Authors: Vaughn Heppner
Alarm codes rang in Marten’s helmet. That meant the alert had gone station wide. PHC officers hunted for him. To listen to the alarms was more than he could handle. So he shut off the com-unit. Despite his best efforts, he could no longer control his emotions. On his arm-pad, he punched in a command to his vacc-suit’s medical unit. A hiss sounded in his ears, the suit’s hypo-spray. A cooling numbness spread over him and the awful agony in his chest faded. The double dose of tranks allowed him to breathe normally and relax clenched muscles as he rode the thruster-pack a bare few feet above the habitat.
In the distance floated bulky transports, boarding tubes snaking out of the Sun-Works Factory to them. Farther a-field winked the blue and red work-lights of space tugs and their accompanying bots.
Marten concentrated as he slowed his momentum. Then he unhooked himself and set the thruster-pack on auto. He pushed himself down, sending the pack one way and he in the opposite direction. A moment later, the empty thruster-pack burned for the last time, shooting off at a tangent. Marten watched it go as he readied himself. He bent his knees and turned on the magnetic clamps at minimum power. As he drifted fast onto the station’s plates, he ran lightly, using his boots’ weak magnetic force to slow his speed. Finally, he increased magnetic power and brought himself to a halt. He was sweating from the exertion and his conditioners hummed at overdrive.
He studied the nearest markings, turned forty degrees and walked, making the customary clank, clank, clank of a magnetic stroll. Sixteen minutes later, he came to an emergency hatch. He entered a small utility tube and shed his vacc-suit. From there he traveled through narrow maintenance shafts. He floated faster than a man could run in normal gravity. In time, he found Junction Z-321-B and felt under a girder for his stash pod. He extracted a welder’s gray jumpsuit, boots and traveling kit, along with a wallet that contained a single ID card. It was one Simon had carefully created. Marten stuffed his old clothes into the pod and carefully weighed the tangler.
For three years he’d carried it, kept it under his pillow at night.
He broke it in half, slipped it into the stash pod and attached the pod back under the girder.
He swallowed. Without the tangler, he felt naked. Fortunately, the double dose of tranks kept him easy. He began to float-travel.
After several kilometers, he slipped into a main corridor with light-gravity. Brown Earth tones, soft music and the occasional shrub changed the feel of this corridor. The usual arrows pointed out the nearby destinations.
He waited, sitting on the lip of the pot that contained a shrub. Finally, a group of welders marched past. They were hard-faced men with thick necks and gnarled hands. They wore regulation gray jumpsuits; a few of them had synthetic-leather jackets, most had hats. Each welder carried his kit and had his ID ready. Marten rose with a grunt and jointed the back of the group. A welder glanced at him, taking in his clothes and kit, maybe wondering about his youth.
Marten nodded, keeping his features even. “Got lost in this maze,” he said. “Been waiting for you guys to show up.”
The welder shrugged noncommittally. It wasn’t wise to ask too many questions. He ignored Marten.
The noise level grew and the group marched into Docking Bay Thirteen Terminal It was circular-shaped and, spacious, with tall palms, several modern sculptures and a fountain in the center. Along the sides stood lockers, restrooms and waiting cubicles. It seemed packed with welders, technicians, bureaucrats, military personnel and bulky-armored, red uniformed PHC officers on the prowl. Overhead, plexiglas windows five stories up allowed everyone a view of the nearest shuttles and the twinkling stars behind.
Marten slipped from his group and sat hunched on a stool at a refreshment booth. He ordered a beer and sipped, waiting for announcements. His dark thoughts threatened to overwhelm him. Deciding he’d better stay clear-headed, he ordered a cup of coffee.
“A-Nineteen,” called a bored docking clerk over the PA. “Report to Area Eight.”
Marten drained his coffee. His stomach tightened as he saw the long line of welders. They snaked toward a small booth and the entrance to the boarding tube. Two PHC officers at the booth checked IDs. Marten stepped into line and advanced slowly. Would PHC simply kill him? His tension increased. Simon had picked up rumors of a new experimental station for political undesirables. Would they send him there?
Marten deliberately recalled why he was in line, why he’d been forced into this long shot. “Bastards,” he muttered.
A tall welder with dark eyebrows glanced at him.
Marten bared his teeth in a savage smile, a parody of his father’s combat grimace. As the tall man jerked forward, Marten pictured his mother, and he balled his fists. He couldn’t do anything about her death now. But the anger was useful.
Soon, a PHC officer growled, “Next.”
The tall welder in front of Marten held out his ID.
A PHC woman snatched it from the man and fed it into her computer. After two seconds, the unit beeped. The woman jerked out the ID and shoved it at the welder, waving him through.
Marten gritted his teeth, and stepped forward.
“What’s wrong with you?” the woman asked, eyeing him. Her hair had been shaved down to her scalp and her black-tattooed lips were twisted into a sneer.
Confusion froze Marten’s tongue.
The woman leaned near, sniffed his breath. “You’ve been drinking. That’s against regs for an out-system traveler.”
Speechless, Marten could only stare into her pitiless eyes.
“Step out of line you,” ordered the PHC officer beside the woman, using his carbine to poke Marten in the chest.
Marten recovered his wits. “I heard our transport has a reactor leak. I needed something to calm my nerves is all.”
The woman narrowed her already hostile gaze.
“Who told you that?” she asked.
“What?”
“About the reactor leak!”
“Two maintenance men,” Marten said. “I overheard them talking.”
“An eavesdropper, eh?” growled the man.
“Forgot about that,” the woman said. “Maintenance was warned to keep quiet.”
“They’ll have to be told again,” the man said, “after they exit the agonizer.”
The woman grinned as she lifted her com-unit to report this delicious news.
As he waited, Marten fought off a deepening sense of exhaustion.
Finished reporting, the woman snatched his ID, eyed him closely, licked her lips in an evil manner and then waved him through with an arrogant flick of her wrist.
The released tension almost made Marten buckle. But he didn’t. Instead, he moved through the exit portal, floated down a tube and entered the transport. Like most transports, the interior was plain, with endless brown cushioned seats set in tightly spaced rows. Welders buckled themselves in. A few chatted, some napped. Others put on vid-goggles and watched porn.
Marten settled down and waited. His tranks wore off and his stomach twisted. He envisioned a hundred different problems. Finally, however, he was pressed without warning into his cushioned seat. That’s what he hated most about Social Unity. They treated you like cattle. As the growing acceleration shoved him deeper, he said a silent prayer for his parents. Then he wondered about his forged passes to Australian Sector. Would they work? He had no idea. But even if they did work—Earth was the birthplace of Social Unity, the epicenter of the most suffocating political creed ever invented. If the Sun-Works Factory had been hell, what would it be like on Earth?
Part I: Civilian
1.
Concrete, glass and plasteel buildings sprawled for kilometers in all directions, but especially down. Greater Sydney, Australian Sector wasn’t as congested as Hong Kong or New York, but its fifty-one million inhabitants seldom felt the sun’s warmth. There wasn’t anything wrong with the sun or its ability to shine upon the populace. Ozone depletion, long a concern of earlier generations, had been taken care of a century ago. Nor was smog any worse than it had been at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. The problem for sun-lovers had taken a different turn.
To feed Earth’s hordes took more land than the world had and more than all the resources of the sea-farms. Thus, a hundred agricultural gigahabs orbited the planet. And even in the middle of the greatest civil war the Solar System had ever known, laser-launched transports went up and came back down every hour of the day. To save land the cities burrowed into the Earth rather than sprawl outward in ever widening circumferences. If humanity hadn’t taken this radical turn, concrete, glass and plasteel would have covered the entire planet by 2349.
Greater Sydney boasted fifty-nine levels, neither the greatest nor the least among the planet’s megalopolises. Mole-like machinery eternally chewed into the stygian depths, expanding and mining, growing the city at a pre-determined rate.
Most of the fifty-one million inhabitants carried their Social Unity cards with pride. They had been taught that the Inner Planets needed people who could work together for the good of the whole. Loners, hermits and individualists who were found out—and eventually they all were—underwent strenuous re-education or a stint of labor-learning in the algae tanks.
Sometimes, however, even in this age of social paradise and raging civil war, certain officials took advantage of their rank or failed to perform zealously all their duties.
2.
Marten Kluge claimed he wasn’t angry, upset or even nervous. So he didn’t understand why Molly kept telling him to relax. As they stood alone in the narrow corridor outside the hall leader’s office, she tweaked his collar, fidgeting nervously with it.
“Didn’t I tell you not to miss any more of the hum-a-longs,” she whispered, her pretty face creased with worry. She picked a speck of lint off his collar. “Maybe you could say you had a cold. That your throat hurt.”
“The hum-a-longs don’t have anything to do with this,” said Marten. It was almost three years since he’d escaped out of the Mercury System. He’d turned into a lean, ropy-muscled young man with a handsome, expressive face and bristly blond hair.
He wore black shoes, tan pants and a modest tan jacket with a black choker, suitable attire for such an important meeting, or so Molly kept telling him.
Earth was amazingly different from the Sun-Works Factory. Marten had thought it would be worse, and in a way, it was. The cage was gilded, cleaner than the Sun-Works Ring that built the Doom Star ships. Because of that, the people of Earth had lost… something essential. They couldn’t even see the cage anymore. The enormous changes to his life, the sheer impossibility of affecting anything, had depressed Marten and worn down his resolve. He missed his parents, missed talking to people who thought for themselves. All he wanted now was to throw off his Social Unity pretense and be who he really was, if only for a few hours.
“It must be the missed hum-a-longs,” Molly whispered, brushing his collar and bringing him back to the moment.
“Tell me,” said Marten, “has the hall leader made another advance on you?”
“…What difference would that make?”
Silence was his only answer.
Molly lifted worried green eyes. And with a gesture he’d come to adore, she brushed her stylish bangs. “Promise him you won’t miss any more hum-a-longs. Maybe offer to watch your neighbors more diligently.”
Before Marten could reply, the door opened and a thin woman in a mufti robe stepped out. “Marten Kluge?”
Unconsciously, his face tightened and his shoulders tensed.
“Be careful, Marten,” Molly whispered. “And don’t say anything rash.”
As Marten followed the mufti-robed woman, his throat constricted. So even though it was ill-advised, he tore off the choker and slipped it into his jacket pocket. The chokers were the latest craze, the latest symbol of social unity. Molly had bought him one expressly for the meeting.
The outer office—the woman’s—was as coffin-small as his rental. Her desk and computer terminal filled it. So when she turned to open the hall leader’s door, she brushed his shoulder.
“Excuse me,” he said.
She frowned, staring at his now bare throat. Then she turned, and said, “Hall Leader Quirn. Marten Kluge seeks your guidance.”
The hall leader glanced up from behind his computer desk. He was small with narrow shoulders and wore a crisp brown uniform and military style cap—that to hide his thinning hair. He had ever-vigilant eyes and a mouth habitually turned down with disapproval. His eyes narrowed as he viewed Marten, and he touched the choker around his own throat.
Marten’s bare throat felt exposed, naked, and it made him fidgety. Without thinking about it and before being bidden, he squeezed past the woman and stepped into the hall leader’s office.
“Lout,” the woman said under her breath.
The hall leader’s mouth twitched with annoyance as he studied Marten.
“You sent for me,” said Marten.
“I requested your presence,” said Quirn. To his secretary, “Hold any inquiries until we’re done.”
“Yes, Hall Leader.” She closed the door.
Marten marveled at the office’s spaciousness. It held the desk,
two
low-built chairs and a stand to the left with a potted plant. A holoscreen “window” showed crashing ocean waves.
“I appreciate your promptness,” said Hall Leader Quirn, although he didn’t rise or offer his hand.
Marten ignored the slight as he forced himself to act pleasantly.
“Please,” said Quirn, “take a seat.”
“Thank you,” Marten said, sitting in one of the low-slung chairs. He noticed that the higher-seated hall leader now looked down at him.
Quirn gave him a superior smile as he picked up a plastic chart and tapped it against the desk.
“Marten, I’m afraid we have some unfortunate business to discuss. Yes, troubling business.”
Marten lurched to his feet.
“What’s wrong?”
Marten grimaced and touched his forehead. Then he looked up. “The pain comes and goes. But I feel better now.”