Baharain was an ugly planet. No wonder Dejae had left it.
The atmosphere was toxic. Not merely oxygen-free, but actually poisonous. The gravity was heavy, the days were short, and the solar radiation was carcinogenic. As if to celebrate these ugly features, the domed cities were smelly, squat, and dark.
The planet was rich in heavy metals and closely placed to a node. A hundred thousand people made a living out of these two slightly less ugly features. If you could call artificial light, air, and gravity a living.
Next to metals, immigrants were Baharain’s chief exports. People came to work, saved their credits, and left as soon as they could. A suitcase full of gold or palladium would fund retirement on any planet.
Kyle sank into this stream of economic adventurers without a splash. Asking questions and getting answers proved to be more difficult. People here were suspicious of everyone and everything, and with good reason. Kyle had learned that at least one planet used Baharain as its penal system. Crimes were punished by fines measured in kilos of metal, which amounted to years of servitude. The offenders were shipped off to Baharain to earn their redemption, die, or give up and accept permanent banishment. While Kyle could see the advantages for the locals, it was rather an impolite way to treat the rest of the galaxy. Sweeping your trash into your neighbor’s yard wasn’t very neighborly, even if it was historically commonplace.
Suffering under the peeling, drab dome, watching men and women trudge from their hovels to their pits, Kyle wasn’t sure how many of the men he’d sent to prison on Altair would switch places with these poor drudges. Prison was just another society. Some men took to it, and some didn’t. Some were better once they got out, and some weren’t.
It was hard to think of Prudence as one of those eternal wanderers, floating without connection from place to place. Was she a criminal, banished from her home? Or had she sent herself into exile, fleeing guilt or shame or simple dissatisfaction? It hardly mattered if she were really from a distant world or not. Star-farer or secret agent, she was cut off from her past just as irrevocably. She could never return to the life she had left. He wondered if she remembered that old life, the way he sometimes remembered his life before the League.
The wretches on Baharain didn’t think about their past lives. They barely remembered their own names. None of them remembered Veram Dejae. He crawled through the restaurants and bars, looking for a crack in the wall of ignorance and disinterest. He hadn’t bothered with official channels. That had been done before, with no result. Rica had given Kyle a copy of the previous investigator’s reports. What passed for a government on Baharain was a collection of corporations, and they were not interested in discussing where Veram Dejae had come from.
But he certainly hadn’t come from here. Only the poorest or most negligent parents would try to raise a child on this sorry excuse for a planet. Dejae was too healthy, too smart, too tall to have grown up in this stultifying environment.
There were no clues to be found in the nooks and crannies of these domes. But Kyle had learned how Dejae worked. The secret would be in plain sight.
The first step was to find out how Dejae’s money got delivered. Baharain had its own credit system, but nobody took their sticks off-world. They took sticks of precious metals instead. Barbaric, but effective, and harder to trace than even Altair’s anonymous credit sticks.
He spent three days in dirty clothes and week-old stubble trawling the spaceport. The ships that wouldn’t offer him passage at any price had to be the ones carrying cash payments. The one going to Altair—a beefy freighter three times the size of Prudence’s little ship—had to be Dejae’s. Even Kyle’s Altairian accent couldn’t get him on that ship.
There was no hope of finding out what or who had loaded the ship, of course. Merely asking could prove to be dangerous. Instead, Kyle watched who came to unload it.
The majority of the cargo seemed to be machine parts. Altair’s highly skilled workforce and advanced technological infrastructure made plenty of those, and a world like Baharain would need them. The bulk of the parts went to a mining corporation called Radii Development Corp.
One area the local government did pay attention to was corporate filings. For good reason—they charged companies to file them, fined companies for not filing them, and collected a fee from anyone who wanted to look at them. Kyle paid without complaint. It seemed morally less objectionable than bribing an official to give him the information on the sly, like he would have had to do on any other world.
What he learned was the same thing he’d heard on the street. RDC was an interstellar conglomerate, like all the major players on Baharain, but about fifteen years ago it had started pulling ahead of the competition.
Scouring years of business records reminded Kyle of why he had never been able to stomach forensic accounting. At least the street criminals were living people, however broken. Corporate lawyers were like zombies. They said as little as possible, took as long as they could to do it, and lied without even realizing it. Kyle began to hate them more than he hated juicers. At least the juicers had fun while eating their own souls.
Eventually he managed to find out why RDC was winning the game. They had adopted a policy of automation, replacing more and more workers with automated equipment. An unobvious choice, given how cheaply human beings could be hired. The business vids debated the wisdom of RDC’s course, suggesting that the cost of development and maintenance of the machinery would eat into their profit margin more than their increased production would grow it.
The records seemed to indicate they were right. RDC was taking market share, but not making any more money. Yet RDC went on deploying automation, year after year. This was exactly the kind of uninteresting mystery Kyle was looking for.
The other fact that he learned from the government database was a detail too old and trivial to filter up from street gossip. Fifteen years ago RDC had acquired a new chief executive officer, from off-world.
Kyle couldn’t find any pictures of the man, but he didn’t need one. He already knew what the chief executive officer of RDC looked like, because he’d already met him once. Five years ago, on Altair. In a sporty ground car. Making an illegal turn.
A shower, a shave, and a fresh suit later, Kyle went to renew that acquaintance.
RDC’s corporate headquarters were more impregnable than the Fleet War Room on Altair. Kyle didn’t make it past the secretaries.
Personnel made him fill out forms and said they’d get back to him, but generally they didn’t hire security officers without a recommendation. Investor Relations wouldn’t talk to him until after he purchased at least a thousand shares. Public Relations was willing to talk, but after two hours he knew less than when he’d walked in the door. The only thing he got out of the day was an offer to work as a miner, for about two-thirds the going rate.
He took it. He was running low on leads and credits. And it had another advantage.
The job involved leaving the domes, which meant stepping off the grav-plating while wearing a chem suit. He would be exposed to the native environment of Baharain, protected by only a few millimeters of expensive plastic. It didn’t sound fun and it was certainly dangerous, but the company would provide training and equipment. Those were both necessary to fulfill his sudden desire to go sightseeing outdoors.
This desire sprung from a casual fact he had gleaned while interviewing for jobs. The management of RDC maintained a series of private domes for executives and their families.
Dejae’s twin would live in one of those. Kyle would never get past security to access them normally, but all he needed was a single photograph. The public domes were transparent on most optical wavelengths, filtering out only the dangerous rays. Letting the local sunshine in was cheaper and more naturally satisfying than purely artificial light. No doubt the executive domes were the same. They would, at the very least, be transparent during the night. Everyone liked to look at the stars. Everyone stared up into the great void from time to time, wondering which insignificant sparkle was the light of ancient Earth. A still-living Earth: humanity had left only centuries ago, and they had traveled thousands of light-years through the nodes. The light from that ancient Earth, if it could be resolved into pictures, would show a shining blue ball painted with strokes of green and white. Oceans teeming with schools of fish. Forests whose branches were alive with troops of monkeys and flocks of birds. Plains where herds of animals thundered in glorious freedom.
The visions of Heaven were out there, if only a man could stare hard enough to see it. No one could, of course. It was optically, mathematically impossible. But that didn’t stop people from trying.
The domes would be transparent at night, and Kyle would get his picture. Then he could go home again.
The foreman was scarred, ugly, and one-eyed, but that eye was keen. He barked out corrections and derisions with uncanny accuracy. Kyle wondered why boot camp always felt the same, no matter what boot you were learning to wear.
“Nobody dies on my watch.” The foreman was adjusting Kyle’s suit. “It detracts from my bonus. Your helmet’s too small, man. Get another one.”
“Yes, sir.” Kyle shuffled over to the equipment table and found a helmet with a larger number printed on the collar ring. When he got back to his place in line, the foreman was waiting for him.
“Don’t sir me. This ain’t Fleet. You’re just an idiot on the wrong end of a shovel, and I’m the guy handing out shovels. That makes me smarter than you, but it don’t make me a sir.”
“Fair enough,” Kyle said with a grin.
“Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. They all do, the first day. We’ll see how much you’re laughing at the end of the shift, when just raising your nose to sneer at me feels like lifting a two-ton hopper. No, you idiot, the other way.” The foreman reached out to twist Kyle’s helmet into the locking ring.
“Sorry … I’m not used to space suits.” On Kassa they had only worn them for warmth.
“I can see that, man. And I can see you ain’t Fleet, either. I don’t care. You ain’t from here, you ain’t staying here, and you got a sob story an hour long. And I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re clocking out in six hours with all your parts attached.” He raised his voice, shouting so the rest of the workers could not fail to hear him even through their suits. “That goes for all of you. Stop thinking you can do this. You’ve been in sims—I hope, and if not, it’s too late to tell me now—but real heavy G ain’t like a sim. It don’t go away after half an hour. It tugs at you all the time, drags at every fiber of your being, sucks you down like the dying pull of Earth herself. It is your enemy. Forget that for one microsecond and you’ll be a debit in my paycheck. So stop thinking you can do this job. And start focusing on surviving it.”
It was only seventeen percent over Terran standard. Kyle had tried the sim, doing deep knee bends in a gravity-enhanced chamber, and while it felt ridiculously uncomfortable, he had passed the medical exams.
“Every step you take is a fifth harder. Every drop you fall is a fifth longer. Everything you pick up is a fifth heavier. All them fifths add up fast, in ways your idiot brains didn’t evolve to handle. You can’t operate by instinct out there. Every single action has to be consciously evaluated before you do it. You will burn calories you didn’t know you had. You will strain muscles they ain’t even named in the medical vids. If you try to act like you’re in normal G, your suit’s air-cracker will not be able to keep up oxygen production, and you will pass out. This is for your own good. An unconscious idiot is cheaper than a dead one. We can fix your air, but we can’t fix your heart if it bursts a chamber.”
The idea that he could die of heartbreak struck Kyle as unlikely. If that were possible, then walking off the Ulysses for the last time should have killed him.
“Now get your arses into the air lock. We’re gonna shut the door and flood it with kelamine. If you start throwing up in your suit, that’s ’cause you didn’t seal it properly. You can thank us for saving your life after you clean out your suit.”
The suits were different from Prudence’s. Heavy opaque rubber instead of the clear thin plastic he had expected. He didn’t know if that was because they needed to be stronger, or if the rubber was just cheaper. The suit was impregnated with heavy salts to block radiation, but so was the glass faceplate of the helmet, and it was transparent. On the other hand, there wasn’t much value in being able to see through these suits. They didn’t contain slender dark-haired girls with intense black eyes.
The air lock cycled, lights going from green to yellow. Nobody threw up, which Kyle took as a good beginning. Then the lights went red, and the outer door creaked open.
Climbing down a short set of stairs, he took each step carefully. The foreman was standing to the side, watching the new recruits critically. Kyle stepped out of line to join him.
“Why kelamine?” he asked.
“We used to just use a stinker, but one day we got a jackass with anosomia. Couldn’t smell a thing, and didn’t think to mention it until it was too late. The kelamine means we don’t gotta rely on you idiots to tell us something’s wrong. Plus, it washes off the suits easier.”
Kyle debated asking if it was cheaper, too, but decided not to.
“See that one?” The foreman pointed to a young man who had taken the last two steps in one go. “That jackass is gonna get somebody killed. Go ride his arse and keep him in line. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Kyle agreed. The foreman had an impressive sense of judgment. He seemed to already know what every member of his team was capable of.
Kyle shuffled over to join up with the young stallion. “Hey, slow down a second. Give an old man a break.”
The kid turned and stared at him through his glass bubble, trying to see if Kyle was ribbing him.
“The foreman teamed us up,” Kyle explained. “This is my first time out here. How about you?”
“Yeah,” the kid agreed. “But I did a lot of time in the sims. I’ll be okay.”
Kyle hadn’t asked. The kid must be pretty nervous to volunteer so much information. People always led with what they were trying to hide.
They climbed onto an open-bed truck with the rest of the squad. The foreman came by to make sure everyone was hanging on to a safety strap. Then he shouted to the driver, and the truck rolled forward, jiggling heavily over every bump. Kyle watched the alien landscape bouncing by for as long as he could stand it. The rocks were almost all the same dull gray, with only the occasional streak of brown or black. Wind had shaped the landscape, carving out pillars and valleys, smoothing craters and building drifts, but after the first five minutes it was just a bunch of rocks.
The truck descended into a valley, rock walls rising up and spreading away.
“Why don’t they use grav-cars?” he asked his young companion.
“Cost. The extra Gs makes them burn too much fuel.” The kid had done his homework.
“Where are you from?” Kyle regretted asking it immediately. On Baharain, people didn’t like to talk about their past, and Kyle had no particular desire to discuss his own. But he liked this kid.
The kid hesitated, but talked anyway. He would learn some expensive lessons about trust, if he stayed in this cesspit long enough. Hopefully the lessons wouldn’t be fatal.
“Kassa. We got attacked. I used to cut trees, but my dad said we’d need hard currency to make it through winter.”
The effluent of war. Refugees.
“I heard about that,” Kyle said, feeling like a heel for lying. “But you’ll pull through.”
“If they don’t come back. Dad says why would they, but nobody knows why they came in the first place.”
“Is anybody sending help?” His news was a few weeks out of date.
“Altair Fleet is there, but they don’t do much. Just hang around in deep space, looking for secret nodes. Other planets have sent food and stuff, but we don’t need that. We need a fleet of our own.”
That surely couldn’t be what the League wanted to hear. They wanted the worlds cowering under their thumb, not arming themselves for resistance.
“Fleets are expensive,” Kyle said. It was a perennial political football on Altair. Fleet never seemed to provide anything except prestige. Not everyone felt that was worth paying for. Kyle’s experience as a cop had convinced him that the reason Fleet had nothing to do was because it existed. Just like detectives had a lot less to do when there were regular patrols by beat cops. If Fleet didn’t exist, then Altair would pretty quickly find out why they needed it.
He imagined there was a lot of crowing and finger-pointing going on right now, back on Altair. The people who voted for Fleet would be bragging about their prescience. He wasn’t ready to join them, though. Not until he was sure Fleet could actually help.
Not until he was sure whose side Fleet was really on.
The truck rattled around a corner, exposing a vast but shallow crater. The road crept along a lip of the crater. Men and machines labored below. Kyle goggled at them, stunned by the improbable sight.
“What are those?”
His knowledgeable young guide answered. “Crawlers. The company’s secret weapon.”
The crawlers were large, compared to men, but small on the scale of starships and earth-moving equipment. The other companies used massive bulldozers and ore transports the size of houses, or sometimes the size of entire apartment buildings. These machines seemed almost delicate in comparison. Only five meters high and ten wide, they looked like animated bowls carrying ore from place to place. What shocked Kyle was how they moved.
On eight legs. Like insects, stepping gingerly from place to place, moving in unnatural gaits with their own sense of purpose.
The wheel was as old as Earth, tried and tested by the ages. Improved by tracks and rails, it could go anywhere. The only technology that had superseded the wheel was gravitics. Wings, hovercrafts, and jet propulsion had all fallen by the wayside. Not every planet had an atmosphere suitable to aerodynamics. Not every planet had an atmosphere.
But they all had gravity, and they all had surfaces. Gravitics and the wheel had carried man to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Why change?
“How are you supposed to drive one of those things?” Kyle had mastered several versions of the ground car, with various numbers of wheels from two to twelve. He couldn’t imagine what kind of controls would be needed for legs.
“That’s the trick,” his companion said. “You don’t. They drive themselves. They’re robotic. That’s why they can justify paying us less. No human can operate those bloody machines, so they don’t have to pay for skilled labor.”
No human could design those bloody machines.
The image of the spinning disk flashed through Kyle’s mind.
Eight resting places. Eight kickplates. Eight legs.
Would anybody else make the connection? Would anyone on Altair think of this distant mining camp and its eight-legged robots? Probably not, because no one on Altair had any reason to. They were thinking about hairy monsters from the dark, not technological beings who made machines in their own image. But that might change when they found out their prime minister had a twin who played with spiders’ toys.
The foreman was right. After five hours of heavy G, Kyle could feel the weight of his eyebrows pulling on his face. The thought of lying down and taking a nap wasn’t refreshing. He knew that his ears would try to stretch to the ground, his lips would slide off his teeth and into his jowls, his tongue would fall back into his throat and suffocate him, if the effort of lifting his chest with every breath didn’t. Lying down would just be giving in to the gravity.
Instead, he pointed his laser at a gleaming patch on the ground. Human brains were good for something. In a matter of minutes he had learned to distinguish between dross and value, with an accuracy the dumb robots could never match. One color of laser for inert material that needed to be hauled away to the dump, and another for ore to be fed into the refinery. That was tiring enough. He couldn’t imagine wielding a real shovel in this environment.
The mechanical spider that towered over him waltzed to his signal, lowering itself over the spot and biting into the earth with black iron jaws. Fangs of shining steel jackhammered from its lips, cracking the ground into rubble, while knobby teeth chewed and swallowed. When the beast was full, it waltzed off to the appropriate destination while he sought out the next target.
So many legs in motion could not be described any other way than waltzing. The contrast between the elegant dance and the slavering feast sickened Kyle. He was tired of contrasts. He wanted something in his life to be pure and simple, without silver linings or feet of clay. He wanted something to be straightforward, without hidden depths or secret angles.
The spider-machine stood, began its waltz. Two steps and it faltered, like a dancer losing the beat. Years of paranoia moved Kyle before he was conscious of the danger. His puny biological brain, so adept at recognizing patterns, sent him stumbling backward on a tangential line for no logical reason.
He collided with an iron post. The leg of another spider, too close behind. His own machine put down legs at random, confused, while the choreographed waltz transformed into senseless flailing. The machine toppled under its momentum, falling with unnatural acceleration.
The side of the beast slammed into the ground where Kyle had been standing. Ore spilled from the top, flowing over him, knocking him to the ground under its weight.
He rolled with the blow. Better to be crushed under weight than to tear his suit trying to escape. Broken limbs could be healed, but the atmosphere would poison him in minutes.
Voices yelling. Hands at his suit, digging him out.
“Is your suit still sealed?” The foreman held Kyle’s helmet between his hands, shouting at him, demanding attention.
Kyle focused his eyes on the virtual display projected onto his faceplate. Warning beacons flashed in red. Belatedly, an alarm began to beep. Underneath it he could hear a rushing hiss. The air felt heavy and dense in his face. The foreman must have seen the answer in his face.
“Earth-fire! Can you stand?” The foreman wasn’t panicking, so Kyle didn’t either. He stood up, shocked that nothing was broken. From his left shin white vapor spewed forth. Kyle stared at it stupidly, but the foreman was already kneeling, swatting at the plume of precious air.
The hissing stopped. A few seconds later the alarm bell shut off. The air still felt dense and confining.
“What’s your pressure say now?”
Kyle tore his attention away from the patch on his shin, and looked at the display. “A hundred and twenty-seven percent.”
“Okay, good. Can you walk? Don’t worry about the patch. It’s stronger than the suit. But you gotta move, show us if there are any other ruptures about to blow. Do it while you still have over-pressure. The blowback will keep the atmosphere out. You’ll be fine.”
Kyle took an experimental step. Nothing bad happened. He could see men crowding around the wreckage. He could see his young companion, paralyzed by horror, standing next to the offending spider.
His spider. The kid had steered his beast too close, and Kyle’s had become confused and lost its footing.
“Earth-damned model sevens.” The foreman gave in to swearing, which meant the danger must be past. “These bastards get in each other’s way. Only happens when they’re trying to stand up. I know they have an upgrade module. Heard it went through quality testing. Ought to have all these units retrofitted. Take another step, man. Tell me where it hurts.”
“I’m fine,” Kyle said. Bruised and battered, but not broken. He could still wiggle his fingers and toes.
The foreman walked around him, visually checking for damage to the suit. “Okay, go ahead and vent your over-pressure. I’ll plug in another emergency canister, just in case. Take these patches. If anything starts spurting, slap one on it.”
Kyle wasn’t sure he was in a state to be slapping anything, but he took the patches. They felt comforting in his hand. He spoke the command word and a jet of vapor shot out of the side of his neck.
His face no longer felt like invisible hands were pressing on it.
“You okay?” The foreman was asking about his mental state this time.
“Yeah, I’m good.” Kyle forced himself to breathe through his nose. “I’m okay. But my spider’s down.”
The foreman shrugged. “Forget that piece of shit. Go back to the truck and sit down. The shift’s almost over, anyway. If you get woozy or anything, trip the alarm. Don’t let yourself go to sleep, though. That will trip the alarm too. I’ve got your suit’s vital sensors jacked to mine, so just kick back and take it easy. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Kyle agreed. That was pretty much all he was capable of at the moment.
“I’m sorry.” The kid had come over, close enough that Kyle could see his blush. Kyle wondered how the vid industry was managing, since apparently the League had hired all the best actors and turned them into assassins.
But that was paranoia talking. The kid wasn’t necessarily trying to kill him. The accident could have been caused by someone else, remotely messing with the spider’s programming. Really, any of a number of people here could be trying to kill him.
It was even conceivable that it had merely been bad luck.
He waved the kid off, unable to deal with the turmoil of suspicion. Stumbling to the truck, he thought about how the puzzle pieces fit together. From the too-early tip, to the twin prime minister, to Radii Development Corp. The stray threads kept popping up all over the place, and when he tugged on them, things exploded, caught on fire, or fell on his head.
Maybe the only puzzle, then, was why he kept tugging.
But when he closed his eyes, all he could see were visions of Altair in ruins, its beautiful cities shattered and lifeless like the smoking husks of towns on Kassa.