How Dark the World Becomes

by Frank Chadwick

  I triggered my embedded commlink, the sound of flechettes tearing through vehicles and the screams of pain a few moments earlier echoing in my head.

  “Marrissa! Are you okay?” I practically screamed over the link.

  She was okay, and so were the kids, although she was so frightened and excited she started hiccupping.

  It’s funny how under stress you sort of abbreviate things. I meant to say, “Are you and the kids okay?” It was really the kids I was most concerned about, but the words came out different. She knew what I meant, though.

  We sped out of town and headed northeast, because that was the shortest road to thick jungle. We didn’t pass any disabled vehicles along the way, but I lost sight of Wataski’s trucks in all the confusion. We needed to get some vegetation overhead as soon as possible, hopefully before they got another drone airborne. The RTM rockets made a moaning scream as they passed over, and I heard the rippling crumps as they detonated all around the town.

  We made the jungle edge without even seeing any sign of pursuit. Then we entered the dark tunnel of the rainforest road. There were roads going in a couple different directions, a few vehicles on each of them. There was a car and three other light trucks in our little gaggle of fugitives. My pulse rate slowed down enough that I got some of my higher brain functions back, and I took a good look around.

  The jungle road was pretty interesting. The roadway was very hard, almost glass-like, but with a flexible composite covering four or five centimeters thick over the top. You could see that the roadway was buckled and uneven in places, maybe because of tree roots or erosion of the ground nearby, or just settling under the weight of traffic. I’d seen roads like this before—directed-fusion burned, with the heat probably used to incinerate the undergrowth as well as form the roadbed from the soil underneath, melted in temperatures that you usually find inside a star. The composite layer came later—you needed it to protect the vehicles from the roadway, because once that solid sheet began to break—and anything that long and that rigid would start to break right away—the edges would slash your tires to ribbons. But it was a cheap and fast way to cut a road.

  I wondered how they kept the rainforest from burning down while they were cutting it; maybe they did their fusion work in the rainy season. Dirt was not very dense, so you needed to fuse a lot of it to get a solid roadbed. As a result, the road itself was sunken in a shallow ravine, which meant the road would be a canal in the rainy season if it weren’t for the drainage ditches to either side. Maybe it was a canal anyway when it rained hard enough.

  After an hour of exciting driving, I spotted a wide spot in the road and told Borro to pull over. Another truck came even with us and stopped, and a Marine corporal I didn’t recognize stuck his head out the cab window.

  “Why are you stopping?” he yelled.

  “We got wounded,” I yelled back, and hooked my thumb over my shoulder toward the cargo bay.

  “We need to keep moving!” he answered.

  “Go ahead. We’ll catch up.”

  Sure, when pigs fly we would.

  He hit the accelerator and sped down the road. The car ahead of us had already vanished around a bend, and the two following trucks disappeared after it in seconds.

  “They still have difficulty accepting the need for dispersion,” Borro observed.

  “Yup.”

  * * *

  We had some very frightened people in the back of the vehicle—all Varoki, of course, except for Marfoglia. Aside from our original group, we had the MP, four Varoki men, two women, and a little girl. None of the adults were the little girl’s parents.

  One of the men had taken a flechette in the side of his head, and it apparently went in and then bounced around inside for a while. We had plastic body bags, so we bagged and sealed him, slid him under the bench seat with as much dignity as the situation allowed, and gave him a moment of silence.

  Another man and one of the women had combat dressings as well. The wounds didn’t look that serious, but both of them were carrying on and making a lot of noise. That was typical; really serious wounds don’t hurt as much as light wounds do, strange as that sounds. It’s partly because serious trauma tends to put you in shock—nature’s anesthetic.

  The little girl shivered with fear and pain, her left hand badly mangled by a flechette burst. Someone had already dressed her wound and given her something for the pain, so she was probably a lot better off now than half an hour ago. Tweezaa sat beside her, holding her good hand, and I think that might have been as effective as the anti-shock drug.

  TheHon was sitting on the other side of Tweezaa, and Barraki next to him. TheHon had his arms around the two kid’s shoulders, and it made me feel jealous, in a stupid sort of way. After all, I was the one supposed to make them feel safe, right?

  Wrong. I was supposed to actually make them be safe, which was what I was doing. It still felt like he was stealing my job, though.

  “You guys okay?” I asked Barraki. He gave me a shaky smile and nodded. Tweezaa looked calmer. She had someone to comfort—the wounded girl—and that can make a big difference.

  Marfoglia was inventorying our consumables. Maybe she was doing it to keep busy and take her mind off her fear, or maybe she was doing it because that economist part of her brain just needed to count shit and make lists, but either way, it needed doing.

  Borro and I did a quick material assessment next. The truck was a pretty standard outback rig—all-wheel drive, each wheel powered by its own electric motor in the wheel assembly, juiced from a central battery pack spread along the bottom of the chassis. The batteries recharged from an LENR generator—Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, what they used to call cold fusion. Not a lot of energy output, but it’s continuous, clean, and cheap, provided the generator had a good fill of deuterium—heavy water—and a fill might last a year or more. The generator didn’t kick out enough juice to actually run the truck continuously, which is why the batteries were there—the generator was charging them all the time, and you could get maybe eight or ten hours driving in every twenty from them.

  There were solar skins on the cab roofs as well, and they would get you extra mileage if you were out in the sunlight a lot. But since we were avoiding open skies, the LENR was it.

  “We need to disable the vehicle transponder right away,” I said to Borro. Every vehicle has a unique transponder code, an electronic vehicle-identification number that makes stolen vehicles fairly easy to track. We were facing counterinsurgency goons, playing at soldier instead of cop, but sooner or later they’d remember their basic police procedures. Borro shrugged.

  “In some ways a vehicle without a transponder signature is as much of a problem as a vehicle with a high interest code,” he answered. “Let us contact your people in orbit and have them download a modified transponder code.”

  “Uhh . . . I doubt they can do that,” I answered.

  “Mr. Naradnyo,” he said, “I understand that you have some experience at this. Trust me that I have some experience from the other side of the . . . contest. They have the means to alter the transponder codes from orbit, provided your helmet downlink is within a meter or so of the transponder itself.”

  Really? Now, that was interesting.

  We added up the firepower next. We had my Hawker, the little LeMatt, and the Marine-issue RAG-19, with twelve magazines and eight grenades. Borro and the MP each had a gauss pistol, and that was it. We were okay on rations—Marfoglia’s inventory showed we had enough to last a week, and if it took any longer than that to get to safety, we were screwed anyway.

  The truck had enough battery charge for about six more hours of driving, given the fact that the roads weren’t all that good back here in the jungle. I didn’t want to run us absolutely bone dry, though, so Borro and I decided on four more hours of travel and then we’d stop for the night to let the generators recharge the batteries.

  Tomorrow I’d spring part two of the plan on everyone.

  TWENTY-FIVE


  “Jungle Bird Seven, this is Orbital Six. Why have you turned northwest?”

  “Commodore Gasiri!” I answered. “Good to hear you again.”

  “Maintain comm protocol and answer query: Why have you turned northwest?”

  “Take it easy, Commodore. We’re on tight beam. They can’t listen in unless they got a hover-plat almost right between us, and one of us would notice that.”

  “Goddamnit, Naradnyo, if you think I do not know what you are up to, you are sadly mistaken. Now get back on that northbound road or I will have your ass.”

  “You talk pretty tough from orbit, Gasiri. Why don’t you come down here and we’ll see whose ass gets kicked?”

  I could tell her self-control was starting to slip. She was under a lot of pressure, after all, and I wasn’t making her life any easier. Well, too bad. That wasn’t my job.

  I had the feed switched to the uplink helmet’s speaker so we could all hear, but for a half minute or so there was just silence. Beside me, Barraki’s ears started quivering with alarm. I killed the mike for a second and winked at him.

  “Don’t worry, pal. I’m pretty sure I can take her.”

  Borro covered his eyes with his hand and shook his head. The Varoki MP, a lance corporal named Tuvaani, broke into a big grin. Marfoglia just looked off into the jungle. She was wearing viewer glasses and cramming like crazy on the data dump I’d given her a couple hours ago.

  When Gasiri spoke again, her voice was level and controlled. She was sharp enough to know that screaming wasn’t going to get her anywhere. More to the point, she understood the implication of what I’d said—as long as we were the ones down here with our asses in the grass, she was just another backseat driver with a dime-a-dozen opinion.

  “What does your special passenger think of this new plan?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t share it with him. I got him out digging a latrine for us, but when he gets back, you can ask him yourself.”

  Gasiri probably figured that last bit was a wisecrack, and it was, but it was also the truth. I did have the Cottohazz Executive Council’s Special Envoy Plenipotentiary for Emergency Abatement on K’Tok digging a latrine. I’d told him before that I was in charge and he was strictly coolie labor, and so I’d given him a couple crappy jobs just to drive the point home.

  “You really do amuse yourself, don’t you, Naradnyo?”

  “Well, Commodore, somebody better. Nobody seems to like it much when I get mad.”

  * * *

  A half hour later we were on the road again, and this time I rode in back, while the Varoki MP rode shotgun up front with Borro. We had the sideflaps of the cargo bed rolled up to get more air, but it didn’t help that much. The jungle closed around us like a prison, made more oppressive by the solid overhead canopy of vegetation. Sweat poured off me, and everyone else for that matter. I swatted a flying bug that stung me on the neck—no more survival instinct than the bugs on Nishtaaka, but at least they were smaller.

  “Okay, so now you’re my political expert,” I said to Marfoglia. “Educate me.”

  We were sitting all the way in front, right behind the cab, with a little space between us and the other passengers. It wasn’t much privacy, but it was all there was.

  She ate as she frowned in thought, working through an answer. She was eating a ration pack, and just the way she held the pack in one hand and her fork in the other looked balanced, comfortable, and somehow elegant, as if it were the only right way to eat rations in the field. How did she do that? Was it some gimmick they taught in charm school or something? I found it impressive and irritating at the same time, and that’s a good trick.

  “How much of the briefing did you read?”

  “Enough to give me a headache,” I answered. “That’s when I turned it over to you. Imagine I’m an investor. What’s the prospectus?”

  She gave me a look that said she didn’t like being patronized, but she was used to it coming from assholes like me.

  “Don’t invest a Cotto here. Terrible risk-to-reward ratio. Everybody’s banking on the ecoform working.”

  “Problems with that?” I asked.

  “Well, the old Many-Eggs-One-Basket problem to begin with. They have had a Needle in place a long time, and it’s not exactly paying for itself. A lot of governments and merchant houses have money sunk into the world, and they all believe the money has earned them the right to decide what happens here. But the people who live here have their own ideas.”

  “Is that what this revolt is about?”

  She frowned again as she took another bite and cocked her head to the side in thought.

  “Ultimately, yes. There are complaints about corruption and incompetence in the uZmataanki colonial government, but the political agenda of the insurgents isn’t simply reform or a power change; it’s union between the two colonies to become an independent member state of the Cottohazz.”

  “That’s why they’re called Unionists?” I asked, and she nodded. “Well, hard to see the Cottohazz making them a member when they’re shooting up Cottohazz security forces.”

  “I didn’t see any record of hostilities against any Cottohazz forces in the briefing,” she said. She didn’t see any because there weren’t any—that I’d checked. Interesting that she’d noticed.

  “Okay, one more question. Later I’ll have a million, but this is the big one. I didn’t run across any clear records of atrocities. What did you see?”

  “Quite a few charges by the uZmataanki colonial government—assassinations of government officials, firing at people who were under flags of truce, executing prisoners after a battle . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “Shit happens. Half of it’s lies and the other half everybody does when no one’s looking. Here’s the acid test—any mass graves?”

  She shook her head.

  That’s what I’d figured, but it was good to have it confirmed. I leaned back, took a drink of water from my load harness, and let my mind wander. Sometimes a wandering mind finds useful places to go.

  “I wonder if Wataski made it out,” I said.

  “You like her, don’t you?” Marfoglia asked.

  “Yeah. She reminds me of a Zack. Don’t ever tell her I said that; she’d probably take it wrong.”

  “You like Zaschaan, too.”

  “I do. Great senses of humor.”

  She frowned at me, unsure if I was making fun of her or just being a wiseass. For a change, none of the above.

  “When I was on Nishtaaka—seems like a lifetime ago now—right after we made planetfall they trucked us to the front. We drove past a Zack ADA battery deployed to defend Needledown. ADA, that’s air-defense artillery, mostly high-energy pulse lasers and masers, but backed up with a few missile rails. The directed-energy weapons will knock down just about anything aircraft-sized that pokes up over the horizon, unless it’s really well shielded—say a superconducting reflector skin. If so, that’s what the missiles are for. This Zack outfit we passed was a missile battery.

  “I didn’t speak or read Szawa yet, but my squad leader did, and when he saw what they’d painted on one of the sealed launch canisters, he laughed.

  “What did it say?” I’d asked.

  “Reflect This.”

  I smiled again just remembering.

  “That’s why we headed north originally, isn’t it?” she asked. “To reach the uBakai, so their air defenses can protect us from uZmataanki aircraft.”

  “Yup.”

  “But if so . . .”

  She was looking at me oddly, like she was thinking real hard. Then her eyes narrowed, but in triumph rather than anger, and she smiled.

  “I know your new plan, too,” she said, and she leaned back against the truck railing and folded her arms in triumph. “It will probably get us killed.”

  “Open to suggestions,” I offered, but she didn’t have any, so the conversation petered out.

  * * *

  It sounds odd, but I don’t remember much
of the next two days. I do remember almost getting lynched once.

  We’d pulled into a jungle settlement—a dozen or so buildings and maybe half again as many vehicles. There were two small stores—one specializing in dry goods, hardware, and food, the other for technical stuff: vehicle parts, comm gear, etc. There was a hostel that served hot meals to the locals, one official-looking building, and a bunch of private residences. Not a very big town, but it had a purposeful look to it. There might be a famine and a war going on, but these people had food, work, and a mission, whatever that was.

  Marfoglia stayed under canvas in the truck with TheHon and the kids, and Lance Corporal Tuvaani stood guard to keep the curious away. Our five adult Varoki civilians had broken up into two groups to shop for supplies, one group per store, but their real purpose was to poke around and see what they could find out.

  Meanwhile Borro, wearing parts of my body-armor rig and the corporal’s fatigue cap and shoulder brassard as a half-assed MP uniform, pushed me at gunpoint down the street. I had my hands tied in front of me, and I was wearing some body armor and the helmet, but with the visor up so folks could see Borro’s Human “prisoner.” Maybe staging a one-man POW parade wasn’t the smartest part of my plan, but none of us could think of any other way to get me and the helmet close enough to all those vehicles one at a time.

  See, it occurred to me that changing our transponder code wasn’t much of an answer. If it was a phony code, that would show up in their database. If it was a duplicate code, it would also show up, and although they might not know which code location was the phony, they could at least narrow it down to two target points. No, the answer was to go into a town and change all of the vehicle transponder codes there to match ours. Then let them figure out which one was which. Of course, a stranger in an uplink helmet hanging around everyone’s vehicle might attract attention, so instead we staged our little passion play.