Deucalion (5 page)

Looking at him, Jane could see that he was speaking to lighten the mood. Something inside her knew better than to believe him.

4

DOWN

Central Desert, West of the Roosevelt Ranges

Edison Sector (West)

15/7/101 Standard

DARYL

Another bloody field trip!

Thirty-five of us strapped into our seats, while Jacklin took on the power of the desert windstorms, trying to keep the flyer from losing altitude and smashing into one of the jagged hills that lay between the Martinez Oasis and the Genetic Research Facility at Edison. There's only one thing I ever hated more than flying over the Central Desert, and that was flying over the Central Desert on the same flyer as Karl Johannsen. An ego I could stand. He was a politician; you sort of expect it. But the J-man seemed to feel that the only way to demonstrate his importance was to make everyone around him feel small. Not me, so much. I was just ‘the help' – I didn't rate. But I don't know how a smart kid like Jacklin lasted the distance.

There was a kind of . . . elitism among the old guard of the Party, the ones who'd made the ‘freeze-trip' out from Old Earth. Jacklin and most of the young lions were first or second-generation Deucs, and the old guard looked down on them. Literally.

I don't know for sure, but I'll bet that one of the projects in the Genetic Research Facility at Edison would have involved trying to find out why kids conceived and born on Deucalion ended up so much shorter and more finely featured than Old Earthers. Changes like that usually take several generations to show themselves, but on Deucalion, the short stature of the ‘home-grown' stock was noticeable from the first years of the settlement.

And didn't Johannsen just love playing on it. In my line of work, you don't get to choose your boss. He's assigned to you, a bit like garbage-detail or graveyard shift. But a lot of the guys would have sold their grandmother for the job. After all, with his ‘get-out-and-meet-the-people' routine and his big-money backers, he was a shoo-in certainty for President in the inaugural elections. Dimitri Gaston was the only Councillor with even an outside chance of beating the J-man, and Gaston was slipping in every poll.

101 had been chosen as the year when the Ruling Council (which was selected by the Earth-appointed bureaucracy and the Corporation, and made no pretence at all of being democratic) was to be replaced by an elected Congress. And a President.

The President was going to need Security in a big way, and if he liked your work, it would be a safe bet he could override the roster and requisition you for his personal cadre.

So I had the job I didn't want, and the job that they did. But they were career-Security, they loved the uniform and the sense of power it carried. I'd never intended to spend my life working for Security – or anyone else. I had dreams.

When I was a
kid
,
I had dreams . . .

Unfortunately, most of those dreams had involved working the land that my father was granted as part of the immigration package, when he signed up for us to make the trip from Old Earth. It was a standard sort of deal. The Deucalion Mining Corporation paid the expenses for the Jump, and the government kicked in with an offer of farming land. In return, my father agreed to work for the Corporation for three years, with an option to renew if he liked the work. Most of the immigrants were offered the same deal. After all, it didn't cost the government anything – there was more than enough land to go around.

And the DMC was getting its money's worth. With Earth's resources so badly depleted, they could charge what they liked for minerals, especially the heavy metals. Of course, the thing that made it so cost-effective for them was the fact that it was actually less expensive to warp a huge ore-carrier to Earth than it was to warp a small shuttle – something to do with the DiBortelli Principle, and the law of inverse-proportion between mass converted and energy expended in warp-state. They built these immense carriers, the size of a city-block, and people like my father filled them. Then, twelve months and one warp-jump later, the minerals arrived back on Old Earth, and the DMC raked in the profits.

Which was great for the Corporation. But not for my father. Or my dreams. You see, it didn't really serve the Corporation's best interests for workers to see out their contracts then go off to be farmers. It meant new recruitment costs, and the waste of training new workers. And as the taxes and royalties that the Corporation paid were so important to the Ruling Council, a few strange things began to happen.

For one, at about the time we arrived on the freeze-liner, the rules were changed. They still assigned the land grants – they were part of the contract, after all. But though there appeared to be plenty of perfectly good land around, the grants all seemed to be on the edge of the desert, or in areas of high salinity where the best you could grow was old.

And the Corporation was granted monopoly rights over surface transportation, so that even if you managed to grow a crop, the costs of getting it to a market were so high that you ended up selling them your soul, just to survive. A couple of lean seasons and the only way out was to go back and work for the Corporation, while you watched the agricultural conglomerates buy up the land.

I watched my parents fight the system. And I watched the system destroy them.

When they lost the farm, my father went back to work in the mines, but he was little more than a shadow of the man he had been. The night they called and informed us of the accident, I don't think my mother was any more surprised than I was. At least he died at work. That meant that the compensation gave us enough to buy a small house in the suburbs of New Geneva, with money left over to live on. I used to wonder if it was really an accident, or if it was his final act of defiance. The only way he could think of to make the Corporation give something back. I guess I could never decide.

We grew vegetables in the backyard, and hybrid fruit trees, but a suburban garden was a long way from the farm of his dreams. And mine.

So I ended up in Security. And, though I say so myself, I was damned good at my job. Probably it had something to do with not really wanting it in the first place. Security is a job where you have to think on your feet, and you can't do that if you're always stopping to consider the effect of this or that decision on your future in the Corps. Most career-Security types play it safe and do everything by the book. Unfortunately, ‘the book' was written by people who never put their lives on the line in the field. So it only works in cases where commonsense would tell you what to do anyway.

The end result? Security became just another big bureaucracy. It's just lucky that there was so little to secure, or people like the J-man might have had a pretty short life-expectancy. Of course, it only takes one looney-tune – or one accident – to test just how good you really are.

Edison was maybe a thousand clicks south of the capital. After New G and the northern cities of Roma and Elton, it was the largest settlement on Deucalion. And it was the one place that wasn't controlled by the Corporation. The main reason for its independence was the reason for its existence in the first place. Edison had been set up as a centre for Funded Research.

Rumour had it that the 1,000-kilometre buffer-zone between it and New Geneva was to protect the top-secret nature of a lot of the research going on there. Though with a population pushing half a million, from a Security point of view that argument didn't hold too much water. My personal belief was that it was to protect the rest of us – in case one or more of those ‘top-secret' experiments went horribly wrong.

Whatever the reason, we were headed there. Researchers or Rockbiters, there were almost half a million potential voters in Edison, and the J-man was going to shake as many of their hands as he physically could. While I tried to stop people from killing him.

Of course, all that assumed that we made it safely across the Roosevelt Ranges. Which proved to be a hugely optimistic assumption . . .

SAEBI

Standing at the entrance to the cave, Saebi heard the noise of the flyer before she caught sight of it. That fact alone made her move into the open to see what was wrong.

Flyers were almost silent. More than once, as she had watched the offworlders from her favourite position on the cliff above Neuenstadt, she had been surprised by one flashing past, almost close enough to touch. Surprised, because she had not heard it approaching until it was right on top of her.

But this one she could hear. It was labouring as it struggled to make enough altitude to clear the sharp peaks that surrounded the small valley in which she was standing. She tried to call to Cael, but he was painting inside the cave, and his mind was closed to her. She was caught between moving inside to get him, and the awful fascination of watching the fate of the flyer.

Then it was too late.

The flyer came in from the west, barely clearing the wall of rock and losing altitude, as if the pilot were desperately searching for a place to land. But the floor of the narrow valley was littered with boulders. Huge cracks in the barren soil were all that remained of the ancient river that had once carved it from the flesh of the land.

It passed not far from her, travelling at great speed, and as it passed, she caught the taste of fear from a number of minds. Offworlders. Thoughts too alien to understand, yet the alarm she tasted was terrifyingly real.

The flyer banked slightly, following the path of the ancient river, until the valley curved sharply around the base of a rocky outcrop, about a kilometre from where she stood. She watched the machine struggle to find height, climbing metre by metre as it approached the outcrop, but too slowly, so that it seemed that it must crash.

But somehow, suddenly, it was high enough, and it disappeared from view behind the rocky crest. The alien minds were too far away now for her to taste them, but she imagined the relief that they must be feeling . . .

The force of the explosion shook the ground beneath her feet. Within moments, a huge plume of black smoke began to rise above the wall of rock.

Saebi turned to run inside the cave, but Cael was already emerging. In his hand he held the painting stick, still wet with colour, but his eyes were fixed on the swirling column of black that rose perhaps a hundred metres into the sky, before the desert wind caught it and drove it eastwards towards the deep-water.

Another explosion shook the ancient riverbed, and Saebi looked at her mate, reading on his face the decision she had already reached.

‘Come.' She spoke the word aloud, and he responded.

DARYL

Poor Jacklin. Johannsen never gave him anything but the power put-down. Sometimes I wondered why Jacklin stood for it. I guess he figured that the old guard could only last a few more years before they were put out to pasture, then those who had stuck it out, put up with all the crap, would still be around to take over the reins.

I actually think Jacklin would have made an acceptable politician – if there is such an animal. He was pretty honest, even if he was just about running the J-man's election campaign. And he got on with nearly everyone. He spoke to you as if you were just as important as Johannsen or anyone on the Ruling Council, yet he still got you to do more – and willingly – than all the J-man's posing and demanding could ever do. But in one moment, it was all over. And who he was, what he might have become . . . suddenly, it all meant nothing.

When the flyer started to lose power, no one really worried all that much. Even the cheapest personal models have back-up field-generators, and all the guidance and navigation circuits were duplicated in a stand-by computer with its own power source. The chances of every system failing at the same time were too minuscule to even consider.

So, of course, that was exactly what happened.

Jacklin was a grade one pilot. It was one of the original reasons he was on Johannsen's staff. He could fly anything, from a two-passenger cub to a full-size flyer like the one we were on. It gave the J-man flexibility in his movements, and that was important. Sometimes he had to fly to secret meetings with people who wanted them to remain secret. A pilot who could take part in discussions and be trusted to keep his mouth shut was a valuable asset.

But it wouldn't have mattered who was piloting the thing, it was never going to make it to Edison.

It's amazing that he got it as far as he did. Once the secondary field-generator began to fritz out, I knew he was looking for a nice soft place to put down. But ‘soft' and ‘Deucalion' are two words you don't often use in the same sentence.

We had already reached the foothills, and the terrain there is about the worst you'll find anywhere. Jacklin scouted a couple of dry river valleys, without any luck, and all the time we were losing power and altitude. Then, just as we climbed out of one of the valleys, the generator coil collapsed completely, the repulsion-field died and we were on our way down.

I was sitting a few seats back from Jacklin. I watched him as he fought to control the flyer's trajectory. He looked amazingly calm. ‘Hang on,' he said, almost to himself. ‘We're going in.' Then he turned for just a moment and caught my eye, with a sort of half-smiled encouragement.

Actually, I think I would have liked him, if he had survived.

But he didn't. And neither did most of the thirty-odd people on board.

At first I thought he'd managed to pull it off. He angled the crippled flyer for a space between two huge boulders and hit reverse on the thrusters. It killed a lot of the forward momentum, but the thing was falling too fast. At the last moment, the nose dipped, and the whole flyer slewed over onto its side as the right-hand wing glanced off the face of one of the rocks.

I know it's all supposed to happen in slow-mo like a videodisk replay; things spinning around, your life flashing before your eyes, the whole bit, but let me tell you, it doesn't. Everything happened in an instant.

Even so, every detail is clear. The flyer crashed on its side, and suddenly it was like a giant hand had ripped it in half. We were tumbling, cartwheeling out of control. I could see sky and rocks and the ground flashing past my eyes. The seat's automatic crash-bars had locked into place, and I was completely immobilised and helpless, but I knew, at that moment, that I was going to survive. Don't ask me how. It was like . . . a flash. The whole front of the flyer had been torn off – the cockpit and all the seats in front of mine. I knew that Jacklin and the others were dead. There was no hope for them. They'd taken the full force of the impact that had ripped the flyer in half. But I was still there.