Steelwire

STEELWIRE



    He gripped the gunmetal edge of the hatchway before him, and lowered the industrial suitcase carrying his personal effects to the ground.  When he turned one of the techs from Groundlink was running a scanning device over him which emitted an ominous low hum.
  “So is the suit working?” he growled at the tech.
  “Better hope so,” the tech smirked, placing the device in a leadlined case at his belt, which he then latched shut.
  The astronaut, Grizz Steelwire, scowled at the weedy youth before him, his mind working.
  A flashbulb went off and Steelwire blinked.  He stared down the catwalk towards the Groundlink station where the young technician now sauntered away from him as an immaculately groomed man with greased black eyebrows strode towards him, followed closely by a young woman wearing large-framed glasses and holding a bulky camera apparatus.  As they passed the tech on the catwalk she raised the camera to her shoulder and the bulb flashed again.  The tech uttered a few expletives, mostly inaudible to Steelwire, before stumbling away.
  “Commander Steelwire!” the man with the greased-eyebrows bellowed at him.  “Gus Greenwald.  News Syndicate Anchor.  This is Sassy Reinhardt, who’ll be taking some pictures and collecting the newsfeed footage.”
    “Pleasure to meet ya,” she drawled, snapping another picture.
    Steelwire blinked, and growled inarticulately.  “Let’s get on with this shit,” he said. 
    Greenwald’s face was blank for a moment, possibly as he received instructions through his headwire.  Sassy snapped another shot.
    “All right Sassy,” the Anchor said.  “You can roll the feed from here.”
    She lowered a lever on the side of her apparatus and the front of it unfolded downwards in clockwork fashion.  It whirred to life and began to rattle slightly as she raised it to her shoulder, a constant light illuminating near the lens. 
  The Anchor’s face contorted into a smilegrimace.  “This is Gus Greenwald reporting from the hatchway of the Republican Star as it stands prepared for take-off here in Coast City, Pacifica.  And it’s a beautiful day to mark this occasion of Our Glorious Republic’s most recent bold mission beyond the boundaries of our world, shining humanity’s light into the dark of space as surely as it has shone all about our planet, brightening our lives.”
  He turned to face Steelwire, extending his orange-tanned hand.  A flicker of disgust passed over the Commander’s face which would later be edited out of the broadcast.  He took the Anchor’s hand, his own hand bound in thick cotton gloves woven with sensors, emerging from the wrist ring of his spacesuit.  “And this is the Republican hero who will take that bold step,” Greenwald sang out.  “Commander Grizz Steelwire!  Pleasure to meet you.”
  “The same, Gus,” Steelwire replied, momentarily not releasing his grip.  Greenwald winced as he finally released it.
  The Anchor didn’t miss a beat.  “Is there anything you’d like to say to all the folks watching out there?”
    The Space Force, ostensibly run as a taskforce of the Republican Armies and Navies Commission, who RANCed quite higher than anyone, had provided Steelwire with a plain yellow card covered in typed instructions for the interview this morning.  He had the card in the suitcase at his feet now, pressed between two pairs of spacepants and a pornographic magazine he had smuggled past the censor.  Upon that card, in neatly-typed letters, was the following, to be delivered as the first formal answer:  “I’d just like to tell all those young Republican heroes out there to keep living the dream!”
  “Um,” Grizz said.
  “I know there are a lot of youngsters out there who are looking up to you,” the Anchor picked up smoothly.  “Perhaps you’d like to say something to them.”  His face was still screwed up in that smilegrimace.
  Steelwire looked directly at the camera and gave a thumbs up.  “Keep living the dream!” he barked.
  The Anchor chuckled.  “I know I’ve wondered, what kind of thoughts would be going through your head at a moment like this?”
  The card:  “It’s moments like these that really make me stop and think about what makes this Republic so great.”
  This one wasn’t hard.  Steelwire rubbed his lanternjaw.  He said, “You know it’s hard to turn around without coming across another reason why this is the greatest time to be alive, and in the greatest place.” 
  “They say your mission will take you near Tarnak, fifth planet from the sun.  Perhaps you’d say hello to the sky god on behalf of us here at RNS, along with the whole Effervescent Republic!”
  The card: “You can bet on!”
  Steelwire: “I sure will!” He leaned forward smiling grimly, mugging for the camera.
  “This is Gus Greenwald, News Syndicate Headquarters, Coast City.”
  Sassy hit the lever and immediately lowered the camera to the grating of the catwalk, looking it over and fiddling with the controls.
  “Nice,” Greenwald said, his smilegrimace gone and his greasy eyebrows come together in consternation.  “Can’t you fucking jarhead astronauts even remember a few lines?”
  For a moment Steelwire didn’t react, then he smiled and Greenwald seemed to realise something was awry right before the punch hit him square in the face. 
  The newsman cursed as he reeled away, stumbling into the railing of the catwalk.  Sassy looked up from her camera towards the scuffle. They were all suddenly conscious of being a few hundred feet above ground.  Greenwald cursed indecipherably as blood streamed out of the fist he had closed over his nose.
  “I bet you’ll have no problem getting your prettyboy friends to fix you up back in The Core,” Steelwire spat at him.
  Greenwald gestured violently towards Sassy and she began to follow him down the catwalk, as he held his face in one hand and steadied himself on the railing with the other.  When he was a sufficient distance away he shouted “Lunatic!”  His voice was thick and nasal.
  Steelwire grunted and took up his suitcase.  He ducked through the hatchway.

  As soon as he was in the command chair with his headphones on, a voice crackled through:  “I gotta tell ya, Steelwire, folks up here in the tower sure are misty-eyed about that city boy gettin’ busted up.”
  Steelwire smiled.  Most of the crew here at Groundlink were locals from what used to be called Caladosia, before it was subsumed by the Effervescent Republic a little over fifty years earlier.  Though most everyone was outwardly a staunch Republican these days, Caladosians, and especially those around the old capitol of Coast City, tended to criticise those from The Core, the great megalopolis to the east, and capitol of the Republic.  The more elaborate and showy clothing styles and mannerisms of mainstream Republican culture had yet to fully assert dominance here in Coast City, where most of the Space Force was based due to its equatorial latitude.
  “As soon as the villain turns from his crime...” Steelwire recited, his manner now completely different than it had been at the hatch – relaxed, open. 
  It was the opening lines of a verse in the old Caladosian anthem.  The voice on the other end finished it. “...he’ll lay upon the line.”  A couple hoots of laughter made it through, then a crackle.
  Uttering those words were technically treasonous these days.  The laws that made it so reached in from circuitous directions, but they brandished the same silent, efficient implements at their ends.  Steelwire wasn’t worried.  The crew up in the control tower on the other end of the transmission were unlikely to report it, and the line was supposedly secure between here and there. 
  They continued on with the ignition sequence amidst other subsequent jokes and jibes.  Despite all else, a joyous atmosphere prevailed.  What was now the province of Caladosia was immensely proud on the whole of their involvement in the space program, and never more so than on launch days like this one.
  Only one sour note sounded as they proceeded.  As the relay antennas were being checked, one of the warning lights on Steelwire’s panel light up.  He peered at it.  “I have a transmission interference warning on the aft relay antenna,” he reported.
  There was a pause.  He flipped the reset toggle, and the light went out while the system restarted.  A moment later it came back on.
  “Try a reset,” Groundlink told him at last.
  “Already tried it.  It’s back on.”
  “We don’t have any indication of it down here.  Might be local.”
  Steelwire frowned.  “You mean a local broadcasting antenna?”
  The other end crackled.  “Something, anyway.  Sure as hell won’t be bothering you after launch anyway.”
  He replied with a noncommittal grunt and the sequence went on.

  One of the RANC Captains assigned to the Space Force came along the catwalk with a couple more techs making last minute checks and adjustments.  “Feeling well, Commander?” he asked as he came up to Steelwire at the hatch.
  “I’ll sure as hell feel better once we get this underway,” he grumbled.  He was within a different command structure than the Captain, and so didn’t exactly have to toady up to him, but it was a general habit to defer to RANC officers since they had the direct authority of The Core behind them.
  The Captain blinked.  “Yes.  Did preflight jitters also account for breaking an RNS Anchor’s nose on this very catwalk?”  He asked the question calmly, but the implications were clear.  He was being given the opportunity to submit.
  Steelwire paused.  He pictured having each of his limbs incinerated over a period of days.  Rumour had it this was how it was done in torture chambers in the bowels of The Core somewhere.  “Imagine that was it, sir,” was what he said.
  The Captain looked him over, then sniffed.  “Very well.  Take a tab if you feel it might overcome your abilities.”
  “I’ll keep it in mind,” he said, leaving off the sir again this time.
  The Captain wasn’t looking at him anymore.  He leaned inside the hatch and addressed the technicians who were milling about the access panel there.  “Unless you men fancy seeing the stars, I’d report back to Groundlink.  I’m beginning the countdown as soon as I return.”  Then he turned and made his way back down the catwalk. 
  Steelwire shook off a funny feeling and stepped back through the hatch.  As he turned to face the technicians one of them was rebolting the access panel into place and the other was closing an instrument case that lay on the ground.  “What were you doing there?” he demanded of them.  That panel had been calibrated months ago.
    One of the technicians glared at him.  He realised it was the same callow youth from earlier.  “Sure, I’ll teach you all about electrical engineering and we’ll still have time for a cup of tea before launch.”
  Steelwire menaced over him.  “Maybe I should wipe that smirk off your punk face?”
  The youth seemed momentarily intimidated, then he reconstituted his attitude of insolence.  “Maybe you’ll find out how far your flyboy street cred will get you in space,” he said.
  The other technician finished with the panel and walked out of the hatchway holding the drill he had used.  He didn’t enter into the conversation.  Seeing this, his companion fumbled with his case to follow him, flinching as he ducked past Steelwire, who stood there staring at the hatchway long after they had departed, his mind still working.

    Above Coast City the rocket lifted off on a plume of fire.  It arced up and up, a contrail forming behind it as it neared the sparse clouds.  If it had been fifteen years previous there might have been quite a crowd gathered near the launch site, especially in light of the clear skies and sunshine that prevailed on this day, but with at least a launch a year and sometimes two or three, the aw-shucks reaction of the populace could not be counted on as keenly as it once could be.  As it was there were only a few scattered groups of people upon Grayson’s Peak overlooking the launch site.  Most of them wore the blue and white uniform of the Space Force, and one group wore the unmistakable red and black scaled armour of the RANC.  The latter group stood clustered around an APC with waves of heat distortion rising from its cooling fins.
  Eventually the body of the rocket winked from sight, and all that could be seen was the faint white contrail snaking off into the blue.

  Commander Grizz Steelwire, having shucked his spacesuit, crouched on the maindeck of the service area sipping halfheartedly at a nutrient paste.  He was wearing tightfitting spacepants and shirt, meant not to catch on anything in the cramped space in which he found himself.  The space he inhabited was about seven feet from top-to-bottom (top and bottom relative to the old prelaunch orientation, of course), five feet across and ten end-to-end.  Every available surface of the old sides was crammed with panels and controls.  The ceiling was grated hatches that closed over various storage spaces, and he could detach the floor panels to access most of the serious guts that ran behind the panels.  At each end he had viewports, currently filled with wheeling stars as the Republican Star completed her postlaunch manoeuvres. 
  He sucked on a little more of the paste with a grimace.  As the burn completion lights came on before him, he flipped the corresponding engine kill switches.  “Coming out of it now,” he radioed into the bulky headset he wore on an angle across his head. 
  Like all members of Space Force the right side of his head was shaved in a swath above his ear, RANC style, to display his service tattoo, which bore the RANC insignia above the Space Force logo with the area beside them set aside for the details of his service record.  This area on his tattoo was impressively decorated.  As a consequence of not liking the feeling of the material of the headset touching this shaved area, he often pushed it up on the right side and relied on the left earpiece only.
  “We’re reading it,” the reply from Groundlink came through.
  The ship continued on for a few seconds, relatively silent after the burn.  He checked telemetry readings against the flight log, tried to sip again at the paste and surprisingly found the packet empty.  He released it momentarily and it floated to one side.
  “So, are you giving me correction numbers, or what?”  He looked out the viewports.  Portside he could see the distant moon, on the other only stars.
  Finally his radio crackled again.  “Can you confirm transmission of that packet?”
  He frowned.  Looking over at the communications panel he didn’t see any warning lights.  What packet were they talking about?
  “Stand by,” he transmitted, then moved over to the ladder and kicked up it, winding up back at the main console with his command chair.  He looked down at the panel and saw that antenna warning light back on. 
  “Groundlink, remember that warning light you said was local?” he transmitted, trying the reset trick again.
  In a slightly peevish tone of voice, the reply came back, “Commander, can you confirm transmission of that last packet?”
  “I cannot,” he said.
  Now it was their turn.  “Stand by.”
  He sighed.  It sure wasn’t the local transmission source they thought.  Some pirate radio rig out of a van driving by the launch site.  They’d have to be using one hell of a transmitter to still be interfering up here.  Steelwire’s eyes drifted across the expanse of stars before him.  He could see the moon far off in one corner, moving out of sight.  Every second he went without another burn brought him around in an arc to face right back where he had started from.  Even now he could see the planet’s luminescence moving into view, shortly followed by an arc of it, really a straight line from this distance, and then a continental shelf began to come into view.
  “This is looking like one short mission, if I’m already headed back home, boys.”  He slipped down into the command chair.
  After twenty seconds by his chronometer a reply came through.  “We are resending the packet text-only to the communications console in the service area.  Can you confirm?”
  He shook his head unconsciously.  “Negative, Groundlink.  I’m in the command chair.  Please resend on the main channel.”
  Two things then happened at once.  They transmitted: “That is a priority one communication packet.  Please confirm from the service area.”  And Steelwire glimpsed a flash against the face of the planet that was rapidly filling his viewport.
  His hands went by reflex to the panel before him, taking readings.  His eye bent to the scope when he had a position.  Through the scope he had a fisheye view before the ship.  He turned a knob and a section of space before the planet came into focus.  There was an ugly structure comprised primarily of skeletal-looking steel supports connecting launch tubes and engine mountings drifting there.  He leaned back from the scope and rechecked the knobs.  At this resolution that structure must be at least a kilometre across. 
  This was when Steelwire’s perception began to take on a dreamlike quality.  He had never heard anything about a structure like that during all his years with the Space Force.  Then his eyes caught a silent red warning light flashing before him.  Something was approaching.  He didn’t need to take any readings.  There was a visible plume of fire, angled away from him, growing in size through the viewport.
  “Groundlink...,” he began.
  The plume of fire now had a barely discernible white shape at the head of it.  Streaking towards him it appeared to strike a shifting mosaic pattern that became visible where the exploding warhead illuminated it.  Following its visible edge it appeared to stretch in a vast wall before Steelwire and his tiny vessel. 
  The grizzled astronaut, certainly considered to be of an able constitution by all who met him, felt for the first time in his life a wave of vertigo pass through him.  Despite the lack of gravity, he reached a hand out to the panel before him to steady himself.  The light of the explosion and the wall that protected him from it filled the cabin with a dim red glow.
  The explosion of the warhead, already eerie looking in a vacuum, dispersed with equally eerie rapidity.  Whatever could be seen of the barrier it had encountered disappeared also.
    There was total silence in the command area for some length of time indiscernible to Steelwire.  He breathed deeply and evenly, his eyes locked on the section of space where the strange spectacle had occurred, beads of sweat appearing on his brow.
  Then the whole ship groaned and the field of view before him wheeled rapidly, too rapidly.  He saw pieces of blackness.  Then only blackness.

  He came to what was in fact only seconds later.  A glance at the chronometer confirmed this.  He tasted blood and, upon wiping his wrist across his mouth, found the reason why.  His nose had bled.  Having been extensively tested in acceleration simulators he was surprised.  There was nothing this ship could achieve on its engines that would cause him any discomfort over so short a period of time. 
  Then he looked out the viewport.  Tarnak.  Tawny and white.  Stormridden.  Gigantic.
  A knock sounded at the airlock.
  Steelwire was out of the command chair and headed towards the ladder to answer it before he finally realised what he was doing and stopped himself.  He’d been running on autopilot, so to speak, since the missile but now came back to himself to a certain degree and tried to think.
The soldier in him felt a twinge of fear which almost immediately transmuted into battlelust.  But what to fight?
  It had to be RANC that had shot that missile at him, as hard of a pill as that was to swallow, but if that was the case it was probably better for him to just never go back home again.  He thought again about underground torture chambers.
  He turned back to the viewport. 
  Then back to the ladder.
  He breathed deeply.
  The knock sounded again.  A little louder, but still polite sounding somehow.
  He was still wearing the headset.  Blowing into the mic brought nothing through the earpiece.  No alignment with the antennas.  No transmission.  He tossed the headset into the command chair, and started down the ladder.
  On the service deck one of the lockers had sprung open and a spacesuit was floating around with coils of wire and toolbelts seemingly orbiting it.  He pulled on the spacesuit, only operating on a rudimentary level.  If he was dealing with the airlock, regulations said that he had to be suited.
  Regulations also said that they would shoot a missile at you if you failed to receive a communications package.  He didn’t remember reading anything about that.  Also nothing about making the twenty-day trip to Tarnak in five seconds. 
  He secured his helmet as the knock sounded again.  Patient guests.
  Another bit of the old Caladosian anthem flitted through Steelwire’s head:  “And when at last a guest arrives to sit beside our hearth, we’ll spin a shank and sing a song and show them what we’re worth.”
  Pulling the safety lock off the hatch, he spun the mainlock and muscled it open.  He pushed himself back as the hatch swung open into the service area. 
  Behind it stood a tall, thin figure.  Human, thought Steelwire.  Then he looked again.  The face was slightly longer and there was another two eyes below the two that he was expecting. 
  “Um,” he said.
  “Pleasure to meet you,” the figure said.
  “Um.”
  “Do you mind if I come inside?  I’m simply dying with curiosity.  It’s been a while since I’ve seen a craft of this level of technology.  I had to practically lock the hatch behind me to prevent my partner from coming in with me.  It was my turn, you see.  Last stop we made was Gandalore Betweensuns and I had to supervise repairs while he roamed the natureparks, lucky bastard.
  “So, anyway – sorry for the shock.  Do you mind if I come inside?” he repeated.  Steelwire wasn’t sure if it was a he or not.
  “No,” he managed.  He shakily extended an arm towards the limited depths of the service area in a sort of greeting.
  The figure beamed.  Its teeth were bright red, though not intimidating.  He ambled over to the lip of the hatchway with his long legs and stepped into the service area.  Steelwire noted warily that he was walking on the deck plating with bare splaytoed feet as he himself floated in his spacesuit.  He removed his helmet, half in a dream.
  The figure spoke over its shoulder as it nosed around the service area, recalling in Steelwire’s mind someone examining museum exhibits as it peered at the consoles and lockers.  “My name is Glaartheeble, by the way, Commander.  And it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
  “You know my name?” he managed.
  “Your title, anyway.”  He chuckled.  Steelwire found him quite affable as long as he was speaking.  “But, yes.  Grizzman Steelwire.  Quite a charming name.”
  “Um, thanks,” Steelwire said.
  “Let me show you something,” Glaartheeble said, after a time.  He was back working at the bolts of one of the service panels with his fingers.  His skin tone was almost the same as Steelwire’s, but the astronaut realised after a moment that he had maybe twice as many joints in the fingers.  Consequently the alien’s hands moved in a curious way over the bolts, though having no trouble apparently at loosening them.  As the panel was removed Steelwire realised that it was the same one he had seen the techs manipulating before the launch, though now his orientation was reversed floor-to-ceiling.
  Glaartheeble peered inside for a moment before reaching in and removing something that looked like a large purple spider. 
  “What the hell is that?” Steelwire found himself asking, moving forwards.
  Looking at him with both rows of eyes the alien said, “A shunt on one of the lines of your communication system, meant to mimic a transmission coming in through one of your antennas.  Quite fascinating.”  He turned it over in his longfingered hands.
    “The RANCs.”  Steelwire frowned.  A picture was becoming clearer though he could only look it over slowly, piece by piece, or else risk something like the earlier sense of vertigo he had felt.
  “Yes,” Glaartheeble told him, nodding.  “I hope you won’t be offended that we actually found the development of the drama quite enthralling from the relative safety of our vessel.  Your headset was rigged to transmit an activation code that would have overridden your basic program with more recently, um, installed software, and caused you to overload your ship’s main engine.”
  “What?”  Some of the old Steelwire Growl was coming back into his voice.
  “They certainly haven’t trusted you for a long time.  Punching one of their mouthpieces and later justifying it with a bit your illegal national anthem is certainly the sort of thing that has contributed to their distrust.”  Glaartheeble tried to hand him the device he held but he just stared at it so the alien let it drift away.
  “So why the hell would they shoot me up in a rocket?  Why not just whisk me off to The Core?” 
  Glaartheeble, still poking around, ascended the ladder to the command section.  Steelwire didn’t think there was any point in trying to restrict his movements at this point, so just moved to the base of the ladder in order to hear the reply that was forthcoming. 
  “Well, that’s what my partner and I have been trying to figure out, actually,” the alien’s voice called down.  “All apologies Steelwire, but your government is a bit of a mess at the moment.”
  The grizzled astronaut grunted in agreement, and then regarded his own casual response with shocked bemusement.  Such exchanges had occurred plenty of times before between him and various friends and acquaintances in some Coast City bar late at night.  It lent the strangeness of this encounter a certain familiarity.
  The alien came back down the ladder head first, with his head cocked at a strange angle to look Steelwire eye-to-eyes.  “We think we have it figured out, now, though,” he said.
  “Oh?”
  “It’s simple.  Your technological development has managed to keep pace with your capacity for lying to a remarkable degree.  It’s quite unprecedented, actually.  At least in my experience.”  Glaartheeble executed an acrobatic manoeuvre that brought his legs down in front of his face, but he ended up twisted back around looking at Steelwire again.
  “Would you like to join me onboard my ship for some refreshment?” he enquired, the soul of politeness. 

    The external airlock door now looked out onto a shimmering black expanse of floor with what looked like sky above it.  Orange sky and pink clouds.  Steelwire left his helmet behind but still wore his spacesuit through the other side, mostly because he couldn’t be bothered to think about removing it.  What appeared to be a vast panoramic expanse of worldbound vistas was later revealed to him to be a trick of holograms and environmental effects to create a near perfect replica of anything the eccentric pilots could imagine.  This main area of their vessel could appear to be anywhere at all, but at the far side of it remained visible the hatch leading back to the Republican Star, perhaps to reassure Steelwire that it still existed.  On the other side of this area lay access to the functional areas of the ship.  Though for the most part there was still extensive vegetation in these areas, and all of the corridors appeared and felt to open onto skies.  Here and there Steelwire saw something like a console, which vaguely reassured him. 
  In what he assumed was the bridge area, Steelwire and his guide encountered who could only be the ‘partner’ described by Glaartheeble.  He was corpulent, purpleskinned, and his face consisted of a mouth on a long stalk that extended from his body.  “Pleasant to meet you, Commander,” the mouth said to him.  Steelwire flashed back to his meet and greet on the catwalk earlier that same day and he actually chuckled.  Then felt ill.
  “And you,” he replied, holding on to himself.
  “Call me Ballmaster,” the alien said.
  “Um.”
  “Here you are,” Glaartheeble said, presenting him with what appeared to be a fair approximation of lemonade. 
  Steelwire sipped it appreciatively.  “Delicious.”
  Ballmaster nudged Glaartheeble with one of his arms, which he appeared to have a few of.  “See, they’re not all bloodthirsty ruffians.”
  Steelwire grinned as Glaartheeble appeared a little flustered. 
  “Now, you have to understand, Steelwire, what I said was a generalisation based upon the observations we both made over the course of the last couple of weeks.”
  “It’s fine,” the astronaut replied, sipping his lemonade, relaxing himself a little into the experience.  “I might say the same of us.”
  “How openminded,” Glaartheeble noted.  “Please sit down, Commander.” 
  Steelwire sat upon a bench at a nearby table.  Though the smallest room he had encountered yet on the ship, the place was still made expansive by the floor-to-ceiling viewscreens on three of the walls, and upon the ceiling.  The expanse of viewscreen displayed inset sections of densely-layered starcharts and others of zoomed views of various stellar phenomenon from the general expanse of space and stars.  Compared to the closet of a command area on the Republican Star, it was expansive.  Steelwire tried to collect his thoughts.  To his surprise, he found his mind working.
  “The communications packet,” he said aloud.  They both looked at him from their consoles.  “It didn’t follow the main channel.  It piggybacked.”  He thought it through again, then nodded.  “It did come through, but it only played in the right earpiece.”
  Ballmaster snorted.  “Might have been the wrong earpiece if you had’ve been wearing that headset by the rules.”
  Glaartheeble chuckled, tapping out some sequence on the panel before him.
  Mirthless, the astronaut stared at the purple alien before him.  He was thinking about the sway he was granted around Coast City because of his military record and involvement with the space program.  Above all else his father, now dead, who had been a war hero in the resistance against the Republic years before.  Even acknowledging that sort of credibility had been becoming a thing of the past in Caladosia, but Steelwire had been a household name throughout most of his life.  And now.  “What will they tell the people?” he asked.
  Glaartheeble answered with his back turned, still facing the console.  “They’ve already made announcements concerning a malfunction and explosion in space.  You’re dead.”  The alien came back to himself after a moment, realising what he had just said.  His four eyes looked searchingly at Steelwire.  “You understand my meaning, of course?”
  Steelwire nodded grimly in reply.
  Ballmaster scratched his bare belly with an idle hand.  “The Space Force is in decline, anyway.  It was only useful as a propaganda tool for the Republic.  They’ll have to dangle something prettier over the crib to hold everyone’s attention now.”
  “The explosion?” Steelwire asked.
  The purple alien shrugged.  “It’s something.  Something out of nothing, anyway.  But my guess is the next thing will be land-based.  Gworkness.  Your only contintent not subsumed by the Republic.  My guess is they’re about to fuck up big time.  Or so the News Syndicate will say.  Blah blah blah.”  He popped something neon blue and furry into his mouth and chewed on it.
  “But my mission to Tarnak was to conduct repairs on our base out there in orbit.  Put it back in operation after Sutherland...”  He trailed off.  Though he couldn’t detect any eyes on Ballmaster’s body he got the impression the mouth was staring at him.
  “This next part might be a bit of a shock, kid,” he said around whatever he was chewing.
  In different circumstances Steelwire thought being called ‘kid’ for the first time in twenty years might have been a shock.  ‘A bit of a shock’ had taken on an entirely new relative meaning in a very short time.
  Ballmaster continued.  “There ain’t no station at, uh, Tarnak.  The only spacestation your Republic has is that missile complex that fired on you.”  He swallowed it.  “Oh, and they left some shit on your moon too.”
  “From Anderson’s mission?” Steelwire asked, puzzled.
  Glaartheeble looked over at his partner and they seemed to confer silently for a moment.  Now the thin alien continued and his partner took over console duty.  “Bobcrank Anderson, and a lot of the other brass at the Space Force have been supplied with various pieces of information that are otherwise secret.”
  Steelwire took this in.
  Ballmaster guffawed.  “He sure as hell didn’t have to be told he never walked on the moon.”
  “No,” Glaartheeble admitted.  “The primary problem with the Republic maintaining any sort of space program is that they simply don’t have the technology.  And the means of achieving it are locked up in the paroxysms of your society.  As long as the vast majority of people continue to be lied to, they can’t be relied on for much other than their brute labour.  Also their conviction in the lie.”
  Through the viewscreen Steelwire could see Tarnak moving and growing in size.  He took this to be indicating their movement relative to it.  An inset window resolved out of an area closer to the planet displaying a vessel not unlike the Republican Star.  Its serial number and designation became visible as it rolled over in its orbit.  The Alchemist’s Dream. 
  “What . . . the . . . fuck?” Steelwire asked, after a time.  That ship had launched three years ago to assist energy collection efforts on Ragnarock, close to the sun.  Friends of his had been on board.  Cooper.  Piedaterre.
  “Marooned,” the thin alien said in reply.  “Their course was preprogrammed, I’m afraid, to take them nowhere near Ragnarock.  Sometimes this is the result of the overt launches that occur, other times the astronauts are aware of the facade and need only bide a certain amount of time before returning from orbit on schedule.  Or they work on the launch platform.  They call that The Finger, by the way.  You can guess whose Finger is being referred to as well as I can, I suppose.”
  Steelwire’s mind, attempting at last some reorganisation of the mental landmarks he had heretofore called his reality, was having a hard time of it.  He knew Starmarshal Anderson.  He had shaken his hand.  Had his picture taken with him.  He couldn’t believe it.  Anderson’s exploits twenty years ago had been what inspired him to apply to the Space Force.  Crank Anderson was a legend.
  But these aliens.  Their casual attitude.  Despite the extreme degree of reconnaissance allowed to them, they seemed to regard the whole think as a general sightseeing lark.  “You said you’d never seen a society match its capacity for technology with its capacity for lying to this degree.”  He drained the rest of the lemonade and set the glass aside.  “Surely you must have seen something similar to our world before.”
  Glaartheeble nodded and thought for a moment.  They came around Tarnak on a course that took them across the orbits of a few of the moons.  None of the installations or stations he had read about, or seen recordings of transmitted back.  Just raw nature.  Burning, frozen, spinning awesomeness.  And a fat purple alien named Ballmaster at the helm.
    “The preponderance of sentient life is avaristic in the extreme, but extremely low on the technology scale.  The usual balance that is struck on a planet like yours is something that allows stone construction, aqueducts, sewers – or equivalents – for the masters of the society anyway.  Enough to keep the rabble in line.  Then things often stagnate.”  He sighed in thought.  The universe moved about them.  “There are wars.  Then fallow periods.”  He brightened up a little bit.  “Ballmaster here is actually the expert on the subject.  He wrote a comparative examination of over five hundred worlds based on first-hand, heh, so to speak, examination.”
  Ballmaster appeared a little shy at the praise.  “Xenoanthropology is a field as wide as they come,” he protested.  “There’s been literature published on the subject for thousands of years.”  He stayed focused on the panel.
  Glaartheeble smiled.  “Anyway, it is rare.  In our analysis, you’ve reached your own theoretical limit, however.  It’ll be interesting to see what happens.  We’ve already sent our preliminary observations back to the infonetworks.  Might cause a small buzz in certain circles, anyway.”
  The conversation was moving a bit beyond Steelwire’s capacity to take in at the moment.  He found himself breaking back in.  “But what the hell am I supposed to do now?”  He found that he had spoken louder than he had intended.  The two aliens stared at him.
  “He’s stable, right?” Ballmaster asked.
  A different voice answered, from nowhere in particular.  It was vaguely feminine.  “As they come,” it said.
  Steelwire blinked.  He glanced again around the room.  It could have spoken from any of these stars.  “Who was that?”
  “The ship,” Ballmaster said.  The mouth leaned forward, towards him.  “Listen, kid, I’m not sure what you should do.  It’s true we’re responsible for bringing you to this choice, but . . . oh fuck, no sense hiding it, this tenderfoot over here said we should pluck you out of that jam.”
  Glaartheeble snorted. 
  “Anyway,” the purple alien continued. “My friend is right when he says that back there you are dead.  Not sure what would happen if you came back from the grave.”  One of his hands came around and rubbed his jaw appreciatively.  “The important part is what you think.  What do you want to do?”
  Steelwire thought a moment.  Here he sat, fifty-three years old, grizzled, supposedly experienced, but with all the pieces of the world he knew broken and now as distinct from each other as all the points of light he could see sweeping the darkness through the viewsceen.  Falling away from each other.  He looked down and saw he was still wearing his spacesuit, minus gloves and helmet, and he felt suddenly constricted.  He felt like taking the damn thing off and going for a walk.  He growled.


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