Chapter 8
For Jackson, the next few days were occupied with maintenance on the ship and some friendly games of longball in the corridor. He was outside helping repair a spot on one side of the cargo area that had taken a micrometeorite hit, when the captain announced they were only a few hours away from the first gate security check and that all the crew were to prepare themselves in case the authorities wanted to board and inspect the ship and its cargo.
Checkpoint security was not something you wanted to mess with. At least not openly. And so Jackson finished his work quickly and returned to the ship.
Gates were some of the most valuable things in space. The more a government could control, the more powerful it became. The ISF owned this one, as well as about two dozen others across seven systems. Just as with planets, their security system extended for hundreds of thousands of kilometers around them. Nobody wanted to build something that cost a significant percentage of a planet’s GDP only to have it threatened by malcontents.
Gates were always located a good distance from a system’s star and a few degrees off the orbital plane of any planets or smaller objects. The math that explained why was far over his head, and he was no slouch in the brains department. He might be rough around the edges academically, but as much real-world work on mechs and ships as he’d done, he figured that was as good as any engineering degree from a planetside university. Especially since out here failing an exam meant dying painfully. However, even halfway comprehending the crazy physics behind gate travel caused nosebleeds in geniuses. It was all frankly way beyond Jackson’s grasp.
There were two gates in this system. One was dedicated to traffic between Nivaas and Earth. The second could be adjusted to transit to a few other systems. That was where they were heading.
There was always a specific route you had to use to approach a gate. Any ship or object outside of that approved route was deemed hostile and targeted for elimination. Three years back, at one of the seven Earth system gates, some poor ship strayed into a forbidden zone. There were many conflicting stories about how and why it had strayed, but what everyone agreed on was that the ship had been lit up by the gate defenses. Ten thousand people had been on board, and ten thousand dreams of a home on some new colony world had been instantly snuffed out. Of all the stories, Jackson figured the story claiming it had been a hijacking and ransom gone bad was probably the most accurate.
So, if you wanted to stay alive, you followed the approved route to the gate. And along that route were various security checks.
The first checkpoint was usually millions of kilometers away from the actual gate. This one was an asteroid that was maybe twenty-four kilometers in diameter. Part of it was being mined, while the other half housed the security forces. Five other ships were already lined up at the checkpoint ahead of them, waiting for processing.
As it approached, the Tar Heel called in and was given parking coordinates. They took up position. And waited.
And waited.
The next day, ten gate cops, a dog, and a horde of sniffer bots boarded the ship. Eight of them spread out on a quest for contraband. The others interviewed crew members and took DNA samples.
Nerves were high, but the crew played it cool. Nivaas was an independent colony, but they paid for ISF protection and to use the ISF gate system. If Splendid Ventures had decided their Citadel had been stolen, rather than accidentally destroyed, surely Nivaas would have asked the ISF to be on the lookout for it. But the cops seemed bored as usual, and Chief Hilker was an artist when it came to hiding whatever they were smuggling. There were places on this ship that Jackson didn’t even know about, and he spent most of his duty hours repairing her.
Six hours later, after reconciling the manifest with the cargo and everyone on board, the gate patrol cleared the Tar Heel to proceed to the next checkpoint a few million kilometers away.
Jackson didn’t know who Shade was connected with, whether it was some organized crime group, or old wartime network, or someone she personally had on the inside, but the gate cops rarely found anything amiss. When they did, it was usually over minor things that were handled with an under-the-table fee.
Before leaving this checkpoint, an official escort pod was attached to the hull of the ship. Its job was to continually report the position of the Tar Heel, monitor conversations and communications, and take control of the ship’s propulsion system if it was deemed a threat. The problem was that sometimes the pod system and the ship system conflicted, and that was never a good thing. Ships had been damaged from it. But what could you do? You use the ISF’s gates, you played the ISF’s game.
As they were accelerating toward the next station, they received a news report about the destruction of a container in Nivaas orbit. Sabotage was suspected. There was an ongoing investigation, but no suspects at this time. Normally the crew would have loved to gloat about that, but with the ISF pod attached to the hull, they said nothing.
Instead, they enjoyed another few days of maintenance, carefully generalized banter, and zero conversation about the client, until the Tar Heel arrived at the next security point without fanfare.
There were more ships waiting for their turn at the gate. Back in the Earth system, many of the vessels traversing the gate would be huge migrant freighters full of people trying to make a new life in the stars. There were no migrant freighters here, just cargo ships that had transported out-system goods in and now were transporting Nivaas goods out. The Tar Heel was nothing special. They were just another hauler making the rounds in the vast and interconnected system that was galactic trade.
This check wasn’t as invasive or as intensive as the first. There were so many tons of freight moving between worlds that it would take an army of gate cops to check it all. So they did the cursory, mandatory minimum percentage of container checks, looking for things like slaves, endangered species, or stolen mechs, and once nothing super obvious jumped out to bite them, they signed off on the transfer.
Jackson was never sure how Chief Hilker managed to hide so much of the good stuff so well, but the man had a gift for creative stacking. What could be disguised was disguised, what could be broken down into parts was broken down, so on and so forth. It helped that the Tar Heel was so massive. It would take weeks to search everything, and nobody ever took that long because time was money.
Then the cops checked their escort pod to see if it had found anything suspicious from the ship’s logs, but of course, it only saw what Jane wanted it to see. So they took their toy, filed their paperwork, and the Tar Heel went on its merry way.
They arrived at the gate a few days later. This one was about eighty kilometers in diameter, huge white rings floating in the black. Each ring was connected to a facility called the gatehouse, which held the control center and power source, which in this case was a massive solar farm.
It was a busy day. About thirty ships were there, waiting their turn. There was a supply depot nearby, as well as a repair yard. The service rates would be astronomical there, but you really didn’t want to have a major system go down during transit. A horde of garbage trucks flew constant patterns around the gates in an effort to keep the area clean. If a gate took an impact sufficient to alter its orientation even the slightest bit during a transit, that ship would end up who knew where. Every spacer had heard horror stories about that happening, with the vessel never being seen again.
There were legends of lost colonies, created by ships filled with settlers who had been accidentally sent to unknown destinations. Based upon the vastness of space, Jackson knew those stories were wishful thinking created by relatives of the missing, and somewhere out in all the big empty were dead ships filled with frozen corpses.
The queue for the Earth gate moved a lot faster than theirs, because that was a constant stream of traffic toward the same location. The secondary gate took hours of adjustment between each transit. The targeting calculations factored in the movement of the gate’s orbit, the orbit of the Nivaas system, the movement of the target system, the size of the ship, its magnetic resonance, and five hundred other complicated factors. Since your life was literally in their hands, nobody ever rushed the gatehouse’s calculations.
The Tar Heel’s turn finally came. Gate control gave them a precise position, angle of entry, and time. And then the Tar Heel slowly moved out of the line to its launch spot.
Jackson went up to the bridge because he enjoyed watching this part. The captain halted the spin of the habitat ring. Gate control checked and double-checked all their settings. Then the gate lights turned from blue to red. Blue meant inactive, you could fly right through and nothing would happen. Red meant they had begun to stack space and generate the pathway.
The stars that were visible through the gate winked out one by one, and then the path began to form. It looked like a ripple at first, then grew into a massive funnel that had the appearance of swirling clouds. Every once in a while they’d see a soft flash of violet light deep inside, like distant lightning…Funny thing was, nobody had ever conclusively proven what caused that effect.
“Countdown in tee minus five,” the captain said over the speakers. “Four, three, two, one.” Then he flashed the thrusters and their ship began to move forward.
A gate transit was an act of faith. You had to trust the gatehouse had gotten their numbers right. You had to trust your ship’s engines would work throughout, or that there wouldn’t be a power glitch, or that they weren’t about to smack you into an unexpected object as soon as you exited.
The farther a gate sent you, the less precision it had. Nivaas system to the Swindle system was only 8.4 light-years, which promised their placement somewhere within an area approximately three hundred thousand kilometers in diameter. If you put that on paper and compared it to the distance traveled, it was incredibly accurate. But when thinking about it from the point of view of the ship, it was a shot in the dark. It was a blindfolded leap.
And you’d really better hope that the government didn’t think you were enough of a troublemaker to get rid of you, because it would be super easy to make a “slight miscalculation” and hurl you out into some empty part of the universe with no way of ever getting back. Gates worked one way. If you wanted to transit back, you needed to build another gate at the other end. The means to do so were way beyond the resources of most nations, let alone a lone cargo ship.
“Your line to Swindle looks good, Tar Heel,” gate control told them.
“Roger that,” the captain said.
The swirling vortex was getting bigger on the screen.
“Isn’t that the planet where the air catches on fire and everything on the surface is huge and wants to eat you? I don’t know why anybody would want to live there.”
“Beats me, Gatehouse. I’m just the delivery boy with their groceries.”
“Safe travels.”
“Thank you.”
Then they slowly entered the dark path.
* * *
Nivaas to Swindle was a sixteen-hour ride through the darkness of transit space, lit only by that occasional soft glow the scientists still couldn’t explain.
They couldn’t really explain the god moment either.
It didn’t always happen during a transit. But when it did, it was always at the midpoint, and it was a rush. In the god moment, people heard things. Saw things. Thought things. Your mind expanded. Some had tremendous insights. Jackson had taken mind-altering drugs before. He’d been linked up and melded with machines. The god moment was nothing like either of those. It was inexplicable. And when it ended, many people collapsed.
There were some religious groups and spiritualists who paid the gate fee just so they could experience what they thought was a hack into God’s mind. Jackson didn’t know what it was. Nobody did. But he did hope to enjoy this one with a hamburger and coleslaw. Jackson was in the galley, eating his lunch at the right time, but the midpoint came and went without anything to note. Just a brief chill, and then it was gone.
Eight hours later they reached the end of their dark funnel. And as the MSV Tar Heel emerged from the path into a new system, a billion stars suddenly winked into existence.
Right about now the ship’s sensors would be scanning in every direction and matching stars to charts. This was the part where they found out if they’d reached their destination, or if they were in that not statistically insignificant number of transits that got tossed into an uncharted part of the universe, never to be seen again.
The captain came over the speakers. “We’ve arrived in the Swindle system.”
There were cheers all up and down the corridor. No matter how many times you did this, that part was always a relief.
“All systems are green. Now let’s clean house. Setting course for Big Town.”
And with that the crew went into action removing all the bugs and other devices the ISF gate cops had planted. There was excitement in the air. It was time to get paid.
* * *
The storm blew in like an angry caliban, turning the sky purple and gold. With it came a wind that howled and thrashed the trees, and acid rain that fell in sheets.
Wulf wiped the water off his helmet’s visor, in a vain attempt to see better. Ten paces in front of him was his father. Ten behind was the tech named Pridgeon. Each of them was wearing a basic exoskeleton frame that enabled them to lope along the trail with augmented speed and strength. The Originals’ exos were old and battered and had been repaired dozens of times, but they still did their job. Mostly.
“This rotted helmet does nothing but fog up,” Pridgeon said over the commlink. “I can’t see worth a kacke. Climate control’s been on the fritz since we left.”
“Put on your mouthpiece,” Wulf’s father replied over the comm.
Pridgeon cursed, but he lifted his visor, temporarily opening his helmet to the caustic air. Even brief exposure to Swindle’s atmosphere was irritating. A few minutes would scar your lungs. A few hours and you were dead. But Pridgeon got his breathing apparatus on in practiced seconds and closed his lid.
“Better?”
“Better.”
“Then shut up and keep walking.”
They’d been out on a service patrol to conduct preventative maintenance on three of their sentinels when the alert had come through. Just as the ping had appeared on their heads-up displays, there’d been a series of lightning strikes, and the signal had gone dead. It could be nothing. It might be something. They had to find out.
All three of them carried rifles. You had to when dealing with the nasty creatures that lived on this planet. Wulf had a 6mm HyperV. It would be good for the regular wildlife, but if one of the big predators caught their scent he was out of luck. Anything short of a cannon bounced off them. When you found one of the big ones, your only hope of survival was running and hiding. The original settlers had a lot of practice at running and hiding.
Wulf enlarged the rifle’s targeting display on his heads-up, then scanned the woods on the left and right, flicking through visible spectrum, UV, and IR, just as father had taught him. The site cam connected wirelessly to his helmet’s visor for quick aim and ballistic calculations, He saw no clear signatures in the woods around him. If the alarm had been from a caliban, surely the infrared would have picked up such a large beast, but it could only see so far through the vine-choked underbrush. It was thick here, but it was thick everywhere. As a rule of thumb, if there was a game trail on Swindle, it was made by an animal that could hardly be called game. If there was a clearing, it was because something large had flattened it. Everywhere else you could see three or four meters if you were lucky.
They marched for a time as the rain and wind grew worse. Swindle was the only place Wulf had ever known so he was used to the suck, but this was shaping up to be a bad one.
“Forget the alarm, I say we go back,” Pridgeon said.
“It’s thirteen kilometers to base,” Father replied. He meant actual traveling distance, it wasn’t nearly that far in a straight line, but nothing moved in a straight line through this rugged terrain. “Even maxing our exos that’s going to take a while. There’s a spider hole less than ten minutes away. We can ride the storm out there.”
“If something’s got our scent that spider hole won’t—”
Wulf waited for the rest of Pridgeon’s sentence, but it never came. He glanced back to find the trail behind him empty.
A bolt of fear shot through Wulf. “Pridgeon?”
There was no response.
“Father!” Wulf gripped his rifle tight and scanned, ready to shoot. “He’s gone.”
But how could Pridgeon just be gone?
And then Wulf thought about the canopy and fear seized his guts, for there were a number of ambush predators on Swindle that hunted from the trees. He looked up and found only the lofty branches thrashing in the wind.
His father froze in place. His older—but more powerful—rifle only had a low-tech glass scope, good for magnification but not much else. “What do you see?”
There were the footprints of Pridgeon’s exo in the mud. He could see where they stopped, but Pridgeon and his heavy backpack full of parts and tools were gone. Vanished. No heat trail. Nothing but the pouring rain.
“Nichts.”
“Pridgeon, come in,” Wulf’s father demanded over the commlink. “Ryan, can you hear me?”
Wulf swallowed and listened, but all he could hear was the rain banging on his helmet.
“Maybe there’s a hole?” his father said. “See if he stepped in a kinsella burrow.”
Only then there was a flash in the corner of Wulf’s eye. He jerked his rifle that way, but before he could fire, the shadow sped out of the woods and slammed into his father.
Father grunted at the blow, then growled as he struggled. As they fell to the ground Wulf realized the figure wasn’t an animal, but a man. His active-camo was automatically adjusting to match its background, but it flickered as they rolled through the mud. Their attacker was in a combat exo, a frame which would give him four or five times his normal strength, far more than the antiques Wulf or his father wore.
Except Father somehow bunched up his legs between them and shoved. Servos whined in protest, but the kick sent their attacker flying back into the trunk of a tree. The impact knocked his helmet off. The man fell to the ground, rolled, and came up in a crouch, the rain wetting his dark hair.
Wulf aimed, but before he could pull the trigger—
“Peder?” Wulf blinked, hesitating…because the face in his targeting display belonged to his brother.
“Shoot him!” Father roared as he rolled to the side and scrambled to his feet. His rifle had landed somewhere in the mud, but he scooped up a large stick, to swing like a club.
“It’s Peder!” Wulf shouted.
His older brother snarled and sprang at father.
Father dodged to the side, but his exo wasn’t nearly as responsive as the one Peder wore. Father was thrown violently down. He struggled, but Peder pinned him and raised a knife in one hand. Father managed to grab Peder’s wrist on the way down.
Wulf used to tell himself that Peder would escape Warlord’s prison and come back to them. Come back clean. And things would be like they had been before. And he and Peder would play wicket. And Peder would tell his dumb jokes. And things would be like they’d been before…Only a year had passed since his brother had been captured and Wulf had slowly accepted that he was dead.
This was worse than dead.
Knife hand trapped, Peder pounded Father’s faceplate with his other fist, shattering the visor and slamming Father’s head into the ground.
Peder wasn’t Peder anymore. Wulf had a clear shot. His finger was on the trigger. The display was shaking all over the place. But maybe they could heal him? Warlord had sent other captives against the Originals before. Doctors could fix slaveware, right? Pick it out of his brain and turn him back to himself?
“Wulf!” Father shouted. His exo groaned and whined as he fought to stop Peder’s slow stab.
“But it’s Peder!” Wulf screamed. But a voice inside his head told the truth. Not anymore.
“Shoot him!”
Peder let out a bloodcurdling cry, and the sound struck Wulf like a fist. That animal howl confirmed it. As Peder pushed his long-bladed knife toward Father’s face, the metallic groaning from the old exo got louder. It was about to seize, and then Father would die.
“Wulf!” Father begged.
Wulf took aim, tears welling in his eyes, his hope snuffed out because he knew there was no way they’d ever get his brother back. He tagged the spot on Peder he wanted to hit then fired. The rifle kicked. The bullet struck Peder in the back.
But the armor was quality, and the bullet fragmented off.
Peder didn’t even glance back. He simply growled and kept pushing the knife closer toward Father’s eye. The old exo was weakening. Father was now using both hands to keep the knife back but was still losing the struggle.
Damn the Warlord! Wulf thought. Damn them all!
Wulf took a step to the side and fired again. The gun flashed in the rain. The shot cracked like thunder.
It took Peder in the neck. Blood flew out the side.
Peder didn’t immediately crumple but put an arm down to steady himself.
Father threw Peder to the side, then ripped the knife from his hand.
Father was too close, and Wulf needed a clear shot. “Move!”
But Peder didn’t rise. Instead, his arm spasmed, his chest fell and rose, and then he lay still.
The rain fell all about them, a loud hiss.
Father crept over and cradled Peder’s head in one hand, then wiped the hair back from his face with the other. “Oh, son.” His voice was full of grief. “My bright boy.”
Wulf walked over in a daze and sank to his knees in the mud beside Father. Peder’s neck wound was much larger than it had at first seemed. Wulf looked at the ragged hole, then at his brother’s face.
“Peder…” He was numb with shock.
“You did what you had to do. What Peder would have wanted.”
Peder the Magnificent. His brother. And there was his blood, thinning in the rain. And his ravaged neck.
While Father hurried and got his emergency breathing apparatus on, thoughts tumbled through Wulf’s head. Maybe if he had hit Peder in the head with the butt stock, maybe he could have knocked him out instead of killing him. Maybe he and Father could have wrestled Peder together and somehow subdued him. They could have carried him back and held him until the doctors had figured out how to save him.
But he’d shot him instead.
“I should have—”
“No!” Father said. “He was beyond repair. You gave him the best thing a brother could. You gave him a quick death.”
Grief boiled up in Wulf. He’d just had to kill his own brother. This was Warlord’s doing. He’d taken their land, taken their lives. How many had he sent back this way? And how many more corrupted would come? Wulf’s sadness turned to rage.
“I’m gonna kill him,” Wulf growled. “That greasy whoreson. I’m gonna kill the Warlord.”
“Someday, son…” And then Father held up a transmitter from Peder’s suit. “Verdammich! Help me find them.”
The suit was sending data back to the monsters who’d enslaved him.
“Destroy them! Quickly.”
* * *
The man everyone on Swindle knew only as Warlord stood in front of the displays and smiled to himself as he watched the last signal go to static. The fight between son and father and son had been rather satisfying. It would remind those wretched Originals who they were dealing with.
“That howler didn’t accomplish much,” Fain said in disgust. Big Town’s security chief held a container with three kava in it. They were long, multilegged creatures from the planet’s surface with mandibles that could slice a finger off, but despite that they were rather delicious. Fain skewered one with a long fork right behind the head. The kava wriggled and writhed. Fain brought the kava up, held it out to his employer, but Warlord was full, so he waved it off.
“He got a good reading of their perimeter.”
“But only one kill. We’ll never exterminate all the surface rats at this rate.” Fain took hold of the body of the kava, twisted and yanked, separating the head, and then he brought the decapitated body up and sucked out a chunk of meat.
“It’s not about the numbers,” Warlord told his subordinate. Fain was extremely dangerous, but in a direct sort of way. He hadn’t hired the man for big-picture thinking. “We send in a few more uncles and mothers and fathers down there, a few of them explode for good effect. That’s incredibly demoralizing.”
“Implanting slaveware isn’t cheap.”
“I’m aware.”
“Not to mention it’s a war crime.”
They both chuckled at that. Out this far the law was whatever Warlord said it was. “Oh no, not more sanctions from the ISF. Whatever will I do?” Warlord snorted. “Regardless, this amuses me. And Howlers keep the surface rats distracted while we prepare the final solution, Fain. The next arms shipment should be here soon. If the runners deliver half of what they’ve assured me they can get, I’ll finally have the resources to root out the Originals once and for all.”
“I’ll believe that when I see it.”
He knew the mercenary meant no disrespect. Fain had fought in the crag mountains of Gloss and the glass-steel cave cities of Motonari, both terrible places indeed, but as far as the planets human beings had actually managed to settle and eke out existence, there wasn’t anywhere less forgiving than the caustic, monster-infested, nightmare hellscape they were currently orbiting. The air slowly corroded their flyers. Satellites couldn’t see through the thick canopy. The ground was too rugged for most vehicles. The plants so aggressive that if they burned a road, within days it was re-covered, and that was if the work crew didn’t get torn apart by the wildlife in the process. Sending more men down only made it more likely they’d attract a kaiju. Those circumstances combined made it frustratingly easy for the guerillas to sabotage his operations and then vanish.
Warlord would have loved to drag a giant asteroid over and drop it into this wretched planet’s gravity well, but he needed Swindle’s vicious, yet extremely valuable, ecosystem alive. It was of no value to anyone dead. The original settlers who had stubbornly refused to fall into line, on the other hand…
“There’s a weapons shipment coming. And once it arrives, we’ll wipe them out—every man, woman, and child. We’ll exterminate the rats. All the rats in all their filthy little ratholes.”