Less than three days from now, Dakota would be piloting one of a dozen dropships in towards Cardinal Point for the rescue attempt.
Over the past several days they’d received an intensive briefing on the nature of the conflict. Because Dakota came from the same world as Banville, a lot of it was old news to her but, even so, she hadn’t been aware of much of the historical background.
Koti Uchida, more than two centuries before, had been a planetary genetics specialist on a research team evaluating a likely terraforming candidate in the Onada 125 system, thirty-seven light years from Earth. When a relief crew from Mann-Kolbert Geophysical Evaluations had arrived at the planet six months later, they’d found their predecessors wiped out by a crudely altered virus originally intended to modify carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere.
Near catatonic with shock, Uchida was the only survivor, holed up alone in an airtight hut with its own air supply while the corpses of his fellow researchers rotted nearby.
They got him transported back out on the next crew rotation, and the subsequent investigation turned up evidence of latent psychosis that Uchida had somehow kept hidden throughout the standard psych-evaluation tests. There was even the suspicion Uchida had been responsible for altering the virus that then wiped out his compatriots, but that could never be proved.
Uchida was subsequently removed from his position, and disappeared off the general radar for a while.
He resurfaced three years later, claiming he’d spent most of this time in his lonely hut taking dictation from a disembodied alien spirit that preached salvation through technology. Only once every human being could see the universe as God saw it, Uchida claimed, would a new age of peace and understanding come about. He began preaching his peculiar new gospel on the streets of the Mound, a city on the world of Fullstop, long famous for its surfeit of wild-eyed prophets.
The book Uchida claimed to have taken down during his long solitude became known as the Oratory. In time, he gained followers. Only sixty years after his death, Oratory temples could be found on a dozen worlds throughout Consortium space. They all offered the same route to instant karma: a skull implant-a primitive forerunner of Ghost technology-that tapped directly into the temporal lobes of the human brain, long associated with religious epiphany, thereby generating a supposedly unending neurological state of transcendent consciousness.
Follow Uchida, potential converts were told, and you will experience God for ever.
There was no lack of takers for Uchida’s instant salvation. But then came the accusations that these implants had been placed inside the heads of less than willing converts. Eventually, the notorious debacle involving Belle Trevois pushed the Uchidans into even harder times.
The riots breaking out on half a dozen Consortium worlds, after Belle’s death, helped push through approval for a long-standing application by the Uchidans for a colonial charter. They wanted to set up their own world-and, in order to get rid of them, the Consortium was more than happy to grant their request.
The Uchidans were given a desolate, near-uninhabitable ball of rock with a thin veil of poisonous atmosphere, located in a system on the furthest edge of Consortium space. There they dug in, pressurizing caverns and boring tunnels for miles beneath the surface.
Fifteen years passed before the Shoal suddenly invoked Clause Six in the Uchidans’ contract, and reclaimed the entire system without explanation.
The Shoal Hegemony controlled a constantly shifting web of trade routes plied by their coreships, and they reserved the right to reoccupy any colonized system for their own purposes, so long as the colony in question had been in existence for less than twenty standard years. It proved the single most contentious item in the ongoing relationship between humanity and the Shoal. Concessions had been made in other areas, but on this one issue the Hegemony remained resolute.
No one had seriously anticipated that the Shoal might ever actually invoke Clause Six and, as the centuries passed, it had looked less and less likely they ever would.
Everyone, however, was proved wrong.
Slews of civil servants and politicians, all the way up to the highest ranks of the Consortium, fell by the wayside in the ensuing chaos. Fledgling colonies within a three hundred light year radius of Earth hurriedly reexamined their own charters in a panic.
Over the next several years, the Uchidans were rescued from their failed colony and shipped instead to Redstone. But that planet was already home to the Freehold, who were no strangers to controversy themselves. Extreme libertarians with a bent for violence, the Consortium had been equally happy to see the Freehold occupying their own inhospitable ball of mud somewhere far away from the centre of human affairs.
On Redstone, the Uchidans had occupied the deserted continent of Agrona, a token Consortium military force remaining in orbit for a couple of decades in order to maintain peace between the two groups now inhabiting the planet.
Eventually they left, and such co-existence might even have proved ultimately acceptable if the Uchidans had not then begun work on altering Redstone’s biosphere-with potentially disastrous consequences for the Freehold colony.
The ensuing war had remained in a state of detente for decades, a constant tit-for-tat struggle along fluctuating borders, until the Consortium uncovered evidence that the Uchidans had meanwhile smuggled Howard Banville to Redstone on board one of the Shoal Hegemony’s coreships. As a result, the Freehold were suddenly granted Consortium military support.
And that was why Dakota and Severn and all the rest were now here on this desolate world, so far from home.
Below, the Freeholder whose breather mask had been displaced snapped it back into place, then pulled out some kind of weapon. It was a short, nasty-looking blade which he began to wave in the face of his assailant, who retreated quickly. There was something showy about the motions: as if he were playing to an audience, and Dakota felt she was witnessing some secret ritual.
‘See, most Freeholders tend to stay right here,’ Severn explained. ‘Redstone’s a fair distance away from all the normal coreship routes, so you’ll get one coming through here only once or twice a year. But every now and then some of these people find their way in among the human communities on the coreships, and put on a show for them, fighting to the death for a paying audience. There’s big money in it, from what I hear-for the survivor, anyway.’
‘Shit, really?’ Dakota shivered again, not entirely from the cold this time.
‘Yeah, but they’re still playing within their own rules. The winner still gains in social status here, but also becomes wealthy in the process.’