Chapter Six
CURSES IN THE DARKNESS
ALONG THEMISTVALEROAD
WILHEMTONDISTRICT
THEPLANETSOLACE
By the light of the burning police cruiser, Zak Destan walked back from the road and surveyed the scene with satisfaction. The two dead bodies, facedown in the road, marked a significant victory. No one—not even the local groundcop force—especiallythe local groundcops—was going to shed a tear over Watch Officers Walzen and Teglen. Of course, the groundcops would investigate, but that would just be for form’s sake. They wouldn’t reallyneed to investigate. They would know, forty-five seconds after they came on the scene, who had done it. Hewanted them to know it. He was going to makesure they knew it. And they, and everyone else, would know why. Copies of Walzen’s and Teglen’s discipline files, along with certain other highly informative documents, would arrive the next morning at every mayor’s office and news service and police department in the district. Everyone had always known the two of them were dirty—now everyone would be astonished to learn justhow dirty. With the whole district bleeding to death, the two of them had just kept squeezing harder for more. A little honest graft between friends was one thing—but cops running a protection racket, and upping the rates, on farmers with starving kids—that was crossing every line there was, and maybe a few that hadn’t been thought of before.
“Let’s wrap it up, boys,” Destan called out into the darkness, and his troopers started to put a move on, gathering up the loot and the weapons they had pulled from the cruiser before setting it alight.
Destan stayed where he was for the moment, savoring the moment. Even though he had just done the local groundcop commander a favor, even though the commander would know it, and be glad to be rid of the pair, that wouldn’t matter. They would have to go after him, and Destan knew he would get the jolt for this one if they caught him. It didn’t bother him. They had evidence enough against him to do plenty already—if they caught him. How many times could they execute one man?
He had done the local commander more than one favor, come to think of it. Not only had he weeded out the two worst crooks on the force—he had given all the others a very strong incentive to play the game straight—unless they wanted to end up like the two in the road.
His troopers finished packing the guns and gear they’d stripped from the cruiser, and started hauling it toward the two camouflaged aircars they had used to spring the ambush.
The weapons Destan would keep, but the satchelful of cash and the other goodies—that was blood money. That he could not keep, and still be thought of well by the villagers—or by himself. Besides, the two dead cops had been good enough to keep detailed records of their shakedowns and other enterprises. It would take some care, and some doing, but quietly, carefully, their victims would be compensated from the stash, as best Destan could manage it.
There was a muffledboom and the flames flared up for a moment. It was time to go. They had a lot to do yet. Everyone would be watching the Ignition Day doings. It was as if the Planetary Executive herself had arranged a gigantic diversion for Destan’s Reivers, drawing all the world’s attention away from them. Zak Destan was determined to make the most of it.
He headed toward the lead aircar, and their next objective. He’d planned a busy night for his boys—and for the cops.
ABOARDLODESTARVII
INORBIT OF THEGASGIANTPLANETCOMFORT
SOLACIANSYSTEM
Neshobe Kalzant stood on the narrow platform in the rear of the large compartment, ignoring the busy people at the command consoles below. Instead she studied the huge display at the far end, the forward end, of the compartment. She glared at the display, at the numbers slowly ticking away toward a zero that would arrive in just over an hour. The big screen was subdivided to show a half dozen different views at the moment. Her gaze shifted to the image of the small world Greenhouse—then to the image of the SunSpot, the artificial sun that was about to die. Last, she looked on NovaSpot, the still-dormant artificial star that orbited Greenhouse. If all went well, SunSpot would die giving life to NovaSpot—giving life to all of them.
Neshobe could feel sweat trickling down the small of her back, and wished once again they could do something about the heat—but she knew better. There were simply too many nervous people and too many overworked machines in too small a space. The ship’s cargo-zone cooling system hadn’t been designed to handle the load. It had taken some doing to build the command center into what had been the cargo hold of theLodestar VII, but they’d managed it. Barely. And so the heat built up. Never mind. The people working there were concentrating on somewhat larger climatic problems.
From behind her came a voice she was already thoroughly tired of hearing. “On my mark,” the voice said, “Final Sequence start in one hour—mark.”
As if she, or anyone else, needed to be told. The moment of Ignition had been chosen—or perhapspreordained would be a more accurate term—years before.
Ignition would generate a hellfire of radiation, a spherical blast wave of gamma rays, X rays, and heavy particles that would sterilize any living world or habitat unlucky enough to be caught in its path. Therefore Ignition had to be timed for a moment with very particular conditions of planetary alignment, such that not only the planet Solace, but all the spaceside habitats, were well out of harm’s way. Those alignment conditions would obtain very soon—but once the window was closed, they wouldn’t come back for another dozen years. Even then the alignment would be far less satisfactory, with several orbiting habitats in the danger zone and requiring evacuation.
Not that it would matter, twelve years in the future. By then, nearly everyone in the Solacian system would have been evacuated—or would be dead.
Unless—unless a lot of things. Starting with whether the Ignition worked. All else depended on that. Neshobe Kalzant had bet nearly everything and everyone on it working. A high-risk gamble—but then, it was the only game in town. There were no other options. Depending on one’s point of view, it was therefore most fortunate, or disastrously unfortunate, that Neshobe was a gambler. She had to be. She was utterly convinced that to play it safe in their current situation would be the same as playing dead.
“In just under one hour’s time,” the announcer droned on, “the final sequence will begin, culminating in the Ignition of NovaSpot, successor to the aging SunSpot. NovaSpot will, of course, be the largest and most powerful artificial fusion reactor in all history, larger than any ever seen in any sky, with a maximum potential output four times more powerful than the original SunSpot was at maximum output. That’s more than ten times the SunSpot’scurrent output. The excess power output capacity was engineered in to permit centuries more power at optimum capacity.”
The announcer’s console was at one corner of the narrow platform, affording him a fine view of everything that happened down below. Just incidentally, it put him but a few meters from the spot where Neshobe Kalzant and a few other notables had been invited to observe the proceedings. Neshobe was not grateful for the proximity. She turned toward him, and her face was caught in shadow for a moment. The curses she thought at him from the safety of darkness should have been enough to turn him to stone then and there. But there was no justice in the universe. Her bitter maledictions had no effect whatsoever.
“Once, the SunSpot was powerful enough to light an entire hemisphere of Greenhouse, from pole to pole,” the announcer burbled on. “But for more than a century, the SunSpot’s power output has been diminishing, and the light from the SunSpot has been concentrated down into a tighter and tighter beam, in order to conserve power and protect the SunSpot’s aging machinery. For the last fifty years, that light has been directed only onto the equatorial zones of Greenhouse, literally leaving the higher latitudes in the dark.
“Now, all that ends. NovaSpot will operate with sufficient power to permit illumination once again from pole to pole, thus providing a day-night cycle over the entire surface of Greenhouse for the first time in many generations.
“One hour from now, the Final Sequence leading toward Ignition will commence, and a new era will begin in the history of Greenhouse—indeed in the history of the entire Solacian system.”
If it works,Neshobe told herself.
“At my mark, fifty-five minutes until Final Sequence start.Mark. This is the voice of Ignition Control.”
Neshobe felt her hands balling up into fists. She wasn’t going to be able to tolerate much more of the endless chatter. She felt a great desire to stomp off to her private quarters and watch the show from there. But she was going tohave to stand it, at least for a little while longer.
One of the great disadvantages of being the Planetary Executive was the need to endure the foolishness of ritual and ceremony. Her part of the job of making Ignition happen, the political job of arm-twisting, backslapping, promising, lying just a little, had been over for months, even years. There was no work for her here. Nonetheless, retiring to her quarters at this crucial juncture would look too much like abandoning her post.
She could have, perhaps should have, stayed safely home on-planet, on Solace, along with everyone watching from there. After all, part of a leader’s job was to ensure continuity of leadership, to avoid getting killed when getting killed would produce a crisis.
But staying alive in the event of disaster didn’t matter so much in the present case. If things went terribly wrong, if, for example, the NovaSpot ignited just a trifle too soon or a bit too energetically—well, then, they would all soon be dead anyway. Leadership would be able to do no more than point the way to the graveyard.
Greenhouse was merely the rocky outer moon of a quite ordinary gas giant planet in the outer Solacian star system. But everything—everything—depended on Greenhouse, to the point that there had been serious discussions about the possibility of renaming the little satellite “Lifeboat.” After all, the little world’s little sun was dying, and now a new sun was about to be born. Those were profound changes—certainly profound enough, it was argued, to be marked by a change of name. And if the old name had accurately described the use to which the world had been put, then surely the new name should do the same thing.
Neshobe had vetoed the idea. The name change idea was apt—too apt. Morale was bad enough without indulging in a surfeit of honesty. Besides, Neshobe herself could not help but wonder if this particular lifeboat would have spaces enough for everyone. Changing the name would only make it more likely that others would think to ask themselves the same question. In her more superstitious moments, Neshobe worried that a name change might even be bad luck, tempting fate. For all that she cited various political reasons, and the needless time, effort, and confusion that would be produced by the effort to change the name in all the books, charts, histories, and so on, that had been thereal reason she had refused to make the change.
Neshobe Kalzant had no desire to bring down further curses on Solace and Greenhouse and the rest of the worlds of the Solacian system. They had been under a curse, many dark curses, for far too long already.
“The timing of Ignition is of course absolutely crucial,” the announcer volunteered to no one in particular. “In the first hours after Ignition is initiated, a lethal blast of radiation, more powerful than any other radiation burst ever produced by humanity, will roar out from the NovaSpot. That initial radiation blast will bloom out in all directions, until NovaSpot’s power shields can be brought on-line to control and focus the power output and dampen the radiation.
“All the inhabited places of the Solacian system must be shielded from that first blast, either by simple distance, or, better still, by being behind some massive body. At the moment chosen for Ignition, the planet Solace will be on the farside of our sun, and, for good measure, the gas giant Comfort will stand between Greenhouse and the sun. This is a relatively common alignment, but it is rare indeed that it coincides with a set of planetary alignments that also serve to shield the major outer-system habitats. It will be many years before such a moment comes again, and even then . . .”
That was enough for Neshobe. If she could not leave the room, she could at least escape that damned low, soothing drone of a voice. She turned and walked to the far end of the observation platform and made her way down to the main level of the command center. She wasn’t really supposed to go down there, but who was going to stop her?
She looked around the command center and spotted Director Drayax. The director was, arguably, every bit as useless as Neshobe, just at the moment. Berana Drayax had already made her strategic decisions and commands. Now she, like Neshobe, could do little more than watch and see what happened as those commands were carried out. Not too long from now, once the final sequence began, she would once again have real work to do, guiding the minute-by-minute, second-by-second details of the operation. But for the moment, she could stray at least a few meters from her console.
Neshobe caught Drayax’s eye and walked over to the older woman. Drayax was tall and slender, with snow-white hair done up in a braid, pale skin, and a calm face that fell easily into a calm smile. The fact that she looked like a kindly grandmother had not hurt her in the least during the hard-charging times leading up to this day. The unforgiving deadlines, the technical challenges, the political battles, the fights over funding, staffing, supplies—all those should have drained the life from her. And yet here she was, cool and poised in a formal business suit, the picture of confidence, looking for all the world as if she were hosting a cocktail party reception for visiting business associates.
“What the devil do we have to hang around here for?” Neshobe asked Drayax, in a voice that would not carry, a very sincere-looking and quite artificial smile on her face. The press would be watching, and so she had to play the game. But at least they would not be listening. So long as her facial expression had nothing to do with her words, she could say what she liked. She refused to worry about lip-readers. “Hell of a day, Berana. Please, tell me again why the hell we couldn’t have just come a day later and had it all over with by now, one way or the other?”
Berana Drayax was every bit as practiced as Neshobe in the obscure art of speaking words that did not match her expression. She knew as well as the PlanEx how many cameras were around. She smiled warmly and said, “Why hurry? We’ll find out if we’re all dead soon enough, Madam Executive.”
“That’s not exactly the optimism I’ve heard from you before,” Neshobe said, genuinely taken aback behind her cheerful smile. Drayax wasn’t much given to gallows humor. “Has something happened that I need to know about?”
“Probably, Madam Executive—but what? This is one of the most complex engineering tasks ever attempted—comparable with setting a timeshaft wormhole. Something isbound to have gone wrong—something we haven’t detected yet. If it’s critical, if it’s something we haven’t got a redundant system for, or if something else we haven’t thought of takes us by surprise from out of nowhere—the later in the game we are, the higher the odds on a possible system failure where we wouldn’t be able to do anything except sit back and watch the disaster.”
“I know. You’ve told me all this before—though not with quite so much drama. But you don’t know of anyparticular problem right now, do you?”
Drayax shrugged. “There’s one sensor problem that’s got me a bit worried. I suppose it’s just a dramatic moment, with a lot of dangers just ahead—and maybe I’ve done just a little too much pretending everything is fine and nothing can go wrong. It’s too late for pretending, don’t you think?”
It was impossible for Neshobe not to note that Drayax’s false smile remained where it was and seemed just as real as it always did, even as she spoke those words.
Neshobe suddenly understood. Drayax was scared to death, more scared than Neshobe—and yet it was absolutely impossible for Drayax to show the slightest niggle of worry. Venting at the Planetary Executive from behind a frozen smile was her only possible release.
So who do I vent at?Neshobe asked herself, knowing full well that answer was “no one.” That was one of the other problems with being Planetary Executive.
“Now coming up on fifty minutes until NovaSpot Ignition,” said the announcer’s voice. Down off the platform, Neshobe was far enough away from the announcer’s desk not to hear him directly, but that did not stop his voice from pursuing here, booming down from a speaker directly above her head. Was there no escape from his endless repetition of what everyone already knew? “Final preparations are now under way for refocusing the power beam of the original SunSpot,” he went on, “to be followed by the power-surge transfer to the Timeshield Generator. Those aboard theLodestar VII and other close-in command, control, and observation craft are now starting their final safety preparations before those events.”
A gong sounded, and another voice cut in. “All nonessential personnel to preassigned strap-down locations. All nonessential personnel to preassigned strap-down locations.”
“That’s my cue, Madam Kalzant,” said Drayax. “If you’ll excuse me?”
Neshobe Kalzant nodded and watched Drayax head back to her console. Neshobe had been at any number of official events where she was required to put in an appearance, remain for a politically appropriate amount of time, and was then permitted to escape. That sense of relief when the blessed moment came was always intense, but never before had it been so powerful.
At last there was something todo, even if it was nothing more than going to an assigned seat and strapping herself in. Not that there was much point to the exercise, insofar as safety was concerned. Nothing was going to happen aboard theLodestar VII . It was the SunSpot that was going to be called upon to go through a complicated sequence of targeting and refocusing operations.
Granted, there was a small chance that the SunSpot could malfunction spectacularly while so doing—but if so, being strapped down ahead of time would do but little good. If the SunSpot blew up, theLodestar VII would doubtless be torn apart by blast debris, shortly after all those aboard absorbed a lethal dose of nuclear radiation, all while being incinerated.
The real reason was to get Neshobe Kalzant and all the other useless Very Important People out from underfoot so that Berana Drayax and her people could concentrate properly on their jobs at a crucial moment in the process. So be it, so far as Neshobe was concerned. Anything that would occupy her mind and keep her fromthinking, at least for a few moments.
But even so, Neshobe could not help but find it intensely irritating that the damned-fool announcer wasn’t among those being herded out of the command center. She, the leader of the planet Solace, thede facto ruler of the entire Solacian star system, was “nonessential.” The endlessly blathering announcer was not.
There was probably a message in there somewhere. If so, PlanEx Kalzant chose not to go looking for it. She started heading for her cabin, in the forward end of theLodestar VII.