Empire of Dust

by Jacey Bedford

  Ben landed the four-man flitter in a clearing below the town.

  Suzi popped the door and stood on the sill, using the flitter as a vantage point. She narrowed her eyes and scanned the half-plowed ground. “Not good at all.” She turned to the two young men occupying the backseats. “What do you think?”

  Archie Tatum patted the bag of sensor bots in his lap. “I brought the boys to do structural assessments on the ruins, but even from here I can see what the report will say. It’s all been blown to shit.”

  Bronsen ran a hand through his hair to smooth it. “Is that Fliss Ruffalo in a skirt?”

  Ben looked more closely at the four settlers walking over the uneven ground to meet them and realized that the party consisted of three settlers and Fliss Ruffalo dressed in settler brown, not her usual buddysuit.

  “Commander Benjamin.” Fliss greeted them all as they climbed down from the flitter, but Ben noticed her eyes lingered on Bronsen a little longer than was necessary and Bronsen seemed almost shy. Ben got the impression he might have blushed, but on dark brown skin it didn’t show. Fliss, however, a pale-skinned redhead with freckles, turned pink and Ben was pretty sure it was unconnected with the three settler men she was introducing.

  “This is Wade Morgan, his brother Jonti, and their cousin Goff Parker. Goff is this region’s blacksmith mentor and Wade and Jonti are carpenters, intending to set up a sawmill.”

  “Thank you for coming so quickly,” Goff said as they took turns to shake hands. “We’re grateful for your help.”

  Ben nodded. “Looks like you’ve taken a beating.”

  “It hit us at the wrong time.”

  “There’s never a right time.”

  “I guess not. We’d got eleven timber frames up for houses, but not finished and—well, as you can see—they’re finished now. With luck we’ll be able to retrieve enough wood to make a very small garden shed. I guess we’re starting over.”

  Archie Tatum gestured at the wreckage. “No casualties. You’ve got a storm cellar?”

  “Caves. Back in the trees,” Wade said. “We dropped everything and made a run for it. Fliss got all our animals in there, bless her. Otherwise we’d have nothing left.”

  “I didn’t do it on my own,” Fliss said.

  “But we lost the seed grain.” Jonti spread his hands wide. “Stupid of us to leave it exposed, but it all happened so fast. There must have been a natural dam burst farther up the valley. A wall of water hit the town like a hammer. We found an axle three klicks down the valley, but no sign of the grain. I guess the bags split.”

  “Well, look at it this way,” Suzi said. “Some time in the autumn you’ll find familiar looking wheat and barley growing wild downriver from here. It’ll be time-consuming, but you can get out there and harvest the seed. Send your kids out to do it. Turn it into a game with a prize.”

  “Good idea, but in the meantime . . . We don’t expect something for nothing . . .”

  “There’s a little spare seed grain for emergencies,” Suzi said.

  “Thank you,” Jonti said. “We’ll store it in the cave until we’re ready for planting.”

  “Don’t thank us,” Ben said. “It’s your grain.”

  They took a walk through what was left of the town. Fliss dropped back to walk with Ben while the Morgan brothers strode ahead with Suzi. Archie set his bots loose, checking over the ground, and Bronsen mounted the offered pony and rode down the valley with Goff in search of the remains of the lost wagon. Where resources were scarce, wheels and axles were more valuable than gold.

  “They’re good people,” Fliss said. “I hate to see everything blown away like this. They don’t ask for much, just get on with things as best they can.”

  “You’ve had no problems working with them?” Ben asked.

  “None.”

  “Abandoned your buddysuit for a reason?”

  “I lent it to Jonti’s wife. She’s been having a lot of back pain. It looks like chronic sciatica, nothing dangerous, but it’s painful. The suit’s been giving her analgesics until the district medic gets back from Royertown.”

  “Good move.”

  “She’s very grateful. Said if she’d known, she’d have ordered a suit a long time ago. I didn’t tell her how much they cost.”

  Ben laughed. “You like these people.”

  “I do. They’re not what I expected.”

  Bronsen and Goff arrived back triumphantly with the lost axle and two wheels slung between their two ponies, arriving just in time for a hot meal of roast mutton, one of the casualties of the storm cooked long and slow over a communal open fire.

  At least the timber came in useful for something, Ben thought.

  The children got the choice bits, served up with a mash made of reconstituted paruna powder, which luckily had not been washed away with the seed grain.

  Ben smiled to see the children so well looked after. Fliss was right. The more he saw of these people the more he liked them. They were the polar opposites of Lorient’s hard-liners, yet they still lived within the Ecolibrian framework. These were the people who would make the settlement work. Not the administrators.

  Chapter Nineteen

  STORM

  “So this is your real consultation room, Dr. Wolfe?” Cara found Ronan tucked away in what amounted to little more than a cupboard on the LV, close to the now redundant med bay.

  “Cara.” He looked up and smiled. “Just packing up the last of my stuff for my only-very-slightly-larger office in the new med-center. I thought that we’d go somewhere a bit more relaxing than a consulting room, though, if that’s all right.”

  “Whatever.” Cara was feeling nervous as it was, and to find out that they were going to have to make a journey before they could even start the monitoring session was just one more way of delaying the inevitable.

  They walked across the compound in companionable silence, to a waiting flitter. Ronan took the helm confidently.

  “Where are we going?” Cara asked.

  “I told Ben I wanted to take you out of the camp. He suggested the lake you went to yesterday. Said you liked it.”

  “I hope there are no storms forecast.”

  “Not according to the long-range scanners. Trust me, I’m a doctor.”

  “I’d trust you more if you were a meteorologist.” She grinned. “You’ll like this place. It reminds me of being inside a cathedral, like the ones in Europe.”

  “I’ve never been to Earth,” Ronan said.

  “You’re from Magna colony, right?”

  “Yeah, a highly volcanic lump of rock in the Ortes System, which just happens to be well positioned to serve an eight-way jump gate hub. Specializes in shipbuilding. Freighters mostly. I hear Earth is beautiful.”

  “Parts of it are. The Saharan rain forest preserve is a man-made miracle, but some parts are still struggling. Australia’s an overcrowded mess, the central cities still a dumping ground for all the displaced Chinese from the coastal regions. They’ve done some great preservation work on the historic European cities, though. I lived close to Old York for a time.” With Ari, but she couldn’t say that. “They’ve domed the medieval city to protect it. The Minster is magnificent. That’s what this place reminds me of. If you close your eyes, you can feel it.”

  “Feel what?”

  “Awe. Wonder. A sense of something immensely old and magnificent. It makes you want to whisper into the vastness of it to see if anything whispers back.” She laughed. “Don’t mind me. I get carried away. History from texts is dry and dusty, but it’s never far from the surface if you open yourself up to it. Even here. Especially here.”

  They landed in the shallows of the lake.

  She clicked back the harness and levered herself up out of the seat. “Oh, look. I didn’t see those yesterday.”

  Down in the shallows, tiny silver-pink fishes, long and threadlike, darted from light to shade. Every so often they came up for air.

  “Not fishes,” Ronan said. “Amphibians
, harmless according to Lee Gardham’s wildlife reports.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Edible, too.” He grinned and wrinkled his nose up. “But I wouldn’t try them unless the alternative is starvation.”

  “Look there!” She turned to follow the blue-green flash of wings. Her excited words fell to the gentle earth, and silence flooded in to cover their tracks. “Humans are going to change this world, probably not for the better, but I’m glad I saw it like this.”

  They splashed to the lakeshore.

  “Cara Benjamin, you’re a romantic.”

  “Don’t tell anyone, or it will blow my credibility.”

  Ronan laughed. “Welcome to my consulting room. Take a seat.”

  She chose to sit on the sand and Ronan sat facing her, his right leg touching hers. Body contact seemed to steady psi-techs.

  “Nervous?” Ronan asked.

  “Why? Can you feel me shaking?”

  “No, it’s just that I’d be scared if our roles were reversed.”

  She nodded.

  “Well, we’ll just do some relaxation first, deep breathing. Clear out the jumble of today so we can start on yesterday . . .”

  His voice was low and gentle and not for the first time she wondered whether life would be very complicated indeed if he wasn’t comfortably and certifiably gay.

  Implants meshed and Ronan slipstreamed into her thoughts.

  They went over what had happened since Cara arrived on Mirrimar-14, and Cara had no problems relating everything—even that first night with Ben. Ronan was easy to trust.

  “What about before Mirrimar-14?”

  Before Mirrimar-14.

  She took it one step at a time.

  Following rumors of psi-techs gone independent. A series of short hops on freighters and longer hops between worlds. Always dodging the authorities. Trying not to draw attention to herself while asking questions that no legitimate psi-tech would ask. Worrying as her available credits dwindled.

  “Why?”

  Escaped. She’d escaped from . . .

  She’s in a holding cell. How long has she been there, doped up on Reisercaine and totally alone? Her bed is a hard board with no blanket or sheets and the lavatory is in full view of the observation hatch in the door. They’ve taken everything from her, even her buddysuit, so she’s shivering in a thin shift, more like a hospital gown than prison garb. It’s trilene, so she can’t tear it; can’t make a rope from it and hang herself—as if she would. They haven’t even given her undergarments or shoes, and they feed her with finger foods; no cutlery.

  She’s had time to reflect on how she came to be here. That’s what they want her to do; it’s the first part of the softening-up process, before they begin Neural Readjustment.

  She thinks about Ari. She’s been thinking about him a lot lately.

  Maybe it’s her fault. She’s made a big mistake, a bad choice. Two bad choices—though the second was the only one her conscience would let her make. Hooking up with Ari had been stupid, though it hadn’t felt like that at the time. She’d driven a rocket sled through Alphacorp’s first two unwritten rules. One: thou shalt not fuck thy boss. Two: thou shalt not fuck with thy boss’ orders.

  They’ve got her on a trumped-up mutiny charge after Felcon. She’d logged an official complaint, but Craike erased it. Now her protest is being treated as mutiny. It’s grossly unfair. She’s always done her best for Ari and for Alphacorp, and this is her reward.

  Why are they going to all this trouble? It would be simpler to kill her. Plenty of ways to cover it up. Is it possible Ari has real feelings for her? Her face twists into a grimace. Strange way of showing it.

  She hears the quiet shush of the airtight door mechanism along the corridor.

  Footsteps and voices.

  Ari. It’s Ari.

  Hope replaces everything else.

  But then she recognizes the other voice. Donida McLellan. Psi-1 and then some. Sadist; bitch. She is to the psi-tech world what Ari’s henchman, Craike, is to the physical one. There has to be something wrong with Ari to have two such perfect bastards doing his dirty work.

  McLellan is speaking as they get near enough for Cara to make out the words. “Let me have another session with her, and I’ll feel a lot happier about releasing her to you.”

  “Later.” Ari’s voice is, as always, warm and cultured with both an edge of friendliness and a tone of authority that makes it hard to go against him. “Have her brought up to my quarters. I think we can sort out this little aberration.”

  Little aberration. Does he think that her disobeying Craike’s orders to shoot down unarmed farmers is an aberration? She needs to tell her side of things. Now Ari’s here, she’ll get her chance . . .

  “It’s okay, take it easy.”

  She was on her hands and knees, retching into the sand.

  Ronan knelt beside her and held her shoulders until she’d finished and her breathing had returned to normal.

  She sat down again. “How’d I do, Doc? Did you pick up anything worth having?”

  “Some, not a lot. Did you?”

  “I . . . I know.” She started to feel sick and dizzy again. She did know. Donida McLellan had said to Ari: Let me have another session with her. All that time in the holding cell had not been spent entirely on her own. What she remembered were false memories. All she needed to do was find the real ones.

  “Next time,” Ronan said. “Here, give me the start-card. I’ll fly us home.”

  • • •

  Outside the LV, early the following morning, the whine of antigravs and the whirr of machinery, combined with distant thumps and bangs, announced that Serafin’s builders were finally erecting an accommodation block. Cara tried to ignore it, but involuntarily winced when percussive bangs shook the ops room. Wenna looked up from her station and mouthed a cuss word.

  “Anybody home?” Serafin West dusted off his hands on the seat of his buddysuit as he walked through the door. “You’ve got accommodation now.”

  “Does that mean I get a real bedroom?” Wenna asked.

  “I’ve put you in the first broom cupboard on the left,” Serafin said.

  “Where have you put Ronan?” Wenna asked.

  “Riser Five.”

  “Move him up. Put him in the room next to me. That boy’s got to look me in the eye sometime.”

  “Wenna—” Ben started.

  “What?”

  Ben shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “You’ve got a damn good doctor half frozen because of something he thinks he’s done wrong.”

  Ben nodded. “Go easy on him.”

  “I don’t blame him for this, Ben.” She gestured with the prosthetic arm and wiggled her fingers. “If I’d have been him, I’d have made the same decision. I was done for, but you were too stubborn to realize it. You could have gotten yourself killed trying to do what you did.” She turned to Cara. “Thinks he has to save everyone.”

  Cara smiled. “I know. Sometimes it works out for the best.”

  “And one day it’ll get him killed.”

  Cara felt a chill run down her spine. Not on my account, I hope.

  “If you’ve finished talking about me as if I’m not here and not your boss . . .” Ben turned to Serafin. “You said something about having a room.”

  “Uh, yes.” Serafin’s attention had been taken by the exchange. “I’ve put you and Cara in the room at the far end. I’ve tried to give you a bit more space than usual. Tell me if it’s a problem.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” Ben said.

  “And Wenna’s right, by the way,” Serafin said.

  Ben looked up to the ceiling and gave an exaggerated long-suffering sigh. “Remind me again why I like working with you people?”

  “Because we love you, really,” Wenna said, and reached up to cup his cheek in her good hand.

  Cara couldn’t ever imagine anything like the relationship these people had in any Alphacorp team she’d ever worked with, but it
felt good.

  “Cara, here’s your lock code.” Serafin held out his hand and they fist-bumped to transfer the lock code to her handpad and then to Ben’s. That’s when the reality of the new room crept up and slapped her upside the head. Serafin had put them both in the same room. Of course he had. What else could he do without giving the game away?

  • • •

  Would sharing a room with Cara—a private room—be a problem? Ben watched Cara head for the new riser to check it out. This was the disadvantage of keeping up the marriage sham. Well, he could cope if Cara could. It wasn’t so much lack of privacy that was the problem. After all, they’d been sharing a dormitory with forty other people since they got here, but he found her presence in the cool of the night distracting. More than distracting if he was honest, but he’d promised her no strings and he was damn sure he wasn’t going to crack.

  He’d have liked to talk to Nan about it all, but the only way he could do that was through someone else’s head, and if he did contact Nan, she was quickly going to figure that something was wrong. He felt guilty about not staying in touch, but it was better not to worry her.

  When he took his pack into their new quarters, he found Cara sitting on the edge of one of the beds. She’d separated them and pushed them to opposite sides of the room, but she hadn’t unpacked her kit.

  “Ask Serafin to change the room for a single if you like. I’ll bunk in with Gen,” Cara offered.

  “That’ll look like my own wife can’t stand my company.”

  When she looked at him sharply, he laughed at her. “A joke, okay?”

  “I’m serious,” she said. “You’ve got a heavy job. There’ll be times when you need some breathing space.”

  “If I do, I’ll kick you out. We can tell them it’s a lovers’ tiff.”

  “It’s a long time since I’ve had one of those.”

  “A lover or a tiff?” He knew he shouldn’t have said that as soon as the words were out.

  “Both.”

  Ben caught Cara’s sudden change of mood. Her former lovers were none of his business really, but dammit, sham or not, he felt unreasonably possessive, despite all logic telling him that even if she made a commitment to him—a big ask with everything that was going on with her right now—he could no more possess her than he could possess the air he breathed. And yet she means as much to me as the air I breathe and the ground I walk on, even though I know no more about her now than I did that first night on Mirrimar-14.