The Seeds of War- Omnibus Edition

by T S Hottle

  The escorts had risen from their seats when the train stopped and now herded JT to the nearest exit. Boxing him in again, they led him over to the man waiting on the platform. He had an old-style pistol on his belt but not much else to identify him as a law man. He held up his palm, which flashed some sort of stylized badge.

  “John Parker,” he said. “Constable for Harlan Township.”

  One of the escorts reached into his pocket, pulled out a sheet of paper, and handed it to Parker without comment.

  Parker read it to himself nodding. Then he looked JT over. “Let’s see your hands, boy.”

  “Huh?” Why would anyone want to see his hands? He was clearly unarmed.

  “Your hands,” said Parker. “Let me look at them.”

  JT held out his hands in front of him. Parker took them in his own and felt them.

  “Soft,” said the constable. “Rich man’s hands. Nothing wrong with that, but at your age and with you being in custody, I doubt you’ve done a day’s work in your life, real or virtual.” He nodded to one of escorts. “I’ll take him from here, gentlemen. Give Governor Croix my regards.”

  The escorts behind JT moved to cuff him.

  “No need, boys,” said Parker. “You’re as far from the cities as you can get, young man. If you manage to escape my custody, you’ll just have to deal with suspicious farmers and hungry wildlife.”

  The escorts, not the most expressive types to begin with, turned and marched back into the maglev car without a word. It had already started to move by the time Parker and JT reached the interior of the station.

  “Welcome to Amargosa, son,” said Parker. “I hope you’re prepared to work because that’s what you’re going to be doing for the next four months.”

  “What kind of work?” asked JT, wondering what sort of vehicle Parker drove and over what kind of roads. “Don’t tractbots do everything?”

  “Tractbots do everything we tell them to,” said Parker. “Sometimes. They don’t do everything we need done.”

  “But I don’t know anything about farming.”

  “You will by the time you leave.”

  ***

  They stood in a line down in a depression on Gupta’s farm, moosalo grazing lazily at the top of the hill behind them. The big shaggy beasts seemed oblivious to the projectile weapons fire going off at regular intervals. Lucius Kray watched as the twelve men he’d chosen as his first recruits shot at old compressor housings, water tanks, and a large rover that Gupta himself had left in the depression years earlier. They had been at it all day, shooting at the junk standing still, running, and while lying flat. Kray even had them change positions and angles. They could hit a target well enough, but the target never moved, never shot back, and never threatened.

  “This is no way to train a militia,” he said aloud, not really expecting anyone to listen.

  “And you’ll need more than a dozen people to make this work,” said Saja. “You’ll need the whole township.”

  Kray sighed and turned his back on his willing-but-hapless troops. “We need weapons, and our friend hasn’t come through for us. He hasn’t even supplied the creeper he wanted them to plant.”

  Saja fell in step beside him as they walked back to his bat wagon. “I do not trust that man. You can tell he’s hiding something.”

  “He is a salesman first. They’re always hiding something.” He stopped and turned to his assistant. “I heard Wallek is giving us trouble.”

  “He wants more money for the creeper planting. Says his neighbors over the line in Harlan Township will burn him out if it infests their fields.”

  “Maybe he shouldn’t have planted his son’s science project last summer. He’s already kicking back fifteen percent of his crop, milk, and livestock to the emergency stores for that.”

  “He says if he doesn’t get a bigger cut, he’ll go to the governor about your militia.”

  Kray felt the rage, the bile, rising in him. His ears began to roar with the sound of blood rushing through his head. A small part of him noticed that Saja picked up on this change and was getting aroused. He would have to be careful. Fortunately, his years as a sniper kept him from expressing that rage or taking what Saja now silently offered him. “We will have to pay Wallek a visit tonight.” The sound of weapons echoed from behind them, followed by the loud clink of bullets on old metal. “And if he doesn’t cooperate, it may be time our first volunteers practice their skills on something that moves.”

  “May I make a suggestion?” said Saja.

  Kray nodded.

  “You know and I know an enemy is coming,” she said. “After we make an example of Wallek, let’s use it to incentivize the rest of the township. If they come aboard, they can profit from Leitman’s weed…”

  “Vine,” said Kray, but he thought it was a weed, too.

  “But if they refuse, and the enemy comes…”

  “Then they’re the enemy, too,” finished Kray.

  A small vehicle, enclosed with room only for two, appeared at the bottom of the hill away from where Kray’s troops were shooting. Kray and Saja headed down the trail toward the personal transport and stood in its path. The driver stopped, a cloud of dust dissipating behind the vehicle. The side window lowered to reveal Marcus Leitman at the controls.

  “Your deputy told me you were here,” he said. “I have the creeper back at the maglev station. We need to talk, though.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Kray. “We do.”

  ***

  Lansdorp, with its heavy traffic and personal vehicles, might have looked primitive to JT, but at least its streets had been paved. Parker’s car, an archaic-looking vehicle on four rubber-ringed wheels called a “runabout,” bounced and rocked over the dirt road from the maglev station to wherever they were headed. The reds and yellows of the grass and leaves unsettled him, and the expanses of green from each field did not help. This world was utterly alien to him.

  Which it would be, of course, since he was no longer on Earth.

  They drove for about thirty minutes, roughly the same amount of time JT thought his kidneys could handle the pitted road before they liquefied inside him. Parker drove up to a gathering of runabouts, some longer vehicles with long beds in the back called “barrows,” and a couple larger military-looking vehicles called “bat wagons,” all as dusty or muddy as Parker’s own runabout.

  “Another stop?” asked JT.

  “Nope,” said Parker. “Time to put you to work.”

  “Work?”

  Parker climbed out of the runabout and gestured for JT to do the same. “You’re not staying here for free.”

  JT climbed out and followed Parker to the cluster of men gathered around a muddy tractbot. The thing looked like a bullet with giant rubber-ringed wheels. A dark-skinned man, Tianese from his accent and his East Asian features, sat atop the tractbot. He tilted his head at Parker as they approached.

  “Quan,” said Parker, “this is JT Austin. He’ll be staying with me and Sarah for a while.”

  Quan looked over to JT and frowned. “You’re going to have him doing chores?”

  “His record suggests if I put him on bookkeeping, I’d have to shut the farm down in a week.”

  JT wanted to lash out but thought better of it. Parker was the law here. Besides, it would be unwise to mouth off with a dozen or so muscle-bound farm hands surrounding him.

  “Hay in the east field ready?” asked Parker.

  “Been ready for a week. I had to put a couple hands on it overnight. You don’t reap it soon, we’re going to be overrun with gosalope. And it’s almost mating season.”

  Parker gently but firmly put a hand square between JT’s shoulder blades and nudged him toward Quan. “Why don’t you put him to work bailing? Give this boy the workout he so clearly needs.”

  Bailing? “I don’t know anything about bailing.”

  “Just heavy lifting, kid,” said Quan. “Time you got familiar with it.”

  ***

  Tractbots w
ith forklift extensions mounted on their fronts pulled large vats off the maglev and placed them carefully on the Dagar Township side of the track. Leitman opened the lid of one to reveal what appeared to be green pebbles inside.

  “If they spray these in the center of a field,” he said, “especially after a good, hard rain, it’ll cover a ten hectare field in a week.”

  Kray stuck his hand in the vat and let the green stuff slip between his fingers. It almost felt like it wanted to move. “Seeds? Or spores?”

  “Something in between,” said Leitman. “I told the customs people it was fertilizer for GenitiTech’s new wheat strains.”

  Kray looked up at Leitman, spotting Saja and her sour glare over the man’s shoulder. “The customs in Lansdorp aren’t that sloppy.”

  “I didn’t bring it through Lansdorp. I brought it through Riverside.”

  Nothing off-world came from Riverside. Not unless… “You didn’t go through the hypergate, did you?”

  “Juno’s backers,” said Leitman, closing the lid, “can afford their own projection-drive ships.”

  As if that explained everything. Then again, it did. If someone entered Amargosa’s star system without going through the colony’s sole hypergate, they could arrive planetside almost undetected. True, the orbital station would spot anything or anyone emerging from a self-generated wormhole, but Kray knew all such ships had to do was provide a transponder signal and a destination. The industrial city of Deming regularly received supply ships that bypassed the hypergate system. But this was the first time he’d heard of anyone landing at Riverside.

  “So,” he said. “The weapons.”

  Leitman leaned against the vat, folding his arms. “How many people have signed on for the planting?”

  “Where are my weapons? A dozen won’t even defend the settlement, let alone allow us to fight a war of liberation.”

  “Mr. Kray, this is a quid pro quo situation. I give you things; you give me things.”

  Pointing at the vat, Kray said, “This is definitely illegal. I could simply confiscate the vats and convince enough people to say you persuaded them to trash their grain crops for this mutant ivy you’re foisting on us.”

  “Mr. Kray,” said Leitman, “I can whisper in the ear of a Jefivan minister or a religious leader there and say, ‘You know what? This constable on this Martian colony tried to get me to supply him weapons. Now what do you make of that?’ Then that little rumor makes its way back to Earth and finds itself in the ear of the Martian member of the Compact Security Council, who then is going to ask your Governor Croix about it. Tell me, do you have any friends who are ministers or cultural leaders on a core world, Mr. Kray?”

  Kray smiled. He loved it when they threatened him. It never ended well for anyone except Kray. “And how are you going to do that from a jail cell, Mr. Leitman?”

  The weird little smile returned, which unsettled the constable. “Why, Lucius, do you really want to risk the wrath of Juno?”

  Kray returned the weird little smile. “Well, I’ve never heard of Juno.”

  “Yet.” Leitman took Kray by the arm and pulled him aside, as if anything he said would fail to reach Saja’s ears. “Weapons will start coming in from Riverside. I suggest you have your most trusted volunteers wait for the shipment.” He looked around some more. “If you have the planting done by the end of the week, the creeper will be ready for harvest before the season even ends. You’ll want your citizens’ militia trained and ready by then.”

  “And which of your ministerial or culturally significant friends,” said Kray, “tipped you off to the coming colony grab?”

  “I never said there was a human enemy. In fact, I only said there was an enemy. Might want to plan for that, Colonel.”

  Kray almost corrected him before deciding he entirely liked the sound of “Colonel.”

  ***

  JT spent the day catching hay bales. He never knew such things existed until now. Each one weighed about twenty-five kilos. Multiply that by sixty per hour over three hours, and it added up to a stiff back, sore hands, aching shoulders, and wobbly legs. He might have complained at the end of the day, except he was too tired to say anything about it.

  Quan drove him to the Parkers’ home in his barrow, the cramped cab stifling and the rear track biting into the farm’s rough terrain. JT noticed Quan’s tattoos, which pegged him as an ex-Marine and a combat veteran at that. He said nothing as he drove, but JT could tell Quan found his pain amusing.

  “Well,” said an older woman as he clambered out of the vehicle. She did not look nearly as weathered as John Parker, “You must be JT.” She pushed a glass of some sweet-smelling yellow liquid at him. “I’m Sarah Parker. Welcome to our farm.”

  JT gratefully accepted the drink and downed half of it in a gulp. Catching his breath, he said, “Thank you. JT Austin. Guess I’m your new farm hand.”

  “Why don’t you lie down over here, dear. I know Quan likes to work the new hands to death.”

  He would not argue with her. What he really wanted was a bed. Even a military cot with a thin mattress and large springs would do. Instead, he lay down on a wooden picnic table and immediately shut his eyes. When he opened them again, he spotted a pretty blonde girl about his own age staring at him. She seemed fascinated.

  So was he. She wasn’t quite the type of girl he was used to. Instead of the thin waifs who smelled his mother’s money and noticed he looked much older, this girl had a few curves. Some of those curves came from muscle, especially in the legs. But it was the eyes that kept him staring back, ice blue and wide. She looked innocent, an innocence he himself did not have for very long.

  “What?” he asked, unsure of why she was staring at him.

  “Wow,” she said. “A real Earth man.”

  ***

  Varnal Wallek was a mountain of a man. Not particularly fit, his size came from a diet high in chocolate imported from Mars and the two moosalo he slaughtered every year for meat. Since Wallek lived alone, he had nothing to do in his off hours but eat and drink. He continuously denied to anyone who would listen that drinking contributed to his size.

  Kray did not want to listen to Wallek’s denial about his weight or his drinking habits. He only wanted Wallek to listen to reason.

  “You must understand something,” said Kray. “I’ve already recruited the entire township. Come aboard, and you’ll have a generous harvest in less time than it takes to grow the grain you’ve already plowed under. All I ask is that you plant this creeper, accept Juno’s payment, and give us a few hours of your time each week.”

  They stood in the yard of Wallek’s home. It did not resemble the typical Amargosan farm house, an extruded first story with a customized second floor. It looked more like a shack or a hastily 3-D printed shelter. The structure had been fused onto an old habitat module used by planetary survey teams and an old transit bus that now served as Wallek’s bedroom.

  Wallek belched. “It seems to me, Constable, that you need me more than I need you. I’ve still got two fields of pristine wheat growing on the south side. Do you know how much Genitigroup pays for unmodified wheat? And they invented customized crops.”

  “Colonel,” said Saja, standing guard next to Kray’s bat wagon, “we should go. Clearly, Mr. Wallek doesn’t understand the consequences of his actions.”

  “I understand. I also understand that this… Juno, is it? I’ve never heard of them. I understand they have some very deep pockets indeed if they can help our good constable form a resistance movement to an enemy that does not exist. And if they can afford to do that, they can afford to compensate me to my satisfaction.” He spat at Kray’s feet and folded his arms.

  “You do understand,” said Kray, “that if the enemy does appear, and you are not with us, you, too, will be considered the enemy until the planet is liberated.”

  Wallek laughed, displaying a mouthful of bad teeth. “I’ll just have to take that chance. Good night, ‘Colonel.’ Take your tin soldier with you.
I’m sure she makes a nice pleasure doll when she’s at ease.”

  As Wallek strode away back to his cobbled-together home, Kray resisted a strong urge to plant his hunting knife between the big man’s shoulders. Instead, he turned to Saja, who looked even angrier.

  He climbed into the bat wagon. As Saja joined him, he said, “Let’s go visit his south field.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “I want to see how well unmodified wheat burns.”

  ***

  The black letters scrawled across JT’s hand read “Service unavailable,” just as they had since the moment he left the Ralan Underhill. Sarah Parker laughed. “Core worlders. Most of your nanotats are incompatible with the local nets. Fortunately, John picked up something for you to use while you’re with us.” She handed JT a…

  Tablet? What was this? The World War Era? Was he supposed to play pixel games and watch videos of cats with it? How did this thing work?

  “Just tap it,” said Sarah, “fingerprint it, and tell it who you are. You’ll be on our access account.”

  He sat at the Parkers’ kitchen table and played with the tablet, giving it his fingerprints and telling it his name. Once the device realized JT was, at least temporarily, a part of the Parker family, it automatically connected to Amargosa’s internet.

  And what a pathetic excuse for an internet it was. The rugby scores were two days old. The news feeds had just now caught up with the rest of the Compact. Even then, there were gaps. He wondered if people here thought the Polygamy Wars still raged between Deseret and her colonies. As he spotted John Parker’s primitive runabout pulling into the yard outside, he thought it was likely.

  “Hi, Earth Man.” The girl appeared almost out of thin air, probably sneaking up behind him before dropping into the seat next to him. Those ice blue eyes proceeded to devour him. “I’m Lizzy.”

  JT looked up from his tablet with its stale news and balky interface. “JT Austin. Apparently, I live here now.”