Counterweight

by A. G. Claymore

  Counterweight

  By A.G. Claymore

  Edited by Beryl MacFadyen

  Copyright 2014 A.G. Claymore

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, incidents and brands are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademark status and trademark owners of any products referenced in this work of fiction which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.

  Contents

  History’s Orphans

  Changing Trajectories

  Intersection

  New Purpose

  The Gloves Come Off

  From the Author

  History’s Orphans

  Pruning the Tree

  Tsekoh, Capital of Chaco Benthic

  Callum McKinnon was about to kill someone. He wasn’t doing it personally, but he’d been the one to give the order and so the responsibility was his. Still, D’Nei had to carry some of the responsibility. He’d displayed a complete lack of regard for the concept of secrecy.

  Cal closed his jacket against the cold of the lower levels and moved along the railing to get away from a hover cab that had parked in his line of vision. Even from his new vantage point, he could still smell the stink of ozone from the vehicle’s faulty mag-emitters. The odor blended with the acrid scent of raw minerals carried by the fog of the first sixty levels.

  Down here in the thirties, the fog never thinned enough to permit a glimpse of the vast atrium bisecting the sub-oceanic city. The vapor condensed on the walkways and shops, gathering into myriad rills that flowed over the edges of one level to spatter unwary pedestrians on the next, leaving a grimy trail of ore dust in its wake.

  Cal had settled behind a sheet of water that slid off the roof of a rail shop on the level above. The small pastry stand was built on the outside of the thick graphene railing and, like most such shops, looked like it might collapse at any moment.

  A large quantity of water was running off its corrugated aluminum roof, providing excellent cover for the Human agent as he leaned on the railing, pretending to read a message on his palm.

  The city was an insurgent’s dream – overcrowded and built like a massive rabbit warren. There were almost endless choices for escape and evasion should he happen to run into trouble with the law, and the millions of Tauhentan expatriates living down here made it very easy for a Human to blend in. The two species were practically indistinguishable.

  Built into a narrow, ocean-floor canyon, Tsekoh was the only population center on the Republic-controlled landless world of Chaco Benthic. Roughly four kilometers long, one kilometer high and averaging a half kilometer in width, the city contained just over a half billion square meters of floor space and housed just over fifteen million citizens – legally.

  There were at least another eight million NRW’s, as the administration referred to them – non-registered workers who had no fixed address and simply found a place to lay their heads between shifts. They mostly had jobs but there was only so much space set aside for housing. NRW’s worked their shifts, predominately in ore processing facilities, paid for a few minutes in a public shower and changed at their rented lockers before meeting their friends at one of the thousands of public houses for dinner.

  They produced ore and they generated tax revenue through their spending so the Dactari corporation that ran this planet couldn’t care less where they slept. It was an ideal solution to what would have otherwise been a severe labor shortage.

  Not so ideal if you were an NRW.

  There was a combustible feeling to the place, and that was the reason Callum had been assigned here. The Alliance liked to find small fringe worlds like this one where there was no Republic military presence. Stir up enough trouble here and the enemy would have to deploy troops to put it down, bleeding off their central reserves.

  This was Callum’s eighth assignment. Each one took roughly a decade to plan and execute properly and, each time, he came to identify more with his target world than he did with Earth. Almost a century of pretending to be a Tauhentan expatriate had severed his emotional links to his real home world – a world he wasn’t welcome on anyway. His post-vaccination lifespan was estimated at just over thirty-five hundred years, but he just couldn’t see himself ever returning to Earth.

  He felt a tingle in his right hand and looked down at his palm. The message, spelled out by fluorescent compounds in his skin, suggested a get-together at a popular eating establishment in the mid levels. He made a fist, clearing the message, and looked for the target that it was meant to indicate.

  The messages were displayed on the recipient’s palm by a sophisticated network of transmitters that could locate the customer and fluoresce text or green-shade images by creating highly-focused interference patterns in the skin. It was an efficient way to communicate, but it wasn’t secure. A bank of computers in the central core constantly monitored all message traffic, looking for flagged content – words such as bomb, kill, uprising or even worse – union.

  You certainly couldn’t use it to say ‘The guy we’re planning to kill is about to walk past you – one level down…’, but you could send an innocuous dinner invitation, listing a restaurant that was fifty-one floors above the subject’s current level. Callum had picked an odd number, knowing that the tracking software would correlate suspicious activity with any message traffic that matched the floor as well as any even offsets, such as ten floors up or down.

  The real art, of course, was in killing the subject without arousing any suspicion.

  Callum leaned on the slick graphene railing and looked down to the steady flow of pedestrians, barely visible through the mist, on the wide pedway one level down and fifty meters away. The target was across the atrium from his position. The languid traffic flow was in contrast to the hurried crowds an hour earlier, rushing to start the night shift.

  These pedestrians were fresh from their post-shift showers, some already half drunk from whatever pick-me-up they kept in their lockers, and they were walking off the stresses of collecting manganese nodules from the ocean floor with nothing but a centuries-old shield-suit to hold back the crushing deep. Over the next hour, they would drift in and out of the shops and alehouses until exhaustion forced them to their cramped quarters or, for the NRW’s, to some quiet corner of the city.

  Callum had no trouble spotting D’Nei. He was a Tauhentan (a real one) who had been an NRW since coming here as a child with his father. He’d constantly gotten the short end of every stick in the universe and Cal usually found such subjects eager to join in the struggle against oppression. Still, every now and then they internalized the wrong message from their induction.

  For D’Nei, it wasn’t about the struggle; it was about him. He’d taken on an air of self-importance since joining one of Cal’s insurgent cells and he was drawing too much attention. He’d even begun flapping his gums about the organization. A casino manager who was into him for eighty thousand credits had sent his goons to give D’Nei a friendly thumping and he had somehow gotten the idea that Cal would make good on the debt.

  The damage had been contained and the casino was now a regular, if somewhat reluctant, ‘contributor’ to the cause, but Cal couldn’t afford to let a walking risk vector like D’Nei continue breathing. He had to be stopped.

  Cal realized with a flush of pride that he couldn’t make the operator from cell thirteen who’d been tasked for the op. There wasn’t the slightest sign that D’Nei was being tailed and Cal wondered, with a sudden flash of concern, whether the man had lost his target. D’Nei was almost to the cab stand. If it was going to happen, it would be in the next ten seconds. He felt the surge of
adrenaline and fought to control his physical behavior. If a passerby noticed his agitation only seconds before D’Nei was shoved over the railing-free edge of the cab stand, they might make the connection.

  D’Nei was halfway past the ten-meter cab stand. A group of company magisters was approaching from the opposite direction and Cal felt the urge to curse but stifled it. It was too risky. There were five of the lawmen and they raised the risk to unacceptable levels. They would have to set up for tomorrow and let D’Nei have one more night to damage the cause.

  Cal was just about to turn away when he saw a disturbance among the company enforcers. One magister had been knocked to the floor and almost rolled over the glowing red strip marking the edge of the stand. He’d been stopped by one of his quicker comrades who held him, legs dangling, over the sixty-meter drop of the central atrium, the red-hazed mist roiling around his head.

  A brief moment of exertion and he was safe again, sitting on the floor in the grip of an adrenaline rush. One of his fellow officials dragged the cause of the accident into the clear space left by the watching crowd, throwing him down in front of the shuddering judge.

  It was D’Nei.

  Cal forced an expression of mild interest to hide the smile in his head. His operator had obviously absorbed every detail of his briefing. D’Nei had more than ninety demerits on his account.

  They had learned of his predicament when he’d reached seventy-five. At fifty demerits, you’re deemed too stupid to operate a passenger vehicle and your license is revoked. At seventy-five you’re denied the privilege of reproduction and an implant is hidden somewhere on your body to render you sterile. With limited space and resources, the administrators didn’t want the city filling up with criminals or idiots.

  D’Nei had been spotted coming out of the clinic and Cal had learned of it within the hour. Through a ‘friend’ in the records department, they had watched with growing concern as the number of his demerits continued to grow. He’d accumulated the vast majority of points since his induction to the movement, pushing ever closer to that fateful hundred.

  If you accumulated a hundred demerits, you just didn’t belong in Tsekoh. The cost to leave was beyond most citizens. There was only one way out – up the orbital tether through a shielded corridor protecting passengers from the immense pressure of the ocean as well as the poisonous gasses of the planetary atmosphere. The price per kilogram of an elevator ride up the carbon tether was usually only achievable after years of saving.

  And there was no way the administration was going to pay to ship malcontents off world…

  The magister climbed back to his feet and pulled out his handheld. One of his colleagues reached down, grabbing the grovelling D’Nei’s hand and held it, palm up, for identification.

  D’Nei’s hand fluoresced his identity code and the aggrieved magister scanned it, grinning as his readout flashed red. Assault carried a range of five to thirty demerits and, when the accused had almost killed a company magister in the process, the maximum was considered justifiable. The magisters edged D’Nei over to the glowing red warning line, one of them waving off an approaching cab – directing it to drop its passengers at the next level up.

  A registered citizen who accumulated a hundred demerits would still serve the city – as an organ bank. They were far less likely to be addicted to narcotics and their organs were usually all claimed within the first week. It at least gave them a chance to put their affairs in order.

  If you were an NRW, the risk of contamination was deemed too high. Far better to simply get rid of them, but there was still that nagging problem concerning the cost of deportation. Well, they were criminals, after all.

  Ignoring D’Nei’s frantic pleas, the officer he’d hit raised his unit and pulled the trigger. The energy burst began at center of mass, blasting D’Nei’s tissues outward in a spray of flesh and fluid, vaporizing every last bit of him within a one meter radius. He was now one with the mist. It was clean, efficient and absolutely terrifying to watch.

  Though Cal was disgusted by this demonstration of law enforcement, he was still able to appreciate how well the operative from cell thirteen had performed. He’d spotted the magisters but, instead of simply aborting, he’d used his knowledge of the target to engineer his death at the hands of the administration.

  The operator would certainly bear watching, but in a much more positive connotation than D’Nei.

  The Last Humans

  Planet 3428

  Rick paused, balancing on his left foot with practiced grace. He eased his right foot back, looking down at the twig that would have snapped under his foot, drawing the attention of the farthest smuggler. He cocked his head as realization dawned. Whether the nearer smuggler had a hearing problem or was simply pre-occupied, it was an advantage to keep in mind.

  He was close enough, at any rate, and he sank down to a crouch, sweat jarring into motion, gathering speed as the rivulets absorbed smaller beads on their way down his face. He wanted to be sure of what he was seeing before taking any action so he settled in to watch the two men working in the tropical heat of the dense jungle.

  Men might have been a stretch, but they were humanoid and close enough in their looks to pass unremarked among the Humans back at the Canal. They’d claimed to be Tauhentan traders when they had first come down to the surface with a badly shot-up port lifter and atmosphere venting from several locations on their ship, the Foxlight.

  Nobody had thought to question their profession. What did it matter how they earned a living? Everybody was far more concerned about the combat damage on the Foxlight. The residents of the Canal were the last of mankind and they’d survived this long by staying hidden. For nearly eight generations now, they’d managed to avoid detection. And now there were strangers in their midst and potential hostiles in the black above?

  After their ancestors had refused the unlawful command of Admiral John Towers and fled from the dying, plague-infested fleet, they’d settled here and remained hidden for a century and a half. The war was done. The Dactari, if they had managed to escape the plague, would have been able to chalk it up as a victory and get back to business as usual.

  Perhaps Humans would rise again but, for now, they were an endangered species.

  And the presence of a smuggler ship in their midst had raised the specter of discovery. Sam Fletcher had led the discussions with the visitors, as was his hereditary right, and he’d reported that the aliens didn’t seem to possess the limited pre-cognitive abilities common to Humans born on 3428. He’d been able to dance verbal circles around their guests and concluded that killing them would only bring search parties, led by their comrades.

  Of course, the smugglers had no idea they were up against such an advantage. They also had no idea about the rapid-fire questions that were almost, but never quite, asked. Almost every Human on 3428 had the ability to see anywhere from three to fifteen seconds into their own futures and most of them were able to handle a live stream of several future perception trails as a part of their daily life.

  More than eighty-five percent of the average 3428 resident’s brain was in use at any given moment, processing the results of their possible actions and sorting out the wisest options. Nobody disagreed when Sam decided that the best course of action would be to trade spicewood with the smugglers in return for materials and parts.

  Fletcher had noticed the smuggler captain’s reaction to the small spicewood box in the conference room and probed him about it. Through several dozen questions, considered but not asked, he learned of the value that was still placed on spicewood and knew he had the ability to apply leverage.

  They’d only landed on 3428 after being shot up by raiders, but there was an easy way to ensure their silence. There was enough spicewood on 3428 to make a thousand men rich and Fletcher knew the smuggler captain and his crew, all family, would go to great lengths to protect the secret behind their new-found windfall.

  But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t get greedy.
>
  The deal had been struck almost a year ago and both sides had done well. The smugglers’ shuttle, sitting just inside the hangar bay of the Canal, was a shiny new model, a far cry from the piece of garbage they’d landed in the first encounter. The food and textiles brought by the traders had gone a long way toward making life a little more comfortable for the Humans and Rick had managed to get his hands on enough parts to start bringing the Canal back up to snuff.

  As a direct descendant of the ship’s original chief engineer, Sandy Heywood, Rick and his older brother had inherited the job, and the parts brought in trade had gone a long way toward reversing the ravages of time.

  But now, it looked like the smugglers were thinking about cutting out the middle-man. As Rick crouched in the tropical humidity, the two smugglers in the clearing ahead were stacking up sections of spicewood trunks.

  The agreement was clear. The Humans would harvest the wood, and the only loading point would be in the hangar deck of the Canal. The smugglers were obviously padding the deal with a little free wood.

  Rick couldn’t see more than fourteen seconds into his own future, but he didn’t need his pre-cog ability to know that things would go badly for his people if they were cut out of the deal.

  Rising to one knee, he drew his recurve bow, massive arm and back muscles making light of a motion he’d been practicing his entire adult life. He took careful aim at the farthest smuggler. He waited for a few seconds to avoid an apparent lack of distraction with the nearest man and then loosed. The arrow, made of dense spicewood, took the man in the armpit as he reached up to wipe the sweat from his face. His body pitched sideways from the force, just as Rick knew it would.

  He was already attending to the death of the second man, who was just starting to notice something was amiss. Rick aimed at a spot above the second man’s head and released the second arrow as the target rose to go to his comrade’s aid. The arrow punched through his back, snapped a rib and destroyed his heart.