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

by Jay Allan

  “That’s all most of us got anyway,” said a thin kid with a shaved head.

  “Tell everyone on our side of Thermopylae to fill their tubs with water. Empty jugs. Anything they got.”

  Pete cocked his head, brown eyes doubting. “What are you expecting?”

  “OA will panic,” I said. “It won’t be pretty.”

  “Ah,” he nodded. “Good luck.”

  “You too.” I nodded at Baxter on my way back to Jia, but he was too busy rigging a stretcher for Shelby to notice. As I neared Jia, she and her five troopers clapped their hands and barked. I waited for her to notice me. “Got something?”

  “Sure do.” During our talk over Shelby’s body, her eyes had been bright with fear. That was gone now. Replaced by resolve. She pointed at the dome roof. “Your boy in the sky. How’s he at forgery?”

  “Probably better than you are at explaining yourself.”

  She wiped the tip of her nose. “If we go in blasting, we can tear the cache apart. But you know who’s guarding the place?”

  I frowned, then nodded. “Your friends.”

  “Guys who may not have crossed sides with us, but who ate lunch with us yesterday. If we’ve got an order stamped with Linigan’s sig-key, we get in, get out, and no one’s the wiser.”

  “Hey Fay,” I said, “think you can—”

  “Just a moment,” Fay said.

  My omni hummed. I flashed Fay’s download at Jia. “Look right?”

  She leaned over its screen. “Like we’re about to celebrate Christmas early.”

  We packed into the battlewagon. With one of her men driving, the remaining five of us fit easily into its personnel hold. The soldiers’ strained faces glowed green in the heads-up displays mounted around the wagon’s interior.

  I transferred Fay’s forgery to the others. They found me a spare uniform that gathered loosely around my ankles and wrists. As Jia helped me dress, I noticed a small bandage on the back of her left hand. Had she cut out her tracking chip? The wagon rolled smoothly over streets paved by employee taxes, delivering us to another tax-funded institution: an auxiliary arms cache in the basement beneath Offworld Rainbow, a produce importer specializing in citrus and tropical fruit.

  The driver stayed onboard with the gunner. A muscly redhead named Hondo swiped his ID stick at the unmarked door in the back of the smooth white building. The three-inch-thick door slid open into a broad service elevator.

  “How’s Shelby?” I subvocalized as we descended.

  “Stable but unchanged,” Fay said. “Hey, your signal’s going rotten. Where are you?”

  “Underground.”

  “Well, come back...” Its voice shrank into a crackle of static, then nothing. I was out of touch with Fay for the first time since I’d stripped my comm gear on Hidey-Hole.

  The elevator slowed, stopped, glided open.

  A lone armed soldier crouched behind a faukwood desk. Seeing our uniforms, he shouldered his gun and ran a hand over his smooth, sweaty scalp. “Sorry for being so twitchy. Some crazy shit’s going down outside.”

  “That’s exactly why we’re here,” Hondo said. “Got to pick up some gear for the Pyramid.”

  The soldier thumbed through his omni. “Huh. Don’t see any requisitions.”

  “Bullshit net,” Hondo muttered. He held out his omni. “Check mine.”

  The bald soldier sucked his lip, reading. “I don’t see an inventory here.”

  “Linigan didn’t have time for details,” Jia said.

  “Then how am I supposed to know what you’re authorized to take?”

  Jia chuckled. “Call up Linigan, why don’t you. I’m sure he’ll be happy to run down every rifle, clip, and shell for you.”

  The man nodded and went for his omni. “Good idea.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “Wait.”

  “Yes?”

  She bugged her eyes at me. Put on the spot, I said, “You ever hear the one about the woman who knocked this guy out with one punch?”

  The soldier owled at me. Jia slammed a left hook into his jaw. He crashed into the desk, sprawling.

  “What the hell, guys?” he cried.

  Jia cocked her arm and pounded him until he stopped moving. I peeled back one eyelid to check if he was faking, but he didn’t flinch.

  “What the hell was that?” Jia said.

  I held out my palms. “I said one punch.”

  “Move.” She gestured Hondo and the other soldier to the back room, then nodded at me. “Tie him up.”

  I went for his shoelaces, but even military operations had switched to foot-hugging memoryform boots decades ago. He did have a knife on his belt, however, which I used to slice his pant legs into strips. I knotted them around his wrists and ankles. Pantsless in his shirt and cap, he looked like a KO’d Donald Duck. His omni winked with updates. I pocketed it.

  Someone shouted from the back. I ran to find our crew raining punches on a soldier curled up in the bathroom with his pants around his ankles. Once he was out cold, I trussed him up too.

  Jia used his key to beep open the shuttered walls of the bright white room, revealing racks of rifles and pistols and ammo boxes. There was also an array of nonlethal weapons—telescoping batons, net guns, stunners, bullhorn-like pistols whose purpose I couldn’t fathom—and a small selection of explosive ordnance. I understood the riot gear. The lethal arms, however—there was only one group OA could have anticipated using those against.

  We loaded two flatbed dollies, lobbing boxes of ammo that would have weighed thirty pounds on Earth and catching them without a grunt. With the dollies filled to unsettling capacity, we wheeled them into the elevator. I checked my omni; we’d spent twenty minutes inside.

  “Rob,” Fay said. “Rob. Robrobrob.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, there you are. Um. Pete tells me his team had a skirmish.”

  I backed away from the wagon to focus. “Is he all right?”

  “He is. We lost one. Two wounded.” Did Fay sound scared? “Rob, this is getting bad.”

  “What about Shelby?”

  “No change. Do you want me to let you know if there is?”

  “Please.”

  “I don’t know about all this, Rob.”

  I pitched an ammo box up to a waiting pair of hands in the wagon. “Why? Do you see something?”

  “Everything’s too stirred up. I don’t have the first idea what will happen next.”

  “That’s probably why you’re scared. Enjoy it, that’s what us humans call life.”

  We rolled out. The few pedestrians scattered on sight of us. While the presence of a few backpacked pilgrims headed for Thermopylae tipped me off that word was penetrating the omniless city, either it wasn’t spreading far enough, or my estimation of the public reaction had been grossly optimistic. In the case of the former, good people were going to be locked out with the wolves.

  “Are there speakers in this thing?” I asked Jia.

  “What? Think we should put on ‘Flight of the Valkyries’?”

  “Loudspeakers.”

  She nodded. “It’s primarily for crowd control.”

  “We need to spread the word. Slow down and start shouting.”

  We decelerated to the speed of a fast walk. Jia passed me a wireless mike the size of my pinky. With the soldiers staring, I blanked.

  “Come on, Paul Revere,” Jia grinned.

  “Olympian Atomics is coming!” my voice boomed through the street. The others laughed. I leaned over the mike. “Citizens of Titan! You face a choice: freedom, or security. In another hour, OA will take that choice from you. If you’re willing to fight for your freedom, assemble in Dome 27 now.”

  Apartment windows opened. Faces watched with suspicion. By the fifth time I repeated my call to action, I began to remember my speeches in the Assembly. The rhythm of rhetoric. We rolled down the pavement and I slowed my speech, leaving them impatient for each word. I paused just long enough between sentences for my apartment-boun
d audience to grasp their implications, then I plowed into the next. They left their homes bearing blankets stuffed with clothes and supplies. Most stayed put, but we were getting results.

  Midway through our third dome, Hondo tapped his ear. “My omni just died.”

  The other soldiers tapped their frozen screens. I clicked off the mike and unpocketed the omni I’d stolen from the soldier. Updates scrolled on its screen. I tossed it to Jia.

  “They’ve got our location,” she said. “They’ll be on us in minutes.”

  “How?” I said. “Cameras?”

  “Our tracking pins.” She tapped the bandage on her left hand, jerked her chin at the other guards. “They must have heard we switched sides.”

  “You’re all pinned?”

  “Every citizen of Shangri-la. So they can find us if a dome fails or we get lost outside.”

  I punched the car’s roof. “We’ve got to get to Dome 27. Set up our defense.”

  Jia shook her head, dark hair swaying. “What about the rest of the colonists?”

  “Our whole plan’s flushed if OA breaks through before we’re entrenched.”

  She swore softly, hands sitting in her lap like dead birds. She spoke to the driver and the wagon revved, jolting me sideways. A block later we raced past a squad of green uniforms. They opened fire, rifles flashing in the darkness, bullets spinning off our plass windows. Pedestrians scattered, their screams as faint through the plass as the trains I used to listen to at night from my Idaho cabin.

  “Take us to this tunnel.” I held my holomap up for the driver, pointing to the northernmost entry from the larger dome-constellation into Dome 27. “We’ll blow that tube, then fortify the other.”

  The driver raced to the tunnel and braked hard. Our shoes hit the ground before the wagon stopped moving. A trickle of incoming pilgrims dropped back, faces tight in the wagon’s harsh lights.

  Jia grabbed Hondo’s collar. “Get everyone inside 27. Once the tunnel’s clear, kaboom.”

  He worked his jaw. “What about you?”

  “We’ll swing around and come in through Thermopylae. Get moving!”

  He dropped into the tunnel mouth. She reached into the wagon for a white pack of explosives and dashed inside the tunnel. I rang up Pete by way of Fay and told him to fall back and start digging in.

  A plume of yellow ice and orange dust mushroomed from the open ground between our dome and 27. The ground shook; an enormous bang pounded through my palm-covered ears; a tongue of fire spat from the tunnel mouth, carrying the dry, hot stink of melted plastic. Alarms whined above the tunnel mouth, splashing us with white light. A faint breeze touched my face as atmosphere rushed into the decompressed tube. Falling pebbles clanked the bubble’s curved wall.

  A small group of pilgrims gaped as three sets of doors slanted across the tunnel. I explained the other route into Dome 27, then watched from the wagon’s rear window as they ran off.

  We peeled out moments later. Jogging citizens fell behind us. At the tunnel now known as Thermopylae, we backed the battlewagon inside, stopped in the middle of the tube, and executed an eighty-point turn to park it lengthwise, all but blocking passage. Jia aimed its cannon back the way we’d come in.

  Green-uniformed rebels mixed with polo-shirted civilians to haul debris into the tunnel, snarling it, assembling barriers of upturned tables, mattresses, street-tough plastic garbage cans, and stray rocks, caulking it all with shoveled dirt. Jia’s soldiers handed rifles to every citizen who’d touched one before and gave the spares to any man and woman whose friends could vouch they weren’t OA plants.

  We had far too little body armor and limited ammunition. Our force numbered just thirteen trained and able-bodied soldiers, me and Pete, and another sixty-odd colonists and citizens with some firearms training, be they ex-military or just dudes who played a lot of video games.

  Olympian Atomics had five times that many in Shangri-la alone. Armed, armored, and trained.

  Their troops arrived minutes after the wagon was installed across the tunnel. I stood inside Dome 27 with most of our conscripts, including blunt colonial representative Becky Morgan, as Jia gave a crash course on the .28-caliber caseless automatic rifle.

  “Loemann-Chen,” Fay informed me. “A HemiCo subsidiary.”

  OA’s lights came first, white beacons that washed the methane-smeared dome walls. Outside the entrance to Thermopylae, men in bright green uniforms gathered by the dozens. White vehicles cleaved their ranks, details blurred by the yellow rain slicking the bubbles. Like the silhouettes of triremes crawling over the wind-tossed seas. Like the black mob of the Persian army swamping the coast and lighting it for miles with their flickering campfires. Countless. Unstoppable.

  We’d thrown the dice. Not even Fay could say what happened next. My friends were waiting in the tube. I shouldered my rifle and ran to be with them.

  If Baxter were the type of being that required oxygen, he would have taken a deep breath before replying to the policeman. “I am a robot.”

  The policeman squinted at him. Baxter saw no humor in his face. The officer got out an omni. “Your name, now, or we head down to the station and you don’t see the outdoors for a very long time.”

  “My name’s Baxter RUR-b03.05. I am an artificial intelligence in an artificial body. The reason I set off your metal detector is my skeleton and nerves are composed primarily—”

  The cop clanked a pair of handcuffs onto the table. “One more chance.”

  “Show him,” Arthur said, utterly resigned.

  Baxter lifted his shirt. Pierced by keen embarrassment, he peeled the skin back from the DNP/C port under his left arm. The policeman sat paralyzed as Baxter removed the port, too, then turned his body to display the inch-wide hole in his ribs.

  Baxter craned his neck to see if any wires or hydraulics or steel skeleto-structure were visible. “Do you have a flashlight?”

  20

  They didn’t attack. They didn’t have to.

  “We’ve got a choice for you.” Linigan’s omni-amplified Hong Kong British bounced down the shadowy tunnel. “Surrender now. Or surrender in a week or two once you’re too cold and hungry to remember why you’re down there.”

  “Why, we must have five thousand people in these domes,” Becky Morgan hollered from behind a trench of tables and dirt. “It’ll take us a lot longer than two weeks to eat them all.”

  “We’ll be waiting.” From the far end of the tunnel, Linigan’s omni clicked off.

  I gripped my rifle, breathing through my mouth to avoid smelling the sweat souring our tight enclosure. Casual conversation drifted down the tunnel. Crunching footsteps. The heavy hum of vehicles. All of it low-key, workmanlike, the pace of police after a crime scene.

  “What do you think?” Becky asked me.

  I slung my rifle over my chest. “I think unless we find a non-death way to stop eating and breathing, they’re going to win.”

  She nodded, face clouded with thought. “I can see we’ll have to eat you first.”

  I imagine the cheer drained from her face when OA shut off the lights. And the power and heat and water and sewage and recyclers. I wouldn’t know; I was sitting over Shelby’s bed in the clinic, spelling Baxter and trying to come up with a plan. Holing up wasn’t a solution. Thermopylae was just the means to buy us time to find that solution. Right now, it looked like that meant starving long enough to feel noble about ourselves, then crying to Olympian Atomics for mercy.

  There in the hospital, the lights blanked off. The machines quit humming. I was alone in perfect peace, a silent world of darkness broken by the red and green dots of internally-powered electronics. It felt holy, how cleaving through the vacuum must feel to Fay.

  Then everyone started screaming.

  I got up and shouted into the black hall. “People are trying to sleep in here!”

  I banged my face into the wall on the way back in and sat on the floor feeling sorry for myself. The clinic’s auxiliary power kicked up, bathing
me and the sleeping Shelby in a steady light too weak to illuminate much besides how much trouble we were in.

  On New Houston, dome infrastructure was distributed. Three different fusion companies competed for 1.6 million potential customers. Those same companies provided most of the edible algae, too (and were further rewarded with a cut of the population’s oxygen taxes in exchange for the algae farms’ O2 output). It could have been a recipe for disaster.

  But it wasn’t monopolistic. Tax breaks were awarded to citizens and independent collectives who ran their own vats. If they were productive enough to create measurable quantities of O2, they received their portion of the air taxes just like the big boys. Given the general New Houstonian mindset—virtuously independent or avariciously selfish, depending on your perspective—vats of all sizes could be found in every dome across the city. Not to say that every dome was entirely self-sufficient, but if one were cut off from the others, it would still have sources of food and oxygen.

  Shangri-la was centralized. Its power, algae, recycling systems, all those were monopolized within the Pyramid Dome and its immediate neighbors. Backups and redundancies in a couple other domes supplemented the primary supplies, but these were emergency systems, incapable of sustaining their population long-term. I wondered if some farseeing Olympian Atomics architect had envisioned a situation like ours, built Shangri-la so it would always be under the control of its owners.

  “So, Fay,” I said, gazing by habit at the pale green corner of the hospital room, “what do you think we’ll die of first?”

  “Oh, dehydration, probably,” it said. “It depends on whether you’d rather save the water for yourself and then starve and suffocate when the local algae vats die, or to eat and breathe but pour all your water into your single-celled competitors. Either way, you have about six weeks before your survival would depend on methods you would find distasteful.”

  “I don’t know about that. Human flesh tastes pretty good.” I went to the window and looked up at the dome ceiling, a silvery rim in the night. “What about cold?”

  “The domes are multilayered to maximize insulation. Plass, vacuum, plass, et cetera. Which is good news for you. And heating costs. But mostly you.”