as fierce as old Pytr, we shouldn’t have expected any more generous terms. The Duck had no choice but to hedge his long-shot bet, which he was placing with his employer’s chips. If we failed, the Human Union needed to be able to plausibly deny connection with these misguided rebels when it knuckled under to the RS, and to knuckle under fast.
So job one was to deliver Tressel’s weapons-grade Cavorite to the Human Union within a month. But a planet’s a big place, and I didn’t even know where to start. However, I knew who did.
FIFTY-ONE
WITH THE SPOOKS’ HELP, I met Howard Hibble the next day, at the Tressen National Museum of Natural History, a logical place for a person of Howard’s peculiar predilections to visit. I found him in a basement storage room that reeked of formaldehyde.
Howard was standing on tiptoe, reading labels of shelved specimens, when I closed the door behind us and locked it.
Howard said, “What a great place! Couldn’t you just spend the day?”
“Howard, we have twenty minutes before your Ferrent tail figures out that isn’t you upstairs in the library.”
Howard reshelved a jar packed with trilobites the size of kosher dills, then sighed. “That’s not the only clock that’s running.”
“What have you heard?”
“Nothing. That’s the problem. We have no idea how the Pseudocephalopod will use its new Cavorite. Our best alternative is to do unto It before It does unto us.”
“Which we want to help you with.”
“We?”
“I’m retired now.”
“I heard that. They say the dental plan’s awful.”
“I take it that the Tressel Cavorite fall didn’t land in the middle of nowhere. If it had, you would have just snuck down here, mined what you needed, and snuck away. Without telling the Tressens a thing.”
Howard’s eyes widened. “You think I’d do that?”
“Not think. Know.”
He sighed. “The Joint Intelligence Directorate wouldn’t let me.”
“Assuming we can deal with the fall’s location, wherever it is, what will it take to get the meteorites out?”
“Weapons-grade Cavorite behaves like it’s less dense even than the Stone Hills Cavorite we mine on Bren. Each meteorite’s as light as a tennis ball, so they don’t burrow or burst on impact, like nickel-iron meteorites would. The fall took place forty thousand years ago, give or take. But the environment around it is static. We estimate that forty-two percent of the bolides remain at or near their individual points of impact, exposed on the surface. We designed these terrific ’bots that would scuttle around the surface and harvest them like tomatoes.”
“Where are your ’bots now?”
“ Pasadena.”
“ California?”
“Actually, there’s just the prototype. It cost as much as a main battle tank.”
I sighed. “Could people just go around and pick the rocks up off the ground?”
“That would be simpler, wouldn’t it?”
“How long would that take?”
He shrugged. “Depends on how many pickers you have. If you had a thousand pickers, a week or so. Once the bolides were gathered to a central point, one Scorpion could fly in, pick up the whole kaboodle, and be gone inside an hour.”
I narrowed my eyes. “That’s too easy.”
Howard sighed. “I haven’t told you where the Cavorite fell.”
FIFTY-TWO
TWO WEEKS LATER, pounded by a two a.m. downpour, Aud Planck and I carried cheap civilian suitcases down an alley in Tressia’s old town. Despite healing accelerants, Aud gritted his teeth as he disguised his limp, more so because he, like me, had to pretend his suitcase was no heavier than a normal traveler’s valise.
From other compass points, Jude and Celline, and six other groups of two, converged on our destination, with the modest objective of saving the human race and the more local benefit of beginning the end of Republican Socialism on Tressel.
We rounded a street corner and bent forward into the wind that drove the cold rain. Down the cobbled pavement of the dark street we entered snaked a double line of people bent like us, bundled like us, and carrying luggage like us.
We slipped into the line, and a shivering woman, clutching a scarf around her head, leaned out to peer toward the line’s head. “How much farther?”
A chubby soldier alongside the line motioned her back into her place. “Not far. Not far now. These coaches will be crowded, but when you get off, there will be stoves where you can dry your wet clothes.”
I leaned toward Aud. “What a crock!”
Aud shook his head and whispered, “Jason, the coaches just run a few hours north, to the Ice Line. That’s where it begins to dawn on these people. It’s brilliant. Not even these soldiers know what’s really going on.”
Neither that guard nor any of the other guards spaced every ten yards along the dutifully shuffling lines glanced at Aud or at me. We shuffled past them with all the others, and on toward the coaches. Breaking out of a death camp might be hard, but breaking in was a can of corn.
The coaches had their seats removed, to hold more of us, and we shivered, standing packed together while they rolled north. At three a.m. the coaches halted and we spilled out onto a glassy, moonlit plain. Fifty yards from us, a blocky black wall ran until it disappeared into the night in both directions.
I blinked back tears pricked by the icy wind. It wasn’t a wall, it was a coupled train of iron-sided ore sledges. Each sledge stood fifteen feet high from runners to wood-plank roof, and a greatcoated soldier with a rifle paced atop each sledge.
Paleozoic Tressel was too young for coal, and its human colonizers had bypassed the age of steam and railroads, on the way to the industrial revolution. North of the Ice Line, the latitude above which rivers stayed frozen nine months of each year and nonnavigable the rest of the time, the Tressen mines were linked to the populous South by trains of sledges towed up and down the frozen rivers by spike-wheeled engines that ran on fuel oil refined from algae.
A man at my elbow, who carried a cello case swaddled in oilcloth, said, “Those have to be the luggage vans. They must be bringing up the passenger coaches after.”
A sign between us and the ice train read “Resettlement buildings are well heated, but outside temperatures can be uncomfortable in winter. Don’t be concerned if you have underpacked. Suitable outerwear is available for loan at the Northern Terminus.” The beauty of this operation was that people believed the soothing whoppers because to believe otherwise was simply too horrible. The guards didn’t search bags. That would have been inconsistent with the lie. There would be ample opportunity to recover the dead’s valuables at “the Northern Terminus.”
I set my suitcase down on the frozen river, and its contents clanked. Nobody noticed. Then I flexed my fingers as I whispered to Aud, “You see the others?”
He nodded. “Jude and Celline just boarded the sledge forward of us. Freder and Maur are two coaches back.”
