Judas Unchained

“Tell you about it later,” Mark said automatically. He winked. “When your mom’s not about.”

“Don’t you dare,” Liz growled.

Barry giggled happily. “Sure thing, Dad.” He pelted off back into the house. “Hey, Sis, I know something you don’t!”

“What?” Sandy squeaked.

“Not telling you.”

“Pig!”

Liz grinned and rolled her eyes. “Gonna be a long day.”

***

Mark had arranged to borrow a Ford Trailmaster7 from the garage. They all piled in, with Panda in the back, and he headed out of their big housing estate for the perimeter ring road. All the civil construction work had finished now. The town was as large as it was ever going to be, supporting twelve thousand technicians, scientists, and engineers who were busy assembling the starships in their orbital docks, and the crews who would fly them.

A bright sun shone down out of the light purple sky, glinting strongly off the town’s composite buildings. The ground between them was gritty sand scattered with flaking rocks; there wasn’t even a single weed growing anywhere. Nobody had gardens. H-congruous plant life wasn’t permitted here. Hundreds of modified gardenbots were on constant patrol in the town, spraying the sand with biological inhibiters that would prevent any kind of growth. Sewage from every building was simply tanked to Cressat, and from there back to Augusta, as was all the garbage. Nothing was allowed to contaminate the pristine environment.

Liz wrinkled her nose up at the town as they sped along the ring road. “This place is like Gaczyna,” she said as they passed a Bab’s Kebabs franchise at the end of a strip mall.

“Where?”

“A place in Russia that they used to train spies during the Cold War. It supposedly had a perfect replica of an American town, so the agents could familiarize themselves with life in the West. That’s what this is, a replica of the Commonwealth. Everything we associate with everyday life is here, but it’s not actually real.”

“The Dynasty’s doing its best to make things comfortable for us.”

“Yeah, baby, I know. It wasn’t a complaint, just an observation.”

Mark nodded, and concentrated on driving. He was getting quite worried about Liz; the whole lifeboat venture had brought out a despondency in her that he found difficult to deal with. She was normally the sunny one, the one he relied on for common sense and optimism. Given what he had to tell her at some point today, her criticisms and moodiness weren’t good omens. He could see what she meant about Gaczyna, though. He’d never been anywhere with so many bots. The only people the Dynasty allowed here were those involved in building the lifeboats. There was no service economy; bots performed every domestic function; even Bab’s Kebabs along with all the other stores in the strip mall were automated. When a bot malfunctioned, it wasn’t repaired here; that would require a secondary industry, people not connected to the lifeboat project. He’d seen whole trucks full of faulty bots being shipped back to Augusta for maintenance. It was an expensive way of doing things, but it was the only way of sustaining the level of security that Nigel Sheldon insisted on.

They turned off the ring road onto a dirt track that led away into the hills above the town beyond the fusion stations. He actually enjoyed sitting behind the wheel, driving manually. There were no real roads on the planet outside the town and its sprawling grid of industrial buildings. All the tracks out here had been made by residents taking off to explore. Mark turned left at the first fork, then right, following a route he’d been told about. The Ford’s tires churned up a lot of dust, deepening the wheel ruts.

After an hour they came to the tarn. The sand had given way to naked rock kilometers earlier. All around them were the steep rolling slopes of the interlocking mountaintops. There were no streambeds, or erosion gullies; the planet hadn’t had an atmosphere long enough to begin features like that, although rain was busy washing regolith sand down into the lowlands. From there it was creeping steadily into the shallow oceans. Up here, water trickled over the undulations in unbroken sheets until it found basins and nooks to collect in. The tarn was a long oval shape, with water up to its brim. When the rains came it overflowed into a sharp cleft of black granite at the eastern end.

“It’s so clear,” Barry exclaimed as they stood at the edge. Apart from small ripples reflecting the velvet sky there was no movement. They could see the rough rock bottom sloping away toward the center. “Just like the Trine’ba,” he said with a smile.

“Almost,” Liz agreed. “Come on, let’s go get changed.”

The four of them waded in, gasping at how cold the tarn was. Their voices echoed cleanly through the mountain air, bouncing off the high rumpled inclines around them.

“I miss the fish,” Sandy confessed as she swam cautiously farther out from the shore. Mark had insisted she wear inflatable wings on the back of her suit. For once she didn’t argue.