Book 1 - Shadowline Read Free Page B

like a screaming cue ball on the break.
The people-balls were all on the table. Frog’s impact set
them flying from bank to bank.
    My father never met Frog. It’s doubtful that Frog ever
heard of my father. So it goes sometimes.
    —Masato Igarashi Storm
     
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Six: 3007 AD
    BLACKWORLD (Reference:
Morgan’s New Revised Catalogue of
Stars, Planets, Astrogational Benchmarks, and Spatial Phenomena
,
edition of 3007): Sole planet of white dwarf A257-23. Uniface body.
Unique in that it is the only such planet colonized by mankind. A
small population houses itself in seven domed cities, each
essentially a corporate state. Economically important as a
transport nexus and rich source of power metals. Major industry,
mining. Major export, rare elements. Population, chiefly of negroid
stock, of First Expansion origins. The name, however, comes from
the fact that life is confined to Darkside. Major tourist
attraction, the Thunder Mountains on the western terminator, where
slight perturbations in the slow planetary rotation result in
tremendous tectonic activity due to heat expansion and
contraction.
     
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Seven: 3020 AD
    Blackworld as a reference-book entry was hardly an
eyebrow-raiser. Nothing more than a note to make people wonder why
anyone would live there.
    It was a hell of a world. Even the natives sometimes wondered
why anybody lived there.
    Or so Frog thought as he cursed heaven and hell and slammed his
portside tracks into reverse.
    “Goddamned heat erosion in the friggin’ Whitlandsund
now,” he muttered, and with his free hand returned the
gesture of the obelisk/landmark he called Big Dick.
    He had become lax. He had been daydreaming down a familiar
route. He had aligned Big Dick wrong and drifted into terrain not
recharted since last the sun had shoved a blazing finger into the
pass.
    Luckily, he had been in no hurry. The first sliding crunch under
the starboard lead track had alerted him. Quick braking and a
little rocking pulled the tractor out.
    He heaved a sigh of relief.
    There wasn’t much real danger this side of the Edge of the
World. Other tractors could reach him in the darkness.
    He was sweating anyway. For him it did not matter where the
accident happened. His finances allowed no margin for error. One
screw-up and he was as good as dead.
    There was no excuse for what had happened, Brightside or Dark.
He was angry. “You don’t get old making mistakes,
idiot,” he snarled at the image reflected in the visual plate
in front of him.
    Frog was old. Nobody knew just how old, and he wasn’t
telling, but there were men in Edgeward who had heard him spin
tavern tales of his father’s adventures with the
Devil’s Guard, and the Guard had folded a century ago, right
after the Ulantonid War. The conservatives figured him for his
early seventies. He had been the town character for as long as
anyone could remember.
    Frog was the last of a breed that had begun disappearing when
postwar resumption of commerce had created a huge demand for
Blackworld metals. The need for efficiency had made the appearance
of big exploitation corporation inevitable. Frog was Edgeward
City’s only surviving independent prospector.
    In the old days, while the Blakes had been on the rise, he had
faced more danger in Edgeward itself than he had Brightside. The
consolidation of Blake Mining and Metals had not been a gentle
process. Now his competition was so insubstantial that the
Corporation ignored it. Blake helped keep him rolling, in fact, the
way historical societies keep old homes standing. He was a piece of
yesterday to show off to out-of-towners.
    Frog did not care. He just lived on, cursing everyone in general
and Blake in particular, and kept doing what he knew best.
    He was the finest tractor hog ever to work the Shadowline. And
they damned well knew it.
    Still, making it as a loner in a corporate age was difficult and
dangerous. Blake had long since squatted on every easily reached
pool and deposit