The lighthouse of kuiper, p.3
The Lighthouse of Kuiper, page 3
There had been no organization, no religion, no leaders, no plan. Just an unfettered riot against the existence of man.
Some had fought back—remnants of old national militaries, new coalitions funded by the same industrial families who’d had the foresight to fund Arran terraforming—but organized resistance had ultimately been futile. Too many people dead, too much of the international infrastructure of civilization decayed beyond repair. Once hallucination contagions were spliced into seed crops, all the fighting bought was time to escape.
There was already a small population living outwell of Earth, but when the famines and the nightmare plagues became too much, that population exploded. Military forces kept the lifts open, but from there, people had to find their own way.
Most settled on moons, or out in the major asteroid fields of LaGrange points. For those closer in, the gravitational influences of major planets wrecked havoc on Earth-born physiology. But those settlers had it easy, or so they thought, even as genetics were forcefully adapted, labor consolidated, populations enslaved.
By contrast, settlement on Mars had been more difficult. Living on a planet in the middle of terraforming was no simple feat. But those few souls hardy or adventurous or desperate enough to sign on for the Founders’ onerous conditions, it had proven a hedge against the worst of the insanity.
Earth’s philosophical sickness had still spread into the void. Student riots on Titan. Polarist activity spreading through the settlements of the Jovian inwell. Discoveries in Europa’s adlivun depths that claimed nearly three brigades before nuclear fires burnt it away. The last gasp of the Euphemism.
Something had to be done.
The University of Titan had proposed the Tenancy. Totalitarian control. Undying. Unending. To halt the descent.
The first of the Landlords, the Wytt, announced his presence by killing nearly six million people—scientists, doctors, theorists, drug lords, anyone sympathetic to the Euphemisms’s various ideologies—the day the decision was ratified. The rest proved little better. A depopulated Earth was placed under permanent watch. Scientific research was all but banned. Religion was viciously excoriated from most of the system. Economic systems were frozen.
Mars positioned its military forces against the lingering madness.
The Euphemism was stopped.
But seven Propagations on—an eighth due any year now—the Heliosphere hardly resembled the gleaming paradise once promised.
Mercury dead. Venus barely holding on. An empty Earth watched by a lonely woman who regenerated by giving birth to herself. Mars violating its own Constitution by allowing a dictator. The Inner Shoals, run by an Arran traitor whose portrait hung in every shop and home and facility, the starched blue of her collar unmistakable as the old Earth's resistance military. Jupiter with its nepotistic stranglehold on the Heliosphere’s energy resources. Saturn, fancying itself above the milieu, leeching billions in resources from other inwells. Uranus and Neptune, half-empty habitats haunted by insane, lonely Landlords. The brain-dead pilot of Pluto. The frozen wastes of the Kuiper and their madwoman, who promised a utopia none had ever seen.
Tharsis pressed on, over the last bridge into the hostel district. Humphryes had dorm complexes, but the things were large, power-intensive. The squadron only kept one open at a time; when it was full, personnel were allowed to live off base instead. Tharsis had arrived at such a time and had jumped on the chance. The things everybody warned her about—you’ll constantly be out of time-synch, you’ll need to watch what you say around the voiders, you have to sleep in a grav-bag all the time—hadn’t mattered. It had sounded like an adventure, and an adventure sounded good.
The only true concern was gravity. Humphryes was kept to the Arran standard of 3.73 m/s2. Ibbies, by comparison, kept their cities to the bare minimum required to hold the seas together, and even that was aided greatly by the sky-structures and general water tension. Local physiologies were adapted, but for the planet-born Arrans, calcium depletion and muscle atrophy were ever-present health risks. Tharsis had spent a few hundred MSD on a good graviton sleep bag and found herself somewhere that wasn’t full of Arrans.
Nighttrippers.
A hostel, tuned to serve the mélange of low-budget, grav-shot travelers who passed through New Stockholm every year. It was a worn-out place, the seals around the doors showing their age, battered furniture and old cookware in the common kitchen that could barely hold together under standard prep pressures. Nothing matched, everything from the rugs on the bare stone floors to the ceiling air compressors looked as if it had been raided from the local recycle shops. There was a pub in the basement and a decent library with an Arran wireless terminal on the first floor, and nobody cared about the military rank tattooed across her neck. It had been love at first sight.
Coming in that evening, the el-tee smiled a little at the sight of the cobalt-skinned Iapetan behind the front desk in the foyer. Feet were kicked up, a tablet in a long-fingered hand, the sticker on the back—Fuck Planets, Go Mig—glowing blue in the halogens of the foyer. tDaer had been working here for at least the last Heliosphere-standard year, according to some of the other long-term travelers. Whenever the graduate student wasn’t cleaning toilets or working on research, she had her nose in a book.
Hen, Tharsis silently reminded herself. The Cronuans were touchy about gender—their Landlord had done away with it centuries before, at the first settlers’ requests. tDaer had, after a sinful amount of alcohol on a synched-up Fiveday night, tried to explain it. “I know it’s not Heliosphere Standard, but not using the right pronouns makes you Martians look like hicks.”
Tharsis had never really thought about something like that before. It had been her first taste of just how varied the human cultures of the Heliosphere were. Tharsis didn’t quite understand it but tried to be sensitive. Didn’t make the two of them friends, but tDaer was nicer to Tharsis than hen was to just about any of the others passing through.
“Hey, Tharsis, you look dragged. What’s up?”
About to reply, she noticed the projector over the counter. On mute, in deference to tDaer’s tablet, legible Ibbie script in the ticker. International news. Explosions at a recycling plant on Ennomos, more Arran military assistance being readied for Venus as the Dena threatened to shut down the argon scoops again, a Nalatok terror cell rooted out on Hygiea.
“Fuckin’ Toks,” she grumbled.
“So much for your people’s much vaunted freedom of religion,” tDaer commented without looking up. “The Rossen has ʼem executed, doesn’t he?”
“Homicidal behavior is not religion,” Tharsis shot back. “Mars executing Toks is about as remarkable as Ibbies sending tax-dodgers to the sucksuck.”
tDaer’s dark eyes, just a little too big for hen’s face, edged over the top of the tablet. “Bad day with that bloated gas-harvester of a captain?”
“Nothing more booze won’t fix,” the lieutenant grumbled, and tried to put it out of mind. “What are you reading?”
“HS Zero-Five-Two-Six,” came the answer. “A whole lot of nothing.”
“I still don’t believe that you’ve read five hundred years of the Journals.”
“Sometimes I think the rest of the Heliosphere knows you Martians’ history better than you do,” tDaer replied, and tapped the tablet. “Didn’t you have to read this in school?”
“A little bit, as kids,” Tharsis evaded. She was not about to explain her planet’s lack of formal schooling to the academic-obsessed Cronuan again. “The Rossen’s obligated to publish it. We’re not obligated to read it.”
It wasn’t quite a lie. Not even the Speaker of the House could order Mars’s Landlord to do scat he didn’t feel like doing. The Rossen’s Journals were published, most people thought, not in accordance with any mandate, but guilt.
For the first seventy years or so of Tenancy rule, things had been fine. Not great, but not horrible. Two generations on Mars grew up without war, and the memories of the Euphemism faded with each trip the planet took around the sun.
Until, in hS0079, the Arcna’s initial broadcast fucked that peace to hell.
Until, in hS0081, the Rallarhu tore the sky off Ceres, killing a million people and launching parallel invasions of every other city-state in the Inner Belt.
The first and final moments of the First Propagation.
The details of what happened in those two years were hazy. In hS0080, when it became clear the broadcast was not going to stop on its own, the Flet himself had launched a craft to the Kuiper. To investigate. To hold the Arcna to the Accords. To stop the killing.
Reports varied on who had actually gone along, but it was a confirmed fact that the Rossen had led the expedition. It was also confirmed that he’d shot himself in the senate, rather than report what he saw, or explain why he’d ordered a military stand-down while the Rallarhu tore the Inner Belt apart.
A small book had been found in his pocket. One word in the whole fucking thing.
Noqumiut.
The Arran people were incensed. They wanted answers. They wanted insight. His regenerated twenty-four-year-old self, coming out of the vat for only the third time and pissed as hell about it, had agreed. Since then, the Rossen had kept a very thorough accounting of his actions.
Outside of school, Tharsis had never felt the need to read the damn things.
“Why not? He’s your Landlord. You should know what he’s done.”
“I didn’t vote for him,” she retorted. “The Tenancy’s a fucking stupid system anyway.”
“Voting’s a stupid system. Never understood why you Martians chose yourselves a Landlord who kept that antiquated scat around.”
The Rossen had been a goddamn national hero. Once. One of the Founders. The man who’d held the planet together through the stress of colonization and those early civil wars. Tharsis had always believed, privately, that maybe he’d done what he could to preserve what they’d been fighting for. “Who knows?”
“You wanna go out tonight? I’m off shift in an hour or so.”
tDaer always asked. The same thing. Every one of Tharsis’s Fiveday nights. But it probably meant either drugs or illicit booze or one of a dozen different other illegal entertainments sold openly in New Stockholm. It didn’t matter which one. The consequences for Tharsis would all be equally bad.
Tharsis never went, but she never said no.
“Come on,” tDaer challenged, smile hopeful. “It’d be fun to spend some time outside of this piss-chute of a place.”
Tharsis hesitated. That wasn’t interest. Was that interest? Nobody was interested in her. tDaer couldn’t be interested in her. Hen was interested in reading and traveling and talking and studying. Working on a doctorate. There was nothing a girl from the back country of Mars had to offer someone like that.
“I’ll think about it,” Tharsis promised.
“And I think you’ll enjoy it,” tDaer said, the edges of hen’s mouth quirking up just so, and went back to the tablet.
CHAPTER
FOUR
That night, for the first time in her life, Tharsis dreamed.
Of a planet, an unspeakable menace hanging in the background radiation of the universe. Of its song, an ancient, decrepit hymn, diving into her mind, wrapping around neurons, vibrating across synaptic gaps. Of metal pressing against her skin, her own blood boiling into the void, her life slipping as that song tore at her, demanding a—
A bang tore her from its depth.
She woke to the confines of her grav bag, the close pressure of its humming gravitational circuits oppressive. Normally, the sensation took her back to the soundless nights of the Centrifuge cruise at the Academy, that three-hundred-day trip to the Koronis training grounds meant to separate those who could stand deep void service from those who could not. More serene, she’d always thought, then the constant pressure of the artificial gravity on the base.
Grav bags were said to aggravate penumbra sensitivities, but she’d never been prone to it. She’d never seen the things that moved in the spectral depths of the space-time gradient.
That morning, Tharsis almost tore the bag getting the seal open, panting into the cool air of her room.
The bang sounded again, continuing.
“Hey, El-Tee, come on! You alive in there?”
Sergeant Olin.
“Field trip, ma’am! Get that lazy officer self of yours out here!”
Scrubbing a hand across her face, Tharsis tried to remember where she’d left her uniform. She rolled her eyes over to the row of recessed cubbies that served as secure storage in the room. Empty. Fuck. Everything tended to drift into the vents if it wasn’t secure. Last thing she needed was another uniform getting sucked into the atmo intakes.
“What’s the occasion?” she shot back as she unzipped herself from the bag and let herself float out naked, grabbing the bag’s anchor cable for support. Twisting around, she spotted her errant piece of clothing. Three meters up, up in the heat chimney. “It’s not like it’s the fucking weekend or anything.”
“Would you just let me in, ma’am, and we can talk about it?”
She jumped; Mars-born muscle easily made the leap to the ceiling. Her hair was getting too long again, she noticed idly, the dark strands of it drifting around her bare shoulders. Tharsis could never bring herself to cut it all off, like Junia had. As stupid as it was, it felt like the only thing she had left that separated her from the guys.
“You’re staying outside until I get my uniform on!”
Olin was quiet for a moment, and then knocked again. “Are you sure I can’t come in?” His chuckle sounded through the door.
“Fuck you,” she snapped, grabbing her clothing at the top of her jump, letting herself fall slowly down, regretting her stupidity in not securing it properly.
Tharsis could still hear him laughing as she landed. “It’s really not funny!” she yelled back but got dressed as fast as she could. Knickers, breast-binders, thermal undershirt, thermal socks, grav-suit grays. The lieutenant headed over to the control panel and punched him in.
“How you doin’, El-Tee?” he asked casually, strolling in, hands in his pockets.
“You see my boots anywhere?” she asked sharply enough to cut through his humor.
“They’re over there,” and he pointed to where they were caught in a corner of the recessed desk area. He glanced back out into the hallway. “Fuck, where’d Tommy go?”
“You brought the cat?” she asked, and snapped the seals on her boot shut, wincing a little as the circuits connected and the field switched on, simulating a change of mass relative to the ʼroid’s own artificial standard. It let her heart pump, muscles move, as if she were in Mars-standard gravity.
“Yeah, he’s gettin’ fat, not doing any work.”
The ASDF went nowhere without its four-leggers, and the cislunar cat variants were especially vital. At least one of the twenty-kilo, thick-furred animals could be found on every base, outpost, and craft in the inventory. Dogs deployed with combat forces, but cats were essential to keeping penumbra entities off base. Pest control. Humphryes’s tom was a moody little bastard, though. Olin wouldn’t have been messing with him unless it was important.
“We really need him?”
“High radiation zone? Yeah, we need him.”
“Radiation?” She thought for a second. “The Lighthouse? We’re going down there?”
He just gave her that look all senior sergeants seemed to reserve for an especially stupid junior officer question. “The lab’s still working on that tumor we pulled outta the wall, but they got me the RNA markers. It indicated it was part of the main communication taproot for the city. Those are shielded lines. It wasn’t cross talk. Something was multiplexing across.”
Multiplexing. Only one option for that. “Voice?”
“Most likely. I can source it better at the antenna forest.”
The lieutenant was going to ask him something else about that, and then caught the chronograph again out of the corner of her eye, the date displayed at the bottom, and felt her stomach clench up. That day of the month again. Of all the things she’d thought she’d be happy about leaving behind when she’d joined up, the reality was quite different.
Sometimes, she wanted to go back and slap some sense into her twelve-year-old self.
“Come on, how bad can it be?” she asked brusquely, brushing past him back over to the cubbies, pulling out the small stainless case with its unpleasant inventory of small hormone patches. Three were already used, three left to take, and then she’d have to turn the whole thing into medical, get her blood tested, and pick up the next round. She removed the next in the series, her back to Olin.
“Tumors only express if there’s something abnormal coming through the system,” Olin began, and then stopped. The lieutenant could feel his eyes on her and was glad she couldn’t see his face. “Come on. We’re burning daylight.”
“Go get the cat,” she shot back, and eased the patch under her zipper and onto her hip.
The plagues of the Euphemism had been originally bred for pleasure, bringing out vivid visions in the infected. Gene hackers tweaked the active compounds, found ways to facilitate the sharing of everything from memories to entire interactive environments; bridging, some stories said, the collective unconscious itself. It was only one of the period’s biological horrors, and far from the worst, but it had been the most insidious. Induced nightmares, insanity, mass suicides.
The genetic vaccinations required to settle on Mars, delivered via high-velocity RNA, had worked perfectly; certain perceptions were dampened, lessening the drug’s influence on the mind. For most voiders at the time, already significantly genetically altered as they were, the effects of that were almost unnoticeable. A slight decrease in right-brain function, barely enough to bother anyone, or so the doctors had thought at the time.
But it had destroyed something in the Arran mind. Except for extreme cases, or after years of strenuous training, spontaneous interaction with the subconscious was gone. Only one of the many genetic sacrifices humanity had made, but the most profound experienced on Mars.
