Shadowline - Starfishers Triology - Book 1

Ten: 3020 AD

The Shadowline was Blackworld's best-known natural feature. It was a four-thousand-kilometer-long fault in the planet's Brightside crust, the sunward side of which had heaved itself up an average of two hundred meters above the burning plain. The rift wandered in a northwesterly direction. It cast a permanent wide band of shadow that Edgeward's miners used as a sun-free highway to the riches of Brightside. By extending its miners' scope of operations the Shadowline gave Edgeward a tremendous advantage over competitors.

No one had ever tried reaching the Shadowline's end. There was no need. Sufficient deposits lay within reach of the first few hundred kilometers of shade. The pragmatic miners shunned a risk that promised no reward but a sense of accomplishment.

On Blackworld a man did not break trail unless forced by a pressing survival need.

But that rickety little man called Frog, this time, was bound for the Shadowline's end.

Every tractor hog considered it. Every man at some time, off-handedly, contemplates suicide. Frog was no different. This was a way to make it into the histories. There were not many firsts to be claimed on Blackworld.

Frog had been thinking about it for a long time. He usually sniggered at himself when he did. Only a fool would try it, and old Frog was no fool.

Lately he had become all too aware of his age and mortality. He had begun to dwell on the fact that he had done nothing to scratch his immortality on the future. His passing would go virtually unnoticed. Few would mourn him.

He knew only one way of life, hogging, and there was only one way for a tractor hog to achieve immortality. By ending the Shadowline.

He still had not made up his mind. Not absolutely. The rational, experienced hog in him was fighting a vigorous rearguard action.

Though Torquemada himself could not have pried the truth loose, Frog wanted to impress someone.

Humanity in the whole meant nothing to Frog. He had been the butt of jests and cruelties and, worse, indifference all his life. People were irrelevant. There was only one person about whom he cared.

He had an adopted daughter named Moira. She was a white girl-child he had found wandering Edgeward's rudimentary spaceport. She had been abandoned by Sangaree slavers passing through hurriedly, hotly pursued by Navy and dumping evidence wherever they could. She had been about six, starving, and unable to cope with a non-slave environment. No one had cared. Not till the hard-shelled, bullheaded, misanthropic dwarf, Edgeward's involuntary clown laureate, had happened along and been touched.

Moira was not his first project. He was a sucker for strays.

He had cut up a candyman pervert, then had taken her home, as frightened as a newly weaned kitten, to his tiny apartment-lair behind the water plant down in Edgeward's Service Underground.

The child complicated his life no end, but he had invested his secret self in her. Now, obsessed with his own mortality, he wanted to leave her with memories of a man who had amounted to more than megaliters of suit-sweat and a stubborn pride five times too big for his retarded growth.

Frog wakened still unsure what he would do. The deepest route controls that he himself had set on previous penetrations ran only a thousand kilometers up the Shadowline.

That first quarter of the way would be the easy part. The markers would guide his computers and leave him free to work or loaf for the four full days needed to reach the last transponder. Then he would have to go on manual and begin breaking new ground, planting markers to guide his return. He would have to stop to sleep. He would use up time backing down to experiment with various routes. Three thousand kilometers might take forever.

They took him thirty-one days and a few hours. During that time Frog committed every sin known to the tractor hog but that of getting himself killed. And Death was back there in the shadows, grinning, playing a little waiting game, keeping him wondering when the meathook would lash out and yank him off the stage of life.

Frog knew he was not going to make it back.

No rig, not even the Corporation's newest, had been designed to stay out this long. His antique could not survive another four thousand clicks of punishment.

Even if he had perfect mechanical luck he would come up short on oxygen. His systems were not renewing properly.

He had paused when his tanks had dropped to half, and had thought hard. And then he had gone on, betting his life that he could get far enough back to be rescued with proof of his accomplishment.

Frog was a poker player. He made the big bets without batting an eye.

He celebrated success by breaking his own most inflexible rule. He shed his hotsuit.

A man out of suit stood zero chance of surviving even minor tractor damage. But he had been trapped in that damned thing, smelling himself, for what seemed half a lifetime. He had to get out or start screaming.

He reveled in the perilous, delicious freedom. He even wasted water scouring himself and the suit's interior. Then he went to work on the case of beer some damn fool part of him had compelled him to stash in his tool locker.

Halfway through the case he commed Blake and crowed his victory. He gave the boys at the shade station several choruses of his finest shower-rattlers. They did not have much to say. He fell asleep before he could finish the case.

Sanity returned with his awakening.

"Goddamn, you stupid old man. What the hell you doing, hey? Nine kinds of fool in one, that what you are." He scrambled into his suit. "Oh, Frog, Frog. You don't got to prove you crazy. Man, they already know."

He settled into his control couch. It was time to resume his daily argument, via the transponder-markers, with the controller at the Blake outstation. "Sumbitch," he muttered. "Bastard going to eat crow today. Made a liar of him, you did, Frog."

Was anybody else listening? Anybody in Edgeward? It seemed likely. The whole town would know by now. The old man had finally gone and proved that he was as crazy as they always thought.

It would be a big vicarious adventure for them, especially while he was clawing his way back with his telemetry reporting his sinking oxygen levels. How much would get bet on his making it? How much more would be put down the other way?

"Yeah," he murmured. "They be watching." That made him feel taller, handsomer, richer, more macho. For once he was a little more than the town character.

But Moira... His spirits sank. The poor girl would be going through hell.

He did not open comm right away. Instead, he stared at displays for which he had had no time the night before. He had become trapped in a spider's web of fantasy come true.

From the root of the Shadowline hither he had seen little but ebony cliffs on his left and flaming Brightside on his right. Every kilometer had been exactly like the last and next. He had not found the El Dorado they had all believed in back in the old days, when they had all been entrepreneur prospectors racing one another to the better deposits. After the first thousand virgin kilometers he had stopped watching for the mother lode.

Even here the immediate perception remained the same, except that the contour lines of the rift spread out till they became lost in those of the hell plain beyond the Shadowline's end. But there was one eye-catcher on his main display, a yellowness that grew more intense as the eye moved to examine the feedback on the territory ahead.

Near his equipment's reliable sensory limits it became a flaming intense orange.

Yellow. Radioactivity. Shading to orange meant there was so much of it that it was generating heat. He glared at the big screen. He was over the edge of the stain, taking an exposure through the floor of his rig.

He started pounding on his computer terminal, demanding answers.

The idiot box had had hours to play with the data. It had a hypothesis ready.

"What the hell?" Frog did not like it. "Try again."

The machine refused. It knew it was right.

The computer said there was a thin place in the planetary mantle here. A finger of magma reached toward the surface. Convection currents from the deep interior had carried warmer radioactives into the pocket. Over the ages a fabulous lode had formed.

Frog fought it, but believed. He wanted to believe. He had to believe. This was what he had given his life to find. He was rich...

The practicalities began to occur to him when the euphoria wore off. Radioactivity would have to be overcome. Six kilometers of mantle would have to be penetrated. A way to beat the sun would have to be found because the lode was centered beyond the Shadowline's end... Mining it would require nuclear explosives, masses of equipment, legions of shadow generators, logistics on a military scale. Whole divisions of men would have to be assembled and trained. New technologies would have to be invented to draw the molten magma from the earth...

His dreams, like smoke, wafted away along the long, still corridors of eternity. He was Frog. He was one little man. Even Blake did not have the resources to handle this. It would take a decade of outrageous capitalization, with no return, just to develop the needed technologies.

"Damn!" he snarled. Then he laughed. "Well, you was rich for one minute there, Frog. And it felt goddamned good while it lasted." He had a thought. "File a claim anyway. Maybe someday somebody'll want to buy an exploitation franchise."

No, he thought. No way. Blake was the only plausible franchisee. He was not going to make those people any richer. He would keep the whole damned thing behind his chin.

But it was something to think about. It really was.

Piqued by the futility of it all, he ordered his computer to lock out any memories relating to the lode.