Stardust

by Edward W. Robertson

  She stepped down and returned to her seat. Webber put his hand on her shoulder. There were a few more speeches after hers. They were all good, and Toman would have been proud.

  When they finished, the priest in the gray robe returned to the dais. "It was Toman's dream to reach the stars and be spread among them. We are not there yet—but it is because of him that we will get there some day. Until such a time, he will be entombed here in the world in miniature he built for himself."

  MacAdams and Webber helped bear his coffin into the meteor-nickel tomb that had been built on a low hill across from the castle. People stood around to reminisce and speculate. Once things were winding down, a man in a black suit approached Rada, his gray hair brushed back from his temples. She vaguely recognized him as Harry Fantano. He was one of Toman's chief lawyers, but he'd had little involvement in the wars, largely because law had more or less ceased to exist for a while there.

  "Admiral Pence." He gave her a bow. "I'm completely honored. My grandkids won't believe me when I tell them I met you."

  Despite her mood, Rada managed to laugh. "Tell them I said hi. And that if they'd like to do their part when they get old enough, we're going to need a lot of good pilots."

  "I hope that you're wrong, but I'll be sure to tell them that." He motioned toward the artificial half of the station visible through the bubble enclosing the planetoid. "May we speak in my office?"

  "I don't much feel like offices today. We can talk right here."

  He nodded, motioning to the shade of a stand of trees at the edge of the water away from what remained of the crowd. They moved to it.

  Fantano smiled out at the water, eyes crinkled wryly. "Normally, I'd wait on this. Not really the time for it. But I know you're about to return to Earth, and with the way everything's so kicked up right now, nothing is really the right time."

  "What's this about, Mr. Fantano?"

  "Toman, as you may or may not have heard, picked up a few bucks during his time among us. It's my job to distribute them in accordance with his wishes. And it was his wish that you be given full control of the Hive."

  She blinked. "He left me the whole station?"

  "I'm not sure you understand, Admiral Pence. He didn't just leave you this station. He left you the corporate entity that is the Hive. Its assets, this station, its ships and holdings—everything."

  "What the hell was he thinking? I couldn't run a hot dog stand, let alone one of the most important businesses in the System."

  "He liked your instincts. Knew you'd do the right thing. I'll tell you, the first time he told me this, I was as iffy as you are. But you've made me into a believer."

  "Well, what am I supposed to do with it?"

  "Whatever you like."

  "I wouldn't even know where to begin." Rada scowled, abruptly angry with Toman for making such a ludicrous decision. The Hive was a vital part of human infrastructure. It had been studying the Swimmers for years. Without it, the System might never have even known— "Actually, that's not true. I know exactly where to begin: with what Toman always wanted for the Hive. If we haven't done so already, our first priority is to return to all of the battle sites and see if there's anything we can salvage from the alien ships—both the Lurkers and the Swimmers. We need to study their designs. Their weapons. But especially their propulsion and life support. These ships got their crews from their home systems to ours. By the time we're done studying them, I want us to be able to do the same thing."

  Fantano had been frantically typing all of this into his pad. He looked up, mouth half open. "The same thing?"

  "The Black Curtain has finally been ripped down. We're going to start building new ships. And we're going to learn how to go beyond the System."

  ~

  Webber waddled into the cave, the box in his arms threatening to dejoint both his shoulders. Somehow, he made it to MacAdams, lowering the sleek machine next to the others. MacAdams patched it into the system, secured it to the floor, and wired it to melt down if anyone tried to pry it loose.

  "These things weigh more than I do," Webber muttered.

  "Just about." MacAdams stood and put his gloves back on. He nodded at Webber's legs. "You holding up okay?"

  Webber smacked his leg. After the last round of treatment from Valiant and Dark Solutions, he'd gotten the braces off just two weeks ago. They hadn't weighed all that much, but it still felt like his feet weren't quite touching the ground.

  "I'm fine," he said. "But couldn't they have made these things any lighter? And doesn't it strike you as just a little bit paranoid that we're still stashing them in the middle of fucking nowhere? Nobody's seen a living Lurker in three months."

  MacAdams walked out the cave entrance. Gray clouds hung over the white peaks. There was nothing but mountains in every direction and not a single hint of human settlement.

  Steam skirled from MacAdams' mouth. "That's the orders. You were there on the boat when the Tube told us what they meant to do if they lost the fleet action."

  "Yeah, they'd infiltrate Earth, take us over from the inside, yadda yadda yadda. But even if some of them are still here, and they find our little factories, how are they going to take over the world with a few antibiotics, nails, screws, water tablets, and soap?"

  They'd been Earthside for the last four months. The early weeks had been the most frantic by far: no matter how much food or medicine got shipped in, it was never close to enough. What they had managed to ship in often sparked off bloody fights for supplies. There had been a lot of dying. Like a lot.

  It hadn't quite stopped since then, but it had certainly calmed down. To the point where people like Webber and MacAdams had been peeled away from the resupply work to less straightforward efforts. This particular scheme had been LOTR's idea: taking a page out of the Lurkers' handbook, they had built a portable factory that assembled what were in effect miniature factories. Like a simplified dispenser, each one of the machines could produce a common, useful good: antibiotics and soap and so forth. Stuff the new settlements would always need.

  That part made perfect sense to Webber. What didn't make any god damn sense was why he and MacAdams had been instructed to deliver the mini-facs into the most remote reaches of the globe.

  Webber snapped his boots into his skis, picked up his poles, and got his half of the sledge folded up and into his pack. Done, he cut down the slope, MacAdams beside him. Frigid air flowed over his face. Powder hissed away from him. He'd never used them before and his skis were automated, doing most of the work for him, but that hardly took away from the thrill of skimming down from the frigid heights of the world. He hadn't done enough stuff like this when he'd grown up on Earth. Since then, he'd spent way too much time in ships and stations, where things like "snow" and "nature" simply didn't exist.

  "It's just not logical," Webber said, as if there hadn't been a two-minute break in their conversation. "If anything, sticking the minis in caves and deep dark woods makes it easier for the Lurkers to steal them without anyone noticing."

  MacAdams grunted. "Yeah."

  "I know that grunt. You know something, don't you?"

  "They're not just supposed to be hard for any Lurkers to get to. They're supposed to be hard for people, too."

  "Why? To toughen them up, Kansas-style?"

  MacAdams glanced over, frowned, then switched off his device. He motioned for Webber to do the same. "Everything is up in the air right now. No one knows how Earth is going to shake out and no one agrees on how it should shake out. So they're being cautious."

  "We think it's important for people to have this stuff, but we make them march two miles up a mountain whenever they want clean water? Why not just build them a treatment plant down in town?"

  "The planet has collapsed. You can't just jump-start it back to where it was without the risk of something going terribly wrong. Leaders on Earth are afraid that if you stick a bunch of factories and facilities in the middle of town square, local warlords are going to use them to consolidate
power and enslave everybody. Meanwhile, out on Mars, they're afraid of a power vacuum: if one group down here gets too big too fast, and starts snowballing, they could unite most or all of Earth under a single government. And the kind of government that's potent and aggressive enough to swallow up a whole world is likely to come for its neighbors next."

  MacAdams paused as they entered the treeline and passed into the shadow of pines so gnarled and stunted they looked like they grew about a quarter of an inch every three hundred years.

  "As for the corporations," he went on, "Earth no longer has anything they're interested in buying. Anyway, they'd rather spend their resources building new fleets and such. You got some that would be happy to colonize the place and make a bundle, but just about everyone else in the System has put the kibosh on that. Including Kansas, who's still taking a real hard line for the idea that Earth has to earn its way back into civilization."

  A snow-heavy bough gave way to Webber's left, leading to a tree-wide cascade of snow across the trail. His skis adjusted course. "What about Rada? She didn't seem too keen on the whole 'send this worthless world back to the Bronze Age' thing."

  "We know the Lurkers sent broadcasts back to their home world. Say one of those was a request for reinforcements. If the Lurkers get another fleet on the way, it could be here within twenty years. That's a single generation. Rada's in charge of the Hive now. She's seen its estimates. She knows that twenty years isn't enough to rebuild and modernize our fleets and defenses and build homes and schools and nice jobs for everyone on Earth."

  "There's something of a strategic element to this too, right? Earth got its ass kicked. By a few ships with rocks. If the Lurkers do come back, it's probably best if we don't have two-thirds of our eggs in one big juicy basket."

  "Yeah, that's another angle to it. Short and long of it is that while nobody wants Earth to die, they agree there's no way to shortcut its revival without endangering the rest of the System in a whole bunch of different ways. What they can do is reduce undue hardship and suffering on the people who still live here."

  "But they care nothing for the hardship of the people who have to tote hundreds of pounds of tiny factories into the most inaccessible places you can find."

  "Sticking them in the middle of nowhere is half the point. You want them where only the locals know about them and can put them to use."

  Webber glanced up into the needles of the pines. When you saw trees, you expected birds and squirrels and stuff, but way up here the trees were all alone. "If I was the tribal leader in charge of these things, I'd charge admission. Or turn it into like a sacred thing where I speak the magic words and the gods reward me with special pills that cure your mother's fever. Before you know it, I'd have nine wives."

  "Wouldn't surprise me if that's about how it goes in some places. It ain't half as bad as it was after the Panhandler, but Earth's going to be a backwater for a while."

  It still didn't make perfect sense to Webber. But if he'd learned one thing during all of his recent interplanetary intrigue, war, and then an even bigger war, it was that when the wave of history swept toward you, you didn't dive to the bottom of it to try to find what was driving it. That would only get you drowned.

  The only thing a person like him could do was grab a board, stand up, and ride the wave.

  They glided through a valley, the snow marked only by the lines of their skis from the trip up and the tracks of rabbits and birds. As they neared the valley's end, they looked down on Wailan, a settlement of a few hundred people next to a swift and extremely cold brook. Every one of the log cabins there had been built within the last six months and you could still smell the fresh-cut wood on some of them, yet they already looked so much like they belonged there it was like they'd been pulled out of a portal to the distant past.

  The villagers turned out to watch them as they skied in. While MacAdams told the town council how to get up to and operate the minis, Webber meandered off on his own. Smoke climbed from stone chimneys, smelling warm and good. Men were out in the commons of the wood hacking at trees with manual axes while women baked bricks and bread and children dashed between houses and pelted each other with snow, red-faced and laughing.

  If you flew in to one of the bombed-out cities, you'd see nothing but devastation and squalor. Here, though, despite the fact the planet had suffered its greatest tragedy in a thousand years, everyone seemed…happy. Happier even than the people who lived in the stations that had been untouched by the war. Webber didn't know what to make of it.

  Rada flew in two days later, touching down next to the commons east of town. She'd brought another load of supplies with her and Webber and MacAdams showed up to help with the goods. As Webber loaded up the crates and bins onto self-propelled handcarts, it finally struck him that the supplies were all raw materials and tools. They included no finished products at all. And now that he thought about it, it had been the same at every supply run Rada had made to every settlement they'd been to.

  Webber took up the cart's lead and turned it on, crunching through the snow next to Rada. "How are your latest crop of pilots doing?"

  Rada rolled her eyes. "Less than incredible. If there was any fighting going on, they'd be nothing but cannon fodder." Her mouth softened. "But they're making progress. By the time we've got some new ships built, they might even be ready to fly them."

  They flew out of Wailan the next day, resupplying at Grant, where Webber got a look at her upcoming class of pilots. Most were young—like young enough that while it wasn't illegal to date them, if you tried it, you'd probably get fired from your place of employment—and although they could return to Earth after their six-year contracts were up, the look in their eyes said they had no intention of coming home. Webber knew it because he'd had the same look in his eyes when he'd run off. At the time, the feeling had been immensely potent. Now, it felt very foreign.

  Their next stop was Ana Ri, a sweaty patch of jungle near the very southern reaches of what had recently been the nation of Las Reinas. There, Webber and MacAdams hauled a new set of mini-facs through the vines and mosquitos out to a hollow in the limestone next to a gigantic natural cistern.

  The settlement of Ana Ri was as hot as Wailan had been cold. Webber missed the skiing, and the not getting attacked by bugs for every second of the day, but the people worked with the same spirit of purpose, digging terraces and clearing ground for squash. With nothing else to do while they waited for Rada to return, Webber pitched in, chopping at the dark, damp soil.

  The job after that was at Bluehill, a rocky, rain-thumped coast where the waves reached up the cliffs like they were trying to grab you and eat you. They set up the minis on a flat-topped island connected to the cliffs by a rope bridge. While they were crossing it, Webber spent every second completely certain he was about to plunge down into the angry gray waters.

  Once they were done, he was so nerve-addled he took a seat on a mossy rock while MacAdams continued down the trail to Bluehill. He closed his eyes. The cold wind felt good, like it was cleansing the nerves out of him.

  When he opened his eyes, a woman stood across from him. She was wearing a long dress of a style he hadn't seen in a long time and her hair streamed from her head like sunlight.

  She inhaled sharply, like she'd been caught cheating at something, then stood up a little straighter. "You're him, aren't you? You're Mazzy Webber."

  "Wrong. I'm Agent Webber."

  "I knew it. You're the one that fought the Lurkers, aren't you? The one that saved us."

  "A lot of people fought the Lurkers. But yeah, I was one of them."

  The woman nodded once. "Thank you, Agent Webber. From myself and everyone here."

  She turned, dress swirling around her feet, and carried on down the trail through the tall grass. Webber stood, shielding his eyes against a sudden squall of rain. After a long moment, he headed the other way after MacAdams.

  After Bluehill, it was back to Grant. The installation was also on a coastline, but
the waters were much calmer and the breeze passed over you without leaving any mark at all.

  Coming in from her latest supply run, Rada hopped out of her jet and stretched her back. "I've got business out at the Hive. My new prototype just came in and I want to give it a test run for myself. Which means it's break time for you two. Twenty days of leave. You can have a flight anywhere you want to go."

  MacAdams raised a brow. "Including off-world?"

  "After the work we've put in, I'd fly you to the center of the sun if that's where you wanted. Assuming you don't mind getting a little melty."

  "How about Sky's Reach? Been looking at some property there."

  "Itching to rid yourself of the endowment Toman left you?"

  "Couldn't do that if I bought the whole settlement."

  "How about you, Webber?"

  "Let me think about it," he said.

  "Think fast or catch a later shuttle." Rada motioned to the one waiting on the tarmac. "I'm flying us up to orbit in fifteen minutes."

  "You're leaving that soon?"

  "We've been working together for months. Earth is finally more or less stable. We'll only be gone for three weeks. It's not going to miss us."

  "Yeah," Webber said.

  But when they all hugged, and the two of them stepped on the shuttle while Webber got on a cart to clear the pad, he had the strange feeling it would be a long time before they saw each other again.

  He watched the shuttle take off and climb until it was a speck against the blue. Once it was gone, he walked down to the cliffs. Below, the ocean waged an endless war against the land.

  He scheduled a flight back to Bluehill.

  ~

  Kansas caught up to him somewhere outside Jupiter. MacAdams knew something was up right away. Since the dissolution of the lanes that had once been necessary to protect shipping from people like Kansas, two ships didn't just bump into each other in the middle of the void. They absolutely didn't do so at speeds matched close enough to dock.