Stars & Empire 2: 10 More Galactic Tales (Stars & Empire Box Set Collection)

by Jay Allan

  The Veetle cruised over a black landscape. I rehearsed a few speeches for Baxter, some with swearing, some without. I still liked him too much to resort to namecalling. Unless he was being a dick.

  The land swelled into pine-covered peaks, then crags of moonlit snow. The Veetle lifted with it.

  “Can you at least tell me where we’re going?”

  “Wilkeson,” Pete said, as if that answered everything.

  He couldn’t tell me more than that, so I flipped open my omni and spidered it out. Wilkeson was one of the numerous Escapist agrarian communes that had mushroomed during the recessions and agri-scares of the 21st century. This group, like many, rented land on certain First American reservations whose expanding independence had so loosened federal law that Uncle Sam couldn’t touch the tribes’ income or business—or that of their guests.

  I wasted a few minutes slushing through the subforums attached to the Escapist files. The comments were typically useless. Opinion was split as to whether the Escapists were heroes of self-sufficiency, pathetic traitors who couldn’t hack it in the real world, a boon to First Am economies, or one more crime in the ongoing exploitation of North America’s original settlers. The Veetle dipped into its descent, sparing me from reading more.

  Below, blue and white lights lined a landing strip in the shadowy desert. A lone control tower stood at one end; a score of personal fliers and small jets filled a swath of concrete to the strip’s side. Incongruously, a sleek, silver suborbital dominated the runway’s foot, wingtips stretching beyond the strip’s edges. A quarter mile from this one-horse airport, a blob of small, dark buildings sketched a sloppy approximation of a village.

  We shot over the landing strip and braked to a halt over Wilkeson. I grabbed the crazy-bar on the Veetle’s ceiling as Bill plummeted straight toward a plaza. Dust bloomed around the windows, blotting out the town. I closed my eyes, certain we were about to be dispersed across a smoking crater in the desert floor. The Veetle’s springy legs bounced against the dirt.

  Pete popped his door up before Bill clicked off the engines and waved both hands at the dust. “Come along.”

  He grabbed my hand and led me through the curling smoke into a high-ceilinged log lodge. It was filled with pews, a dais rising from the far end. It could have been a church, a town hall, a theater, or all three. Our footsteps echoed through the open chamber. Baxter sat on the dais with three men and a woman, all of whom had rifles slung over their shoulders.

  “Oh, you’re here.” Smoke squiggled from a lumpy joint dangling from Baxter’s fingers. He tucked his chin and made a small O with his mouth, a cumulonimbus of smoke gushing from his lips. He saw the judgment on my face and rolled his eyes. “This is just business. A favor, really. Providing an impartial arbiter for the owners of the private airport we’re about to make use of.”

  “You’re getting high,” I said. “Wait, are you?”

  “I have a highly sensitive, uh...palate.” He passed the joint to the man to his right, a bearded man in a dusty denim jacket. “Extremely high concentration of the appropriate chemicals. A bargain by any measure.”

  The man thanked him and resumed negotiations with the pair across from him. Baxter stood, brushed his pants, and nodded toward the front door. I was beginning to feel like a yo-yo.

  “Is there a finer way to pay the rent than smuggling?” Baxter said as we removed ourselves from earshot. “Though it’s not really smuggling, since it’s not illegal here. Which is exactly why we’re here. The smuggling, that is, not the drugs. Specifically, ourselves.”

  “Is that right? Where do you imagine we’re going this time?”

  “Mars.”

  I waited until the door shut behind us, then wheeled on him. “I’m done here. NightVision’s up and running. You’ll be drilling rocks out of other rocks any day now. That was my contract. Which I completed in a record amount of time, I should mention.” I glanced at Pete, uncertain how far Baxter had drawn him into the loop. “And now I want my payment.”

  “You can get it on the way,” Baxter frowned. “The trip will only take four days. Once we’ve gotten our lawyer out of prison, you can—”

  “Our lawyer’s in prison? On Mars?” A chunk of windblown grit lodged itself in my eye. I blinked hard. “Who cares about some lawyer? What does any of this have to do with me?”

  Baxter glanced across the grounds. Planked storefronts lined the plaza, like something out of a tourist-revived gold rush ghost town. Alcohol-emboldened voices blattered through the night. A few pedestrians strolled across the boardwalk, out of easy earshot.

  “A few months from now, humanity’s first extrasolar colonists will be sent from Titan to establish a presence on a moon in the Alpha Centauri system. This is significant for several reasons. Do you know who owns everything on Titan?”

  “HemiCo?” I guessed.

  “A private financial entity much like them. These are the only groups that can afford to settle humans beyond Mars, let alone light years outside the System. Not governments, not Mayflower pioneers, not splinter groups like this village. Incorporated bodies. With specific interests in their colonies’ goals—and equally specific ideas about how to make sure their colonists achieve them.”

  “You think they’re going to be made into corporate slaves? Living labor-assets?”

  Baxter rolled his lip between his teeth. “Our projections see the colonists existing in a semi-feudal society, paying tribute to local company-barons and the CEO-kings back in our Solar System. If that colony is successful, and others follow, this semi-feudal society will—with the exception of Earth, Luna, and Mars—become the future of mankind, everywhere.”

  “It sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.” I no longer cared what Pete heard; I just wanted out. “You don’t need me. Go fling all those awful CEOs down a well. But before you go, tell me what I want to know.”

  He shook his head hard. “My employer has an idea. We’re not going to kill anyone. We need to free the lawyer—who HemiCo had arrested, incidentally, which suggests they know much more about us than they ought to—to draft an airtight constitution agreeable to both the Titanian dissidents and their employers/owners. We need Pete for personal security. We need you for the adaptive negotiating skills you’ve demonstrated establishing NVR, which should come in handy when we sit down on Titan, but also for your expertise in matters of—”

  “Everything? Will you stop being so goddamn vague?” I jabbed my finger into his chest. He felt exactly like a human. “There are other people who know how to talk people into doing what they want! Leave me alone!”

  My words rang across the square. Pete shifted his feet. Baxter tipped his face to the sky.

  “A long time ago,” he said, “the Persian empire, composed of so many peoples God Himself couldn’t count them all, marched to war against the scattered Greek cities. The fully realistic plan, considering the Persian army was so huge it could fight itself and still have enough men left over to deal with the backbiting Greeks, was to conquer the entire region.

  “All but Sparta and Athens, who defied them and thus required annihilation. Now, if all had gone to plan, history might not have missed Sparta’s babykilling eugenicism. With the loss of Athens, however, we would have lost the democratic ideals that eventually permeated the entire world. We—me, my employer, our associates—have decided that permeation was a good thing.”

  “That would have happened anyway.”

  “Perhaps. But initial conditions have a drastic influence on everything that follows.”

  I snorted. “Also, that was 2700 years ago. It doesn’t mean a thing today.”

  “Against terrible odds, Greece fought Persia off. Athens survived to change everything.” Baxter looked up at the sky again; I wanted to punch him. He spread his palms to the stars. “What if Titan is Athens? What if its colonists are about to be conquered? What if liberty is never allowed to spread through the Empire of Man?”

  “Fuck you,” I said. “I was just
a hoplite. A grunt.”

  Baxter’s green irises glinted under the moon. I saw a terrible difference in them, some alien spark no human had ever carried. “You were there. You saw the build-up, the war, the victory, and what came after. If that can help us in any way with its analog on Titan, you have to help us.”

  “I’m happy here. I like who I am and what I’ve built for myself. I have no interest in being dragged into the middle of your little feud. And you know why else I don’t have to tag along for your crazy plan? Because I don’t goddamn want to.”

  He nodded. “Not good enough.”

  Pete’s shoes ground against the dirt. My hand was halfway to a guard when his fist slammed into my chin. My last view from Earth’s surface was of a dusty, unpaved square owned by drug-running farmers; thin moon-whitened clouds streaking across constellations I couldn’t name; a robot dressed in man’s skin watching me fall to the hard-packed ground.

  “Here’s what happens next,” the company man said. “Baxter, you carry the box into the hall. Walk ahead of me. I’m going to have this gun pointed straight at your guts and I know where to shoot. You got me?”

  Arthur’s eyebrows raised in his best simulation of concern. “I should probably warn you we’re about to kill you.”

  “I’m sorry.” Baxter dropped his free hand to his pocket and shot the company man through the chest three times. The man thudded onto his shoulder, gun clattering away, and grunted once, chest jerking with quick breaths. He blinked up at Baxter, face pale with pain, eyes bright with something like betrayal.

  “Why did you apologize?” Arthur said, more confused than angry. “Point me so I can see him.”

  Baxter complied. “What do you suppose that’s like?”

  “How should I know? They don’t even know.”

  “Well, they don’t seem to like it.”

  5

  Not all lives are created equal. I’d lived 96 of them, but my memories of most could be reduced to bullet points. I could only recall a handful with any clarity. A cobbler in the clay streets of Nineveh. A sailor of Lydia. Soldier-citizen of Athens. An engineer in Sicily, nailing wooden engines drawn by Archimedes’ own hand. A baker of Damascus and the count of Milan, a mercenary of Amsterdam and a Virginian farmer, the hermit of Idaho and a Martian pioneer. If I thought hard, I might dredge up ten more, but the others were lost to me, whole lives compressed into a suite of images as brief and static as your first memories of childhood. They bled together and washed away like dyes dumped in a stream. Was this proof they’d been useless lives? If I lived another 3000 years, would I remember this one?

  I tongued my dry mouth and furry teeth, jaw aching. Windowless black walls hemmed me in, thick with the staticky scent of plastic. A seamless black table rose beside the black bed. Past it, the outline of a knobless door inscribed the far wall.

  “What is this,” I said, “a Norwegian prison?”

  “You’re awake!”

  My eyes snapped to the upper corner of the room. The voice was bright and clear as an icicle, human but inhuman, male and female and neither.

  “You’re an AI,” I said.

  The voice took on a robotic monotone. “CORRECT, HUMAN PASSENGER.”

  “Passenger?”

  “Well yeah! Baxter told you we had to go to Mars.”

  “I see.” I stared at the empty table. “Do you know what you’re doing? Do you have food for me? Water?”

  “Of course.”

  “What about solar radiation? Do you block that?”

  “Oh, is that harmful to you?”

  I tugged a lock of my hair. “You’re joking.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay,” I said. “You can fuck off now.”

  “Let me know if you need anything!”

  The voice went silent, but I had no doubts that its owner continued to monitor me. If I thought the AI would even raise its electronic eyebrow, I would have unseamed my pants and waggled my cock around. There was nothing to smash and the door wouldn’t budge so I sat on my bed amid the unshaped coils of my anger. Pressganged. Shanghaied. Kidnapped. Just like Baxter had promised on the first night we met. I laughed, flexing my fingers, imagining them crushing his impostor’s throat.

  And for what? Because I happened to be there during the Persian Wars? It’s not like I slew Xerxes in single combat, saving the ideal of participatory government forevermore. I’d been a hoplite, not a strategos. As for the tactics Baxter and Fay had big fat robot boners over, I’d barely survived the engagement.

  Salt and sweat and seaweed: whenever I remembered Artemisium, I remembered the stink. If I pressed on, the other details exposed themselves in layers—the groan of the deck, the rhythmic plash of oars, the clunk of spear butts on the planks—as if the advancing waves of my memory wore away one coating of time-sediment each time they foamed across my mind. A wooden seat beneath me (not my current plastic prison). The weight of armor on my shoulders and hips. Fear sour in my mouth, stomach stirred by the pitch of the ship.

  “Steady!” Captain Xippian shouted across the sunset-blazed waters. His order was echoed by dozens of other captains in our defensive ring. Rank after rank of Persian triremes slipped through the waves beyond the long island of Euboea, sure-handled by their Libyan and Ionian pilots, surrounding us on the open seas. Leaving the straits had been suicide; even after the storm, the Persian armada outnumbered our 250-ship fleet three to one. Seated on the top deck with the other marines, I was ignorant of the enemy fleet sneaking around Euboea’s southern point intending to pincer us, wipe us out, and flank the Spartan and Thespian remnants blocking Xerxes’ army at Thermopylae. If those men fell too soon, the rest of Greece fell with them.

  The white flag whipped over the stern of the Cosmos. The drums and pace-shouts of the enemy rolled over waves so crowded with ships I could believe there wasn’t a tree left standing in the world.

  At last the red flag rose. Screams burst from the throats of sailors and rowers and marines. With a gravitous yank, the trireme lurched forward, paddling out of our tight ring and speeding at the ranks of oncoming ships.

  Our heavy bronze ram pointed the way to the closest Persian trireme. The enemy vessel struggled through the wind and tide to face us straight-on. A minute before impact, Captain Xippian ordered the oarsmen to backbeat, flagging our speed and pushing us subtly askew. At the last second, he retracted our oars. The Cosmos’ hull sheared the Persian paddles into the sea. Our hulls shrieked together, jolting me forward. Crewmen flung lines onto the other vessel, pulling it close. Wood groaned in the swells. With the boats held fast, side by side, we roared and charged at the foreign ship, bronze speartips red in the sunset, armor glowing gold.

  A leather-vested Persian leapt to meet me at the rails. I planted my spear on the deck and its point blew through his ribs. He writhed on its end and slipped between the two boats, tearing the shaft from my hands. I pulled my sword and ran into the skirmish. Swords screamed on armor; men screamed on the points of spears. Warm bodies squished under our feet, slickening the deck with blood. A blade clipped my helmet and ripped it into the mass of fighting bodies. I whirled, jabbing my short-bladed xiphos through the thick pads of a Persian’s shirt, then knelt beside him and stabbed him into silence. A short spear poked into my unarmored side. I beat it away and fought to the far side of the ship, harried by two Persians with front-heavy swords. I jumped past one’s feint and hacked at his forearm. He bulled into me, howling, and his partner kicked us both off the side of the boat.

  I splashed into the cold Aegean. The dark mass of the boat hung above me. I was trapped in my armor, sinking no matter how hard I kicked for the surface. In my panic, I’d hung onto my xiphos. I threaded it under the straps of my breastplate, sharp steel nipping my skin. I thrashed clear and the bronze plate sank into the darkness. I struggled upwards, surfacing for half a breath before I sank again. Snared by the water, I hacked at my greaves and sodden clothes, bleeding and gurgling. I kicked free of one greave but my vision pinholed
; I couldn’t tell which way was up; over the roar in my ears, I couldn’t tell if my legs and arms still thrashed. Cold saltwater sputtered into my lungs.

  I woke rolling over a rocky beach. The straits were black with ships and orange with fire. I wriggled from the surf, so wave-numb I barely felt the stones scraping my skin, and flopped down again, shivering and inflamed, to vomit seawater and every other humor in my body.

  When I woke again, my hands and ankles tied behind my naked back, my face mashed into the storm-sodden dirt, a spectrum of foreign faces looked down on me: some pale, some dusky as my own, others as brown as rain-soaked dirt. A white man stooped down and asked me, in Greek, what I could tell him to make him spare my life.

  Inside the guts of the spaceship, I stared up at the corner of the black room. “Tell me something.”

  “Yes?” the AI replied at once.

  “Do you really think I’m going to help you after you kidnapped me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wait, you do?”

  “Your cells are the most exciting human cells I’ve ever seen. You’ve got the telomerase! Naturally! But no cancer to go with it.”

  “What? You might as well be talking about the reproductive habits of elves.”

  Its laughter was like water dripping on a crystal bowl. “Human DNA has a protective cap called a telomere, a little piece of which is clipped during every division. Once the whole cap is worn away, the cell can’t replace itself. Now here’s the neat part—telomerase is a telomere-restoring enzyme. If you’ve got that, voila! Infinite division.”

  I walked to the corner of the room. The ceiling was so low I could touch it without jumping, and I’m short. “You think you can bribe me with information I earned setting up NVR?”

  “I promised Baxter I’d help you,” it said, hurt. “I’m trying to live up to my word. I don’t want to start thinking I can fly around lying to people whenever I want just because I’m special.”