Buried deep within her basement office, Linda Libiziewsky’s fingers drummed on the desktop as she stared at the tacked-up mountain scene that passed for a window. Hugo Azhad dripped from every bough. The meadow bloomed with the purple flowers of Marul’s eyes. Deela’s laugh splashed along the brook her brothers’ footsteps sprinting up the red-earth track.
Linda wasn’t particularly close to the Azhads, but everybody knew Ollie. He was a bright spot in the TCM. While MP blow-ins fired up their fanatical goon squads, Ollie hired and trained all-local boys for supplemental security contracts. He kept them supervised and out of trouble. He was intolerant of thugs and bullies. He cultivated good relations with the civil police; with Zone and Church authorities. His recruitment net was ecumenical. “It’s a warehouse,” he’d shrug, “not a sanctuary.” His lads were quiet, effective, nearly invisible, and in high demand. New Utahans were pragmatic.
No local, drummed Linda’s fingers, would have done this. Not at all; and not like this. What was the point of kidnap? Ransom? There was no percentage in it. TCM Security profits went to the Church, not Ollie. The Church didn’t ransom kidnap victims. It ruthlessly hunted down the perpetrators, declared them and their families excommunicants, confiscated their property, exiled them to The Barrens, and placed them under shunning orders. There was nowhere to take the money and run to. Extortion? Over what? Warehouse security? VIP escort? Nobody local would pick that fight lightly. Ollie was too astute a politician and businessman. He was a decent man, but he controlled the equivalent of an infantry division with eyes and ears in every community on the planet. There wasn’t a contract out there worth measures as extreme as murdering his eldest son and stealing his youngest kids, because there wasn’t a contract out there worth the potential retribution.
No, this murder smacked of offworlders: offworld prejudice, and offworld threat. It was meant to look like a local cock-up. That was the prejudice part. It was what an offworlder might imagine a local blood feud would look like; some offworlder framing of negotiation hostages. But New Utahans didn’t do blood feuds. They did litigations and shamings and shunnings and banishments. They might tie each other up in court for decades determining just compensation, but they didn’t tie each other up in trees for public guttings. They didn’t steal one another’s kids.
So, it was a message. A disgusting, public threat. To whom? To whom? To whom? drummed Linda’s fingers. To Ollie? It just didn’t make sense. To Moorstown? It had certainly soaked the community in fear. Street play all but shut down. Parents hovered over their kids. Whispers and rumors flew everywhere. But to what purpose was that? What message was sent? Why shouldn’t kids go to and from work or play outside?
The drumming stopped. Linda went icy all over. She felt physically sick. Because nobody can protect them, she thought. That’s the message. Nobody can protect you. Not even Ollie Azhad. Not even the TCM. Now she went hot all over. Her faced flushed bright red. The message was bright and clear, to anyone who knew how to read it: deal with us, or you’ll have no future here.
Suddenly, all the random violence made sense. At some level or another, Linda knew most things of any consequence in the Zone, because she paid all the bills. She didn’t need to pull up Trippe’s travel reimbursements. She knew them by heart. One FLIVR fuel receipt, for a weekly out-of-Zone community relations meeting with the current lessees of the old Founder’s Retreat. She reached forward; pulled down the picture, and thought deeply as she examined the cliff face, capped by the façade of the mountain aerie now occupied by Lillith van Zandt.
Blaine Institute, New Caledonia
The IA communications satellite was tiny. It didn’t hold a lot. It didn’t do a lot. It served a specific purpose, which was to burp transmissions at light speed and hideous expense to like-minded state-of-the-art transponders parked within eyeshot of the daisy-chain of Alderson points tenuously connecting New Utah to the rest of Empire space. That’s why Asach had dropped it into geosynchronous orbit above the Bonneville plains all those years ago.
It did have a minuscule image acquisition system, which didn’t cover many bands. It had no onboard atmospheric correction, nor could it record data needed to accomplish same. It was lousy at punching through clouds. It was pretty worthless at night. But on a clear day, if nothing else was going on, if anybody asked it to, it could record whatever happened to lie beneath it. It couldn’t see a lot. It wasn’t strictly speaking directable, but you could fiddle with the aperture slit, so that it looked out at an oblique angle. If you had those settings, you could correct the image so that it looked something like vertical. If you knew exactly where you wanted to look, you could use all of your available storage to bump up resolution and get as much detail stuffed in as possible. Using it was like waving a camera above everyone’s heads at a rock concert, and hoping whatever you got would turn out well.
Given those constraints, it was pretty amazing that they got anything at all. Anything much smaller than a house was little more than a dot. Waist-high scrub along dry washes was reduced to darkened streaks. Multi-story dunes appeared as hazy smears obscuring the white scars of bulldozed access roads.
It didn’t matter. They stared at the scaffolded contraption with shock and awe. It looked like a skyscraper’s innards mated with an octopus. The tiny yellow cab must have been, well, bigger than a house, or it would not have been visible at all. But what was most stunning was the sand itself. It was not the stuff of palm-swept holidays or Scheherazade oases. Linear mustard yellow dunes banded with greenish black spilled like vomit across a vast expanse at the base of scruffy mountains. The octopus had chewed away square-walled sections seven stories high, and re-spewed the multi-colored grains into a bracelet of neatly-sorted conical piles. In turn, SunRail spurs chewed away at these, ferrying gemstone-colored open boxcars in a necklace that cascaded to a ring of smelters, fired by a solar concentrator big enough to cast a shadow across the entire yard.
But the alignment was not cooperative. They stretched. They rotated. They enhanced and cropped and magnified. But they could not get any clear image of insignia; branding; printing: anything at all that indicated the identity of the operators of the mine. So they called in Chief Snow, a Warrant Officer older than the sands of time. He looked at the mining booms. He looked at the operations layout. He looked at the SunRail boxcars. “Local,” he grunted. He looked at the smelters. “Nice adaptation,” he rasped. Then he shifted the view slightly, and looked at outbuildings; latrines; bunkhouses; warehouses, equipment yards.
“Come ‘ere,” he wheezed. His breath was foul. “That,” he said, his tobacco-stained index finger poking at one nondescript building among many, “is the primary flinger house. And that,” he said, circling the array; walking his hangnailed, callous-encrusted digit along the lines and paths and buildings, “is a Van Zandt Mining Number Four-A layout.” He turned away, grey stubble glowing in the backlight; dandruff flecks carpeting his shoulders. “Colony concession model. Unmitigated, total extraction, open cut-and-strip. Not silica sand. Wrong geology, wrong color. You got a lot goin’ on here. That ridge is an old sea mount—undersea volcano—that went dormant, got ringed with reefs, then raised up, then baked in sun, then weathered down. Those sands are eroding out of an exposed shoulder of the mountain core. Best wild guess, rare earths, based on that geology and color.”
“Rare earths?”
Snow grunted. “Yeah. Only thing is, rare earths ain’t. Depending on where you are. Something out there’s worth some startup, though. Look at the height of that tower feeding the smelters.” He drew the triangulation of the solar concentrator’s height and shadow, then punched in trigonometry based on standard heights for the warehouses. A number appeared. They all gave a low whistle. “Plus or minus, either way, if they went in legal, they did this fast. You either need big payback quick, or a guaranteed long haul to make that investment worthwhile. And no overhead.”