Gradient

by Anders Cahill

  Someone like me.

  Which is exactly why Tholpausha chose me as his second for the Linstar mission. During my work as part of the Starnet’s subatomic amplification research team, I had developed a deep understanding of a starhub’s underlying technology. That, combined with my experience on Transcendence, and my cultural heritage as a miner from Verygone, made me his leading candidate. I leapt at the chance to escape the trappings of research work and get back into space.

  No word had come from our local ambassador or the construction superintendent in over six months. A lag in communication was to be expected until the Linstar hub was up and running, but it should have only taken three months, at the outside, to get a message from the Linstar to the nearest starhub in the Molroun system, and then home to Forsara in an instant. It had been more than twice that.

  We were tasked with the investigation and, if necessary, the reconstruction of the Linstar hub. It was my first opportunity to serve in a leadership capacity on an interstellar ship. To stand as a representative of the Fellowship. To translate all my study into practice.

  It was to become one of the greatest failures of my long life.

  14 Linstar

  We were assigned Divider, a small but powerful patrol ship, and a crew of seven securers, headed by Worn Opo, a competent and seasoned officer. After unfolding from Forsara to the nearest starhub in Molroun, we approached the Linstar system at near-light.

  It was a three-month journey from Molroun, and when we arrived at the outer edge of the system, we used the ship’s sensors to do an initial assessment. Those first observations showed no obvious irregularities. Longsight displayed the unfinished frame of the starhub, encircling more than two-thirds of the Linstar like a gossamer skeleton, and a number of the orbiting construction stations and satellites were also visible.

  But no one answered our hails. We tried every bandwidth, and got nothing.

  “Orendala,” Tholpausha said to me. Hearing the honorific ‘dala’ attached to my name gave me a small thrill. “I must go down to the surface. If the Linden don’t know we’re here yet, they will soon enough.

  “It is only right that I meet their leaders in person, and they may have the answers we’re looking for. While I am gone, I need you to conduct a full scan of the starhub. If you find any irregularities, have Divider contact me immediately. Understood?”

  “Is that safe?” I ventured. I was hesitant to question Thol, but it seemed risky. “What if it’s a trap?”

  He nodded. “It may be. But decorum demands it. If I do not show face, it will be seen as a grave insult. I’m taking two of Worn’s best with me, and if anything goes wrong, Divider can pinpoint my location within a hair’s breadth. We won’t use force unless absolutely necessary, but if it comes to that, Divider will know what to do.”

  From there, we approached Lin Den and entered a visible orbit, close enough to be seen by the naked eye, but far enough away so as not to seem overtly threatening.

  Thol and his escort departed in one of our two orbital hoppers, leaving me with my first official ship’s command.

  “Orendala?” Divider said. “You seem pensive.”

  “First time jitters. That’s all, Divider. Commence with the scans.”

  Then the signal came through.

  It was in local dialect, so I could not immediately understand it, but I could hear anger and fear. Divider pared the message down to its essentials: “A small, heavily-armed band has brought construction of the starhub to a halt,” he translated. “They are holding the entire construction team hostage, and they are demanding safe haven. It seems they have been expecting us.”

  “Eledar’s breath. What do they want?”

  “They have not yet said.”

  “And they understand what we’re capable of? With this ship and this team?” Worn’s securer force was an elite group trained in the arts of combat and defense.

  “If they do, they do not care,” Divider said.

  “And you’re certain they have hostages?”

  “Yes. They were masking the biosigs during earlier scans, but now I am showing more than four hundred distinct human lifeforms.”

  “Masking!” I murmured to myself, rubbing my cheek and chin. “Who in the names of the Scions taught them that?”

  “How would you like to proceed, dala?”

  “We’re going to take this one slow. Tell them we’ll hear them out. But if they harm a single hostage, they’ll pay for it. And notify Tholpausha.”

  “I have already sent word. I await his response.”

  “Right then.” I turned to Worn. “I want you ready to move. Understood?”

  He nodded. He was in his element. That gave me confidence.

  * * *

  Thirty minutes later, I stood alone on the main deck of the primary construction satellite, standing across from a woman half my size. She was tiny, but looked carved out of wire and sinew, ropy and attractive, with a fighter’s stance and a cold smile. She was flanked by a half-dozen skinny, rangy men, and we stared at each other, no one speaking. My heart thumped in my chest.

  Since this woman had contacted us, we had received no word from Tholpausha. Either their masking technology prevented us from detecting his biosig down on Lin Den, or he was dead. Or both. Divider was attempting a workaround, but until he was successful, we were on our own.

  Worn was contemplating a scorched earth approach. “Let’s just light the whole backwards planet up from here,” he muttered. “Then we’ll see what they think about threatening us.”

  I knew he was angry, and a part of me was actually tempted to hand authority over to him, but I pulled myself together. “If things turn to violence, Worn, we may lose any hope of salvaging this mess. Fear is too often the harbinger of violence, and I don’t want things to escalate if we can help it.”

  Worn sucked his teeth. “They have our pausha. We cannot risk losing you too. Let me at least back you up.” He patted his rifle.

  I shook my head. “If we show any untoward aggression, those hostages might die. And if Tholpausha is still alive, and we’re to have any hope of seeing him again, we have to move carefully.”

  “What if we come around the back? Spacewalk through this airlock here.” He pointed at the satellite’s three dimensional schematics floating in front of us. “We’ll stay out of sight, and be ready to move if it comes down to it. You’ve got to let me do my job here, Orendala.”

  I rubbed my cheeks. “Alright. That’s good thinking. We’ll make that work, as long as you stay out of sight until I signal you. Let’s move.”

  Once I was onboard, it occurred to me that my size might be intimidating in its own right, but this crew did not seem intimidated by me. They took their cue from their leader, and, if anything, she looked bored.

  “Ahalayo,” I said, greeting her in the dialect of the Linden, doing my best to make my accent and intonation sound authentic.

  She did not respond.

  “What are we doing here?” I asked, still speaking in dialect.

  “What do you think?” she said in the universal tongue.

  I acted surprised, raising my eyebrows. “You speak the shared language. Who are you? Tell me your name.”

  “Why should I? You stand there, tall and imposing, but you’re not the only one with power here. So why don’t you tell me your name?”

  “Oren,” I said. “My name is Oren Siris. I’m a senior cadet with the Academy of the Fellowship, and I am serving as the second on this mission.”

  She scowled. “I should have known they would send a cadet. Another in a long line of insults.”

  “They sent me because I am an expert on the starhub, and because I’m from a fringe world too. Like you. And I am here because our leader, pausha Thol Tep, is down on Lin Den. We have not heard from him, and I think you know something about that.”

  “Fringe world,” she said, shaking her head with disgust. “These labels are meaningless to us. We are our own people, and we have little
use for some galactic map drawn up by people who have never stepped foot on the soil of Lin Den or walked in the light of the Linstar. How we live is what matters. Not some arbitrary dividing line drawn between stars.”

  “Well, I grew up on a world much like Lin Den, long before I knew anything about the Fellowship. Smaller, and colder in the winters, but we mostly made due on our own, a long ways away from the people who decided where to mark those dividing lines.”

  Her demeanor softened a little. “What was your world called?”

  “Verygone. A mining settlement in the Beallurian system.”

  “You’re a miner?” she said.

  “I was.”

  “Then why did you leave?” Suspicion crept back into her voice.

  “Because I have always felt that there was more to life than digging in the dirt, and more to the galaxy than our little moon. And my parents believed that too.

  “They helped me see that I might have a place beyond Verygone. That I might be able to help others like me. It wasn’t easy to leave them behind, but I am grateful to them. They gave everything for me.”

  “If my parents were still alive,” she said, “maybe they would have done the same for me. But they both died in the Denarian mines when I was a child.”

  “I am sorry for that loss. Terribly sorry. I lost people too, in the mines of Verygone.”

  “Then you understand that they are gone, and there are no words to bring them back. That is just one of the countless crimes your Fellowship must be called to answer for. If you had the power to answer for those crimes, then this conversation might actually accomplish something. But you don’t, do you?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. I am a just a tiny piece in a much larger game. As most of us are. But maybe I can still help you.”

  She sighed. “Listen. You seem fine enough, for an offworlder, but you shouldn’t have bothered. It is too late for diplomacy. Much too late. We are set on our path. Either you give us what we want, or we take it.”

  “That’s not much of a choice. We don’t even know your demands.”

  She gestured to a man at her right flank. He slid a small holocube across the ground. It stopped close to my feet. A moment later, an image was projected above it, into the open space between us. It showed a single planet orbiting a small star.

  “The Linstar system,” I said. “Why am I looking at it?”

  “Because it is our home, you idiot,” snapped the man who had slid the holocube. He spoke the universal tongue, but his accent was thick and snarled.

  She silenced him with her hand. “Many generations ago,” she said, “the Cendants left the Fellowship and founded Lin Den. Our society thrived for centuries.

  “But no one knew that the Linstar was a cosmic time bomb. Not until the Fellowship returned to harvest the dying star’s energy. Once the Linden understood that your people could save us from a terrible fate, our fear shifted to excitement. We had been isolated from the universe for so long, and at a time of great need, saviors had arrived from the stars.

  “It was undeniably exciting. The promise of a bright future hung before us like a mirage in the desert. I was just a child then, and my parents were still alive. I remember walking with them through the streets of Vossol, people everywhere, drinking, eating, dancing in celebration. We were to become a part of something bigger. Something greater. In exchange for our resources, you would heal our sun. And for those who were ready to walk it, a path to the stars had dropped out of the heavens.

  “But soon it became clear to anyone paying attention that, despite all our ancestors had done to leave behind the materialistic politics of the galaxy and build a new world, the same dysfunctional patterns had begun to reemerge. Farmers set down their spades for pick axes. Artisans traded in their clay for mineral ore. We started digging up and tearing apart our own planet with no regard to the past that had once defined us.

  “Factions formed, vying for the same resources. And the people who accumulated the most began to accumulate power too, upending centuries of egalitarian leadership. We watched as our wealthy elite suckled from the teat of the Fellowship, leaving the rest of us to eke out a life from their scrapings. We have been forced to adjust our whole lives to meet the schedules of your galactic timekeepers, pushing all your damn systems down on us to build your precious starhub, and we have nothing to show for it but scars and loss.”

  “If even half of what you say is true,” I said when she finally took a pause, “then you have fair grievance, and I promise we will work with you to make it right. But the treaty to build the starhub was negotiated in good faith with your leaders. It was understood that the construction would take several generations, and that we would do our best not to interfere with your culture, even as we paid you handsomely for your resources, and, eventually, gave you the education and means to find a new home in the galaxy.”

  “Not to interfere?” Her voice was filled with venom. “You build a web around our sun, using raw resources from our planets, and you claim not to interfere? The fat grow fatter, while the masses of common people wither and suffer, and the Fellowship turns a blind eye. You’re lying to yourself if you believe anything other than this.”

  I held up my hands in a peaceful gesture. “I promise you that this is the first I am hearing of it. All the reports we have tell of a prospering system of trade and exchange, and the starhub has progressed ahead of pace. Until now.”

  “Listen to yourself.” She spat on the ground. “You’re not looking deep enough. Those fat old men are not our leaders. They do not speak for us. They never spoke for us. And they have been feeding you lies. Your simpering pledge of non-interference is a sad attempt to absolve yourself of this mess.”

  “Then show me,” I said. “Show me the proof.”

  “Kneel down,” she said. “And I will give you your proof.”

  “I’m by myself, unarmed, and you want me to kneel? I’ve been called a fool before, but I don’t have a death wish. Not yet.”

  She laughed. Her teeth were gleaming white, and her lips were shining with moisture. “I want to see your precious port. This great gift, this hole to your brain.”

  “So you can drive a dagger right through it?”

  “Do you want me to show you proof or not? If you do, plug into this recall unit, and you will see the truth.” She held up a long, thin obsidian cylinder.

  “Fine. But that recall unit is based on an outdated design. More than three centuries in fact. I don’t have a gaping hole in the base of my neck, waiting for something to get stuck inside of it. The biointerface is microscopic. We’ll have to run that through my ship’s system.”

  She sneered at me.

  “I am willing to watch whatever you have, but that unit is useless unless we bring it to my ship. And when I am connected, I will be at your mercy. I am not going to do that surrounded by a half-dozen men who all look like they could kill me as soon as shake my hand.”

  She remained stonefaced.

  “Please. I swear to you. This is no trap. My boarding ship has everything we need.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Fine, then.”

  The man who had shouted at me grabbed her shoulder. “Ifrit,” he hissed.

  She turned her head to glare at him.

  After a moment he let her go, fear and anger playing out on his face.

  She walked towards me. “Lead the way, Oren Siris.”

  * * *

  As soon as the inner door to my boarding ship sealed shut, she spun around and pushed me back into the chair. She was much stronger than I anticipated. She wore an impish, hungry grin.

  Was she flirting with me? I smiled back at her, trying to remain impassive. “I am at your mercy now, Ifrit.”

  She hesitated, and fear flashed across her face. “So now you know my name,” she said.

  Throughout our encounter, she had projected an air of confident disdain. Now, for just a moment, she looked vulnerable. Like she was afraid we might actually make a meaningfu
l, human connection.

  I touched her hand. “Ifrit. I mean you no harm. Truly.”

  She looked down at my hand on hers. She softened again, for a moment, then quickly composed herself, regaining her tough, gritty exterior. “No,” she said. “Your ambassadors said the same thing to our elders. But harm came to us anyway. We must be free from the temptation of your beautiful lies.”

  She leaned over me, pinning my shoulders with her hands. I could have pushed her away, but I let her hold me down. She reached behind her back and pulled the recall unit out from her pocket.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  I looked at her, holding eye contact. She was so close, her breath warmed my skin. Flints of green speckled her blue eyes. I repressed a wild impulse to kiss her.

  “I’m ready,” I said. “You can connect over there.” I pointed. “Speak into the microphone once I am under, and I’ll be able to hear you.”

  Divider was listening, and he lit up the connection on the console, so she could tell where I was pointing. She placed the recall unit in the port. A moment later, wires snaked out from the headrest of my chair, crept inside my neck, and established a link with my nervous system. Everything on the small boarding ship dissolved from my awareness.

  I was hovering above a small city sprawling across a russet valley. It was the planet Lin Den. I knew it as if it had always been my home. My view swooped in with the drone that had made this visual recording, passing low over the city. The streets were empty. There was no sign of life in the lanes or buildings, no movements or sounds. The drone circled, carrying me with it, and I searched in vain for anything beyond the deserted city.

  Ifrit spoke. “This is Vossol. Where I was born. It is dead now. All of its people have moved to the far side of the continent, chasing after the mineral deposits that were mostly worthless until the Fellowship came.”