Copyright

HarperVoyager

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Kevin J. Anderson 1995

Kevin J. Anderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006483069

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007571529

Version: 2016-12-16

Dedication

This book is for

KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH

for all the help and love she has shared over the years in helping me become a better writer.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Accused

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Truthsayers Guild

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Orblab 2

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

The Burden of Proof

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Exiles

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Truth

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

About the Publisher

Epigraph

Our conscience is not the vessel of eternal verities. It grows with our social life, and a new social condition means a radical change in conscience.

WALTER LIPPMANN

The way of paradoxes is the way of truth. To test reality we must see it on the tight-rope. When the Verities become acrobats we can judge them.

OSCAR WILDE

ACCUSED

CHAPTER
1
i

Outside the Truthsayers Guild, the crowd had already started to gather. Kalliana could hear the murmur of voices, feel the press of their excited thoughts even through the shielded walls of Guild Headquarters.

They were waiting.

She looked through the stained glass windows of her quarters on the third deck. She brushed pale fingers across the smooth, cool glass panes—brilliant shards of crimson, green, and blue epoxied into dull alloy tracks—as if to rub away the shadows of milling people anticipating the trial. But they would not leave, not until Kalliana had made her judgment.

The people of First Landing waited in the plaza for the Truthsayer to come out, to face the accused murderer, to read the guilt or innocence directly from his thoughts.

Perhaps it was the spectacle the colonists wanted, a bright entertainment, or just relief from their strenuous jobs for an hour or so. Kalliana knew they all had hard lives out there; she wouldn’t have traded with them for anything.

Officially, the Truthsayers Guild believed the citizens longed for a reaffirming lesson in morality, a demonstration of what would happen if they slipped from the narrow but clearly defined path of the law …. Then again, after spending so much time descending into the minds of criminals, Kalliana wondered if maybe the spectators were just thirsty for blood.

The accused—a man named Eli Strone—had supposedly spilled enough blood.

Raw sunlight filtered through her window to spill rainbows across the rugs that covered the cold deck plates. Her quarters, once the cabin of a high-ranking officer on the scuttled spaceship that had been converted into the Guild building, seemed safe and warm to her, a shelter from the evil thoughts of the populace at large. Every day she and the eleven other telepathic Truthsayers had to face the sins of the people, but today would be worse. Today, if the accused was indeed guilty, she would be forced to confront his memory of slaughtering twenty-three people.

Kalliana wrapped herself in her white robe, clean and pure, made of bleached cotton grown here on the planet Atlas, then tied it with the emerald sash of a Truthsayer. Her petite body, fine blond hair, and translucent skin made her look like a pale angel. The cloth rustled like hushed whispers as she moved. She completed her ceremonial costume with a wide, ornate gold collar that added extra weight to her shoulders, as if her burden wasn’t already heavy enough. But the formal spectacle required all the trappings of a mystical ritual.

The crowd was growing restless in the plaza. Her reluctance had already made her late. She would have to face the people soon, face Eli Strone.

ii

She had read the proclamation a dozen times over, but Kalliana picked up the discolored sheets and stared at the words again. Documents printed on genuine paper made from kenaf fibers, because a physical document implied a permanence that electronic records could not convey.

The Strone Case. The brutal murders had occurred in the isolated wastelands between the landholdings of Carsus and Bondalar, out in the construction camps for the new mag-lev rail that would link the two holdings. An efficient mag-lev network already connected each of the nineteen scattered landholdings with the hub city of First Landing, but in an unprecedented alliance, Carsus and Bondalar had decided to join their holdings directly, without passing through the central point.

The construction work had proceeded for three years, plagued by disasters, sabotage, defective materials. And now this: Three separate labor gangs, twenty-three people, had been murdered. The bodies hadn’t been discovered for days, since the crews reported to their overseers only once a week. The killings had gotten progressively more monstrous down the line.

A man named Eli Strone had shown up on the roster of each slaughtered crew. Up until two years ago, Strone had been a member of the elite guard working in the Guild Headquarters, steadfast and ready to defend the Truthsayers against any sort of disturbance—but he had abandoned his post suddenly, without explanation, after years of service. Strone had then bounced between minor jobs in First Landing’s hydroponic greenhouses or loading docks, eventually heading out to the wilderness and a more rugged life.

Three months ago Strone had volunteered for the backbreaking work of laying inductance coils and alloy rails for the transportation link between Bondalar and Carsus holdings. Such work had generally been assigned as slave labor to criminals convicted of minor offenses, or even the religious fanatics, the Pilgrims, but crew bosses would not turn down a willing worker.

Then the murders had occurred.

Eli Strone had survived; no one else had. He had applied for labor on a fourth crew shortly after the massacres were discovered, and the soldier-police had apprehended him.

Strone insisted he was innocent. But then, most guilty people did. Only a Truthsayer could tell ….

Finally ready to face the accused, Kalliana stepped toward her cabin door. Her stomach knotted, and she felt the frosty electricity of nervous sweat, but she did not hesitate. She had been raised in the Guild since the embryo stage, developed for this duty. It was the way she paid for the comfortable life she lived.

As she stepped into the corridor, she saw Guild Master Tharion striding toward her: a tall man with sunlight-yellow hair and eyebrows, granite-gray eyes, and a long white robe cinched with a royal blue sash. He was thirty-four, thirteen years her senior; only two years ago he had found himself suddenly saddled with leadership of the Truthsayers Guild.

“I’m ready, Guild Master,” Kalliana said, averting her eyes, certain Tharion had come in impatience.

“A moment, Kalliana,” he said, gesturing back into her quarters. “The people can wait. They enjoy the anticipation.”

Kalliana retreated into her quarters, glad for the delay but worried about what Tharion would ask. She detected no anger in his expression, no stiffness in his movements. He had a pleasant face, calm but firm, just beginning to show the lines of responsibility that came with middle age.

With her own residual telepathic enhancement, Kalliana was tempted to reach out and pluck the concerns directly from Tharion’s mind, to prepare herself—but after her years of rigorous ethical training, she would never do such a thing.

Guild Master Tharion lowered his voice, commanding her attention. “There may be more to this case than the murders, Kalliana,” he said. “It troubles me deeply. You know that Strone used to be one of our elite guards, but he left us just after I became Guild Master. Very mysterious. He always seemed a bit of an odd sort, but reliable. He escorted me many times when I was younger. I got the impression he revered the Truthsayers, looked up to us as great dispensers of truth, wielding the sword of justice.” He laughed, then frowned, letting his thoughts come through.

“I’ve done a lot of thinking … and I cannot help but wonder if he may be a pawn in a larger, older plot against … us? Against some of the landholders? I don’t know.”

Kalliana frowned, not sure what he wanted from her. “What makes you say that? Murders were committed, and this man was implicated. It’s up to me to declare whether he is guilty or innocent.”

“There may be more,” Tharion said. “Given the constant delays and frequent setbacks on the rail-construction project, Hektor Carsus has informally petitioned me for some answers. If any information comes to light during your reading of Strone …”

“What kind of information?” Kalliana asked, suddenly wary. She knew clearly, from her years of ethical training, exactly how far she was expected to go inside the criminal mind. “I am not required to read any deeper than necessary to determine his guilt or innocence.”

“Just be watchful. Perhaps his motivations will be plain enough,” Tharion said, a pair of small creases forming between his pale brows. “We all know Hektor Carsus is a suspicious hothead, but he does have certain valid points. From the day he and Janine Bondalar announced their plans to form a marriage alliance, the mag-lev project connecting their holdings has been beset with unreasonable problems. Cursed, some people might say.”

Tharion wove his long fingers together. “I have privately brought some of his concerns to Guild Mediators. There’s a distinct possibility these murders might be another attempt by some rival landholder to destroy the direct rail link. Strone may just be a hired killer—or a patsy who hasn’t really done anything.”

Kalliana considered this and nodded uneasily. Tharion looked at her with an open expression, not quite a plea. “When you’re inside Strone’s head, try to determine whether he was acting under orders from someone else. Is this just a random act of violence, or is there a deeper plan?”

“If he is guilty at all,” Kalliana pointed out.

“True,” Tharion said, embarrassed. “We need that answer too, of course.”

She could hear the continued droning of the crowd in the plaza, rising and falling in irregular waves. “Why should Truthsayers worry about more landholder rivalries? They always squabble with each other—but we are independent, and have been for a hundred years. Let them do their own investigations, their own snooping. I won’t be a spy for Carsus or Bondalar or Dokken or any other landholder—”

Tharion held up his hand. “Not for the landholders. For us. Because if another landholder is working this plot, then we are being manipulated.”

Kalliana finally saw his logic and could not think of an excuse to deny his request, despite her reluctance. She nodded and followed him out the door. “All right, let’s get this over with.”

iii

The huge ground level opening of the half-buried spaceship, the SkySword, had originally been designed for loading cargo and launching military assault vehicles, but the Truthsayers had replaced the doors with ornate slabs of metal cast in the foundries of one of the mountain holdings. The regal portals were inlaid with beautiful and complex mosaics of bright polished rock. Grandeur to impress the masses.

A cascade of sunlight spilled into the main corridor as the doors swung open. Kalliana walked down the ramp beside the Guild Master, her petite form dwarfed by the immense size of the Guild Headquarters.

Outside, a group of elite guards flanked the door, ready to escort her through the crowd to the speaking platform in the center of the plaza. Kalliana raised her chin and walked forward, her feet bare on the shadowed flagstones, her white robe fluttering around her in the breeze. The air outside smelled dry and flat, like rock dust, without the enriching moisturizers and perfumes that circulated through the Guild’s confined chambers. She felt instantly uncomfortable, but she would be back inside soon, as soon as she finished her duty.

The elite guard fell silently into ranks beside her, their scarlet gauntlets and boots, deep blue uniforms, and goggled helmets setting them apart from the citizens. Kalliana ascended the granite steps to the speaking platform.

Overhead, the skies turned gray with an approaching cloud front, one of the fast-moving storms that cruised over the surface of Atlas. The orbital Platform had not issued a weather warning, but she wondered if it would rain soon. The water would probably make a big difference to those living in the outer landholdings, though it wouldn’t matter to the Truthsayers inside their Headquarters. Often, she found it soothing to listen to the raindrops beating an irregular rhythm against the hull plates and watch them stream and ripple over the stained glass windows.

Kalliana would need some forced relaxation after this ordeal in front of so many people. She hated murder cases.

The crowd was larger than usual. Eli Strone’s alleged crimes were so heinous that many had come even from the far landholdings to witness her pronouncement. Guild Master Tharion seemed pleased at the turnout.

As she walked among them, Kalliana felt the surge of anticipation from the audience, a maelstrom of conflicting thoughts that forced her to put up mental barriers. Though she had not taken a booster dose of the mind-enhancing drug Veritas in days, she still felt the backwash of their thoughts—disjointed hopes, bitterness, frustration, new love, anticipation, even physical thoughts of muscle aches and noontime hunger.

She shook her head to clear her mind, pushing back the psychic babble. While she was required to experience the sins—if any—of Eli Strone, these other citizens could keep their weary lives to themselves.

Kalliana didn’t comprehend how all these people lived, what their dreams were, how they coped with such a bleak and difficult existence. The colonists often seemed happy, though she could not understand it. She had seen so much anger and misery in the minds she had truth-read. Nervously, she glanced behind her at the polished hull of the Guild Headquarters, her landmark of safety and shelter.

In the front row of spectators, sitting in canvas chairs covered with sun shades, swarthy Hektor Carsus sat beside his betrothed, landholder Janine Bondalar, who was at least fifteen years the man’s senior. The two held hands and stared woodenly ahead, waiting to hear Kalliana’s judgment about the man accused of killing so many of their workers.

Kalliana wondered what they wanted to hear—did the allied landholders wish to find a scapegoat so they could start another feud with somebody? Hadn’t Atlas already suffered enough bloody civil wars during its two centuries of colonial history?

But it didn’t matter what Carsus and Bondalar wanted to hear. Kalliana would speak the truth of the case. The consequences were not her concern.

The Guild’s other eleven Truthsayers sat on shaded stone benches to the side of the stage; many of the crimson-sashed Guild Mediators, those who had lesser telepathic powers but greater skills as negotiators and politicians, had also come to watch Kalliana’s pronouncement, though they were not required to witness the spectacle.

From the height of the raised platform, Kalliana looked down at the intimidating sea of faces, all strangers to her. The citizens gazed up at their Truthsayer. They did not know her, because their names were not divulged. To them, all Truthsayers were identical, equally trained, equally capable.

And they were right.

The Guild Master took the center of the stage, raising his arms so that the wide white sleeves of his robe pooled around his elbows. His bright blue sash made him look regal; his sun-yellow hair blew in the breeze.

“The Truthsayers Guild does everything in its power to see that you remain safe,” Tharion said, thrusting his voice into the hush of the crowd. As he grew more accustomed to his position as Guild Master, his voice seemed to grow stronger, Kalliana thought. “Your lives are difficult enough, trying to wring an existence from our untamed world, and we do all we can so that you may go about your business without fear of violent crime or war.

“But sometimes we fail. Here, the Guild has failed twenty-three citizens, now dead, found murdered as they worked to construct a new mag-lev rail line that would have benefited the holdings of Carsus and Bondalar.” Tharion drew a deep breath, and paused meaningfully.

“When the Guild fails to protect the people, the best thing we can do is to make certain that justice is done, that a criminal does not escape punishment—and that an innocent person is not convicted of someone else’s crime. Today, the Truthsayer will determine the guilt or innocence of the man accused of these murders. The dead cannot be brought back to life, but your safety can be assured.”

Tharion swept his pale gaze over the gathered people, hesitating on the calm figures of Hektor Carsus and Janine Bondalar, then moved on to glance at the other landholders, each standing separate from their rivals in the crowd. Kalliana noted that Tharion’s friend and mentor, the landholder Franz Dokken, had not bothered to attend the trial.

“Over the years,” Tharion continued, “despite the best efforts of the Council, some landholders have still attempted to settle disputes through violence, or to usurp lands or resources that have not been distributed to them. For generations, under the authority of the Truthsayers Guild, regiments of soldier-police have been stationed at each holding to deter such hostilities. In the wake of these new murders, I have asked that the sol-pols step up their patrols, keep a more diligent watch for violence brewing in outlying lands as well as here in First Landing. Until we can all work together, Atlas will never become the Eden we were promised it would be.”

Looking satisfied, Tharion took a step backward until he stood next to Kalliana again. “Now let us determine the truth about Eli Strone, and learn whether or not we can sleep safely tonight.”

Guild Master Tharion gestured, and one of the white-sashed Guild children came up to Kalliana bearing an ornate brass and copper case that held a booster dose of the precious Veritas drug. Kalliana took the case without smiling, and the white-robed child ran back to her companions.

From the gilded, fingerprint-locked cache, Kalliana withdrew one of the sky-blue Veritas capsules. She rolled its smooth shape in her palm. Then, turning her back to the crowd and looking up at the towering metal curves of the Guild Headquarters, she popped the pill into her mouth.

Drawing a long breath, she cracked down on the capsule to make it work faster. The bitter syrup spilled along her tongue, down her throat. She swallowed repeatedly as she gazed up at the motto of the Truthsayers Guild emblazoned on the metal bulkhead over the arching structure of the derelict starship. She stared at it hypnotically, concentrating, focusing.

Truth Holds No Secrets.

Kalliana straightened her white robe, swallowed, and let the Veritas boil within her mind. She closed her dusty blue eyes, nodded, then opened them again. One of the elite guards gestured. From the detention decks beneath the Guild Headquarters, Eli Strone emerged.

Already feeling the psychic rush building in her mind, Kalliana turned to look as the accused murderer was brought before her.

iv

When Strone walked forward, a mental hush fell over the crowd. Kalliana detected a faint, indescribable change in the smell of the air, like ozone. A cool breeze rippled across her white robes, as if presaging a storm from the gunmetal gray clouds. She stiffened.

Tall and angular, Eli Strone seemed incredibly placid. His face showed nothing but peace, and he presented a totally cooperative demeanor—but the sol-pol guards had shackled his ankles and chained his wrists, nonetheless. These were primarily symbolic bonds, because if Kalliana pronounced him innocent, she would remove the chains herself, freeing Strone in front of all the spectators. But the bonds also kept the prisoner under control on the off chance that he turned violent.

Kalliana looked down at the accused, bracing herself, but not yet releasing her telepathic abilities. She wasn’t ready, but she couldn’t show it. She rubbed sweaty palms against her white robe. The weight of the golden collar on her shoulders seemed to increase as she studied the man before her.

The big man wore a gray jumpsuit, barefoot, bare-handed. His knuckles were large and bony, his wide hands callused as if he was accustomed to heavy labor. His hair was a rich, chocolate brown, cut short, but with an unruliness that implied wild curls. What did his thoughts hold?

If Strone had actually committed the killings, Kalliana would find out the moment she looked into his mind—and he knew it. The entire justice system depended on the infallibility of the Veritas drug. No one on Atlas could get away with a crime if brought before a telepathic Truthsayer. The guilty ones often confessed and accepted a lighter punishment rather than be taken before a Truthsayer. Therefore, since Strone insisted he was innocent, Guild Master Tharion’s suggested conspiracy might indeed be true. And that would mean the real murderer remained out in society, uncaught.

Eli Strone stood directly before her, gazing into the bright wash of translucent sky. Something about him made Kalliana’s skin crawl: an inhuman quality that made him seem aloof from his own circumstances. His eyes, the color of rusty water, were wide, almost circular with unblinking detachment. Guilty or not, he was a strange one, no question about that.

Strone gave her a thin-lipped smile and raised his chin. Kalliana focused her mind. The sol-pol guards placed their hands on their weapons. The gathered audience in the plaza held its breath.

Kalliana touched Eli Strone’s temples with her short delicate fingers. She closed her eyes —

And entered a chamber of horrors.

v

The first work gang of eight: he had shot them all in the middle of the night as they slept huddled for warmth under their tents in the wasteland. The blood was black as oil in the starlight.

Strone cleared his thoughts to make it easy for Kalliana. Proud, he wanted the Truthsayer to see, to understand. He thought of nothing but what he had done to those abominably guilty human beings. He expected some sort of reward for what he had done.

Strone had been with the team only three days—but that was enough for him to see their sins, the guilt written all over their faces, their expressions, their manners. They coveted things that didn’t belong to them, they fantasized about other men’s wives, they thought of violence toward one another. They were so twisted. Their evil ran so very deep. In these outlying lands there was no one to dispense justice … no one but himself.

Sick with revulsion at their guilt, Strone had crept out of his own tent, blinking his eyes in the watery light of the silent greenish aurora overhead. The mag-lev rail under construction stood like a sentinel, a silver line drawn by a hooked claw across the rocky landscape, raised up on boxlike pedestals with induction coils, transformers, and magnetic boosters. Dust blew across the open desert like a lost sigh.

Strone had killed the sentry first, lulling the man by distracting him, volunteering to take night watch for a few hours since he couldn’t sleep anyway. Then, Strone had balled his fist and punched like a sledgehammer into the side of the man’s head, cracking the eggshell-thin temple bone. As the sentry slumped, Strone wrapped his forearm around the man’s neck, settling the chin into the crook of his elbow. He knelt, using his knee and his back muscles to snap the sentry’s neck so thoroughly that Strone could have ripped his entire head off if he had pulled just a little harder. That wouldn’t be necessary, though.

He took the sentry’s weapon and with fast, cold efficiency, walked from tent to tent, firing into the seven flimsy shelters. A few workers, awakened by the sound of gunfire but still groggy, staggered out, fumbling with the flap zippers even as he shot them. They sprawled on the ground, half out of their tents. Some of them groaned in pain. And he shot them again.

They had continued thinking evil thoughts even in their last moments of life. Strone could tell. He could read their sins.

Eli Strone had been brought up believing that the Truthsayers were dispensers of justice, that the white-robed telepaths kept all crime and sin in abeyance. But he had learned that not even the Truthsayers were perfect. And though they worked diligently, evil still ran rampant among the citizenry. Even in First Landing the Guild couldn’t possibly handle it all. There was just too much.

In rare and secret instances, Strone had seen others peripherally able to read thoughts, common people given a brief and illegal rush of telepathy, not the long-standing ability of a Truthsayer, but enough to know the truth. He had heard rumors about black market availability of the Veritas drug, normally held in such tight control by the Guild.

Strone, though, had his own access to the truth. He was a vigilante, who could sense the evil lurking inside the other colonists. And he would quietly assist the Truthsayers in their quest for justice. It was his mission ….

Leaving the bodies behind at the first site, Strone had walked along the path of the mag-lev rail until he found another group of seven workers and offered them his services.

The second group were all Pilgrims, the quiet religious order who wore dark woolen clothes despite the heat. The Pilgrim crew gladly accepted the help of Eli Strone, then set about attempting to convert him to their religion, but Strone had no interest. His secret powers revealed the hypocrisy in their facial expressions. He could see the hidden desires they harbored within themselves, the evil thoughts, the twisted dreams.

His killing was quieter and more efficient this time. Strone slipped from tent to tent in the deepness of the night. With a knife blade, he made no sound, and neither did the cooling bodies as they twitched and spilled their blood on the ground while Strone held a broad callused hand across their mouths and noses. A few Pilgrims thrashed and fought even after he had slit their throats, but their struggles soon faded.

He was drenched with blood when he finished punishing the second camp, his clothes sticky, his skin painted copper red. He stripped himself naked and scoured his body with handfuls of sand until his flesh felt tingly and raw, and he was cleansed, inside and out, with the purging fire of justice. He was like the Truthsayers he so greatly revered. He didn’t need the Veritas drug, because the power of rightness was on his side ….

As Kalliana touched his forehead, Strone’s thoughts continued to hammer her, cold and impersonal, a simple recitation of factual memories, like a sol-pol incident report. Despite her revulsion, she was forced to view all the flashbacks through his eyes. Strone’s lack of emotion nauseated her just as much as the vivid slaughter. He continued to pour out his thoughts eagerly, as if offering her a gift:

The members of the third camp looked at him with greater suspicion when he offered to join their detail. These were exiles guarded by two sol-pols, people convicted of crimes and put to hard work for Carsus Holding, blasting and leveling the grade for the mag-lev rail.

Strone wore a rough, ill-fitting robe stolen from one of the Pilgrims. The guards looked strangely at his tattered clothing. They asked him his name, and he gave it freely. He had nothing to hide, since no one had yet learned of the previous murders. As a former member of the esteemed elite guard, he had no blot on his record. He was a righteous man.

Warily, they accepted him because the work team had fallen behind schedule. They had several more kilometers of rail to lay down before they could take furlough back at the main village.

Within three nights it was Strone’s turn to help with the cooking, a heavily spiced rice dish. He drugged them all with a small supply of stenn, often used by sol-pols to quell disturbances. Before leaving the Guild, Strone had kept the stenn given to him as an elite guard. He put it to good use now. No one tasted the paralysis drug mingled with the pungent spices.

All the victims lay helpless as darkness fell. A line of scarlet clouds clumped on the flat desert horizon. Strone withdrew his most prized equipment, scalpels and pliers. He had planned ahead, dreaming of this day. They all deserved it.

He was in no hurry, so he took his time with this group. They were paralyzed and could not run—but they could still scream. He made one incision with the scalpel in exchange for every outcry they made, continuing his tally until they could make no more sound.

It took him all night long. These people were very evil ….

Kalliana tore herself away, reeling backward. More darkness lay deeper, more secrets, a tangled labyrinth of shock and betrayal—information Kalliana did not dare to witness. She fled, coming back to herself.

Eli Strone looked up at her with an open eagerness, like a pet waiting to be praised by its master.

“Guilty,” Kalliana choked. “Guilty!” She staggered away and fell to her knees. The sol-pols rushed forward to grab the shackled Strone as he stood gaping at her in shock, too surprised even to struggle.

“But you saw,” he said. “You saw my reasons! You know!”

In answer Kalliana felt revulsion rush upward inside her, as if a fist had plunged into her stomach, and she vomited onto the speaking platform. The thoughts of all the crowded people sliced at the edges of her mind like a whirlwind of razor blades.

“But how can you call me guilty?” Strone wailed.

Kalliana couldn’t bear to open her eyes as the elite guard caught her, supporting her by the shoulders and arms as she slumped. They rushed her back to the sanctuary of Guild Headquarters.

CHAPTER
2
i

Craning his neck to gaze up into a sky that had been threatening rain for days, Troy Boren watched the space elevator car come down through the clouds. It hung from a braided diamond-fiber thread like fine spider silk thousands of kilometers long.

Sol-pol guards opened the chain-link security fence around the anchor point as the space elevator glided down, silently propelled by motivators along the unseverable cable. Troy squinted at the approaching shape, an artifact of old Earth technology: its armored walls were streaked with tarnish and ionization scars from daily trips to orbit and back over two centuries.

Troy imagined what it must have been like so long ago, when conditions were even more rugged than now. Upon their arrival at the raw, new planet, the original colonists had lived in orbit aboard a platform detached from the main shell of the ship. After several years they had dropped the elevator cable and anchored it at the place that would become First Landing, then they had begun their mass exodus down to the surface….

Now the cylindrical elevator car thrummed as it decelerated on the sturdy cable. A complicated network of servomotors, impellers, tension sensors, docking attachments, and control apparatus crowned its roof, looking as if someone had hammered random scrap components into place without prior planning. But the elevator worked, and it had always worked, and Troy had no doubt that it would continue to work for as long as he lived.

He hadn’t grown tired of the sight yet, not in his three weeks at the new job in First Landing. The space elevator seemed so … majestic. He squinted his bright, hazel eyes and watched the car descend. A wonder-filled smile crossed his face.

“All right, everybody, prepare for arrival,” Cren shouted. Troy’s boss worked with a feverish intensity that exhausted him just to watch. “Got it this time, Boren? Don’t screw up again. Training period is over. I don’t care who your father paid off.”

“Yes, sir!” Troy nodded, then glanced upward again, unable to tear his gaze from the elevator car’s final descent toward the anchor point.

“Oh, stop gawking,” Cren said. “You make me sick. It’s embarrassing to have such a starstruck kid on my crew. Go over there and get ready. You got the cargo manifests?”

“Uh, yes sir!” Troy waved the four paper cards printed with itemized lists of supplies, as if his boss might not believe him. He wondered how long it would take for Cren to believe in his competence.

“Be sure you get the damned numbers right this time. I don’t think it’ll stretch your mental capacity.” With a disgusted look, Cren went off to harass someone else. He clapped his hands as he flitted like a sand flea from worker to worker, double-checking, issuing orders, reinforcing his control.

Troy stared nervously down at the manifest cards in his hands, as if that could prevent him from making another mistake. Only two weeks ago he had transposed some digits in two shipments, which sent valuable cargo off to a pair of landholders who had not paid for it—and who refused, even on threat of sol-pol intervention, to return the precious resources that had arrived at their cargo stations. The Landholders Council and the Guild Mediators had been brought in and were even now working to settle the dispute. Cren had never let Troy forget just how much trouble his incompetence had caused.

“Never again,” Cren had said, leaning close enough to Troy that the young man could count the bloodshot lines on his boss’s eyeballs. Troy knew Cren got more enjoyment out of intimidating his workers than in getting the job done well. “Don’t you ever even dream of putting me through this another time.”

Troy was of medium height and thin, fidgety as he moved from one task to another. His family had been frustrated with his distractibility, unable to comprehend why he couldn’t just work hard and be content with his lot in life like the rest of them were. He just wasn’t cut out for a life as a miner, though.

He had done a brief stint on an ore hauler in one of the mine shafts, but he simply could not handle the strenuous physical toil. He had been transferred to one of the chemical leaching plants, and finally to an inventory shop, where he had received some of his training on computers. He had been reprimanded twice for letting his thoughts wander, for doodling, for letting the paperwork pile up. His mother had lectured him, making everything worse. Though he loved them, like a dutiful son, Troy couldn’t understand his family, why they were blind to dreams and possibilities, why they saw no further into the future than the next day—until it involved them directly.

Once the elevator car docked, Troy’s job was to go through the manifests and inspect every item as it came off the ramp, tallying it with the orders from various landholders, the Council, the Truthsayers Guild, merchants, or wealthy private citizens. When all the shipments had been removed and stored in the low holding warehouse for later distribution, and their totals entered into the computer systems, Troy would hand the double-checked manifests to Cren, who would then determine an equivalent amount of supplies to be sent back up to the Platform in exchange: water, canisters of air, craftwork, and hydroponically grown food or actual agricultural produce.

Under the overcast sky Troy and a dozen coworkers marched into the fenced area as the car settled onto its toroidal supports and padded bumpers. Chain links rattled as the fence gates moved apart. Two sol-pols stood at their station, looking bored; they had seen the car come and go hundreds of times.

Stalls lined the streets around the anchor point. First Landing’s marketplace bustled with merchants selling oddities, from desperately needed supplies to valueless trinkets: new fossils dug up in the mountain holdings, gaudy gemstones, exotic plants grown in private greenhouses.

The mag-lev lines from each landholding ran straight into First Landing at the large supply hub and boarding station. Single-passenger cars whistled in from the outlying areas, and cargo haulers trundled along the rails delivering supplies and resources: sweet-smelling pine lumber from Toth Holding, fish and kelp and bricks from Sardili Shores, salt and processed chemicals from the dry lakebeds of Dokken Holding.

As the other workers plodded through the elevator arrival procedures, Troy watched a big ore hauler come in from Koman Holding. As the cargo hauler locked itself down, burly miners sprang out, reminding him of his home and family up in the Mining District … how his father’s skin was always grimy from work in the ore shafts, his fingernails black no matter how much scrubbing he did. His squat mother had developed sloped shoulders and biceps as large as hams from her own backbreaking labor.

Troy’s family knew full well he could not have handled such a life. His little sister Rissbeth belittled him incessantly about being a weakling. His older sister Leisa understood and loved him unconditionally, though she had no idea what advice to give him. But Troy’s gruff father Rambra had unexpectedly rescued him. Paying a large bonus out of their family savings—all the credits he had set aside from his years of work—Rambra had petitioned their landholder, Victoria Koman herself, and she had found Troy a job in First Landing.

His job at the anchor point had been a godsend, and he knew his family had pinned all their hopes on the slim chance of his success. They gambled on him working his way up in the world, and finding a spot for them, too, so that they could escape from the mines.

If he could only establish a foothold here, perhaps Troy could find jobs for his sisters, a new position for his father, anything to free them from their cramped quarters and daily drudgery. Troy had vowed to do his best, but the way Cren treated him, he didn’t think his chances were too great.

On one of the first days, the boss had yanked him aside for a lecture. Cren jabbed a finger at Troy, keeping his voice low. “I don’t like being ordered to hire a redneck yokel from dirt-digger Koman Holding,” he said. “I don’t care who your father is or what he did, but this isn’t a free ride for you. I’m going to watch you closer than any of my other team members—because if you don’t deserve to keep your job here, there are plenty of others who do. Don’t think your father is going to get you out of trouble again.”

Troy swallowed and shook his head. “No, sir. He can’t—he has no money left. He spent it all just to get me this job.”

Now, Troy looked around him, wide eyed at the big city, where citizens went about their jobs as if everyone on Atlas was so blessed. Sol-pol guards stood at the corners, keeping order. Pilgrims in hooded robes moved about, muttering to themselves. Representatives from the outer landholdings met to make deals, trade supplies, and increase their own power. The space elevator landed with a thunking sound of locks and stabilizers.

Cren yelled at Troy again. “Hey, Boren—I’ve got a suggestion. Quit daydreaming! Come help us unload. Do your work, dammit! The car is down.”

Troy snapped out of his reverie and ran to do his job.

ii

When the tall elevator car opened its bottom level, two passengers disembarked, stepping carefully onto the ramp the workers had rolled up and clamped into position by the access hatch. Troy was fascinated by the two Guild Mediators, in their white robes and crimson sashes, who had gone up to inspect operations on the Platform. A pair of elite guards also emerged from the elevator, escorting the Mediators.

When the passengers were clear and checked through security, Troy and his coworkers entered the cramped main chamber of the elevator, bumping shoulders as they wrestled with the containers lashed down in the lower storage bay.

Troy held the manifest cards, shuffling them as he tried to keep track of everything that came out of the elevator. He was especially careful not to get distracted and miss an item. Everything had its place on his list and in the storage warehouse.

Over by the chain-link fences Cren stood watching, checking each activity around him as if he could somehow keep control through the intensity of his scrutiny. Troy worked with greater diligence, trying not to reveal that he knew he was being watched.

Men in cargo hauler jumpsuits unloaded the sealed packages of replacement computerware: perfectly sandwiched circuits grown in orbit, sapphire films laid down in impedance paths on wafers, then sliced into specially patterned chips that followed old templates from Earth.

The man in charge of the Platform, Kareem Sondheim, whose property and power rested in orbit, was called the “landholder without land.” The ancient man was said to be one of the original occupants of the first colony ship that had arrived 231 years earlier. Sondheim had never set foot on Atlas. He had remained alive by staying in zero gravity and indulging in sophisticated geriatric treatments that were not available on the surface.

Sondheim kept control of the Platform’s genetic library of embryos and cloning sequences the colonists had brought from Earth; its vast array of species, a veritable Noah’s ark, would provide the foundation of an Earthlike ecosystem on a new world.

Unfortunately, Atlas had proved more inhospitable than they had expected.

The planet’s atmosphere and climate were tolerable, with the right temperature range and an amenable mix of component gases. But Atlas was just at the very cusp of bringing forth life of its own. Its fledgling ecosystem was shallow and undiversified, with only a few primitive species, most of them in the cradle of the sea. The soil was utterly barren, forcing the colonists to begin their work several steps farther down the chain than they had hoped.

The native biochemistry was incompatible with human systems, but for a very few exceptions, such as the Veritas drug. The planetary ecology and the new Terran organic matrix were two independent and parallel paths.

Unable to turn back to Earth across the gulf of a fifty-year voyage, the colonists had to start from scratch, and they had held on by their fingernails, gradually using up what supplies they had brought with them. Separated from assistance by half a century, they could not simply send home for a new batch of supplies. The colony’s technical resources had been only marginally replenished by the four other ships that had arrived in the intervening years.

Landholders continued to claim swaths of land, bombarding them with fertilizers, fixing nitrogen, irrigating deserts, and plowing under grasses, mosses, algae they had planted to lay down a nutritive soil matrix. New life forms were introduced experimentally and with great caution once they were carefully selected from the genetic library on the Platform….

As the packages were unloaded from the elevator, Troy documented the computer chips, finding their notation on his manifests, then moved on to log a series of insulated fish tanks for Dokken Holding. The tanks were filled with thousands of trout and salmon fry that might find enough to eat among the strands of algae and the dragonfly larvae Franz Dokken had previously introduced into his warm artificial ponds.

Toth Holding had ordered cages and cages of live chicks grown from embryos aboard the Platform, and the birds were now ready to be turned loose in the grain debris in the fields.

Muttering to himself to verify his own markings, Troy moved about to inspect the cargo with loose manifest pages fluttering in his hand. He found a trio of cages holding three water buffalo calves, small and fragile and bleating. The beasts had knobby knees and large wet nostrils. Their dark eyes flicked around in confusion. According to the manifest, the water buffalo would be put to work in the rice fields in the river delta at Sardili Shores.

When someone called for a new species—such as these water buffalo, or the chickens—biological technicians on the Platform took the stored embryos from their precious library, cloned them, and grew the new animals to their birth age. The offspring were then shipped down on the space elevator.

The cargo haulers heaved the water buffalo cages out of the elevator car, bumping into each other and wrestling the beasts onto the concrete receiving area. Troy followed them briskly, needing to verify the serial numbers tattooed in the animals’ ears and scribbling on his manifest sheets.

The calves shifted awkwardly in their cages, trying to maintain their footing. Suddenly, one of the handlers slipped and let loose his corner of the cage. It crashed to the ground with a loud noise that triggered a panicked reaction. The female handler shouted and scolded her partner. The water buffalo bleated a pitiful sound.

On the pad the handlers roughly set down their wire mesh cages containing thousands of cheeping chicks, not noticing that one door had not been fastened properly. Suddenly the front of the cage sprang open, spilling a chaotic flock of fuzzy yellow chicks that scattered chirping across the landing area. Some ran toward the toroidal supports and padded bumpers around the anchor point where the elevator had come to rest.

“Hey!” Cren shouted. The handlers dropped what they were doing and rushed to help. “Get those chicks! They’re all accountable.”

Already unbalanced, the water buffalo cage tipped over as the calf tried to move. The metal crashing on the concrete sounded like thunder, which further startled the already-panicked chicks. The pathetic calf lowed as if bemoaning its fate, and the other two calves set up a similar racket. The two handlers yelled at each other, voices raised over the din.

Troy had been shuffling through his manifest sheets, but now he stuffed the papers in his various pockets as he ran to help out.

The burly handlers seemed to think the best way to catch chicks was to lunge after them, large hands outspread. But the fuzzy birds simmered across the area, rushing toward the chain-link fence.

The four sol-pols leaped into action, pointing their weapons at the escaped birds, as if their threatening posture could help.

Troy crept toward some of the chicks, whistling cheerily at them, extending his hands and trying to coax them nearer. He nabbed one, which squirmed and pecked at him, peeping comically, but Troy didn’t let go until he had stuffed it back in its cage.

The people in the merchant district paused to observe the spectacle. Apparently, the frantic action of workers scrambling about was worth giving up a few minutes of business. Troy shook his head, muttering to himself that this was the most spectacular entertainment the citizens had seen since the grim judgment of Eli Strone several days earlier. He wondered what might come next—a comet striking the planet and obliterating all life?

One of the handlers managed to find a shovel and used it unceremoniously to scoop up five chicks at a time, depositing them back in the wire cage. Downy feathers flew in the air like a seed storm in one of the kenaf fields.

On the other side of the fence Cren used his palms to rattle the chain link, which frightened away the chicks that were trying to work their way through the openings in the wire. They ran around in circles, cheeping in terror.

It took the better part of an hour to recapture the birds. But the victory was not without casualties. Three of the delicate chicks had been killed in the roundup, and another had a broken leg.

Troy sighed, knowing he had done a good enough job, even as Cren used a low tone of voice to rail at the handlers for their stupidity and clumsiness. Cren checked out the water buffalo calves, then sent them to the big holding warehouse. The following morning they would be whisked off on the mag-lev to Sardili Shores.

At the end of his shift, Troy handed in his crumpled manifest sheets listing his tally of the computer chips, pharmaceuticals, supplies of the Truthsayers’ precious Veritas drug, and live animal cargo.

He shook his head, thinking again of the frantic escape attempt by the baby chickens, the mishandling of the water buffalo calves. This wasn’t exactly what he had expected when he left the Mining District to take a respectable job as a documentor for First Landing.

Oh, well. All in a day’s work.

iii

As evening gathered around the city, and the glass-and-steel buildings lit up with hydroelectric power, Troy settled in to his small rooms. The new place in the multiple-dwelling complex was still unfamiliar to him, and he reveled in the delicious privacy. He could think and breathe and not bump into anybody else when he decided to daydream. It seemed like heaven.

For too long Troy had been cramped in the same apartment with his mother and father and sisters, listening to loud arguments, tedious conversations about the day’s events (which always sounded the same to him, though his mother and father went through the same dialog every evening, as if it were a ritual). He smelled Rissbeth’s acrid homemade perfume, endured entire days without five minutes of privacy or quiet. For release, he dabbled with painting, strictly for his own enjoyment, though his mother resented the expenditure on useless items and his little sister criticized his work.

Their quarters had become even more crowded when Leisa married and brought her husband to live with them; he had lost much of his older sister’s attention as well, one of the few tolerable aspects of his life there. No doubt Leisa and her husband would soon wish to start a family—a large one, as most colonists preferred—and that would take up even more space. But these new rooms were Troy’s own space, and he had already begun to think of it as his “home.”

After preparing a meal of hydroponic vegetables and a few small morsels of cultured turkey and setting it to cook, he settled back to unwind and to begin painting. What a luxury to indulge himself with a hobby. He had been experimenting with new paints available from First Landing vendors, vibrant colors he had never before seen in the small merchant shops up in Koman Holding. Brilliant blues, reds, and yellows made from cobalt and cinnabar and uranium oxide.

He dabbed designs with his paint. Some of his fresh work hung on the walls, like trophies. Nothing very good, he knew, but Troy enjoyed the soothing yet exhilarating act of painting. He’d experimented with different techniques, different styles. His abstract imitations were complete failures—but then, he wasn’t quite sure how to tell when an abstract painting “failed.”

He preferred painting imaginary landscapes, looking out upon the vastness of Atlas with his mind’s eye. He had already drawn the low, rocky hills of Koman Holding, honeycombed with mine shafts. He swirled the colors, sketching out another barren landscape—but this time adding forests, swamps, beautiful birds spreading their wings to display remarkable plumage in the sunlight as they glided across the air … pure fantasy.

Troy hummed to himself, scratching his curly, light brown hair. Muffled noises came through the thin walls, his neighbors arguing, the children crying. He had lived his life among the sounds of other people, so it didn’t bother him, but he would have preferred to overhear a happy family.

He painted part of a granite outcropping, adding fanciful wind-bent cypress trees in the crannies of the rock … and then on impulse he sketched in some stylized mountain sheep. He recognized that he was mixing a great many ecosystems here—accuracy was not his goal at the moment. He looked at the mountain sheep and smiled.

He went to change his clothes, pulling on a wool sweater Leisa had made for him (though her new husband grumbled that it was a waste of expensive Bondalar yarn). As he folded up his work pants, Troy heard a faint and unexpected crinkling sound. He reached into his back pocket to find one of the wayward manifest sheets. He must have thrust it there during the chaos of the escaping chicks.

Then the implications struck him. He blinked rapidly, and his throat tightened like a piece of gnarled wood. He had recorded all of the deliveries from the elevator car, but without this last sheet he had missed several items. The logs wouldn’t match—and that meant big trouble.

Troy sighed and sank into a seat beside the bed, wearing the pullover sweater but leaving his pants crumpled on the floor. He looked at the manifest sheet and groaned. Cren would have his hide for this—he just knew it! After his previous mistake of the transposed shipments, his boss would be utterly unforgiving. No more chances. After only three weeks, Cren would have an excuse to send him whipped back home, no doubt imagining a preposterous chain of disastrous effects.

Red-faced, Cren would yell, “This error could set up echoes throughout the entire system, mistake upon mistake, leading to misdirected supplies, unreported shipments, and major upheavals in the economy of Atlas itself!”

Troy sighed. “Or more likely Cren will be the only one to notice, and I’ll still be on the next mag-lev car back to Koman Holding.” He would spend the rest of his life down in the shafts, coming home to a crowded apartment no bigger than a cargo container, with his own family glaring at him because he failed them in their one opportunity to get a foothold in the city.

He didn’t want to go back to the Mining District.

Troy ran his fingers over the rough scrap of paper in his hands. He knew exactly how he could fix this mixup, if he could get back to the holding warehouse and the inventory terminals before anyone noticed. Troy knew the appropriate passwords to access the records computers—he had been so proud when Cren had grudgingly given him the access codes the week before.

The idea caught hold, and he clutched it like a drowning man clutched a twig. If he could log in these receipts before the space elevator began its return journey up to the Platform, no one would be the wiser. Sondheim would get his expected shipment, and First Landing’s records would accurately reflect the supplies that had come down.

Troy felt so stupid. Abruptly, the smell of his dinner overheating on the stove unit penetrated his melancholy, and he dashed into the kitchenette to remove his now soggy and overcooked vegetables.

He would wait a few hours yet, go in much later that night and make a few quick adjustments on the computer. Simple enough. No one would ever know. His stomach was already tied into a knot of nervousness, but this would be the quickest and safest solution.

Simple, he thought. Simple.

CHAPTER
3
i

The storm front finally rolled in just after dark, pelting down clean fresh rain that gave the air a metallic tang, slicking down the streets with muddy runoff that gurgled in the gutters. Breezes tore the clouds to shreds, and the tattered remnants scudded across the sky, clearing patches of night flecked with stars.

The wet cobblestones of First Landing’s thoroughfares looked oily under the wavering aurora, and silted runoff curled through drainage channels. Because of the heavy weather, most streets were deserted. Only a few vendors of fried vegetables, sweet desserts, and warm beverages remained open to catch brave customers. The smell of hot oil, burned honey, and watery coffee mixed with the scent of rain.

Four figures moved through the wet shadows, keeping to narrow alleys when possible. Two sol-pols took the point, wearing deep blue uniforms that turned them into silhouettes in the falling darkness.

A tall bald man with a craggy face, his features seemingly carved out of stone with a blunt chisel, strode confidently behind the guards, taking long steps in his loose gray jalaba. The fourth man betrayed the greatest eagerness, but he hung back behind the bald man, glancing furtively about. “Maximillian—”

The bald man cut him off with a quick gesture of his broad hand. “Don’t worry, Cialben. We have everything we need.”

“But what if we’re stopped?” Cialben pressed.

“We won’t be stopped. We’re obviously going about official business. We’re accompanied by two sol-pols.”

“Sol-pols assigned to Dokken Holding, not First Landing—”

“Who’s going to stop us?” Maximillian asked in a sharp tone.

Cialben swallowed and looked ahead to the stadium-sized lit area where the space elevator car sat docked, ready for resupply in the morning. “I’ve just never picked up a shipment myself, that’s all. Is this the way it’s always done?”

“It’s different every time,” Maximillian answered. “Dokken insisted you come along this time.”

“He’s never done that before either, not in ten years of this kind of scut work. You don’t think that’s unusual?”

“You must learn to trust people,” Maximillian said.

“Dokken’s the one who taught me not to trust anybody,” Cialben said in exasperation.

“Stop asking questions,” Maximillian said.

Cialben muttered. The sol-pols said nothing—they rarely did.

The guards led the way through the streets with no indication of uneasiness. Cialben and Maximillian had an excuse if they were stopped and questioned … but Dokken had made it clear that he preferred they not be questioned.

The Veritas drug was rigidly controlled by the Truthsayers Guild, but Cialben managed to distribute a small fraction of it to the black market. He had never dared to ask what sort of arrangement the powerful landholder Franz Dokken had made with Kareem Sondheim up on the Platform, how he obtained capsules skimmed from the supplies allotted only to Truthsayers. By Atlas law—established by the Guild itself, of course—no one but a designated Truthsayer was allowed to use the mind-boosting drug.

That didn’t mean there was no demand elsewhere, though. Cialben fed that demand.

True, only Truthsayers could use the Veritas to maximum effect. Their bodies had built up a tolerance from a lifelong exposure to the drug. For them the psychic boost lasted hours or days, whereas in a regular human the Veritas rush was good for only a few seconds.

But, oh, those seconds! Like having a dozen minds at once, lifetimes of memories, experiences right at his mental fingertips … though they faded as fast as the drug did in his nonacclimated system. Short-term memories, like vanishing dreams.

Cialben had taken Veritas himself back in the early days, when Dokken had used him as a spy numerous times to get an edge in the constant power struggle for land. Cialben had performed admirably each time, though Dokken had been miserly with his rewards.

But Dokken had flown into a rage when Cialben had once dared to carry Veritas in his presence, intending to use it later for enjoyment among the servants … possibly even dipping into the mind of Dokken’s beautiful lover Schandra. He hadn’t anticipated Dokken’s violent reaction. In a terrifying instant Maximillian, Dokken’s faithful and powerful manservant, had locked Cialben’s arms behind his back, driving him to his knees in the private drawing room of the villa. Franz Dokken had glared down at him, his teeth bared in anger that transformed him into a beast.

“I do like secrets, Cialben,” Dokken had whispered, “especially when they belong to someone else.” His voice was low and cold. “But I want to keep my own secrets. You are never to use Veritas in my presence. Is that understood?”

Cialben, his neck aching from staring up at the landholder, tried to nod. Maximillian’s powerful fist clutched Cialben’s short graying hair, yanking his head up so that he gazed directly into Dokken’s tanned face.

“I understand,” Cialben said. “Really, I do.”

“No one on Dokken Holding is to use this drug, but you’re free to sell it to all the other landholders. I know how destabilizing Veritas can be. Let my rivals tear themselves apart.”

Since that time, they had indeed kept their understanding—but now, tonight, he and Maximillian had been sent all the way in to First Landing to obtain a large shipment of Veritas capsules, the largest delivery ever. If Guild Master Tharion found out about it, he would probably have a cerebral hemorrhage.

The group of four splashed through the darkening streets. The air jealously held on to its damp coolness, and Cialben felt his hands growing numb. He stepped in a puddle, which made his ankle cold and wet. Cialben shook his foot. Maximillian gestured for him to hurry. Faint steam curled from his breath.

The bright lights of the elevator anchor point stood in front of them. A squad of First Landing sol-pols stood around the chain-link fence, huddled together to keep warm. But Cialben knew the shipment wasn’t on the elevator. It remained in the inventory warehouse, where the computers and shipping manifests were kept, along with the supplies waiting to be distributed to the outer holdings.

The inventory warehouse was a low, one-story building made of steel supports, darkened glass windows, and adobe bricks, only one building in a district of similar warehouses. The group approached from the rear. Maximillian showed not the slightest tension.

While the regular night shift sol-pols had established a firm presence at the anchor point, the inventory warehouse had been locked and left alone. Their two sol-pols slipped toward the building. The shorter of them withdrew an access key card and slid it in to the sealed door.

The door opened silently, letting Maximillian and Cialben enter. Lined with pale bricks, the entrance yawned like a cave. Faint lights burned inside, tiny illumination resisting complete darkness and leaving only murk.

“How can you be sure the warehouse is empty?” Cialben said.

Maximillian looked down at him with scorn, his craggy face creasing in distaste. “Look how dark it is.”

They crouched inside, using their hand illuminators to send bright spears of light into the shadows. “Shouldn’t be hard to find,” Cialben whispered, moving forward, still reluctant to take the lead. One of the sol-pols remained stationed at the door while Cialben, Maximillian, and the second guard went past administrative cubicles equipped with old computer systems and paper files, to the chill warehouse section.

“This way.” Maximillian’s pale gray outfit made him look like a ghost in the dimness.

A clutter of canisters, supply crates, and cages waited in the rear. The boxes of computer chips and sterilized pharmaceuticals had been placed in neatly ordered bins along one wall. The cold concrete floor made flat echoes of their footsteps as they walked.

Cialben flashed his light around. Segmented metal doors rolled up for loading heavy transports; beside them stood bins of metal sheeting, girders, and other supplies. Sweet, resinous lumber had been stacked in the middle of the concrete pad. Outside in separate storage barns were further shipments, bulky items brought in from one holding and marked for commercial distribution to the highest bidders.

In the livestock section Cialben went to a wire cage filled with hopping, cheeping chicks. The stupid birds had spilled their water and dumped feed all over the bottom of their cages. They looked filthy.

“Here,” Maximillian said, squatting by one of the large cages. “Shine the light over here.”

Inside, the black water buffalo calf seemed eager for attention, lowing loudly. Its dark eyes were wet and glistening. It tilted its squarish nose upward as if seeking milk from a mother it had never had. The clone-grown calf knew nothing of its own existence.

“Not this one,” Maximillian said, squinting at the tattoo in the calf’s ear. He moved to a second cage. The other calf let out a bellow, demanding yet shy. “Here.”

He unfastened the catch on the wire cage and swung open the door. The calf backed away clumsily, uncertain but with nowhere to go. Maximillian banged the back of the cage with the flat of his hands rattling the wires. The startled animal stumbled out, lowing again.

Cialben gently put an arm around the calf’s neck to keep it from running loose in the warehouse. Grateful, the animal nuzzled his hands with a wet nose. An overturned aluminum water dish sat dry at the bottom of the cage.

“In a water buffalo?” Cialben said. “Is Sondheim running out of ideas? Or is this one of Dieter’s sick suggestions?”

“No one asked me how to do it,” Maximillian said, then fixed a stony glare on Cialben. “And no one asked you either.”

The water buffalo mooed again, and Cialben patted its neck to hush it. The calf nuzzled his hand, running a long, wet tongue along his palm.

Maximillian slipped a long wide-bladed knife from a sheath at his hip, and in a single lightning movement drove the blade hard against the calf’s side. A quick thrust between the ribs, then a second full-muscled shove to drive the point all the way into the calf’s heart.

The animal bleated in shock, but was dead before it could move. Its eyes rolled up, glassy. Its body shuddered and spilled blood all over the concrete floor as it fell.

Cialben stepped back to keep from being sprayed.

With the carcass still twitching, Maximillian knelt and, tugging on a pair of rubber gloves, withdrew the knife and gutted the calf. He worked without speaking, breathing hard from the strenuous activity.

Cialben watched the slaughter with eager horror, his throat dry, his lips peeled back in a combined grin and wince. Maximillian’s arms were slick with red up to his elbows, far higher than the gloves reached. Using both arms Maximillian heaved out the calf’s entrails, then sliced open the largest stomach to pull out a plastic-wrapped package.

Dokken’s manservant held the bloody packet in his gloved hands and gestured for the sol-pols. The second guard rushed forward from his post at the door. The first man bent over the carcass, choosing the best handhold. The two strong men lifted up the dead water buffalo, and together they lugged it, still dripping blood, out of the warehouse. They disappeared into the night. The fresh veal—a delicacy read about in the archives but never tasted by any living person on the planet—would bring a high price indeed.

Maximillian used his slippery fingers to unwrap the folded plastic of the hidden package. He unrolled the outer wrapping and exposed a treasure.

Cialben gasped. He had never before seen so much in a single shipment. Hundreds and hundreds of sky-blue capsules of the Veritas drug.

More truth than all of Atlas could comprehend.

ii

With a stretching sound and then a snap, Maximillian removed the rubber glove from his left hand, carefully tucking it into the pocket of his gray cotton jalaba, where it left a bloody smear.

Cialben kept his eyes fixed hungrily on the hoard of Veritas, dreaming of the huge number of credits it would bring and also eager to experience the psychic rush again. Because of Dokken’s adamant refusal to allow any use of Veritas by his own workers, Cialben had restrained himself, his fear of Dokken’s wrath greater than his desire for fleeting entertainment.

With a clean hand Maximillian delicately, reverently, picked up one of the sky-blue capsules with his thick fingers. He held it in the palm of his hand, rolling it around in the creases of his skin, studying it under the uncertain light. Cialben’s eyes followed it.

“Do you deserve this?” Maximillian said, surprising Cialben.

“Come on—after all I’ve done for Dokken?” he answered. “What does he think?”

Maximillian held Cialben’s gaze for a long moment. Around them the stillness and darkness of the warehouse seemed to smother all sound. The remaining two water buffalo snorted in their cages, smelling the blood.

The manservant flicked his wrist, tossing the sky-blue capsule toward Cialben. Grinning, he reached out to snatch it from the air.

Maximillian continued in a voice free of emotion. “One and one only,” he said. “And you have to do it here.”

Cialben held the capsule like a gem, slightly soft and filled with secrets. He looked around him in the empty warehouse. “Here?”

“And now. You know Dokken won’t allow it on his own landholding.”

Cialben didn’t know what the psychic rush would do for him in such an empty scenario. But the sleeping city lay out there, the identical dwellings, the brick homes, the steel apartment buildings. He considered the thousands of thoughts, the personal mysteries, the muddled dreams the colonists would be broadcasting into the air. The telepathic boost would last only a few seconds, but it would burn very brightly indeed, at peace, surrounded by the city.

And there was Maximillian. Did he really want to read the manservant’s thoughts? Yes, he realized, he did. He was astonished that Dokken would allow such a thing, because Maximillian had been the landholder’s right-hand man for decades.

Cialben popped the capsule into his mouth, bit down with his back teeth, felt the acrid gush down his throat. He closed his eyes and drew a deep breath, then a second. His scalp began to tingle in anticipation.

He opened his eyes, and opened his mind, and everything came flooding in.

He looked with anticipation at Maximillian. And froze.

At the front of the manservant’s mind Cialben read Franz Dokken’s final instructions like a sharp-bladed ax coming down. Maximillian must have been thinking the conversation over and over again, keeping his memory fresh, so that the thoughts remained clear in his mind.

He watched as Cialben read them.

“Let him take one capsule and wait until he reads your mind. I want him to know your orders. I want him to know his fate—then kill him.”

Cialben caught the rest of the entire appalling setup, the details of what Maximillian would do to his body—planting evidence, distorting clues.

He was already backing away in horror, windmilling his arms. He slipped in the wet blood on the concrete floor from the slain water buffalo.

Maximillian reached out with a fist that moved like a cobra, grabbing Cialben’s collar, holding him upright.

Cialben regained his balance and began to struggle. Maximillian drove the long blade hard against his side. A quick thrust between the ribs, then a second full-muscled shove to drive the point all the way into Cialben’s heart. He twisted the blade.

Cialben fell, his body losing control, the nerve signals melting into black static. He slumped into darkness, his last thoughts cursing Franz Dokken.

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