2
Port Gregson
The Alouette Bar was on the outer rim of the Port Gregson support truss, beyond the protective enclosure of the gasbag, with picture windows overlooking the abyss. At one time, the place had boasted a balcony where patrons could step outside — suitably bundled up against the cold and wearing a nose breather, of course. It had been the custom for drinkers to lean over the waist high railing and spit into the wind. The balcony had been closed when one expectorator had let go with too much enthusiasm, and had nearly followed his saliva into the misty depths.
For the past twenty minutes, Larson Sands had been eyeing the graphite railing through the floor-to-ceiling plastic window and thinking how easy it would be to end his problems forever. All that was required of him was to get up from the table, walk casually to the hydrogen lock, and step through. It would then be three long strides to the city’s outer edge. Once over the railing, Lars would have two thousand kilometers of empty sky in which to soar before plunging into the hydrogen sea that had swallowed Dane. Without a breather, he would pass out from asphyxiation long before the temperature or pressure rose to fatal levels. All things considered, not a bad way to go.
“Ready for another, Lars?”
His drinking partner’s question shook him out of his reverie. Ross Crandall was an old man for a privateer. At 45 standard years, he had been a hired mercenary for more than two decades. He had once had a ship of his own, but had lost it in a brushfire war five years earlier. After bouncing from ship to ship, he had joined SparrowHawk as a weapons specialist. It had been Crandall’s marksmanship that had cleared the way for them to go to the aid of the stricken Delphi.
“Sure, Ross.”
Crandall signaled for the waitress’s attention. She sauntered over to the table. She was a typical Gregsonite, a fact made obvious by a costume that left little to the imagination. Had Lars been in a better mood, he might have been interested in the wares she was so forthrightly advertising. As it was, Crandall ordered two more scotches while Lars stared off into space.
The bar was on the starboard side of the city, which meant that it faced south. The Arch was a pale rainbow of soft white light barely visible in the royal blue sky. From this latitude, it climbed nearly one-third to the zenith. The sun was low to the right, casting darkening shadows over the cloud canyons. In only a few minutes it would dip below the horizon and First Night would begin.
“Stop torturing yourself,” Crandall said. “Dane’s death wasn’t your fault.”
“It should have been me,” he muttered, his voice breaking with emotion. “Fleet liaison is my job. If I’d done my job, Dane wouldn’t have been aboard Delphi when she went down.”
“No, but you would have! You would now be dead and Dane and I would be having this conversation. Dane was a privateer. He knew what he was doing. In our line of work, people get killed.”
“But damn it, they’d surrendered!”
Crandall nodded. “And the Alliance shot them down anyway. Not too difficult to figure their motives, is it? Most of the New Philadelphia brass were aboard that ship. Better for the Alliance that they not be around to cause problems during the assimilation. Dane was just one of the poor bastards unlucky enough to be aboard the ship when the Alliance assassinated it.”
Sands did not answer. One part of him could see the logic of Ross’s words even though most of him burned with rage at the injustice of it all. Then there was the corner of his brain that remembered how he had always laughed at people who mentioned war and justice in the same breath.
Following the disappearance of Delphi into the mist, Sands had evaded the Alliance fleet by heading directly for the nearest cloud wall. In so doing, he had adopted the tactic that the Alliance had used to set up their ambush.
Unlike Earth, which is largely heated by the sun, Saturn derives most of its heat from internal processes. The predominant mechanism is the formation of helium droplets under high pressure. Once formed, the droplets fall as helium rain into the vast hydrogen sea that covers Saturn to a depth of several thousand kilometers. As the helium droplets sink, they generate heat. As the lower atmosphere is heated, vast columns of rising hydrogen form and produce convection cells that cover many thousands of kilometers. The cells are then smeared along the lines of latitude by the planet’s high rate of rotation, forming globe girdling linear storms that give the planet its characteristic banded appearance.
The rising legs of the convection cells are called Zones, and are characterized by dense clouds and unstable conditions. As the organic-molecule-laden hydrogen rises, it cools, causing its load of chemicals to condense out to form multihued clouds at various altitudes. Blue clouds of water vapor form a layer 500 kilometers deep in the atmosphere, while a layer of brown ammonia hydrosulfide mist forms a hundred kilometers higher still. A third cloud layer, this one composed of white ammonia ice, forms at a depth of 320 kilometers from the arbitrary line that marks the edge of the planetary atmosphere. Non-condensing particulates are carried above the ammonia cloud layer by the rising convection cells. There they form the high thin haze that softens the planet’s outlines and mutes its colors when viewed from space.
By the time the rising column of hydrogen reaches the top of its arc, it is cold and largely devoid of impurities. As the column falls back toward the depths, it sweeps away the clouds and creates vast canyons of clear, stable air. The astronomers dubbed these canyons “belts” because of their dark color. It is the alternating pattern of the broad light zones and narrow dark belts that form Saturn’s bands. By diving into the cloud wall, Sands had sent his ship across the zone - belt interface and into hiding.
Once he had won free of the battle area, Sands sought safety for his ship and crew in Port Gregson. He would have preferred a sanctuary farther from the Alliance, but the long dive into the thick, hot atmosphere near the bottom of the flyway had caused SparrowHawk’s reactor to overheat. By the time they regained the heights, Port Gregson had been one of the few independent cities within range of their stricken craft.
Port Gregson was a trading city that made its living by tacking back and forth across the six thousand kilometer wide North Temperate Belt and trading with the other cities as they sailed past. Because of their need to stay on good terms with everyone, they were neutral in the various rivalries of North Saturnian politics. They had a tradition of offering sanctuary to the vanquished so long as the refugees could pay their way. Sands used the last of his crew’s funds for the city’s mandatory docking and port fees.
In the past two weeks, he had contracted with the port authorities to repair and reprovision SparrowHawk. The work was nearly done and payment due. Unfortunately, Sands was broke. If he were lucky, the Port Gregson authorities would only throw him into jail when they realized the truth. Otherwise, they might decide to drop him over the side. On Saturn, the disposal of inconvenient corpses was a matter of the utmost simplicity.
* * *
“You’re Larson Sands, aren’t you?”
Sands looked up bleary eyed at the speaker. His first impression was of an egg. When he focused his eyes, he saw that his interrogator was bald to the point where he lacked even eyebrows. Even though tall, the stranger was obviously not from Port Gregson. His clothes were conservative, but expensive, as was the gold bracelet he wore on one wrist. A diamond stickpin held his cravat in place. The stone dated from the time before Earth’s evacuation. It was priceless for that reason.
“Yes,” Sands answered warily.
“I am interested in hiring your ship. May I buy each of you a drink while we discuss it?”
“Sure,” Crandall replied for Sands. The mention of possible business sobered the old warrior faster than a cold needle shower.
The bald stranger sat down and made a show of taking off his leather gloves. These alone would have cost Lars his previous year’s earnings.
“Might we know your name?”
“Certainly. I am Micah Bolin.”
“Of what city?”
“That is not important at the moment. Let us just say that I am a citizen of Saturn.”
“Very well. You wish to hire our ship?”
“I do if you own that Air Shark Mark III down in the landing bay.”
“We do.”
“She’s beautiful,” Bolin said. “What power plant?”
“Twin Saturn Industries hundred megawatt drive reactors.”
“Range?”
“Enough for ten times around the planet,” Sands lied. When she had been new, SparrowHawk could have done it easily. In her present condition, once around would be risky. Still, at 375,000 kilometers in circumference, Saturn was a big world.
“Armament?”
“Up to one hundred air-to-air missiles with mixed seekers, full circumambient fire control, and two heavy turret mounted lasers.”
“I take it that you are between engagements,” Bolin said.
“You would have to be very ill informed not to know that,” Crandall replied.
“Your last employer?”
“New Philadelphia.”
“Ah, yes. The ill-fated defense of those poor foolish cities,” Bolin said. “I thought as much. In fact, it was New Philadelphia’s loss that spurred me to come here in search of privateers. I figured at least some of you would put into Port Gregson to reprovision.”
“What’s the job?” Lars asked.
“The job is confidential. If you are free, I would like to discuss it at some length. If not, I don’t want to waste your time … or mine.”
“We’ll always listen, Citizen Bolin.”
“Excellent.” Bolin fished in an inside pocket, retrieved a card — of real paper — and wrote a note on the back. He handed it to Sands. “Please meet me at this address at Second Dusk this evening. We’ll talk more fully then.”
Sands glanced at the address. It was in the warehouse district on the underside of the support truss. It was not the sort of neighborhood he would have expected someone who dressed as well as Bolin to visit.
“We’ll be there.”
“Not ‘we’, Captain. I want you to come alone. What I have to say requires the utmost discretion.”
“My crew will have to agree to whatever deal we make.”
“I understand that. However, I must insist that we keep our business quiet. Once you know the job, you will understand the need. Tonight at dusk?”
“Tonight at dusk,” Sands agreed.
“Excellent. I will be expecting you.” Bolin stood and walked away from the table. The two of them watched him go. Sands wished he had not drunk so much. He could not think with his head spinning and thought was what he needed most just now. Something about Bolin hadn’t rung completely true. Yet, considering the current state of their finances, they were in no position to be choosy.
As he downed one final gulp of scotch, he hoped Bolin did not know that.
* * *
Kelt Dalishaar stood on the balcony of his apartment in Government Tower and surveyed his domain. It was near first midnight, with The Notch almost directly over the city. The Notch was the region of the ring eclipsed by Saturn’s shadow. One look at its position in the night sky told one the time to within a few minutes.
Saturn’s rings never failed to fascinate Dalishaar. Their intricate structure was apparent even to the unaided eye. From one of the cloud cities, The Arch looked to have the texture of an ancient phonograph record. With even a small telescope it was possible to see the twisting strands of the F Ring and the spokes that had so surprised Earthbound astronomers when first they noticed them. Gazing at the proportion of the sky that The Arch covered, it was easy to forget that the whole imposing display consisted of a band of ice particles only a few hundred meters thick. Dalishaar remembered a trip to the southern hemisphere many years earlier. As their suborbital transport had reached the apex of its trajectory, the sun had slipped into eclipse behind a knife-edged ring. It had been a moment that had disturbed him greatly, for it had been a reminder of just how insignificant human beings are on the scale of the universe.
Dalishaar let his gaze sweep down the darkened horizon to where the base of The Arch dropped behind the cloud walls of the North Temperate Belt. Stretched out as far as he could see were the cities of the Northern Alliance. In two weeks, they would be passing the Dardanelles Cyclone. The cyclone was a giant storm that intruded into the flyway, narrowing it to less than one-quarter its normal six thousand kilometer width. Since even the cyclone’s outermost winds could blow a cloud city off course, the storm was always given a wide berth. They would be literally hugging the northern cloud wall of the flyway during the passage.
The move north took place at approximately the same time every standard year as the Alliance’s swift passage around Saturn brought it into phase with the equally swift moving thousand-year-old storm. As the fifty Alliance cities maneuvered into line astern order, they bunched closer than at any other time. The sight was a reminder that the Alliance was growing steadily year-by-year.
Kelt Dalishaar had often thought that he had been born into the wrong century. Back before the sun had gone awry, the human race had seemed to be evolving toward maturity. The ancient nation-states and their inefficient partitioning of resources had slowly given way to a larger international order. In another few centuries, the human race would have been truly united for the first time in its history.
The discovery that the sun was flaring out of control had actually accelerated the process for a time. For more than a hundred years, humans put aside their bickering to work together against the traitor star. At first, they tried to find a way to protect the home planet. When that had failed, they cooperated in evacuating the race to the upper reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere. Most had expected the cooperation to continue. They were badly mistaken.
The advent of the cloud city had brought with it a disintegration of human social order. On Earth, people were largely confined to the nations into which they were born. That was because their cities were tied to a particular geographic location. The free-flying cities of Saturn, however, could go where they would. Thus, it was easy for a dissident city to seek other associations if they were unhappy with their rulers. Though some hailed this as an expansion of freedom, Kelt Dalishaar saw it as the road to anarchy. It was his goal and that of the Northern Alliance to someday to bring Saturn under a single political administration.
As he gazed at the line of cities astern, Dalishaar’s eyes dropped to the lights of Cloudcroft itself. The habitat barrier was close enough above him that he could feel the heat radiating from the main hydrogen gasbag overhead. Although transparent and relatively non-reflecting, the barrier did reflect those lights out near the edge of the city. The reflections created a phantom line of illumination just beyond the city’s rim, a “barrier reef” as Dalishaar was fond of calling the illusion.
His attention was drawn to a line of strobing lights far off in the distance. He recognized the hull beacons of an approaching ship. It was, he decided, one of the big dirigibles transporting prisoners from New Philadelphia. He scowled as he remembered how the Militarists had pushed their plan to conquer the geneticists through the Alliance Council. The council had adopted the scheme against Dalishaar’s advice. The Militarists were now stronger because of their success.
Like all members of the council, Dalishaar believed in the Alliance’s manifest destiny to one day rule Saturn. Still, he found the Militarists’ impatience to be childish. Didn’t the fools understand that there were other ways to unification than conquest? Given time, the Delphis could have been made to see the advantages of peaceful assimilation. Moreover, if they had remained reluctant, there were still economic and political pressures that could have been brought to bear. As it was, the Militants had gotten their way and thereby put every independent city on Saturn on their guard. This was an especially bad time to remind them that they had an expansionist power in their midst.
If only the damned admirals had waited until…
Dalishaar clamped down on the thought as quickly as it flowed into his brain. The admirals were ignorant of his special project and he intended to keep them that way. They would learn nothing until he had consolidated his own position and fought back this latest danger to his personal power. So careful was he about keeping the secret that he did not even allow himself to think about it. That way he would be less likely to whisper something in his sleep. Not only did an occasional eavesdropping device turn up in his apartments, at least one of his mistresses was in the pay of the Militarists.