How Dark the World Becomes

HOW DARK

THE WORLD

BECOMES

FRANK

CHADWICK

How Dark the World Becomes

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Frank Chadwick

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.

A Baen Books Original

Baen Publishing Enterprises

P.O. Box 1403

Riverdale, NY 10471

www.baen.com

ISBN: 978-1-4516-3870-7

eISBN: 978-1-61824-988-3

Cover art by David Seely

First printing, February 2013

Distributed by Simon & Schuster

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chadwick, Frank.

  How dark the world becomes / Frank Chadwick.

       pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3870-7 (trade pb)

 1. Life on other planets—Fiction.  I. Title.

  PS3553.H2184H69 2013

  813’.54—dc23

                                                            2012043560

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Pages by Joy Freeman (www.pagesbyjoy.com)

Printed in the United States of America

For Barraki and Tweezaa.

You know who you are. 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks first of all to my many friends and colleagues who read the work and offered both insightful criticism and generous encouragement, but particularly to Jake and Beth Strangeway, Don Perrin, and Bart Palamaro, one of the best editors I’ve ever worked with. Thanks also to everyone at the Greater Lehigh Valley Writer’s Group, especially my critique group pals, for making an inescapably lonely occupation a little less so. 

Finally, thanks to the whole gang at Baen Books, but especially to Gray Rinehart, Toni Weisskopf, and Edith Maor—who gives great line-by-line. 

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail,
there is a tiny and brilliant light in the heart of man
that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

—Leo Tolstoy

ONE

Arrie . . . Arrie was something else: an iridescent-skinned lizard, a bit over two meters tall, wearing bell-bottoms, a tie-dyed tee shirt, and rose-tinted granny glasses. Pretty odd getup for a Human these days, let alone a Varoki, but Kako Arrakatlak—Arrie to his pals—was deep into that whole retro–Haight-Ashbury scene. I figured that was how he romanticized mainlining Laugh. Well, that was his business. 

His shining hairless head looked small on that long body, and, if you weren’t used to looking at Varoki, there were things just
wrong
with it: the ears as big as your hands—leaf-like, delicate, and constantly moving—the narrow, slitted eyes, broad, flat nose, and the big brow ridges that made his forehead look smaller than it was, made him look stupid—which he was not.

He had me listening to his latest “classical music” acquisition. I could have told him Yanni being dead a little over a century don’t make his stuff classical, but when your best customer wants to impress you with how hip he is to
Terrakultur
, you don’t spit in his eye; you sit there and you listen to the overproduced, soulless crap as if it meant something. The color and pattern of the walls around us changed in time with the music, the smart surface keyed into the audio data stream, and Arrie had his system rigged to look like a back-projected psychedelic light show. Only thing missing was a lava lamp.

Finally it was over, and Arrie took a slow, gurgling pull on his water pipe, ears quivering, smiling in dreamy pleasure. He held the mouthpiece in his long, bony lizard fingers—too long for the number of joints, so they looked awkward and graceful at the same time, like spider legs.

“Beautiful, Sasha, you agree?”

“A remarkable piece of music,” I answered honestly, feeling no need to share the precise remark I had in mind.

“Do you know why I find your music—Human music—so fascinating? Because it is a window to your souls, and your souls are amazing!

“We found you—what?—less than seventy standard years ago, and already Human composers, architects, designers are everywhere. Your music and visual arts have thrown the aesthetic sensibility of the
Cottohazz
into turmoil. But this other side of you—this delicious, savage darkness . . . Your soldiers are the most feared in the
Cottohazz
, second only perhaps to the Zaschaan. And Humans are taking over organized crime everywhere. You are such
brilliant
criminals!”

“Well, now you’re makin’ me blush,” I said. I shifted my weight and put my left arm up on the back of the couch, and my jacket fell open a little to show the chrome-plated automatic in the shoulder holster. I hardly ever wear the damned thing, but Arrie gets a kick out if it, and what the hell—a little theater never hurts. “So if we’re so smart, how come you guys own everything?”

He smiled and tilted his head to the side a bit, the equivalent of a shrug.

“Give yourselves time, Sasha.”

“Oh, tha’s good advice, Massa Arrie,”
I drawled
. “Meantime, we jes’ keep choppin’ cotton.”

He smiled again, knowing enough Human history to appreciate the reference. Like I said—very into
Terrakultur
. He took another slow pull on the pipe and studied me, ears twitching playfully. Arrie likes to play the fool, but he has to stretch his acting chops to do it.

“Speaking of brilliant criminals,” he said, “how is Mr. Markov these days?” 

“Still a homicidal sociopath. How’s
your
boss?”

He laughed—that creepy barking honk of a lizard laugh, ears fluttering like butterfly wings. 

“Still far away, and not very interested in me—the best sort of boss.”

“Amen to that, brother.” I didn’t know a lot about Arrie’s organization, except he liked to refer to it as his Brotherhood. I figure he picked that up from
Terrakultur
as well, even though no Human criminal I knew of had used that term for maybe a century.

“Speaking of business,” I said, “you got something for me.” 

He rose, unfolding like a pocket stiletto, and glided to a small table—rattan and wood, simple but elegant. It looked like Sung Dynasty to me—reproduction, of course, but a nice one. I used to be a second-story guy, and you can’t make money at that without an appraiser’s eye.

He opened a black lacquered box on top of the table, took out a neat stack of
Cotto
flexichips bundled together with plastic, and tossed it lightly across the room to me. I caught it with my left hand and put it in my jacket pocket without counting—I trusted Arrie, and besides, if it was short, I knew where he lived. 

“Tell me,” he said, his eyes more serious, “how confident are you and Mr. Markov in the continued . . . reliability of your supply.”

“If there’s a problem, I don’t know about it. Hell, Kolya wants me to lean on you to up your volume.” 

“Interesting,” Arrie said thoughtfully, his ears open but folded slightly back—alert but cautious. “Mr. Markov tells you to encourage me to increase my purchases, but you choose not to. Why?” He walked back and settled into his formachair, waiting patiently for an answer while it readjusted to his shape. 

It was a good question. I just wasn’t sure he was going to like the answer. 

The thing Arrie and Kolya Markov have in common is both of them are dangerous enough to get me killed, but that’s about the extent of the similarity. The big difference—aside from the whole lizard thing—is I figure the worst move I can make with Kolya is to tell him the unvarnished truth; the worst move I can make with Arrie is to bullshit him. 

“Well, I see it like this. We get pretty good cover from your people up the food chain, but sooner or later, enough high-end leather-heads are going to get themselves dead on Laugh, there’s going to be serious heat, more serious than you’re going to want to handle. On that day, as we like to say, the shit hits the fan, and I figure
all
the shit is likely to hit
our
fan. You’re gonna walk away clean, Arrie, and just find yourself another hobby, while we’re gonna be up to our ears in Co-Gozhak provosts.”

I took a chance, calling him and the other Varoki
leather-heads
, and his ears had folded tightly back against his head when I did, but he’d relaxed into a smile by the end of my little speech. If you insult someone, they may not love you for it, but they’ll give you points for honesty—that’s kind of a cross-cultural truism.

“Did you share this insight with Mr. Markov?”

“Sure, for what it’s worth. Kolya fought on Nishtaaka, so he says he’s not afraid of the Co-Gozhak.”

“Markov fought in the Nishtaaka campaign?” Arrie asked, his ears fanning wide again.

“Yeah, so what? Yesterday’s news. It’s not like he was the only guy there.” 

He shook his head and drew on the pipe, his ears settling back.

“Sasha, Sasha,” he said, taking the pipe from his mouth and waving it at me like a scolding finger. “You are too hard on your friends. Veterans of Nishtaaka speak with admiration of the two Human rogue brigades they fought there.”

“Nobody ever said Kolya didn’t have steel teeth,” I answered, and Arrie nodded his agreement.

“So what do you plan to do, my friend?” he asked, and the pipe went back into his mouth, eyes narrow and unreadable, ears motionless. Of course, he hadn’t said I was wrong. One of the things I like about Arrie is he doesn’t waste your time denying the obvious.

“Don’t know yet,” I answered truthfully.

He leaned his head back and studied me for a moment in unguarded curiosity. 

“Then why share this with me?”

“I knew it would entertain you.” 

For a second he said nothing, and then he broke into laughter.

That same creepy honking laughter.

*   *   *

It was a good question, though. What
was
I going to do? I thought about it as the teardrop-shaped auto-cab hissed out into the Riverside Traffic Trench and insinuated itself into the tail-end tatters of the evening commute. 

“Clear top,” I commanded. The roof went transparent and I leaned back, taking in the view up the canyon walls, stars twinkling in the narrow ribbon of black sky way up at the top, kilometers overhead, like a diamond necklace hopelessly beyond reach. Glowing traffic ramps snaked up the sides of the canyon, linking apartment blocks and crowded market clusters, hanging from the canyon walls like glass and concrete moss. The leather-heads had a name for the city, something that translated as Capital of Peezgtaan—about as creative a name as they ever thought of. Humans came up with our own name, and now that’s what everyone called it, even the leather-heads: Crack City. 

Climb all the way up to the top of the Crack, climb all the way up and walk on the surface of Peezgtaan, and you die in maybe a minute, your lungs failing in near-vacuum, the yellow-orange light of Prime burning your skin off. But way down here, down at the bottom of the Crack, people can live. All kinds of people: leather-heads like Arrie, Humans like me. 

At least until the shit hits the fan.

TWO

The autocab dropped me at the edge of the Human Quarter. You couldn’t see the stars from down there; open space out in the canyon went at too much of a premium. The Quarter lurked under rock, back in the honeycomb of dark tunnels and crumbling chambers that made up most of the low-rent space in Crack City. A lot of those old chambers were left from the ice mining that made the Peezgtaan Eco-form possible, way back before we’d even heard of the
Cottohazz
—the Stellar Commonwealth. 

My office was on the second floor of a commercial block facing Planck Plaza. I got there half an hour before my people showed up. Somebody had stuck a flyer to the front door of the building—an announcement for a meeting of the Society of Human Progress down at St. Mike’s tomorrow evening, along with a list of speakers and the Society’s e-nexus code. I crumpled it up and threw it into a trash tub. It’s not that I’m against progress; I just don’t have a lot of patience for talk. You want to make the world a better place? Fine. Just
do
it, okay? Tell me about it when you’re done.

I unlocked the office, fired up the samovar, and took a look around. The furniture’s all composite of one sort or another. The outer office had my admin’s desk—with a built-in viewer screen—half a dozen chairs for waiting clients, and a little kitchenette with the samovar for tea and a nuker to heat soup and sandwiches. I had a couple framed prints on the wall—Earth landscapes, very soothing. 

My inner office was pretty much the same, but with a bathroom and shower instead of the kitchenette, and a sofa in place of half the chairs. The furniture was sturdy and in good condition, but I’d gotten it here and there over the years, so it was all different styles and colors. The office was clean, but it wasn’t expensive looking, and that was deliberate. I guess you’d call it austere, if you were being polite, and—without making too much of this—I’m a guy you probably want to be polite to.