by Natalie Grey
“I trust you to do so,” Lan told him magnanimously. “I will return to my work for now.”
What work? Gar thought contemptuously, but he said nothing.
“We are glad to have you back,” Lan added, and he went back down the stairs and toward his hut.
He was considering his options. He had intended to give Gar more money to keep his mouth shut, but it seemed there was no longer any need to do that. And in business one should never spend money when one didn’t have to do so, of course.
Anyway, the whole thing had been his idea. He deserved to reap all the rewards.
He didn’t realize yet that those rewards might not be as positive as he was expecting.
Gar’s hands were clenched behind his back as he watched Lan leave.
It was clear what Lan wanted: to have the mines continue working for his sole benefit. Lan was many things, but he was not stupid about business. After this conversation, Gar knew exactly what the overseer was planning: to get away with this as long as he could, cutting all possible corners to make the most profits for himself, and when the whole thing either collapsed or authorities came for him Lan would run away with the money.
This was all about Lan, and Lan’s interests.
Gar knew he could stride up to the overseer’s hut and demand that he be compensated fairly. He probably should have done so, in fact. Sooner or later Lan would realize that it was strange for Gar not to have bargained at all with the information he revealed.
Would he have done so if he had not met Barnabas? He was afraid he might have.
He began to walk along the walls slowly, taking great care to inspect the construction and the electrical panels he could see. Lan would tell the guards what Gar was doing, so he no longer needed to worry that people would find his behavior odd or suspicious.
But it was difficult to look down on the camps from here and think about what was going on below. He could not tune out the little details he saw now; the way the guards watched the miners, the miners walking with slumped shoulders, the huts’ shoddy construction.
How had he allowed himself to be caught up in something like this? Had it happened in small increments or had he blinded himself to everything in his haste to get off Luvendan?
Those questions might be productive later, but they weren’t useful now. Gar tuned his thoughts out.
He could see places where the guards would easily be able to control crowds or get at people trying to escape, but there were a few stretches of wall that weren’t easily accessible to them. One of the guard towers had recently suffered an electrical failure and the guards weren’t manning it anymore. There was also a place where people had been dumping waste from the mines. Not only would it be difficult for the guards to reach anyone trying to break through the wall there, they might not even notice.
Gar just wished he knew what Barnabas’s plan was—and how soon he could expect the human to arrive.
8
The transport ship shuddered as it hit High Tortuga’s atmosphere. Carter Eastbourne ran a hand through his thick brown hair and sighed. He wanted off this ship already. It had been days since he’d had fresh air in his lungs, and…
Well, he should be honest. The Meredith Reynolds had really spoiled him. The air purification systems there ran like a dream, the lighting didn’t hurt his eyes, and the food was good. He could get anything he wanted there.
Contrast that with the alien transport ships—worn down and poorly maintained, with food that barely deserved the designation.
Which really left the question of what he was doing here.
The thing was, living in established settlements full of humans might be more comfortable in some ways, but it didn’t scratch “that itch.” Carter’s wife, Elisa, used that term with weary affection.
It was a big part of what had led him to leave Earth with Bethany Anne’s group. It wasn’t just that he’d spent years being frustrated by the total inability of governments on Earth to, well…govern. He’d known since he was a little boy that there had to be more than just life on Earth. There was more to explore. There were places to go and things to figure out.
In a way, he wanted to be traveling on ratty old ships and eating awful food. Those would make good stories for later, when he was growing old in a house he’d built with his own two hands and he had his family all around him.
And in the meantime? Well, he’d be seeing things no human had ever seen before and carving out his place in the universe.
When they’d been told about High Tortuga, he’d been one of the first to volunteer. He’d left Elisa with the twins, Alanna and Samuel, and come here to find them a new home.
But not in H’onu. No, Carter wanted to carve out his own little square of the world, somewhere less traveled. He wanted to be surrounded by the unfamiliar, building things from the ground up.
Elisa had asked him before he left if he had any ideas about how to make money when he settled in. When he’d said he didn’t have one she’d given him a Look, the sort of Look that made you realize just how foolish you’d been to underestimate her.
The truth was, he did have a plan—but it was risky.
It was very risky. He knew he should be grateful to Bethany Anne for leading the way to the stars, and he really was. He didn’t want to disagree with her on anything because he knew her morals were the absolute gold standard. He could never have left Earth or lived as long as he had without the technologies she and the Empire had made commonplace.
It was just, well...Carter liked Pepsi.
He knew for sure that if he were to set up a bottling plant on High Tortuga there would be plenty of business. There were others living in the shadows of the Meredith Reynolds who thought like he did. He’d even heard that Nathan Lowell was one of them. Carter knew the old saying: where there’s risk, there’s money.
Bethany Anne was only part of the risk, though. Elisa was the other part, and far closer to home. Carter was hoping to win her over by having the production systems in place by the time she showed up...and maybe an informal offer of protection from Bethany Anne’s wrath.
Secretly he kind of hoped the former Empress, now Queen, did show up. He’d heard her swearing could be really inventive when she got going, and he had always wanted to hear that. She’d chew Carter out, sure, but he’d get to meet one of his idols—and she might not destroy his whole stash.
For him, the risk just made it more fun.
The transport ship came down with a creak and a loud groan that made him wonder if it had really been wise to fly on it. Then there was the curious ear-popping sensation of an airlock opening. Even when it wasn’t close, you could really feel it.
Carter shuffled along with the other people, marveling at how similar it was to airline travel. Everyone jumped up as soon as they could and grabbed for their bags, even though they knew they wouldn’t get out soon.
To his surprise, though, there was no security checkpoint to go through. They just found themselves on a big, scorched pad of something like concrete with the city glimmering in the distance and a lot of vehicles nearby that were probably cabs.
Carter decided to walk. Most of the passengers seemed to be doing the same. The path was a swampy mess, but they hauled their bags along with grim determination—it looked grim to him, anyway—and he tramped behind them looking at anything and everything.
When he heard the distinctive whine in the air he looked around in absolute disbelief. It couldn’t be. Surely not.
But it was. There were mosquitoes on this planet, or at least something like them.
Fucking unbelievable. He was going to try to contact the scientists on the Meredith Reynolds, because if anyone could whip up some effective bug repellant it would be them. And none of that DEET-free crap, either. He wanted the mosquitoes dead and the ground under them salted. Metaphorically, of course, unless literally salting the ground was what the situation called for.
You couldn’t be too careful when it came to mosquitoes.
The city didn’t begin gradually like he’d expected. The dirt road just turned into a paved one all at once, and suddenly there were buildings. Given that they had to take care not to sink into the swamp, Carter supposed that made sense.
He decided just to let the flow of people take him along for a while. He didn’t know anyone here and it was morning, so he had plenty of time to find lodging. He could browse for a while and get a feel for the place.
A few people gave him long looks and he stared back equably. He didn’t really mind that sort of thing. Humans were newcomers. Even on the Meredith Reynolds, people stared a lot. Carter had fielded a lot of questions about himself, from the ridiculous to the ridiculously personal.
After some wanderings between various stalls selling food that smelled pretty good but might not be safe, the crowd carried him to the edge of the street and he had a chance to look out over it all.
He liked this place; liked it instinctively. It was a bit rough around the edges, but in a homey way—like people who came here could put together their own stand to sell their wares, or build their own house, or start their own business.
He saw something that looked like a bar and forged across the street, ducking into the dim interior and stopping when he saw a monkey sitting there. It chittered at him.
His aural implant translated the words: “Good afternoon, human. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Yes, please.” Carter heard the strange noises coming out of his mouth and shook his head slightly. It was weird using the implant. “Do you happen to know what’s safe for humans to drink?”
He had same basic upgrades as the rest of Meredith’s population, but he didn’t want to push it.
“I have fruit juice,” the bartender told him. “The human who was here yesterday drank that with no problems.” She added smugly, “He said it was very good. I make it myself.”
“I’ll have a glass of that then.” Carter smiled at the weight of the Pepsi in his bag. Maybe he should see about setting up shop somewhere that was already established. It was something to think about.
In the meantime, he wondered if he knew the other human who’d been here.
Shinigami liked researching things.
To her knowledge, every computer intelligence did. The world seemed to be set up to disperse information at the pace organic life forms could take it in, which was far too slow for her. Researching allowed her to do something with all the time between words when people were speaking, and also for the interminable amounts of time in which they slept.
When she’d mentioned the latter to Barnabas, he had asked her whether she dreamt of electric sheep and wandered vaguely off again to plan his mission. So she kept researching.
It was galling to admit, but he’d made a good point the other day about viewing High Tortuga as a whole, not simply in the context of this one mission.
Where she differed from him, however, was that while he wanted to talk to people in order to find out what he should know, she was sure she could reach the conclusions far more efficiently by sifting through the data.
For a while she had looked at the ships going in and out of High Tortuga, noting the ships’ makes and tracing their registrations. She’d made some progress, but not much. Not an awful lot happened here.
Then she realized that this was exactly the point—not an awful lot happened on High Tortuga.
What did happen here was, like the immigration of humans from the former Etheric Empire, the result of things happening elsewhere. The planet was simply a nexus where various forces and interests collided.
When she had realized that, her research had opened up significantly.
She went back through the records of the company that had owned the mines and compared High Tortuga to the other planets on which it operated. In not too long, she had found a simple but telling list of similarities: rich in ores, no indigenous sentient life, not wildly inhospitable, and most importantly, either not controlled by a government or very far from the government’s central location.
This told her more about why people would look for a place like High Tortuga. They wanted somewhere that they could do exactly what they had done—put in a bunch of mines without having to bother about laws or land rights, and not spend a great deal of money keeping people in the appropriate atmosphere or pressure.
Once she saw High Tortuga as a planet possessing certain qualities, she began to understand who might want it. There were certain norms for who could own land on “unclaimed” planets, but those norms were often violated. There were also many people who wanted to live here, not so much to build businesses and grow rich as to exist without an entrenched bureaucratic government hanging over their heads.
From resources to a breakdown of certain types of settlers, Shinigami began to build a list of potential problem areas in keeping the planet safe.
That was not as interesting to her, however, as undoing what had already been done. She had been studying the behavior of sentient organic minds, and she was beginning to learn what some people called “tactics” and others called “sneakiness.”
She had considered asking Barnabas for his input, but she was still not sure if ADAM and TOM had been serious about him being sneaky. She thought that might have been a practical joke.
In any case, she had a lot of ideas. She didn’t need to involve him yet.
She found the scouting conglomerates that both sent their ships out into space to chart new planets and bought information from independent pilots. She had thought of simply erasing Devon from their databases, but that left the problem that another person would inevitably come along and sell the information again.
No, she needed to be sneakier. She worked her way into their systems and began to change Devon’s classification. She couldn’t simply say it was barren, since it clearly was not. Instead, she modified the information to say that there were severely hostile plant and animal life forms, possibly including indigenous sentient life, and that the original settlers had lasted just long enough to build fairly respectable-looking cities before being brutally killed off by the local animals and a host of nasty diseases.
The only alien life remaining on the planet, she put in there, was a series of fanatical cults that sacrificed new settlers and ate them, and most of them had likely been driven mad by disease.
As a finishing touch, she began to work on a program to make the automated scanning systems of ships—always on the lookout for a little extra cash by scouting habitable new planets—totally disregard Devon. Nothing to see here, move along.
She was just finishing up when Barnabas looked up from his reading material and asked suspiciously, “Shinigami, you’ve been awfully quiet. What are you up to?”
“How do you know I’m up to something?”
“Nathan and Ecaterina once mentioned that the most worrisome sound for the parents of a toddler is silence. I’m extrapolating.”
“Are you saying that an AI is in any way comparable to a human toddler?”
“In many ways, actually.” He sat back. “The main ones would be that it’s too smart for its own good and also somewhat sociopathic. I believe the exact phrase Nathan used was, ‘tiny terrorist.’ You are basically a toddler with a flamethrower.”
“Rude! Maybe I won’t show you what I was working on.”
“That suggests you were originally planning on doing so, which means you must have wanted to.” He smiled.
“Maybe.” But she brought up the charts and programs.
He leaned forward to scan through them, and she watched his eyebrows rise as he assessed the information.
“This is some very good work.”
“Really?”
“Yes.” He looked up at her sensors with another smile. “You should add ‘venereal’ to the description of the diseases. Also, ‘necrotic.’”
“Why? You don’t think cerebral hemorrhage is good enough?”
“Trust me on this one, you want something visceral. A
nd before you ask, no sentient life form is going to care as much about their brain as their... Well...”
“Why not? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“There’s still so much you have to learn,” Barnabas replied wearily. “Though for what it’s worth, from a logical standpoint I agree with you.”
“This is one of those times when organic life is illogical, then.”
Barnabas snorted. “Sex? Yes, you could put it that way. It would be a massive understatement, of course, but it would technically be true.”
“Hmm. I can probably use that in the future.”
“You don’t say.” Barnabas stood up and carefully marked his place in his book. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to change.”
“Why? Into what?”
“You’ll see.”
9
Barnabas walked slowly and meditatively as his steps carried him away from Tethra and into the mountains. He could walk faster if he wanted to. He could have run the whole way if he’d wanted to.
However, he had learned that the discipline of pacing himself allowed him to be more present in the moment. It was a ritual he had been taught as a monk, and he still practiced it at times.
Speaking of which…
This is easily the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen you do.
You’ve only worked with me for a week and a half. To paraphrase Eric, you haven’t seen anything yet.
To paraphrase? What would he have said?
Barnabas wrinkled his nose slightly before repeating the exact phrasing. “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
You really dislike poor grammar, huh?
Yes. It is an abomination. There are perfectly good reasons to—
This is gonna be sooooo fun.
I regret so many things right now. Barnabas drew back the cowl of his monk’s robes and looked up at the mountains. Shinigami, can you see this?
Of course I can. Is that a joke?
No. Through my eyes, I mean.
Up in orbit, Shinigami paused in her research to look through Barnabas’s eyes. She knew she had the capability to do so very easily if he wished her to, but it had never occurred to her that it would be useful.
