LITMIR.BIZ

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space in microgravity. But the steady one-g acceleration—three times what she was used to after a year on Mars—kept her pinned to the deck, and most of the time strapped into her couch. She didn’t understand how Horst and the others could move about with such casual disregard for the acceleration dragging at them every minute of the long ship-day.

      Then something one of the Marines had just said managed to register in her weight-numbed mind. “Wait a minute,” she said. “What was that about Llalande?”

      “Llalande 21185,” Barnes said, staring at her with her peculiarly dark nanoaltered eyes. “It’s a red dwarf star about eight light-years from—”

      “I know what it is,” Hanson snapped. “We’ve been watching it from Mars. What did you mean about an out-Solar mission there?”

      “Stands to reason, honey,” Ostergaard said, grinning. “That’s where the action is. My money’s riding on a relief expedition. You’re an archie, right?”

      “Xenoarcheotechnologist,” she replied.

      “Whoa, the lady’s using damned big words,” Barnes said.

      “Positively sesquipedalian,” Horst said, with just a hint of a sneer.

      Ostergaard laughed. “I’ll bet a month’s pay they want you out on the Llalande planet to check out the xenotech they’ve been finding. Right, Marines?”

      “Fuckin’-A,” Barnes said. “Assuming there’s any left when we get there, ten years from now.”

      “I’m not going to Ishtar!” Hanson said. She didn’t want to admit it, but these people were scaring her now. “My work is here, on Mars.”

      “You’re not on Mars now, honey,” Horst reminded her. “You’re en route to Earth on very special orders. Either you really pissed someone off back there or you’re headed for Ishtar.” She grinned, an evil showing of teeth. “And maybe both!”

      Traci Hanson was used to having things her own way, to charting her own course and the hell with what others thought. It had gotten her this far, head of mission research at the Cydonian complex, and only a few scars the worse for wear. If they thought they could just order her to drop everything to go haring off to the stars, they were crazy. What did they think AIs were for?

      Robinson. She would take this up with Robinson as soon as she got back.

      Or … as soon as she was able to get up and walk around again, after this brutal week of acceleration.

      Then she remembered that the packet’s acceleration matched the gravitational acceleration of Earth itself, that this hell was going to go on and on.

      Shit …

       Headquarters, PanTerra Dynamics

       New Chicago, Illinois

       United Federal Republic, Earth

       1455 hours CT

      Gavin Norris had never seen a demonstration like this. The chanting throngs filled the circular PanTerra Plaza and spilled over into all of the surrounding thoroughfares. Police in full armor were everywhere, trying to maintain order and keep the main walkways open. The demonstration, he gathered, was an anti-An gathering, and tempers were burning high. Pro-Anners were there as well, and demonstration and counterdemonstration were threatening to erupt into full-scale civil war.

      Norris ignored the chanting crowds as best as he could, making his way toward the slender, black pinnacle that was his destination. The PanTerra Building soared two kilometers into the thin, cold air of the midwestern sky, rising from the Highland Park district to look down on a cloud-mottled Lake Michigan to the east and the still empty ruin of the Barrens to the south.

      The destruction of Old Chicago during the UN War a century ago had killed millions—no one would ever know the precise death toll—and extinguished one of the largest and most prosperous cities on the planet. Plutonium from the reaction mass heating grid of the French spacecraft that had broken up above Lake Michigan had scattered radioactive dust southwest across the city, leaving a poisoned footprint fifty kilometers long burned into the soil of northern Illinois. Detox robots and crews in sealed crawlers continued to work both in the desert ashore and in the waters offshore, but the most optimistic calculations indicated that the Barrens would remain hazardous for another five centuries at least.

      North of the Barrens, though, the rebuilding had been proceeding with an enthusiasm born of victory in the determination not to see the brawling, big-shouldered city of Sandburg’s poem forever extinguished. The cities of Highland Park and Waukegan had merged, becoming the nucleus of the new metropolis. The lake itself was all but dead now, but construction had begun extending out over the water almost as soon as the radiation there dropped to reasonable levels.

      The PanTerra Building, with its distinctive black panther logo perched high atop the revolving dome that housed its executive suites, had foundations sunk deep within the bedrock beneath what once had been open water. The PanTerra Plaza consisted of open grounds and pavement immediately in front of the main entrance, centered on a towering water fountain symbolizing the Spirit of Chicago.

      The demonstration was well under way by the time Norris approached the building. All traffic—ground and air—had been blocked from the Highland Park district as far south as Central and as far west as Sheridan, and the slide-ways had been turned off. He had to park his flier at a port garage near Central Park and walk five blocks through streets packed with thronging mobs. When he saw how packed the plaza was, he turned away and found an entranceway to the transit levels. Most of the major buildings in New Chicago were connected by floater tubes beneath the ground level.

      An elevator took Norris from the PanTerra Building’s transit access bay to the lobby. A separate elevator, one with a security check panel that tasted the DNA on his palm and electronically probed his briefcase and his clothing, took him then to the 540th floor, so far above the demonstration that the mobs simply vanished into the geometrical intricacies of street, building, and plaza.

      Allyn Buckner met him in another lobby, this one with soaring, curving walls that were either completely transparent or remarkably large and seamlessly joined viewall panels. The PanTerran panther hung above the entrance to the conference center, ten meters high, muscles rippling in realistically animated holography.

      “Mr. Norris,” Buckner said, extending a hand. He was a thin, acid-looking man with an insincere smile, one of the small army of PanTerran vice presidents whom Norris had dealt with in the past. “Thank you for coming in person.”

      “Not a problem, Mr. Buckner,” Norris replied. “You never know who’s got access to your VR link codes. I prefer face-to-face.”

      “Indeed. We can guarantee the security of our conversation here. This way, please?”

      Norris jerked his head to the side, indicating the crowds far below. “So, what the hell is that all about?”

      “War, Mr. Norris,” Buckner said as he led Norris beneath the giant panther and into the conference suite. “There is going to be a war very soon now. The first war, I might add, to be fought across interstellar distances.”

      “Llalande?”

      “Of course. The people are quite upset over the, um, slavery issue.”

      “There was a pretty sizable pro-An contingent down there too.”

      “Religious nuts, Mr. Norris. The lunatic fringe. The people are demanding that the human slaves on Ishtar be freed.”

      That, Norris thought, was something of an oversimplification. The number of separate factions on Earth clashing over the issue of contact with the An and the sociopolitical situation on distant Ishtar was simply incalculable. True, the loudest voices right now were those of outrage over the discovery of the Exiles—descendants of humans taken from Mesopotamia thousands of years ago and transplanted to the An world as a slave population. But there were other voices as well.

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