Solaris Rising 2 (25 page)

Stepping over a pool of slurry, Lu found a sync screen thrust in front of his face.

“Credentials,” barked the officer holding the tablet. The regulation PAP visor made the man appear more cyborg than human. Lu suspected that was by design.

A second officer kept a hand on the gun strapped across his body, a black keratin-shelled automatic. Standard issue.

“Lu De Lun. Afro-Caribbean Asian male. Age 43. Employment: Fuel Transportation.” He reeled off his own data while inputting his signature code to the sync screen and scanning the birth bar at his wrist.

“Specialist or Independent?”

A Specialist transported one type of geofuel and was in the pockets of the corresponding Fuel Prospector. Often as not, they acted as middle men between the PAP and the Prospectors, adding another layer of corruption to Twelve’s feudal monopoly. Independents, on the other hand, paid fealty to no single Prospector or crop type.

Begrudgingly, Lu admitted, “Independent.”
Now came the wack bureaucracy and timewasting.

“We’re going to need some more details,” said the sync screen waver.

“All the necessary licences are there, linked to my signature code.” Lu flashed a sour smile.

“Of course,” said the officer tightly. His partner stroked the automatic. “But there are still the quotas. There’s plenty of chicken waste to load. I’d strongly recommend you make your way to the slurry vats.”

“Of course,” Lu mimicked. Stinking chicken waste, worth half the value of other loads like pokeberry, potato or citrus peel. He knew that he needed to get shot of the officers before they forced him to preregister for a chicken waste load via the sync screen.

“I don’t suppose you gentlemen could direct me to the magistrate’s quarters?” He took a clip of dollar notes out of his back pocket and held it up. “I need to make a deposit of fifty US dollars.”

While unable to see the officers’ expressions, he knew they understood the bribe well enough.

The first officer plucked the clip from his fingers. “We will see the magistrate gets your deposit.”

Lu waited. The men had accepted his bribe, but PAP officers could be bastards and they might opt to harass him anyway.

In the end, it was the Robot Arena which came to his rescue. Standing fifty metres or so outside its wire perimeter, Lu could see the upper halves of the crop giants over the heads of the crowd. Most were the usual models – 9Z4s, P99Ps, couple of borers. The huge steel mechanisms were designed to withstand the ravages of Twelve’s geothermic landscape. But some lucky vendor had a new model on display: a Titan SLS. The crowd had thickened around it. Apparently the two officers were keen to take a closer look too.

“Go on now.” The officer pocketed the money clip. With a swipe of a hand, the sync screen went blank. Both men moved off, their visors turned towards the Titan.

Taking care to keep his distance, Lu joined the crowd at the opposite side of the arena. The older models of crop giants oozed smoke from the seals of their feed hatches. The stench was incredible; Lu was all too aware that the faeces of Prospectors and itinerant workers alike went into fuelling the things. The design of a crop giant was fundamentally basic. Lu knew how to repair one and how to take it apart. Colossal shears moved on pinioned arms. Bucket jaws delivered into thresher spools. Balls of revolving caterpillar tracks gave the robots their gliding motion. Mothers frightened naughty children with tales of crop giants abandoning the fields and acquiring a taste for blood.

Lu had never seen a robot like the Titan. The head was black and gridded like a compound eye; in fact, Lu suspected the design was precisely that – a grid of stereoscopic cameras delivering 3D images of an entire field of crops. If the older robots were spiders, the Titan was a king crab, its kin dangling from hooks at chop bars or hissing inside stock pots. Six huge, harvesting arms were multi-axis and reticulating, doubling up as legs. Sonar booms served as antenna. A central jaw sat in a cradle of synthetic sinew. Traction engines were bolted beneath, alongside a complex bowel of cabling. The entire system was powered by a Cyclops 84 chip – so declared the neon data screen above the robot. ‘Titan is the first crop giant with surveillance mapping and a PAP-sanctioned weapons system.’ Lu noted the gas guns at the pivoting midpoint of each arm.

“That will put the noses of the Yellow Scarves out of joint,” remarked a man next to him.

“I’m yet to meet a machine the rebels couldn’t destroy,” he replied. Too poor to leave Twelve, many families found themselves entirely dependent on the dire wages offered by the Fuel Prospectors. Thanks to the increasing utilisation of crop giants, the workers were being deprived of even that small source of revenue. The Yellow Scarves fought for survival, and Lu understood why. But could they really take down the likes of the Titan?

The man didn’t share his faith. “If the Yellow Scarves don’t take a shot to the belly from those guns, I reckon that machine can keep a grip on them until the PAP arrive.” He smacked his heat-dried lips. “Then it’ll be off to the Heat Zone for those they catch. Poor bastards.” Rolling his rheumy eyes, he seemed to squat down inside the sorrow of the thought.

Lu moved on.

L
ABOUR
H
ALL WAS
packed with workers putting themselves up for sale. Lu squeezed past men, women and children, aware of their bony limbs, leathered skin, and the stench of desperation. He made his way up the sweaty iron stairs to the hiring platform. Taking a numbered bat from a nearby table, he joined the twenty or so foremen on the platform. Each held the fates of those below in their grasp; raise a baton to indicate a job offer, keep it lowered to opt out.

Lu scanned the crowd. He saw scores of faces and skins of every shade. China might have originally colonised Twelve fifty years earlier, but rubber stamped work visas and the promise of good wages had attracted a 10% US contingent. Finding the planet’s geothermal activity too unstable, China had pulled out. That was 23 years ago. Now the Fuel Prospectors lorded over their volcanic real estate and the workers were forced into the Labour Hall.

A ramp led up to the hiring platform and another led down. The workers took turns to file past the foremen. The hour was allotted to ‘Unskilled Labour’; a neon sign ticker taping around the circumference of the hall declared as much.

Poverty was the true equaliser, Lu concluded, watching the procession with his arms folded and a knot between his eyebrows. The younger men and women had the advantage when it came to attracting a foreman’s eye. Those who were elderly or in any way disabled did not attract a bid.

When the tickertape switched to ‘Apprentices’, the age of those in line dropped considerably. So did the number of potential employers. Lu joined four other men on the viewing step. He wasn’t entirely welcome in their company.

“You don’t need to train a kid to join the long haul,” spat one out the side of his mouth.

“Maybe he needs an apprentice to clean the ship’s toilet? Is that it, trucker?” said a second.

“That’s it.” Lu concentrated on the children filing past. He needed a strong one. Own teeth wouldn’t hurt either. And then there were the eyes. His father had once remarked on the grit contained within a man’s eyes. “Look for the soul beyond the sadness,” he told him. “Those are the ones we can trust with our secrets.”

“Come on, come on,” he muttered.

“Eager to be on your way again, huh? I do not blame you,” said the man to his right. Guy in his fifties, Lu guessed. Big old boots that belonged on a soldier. Neatly darned tunic to his knees.

“No one should have to live out their days in this stink hole, least of all the young.” He nodded at the girls and boys so desperate to find a trade. “Me? I can only help one of them today.” He raised his baton as a boy of twelve or so stepped forward. None of the foremen challenged his bid, not with so many youngsters to go around.

“I’m offering a three yearer in chicken waste,” announced the man.

“Oh shit,” said one of the mouthy foremen. The others shook their heads and laughed.

The kid didn’t laugh. Instead he got the despairing look of someone who’d hoped for the best and heard the worst. But Lu knew the kid was in no position to argue or negotiate. The new apprentice and the man moved aside.

For the next half hour, Lu watched the children come and go. Some were taken on as apple pickers, mulch grain sifters, gas pump operators or kitchen staff. The majority went home wanting.

A small boy stepped forward, the sort with bones still soft enough to allow him to root around the engine of the Eighteen Wheeler. Lu was about to hold up his baton when he spotted the girl up next. She had black hair in a braid, crooked teeth in an over-wide mouth, and long, slim eyes. He put her at 15 – the maximum age for an apprentice.

When she took the boy’s place, Lu raised his baton. The remaining foremen knocked elbows and he heard one whisper, “A girl on board a fuel ship?” and another, “If it’s a whore he wanted, there’s cheaper to be had at Pig Town.”

If the girl was afraid of him, she didn’t show it. Instead she met his gaze and held it.

“Two yearer hauling gas.” Lu would have tried to sell the proposition if he thought she had any choice in the matter. As it stood, he didn’t bother.

She nodded, even flashed her crooked smile. “Yes, sir.”

Lu led her over to the PAP officer busy registering new vocations against workers’ employment sheets on his sync screen. At his back, the foremen offered a few crude comments then forgot them.

The officer scanned the birth code at the girl’s wrist.

“Pay rate?”

“Bed and board.”

Lu looked at the girl for a reaction. Surely she’d expect some kind of wage. Her expression didn’t change though.

In minutes, she had signed away the next two years of her life for an apprenticeship on board the Eighteen Wheeler. She followed as Lu led the way back down the stairs and through the crowd, all the while praying he’d made the right choice.

T
HE GIRL’S NAME
was Hope Turner. She thought she was 15, but couldn’t be sure having lost her mother and siblings to cholera several years earlier and with a father too busy lugging potato sacks at the local farm to count birthdays. Lu didn’t care. He just wanted someone to grease the engine of the Eighteen Wheeler, hook up the hoses for liquid fuel, scrub the dry bay to keep it clear of fungus, and otherwise stay out of his business. At least to start with.

So far Hope was turning out to be a good choice of apprentice. Her reaction on seeing the Eighteen Wheeler up close in the hangar was genuine awe.

“She’s a dark horse, but there’s value in that,” he explained. “Keeps nosy children and parts pirates at bay. Fast too. We can make the trip between here and K01-461-13 in a week.”

“I’ve never seen a land shuttle up close. Has it got a name?” she asked in her strong provincial accent.

“Eighteen Wheeler. I don’t like to complicate things.”

The girl had nodded, the huge craft reflecting in her pupils.

They’d left Man Fu that afternoon, driving at first and then taking to the sky to pass over beet farms and vast golden stretches of wheat. The vegetation was hardy fuel stock, tough as a sun-dried rat’s carcass and able to withstand the harsh conditions. Hope had sat alongside him in the co-driver seat, absorbing everything.

“Everything looks so different from up here,” she told him. “The world looks alive.”

“Not rotting to pieces.” Hands steady on the wheel, he glanced over at her. “The farms are no different to embroidering a rotten bandage. Sooner or later the fabric will tear and the crud will pour out.”

T
HEY ARRIVED IN
Pig Town early that evening. K01-461, the Scarlet Star, pulsed at the horizon. The Heat Zone was just visible to the west – five hundred kilometres of the planet’s most active geothermics. The area was home to geysers, boiling springs, mudflats and fumaroles. With magma flowing so close to the surface and subject to colossal pressures, the water achieved a boiling point of 300°C, meaning the zone was perfect for cultivating algae – another source of fuel. It was also where convicts laboured in the carbon dioxide rich atmosphere and treacherous working conditions.

“I can’t believe I’m back in Pig Town.” Hope nodded towards the open sewer running the length of the main street. “Thought I’d escaped that stench.”

“You walked to Man Fu?”

The girl shrugged. “Walked some, hitched a lift with a market truck couple of times.” She pointed at her bare feet. “My father says I have my mother’s feet. Small enough to attract a husband. Broad enough to carry life’s woes.”

Lu surveyed the shanty huts and makeshift chop bars, the chicken-shit peppered paths in-between. “I’ve got business here. You can stay with me or pay your father a visit. Your choice.”

Hope jutted her chin. “My father would be ashamed to see me home so soon. I would prefer to stay and begin to learn my trade. That is, after all, the reason you took me on.”

She showed her crooked teeth. Lu grunted.

“Come on then. You can help me choose a present for someone.”

I
N
M
AN
F
U
, the very visible presence of the PAP kept any reminders of the resistance at a minimum. But out among the villages, people were braver. Every so often he’d spot graffiti on the dung brick walls – the tag of the resistance – or ‘Death to the Dark Greens’: a reference to the PAP’s olive coloured uniforms.

It took guts to go up against the authorities in such a direct way. Those who were caught earned a one way ticket to the Heat Zone. But that didn’t stop people – some whispered their support for the rebels, some daubed walls with graffiti, and some took action.

“What kind of a present are you looking for?” asked Hope, fingering the strings of beads that hung off a hook at one end of the stall. “My mother always said to give the gift of colour. Red for good fortune, yellow for freedom from life’s cares, green for health and harmony. Never white – the mourning shade.”