A Tangled Road to Justice

by Olan Thorensen

  Millen read my mind. “Incongruous, I know. Electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles and horses. Welcome to the sticks, Astrild-style. When the interstellar drive was developed further, the cost of colonization came within the means of not only nations and regions on Earth, but any political, religious, or any other conglomeration of humans willing to come up with the funds. There was a frenzy of exploration and colonization, much of the latter irrational. No one will probably ever know exactly how many colonization attempts ended in disaster, but even those that survived usually started almost from scratch and are clawing their way up technologically and economically.

  “If things go well on Astrild, you might come back to Justice in forty years and find a larger town and no sign of horse-powered transportation except for hobbyists. But that’s then, maybe, and this is now. Expect to see other examples of advanced technology working beside tools you’d expect from centuries ago.

  “As for now, I’ll check on our baggage. You find us some transportation.”

  I hurried ahead of the few other passengers who had gotten off and walked to the front of the terminal looking for . . . something. My choices were limited to one car that didn’t appear big enough to hold all our stuff and a flatbed wagon with two benches, pulled by horses. Having no options, I engaged the driver, who proceeded to inform me he didn’t do lifting.

  Millen arrived with three dollies and a couple of workmen pushing two of them. The four of us loaded the boxes and bags on the wagon, and Millen slipped the two workmen paper bills—I couldn’t see the denominations. In fact, I hadn’t even known there was an Astrild physical currency—a rarity on Earth.

  “To the Blue River Hotel, if you please, my good man,” Millen said, and we were off to check in.

  “We’ll leave most of our equipment at the hotel for now. We might not sleep there all the time, but the room we’ll rent will be locked. Johnson should show up tomorrow to take us to their research site. I’ve been in regular communication with him the last two days to be sure we connect as soon as possible.”

  “We’ll have to work on communication of our own,” I said. “It’d be nice if you let me in on what’s happening and planned, just in case I need to make some contribution to whatever it is we’re doing.”

  “Good idea,” said Millen, without committing to anything.

  The wagon trip reinforced the aerial impression of Justice, including the mix of transportation methods and the mélange of aromas telling me we weren’t in a “city” anymore. At the hotel, Millen and I moved all the boxes ourselves—most either heavy or big enough to require two men. Our room was small, with two narrow beds, a small desk, a table with two straight-backed chairs, a chest of drawers, a single light between the beds, and a comm link. What it lacked in amenities and style, it made up for by being on a ground-floor hall within sight of the main desk and having an impressively solid door with multiple locking mechanisms.

  One feature struck me as soon as we had walked into the hotel.

  “Almost everything is made of wood or, at least, what looks like wood,” I said, stroking the finely grained tabletop. “I assume it comes from native trees. Hardly any plastics or other synthetic materials. Maybe that’s because they don’t have fossil fuels to provide chemical feedstocks.”

  “You use what you’ve got,” said Millen.

  We’d lined the boxes up along one wall. “Okay, Everett, let’s check things.” He whipped out a small crowbar, from where I haven’t a clue, and starting prying open boxes, beginning with one of the smaller ones.

  The first thing he pulled out was a pair of night vision goggles. They were small, so they couldn’t have the latest computer-assisted vision enhancements, but I didn’t figure we’d need anything too exotic on Astrild. However, the next thing he pulled out of a box surprised me.

  “A ghillie suit?”

  Millen laughed. “Gotta love ’em. I once got within two meters of an Ecorium panda. That sucker was so confused. It could smell me but couldn’t see me.”

  Now I stared at Millen, instead of the ghillie suit, not comprehending why anyone would want to get within a hundred meters of an Ecorium panda. “Panda” was a euphemism. I’d seen the Ecorium version in a Houston zoo, and the black-and-white patched coloring of the two-ton monstrosity was its only similarity to a Chinese panda.

  “All right. I give up. Why the hell would you creep up to an Ecorium panda?”

  “It’s a bit of a story. I’ll tell you about it someday. Maybe.”

  “Okay, then what about the ghillie suit? I’ve used them, but I didn’t expect to see one here.”

  “Never know when it’ll come in handy. And it’s not a suit, it’s two,” he said, holding up a second suit. “No point in having one of us hidden if the other’s got his ass hanging out.”

  The original ghillie suits were made of netting or cloth covered with strips of burlap, cloth, or whatever else would break up an outline. The modern ones were made of synthetic optical fibers connected to a small computer that aped whatever surrounded the suit. If you were lying on sand, it looked like you were a sand pile. Dig in a little bit, and you effectively disappeared. The ends of the strips even responded to wind—I’d seen a man standing in front of a bush with the wind blowing, and even ten meters away, I couldn’t pick out his outline.

  Having the suits available was good, but I had a question I had to ask. “And why do you think we’ll need them?”

  “Oh, we might not, but you never know. However, here’s something I expect will get used.”

  He set aside the ghillies and pulled out two full-body protective Dynaplex suits. Their synthetic fibers were originally based on spider silk that encased overlapping thin cells containing a liquid ceramic. The black, neck-to-ankle suit would stop anything short of rounds from a heavy, armor-piercing machine gun or rifle. The fibers were all but unbreakable, and the liquid ceramic turned solid on sudden impact. The outer layer would also absorb and dissipate energy beams from most handheld weapons, but only once—a second hit at the same spot would burn through.

  A suit weighed nine kilograms, and I had benefited from the suits enough to appreciate them—although I’d suffered broken ribs, a fractured collarbone, and more deep bruises than I cared to remember. They might stop a round from penetrating, but the kinetic energy of the round still transferred to your body, just over a larger area. The weight and heat were major hindrances to using the suits, but if heavy action was expected, the positives dominated.

  “What? No matching helmet?” I snarked.

  “Thought about it,” dead-panned Millen, “but that’d be a bit too obvious. Plus, I’d rather be shot by someone not knowing we have the suits on than someone knowing and using more extreme measures.”

  “How about combat armor?” I couldn’t help but ask with a laugh.

  Millen didn’t reciprocate my attempt at humor. “There might be missions where it would come in handy, but we’d be a little too noticeable, running around as self-mobile infantry. Besides, keeping them powered and maintained would be too difficult in most of the places we’ll go.”

  Once again, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into if Millen didn’t outright reject the possibility that we’d need combat armor used in serious wars. I hoped Millen was just overly cautious, though I worried I might be whistling in the wind.

  “How about anti-aircraft missiles or nukes?” My level of concern hadn’t reached its limit yet.

  Millen ignored me. I didn’t blame him. I accepted with equanimity the recon drone but less so the box of eight fragmentation grenades. Drones could fly silent at several hundred meters and provide video feeds of what wasn’t in the direct line of sight—always something appreciated.

  The grenades were another matter. Whatever their use, it meant something or someone intending you harm was close—too close. I preferred keeping and dealing with potential problems a good distance away.

  I had started to wonder whether Millen did have missiles or nukes in those
crates when he finally got to the firearms. I found their familiarity somehow comforting. Maybe we weren’t going to face entire armies—maybe just parts of armies.

  Four 10-millimeter pistols, two regular-sized with 22-round magazines and two small, snub-nosed, 10-round holdouts. Two 6-millimeter M504 assault rifles, both with detachable under-barrel 25-millimeter grenade launchers. Two short cannons followed. Okay, not real cannons, but auto-loading shotguns that must have rated 6 gauge. The barrels were short, and the magazine tubes were the same length, so each one could hold only four shells. But if you needed more than that to clear a room with these monsters, you were in deep shit.

  Boxes of shells followed. Different sizes and shapes for the different guns. The chemical propellant wasn’t gunpowder any more, but these types worked even better, and the reduced charge volume allowed magazines with more rounds. I’d used all the weapons or similar ones for purposes I didn’t always want to remember.

  Despite advances in human technology, the tried-and-true projectile weapons were still the most efficient. Yes, there were personal laser and railgun weapons, but both technologies were better suited to static positions, drawing on large power sources. The mobile lasers took too long to recharge, and the smallest railguns needed two people to lug them—running any distance was out.

  No, projectiles were the method of choice for destroying other humans, and the basic range of calibers hadn’t changed since before we first got off Earth. Hey, if you’ve got a good product, why change? Millen had explained that the locals would mainly use a hodgepodge of projectile weapons and a few laser models. Our pistols and shotguns wouldn’t be noticed as out of the ordinary, and while the assault rifles might draw more attention, they probably wouldn’t be recognized by most people as state-of-the-art.

  I thought a selection of knives had completed our destruction kit when Millen pulled out a cloth-encased object from a longer box. When he unwrapped the cloth, the revealed object screamed death. Solid black, it was hinged to fold and snap in position to be more than a meter long. It had a scope that Galileo would have killed for. On seeing the object, I was inclined to forgive Millen for much of his bullshit. It was the latest Napua 15-millimeter flight-enhanced sniper rifle. I’d never used one in the field, but at a test range I’d consistently hit targets at 1,600 meters—about a mile to us American descendants still attached to the old measurements. It had considerable kick, even with the shock-absorbing stock, but the teardrop-shaped rounds minimized vortexing and wind effects, aided by tiny vanes that deployed after the round exited the barrel at high muzzle velocity. If only humans used such ingenuity for other purposes.

  Millen interrupted my admiration of the Napua. “All right, let’s check out the guns and load.” We spent the next hour inspecting the gun mechanisms and loading magazines. Live fire tests had to wait.

  Millen’s comm unit beeped. Our initial contact, the man named Johnson, was in town and would pick us up in front of the hotel the next morning at 9:00 a.m. Did I mention that Astrild had 28-hour days? The habit from Earth of dividing the day into hours of the same duration as on Earth and noon being halfway through the day had been kept by the original colonists. It was 13:00 p.m. (or 27:00 military time) when we finished loading gear for the next day’s trip and stacking the boxes in the room’s large closet. I could sleep on demand and left Millen futzing with his comm.

  The next morning, we were waiting out front when two horses pulling a flatbed wagon with rails trotted up to the hotel. The bed held boxes and bags of something.

  “Millen and Cole, I assume,” said a tanned man from the wagon’s seat. “I’m Johnson from the Starsumal Research Station. Put your gear aboard, and let’s get going. We want to get to the base of the Ringheld Mountains before dark.”

  “Right on time, Mr. Johnson,” Millen said. “Or should I say Doctor Johnson?”

  “It’s doctor. But that’s doesn’t mean much here. Johnson’s fine.”

  So, no first names? I thought. Simple formality or not wanting to get too familiar with riff-raff?

  Either way, we loaded our packs containing sleeping bags, ammunition, first aid kits, and a change of clothes. We took the Dynaplex suits—Millen didn’t think we’d need them, but you can’t go wrong being prepared for anything. A case held the drone, and the Napua was protected in a waterproof bag. Once loaded, we were off at a brisk pace. The two horses were big brown ones with faint paler splotches on their haunches and short, stiff manes like zebras or Przewalski’s horses I’d once seen in a zoo. Some local breed? I wondered. I’ve never seen pictures like these two. Whatever they were, they pulled the wagon, the cargo, and three passengers with ease. The two beasts also had a nasty streak. When I got too close, one horse missed taking an ear only because of my good reflexes. The other horse kept an eye on me as if waiting for me to come in range.

  “Careful,” said Johnson, “they’re a bit frisky until they’re used to you being around. Most people know to stay clear at first.”

  Would have been nice to get the warning earlier.

  Millen sat next to Johnson in the wagon. I was relegated to perching on a sack of something not too hard. We each had a pistol and a rifle, plus we had the Napua. I held my rifle at the ready by the time we were out of sight of the last farmhouse. Millen glanced back. “I think you can relax, Everett. If there’s gonna be trouble, it’ll happen on the way back, not when we’re not carrying anything worthwhile.”

  God damn it. I hate when Millen’s right, especially when I’m not thinking clearly. But hey, this is my first time riding shotgun. I’d figured out on my own what it meant, although I couldn’t help wonder why it was called that, if we weren’t bringing the shotguns.

  I laid the rifle beside me but not too far away.

  We made 42 kilometers that day—according to Johnson—but my butt felt like we did 142. Millen and I had switched positions in the afternoon, but my two gluteus maximus muscles didn’t know the difference.

  During the ride, Johnson filled us in on what he knew, which turned out to be piss little, except for giving names to a few citizens of Justice, such as Mayor Bossev, a doctor named Gebran, and an ex-judge named Felzoni. Two other persons he mentioned were Marshal Wilton and a judge whose name he couldn’t remember—the last two being stooges of the man named Makon Cherkoff, who had appeared in Justice eighteen months earlier and was well on the way to controlling everything in and around the town.

  Other than that, Johnson was short on details because he and the other Starsumal staff came into town only on occasion. Except for the biological shipments, everything else he knew was second- and third-hand. He had been approached by a man in Justice he didn’t name and was requested to pass on an encrypted message to anyone he knew who could get to some unidentified parties to help get rid of Cherkoff. To me, it sounded too much like the proverbial tossing a message bottle into the sea and hoping for an answer. Johnson also didn’t understand why communications between Justice and the outside world were somehow restricted. Johnson’s site had its own satellite link—something he suspected was overlooked by whoever controlled Justice. It quickly became evident that Johnson felt ill-at-ease with his role as go-between. He hinted that he was content with performing a favor and hoped to be repaid by our stopping the research station’s shipments from being stolen.

  At one point, when Millen turned to look at me, I gave an exaggerated shrug, hand gesture, and eyebrows raised combination, while I mouthed, “What the hell!” Obviously, our latest Mr. White wasn’t omniscient because he hadn’t realized how little Johnson knew.

  The terrain had risen sharply from the flat to rolling land near Justice. Terrestrial plants were long gone, and for the last twenty or more kilometers we passed only native species. Half an hour before dark, we camped—actually camped, with a fire, horses staked, and even taking turns keeping guard. Johnson said the local animals were generally shy around humans, but there had been exceptions. That was enough for me. I had been in situations where keep
ing alert at night kept you alive, but that involved other humans or animals I recognized. Johnson’s description of an Astrilian pseudokomodo had me envisioning a huge lizard. Johnson didn’t seem worried, but it turned out my imagination was closer to the truth. That’s a story for another time, though.

  For firewood, Johnson described to us the yellowish fragments of a certain Astrild tree whose trunk fragmented when struck by lightning.

  “It looks rotten,” he said, “but the bolt shatters the tree into pieces like tempered glass that come apart with the right shock.”

  Millen and I collected pieces until Johnson said we had enough. It burned with a steady, long-lasting fire that reminded me of the applewood my uncle said was the best firewood. We sat around the fire after dark, and I had a moment to satisfy some curiosity.

  “Why exactly are you out here? I know you are doing research on something and shipping biological matter out, but for what purpose?”

  “It’s the uniqueness of the ecosystem,” Johnson said. “It’s clear that Astrild evolved life twice, which makes it the only known case of that happening. The two systems subsequently evolved together, and there are fascinating interactions among the plants and animals. Our results have only recently been disseminated off Astrild, and we’re swamped with calls for samples to be sent to other, better-equipped facilities, mainly off-planet. Signs are, there will be many more research stations established here in the coming years, but for now we’re the only one prepping and sending out samples.

  “They have to be carefully prepared and packaged, and we’re the only ones currently able to do it properly. Unfortunately, not all the laboratories in Oslo or other worlds are all that particular on how they get the samples, which is why the robberies occur. There are also indications of important biomedical potential. Nothing specific has come out yet, but interest is ratcheting up.”

  “Then I’m surprised there isn’t more activity,” I said. “What’ll happen with your group once more researchers and maybe companies show up?”