winds. Over the next few days he’d hidden it in the family’s barn, a long shaft dug into a nearby hillside—to protect the stock from Thuringia’s strong winds. While tending the Earth-pattern clone animals, he snuck grain and fed the groundhugger, cleaned up after it, and watched its four black eyes alertly track his every move, even when his fingers playfully poked it in a tummy without a ribcage—merely an assemblage of cartilage and tendons that braced the sparse bones of spine and legs. Then his father had found Matt’s pet hiding in a grain barrel and killed it as a pest—unaware of his son’s secret.
His mother Kristin had comforted him, for a while. Then his first sister had been born, displacing him and putting more farm work on him and his stiffly formal father. Matt had tried to forget the loss and his father Benoit had reached out to an only son. The man, a stocky, heavily built, black-haired man of reddish-brown skin and an intense manner, unbent enough to tell Matt about his grandparents. Grandpa had been a full-blooded Apache Indian from the Southwest of old North America, who’d married a Scots-American rancher, while his grandma had been a Tongan Polynesian who’d hooked up with a French sailor from Marseilles, from whom the family name of Dragoneaux derived. It helped him understand his mother’s endurance of hard times and his father’s insistence on family duty ahead of personal wishes.
One day, years later, Matt was down-peninsula at Thuringia’s single spaceport of Elios, bartering with a Javanese merchant for new tiller-robot parts. His parents had stayed behind with his four sisters—every hand was needed to bring in the spring harvest of ground tubers.
A genome harvester hit Thuringia.
But not like the first one that hit Earth in 2040 and stayed so long it had been captured.
This one had lain hidden in Thuringia’s asteroid belt for months, mapping the power emissions from farmstead hoverjets as they moved from backcountry down to the planet’s only spaceport—a Port protected by antique neon-argon lasers with adaptive optics mirrors—and then back out to their dispersed homesteads. It was a regular, agricultural pattern. With the pattern known and the target homesteads selected, the harvester ship moved.
It went first to a polar orbit in stealth mode, where it dispatched a hypersonic Fire-and-Forget missile that took out the Port’s FTL communicator. Then it launched radar decoys—to veil the touchdown sites of its three landing craft. Finally, just minutes after the initial strike, the genome harvester collected forty-seven humans from eight isolated farmsteads. It was an efficient harvest. They did not need quantity when all they required were zombie reservoirs of sapient DNA. They were, after all, not organ harvesters or labor-slavers—they were the top of the line in Anarchate commercialism. They were genome harvesters.
In just one hour they struck, took, destroyed, and left out-system. In that short time Matt lost his entire family.
He returned briefly to see the blasted homestead, smell the burned odor of blackened crops, and then leave, never to return. At Thuringia Port, Matt took passage out as a laborer and personal Servant to a freighter ship’s alien captain. The captain taught him his duties—and used a neurowhip when he didn’t move fast enough. Later, he moved up to Stevedore level. On other ships in other star quadrants he survived, grew taller, acquired new scars, and educated himself from borrowed datacubes. Matt also learned violence, especially controlled violence, and then discovered how much other sapients respected those beings who could exert such violence.
A brief setback occurred when his ship was captured by optoelectronics raiders. They sold him to the foul-smelling Flesh Markets of Alkalurops, where he soon discovered why there was no universal law in the galaxy—anarchy was too profitable. The Anarchate was founded to perpetuate anarchy
His mother Kristin had comforted him, for a while. Then his first sister had been born, displacing him and putting more farm work on him and his stiffly formal father. Matt had tried to forget the loss and his father Benoit had reached out to an only son. The man, a stocky, heavily built, black-haired man of reddish-brown skin and an intense manner, unbent enough to tell Matt about his grandparents. Grandpa had been a full-blooded Apache Indian from the Southwest of old North America, who’d married a Scots-American rancher, while his grandma had been a Tongan Polynesian who’d hooked up with a French sailor from Marseilles, from whom the family name of Dragoneaux derived. It helped him understand his mother’s endurance of hard times and his father’s insistence on family duty ahead of personal wishes.
One day, years later, Matt was down-peninsula at Thuringia’s single spaceport of Elios, bartering with a Javanese merchant for new tiller-robot parts. His parents had stayed behind with his four sisters—every hand was needed to bring in the spring harvest of ground tubers.
A genome harvester hit Thuringia.
But not like the first one that hit Earth in 2040 and stayed so long it had been captured.
This one had lain hidden in Thuringia’s asteroid belt for months, mapping the power emissions from farmstead hoverjets as they moved from backcountry down to the planet’s only spaceport—a Port protected by antique neon-argon lasers with adaptive optics mirrors—and then back out to their dispersed homesteads. It was a regular, agricultural pattern. With the pattern known and the target homesteads selected, the harvester ship moved.
It went first to a polar orbit in stealth mode, where it dispatched a hypersonic Fire-and-Forget missile that took out the Port’s FTL communicator. Then it launched radar decoys—to veil the touchdown sites of its three landing craft. Finally, just minutes after the initial strike, the genome harvester collected forty-seven humans from eight isolated farmsteads. It was an efficient harvest. They did not need quantity when all they required were zombie reservoirs of sapient DNA. They were, after all, not organ harvesters or labor-slavers—they were the top of the line in Anarchate commercialism. They were genome harvesters.
In just one hour they struck, took, destroyed, and left out-system. In that short time Matt lost his entire family.
He returned briefly to see the blasted homestead, smell the burned odor of blackened crops, and then leave, never to return. At Thuringia Port, Matt took passage out as a laborer and personal Servant to a freighter ship’s alien captain. The captain taught him his duties—and used a neurowhip when he didn’t move fast enough. Later, he moved up to Stevedore level. On other ships in other star quadrants he survived, grew taller, acquired new scars, and educated himself from borrowed datacubes. Matt also learned violence, especially controlled violence, and then discovered how much other sapients respected those beings who could exert such violence.
A brief setback occurred when his ship was captured by optoelectronics raiders. They sold him to the foul-smelling Flesh Markets of Alkalurops, where he soon discovered why there was no universal law in the galaxy—anarchy was too profitable. The Anarchate was founded to perpetuate anarchy
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