by M J Gauntlet
Ignoring the still moaning bodies around him, the ex- Imperial Scout stood over the body of his wife’s murderer for a moment, then stepped over to his fallen wife and oh so gently picked up her body. With the tracks of his silent tears, he walked back to his humble makeshift home and to his now motherless son, not noticing a small face peering out of the abode through a plastiglass widow, whose mouth held the silent scream of noooo!
The official Centennial police account stated that a minor incident took place in the temporary settlement of Last Town in which five fatalities were recorded: one due to blunt force trauma (a man’s jawbone was driven through the bottom of his skull), three died of neural disruption (including the body of a female settlement resident), and one died of exsanguination (due to being pierced by the sharp end of a neural lash weapon). In addition to the fatalities, seven citizens suffered critical injuries. Two of the seven were later pronounced brain dead at the hospital, while the remaining five had required extensive reconstructive surgeries. Fourteen others, listed as ‘bystanders’, were treated for a variety of serious lacerations, concussions and broken bones.
According to the police findings, four or five ‘nonparticipants’ had fled the scene, suffering only superficial cuts and bruises. It was further determined that although the ex-Imperial Scout pilot had sustained various injuries and his son had survived uninjured, the Nubian wife of the pilot was killed by the discharge of an illegal neuron disruptor at point blank range.
In the past, such ‘flair ups’ would capture the public’s attention and remain news worthy for a few days. Then after generating the usual wave of self-righteous condemnation by a minor segment of the citizenry who would loudly deplore the living conditions found in the settlements, (never to referred to as slums) the outcry would usually generate a self-righteous wave of indignity. This would then be followed by the popular talking heads of the media creating the obligatory hot topic commentary on the planetary web until the next trending topic would replace it.
This time it was different. Apparently mixed amongst the casualties of the usual local thugs, one of the dead and a few of the injured, just happened to be scions of prominent planetary families who appeared to be out slumming for the night. When news of the death of such a noteworthy individual, and the injuries sustained by his mates reached the authorities, a wave of outrage and consternation swept through the citizenry of Bright.
A fully armed tactical unit was sent into Last Town to arrest the ‘deviant’ Laster and hold him for trail. The miscreant and his son were dragged from their home and taken the nearest precinct for processing. Then to the surprise of all, it was revealed that the ex-scout pilot was not only a registered full citizen of Bright but, as an ex- military officer in the service of the Empire, by Imperial decree he was entitled to carry a firearm. Furthermore, it was later discovered that it was the citizens who were, in fact, trespassing on his private property. It was also revealed that the ex-scout pilot’s home was located on land which was legally deeded to him by right of the planetary Land Acquisition Grant.
Once it was established that the ex-scout was defending his home against trespassers, the courts had no alternative but to drop all charges against him. Unfortunately, the office of the D.A. also elected not to pursue charges for the murder of his wife, against those who were injured in the fracas, nor those who had escaped. ‘Lack of evidence’ was given by the prosecutors as the reason not to carry on with the case, since it was unclear as to who might have actually been involved in the ‘incident’. As far as the courts and the populous were concerned, the unfortunate affair was over.
Twomonthsafterthecourts’ decisionnottoprosecute, four members of the Nubian Alliance Diplomatic Corps arrived on Bright in a diplomatic courier ship to take the body of their clanswoman back to their star system’s home world of Zanzibar for burial. While on the planet, they visited both the planetary courthouse along with the Hall of Records and reviewed the facts, which resulted in the death of their tribal sister. Within a span of three weeks after the envoy’s arrival, there were a series of unfortunate accidents that befell several of the survivors of the Last Town riot.
Of the nine who and been implicated as participating in the riot, four died of mysterious ailments, three suffered air car accidents and two had simply disappeared (it was rumored that their wealthy families had shipped them off-world). While no one could definitively place any of the visiting Nubians anywhere near these events, there was little doubt in anyone’s minds as to who was responsible for the rash of inexplicable fatal occurrences. There was a collective planetary sigh of relief when the Nubians finally collected the body of their kin, boarded their ship and lifted off for their home systems.
The one positive fallout from the Last Town riots of ’87 was the de facto end of ‘cleansing sweeps’ in all of the fringe settlements. The citizens of Bright had decided to adopt a laissez faire attitude towards all the temporary settlements. As a result, townships all over the planet had gained a sense of limited autonomy and began to slowly establish their own unofficial watchmen, ambulatory response teams and fire brigades. Because of that one fateful night, Ezekiel Grayson had inadvertently changed the entire makeup of settlements across the planet of Bright, and in the process, he correspondently became something he had strenuously avoided for years: a person of notice.
CHAPTER TWO
“GRAYSON!” A voice bellowed in Zax’s earbud. “ZAXXION GRAYSON, I KNOW YOU CAN HEAR ME! ANSWER ME YOU USLESS PIECE OF LASTER SHIT.” Even though he had turned down the gain to its lowest point, the piercingly shrill voice still stabbed at his eardrums. Grimacing, Zaxxion Grayson wondered what it was that Slater Lagasse (otherwise known to all that knew him as Large Ass) wanted this time. Lagasse was the foreman of the third shift and a nasty piece of work. If he could have things his way, he would demand that every planetary immigrant address him as ‘Citizen Lagasse’. As far as Lagasse was concerned, the planet had far too many ‘off- worlder squatters’ that were sapping the life out of the legitimate citizens of Bright like himself. Never mind that these off-worlders performed ninety percent of the jobs that the ‘regular’ citizens would never dirty their hands on.
Lagasse was a squat, bow legged, blob of flesh that smelled like a tidal basin at low tide. Zax could just imagine his two piggy eyes set in a face the size of a dinner plate, peering up at the gantry searching for him.
Shifting his attention back to the job at hand, Zax pressed the mute button on his wristcom and turned back to examine the surface of the exhaust tube he was currently working on. There was a meter-wide area of pitted ceramic tube lining that had almost been eroded down to where the base metal was beginning to show through. Reaching back over his shoulder, Zax pulled out a thin sheet of plasticine that had been treated with his own homemade solution. Carefully, he spread the sheet over the pitted surface, pressing its corners flat, so that they adhered to the unmarked ceramic that outlined the scared area. As the corners made contact with the slick inner surface of the exhaust tube, they adhered to it and the sheet formed a billowy tent over the damaged spot. Reaching into his toolbelt, Zax removed a small portable UV wand, turned it on and waved it over the bulging mass. Upon exposure to the light, the loosely fitted swatch immediately began to contract and shrink until it formed a tight seal over the affected area. The once pliable plasticine patch began to fill in the pitted holes as it melded to the surrounding surface forming a high-density polyethylene filament bond that mimicked exactly, atom for atom, the molecular composition of the surrounding material.
Stepping back, Zax surveyed his handiwork and gave a grunt of satisfaction. That patch would outlast the original ceramic lining surrounding it. It was the secret to his success as a ‘tube jockey’. Normally a distressed section of lining like that would have taken at least an hour to repair, but with his process it took only a fifth of the time it would have taken to grind down the affected area, then replace it with a molded patch. Once he had considered trying to patent his
process but quickly discarded the idea. The way things worked on Bright, he was sure that his patent would have been highjacked or stolen. More than likely, the ‘discovery’ would be accredited to a ‘Firster’ micro engineer with no chance of Zax receiving either the recognition or the eunits for its development. His wristcom buzzed annoyingly once again and Zax tapped his wristcom, switching it to the shop frequency as he finally answered the foreman.
“I’m right here Lagasse, in exhaust four. Where the hell else would I be?”
“Don’t give me any lip, Laster. And that’s Mister Lagasse to you or I will write you up for insubordination!”
“Ok, ok,” Zax said tiredly, “Mister Lagasse. What do you want? I’m very busy now.”
“Not as busy as you are gonna be,” the foreman’s replied, his voice suddenly turning silky smooth. “I just had a most disturbing conversation with a Captain Resnick of the midliner Lido and he informed me that you had promised him that the work on his ion tubes would be finished by first sunset.” Lagasse’s voice abruptly turned nasty. “Could you tell me how a low life Laster such as yourself has the unmitigated gall to set a work schedule, huh? How dare you promise anyone anything in this work yard! You don’t set the schedules and you damn sure don’t promise captains when their ships will be ready! That’s my job!”
Zaxxion was tapping his wristcom while the foreman was ranting, a tiny holo projection sprung to life and he stared down at the work order.
“I was only relaying what I read on the work order Mister Lagasse. But… you know…” Grayson said, pausing with a sly little grin. “You know what? I realize that you are absolutely right, sir! So, I will just inform Captain Resnick of my mistaken and presumptuous declaration and tell him that the work on his ship has just been rescheduled. Of course, that means that he will have to rescind the bonus that he has awarded the shop for the early completion of the work.”
There was a long pause. Zax smiled broadly because he knew that the foreman was now furiously checking the shop’s bonus allotments, as he had just done. Lagasse would see the rather generous amount of eunits the midliner captain had awarded the workshop crew (including the 2% extra for the foreman) for getting him out of dry dock ahead of schedule and was coming to the realization that it would be forfeit if he rescinded the work order. Zax could almost hear the man’s teeth grinding, as he knew he had to swallow the words he had just spoken.
“Very well, smart ass,” Lagasse said, finally, “since you have seen fit to disrupt the shop’s work schedule, when you finish that scrub and patch job on Captain Resnick’s ship, you are to go over to launch bay 4 and back up the robot scrubbers there, and oh…did I fail to mention that we still have to get the tubes scrubbed on that tradership sitting over in launch by number six and have her out by second sunrise?
Zax’s face fell. He started to snarl a curse at the man but stifled it, not wanting to give the slob the satisfaction of hearing the disappointment in his voice. It was too much to expect the fat bigot to be grateful for the bonus eunits Zax had just put in everyone’s pockets. The foreman’s vindictive work rescheduling had just shot the rest of his day to hell and there was nothing he could do about it, no matter that it was technically against the work safety regulations. This would be his third consecutive ‘mandatory’ overtime shift in the past ten-day. But when it came to Lasters, the guidelines never seemed to apply.
At least they hadn’t found a way to take away the overtime bonus pay. That was controlled by the planetary taxation division. Extra pay meant extra taxes and the planetary bureaucrats took tax collection very seriously. Besides, the truth be told, he and his father could use the overtime units the extra work would produce. Ever since his mother had been killed (the memory of that night brought on a pang of immense sadness), it was just him and his dad trying to keep it together. Although both he and his father wore the tattoos of a full citizen of Bright, they were still treated as second-class citizens… Lasters.
Bright had been settled over three hundred ‘T’ years ago by near-light colonizing ships sent out from an overburdened and overcrowded Earth, whose population had swollen to an almost forty billion. Even the monolithic, megacity towers could no longer sustain the planet’s multitudes. When the deep space radar and multi-spectrum telescopes established the existence of several relatively nearby solar systems with planets in a stable orbit, humanity thought that it had finally found a viable solution to its population problems. Although, several of the planets were huge gas colossi circling close to the primary star, several star systems contained binary stars which tended to catapult the larger gas giants into stable obits further out in the solar system. Because of the binary configuration, these star systems also created zones of habitation: ‘Goldilocks Zones’.
About the same time, a little-known scientist, who was working on what she believed to be a matter transference device, accidently discovered a way to detect dimensional rifts in space. This discovery led to the development of the first Schlender ‘skip’ drive. With these twin discoveries, Earth Authority decided to send a sizeable portion of its population to the stars in huge colony ships.
The early form of the Schlender transitional drive allowed a spacecraft to ‘dip’ in and out of transitional space folds at pre-established intervals. While this ‘skipping stone’ approach allowed travel to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, it also mandated that voyages longer than one hundred parsecs required that passengers spent much of the trip in cryo-hibernation.
These colonization ships were basically gigantic one-way ‘disposable’ shells which were designed to be both personnel transports and upon planetfall, become a convenient supply of pre-refined metals and prefabricated microelectronics. The main components of the hyper drive, the fusion bottles and the containment coils, were designed to be cannibalized by the new colonist to create the power plant and hydroponics for the budding colony.
The first settlers to reach a new world faced the most rigorous survival conditions, since they had to build everything from scratch. Even with the aid of twenty- ninth century technology such as, contragrav and inertial nullifiers, taming a hostile planet was extremely difficult and Bright was as hostile as they came. The planet had an axial tilt of almost thirty degrees, which led to shortened growing seasons and an extended tropical zone at about the thirty-eight-degree latitudinal line. The harsh environmental climate swings gave rise to extremely aggressive life forms, (both plant and animal) that had evolved to adapt to the extreme climate changes. The survival of the original colonists was touch and go for first few decades. If not for the pre-Imperial C-Cas9 nanites that were developed prior to outer system colonization and were implanted in every citizen’s body at birth, it would have been doubtful that the early colonists would have survived.
Without the development of the C-Cas9 nanites, colonization beyond the Sol system would have been impossible. Not only did they monitor a person’s internal health they also, along with the body’s natural immune system, fought off most of the extra-terrestrial spores, bacteria and viruses encountered on newly discovered ecosystems. As a by-product, their ability to repair mutated or damaged strands of DNA, bolstered the body’s immune system and slowed down the natural aging processes in human beings.
Over time, the Old Earth Authority had grown into the Solarian Union, which then became the Confederation of Human Worlds, and had finally morphed into the Imperial Unity of Humankind. By then humans had colonized over a thousand worlds along both spiral arms of the galaxy. Coming from a densely overcrowded Sol system, the first colonists on Bright realized that the then Earth Authority would eventually send more and more ships to ‘seed’ their newly discovered planet, which would in turn recreate the overcrowding conditions that forced the first colonists to flee Old Earth in the beginning.
Bright was colonized by a radical group of economic reformers who called themselves, Equalizers. It was their belief that all of civilization’s ills could be traced back to two things: the allocation of
land and the inheritance of land. When it was discovered that the binary system of Beta Lyrae contained a marginal E-type planet for settlement, the Equalizers pooled their resources and mounted a colonizing expedition to the planet they later called Bright. Once there, they put their economic theories into practice. Determined to forestall some of the social and economic problems of old EA they had originally fled Earth to escape from, they instigated a unique land granting policy for the present and future populations: The Land Acquisition Grant.
All land on the Bright was gridded off into four- acre plots of equal size. Each citizen of the planet was awarded only one such plot through a Land Lottery. Once allocated, that acreage belonged to that individual until their death. It was theirs to develop in any way that they chose, as long as it did not adversely impact the environment or restrict the access to, or development of, any properties that lay adjacent. Title to the property could not be sold, traded or deeded to another individual, nor could it be inherited by one’s offspring or relations. When the person died, the title immediately reverted into the general ‘pool’ of available properties and was redistributed via the yearly Land Acquisition Grant. Every adult citizen of Bright (adulthood was granted at 24 T-years of age) was guaranteed a title to a plot of land somewhere on the planet. It didn’t matter if the allotted land was desert, tundra or on an island. If it was above ground, it was eligible to be allocated. Of course, there were exceptions. In practice, not all the land on the planet was placed the lottery pool. Both planetary poles were exempted, as were ecological areas such as the mud swamps, rain forests, and certain native animal sanctuaries.