The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “There was some confusion with this flooring, as I recall?” Martinez asked. His review of the Fleet contracts had told him that much.

  “Yes, Lord Inspector, there was,” Allodorm said in his beautiful voice. “A consequence of our not rethinking something – we hadn’t worried about anything so basic as station flooring. But when we looked at the standard station flooring we’d ordered, we found that it was inadequate to the stresses of a developing station, the vehicle traffic and weights we’d have to move along in these corridors. We’d have to replace it all within ten years, and of course we couldn’t afford to shut down the station to do that, not with our deadlines. So we had to special order new flooring from Zarafan, and ship it out by high-gee express.”

  “That Torminel crew must have knocked years off their lives getting it here,” Ehl said, and made a deliberate, shivering motion of his hands – his hollow-boned species abhorred high gravities.

  “Well,” said Martinez, “at least the problem was corrected.”

  He tried to sound offhand, and he wondered how he could get underneath the flooring to take a look at it.

  The Senior Officers’ Quarters were as overdesigned as the rest of the station, with dark wood paneling and polished brass fittings. Aquaria glowed turquoise along the walls, filled with exotic fish from the planet below, and below the tall ceilings hung chandeliers that looked like ice sculptures. Everything smelled new. Ehl and Allodorm retired to allow their visitors to “recover from the rigors of the journey,” as if traveling forty-three days by private yacht were as taxing as crossing a mountain range on the back of a mule.

  That left Terza and Martinez alone in the entrance hall, standing on the wood parquet that formed a map of the empire, with Chee a small disk of green malachite and Zanshaa, the capital, a blood-red garnet.

  They looked at each other. “They’ve given us separate bedrooms,” Terza said.

  “I noticed.”

  “I’ll have Fran move my things into your room, if that’s all right.”

  “Please,” Martinez said. “That huge room would be lonely without you.”

  Their palace in Zanshaa High City didn’t have bedrooms as large. The Fleet must have paid a pretty penny for these accommodations, but on the other hand the Fleet wasn’t exactly known for depriving its officers of their comforts.

  There was an hour or so before dinner. Martinez had his orderly, Alikhan, find him some casual civilian clothes, and he changed and left his quarters through the kitchen entrance, surprising the cooks who were preparing his meal.

  This was a free hour on his schedule. He might as well make use of it.

  He walked to one of the personnel elevators, then went to the unfinished wheel. He found an area still under construction, where Torminel workers straddled polycarbon beams just beyond portable barriers, working on pipes and ducts, and the flooring waited on huge spools taller than a Lai-own. Martinez quietly made some measurements, then ventured across the barriers to the point where the flooring dropped away to reveal an expanse of plastic sheeting, followed by open beams and the workers.

  If the Torminel noticed Martinez making his measurements, they gave no sign. Martinez finished his task and returned to his quarters.

  “Not custom-made, not at all,” Martinez said over dinner. “They’re just laying a second layer of the standard flooring over the first.” He raised a glass and sipped some of the Fleet’s excellent emerald Hy-oso wine. “The Meridian Company’s pocketing the money for all that flooring.”

  “I’d suggest not,” Terza said. “I think the flooring exists. That express ship came out here with something. I think the flooring’s been diverted to another project, one owned one hundred percent by the Meridian Company.”

  “I wonder how many people know,” Martinez said.

  “Quite a few, probably,” Terza said. “Not the work gangs, who I imagine just do what they’re told. You can’t do corruption on this scale without a good many people figuring it out. But I’m sure the company keeps them happy one way or another.”

  “Does Lord Ehl know, I wonder?” Martinez asked. “He’d have to be remarkably incurious not to notice what’s happening with the flooring, but perhaps he is incurious.”

  Terza gave Martinez a significant look. “I suggest you not ask him,” she said.

  Martinez looked at his plate and considered his roast fristigo lying in its sauce of onions and kistip berries. The berries and vegetables were fresh, a delight after forty-three days without – the settlements must have got agriculture under way. “I wish we knew who owns the Meridian Company. But it’s privately held, and the exchanges don’t know because it’s not publicly traded . . .” He let the thought fade away. “As Lord Inspector I could demand the information, but I might not get it, and it’s an indiscreet way of conducting an investigation.”

  “Lord Pa must be one of the owners, and very likely the whole Maq-fan clan is involved,” Terza said. “But unless we get access to the confidential records of whatever planet the company’s chartered on, we’re sunk . . .” She looked thoughtful. “You know, I could find out.”

  Martinez turned to her. “How?” he said.

  “Meridian does business with the Fleet, and law requires them to give the Ministry a list of their principal owners. The names are supposed to remain confidential, but – ” She gazed upward into a distant corner of the room. “I’m trying to think who I could ask.”

  “Your father,” Martinez pointed out. “He’s on the Fleet Control Board, he should have the authority to get the information.”

  Terza shook her head. “He couldn’t do it discreetly. An inquiry from the Control Board is like firing an antimatter missile from orbit.” She smiled. “Or like a command from a Lord Inspector. People would notice.” She gazed up into the corner again for a long moment. “Bernardo, then,” she decided. “He’s got access and is reasonably discreet. But I’ll owe him a big favor.”

  “Ten days for the query to get to Zanshaa,” Martinez said. “Another ten days for the answer to return.”

  The communication would leap from system to system at the speed of light, but Martinez still felt a burning impatience at the delay.

  A smile quirked its way across Terza’s face. “I’ve never seen you work before. Half the time you’re frantic with impatience, and the rest of the time you’re marching around giving orders like a little king. It’s actually sort of fascinating.”

  Martinez raised his eyebrows at this description of himself, but said, “I hope you can manage to sustain the fascination a little longer.”

  “I think I’ll manage.”

  Martinez reached across the corner of the table to take her hand. Terza leaned toward him to kiss his cheek. Her voice came low to his ear. “My doctor once told me that a woman’s at her most fertile in the month following the removal of her implant. I think we’ve proved him right. For the second time.”

  He felt his skin prickle with sudden heat as delight flared along his nerves. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Well, no,” Terza said, “I’m not. But I feel the same way I felt last time, and I think experience counts in these things.”

  “It definitely should,” Martinez said.

  Fecundity, he thought. What more could a man want?

  “The harbor looks a little bare,” Martinez said. He sat, awaiting breakfast, beneath an umbrella on the terrace of the Chee Fishing Club, where he had been given an honorary membership, and where he and Terza were staying. No Fleet accommodation on the ground had been judged worthy of a Lord Inspector, and the only deluxe lodgings on the planet were at the club – conveniently owned by Martinez’s father, a part of a sport-fishing scheme.

  “The commercial fishing boats are out, and the shuttles aren’t coming in any longer,” the manager said. He was a Terran, with a beard dyed purple and twined in two thin braids. He wore a jacket with padded shoulders and of many different fabrics, all in bright tropical colors, stitched together in a clashing mele
e of brilliant pigment. Martinez hadn’t seen anyone else similarly dressed, and he suspected the manager’s style was peculiar to him alone.

  Steam rose as the manager freshened Martinez’s coffee. “Without the shuttles we’ve just got a small fishing fleet and just a few sport boats,” he said, “though more will come in time. We can build up an enormous fishery here – though we may have to export most of the catch, since everyone here ate nothing but fish for the first year and a half, and they’re all sick of it.”

  Martinez gazed down a lawn-green slope at three bobbing boats dwarfed by the huge gray concrete quay against which they were moored. Two flew Fishing Club ensigns, and another a private flag, probably that of an official in the Meridian or Chee companies. Across the harbor was the town of Port Vipsania, named after one of Martinez’s sisters, and beyond that, stretching up into the sky, was the cable that ran to geosynchronous orbit and Chee Station.

  Port Vipsania, like all the early settlements, was built on the sea, because before the skyhook had gone into operation the previous year, workers and their gear had been brought to the planet in shuttles powered by chemical rockets, shuttles that had landed on the open water and then taxied to a mooring. Supplies, too, had been dropped into the sea in unmanned containers braked with retro-rockets, then towed to shore by workers in boats. The huge resinous containers, opened, also served as temporary shelters and warehouses.

  Once the skyhook could bring people and cargo from orbit at much less expense, the shuttles were largely discontinued, though Port Gareth, in the north and as yet unconnected to the expanding rail network, was still supplied by shuttles and containers dropped down from orbit.

  A bare three years after the opening of the planet to exploitation, the Chee settlements were growing with incredible speed, fueled by even more incredible amounts of capital. The investment was vast, and as the work had only begun the inflow of capital would have to continue. Lord Mukerji’s work in attracting ceaseless investment was vital, as was the work of many lesser envoys, and of course the work of Lord Martinez himself, raising funds from his own considerable resources.

  The resources of a whole planet were more than enough to repay any investment over time, but the scale of the payouts ran in years, and mismanagement and theft were still dangers to the Chee Company. If investor confidence were lost the company could go bankrupt whether it owned a planet or not . . .

  “I’d like to see a fleet of boats on that quay,” Martinez said.

  “So would I,” the manager said. “The business would be a lot better.” He grinned. “And after all the trouble building that quay, I’d like to see it in use.”

  “Trouble?” Martinez asked.

  “They shipped down the wrong kind of cement for that pier,” the manager said. “They need De-loq cement, that sets underwater and is immune to salt-water corrosion. But they sent down the ordinary stuff, and a special shipment had to be made from Laredo.”

  “What did they do with the other cement?” Martinez asked.

  “Condemned,” the manager said. “They couldn’t use it. Ah – here’s your breakfast.”

  Martinez’s breakfast arrived, a grilled fish with needle-sharp teeth, a pair of eyes on each end, and plates of armor expertly peeled back from the flesh. Martinez’s eyes rose from the fish to Port Vipsania, to the rows of white concrete apartments that held the Meridian Company’s workers.

  “Pity they couldn’t find a use for it,” he said.

  Martinez found that he couldn’t resist the lure of the town his father had named after him. After ten days on Chee, Martinez escaped the endless round of formal banquets and receptions by taking a Fleet coleopter to Port Gareth, north in the temperate zone.

  The coleopter carried him over land that was a uniform green – while the oceans thronged with a staggering variety of fish, life on land was primitive and confined to a few basic types: the only fauna were worms and millipedes, and plants were confined to molds, fungus, and a wide variety of fern, some as tall as a two-storied building.

  All of which were going to face stiff competition, as alien plants and animals were being introduced in abundance. Herds of portschen, fristigo, sheep, bison, and cattle had been landed and allowed more or less to run wild. Without any predators to cull their numbers, the herds were growing swiftly.

  Vast farms, largely automated, had also been set up in the interior, upriver from the settlements, or along the expanding railroads. Because no one yet knew what would grow, the farms were simply planting everything, far more than the population could conceivably need. If things went reasonably well, the planet could become a grain exporter very quickly and start earning a bit of profit for the Chee Corporation.

  Within a couple of centuries, it was calculated, the only native plants a person would see would probably be in a museum.

  The coleopter bounded over a range of mountains that kept Port Gareth isolated from the rest of the continent, then dropped over a rich plain that showed rivers of gleaming silver curling amid the green fern forest. The coleopter fell toward a green-blue ocean that began to creep over the horizon, and then began to fly over cultivated fields, the sun winking off the clear canopies of the harvesters.

  Port Gareth was very possibly outside the mandate of a Lord Inspector, as it contained no Fleet installations, but Martinez had decided that the railroad that would connect the town to the settlements farther south was a matter of state security, and therefore of interest to the Fleet.

  The turbine shrouds on the ends of the aircraft’s wings rotated, and the craft began to descend. On the edge of the pad was yet another reception committee.

  The coleopter’s wide cargo door rolled open. Martinez took off his headset, thanked the pilot, and stepped out onto the landing pad. The brisk wind tore at his hair. As Alikhan stepped from the coleopter with Martinez’s luggage, the reception committee advanced behind the Lady Mayor, a client of the Martinez family who Martinez vaguely remembered from childhood. She was a Torminel, whose gray and black fur was more suitable to the bracing climate of Port Gareth than to the tropics of Port Vipsania.

  In short order Martinez was introduced to the Mayor’s Council, and the local representatives of the Meridian and Chee companies, and then a familiar figure stepped forward from the long, teardrop-shaped car.

  “Remember me, my lord?” the man leered.

  Martinez could hardly forget. Ahmet had been a rigger on Corona, Martinez’s first command. He had spent a considerable portion of the commission under arrest or doing punishment duty; and the rest of his time had been occupied with running illegal gambling games, brewing illicit liquor, and performing the occasional bit of vandalism.

  “Ahmet,” Martinez said. “You’re out of the Fleet, I see.”

  This was only good news for the Fleet.

  “I’m a foreman here on the railroad project,” Ahmet said. “When I heard you were coming, I told everyone I knew you, and asked to be part of the welcoming committee.” With one sleeve he buffed the shiny object pinned to his chest. “I still have the Corona medal, as you see. I’ve been assigned as your guide and driver.”

  To Martinez, their employment of Ahmet in a position of responsibility was proof enough of criminal negligence or worse. But he smiled as stoutly as he could, said “Good to see you,” and was then carried off toward his lodging in the Mayor’s Palace, after which he would endure yet another banquet. He had a healthy respect for himself that some considered conceit, but even so he was beginning to grow weary of all these meals in his honor.

  Still, he was pleased to discover a statue of himself in the main square, looking stern and carrying the Golden Orb. He was less pleased to see a pump jack in the overgrown green park behind the statue, its flywheel spinning brightly in the sun.

  “What’s that?” he asked. “Petroleum?”

  “Yes,” the Lady Mayor said. “We found it close to the surface here – lucky, otherwise we couldn’t have brought it up with the equipment we’ve got.”
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  “What do you use it for?”

  “Plastics. We’ll have a whole industry running here in a few years.”

  “How is the railroad progressing?”

  The railroad would eventually connect Port Gareth to the south: Supersonic trains would speed north from the skyhook, bringing migrants and supplies, and carrying away produce and plastic products for export. The rails were being laid from each end toward a common center, and would meet somewhere in the mountains.

  “There were some delays last month,” the Lady Mayor said. “But the track’s still ahead of schedule.”

  “Delays?” Martinez said. “There’s nothing the Fleet can do to expedite matters, is there?”

  “Very kind, but no. It turned out that the early geologists’ reports were incorrect, or maybe just incomplete. The engineers encountered a much harder layer of rock than they’d expected, and it held up the work for some time.”

  Martinez decided that though he didn’t know much about geology, he was going to learn.

  Next morning Martinez rose early, took the cup of coffee that his orderly handed him, and called Ahmet.

  “I’d like to get up to the railhead,” he said. “Can you do it?”

  “Absolutely, my lord.”

  “I also don’t want a fuss. I’m tired of delegations. Can we go, just the two of us, with you as my guide?”

  Martinez sensed a degree of personal triumph in Ahmet’s reply. “Of course, lord captain! That’s easier than anything!”

  The ride to the railhead was made on a train bringing out supplies, and Martinez spent the ride in the car reserved for the transport crews. He wore civilian clothes and heavy boots, which he thought disappointed Ahmet, who wanted a fully dressed military hero to show off to his colleagues. As it was, Martinez had to put up with Ahmet’s loud reminiscences of the Corona and the battle of Hone-bar, which managed to imply that Martinez, under Ahmet’s brilliant direction, had managed to polish off the Naxids in time for breakfast.

  “That’s when we swung onto our new heading and dazzled the Naxids with our engine flares, so they couldn’t see our supports,” Ahmet said, and then gave Martinez a confidential wink. “Isn’t that right, my lord?”