Dust and Echoes/In the Immediate Distance - Chapter 5

Robb woke up face down on a rather comfortable bed; how he had gotten there eluded him, which was growing more and more worrisome as time went on. He frantically sorted through the scraps of memory he still had from the previous night and tried to find something that pointed away from spending an ugly couple of minutes trying to escape without notice.

“Relax, it’s just a hairy old man,” Cailan said. “I realize that might be the exact kind of thing you’d love to hear in the morning if you’re into that kind ‘a thing, but judging by last night you don’t seem to be. Or would the hairy thing not be attractive? I guess it’s personal preference.” He walked in through the hotel room door with what appeared to Thade to be goblets of pure golden ichor. “Whatever, I brought coffee.”

“What,” said Thade, taking one of the cups, “what all happened last night? In the interest of keeping my personal high scores up to date, understand. Did I say anything stupid?”

“No, surprisingly,” replied Cailan. “You showed some real crafty stuff; must be state-dependent. The girl you were talking to started spoutin’ off about her perfect Earth weddin’ and sending up red flags like a colonial settler, and you jumped under the room service cart when they came to take it. I found you passed out in the hallway where you fell out. You owe me for dragging you back here, by the way; my back’s not what it used to be and you are especially dense - and yes, I do mean in all senses of the word.”

“Thanks, Cailan,” Thade said. “Maybe I can repay you with a trip to the DZ.”

Cailan’s face quickly became unreadable. “How’s that supposed to work, exactly?”

“My boat’s more than she seems. She can evade any type of scanner that the Government  might be using, though Ecosynth will be keeping a closer watch. I still feel pretty confident I could make it through, and last night’s ‘play’, as you called it, gives me enough reason to try – besides the obvious incentive of all of the riches and fountains of youth that are supposed to be in store for anyone who can make it out there and back.”

“Nothin’s changed,” Cailan said. ”I’d try to dissuade you, if I thought it was worth the effort; you’re bloody well open to try it if you want.” He didn’t know what to think of this kid. He showed all the signs of a normal in-over-his-head toddler, but if that was all there was to Thade, Cailan would have ditched him as soon as they got to Kurese. No, he’s  perfectly happy with other people seeing him like they want ‘a see him. He lets himself seem reckless, but he was level-headed in the pub when he should have bolted – or at least done something stupid; plus, a run-of the-mill merc doesn’t typically have access to the kind of tech inside the Return. Although - that could have been passed down by a wealthy parent or relative … that would be the typical psychological background to generate Thade’s supposed personality type. He obviously already had plans to try the Halifax Line before picking me up, but why? It can’t be for the resources alone… Cailan didn’t know exactly how much he could trust him, but they fortunately did not require each other’s full trust at the moment. They had a pretty standard agreement, which would last until Cailan secured separate living arrangements; as it currently stood he was sleeping on the floor. “What are your plans for today?”

Thade started getting dressed. “I have to restock the ship and meet up with some old friends. You’re on your own, and don’t expect me to cook you a big fancy dinner.”

No older than thirty and he already has outer-colony contacts.

He considered tailing Thade for the day, then considered whether Thade would be the type to catch on if someone tailed him for an entire day, and finally decided that he ultimately did not care enough at the moment to spend that much of his time. “Well I guess I’ll have to make some ‘friends’, too. Good to get to know some Romans when you’re in Rome, or else you don’t know what you’re supposed to do.”

“Sounds good,” said Thade, “though I don’t really get the ‘Romans’ thing, to be honest. I’ll be back here by eight, most likely eating something dirt cheap and watching something I’ve seen a thousand times. If you want, I can pull up an extra chair.”

Cailan smiled. “Sounds like a Tuesday.”

*    *    *

New Denver was an odd combination of ideals. Before the forest at its heart had become the Star it had been a charming town, low buildings and small houses spread widely over a few hundred square miles of spotted clearings meant to be as unobtrusive as possible. The people who had settled it loved it the way it was, but the inevitable flow of new scientists, the arrival of industrial-scale processing capabilities, and Government involvement in the DZ had brought with them even more in tourism and entrepreneurship. The idea to build New Denver into something great was then posed to some of the resident megacorps as a move to create a ‘Las Vegas at the edge of known space’, the next great center of gambling and entertainment - as well as being a dynamite profit model. The longest-standing residents managed to band together and convince them to incorporate the forest as an attraction rather than clearing it, but the town still changed; it grew exponentially and pushed the rural residents slowly outward. Many of the original buildings remained around the outside of the city in a much more sparse ring of jungle than they had occupied before, but inside of those the city seemed to grow from the ground up, rising slowly from building to building, one story at a time, towards the massive canopy covering the very center. Because of this structure and the circular orientation of the rail lines and roads, the districts were separated into rings that were each equidistant to the center at almost all points. Thade had departed early in the morning to the outermost edge of the city, but Cailan decided to spend the day in the business district, the ring immediately surrounding the Star and known colloquially – and sarcastically – as the Halo. It held the operating bases of most of the major companies that worked with the Government in the DZ, and Cailan was curious to see what the ‘operating base’ of a megacorporation in a fringe colony looked like. Cailan sat sipping his coffee in the shade of a coffee shop overlooking the courtyard that fronted the Ecosynth building. It would have been an average skyscraper on Earth, though nothing compared to some of the newer feats of engineering through the inner colonies; every floor of the building was leased to the Ecosynth Corporation. As he adjusted the straw hat that he had paired with a duster to create a western-tinged disguise, he noticed the first Caecus Lemur that he had yet seen on Kurese. It was staring in the direction of the courtyard and looked tense, as if watching and waiting with an artificially constructed patience. Cailan had seen that look many times on predators waiting to attack some unfortunate prey at the opportune moment. Most species of lemur had a more vegetarian diet, but these ones had been seen catching and eating insects and small rodents as well. He tried to detect the unlucky creature, but before he was able to do so the front doors of the office building opened to reveal Eliza Gunningham and a swarm of lower level executives. Cailan glanced back to where he had seen the lemur, but it had already disappeared into the brush. He returned his gaze to the building and tracked the black-clad party’s progress. The faces were hard to make out, but the goofy, loping gait of Renkal Fend was almost unmistakable.

Renkal Fend wasn’t well known publicly, though he was a very storied figure where hitchhikers like Cailan were concerned. He had been many of the places Cailan had been, and even more that he still wanted to visit, and had not slowed down one bit after passing the sixty-year mark. He hadn’t exactly done almost anything of note, but he had been present for what seemed like every event of import in the last few decades. He had been on Noel, the heartland of the separatists during the very first Planetary Civil War (which it seemed people were very excited to begin just so they could say that humanity had waged a ‘Planetary Civil War’), and had lived with many of the masters of the Flood, an artistic movement that tried to cut away complex and ambiguous themes and meanings in favor of a simplistic style that elicited powerful emotion. He had later been quoted as saying “I still cannot figure out what Briggs and Helamon were talking about. All of this ‘government should be run by people who understand how other people work’ talk, or that ‘art should be for the audience and not something that the artist could hold over their heads’. From what I gathered they thought psychologists and artists should rule the galaxy, a ridiculous thought if you have half a wit about you. Not that I would be one to say how the Republic should be run, mind you; I very much enjoy the minding of my own business.” Frank Briggs, a military commander-turned-painter that was instrumental in the Flood’s early years, and Helamon, a former pastor and psychology professor - as well as the representative for the Proxima Colonies to the first Republic Congress - who famously led the Colony’s Rebellion, had also both been separately quoted as saying “I don’t believe Mr. Fend really understands much of what’s going on around him.”

Fend? I knew he was slow, but I thought he had some common sense at least. Well, it seems Ecosynth found their guy. Why are they still here? Why haven’t they left yet? Cailan tried to catch snatches of speech, or to read someone’s lips, but the company was almost always secure from anyone watching them; it really was good business practice as there often was someone watching them. He paid for his drink and took one last look back to the skyscraper across the road. He needed more information, no matter how little he wanted to get near any of this; he knew that they wouldn’t leave him alone just as much as his curiosity kept him from leaving them alone. He had heard rumblings of some sort of Ecosynth factory only one district out from the Halo; it was supposedly a terraforming supply factory that mined raw materials from ground just below the planet’s surface. Fend followed Gunningham and her flock of murmuring underlings as they ducked into a limousine and drove away from the courtyard. Cailan hailed a chariot of his own and said “Take me to the next ring down.”

“The Bangle it is,” the cab driver responded in a thick colony accent.

Cailan loved that accent. The older colonies at the center of the Republic had kept Romantic languages close to their hearts, while those that had traveled further and further away had contained heavy numbers from eastern European and Asiatic cultures on Earth. The outer reaches of space had been infused with a mix of western and eastern dialects, and though there was heavy criticism of this new cultural breed from more traditional viewpoints, it seemed that western scientific progressivism and the stubborn eastern work ethic paired well in the new colonies that were equal parts harsh and plentiful. The ancient cultures of Earth - and especially religions like Buddhism and Hinduism that were steeped in centuries of tradition - still endured at home, while the outer colonies forged a new hybrid culture that was as straight-talking and matter-of-fact as hard living needed it to be. As the distinctly lower facades of the Bangle pulled into view, Cailan looked for the marbled black stone that would signal the single factory owned by the Ecosynth-affiliated Astrella Corp. No one had heard of this small company when it bought an empty plot of land and built a factory to process the slightly green and orange tinged white dirt that was plentiful in this area. The dust it was refined into did not seem to anyone to be particularly useful, but it was far enough out of people’s attention that it was rarely thought of for more than twenty seconds – there was already too much questionable business to avoid in the first place that it didn’t matter if the factory was legitimate or if it was just a front for something more nefarious. Cailan spotted the building and told the cab driver to park down the road a ways. He paid him and sat back towards the factory on foot. There did not seem to be any guards in the area, nor anything to guard besides a single entrance: a sturdy garage door with a slatted walk-in portal set inside it at the left end. The smaller opening rotated inward like a decorated oriental fan, which allowed the larger garage door to function as long as the smaller door was closed - and vice versa. There were no real avenues of surveillance from the outside and the door sealed without any gaps exploitable by flexible remote-controlled cameras. There were no windows, and it seemed like the building was lighted only internally. It was carefully crafted to give no information to prying eyes, but that fact itself told Cailan that it definitely was important. The dust had to be a feint, but what purpose the building actually served was a mystery. Cailan at least knew that, whatever the job Ecosynth had offered him was, there was much more going on than smuggling some barely illegal substance. Frustratingly interesting, is what it is.