Stealing Light

Corso had stopped, fists clenching at his sides, any last remaining scrap of doubt concerning the identity of Cara’s murderer suddenly vanished. That was when he had challenged Bull. They could have easily arrested him there and then: since the Freehold had found a real enemy to fight in the Uchidans, the challenges had been outlawed. Too many soldiers were dying in duels when they were needed on the front.

But Bull had just kept gri

Sal snapped awake as the tractor rolled down and then back up the banks of a stream, before Corso finally hit the brakes.

‘Oh shit, I’m still here,’ Sal yawned, blinking sleepily and staring around. ‘Guess that means you’re still going to get yourself killed, huh?’

Corso shot him a sharp glance, and Sal shrugged, turning to look out at the lakeshore, falling silent again.

Senator Northcutt, Bull’s father, was in charge of the Senate investigation against Lucas’s father, Senator Corso. Murdering Cara was Senator Northcutt’s way of sending a violent message, not just to Lucas but also to his old man. Witnesses had already been bribed or coerced into claiming Senator Corso had organized secret meetings with the Uchidans; that he’d supplied them with vital military information and worked against the Freehold in order to destroy it; that he’d kidnapped Freehold children, handing them over to the Uchidans for mind-control experiments.

Men and women, friends and confidants, all frightened, all bruised and bloodied from long, violent hours in Kieran Mansell’s police cells. All had testified against Senator Corso and his supporters, before the assembled Senate.

Lies, all lies.

A brief squall of icy rain spattered across the windscreen. Corso peered into the distance, and saw a couple of black dots standing around another tractor, a couple of flares driven into the hard icy soil, marking the site of the challenge by the shores of the lake.

‘We’re here,’ Corso muttered, surprised at how calm he sounded.

Corso pulled on his winter gear before following Sal from the cabin, dropping several metres down the ladder to snow churned up by the tractor’s tracks. He checked the seal around his breather mask one last time, then looked around. They stood on loose shale and rock dotted with tiny green and blue growths that pushed through the permafrost. The cold burned his skin wherever it was exposed, 82 Eridani’s orange-red orb dropping towards the horizon as evening descended on Redstone.

Corso rubbed at the red fuzz of his beard where it was uncovered by his breather mask. Its protection was essential because the partial pressure of the nitrogen in the air was enough to cause a potentially fatal case of the bends after just a few moments of unaided respiration. It was possible to talk through the mask, which had built-in electronics that processed the voice, but what emerged sounded flat and metallic, like a robot speaking.

Harsh laughter, faint and distant, carried towards them from the other tractor. Corso clenched his fists tightly, anger reasserting itself under a black tide of adrenalin.

‘Lucas. Listen to me. Remember what I suggested? Just walk in there, accept the challenge, and surrender without fighting. Then you can walk away with honour-and with your life. According to the code of conduct he has to accept that or he loses his honour, right?’

‘No, Sal, I need to kill him. If I don’t, they don’t get the message. They’ll go on thinking we’ll never fight back.’

Sal then lost his temper. ‘For God’s sake, even if you won, that doesn’t make you a Citizen! Challenges are illegal.’

‘I’ll present it to the Senate as a fait accompli. They’ll arrest me, sure, but I’ll go on fighting from inside prison until they take notice. Things have got to change here. Arbenz himself wants to re-legalize challenges. If I win and he still refuses to recognize me as a Citizen, he’d be committing political suicide.’

Sal snorted. ‘Yeah, and either way, you’re committing real suicide.’

The Freehold was based on ancient ideals. To become a Citizen-to enjoy certain privileges, to be able to vote -you had to be prepared to fight on its behalf. This inherently warlike philosophy had seen the Freehold forced out of colony after colony until the Consortium had relented and granted them a development contract for Redstone. With no actual enemies to fight, at least until the arrival of the Uchidans, and comfortably far from Sol and the bulk of the Consortium, the system of challenges had developed there.

But times were changing and, increasingly, only extremists like Arbenz and his gang of followers held up the old principles. The fact they were losing the war with the Uchidans, a constant tit-for-tat exchange of guerrilla fighting along a constantly fluctuating border, made the ground on which the old guard stood even less sure.

Six bright flares shone around a circle demarcated by stones carefully selected from the nearby shore. In the flickering light, Corso noted the same faces he’d seen that day outside the hydro tents when he had issued his challenge. Drunken cheers went up as he and Sal approached the base of the two-storey transport Northcutt and his cronies had arrived in earlier.

‘All right,’ Sal said, exhaling long and slow, as if he’d just come to a momentous decision. ‘So you’re really doing this.’

Corso nodded, without even glancing at his friend. ‘I’m doing this.’

Eduardo Jones was Bull’s right-hand man, and the last of Northcutt’s crew to swing himself down from the lofty transport’s cabin, agilely stepping down the ladder with practised ease. From the lake, a warm breeze blew over them, tinged with sulphur from the hot springs a couple of kilometres further along the shore.

‘Hey!’ he shouted as Corso and Sal drew closer. Jones began playing the hard man, pushing his breather mask up on top of his head and briefly sucking in the raw, nitrogen-heavy air like there was no tomorrow. ‘What’s this shit about you challenging a real man, Corso?’ he yelled, after dropping his mask back down, so his voice emerged as a metallic rattle. ‘Don’t you know the rules-don’t pee in your own bed, don’t screw your sister, and don’t get into a fight you know you can’t win?’

One or two others chuckled. Bull Northcutt laughed the loudest. His face was twisted in an arrogant sneer above his powerful shoulders, eyes bright from heavy military-grade neurochem abuse.

‘This is bullshit,’ Sal yelled back to Corso’s amazement. ‘This isn’t a fair challenge. There’s not one of you,’ he shouted, anger emerging from him in waves as his voice rose, ‘that doesn’t know it.’