Starfishers Volume 1: Shadowline (22 page)

She dithered. “At your earliest convenience,” from Blake meant yesterday, and was that much more intimidating.

“Might as well get it over.” She sighed, mussed her hair, and went.

Main offices for Blake Mining and Metals were in a huge old building at Edgeward’s center, beneath the strongest part of the meteor screen shielding the dome. Years ago it had been City Hall and had housed city administrators’ offices exclusively. Blake controlled that now. Edgeward was a company town. He might as well be in City Hall.

Moira arrived as the afternoon’s programed rain began falling. A light breeze drove mist into her face. Scents on the air brought back vague images of herself running across a grassy, wild-flowered plain under a friendly yellow sun, playing with the other children on the breeding farm. It had been a gentle, realtime operation run by a paternalistic station master. The youngsters had not known they were property to be trained and sold. She would not have cared had she known. She had been happy.

She paused on the steps of City Hall and stared upward, trying to glimpse the star-speckled black enemy besieging the city. She saw nothing but sunlights and the piping from which the rain was falling. Edgeward worked hard to deny the night.

The rain fell harder. She hurried through an iris door that would become an airlock should the dome fall.

She entered a small, comfortable reception room. Its sole occupant was a thin, elderly gentleman who reminded her of a grown Frog. He had the leathery look of a lifelong tractor hog forced to retire from outservice. He made her nervous. Retired hogs sometimes became antsy and unpleasant.

This man had not. He glanced up and noticed her biting her lip in front of his desk. His whole face broke into smiles. He made it look as if he had been waiting years just for her.

“Miss Eight? Moira Eight? So glad you could come.” He thrust a dark, wrinkled hand at her. She took it in a bit of a daze. It felt warm and soft. She relaxed a little. She judged people by the way they felt. Soft and warm meant nice and no harm planned. Cold, damp, hard, meant unpleasant intentions. She knew body temperatures were nearly the same in everyone, yet she depended on the difference in hands—and later, lips—and trusted that part of her unconscious which interpreted them.

It proved right most of the time.

“What . . . What’s it about?” she asked.

“Don’t know. I’m just the old man’s legs. So you’re Frog’s iittle girl. All growed up. You should get out more. Pretty thing like you shouldn’t hide herself.” As he talked and she blushed, he guided her toward an elevator. “Mr. Blake is in the penthouse. We’ll go straight up. He said to bring you right to him.”

Moira bit her lip and tried for a brave face.

“Now then, no need to be scared. He’s no ogre. We haven’t let him devour a maiden in, oh, three or four years.”

That’s the way Frog used to baby me, she thought. There was something about Brightside that made tractor men more sensitive. Everybody thought Frog was a crusty old grouch—maybe even Frog thought he was—but that was just people who didn’t know him.

Nobody bothered to get to know tractor hogs well. Their life expectancies were too short. It did not pay to get close to an enemy of the Demon Sun. Men like this one and Frog, who got old running the Thunder Mountains and Shadowline, were rare. Human beings simply could not indefinitely endure the rigid discipline and narrow attention/alertness it took to survive beyond the Edge of the World. Frog had broken down in the end, but he had been lucky. They had brought him out—to be murdered. Maybe this man had had his failure and been lucky too.

She began to grow angry. They had not done a thing about Frog’s murder. Oh, they had exiled those people, but the murderer hadn’t been caught. She planned to do it herself. She would be of age in less than a year. With Frog’s bequest, and the credit from the sale of the salvageable parts of his rig after Blake had deducted recovery costs, she would buy passage offworld and find August Plainfield.

The obsession had been growing from the moment she had looked through that hospital door and realized what Plainfield had done. The practicalities did not intimidate her. She was still young enough to believe in magic and justice.

Her plan was her one rebellion against the dwarf’s philosophy. Sour and grumbly as he had been, he would not have wanted her to hold a grudge so deeply it would shape her life.

“Here we are. Top of the tower. Be sure to ask if you can see the observation platform. Not many people get the chance. The view is worth it.”

Moira’s escort led her into an antechamber almost exactly reflecting her preconception of Blake’s headquarters. It smelled of wealth. Such spendthrift use of space!

A domed city like Edgeward used every cubic centimeter to some critical purpose. Even open areas were part of a grand design intended to provide relief from the cramped limits of living quarters.

Here space existed without function beyond announcing the wealth and power of its occupant.

“He’ll be in his private office, I believe,” Moira’s companion told her. “Follow me.”

“There’s so much room . . . ”

“A big man with big responsibilities needs room to wrestle them.”

“Thank you. Uh . . . I don’t know your name.”

“It’s not important. Why?”

“Because you’ve been kind, I guess. And it is important. I like to know who’s been nice so I can think nice things about them.” She could not think of a better way to put it.

“Albin Korando, then.”

“That’s odd.”

“For Blackworld, I suppose. My people didn’t come here till after the war.”

“No, I mean Frog used to talk about you. I was trying to remember your name just yesterday.”

“I’ll bet he told some stories,” Korando said, and laughed softly. He wore a faraway look. Then he saddened. “Some stories, yes. We’re here. And Miss?”

“Yes?”

“Don’t be frightened. He’s just a man. And a pretty good man at that. Very few of the street stories are true.”

“All right.” But as they paused before the door that would open on a man almost omnipotent, she became terrified of the sheer power she faced.

Korando pushed through. “Miss Eight is here, sir.”

Timorously, Moira followed.

The man who swiveled a chair to greet her was not the fang-toothed cyclops she expected. Nor was he old. She guessed thirty-five. Maybe even younger. He had a slight frame which, nevertheless, had about it a suggestion of the restrained power of the professional fighter. His smile was broad and dazzling, revealing perfect teeth. For an instant she noticed nothing else.

“Forgive me for not rising,” he said, offering a hand. With the other he gestured at legs that ended in stumps where he should have had knees. “An accident at the shade station in the Shadowline a few years ago. I haven’t had time to grow new ones.”

“Oh! I’m sorry.”

“For what? I earned it. I should know better than to go crawling around under a rogue slave. I’ve got people who get paid for doing that sort of thing. Albin, bring the lady something. Something mixed, Moira? No, better not. Wouldn’t do to have it get around that I’m getting young women drunk. Will coffee do?”

Korando departed when she nodded.

“Well, have a seat. Have a seat. And why this look of perplexity?”

“Uh . . . ” Moira reddened. She had been staring. “I thought you were old.”

Blake laughed. His laugh was a pleasant, almost feminine tinkle. She wished she had taken his briefly offered hand to see if it was warm. That hand gestured toward oil portraits hanging on a distant wall. “There they are. The real old ones. My father. His father. And the old pirate who started it all. Obadiah Blake.” Three dark, hard faces fixed her with that look which is traditional in ancestral portraiture, a sort of angry calculation or cunning rapacity, as if each had been considering selling the artist into slavery. “They’re old enough to suit anybody. I call them the Ancient Marinators. They took everything so serious. They soaked in their own juices.” He smiled as if at an old joke. “Greedy grabbers, they were. Had to have it all.”

“I guess when you’ve got it all you can point fingers and say shamey-shamey.” Moira was astounded at her own temerity.

Blake laughed. “You’re Frog’s brat, all right. Hardly knew him myself, but Dad had a few things to say about him.”

“None of them kind, I hope.” She smiled at Korando as he arrived with a silver carafe and china teacup on a silver tray. Silver and gold were by-products of Blake’s mining operations. Both were common around Edgeward. Korando wore one large gold loop earring.

“Not a one. Not a one. And none of them fit for your pretty ears, either. No, Albin, stay. I think my guest would feel more comfortable with a chaperon, though God alone knows how I’d run her down if the fancy hit me.”

“As you wish, sir.”

Moira smiled gratefully, including both men.

“Well, then,” said Blake, “pretty as you are, and much as I’d like to chat and look and wishful think, it’s business that made me ask you here, so to business we must. How do you feel about the man who killed Frog?”

She did not have to answer. Her feelings burned on her face.

“That strongly? Albin, rummage through that stuff on the table there and hand Miss Eight the solidos we were talking about last night.” Blake’s office was a vast clutter. He seemed to be a man without time to keep order.

“Plainfield,” she said, handling two cubes about ten centimeters to a side. There were little differences in appearances, but she felt no doubt.

“Those came in yesterday, from Twilight Town. I’ve got a man up there who watches out for things. Made these of a fellow who’s been hanging around their brass. Thought he recognized him from back when. He was one of the ones we exiled when Frog was killed. He was lucky. Got picked up by one of their crawlers. But he wants to come home. Has family here. He’s trying to earn his way back in.”

“What about Plainfield?” Her voice was hard, her throat tight. Her stomach felt as though she were about to throw up.

“He’s using the name Diebold Amelung now, but that’s not his real one either.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“For now, nothing.” He raised a hand to silence her protest. “For now. In time, what needs doing. I could have him killed, but then I wouldn’t find out what he’s up to. I wouldn’t find out why he killed Frog. I wouldn’t find out if he’s connected with some strange phenomena we’ve observed Brightside. Albin, is that projector ready? Good. Moira, the man’s real name is Michael Dee. We’ve known that for some time.”

“And you haven’t done anything?” She began to get mad.

“My dear young lady, Blake has done everything possible, consistent with its own interests. Which isn’t much, I’ll grant. This man, whatever name he uses, is no Old Earth shooter, no crackdome cutthroat. He could buy and sell Edgeward City. He’s a very old, rich, and powerful man. He’s got a lot of connections.”

“So?”

“For you it’s simple. You could burn him. You’ve got nothing to lose. I’ve got an industrial empire and a hundred thousand people to consider.”

“He can’t be that important.”

“No? He owns a planet. He almost controls the private instel trade. He has interests in all the shipping lines that carry our exports. His brother is Gneaus Julius Storm, the mercenary, who has a personal army of twenty thousand men and the ships to move it. He’s associated with Richard Hawksblood, another mercenary. And he has friends in Luna Command who would put Blackworld under embargo simply on his say-so.”

“I see. If he’s such a big man, how come he’s in Twilight?”

“Exactly. Now we’re in tune, little lady. Let’s watch some clips. Albin.”

Korando lowered the lighting and started the holo projector.

“This is the shade cloud we send up from the outstation to cover the run from the Whitlandsund to the Shadowline,” Blake said. The holo cube portrayed a tower of darkness, which, she realized after a moment, was dark only due to a lessening of an almost unbearable glare. “We’ve filtered it down to the limits of resolution.”

The hologram changed. Another pillar of dust appeared, viewed from a slightly sunward angle, making a portion look like a tower of fiery motes. “A charter running fourteen hours north of the Shadowline caught this two years ago. We couldn’t make anything of it then. Too far to investigate, and in Twilight territory. Somebody thought it might be dust blowing out of a volcano.”

The third clip was a still of crawler tracks under artificial lighting. “This one’s only about a month old. It was taken a little over two thousand kilometers out the Shadowline by another charter. He thought he’d stumbled across some side trip of Frog’s. They didn’t look right. Too wide. We checked against Frog’s log. He didn’t make them.

“Something was wrong. Obviously. It bothered me. Curiosities always do. I had Albin check the records. I had him talk to drivers. And he found out what I thought he’d find out. The only Edgeward man who ever went that far was Frog. So I had Albin make the rounds again. He found several charters who had gotten readings on, or sightings of, dust pillars in the north, especially way out west, where they could be seen from the Shadowline itself. Albin.”

The holo changed to a small-scale chart of the northern hemisphere west of the Edge of the World. “Nobody thought they were worth reporting. Just another Brightside curiosity. Once we got interested, we plotted them. They all seem to have appeared along the black line there.”

Moira understood. “A shade route to the Shadowline from Twilight territory. That would be expensive.”

“She’s quick, Albin. And the crawler track confirms it. It was made by a Meacham long-range charter. Twilight is in the Shadowline, at considerable expense in money and man-hours. More than they’d have available for a speculative venture. Putting a line of shadow generators across two thousand kilometers of Brightside is an awesome feat. The cost in equipment and lives must have been phenomenal. I checked with the engineers. They said it could be done, but somebody would have to be crazy to try it. So why did somebody?”

Korando changed clips twice while Blake was talking. The first showed an artist’s concept of a peculiar tractor, the second an action sequence of the real thing, slightly different in its lines. The camera angle left no doubt that it had been shot in the Shadowline. Fine lines of intense light ran along the lip of towering cliffs in the background. “This was shot earlier in the week, not far from where we found the mysterious crawler track,” Blake explained.