by John F. Carr
“Take him in this wagon,” said Chuluun. “We will bury him in the steppes he wished to call home.”
The men at the wagon nodded.
Chuluun mounted his horse again. When Tuya was in the saddle, he drew close to her.
“When we have a son, I should like to name him Bataar,” said Chuluun. “Bataar, meaning hero. He will never labor in the mines. He will never know a shimmer stone, and he will never care.”
“We will have a son named Bataar,” said Tuya. “We will have other sons and daughters, too, in our new life.”
Chuluun, second khan of the steppes, simply nodded. He rode forward along the line of wagons, with Tuya behind him, to lead his new tribe to a land beneath open sky.
— 14 —
DOWN THE RABID HOLE
or
The Report on Lost Colony 4a
Charles E. Gannon
2057 A.D. Earth
Hagman grazed his fingertip across the secure activation switch: the recorder’s status panel illuminated. “Ready,” he said.
Funakoshi, the paralegal assigned by the out-system Extraterritorial Arbitration Court, cleared his throat. “This convenes the in absentia deposition of all representatives and employees of the Kennicott Metals Corporation, LLC, in regard to the events surrounding the establishment, and subsequent loss, of the limited-shareholder prospecting post officially designated as ‘Colony 4 a’ by the CoDominium Colonial Registry office, and situated on the so-called Eastern Continent of ‘Haven,’ the fourth moon of the gas giant Byers II, colloquially known as ‘Cat’s Eye,’ in the Byers System.”
Hagman wondered how Funakoshi could say all that in one breath. ‘’Let’s get started,” he grunted, hitching his round belly closer to the table.
The words were no sooner out of Hagman’s mouth than a spare, almost gaunt woman with high cheekbones and sunken eyes jumped upright. “I protest the legitimacy of these evidentiary proceedings. My clients have the explicit right to—”
“Ms. Dumaskaya, this is not a court of law; this is a class-action arbitration. And in this circumstance, there is nothing irregular about not having relevant witnesses available for examination.”
“There is ‘nothing irregular’ about this hearing only because most clients inexplicably tolerate this flagrant violation of their rights. However, as the legal representative of the settlers of Colony 4a, and through them, their heirs and assigns, I insist upon exercising my right to make my own inquiries of the parties who served on board the CDSS Stellar Bourse during the incident.”
“We can’t accommodate your request for access to the Stellar Bourse, Ms. Dumaskaya, but you’re welcome to head through about a dozen Alderson Point Jumps to find her ‘last’ known location.” That ‘location’—as all three people in the room already knew—was probably half-a-year out of date, itself.
“It is not our concern that summoning the relevant parties for a live deposition would be an expensive and lengthy proposition. It is our right to demand access to them.”
“Actually, Ms. Dumaskaya, you are dead wrong about that. Under the terms of the Compensatory Labor Contracts signed by all the parties from which the plaintiffs in your case derive their ostensible claim, evidentiary depositions taken in absentia are admissible in the proceedings and are accorded full legal and official status if the deposition was taken under the direct auspices of—and I quote—‘a duly recognized court officer of any CoDominium court or a commander (or above) in any CoDominium naval service.’” Hagman flopped a contractual binder the thickness of the Domesday Book on the table. “Have a look for yourself, if you don’t believe me. Otherwise, please sit down. Now.”
Ekaterina Dumaskaya snapped her eyes off Hagman, fixed them on a less noisome blank spot on the far wall; she sat down with an indignant huffing noise.
Hagman sighed. There was no way this could be over soon enough. He cleared his throat and read: “For entry into the record—”
Deposition of Captain Delmore Seurault, Master and Owner of the CDSS Stellar Bourse. Taken by Ensign J. T. Muhlenberger, Acting Yeoman of the CDSN Fort De Soto, DDE, under the supervision of Lt. Commander Beryl Tedesco, commanding. Recorded September 19, 2056 AD (sidereal). Relevant excerpts included for entry into the record; transcript of full deposition available in archives.
DS: So we got to Byers [System] about half a month later than we had contracted. No fault of ours, though: like I said, you Navy boys commandeered us to move those nukes from—
JM: Yes, fine: please, stay on the topic of the events at Byers II d.
DS: Byers II d…? Oh, right. Haven. So, during our trip out there, it turned out Kennicott had underestimated the comestibles requirement for its workers. The more sparse the rations in steerage became, the hotter the tempers. With each other, with my crew, with the universe in general. In all fairness, they were the strangest group of labor-slaves I ever saw—white collar Norwegians, Uzbeki gastarbeiters, oil-field workers from Siberia, miners from South Africa. They had one thing in common: debt. Some had probably been living beyond their means—so they deserved being there. The rest—damn, they just got caught up in the market failures when the commodities values on gold and platinum went through the basement during the Asteroid Extraction Deregulation Interval. I felt real sorry for ’em: they were just folks who’d lost everything and took a chance on the stars instead of staying at home and starving, waiting for handouts that were never going to come. Hardly fair if you ask me.
But anyway, we had trouble brewing below decks, and some of the bottom-feeders in my crew weren’t above a little black-market food peddling out of the galley. That made things a lot worse—particularly when my bilge-lovers started seeking sex as their preferred method of payment. Starving kids, desperate moms, pissed husbands: it was an ugly scene. In the two days before we made orbit at Haven, I had to issue weapons from the ship’s locker to break up three fights. I had two crewmen in sickbay for a week, and four of the contract workers never made it to their new promised land. Of course, in the end, that was probably lucky for them.
So bottom line: I was in a rush to get the contract workers off my ship. And the corporate management team from Kennicott was urging me to waste no time, since we were already two weeks behind schedule. So they were only too happy to accept full responsibility for accelerated deployment.
JM: Excuse me; ‘accelerated deployment?’ Could you define that term?
DS: Sure: ‘accelerated deployment’ meant that we were going to drop them into a pre-prospected shimmer-stone lode without a comprehensive advance survey by the corporate team. Site survey and worker settlement were to take place concurrently.
JM: And what was the problem with that?
DS: What wasn’t? The advance prospecting data was restricted to confirming the presence of shimmer stones—and even that data was pretty thin. We had absolutely no info on the air pressure at the site, or on access to water sources, or anything else that might be handy for a self-sustaining labor colony. One of Kennicott’s managers commented that his only concern was to ‘first get ’em dropped, and then get ’em digging.’ That was pretty much the corporate motto, I think. And given the unrest down in my lower decks, I wasn’t in the mood to argue.
JM: And when you landed, what did you find?
DS: Mind you, I only went down once—on the third trip, just to get a break from the ship. Same old bulkheads get dull after a while, y’know? Any change of scenery is a relief. Or so I always thought.
Well, let me tell you, I couldn’t get back upstairs to Stellar Bourse fast enough. These poor saps had been plopped down in the middle of an old volcanic plain. Nothing but rock as far as you could see. And their mine was also their home: a big sinkhole. You know what I’m talking about: there’s a special name for the geological feature, for those big shafts where the lava comes up—
JM: (term) It’s a special kind of vertical volcanic tube, often confused with what’s called a ‘skylight.’ Yes, I’m familiar with them. Go on.
DS: Yeah, it was one of those. Only it was big. I mean really big. Almost 90 meters across. The walls were almost a perfect ninety degree vertical, down to 3 kilometers. Then they started tapering inward down to a depth of five kilometers. Beyond that, it seemed to branch off into side chambers and galleries and crevices: a spelunker’s paradise from the sound of it. But a hell of a place to live: light coming down from way up high, all the ground water dripping down, and when it rained—Christ. The opening to the tube sat down at the base of a shallow depression in the surrounding plain. Probably that basin was the result of water erosion, from eons of everything running down that big 90 meter-wide drain in the middle of a black expanse of igneous rock. So when it rained, it all drained down there—and suddenly, living on the galleries that spiraled down along the inner side of that thing was like living at arm’s length from the Victoria Falls.
Actually, that feature—the wide ledges—were the one thing that was helpful for the settlers. See, the walls of the tube were terraced, sort of like a corkscrew in reverse: there was a shelf that came out from the wall, went all the way down to the bottom. It was anywhere between 4 to 10 meters wide, and looked like a road spiraling down, down, down into all that blackness. At the time, the company guys from Kennicott were all patting themselves on the back, saying what a lucky find that was, and what a freak geological formation. There was nothing in any planetary record which could account for that, they said—yet there it was, like a godsend to them, made to order for multi-level extraction. No need for elevators, no need for scaffolding: just follow the ledge round and round, down to the depth you want and then dig straight back into the wall. That ease of access saved them at least three months of start-up work, which made the suits simply ecstatic. I remember because they were boozing it up one day back on board the Bourse, and the Assistant Project Manager, Alvaro Gartian, drank himself silly while chanting the mantra, ‘Too good to be true, too good to be true.’
We didn’t know—couldn’t even guess—how right he was.
Hagman felt Dumaskaya’s green, ice-chip eyes attempting to impale his own. “And no one in your company thought to investigate these uncommon rock formations before sending the colonists down?”
“Actually, Ms. Dumaskaya, they were investigated. They were carefully assessed for erosion, their long-term suitability for sustained load-bearing, possible drainage modification, and a slew of other relevant engineering and architectural and mining considerations.” Hagman thumped down another binder half as wide as the first. “That’s what we were supposed to do. That’s all we knew to do. There was absolutely no reason to conduct any other investigations. In fact, if we weren’t the beneficiaries of hindsight, I wonder if we’d be any more likely than they were to realize what kind of tests they actually did need to run.”
“Easy to say, now.”
“Ma’am, all I’m saying is that it was a mining project, so we sent miners. They conducted all the tests you are supposed to conduct to make sure that you’re going to be operating a safe—and yes, profitable—mine.”
“Which did the colonists absolutely no good.”
Hagman nodded. “I can’t argue with that; it did them not one whit of good.” He sighed. “Let’s move on.” He reactivated the playback unit.
Deposition of Alvaro Gartian, formerly Assistant Project Manager of Compensatory Labor Colony Number 4a (chartered under the Colonial Development Act by Kennicott Metals Corporation, LLC). Taken by Chanille Jones, Court Clerk, Mugwump’s World, Zeta Doradus system. Recorded January 19-21, 2057 AD (sidereal), at the Brakeshoe Chemical and Toxin Rehabilitation Clinic. Relevant excerpts included for entry into the record; transcript of full deposition available in archives. (Some sections are unclear due to subject’s slurring and unclear enunciation.)
AG: Is this thing running? Listen, before we start—if you can’t sneak me some more of that—Oh, this is part of the record? Okay, yeah; okay.
So it was my job to conduct the logistical part of the site survey. You know, best place for the ships to land, best places to process the raw stones, best sites to store the transshipment containers. And all the less charming stuff, like: as we expand, where do we get water; where do we dump wastes; how do we reduce our costs by getting self-sufficiency in energy; how do use local biota to supplement off-world rations; you name it. Not a sexy job, but hey: it pays. Well, it paid.
Anyhow, I took a look at the lay of the land and found out that the surrounding basalt barrens were not as barren as they looked from the air. There was a micro-ecology that was pretty sparse, but it was there. Small critters—like furry tree-frogs with big suckers on their feet—seemed to live off lichens and grasses that grew in some niches. They were the base of the food chain. Certainly there wasn’t the diversity of wildlife that they discovered over on the West Continent, in what came to be called the Shangri-La Valley. Out on the Eastern Continent, it was a pretty simple food chain—and stobors were at the top of it. Aggressive hunters but otherwise, pretty reclusive. But as I mentioned yesterday, there were a lot of deep, narrow ravines and crevasses in the basalt that you only noticed when you got up-close. It was like a sort of open-top rat warren, with pathways cutting this way and that. Whatever was going on in those cracks and crevices—including the life-habits of stobors—we didn’t need, and didn’t want, to know about. Quite frankly we were blind to it: we were all blind to everything except the shimmer stones. Even the most worn-out colonists started coming alive when they saw that treasure-trove. It was like a shining promise sparkling at us out of all that dark. It meant that the company was going to get rich, and that we were going to get bonuses, and that the workers were going to earn back their freedom and a fair living.
The only real oddity we detected was in some of the side vents down beneath the 2 kilometer mark. These were different, like they were lined with, or maybe cut from, some kind of soft stone that seemed more like tarry charcoal. Our mineralogists hadn’t seen it before, and would have sent it upstairs to the ship’s little lab, but Bourse had gone on to her next destination. So we had to ping a request off of the satellite, for which we had only a 28 minute window twice a day.
As I understood the process at the time, that request for a sample analysis would ultimately be forwarded to the really big facility in the system at that time—the fuel and refit base on the moon Ayesha. They’d eventually make sure that one of the bi-weekly landers going down to Shangri-La would make a quick ballistic hop over to us and pick up our sample before boosting back out. Then the half-staffed, overworked, and underpaid contract labs on Ayesha would take a look at the sample—when they got around to it. But quite frankly, that sample and those weird, half-sealed off side vents just weren’t on our priority list.
We were finding shimmer stones like shells at the seashore. It was incredible; it was a dream come true. There was even talk about sending out some smaller parties to some of the other vertical vents we’d seen in the surrounding four hundred click radius.
And then I got food poisoning: some spoiled company chow. Leave it to me to draw the bad MRE. So there I was, puking up everything I’d eaten for the past twenty years, and they divert a lander that was outbound from Shangri-La. I’m on a stretcher, waiting for them to load me on, three shades of green but really sick with the fear that I was going to get shipped out and lose my share, when I heard the first report come in.
Yeah, I was there: I heard it. A team of advance prospectors had gone down deep into the Rabbit-Hole—’cause that’s what we called it, like in that fairy tale with the Queen and those mushrooms—and two of them had found one of these side vents that had even more of that tarry stuff than the ones back up higher where we were. The vent was almost choked closed with it, they said. So the site manager says, “go in and see what you can see.” So in they went, to see what they could see.
I heard the screams over the radio. First they sounded distant; must have been coming from the guys that went into the vent itself, I guess. Then the thi
rd guy, the one with the transmitter, started getting jittery and teeth-chattery. Didn’t help that everyone in range of the radio on my end started telling him what to do—half of them saying he should get the hell out of there, the other half telling him he had to go back in after his buddies. I think he bugged out: I heard feet running. Then he started screaming—couldn’t make out what he said—and the radio died.
I didn’t hear anything else. Didn’t really want to, either. They were drawing straws for the rescue party when they loaded me into the lander and we dusted off.
That was the last I saw of Haven. Or anyone in the colony.
“So then what of the actions of the Stellar Bourse: leaving orbit at such a time is not malfeasance?” Dumaskaya’s face was white with rage.
‘’No, Ms. Dumaskaya, it is not. If every freighter or transport delayed leaving orbit every time any of its former passengers encountered difficulties, I seriously doubt we’d have any interstellar trade at all.”
‘’So the death of three men—this is but a trifle, a ‘difficulty’? A minor mishap to be ignored?”
“No, but it is the kind of problem that people on the ground can handle.”
‘’Ah, yes—you mean the way the settlers of Colony 4a were so ready to ‘handle’ their crisis? Borgia moie, how can you say such things and not perish from the shame of it?”
Hagman felt tired, tried not to feel bored as well. “Ms. Dumaskaya, that viewpoint is only tenable if you selectively decide to ignore the fact that it is also the product of hindsight’s 20/20 vision. When Capt. Seurault took the Bourse out of orbit to assume its overdue place in the re-fueling rota at Ayesha, only three men had been lost in the colony. I ask you to bear in mind that these casualties occurred in an unexplored mine. At an unsurveyed site. On a new and unfamiliar planet. Meanwhile, the rest of the colonists were in safe, fairly comfortable billets, had plenty of supplies, were relatively well-armed, and were confidently taking matters into their own hands. As they should have.” He spoke over Dumaskaya’s attempted outburst. “There were almost two thousand colonists, ma’am. And they did not ask for help.”