Solaris Rising 1.5

by Ian Whates

  “Very good,” he said approvingly. “I do so like a woman who comes straight to the point.”

  According to the profile the Ameline had been able to piece together from information retrieved from the local Grid, Earl Vilca was one of the most powerful men on Nuevo Cordoba. His operation dealt in drugs, prostitution and extortion. He had politicians and high-ranking police officers in his pocket, and a seemingly endless supply of teenage muscle. On a world of high-piled shanties and meagre mushroom harvests, he lived like a king. But when Kat looked down at him, all she saw was a white, bloated parasite: a puffed-up hoodlum in a cheaply-fabbed suit.

  “I know who you are, and what you are,” she said. “And I’m not impressed. So if you’d be kind enough to release Napoleon Jones, I’ll be on my way.”

  On the opposite side of the desk, Vilca pursed his lips. He drummed his fingers against his belt buckle.

  “Jones, eh? Well, well, well.” He shook his head with a smile. “You’ve come bursting in here to rescue Napoleon Jones? He’s nothing but a two-bit hustler. He used to be a good pilot, twenty years ago, but he’s all washed up now. What do you want with him?”

  Kat gripped the shotgun.

  “As I said, he’s a friend.”

  Vilca narrowed his eyes. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip. Then he sat forward, hands resting on the desk.

  “All right, Captain. I’ll make you a trade. Jones for some information.”

  “What kind of information?”

  The fat man waved his hand at the sky.

  “I hear things. Rumours. Shipments have disappeared. Scheduled deliveries from Strauli have not arrived. Ships are overdue.”

  Kat felt her pulse quicken. She knew where this was going, and she didn’t have time to waste playing games.

  “Strauli has fallen,” she said bluntly. “Inakpa, Djatt and probably several others.”

  Vilca blinked at her.

  “Fallen?”

  “Gone, destroyed. No more.”

  The man’s brows drew together. He plainly didn’t believe her.

  “I am serious, Captain. I have been losing money—”

  Kat stepped right up to the desk and glared down at him.

  “They’re gone.”

  “Gone?” Vilca’s cheeks flushed. His fingers brushed his lower lip. “But what could do such a thing?”

  Kat used her implant to signal the Ameline.

  “I’ve asked my ship to download all the information we have to the local Grid. See for yourself. It’s all tagged with the keyword ‘Recollection.’”

  Vilca gave her a long look. He was getting flustered.

  “Go on,” she said. “Check it out. I’ll wait here.”

  “No tricks?”

  Kat nodded in the direction of Faro, still cowering in the corner of the room.

  “Your boy here can keep an eye on me.”

  Vilca looked up and to the right, accessing the cranial implant that connected him to the vast cloud of data that formed the planetary Grid. Kat stood watching him. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other. After a few seconds, she saw the colour drain from his cheeks. She knew what he was seeing. She’d seen it herself firsthand: the destruction of Djatt, the boiling red cloud that seemed to emerge from the fabric of space itself, closing like a fist around the planet.

  His eyes snapped back into focus.

  “Madre de Dios.”

  “Quite.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Give me Jones.”

  Vilca’s eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s to stop me killing you and using your ship to escape?”

  Kat hefted the shotgun.

  “You try to kill me and I’ll use my ship’s fusion exhaust to scour this canyon back to the bedrock.”

  Vilca gave a snort. He seemed to have recovered his composure.

  “You wouldn’t. You’re not the type.”

  Kat leaned toward him.

  “Check the data, Vilca. Look at the fall of Strauli Quay.”

  “Strauli...?”

  The man’s eyes flicked away for a second.

  “You fired on the Quay?”

  Kat set her jaw. “I had no choice.”

  “But there were more than a million—”

  She raised her shotgun, pointing the barrel at his chest.

  “Do you still think I’m bluffing?”

  Vilca swallowed. She could see a damp sheen on his bald pate. After a moment, he let his shoulders slump.

  “All right,” he said. “You win. Faro, would you please fetch Mister Jones?”

  Kat realised she’d stepped too close to Vilca’s desk. She hadn’t kept track of the boy. As she turned, she saw him raise his gun. Her finger yanked the trigger. The shotgun jumped in her hand. Faro jerked backward, chest shredded by three rapid-fire blasts. She turned back to Vilca, and caught the fat man in the act of reaching for the pistol in his desk drawer. She fired into the surface of the desk and he jerked his hand back, eyes wide.

  “Okay, that’s enough!”

  Kat’s pulse battered in her head. She didn’t know if she was angry with Vilca, Faro or herself.

  “Get Jones up here, right now!”

  Vilca knew he had been defeated. He sent an order via his implant. Moments later, a pair of wide-eyed teenagers brought Napoleon Jones to the door. They were half-carrying him. He couldn’t walk by himself. They looked down at Faro’s smoking corpse and turned questioning eyes on their boss. Vilca waved them away with a flap of his meaty paw.

  “These people are leaving,” he said.

  Kat looked at Jones. His arm and leg were bandaged. His coat was torn. The antique goggles still hung around his neck.

  “Kat?”

  “I’ve got a ship up top. We’re leaving.”

  Jones shook his head, as if trying to clear it. He’d been beaten. His lips and eyes were swollen; his moustache caked with dried blood.

  “What about Vilca?”

  The man behind the desk looked up at him.

  “You should not have come back, seňor. People love a daredevil because they are always awaiting his death. If he lives too long, well”—he spread his hands—“they become resentful.”

  Kat pulled on Napoleon’s sleeve.

  “Leave him. He knows it’s all over.” She picked Faro’s pistol from the dead boy’s fingers.

  “What’s over?”

  “His little empire.” She glared at the fat man. “This whole planet.”

  Vilca put his head in his hands.

  “Go now,” he said.

  Kat put an arm around Napoleon and he leaned his weight on her shoulder. They backed out of the room. When they reached the door at the far end of the corridor, the one that led to the roof, Vilca raised his head.

  “Captain?” he said, his voice hoarse.

  Kat paused.

  “Yes?”

  “What can we do? About The Recollection, I mean.”

  She took a deep breath. She owed him nothing. Further down the canyon, the freighters were filling their holds with refugees. She’d done all she could.

  She looked him in the eye.

  “Pray it doesn’t take you alive.”

  THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

  MIKE RESNICK

  According to Locus, Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the author of 69 novels, over 250 stories, and 3 screenplays, and has edited 41 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and he is the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

  IN 1860, ABRAHAM Lincoln, who made no secret of his beliefs in his debates with Stephan Douglas, was elected President of the United States, which were feeling less united by the minute. Before he could take the oath of office, seven states had already seceded from the country.

  Lincoln had considered taking Hannibal Hamlin, the staunch Maine Republican, as his vice president, but Hamlin had spoken so forcefully in favor of initiating military action aga
inst the South that Lincoln was convinced he couldn’t possibly avoid war with Hamlin on the ticket. Instead he chose a moderate Tennesseean who, though much more conservative than Hamlin, had nonetheless stood up to the slave owners and secessionists in his state. That man was Andrew Johnson, former Governor of Tennessee and currently one of its two Senators.

  The state of peace didn’t last very long. The military decided to abandon the indefensible Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. Rather than bringing his men back north when South Carolina officially seceded in December of 1860, Major Robert Anderson secretly relocated one hundred and twenty-seven men—thirteen of them musicians—to Fort Sumter. As military strategies went, this one wouldn’t go down in history as one of the most brilliant. The fort wasn’t yet complete, and fewer than half the cannons had been installed.

  Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina kept demanding that Anderson withdraw his men and take them back north, and Anderson kept ignoring him. The first shots of the Civil War were fired on January 9, 1861, when the steamship Star of the West tried to land reinforcements for Fort Sumter and was instantly repulsed by Confederate troops. During the next three months, Confederate Brigadier General Beauregard made almost daily demands that Anderson abandon the fort. Anderson ignored them.

  Lincoln realized that the fort would run out of food and ammunition sometime in mid-April, so on April 6 he sent a small fleet to land in Charleston to bring supplies and reinforcements to the beleaguered men of Fort Sumter.

  On April 11, Beauregard demanded one more time that Anderson surrender. Anderson stalled for time, hemmed and hawed, and finally listed his conditions for surrender. They were unacceptable, and early in the morning of April 12, as many Charleston residents watched the action from their verandas and windows, the Confederate army began thirty-four consecutive hours of bombardment. At the start of the thirty-fifth hour, Anderson surrendered.

  Amazingly, not a single Union soldier was killed during the action. In fact, the only fatality occurred quite by accident when the victorious Confederates allowed the Union a hundred-gun salute.

  And that was the end of the first of the two battles that comprised the First Civil War.

  THE SECOND AND final battle of the First Civil War occurred three months later, on July 21. The Union had been humiliated at Fort Sumter, and they were determined not to suffer another such travesty against the ‘inferior’ Confederate forces.

  Lincoln’s generals outlined the situation to him. They would crush the rebellion once and for all by marching on Richmond in northern Virginia. They had 28,000 men primed and ready, they had the superior generals, the superior weaponry, the superior lines of supply, the superior strategy. It could be done in an afternoon, and Lincoln could accept all the Southern states back into the Union the next morning. Why, it would be such an easy victory that Congress and members of the government could take their horse-drawn carriages to the northern end of the battlefield and watch the Union’s triumph first-hand.

  A couple of men didn’t see it quite that way. One was General Beauregard, who had 33,000 men at his command. And the other was Thomas J. Jackson, who picked up a new name during the battle: Stonewall.

  Lincoln was less certain of an easy victory than his generals and military advisors, though he approved the plan. Finally General McDowell, who was in command of the Union troops, invited him to come to the battlefield and see for himself, and after some hesitation, Lincoln agreed.

  McDowell led his Union troops into battle. Five hours later he led them out of battle; the proper word for it was retreat.

  During those five hours his troops suffered 2,900 casualties, and most of his invited audience, who had anticipated watching an easy victory while having their picnics just beyond the battlefield, caused quite a traffic jam as they fled back to Washington D.C.

  But one observer didn’t flee.

  Nobody knew quite when or how it happened. One moment Lincoln was sitting on a chair, speaking with two of his cabinet members. The next moment he was sprawled on the ground, a bullet lodged in his head above his left eye. He was dead before any of McDowell’s medics could reach him, the most important casualty of the Battle of Bull Run.

  And that was the end of the First Civil War.

  ANDREW JOHNSON WAS sworn in that evening. His address to the joint session of the Congress was brief and to the point:

  “A good and honorable man was a tragic, and I’m sure accidental, victim of the conflict this afternoon. I wish his death had accomplished something meaningful, but all it did was emphasize the brutality and futility of war.

  “And perhaps in that respect it did accomplish something meaningful, because I have reached the decision that as your President I will preside over no further military debacles and deaths. The War of Southern Secession is over. I am not pleased with this. I am from Tennessee, a border state that believes in the Union, and that no man may own another. But I also believe that the Lord did not create men to kill one another either, and I will not be the one who ever orders men to take up arms against their brothers. I hope we can reach an accommodation with the secessionist states; I hope we can, with logic and goodwill, convince them to rejoin the Union. But no man will die because he and his neighbors have voted to go their own way.

  “We face numerous problems, some caused by the secession, others that have been with us for generations. I pledge myself and my Presidency to addressing those problems that Mr. Lincoln died before he could address.”

  It wasn’t as eloquent as some of his predecessor’s speeches, but it officially wrote fini to the war.

  WITH NO WAR to fight, the new President began dismantling the war machine that Lincoln had been building up. It was clear that the major responsibility for the disaster was General McDowell—but the Union already had one scapegoat in Colonel Anderson, who had presided over the defeat at Fort Sumter—and if he was to usher in an era of goodwill, Johnson decided he didn’t need a second disgraced military leader.

  A lot of men disagreed, and many of them had spent their lives in the military. William Tecumseh Sherman resigned his commission within a week of Johnson’s speech to congress, and when General George McClellan was not put in charge of what remained of the Union army, he quit after making a major speech condemning Johnson and warning that war was going to occur whether the new President wanted it or not.

  A year after taking office, Johnson got his Congress and his country to pass the 14th Amendment, but of course it didn’t apply to the states of the Confederacy, and in truth it wasn’t needed in the states that still belonged to the Union. Still, everyone felt it was an eloquent and vital addition to the Constitution.

  The peace, or more accurately the truce, between the Union and the Confederacy held, but there were many strains. The Confederate currency wasn’t backed by gold, and the exchange rate made it all but impossible for those from Confederate states to purchase Northern goods. Also, no member of the Confederacy could bring his slaves with him on excursions to the Union—or rather, he could bring them, but the second they crossed the border between the two countries they were officially free men, and very few opted to go back with their ‘owner’ to the Confederacy.

  By 1863 both sides were feeling the pinch of being separate—and rival—economies. The Confederacy was falling far behind in manufacturing, while the Union constantly had food shortages. Johnson felt the Union’s problem could be solved simply by expanding to fertile new lands west of the Mississippi, but his advisors counseled against it. The South was clearly hurting; who knew when they might resurrect the war, solely for economic reasons? And with Sherman and McClellan gone and the talented Ulysses S. Grant cashiered out for continued drunkenness, the army was still being commanded by General McDowell, and he was not the man one wanted the fate of the country to depend upon.

  So Johnson stopped looking West, and since he felt he couldn’t very well replace McDowell for errors committed two years earlier, his alternative was to build the army to such an extent
that should the Confederacy attack, it didn’t matter who the Union’s commanding general was, they would muster such an overwhelming force that no one could stand against them.

  The Confederacy noted the military build-up, and President Jefferson Davis felt he had no choice but to increase the size and strength of his own army. He couldn’t match the Union’s manpower, but there was no question that in Robert E. Lee he had the most brilliant general, and Lee’s subordinates, from Beauregard and Stonewall Jackson on down, were clearly superior to what was left of their Union counterparts.

  Still, despite the single-minded attention on both sides to the military, not a shot was fired. As the election of 1864 drew near, no one was more surprised than Andrew Johnson that the peace had held.

  THERE WASN’T MUCH question that Johnson was going to be re-elected. The Democrats were decimated, and the Republicans had kept the peace. He searched around for a Vice President. It would be a wholly symbolic choice; in that era the Vice President didn’t even attend cabinet meetings.

  He was worried that the Confederacy might see his pursuit of peace as a sign of weakness, so he felt he needed a tough, no-nonsense Vice President, one who had argued for war back in 1859 and 1860. Even in this nation of northern states, he wanted a man recognized as a true Northerner, and finally he hit upon what he thought was the perfect choice, a Democrat turned Republican, a man Lincoln himself had considered for the office four years earlier: Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine.

  This didn’t sit well with the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis even made a speech condemning the choice, at which point Johnson made an answering speech, inviting the Confederacy to re-join the Union and put up their own candidates. Neither side took it seriously, and tensions continued to grow as Johnson won an easy victory.

  Things came to a head on April 14, 1865.

  UPON BEGINNING HIS first elected term, Johnson cast about for some way to bolster the sagging economy, and finally he hit upon an across-the-board 20% increase on all tariffs applied to Confederacy imports. Davis responded with a total cessation of agricultural exports to the Union.