Those same navigational hazards had disrupted the expansion of the very earliest interstellar civilizations eons ago, trapping them in small, isolated pockets for hundreds of thousands of years. Initially there were few spacefaring species, but slowly their numbers grew, each exploring their immediate parts of the galaxy, often at great cost in terms of lives and ships, all the time improving their technology. When the early civilizations eventually encountered each other there were occasional conflicts, but in time they learnt to coexist and eventually to share their knowledge, completing the great collective work of mapping the galaxy and founding a true Galactic Civilization.
It was not an empire ruled by one, but an immensely heterogeneous association open to all. The members were often vastly unequal in achievement and markedly different in character, yet all were equally protected by Galactic Law. As probationary members of the Access Treaty, mankind was entitled to half a percent – no more, no less. It was a promise of what full membership would bring and while it sounded tiny, it gave humanity access to millions of star systems – provided we played by the rules.
That was our biggest challenge.
In fifty years – when our second attempt to qualify for membership ended – we’d get a major increase in status by gaining a permanent seat on the Galactic Forum, alongside tens of thousands of other, older civilizations. It was just the first step in gaining access to a little more of the galaxy and having a voice – albeit a very small voice – where it mattered most. There were many levels of sharing, each one had to be earned, but for now our focus was simply to qualify for that first, most junior level of galactic citizenship. Unlimited sharing was a very long way off. By the time mankind was a senior member of the Forum, our civilization would have vastly transformed and our species would have moved on to the next stage of evolution beyond Homo sapiens, so immense were the time scales involved. They were time scales set by those who’d already trodden the path and knew the extraordinary length of the journey – a journey without short cuts.
For a species who’d been using stone tools a mere twenty thousand years ago – less than the blink of an eye in cosmic terms – the enormous time scales were daunting, but it was also a fair, rules based system, where every advance was earned and no one could deny what was rightfully due. Its fairness was why the great panoply of civilizations throughout the galaxy, from young to old, from primitive to incomprehensibly advanced, all supported it – and why they united against any who threatened it.
The Tau Ceti gift had been an inducement, not a prison – proof that the benefits of joining the system and playing by its rules far outweighed opting out. We could send our ships beyond the limits of the TC charts if we wished, but the risks became unacceptably high the further out we went.
Consequently, Mapped Space defined the physical extent of Human Interstellar Civilization, and it grew as we explored.
Icetop was four light years outside the TC charts, further than was generally practical to go given the navigational hazards, and the limits of our technology, but we’d explored it ourselves, making it one of the few human contributions to Mapped Space. We’d only gone to Icetop because the promise had seemed so great. Astronomical observations had detected a planet in the Creshan System of approximately the right size in roughly the right orbit for a human habitable planet. It orbited a G-type star of about the right age, offering the hope of a new Earth. We could have reached it in relative safety using a bubble at sub light velocity, but even at half the speed of light, the journey would have taken eight years. We needed to get there fast to make it assessable, so over a hundred and fifty years ago a navy survey team had been given the job of finding a way there. It took seven attempts with robotic probes before they finally succeeded. The first six probes were destroyed by dark matter gravitational effects that each subsequent probe avoided, so through trial and error, a path was found to the Creshan System. Once the navy knew where the dark matter was, a painstaking study of each hazard’s gravitational effect allowed the navy to predict its trajectory. The danger was there were other dark matter anomalies wandering slowly out there that the navy hadn’t detected, and which would inevitably drift into the charted space lane. It hadn’t happened since the path to Icetop had been opened, but one day it would, with disastrous consequences.
It was why every flight to Icetop was a gamble.
When the navy finally surveyed the hoped for new Earth, they found a planet fourth from its star, in an orbit skirting the outer edge of the zone where liquid water could exist. More than seventy active volcanoes dotted the frozen wastes of Icetop, adding enough greenhouse gas to keep the equatorial region marginally habitable, but not to roll back the ice covering the four southern continents or to expose the vast northern ocean. Abundant oceanic life had generated a breathable atmosphere while the strip of exposed land at the equator permitted subarctic agriculture. It was, however, the iceberg filled oceans offering fishing grounds potentially as rich as any seen on Earth where Icetop’s future wealth lay. Those frigid waters had attracted sizeable Core System investment to fund seeding the ocean and building the infrastructure required for commercial fishing.
It was precisely because Icetop was a spinning ice cube that it had escaped colonization by other civilizations – a lucky break for us. If we ever decided to warm it up, it might still become a new Earth, but that was a long way off. Earth Council habitually baulked at the cost and risk of terraforming any planet, especially one outside Mapped Space. Even so, they’d placed a small settlement on Icetop to establish our ownership rights. After all, it may have been a cold windswept hell hole, but it was lawfully ours.
Landing on Icetop was a simple insertion. With no traffic or orbital debris to dodge, we jumped onto their Landing Control’s guide beam and simply dropped into the freezing atmosphere. The vacant lot that passed for a spaceport normally received less than a ship a month, although we soon discovered we were the seventh ship to land in less than forty eight hours. Minutes after engine shut down, a transmission arrived from Mukul Sarat with directions to the meeting place.
When the dust cleared, our external optics gave us a clear view of the other six ships already parked on the paved landing ground. The massive Soberano took up the entire southern end of the apron, four clicks away, while Marie’s Heureux was only a few hundred meters east of us. The other ships were all strung out to the north. The closest was a small, disk shaped yacht that reeked of money. Further north, a utilitarian PFA container carrier, that was little more than a cube shaped skeleton with rectangular compartments for crew and propulsion, stood alongside a small intersystem ferry. At the northern end of the spaceport, parked as far away from the other ships as possible, was a rugged looking half cylinder with suspicious black scars along its sides.
“The yacht is from the Core Systems,” Izin said as he joined Jase and I on the flight deck. As usual, he’d digested the port registry in the horizontal blink of his amphibian eyes. “She’s the Ariel, owner’s name withheld. The freighter is from Chengdu Xin. It claims to be carrying machine parts, although it’s unloaded no cargo since landing. The ferry belongs to Mukul Sarat and that last ship is supposedly a bulk ore carrier called the Cypress Vale.”
Izin’s amphibian face never revealed his emotions but his words describing the last ship revealed his skepticism. The ‘ore carrier’ was obviously an old Earth Navy Vigilant class cutter. It had to be at least two hundred years old and looked as if it hadn’t received hull maintenance for decades. The Vigilants used to carry a single heavy weapon and a respectable shield, although the navy would have stripped her down before selling her. Even so, whoever rescued her from the scrapyard could have refitted her with black market gear.
“Who’s is it?” I asked.
“The port registry has no other data,” Izin replied.
“I don’t suppose the port authorities have questioned its class designation?”
“No.”
Either they were grossly incompetent
and couldn’t tell a bulk ore carrier from a garbage scow, or they’d been paid to look the other way.
“It’s got to be a Raven,” Jase said. “Look at those hull scars!” It had taken Jase half the flight out from Hades City to recover from the stim bomb Sarat had pumped into him, and the second half for me to convince him not to go looking for payback.
“When it’s dark, send a hull crawler over there. Find out what she’s armed with.” I glanced at the other ships curiously. “Check them all.”
“I’ll prepare a crawler this afternoon,” Izin said.
I switched on the autonav’s holo emitter and fed in Sarat’s coordinates to see where we were going. All Jase and Izin knew was that we were here to acquire an illegal item I had a buyer for. Any profit would be split three ways after expenses, as usual. “Jase is coming with me. Izin, you’ll stay aboard. This is no place for you.”
“I would need a heavily insulated thermal suit to survive out there,” Izin agreed. Tamphs found cold climates unpleasant and exposure to freezing temperatures fatal.
A glowing marker on the western edge of Fjordheim, the only continent not buried under ice, highlighted where we were. A high mountain range cut across the middle of the land mass, spawning deep river valleys that fed fiords along both coasts. The Silver Lining had landed outside Tundratown, the only sizeable settlement, which served as both spaceport and seaport. A small village had also been established at an anchorage on the eastern side of Fjordheim for emergency repairs and crew swaps. The band of exposed ocean linking the two coasts was dotted with islands, mostly uninhabited although some were used by the fishing fleet as distant support bases. A third of the way around the equator from Tundratown was a string of dots marking the only archipelago on Icetop in the equatorial ring.
“That’s where we’re headed,” I said, pointing to the tiny island chain. Sarat’s message had given the latitude and longitude, and the Lining’s astrographics data base revealed their name: the Dragon’s Teeth.
Jase peered at the hologram curiously and shrugged. “Why come all the way out here and then fly a third of the way around this iceball to do this deal?”
“Because there are no eyes out there,” I said.
Icetop had only three aging communications satellites in equatorial orbit and a tiny UniPol station in Tundratown with no global surveillance capability. Considering the navigational hazards, no Earth Navy frigate would risk coming out here unless they were going to bombard the planet. If enforcement was required, the navy was more likely to send expendable grunts out in a freighter. Several times a year, a naval liaison officer came out with the regular supply ship for an inspection, but that was the extent of Earth’s reach. Icetop was as remote a place as a man could go and still find a trace of human civilization.
Whatever Sarat was selling, he was taking no chances with the law.
* * * *
Sarat had reserved a seat for me on a transport flying out to the fishing fleet’s base in the Dragon’s Teeth Archipelago. A fisherman, who suddenly developed an acute affinity for my credits, vacated his seat for Jase while a small gratuity to the pilot ensured no objections from the flight crew.
The aircraft was one of a small fleet of sub-orbital scramjets that shuttled supplies and replacement crews out to a network of isolated bases supporting Icetop’s fishing fleet. Like the spaceport and Tundratown, the transport smelled of fish, not surprising considering sea creatures were the lifeblood of the colony. One hundred and thirty five years ago, seed populations of phytoplankton and Atlantic Cod had been released into the ocean. Both were naturally adapted to arctic waters, but some genetic reengineering on Earth had perfectly aligned that adaptation to Icetop’s biochemistry. Within a few decades, the oceans had filled with the Earth transplanted life forms and commercial fishing had begun. The only effect on the indigenous aquatic species was to see their numbers increase dramatically as they acquired a taste for Earth-plankton. In particular, a large, slow moving creature that floated with the planet’s ocean currents had begun to multiply to the point where it was constantly caught in the cod nets. The fishermen called them drift-whales, although they were neither air breathers nor mammals. Fortunately for Icetop’s economy, their body chemistry allowed them to be processed into a thick oil suitable for combustion heating, although their meat was inedible.
The scramjet seated fifty and was fitted with small windows allowing us to see the ragged ice sheet to the south and the large icebergs that had broken free and were drifting towards the equatorial current. Occasionally the wakes of large factory ships could be seen dragging nets which scoured the oceans for cod and drift-whales. After several hours, the vast ice sheet to the south gave way to snow capped mountains and the dark plume of a distant volcano belching gas into the atmosphere.
Soon after the volcanic cloud fell behind us, the transport nosed down and began gliding on short delta wings towards a chain of jagged rock spires that rose from the cold, choppy seas like widely separated black spears. Watching the icy dark blue water below, I realized how underdressed Jase and I were in our thermal suits. The fishermen were all clad in yellow self-sealing flotation suits, enough to keep them alive even if they were swept into the sea. By contrast, our suits could withstand the arctic winds, but if we hit the freezing water, we’d be dead in thirty seconds.
The transport leveled off and flew along the scattered line of black needles. Waves crashed against their bases, throwing up clouds of white foam that were instantly whipped away by the wind, while their tips were lost in low hanging cloud hundreds of meters above the ocean. Most spires had landing platforms high above sea level, protruding from caverns carved out of the rock. After we’d passed more than twenty spires, the transport banked sharply, lowered its landing gear and threw itself recklessly onto a landing platform. The magnetized platform grabbed the scramjet’s landing skis before the wind could hurl us into the sea, then a series of slender metal poles rose from the edge of the platform and began generating an invisible pressure wall around the landing pad, shielding the scramjet from the worst of the wind.
When the hatch cracked open, freezing sea air flooded into the cabin as the fishermen quickly filed out. We followed them across the partially exposed platform towards the shelter of the hanger inside the rock, surprised by the severity of the wind whipping over the top of the pressure wall.
Jase peered out at the rolling sea, dotted with icebergs and wind driven white caps. “Why would anyone want to live here?” he yelled over the whine of the wind.
“Do you know how much real cod sells for on Earth these days?” I yelled back, eager to get inside. Protected by the pressure wall, the wind wasn’t strong enough to blow me into the sea, nevertheless my aversion to water made me feel uncomfortably exposed.
Jase gave me that sharp, hungry look he always got when he smelled money. “How much?”
“Enough to make good people sign five year contracts.” When interest momentarily flashed across his face, I asked, “Thinking of changing careers?”
He glanced at the bleak, windswept sea and shook his head. “Not a chance!”
At the hanger’s entrance we passed through another pressure field, this time into warm air where the scream of the wind was muted to a distant howl. A large metal door hung suspended above us, ready to roll down to shield the chamber if the winds grew too strong for the pressure field. Parked inside the hanger were three small utility aircraft used to ferry replacement crews and supplies out to the factory ships and link the isolated spire communities together. The hanger wasn’t large enough to bring the heavy scramjet inside, which was already receiving passengers for the return trip to the mainland. The outbound men and women had completed their three month tours at sea and were returning to Tundratown for some hard earned rest.
Below the hanger, the spire was honeycombed with storage facilities, workshops, a small hospital and accommodation for the hundred people who operated the base. Due to the ferocity of the rolling seas surroundi
ng the Devil’s Teeth, there were no docking facilities for the fishing fleet. Everything and everyone had to be moved by air.
Mukul Sarat emerged from the back of the hanger wearing a more expensive version of the flotation suits the fishermen wore, suggesting he was a regular visitor to this barely habitable planet. “Captain Kade,” Sarat said as he approached, “welcome to Icetop.”
We shook hands, but our gloves prevented my threading getting direct physical contact for a DNA scan. Just as when he’d visited me in my stateroom, my threading registered nothing about him. Whatever he was carrying completely neutralized my bionetics, but for him only. I was still getting hits on everyone else in sight. Hiding my irritation at being out-teched, I said, “This is Jase Logan, my copilot.”
Sarat gave Jase a surprised look, confirming my suspicion he’d expected me to leave Jase in Hades City. Accepting the unavoidable, Sarat extended his hand. “Welcome.”
“We’ve met,” Jase said, refusing to accept Sarat’s outstretched hand. “Don’t you remember?”
Sarat withdrew his hand slowly, glancing warily at me. “Do we have a problem, Captain Kade?”
I threw Jase a warning look. “No, no problem.”
Sarat studied Jase uncertainly, then motioned to the elevator. “This way.”
The lift took us up through the center of the spire to a surprisingly spacious penthouse. We stepped out into a large lounge area flanked by three floor-to-ceiling windows shielded by pressure fields and equipped with deployable metal shutters. The sprawling room was decorated with replica tribal ornaments and deeply padded chairs covered in tanned drift-whale hide, while the view out over the iceberg strewn ocean was hazy, but spectacular.
Mapped Space 1: The Antaran Codex Page 8