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Blue Remembered Hills - Ch1
Here goes!
(Memo to self: I still need to proof-read the last chapter against the manuscript and fix E.E.'s "globed head and hands" passage...) Done :-D
Blue Remembered Hills
Chapter 1: Outsiders
Olag Gan had never dreamed, in all his born days, that one day he would stand on the flight deck of a starship. But then many things had changed in the long months since he’d killed an armed man with his bare hands; since he’d brought down the Federation trooper who’d left the woman he loved crumpled and lifeless on the street.
There were weeks he preferred not to remember. Weeks of bright light and antiseptic and pain, as his helpless body had been passed from prison cell to test lab as involuntary subject, along with other specimens selected for their strength. Weeks that had left him with a shaved patch on his skull and a dead place in his mind where that act of retaliation had once lain: a metal spider sent its filaments into his brain, locking those impulses now and forever.
They’d left the labouring power of back and arms intact, and he’d learned on the London that he could still point a gun. But he could never take another life to save one he loved, or even to save himself; they had proved that in the lab to their exquisite satisfaction.
There were worse things — far worse — that the limiter in his head could have taken from him. He’d glimpsed a few of the other experiments in those pain-ridden weeks, and cringed in expectation. But he’d been discarded and sent to court, dumped into the holding cell to be shipped off to oblivion with the rest of the hopeless cases, the unreformables and politicals, and the little implant beneath his regrown hair had been discarded along with him.
He’d wondered why, a time or two, when he’d finished counting his blessings: whether they’d developed other, better tools to defang the masses, or whether the limiter had proved all too irreversible an experiment for their liking. The Federation needed constant manpower for its armed forces, and even the most troublesome planet might some day need to defend itself against alien aggression or the expansion of some rebellious colony; there were cheaper and less permanent ways to keep a population under control. And those few who slipped the net of a universal limiter would have become more dangerous than ever.
Gan had never thought he’d miss the power to kill. But then he’d never thought to become the bait in a game of human sacrifice on a prison colony ruled by mad religion, or to find himself recruited into armed revolt against the system that had governed all his life. The world was cruel, it was arbitrary, and if you kept your head down and worked hard it was a living— he’d always accepted that. Until he’d met Roj Blake on board the London, and understood for the first time that it was possible to believe otherwise.
Maybe he, Gan, wasn’t clever like Avon, whose cold-blooded genius with computers Blake set such store on. Maybe he wasn’t space-hardened and full of fire like Jenna, whose skill at flying illegal cargoes had won her a place on the Federation’s condemned list... and the helm of the Liberator. Maybe he wasn’t even quick and neat and tricky-fingered like little Vila, who’d enlivened the weary months on the prison ship for them all with his limitless joking, and whose compulsion for theft had exceeded even the Federation’s capacity for mind-conditioning. But if strength and loyalty could serve Blake’s cause, then those above all were his to give.
He’d been the first to follow on Cygnus Alpha, when none of them, Blake included, had known that the Curse of Cygnus was no more than a fraud— or whether Blake’s fabled teleport was any less of one. Blake was a man to follow... and, in this new world of outlawry with every stranger’s hand turned against them, Gan had understood long since that he could not survive alone. A man who in the extremes of danger could not kill needed people around him he could trust: those who would risk their lives for his. And for all Vila’s talk of cowardice or Avon’s of cynical self-interest, Jenna’s impatience or Blake’s imperious streak, he’d seen that knowledge in the eyes of all of them at one time or another.
They’d been on this vast strange ship only a few days together, always running, hunted, rarely free of pursuit for more than a few hours before the relentless warning returned again. But in that time — even more than on the London — they’d begun to come together as a crew.
The faces of those who had died, men who’d slept and eaten at his side for long months of confinement, were already beginning to fade: Porah, Selman, Arco and the rest. A twist of chance might have brought any one of them here in his place as part of this jailbird crew, he knew that. Porah, who’d been exiled from his own planet for his political ideas, had been close to Blake on the London and would surely have spoken up for him on Cygnus Alpha.
But Porah had died and Gan had lived, and it was his calm strength now that helped to keep the peace between squabbling Vila and sniping Avon, or soften Jenna’s outbursts of scorn. He’d slipped almost without intention into place as the conscience of the crew, the one who could temper Blake’s impulses with sense or shrug off sharp words with a smile. They were settling, all of them, into their roles on the flight deck and in one another’s lives— and soon the time before would start to seem as far away as distant exiled Earth.
Some day they would come back to Earth, Blake murmured. Some day things would be changed, and to argue ideas would no longer be a crime. Some day the High Council would serve the will of those it ruled, and not of those who proffered the greatest pleasure or the greatest threat.
But those were ideas too remote and abstract to hold Gan’s interest. He would settle for the here and now: food, warmth and freedom. And if that meant manning the flight deck and learning to stand his watch on a starship whose like none of them — not even a hardened spacer like Jenna — had ever seen before, then he was prepared to set himself to the task with the calm acceptance that had always governed his life.
Always... save that once. A ‘once’ of which he would not think.
It was supposedly Avon’s watch on the flight deck at the moment, and had been Vila’s before that. But Gan, like the rest of them, had spent most of his waking hours up here for the past few days; for Vila and himself at least — he couldn’t speak for the Alpha-grades — it was as much as anything else a matter of avoiding the uncanny loneliness of the ship’s endless corridors and the isolation of a single cabin. He’d never in his life slept without the reassuring breathing of others. Privacy was for Alphas, and after all those months spent cheek-by-jowl on the London his sudden ascent to the privilege of individual quarters — Blake’s assumption, of course — had come as an unexpected strain.
But while Vila, having stayed on after his watch was over, was currently busy chattering away at Gan’s elbow about the probable — and highly improbable — functions of the control panel in front of them, Blake and Jenna, who had no ostensible reason to be on the flight deck at all, had both been hanging around for hours too. And even Avon, who was always the first to claim lofty self-sufficiency, didn’t seem to be objecting to the company. As Blake had said only this morning, it was hard not to wonder what had happened to the ship’s previous crew... and from time to time there was still something very alien about the Liberator.
The ship’s computer, Zen, not least. A great reddish dome occupied the full height of the flight deck; Avon had made a point of ‘explaining’ to Gan and Vila, with enormous condescension, that the real circuits of the computer ran throughout the entire ship and that the big mounting on the wall was no more than a focal point for those who insisted on assigning a location and intelligence to a machine, but Gan noticed now with private amusement that Avon himself turned towards Zen’s dome before voicing his command.
“Zen, report status of last evasive manœuvre. Is the pursuit flight still within range?”
“INFORMATION: ALL SCANS ARE NEGATIVE.” Zen’s voice, imprinted directly from Jenna’s mind, held a cultured, almost diffident note. “NO PURSUIT CRAFT REMAIN WITHIN DETECTOR RANGE. MANŒUVRE COMPLETED.”
“We’ve done it— we’ve shaken them off!” Vila’s cheer was only the loudest of those that echoed around the flight deck, and even Blake, who’d been sitting and brooding on his own down at the front — away from the controls that they couldn’t work — let out a whoop of relief that had Gan grinning broadly.
“Well, for the moment, anyway,” Jenna cautioned with a sigh as the euphoria ebbed. “But — no offence, Zen — we’re still sitting ducks so long as we’re stuck relying on pre-programmed evasive tactics. Now that we’ve finally got the Federation off our tails for a while, we need to learn to handle the Liberator on manual controls before a situation crops up that we can’t handle by saying ‘Zen, run away’.”
“Or even ‘Zen, attack’,” Blake added, getting up and exchanging a glance with Jenna, who’d moved instinctively towards the helm position. “Yes, I agree... and the other thing that’s worrying me is that after Cygnus Alpha we’re still short-handed. We’re always going to be outnumbered against the Federation, but with only five of us on a ship this size we rattle around like bolts in a lid. Yes, I know there’s only flight positions for five under manual control”—as Jenna began to interrupt—“but that doesn’t make us anything more than a skeleton crew. And I’d be happier with that if we had at least some kind of safety margin.”
“Oh, the greater the numbers of your merry band the better, I’m sure— from your point of view.” Avon’s tone was as dry as ever. “But had it occurred to you that we humble followers might appreciate a trifle of caution in bringing more members on board?”
Jenna nodded, with a certain reluctance. “He’s right, Blake. All of us here have owed our lives to the others at least once; how are you going to find outsiders you can trust?”
“Well, I’m in favour,” Vila said cheerfully, voicing Gan’s own instinct with an apparent disregard for the twin Alpha glares converging across the flight deck. “Only I don’t see what good it does planning to get anyone when we’re stuck all the way out here.”
Blake dropped down into the nearest control position, looking round. “Yes, Zen, where are we? And what’s the nearest planetary system?”
“CURRENT STELLAR CO-ORDINATES ARE IN SECTOR 2, ASTRO POINT TWO ZERO THREE. THE NEAREST SYSTEM IS THE PLANET NEWPARIS, BEARING TWO SEVEN FOUR INTERSECT THREE NINE, OR APPROXIMATELY SIX HOURS DISTANT AT STANDARD SPEED. DO YOU WISH TO PROCEED TO ORBIT?”
“Yes— no, wait.” Blake looked up at Avon, standing beyond him, who had murmured something under his breath. “What was that, Avon?”
Avon’s lip curled slightly. “I said: ‘Newparis — that’s interesting.’ ”
Blake simply looked at him, failing to rise to the bait, and it was an exasperated Vila who was the first to crack.
“Well, go on then, genius— what’s so special about this New... Newpers place that no-one’s ever heard of?”
“Jenna’s heard of it, I fancy,” Avon said, getting a grudging nod of confirmation from that direction. “And Blake too— unless the Federation conveniently wiped that piece of information along with the rest of his mind.”
Blake’s mouth tightened — the forced reprogramming that had enabled the Federation to display him as a penitent who had seen the error of his ways and begged others to recant had included the wiping out of the murders of his friends and entire family, and when the conditioning had begun to break, it had nearly taken his sanity with it — but he let the jibe pass.
“I remember a little, I think; it’s starting to come back. The rumours were reaching Earth four years ago, in the days of the Freedom Party, though of course the Administration tried to hush them up. Newparis”—he pronounced the word carefully for Vila’s benefit, with the same heavy stress on the first syllable that Avon had used—“was supposed to be a hotbed of active dissent: when we were still trying to tackle political rehabilitation centres, they had the Federation on armed alert across the entire planet. The resistance network there called themselves the Operation, and there were stories about a masked leader whose face no-one ever saw....”
He faltered, dropping his head between fists that thrust at his temples as if to cudgel out missing memory, and cast an appeal over towards the helm. “Jenna?”
“They all wear masks down on Newparis anyway,” Jenna said briskly, pushing back blonde hair with a look of challenge at Avon that dared him to interrupt. “It’s not exactly the most hospitable of planets. It was one of the early colonies from the first wave of expansion, and it’s in a handy location for outbound traffic to the Second and Eighth Sectors— that’s about all it’s got going for it. On Earth it’s a Category Four offence to go outside the Domes; without a mask, on Newparis it’s a death sentence, unless you happen to have grown up there. Someone decided it would be cheaper to engineer the colonists to breathe the atmosphere than to terraform the planet— or so the story goes, though it was back before the Atomic Wars and all lost in history now.
“At any rate, the job was never finished either way. The atmosphere’s too thin with too many trace gases for anyone but the Newpies — the colony’s descendants — to tolerate, and the whole planet’s little more than a ball of sand and poisonous dust particles with a few primitive plants. Once the wind whips up the surface the air gets too toxic for even the natives to survive. There’s a big dockyard down on the central plateau that handles just about all the Federation repairs for the Sector, and it’s staffed almost entirely by the Newpie population, to save costs; but the one time I was forced down there by a broken axial link, it was the middle of a duststorm and even the local labour spent the whole of the repairs crawling round the outside of the ship in breath-masks. As for offworlders, it’s got to be one of the best places in the galaxy to head for... if you want an excuse to hide your face.”
“Not quite the place I’d choose,” Gan said mildly, folding his arms. “But the question is, what does Avon find so interesting about it?”
Personally, he would have wagered a few credits that it had been nothing more than an off-the-cuff attempt to get a reaction out of Blake; Avon’s adamant refusal to acknowledge any kind of authority where the other man was concerned had clearly been going on since before the rescue from Cygnus Alpha. The cold look he got in return would have quashed a supernova, but merely confirmed Gan’s private suspicions.
“A matter of simple coincidence,” Avon supplied rather reluctantly as all eyes came to rest on him. “We’ve been chased since Cygnus Alpha, and yet when we finally wind up with time to look around, it turns out Blake has contrived to bring us straight into a nest of existing rebel activity with a leader whose legend is much bigger than his own. Why, even smugglers have heard of the Ghost of the Operation.”
“Free-traders.” But it was an automatic correction; Jenna and Avon shared a glance of agreement. “Yes, I heard those stories about the Ghost, Blake, and they’re none too pretty. Maybe when he first turned up he was an inspiration and a fine force for freedom, as you like to phrase it— but he’s used his reputation as an undercover genius to mount a reign of terror round the planet. He’s got an intercept on just about every computer or communications system on Newparis, and eyes and ears everywhere the Federation cares to snoop; he knows everything the Federation plan to do on-world before they know it themselves, and he runs an iron discipline among his men. They say he lives in a deep bunker buried somewhere in the interior—”
“They also say he’s funding the Operation more or less single-handed via his access to the financial systems,” Avon put in drily, as Jenna’s account threatened to take off into ever more lurid flights of fancy.
“I can see why you’d know all about it, then.” Vila was irrepressible as ever. A short stylus went dancing nimbly across the backs of his fingers from one hand to the other, apparently without effort. He sent it flickering back again almost absent-mindedly, flexing his hands with professional ease. “What about inside the Domes— surely they don’t all go round masked in there?”
“From what little I saw, I’d say the life indoors is as normal as anywhere on Earth— if you call that sort of existence normal,” Jenna retorted, with all the spacer’s disdain for those who allowed themselves to be trapped within the confines of a single city.
“So how does this masked maniac go around without attracting attention?” Vila’s expression was entirely innocent, but Gan caught Avon suppressing a smile.
“The whole thing’s obviously been thoroughly exaggerated,” Blake said firmly, standing up. “At any rate, I don’t see any point in hanging around out here. Whatever the truth behind these stories, the resistance network on Newparis has obviously survived and gone from strength to strength. Maybe we could learn a thing or two from them— at least where the ‘surviving’ part is concerned,” he added, forestalling Avon’s inevitable objection.
“And maybe we could find more crew and get a bit more rest.” Having brought the conversation full circle, Vila sent the stylus he’d been juggling back into hiding up his sleeve and dusted his hands together with an air of finality, looking pleased with himself. “Gan, did you know you can get some quite decent drinks out of the galley synthesizers? I think this calls for a celebration, don’t you?”
“You would.” Avon dismissed the proposal with obvious contempt. “Blake— do I take it that you have just made a ‘democratic’ decision on behalf of everyone else in this crew?”
For the first time Gan thought Blake looked a little weary. “Avon— any time you or anyone else on board this ship decide you don’t like the way I’m running things, I won’t stop you from leaving. I’ll put you down on the nearest habitable planet, and you can rig up a new identity and go back to what you do best: liberating other people’s bank accounts. But the Liberator gives us a real chance to make a difference against a system that enslaves hundreds of thousands and corrupts millions— and I plan to use her for just that. If you want to follow me, I’ll be very grateful for your talents and I’ll take your advice into account... but in the end, while we’re on this ship, I make the decisions. Is there anyone here who can’t live with that?”
Silence, although four out of the five on the flight deck traded glances among themselves. It was Gan, whose loyalties were least ambiguous, who put the disquiet into words.
“I’ll follow you and your ideas, Blake— but I won’t follow a tinpot dictator. We’ll listen to you if you listen to us, but if we think you’re wrong we won’t let you take us all into madness.”
“That’s all I’m asking for,” Blake said quietly, meeting his eyes. And Gan, who had been pushed around by so many would-be-superior Alphas, realised with something of a jolt that Blake had meant every word he’d said.
He just hoped that their leader’s decisions lived up to his intentions.
Blake glanced around the flight deck one last time and looked up at the computer. “All right, Zen— take us in towards Newparis. Standard by two.”
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I've made a few minor edits here, and I think we're now ready to go ahead and publish on FFnet...