Twenty-Eight
TWENTY-EIGHT
Three years ago
Martim had never been beyond the airshield.
As the field car queued up to the hatch, he tucked cold, clammy hands under his armpits for warmth, his heart thudding apprehensively. The sight of the arid landscape beyond was distorted. Shimmery and blurred, as if seen through a thick film of cloudy plastic.
It’s worth it , he reassured himself. You’ll get there on time; that’s what matters.
Renting the field car had cost more scrip than he could really afford.
The cheaper way to get where he needed to go would’ve been to take one of the regular shuttletrains that ferried wagemen to the gas fields, ecological stations, mining sites, and other workplaces where they would stay for days, weeks, or months at a time.
But since it would’ve been his first time navigating the exterior rail system and he had no opportunity to practice, there was a chance he’d fuck up—miss a train, get on or off at the wrong stop, run into an unexpected delay.
That was an outcome he really couldn’t afford.
He’d only been informed last night at 2130 that his interview this morning wouldn’t be occurring at SoCon GasPro headquarters, as he’d expected, but instead would take place one hundred and fifty kilometers outside Tenacity Cityhab, in Field 32, where Director Uchi was taking part in the opening ceremonies for a new hydrofluorocarbon plant.
In a rush of near panic, he’d been forced to spend time he could’ve used for last-minute interview preparation figuring out travel logistics.
Later, he would find out all the candidates were given the same instructions to travel to the gas field on short notice, which caused one of them to drop out and another to arrive late.
As the field car passed through the Southhatch airlock, Martim sucked in a breath and put a hand up to shield his eyes from the stinging sunlight.
The Vastness sprang into sharp view: A desert of coarse reddish-yellow sand stretched toward a long plateau bounded by white cliffs, jagged shelves of rock outlined stark against a steel-gray sky.
Clumps of polar grass punctuated the sprawl of green and white lichen.
Other vehicles traveling across the tundra winked like tiny rolling silver marbles.
Awestruck, Martim pressed his forehead against the window, imagining how the landscape would’ve looked to the Founders. Bleak, but pristine. A virgin, untouched world.
On the horizon squatted an enormous black arch, built centuries ago as a monument, a headstone, and an enduring warning.
The Remembrance Arch cast a long shadow across the tundra, standing where Prosperity Cityhab once existed.
The sister city, the original site of Company headquarters—destroyed in the Second Uprising, nine years into the Great Silence.
Five thousand six hundred and twenty-two souls lost in minutes when the airshield came down during the armed conflict.
The field car’s dashboard indicated temperature and oxygen levels dropping inside the car as the environment outside intruded.
Martim unwrapped the disposable o-mask he’d purchased from a vending machine back at the field-car lot, plugged the hose into the back seat air tank, and cupped it over his nose and mouth, inhaling a lungful of supplemental oxygen.
As spectacular as the view was, it was still deadly.
History blamed the rebels of Prosperity for instigating the tragedy commemorated by the Remembrance Arch—but it was the planet that finished the job.
Martim tried to calm his mind, to summon the quiet state of readiness that his mentor preached as being the essence of an atier.
Instead of gazing out the window, he could use this time in the field car to run through possible interview questions.
But he’d already spent the past week feverishly researching every aspect of gas production, drilling himself with hypothetical problems requiring rapid mental calculations, and rehearsing explanations of his background and experience, trying to frame his disadvantages as strengths.
He’d practiced for hours with the longknife—Isako would’ve been proud—although the possibility that he might be evaluated on combat skills was still terrifying.
There wasn’t much else he could do now, except hope.
Hope that he knocked it out of the park.
An interview with Sandbar fucking Uchi . It was still hard to believe.
When Martim had received the news, he’d immediately called the Agency to confirm there hadn’t been some sort of error.
Newly licensed black badges, especially those with a record of having initially failed the exam, weren’t exactly in high demand.
The best of each cohort of new atiers might be offered three-year-long Principal contracts right off the bat, but the rest had to take whatever came their way, build up a track record with shorter projects, and hope that a client would be impressed enough to offer them something longer.
It didn’t help that he’d come from nothing.
None of his kith were contractors. He didn’t have any useful connections to help with his placement.
Compared with more senior atiers, his billing rates would be low, but he couldn’t count on any clients being willing to pay even that much.
So he’d been fully prepared to tough it out in any small, insignificant position that would get him off the ground.
The scheduling desk had reiterated there was no mistake. Martim ended the call and sat in stupefied silence for an entire minute. “Holy fucking shit,” he said aloud to his empty apartment.
He hadn’t told anyone. Not anyone in his atier cohort, not Isako, not even Leanne. Absolutely no one expected him to get this job, and he didn’t want to jinx his meager chances by sharing his excitement, only to have to tolerate questions and sympathy if he didn’t get the contract.
Before long, the emission towers of Field 32 came into sight.
Thick black columns rising toward the sky, row upon row, forming an enormous pegboard covering over two hundred square kilometers.
The tops of behemoth trunks were obscured by massive clouds of white steam.
Rail lines stretched into the field like black arteries, bringing vast quantities of carbonate rock and polar ice from mining facilities to be processed at super-high temperatures.
Carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, and nitrous oxide were mixed with the output of nearby fluorinated gas factories and sent into the atmosphere nonstop.
The sight was just as impressive, Martim thought, as the Vastness itself.
And Field 32 was only one of hundreds across the Southern Continent alone.
The energy from burning countless tonnes of carbonate minerals was used to power all the workings of the Company so that the terraforming effort could continue unabated, in a great virtuous cycle of hope.
The field car passed through the double hatch of the airshield posts and came to a stop in front of a compound of short buildings clumped in front of the black silos.
Long barracks for the wagemen, common buildings for dining and recreation, stocky field vehicles coming and going along rutted tracks.
Half a dozen off-shift wagemen sat huddled around an outdoor heater, hunched on plastiwood benches, talking, thermoses of warm drink clasped in gloved hands.
They glanced over at Martim curiously as he stepped out of the field car.
The temperature out in the field was far below cityhab standards.
Martim pulled his coat tightly around his shoulders but the bite of cold still took his breath away.
Cold this intense got through all the layers, attacked even a square centimeter of exposed skin, pushed itself into the marrow of one’s bones, made sluggish the blood in one’s veins.
Parked in front of the flagpole flying the Company banner was a huge black shuttlebus, the seal and slogan of SoCon GasPro emblazoned across its tinted windows. Nervously, Martim approached the monstrous vehicle. The door swung open. Light and heat emanated from within.
He paused a moment to take a deep breath and steady his nerves before stepping inside.
You can do this. You were made for this.
The inside of the vehicle had been unrecognizably altered from an ordinary shuttlebus into a luxuriant mobile office.
Ordinarily, a bus this size would be used to transport dozens of wagemen, but all the benches and handrails had been stripped out and replaced with a work desk, fixed swivel chairs, labwood cabinetry, and overhead heating panels.
A plush black rug covered the floor. Director Sandbar Uchi was sprawled comfortably in the reclining seat behind the desk, boots propped on a footstool, eyes darting back and forth as information streamed across a translucent blue data visor.
The first thing that struck Martim about Sandbar Uchi, besides the fine cut of his cashmere sport coat, was his size and solidity—long limbs, square face, and broad shoulders made only more impressively durable by age. They magnified his gravitational pull, seemed to justify his importance.
Uchi was deathly bored. “Are we almost done?” he complained to the hovering secretary just as Martim entered. He barely glanced up as he scrolled distractedly through Martim’s personnel file, pausing to respond to a notification in his vision. Without any real interest, “So, what’s your story?”