Solaris Rising 1.5 (10 page)

“I don’t think so.”

The kid scowled.

“Give me the shotgun or I won’t take you to Vilca.”

She looked him up and down: just another armed street thug with bad teeth and delusions of competence. A few years ago, she would have been intimidated; now she couldn’t care less.

She cleared her throat.

“You saw my ship land?”

The kid’s eyes narrowed further.

“Yeah.”

Kat took a step closer to the razor wire gate.

“You saw its fusion motors?”

The barest nod.

“They spew out star fire, son. That’s fourteen zillion degrees centigrade. What do you think will happen if I let them hover over your little citadel?”

Behind her, she heard the
Ameline
’s engines whine into life. The ship was monitoring her conversation via her neural implant, and this was its idea of theatrics. Suppressing a smile, Kat took another step forward, so that her stomach pressed up against the spikes on the wire gate. At the same time, she brought the shotgun to bear, pointing the barrel at the bridge of the kid’s nose.

“Open up,” she growled.

The kid’s eyes went wide. He knew he was out of his depth. He looked at her, then over her shoulder at the rising wedge of the
Ameline
. She saw him swallow. Without taking his eyes from the looming ship, he reached for a button inside the door and the gate drew back. Kat stepped forward, shotgun still pointed at his midriff.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Faro.”

She raised a finger and waggled it, indicating he should turn around.

“Never try to out-negotiate a trader, Faro.”

F
ARO LED HER
down a set of pleated metal steps. His trainers dragged on each step. She kept the shotgun trained on the small of his back.

“How old are you?” she asked.

He didn’t answer. His vest and jeans hung off him, several sizes too large for his half-starved junkie frame.

“Down ’ere,” he muttered.

At the foot of the steps was an iron door. Beyond that, a poorly-carpeted corridor that stank of incense. Faro flapped an arm at a pair of rough pine doors that formed the corridor’s far end.

“Vilca’s office.”

Kat gave him a prod with the shotgun barrel.

“Why don’t you knock for me?”

She followed him to the doors.

“Go on,” she said.

Faro tapped reluctant knuckles against the wood. From inside, a voice called: “What is it?”

Faro glanced back at Kat, his eyes wide, unsure what to do. She nudged him in the back with the tip of the shotgun.

“Open the door,” she suggested.

Inside, the office was as rough and raw as the rest of the building, but the rugs on the floor were thicker and newer than elsewhere, and there were curtains at the windows. A heavy-set bald man sat behind a scuffed steel desk.

“I said I wasn’t to be disturbed. Who the devil are you?”

Kat took Faro by the shoulder and pushed him aside. She drew herself up.

“My name is Katherine Denktash Abdulov, master of the trading vessel
Ameline
and scion of the Strauli Abdulovs. Are you Earl Vilca?”

The fat man frowned.

“You’re a
trader
?”

Kat lowered the shotgun so that the barrel pointed at the floor.

“As I said, I represent the Abdulov trading family.”

The man eased back in his chair. He gave her an appraising look.

“And what can I do for you, Miss Abdulov?”

Kat took a pace towards the desk.

“That’s
Captain
Abdulov, and you have a friend of mine. I want him released.”

Vilca chuckled. He folded his hands over the bulge of his stomach. Gold rings glistened on his sausage-like fingers.

“Very good,” he said approvingly. “I do so like a woman who comes straight to the point.”

According to the profile the
Ameline
had been able to piece together from information retrieved from the local Grid, Earl Vilca was one of the most powerful men on Nuevo Cordoba. His operation dealt in drugs, prostitution and extortion. He had politicians and high-ranking police officers in his pocket, and a seemingly endless supply of teenage muscle. On a world of high-piled shanties and meagre mushroom harvests, he lived like a king. But when Kat looked down at him, all she saw was a white, bloated parasite: a puffed-up hoodlum in a cheaply-fabbed suit.

“I know who you are, and what you are,” she said. “And I’m not impressed. So if you’d be kind enough to release Napoleon Jones, I’ll be on my way.”

On the opposite side of the desk, Vilca pursed his lips. He drummed his fingers against his belt buckle.

“Jones, eh? Well, well, well.” He shook his head with a smile. “You’ve come bursting in here to rescue Napoleon Jones? He’s nothing but a two-bit hustler. He used to be a good pilot, twenty years ago, but he’s all washed up now. What do you want with him?”

Kat gripped the shotgun.

“As I said, he’s a friend.”

Vilca narrowed his eyes. He ran his tongue across his bottom lip. Then he sat forward, hands resting on the desk.

“All right, Captain. I’ll make you a trade. Jones for some information.”

“What kind of information?”

The fat man waved his hand at the sky.

“I hear things. Rumours. Shipments have disappeared. Scheduled deliveries from Strauli have not arrived. Ships are overdue.”

Kat felt her pulse quicken. She knew where this was going, and she didn’t have time to waste playing games.

“Strauli has fallen,” she said bluntly. “Inakpa, Djatt and probably several others.”

Vilca blinked at her.

“Fallen?”

“Gone, destroyed. No more.”

The man’s brows drew together. He plainly didn’t believe her.

“I am serious, Captain. I have been losing money—”

Kat stepped right up to the desk and glared down at him.

“They’re gone.”

“Gone?” Vilca’s cheeks flushed. His fingers brushed his lower lip. “But what could do such a thing?”

Kat used her implant to signal the
Ameline
.

“I’ve asked my ship to download all the information we have to the local Grid. See for yourself. It’s all tagged with the keyword ‘Recollection.’”

Vilca gave her a long look. He was getting flustered.

“Go on,” she said. “Check it out. I’ll wait here.”

“No tricks?”

Kat nodded in the direction of Faro, still cowering in the corner of the room.

“Your boy here can keep an eye on me.”

Vilca looked up and to the right, accessing the cranial implant that connected him to the vast cloud of data that formed the planetary Grid. Kat stood watching him. She shifted her weight from one hip to the other. After a few seconds, she saw the colour drain from his cheeks. She knew what he was seeing. She’d seen it herself firsthand: the destruction of Djatt, the boiling red cloud that seemed to emerge from the fabric of space itself, closing like a fist around the planet.

His eyes snapped back into focus.

“
Madre de Dios.
”

“Quite.”

“What can we do?”

“Give me Jones.”

Vilca’s eyes narrowed to slits. “What’s to stop me killing you and using your ship to escape?”

Kat hefted the shotgun.

“You try to kill me and I’ll use my ship’s fusion exhaust to scour this canyon back to the bedrock.”

Vilca gave a snort. He seemed to have recovered his composure.

“You wouldn’t. You’re not the type.”

Kat leaned toward him.

“Check the data, Vilca. Look at the fall of Strauli Quay.”

“Strauli...?”

The man’s eyes flicked away for a second.

“You
fired
on the Quay?”

Kat set her jaw. “I had no choice.”

“But there were more than a million—”

She raised her shotgun, pointing the barrel at his chest.

“Do you still think I’m bluffing?”

Vilca swallowed. She could see a damp sheen on his bald pate. After a moment, he let his shoulders slump.

“All right,” he said. “You win. Faro, would you please fetch Mister Jones?”

Kat realised she’d stepped too close to Vilca’s desk. She hadn’t kept track of the boy. As she turned, she saw him raise his gun. Her finger yanked the trigger. The shotgun jumped in her hand. Faro jerked backward, chest shredded by three rapid-fire blasts. She turned back to Vilca, and caught the fat man in the act of reaching for the pistol in his desk drawer. She fired into the surface of the desk and he jerked his hand back, eyes wide.

“Okay, that’s enough!”

Kat’s pulse battered in her head. She didn’t know if she was angry with Vilca, Faro or herself.

“Get Jones up here, right now!”

Vilca knew he had been defeated. He sent an order via his implant. Moments later, a pair of wide-eyed teenagers brought Napoleon Jones to the door. They were half-carrying him. He couldn’t walk by himself. They looked down at Faro’s smoking corpse and turned questioning eyes on their boss. Vilca waved them away with a flap of his meaty paw.

“These people are leaving,” he said.

Kat looked at Jones. His arm and leg were bandaged. His coat was torn. The antique goggles still hung around his neck.

“Kat?”

“I’ve got a ship up top. We’re leaving.”

Jones shook his head, as if trying to clear it. He’d been beaten. His lips and eyes were swollen; his moustache caked with dried blood.

“What about Vilca?”

The man behind the desk looked up at him.

“You should not have come back, seňor. People love a daredevil because they are always awaiting his death. If he lives too long, well”—he spread his hands—“they become resentful.”

Kat pulled on Napoleon’s sleeve.

“Leave him. He knows it’s all over.” She picked Faro’s pistol from the dead boy’s fingers.

“What’s over?”

“His little empire.” She glared at the fat man. “This whole planet.”

Vilca put his head in his hands.

“Go now,” he said.

Kat put an arm around Napoleon and he leaned his weight on her shoulder. They backed out of the room. When they reached the door at the far end of the corridor, the one that led to the roof, Vilca raised his head.

“Captain?” he said, his voice hoarse.

Kat paused.

“Yes?”

“What can we do? About The Recollection, I mean.”

She took a deep breath. She owed him nothing. Further down the canyon, the freighters were filling their holds with refugees. She’d done all she could.

She looked him in the eye.

“Pray it doesn’t take you alive.”

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

MIKE RESNICK

According to
Locus
, Mike Resnick is the all-time leading award winner, living or dead, for short fiction. He is the author of 69 novels, over 250 stories, and 3 screenplays, and has edited 41 anthologies. His work has been translated into 25 languages, and he is the Guest of Honor at the 2012 World Science Fiction Convention.

I
N
1860, A
BRAHAM
Lincoln, who made no secret of his beliefs in his debates with Stephan Douglas, was elected President of the United States, which were feeling less united by the minute. Before he could take the oath of office, seven states had already seceded from the country.

Lincoln had considered taking Hannibal Hamlin, the staunch Maine Republican, as his vice president, but Hamlin had spoken so forcefully in favor of initiating military action against the South that Lincoln was convinced he couldn’t possibly avoid war with Hamlin on the ticket. Instead he chose a moderate Tennesseean who, though much more conservative than Hamlin, had nonetheless stood up to the slave owners and secessionists in his state. That man was Andrew Johnson, former Governor of Tennessee and currently one of its two Senators.

The state of peace didn’t last very long. The military decided to abandon the indefensible Fort Moultrie in South Carolina. Rather than bringing his men back north when South Carolina officially seceded in December of 1860, Major Robert Anderson secretly relocated one hundred and twenty-seven men—thirteen of them musicians—to Fort Sumter. As military strategies went, this one wouldn’t go down in history as one of the most brilliant. The fort wasn’t yet complete, and fewer than half the cannons had been installed.

Governor Francis Pickens of South Carolina kept demanding that Anderson withdraw his men and take them back north, and Anderson kept ignoring him. The first shots of the Civil War were fired on January 9, 1861, when the steamship
Star of the West
tried to land reinforcements for Fort Sumter and was instantly repulsed by Confederate troops. During the next three months, Confederate Brigadier General Beauregard made almost daily demands that Anderson abandon the fort. Anderson ignored them.

Lincoln realized that the fort would run out of food and ammunition sometime in mid-April, so on April 6 he sent a small fleet to land in Charleston to bring supplies and reinforcements to the beleaguered men of Fort Sumter.

On April 11, Beauregard demanded one more time that Anderson surrender. Anderson stalled for time, hemmed and hawed, and finally listed his conditions for surrender. They were unacceptable, and early in the morning of April 12, as many Charleston residents watched the action from their verandas and windows, the Confederate army began thirty-four consecutive hours of bombardment. At the start of the thirty-fifth hour, Anderson surrendered.

Amazingly, not a single Union soldier was killed during the action. In fact, the only fatality occurred quite by accident when the victorious Confederates allowed the Union a hundred-gun salute.

And that was the end of the first of the two battles that comprised the First Civil War.

T
HE SECOND AND
final battle of the First Civil War occurred three months later, on July 21. The Union had been humiliated at Fort Sumter, and they were determined not to suffer another such travesty against the ‘inferior’ Confederate forces.

Lincoln’s generals outlined the situation to him. They would crush the rebellion once and for all by marching on Richmond in northern Virginia. They had 28,000 men primed and ready, they had the superior generals, the superior weaponry, the superior lines of supply, the superior strategy. It could be done in an afternoon, and Lincoln could accept all the Southern states back into the Union the next morning. Why, it would be such an easy victory that Congress and members of the government could take their horse-drawn carriages to the northern end of the battlefield and watch the Union’s triumph first-hand.