Exodus, p.4
Exodus, page 4
“So that’s good for us, right?” Faraji said. “Cheaper iron will help the Crown Dominion economy.”
Makaio-Yalbo and Olomo exchanged a glance.
“The royal house of Wynid does not have any large metal fabrication enterprises in the Kelowan system,” Makaio-Yalbo said. “Our focus since the Accord has been on Gondiar with its agriculture. The estates are cheap to run, thanks to the humans.”
Olomo shook his head slowly. “I never understand why you let them settle in your dominion.”
“They are well suited to basic manual labor, which makes them economically useful. Plus, there are no manufacturing costs like there are for androids.”
“Indeed. But as I understand it, the arrival of an iron exotic will shift the economic nature of the Kelowan system,” Olomo said. “Given the way the queens carved up the Kelowan system after the Imperial Accord was signed, it was Verak’s Grand Families who wound up with enterprises on Anoosha, where the humans mine ores and minerals out of the ground. If anyone is going to undergo a downturn when this new resource eventually comes online, it will be them. And in forty years’ time, Verak’s Queen Carolien will still be sitting upon the throne of the empress. She will be the one who grants the first licenses to harvest the iron rain. No doubt she will be fair, and grant them to any and all of the dominion’s Great Families.”
“Of course she will,” Makaio-Yalbo said, hoping Faraji wouldn’t pick up on Olomo’s less than subtle irony.
“Fortunately, cheaper, more plentiful resources will, as young Faraji says, do nothing but improve the Kelowan system’s economy. Of course, Verak would probably need to increase a different economic asset to compensate for the loss of its Anoosha monopoly. For instance, if there were an opportunity to increase one of its exports.”
The bloodstone prevented any significant facial expression, but Makaio-Yalbo narrowed his eyes. “Much as the Wynid Royal House is aligned with the Heresy, the Verak Royal House is aligned with the Talloch-Te Dominion.”
“Indeed, and the ships of the Talloch-Te consume a considerable amount of helium-3 fuel. One supposes that, as empress, Carolien might be inclined to allow them greater access to the HeSea. The additional revenue would help compensate Verak for the reduced income from Anoosha.”
“Only Crown Dominion ships can scoop the HeSea. The other queens would not sanction any policy change of that magnitude. It would shatter the entire Imperial Accord.”
“Yes, but who would be best placed to provide additional scoopships to Verak’s Great Families? Perhaps a dominion with the largest ship fabrication astroengineering industry within twenty light-years, which of course is the Talloch-Te…”
“Very probably. What do you propose, then?”
“Propose? Why nothing, of course. The Heresy are simply providing our friends in the Wynid Royal House with some interesting astronomical data. How you apply it is entirely up to you.”
Makaio-Yalbo took a deep breath. Of course the Heresy aren’t going to get involved in any conflict with the Talloch-Te; they’re just dumping all this on us. “The critical part of Dolod’s flight is at its closest approach to the Kelowan star,” he said thoughtfully. “Which is where the Archimedes Engine will initiate any momentum transfer. That’s when we get to find out if the Elohim plan to bring it into orbit around the star.”
“Yes,” Olomo said. “Yet if there is no momentum transfer, for whatever reason, Dolod would simply fly past the star and leave the Kelowan system behind. Nothing would change.”
“Such a failure to reach orbit would be unfortunate. And none of our queens would condone such an act.”
“No. Of course they wouldn’t.”
* * *
—
Finn had to lean against Ellie the whole way to her camp. The anesthetic spray was blocking most of the pain coming from his limbs and ribs, but even so, it was hard work hobbling along beside her.
They must have shambled along for a couple of minutes when he saw a fire flickering up ahead. Then they came out into a broad stretch of rock where no trees grew. It sank away toward the valley below like a natural road before the forest closed in on it again. Two hundred meters away, close to the fire, a narrow delta-winged craft had rammed its nose into a clump of small trees. Now that he knew what to look for, he could see the furrows it had carved out of the snow and gravel as it skidded along.
“Bad landing?”
“Anything you can walk away from…” Ellie sounded defensive.
As Finn limped toward the fire, fatigue fuddling his mind, he grew more confused by what was obviously a spaceplane. For a start, the wings were swept upward, and the rear of the fuselage had two tiny rocket nozzles sticking out. A pair of dark, curving windscreens like dead eyes peered out over the crumpled nose section. The whole thing was inexplicably crude. It wasn’t any kind of design he’d ever seen before.
“Grandpa,” Ellie called.
What Finn had taken to be a boulder next to the fire moved, revealing itself to be a man with several blankets pulled tight around his shoulders. He had the thickest beard Finn had ever seen.
“Look what I found,” Ellie said. She sounded bemused.
“Well, well!” the man’s voice boomed. “Who was right?”
“Yes, you’re always right.” She sighed. “This is Finn. His parachute got caught in the trees. His backpack had an orange strobe on it.”
“I saw that! I saw that light come down. She didn’t believe me, Finn.”
Finn made it to the circle of slush surrounding the fire and dropped to his knees with a broken whimper.
“Whoa there,” the man exclaimed. “What is that you’re wearing?”
“He’s not wearing anything, Grandpa,” Ellie chortled.
“Ah, my dear, only for you does a naked man fall out of the sky. Talk about manna from heaven.”
Finn fought to stay conscious as the man came closer. The gray-blue eyes that stared down at him were the most judgmental he’d ever known. The man’s lips curled up in amusement. “Tough day at the office, my boy?”
Finn could only nod. He thought he was about to pitch facedown in the runnels of half-melted snow. Somehow the warmth of the fire was hardly registering. His body felt practically nothing now, and he knew damn well that wasn’t the effect of the anesthetic spray.
“The name’s Josias. Josias Aponi.” Spoken with the expectation that Finn should know it, and indeed be grateful to meet the owner of that name. “Ah, well. I suppose we are a long time from home.” Josias stuck his hand out. Finn didn’t move; couldn’t.
“He needs to rest, Grandpa. We’ve got to get his temperature up.”
“Well, let’s get our poor lost flying lamb closer to the fire. We have some spare clothes in the lander. I’ll go and get them.”
“I have to get w-warm,” Finn stuttered. The cold was so all-consuming his muscles had even stopped trembling. “Can you get me into the lander?”
“Sorry, it’s colder than Pluto in there,” Josias said. “No power. The crash saw to that.”
“Shit.” Finn peered around, alarmed at how his vision seemed to be tunneling. He could barely make out the spaceplane’s fuselage now. In desperation he scanned the ground along the tree line. There was real soil there. “That outcrop,” he said, and raised a hand to point. It took an age; his body wasn’t responding well.
“I’ll put you in a sleeping bag,” Ellie said. “That should help.”
“No, not enough. Get me over there. I can sculpt it.”
She and Josias exchanged a glance. “Sculpt what?”
“The livestone. I told you, I’m uranic.”
“Grandpa, help me get him into a sleeping bag.”
“No,” Finn pleaded. “The livestone. Please. It can warm me. I don’t think I can last much longer.” He glanced at the biomonitor. “I’m going into hypothermic shock.”
“Finn—”
“No, no,” Josias said smoothly. “I want to see this.”
“He’s delusional. The cold’s killing him.”
“We’re strangers here. We don’t know what he can do.”
Finn wanted to thank him, to promise to put on a show—anything. But now the effort just to speak was excessive. The world was shrinking, its dark boundary tightening around him.
“Okay, my boy, here we go.”
Between them they lifted Finn and dragged him over to the smooth outcrop.
“I’m going to get a sleeping bag,” Ellie announced crossly. She hurried off to the little spaceplane.
Finn could see the contact bulb atop the clump of livestone. He reached out, his arm trembling, and brought his hand down on top of it.
The livestone was as strange as always. There was no animal-like awareness, but rather a sense of immutable timeless existence. He and his twin, Otylia, had spent hours in the palace park when they were kids, feeding shape impulses to the livestone paths and walls, to the dismay of the gardeners, who found looping curves and rude-shaped protrusions emerging amid the ornate formal layout. Afterward, their father would shout at them and send them back to reverse it all. If anything, that refined their understanding of the medium, enhancing their ability.
Those frisky twists and bulges sculpted during a misspent youth were irrelevant now. This was going to be his crudest sculpt ever. The livestone wasn’t sentient—nothing close—yet somehow its basic nerve strands resisted the coarse impulses Finn was sending through the connection, as if it knew they would cause its demise.
The Celestials who had created livestone used it for fashioning buildings, supplying them with an almost infinite source of willing silicate structure that required no industry, only patience: the foremost Celestial trait. Tens of thousands of Eden worlds in the Crown Dominion were scattered with raw outcrops, ready for any new town or city to be founded. A blank livestone outcrop was never intended to produce anything quickly. The kernels would take decades to grow into an outcrop that was ready to sculpt. After that, a sculpting architect would impart a design, and the livestone would gradually metamorphose into that shape. If the building had to be larger than the outcrop’s original volume, the livestone would continue to grow, and the architect would provide additional guidance as the years progressed.
Finn’s impulses bullied the livestone’s reticent nerve strands, forcing change regardless of the damage it inflicted on the outcrop. He could grasp the livestone’s shape—a gray shadow filling his mind, his perception tracing out the solid lumps that extended down into the soil, and on from there the roots thrusting out under the trees. But the mountain’s rock made sure the soil wasn’t deep. This outcrop was stunted; it was never destined to be a mansion, or even a simple house.
The livestone emitted sharp snapping sounds as its surface fluctuated in a hurry the original creators had never anticipated.
“Oh my,” Josias purred in delight as he watched the erratic movements.
Finn concentrated on the three-dimensional image he’d drawn in his mind, merging it with the livestone’s existing shape. Just above the ground, a horizontal fissure split open with a loud crack, the two rims pushing away from each other. The split continued deep into the outcrop, and air rushed in.
Ellie returned with the sleeping bag. “What’s happening? How’s he doing this to rock?”
“I’ve no idea. But isn’t it fantastic? The potential here is beyond anything I was expecting.”
The gap Finn created in the outcrop began to inflate. Soil around the livestone was shoved out of the way as its bulk expanded outward.
Finn took his hand off the contact bulb and slithered down the side as it grew steeper. “Inside,” he whispered. “Get me inside.”
Josias hesitated, looking into the horizontal gash in the livestone that had opened. He shone a torch in, revealing perfectly smooth gray-white walls, which opened back into a hemispherical room. “That’s warm,” he said in surprise. “Can you feel that, Ellie? There’s warm air in there.”
“Yeah. I can feel it.”
“Okay, then, let’s get our guest inside.”
Finn was barely aware of them hauling him into the shelter. They opened out the sleeping bag and laid him on it. He inhaled warm air, then consciousness left.
Chapter Two
Kelowan’s capital city was named after the world itself, which in turn carried the star system’s name; and like all capitals of the Crown Dominion, it sat on the planet’s equator. The fabulous mansions and towers of the city occupied a hilly geology whose long valleys hosted winding rivers and deep lakes. Right in the center was Mount Vaxjo, which used to measure four and a half kilometers high. The six founding fleets of the Crown Dominion, who arrived at the start of the Crucible Era more than eleven thousand years earlier, had removed the top five hundred meters to form a sheer plateau, to which they proceeded to anchor the planet’s first orbital tower. Kelowan now had fifteen of the massive structures reaching out to geostationary orbit. Their pinnacles were linked by the georing: a wide gridwork of ultrabonded carbonsteel that wrapped around the planet, providing more stability to the towers and balanced tether points for a multitude of habitats, commercial ports, and microgee industrial stations. The georing also had a classified number of defense bases (rumored to possess antimatter weapons) and fifty dedicated navy docks. As the home of the empress, Kelowan was the most heavily protected planet in the Crown Dominion. Its citizens could see the georing from anywhere on the surface and have complete confidence they were safe.
Helena-Chione, the Now and Forever Queen of the Royal House of the Wynid system, enjoyed the transition from space to atmosphere as her capsule slid down the Vaxjo tower. She stood before the observation deck’s high arched window as they sank through the thermosphere. Faint glints of St. Elmo’s fire flickered over the outer layer of the window’s ultrabonded diamond as the capsule ripped through the tenuous atoms outside.
Above them, the georing was a crisp golden ribbon bisecting the eternal glimmer of the Poseidon Nebula. It was surrounded by a swarm of dazzling pinpoints of light emitted by the ion drives of spaceships. Hundreds of big commercial freighters were heading out to the planets that were strung along the star’s first and second habitation bands: the specific orbits inside the life zone where the twelve Eden worlds orbited. Kelowan and four others occupied first band, 1.2 AUs out from the G3 primary, while the seven planets of the second band were 1.9 AUs out, giving those worlds a more temperate climate. All of them gleamed brightly against the nebula. She could even make out the small crescent of Gondiar, the solid-giant that trailed Kelowan along its orbit.
Looking down, vast stretches of the city were visible to her through jagged gaps between the long clouds that streamed in from a storm away to the east. She could see flashes of light reflected off the still lakes, while pristine white towers rose out of the luxuriant vegetation that thrived in the balmy climate.
As the air thickened and the capsule’s speed slowed, Helena-Chione could see the individual details of the city resolve. She smiled grimly at the Imperial Palace. The massive building was separated from Mount Vaxjo by rolling parkland and Lake Kyzak. At one time it too had been a naked mountain, then Queen Zuberi had chosen Kelowan as her capital, and outcrops of livestone had been sculpted into the pinnacles, producing curving ziggurats that slowly climbed their way up the mountain. Today the vast merged buildings formed terraces that encircled the slopes, with broader shelves cut deeper into the mountain’s bulk to support crystalline domes and elevated towers with buttress wings. There was no sign of the mountain anymore; the palace had engulfed it completely.
Helena-Chione’s head tilted slightly as she frowned at an oval stretch of livestone only ten or so stories high that was extending out from the base of the Imperial Palace, as if the livestone were putting out a tentative pseudopod toward the lake. Her hand rose, and a forefinger extended.
“I don’t remember that section,” she said.
The court datamaster, Lord Stethos-Thierry, stepped forward. At two and a half meters tall he was shorter than his queen, but then at three meters she was the tallest of her court. His scarlet-and-gray robes flared out into a collar that almost touched the bloodstone petals that embellished his skull. The calcium swirls weren’t merely ornamental; they also covered the permanent connection bulb melded with the neural interface patch at the top of his spine. It was the court datamaster’s function to provide the queen with whatever information she required. After all, Helena-Chione hadn’t deigned to connect with a network for more than a thousand years. What would be the point when you had a court to do your every bidding? That she made them attend each minuscule task for her was a simple emphasis of her power.
“It is recent, Majesty,” Lord Stethos-Thierry said. “Empress Luus-Kinza commissioned it twenty years ago. It is used to domicile her beast handlers.”
“What was wrong with their original quarters?”
“They are now being used by a division of Bassa security officials.”
“More security? Luus always was insecure.”
“Indeed, Majesty.”
“You know, I remember the palace mountain when it was Zuberi’s Royal Palace; only the bottom third was livestone in those days. It had some very pretty mekas trees on the summit as I recall; they had such a sweet scent. And the fruit, it was sort of like a fig.”
“I’m very sorry, Majesty, I don’t have access to that information. I can launch a deep archive search.”
Helena-Chione sighed. “It wasn’t a question, datamaster. Do lighten up.”
“Apologies, Majesty.”
The big capsule began to decelerate harder as they reached the end of the mesosphere. A faint whistling sound became audible, and the flickering ion flames died away.
