The Pure Cold Light Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Publishing Data

  Acknowledgments

  Dedication

  Prologue: Covenant of the Arc

  Chapter One: Fat Farm in Space

  Chapter Two: Life In The Pit

  Chapter Three: Gansevoort & the Gang of Four

  Chapter Four: A New Assignment

  Chapter Four: A New Assignment

  Chapter Five: The EAP and the INRE

  Chapter Six: Wearing Disguises

  Chapter Seven: Horrible Woman

  Chapter Eight: Glimet's Passing

  Chapter Nine: Isis

  Chapter Ten: Pirate Air

  Chapter Eleven: Adjusting to New Faces

  Chapter Twelve: Chikako Peat

  Chapter Thirteen: License to Teach

  Chapter Fourteen: Tunneling Out

  Chapter Fifteen: Bordello

  Chapter Sixteen: Virtual Recovery

  Chapter Seventeen: Going Down, No Mercy

  Chapter Eighteen: Underworld Blues

  Chapter Nineteen: Box City

  Chapter Twenty: Reigning Chaos

  Chapter Twenty–One: Toward an Explanation

  Chapter Twenty-Two: Dead Is My Body

  Chapter Twenty-Three: The Evil That Men Do

  Chapter Twenty–Four: The King of Misrule

  Chapter Twenty-Five: Transported by Ecstasy

  Epilogue: The Big Broadcast

  BVC Back Page1

  BVC Back Page2

  THE PURE COLD LIGHT

  by

  Gregory Frost

  The Pure Cold Light

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright © 1993, 1994, 2013 by Gregory Frost

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  AvoNova edition May 1993

  ROC Penguin edition (U.K.) 1994

  Quolibet eBook edition January 2013

  ISBN: 978-1-61138-236-5

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank: Steve Mohl of AVI for technical support; cartoonist Mark Tatuli, Ed Sherry, and Peter Lollelman for imaging; Steve Beuret for items of the console; Bill Kent for the lunches that launched “License to Teach”; and, in far too many ways to name, Michael Swanwick, whose sagacity forever enlightens.

  Dedication

  Quolibet edition

  For Barbara and Captain Wow

  Prologue: Covenant of the Arc

  Heffernan would never appreciate that magnetism was what killed him.

  The alarm klaxon honked twice in the tiny lunar shack, so loud that he fumbled his coffee cup and seared a stripe across his thighs. He hopped to his feet, shouting,“Son of a bitch!” and prying the wet pant legs away from his skin. He had been absorbed till then in a movie on the monitor—a Betty Davis film called Jezebel—but shut it off, cut the overheads, and pressed his face against the cold window. Outside, an empty hopper came sliding smoothly by, silent as a ghost.

  The mass driver on which it rode looked like the track for the world’s dullest roller coaster ride: two aluminum rails stretched straight to the horizon like a big zipper closing the lunar surface. Every couple of seconds a magnetically levitated payload—what everyone called a cannonball—shot off down the length of the right rail and out of sight, to the far end of the driver, where it finally launched its payload at just over two kmps into space. The empty hopper rode the left rail back around, past the modular shack to where it loaded up again. Heffernan thought magnetic levitation was just swell—at least, he had till now. Once launched, the cannonballs traveled on a precisely aligned trajectory for 60,000 kilometers to a collection point near one of ScumberCorp’s orbiting factories, where they dropped right into a funnel-shaped net as broad as the whole lunar facility. The process was computer controlled, and everything depended upon the precise instant that the hopper hit the switch and ejected its payload. But lunar soil had a slight magnetic charge to it; twice previously within the last five years, despite the system’s built-in damping, a charge had built up in the hopper, a magnetic tug sufficient to throw off its speed just the tiniest bit. With mass driver propulsion, any variation in speed meant that instead of those cannonballs zooming straight into the net, they peppered the black sky like a shower of meteors. That was why Heffernan lived eight hours a day in solitary confinement—to monitor trajectory and correct any problem before it became a problem. It was a cushy job and he’d had it for nearly two years. He couldn’t remember the last time he had spent more than ten seconds of any eight hour stretch monitoring the arc of the cannonballs. Nothing had ever gone wrong before. “Why is this happening on my shift?” he asked the sterile landscape.

  Another hopper ripped silently past him. He followed it as best he could, watched the tiny speck of its payload shoot into the sky. Without glancing away, he toggled the monitor switch along the sill; blue numbers appeared in the window glass—a precise measurement of the payload’s trajectory. The wrong numbers. “Skewed,” he said bleakly. “Gone to hell. It’s skewed, and I’m screwed.” He turned to the console, started running the recorded disk back … and back … and back, seeking the point at which the parabola returned to normal, counting the number of mis-guided launches with growing alarm. As the disk ran on without change, James Heffernan began to grind his teeth together. When the parabolic arc shifted back, he stopped the disk.

  Two-hundred-eighteen of the twenty kilogram ilmenite cannonballs had been flung into the wrong part of the void. The trajectory had begun to drift about the time he had sealed up his dry suit and gone down the tunnel for his first cup of coffee. He’d gone for two more after that, all without noticing anything amiss. Why hadn’t the alarm gone off before? This thing had been out of whack for hours without a beep. What sort of margin of error had it been set for? Already he was trying to put together a defense. He would need a good one.

  He had no choice but to shut down the mass driver. Somewhere, in other rooms of other buildings in SC’s lunar factory, more alarms were now going off.

  The speaker on the wall popped to life. Goertel, his shift director, shouted, “Heffernan, what the fuck is going on out there? You’ve shut down!”

  He explained about the belated alarm, the parabolic angle that had slowly drifted from true. He named the number of off-target shots. “The balls just got by me, is all.”

  “Did I hear that? ‘Got by you’?” Heffernan could picture Goertel’s face gone grape with anger. “Well, let’s just see if you get your balls by me.” The speaker popped dead. He sank down into his chair. If he could have, he would have melted through the floor.

  The whole length of the track would need to be inspected. The lost man-hours on this and the other end were—for him at least—incalculable; budget projections sucked into the vacuum. Somebody had to take the heat. He knew already who it would be. Goertel had to answer to the strungatz—the suitboys who had never set foot off Earth and who thought a mass driver was the Catholic who parked the choir bus. The only way to save his job and his ass would be to take a lunar skimmer and chase down the errant ilmenite by himself, on his own time, for no pay. Volunteer work. Right now…before they ordered him to do it anyway. Wearily, he got to his feet and reached for his suit.

  ***

  Four hours later he had retrieved eighty-two of the cannonballs—about all that the skimmer’s bay net could handle.

  He was coming in on automatic when he found the site. He never would have noticed it at all except that something flicked past the windshield while he was daydreaming about suitboy murder. Whatever the glittering thing was, it had zipped out of sight by the time he pulled himself up against the glass. Not a sign of it.

  Seeing his own blue-lit face in the glass, he decided it must have been an optical illusion—lig
ht from the maneuvering system display reflecting off the white of his eye, which in turn had reflected in the windshield and created the falsely perceived object. Happened all the time with his helmet faceplate, which was enough to convince him; he didn’t want to report anything in the first place. But, as the impression was of something shooting up and over him, he naturally gazed down to see where it had come from.

  Beneath him lay the moon’s backside. Craters like lunar acne spotted the surface below as far as he could see—a thousand times more than on the face. Craters.

  And one anomaly.

  Unable to believe what he saw, Heffernan mashed his face up against the glass to peer over the nose of the skimmer just as the anomaly twinkled out of sight. Grabbing the control stick, he thumbed off automatic and nudged the ship down for a closer look.

  In the shadow of the Cordillera Mountains stood a cluster of objects—he wanted to call them buildings but they looked more like enormous budding flowers. “Flowers in a vacuum?” he muttered at the preposterous idea. He couldn’t say just what they were. Lights dotted the edges, running in sequence. He circled the structures, and decided that they kind of reminded him of shiitake mushrooms, too.

  Not far to the north were the landing pad lights of a second installation, which he knew to be the site where Stercus Pharmaceuticals refined raw Orbitol. The flower-buildings below had to be brand new. He couldn’t figure how there hadn’t been a whisper of scuttlebutt about them.

  Abruptly, he realized that the people below would have been tracking him all the while. He was going to catch hell for being there instead of hauling his payload in. Now there would be even more trouble if he didn’t report something. They would want to know what he was covering up. He trembled at the thought of an interrogation. The bastards would try to link him to some rebel subversion—they always did.

  He hastily put in a call to Goertel, who was in the shack, supervising the check on the mass driver. Heffernan babbled a description of the weird structures. Goertel responded oddly. He didn’t get excited; he didn’t get angry. He got very quiet, which he’d never done before, and gently told Heffernan to wait.

  Five minutes passed without a reply. He’d begun to sweat harder than his suit could handle. If he’d put his helmet on, the faceplate would have been flashing red. What was Goertel doing? Going through the corporate ranks with this?

  A curt voice he didn’t know made him jump when it spoke. “Pilot of SCS one-niner-five, return to colony base instantly. Acknowledge.” He swallowed. “Fuck me,” he muttered, then replied dully into the mike, “Copy.”

  “Land at cargo dock E to unload. Repeat, cargo dock E as in Edgar. Acknowledge and repeat.”

  Heffernan acknowledged the instruction. He imagined the corporate chucklehead who would meet him in the dock—a pink-faced suitboy who hadn’t gotten to grind anyone into protein paste lately, who would read him the riot act, then slap him with a fat fine for deviating from his course. Christ, they would send him down for this; the structure had to be an SC operation, something experimental, part of the infamous “black budget” that everybody pretended didn’t exist.

  If he’d had enough fuel, he might have tried for the closest Ichi-Plok factorb. As it was, he didn’t have a prayer.

  ***

  The landing pad lights flashed on and off in sync with computer display number three; the landing was automatic. Heffernan sat with his helmet on, ignoring the red square flashing in the lower right corner of the glass. He stared at the horizon indicator, his brain shocked to numbness, his stomach gurgling like an aerated drinking fountain.

  Cargo Dock E lay at the farthest point from the main colony enclosures. The building itself, covered by a thick layer of lunar soil, looked like a buried cheese log on the moon’s surface.

  By the time the skimmer set down on the circular pad, the doors to Cargo Bay E had opened. Its crew would have been rudely rousted from their normal off-duty pastimes to unload the ilmenite he’d recovered. On top of everything else, the dockers would now hate his ass. He wanted to die.

  He pressed the pads at his wrists to seal the drysuit, then bounced back to the belly of the skimmer. A conical mesh bag twice his height contained the retrieved payloads, each one big as a packing crate.

  He opened the hatch and cranked down the gangway. The ramp into the open cargo dock lay empty before him. There should have been a half dozen or more people there. There was no one. The inside of the dock glowed golden. The hatches stood snugly sealed. A vertical stack of canisters stood just at the edge of the ramp, where the floor flattened out.

  “Son-of-a-bitch, son-of-a-bitch,” he muttered in furious despair. The corporate motherfuckers were going to make him haul the payloads all by himself.

  He walked down the short gangway, grumbling fearfully. He could see one electric cart, parked up behind the canisters. He slogged up the ramp to get it, feeling like a third-stage Orbitol junkie—shunned, rejected, and all but invisible. His faceplate flickered crimson with information about his blood pressure and adrenalin level, which he ignored. The sweat breaking out everywhere told him everything anyway.

  At the entrance to the cargo bay, his helmet radio abruptly clicked and hissed. He paused, leaning on the stack of eight canisters while he glanced around, expecting that someone was about to say something to him. Idly, he considered the labeling on the canisters: hydrazine. Nothing surprising in that. Hydrazine abounded on the Moon—a very useful form for storing nitrogen gas.

  Like everyone else in the SC lunar facility, Heffernan had routinely been instructed in first aid regarding hydrazine’s many noxious properties. Inhaled, it caused pulmonary edemas; spilled on the skin, it created unspeakable chemical burns while being rapidly absorbed as a poison into the body. Since he didn’t work directly with the stuff, he’d never much thought about it, and paid hardly any attention to that part of his first air training. Not that there was much he could have done in any case.

  He pushed away from them, taking a bounce down the ramp, when his radio clicked again. Now, for all his fear, he was getting annoyed at being jerked around.

  He skidded to a stop and turned back angrily just as the canisters detonated.

  In the first instant, the explosion was silent, like something witnessed through the window of the lunar shack. Then the blast caught him in a fist as big as creation. His helmet roared, the faceplate shattered into him. He flew, punched like a nail through the side of the skimmer, and burst, ruptured in freeze-dried agony against the eighty-two netted cannonballs.

  Chapter One: Fat Farm in Space

  Much later, after the fallout resulting from her exposé had settled, Thomasina Lyell would tell interviewers that the journalist in her had recognized unerringly, the first time they met, that she would encounter the man called Angel again.

  The meeting itself was sheer accident; no one could have predicted it. Her presence on the orbiting Geosat station that day had nothing to do with him.

  Lyell was exercising for a fifteen-year-old girl.

  ***

  She pumped away at a good clip on her assigned stationary bicycle, rightside up or maybe upside down or sideways, she couldn’t say for sure. TV screens, pressed together like the quoins of an enormous vacuum-grown gem, hung in the center of the workout room, dozens of them, at every angle, to accommodate viewers on all the cycle machines in the gravityless environment no matter what surface they might be bolted to. There were no windows, and the single exit door sealed snugly and invisibly in the left wall. The only constant point of reference was toward the screens, where every TV at whatever angle displayed the loud opening credits of “The President Odie Show.”

  Over two dozen floating lipoid athletes—Lyell nestled in among them—pedaled and heaved upon their machinery. They stared slackly at the screens to forget themselves, to escape the excruciation of weightless workout by shutting off their brains and acquiescing in scripted idiocy. Odie and Vice President Schnepfe felicitously dished up a story as lurid
as a plate of intestines.

  “Normally, you know,” chimed the President, “we just have on board your and my favorite celebrities. And we do have with us the juggling Prime Minister of Lithuania later, so don’t switch satnets on me yet, folks. But our first guest—I gotta tell you, this woman’s story really moved me. I think Schnepfe had a movement, too.” Laughter, spattered applause, a brief cut to Schnepfe, making hyper–thyroid fish eyes over the joke. “This is Mrs. Akiko Alcevar, a widow and a registered voter,” said the President of the tiny oriental woman at his side. His digitized voice emerged again, out of the ensuing applause, beguiling, insidious, a snake in sharkskin. “Or is Akiko a widow? What you’re about to hear may sound like—well, like the kind of headline you’d expect to get from Alien News Network or some other overproduced smegma—but it’s staggering, honest-to-gawd reality time. For you certainly, hey, Akiko?” She nodded somewhere between Odie and the camera, her lack of resolution injecting just the right amount of believability into the performance. Lyell pedaled hell-bent, trying hard to ignore it but trapped by the program’s contrivance of mystery. Usually, Odie and Schnepfe just bored her to the point of self-immolation. This was not their characteristic show.

  The screen filled with the President’s face, which glistened, his pores brimming like rain-fed puddles. “Maybe for you, too…because Mr. Andre Alcevar, Akiko’s ex and a former Orbitol junkie—who went all the way to Orbitol decay—has reappeared from-the-beyond! Don’t believe me? See for yourself, yeah, yeah.” The background exterior washed away like topsoil; beneath it lay Odie’s documentation—two enormous photos side by side that the President and Mrs. Alcevar now appeared to be walking across, studying intently beneath their feet. Both pictures were, invariably, out of focus.