The Touchback descended the shaft, sinking like a pebble into a miles-deep, dark-water chasm. Large ships docked against greenish projections that jutted out from the walls up and down the length of the shaft. He saw thousands of small ships, but many larger ones as welclass="underline" cargo tugs hauling long lines of hexagonal boxes, space liners sporting sleek lines, bulky freighters loading or unloading payload to haul to other systems, and something that Quentin had never seen — warships.
There were dozens of warships, big and small, bristling with bulky shield generators and the long, thin, unmistakable shapes of weapons. Quentin felt a shiver, thinking of the days when weapon-loaded ships like these had permeated the universe, fighting and killing more often than not.
The Touchback slowed, almost imperceptibly. A light jarring motion indicated they had docked.
[BEINGS ON FIRST SHUTTLE FLIGHT, MOVE TO THE LANDING BAY. FIRST SHUTTLE FLIGHT LEAVES IN FIFTEEN MINUTES.]
“You come with me,” Virak said.
“But I’m on the third flight.”
“I have more to show you,” Virak said. “You come with me.”
Quentin followed the muscular Quyth warrior from the viewing deck down to the landing bay. He boarded — a few of the veteran starters gave him a quick look, but most shrugged (or gave the respective alien equivalent of a shrug) and went back to whatever they had been doing. The shuttle slid out of the landing bay and descended the shaft.
The shuttle finally slipped past the bottom of the shaft and into a cavernous, dome-shaped space. Endless rails of the green crystal ran in curved arms along the dome shell up towards the two-mile wide shaft mouth, which was also ringed by a thick band of green. Ships, probably personal cars judging from their tiny dimensions, flew in every direction like a thick swarm of gnats.
The air looked crowded with vehicles, but not around the shuttle. Off the port side, he noticed a squat yellow and black ship, lethal-looking and bristling with weapons. It struck him as an artistic interpretation of a bumble-bee crossed with an automated factory robot. He didn’t know the reason for its rather un-aerodynamic shape, but there was no mistaking the ship was a fighter.
He watched the fighter out the window. It matched speed and altitude with the shuttle. Then he noticed another fighter, and another, also matching speed. He looked out windows on the other side, and saw many more. Dozens of mechanical bees formed a sort of protective sphere-web with the shuttle at its center.
The Deuce reminded Quentin of Ionath City and Port Whitok — a huge, dome-shaped city. Although this time the dome was twice as large, at least eight miles in diameter and over two miles high. There was no sprawling city playing away from the downtown — here bare rock marked the city’s edge. A winding river, at this height no more than a blue-green ribbon, ran through the center of the city, emanating from one domewall and disappearing into another on the far side.
This place did not have the fine radial symmetry of Ionath City. Rather, it spread outward from the center the way a bacteria colony might grow on a Petri dish: orderly but in a biological fashion, as if it had grown naturally without the guiding hand of a city engineer. Lights glowed from almost every building, adding to the city’s biological feel, as if it were a bioluminescent colonial organism in some deep ocean. Roads wound through the city with little more order than the meandering river.
“How did they put a river in there?”
“Comet harvesters,” Virak said. “Same as the asteroid harvesters. Water is very important for life. Females breed in water. On Ionath and Whitok, we have special water-filled facilities for breeding, but here we can do it naturally, right out in the open like it is done on Quyth.”
The buildings had looked squat from the shaft mouth, but as the shuttle descended, Quentin saw that was just an illusion. The towering, organic-looking hexagonal structures reached to heights of two hundred stories and more. The shuttle banked to the left and followed the line of the river. Buildings seemed to link together, their green crystalline structure branching out like neurons to connect to all their neighbors, several times at several heights. The number of buildings, their densely packed proximity, their height — Quentin’s head spun with one obvious question.
“How many beings live on The Deuce?”
“The last census put us somewhere around 742 million. It’s not as open as Ionath City, but it’s not nearly as crowded as the homeworld.”
All in a space less than half the size of the Earth’s moon. The Quyth homeworld was only slightly larger than Earth — and populated with 72 billion Quyth. The race seemed to have mastered dense-population living.
The shuttle dropped to a hundred feet above the water as the river banked sharply to the right. Around that bend lay Demolition Stadium. A smaller affair than its counterparts on Ionath and Whitok, it had purple seats 500 rows high running parallel to each sideline. Demolition Stadium looked kind of like a freeze-frame sculpture of a thick book being closed. Both end zones were open, free of the towering bleachers which rose at such a steep angle Quentin wondered how anyone could climb the steps. The field surface was a pale, milky white, with yard markers written in a deep blue.
“The surface is Tiralik,” Virak said. “Very springy and giving. Soft surface cuts down injuries, but stains jerseys badly.”
A multi-shaded purple building dominated one end zone, while a platform of some kind dominated the other. The shuttle set down on the purple building.
Virak turned to Quentin and grabbed one arm with a pedipalp. Quentin managed to not wince at the painful grab — he knew the full strength of a Quyth Warrior, and this grab was not meant to hurt.
“You watch yourself,” Virak said. “Orbital Stations are a lot older than Ionath City. Races have mingled here for centuries. This is one of the few places in the galaxy that there are no Creterakian soldiers, so a lot of criminal elements come and go, or just come and stay.”
“So why don’t your people do something about it?”
“For a long time it was difficult to trade with other systems. No one wanted to bother with the Quyth. Smugglers brought in many goods, and they needed a place to hide out. And when the war came, they fought and died right along with us. For that, we leave them be as long as they don’t make too much trouble.”
Quentin noted the phrase too much trouble, as opposed to as long as they don’t make any trouble. As he disembarked onto the roof of the purple building, he wondered what kind of activities might fall under the threshold of too much trouble.
“Just be careful,” Virak said as the races moved to their separate locker rooms. “And you’d do best to keep to yourself.”
THE DEUCE HAD no haven for Purist Nation ex-patriots, so Rick Warburg decided to stay in the Demolition Building. Quentin had no intention of staying in. He opted for dinner with Yassoud and John Tweedy. The city’s bizarre architecture drew him out into the streets. Ionath City was orderly and new, a highly regimented place built with careful planning and meticulous attention to detail. The Deuce, on the other hand, felt far more organic. Not just streets but entire levels had sprung up over the centuries, many without any official sanction or knowledge. Caverns and tunnels, both rough and smoothly engineered, ran through the artificial planetoid like a giant termite colony.
Like Ionath City and Port Whitok, the football stadium lay in a bustling downtown area packed with many species, noise, grav cars and multiple forms of entertainment. It surprised him to see so many representatives of the different races. Some of the Human families, he’d been told, had lived on The Deuce for eight or more generations, two centuries of life, and considered themselves citizens of the Quyth Concordia with no association whatsoever to the Human systems.