The Meek Read online

  The Meek

  Copyright © 2001 by Scott Mackay

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an ebook in 2018 by Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Cover design by Tiger Bright Designs

  ISBN 978-1-625673-50-3

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Ceres

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two: Vesta

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Three: Carswell

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  About the Author

  Also by Scott Mackay

  To my son, Colin

  PART ONE

  CERES

  CHAPTER 1

  As Cody Wisner looked at the orbital photographs of Ceres he detected a discrepancy between the old reference photographs taken thirty years ago and the ones their own surveillance cameras on the Public Works vessel Gerard Kuiper had taken just yesterday. He thought he knew all the Public Works structures on the surface of the abandoned asteroid, but what he saw here in these new photographs baffled him.

  “GK 1, magnify,” he said.

  The computer magnified the image a hundred times. A ramp? A vent? A new surface-to-subsurface entrance? Certainly something man-made. Yet there’d been nothing man-made on Ceres in thirty years. The asteroid was nothing but a big ghost town.

  “Ben, take a look at this,” he said.

  Ben LeBlanc propelled himself through free fall to Cody’s terminal. He was a slight, odd-looking man, with a small head and broad shoulders. Dark whiskers covered his chin already, though it was early; Cody often caught him shaving twice a day. Ben looked at Cody’s magnification of the unidentified object.

  “GK 2,” said Ben, accessing the shipboard computer with his own voiceprint, “extrapolate at 90 degrees west.”

  The screen went blank for a second, then filled with an extrapolated image, a surface-level view of the object. The image showed a cavelike opening, with the ramp-shaped structure tapering to the dusty, cratered surface of Ceres.

  “GK 2, extrapolate, frontal elevation,” said Ben.

  A hypothetical camera panned to a front view of the unidentified object. The thing looked like a gigantic dorsal fin. Cody tapped in some commands.

  “Let’s get some measurements,” he said.

  The computer estimated measurements for the thing: two hundred meters tall at its highest elevation, tapering at a slant more than three hundred meters long, forming a broad right-angle triangle contiguous to the surface of Ceres. Both men stared at the thing for a long time. Cody was mystified. Considerable man and machine power must have been used to build it, and such activity, especially on the surface, would have been detected by the swarm of microsatellites orbiting Ceres.

  “Any ideas?” he asked.

  Ben stared at the object. “I think we’re going to have to go down,” he said, “before we start our survey.”

  Cody had to agree. Anything unexpected had to be checked before they began their infrastructure viability survey for the Vesta City Public Works Department. What bothered him was that there was anything unexpected at all, especially after thirty years of scrutiny.

  “There’s nothing coming from it,” said Cody. “No readings of any kind. Maybe it’s space debris.”

  “GK 2, catalog impacts for current coordinates,” said Ben.

  The computer cataloged all known impacts down to a millimeter. Nothing.

  “No,” said Ben, “it was built.” He arched his brow curiously. “What’s underneath there, anyway?” he asked.

  “There’s nothing underneath there,” said Cody. “The Ceresians never built this far east. The closest utility is seventy kilometers away, the solar-power generating plant at Actinium on the outskirts of Newton.” He looked over his shoulder. “Deirdre,” he called, “come have a look at this.”

  Deirdre Malvern, the crew’s structural engineer, floated free of her seat and propelled herself to Cody’s workstation. She was in her early thirties, an attractive woman with close-cropped hair the color of burnt sienna and unsettling green eyes.

  “This isn’t on any of the reference satellite photographs,” said Cody. “This is new.”

  Deirdre leaned forward, put her hand on Cody’s shoulder.

  “Someone’s been tampering with the satellites, then,” she said. “Those satellites have been in place ever since the Civil Action. Vesta City should have picked up on this.”

  “That’s what I thought,” said Cody.

  Cody stared at the structure on the surface. The geometrical precision of the structure unnerved him, was daunting in its angles and its size, like a knife blade rising above the surface of the dusty asteroid, as still and imposing as a gigantic tomb, isolated, secretive. Was this the work of human endeavor? Or could the structure be the product of unknown visitors? If so, what would be the impact on his survey schedule and, ultimately, on the more massive and complicated reconstruction effort? He pressed the communication button.

  “Jerry,” he said, “could you come up here and have a look at this?”

  A few moments later Dr. Jerry Rudnick floated up through the companionway. He was a tall man afflicted with a slight hunchback—bone disease from growing up in the microgravity of Juno, where the capacity spin produced only .2 gees.

  “Take a look at this,” said Cody.

  The doctor leaned forward and peered myopically through his glasses at the screen. He looked at it for a long time. Finally he arched his back, scratched his head, and spoke into the computer.

  “GK 3,” he said, “search yesterday’s orbital photographs for like or similar structures.”

  Two seconds later the computer identified seventeen other similar structures, all of them brand new, scattered over the surface of the asteroid.

  Cody sealed his helmet and went into the lander’s airlock with Ben. Ben leaned heavily against the railing, unused to the artificially produced gravity on Ceres—a speck of a singularity inserted into the asteroid’s core a hundred years ago, a laboratory-created black hole pulling everything coreward at a force of .5 gees.

  “You all right?” asked Cody.

  “It’ll take some getting used to,” said Ben. He was from tiny Flora, a planetesimal where gravitational enhancement couldn’t exceed an integrity point of .2 gees; any greater and Ben’s small home asteroid would shake apart in the resulting tidal fluxes. “I guess point-five gees is about right for you.”

  Cody was from Vesta, an asteroid half the size of Ceres that used the same gravitational technology. “We have point-four on Vesta. That’s about as high as we can go without running into serious problems. So this will be a bit of a go for me as well.”

  Cody cycled the airlock, and the two engineers descended the ladder to the surface of the asteroid. Cody was glad he lived on a grav-core asteroid, where such a thing a
s surface walking was possible. A place like little Flora, where Ben came from, you stayed inside all the time, walking on the inside rim while the whole works spun centrifugally to artificially create a meager .2 gees. No wonder Ben was already out of breath.

  “I guess you don’t see the sun much,” said Cody.

  “Not until I joined Public Works,” said Ben. “To tell you the truth, the sun kind of scares me.”

  Both engineers looked at the distant white ball. It shone with a hard brittleness. Through his heavily tinted visor, Cody made out its disk, round and nearly blue in a hot insistent way. He liked surface-walking, the loneliness of it, the desolation of an asteroidscape, the quiet. But surface-walking always reminded him of Christine, and he couldn’t help thinking how he would never surface-walk with Christine again.

  “Can you manage?” asked Cody. “Or do you want me to give you a hand?”

  “No, I’m okay,” said Ben. “Just a little dizzy. It really presses down, doesn’t it?”

  “You’ll be okay.”

  “We really have to get this place up and running again.”

  It was all a question of gravity in the Belt, thought Cody. Gravity in the Belt was as precious, in its way, as air. He actually enjoyed the tug he felt coming from Ceres. He picked up a stone and threw it, marked its trajectory in the weak light coming from the sun, saw that it came down a lot more quickly than it would have on Vesta, where the gravity was 20 percent weaker. The children of the Belt had to be able to grow up on Ceres again, as they had thirty years ago. Heart disease. Bone disease. Inner-ear deficiencies. All these maladies and more could be avoided later in life if children could again be sent to the schools on Ceres, where the sheer size of the place made a stronger gravity possible, up to a full Earth gravity without any significant damage to the asteroid’s geological structure.

  “I wonder what one gee feels like,” Cody speculated. “Can you imagine?”

  “At this point,” said Ben, gasping even more, “I’d sooner not.”

  They proceeded over the blasted surface toward the unidentified object. Cody felt the crunch his boots made on the age-old carbonaceous dirt. He looked around for signs of construction activity, footprints or machine tracks, but except for the usual pitting of micrometeorites, the surface looked undisturbed—virgin asteroid terrain, beautiful in a cold, sterile way.

  A holo-image of Deirdre appeared in the upper right corner of his visor.

  “How is it?” she asked.

  “Sixty percent on Ben,” he said. “He’s the one you should be asking.”

  “Vesta City is still giving us the go-ahead,” she said. “Pending what you find surface-side.”

  “Nothing so far.”

  “We’ll be out of contact for the next seven minutes while we’re in occultation,” she said. “I thought I’d better let you know.”

  “We’ll be fine,” he said.

  “Then bye for now,” she said, but left her holo-image intact, staring at him with those green eyes of hers until occultation cracked her image into a million pieces.

  He thought of his hometown—dim, unimaginative, provincial Vesta City, thrust into prominence as the Belt’s provisional primary city after the evacuation here on Ceres thirty years ago. What would become of Vesta City once they got Ceres up and running again? Would it be content to take second place to Newton again? Would its stolid citizens be glad to go back to modest, unassuming lives after three decades in the spotlight? And would Council’s government officials uproot themselves and return to Isosceles Boulevard? Did officials with Vestan constituencies not realize that in voting to undertake this massive reconstruction project on Ceres they were in fact cutting Vesta’s throat economically and culturally? Yet the fact remained: you could boost the gravity on this seven-hundred kilometer-long rock to one gee without the place shaking apart, and give the children a healthy place to grow up in, to develop as they should, so they could be farmed back to their home asteroids with less likelihood of microgravity-related conditions.

  “Who was that?” asked Ben.

  “She didn’t have it on the open channel?”

  Ben grunted. “Deirdre again?”

  “You got it.”

  “She’s a nice girl, Cody.”

  “I know she is.”

  “I heard her singing the other day.”

  “You did?”

  “She’s got a nice voice.”

  “She’s a top structural engineer,” said Cody.

  “Is that the only thing you can say about her?”

  The thing, when they got there, cast a stark shadow to the southeast. The ramp rose three hundred meters, three times the length of the field in Kirkwood Stadium in downtown Vesta City, rounding to a dark, cavelike opening that dwarfed the two men. The sun lit the outer rim of the opening as if with a stroke of white fire, while the inner portion was as dark as ink. Cody took a visor reading, first in infrared, then with the spectrometer, and was surprised to find trace amounts of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide shimmering over the walls.

  “Do you see that?” he asked Ben. “Check your spectrometer.”

  Ben checked his spectrometer. “Shit,” he said.

  “Let’s have a look,” said Cody.

  They proceeded into the gigantic entrance, turning on their guidelights to penetrate the dense shadow within.

  Plantlike cilia grew in sparse patches on the metallic walls. Plants. In a vacuum. In deep-space cold and dark, with no water. He moved closer. Each cilium was a thumb-length long, flat, leaf-shaped, bilateral in design, with three rounded points on either side, six points in all; a bit like an oak leaf but blue-green in color and growing in colonies. Sources of oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon dioxide showed up strongest around these colonies.

  They shrink-wrapped a specimen in quarantine polymer.

  Back on the Gerard Kuiper, Jerry put the sample in a larger quarantine study box and gassed it so the shrink-wrap polymer dissolved around it.

  “Six-and-a-half centimeters long, 2.2 centimeters wide, and .7 millimeters thick,” said Jerry. “GK 3, compare present sample to all known plant, lichen, fungi, bacteria, and virus specimens.”

  Cody read the screen two seconds later: comparison negative. In other words, they had a specimen of something entirely new here.

  “What I’d like to know is how it could survive out there on the surface?” said Cody. “GK 1, is present sample alive?”

  The screen read positive.

  “GK 1, run a toxicology analysis,” he said.

  The inside of the quarantine box steamed over with various chemical compounds designed to test for all known toxins. Five seconds later, the steam cleared and Cody had his answer.

  Negative. No known toxins detected.

  “GK 3,” said Jerry, “analyze molecular structure and extrapolate for possible bacterial, toxic, or viral threat to the human metabolism.”

  The quarantine box filled with a lighter mist.

  Negative for possible bacterial, toxic, or viral threat.

  Deirdre pushed her way forward. “GK 4, is current sample innocuous to human life?”

  The computer told them that the lichen, or fungi, or cilia, or whatever it was, was indeed innocuous to human life. But to be on the safe side Jerry introduced a lab mouse into the quarantine box. The mouse sniffed the sample, bit into it, tore a chunk off, and began eating. Cody glanced at Jerry, then at Ben, finally checking in with Deirdre, who was staring at the mouse with a small smile.

  “He likes it,” he said.

  “The genetic analysis is coming up just now,” said Jerry. “Coding 76 percent similar to the Parasol Mushroom of eastern Michigan.”

  “What about the remaining 24 percent?”

  “Unknown.”

  “But still innocuous.”

  “Still innocuous,” said Jerry.

  “Then I say we go in,” said Cody.

  “Shouldn’t we relay to Vesta City?” suggested Deirdre.

  “We’ll do tha
t,” said Cody. “But in the meantime let’s get our gear.” He called to their pilot, Joe Calaminci. “Joe, fire attitude jets and bring us into synchronous orbit above Newton.”

  As Joe followed Cody’s instructions, everybody floated against the left wall, pushed there by the mild gee-force, and grasped various handholds until the Gerard Kuiper positioned itself above Newton, that city of cities, an idea as much as a city, as mythical as New York, Paris, or London—a place to start, the chosen hub of the reconstruction effort, the heart of the asteroid Ceres, and indeed, of the whole Belt.

  They all dealt with it in their different ways, the gravity, .5 gees produced by a utility, that sliver of a black hole in the core that had stayed on-line, if in a degraded form, since the evacuation. Cody glanced around as they walked in their pressure suits down Isosceles Boulevard into the underground city of Newton. Deirdre, who was also from Vesta, forced herself to walk upright, even managed a bounce in her step, as though determined to prove herself. Jerry walked with flat-footed effort, his stooped shoulders a lot more stooped than they usually were, his arms hanging with a nearly apelike droop at his sides. Ben got himself into a rhythm, banging each foot down on the macadamized surface of Isosceles Boulevard as if he were stepping on insects, sending small puffs of dust into the vacuum.

  Cody glanced around at the other eight members of his survey crew, all good men and women, people he knew he could trust. Russ Burke, Dina Alton, and Peter Wooster stuck together, talking in low voices in the hard-to-follow Perseusian dialect of their home asteroid. Witold Kawlosewicz helped Claire Dubeau because Witold came from Vesta and Claire came from Flora, and the difference was .3 gees. Huy Hai, the waterworks engineer, kept close to the curb by force of habit, inspecting whatever drains they came to, occasionally picking pieces of the strange lichen off lampposts and tossing them into the road. Anne-Marie Waddell, communications engineer, was hunched over like Jerry, but not as badly. Finally, Wolf Steiger, who came from one of the Hundred Towns in the Nefertiti Family, a place so tiny that centrifugal capacity couldn’t exceed .05 gees, a big man, muscular, fitter than all of them, but breathing hard, as if he had chronic lung disease.