘In Britehaven the law is clear. You don’t mess with God’s word, or he mess with you. We keep things nice and tidy.’
In the end it didn’t really matter, Mark decided. Whoever they’d killed, it amounted to medieval law in a modern colony. Maybe they should have tried harder to think of other ways of reaching the spaceport.
Crates of Fecund art and tubs of random scientific machinery stood stacked up around the doors to the dome’s main airlock. To Mark’s eye, it looked like most of it had been hacked straight out of the stone with a mono-knife. The desert grit couldn’t be doing the ancient lab-equipment much good, not that any
one here cared.
The rover turned, reversed up to the gate and waited for a lock jetty to crawl out to them and dock.
‘Back to the sleds,’ said Den. ‘Now everyone gets to see our big find from the raid. Not many hostages nowadays, I can tell you.’
Mark and the others took their places on the carts and Den triumphantly led them down the rover’s ramp into the settlement beyond.
Mark had expected poverty. He’d heard that the sect Leading put little effort into making their claim-sites habitable. The last thing he expected was a low-budget wonderland.
The town that Den drove them through offered everything a poor Earther might crave. The dome had plenty of space, open skies and gaudy high-tech toys scattered about. Rave scooters, jump-packs and ped-sleds leaned up against walls gathering dust. What the place lacked were all the things most Earthers didn’t know to miss, like proper seals and rad-shielding. He coughed in the thin, dusty air, which probably hadn’t been filtered in months.
Worse than the cheap luxury was the way the place had been brazenly meme-hacked. Every crappy dustboard house they passed was painted with Truist designs. Murals everywhere depicted Earth’s early victories during the war and the burning of the First Wave Colonies. The screens in every window played video footage of old Truist propaganda. Animatronic Sanchez shrines sat on street corners, watching them pass with empty electronic eyes.
The religious immersion would have been depressing enough on its own, but Mark had started to notice the people. Women with heavy white make-up doubling as sunscreen watched from doorways. Mark could see their cheaply reprinted body parts – breasts, mostly. Dozens of thin children with plastic implants and bad skin stood quietly watching them pass.
It was, Mark thought, a refugee camp tricked out like a theme park. It reeked of exploitation. He’d imagined poor Earthers struggling with dignity. He saw no dignity here.
‘Don’t accept food or water here unless you have to,’ Venetia quietly warned him. ‘It’s all tweaked. Eat enough and you’ll never want to leave.’
Mark wanted to snap at her and tell her that things here couldn’t be so bad. But all the while his eyes told him otherwise.
They passed a row of ancient-looking exosuits lined up next to a building site. It occurred to Mark then that he hadn’t seen a single robot since they reached the dome. He realised with a start that people had built the houses all around him. With no reason to exist other than to establish a sect’s legal claim, the settlement was probably desperate to find things for their imported peasants to do.
The carts came to a halt outside the one building in the entire dome that looked properly constructed. It had high, reinforced walls of white printrock and a broad overhanging roof lined with metallic panels – rad-shielding, Mark suspected. An elegant arched door like that of a church adorned the front.
It opened and a man stepped through. He wore High Church white from head to toe, with gloves and a broad-rimmed hat that cast a shadow over his shoulders. He had a powerful face with a deep, rich tan, and what Mark assumed was artificially bleached hair. He looked like a weight-lifter disguised as an old-world pope.
‘Good morning, Den,’ said the man, with a broad, benevolent smile. His accent was pure Earth Leading. ‘My blessings to you and your team. What do we have here – an offering?’
Den bowed deeply, his hands joined in prayer. ‘Father,’ he said. ‘We find this lot up in the mines. Get this. They say they want to come here. They got data and claim the Moddies mean to harm us. Not sure if I believe.’
The head man turned to look them over. ‘Intriguing,’ he said. ‘Is this the case?’
‘We’re on the run from the New Luxor authorities,’ said Venetia. ‘Or should I say the Frontier Protection Party. They’re trying to hold us here to stop us getting back to our ship. We have evidence of a plan to attack Earth with alien weapons. Those same weapons are on their way here right now. They don’t want anyone in the sects to know – your settlement included.’
The head man listened patiently, his smile never diminishing.
‘Fascinating,’ he said. His eyes twinkled. ‘And why are you so keen that we should know this?’
‘We’re not Fleet,’ said Venetia. ‘We were on a diplomatic mission run by Yunus Chesterford and supported by the government of Earth.’
The head man quirked an eyebrow. ‘The Yunus Chesterford?’
Venetia nodded.
The head man turned to Den. ‘Blessings be on you and your team, Dennis Ochoa,’ he said. ‘You have done well. The Lord is pleased with your diligence and attention to duty.’
The collars of everyone on Den’s team chimed several times. There were whoops and cheers all round.
‘Kal found them,’ said Den. ‘And he kept that itchy finger of his off the trigger like you told him.’
‘Then Kal is particularly blessed,’ said the head man.
Kal’s collar chimed again. He beamed.
‘Don’t spend God’s bounty all at once,’ the head man told them with a knowing smile. ‘Remember, the Lord adores celebration in his name, but not when it interferes with your health. There is such a thing as too much pleasure.’
‘Yes, Father!’ said Den, grinning. ‘You got it. No messing.’ He gestured at the others. ‘Okay, you lot. Sleds back to the dock.’
Den and his team jumped onto their carts, leaving Mark and the others standing in front of the white villa with the head man. The only other people around were the malnourished children with blotchy faces watching them from the street corners.
‘Good morning. I’m Massimo Singh,’ said the head man. ‘Nice to meet you all, and welcome to Britehaven. I can’t remember the last time I had civilised company out here.’
He gestured towards the door. ‘Can I offer you breakfast?’
15.2: WILL
The shuttle fell relentlessly towards Snakepit and Will couldn’t do a damned thing about it. The shuttle lacked even the most rudimentary self-repair robots. Short of climbing outside himself and fixing it, they were stuck, and Will wasn’t sure even his abilities stretched quite that far. It galled him. It would take them hours to reach the planet – plenty of time for him to reflect on his folly. Had he headed straight for the Chiyome, they’d have been safely docked by now.
He lay sprawled in his couch while the shuttle rocked from wave after wave of blasts. Then, abruptly, the impacts stopped.
‘What happened?’ said Ann. ‘Why has it all gone quiet?’
Will scanned the surrounding space. To his surprise, the Nems appeared to have just kissed and made up. They’d gone from fighting to swarming cooperatively within seconds.
‘Apparently civil wars don’t last long around here,’ he said.
As he watched, the drone swarm changed from a random churn to directed motion, all pointed towards the remaining raspberry ship which was still trying to track down Pari’s station. The Nems fanned out, adopting a search configuration. That couldn’t be good news for the League. Eventually the drones would get over their stupidity and try swapping their swarming protocol. When that happened, the League ships would become instant targets.
The swarm changed their broadcast. Will piped it into the cabin.
‘Human friends!’ said the swarm. ‘There is no need to hide. We know you are here. We wish you no harm. We only want to give you the gift of happy incorporation! Show yourselves and let us grant you eternal usefulness! You will be located eventually. Why not spare yourselves the discomfort of waiting and enjoy peace now?’
Sooner or later those eerie bastards were actually going to come up with an offer that sounded appealing, Will thought. He hoped to be long gone by then.
‘Can they see us?’ said Ann.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Will. ‘They’re trying to infiltrate our systems, but they can’t hack any better than a five-year-old so I’m n
ot worried on that count.’
Will checked his link to the Ariel Two. He could still feel the ship through what remained of the shuttle’s sensor array but Nelson still had the power out. And even if he could request an extra shuttle, the moment he did so he’d be telling both the League and the Nems exactly where to find him.
Ironically, their best hope lay in the several hundred pieces of drone shrapnel from the impromptu war falling alongside them. They slid towards the planet in long leisurely arcs. Under the circumstances, he would have been worried about the prospect of chance collisions. As it was, the fallout from the war just made them one more piece of broken technology drifting through the void. They might be out of control and plunging to their deaths on the most dangerous world humanity had ever discovered, but at least they had one thing going for them.
Will stopped trying to minimise their spin. They were less obvious while tumbling like a dead thing and there’d be plenty of opportunities to regularise their flight when they neared atmosphere. What he needed to do, he reasoned, was make the best use of the window of quiet he’d been granted and heal. It also gave him a chance to figure out why he had company.
He hooked his vision to the camera above Ann’s crash couch.
‘Tell me why you’re here,’ he said.
Ann stared at the camera with an expression of steel-edged disappointment. The fact that he’d landed them in this mess clearly rankled her.
‘Because you were right. The League plan is unravelling. The machines are changing too fast. After you told me about the cells in the bioblocker I did a little research of my own. Sam Shah set this project up to fail from the start. He wants Earth dead, and I did not sign up for that. So I thought, why not get out of here with Will and try to apologise to him? Could that possibly be any worse? Apparently, though, the answer was yes.’
‘So why did you sign up, then?’ said Will. ‘This whole operation is about smacking Earth down, isn’t it?’
She shook her head. ‘Because the threat of war was real. Something had to be done and this was the only option we could find. I’ve been working against genocide this entire time. My first tour of duty on the New Frontier made me sick. I went away and built my models because I knew the peace between the colonies and the sects couldn’t last. The Fleet was burning too much of its energy enforcing it. I wanted to do something.’