Hellhole

by Kevin J. Anderson

  Knowing his father wouldn’t go away, he yanked open the door to see Percival standing there, his silvery muttonchop sideburns even puffier than usual. He’d once been quite muscular, but his physique had sagged on him. Percival took one look at his son standing in his dressing robe. “You’re out of uniform, soldier!” As usual, the retired Commodore wore his favorite gold-and-black uniform, threadbare in some places, its jacket wrinkled from the weight of the tarnished medals attached to it.

  “I haven’t left my room yet, sir. I was just about to dress and go down to the shipyards.” His voice took on a hint of defensiveness. “It’s not combat duty, but I still do important military work. I’m responsible for keeping all those ships ready.”

  The old man’s large gray eyes narrowed. “Maybe one day you’ll be fortunate enough to experience the glory of combat yourself.”

  “We can only hope, sir.” Knowing what would come next, Escobar hurried into his adjacent bedroom to retrieve the black uniform that the servants had laid out. His outfit was gold and black like his father’s, but with new-style braids and modern tailoring. So far, he had only one medal to affix to the lapel, an award presented to him for efficient management of the Lubis Plain shipyards.

  Standing too close behind his son, Percival launched into one of his interminable stories. “Have I ever mentioned how I got this scar on my forehead?” He touched the edge of his receding hairline. The old man could have had the scar removed, but opted to keep it on display like one of his war medals.

  Escobar had, in fact, heard the story numerous times. His mother, now dead for seven years, had endured even more repetition, but she’d lovingly pretended as if each telling was the first time she’d heard it. Love made a person patient, he supposed. Escobar loved and admired his father, but there were limits.

  Percival droned on, “I was a career military officer, and I served in several theaters of war before the formation of the Army of the Constellation, before I ever went up against General Adolphus.” He lowered his frame onto an antique divan, which made the furniture creak in protest.

  Escobar pulled on his trousers, boots, shirt, and suspenders, then worked to secure his cufftabs. In his haste he dropped one, and it tumbled under the bed. He got down on his hands and knees on the soft carpet to find the ornament.

  Unfazed, Percival continued talking. “I was in the Barassa campaign of ’99, you know, and the Tanine assault of ’02.”

  Escobar located the cufftab and stood up. To his recollection, the old man had been in the Machi campaign in ’99, not Barassa, and during those engagements Percival Hallholme had made a number of command blunders that had garnered criticism from the Sonjeera high command. Escobar didn’t point that out, at the risk of engaging the old man in one of their long arguments. Instead, he said, “You deserve all the medals you got, sir.”

  “The really big action, though, was when I faced off against General Adolphus and his rebels in the skies over Sonjeera itself. The climactic battle of the whole rebellion – a clash that decided the future of the Constellation.”

  The Commodore heaved a long, wistful sigh. “It was eleven years ago, and I was on the bridge of my battle station, commanding the defense of the capital. And I could see quite clearly that we were going to lose!” He jabbed his finger toward his son, who was barely listening. “My entire fleet was out there, badly outnumbered. With no chance of driving off the rebel attack, I developed a key defense strategy – I filled those warships with seventeen thousand civilians we had taken from Crown Jewel planets, all of them members of the leading rebel families, including quite a few from right here on Qiorfu. We roughed up the civilians a little so they looked desperate, then transmitted their images – and dared Adolphus to open fire on us with his superior force.”

  The retired old soldier paused, as if he had lost his train of thought, then touched the scar on his forehead again. “Ah yes! Right after I delivered my ultimatum, that’s when the traitor on my staff rushed from his station, pointed his sidearm at me, and actually fired! In that split second I jerked my head back and fired my own service automatic, killing him on the spot. The blackheart’s bullet, though, tore off a chunk of my forehead and hair along with it – as if I could spare any! If I hadn’t moved so quickly, I’d be dead myself. Blood was pouring into my eyes but I never passed out, never left my command station. With that traitor lying dead on the deck, I waved off anyone trying to attend to me – and I repeated my demands to General Adolphus.”

  Rather than the usual ring of triumph in his voice, though, Percival sounded somewhat sad. “The Diadem had commanded me to win at all costs, and I did. I was facing an enemy with a fleet almost twice the size of ours, but because of my strategy, General Adolphus knew that if he opened fire, he’d be killing many thousands of innocent civilians. I had gauged him well. Know your enemy. The rebel general blinked. And at the crucial moment, he refused to open fire. I, however, did not.”

  Percival sniffed. “We tore the rebel ships to ribbons. His own people howled for him to return fire on us, but we had left the codecall lines open, and our human shields pleaded for their lives. Adolphus wouldn’t step over that line, but we kept firing. In the end, the General had no choice but to surrender what remained of his force.”

  Escobar slipped his jacket on, stood in front of a full-length mirror and secured his tie with a gold stickpin bearing the shield insignia of the Riomini family. “Morally sound on your opponent’s part, but a poor tactical decision. It cost him the war.”

  The victory celebrations had painted Commodore Hallholme as a military genius. In that final battle, he had achieved victory for the Constellation while incurring minimal casualties on his side. That triumph had saved Percival’s checkered career, erased all mention of prior mistakes, and made him out to be a bold tactician with nerves of steel, and even – ironically – as a great humanitarian.

  Luck was on his side, Escobar thought. The Commodore retired immediately after the end of the rebellion and became a veritable recluse on Qiorfu.

  Fully dressed now, Escobar hurried toward the hall door. He did not invite his father to join him in the inspection of the shipyards. The Commodore remained on the divan, still talking, as his son slipped out of the manor house and hurried away.

  16

  It was another grim duty for Cristoph, something that his father should have done. At one time, Louis de Carre had been so good at expressing compassion. He knew how to deal with his people when they were hurting. He would admit that he couldn’t possibly understand their grief, yet he felt it anyway. In some ways, the lord had provided a good example for his son. In others . . .

  With a knotted stomach, Cristoph drew a deep breath for strength as he entered the intensive-care ward. Doctors reviewed orders, technicians adjusted medical instrumentation. Hovering about were the serene and compassionate Mercifuls, intent nurses who belonged to a secular humanitarian group that had spread across many planets in the Constellation. Sometimes they remembered to flash encouraging smiles to their fading patients, sometimes they didn’t. Each bed was covered with a filtration field, though the patients could see and hear. The contaminants were contained and inert, though it was too late to help the dying men and women.

  Despite all the medical equipment, Cristoph knew this was little more than a hospice ward. These twelve poor miners didn’t have a chance. The only question was how long they would linger, suffering the increasingly debilitating effects of their massive exposure to raw iperion. Another accident . . .

  Cristoph could do so little for these people now. His people.

  Lanny Oberon, the mining supervisor, was inside the hushed room, red-eyed, his face drawn. “My Lord, thank you for coming.”

  Cristoph bowed respectfully. Some of the bedridden men and women were alert enough to recognize him, and two even struggled into sitting positions, though the smiling, peaceful Mercifuls forced them back down. Three patients remained unconscious, or perhaps pretended to sleep so they didn’
t have to acknowledge his arrival.

  “I’m so very sorry, all of you,” Cristoph said. Those words had to be spoken first. “I don’t know how this happened, but we will get to the bottom of it.”

  “Not gonna do us any good,” said one of the miners.

  “At least there’s a bonus clause in the contract if we die in a work-related accident,” said a drawn-faced female miner. “My husband and kids don’t have to suffer.”

  The first man snorted. “We’re doing all the suffering for them right now.”

  There was palpable anger in the room. Cristoph stood straight, showing his strength but not his fury. This was all so unnecessary! “I swear to every person here, I will see that you get the best possible treatment, that your families are taken care of, and that this type of accident never happens again.”

  “Oh, there’ll be other accidents,” said a gray-faced man lying on the other side of the room. He wheezed as he spoke. “That seems to be standard these days. Everything’s falling apart. Nobody’s blaming you, my Lord,” he added quickly, “but it used to be so different on Vielinger . . .”

  Cristoph knew that everyone was indeed blaming him, and it was his fault. Whether because of outright sabotage or mismanagement, he hadn’t been able to prevent it. He had asked for the extra efforts to extract the last bits of iperion in the deep shafts, when in earlier days the miners would have abandoned those deposits much sooner. “Mr Oberon, introduce me to each one of these workers. I want to know their names and their families.”

  The mine supervisor led him from bed to bed, telling a little about each victim. Though it was difficult for Cristoph to look at these miners wasting away because of faulty – sabotaged? – equipment, he met their gazes and grasped their hands through the decon field. The least he could do for them was to show that he cared, and then he would follow through on his promise to fix the problem.

  He spoke quietly to Oberon, knowing that some of the patients could hear him. “Any preliminary results of your investigations, Lanny? How did this happen?”

  The mine supervisor shook his head. “These twelve were in the tail-end of our deepest shaft. A few decades ago we would have ignored the whole vein – not enough there to bother with – but it’s worthwhile to plan ahead for tough times, scrape a little harder with what we’ve already found. To get at the iperion, this team had to do what we call a rough excavation, pulverizing rock so they could filter out any speck of the stuff.”

  “Much more dust in the air than usual, sir, but we had full-face breathers, respirator systems, gloves,” one of the miners spoke up. “And we were told the precautions were sufficient.” An angry, assenting mutter coursed around the room. Cristoph was sure he even heard a grumble from two of the supposedly unconscious men.

  “You should have been safe.” A hard edge of anger crept into his voice. “You should have been able to count on that – on us.” He turned to Oberon for an explanation. “What went wrong?”

  “All the respirators were defective, my Lord. Every single one. The filters were loose, punctured.”

  “That meant we inhaled the damn iperion!” cried one of the miners, then fell into a bout of heavy coughing for emphasis. “We spent days down there, breathing that toxic stuff, thinking we were safe. It’s lodged inside us now, and our lungs are rotting from the inside out!” He raised his hand at the bedside, brushing against the thin decontamination covering.

  Cristoph didn’t understand how there could have been anything wrong with those breathers. “But I made sure there were regular safety inspections. I audited them myself after the last spate of accidents.”

  “Oh, the equipment was inspected, my Lord,” Oberon said quietly. “Every piece passed the tests – and every one of them failed in practical use.”

  Cristoph clenched his jaw. Either an inspector had been paid off, or someone had secretly damaged the equipment to make the de Carres look incompetent and to turn the workers against them.

  “Cease all iperion operations immediately, Lanny. Shut down every mine, planetwide. I want each breather, every single piece of equipment, inspected by two independent teams. I’ll fund the cost for new equipment and lost wages out of my own account. We’ll find the money somewhere.”

  In the two years since his father had gone off to play on Sonjeera with Keana Duchenet, the rival noble families had seen Vielinger as an easy target, and Cristoph as a man easily made into a scapegoat. The artificial catastrophes eroded his ability to effectively manage the major operations his father had left him to handle.

  Cristoph loved this planet and its people; he cared for his family honor and their place in Constellation history. But with all these incidents – and his father’s continued obliviousness, when the de Carre holdings needed a strong voice on Sonjeera more than ever – Cristoph felt like a single man fighting in vain against the fast-moving phantoms of treachery and propaganda. But he would not give up.

  For centuries, the de Carre family had been benevolent wards, and Vielinger was a peaceful and prosperous world with no distinctive exports. Then, nearly two centuries ago, a scientist named Elwar Cori discovered a way to make a theoretical superfast stardrive viable. He found an odd quirk in a rare mineral found on Vielinger, which could mark a path through space, drawing a safe line to keep the recklessly fast starships on course. Before then, no one had paid much attention to the substance.

  When the first stringline network was laid down across the Crown Jewels, the de Carres grew fabulously wealthy from selling iperion. Although prospectors combed Crown Jewel worlds and other scattered planets to find alternative sources of iperion, they discovered only a few modest veins, nothing to compete with Vielinger. The lucrative market transformed the planet into a world whose entire industry revolved around iperion processing, and the population had enough money to buy whatever else they needed from offplanet.

  Cristoph’s predecessors had become accustomed to the wealth, and their profligate spending was legendary, but the people of Vielinger didn’t complain, because the wealth trickled down to them as well. Now, however, the wealth might be gone in another decade or two, but Cristoph’s father continued his frivolous spending, starstruck with Princess Keana and giving very little thought to his people, or to the future. That wasn’t like him at all.

  Everything had been fine before Keana. Vielinger was stable, and the de Carre administration was strong, leaving no vulnerabilities for the Riominis to exploit. But Louis was so fuzzy-headed with love that he’d left his holdings exposed. He was like a man throwing all cares to the wind, celebrating wildly on the eve of Doomsday. While he cavorted with that woman, the jackals had been circling, and now they had finally struck. When Cristoph needed his father most of all, he had no support whatsoever . . .

  A young woman entered the ward. Her long brown hair hung loose except for a single braid in the back. She was thin, her movements frantic. She raced to one of the beds and stopped at the protective field. The man there stirred and looked up, then smiled at the woman. When the protective field prevented her from embracing the man fully, she shot a glare at Cristoph. “We trusted you! Weren’t their jobs hard enough? Weren’t you making enough profit to afford decent safety equipment? Why did you need to kill my husband?”

  The miner reached a hand out of the field, trying to hold her wrist and calm her, but she pulled away.

  Cristoph knew any words would sound like an excuse. Whenever he talked about sabotage and outside plans to weaken the de Carre family, people thought he was hiding behind a bizarre conspiracy theory to cover his own weakness and errors.

  As he looked at this distraught woman and her fading husband – who was dying because Cristoph hadn’t kept him safe – he knew that excuses and justifications didn’t matter to her. These people deserved his best. “Apologies amount to nothing,” he said. “I have failed you, but I will make it up to the people of Vielinger by ensuring that no such accident can happen again.”

  “Just words,” the woman said col
dly. “I’d rather have my husband than your words.”

  The codecall box buzzed at Lanny Oberon’s hip, and when he took the message, his expression fell. “My Lord – a large fire at the Rapana iperion-processing center! There’s been an explosion.”

  He didn’t pause to wonder about the cause of the explosion or the peculiarly devastating timing. “Evacuate, the whole block – get everyone out of there. Check for wind conditions and clear anybody downwind of the plume!” The smoke from the fires would be toxic to anyone without proper protection.

  As he raced off with Oberon, everyone in the ward watched him go. Cristoph felt their unspoken accusations pierce his back like arrows.

  Such an accident could not possibly be a coincidence. Arson, sabotage, even outright murder – the rival noble families were using his people as pawns to win their game. But even if someone else caused the disaster, the responsibility fell on his own shoulders. The additional security he’d hired – guards, inspectors, monitoring systems – had not been enough. Therefore, Cristoph had not been enough.

  Oberon continued to receive codecall updates as they raced across the city to the Rapana processing center. Black-and-gray smoke rose like poisonous tornadoes. Trucks rolled up, and frantic emergency-response workers donned full-body suits, racing toward the raging fire.

  Cristoph and Oberon had to stop two streets away because the swirling fumes had already reached dangerous levels. “Have them get to the people inside first!” Cristoph shouted. “What was the shift complement?”

  Oberon remained grave. “At least sixty processors, packagers, and line supervisors. But . . . my Lord, they must all be dead by now. Even with full-protective suits, it’s too dangerous.”

  “This is a rescue operation until I know for sure. Get the people out. Afterward, we’ll worry about salvaging what we can.”

  The flames were intense, flapping from breaches in the metal walls, spilling out of the shattered windows. “The iperion inside will all be contaminated, sir,” Oberon said. “We’ll have to scrap it all.”