Crystal Rain
Page 38
“Nice clothes,” the pendant in her ear translated the thumping and growling. The lady cleared her throat. “I am Growf.” She slapped her hand on her wrist and growled. “You live behind the wall?”
“Recently, for a while, yes.” Nashara said.
“You hate me.”
“No.” Nashara shook her head. “I’m sorry for you.”
“I may be pet,” the lady growled in Gahe. “But I eat. My great-grandfather pet. Good pet. Eat well. Not starve. Do tricks.”
A Gahe stood up and barked at them both, too quickly for the pendant to translate. It walked over and its tongues reached out and grabbed the lady’s crown. They were strong, strong enough to yank Growf up to her feet.
Growf whined and bowed, kissed the floor, and shuffled over to the back of the bus.
Nashara turned away from the scene and looked out of the window at yellow grass and squiggly trees.
It all depressed her. The whole damn planet depressed her. The Gahe ruled Astragalai firmly, and there were too few humans here to do much about it.
A few hundred thousand lived behind the wall in Pitt’s Cross, most of the rest as professional bonded pets to Gahe.
She’d killed a high-ranking Gahe breeder late last night for some shadowy, idiot organization formed by offworld humans that wanted to free the human pets. The League of Human Affairs. They’d repaid her with a ticket that would take her off Astragalai and aboard a ship heading toward the planet New Anegada.
Five years, planet by planet, trying to get there, the last two a particular hell stuck here in Pitt’s Cross.
Nashara couldn’t wait to get the fuck off the planet. It had been a mistake to head into a nonhuman place. A twoyear mistake.
She checked the pendant cover, squinting. Just a few hours left. Any Gahe would have the right to take her as property or kill her when that ran out. Gahe authorities would be moving to deport her right back into Pitt’s Cross. Gahe breeders paid prime for wild pets.
The pickup zone was a clearing, bordered by wellmaintained gardens, and a ticket booth. A round pod with windows sat in the middle of the grass. Nashara walked over the cut yellow grass, squishing her way to the ticket booth.
“You travel alone?” The Gahe behind the glass shook its squat head. Round eyes looked her up and down.
“My ticket is confirmed. I am here. I am a freedman.” No damn pet. “Here is my pass.” She waved the necklace at the window. She had no time for delays. The body of the Gahe breeder she’d killed would have been found by now. It wouldn’t take long for its friends to figure out it wasn’t one of its pets or human breeding pairs that had killed it. Enough checking and Nashara’s DNA would be found somewhere on the pen she’d used to stab it in the large eyes.
“I guess this is okay,” the Gahe informed her. “Go to the pickup pod.”
The pod stood twice her height with a massive reinforced hook at its tip. Fifteen Gahe seats ringed the inside. Reclining Gahe sat strapped in half of them.
Alarms sounded throughout the clearing as Nashara stepped in the pod. A Gahe attendant outside licked the pod with a tongue and the pod sealed shut.
Gahe stared at her, panting. One of them growled.
Nashara strapped herself in as best she could. It was clear they never expected human use of these seats.
Another timbre of alarm started. Nashara turned around and looked down the length of the clearing just in time to see a shadow and then the long line of the orbital skyhook coming straight toward them. The strong rope of carbon fiber led all the way back to orbit. It spun slowly, each end touching down to snag cargo several times per day.
The massive, rusted, industrial-looking hook on the end whipped toward them and struck the top of the pod.
Nashara’s neck snapped back. She swore. Gahe pounded the floor with their front feet. “Laughter,” the pendant noted as she pushed it back in her ear. The joke was on them. Right now word would be spreading that a human had killed a Gahe. If the League person who’d paid her to do it had told the truth, then the last time that had happened had been a hundred years ago. And that same small insurrection that had left a Gahe dead by human hands in Pitt’s Cross had led the Gahe to isolate the free humans on the planet there.
The pod accelerated, hooked onto the almost indestructible cable. It swung up into the sky past the clouds in a long arc toward space.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
CRYSTAL RAIN
Copyright © 2006 by Tobias S. Buckell
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
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Read on for a preview of
Arctic Rising
Tobias S. Buckell
Available February 28, 2012, from Tom Doherty Associates
A Tor Hardcover ISBN 978-0-7653-1921-0
Copyright © 2012 by Tobias S. Buckell
Chapter 1
Centuries ago, the fifty-mile-wide mouth of the Lancaster Sound imprisoned ships in its icy bite. But today, the choppy polar waters between Baffin Island to the south of the sound, and Devon Island on the north, twinkled in the perpetual sunlight of the Arctic’s summer months, and tons of merchant traffic constantly sailed through the once impossible-to-pass Northwest Passage over the top of Canada.
A thousand feet over the frigid, but no longer freezing and ice-choked waters, the seventy-five-meter-long United Nations Polar Guard airship Plover hung in a slow-moving air current. The turboprop engines growled to life as the fat, cigar-shaped vehicle adjusted course, then fell silent.
Inside the cabin of the airship, Anika Duncan checked her readings, then leaned over the matte-screened displays in the cockpit to look out the front windows.
The airship’s cabin had once held twelve passengers, but was now retrofitted with a bunk, a small kitchen area, supply closets, and a cramped navigation station. Tourists had once sat in the cabin underneath the giant gasbag as the airship glided over New York’s tallest buildings. After that tour of duty, the United Nations Polar Guard purchased it well used and very cheap.
Airships didn’t use much fuel. They could put observers into the air to monitor ship traffic for days at a time, wafting from position to position with air currents.
It saved money. And Anika knew the UNPG was always struggling with a lean budget. It showed on her paycheck, too.
She’d unzipped her bright red cold-sea survival suit and rolled it down to her waist, as it was too hot for her to wear fully zipped up as regulations required. She had her frizzy hair pulled back in a bouncy ponytail: a week without relaxant meant it had a mind of its own right now. She’d consider letting it turn to dreads if she could, but the UNPG didn’t approve. And yet, she thought to herself, they expected her to sit up in the air for a week without a real shower.
Someone once told her to just shave it. But she liked her hair. Why hide it? As long as it was tied up, regs said she could have longer hair.
Now Thomas Hutton, her copilot, was all about the regs and then some. He had his blond hair millimeter short. Shorter than required. But even he wore his survival suit halfsies.
It was one of those balancing acts:if they kept it cold enough in the airship’s cabin to wear the suits zipped up, using the tiny, cramped toilet was torture.
Particularly, Tom said, for the guys.
“Tom?” she prompted.
“Yeah, I’m looking, I’m looking.” He walked back from the nav station, the top half of his suit floppily smacking along behind him as he peered down through the windows along the way.
Four ships were funneling their way into the Lancaster Sound from the east, where Greenland lurked beneath the curve of the horizon. The ships looked like bath toys from up at this height. Three of the ships had large wing-shaped parafoils hanging in the sky overhead. The parafoils, connected to the ships by cables, reached up to where the strong winds were blowing to drag the ships through the water.
“I want to take a closer look at that oil burner,” Tom finally announced.
“You are getting predictable,” Anika said as he slid into the copilot’s seat. Though, one of the things she liked about Tom was his easy predictability. Her own life had been chaotic enough before coming so far north. It was a different pace up here. A different chapter of her life. And she liked it. “It is supposed to be a random check?”
He pointed at the black plume of smoke trailing from the stacks of the fourth ship in the distance. “That one sticks out like a sore thumb. Hard to say no to.”
Anika tapped the scratched and well-worn touch screens around her. She pulled up video from one of the telephoto-lens cameras mounted on the prow of the cabin and zoomed in on the fourth ship.
Thirty meters long with a bulbous-prowed hull, flaking rust, and colored industrial gray, the ship was pushing fifteen knots in its hurry to pass through the sound.
“They seem to be in a hurry.”
Tom glanced over. “Fifteen knots? She hits a berg at that speed she’ll Titanic herself quickly enough.”
The Arctic still had an island of ice floating around the actual pole. It was kept alive by a fusion of conservationists, tourism, and the creation of a semi-country and series of ports that sprang up called Thule. They’d used refrigerator cables down off platforms to keep the ice congealed around themselves despite the warmed up modern Arctic, a trick learned from old Polar oil riggers who’d done that to create temporary ice islands back at the turn of the century.
It was an old trick that didn’t really work anywhere else but near the Pole now. But even the carefully artificial polar ice island that was Thule still calved chunks, some of which would get as far south as Lancaster.
Hit one at the speed this ship was going, they’d sink easily enough.
“Shall we get closer to him and sniff him over?” Anika asked. “Remind him to slow down.”
Tom grinned. “Yeah, their credentials should come through shortly. The scatter camera’s up. Let’s see if this ship’s radioactive.”
* * *
The neutron scatter camera, mounted on a gimbaled platform right next to the telephoto cameras, hunted for radioactive signatures. Port authorities had been using them to hunt for potential terrorist bombs for decades. But what they found, over time, was a secondary use for the scatter cameras: catching nuclear waste dumpers.
At the turn of the century, after the tsunami that washed over East Asia, UN monitors found themselves contacted by East African countries about industrial pollutants washing up on the beaches. People had been falling sick after approaching large, well-insulated drums washed up from deep in the ocean. People had also been showing statistically high rates of cancer near coastlines throughout countries where standing navies and coast guards just didn’t exist.
Toxic waste, including spent nuclear fuel, was clearly getting dumped off non-monitored coasts by commercial shipping.
The gig started when a shady company got the lowest bid for safely storing fuel or industrial waste. Ostensibly they were transporting it out of country to another location.
In reality, once offshore of some struggling African country with no navy, they’d dump it.
Even so called “first world” countries weren’t immune. A statistical study of waste-transporting merchant ships thirty years ago showed a higher number of merchant ships “sinking” in the deeper Mediterranean.
Charter an old leaker, stuff it with barrels full of whatever the host country and its businesses didn’t want. Take the big payout, head out to sea, and then experience difficulties. Instant massive profit.
The African and Mediterranean dumping had faded with the EU and East African naval buildups and public outrage. More dumping was going on off Arabic coasts these days. The post oil-boom nations were too busy trying to destroy each other for what little black gold was left to have the capability to worry about what was going on off their coastlines.
But now the Arctic was also seeing dumping. With the whole Northwest Passage open and free of ice, merchant ships could cross from Russia to Greenland, on through Canadian Polar ports, and then to Alaska. Which also meant they crossed over some very deep arctic water.
As nuclear power boomed across Eurasia and the Americas, with smaller corporations offering small pebble-bed nuclear reactors to energy-hungry towns and small cities demanding an alternative to oils needed in the plastics industries, the waste had to go somewhere.
Somewhere was more often than not… out here where Anika patrolled.
Hence the old, repurposed UNPG spotter airships with scatter cameras. Anika and her fellow pilots hung above the Northwest Passage helping monitor ship traffic that came from the world over. But mainly, they were hunting for ships with radioactive signatures.
The program had proven effective enough. Word had gotten out, thanks in part to a major UNPG advertising campaign online. For the past seven months Anika’s job had become rather routine.
Maybe even a little boring.
Which is why for a moment, she didn’t notice the sound of the scatter camera alarm going off.
Chapter 2
Anika gunned the turboprop engines to shove the airship down toward the choppy ocean.
“Do you have an ID on the ship?” she asked. The ship could be nuclear powered, she guessed. There were plenty of bulk carriers that were. But this one felt way too small for that.
Tom had a tablet in his lap and was paging through documentation.
“The transponder onboard claims it’s the Kosatka, registered out of Liberia. Papers are in order. She cleared herself in Nord Harbor.” He looked across at her. “She’s already been cleared by Greenland Polar Guard. We shouldn’t even be paying attention to her. If we hadn’t left the camera on, we would have just pinged the transponder and let them through.”
They’d dropped a couple hundred feet, and the Plover picked up speed in the still air as the four engines strained away.
“Is there anything about radioactive cargo when she cleared Greenland?”
Tom shook his head. “She’s clean on here. Do you still want to get in closer?”
That was Tom, following the letter of the law. The rules said the ship was cleared, that someone had checked it over in Greenland. They didn’t need to run a second check.
“Someon
e in Greenland could have slipped up,” Anika said. Or, she thought silently, been bribed. She picked up the VHF radio transmitter and held it to the side of her mouth. This was weird enough to warrant a closer look, either way. “Kosatka, Kosatka, Kosatka, this is UNPG 4975, Plover, over.”
Nothing but a faint crackle came from the channel.
Tom waved his tablet. “Says here it’s a private research vessel operating out of Arkhangel’sk.”
“So they are registered in Liberia for convenience,” Anika said. “But operating out of Russia. And they’re studying what?”
“It doesn’t say.”
“Search around online, see if you can find anything.”
“Already on it.”
Anika piloted them down through the black plume of smoke in the air behind the Russian vessel. They were catching up to it.
Once abreast, she would run the scatter camera again. This would get them better data for Baffin Island. This way whoever was doing this couldn’t then claim the camera flagged a false reading. Even if the ship dumped its waste, Anika could prove it had been carrying something obviously radioactive.
Then the gunships would get involved. And boarding parties.
But that wouldn’t be her problem. Which was why Anika liked flying. Back in the Sahara, after she’d put Lagos well behind her, she’d flown as a spotter for the miles of DESERTEC solar stations out in the middle of nowhere. High over the baking sand she’d run patrols looking for trouble.