A stratoplane flew into the city the next morning, a jet with wide flat wings and a pair of piezoelectric fins trailing behind it. It came in low, clearing the ground by a few hundred feet, heading for some local touching-down spot.
It couldn’t land at the same skyport that the other spacecraft used. That type of plane couldn’t land vertically. When it disappeared out of view beyond the hills to the north, Miles assumed it was being routed to an old-style airstrip.
He wondered where it had come from. The fins were covered in photovoltaics and he remembered that there had been solar planes that could stay in the air indefinitely, sacrificing speed for longevity.
Before the break, they’d been a novelty. Now, they were probably the only type of aircraft surviving settlements could afford to fuel.
It was already a lot more organization than he’d expected to see on his return.
His family’s settlement had had an operational light helicopter, but they’d kept it on the ground, fueled and ready for emergencies. If places were able to get tech like the stratoplane working again, it meant Earth was starting to recover.
The world had seemed to grow dramatically when the bower break had hit the edge of Solar space. A wave of light had flooded inwards from the shredded boundary, frying GPS satellites and unshielded computers. Container ships had been moored indefinitely. Flight companies hadn’t survived, and neither had the planes’ electronics.
The other side of the world was no longer a twenty-hour flight away. Anything that wasn’t grown, mined, or manufactured locally might as well not exist.
Some places had been self-sufficient enough to cope, but twenty-four-hour supply chains had broken down across the world. Grocery store shelves had emptied quickly and not refilled. Regional supply centers had been looted, the contents hoarded. The electrical grid went down, and with it water pumping and treatment. If there had been people sitting on grain silos or livestock farms out in the farm belt, they weren’t breaking out the horses and wagons to get distribution moving again.
The global banking system crashed, taking all money with it. Police and militaries were no longer being paid, and soon weren’t being supplied. There just wasn’t enough slack in trade and stockpiles to keep things going. Not enough people to repair damaged systems fast enough. The efficient momentum of the world had hit a stone and broken loose, all that momentum turning to chaos.
The solar plane suggested that was changing. There was no maximum range on those things. They could be coming from Europe, Asia, the US.
Nobody else on the street took any notice of it. They must have been a common enough sight.
The way to the Spiral Administration building wasn’t hard to find. It was signposted at every intersection.
The place was an embassy, a chamber of commerce for Spiral economic interests, and, if Miles believed the graffiti scattered around the city, the place from which the ‘aliens’ controlled the local government.
Miles didn’t believe the graffiti, if only because the city would be running a lot differently if the Spiral was in control here. He’d be able to access all of its maps and resources through his comm, for one.
The streets weren’t crowded as he made his way through the city center. There were people, more humans than he’d seen in one place for months, but it wasn’t reaching Chicago at rush-hour levels.
He passed markets selling fish, salvaged and repaired human tech, Earth fruits and vegetables, as well as some more basic examples of spiral tech. There were comm units for sale, among the latter.
Now it was daylight, the city was backdropped by rolling green hills. It was exactly the shade of green he'd missed. Dark, vibrant. When he first caught sight of it through his hotel window, he thought he'd be frozen the spot forever, just staring at it. He'd found the will to move eventually, but walking through the streets, it kept catching his eye, threatening to captivate him again.
The Spiral administration office was built on top of an older terrestrial building, a chunk of Spiral architecture jammed into the roof of a brick-and-mortar office block. For some reason, Miles had expected the building to be Gilthaen, but the black angular plates rising up out of the single-story office were from some other architectural tradition.
Stopping across the street to look at it, it almost looked like a squat weave ship, like a vessel had dropped down from the sky and integrated directly into the pre-existing building.
A pair of motion-sensing doors slid open in front of him when he approached.
Inside, the space had the feel of a militarized DMV. The far wall had a bank of teller stations, part of the original human-built fittings, with armored glass covering most of them. Several angular drones hung in the air around the room, definitely not human-built, and Miles had seen enough Spiral tech to recognize them as armed security. Two of the stations opposite were staffed by Hurc tellers. Both male, one with solid black eyes.
There were a few unattended information stations set against the walls. One was populated with paper-printed pamphlets, the kinds of basic information the refugees on Unsiel station had access to. Another had shelves of basic comm units, similar to the one Miles carried. The comms were apparently free for anyone to just come up and take. Another Spiral initiative to try and integrate as many humans as possible.
Miles had known coming in that anyone wanting to stake a claim would need to have a comm unit, just because that's how the Spiral legal system worked. It looked like they were available here for anyone who wanted one.
One of the tellers was occupied dealing with a human woman in red spiral-tech armor. It had the same look as the powered armor he'd fought in the dungeon.
Miles stared at her as he approached the free teller. He'd never seen another human with that level of spiral tech, himself included. He knew from experience that powered armor like that was expensive.
She was arguing with her teller, waving a credit-card-sized comm unit.
"Hey, how can I help you?" the other teller asked as Miles stepped up.
It took Miles a second to realize that beneath his Eyes of the Emigre, the Hurc was speaking Icelandic.
Weird.
Miles brought up his comm with the message showing from Entrant Allocations.
"I got this message about a mineral rights allocation," he said, laying the comm on the counter so that the teller could read it. "Can I collect that here?"
The teller looked at the message, reading across it.
"Yeah. That's in order, all right," he said. He tapped a device to Miles' comm and the screen changed to show an interface. "Fill this in and we'll get your claim processing."
Miles picked up the device, looking down the fields of what was essentially a piece of paperwork. From the questions, it was obviously trying to match and authenticate him to a known human survivor.
Date of birth, May 11th, 2112. City of birth, Fort Wayne. Full name…
***
"Miles Asher," the patrol leader called out, staring out over the crowd.
Seth was one of Damien Asher's favored. He led the raids that another commander might balk at. The hot supply raids, the population runs. His team was just returning from a population run now.
The gas truck was disgorging a crowd of ragged survivors, healthy men and young women, all sleepy-eyed from whatever sedatives the troops had given them at gunpoint to make transporting them easier. Some days it was xanax, others ambien. Whatever was available.
The newcomers would rail and fight when they woke up, furious at being kidnapped, furious at being trafficked. They were kept in a different part of the wreck, sequestered behind locked doors. Miles could usually hear them shouting from his room. The fighting never lasted long. The people who’d eventually bring them into the fold had been brought to the settlement the same way. Eventually, they’d all accept the settlement as their new home. His father said it was human nature.
It was the main way the settlement grew. There was no automated farming tech left working, and the nascent plots at the boundary needed hands. There were unfriendly settlements within thirty miles, and the settlement needed guards. Most of all, Miles thought, Damien Asher needed his dominion, and having more people under his control fed his ego. Damien was his father, which technically put Miles within the ruling camp, but within that, he had no control. He could try to run and find himself somewhere as bad or worse, or try to run and be caught, or try to run and die out in the unforgiving new world.
Most of Earth's modern technology had been lost, but there was still plenty of ancient technology within reach. Using violence and survival pressures to control people was a tool the Frazer leadership had found quickly.
Seth spotted him standing in the crowd and waved him over.
Miles’ feet felt like lead as he approached the truck. Today he was riding along on a defense run, but he wouldn’t escape the population raids for long. This was just the start of the process. Toughening him up.
The back of the truck smelled of bodies that had gone weeks without washing, of infection, of sewer water.
He picked a place on the wooden bench closest to the opening at the back, hoping he’d get more fresh air that way.
A handful of troops joined him over the next ten minutes. Men with dark hair, younger versions of his father, all armed with early twenty-first-century assault rifles, smelling like sweat and oiled metal. They kept themselves apart from him, shooting him glances, but never bringing him into their conversation.
Miles guessed that this outing was also meant to be a kind of initiation for him, but he wasn’t yet part of the group. He didn’t think he wanted to be.
After the tenth soldier climbed on board, the engine started up, blasting Miles’ seat with gasoline fumes. The truck reversed backward, nearly tipping him out when it hit a dip in the mud, then grumbled as the driver pushed it to its maximum speed of about thirty miles per hour. They left through the wire fence enclosure of the outer settlement, then joined a mostly cleared highway going west.
It was maybe three hours to the Eagle Creek settlement.
The location of the raid turned out to be a park on the west edge of the reservoir. The friendly subset of the Indianapolis survivors had set up a settlement in a massive business park on the west edge of the city, close enough to the reservoir to fill up their trucks with good water every week, no pumping infrastructure needed, and defensive enough to keep raids out.
The center of the city had its own survivor population, but they weren’t welcoming to visitors, and nobody in the Frazer settlement knew their numbers or dispositions.
Somehow Seth had known the exact time and place that the alien ship was set to land, and when they got there it was already on the ground.
It wasn’t what Miles had imagined. Not because it was alien, but because it looked so normal.
A metal hull, with an aerodynamic shape, wider around the middle than the front, with windows dotted along its length. It wasn’t a saucer, or a craft built by unknowable minds according to unknowable principles. It looked like a slightly weird passenger jet.
The main oddity was that it didn’t have wings. Instead, the ship had four round barrel-shaped devices attached at the corners.
The rear door was down, and a group of aliens were standing behind the craft, doing something to a group of human survivors.
The aliens almost looked human. Two arms and two legs each, a head and hands, but they had translucent blue-purple skin, and their tusks gave an animal edge to their features. They didn’t look like a species that was hundreds or thousands of years ahead of humans in their technology.
“Go,” a shout came from the front of the truck, the order punctuated by the truck’s horn. “Light them up.”
The fighters around Miles leaped up and hopped out of the back of the truck.
They started shooting even before they were all out of the truck. Miles put his hands over his ears, blocking out the sharp sound of single shots being fired off without any kind of organization behind them.
He had to lean out around the edge of the truck to see what was happening to the aliens.
They didn’t seem to mind the hail of gunfire too much.
The purple aliens were still standing around. The humans they’d been dealing with had gone, taking shelter behind the ship and running away in that direction. It looked like a few of the people had gone inside the ship, their faces looking out through the windows. Miles tried to imagine what the aliens had promised to get them to come willingly.
The aliens weren’t running, or even returning fire. If Miles had to put an emotion to them, they seemed bored.
As he watched, another round of three shots rang out from the soldiers around the truck.
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Around the aliens, small plate-sized disks of glowing energy appeared in the air, blocking the shots. They had some kind of forcefield. No wonder they weren’t worried.
The aliens didn’t even seem to care that they were being shot at. Over the next minute, they spoke among themselves, gesturing in the direction of the settlers who’d run, before unloading some boxes and climbing back into the ship.
The devices positioned at the corners of the ship lit up, lifting it off the ground.
The fighters fired a few rounds at the alien craft as it ascended. The bullets did less to the hull than they’d done to the energy fields.
The ship left at speed, zapping away faster than a jet, with less ramp-up.
Seth and a couple of the other fighters let out cheers as it receded into the sky.
Miles was left feeling like aliens were departing at their own pace, for their own reasons. The attack hadn’t done anything to them at all. It’d scared away the people who were looking to talk, but beyond that, it’d been a completely pointless exercise. With the difference in technology, he wasn’t even sure if rockets or grenades would have gone any good.
While the settlement fighters were celebrating, Miles wandered over to the flattened grass where the ship had been sitting.
It looked like they’d left some trash behind. Along with a few sealed boxes, there were a handful of tablet-sized devices sitting in a small stack on the ground. The screens were active, showing text that Miles couldn’t read without picking one up.
“Miles,” Seth called from back at the truck. “Come on. We’re leaving.”
***
Miles filled out the paperwork, handing them back to the Hurc teller.
“You must have had a lot of off-world humans coming back for this,” he said, fishing for how many people were in a similar position to him.
The refugee station had seen a few hundred human residents, and some of them had left for elsewhere in the weave. With the availability of spiral transport here and in other cities, there must have been travelers who’d departed Earth from other places too.
With only two terrestrial destinations accessible from the Forward Fleet, at least half of anyone returning would have come through Neyjavk.
“Yeah, a few,” the teller said, looking through the form. “Last stats I saw, the scheme had a couple thousand non-residents taking up claims.”
That was more returnees than Miles was expecting.
He knew he wasn’t special for having left Earth and made his way in the spiral, he’d seen people leave the refugee station for better things before, but the low density of humans in spiral territory had given him the false impression he was unique out there.
He remembered the woman in armor who’d just left the room. How was she making her living out there?
It was also interesting that these figures were available at all.
“What about total uptake?” Miles asked.
As he understood the scheme, any share which went unclaimed would be redistributed into shares that had been. The lower the overall uptake, the more each individual piece would be worth in the end, after the unclaimed allotments were divided up.
“In this city, about ten thousand. Across the planet, it’s coming up to about six million.”
That couldn’t be right. Miles’ message had offered him a certain percentage of the find. He’d worked out that the whole had been divided into about 800 million parts. That’d been a grim assessment of the state of Earth’s surviving population, and Miles thought that was bad enough, but if so few of them were taking what they were owed, then it was a sign that something was seriously wrong.
“Out of how many people who could claim?” he asked.
The Hurc teller checked a comm unit of his own, before saying, “Last scan, it was 840 million and change.”
“Almost no one is taking it?”
“Fifteen percent of the people in this region are taking it,” the teller said. “That’s the highest of anywhere, as far as I know.” He stared at Miles for a few seconds, then his eyes slid to point in different directions, a Hurc shrug. “I know. I get it. It hurts me to see money being left on the table, too.”
That wasn’t why Miles had a problem with the figure. This was technically good for him. His claim was going to be worth about two orders of magnitude more than he’d thought coming in. But it was bad news for humanity.
Everyone who claimed their allotment was going to be getting the resources due to more than a hundred other people, if it were properly spread out.
The division had seemed like a brutally democratic distribution in principle. In practice, it was going to create a new class system.
“I don’t see why uptake is so low,” Miles persisted. “Do people need help getting comms?”
The teller gestured at the stack of comm devices available by the door.
“We give them to whoever will take them. At admin centers, in aid drops. There’s special allowances for shared comm units. We even send the same messages out over the local communication channels. Entrant Allocations says ten percent of non-claimants have legit problems getting spiral tech, forty percent are living in local cultures that prohibit it, and that’s not counting the ones who think spiral sapients are monsters from their mythology.”
The teller’s description made it sound like the problems Miles had faced at home writ large. People here were so quick to trust their own people over other sapients, even when that trust was clearly being abused.
“It’s a trust problem,” Miles said.
“It’s a trauma problem,” the teller said. “Personal trauma. Cultural trauma. Some of the strategists keeping things running up there can’t understand it, and they don’t account for it. But I get it. A lot of new worlds go through something similar. It’s a kind of grieving, pushing anything unusual away.”
A few thoughts flitted through Miles’ head.
He wanted to ask ‘Can I help?’ But he knew he couldn’t. He couldn’t fix this global problem any more than he could liberate his home settlement. He was one person, and just getting here had been hard enough.
Both Miles and the clerk were quiet for a minute, both probably weighing the enormity of problems in Earth’s near future.
Eventually, the teller spoke.
“You mind having this processed by an automated system, or do you want a sapient to look at it?”
It was the same question Miles had been asked when having his Healer accreditation judged.
“Is there any advantage to having it done by a sapient?”
The clerk let out a laugh. “I hear you. I’ll send it to the system. It should just take a few minutes.”
"That's fine," Miles said. The next shuttle back to the Forward Fleet wasn't until the next day anyway.
Miles thanked the clerk, took the tablet back, and left the office.
***
The confirmation came in several minutes later.
> Entrant Allocations > Miles
>
> This system is pleased to confirm your allotment of a 0.000000119% share of asteroids I9411, I599, and I85591, constituting around 24M tons of recoverable materials. For a breakdown of the mineral content in this allocation, please view the attached file. For information on ventures and corporations who may be interested in purchasing or leasing this claim, message this system with a specific inquiry. Thank you for interfacing with Entrant Allocations.
One ten-millionth of a percent seemed like a small number on paper. 24 million tons of anything, on the other hand, was unimaginably vast.
24 million tons of mixed metals and rare compounds, most written only in Spiral chemical shorthand.
It was all so much.
On Earth, before the bower break, that amount of any resource would have been worth billions of dollars. Maybe trillions.
In the Spiral, minerals were probably both more common and cheaper to extract, but it still had to be an enormous figure. He was sure he’d find out what kind of value it had as soon as he got back into spiral space.
The tone of the city seemed to change after Miles had received his confirmation.
Neyjavik stopped being somewhere he needed to be to accomplish something, and became a place he was just passing through on his way out.
He no longer had to mold himself to the city, to figure out its rules and layouts. Now he was just a tourist, and to the extent that he had to interact with it at all, he felt like it was the city’s responsibility to conform to him.
As a tourist, Miles passed through the commercial district.
With the pressure off, he felt like he had more time to indulge the offerings. Among the bars and businesses, there were cafes, bakeries, coffee shops. There were none of the chains he’d known growing up around the US, but there was a lot there that was familiar.
He stopped outside one restaurant, finding the menu to be pretty fish-heavy, then another, which sold Scandinavian food, none of which sounded appetizing in the translations provided by Eyes of the Emigre. He went on down the row, checking menus as he went.
He wasn’t particularly hungry, Hum of the Enduring had brought his food requirements down to about one good meal a day and he’d bought an in-flight meal on the shuttle from the Forward Fleet, but today and tomorrow would probably be his last chances to sample Solar delicacies for a while.
He finally found a restaurant that had coffee, pizza, and ice cream on the menu.
The board outside the doors listed prices in both Krona and seln, and prices in both were high. A single meal would cost as much as a hotel room for the night, but Miles thought it was probably worth it, given the state of trade and supply routes. The coffee was particularly incomprehensible. In the pre-break regime, coffee production was centralized in a few far-flung countries and shipped all over the world. Post-break, nobody was going to be wasting fuel shipping beans across thousands of miles of ocean.
Miles pushed the door open and stepped inside. A wave of warm air greeted him, along with smells of foods he’d only imagined in the last year. Bread, tomato, bacon. Even the simple smells of vegetable oil and salt were mouthwatering.
The place was popular, and Miles started scanning the room, looking for a table.
He froze when he spotted a group of people sitting at one table.
Young men and women, with short hair and athletic builds, all with a similar kind of look.
He recognized one of them specifically. Buzzed black hair, an angular chin. Seth. Damien Asher’s lieutenant. He was staring right back at Miles with furious intensity.
Miles’ heart stuttered in his chest. What was he doing here?
Miles backed out of the building, sneakers scraping the sidewalk. He pulled the door closed in front of him.
Turning, he scanned the street, looking for somewhere to run, someone to go stand beside.
Nothing. There was hardly any foot traffic, even during the day. No crowd to lose himself in. There were other restaurants back the way he’d come. He turned back towards them.
Miles had made it fifty feet from the restaurant by the time Seth’s group stepped outside. They spotted him straight away and started running down the street after him.
What were they even doing here? Had they come for him? What other reasons could they have? Seth had been shooting at Spiral relief agents a year ago, on behalf of Miles’ father. What had changed that he was willing to come to one of the most open ports on the planet now?
Miles immediately started sprinting away, heading for the next restaurant along the street.
He felt like he was back in the dungeon, running for his life in the Ymn City environ.
He looked inward, casting Temporary Enhancement, focusing on his Speed. The litany rolled through him like a personal mantra.
In myself, I am complete…
The burst of speed came to him with a feeling like he’d been holding himself back until that moment. His feet rattled against the sidewalk. The gap between him and Seth expanded.
He reached a bend in the road and paused. He stood for a second, breathing hard. He looked back down the street.
He’d already put a lot of distance between himself and the group from the settlement. Miles hadn’t measured how fast he could run with his spell-enhanced speed, but from the gap it had to be comparable to a city car.
Seth was still running towards him, his boots hitting the ground in the heavy footfalls of an unaugmented physique.
Miles wasn’t weighed down with his shield or bag, his Authority felt no strain. There was no way they could catch him if he ran. Assuming he still wanted to run.
Miles wasn’t the same person who’d escaped the settlement a year before.
He spent long seconds watching Seth approach, deciding what to do.
He could run, but what if he didn’t? What could Seth, even with his group backing him up, seriously do to him now?
Weapons were forbidden in the city, so they wouldn’t have guns. Knives wouldn’t get through Miles’ robe. If they tried to hold him, he could break free with enhanced strength. If they tried anything, he knew he could get away.
Miles picked a spot on the corner and waited.
When the group realized Miles wasn’t running, they slowed down. They arrived flushed and out of breath, fog steaming out of their mouths in the cold air.
“You’re Miles Asher?” Seth said. “Miles Asher, the captain’s kid? The runaway?”
It hadn’t occurred to Miles that Seth might not recognize him. There was an incredulous note in the man’s voice, as if he thought finding Miles there was an impossible coincidence.
“Yeah,” Miles replied.
“Holy shit. If he could see us now. He’d fucking lose it. You are the chip on his shoulder.”
Seth shared an amused look with a couple of the group with him.
Miles didn’t recognize any of them personally, but they looked like the kinds of guys his father would send out on an errand.
“What are you doing here?” Miles asked.
As an answer, Seth pulled out a palm-sized device from his jeans pocket, waving it in front of Miles. It was one of the comm units that the Spiral administration office was giving away.
The answer was so out of place it took Miles a second to make the connection.
“You’re here for the allocation?”
“Yeah. We did all that work kicking the aliens out of our territory, then they go and do this. Their payback, I guess. It took us weeks to find somewhere they were still setting down.”
“Damien sent you?” Miles asked.
Miles had been completely in the dark until he stumbled across a spiral comm unit left by a relief ship. At first, he’d thought the message coming through to it had been propaganda, but there’d been nothing hyperbolic in them. They’d been pragmatic messages offering mundane hope. Food supply drop-offs. Essential equipment. The potential for claiming asylum off-world. Over the following days his world had inverted, and he’d realized that they really were offering help.
Damien Asher had had a comm unit all along. If any of his people were here now, it meant he was the one who'd told them to come here.
Seth lifted a shoulder in a half-shrug.
“Yeah. The faithful. He sent us out to get the payout. He wants everything he can get. Buuut… we’re not going back.” Seth glanced around at the group before turning back to Miles. “You’ve been living with the aliens, right? What do you think this is going to be worth? Enough to get out of this shit heap?”
A new picture started growing in Miles’ mind. An image of his father, not berating Miles to hand over his share of the allocation because he had some special insight or grand plan, not because Miles' allocation was uniquely valuable, but because anyone else he put in a position to claim it turned around and took it for themselves.
Suddenly, Damien Asher wasn’t a mastermind trying to add one more claim to his pool of hundreds, he was a desperate man trying to add just one more to a meager handful. How many claims did he even have, if even the people he trusted were turning on him? Just his own, Miles’ mom’s, and his sister’s? Or not even that? Miles hadn’t had any messages from his mom, even among the deluge from his father.
Miles didn’t answer Seth’s question. He was done. They weren’t a threat to him, they weren’t even really interested in him. He turned and started walking away.
“Hey, where are you going, little man? You lived in space while you were gone, right? What’s it like up there?” Seth tried to walk alongside Miles, keeping up the questions. “I heard if you can make it to an alien city, everything there is free. Is that how it is?”
Miles didn’t answer. He didn’t even look at them.
When it was clear to Seth he was just going to be ignored, the group stopped following.
Miles didn’t look back to see where they went.