Blindfold. Kevin J. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ