Space Pioneers

by Hank Davis

  Why not triumph? Because not twelve, not twenty, not even thirty minutes is it taking the satellite to complete its eighth-of-an-orbit: fifty minutes are gone, and still there’s a slice of shadow yonder. It is this, this which is placing the cold finger upon his heart, and he doesn’t know why, he doesn’t know why, he will not know why; he is afraid he shall when his head is working again. . . .

  Oh, where’s the kid? Where is any way to busy the mind, apply it to something, anything else but the watchhand which outruns the moon? Here, kid: come over here—what you got there?

  If you were the kid, then you’d forgive everything and hunker down with your new model, not a toy, not a helicopter or a rocket-plane, but the big one, the one that looks like an overgrown cartridge. It’s so big, even as a model, that even an angry sick man wouldn’t call it a toy. A giant cartridge, but watch: the lower four-fifths is Alpha—all muscle—over a million pounds thrust. (Snap it off, throw it away.) Half the rest is Beta—all brains—it puts you on your way. (Snap it off, throw it away.) And now look at the polished fraction which is left. Touch a control somewhere and see—see? it has wings—wide triangular wings. This is Gamma, the one with wings, and on its back is a small sausage; it is a moth with a sausage on its back. The sausage (click! it comes free) is Delta. Delta is the last, the smallest: Delta is the way home.

  What will they think of next? Quite a toy. Quite a toy. Beat it, kid. The satellite is almost overhead, the sliver of shadow going—going—almost gone and . . . gone.

  Check: 0459. Fifty-nine minutes? give or take a few. Times eight . . . 472 . . . is, uh, 7 hours 52 minutes.

  Seven hours fifty-two minutes? Why, there isn’t a satellite round earth with a period like that. In all the solar system there’s only . . .

  The cold finger turns fierce, implacable.

  The east is paling and the sick man turns to it, wanting the light, the sun, an end to questions whose answers couldn’t be looked upon. The sea stretches endlessly out to the growing light, and endlessly, somewhere out of sight, the surf roars. The paling east bleaches the sandy hilltops and throws the line of footprints into aching relief. That would be the buddy, the sick man knows, gone for help. He cannot at the moment recall who the buddy is, but in time he will, and meanwhile the footprints make him less alone.

  The sun’s upper rim thrusts itself above the horizon with a flash of green, instantly gone. There is no dawn, just the green flash and then a clear white blast of unequivocal sunup. The sea could not be whiter, more still, if it were frozen and snow-blanketed. In the west, stars still blaze, and overhead the crinkled satellite is scarcely abashed by the growing light. A formless jumble in the valley below begins to resolve itself into a sort of tent-city, or installation of some kind, with tubelike and sail-like buildings. This would have meaning for the sick man if his head were working right. Soon, it would. Will. (Oh . . .)

  The sea, out on the horizon just under the rising sun, is behaving strangely, for in that place where properly belongs a pool of unbearable brightness, there is instead a notch of brown. It is as if the white fire of the sun is drinking dry the sea—for look, look! the notch becomes a bow and the bow a crescent, racing ahead of the sunlight, white sea ahead of it and behind it a cocoa-dry stain spreading across and down toward where he watches.

  Beside the finger of fear which lies on him, another finger places itself, and another, making ready for that clutch, that grip, that ultimate insane squeeze of panic. Yet beyond that again, past that squeeze when it comes, to be savored if the squeeze is only fear and not panic, lies triumph—triumph, and a glory. It is perhaps this which constitutes his whole battle: to fit himself, prepare himself to bear the utmost that fear could do, for if he can do that, there is a triumph on the other side. But . . . not yet. Please, not yet awhile.

  Something flies (or flew, or will fly—he is a little confused on this point) toward him, from the far right where the stars still shine. It is not a bird and it is unlike any aircraft on earth, for the aerodynamics are wrong. Wings so wide and so fragile would be useless, would melt and tear away in any of earth’s atmosphere but the outer fringes. He sees then (because he prefers to see it so) that it is the kid’s model, or part of it, and for a toy it does very well indeed.

  It is the part called Gamma, and it glides in, balancing, parallels the sand and holds away, holds away slowing, then, settles, all in slow motion, throwing up graceful sheet-fountains of fine sand from its skids. And it runs along the ground for an impossible distance, letting down its weight by the ounce and stingily the ounce, until look out until a skid look out fits itself into a bridged crevasse look out, look out! and still moving on, it settles down to the struts. Gamma then, tired, digs her wide left wingtip carefully into the racing sand, digs it in hard; and as the wing breaks off, Gamma slews, sidles, slides slowly, pointing her other triangular tentlike wing at the sky, and broadside crushes into the rocks at the valley’s end.

  As she rolls smashing over, there breaks from her broad back the sausage, the little Delta, which somersaults away to break its back upon the rocks, and through the broken hull spill smashed shards of graphite from the moderator of her power-pile. Look out! Look out! and at the same instant from the finally checked mass of Gamma there explodes a doll, which slides and tumbles into the sand, into the rocks and smashed hot graphite from the wreck of Delta.

  The sick man numbly watches this toy destroy itself: what will they think of next?—and with a gelid horror prays at the doll lying in the raging rubble of the atomic pile: don’t stay there, man—get away! get away! that’s hot, you know? But it seems like a night and a day and half another night before the doll staggers to its feet and, clumsy in its pressure-suit, runs away up the valleyside, climbs a sand-topped outcrop, slips, falls, lies under a slow cascade of cold ancient sand until, but for an arm and the helmet, it is buried.

  The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun’s disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and, like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.)

  And from it stretches the line of footprints, to and by the sick man, above to the bluff, and gone with the sandslide which had buried him there. Whose footprints?

  He knows whose, whether or not he knows that he knows, or wants to or not. He knows what satellite has (give or take a bit) a period like that (want it exactly?—it’s 7.66 hours). He knows what world has such a night, and such a frosty glare by day. He knows these things as he knows how spilled radioactives will pour the crash and mutter of surf into a man’s earphones.

  Say you were that kid: say, instead, at last, that you are the sick man, for they are the same; surely then you can understand why of all things, even while shattered, shocked, sick with radiation calculated (leaving) radiation computed (arriving) and radiation past all bearing (lying in the wreckage of Delta) you would want to think of the sea. For no farmer who fingers the soil with love and knowledge, no poet who sings of it, artist, contractor, engineer, even child bursting into tears at the inexpressible beauty of a field of daffodils—none of these is as intimate with Earth as those who live on, live with, breathe and drift in its seas. So of these things you must think; with these you must dwell until you are less sick and more ready to face the truth.

  The truth, then, is that the satellite fading here is Phobos, that those footprints are your own, that there is no sea here, that you have crashed and are killed and will in a moment be dead. The cold hand ready to squeeze and still your heart is not anoxia or even fear, it is death. Now, if there is something more important than this, now is the time for it to show its
elf.

  The sick man looks at the line of his own footprints, which testify that he is alone, and at the wreckage below, which states that there is no way back, and at the white east and the mottled west and the paling flecklike satellite above. Surf sounds in his ears. He hears his pumps. He hears what is left of his breathing. The cold clamps down and folds him round past measuring, past all limit.

  Then he speaks, cries out: then with joy he takes his triumph at the other side of death, as one takes a great fish, as one completes a skilled and mighty task, rebalances at the end of some great daring leap; and as he used to say “we shot a fish” he uses no “I”:

  “God,” he cries, dying on Mars, “God, we made it!”

  THE PARLIAMENT OF OWLS

  by Christopher Ruocchio

  Pioneering is big business, and big business means big crime. Young Christopher’s story is the second all-original story in this anthology of reprints, after Sarah A. Hoyt and Jeff Greason’s “Home Front.” In fact, it’s also only the second short story he’s ever published. (Did I say short? It’s one of the longer tales in the book!) Sometimes the frontier isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes a man just wants to go fishing—too bad he’s a repo man for a terraforming company, and too bad their latest order was just stolen. . . .

  The sky above Abhanri City was gray as the city itself. Concrete and steel and mirrored glass vanished into low cloud only to emerge again, higher and higher until—like shadows vanishing into the arriving night—they were lost in the heavens above.

  Kalas missed trees. He missed the wheat fields and the rolling meadows of his home. Missed the grape vines ripening on the old trellis, and the way the trees would bend when fliers streaked low above their boughs, making for the village where he’d been born. Anything would have been a welcome relief to all that grayness and the neon flash of advertisements tall as houses that shone from the sides of buildings.

  He missed home, though he had not seen Maglona in twenty-four years, and it had not seen him for going on eighty. He had shipped out on the Emperor’s coin, taken commission with the 212th Centaurine Legion. He’d wanted an excuse to see the galaxy, wanted an excuse to leave his dusty old village and a life as farmer and make a name for himself. He hadn’t thought to ever be looking back.

  He hadn’t ever thought to be trapped in a place like Abhanri either, on Kanthi, beyond the borders of his Empire. Hadn’t expected to be working for the Consortium either, doing enforcement. He’d always pictured himself fishing. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe because there weren’t any oceans back home on Maglona—but there were no oceans on Kanthi either. Just gray.

  “I’ve got eyes on our guy here, Kal,” Gant said, voice coming in through Kalas’s ear piece. “Coming out of the lift.”

  “Good,” Kalas replied, subvocalizing. He checked his phase disruptor was set to stun and moved to station himself in the shadow of the curtains that hung to one side of glass wall that overlooked the city. He shut one eye, kept the other fixed on the door. For a moment, all was perfectly still. The apartment’s climate control had stopped running when Kalas had disabled the suite’s security, and even the white noise hum of electronics was dead. Once upon a time, this would have been the moment where the rush of blood pounding in his ears deafened him. But Kalas had been a hunter a long time, and moments like these had ceased to frighten him.

  Gant’s voice came low in his ear, as if his Kanthite partner stood at his ear. “At the door. Look sharp now.” Kalas didn’t reply. He waited, pointed his disruptor at the door, his reflection a faint greenish blur on the brushed metal wall.

  The airlock cycled red to blue, and the inner seal came unglued, admitting the doctor back into his home. Anwen Sen was a small man, on the young side of middle age, with thick black hair and the copper complexion that marked him as a descendant of Kanthi’s first wave of colonists. He hadn’t seen Kalas, was busy undoing his nose-tubes and unzipping the puffy dun jacket he wore against the planet’s interminable chill.

  The hunter watched him go, hardly bothering to control his breathing as the small doctor crossed to the little kitchen unit, fussing with the contents of his pockets.

  “You know the trouble with thieving?” Kalas asked, leveling the stunner at the doctor. The man froze, hands on the blond stone of the counter. “There’s always something missing. People notice.”

  Dr. Sen did not turn. He did not move. That was good. That meant Kalas didn’t have to shoot him and tie him to a chair. Yet. In a high, nasal voice, the geneticist said, “You’re from the Consortium? One of their dogs?”

  Kalas took one careful step closer, footfall light on the thick carpets. He did not lower his arm. “Same as you.”

  “I’m not a dog,” the man said. “I do research.”

  “You’re a rat,” Kalas cut him off. “What did you do with them, Sen? Are they here?”

  He could see sweat beginning to well up on the back of the man’s neck. For all that, Kalas had to admit the man was surprisingly calm. Most of the bonecutters Kalas had known would have fainted already from the stress. “You’ve turned the place inside out, haven’t you?”

  “He doesn’t have them, Kal, I’m telling you,” Gant said over the comm. Kalas ignored him, but he knew Gant was right.

  The hunter took another measured step closer, adjusted his aim. “Who did you sell them to?”

  Sen whirled.

  Bang!

  Where he’d gotten the handgun Kalas wasn’t sure. Had it been in his coat? His sleeve? The bullet went wide, shattered against the metal wall behind him and he lunged to the right, firing back. The stunner bolt struck the cabinetry just above Sen’s shoulder, leaving a smoking mark on the glass there. Sen fired again, but he was no marksman.

  His hand was shaking. Kalas could see it. The man was afraid of his own gun, as such men so often were. He regained his footing. His balance. His aim. The stunner bolt took Dr. Sen in the shoulder, and he dropped his gun, eyes wide with mingled terror and frustration. The nerve damage had cascaded down his side, and his right leg buckled, tipping him back into the range. Kalas cleared the space between him and the doctor in three bounds, scooping up the old-style autorevolver. Without breaking stride, he threw an elbow across the doctor’s face, and while the man was reeling slid his stunner back into his pocket before he seized the man by his shirtfront.

  In a voice of forced and practiced calm, Kalas said, “You know why I’m here.”

  “I sold them!” Sen said, then yelped as Kalas shook him.

  “To who?”

  “To whom!” Gant corrected, forcing a snarl from between Kalas’s teeth.

  Kalas placed the mouth of Sen’s own revolver against the man’s shoulder, the weapon awkward in his left hand. “Who’d you sell to?”

  The man’s eyes widened, “I don’t remember! Some fence in the Narrows!”

  The hunter tightened his grip on the doctor’s shirt, “Which is it?” The doctor made a confused noise, and Kalas said, evenly, “Do you not remember? Or was it a fence in the Narrows?”

  The doctor shook his head furiously, tried to dislodge Kalas’s hand with his still functional one. Moving deliberately, Kalas moved the autorevolver down to the man’s thigh and fired. Dr. Sen made a choking sound, then bit back his cry, blood beginning to soak down his leg. He swore, breath coming in hissing gasps, “You shot me!”

  “And I will again if you don’t answer my questions, doctor,” Kalas said. Not hurried. He’d seen worse on the battlefield from his time in the Legions. He’d done worse. He’d had to. “Who did you sell to?” Sen wheezed, stun-lame arm flapping as he tried to put pressure on his gunshot wound. Kalas brushed the weak arm away with the autorevolver. “None of that now. Who did you sell to?”

  The geneticist shook his head more fiercely, “Said she had a client looking for seed stock. Some offworlder looking to jump-start their own colony in the Veil. I didn’t ask questions.”

  “I do.” Kalas shot the man in his other thigh.r />
  “You hunters . . .” the doctor hissed, teeth clenched.

  “Answer my questions and you can call the health service,” Kalas said. It was a lie, and perhaps the doctor knew it. He was a hunter for the Wong-Hopper Consortium, and the Consortium was not so forgiving of those who stole its product to sell on the black market.

  Kalas hoped the apartment walls were a thick. There was little law enforcement on Kanthi worth the name, but the last thing he wanted was a shootout with prefects of the colonial authority or—more likely—whichever enforcement syndicate Sen’s apartment tower had on the payroll.

  Kalas pressed his knee into one of the doctor’s wounds. Sen whimpered. He didn’t cry out—for which Kalas was grateful—he only clenched his jaw to stop from screaming. Words shaking, Sen said, “Vela! Vela—her name’s Vela. She works out of one of those old stockhouses in the Narrows, down by the reservoir and the fisheries, you know?”

  “I know!” Gant’s voice chimed over the ear piece. Kalas had almost forgotten the younger man was there.

  The hunter eased the pressure on Sen’s knee, glad the hydrophobic wicking in his long coat and pants had kept the blood off. “Good, good. And the buyer?”

  “I don’t know! For Earth’s sake! I don’t know!”

  Kalas let the little man go, and taking a step back he shook his head, “Doctor, I will shoot you again. I swear by Earth and Emperor, I will.”

  Anwen Sen allowed himself to slip down to the floor to sit amidst the smeared blood—the red of it stark against the pale tiling. Thus freed, he pressed his good hand to one thigh, wincing. “Black planet . . . I . . . I don’t know much, all right? She said something about someone called Giacomo.”

  “Giacomo?” Kalas repeated, keeping the gun pointed at Sen from his hip. “What is he? Jaddian?”