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
