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would he risk facing a court martial?
    But what kind of force was it? Who'd care about a soldier and a murderer on his way to life in exile? And had the Chinese been sent here by the same force? And how about the jumpgate accidents, had they been arranged, as well, in order to distract the Fort operators and slacken their vigilance? True that they hadn't looked too deep into my mental scans - not deep enough to discover the unauthorized software, anyway.
    My head was spinning. The Chinese, Infor mation, jumpgate accidents... biocyne.
    "What's carula?" I asked.
    "Just some slimy shit," Georgie muttered. "Stinks to high heaven."
    I looked at the captain. "Why do you send it to the Fort?"
    He shrugged. "God knows. They process it, like, to use as a food supplement. To help with overpopulation. According to them, we deliver food shipments."
    " How often?"
    "How can I say..."
    "Regularly enough," Georgie grumbled.
    "Exactly," the captain nodded. "We send, like, one shipment a month."
    "How do you harvest it?"
    "It's cultured. Once it blossoms, divers go down and filter the muck... Why would you want to know?"
    I didn't say anything.
    "Shitty job," Georgie winced.
    "Not nice, no," the captain said. "But it's McLean and his people who deal with that. Virtually no Russians on his farms. And I shouldn't think of becoming a diver. They're dog meat, no one cares if they live or die. Worse than clones."
    I stared in front of me. I'd just realized that the Information's data was classified. Here on Pangea no one seemed to know anything about biocyne. The deportees seem to think that the Earth needed the blue seaweed as a handy nutrient to add to cheap synthetic food they sold to the poor. Even on Earth, few knew about biocyne's precious properties. It was used to make medications to reverse aging, affordable to a select few like our President and corporate top brass. Had the common people learned that the authorities manipulated them in more than one way, achieving immortality while the deteriorating environment cut the average lifespan further with every year...
    That was all well and good, but the average soldier like myself wasn't supposed to know these things. The Information had told me... no. It had only repeated something I'd known for a long time. This was no Information software - the installation seemed to help surface suppressed memories.
    I got out of synch again, rowing slower as I got lost in thought. It looked like I was caught in a weird and disturbing situation.
    I glanced at Georgie and the captain,
    "I understand the Earth needs the seaweed. But what's in it for the settlers?"
    " All our machinery," he explained, "is exchanged for carula. All the generators, spare parts, guns and ammunition... It's old: nothing digital, no pulse guns or computerized lathes. Even the gun cartridges are analog."
    " And the fuel? There're no mineral resources here, are there?"
    "There aren't," the captain grinned. "But we do have the Tanker."
    Information butted in again. The Tanker is the oil riggers' base. It includes the supertanker Samotlor , an oil rig, a supply vessel and the icebreaking tug Svyatoslav Norg which were teleported to the Continent as a result of Boris Neumann's bomb test disaster.
    "Heard about the Samotlor disaster?" the captain said. "You must have, it was all over the news. A whole convoy disappeared on its way from the Arctic oil rigs."
    "I see," I mumbled.
    "The tanker was full to the brim," the captain perked up, gesturing away. "When Neumann first discovered Pangea forty years back, we kept finding all sorts of shit caught in the jump. Raiders make good money out of it, seeking and selling their goodies on the New Pang market."
    The crane operator nodded.
    "Our Georgie here was with the raiders for quite a while. He used to work with Neumann himself before Earth pulled the plug on his research," the captain raised his bushy eyebrows wrinkling a sunburnt forehead. "You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?