Trident's Forge (2 page)

T
au Ceti G
, (Human designation: Gaia), Local Standard Year 3 pl (Post Landing)

B
enson blew his whistle
, then stepped onto the field. “Pass Interference. Defense. Number twenty-one.”

“What?” Korolev yelled. “I just pushed him out of the way.”

“Yeah,” Benson shouted. “That's pass interference. You can't interfere with an eligible receiver if they have a chance to make a fair catch outside of the first five meters.”

“But I'm
supposed
to keep them from catching the ball. That's my whole job!”

“Yes, but… just not like that.”

“That doesn't make any sense, chief.”

Benson threw up his arms. “Hey, I'm just reading out of the rulebook, OK? I didn't write it. Now are we playing football or not?”

The twenty-two men wandering around the makeshift “field” murmured general agreement that they were in fact playing football and reset for the next down.

“OK, put the ball at the spot of the foul on the twenty seven-meter line,” Benson said.

“The twenty-seven?” Korolev objected. “That's like a thirty meter penalty!”

“That's the rule.”

“So I can get a late hit on the quarterback or drill a guy out of bounds and only get fifteen meters, but if I touch him in the open field before he touches the ball, it could be
ninety
meters?”

“I suppose, if your quarterback has a laser for an arm,” Benson admitted.

“That's dumb.”

“That's the game. Now c'mon, we've only got three more practices before we play the Dervishes.”

“I miss Zero,” their middle linebacker, Lindqvist, muttered. He was a Nordic mountain of a man who would have been better served by the universe if he'd been born in an age when breaking a wooden shield with a single ax swing was a highly prized skill.

“We all do,” Benson snapped. “But the Zero stadium is a little busy right now shipping food and supplies to keep all of us fat and happy, OK? It's either this or soccer, kiddies.”

A chorus of groans let Benson know what the consensus on
that
possibility was.

“That's what I thought. Now c'mon, line up on the twenty-seven!”

Coach Benson tucked the tablet he'd been referencing under an arm and watched the scene unfold. Tau Ceti G's…
Gaia
's first organized sports league was only five days away from its opening game, and American-style football was about to come roaring back from a two-and-a-half century hiatus. Sure, the old player stats and records from the days of the NFL and IAFL weren't any good on a new planet with only ninety-five percent Earth gravity, but they'd decided to jettison the anachronistic imperial yard in favor of the slightly longer meter for the field, which would hopefully account for the lighter gravity to some degree.

After two weeks of practice, one thing was abundantly clear. Even in the lighter gravity, they had a long way to go before the old records were in any danger. Benson only hoped the coaches of the Dervishes, Yaoguai, and Spartans were experiencing similar setbacks.

Not that their trials should have come as any great surprise. Each of the four teams was only afforded an hour of practice per day on the single playing field. Acreage inside humanity's rapidly-growing colony of Shambhala came at a premium, and Benson had called in more than one favor to get the field built in the first place. Professional players back on Earth drilled and trained as a fulltime job. Benson's players were former Zero players, farm hands, construction techs, and one skinny-ass software coder who had somehow been graced with a leg that could kick a football through the uprights from almost sixty meters out, so long as the wind wasn't blowing, which it nearly always was.

The play clock resumed, and the quarterback started his snap-count.

“Blue forty-two. Hut, hut. Hike!”

He'd barely dropped back into the pocket before Benson blew his whistle again.

“Holding. Offense. Number thirty. Ten meter penalty.”

“That's bullshit,” Hoffman, playing number thirty, said. “Why is it ten meters when the offense gets called for a hold, but only five when the defense holds?”

Benson shook the rules tablet in the air angrily.

“I don't fucking know, OK? It's football, it's not supposed to make sense! Now just move the ball back, we're burning daylight.”

Forty-five sweaty and profanity-laden minutes later, the Mustangs' practice was over, just in time for the Spartans to take their turn on the field. Benson slapped shoulders and gave a round of congratulations to his new team, then turned down the path toward his home. The setting sun hung low on the horizon, shining ever so slightly more brightly in his left eye.

The vat-grown eye, courtesy of Doctor Russell, was just a bit more sensitive than his right. It, along with extensive burns on his hands and face, as well as a lungful of plutonium dust, were the keepsakes he'd earned fighting an utter madman named David Kimura and his patron among the crew, Avelina da Silva. The lunatic had detonated one of the small implosion-triggered nukes the Ark used for propulsion. Only a stray bullet from Benson's gun denting the explosive shell surrounding the plutonium pile inside had prevented it from going nuclear, throwing out a huge fireball of conventional explosives and a cloud of vaporized plutonium in the process.

However, considering he'd saved all of humanity in the process, Benson considered the injuries a fair trade. Like his eye, Dr Russell had expertly healed his burns and lungs. Only an occasional itching under the skin of his left cheek where the nerves in his clone skin grafts hadn't quite lined up remained to remind him of the damage he'd sustained in the fight.

Still, some nights, it was enough. Certain kinds of wounds ran deeper than flesh.

He shook off the thought as he turned onto the city's central boulevard. Not for the first time, Benson marveled at how quickly Shambhala had grown. It wouldn't be long before walking from one end of the city to the other wouldn't be feasible. Public transit would be needed before long. The politicians were already fighting over the whats and wheres.

Benson glanced into the Bay of Landing where the space elevator's anchor station floated. Its thin, carbon-nanotube ribbon shimmered in the deep red-orange hues of sunset as it reached tens of thousands of kilometers up to the Ark floating in the null-g of geosynch. Benson's beloved Zero stadium had reverted to its original purpose: a dock and maintenance bay for elevator cars, as well as a warehouse and staging area for all the people, material, and supplies that continued to move back and forth between the Ark and the planet on a near-daily basis. Continue up some tens of thousands of kilometers more and the Pathfinder probe sat, now serving as the elevator system's counterweight.

Humanity's home for the last two and a third centuries had undergone a metamorphosis since it arrived in orbit around Gaia. Its three kilometer-long pleated conical meteor shield had been ejected just before decelerating for the Tau Ceti system. Only a handful of helium-three tanks still studded the outside of the reactor bulb, enough to fuel the ship's fusion reactors for another fifteen years, at most. Only five thousand people remained behind to maintain its systems and tend the farms. Its stockpile of nuclear bombs all but exhausted, it would never move again, save for the occasional station-keeping thruster firing. The Ark had been reborn as a space station.

However, this new role was no less important than its original one. While the majority of mankind had moved down to Gaia's surface over the last three years, Shambhala was still dependent on the immense ship's fusion generators for power, her navigational lasers to deflect the Tau Ceti system's population of asteroids, and what remained of its farmland for food.

As a posthumous gift to mankind, Avelina da Silva, the genius geneticist who had been in charge of the team adapting food crops to Atlantis's biosphere and the woman who had nearly succeeded in killing every last human alive, had sabotaged the first batches of staple crop seeds with time-bombs hidden in their DNA that turned the plants into black sludge less than a month after germination. Their best scientists were still busy cleaning up the mess, damn her.

Benson took a moment to admire human tenacity. Despite possibly the best example of Murphy's Law since the phrase had been coined, in less than three years their beachhead on Gaia had grown from a handful of tents and latrines huddled around the first landing shuttles to a fully functional and expanding city of twenty-five thousand people, complete with power, running water, sewers, networked data systems and a desalinization plant, all with a workforce that had been cut by two fifths just a month before they'd arrived.

Not that humans had done all, or even most, of the building. The majority of labor came courtesy of the army of machines that had spent the last two and a half centuries locked away in the Ark's cargo bays. The explosion of activity only served to reinforce to Benson how much humanity had sat on its hands during the long road to Gaia. What he witnessed now was nothing short of a force of nature at work.

As he walked down the wide boulevard, nearly everyone paused to acknowledge his passing with something bordering on reverence. Benson had known celebrity in his life aboard the Ark as a Zero champion, but it was nothing compared to the legend that had grown around him as the savior of all mankind. It probably wouldn't be long before they started pushing to put up some gaudy bronze statue of him in the city center.

A piece of litter caught his eye. A crumpled piece of paper, laying on the side of the road where it had been scrunched up and carelessly dropped. An old ache gnawed at him as Benson picked the trash up.

Trash. It was a word mankind hadn't used in centuries. Nothing went to waste on the Ark. There, he'd have used the surveillance net to backtrack the culprit and slap them with ten hours of community service for breaking Conservation Code Seven.

But here in Shambhala, only three years into the experiment, humans were already falling into old habits. Bad habits. Benson carried the paper and dropped it into the nearest recycling bin, shaking his head as he did so.

One last turn and Benson was at the doorstep of the house he shared with Theresa, his wife of almost three years and the city's first chief constable. It was a quaint yet comfortable affair straight out of the housing catalog, printed in a day flat by extrusion gantries. The rounded red roof tiles gave it a Mediterranean architectural flavor, but the flare did nothing to hide the fact it was still a standard unit. Not that Benson cared. It had Theresa inside it, so it was home.

The door recognized his plant and opened automatically, inviting him inside.

“Esa, I'm home!”

“Kitchen,” came her reply.

Benson hung his jacket and whistle by the front door, set his tablet down on the small entryway table, then took a deep, cleansing breath, letting the day's stresses and frustrations leak back out of him on the exhale.

“You smell like a jockstrap,” Theresa said from the dining room.

“I love you, too.”

“I thought you're just coaching the team, not rolling around in the dirt with them.”

“There's a lot of yelling and running up and down the sidelines involved.” Benson stared up at the ceiling for several seconds.

“What's wrong?” Theresa asked.

“Hmm?”

“You're counting ceiling tiles again. That's weird.”

Benson pulled out a chair and sat down heavily. “I'm not counting, I just… like having a ceiling.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know. It just feels more secure. I guess I'm still not entirely comfortable with the sky. Sometimes I get caught up looking at a cloud or something and feel like there's nothing keeping me from falling off the planet.”

“Only gravity,” Theresa teased. “You know, one of the four fundamental forces of the universe.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Mmm,” Theresa hummed. “I love the skies here, especially at night. The stars make me feel like I could stretch my arms out forever.”

“You could, and still never find something to grab onto, that's the problem. I spent enough time out among the stars a few years ago, thank you very much. I'd still be out there floating through them if it hadn't been for a safety tether.”

Theresa hugged him lightly from behind. “Don't worry, you're not floating away from me that easily.” She gave him a peck on the head, then pretended to spit it back out. “God, you're as sweaty as a jockstrap, too. You're taking a shower.”

“After dinner. I'm starving. Speaking of dinner, what did Jack send down the beanstalk today?”

Theresa held up a finger and turned for the small kitchen, then returned with a steaming plate of–

“Algae and mushroom casserole.”

“Again?”

“Hey, I slaved all day in the kitchen–”

“Heating up the package the casserole came in. The door told me you got home ten minutes ago.”

Theresa put up her hands. “All right, guilty, but it's not like I'm choosing the menu. And it wouldn't kill
you
to prepare dinner once in a while.”

“I've been busy coaching, you know that.”

Theresa sat down and cut herself a piece of casserole. “Oh yes, the work of our director of recreation and athletic preparedness is never done. Who could blame him for failing to perform his share of the household chores?”

“Have you seen some of the people coming down the elevator? A lot of them can barely lift anything heavier than the contents of their forks or chopsticks, much less do any physical work like, say, building the colony. They should have given me this job years ago.”

Theresa shrugged and set a piece on his plate. “Well, seeing as that means I'd have made chief years ago, I'm hardly going to argue the point. Now, can we eat?”