Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  “No,” Redland said impatiently. “We gotta capture him first.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To find out how he got here.”

  That question hadn’t occurred to me, but I saw that Redland wanted to prove his innocence. It was a selfish move, but one I couldn’t argue with. I nodded my approval.

  We reached the hangar where the barricade had just finished going up. It seemed like little more than fence posts spaced every twenty meters around the building, each of which had an officer standing nearby. Kuznetsov stood by a wheeled vehicle, studying a large touchscreen display mounted to the side door. He waved us over.

  “Lieutenant Perkins told me you did not remain in our guest area as instructed,” he said.

  “We couldn’t do that,” I said.

  “I am not surprised,” Kuznetsov said. “As I told you before, you seem a lot like your father. He did not do as he was told, either.”

  My blank expression surely indicated my surprise, because Kuznetsov dismissed the comment with a wave. “This is a matter for later, Marshal. The Ambassador insisted we wait for you before taking action.”

  So that’s why they decided to bring us in on the operation, I thought. My mother made them do it. To keep the amusement from spreading across my face, I thought about all the people Jarnum had killed. “I’ve been chasing this man for over a month,” I told Kuznetsov. “He’s a crafty sonofabitch. He’s got a thing for booby traps and trickery.”

  “We have discovered this,” Kuznetsov said. “It has cost us lives, and my forces are now trying to find traps Jarnum has set for civilians.” His eyes flashed hate. “We will not allow citizens to be targeted!”

  “We need the bastard alive,” Redland said.

  Kuznetsov sneered. “You would like maybe we set table and give him tea? He must be tired after so much killing.”

  I stopped Redland before he escalated the tension any further. “How many have died?”

  “Too many,” Kuznetsov furrowed his heavy eyebrows. “Don’t worry, Marshal. Inside Dolina, we apprehend first.” He turned and spoke quietly to an officer who approached. “Stay here,” he said, indicating the spot where we were standing. He trotted off with the officer, and then turned back toward us. “Don’t touch invisible fence,” he warned, pointing at the posts surrounding the hangar. “Would not want outsiders to piss their pants.”

  “I’ll handle Kuznetsov,” Redland whispered after the major’s back was turned once again. “Apprehending Jarnum won’t do us any good.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” I said.

  “These civilized types will put him in a cell, follow some bureaucratic niceties, and talk him to death,” Redland said. “He won’t talk to them, and they won’t let us interrogate him. It’ll be a standoff.”

  “You’re saying we nab him?” I asked.

  “As soon as we find him,” Redland nodded.

  I pushed Redland back away from the barricade. I got in close. Traore had to lean closer to hear me speak. “You don’t believe he’s in the hangar?”

  “He’s smarter than that,” Redland said. “The doors are probably booby trapped.”

  “We don’t even know how he got to Dolina,” Traore hissed. “None of us has ever been here before, but you’re still convinced he’s got some kind of advantage. He’s outnumbered by a battalion of soldiers using Founders’ Tech to track him.”

  “Jarnum might have insider knowledge,” I said. “Or outsider knowledge, so to speak.”

  “Are you accusin’ me of collaboration again?” Redland snapped.

  “No, I’m not,” I said. “I’m not a hundred percent sure you’re on our side, either, but I don’t believe you had any opportunity to help Jarnum.”

  “Redland is working with Jarnum,” Traore said.

  Redland and I both turned to stare at Traore.

  Traore explained his theory. “Alex, we almost lost you in the Colderlands when your suit got damaged. Marshal Hero here insisted on going out to save you. How do we know he didn’t point Jarnum to the cave during that time? It had to be just another distraction. He and Jarnum have to be working together.”

  “You little pipsqueak,” Redland hissed at Traore. “You wanna go toe to toe with me, just give the word.”

  “Why do you think I’m here?” Traore sneered. “I figure it’s Alex’s job to get Jarnum, and it’s my job to watch you.”

  Redland flushed. He didn’t say a word, but I could see the pressure building up in him like a bomb ready to go off.

  “Knock it off, Derrick,” I said. “I get it. You’re upset about Brady, but if you can’t keep your head on straight, I’m going to leave you behind.”

  Kuznetsov interrupted us by clearing his throat. “We will breach hangar now. You can watch, or you can argue.”

  Redland, his face still flushed, moved closer to the invisible fence. I threw a glance at Traore, who looked like he wanted to shove Redland into the fence and find out how effective it was. I held my hand up until he looked at me and grudgingly nodded.

  Several officers approached the hangar behind transparent shields. I could hear them communicating with the major through their ear pieces, giving observations and starting their countdown. Instead of going for the door, they went to the hangar’s long wall and produced a device that one of them referred to as a can opener. They aimed the device at the wall and knelt in a semi-circle around it.

  “Go,” Kuznetsov said through the earpieces.

  The can opener produced a muffled whump sound. I heard, and also felt, the shock wave. I ducked instinctively, but realized it had little effect at this distance. The hangar wall, on the other hand, had a hole wide enough for two officers to go in side by side. The squad rushed through the hole and spread out as they entered. It looked very efficient.

  Five seconds later I heard one of the officers swear. “Target not present,” came the voice over the earpiece. “Standby.”

  I looked down at my tablet and saw blue dots surround the red dot inside. I got that sinking feeling that the tablets weren’t as smart as they were supposed to be.

  A flurry of activity ensued among all the officers around the perimeter. Each of them spoke animatedly into their earpieces, and then looked around at the sky. I went straight to Kuznetsov. Redland and Traore followed.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “Look at your screen, Marshal,” Kuznetsov said, angry and impatient.

  I held up the tablet. Instead of one red dot in the middle of the screen, there were now dozens, all moving in different directions. “What the hell does this mean?” I asked.

  Kuznetsov didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed a button on his belt. The fenceposts buzzed once, and then clicked. The major ran toward the hangar with the rest of the officers. The fence did not electrocute them, although the looks on some of their faces suggested they were about to piss their pants anyway. The three of us joined them.

  Kuznetsov gave orders to each of the officers, several of whom ran to nearby trucks, while others boarded some of the flying vehicles. He then spoke into his tablet to direct those who were listening to his signal. The chatter in my earpiece was so confusing that I turned it off. Traore did likewise. We followed the major into the hangar to see what they found.

  Major Kuznetsov leaned over the body of a man dressed in an officer’s uniform. His face had been smashed in. Electrical wires ran between a few handheld consoles lying on his chest. One of the screens had green text moving across it so quickly that I couldn’t read it, while the other had nothing but random characters flickering on the display.

  “I thought you say this man is outsider,” Kuznetsov seethed, his face red with anger. “No outsider could hack our software like this.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  “This monster killed victims for their consoles,” Kuznetsov said. “He reprogrammed their tablets and lured us to this place. Now he is somewhere else.” He tried to close the dead officer’s vacant
eyes, but it there was only one eyelid left. With a piteous groan, he stood up, found a tarp on a nearby shelf, and covered the dead man’s head with it. He left the torso uncovered, since another officer was examining the consoles with some kind of electrical probe.

  Not wanting to interrupt, but needing to know, I asked, “What do you mean by reprogrammed?”

  Kuznetsov shook his head. “You would not understand this. Our devices have computer brains. They can be tricked, but this is not easy to do. One must have great technical skill to do this.”

  “It was Oliver Jarnum,” I insisted. “We believe he might have come from Dolina originally.”

  “The name is not familiar to me,” Kuznetsov said. “A man this smart would not use a real name, however.” He rubbed his eyes and put a surprisingly gentle hand on the dead officer’s shoulder. “If we had some way to understand his modus operandi, we could generate a Logical Predictor on his movements.”

  “Is there anything we can do?” I asked.

  Kuznetsov shrugged. “You not know how we live, how we work in Dolina,” he said, “but each of these hijacked consoles belonged to an officer who is now likely in the same condition as this man on the floor. Two of you are lawmen, and the other a soldier. If you can contribute, I would be thankful. However, I do not know how you can help with such limited knowledge of our Dolina.”

  “We do this for a living,” I said.

  “I will send a signal that grants you access,” Kuznetsov said, “for the good it will do.”

  “Thank you, Major,” I said.

  I ushered Redland and Traore back out the door and looked around, wondering where to begin.

  “Still think I’m a part of this?” Redland asked Traore.

  Traore glared at him. I guessed he wasn’t sure anymore, but he wasn’t going to admit it. Instead, I answered for him. “Jarnum didn’t need your help to get in the cave, Marshal. If anything, your usefulness ended at Ovalsheer Prison.”

  Redland flushed with anger. “He’ll soon find out what it means to double-cross me.”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  I ran to one of the flying vehicles near the hangar. It served as some kind of transport for agricultural jobs, as there were bags of fertilizer and seeds stacked in a cargo bin. The vehicle was about the same size as the flyer that Perkins had flown, with lifting rotors placed near each corner of the chassis. Having watched a few pilots in action, I felt confident that I could handle the controls.

  “I don’t like flying,” Traore said.

  “Stay here, then,” I said, and jumped in the pilot’s seat.

  Redland sat beside me in the second seat. Traore begrudgingly jumped in the back and tossed out the cargo as I started up the motor. If the vehicle was meant to carry heavy loads, it ought to be fairly maneuverable with just passengers aboard. After a false start and a couple of bumps against the tarmac, I increased the throttle and found that it lifted easily into the air. I glanced once at Kuznetsov, who gave a quick salute and went back to his business.

  The steering yoke had a pair of handles that extended from the dashboard. I pushed them forward to accelerate. Pulling back slowed it down. I flipped a thumb switch on the right handle, and we immediately pitched to one side. We had gone nearly sideways before I realized I had unlinked the right and left rotors. I compensated appropriately by increasing the throttle on the left side until we were flying level again. By making this mistake, I realized that the lifting motors could be controlled independently of one another. Additionally, a pair of pedals gave me the ability to spin the vehicle in either direction. The result was a responsive set of controls which needed a light touch, but offered power to spare. I pushed the handles forward and gave us some forward momentum.

  “Maybe I should stay behind,” Traore shouted over the thrum of the blades, one hand gripping a metal handhold, the other hovering near his mouth.

  “Too late,” I said, increasing both throttles to take us higher. As the hangar got smaller and farther behind us, Redland pointed to the right of the vehicle.

  “There’s other flyboys up here with us!” he shouted. “Watch out for ‘em.”

  “Right,” I said. I pulled back on the handles and rotated them inward slightly. All four lifting motors automatically moved to a slightly up-tilted angle. I re-engaged the thumb switch and let go of the controls. The vehicle was stable.

  “Hey!” Traore shouted.

  “Relax,” I shouted back. “They wouldn’t make these without an auto-hover option.”

  “Well…warn us next time,” Traore said as he increased his white-knuckle grip on the handhold.

  “What are you doin’, kid?” Redland asked.

  “Thinking.” I scanned my tablet and compared it to the terrain below. A gauge on the flyer told me our distance above the ground was a full kilometer, which I didn’t tell Traore. Dolina was circular, and slightly concave as we looked down at it. Beyond the wall at the city’s radius was that same pearlescent shimmer, more starkly noticeable from the air. It reminded me that this place, albeit with an amazing view, was still artificial.

  We had to find Jarnum, not just because he had killed people in Dolina, or even because he had a bounty on his head. We had to find him because it was his desire to bring the worst sort of chaos to the world. A war with the T’Neth would be the only thing that satisfied him, and it would ultimately destroy us all. The pertinent question was: how did he plan to accomplish that?

  According to Kuznetsov, Jarnum couldn’t shut down the reactor. He shouldn’t have been able to hack the police tablets, either, I thought. But would shutting down the reactor achieve his goals? A power loss could result in cave-in, but if the T’Neth didn’t know about Dolina, then how would crushing it under a billion metric tons of ice start a war? They might even appreciate Jarnum’s actions if that were the case. No, A power outage wouldn’t be in Jarnum’s plan, but he would use the reactor somehow. That much I was certain of.

  Frustrated by a lack of ideas, I tapped my earpiece to hear more of what the locals were doing. It was nearly impossible to keep all the voices straight, as they spoke over one another much of the time. They each introduced new data, received data from others, and responded as their circumstances dictated. Keeping track of all these communications could only be done by those with extensive training and practical experience, neither of which I had. I almost tapped it back off again.

  That’s when I had an epiphany. This was not unlike listening to the T’Neth communicate, where many individual minds joined to form a unified whole. Sure, human communication was disjointed and fragmented compared to the T’Neth, but humans were now using technology to approximate the same result. If I could learn to distinguish T’Neth voices from one another, surely I could do the same for humans. I closed my eyes, not trying to pick out every word that was said, but to understand the overall conversation.

  “Not a good time for a nap, Alex,” Redland said.

  I opened my eyes. “I’m listening to the radio chatter. They don’t know where Jarnum is,” I said. “They’re treating him like a sociopath who just wants to kill people, and they’ve missed the point.”

  “He is a sociopath,” Redland said.

  “He only cares about the T’Neth,” I countered. “Why would he terrorize Dolina when all he cares about is the T’Neth?”

  “Maybe he doesn’t know they aren’t here,” Traore offered.

  “He knows a lot more than anybody thinks he should,” I argued. “Redland, you once said Jarnum can track T’Neth somehow. If that’s true, he would know they aren’t here.”

  Redland thought about that, and then asked, “What is he after?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said, “Whatever it is, he’s being single-minded about it, and he knows what he’s doing.”

  “He’s trying to start a war,” Redland reminded me.

  “It’s more basic than that,” I corrected him. “He wants to kill T’Neth. You told me that yourself.”

  “He�
�s going to kill T’Neth by killing humans?” Traore said. “What sense does that make?”

  “It makes a lot of sense,” I said. “If you don’t care how many humans die to achieve your goal.”

  “He’s just one person,” Traore exclaimed. “He can’t kill everybody!”

  I locked eyes with Redland. “Yes, he can.”

  I pushed the steering handles all the way forward and revved the motors to the limit. As the vehicle accelerated toward the center of Dolina, I had to yell over the sound of the rotors.

  “There’s only one place he can be,” I shouted over the roar of the motors. “He’s going to the vortex drive.”

  “The gadget that makes the sky look real?” Redland shot back. “Tell me how that kills lots of people and starts a war.”

  “The vortex drive creates an energy field strong enough to drive spaceships across the galaxy,” I explained. “He can’t turn it off, but he can turn it up!”

  “So what?” Traore shouted. “The sun gets brighter? Kuznetsov said it won’t make a difference.”

  “He doesn’t know how Jarnum thinks, either,” I yelled. I thought back to the Dead Sciences I studied for years at the university. I had a pretty good grasp on vortex theory, even more than my instructors because they considered such topics a waste of time. But I had always enjoyed reading texts that had been retrieved from the Celeste. These texts described how a vortex drive would envelop a spaceship within a massive electromagnetic bubble. The bigger the bubble got, the lower the average mass of the ship became. If the drive created enough power, the bubble grew so large that the average density of the vessel inside matched that of empty space, or even became less dense when random space gases were factored in. That ship could then skim above the fabric of space without creating any relativistic effects. The flip side of the vortex drive’s capability was something that Kuznetsov touched on but might not have understood. Vortex drives could not be engaged where any sort of natural gravity well existed. Attempting this would encircle such gravity sources within the vortex bubble, thereby increasing the density of the vessel and multiplying the relativistic effects instead of reducing them. In theory, a vortex bubble that encompassed an entire planet could produce the same effect that absolute zero would – all motion would stop.