The Heretic (Beyond the Wall Book 1) (3 page)

If it were discovered.

Some of the Concessions had workarounds, and the Bazaar demanded flexibility. The border space near the Wall nurtured smugglers like Shepherd. What the Core could not provide, the Bazaar generously supplied instead. For a fee.

A scattering of townships and communities were spread out around Herse, in the steppes of a mountain range that stretched halfway round the moon. Shepherd’s interest lay in just one of them: a small hamlet called Panis. In a concealed shadow of Soteria’s hold, behind a few dozen drums of unrefined oil, sat a cargo of medicine that Shepherd would sell to the hamlet for a profit—albeit a meagre one. Enough to keep him going. Enough to give him time to find a few more contracts for the rest of the season and, hopefully, to service Soteria.

Of course, it wasn’t a cargo he held an official licence for.

He took another sip of the steaming hotleaf, enjoying the burn on his tongue, and turned his mind to the next contract. Ideally, he wanted a cargo from Herse. Perhaps even passengers. If not, there were a few busy communities he could tap to see if there was any work to be had.

Shepherd bore mixed feelings towards the busier settlements. House Rules varied by community, and some were easier to deal with than others. Thieves, brigands and hucksters plied their nefarious trade everywhere—and always would. From what the preachers said, crime had existed for as long as man had cultivated desires. That made sense to Shepherd, but preachers unnerved him. Their devotion to blind faith was alien to him and to everything the schoolteachers from the Core had taught him. Human history, short and beleaguered as it was, no longer permitted belief in a divinity—too much senseless blood had been shed in humanity’s past, they said. This was the First Concession, the foundation of the Consulate Magistratus and the governance of its Republic.

And whilst Shepherd sometimes saw the truth in the preachers’ words about freedom and hope, he also knew that violence and faith
were
intertwined, as he’d been taught. He carried a pistol and had taken the lives of men with it, but each time he handled it, he felt a small part of him inside grow darker. Whatever faith men had, whether it was in money or freedom, it was always wed to violence.

For a while he sat, sipping the hotleaf and thinking, until the nav system klaxon unceremoniously hauled him back to the cockpit. Soteria was about to breach. He ran a final check of the systems and took hold of the freighter’s controls.

Soteria was no beast. She was agile and fleet-footed when called upon, but too often Shepherd encountered her intemperate disposition. Like any vessel with more seasons behind than in front, her mood slid more often towards cantankerous than predictable. He didn’t pull in enough to source himself a top-of-the-line vessel but, secretly, he wasn’t sure he would part with Soteria even if he could. Like most freighter-tramps, he’d grown attached to his partner. It wasn’t an unnatural way to feel about a thing that was both home and livelihood, especially for men who ran them alone. Freighters developed idiosyncrasies, characters.

Sometimes, Shepherd would even talk to her.

When Shepherd first acquired Soteria—way back when, and from a man he didn’t mind leaving in a gutter—he had spent every last coin on making her as fast as hell and untraceable. Maybe he could have spent more elsewhere, and maybe even a little more recently. Because with any temperamental bitch came tantrums, and lately Shepherd could feel her temper fraying.

As he took the controls and together they breached the tunnel, he could feel the vibrations of an old problem returning to haunt him: a fluctuation within the avionics circuitry. Of course, he’d once had the chance to get it repaired—he’d even had the scratch in his pocket. But the unfamiliar weight of that affluence was something he hadn’t been ready to relinquish straight away. He’d known it was a mistake, even then. And he was paying the price now.

As the warning light blinked red on the control panel, and another alarm pealed, he knew his stay in Herse was about to be extended. Either he’d have to fix the problem himself or, if he was lucky, there’d be someone more qualified on the ground. He hoped no other problems would rear up during the landing. It would be a rough ride down, but that was payback, he supposed.

He drew the harness over his shoulders and around his waist and clipped himself in. He cinched the straps until they were tight.
I’m sorry, girl.

He gripped the controls tightly and his hands dampened. As the tunnel breached, Soteria’s nav system devolved flight control to the main systems. Shepherd felt the ship begin to buck and pitch as Soteria vented her fury through his hands. The muscles in his arms twitched as he wrestled the freighter towards the sublight path.

His chest tightened as the controls shuddered in his grip.

Another warning light blinked red and Shepherd angled Soteria port side to compensate for the confused avionics systems, then reduced thrust from one of the starboard nacelles. She yawed and rolled so he compensated again. Behind him, deep within the bowels of the propulsion system, he heard something work loose and carom around the drive room. He shut the airlock door to the cockpit.

‘I said I was sorry,’ he muttered. ‘That not enough for you?’

Soteria answered with another savage yaw to port. He fed her more power and punched in fine adjustments to the avionics systems.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was finished. Tantrum over; equilibrium. She evened out, fell into a gentle arc around the anonymous gas giant, and powered towards Herse on the other side. Shepherd sighed slowly, closed his eyes for a moment and leaned back in his chair. This time, he promised her, he’d get it fixed. No matter what the cost.

When he opened his eyes again, Herse had begun to float into view from its hiding place behind the leviathan sphere of crimson flame. He never tired of gazing at a planet that could sustain life. He’d always felt that the atmosphere of a planet—when infused with oxygen and nitrogen and whatever else the terraformers did to make places habitable—appeared intensely wild and beautiful from above. Framed by the stars and the deep blue and black of space, the maelstrom of vivid colour left him breathless.

But beauty too, he had found, was so often wed to violence. As he broke left and poured on thrust, readying to punch through the upper atmosphere, Soteria again began to roil, the turbulence slinging her from side to side. At least this time she behaved and responded to his commands. But even so, Shepherd was relieved when at last they dropped through the final layers of the atmosphere and Soteria slowly began to level out and relax. He brought her down low and easy and just above the sea to cool her down, carving a wake of white froth behind him.

Herse was a coastal township that stretched back towards dense forest. This time of year, it would be knee-deep in winter. Beyond the leagues of grey-green woodland lay an immense massif of obsidian and slate-grey rock, shrouded in glacial silver and blue névé. Turbid, charcoal cloud seemed to permanently veil the summits. Panis lay well away from even the thinning outskirts of Herse. It was a small community—perhaps a hundred people. The prospects of picking up a mechanic, or at least someone handy with a wrench, would be reasonable only in Herse proper.

The port itself was some way out of town, on a natural shelf that jutted out from the mountainside and then broke off sharply down into the sea. A single track led from the Port into the main township, and the Praetor had licensed a shuttle service that, Shepherd knew, was operated by an old terraformer with a gammy leg. He had never known the man’s name, but the shuttle had always looked in need of a mechanic’s love. Maybe you
could
do wonders with spit and tape.

Shepherd manoeuvred Soteria upwards and into an arc, easing the stern into a gentle quarter turn, then leaned forward towards the radio.

‘Herse Port, this is freighter Soteria, requesting a landing platform.’

The static on the radio hissed for a few seconds, then crackled to life. ‘Freighter Soteria, this is Herse Port. Landing Platform Seven, then proceed directly to Customs to file your licence and nav data.’

‘Received, Herse Port. Soteria out.’

In the end, he thought, sometimes you had no option but to take what was on offer.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

SHEPHERD STEPPED off the ramp leading down from Soteria’s hold, the thick fur collar of his longcoat hitched up and the buckles tightly fastened. From the warmth of Soteria’s embrace he emerged into a hostile, frigid wind that stripped the skin from his face. His pistol was strapped to his thigh, a necessary burden. Most communities bordering the Wall tolerated the overt carrying of weaponry, and in those that did not, concealment was usually enough. But strangers to Herse would be foolish to walk through the township without protection.

Despite the glacial cold, the Port still functioned. Shepherd could only just pick out the feeble glow of the main hangar’s interior lights seeping through the mist of tumbling snow. Beyond the hangar, at the perimeter of the Port, was a border of flashing orange strobes that marked where the cliff’s edge fell away into the raging sea below. Each of the landing platforms was outlined with further strobes, which flashed red and green intermittently.

Two other freighters stood on the adjacent platforms. Both were in the process of being loaded. Tractor units, driven by hunched shadows shrouded in heavy longcoats and goggles to protect them from the spindrift, deposited cargo into the loading bays. Behind them, the slate-grey rock of the mountain’s flank climbed upwards and melted into the charcoal fog high above.

A tall figure, bent against the wind and thinly veiled by the swirling mist, stalked the circumference of one of the freighters, carrying out pre-flight checks. A freighter-tramp, Shepherd thought, making to leave. The man moved efficiently, but Shepherd noticed an urgency in each movement. Suddenly, as if he was aware Shepherd was watching him, the tall man turned and peered through the mist. For a moment he stared at Shepherd, then shook his head grimly. He glanced sideways towards the main hangar and then back again, before jabbing a finger towards Soteria. He didn’t wait for a response before he went back to checking his ship.

What the hell was that about?

Shepherd turned and thumped the switch to raise Soteria’s loading ramp, then keyed in the code to seal her. He gazed at his vessel for a moment, his eyes tracing the smooth, grey lines leading to the cockpit. She always looked so graceful to him, settled into her landing stance. Like a feline on its haunches, but arched forward, tensed and ready to pounce. His hand lingered on the bulkhead next to the keypad for the ramp as he considered the tall man’s curious behaviour. The outer rim was full of crazies.
You’re the only one I trust in a place like this, old girl.
‘Let’s get you some attention,’ he whispered into the wind. ‘Show you how much I love you.’

The first set of doors led to the Caisson Tunnel. He had heard techs call it an MRT, but he’d never really known what the letters were intended to refer to. The tunnel was slightly taller than he was, but otherwise not much larger than a coffin. Shepherd stepped inside and the glass doors in front and behind hissed as they closed. Caisson Tunnels were fully automated; he knew that if the scanning system picked up anything, the doors would lock and then the serious problems would begin. Damn things always made him uneasy.

For as long as Shepherd could remember, no one coming through the tunnels had been able to enter any port without first being scanned for ‘the sickness’. Superluminal travel was physiologically debilitating; it usually brought on severe headaches that started in the eyes, or excruciating pain in the joints. Sensations like insects crawling over the skin were not uncommon.

Shepherd was bathed in darkness until four blue lights illuminated the chamber. Two ones either side of him progressed slowly upwards from the floor to his shoulders. A third, above his head, moved gradually around the circumference of the chamber while the fourth scanned his eyes. For a full three minutes they scrutinised him until, to his relief, the chamber illuminated white and the door in front of him opened.

The heaters inside the hangar whined and clacked, belching out more fumes than they did heat. A group of haggard off-worlders with bulging bags and skittish hands gathered by the door, awaiting clearance to head out to one of the freighters.
A handful of the rare few
, Shepherd thought: those with interstellar permits, or maybe extortionate forgeries from Jieshou or Samarkand. One of them, a woman late in years, caught Shepherd’s eye and watched him for a moment, then glanced quickly away. Shepherd stood a little longer, watching her, then made for Customs. There had been something about her manner that had caught him—something in her restive eyes that made him uneasy. When he reached the Customs chamber, set back behind a barrier of thick plastiglass, he risked another glance back. He couldn’t say why exactly, and he immediately felt foolish.
Nothing to see, Shepherd. Just some people looking to get out of here. And who can blame them?

He turned and slid two flash cards towards the clerk—one with nav data, the other with his licences. The jowled man lifted his head sharply and stared at Shepherd with grey eyes before reaching for the drives. He plugged them into his terminal and scanned the screen. His eyes grew narrow, almost receding into his fleshy cheeks, and he turned to look at Shepherd, scrutinising him for a while before he spoke. ‘What are you importing?’ he said finally.