A sandstone track crumbles up the hillside to a wide cave. Low deciduous trees are sprinkled to either side in subdued, subtropical and temperate tones of green. This is the southern extremity of the northern continent and there is another captive here. He is one who is trained to think in those terms and that is how he recognises his predicament. The green world is his prison.
He sits outside the cave on a flat yellow rock, warm from a day’s steady sun. Dusk is coming in violet footsteps across the water, announced by the faint clucking of woodbirds. The man was not used to solitude before he turned the twisted corner through the worlds, but he certainly is now. Evening is the worst time. He hums a monotonic little rhythm as the stars break through the weakening brightness of the day. Behind him the lilac rosy glow from the potassium lamp flickers feverishly against the rock before steadying. Beside it, there is a locked metal box with a painted yellow circle cut by three black arcs. A Geiger counter clicks idly, unmoved by the powerful source shielded in the box. Leaning against the opposite wall, the vacuum laser rifle rusts. Its tiny signal sighting mirror has long been warped out of alignment with the main tube.
The man fingers a knife at his belt. He is thinking of the last skirmish. The trade zone wars had boiled over for the fifth time in as many standards. Away from the metaphorical knives at the conference tables they escalated into bloody little battles across the traditional triple star frontier planes. Move and countermove, play and strike were often distant from his tiny garrison in the backwaters of the Old Alliance. He had guarded an unimportant little world, a minor member of a small band of mercenaries who didn’t care if they saw no action provided the pay kept coming. “Tiger Twelve,” they were called, a tiny part of a small defence. Then United Tools saw an opening and decided that they could seize Earth from the Old Alliance. Even a small market is better than none if it can be acquired cheaply.
A soft wind blows from across the sea. The man is getting old. He often dozes now in the sun but he sometimes wonders who won and which of his comrades survived. First alert sounded when the orbital relays blew. It was quite spectacular. The primary defence prevented unrequested interlock access but somehow United Tools technicians had overloaded the network. All the distributed processing centres were alerted but on the night side the pyrotechnics from geostationaries was more than enough warning. There were several possible lines of attack now, and not much good second guessing. As it happened, they didn’t pursue a particularly subtle strategy. Troops moved in from orbit and their intelligence must have been accurate because from the way the carriers split, they were heading straight for supply and demand nerves.
In space a battle would be raging for control of the near orbit communications systems and it was crucial that United Tools did not establish their own bypass channel satellites. Several of the troop carriers were shot down. Unhappily for the men of “Tiger Twelve,” ground batteries failed to take out the landers aiming for their zone. The AgGen IV unit which “Tiger Twelve” guarded was responsible for monitoring and collating farming data over a wide region of North Western Europe, and issuing purchasing recommendations. All around the central depot and in their own bunkers the men hired by the Old Alliance prepared their defences and waited for United Tools. If the enemy successfully captured the machine, supply and demand data would go through different data processing based on subtly adjusted economic models favourable to the giant industrial combines beyond Procyon. Earth would be a new market, when the automatic packet ships distributed their next orders from the moon.
It was a bad time for the defending mercenaries. They had just been issued with new kit prior to their impending transfer to a low orbit detail round Valwar VI. The laser rifles, for instance, were almost useless in this thick atmosphere, and though they still had the heavy mortars and the personal combat weapons which any mercenary always carries, projectile weapons and flare guns had been removed. Someone had screwed up.
The collation depot was buried into the hillside to protect it from weather and war, which was just as well. In these games of cat and mouse there was an added element of danger to both sides. It was perfectly legal to destroy ancillary equipment from the marketing agencies, such as the access net employed by the Old Alliance, but it was a serious offence to damage any part of the physical structure of a sovereign planet’s management system. If the codes so carefully laid down in the ‘Dictates of Symeon III’ over a hundred standards ago were infringed in any way, retribution would be swift. The mercenaries were well aware that Legal Integrity troops - many of them mercenaries themselves but hired by the planetary government, were sitting back just waiting for a violation. The infamous slaughter of Alcoor only twenty standards past, had resulted from the accidental bombing of a MinGen II when the Red Star Products group were trying to shift a band of tenacious troops from Inter World Dynamics out of a complex of titanium mine shafts. All the initial combatants lost their lives when Legal Integrity forces moved in and both companies had to pay extensive and painful fines.
So they moved carefully. Through a strand of trees round the far slope, United Tools advanced. It was only then that it was actually confirmed which company group opposed them. The distinctive black uniforms with the white stylised combustion engine removed all doubt. The expected enemy were the actual enemy. As they moved, the mortars fired, breaking up clusters of men thought too dangerous. Between them, in careful sorties and rapid harass runs, the men from “Tiger Twelve” attacked.
One man was cut off. Isolated from his comrades, fighting their losing battle for the Old Alliance, he found himself on a quiet part of the hillside where an unexpected cave could hide him. There was no doubt now that the conflict was going badly. As he watched, some United Tool troops silenced a ridge top bunker. It was no dishonour to withdraw until the battle was over and he suddenly knew what he must do. In these circumstances, he reasoned, why should I get myself killed for a lost cause? To emerge and surrender after it was all over was quite within the accepted ethics of the trade wars. Next month he might be fighting under a new contract for United Tools. So he went in.
And when he came out he was here. The man sighs. It is an easy life but it is a trifle boring. He bites into one of the juicy soft fruits which are so abundant at this time of year on the slopes below. The evening is as long as always. The eternal golden hours pass like solemn suns. Beside him there is a tiny black box; a universal reference map. It is really only a toy. When he was a mercenary they were a popular fad found in many a soldier’s personal effects. Representations of the night sky as seen from any known system in the galaxy are visible through a tiny eye piece. It stores complete reference data for over ten million stars which might be accessible to the naked eye from somewhere in explored space, despite the fact that less than two thousand planets have been systematically developed. You can set up patterns with the tiny controls and the machine will search for a match with any possible stored pattern. Pretty useless really. It’s not often that you can forget just where in the galaxy you are, and in interstellar navigation mistakes are never like taking the wrong turn at a road junction and ending up in the wrong town, much more like right on the doorstep or blown to atoms. Perhaps mercenaries liked the nostalgia value of recalling old skies, or perhaps they liked to impress the planet bound with this trinket of “travel”.
The man knows he is hopelessly lost. He has used his universal reference map, carefully setting up the strange night sky signs and it has failed. He sits back against the cave wall. Surreal patterns from strange imagined constellations burn into the back of his eyes; the molten clock, the spider and the broken sword. In cooling purple the hard light of alien stars comes out.
