A Tangled Road to Justice

by Olan Thorensen

  “Here we go. Should be down in another twenty minutes or so, now that we’ve bled off most of our speed.”

  “So, Millen, I didn’t read many details about Astrild’s cities, other than the info vids they showed us. How big is Oslo?”

  “About six hundred thousand, counting the main areas and immediate surroundings. It might go upwards of a million, if you count the towns and settlements out to maybe a hundred kilometers. That million is about a third the population of the entire plant. It’s also the organizational center of the entire system’s mining operations and has the only manufactory on Astrild.”

  Manufactories were the complex machine systems that 3D-printed most components, from vehicle parts to joints for knee and shoulder replacements and anything else not produced locally and needing to be imported. There was no theoretical limit on the size of an object to be 3D-printed, but the manufactory had to be of appropriate size and have access to a product’s required materials.

  “There are the smaller 3D printers, but Oslo’s got the only small version of a true manufactory,” Millen said, “and Astrild doesn’t have the infrastructure to make more, as yet. It takes infrastructure to build infrastructure, and integrated circuits are a limiting factor. A manufactory can make most of the parts of itself, except for those circuits. That’s what most of the cargo coming down with us is—various integrated circuits, other computer parts, and medicinals they can’t produce here. Things will change, of course, once the population increases enough and when the manufactory is supplemented with local technology, but that’s a few years off.”

  “And how do you happen to know all this?”

  “A report Mr. White sent me.”

  I was irked. “You think I might get on that mailing list?”

  “I’ll take note and copy you what Mr. White sent.”

  “Who owns the single manufactory?” I asked. “Gives the owner an awful lot of power, doesn’t it?” I asked.

  “In theory, but it’s a light hand. In this case, the manufactory is technically run by the Oslo city council, which itself is made up of various factions, but it was initially paid for by the mining companies going in together for the cost. As lucrative as the rare earth mining is in this system, you don’t want to know what even a small manufactory costs to import and set up.”

  Of course, now I did want to know—out of curiosity—but I’d try to look it up later.

  “The system seems to work well enough here,” he said. “The major players on Astrild are more interested in stability than risking alienating the other parties. As for Oslo, it doesn’t control the other cities and towns, but everyone knows that as the outer cities grow, they’ll eventually establish their own production facilities, so nobody wants to make too many enemies.”

  “The other cities must be pretty small.”

  “Only six of them big enough to be called cities. Populations run thirty to a hundred thousand. Names are Trondheim, Bergen, Stavanger, New London, Motumbo, Santa Rosa.”

  “I see they got a little more ethnic diversity in their names.”

  “Yeah. As more settlers, miners, and companies moved in. Then there are scores of smaller towns and settlements, running from hundreds to four thousand in population. Somewhere around fifty of these, plus isolated farms and a few small mines productive enough to justify their remote operation. Lastly are the misanthropes who, for whatever reason, head out to be alone.”

  The shuttle rolled to a stop, and a gangway attached to the single door when another announcement came.

  “Please gather all your belongings and proceed to the customs and security checkpoint. Have your papers ready.”

  Contrary to Millen’s earlier assertion that someone would meet us, the plan had changed. No sooner had we exited the shuttle than he got a call on his comm.

  “We’ll meet our contact later,” was all he said.

  Our papers were hologram IDs. They called them papers just from history. I knew mine was genuine but wondered about Millen’s. Maybe his was real or maybe not, but we both passed through, collected our baggage, and were on an electric-powered taxi into Oslo within thirty minutes. Power generation on Astrild started and ended with combinations of solar, hydroelectric, wind, and nuclear plants. Electricity was used to charge batteries and to hydrolyze water into oxygen and hydrogen, with the hydrogen used as a portable energy source.

  There were no hydrocarbon fuels on Astrild. The planet had nothing in its history similar to Earth’s Carboniferous Period, which generated thick deposits of buried plant material that was subsequently pressured into coal, petroleum, and natural gas. The major planets had fusion plants, but the cost and technology to build and operate them required extensive economic support and infrastructure, something still lacking on Astrild.

  On the drive, the taxi gave us a quick view of the city. It didn’t look all that different from places I’d been on Earth—enough so, you might forget where you were. The taxi dropped us off at a mid-range hotel on the outskirts of downtown Oslo after the driver warned us to avoid a seedier section nearby.

  We shared a room. It was spartan but clean. We dropped our bags, then Millen disappeared for two hours—he never explained more than, “Something I have to do.” I slept on top of one of the two beds, not bothering with undressing or using covers. When I woke up, Millen was back.

  “I’m hungry. Ready to go out, Everett?”

  “Okay. You spot any place promising?

  “Several small diners a few blocks away, but how about a drink first?”

  The thought of hard liquor didn’t please my stomach, which was still recovering from the shuttle trip, but a beer sounded okay.

  “Nothing too strong. I’m still queasy.”

  “Oh, we’ll just stop for a few minutes so I can wet my whistle.”

  Wet my whistle?

  At this point in our relationship, I’d spent a total of only a few conscious hours around Millen, and I wasn’t yet indoctrinated with his endless odd statements. That would change in the following days.

  I reluctantly followed Millen into a dingy bar off an alley. It was the neighborhood the taxi driver had warned us against, but what the hell, Millen was the boss and paying. So far, he’d seemed pretty solid, so I presumed he knew what he was doing. I was right, but not for the reason I thought.

  To say the place was seedy did an injustice to seeds. At least, they foretold growth and transformation. This place was on the dying and decay side of a lifecycle. Forty or more dregs of society crowded at the bar and the tables, bumping elbows. Some kind of music played over speakers, but any words or melodies were lost in the general din. I hadn’t thought to ask Millen or check myself what language was spoken on Astrild. The Federation used a standard form of English, to the lingering resentment of other language groups on Earth, but there were many versions of English, plus colonies had been settled by multiple nationalities from Earth.

  I strained to catch individual voices among the customers. Within seconds, I recognized standard English, a few dialects, and two men speaking in what I thought was Chinese. Relief mixed with chagrin—I hadn’t thought beyond what was right in front of me. That wasn’t good. In the FSES, situational awareness and longer-term thinking had paired to keep me and my men alive. I needed to get my head straightened out. Just because I wasn’t military anymore didn’t mean learned habits weren’t important.

  We wound our way to a table Millen had spotted. I slipped on something slimy, feeling instantly disgusted as to what it might be, and accidentally bumped a burly man talking loudly with three other men.

  “Watch it, shithead! Gonna git your head tore off.”

  “Sorry,” I mumbled, hopefully sounding contrite and inoffensive. Playing at “whose dick is longer” always seemed beyond stupid to me. I merged back into the throng before the man could work himself up into something I didn’t need.

  I sank into a chair, and a life-worn waitress appeared almost instantly. How she’d arrived at our table the
same moment we did was amazing. I chalked up one point for the establishment, figuring it would need all the positive points possible. I was right.

  Two beers arrived forthwith. The brew was surprisingly good, with a strong hop head, which helped cover the odors of unwashed bodies, a floor that might not have been cleaned this century, and tobacco, marijuana, and jubarba leaves. Only the first two were Earth natives; jubarba plants were found on one of the first colonized worlds and quickly spread to other planets—as such things did.

  I was halfway down my glass and had almost forgotten the dirt smudges the glass came with when Millen rose from his seat. “Be back in a minute.” He instantly merged into the other shifting bodies.

  Five minutes later, the bar’s decibel level dropped to merely loud, and space opened around my suddenly isolated table. The burley yahoo I’d bumped into earlier stood glaring at me. Two associate yahoos flanked him. All three looked like caricatures from a movie about a seedy bar in the rough part of town. But hey, that’s exactly where I was, so I guessed they were appropriate.

  “Don’t think you can sneak away after spilling my drink,” the chief yahoo snarled.

  Now, I’d had only half a beer, but my memory told me I hadn’t spilled anything.

  “Terribly sorry about that,” I said. “Let me buy you another round. You and your friends.”

  “You and your fancy clothes think you can just come into our place and push people around!”

  I sighed. My clothes could be considered fancy only if you compared them to the repulsive, smelly garments on the yahoos standing before me. This was not going well. I’d tried twice to placate the man, but that hadn’t worked. All three had the look—they had already decided where this was going before they approached our table.

  Well, shit, I told myself and acquiesced to their intent. I tossed the half-empty beer at the face of the man on my right.

  As he sputtered and stepped back, I shoved the table against the trio’s leader, momentarily occupying those two, while I lunged at the man on the left. A fist to the solar plexus and a firm but not crippling knee to the groin, and he was out of action for the next few minutes.

  The leader roared, threw the table to one side, and launched a roundhouse. I ducked under it. A leg sweep put him on the floor, and a restrained kick to the temple put him in a passive state.

  I finished the third man with a moderate shot to his Adam’s apple. His eyes popped out, and he grabbed at his throat and staggered back. He might not even have had hostile intent, dripping beer and standing surprised at the fate of his two companions. But hey, why take chances? I was still the stranger, and who knew which others might jump in? Anyway, they’d started it. All the action took no more than six seconds.

  I straightened up to ward off anyone else joining in, but all I saw were faces showing a mixture of anger, surprise, and anticipation of possibly more to come. I glanced at the three idiots. None was seriously hurt, and none seemed interested in continuing our encounter. It was the optimal outcome. I cast around for the quickest way out when a scowling, burly man significantly bigger than me pushed his way through the onlookers. He had all the characteristics of a bouncer, and from the way he moved, I readied for a more serious confrontation.

  He ignored me and yelled at several customers. “Help me drag these jokers out of here. They know better than to start anything.”

  As if by magic, Millen reappeared. “Show’s over, folks. All in good fun. Let’s have a round for everybody. It’s already covered at the bar.”

  The faces shifted, and most men headed to the bar, though a few still glared while the establishment’s staff dragged away my three new acquaintances.

  “Time to go,” Millen said, and we got to the entrance before anyone so inclined had time to consider retaliation. The air was cool, and a mist had started. It felt good after the stifling atmosphere of the bar.

  I wasn’t mad at the three men. They were natural idiots, so how could you hold them responsible? With Millen, it was different. My muscles clenched, and my face heated up. “You did that, you asshole! You did something to get them after me!”

  Millen stared, impassive. “Sorry, but I needed more assurances about you before we get into serious situations. All the files, reports, and interviews are well and good, but I needed to know how you react when surprised. You can consider this your final interview—or test, if you will. It won’t happen again.”

  I was still mad, but for some reason I believed him. Whoever and whatever Millen was, my sense of him from our time together was that he wouldn’t lie to me. Maybe to someone else, but not to me. That didn’t mean I thought he’d tell me all the truth. Don’t ask me to explain how I knew this, but maybe it was just my experience in dealing with men. Or maybe I was fantasizing, but there it was.

  “I thought we’d finished the interview back at Thalassa! You mean I could still end up heading back to Earth after taking two jumps and stasis shit to get here?”

  “No,” Millen said. “That was it. You can consider yourself hired.”

  “Well, thanks for nothing.”

  We walked back toward our hotel. After a couple of blocks, the air and the passage of time had cooled me. “So, what did you learn about me?”

  He never looked at me or stopped walking. “You don’t have a macho chip that you have to defend. Your first and second choices were to avoid conflict, but when that failed, you didn’t hesitate. You’re dangerous. You could have easily killed or critically injured all three of those men. Instead, you put them out of action in such a way that they were of no immediate danger to you and with minimum damage to them.”

  “And what about you?” I asked. “How would you make a similar judgment about yourself?”

  “I’m dangerous, too,” Millen said in that eerily passive tone he often used. “In ways, more dangerous than you. You were confident enough in your ability to handle yourself that you could show mercy. In that same situation, I might not have been as confident I could handle the three of them. All would have ended up dead or critical.” He paused briefly, then continued, his tone slightly different. “Or maybe I just wouldn’t have cared.

  “Anyway, your method of handling them was better for civilization, but we’ll soon get into situations where being restrained can get you killed. In those cases, my way will be safer. As always, it depends on where you are and what level of civil society surrounds you.”

  Millen looked at me for the first time since we’d left the bar. “I think we’re going to be a good team. It doesn’t hurt for me to have someone around to remind me to show restraint when appropriate, but you’ll have to learn that there are occasions when restraint is dangerous. I imagine you already know that from your FSES career, but it may take some adjusting to civilian situations.”

  I didn’t know what to say next. Getting into unnecessary scrapes was stupid, but Millen didn’t strike me as stupid, so he must have thought this “test” important. For not the first or the fiftieth time, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Maybe I’d passed Millen’s final test, but the job hadn’t passed mine. I had six months to decide before my return voucher back to Earth expired.

  “Now what?” I asked, in lieu of anything else to say.

  “Guns. We couldn’t bring them with us—too many regulations about what you can take on a starship. Plus, they would have appeared on the public manifest and drawn attention from some people we’d rather not know about us—at least, not too soon. We’ll visit the manufactory tomorrow, but for now, let’s eat and sleep.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The next morning, we traveled by taxi to the manufactory. Turned out, it was near the spaceport, and we’d passed it on the way into Oslo the previous day. The facility had more security than customs at the spaceport.

  “Why so persnickety here and not when we arrived?”

  “Reality,” Millen said. “No one worries about who arrives on the planet. They assume checking was done before people got on the ship. Plus, they w
ant people to arrive. At the manufactory, the security is because they don’t want anyone trying to take it over. It’s the only one on Astrild and too important to take chances with. Watch on the way out. They’ll just check our authorization paperwork for any containers we have and pass us through.”

  We followed directions and found a counter with a middle-aged man whose sour expression and bored acknowledgment of our existence identified a bureaucrat, no matter what planet you were on.

  “Do you have the forms ready?” he barked, evidently annoyed that we’d interrupted his doing nothing.

  “Yes, sir, right here,” and Millen handed over a standard data sliver.

  I didn’t know what Millen had on the sliver. The five-centimeter-long, gold-colored piece of metal could hold a thousand terabytes of data. The clerk poked it into a slot on his computer, pulled up a file, and looked at the screen. He narrowed his eyes, then looked back at Millen.

  “Planning on starting a war here?”

  “Just some hunting in the more remote areas of Astrild. We’re exploring the possibility of setting up hunting reserves. Since we don’t know exactly what’s out there, can’t be too careful.”

  “Yeah, right,” said the skeptical clerk. “Well, as soon as you pay, you’ll be slotted into the schedule.” He scrolled through pages. “Looks like it should be ready in about five weeks.”

  “Actually, we need the items a little sooner than that. We’d like to have them ready by late tonight or before dawn tomorrow.”

  The clerk sneered. “Sure, and I’d like to be King of Astrild and my wife not a shrew. But neither of those are going to happen any more than you jumping the schedule.”

  “Oh, I think we can manage to facilitate my items, even we can’t help you with your two wishes.” Millen laid another sliver on the counter.

  “And what’s this?”

  “Just bring it up, and you’ll understand.”