The good new stuff, p.54
The Good New Stuff, page 54
Only a knack for steering through trouble (and putting up with Thals) earned Defoe part-time privileges on Spindle.
At the top of the stratosphere, the shuttle shifted her angle of attack. Acceleration gave way to the gentle persistent push of gravity. Through the near porthole Defoe saw the green-brown limb of the planet rising to greet him, edged by a thin corona of atmosphere. Cloud puffs hung over blue splotches—large lakes or inland seas. Knocking around the Near Eridani, he had seen worlds aplenty, some good, some bad, some merely uninhabitable. When humans first arrived, Glory had been an airless husk, pitted with craters. Relentless terraforming had made her almost livable. No worse than New Harmony, Elysium, Bliss, or any of a half-dozen made-to-order worlds. Either a shining success story, or a case of hideous ecocide. As a pilot, Defoe had to believe in terra-forming; starships needed places to go.
The shuttle came screeching in for a horizontal landing. Millions of kilometers of steppe, savanna, and lava desert allowed landing strips to be as long as needed. A groundhand undogged the hatch with a gleeful “Welcome to dirtside, land of enchantment—where falls can kill you, beasts can eat you, and Thals will snap your spine just to hear it pop. Watch your step, you are in two-thirds g.”
Defoe nodded. He was used to gaining thirty kilos every time he went down to Glory. The strip was a study in spasmodic activity. Cargo pallets came dropping down from orbit, braked by big silver chutes, raising yellow clouds of dust. Semirigids landed and departed. SuperChimps sat like rows of sad monkeys, ready to help with the unloading. It had been cocktail time on Spindle; here it was early morning. Dun-colored hills stretched north and west of the field. Beyond the electrified perimeter, a solitary male moropus dug for steppe tubers. Hyenas trotted past, giving the moropus wide leeway—behind them, the Camelback Steppe disappeared into endless distance.
Waiting at the bottom of the landing ladder was a uniformed woman. Tall and athletic, with her steel-gray hair cut down to stubble, Ellenor Battle could easily have looked half her age—but she did not go for biosculpt or hair toner. Taking life as it came, she expected the universe to do the same. Defoe had dealt with Ellenor before, finding her as proud as Lucifer’s aunt, a no-nonsense reminder that AID stood for the Agency for Imperial Development.
She gave him a liquid hydrogen greeting. “Welcome to Glory. You missed your briefing.” Defoe confessed as much. Full-blown AID briefings were full of glaring oversights and ass-backward assumptions—besides, if the problem was solvable from orbit, AID would not have asked him down. But he listened dutifully to the facts as Ellenor saw them. “We have a semirigid and crew more than forty hours overdue. Orbital recon spotted the crash site in the TransAzur, Tuch-Dah territory … .”
“How many in the crew?”
“Three.”
“All human?” A normal enough question, but Ellenor Battle took it badly, replying with a curt nod. Defoe never knew what was about to bother her. She was very like a Thal in that way—moody and demanding. Salome might worship Satan, but you at least knew where you stood.
A bang and a wail cut off conversation. SuperChimps were refueling the shuttle for her return to Spindle. Boiling LOX filled the collapsed tanks, screaming through the safety valves. With an irritated wave, Ellenor led him away from the ladder. Defoe matched her swift sure strides.
Two huge airship hangars dwarfed the clutter of buildings edging the strip. Outside the electrified perimeter sprawled Shacktown, one of those shameful slums-cum-animal-pens that sprang up around an Outback landing field. Cook smoke climbed lazily over dirty-naked That children searching through dung heaps for breakfast. Plastic honeycomb, narrow alleys, and open sewers gave Shacktown the look and smell of a slave labor camp—lacking only the camp’s energy fences and city services.
The howl of liquid oxygen faded, and Ellenor went on, “A Thal came into Azur Station with a ship’s recorder—hoping to trade it for booze. When the ship crashed, the survivors were attacked by Tuch-Dahs.”
It had been a long time coming, Defoe decided, but all hell had finally broken out.
The main hangar was packed with nervous armed humans. Defoe was welcomed aboard by the Port Master, a local worthy who doubled as Mayor of Shacktown, charged with neglecting sanitation and handing out beer and bhang on election day. The hangar canteen had been opened for the duration. Drunk vigilantes brandished riot pistols, pepper grenades, and scoped sporting lasers—as though they could not decide whether they were faced with a prison break or a big game hunt. A Tuch-Dah uprising had the worst elements of both.
The quarter-kilometer hangar housed a giant rigid airship, the Joie de Vivre, belonging to a rancher named Helio from the Azur. Ellenor Battle pushed through the jittery throng with Defoe in tow, making for the control car. The gangway was guarded by a brace of armed Thals, meaner than normal Neanderthals, nearly as tall as Defoe, and twice as wide. They wore standard airship harnesses, supporting stubby grenade launchers and bandoliers of gas grenades. A pair of dire wolves strained on electronic leashes.
The liquored-up posse, loudly aiming to take on the entire Tuch-Dah nation, gave the two Thals ample space. It was easier to talk of annihilating ten thousand Neanderthals somewhere out on the steppe than to face down a couple of them sporting grim looks and civilized weapons.
What the Thals thought, Defoe could hardly guess. Heavy browridges hid their deep-set eyes.
A rigger appeared at the top of the gangway—a Homo sapiens with dark skin and a drooping mustache trained to blend into trim whiskers. Giving a sloppy sarcastic salute, he led them to the control car’s lounge. He had a gasman’s easy grace, accustomed to balancing on a catwalk in any sort of wind and weather. Crepe overshoes kept him from raising sparks. RIG’EM RIGHT was scrawled across the back of his bull-hide flight jacket, and he had the veteran gasman’s grin—the small ironic smile that said he savored the insanity of making his living aboard a flying bomb.
Helio had that smile too. He sat by an open lounge window, eyes hidden by blue wraparound shades. Broad-shouldered as a Thal, the rancher was reckoned to be a dead shot. Surrounded by a breakfast buffet of cold capon and Azur caviar, he still looked deadlier than any dozen men outside.
Defoe pulled up a handwoven wicker seat, admiring the gold pattern in his plate.
Ellenor Battle tried to decline brunch, but Helio insisted. “It’s no advantage to be uncomfortable.”
No advantage indeed. Defoe let his host pour him some off-planet champagne. Relaxing under six tons of explosive hydrogen did not stop Helio from doing himself up right. Silk paneling framed slender lacquered columns.
“The first thing,” Helio told his guests, “is to see this recorder—and the Thal who found it. We have the transmission from Azur Station. But what is that? A bunch of digital blips.” He smiled behind his blue shades, kissing off the tips of his fingers. Electronic evidence was notoriously manipulatable—inadmissible in honest courts.
“So long as we get going.” Ellenor Battle glared out the open window at the panicky mob scene below.
Defoe agreed. He too wanted to see the recorder—and the Thai who found it. But most immediately he had to get out of this idiotic atmosphere with its infectious panic. Once underway, things were bound to be better. Helio was supposed to understand Thais—and conditions in Tuch-Dah country—as well as anyone could pretend to. Besides, if there was any answer to the disappearance of the AID team, it was going to be “out there.” Somewhere in the endless unknown that lay beyond the fringes of settlement, even on human-made planets. Defoe was fairly at peace with that. Hell, at the moment he made a dubious living off it.
Helio gave orders from the table, speaking through the open window and into the ship’s comlink, letting the Port Master’s young assistant come aboard, along with a couple of sober gunmen. The rest of the mob would be more of a threat to themselves than to the Tuch-Dahs. A gang of SuperChimps hauled on the ground lines, and the cabin began to move.
As they cleared the hangar, Defoe had his navmatrix lock into the onboard systems. Everything read right. Gas pressure. Wind speed. Elevator alignment. Keel angle. When Helio gave the order to “up ship,” the champagne in Defoe’s glass did not so much as quiver. The sign of a good crew.
Shacktown and the landing strip fell away to windward. There was a hesitation as the big props started to turn, biting into thin air. Then airspeed picked up and they plowed along, powered by a cold-fusion reactor driving four paired propellers. The Camelback Steppe rolled placidly along a few hundred meters below. Springbok bounded off, alarmed by the airship’s shadow.
Defoe decided he should see the recorder transmission from Azur Station, subjecting it to his own prejudices before hearing about it from others. Helio gave an airy wave. “Use my cabin. I have flying to do.”
Ellenor Battle followed Defoe to the cabin, bent on seeing the recording again. Helio’s private quarters were a sumptuous reminder of the good things to be had on Glory—hand-carved ivory and fine embroidery-luxuries that people on Spindle were too busy enjoying themselves to produce. And there was power to be had as well. Snappy service from human and semihuman attendants. Naked authority over Chimps, Thals, and Shacktown whores who would do nearly anything for next to nothing. Exotic animals roamed the endless veldt, ready to be hunted, killed, and butchered—the cabin was carpeted with a giant moropus hide, its head and claws attached. Defoe knew Dirtsiders who were not even tempted by the tame pleasures of Spindle, who snickered when he boarded a shuttle to go back.
The 3V imager made use of one whole bulkhead, turning curios and tapestries into a stereo tank.
Images leaped out. Defoe saw at once that the transmission wasn’t a proper flight recording. The transmission had to come from an AID team member’s personal recorder. First came establishing scenes—the semirigid taking off, steppe wildlife, a couple of male team members. Then came a terrible swift pan of breathtaking intensity. The recorder was sited on a small rise, aiming downslope. A low cairn of charred stones poked out of the steppe grass. Defoe flinched as rocket grenades and recoilless projectiles roared right at the recorder, a barrage so real that he almost dived out of his wicker seat, expecting to be showered with exploding shrapnel and shattered bric-a-brac. A ragged line of Thals came screaming out of the long grass, waving steel hatchets and hideous spiked clubs. They were Tuch-Dahs—no doubt there—Defoe recognized the garish paint and blood-freezing cries.
Willungha himself led the charge, atop a full-grown moropus—a tremendous horse-headed, long-necked beast with rhino-sized shoulders and tree-trunk limbs. Like Tars Tarkas aboard a wild thoat, the Neanderthal chieftain brayed commands, wielding a long thin lance. A grenade launcher in his rein hand looked like a tiny toy pistol.
Willungha’s mount reared, waving clawed forefeet, and the recorder swung crazily, focusing for a second on the scene atop the knoll. Defoe could clearly make out the crash site. Kneeling among blackened girders and burnt grass was a woman, the third member of the AID team. She was small and brown-haired, in a rumpled uniform, taking painstaking aim with a recoilless pistol. Brown eyes stared intently over the sights, seeming to look right at Defoe. She squeezed off shot after shot as death stormed toward her.
The recorder jerked upward. Swaying grass tops framed empty blue sky. A superbly ugly Tuch-Dah appeared, swinging a hideous curved club. The transmission ceased, replaced by braided hangings and a case of bone china.
Defoe turned to Lady Ellenor, saying, “That was fairly ghastly.” Shutting her eyes, she gripped her wicker seat with white knuckles, letting out a short sharp gasp. He had thought Ellenor Battle would be fairly shockproof, especially on a second viewing—but without any warning, her feelings were showing. The woman was full of surprises.
Helio was in the lounge. Any flying he had done had not taken him away from the table. Breakfast had disappeared, but his glass still held champagne. Broken highlands had replaced the Camelback Steppe. Defoe’s navmatrix knew the country; beyond these mesas lay the Sleeping Steppe. Then the Azur.
“Enjoy the show?” Helio’s eyes were still hidden by blue shades, so it was hard to tell how he meant it.
Defoe nodded. A full-blown Tuch-Dah massacre. No wonder everyone from the Port Master on down was potted and praying. There were a thousand or so bona fide Homo sapiens on Glory. Plus maybe twice as many on Spindle who weren’t much inclined to come down. Willungha could field twenty thousand club-wielding Tuch-Dah, if he cared to. There were ten million Thals spread over the planet.
Helio twirled the stem of his champagne glass. “Glory might have been a new Eden for ambitious youngsters from the Home Systems—but the task of terraforming was too real for them.” Helio did not have to say that he had come here, giving up the easy life to raise bison and horses, risking his neck with archaic technology, making the planet not merely habitable but semi-inviting.
He clearly relished the irony of how hard it was to get people just to come down from Spindle. Yet the habitat was built as an interstellar slowboat, launched ages ago to seed the Delta Eridani system. A home for humans while Glory was being terraformed. But by the time Glory had a biosphere and a semibreathable atmosphere, the in-system humans had become perfectly adapted—to life on Spindle.
So AID had to go for Thals. Retrobred Neanderthals were shipped direct to Glory, to do the drudge work, overseeing SuperChimps, leveling landing strips, digging canals, tending great herds of herbivores. And the brutes had done a sterling job. Hell, they were still doing it. While backward types—like the Tuch-Dahs—bred like lemmings out on the vast steppes.
Defoe glanced over at Ellenor Battle. AID had planned this fiasco, from the first slowboats to the retrobreeding program that produced not just the Neanderthals, but a ready-made Cenozoic ecology as well.
She gave him a defiant glare, daring him to say that AID’s multithousandyear program was a disaster. “The first colonists are on their way—ten thousand settlers, headed straight from Epsilon Eridani at near light speed. And a hundred thousand more are set to follow. And a million after that.”
Epsilon E was less than twenty light-years away.
“Excellent.” Helio emptied his champagne glass with an evil chuckle. “Willungha will have them for breakfast.”
The rancher was right. Even a Navy cruiser with antimatter warheads could hardly cope with ten million Thals spread over an entire planet. (Currently the Navy had not so much as a captain’s gig in-system.) The colonists could be armed, of course—but the Tuch-Dahs knew all about modern weapons. Dumping an armed mob of city-bred humans on a strange world, outnumbered ten thousand to one, with no way of telling the “good” Thals from the “bad” ones, would be a first-magnitude disaster. They might as well ship the weapons straight to Willungha, compliments of AID.
Ellenor Battle looked angrily out the lounge window, staring stiff-necked and imperious at the endless veldt. “There is room enough for humans and Neanderthals.” As she saw it, AID was doing everyone a favor, bringing life to a dead world, making space for settlement, resurrecting a lost race, perhaps partly atoning for some ancient Cro-Magnon genocide.
Helio laughed heartily. “Tell that to Willungha. Maybe there is room. If the wild ones can be tamed, or pushed back. And the colonists kept near the strips. But no one is planning for that, eh?” He clearly thought someone should be.
“We have plans,” Ellenor retorted.
Defoe thought of the lone AID woman in the recording, backed against the burnt-out wreck, coolly firing at the oncoming Thals. Whatever plans AID was hoarding had to beat that—in fact, they had better be damned slick.
The great blue-green ink blot of the Azur hove into sight. Azur Station stood at the near end, a small circle of dugouts and stock pens between the Blue Water Canal and an east-west fence line. All along the canal the Sleeping Steppe had been made to bloom, growing rice, melons, and sugarcane.
Azur’s station chief met the airship. She was a big weatherbeaten woman named Cleo with flaming red hair, and scoped Centauri Special tucked under her arm—a sign of the times. A caravan was leaving her station, headed west along the fence line. The beasts of burden were low-humped retrobred camels, Camelops hesternus, as strong as Bactrians but more docile, with finer wool, also better eating.
Cleo had the recorder, and the Thal who had brought it, guarded by armed SuperChimps. The Thai did not understand Universal, or at least pretended not to—staring dumbly at the ring of narrow Cro-Magnon faces.
Helio tried signs. Grudgingly the Thal responded enough to indicate that he was not Tuch-Dah. He was Kee-too-Hee, from the marshes. He had found the recorder in a salt pan and trekked down to the station, hoping to get a reward. Instead he was being held prisoner and insulted. This did not altogether surprise him, but did not please him, either.
Ellenor Battle studied the recorder, then passed it to Defoe with a grim “What do you think?” The first time she had asked his opinion. Touched, he had his navmatrix go over the recorder. No sign of tampering. But this was an idiot box with sensors, playing back what was put in.
Defoe nodded at the Thal. “He’s telling the truth. At least about not being Tuch-Dah. That circle and dot on his cheek is a Kee-too-Hee clan mark. Any right-thinking Tuch-Dah would cut his throat with a dull clamshell before claiming to be a Kee-too-Hee.”
“But what was the recorder doing, sitting on a salt pan?” Ellenor sounded unconvinced. Rightly, so far as Defoe could see. “Give him his reward,” she decided. “AID will pay. But don’t let him go until we come back from the crash site.”
The crash site lay across the Azur. Defoe watched the approach from the control car’s foredeck, standing before wide wraparound windows. He felt Helio’s firm hand on the elevators, anticipating changes in trim, keeping the keel angle constant. North of Azur Station, the shoreline became a maze of salt marsh teeming with spoonbills and wild boar. Then came the Azur itself, bright green in the shallows, deep blue in the center.
