‘Hm. Chael tells me Jasoft Parz is running another recruitment round. More folk to be transferred from other duties to the exotic-matter plants.’
‘If we had more time we could roboticise the process properly. But we don’t have the time, and we do have lots of people, and that’s the resource that’s being applied to speed things up – especially now we’ve located these operations on Earth.’
‘I do wonder about the urgency of it all,’ Mara said. ‘Why the hurry? And what about safety?’
Tasqer didn’t speak. He was staring into the distance, to the west, towards the setting sun; he seemed distracted. Looking that way, Mara thought she could see a speck in the sky, some kind of aircraft on the way in.
‘Engineer?’
‘What?’
‘About safety?’ she repeated sharply.
‘Human safety? In the facility?’ He shrugged. ‘What about it? The Qax don’t care. The plant managers do their best.’
They walked on. She could hear a faint noise in the distance now, off to the west, where Tasqer had been looking: a hum of engines. That aircraft, whatever it was, coming in for a low approach. She said now, ‘I hear rumours.’
‘Rumours?’
‘I do talk to people, you know, I don’t hide away in my town house all the time. There are reports of indentured labour. People forced to work in particularly dangerous environments.’
He looked at her blankly. ‘Look, Mara, the Qax don’t want us. They don’t buy or sell us. What they do sell is the exotic biochemistry of creatures like your diprotodons and your gum trees. We are partially useful – slaves. And as such we are expendable, to them.’ He looked her in the eye. ‘And to me.’
She was shocked by that last remark, by his deadened tone as much as by the words.
And that engine noise was suddenly growing louder, becoming deafening.
The aircraft, an Earth-to-orbit flitter she saw now, was coming in low and flat above the ground. Heading straight towards the exotic-matter facility. There was some kind of heavy pod suspended beneath its belly—
‘Down!’ Without warning Tasqer grabbed her around the waist and pushed her to the floor.
Twisting to see, she saw the flitter pass overhead and then roar down on the facility.
‘Close your eyes!’ Tasqer yelled, holding her down, his arm around her shoulders. ‘Close them tight!’
The flash was visible even through closed lids.
Then came a wash of air, a hot wind, and the ground itself shuddered, as if some tremendous Pleistocene beast had been felled.
She twisted her head to look at Tasqer.
‘Stay down,’ Tasqer yelled again, over a continuing roar of noise.
‘You did this,’ she screamed. ‘You and your people. The Engineers!’
‘Hell, yes.’ He raised a face crumpled against the noise, the wind, the dust. ‘We still have a few ships the Qax don’t know about, hiding out in the asteroid belt and elsewhere. Yes, we did this. I did this. I got into the facility, set a targeting beacon, disabled the defences, such as they were. There should have been simultaneous strikes all across the planet. This is why I gave myself up and burrowed into your sick Earth society in the first place. All for this. If we can disrupt this insane new project of the Governor—’
‘But what do you think the response is going to be? Do you think the Governor will just give up? The Governor is going to replace all this with something even worse for us than what you just destroyed. Did you fools think of that? And what about the people you slaughtered, the innocents forced to work in there—’
‘We’re in a war for the future,’ he said.
‘Mankind is to be saved, but people are expendable, to you as to the Qax.’
‘We all must do what we have to do.’
She stood up. ‘I have some police authority. Engineer Tasqer, you’re under arrest.’
5
Chael invited Mara to join him on his weekly inspection tour of the new exotic-matter facility in the Mellborn urban area. After Yarraranj, Mara was deeply reluctant, but the way Chael phrased it she sensed this was a command, not an invitation.
Chael landed on the spacious lawn of the family’s villa, off Crun Strand, in an armoured flitter bearing two armed crew, and with the black cross on its upper surface that signified it to be a craft of the Occupation. Mara briskly boarded.
As the ship lifted, the looming sky-blue hulk of the brand new exotic-matter factory on Flind Strand was soon visible. The raid Tasqer had guided down to the facility to the east of Mellborn had not been unique; on that day, still only a month ago, a coordinated series of strikes from deep space had indeed hit facilities all around the planet. The Qax’s punishment of those responsible had been brutal, and their response decisive and swift. Now the urban centres were not to be spared. Within days, blue exotic-matter facilities like this one had bloomed in the very hearts of human cities, like malevolent mushrooms.
Chael swore at the sight of Flind Strand. ‘When the Governor announced he was moving the factories into the urban areas, we argued against using the historic city centres, at least. Parz himself spoke eloquently. After all, the Qax have spared cultural monuments in the past.’
‘One sees it glowing blue in the dark,’ Mara said now. ‘From all over the city. One hears the hum of the great engines day and night, the whoosh of flitters coming and going – why, the noise of its hasty construction was itself cacophonous. I cannot sleep.’
Her brother-in-law smiled. ‘I sympathise. But those in the work camps have it worse, you know.’
‘I can imagine.’
The flitter skimmed east now, and Mara could already see another blue torus standing squat on the horizon, another new exotic-matter plant, brilliant in the low morning sun. It was surrounded by a muddy brown scar, fenced off: the living area for the human community that had been forcibly brought here to serve the facility.
‘That’s the Took plant,’ Chael said. ‘There’s a ring of six around the city, Took, Parc, Cens, Spots, Nu, and Wills. We’ll see them all today. There have been incidents to handle at them all,’ and he sighed.
‘The city is too quiet,’ Mara said. ‘They took so many people, stripping out everybody but the most senior in the Diplomatic Corps and their families, and workers on the most basic facilities, the sewage and food ducts. I thought they would just take—’ She waved a hand. ‘Criminals. Prisoners. Those without work. But nobody has been spared. Even children.’
‘They took most of the best engineers also,’ Chael said. ‘The Governor no longer seems to care about breakdowns in essential systems – if a suburb here or there goes hungry. It’s the same across the planet, if that’s any consolation.’
‘To think that two centuries ago we were immortals and interstellar travellers, and now this. I heard Ambassador Parz tried to argue against the use of child labour, at least.’
Chael smiled, rueful. ‘You may know that since the Qax removed AS treatment, our population has boomed. Whether that’s a response to the loss of our immortality, or some deeper survival response to the stress of the Occupation, I couldn’t say. Whichever, we are a young society, rich in children. And now we’re paying the price for that. And of course, if you don’t use children the value of the workers as shields is diminished.’