Transference Station

by Stephen Hunt

  ‘I’m the skipper,’ said Lana, ‘nobody gets a say. You just get to voice your thoughts, is all, so I know I’m examining the situation from all the angles. And as far as the chief is concerned, one system looks pretty much the same as the next when you won’t even leave the engine room.’

  The screen next to the door indicated a safe seal had been formed by the station’s gantry, so Lana pulled the lock open. There was a slight sweet smell to the air on the other side. Transference had low traces of methylene in its atmosphere, the station running their environmental systems just like mamma had baked below. It was about the only sweet thing spacers found in Transference Station. They walked through a thin cloud of dust filling the corridor, decontamination nano – imperceptibly testing the visitors’ blood and DNA to make sure their health matched the ship’s pre-arrival check-up data. Pity the authorities never scrubbed the billions living in the station. Lana was more likely to catch something from Transference’s citizens rather than the reverse. After the decon cloud, they passed through the entrance into the habitat. Transference Station’s main ring was divided into six levels, if only to give the property realtors something to justify their price differentials. Anyone buying bottom on six didn’t need a mortgage, they needed a laser fence to keep the locals out. Lana found herself on one of the midlevels, a plaza scattered with fountains and public art taking up the full volume of the chamber. It was a good attempt to make the station look civilized to visiting eyes, but the station cops in twenty-foot high exo-armour couldn’t be mistaken for modern art, even with the fountains’ water foaming into all sorts of creative rollercoaster shapes under focused gravity compression. There was a glass-viewing gallery in front of Lana, aluminium rails to clutch onto while watching the spin of the world below. She glanced down. It was just as she remembered it. Transference Station locked to its parent planet’s spin, a circlet set above the oceans. Nobody in the Edge had the money and resources to build space elevators – that was strictly alliance tech – so cargo and passengers shuttled between ground and station the economic way, little motes of light exploding across the seas below as craft powered their way into orbit. Engineless craft, little more than water-filled cones riding beams from super-lasers up to space. Going down it was heat shields and gravity brakes and biodegradable parachutes. The fortieth century and steam power – albeit liquid reaction mass under laser ignition – was still going strong. You had to hand it to humanity; no good idea went to waste. Everything ended up being recycled – metals, plastics, technologies, politics. No wonder near-immortal sentients like Zeno ended up jaded. The merry-go-round of history just keeps on spinning. Lana’s thoughts turned to Dollar-sign Dillard waiting for them in his office. Some people cling to the ride just a little bit tight. Yeah, everyone deserved to meet him once. Trouble was, for Lana, this visit was once too often for her taste. There were benches on the other side of the viewing gallery, a gaggle of women in colourful dresses gossiping there in a language she hadn’t learnt. A Brazilian derivative, maybe, if their dark features were any guide. They had children playing around their feet. Lana felt a tug of conflicting emotions as she observed the kids enjoying themselves. Forget it, girl. A starship is no place to bring up a toddler. You’re living proof of that. Your whole family dead on a foreign world, leaving you to be raised by a ship’s A.I and an android.

  Lana watched her navigator head off to church, while Zeno slipped away to do whatever the hell her secretive android did during his shore leave. ‘Come on,’ she sighed. ‘Let’s go and see DSD.’ And let’s see if I can walk away without being pooch-screwed this time.

  ***

  Polter was approaching the temple of the Unified Church when a gang of young humans stepped out from a break between two living units, blocking his path. Polter was the only one walking along the pavement at the moment. A few automated transport pods moved up and down the street, but their windows were mirrored, no doubt displaying entrainment feeds so the inhabitants wouldn’t have to notice the low rent neighbourhood they were passing through and feel guilty pangs at the poverty of the station’s lowest level. But this was where mother church so often did her business, amidst those that needed succouring most. The kaggen navigator could see that the gangsters were dirt-poor even as he took in their feral pinched faces – their chests a riot of competing animated adverts, clothes handed out free from a sponsorship store. These braves had hacked their clothes’ broadcast fibres, though, muting the sound – breeching the terms under which the dole shops had passed them the shirts, jackets and trousers. It would take a brave store enforcer to call such scruffs to account, though. They would no doubt take one look at the illegally amped shock sticks clutched in their fists and decide that discretion was the better part of valour. Polter whistled in disgust as their leader stepped out of the crowd. He wore a home weaved monk’s habit, having shaved his head into a brutal tonsure. So, what Polter had heard on the ship was true then. Shocking, but true. Blasphemy in its rawest form.

  ‘Da mihi pecuniam tuam, spumae,’ snarled the gang leader.

  ‘I might forgive you your crude mangling of Latin,’ said Polter. ‘But your mockery of a churchman is something I find reprehensible.’

  The young thug lifted up his phone, a tiny black ceramic stick tied to his belt as though it was a bible. He abandoned his attempts at Pig Latin and indicated that his device was set to receive a transfer of funds from Polter’s phone. ‘You walk our streets, you pay our toll.’

  Polter lifted up a manipulator hand and pointed towards the temple entrance less than a hundred feet away. ‘These streets belong to our Lord, young miscreant. You must present your hearts to the Holiest of Holies if you are to prosper. Offer me not violence but your penance.’

  ‘This is what I have for you, fucker,’ said the gang leader, jabbing the shock stick an inch short of Polter’s face, little sparks of energy flashing against his heavy carapace above. ‘What are you, some kind of snail-head? You’re carrying your shitting house around on those mutant legs of yours? How many dollars you got on your phone for me, fucker?’

  ‘If you weren’t truanting quite so effectively, young human, you might have learnt that I am a Kaggen,’ said Polter. He seized the gang leader’s hand and pulled the weapon down onto the surface of his shell, a lightning flash of blue electricity coursing across his elaborately tattooed carapace as the weapon discharged in a couple of seconds. Jabbing down with a bony finger, Polter paralyzed the faux monk’s hand, removed the spent shock stick and tossed it aside in less time than it took the ruffian to yelp in surprise. ‘I have felt the agony of the Holy of Holies as I have trespassed across his realm, I have broken the folds of hyperspace and been rewarded with infinite bliss. You think this mean spark you carry can touch me? It is less even than the marks of pollution spotting your souls.’

  The others charged in and had at the navigator with their sticks, a sulphurous stink filling the street as his shell danced with weapons discharge. Polter gave them long enough to realize that ten of their illegally amplified anti-mugging devices simultaneously striking his body were only going to yield the same result as their chief’s weapon. Then he unfurled his two vestigial fighting claws, filling the entire width of the pavement with the clacking of his razored pincers. ‘We are no longer a violent species, but I am sorely tempted to chastise your flesh!’

  Driven into a murderous rage through his loss of face, the gang leader ran at Polter screaming a string of incoherent blasphemies. The navigator gave him the blunt end of his right claw, lifting the chief off his feet and sending him sprawling against the wall of the nearest building. There he lay, moaning, while his pack of young bandits fled as Polter’s six legs pincered his bulk towards them. They were no longer facing an alien stranger begging to be liberated of its purse. They were fleeing an advancing organic tank, a species that had once battered and clawed its way to the top of its ecosystem’s food chain, on land and underwater.

  Scooping up the semiconscious thug, Polter w
alked unaccosted the rest of the way to church. Climbing the steps, double doors opened automatically in front of him. There was already a congregation at worship in the pews, mainly humans, a few representatives of other species who had embraced the unified church. Linking their destinies to the universal spirit. Hidden speakers in the eaves of the church began blaring out a hymn of welcome, recognising the identity of a lay preacher being signalled by Polter’s phone. The vicar was a female human, sitting on the altar under the joined cross and crescent of humanity’s original church, the centre of the cross bisected by the lightning flash of the skirl’s deity. She was beating passionately on the holy water drum of the kaggens. A choir stood on her left, singing and wildly beating on their own instruments.

  ‘I have come,’ cried Polter. He tossed the miserable gang leader down on the aisle and drove him towards the altar with his jabbing feet. ‘I share the miracle of transiting heaven, and I bring one who needs to repent. Forward, you wicked little tree monkey. Forward to find the Holiest of Holies within your foul heart.’

  ‘Brother!’ yelled the vicar, leaping down. She pulled the gang leader to his feet and was passed a drum which she forced into the thug’s hands. ‘Play, boy, play! Drum the evil out of your soul.’

  He stumbled and swayed, awed by the subliminal majesty of the hymn, and began drumming as the rapture swept him up, a deep sonic beat possessing his limbs. It was doubtless the first time the miscreant had been to church… but the addictive chemicals on the skin of the drum would ensure it wouldn’t be his last.

  Polter turned to face the congregation, their faces earnest and mesmerized. He beat on his tattooed shell with his two weapon claws; appendages of war remade into one the holiest tools of worship. Swords into ploughshares and pincers into drum sticks.

  ‘I have remade the universe to reach the lowest halls of heaven and the universe had remade me!’ cried Polter.

  Hallelujah, returned the congregation. Hallelujah! Polter was home.

  ***

  The part of Calder that hadn’t been inculcated to the wonders of the future by Zeno’s sim entertainments found the idea of so many people living in a metal ring circling a world quite bizarre. On a mental level, Calder knew the advantages of living in orbit rather than dirt-side were legion. Never too hot, never too cold. Immune from pollution, tsunamis, hurricanes, ice ages, global warming, volcanic eruptions, landslides, rising sea levels, acid rain and too harsh seasons. But the born-and-raised on Hesperus native in him found the concept just a little claustrophobic. On the Gravity Rose you were always aware you were on a ship – passages that stretched for miles and hydroponic gardens giving out to the void had never felt quite so out of place as this. On Transference Station, it was as though the noises and smells of the most crowded city in Hesperus had been packed into decks crammed with houses and shops and factories and commercial concerns. The idea of living here, well, it just felt wrong in a way that serving on board the Gravity Rose hadn’t. Maybe because with just the six of them rattling around the Gravity Rose’s cavernous spaces, living on board the massive ship had never seemed as congested or busy as this. The habitat’s transportation tube had brought Calder, Lana and Skrat to a fancy commercial district. Glass-fronted office buildings interspaced with boutique stores and hand-milled coffee shops, workers in sober dark business suits. An area that seemed at odds with the bent nature of the commission Lana seemed to be expecting to negotiate. These corporate drones put Calder in mind of priests back home, the same dead faces and intentness of purpose. The manner in which they burnt people here might involve articles of law rather than tar baths and petrol-filled cauldrons, but Calder suspected the results were frequently the same. Their attitude certainly was. It was all very Lives of the Planet Kings, albeit a slightly more low rent version of the lifestyles enjoyed by the sim show’s planetary plutocrats. Not an advert to be seen on any of the shirts or jackets here. Calder guessed that the executives of this neighbourhood didn’t source their clothes free from sponsorship stores and dole shops. Were the locals even exposed to marketing here? It wouldn’t have surprised Calder to discover that this level’s inhabitants automatically knew which little ceramic fingernail of a device displayed on black cushions in shop displays were the current season’s must-have object of desire. Up until a month ago, Calder would have said that a brand was a burning hot length of iron used to mark your family’s slaves. But the royal-in-exile was learning fast.

  Lana led them to a rise of crystal-fronted offices, a marble-floored atrium with a wall of brass plaques mounted behind a curved desk waiting inside. The organisations’ names looked exotic to Calder. They gave away little indication of purpose or function. The prince studied them, as if staring could decipher the firms’ line of business. Old Star Associates, TZL Analysis and Masterworld Group. Much like the boutiques outside, abstruse signalling only enhanced their status. If you had to ask, you had already failed to appreciate their value. To the rear of the reception sat a robot, a pretty woman’s face swimming pixelated inside its glass-screened head, octopus arms on the body flickering across of a bank of concealed instruments.

  ‘Trans-space Situations,’ announced Lana. ‘Three expected.’

  ‘Welcome Captain Fiveworlds,’ said the robot, the photo-realistic animation tilting inside the domed head, dazzling white teeth smiling at the three of them as if they were diplomats turning up at a foreign court. ‘Take the elevator to the top floor, please.’

  The lift was designed with retro-historic styling; wrought iron doors and ancient polished wood for walls and floor. Of course, to Calder even an antique lift was a future that had never arrived at his primitive world. What it took the party to might have been considered retro-historic too. Calder gawped in amazement at what lay beyond. An entrance hall of gleaming spotless white, dotted with hundreds of coin-size holographic projectors. This rig wasn’t being used for remote teleconference calls, though. It was being run to fill the chamber beyond with a cartoon landscape – trees with human faces in the bark swaying as impossibly cute animals gambolled in the grass – squirrels, rabbits and chipmunks. Wooden faces gurned at Calder, and through the passage of oaks, he could just make out a city beyond a set of hills, little puffs of smoke emerging from factors stacks. Fumes coiled up towards a golden sun hanging high in a cloudless sky, the sun glaring irately at the pollution and blowing it away whenever it drifted too close. Filled with this faux animated landscape, it was impossible to tell how big the room beyond really was. Calder could be standing in the entrance to something office-sized; or the space might be on the same scale as one of the cavernous cargo cambers back on board the Gravity Rose.

  A chime behind the prince announced that the lift doors had opened again, bringing someone else to the hallway. As he turned, a small metal device floated out of the elevator – a steel globe with a segmented trunk hanging off the sphere; shiny lenses for eyes on either side of the proboscis. Its burnished metal exterior was engraved with a series of currency signs, including the alliance T-bill. Another robot or a mobile holo-projector? Perhaps they weren’t going to meet Dollar-sign Dillard in person after all?

  Lana nodded towards the sphere. ‘DSD. It’s been a while.’

  ‘Captain Fiveworlds,’ hummed the sphere, dipping in the air, its proboscis waving from side-to-side to take in Calder and the first mate. There was something vaguely unsettling about the way the trunk moved, as if the organ was alive. An erection in metal saluting them. ‘Zeno isn’t here with you?’

  ‘Other business, apparently.’

  ‘A pity. I was hoping to ask him what he thought about the recent Oscar nominations.’

  ‘What, you haven’t got enough fanboys in the local data sphere? What’s the system’s population up to these days? Twenty billion?’

  ‘Twenty billion freshly minted turds-for-brains, perhaps, each blogging as if their fatuous gushings are original and unique. Not a one able to bring Zeno’s vast experience to a discussion on cultural matters.’


  Calder gazed in confusion at the skipper talking to the sphere. ‘Are we to meet virtually? Is this a teleconference suite?’

  ‘Calder Durk, meet Dollar-sign Dillard. Calder here is trying out for the newbie’s position on the Rose.’

  Calder didn’t like the way Lana said that. It sounded a little too much like cabin boy, rather than the respect due the ex-ruler of an entire kingdom, an heir apparent used to having everyone from farmers to generals sucking up to him.

  ‘Interesting,’ came the voice from the sphere. ‘The boy’s accent is archaic, older than I am, even.’

  ‘We recently extracted the dear chap from a failed colony world,’ said Skrat. ‘An Iron Age level of technology and little contact with offworlders for the last thousand years or so.’

  ‘Aha,’ said the globe. ‘Linguistic drift, Mister Skeratt, of course. And no doubt suffering from the afterburn of all those nasty training viruses to bring him up to speed.’

  ‘I think I need to be injected with a few extra ones,’ said Calder, suspiciously eyeing the machine. ‘Are we not to meet face-to-face?’

  ‘Oh, but you are,’ bobbed the sphere, the metal trunk weaving excitedly about. The voice sounded amused. ‘What is left of my face is inside the pod you see before you.’

  ‘DSD is a cybernetic,’ said Lana. ‘Life extension treatments can currently only take you to your seven hundredth birthday. If you want to go further, then…’ she encompassed the sphere hovering above the floor, ‘this what is required.’

  Calder recoiled in disgust. There were the remains of a human inside that thing? How could anyone consider inhabiting a floating urn living?

  ‘Why not use the prevailing term for what I am,’ said Dollar-sign Dillard, ‘which is to say, pickled.’ He bobbed forward, arrowing towards the colourful hologram landscape of the chamber beyond. As he passed the projection system’s threshold, the cartoon form of a male humanoid cat replaced the steel globe, a tall feline sporting a red-banded hat titled at a jaunty angle and a cane swinging in his brown-furred hand. ‘That’s better. Come on in, let’s talk business.’