White Seed

by Kenneth Marshall

  “Long trip here,” Ai said, standing behind, her voice muffled by the sheer surface of the breather mask over her face.

  Alon grasped a handful of the gravel, let the dust flow through his fist, and brushed the blue limestone pieces out of his open palm. He rolled a white chip over. The top and the bottom were smooth, but the edge around had a noticeable porosity. He looked up at the inner door of the ancient dome—a blank surface brushed with streaks and lines of faint rust, barely visible in the indirect sun reflected from the open plain behind.

  “Yeah,” he said, “but I think it’s over.” His breath fogged in the frigid air in his mask, and it burned in his throat as he inhaled again.

  They’d burned in at dawn, skimming low over the mountains to the west. Alon lay pressed into his seat, watching out of the corner of his helmet as the bare ridges and empty valleys glided past. The mountains—layers of sediment shoved up by tectonic collision, as if the land had curled to the sky—were once covered in snow and cut by glaciers, but even the glaciers had sublimated away after the weather ended.

  As the lander pitched to vertical, Alon glimpsed the ancient dome, glittering in the morning light like a jewel set in the featureless plain. Aestas, he thought, Summer World. He looked up at the environmental indicators on the lander’s instrument panel. Three thousand years ago, judged from Earth at the outer bounds of habitability, Aestas had been a hothouse with a high carbon dioxide atmosphere and a steaming ocean.

  This morning, outside air temperature: minus forty degrees Celsius.

  Kneeling in the doorway of the dome, he turned and held his hand up to Ai, letting her see the white chips on the dark fabric of his glove. She stood, leaning forward slightly, in her brown cold suit, double green flash-strips around her arms, her face invisible behind the sheen of her mask. For a moment her hand hovered over his, and then she knelt beside him, brushing the ground and turning over chips, digging into a small heap of dirt at the corner of the door.

  On the other side of that door, Alon thought, there had been people. Aestas had been seeded. They had incubated and birthed, and grown, and walked through this doorway into the world, and back. And they had never left. For a time, even, Aestas had joined the Network, sending low speed radio signals until it fell silent, the final transmission unfinished.

  This is all yours, he thought. It was an old dream.

  A pulse of artificial light briefly cast his shadow on the inner door. He turned to look back at the truck. It loomed toward the opening of the outer door, a featureless black box cutting a rectangular hole out of the sky and distant mountains. A flash ran down its flanks and thrust out from the nose as if to splash him in white. He caught a glimpse of Kali behind the windshield and the joysticks, the hood of her suit thrown back, gesturing him forward. He turned away, choosing to ignore her.

  The outer door had opened relatively easily, its sealed nanoscale mechanism without power but yielding to the winder he attached to the override shaft to the right of the opening. The inner door was another matter—it had moved only millimeters, failing to clear the dust and gravel accumulated against its bottom edge. If they couldn’t open that door, the truck and their equipment would remain parked in the open.

  Alon held the white chip to Toran. “Bone,” he said.

  “Can’t tell,” Toran replied. He squatted and gently pushed aside dust from the gravel at the base of the door. Probing gently with his fingers, he picked out a slightly larger piece, flattened. “Cranial suture,” he said, “Fused.”

  “Doesn’t look like much,” Alon replied. Just a curved grove on the top. Not enough.

  A flash of light threw Alon’s shadow against the gray of the door and the smears and spray of rust. He held his hand up without turning. Patience was too much to ask; Kali didn’t have any to spare.

  “I have it,” Ai said, standing and offering him her hand. The piece between her fingers shone slightly in the light. She rolled it over, revealing the split projections from the other end, one broken off partway down. A tooth. There was no denying it now. He stepped back from the inner door, just beyond the margin of the entranceway, his back to the truck. The ground in front of him was littered with gravel, the white chips mixed in with worn pieces of blue limestone, a few glinting, others flat on one side, jagged or porous on another. One or many? he wondered.

  “We’re going to have to drive over this,” he said to Toran. The tires on the truck were wide, but…

  “We’re not the first,” Toran replied. He brushed his fingers against the door, the light reflecting from the three green stripes circling the upper arm of his suit. “I want to see what’s on the other side of this.”

  Is it any better? Alon thought. “Not a natural process—” he started. A gush of red light cut him off as it strobed against his back, his shadow flickering on the inner door between Ai’s and Toran’s. He turned to see the truck fading to black, and in the distance, a kilometer down the ancient dirt road, on the other side of the long dead fields, the lander, lost in its own noontime shadow on the sunlit calcite plain.

  “I don’t know about you,” Kali said over the radio, “but I’m freezing in here.” She flipped her hood up, shoved open the driver’s door, and dropped to the ground, pulling a rod-like device and a volatile-tank from behind the seat. She crossed to the service door to the side of the vehicle entrance and pointed the rod at its locking mechanism. A volcanic rush of sparks and flame shot out the end, dousing the door until the metal parts started to drip and the diacom itself glow, crack, and evaporate in a cloud of carbon dioxide.

  Ai jumped visibly as Kali shut off the lance and kicked the side door in with the heel of her boot. Kali disappeared inside.

  “I could’a done that easier,” Alon said to himself. The old service had more elegant ways to put holes in solid things; using a thermal lance on a low security door was like taking a fission device to a termitarium. The inefficiency of it bothered him.

  “I see what your problem is!” Kali shouted from the other side of the main door. Alon stepped back from it as she fired the lance again in another brief rush. “Try it now. It was all wired up on this side.” She reappeared through the side door, the lance pointed like a weapon shouldered. “Your turn.”

  Alon picked up the winder and locked it onto the override shaft at the side of the inner door. With the first burst of power, the door shuddered open a few centimeters, spilling the dust and gravel and shards of bone pushed up against it.

  He watched the dirt slip under the door and imagined wheels rolling over it as they crossed the threshold of the dome, over and over again, crushing each piece of bone into smaller and smaller pieces.

  How many died here?

  Invasion Force

  We’re coming for you, Chon! Alon thought.

  He stood in the center of the cargo hold of belly of the ekranoplane, fifty kilometers from the coast of Haffay, twenty minutes from landing. A line of armed and armored trucks ran down the center of the hold, flanked on one side by the Vertels, fans folded up, and on the other by rocket launchers, automated guns, and supply modules. The deck at his feet was lined with rollers, tie downs, and friction strips; the bowed walls padded with green-gray snap-on quilts; the ceiling a channel of air ducts and power lines. The distant tail propellers sent a smooth electric hum through his boots as the ekranoplane rocked side to side, oscillating gently over the surf of the Athenian sea meters below. The vibration of the engines competed with the buzz of conversation and shouts of command as hundreds of North Athenian soldiers assembled, and the smell of the sea air outside with the smell of munitions and gun oil inside.

  Alon let his gaze go down the length of the hold to the bow door, and pulled the straps tighter under his jumpsuit. He stood at the edge of a loose group of Shinigami; two dozen—the most he’d ever seen in one place—mustered by their assigned vehicles, glide-packs dropped on the deck beside them.

  Chon: he’d brought his Provisional Navy from Senta to the coast of Haffay,
almost every illegal boat in the continent and every ekranoplane he could pirate, and entered Bruno from the docks in a hero’s procession. The Shinigami had sank many of the boats at sea, but not nearly as many as finished the journey; they simply didn’t have the numbers—the fast-boats or the warheads. The Shinigami held a monopoly on the use of explosive and deadly means in and around Senta, but there were never more than two hundred of them spread across a continent spanning arctic northern latitudes to tropical southern, and another one hundred in reserve. Until a few weeks ago, when his orders had come through, Alon had been part of that reserve.

  Senta lay two thousand kilometers from North Athena; Haffay only two hundred. A hundred kilometers south of the port city of Heisenberg—the traditional gateway to Haffay and Senta—lay the twin cities of Newton and Einstein, the financial and political capitals of North Athena. Chon had brought his movement as close to the docks of the North as the sea would allow. The North lay in his reach. He’d never make it back across the eighteen hundred kilometers—the Shinigami would see to that. But he could make it across the two hundred to the Northern coast.

  Chon, on Haffay, was at the point of destruction, or the verge of breakout; he was where the North wanted him, or where he wanted to be; he was trapped, or committed. He was all of those things.

  Alon turned to Jeo, his rigger for the mission, and asked, “Any better it’s the Darwinian?”

  Jeo laughed, his mustache an arc over his mouth, his face round, topped by tight-curled hair. “The fittest survive,” he said, “and that’s us. You been hitting the runners, right?”

  Alon wasn’t much of a runner. “Hey, you know me.”

  “Far enough to go from the feast to the orgy?”

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  Jeo turned to look the length of the cargo hold to the bow. “When the fuck do we get outta here?” he bellowed. “First thing I gotta do is race the Halfies to the shitter. Then I can kill ’em more slowly.”

  Alon felt the ekranoplane turn around him, his feet pressing down on the deck, his equipment getting heavier. One point two G—the ekrano’s lowered wingtip almost touching the sea, its body rising to the limit of ground effect. The final turn to the coast.

  Alon had come to Haffay for one thing: to kill Chon. He had as much right as any Shinigami to take this mission—ten cycles active, nine reserve, on the verge of his career term limit. Cycles of duty in Senta, dozens of black-weapons operations. There had been few Shinigami as experienced as he in the history of the service, none with currency in training, and only one who new Chon better. Alon would leave Haffay and turn in his insignia, or be buried with them.

  There was only one catch—the active duty Shinigami had killed Chon so many times they couldn’t say if he was dead or alive. No one had ever died so many times in the history of Athena. The man sitting in Bruno now might never have been Chon, or he might always have been, and the others replicas and decoys, unlucky or unwise or unafraid enough to step into the footprints of a myth. A myth that had only gotten bigger with every death; the Shinigami had made their enemy as they tried to destroy him.

  Alon turned to look at Jeo. He was kneeling beside his glide-bag, double-checking the supply of mines and detonators, darts and trip-wires. It was his third run through the bag in the last half-hour. Alon thought he saw a quiver in Jeo’s hand as Jeo tapped his way through the pack-list and the dart clips. Jeo looked up and grinned, his smile lighting up his face. He stood and offered Alon an open, gloved hand. Alon grasped it.

  “He who seeks to live…” Jeo said.

  “He who seeks to live…” Alon repeated.

  …Shall die, he thought, completing the first half of the old code.

  Chon is already committed; we will be soon.

  But he wondered, If we lose, will Chon use this ship against the North? They might be bringing Chon the means he needed. The Northern military wasn’t strong—a third of it now stood in the hold of this ekranoplane. It was the remnant of an old force intended to invade Senta, or it was the seminal seed of a new force to do the same, depending on whether you looked to the past or the future. Either way, it hadn’t been scaled for its mission. For a century, it had been maintained as a disaster response team; today it was barely capable of assaulting these islands. The Shinigami were the only battle-tested arm.

  Alon reflected that here, Haffay, was the fulcrum on which human civilization among the stars hung. North Athena was the leading success of the seeding, but Chon threatened to destroy it. And if Athena couldn’t succeed, then what world could? We set an example, as long as we hold on to the truth.

  Alon felt himself lean forward and he put a foot out to steady himself. The ekranoplane was slowing, approaching the coast. He glanced at Jeo—working the crowd, shaking hands with each Shinigami—and then looked back down the cargo hold to the bow doors.

  Near the bow, a woman with flowing black hair and copper skin stepped from between two Vertels and swung up the footholds of a truck to its top. She wore a traditional, tight-fitting green flight suit, her survival vest left aside. She pulled herself up with one hand, and in the other she held a black rifle. It wasn’t a standard assault rifle, Alon noted, but a hunting rifle—a personal weapon, not one that was issued, a technical violation of a little-enforced mission rule.

  The woman stood for a moment on top of the truck, looking down at someone below, joking and smiling for a moment. Then her expression turned serious as she looked down the length of the cargo hold, to Alon’s position and beyond to the tail. She held the rifle over her head for a few seconds, then let its stock fall on the top of the truck three times. The bangs echoed down the belly of the ekranoplane; heads turned.

  “Damn!” Jeo said, “Hope that ain’t loaded.” He circled his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Watch out on the bridge!”

  “You know what this is about!” the woman shouted, her voice strong, carrying over the hum of the engines.

  Alon turned to watch. At first he had taken her for Sentan—her medium skin tones standing out amid the light and dark of the North Athenians—but her accent was pure North. She wasn’t afraid to bring attention on herself, no matter how little she might have fit in. He admired that, but he doubted the value of it—he’d spent a life blending in, hiding in open sight.

  The Shinigami beside him raised their fists above their heads. Alon, unmoved, felt his hands dangling at his sides.

  “You know what this is about!” the woman shouted. “One world, one people, one way!”

  “One world, one people, one way!” the massed soldiers repeated, their voices filling the hold.

  “You know what comes next!”

  “Kill!” came the ritual response, “Kill!”

  “You know what comes after this. As blood and bone build the soil…”

  “Kill! Kill! Kill!”

  “…and ashes build the earth…”

  “Burn! Burn! Burn!”

  “…and flesh feeds the crops…”

  “Cut! Cut! Cut!”

  She led them through the chant, until almost every fist shook in frenzy in the air. Alon slipped his hand in his pockets, turning to look for gap between trucks he could disappear into. The woman laughed, swept her hair back, and held the rifle in the air with one hand. She turned to survey her audience, bowed over her rifle, and jumped down from the roof of the truck.

  Jeo turned to Alon, gripped his shoulders, and asked loudly, “You with us now?”

  I’m ahead of you, Alon thought. But the training chant was shit. Do any of you know what it means? Have you listened to the words?

  “I wanna see it again,” Jeo said to the Shinigami, “This time, topless!”

  “Got your box and your book, Jeo?” Alon asked.

  “Why, yeah,” Jeo said, glancing sideways. “Charges, detos, everything.”

  “Then we’re on.”

  Alon felt the ekranoplane sinking beneath him and put a hand on the side of the truck beside him. The bow of the
ship dipped and the deck dragged beneath him, making him lean forward as it slowed. Now they were floating, less than a kilometer from the shore. The engines surged as they pushed the vehicle through the water, drowning Jeo’s voice.

  Alon rehearsed the next step of the mission in his mind—the flight from the top of the Twin Mountains to the port of Bruno, and the landing. The grunts would truck them up the gravel road to the launch point by the fall of night. There they would wait for the early hours of the morning and prep for the jump in darkness.

  Secure belts, straps, and risers. Check glide-pack and tether. Twenty minutes atmospheric re-fueling for the suit. Check primary and backup micro-light chutes. Check and secure hand weapon. Check windspeed and visibility. Confirm target and glide-path.

  The jump and seven minutes unpowered glide would take them down the side of the old volcano and over the city at a thousand meters. Bring in arms and legs to kill the lift from the suit flight surfaces, tumble feet forward, deploy the micro-light parafoil, and steer for the top of the largest building in town—The Spiral itself.

  But don’t miss because beyond it there was nothing to land on but the capitol park, camped with Chon’s Provies, covered with anti-aircraft guns.

  Then wait, hidden by invisible blinds, to surveil, mark, and, at the right moment, kill. Silence, stealth, invisibility, surprise, and death—the trade of the Shinigami.

  The jump is the best part, Alon thought.

  Jeo turned to Alon, his face serious, and gripped Alon’s shoulder saying, “Wish I had your cool, man…”

  “So do I,” Alon said through tight lips.

  The nose of the ekranoplane lifted as it hit the beach, and he felt it slow as it ground into the sand. The ship’s engines, propellers pitched to reverse, strained to halt its forward motion. Down the length of the cargo hold, soldiers climbed into trucks and Vertels, slammed doors shut, and cradled their weapons.

  The bow doors opened and the morning light spilled in, blinding in its intensity.

  Alon reached for his glide-pack.