Shards of Earth

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Seriously? Jericho is on the Parthenon’s red list. We don’t come here. It’s prime Nativist recruiting territory.”

  Apparently nobody else had known this. Kris herself had only just learnt the potted history of Jericho, and as far as she was concerned, the place was a backwater armpit.

  “Well, it wasn’t the Nativists who stole our ship or killed our friends,” Olli said flatly. “Wasn’t them came to steal our pilot, either.”

  “Enough of that,” Idris said sharply, or at least as sharply as he said anything.

  “The Salvation Orbital’s kybernet is calling,” Kris noted. “We’re docking there?”

  “It’s closest to the dig.” Idris had found some survey maps, which showed various arboreal topologies: lowland forests, upland forests, supermarine forests, polar forests. And although “forest” was a human term, it seemed fairly appropriate here. “There’s an elevator planetside there. It’s probably the closest we can get. Direct orbit-to-surface flight isn’t advised because there’s a craptonne of interference within the atmosphere. Partly the local lifeforms, partly the Originator ruins, they think. These are the biggest anyone ever found, except they’re all buried under the jungle, so no one’s quite sure how big.”

  “What sort of interference?” Olli obviously didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Weird sorts,” Idris said unhelpfully, but then sent over the data. Apparently the native life was constantly shifting the EM bandwidths they put out. Scientists reckoned they were competing to drown one another out or to locate their prey. But for this reason, the survey teams had recommended switching between algorithms to maintain communications.

  “Why can’t we ever go anywhere nice?” the drone specialist complained. “You know, maybe this time I’ll stick in orbit. Where I won’t suddenly lose contact with my fucking legs.”

  *

  There were plenty of ships at Salvation Orbital. The elevator terminus was ninety per cent dock, ten per cent a rat run of doors and compartments surrounding the elevator. A single thronging establishment was ostensibly an eatery but seemed to be doubling up as a drug den, gambling emporium and synthetic brothel. The hub was crowded, all elbows and shoulders and the stink of unwashed bodies. Usually, Kris gathered, it was a ghost town. Right now, there were off-duty military and the crews of twenty ships all jostling for room. She saw the blue and white badge of the Nativists proudly displayed on collars, on chests, even tattooed across the bare back of one scrawny, drunken spacer.

  “This can’t just be down to the Locusts,” Kris hissed at the others, as they pushed through the crowd. She had her slate out and was skipping through the mediotype channels, searching the news. “Blessed equity, there’s timing for you,” she spat. “A Hegemony diplomat turned up at Berlenhof a few days ago suggesting that Hugh should cede Jericho. It should make good on its promises to evict everyone and hand the planet over.”

  “And why?” Idris asked, incredulous.

  “It’s the Originator stuff. The Essiel claim to be the old guys’ heirs, or that’s how it translates, and I guess Jericho’s got ruins big enough to impress even them.” Kris shook her head. “Look, I need to get us passage down to the surface. Solace, I don’t suppose your lot have any secret back way in?”

  “So now you’re happy to be working with the Parthenon?”

  Kris cocked an eye at her. “Look, that was all Olli, and she’s not here.”

  “Olli had a point though,” Solace said shortly. “How we came about, maybe how we could end up. And jokers like this…” A wave at three tables of Nativist spacers, voices raised in a drunken chorus of The Green We Lost, The Fields of Home. “They spit on us, and it drives us further towards becoming that thing. I… I don’t know what to say to her,

  Kris.”

  That made two of them, because Kris didn’t know what to say either. Except: “Wait, so you’re saying there is a secret Partheni handshake?”

  “I have made contact with Trine and they will authorize our descent.”

  “They can do that?”

  “They are senior researcher on the dig. They…” Solace actually looked shifty, which was a new one. “I think they’re in some trouble of their own. You know Nativists and Hivers.”

  Kris had seen plenty of anti-Hiver propaganda in her time. Boots stomping on knots of squirming bugs. Discontent about the hive intelligences winning free from their creators. Nobody wanted their appliances demanding independence. Or that was the Nativist message.

  “So are we just walking into more trouble, if we head down there?”

  Idris barked out a mirthless laugh. “You know what we’ve got on the ship. I mean, trouble? Us? Who’d have thought it?” There was a distinctly hysterical tremble to his voice.

  Kris put a hand on his arm. “You want to wait on the ship? It’s no bother, Solace and I can…”

  “No, no. I’m sorry.” He shook his head, embarrassed. “Be good to see Trine again. Old times, hm?”

  Kris’s slate pinged to say they had access to the elevator. She wondered who’d just been bumped, and hoped it was either a Betrayed activist or some pompous cult hierograve.

  They ended up sharing the elevator car with a real slice of the planet’s current turbulent life. Biologists, Hegemony cultists, Hugh military, Colonial agriculturalists and Nativists. No guns were permitted in the elevator, but this was a wild, frontier-type planet. Kris knew there would be plenty in the luggage compartment.

  “Pills, people,” Kris reminded the others as they descended, and popped her own. Most colony planets had their own version—a vaccination and antidote combination. Otherwise, a world could start killing you the moment you stepped onto the surface.

  “Why’s that guy looking at you?” Solace asked Idris, making him jump.

  “What guy?”

  “Don’t look.”

  “Then how can I—?”

  Kris scanned the room from the corner of her eye, catching who Solace meant on the second pass. Half a head taller than the rest and of decidedly healthier physique than the average Colonial. His lips moved as he stared at Idris, talking into a communicator in his lapel. He wore a shapeless poncho that failed to hide the broadness of his frame, but Kris caught a glimpse of bottle-green fabric at his neck. Where have I seen that colour? Ah, right.

  “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but he’s Voyenni. Like the clowns who snatched Idris back on Roshu?” she murmured.

  “Can’t be,” Solace said. “What are the odds?”

  “Their chief was spouting a lot of that ‘good of humanity’ business when he was leaning on me,” Idris pointed out. “Right out of the Nativist playbook.”

  It made a depressing kind of sense, Kris thought. The Magda Boyarin were the acceptable face of Nativism—and Jericho was prime recruiting territory for the movement right now.

  “We can only hope they have bigger fish to fry,” Kris decided, nodding at the Hegemony’s cult members. She just hoped the Betrayed and the cultists could keep their knives to themselves, at least until they escaped the elevator.

  17.

  Solace

  Jericho’s Anchortown was laid out in concentric rings, each showing the limit of a generation’s ambition before the next influx of refugees arrived. Beyond the walls and the surrounding fields, the native plant life stretched away in clashing shades of yellow and indigo-blue. Those “trees” moved, Solace knew. The fences kept up a modulated electromagnetic babble that repelled the local life, but the forest still made the odd slow rush for the barricades, overwhelming the fences until the farmers retaliated with chainsaws and flamethrowers. Even the trees were at war with people on Jericho.

  Then they were dropping the last ten metres, the elevator car folding open so the bitter-scented alien air washed over them. Cargo crews were already descending on the elevator’s freight compartments, using loading frames and a-grav to haul out the supplies, scientific equipment and luxuries that had come down the wire.

  People were starin
g at Solace’s armour but she wasn’t going to be down here without it. She made a big show of going to the luggage compartment and bringing out Mr. Punch. She’d had the name printed onto the accelerator’s barrel, a little personal nod to Rollo’s memory.

  The inhabitants of Anchortown looked a hardy lot, whose fashion ran to long sleeves, heavy boots to the knee and high closed collars. Sensible, given the wildlife, and a world away from shipboard clothes.

  “Get some new clothes,” Solace advised Kris and Idris. “Lots of things here to bite and sting and get under your skin.”

  That meant a visit to the printers while Solace soaked up the atmosphere outside, scowling at anyone who looked at her twice. There were Hugh military on the streets, and she saw them arrest one local at gunpoint. Nobody liked it; nobody stepped in. This close to the anchor point, Hugh still had its colony in hand. Likely towards the outskirts it was a different story. And of course those Hugh personnel looked at her just as hard as the locals did, and didn’t look away as quickly. She was happy to see Kris and Idris emerge. Idris had purchased the drabbest, saddest long coat and boots she’d ever seen but Kris had made an effort, sporting explorer chic and a new blue and yellow scarf to match the alien foliage.

  “I can’t make contact with Trine,” she told them. She’d been fitfully trying her comms since they got here, without any joy.

  “Can we not just go to their office?” Kris asked. Solace thought back and realized she might not have explained everything.

  “They’re on a dig,” she said. “I told you that.”

  “I thought you meant… you know, some project…” Waving a hand vaguely at the city around them, a gesture that slowed as Kris realized her mistake. “They’re out in the wilds?”

  “That’s where the ruins are. We’ll need to arrange passage. And I need to call Trine somehow and tell them we’re coming.”

  “Is that even possible?” Idris asked. He had a crinkle of discomfort about his eyes. Solace wondered if the planet’s EM chatter was impinging on his Int senses somehow.

  “They use the mother of all transmitter stations,” Kris recalled from her research. “They cut through the background buzz via main force. I guess we go pay to put a call out.”

  There was a transmitter office close enough to the anchor, beside a handful of seedy-looking shacks that claimed they could arrange expeditions into the wilds for you—though Solace assumed game-hunting and smuggling eclipsed sorties for scientific research.

  Solace had kept in touch with Trine after the war, across the decades, when she wasn’t in the freezer herself. Each time she’d woken assuming that the Hiver would have re-instanced, that the intelligence she contacted wouldn’t be her old correspondent. Each time she discovered that Trine had clung on, still the same. And now they were going to meet, and she had one hell of a surprise for the old academic.

  The transmitter station managed to establish a link on the third try, then lost connection twice while she was waiting for someone to find Trine.

  “Can’t you just lay cable or something?” she asked the acned operator, who shrugged.

  “They eat it. Anything in the ground gets et,” he said.

  “This planet…”

  “Oh, tell me about it.”

  And then they had the line again and a crisp, slightly fuzzy-sounding voice was saying, “Gold City Dig to Anchortown, are you receiving me, over?”

  “Gold City this is Anchortown,” Solace said obediently. “Communication for Asset Trine, over.”

  “Delegate Trine is speaking, Anchortown,” the voice said, notably frosty. And she knew it was her old acquaintance, for all the voice was unfamiliar. A Hiver voice was a matter of what software they plugged in, after all.

  “Delegate Trine, this is Myrmidon Executor Solace, over.” She found herself smiling.

  “Well, then we’ve both had a promotion,” came that precise voice. “Congratulations to everyone. You can’t see me right now, but I’ve put on a tiny festive hat and am blowing on a little streamer.” Then static fuzzed up and she lost the connection for a handful of frustrating seconds until their voice faded back in: “Repeat, over?”

  “Repeat yourself, over,” she pressed.

  Fuzz, hiss, buzz, “… saying you didn’t come all this way for a party. Can it be the Parthenon has remembered me after all this time?”

  “Trine, I’ve a matter befitting your expertise, something special. Face-to-face discussion only. Can I come to you, over?”

  “Can you fly in?”

  “I’m told it’s not advisable?”

  “But you have a ship? Repeating: you have a ship, yes?”

  Solace frowned uneasily. “I do, over.”

  “Better than nothing. Base of the elevator…” Fuzz, buzz, hiss, “… Don’t leave it longer, est-ce compris?”

  “Compris, Delegate.”

  “Then done, over, out, whatever,” and then the static rose like a tide and ended the connection for good.

  Solace stepped back from the transmitter, frowning, because there was obviously something else going on. You couldn’t sift a Hiver’s tone for emotional cues, but either something was worrying Trine or the Hiver was having long-term instantiation issues.

  I don’t want to bring yet more trouble to the others, she thought. Yet as she stepped out of the transmitter station, she saw they could find their own trouble. Kris and Idris had been cornered by none other than the Boyarin Piter Tchever Uskaro and a couple of his bottle-green Voyenni.

  As Solace strode over, she heard the Boyarin say, “What else is a man to think, finding the Int here, but that he’s had a change of heart? That he wants to do best by his species after all?”

  “Step away, please,” Solace grated out, not quite pointing Mr. Punch his way.

  Piter Uskaro glanced about him, and Solace saw plenty of black looks sent her way by those rubbernecking nearby.

  “Should I call those Hugh marines over, Patho?” he asked. “Who will they back, do you think? I’m a citizen of the Colonies with diplomatic credentials. You, on the other hand, are a foreign agent—and not even human.”

  Solace blanked. It wasn’t his words alone, but the fact the crowd were plainly in agreement. She was surrounded by angry faces, who probably believed all the anti-Parthenon propaganda. That sisters bore male children but murdered them at birth; that they poisoned water supplies to make men sterile, all the usual.

  However, she had shifted Uskaro slightly away from the pair, and the lawyer took full advantage, shoving Idris forward with a brisk, “Enough, we’re going.”

  “I’ve not done with you—” The Boyarin reached out and hooked Kris by the scarf, pulling the garment half off. Solace moved to club the man and his goons if she had to, but he’d frozen. The Voyenni hovered in confusion.

  Solace couldn’t see what had happened. A moment later, she realized Kris had a knife out. But the Boyarin had stopped before he’d seen it, his fingers still caught in the scarf.

  “Well?” Kris asked him. He’d gone pale, and the artful scar on his face twitched. Solace had no idea what question he was being asked. And it seemed Uskaro didn’t know how to answer.

  “I can quote official protocols, so everyone can hear,” Kris said, calmly, quietly. “But then we’re committed, Messernbruder.”

  The Boyarin stepped back, finally releasing her scarf. Solace magnified her field of vision through her visor and caught a glimpse of the pinkish line that encircled almost half the woman’s neck. It was a thin cut, just like the blazon on the man’s face. A very particular type of duelling scar.

  “Mesdam,” Uskaro said coldly. “Our next meeting…” But Solace saw a faint glimmer of sweat on his forehead, despite the Jerichan climate.

  “The hell?” Idris exclaimed as the man marched off. People were still staring at Solace, and suddenly facing down Colonial scorn didn’t seem much fun anymore.

  “Just come on.” Kris had her scarf arranged again, hiding the scar. Solace wondered what sort
of a bloody mess that duel had been, to give her such a trophy. Not the mannered little game of blades that the Boyarin played. Messernbruder. Knife-brother.

  “You—” she started, but Kris just brushed past, angrily.

  “I’ve arranged transport. We’ve got a land-car to catch, being as that’s the only way to get to this damn dig site of yours. If we miss it I really will end up having to knife somebody.”

  “Would you have actually—?”

  Kris turned on her heel, and Solace decided that she’d never doubt the woman’s readiness to take up her blade again. As they left, someone bounced a rock off Solace’s shoulder-guard. Better that than face up to an angry Kris.

  *

  “Can you configure that thing for chain shot?” the biologist asked Solace, once they were past the last fence.

  “Why would I need to?” She eyed him, clutching Mr. Punch protectively.

  He was a wiry man named Robbelin, with dyed-blonde hair and a strong accent that said he came from Somewhere Else far away from Jericho. “Your ’celerator,” he drawled, “won’t matter piss to the locals. Their fucking flesh is this viscous goop and you’ve never seen the like… Bastards. You send a pellet into ’em, just comes out the other side with its energy intact. Doesn’t do a king’s piss of a damage. Hereabouts we use these fuckers.” He showed her a chunky weapon with a barrel his fist would have fit inside. “Pops ’em with a bean bag, just about subsonic. Doesn’t kill the bastards, but it makes a mess of them and they don’t like it, you get me?”

  “Chain shot, right…” Solace nodded. She made the necessary adjustments to Mr. Punch and glanced at the jungle—looming far too close on either side of the trail. A tracked ground car wasn’t her preferred way of getting anywhere but the locals wouldn’t trust much else. Not between the planet’s EM chaos and the way a-grav systems attracted aerial predators like some kind of mating call.

  “Mockery of an ecosystem, this bloody place,” Robellin went on easily. “There’s no actual species here on this godforsaken world, you know that? Just things that have a shape. And if that shape ain’t working for them, they start shifting into something else. These trees’re only going to stay trees as long as it works for ’em. Bastards’ll morph into fucking balls of teeth and attitude the moment the soil gets too poor.” Abruptly he had his “beanbagger” levelled in both hands, staring suspiciously into the jungle, or perhaps at the trees themselves.