Shadowline-The Starfishers Trilogy I Read online

  "Yes. Of course. But we're not set up to handle it on the necessary scale. We've never had to do it. I've had instruments and equipment on order since the trouble started."

  "You haven't got anything you can make do with?" Deeth's father sounded peevish. He became irritable when the business ran rocky. "There's a fortune in the Osirian orders, and barely time to push them through the fast-growth labs. Rhafu, I can't default on a full-spectrum order. I won't. I refuse."

  Deeth smiled at a dull-eyed sow who was watching him half-curiously. He made a small, barely understood obscene gesture he had picked up at school.

  "Ouch!"

  Having disciplined his son, the Norbon turned to Rhafu as though nothing had happened. Deeth rubbed the sting away. His father abhorred the thought of coupling with livestock. To him that was the ultimate perversion, though the practice was common. The Sexon Family maintained a harem of specially bred exotics.

  "Thirty units for the first shipment," Rhafu said thoughtfully. "I think I can manage that. I might damage a few head forcing it, though."

  "Do what you have to."

  "I hate to injure prime stock, sir. But there'll be no production otherwise. We've had to be alert to prevent self-induced abortion."

  "That bad? It's really that bad?" Pained surprise flashed across the usually expressionless features of the Norbon. "That does it. You have my complete sanction. Do what's necessary. These contracts are worth the risk. They're going to generate follow-ups. The Osirian market is wide open. Fresh. Untouched. The native princes are total despots. Completely sybaritic and self-indulgent. It's one of the human First Expansion worlds gone feral. They've devolved socially and technologically to a feudal level."

  Rhafu nodded. Like most Sangaree with field experience, he had a solid background in human social and cultural history.

  The elder Norbon stared into the pens that were the cornerstone of the Family wealth. "Rhafu, Osiris is the Norbon Wholar. Help me exploit it the way a Great House should."

  Wholar. That's the legendary one, Deeth thought. The bonanza. The bottomless pot of gold. The world so big and wild and rich that it took five Families to exploit it, the world that had made the consortium Families first among the Sangaree.

  Deeth was not sure he wanted an El Dorado for the Norbon. Too much work for him when he became Head. And he would have to socialize with those snobbish Krimnins and Sexons and Masons. Unless he could devour the dream and make the Norbon the richest Family of all. Then he would be First Family Head, could do as he pleased, and would not have to worry about getting along.

  "It's outside trouble, I swear it," Rhafu said. "Sir, there's something coming on. Even the trainees in Isolation are infected. They've been complaining all week. Station master tells me it's the same everywhere. Agriculture caught some boar pickers trying to fire the sithlac fields."

  "Omens and signs, Rhafu? You're superstitious? They are the ones who need the supernatural. It's got to be their water. Or feed."

  "No. I've checked. Complete chemical analysis. Everything is exactly what it should be. I tell you, something's happening and they know it. I've seen it before, remember. On Copper Island."

  Deeth became interested again. Rhafu had come to the Norbon from the Dathegon, whose station had been on Copper Island. No one had told him why. "What happened, Rhafu?"

  The breeding master glanced at his employer. The Norbon frowned, but nodded.

  "Slaves rising, Deeth. Because of sloppy security. The field animals came in contact with wild ones. Pretty soon they rebelled. Some of us saw it coming. We tried to warn the station master. He wouldn't listen. Those of us who survived work for your father now. The Dathegon never recovered."

  "Oh."

  "And you think that could happen here?" Deeth's father demanded.

  "Not necessarily. Our security is better. Our station master served in human space. He knows what the animals can do when they work together. I'm just telling you what it looks like, hoping you'll take steps. We'll want to hold down our losses."

  Rhafu was full of the curious ambivalence of Sangaree who had served in human space. Individuals and small groups he called animals. Larger bodies he elevated to slave status. When he mentioned humanity outside Sangaree dominion he simply called them humans, degrading them very little. His own discriminations reflected those of his species as to the race they exploited.

  "If we let it go much longer we'll have to slaughter our best stock to stop it."

  "Rhafu," Deeth asked, "what happened to the animals on Copper Island?"

  "The Prefactlas Heads voted plagues."

  "Oh." Deeth tried not to care about dead animals. Feeling came anyway. He was not old enough to have hardened. If only they did not look so much like real people . . .

  "I'll think about what you've told me, Rhafu." The Norbon's hand settled onto Deeth's shoulder again. "Department Heads meeting in the morning. We'll determine a policy then. Come, Deeth."

  They inspected the sithlac in its vast, hermetically sealed greenhouse. The crop was sprouting. In time the virally infected germ plasm of the grain would be refined to produce stardust, the most addictive and deadly narcotic ever to plague humankind.

  Stardust addicts did not survive long, but while they did they provided their Sangaree suppliers with a guaranteed income.

  Sithlac was the base of wealth for many of the smaller Families. It underpinned the economy of the race. And it was one of the roots of their belief in the essential animal-ness of humanity. No true sentient would willingly subject itself to such a degrading, slow, painful form of suicide.

  Deeth fidgeted, bored, scarcely hearing his father's remarks. He was indifferent to the security that a sound, conservative agricultural program represented. He was too young to comprehend adult needs. He preferred the risk and romance of a Rhafu-like life to the security of drug production.

  Rhafu had not been much older than he was now when he had served as a gunner's helper during a raid into the Ulant sphere.

  Raiding was the only way possessionless Sangaree had to accumulate the wealth needed to establish a Family. Financially troubled Families sometimes raided when they needed a quick cash flow. Most Sangaree heroes and historical figures came out of the raiding.

  A conservative, the Norbon possessed no raidships. His transports were lightly armed so his ships' masters would not be tempted to indulge in free-lance piracy.

  The Norbon were a "made" Family. They were solid in pleasure slaves and stardust. That their original fortune had been made raiding was irrelevant. Money, as it aged, always became more conservative and respectable.

  Deeth reaffirmed his intention of building raiders when he became Head. Everybody was saying that the human and Ulantonid spheres were going to collide soon. That might mean war. Alien races went to their guns when living space and resources were at stake. The period of adjustment and accommodation would be a raidmaster's godsend.

  Norbon w'Deeth, Scourge of the Spaceways, was slammed back to reality by the impact of his father's hand. "Deeth! Wake up, boy! Time to go back to the greathouse. Your mother wants us to get ready."

  Deeth took his father's hand and allowed himself to be led from the dome. He was not pleased about going. Even prosaic sithlac fields were preferable to parties.

  His mother had one planned for that evening. Everyone who was anyone among the Prefactlas Families would be there—including a few fellow heirs-apparent who could be counted on to start a squabble when their elders were not around. He might have to take a beating in defense of Family honor.

  He understood that his mother felt obligated to have these affairs. They helped reduce friction between the Families. But why couldn't he stay in his suite and view his books about the great raiders and sales agents? Or even just study?

  He was not going to marry a woman who threw parties. They were boring. The adults got staggering around drunk and bellicose, or syrupy, pulling him onto their laps and telling him what a wonderful little boy he was, repell
ing him with their alcohol-laden breath.

  He would never drink, either. A raidmaster had to keep a clear head.

  Five: 3052 AD

  My father once said that people are a lot like billiard balls and gas molecules. They collide with one another randomly, imparting unexpected angles of momentum. A secondary impact can cause a tertiary, and so forth. With people it's usually impossible to determine an initiator because human relationships try to ignore the laws of thermodynamics. In the case of the Shadowline, though, we can trace everything to a man called Frog.

  My father said Frog was like a screaming cue ball on the break. The people-balls were all on the table. Frog's impact set them flying from bank to bank.

  My father never met Frog. It's doubtful that Frog ever heard of my father. So it goes sometimes.

  —Masato Igarashi Storm

  Six: 3007 AD

  BLACKWORLD (Reference: Morgan's New Revised Catalogue of Stars, Planets, Astrogational Benchmarks, and Spatial Phenomena, edition of 3007): Sole planet of white dwarf A257-23. Uniface body. Unique in that it is the only such planet colonized by mankind. A small population houses itself in seven domed cities, each essentially a corporate state. Economically important as a transport nexus and rich source of power metals. Major industry, mining. Major export, rare elements. Population, chiefly of negroid stock, of First Expansion origins. The name, however, comes from the fact that life is confined to Darkside. Major tourist attraction, the Thunder Mountains on the western terminator, where slight perturbations in the slow planetary rotation result in tremendous tectonic activity due to heat expansion and contraction.

  Seven: 3020 AD

  Blackworld as a reference-book entry was hardly an eyebrow-raiser. Nothing more than a note to make people wonder why anyone would live there.

  It was a hell of a world. Even the natives sometimes wondered why anybody lived there.

  Or so Frog thought as he cursed heaven and hell and slammed his portside tracks into reverse.

  "Goddamned heat erosion in the friggin' Whitlandsund now," he muttered, and with his free hand returned the gesture of the obelisk/landmark he called Big Dick.

  He had become lax. He had been daydreaming down a familiar route. He had aligned Big Dick wrong and drifted into terrain not recharted since last the sun had shoved a blazing finger into the pass.

  Luckily, he had been in no hurry. The first sliding crunch under the starboard lead track had alerted him. Quick braking and a little rocking pulled the tractor out.

  He heaved a sigh of relief.

  There wasn't much real danger this side of the Edge of the World. Other tractors could reach him in the darkness.

  He was sweating anyway. For him it did not matter where the accident happened. His finances allowed no margin for error. One screw-up and he was as good as dead.

  There was no excuse for what had happened, Brightside or Dark. He was angry. "You don't get old making mistakes, idiot," he snarled at the image reflected in the visual plate in front of him.

  Frog was old. Nobody knew just how old, and he wasn't telling, but there were men in Edgeward who had heard him spin tavern tales of his father's adventures with the Devil's Guard, and the Guard had folded a century ago, right after the Ulantonid War. The conservatives figured him for his early seventies. He had been the town character for as long as anyone could remember.

  Frog was the last of a breed that had begun disappearing when postwar resumption of commerce had created a huge demand for Blackworld metals. The need for efficiency had made the appearance of a big exploitation corporation inevitable. Frog was Edgeward City's only surviving independent prospector.

  In the old days, while the Blakes had been on the rise, he had faced more danger in Edgeward itself than he had Brightside. The consolidation of Blake Mining and Metals had not been a gentle process. Now his competition was so insubstantial that the Corporation ignored it. Blake helped keep him rolling, in fact, the way historical societies keep old homes standing. He was a piece of yesterday to show off to out-of-towners.

  Frog did not care. He just lived on, cursing everyone in general and Blake in particular, and kept doing what he knew best.

  He was the finest tractor hog ever to work the Shadowline. And they damned well knew it.

  Still, making it as a loner in a corporate age was difficult and dangerous. Blake had long since squatted on every easily reached pool and deposit Brightside. To make his hauls Frog had to do a long run up the Shadowline, three days or more out, then make little exploratory dashes into sunlight till he found something worthwhile. He would fill his tanks, turn around, and claw his way back home. Usually he brought in just enough to finance maintenance, a little beer, and his next trip out.

  If asked he could not have explained why he went on. Life just seemed to pull him along, a ritual of repetitive days and nights that at least afforded him the security of null-change.

  Frog eased around the heat erosion on ground that had never been out of shadow, moved a few kilometers forward, then turned into a side canyon where Brightside gases collected and froze into snows. He met an outbound Blake convoy. They greeted him with flashing running lights. He responded, and with no real feeling muttered, "Sons of bitches."

  They were just tractor hogs themselves. They did not make policy.

  He had to hand load the snow he would ionize in his heat-exchange system. He had to save credit where he could. So what if Corporation tractors used automatic loaders? He had his freedom. He had that little extra credit at boozing time. A loading fee would have creamed it off his narrow profit margin.

  When he finished shoveling he decided to power down and sleep. He was not as young as he used to be. He could not do the Thunder Mountains and the sprints to the Shadowline in one haul anymore.

  Day was a fiction Blackworlders adjusted to their personal rhythms. Frog's came quickly. He seldom wasted time meeting the demands of his flesh. He wanted that time to meet the demands of his soul, though he could not identify them as such. He knew when he was content. He knew when he was not. Getting things accomplished led to the former. Discontent and impatience arose when he had to waste time sleeping or eating. Or when he had to deal with other people.

  He was a born misanthrope. He knew few people that he liked. Most were selfish, rude, and boring. That he might fit a similar mold himself he accepted. He did others the courtesy of not intruding on their lives.

  In truth, though he could admit it only in the dark hours, when he could not sleep, he was frightened of people. He simply did not know how to relate.

  Women terrified him. He did not comprehend them at all. But no matter. He was what he was, was too old to change, and was content with himself more often than not. To have made an accommodation with the universe, no matter how bizarre, seemed a worthy accomplishment.

  His rig was small and antiquated. It was a flat, jointed monstrosity two hundred meters long. Every working arm, sensor housing, antenna, and field-projector grid had a mirror finish. There were scores. They made the machine look like some huge, fantastically complicated alien millipede. It was divided into articulated sections, each of which had its own engines. Power and control came from Frog's command section. All but that command unit were transport and working slaves that could be abandoned if necessary.

  Once, Frog had been forced to drop a slave. His computer had erred. It had not kept the tracks of his tail slave locked into the path of those ahead. He had howled and cursed like a man who had just lost his first-born baby.

  The abandoned section was now a slag-heap landmark far out the Shadowline. Blake respected it as the tacit benchmark delineating the frontier between its own and Frog's territory. Frog made a point of looking it over every trip out.

  No dropped slave lasted long Brightside. That old devil sun rendered them down quick. He studied his lost child to remind himself what became of the careless.

  His rig had been designed to operate in sustained temperatures which often exceeded 2,000° K. Its
cooling systems were the most ingenious ever devised. A thick skin of flexible molybdenum/ceramic sponge mounted on a honeycomb-network radiator frame of molybdenum-base alloy shielded the crawler's guts. High-pressure coolants circulated through the skin sponge.

  Over the mirrored surface of the skin, when the crawler hit daylight, would lie the first line of protection, the magnetic screens. Ionized gases would circulate beneath them. A molecular sorter would vent a thin stream of the highest energy particles aft. The solar wind would blow the ions over Darkside where they would freeze out and maybe someday ride a crawler Brightside once again.

  A crawler in sunlight, when viewed from sunward through the proper filters, looked like a long, low, coruscating comet. The rig itself remained completely concealed by its gaseous chrysalis.

  The magnetic screens not only contained the ion shell, they deflected the gouts of charged particles erupting from Blackworld's pre-nova sun.

  All that technology and still a tractor got godawful hot inside. Tractor hogs had to encase themselves in life-support suits as bulky and cumbersome as man's first primitive spacesuits.

  Frog's heat-exchange systems were energy-expensive, powerful, and supremely effective—and still inadequate against direct sunlight for any extended time. Blackworld's star-sun was just too close and overpoweringly hot.

  Frog warmed his comm laser. Only high-energy beams could punch through the solar static. He tripped switches. His screens and heat evacuators powered up. His companion of decades grumbled and gurgled to itself. It was a soothing mix, a homey vibration, the wakening from sleep of an old friend. He felt better when it surrounded him.

  In his crawler he was alive, he was real, as much a man as anyone on Blackworld. More. He had beaten Brightside more often than any five men alive.