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Chapter Six

“Mail for you, Isaac,” Cephalie chimed from atop the saltshaker.

He finished chewing a mouthful of scrambled eggs, swallowed, and set down his fork. The clinking of utensils against plates and the din of breakfast conversations filled the Arcturus’ Deck Five Observation Dome. His table sat on the edge of a translucent, peninsula-shaped platform above the wide sweep of the dome’s panorama, and Saturn swelled far below his feet as the saucer decelerated.

“Anything good?” He grabbed the bottle next to Cephalie and sprinkled his eggs with hot sauce.

“It’s from Raviv. Looks like work.”

“I hope so. Some time to unwind is nice, but I’m getting antsy with nothing to do. What’s he got for us?”

“Umm, let’s see.” Cephalie opened the message. “Connectome tower accident. Possible double homicide. Top Gordian agents, too. One of them’s a permadeath.”

“Fantastic!”

She looked up over the edge of the message and gave him a stern stare.

“Uhh, I mean”—he smiled apologetically—“it’s good that Raviv would trust us with a case this important. He wouldn’t give a police officer homicide to just anyone.”

“Maybe.”

“You sound doubtful.”

“Initial report from SSP says it’s an accident.”

“Yeah, right,” he scoffed. “When’s the last time you and I worked a case that turned out be an accident?”

“Can’t seem to recall one.”

“Exactly. And that’s because someone higher up thinks those agents were murdered. Who was killed?” He forked another bite of scrambled eggs into his mouth.

“Doctor Andover-Chen and Chief Engineer Joachim Delacroix.”

“Mmm.” He chewed and swallowed, then waved his fork around like a baton. “The doctor I’ve heard of. Caught one of his interviews after the Dynasty Crisis. Most of the stuff he talked about flew right over my head. Who’s the other guy?”

“He’s Gordian’s top engineer.” She shrugged her arms. “Was their top engineer, since he’s the permadeath. Specialized in transtemporal drive systems. Gordian pulled him over from ART shortly after the division was formed.”

“He was with the Antiquities Rescue Trust?” Isaac asked, surprised. He scooped up another helping of eggs and held it aloft. “That’s dubious company for a cop.”

“Yeah, but Gordian also pulled in just about every time machine in service around the same period, so they needed engineers with experience. Plus, ART got audited hard before that. Gordian would have known if Delacroix was clean or not, so I doubt he was involved in any of those nasty ART scandals. Besides, the historians and their security teams were the ones abusing their time travel privileges; I imagine he just worked on their rides.”

“Mmm.” Isaac nodded, swallowed. “Good point. How were they killed?”

“The dish their beam was aligned with shut down.”

“Don’t those things have backups?”

“Yeah. Two of them.”

“And?”

“Neither kicked in.”

“And SSP is calling this an accident?” Isaac made a disgusted face.

“Apparently so.”

“Typical.” He shook his head and sprinkled more hot sauce on his eggs, then took another bite. “You know, I think they printed out the wrong bottle.”

“No, they didn’t.” Cephalie poked the back of his hand with her cane. “It’s not the sauce, Isaac. It’s all those taste buds you’ve killed off with your eating habits.”

“I like my food to fight back a little. What’s wrong with that?” He picked up the hot sauce bottle and eyeballed the label. “‘Atomic’ my pale behind. I can barely feel this.”

“Dead. Pain. Receptors.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He turned the bottle over and smacked the base with the palm of his hand. “Where’s the transceiver tower?”

“Ballast Heights. The tower’s owned and operated by LifeBeam.”

“Oh good. That’ll save us a trip. Cancel our flight to Kronos and arrange transport to the tower.”

“Will do. What about her ‘kit’?”

“Umm, no.” Isaac frowned at the reminder. “Keep it routed for the station.”

“You sure?” Cephalie pushed off the saltshaker and walked over, twirling her cane. “You never know when a heavily armed death machine might come in handy.”

“Then it’s a good thing we know where to find one.” Isaac stirred the sauce into the scrambled eggs until his meal was a uniform red mush. “What’s SSP doing right now?”

“Waiting for us to arrive at the tower, per orders from Kronos.”

“Great,” he sighed. “That’ll put them in a cheerful mood, I bet.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“We need to get you a LENS. Ask the Arcturus crew if they’ll lend us some of their printer capacity before we land.”

“On it.”

“Just be nice about it this time, okay?”

“What?” Cephalie held up her hands. “I can be nice.”

“There’s no need for us to commandeer their printers. If they’re busy, we can wait. We’ll have the nearest SSP precinct print you out one, instead.”

“What about Susan’s gun?”

“I—” Isaac turned to the side and stared off into space. He let out a resigned sigh. “Yes, that too.”

“It’s allowed.” Cephalie gave her cane a twirl. “Not sure why, but it is.”

“It can turn suspects into pink mist!”

“It’s not that bad.” She tapped her cheek with a thoughtful finger. “Close, though.”

“What in Saturn’s rings does she need a sidearm that powerful for?”

“Hey, don’t blame her for the choice.”

“And why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you’re the one who gave her the full catalog. You set the rules for her”—she poked his hand again—“and she followed them. Not her fault she didn’t pick the one you wanted.”

“Fine. Whatever.” Isaac shook his head, eager to change the subject.

“You going to involve her in any of this? Or you working this case alone?”

“With her, obviously.” He scooped up another mouthful of eggs. The heat was…unsatisfactory. “Where is she now?”

“In the main concourse, doing a circuit of the shops. Last I spoke with her, she mentioned wanting to pick out a souvenir.”

“From a saucer? What for?”

Isaac.”

“What?”

“She’s in another universe. This is new to her.”

“I know that. But a souvenir from a saucer?”

“Look”—Cephalie put her hands on her hips—“do you want me to tell her where to meet us or not?”

“Sure, go ahead.”

“Okay, then.” She shook her head and opened a comm window. “Was that so hard?”

Isaac glanced down at Saturn. “Wait.”

“Yes?” Cephalie asked, her hand hovering next to the window.

“I just had an idea.” He flashed a warm smile. “Ask her to meet us in the Deck Three Bow Park. I think she’ll appreciate the view better from there.”

* * *

“And then what happened?” Isaac asked.

He sat with Susan on a bench with a clear view through the Arcturus’s bow. A dozen other passengers relaxed on similar benches or stood around the Bow Park’s grassy hill as Saturn swelled to fill half the horizon. The ship sped forward without thrust, its bow aligned for the descent through the upper atmosphere and its artificial gravity switched on, though it ebbed away as Saturn’s natural gravity took hold.

He’d already reviewed the basics of the case with Susan. There wasn’t much to do but wait until they arrived at the transceiver tower, and in the awkward silence that followed, he’d made the mistake of suggesting she share some of her DTI stories.

It’s like listening to the same joke over and over again, but no matter how many times I hear it, the punchline never makes me laugh.

“I joined a DTI raid involving four chronoports from Defender Squadron,” Susan continued. “I was part of the STAND unit on Defender-Two. We traveled into the near present, about twenty hours in the past, and brought in the Free Luna cell at their last known position, right before they originally released the gas in the Tycho Crater Capital Building.”

“Was this the flesh-eating gas you mentioned or the gas that takes over people’s implants?”

“The flesh-eating one. Not a well-designed weapon, though. The microbots didn’t replicate very well with only human tissue for parts, so we were able to save most of the victims.”

“Well, that’s good. What happened next?”

“The past versions of the terrorists were interrogated, and we were able to determine the cell’s fallback location in the True Present. It turned out they had a base in an old, abandoned part of the Tycho subway line, near the outskirts of the dome. After that, we returned to the present and…”

Susan trailed off, and a hint of worry creased her brow.

“After that, you…what?” Isaac urged.

She smiled bashfully.

“Don’t keep me in suspense,” he said. “What happened next?”

“We…blew up the base.”

“And the terrorists inside?”

“We blew them up, too.”

“Of course, you did,” he sighed, unsurprised.

And there’s the punchline, he thought.

“They resisted,” Susan added.

“How, exactly?”

“They threatened to hit our organic operatives with the gas.”

“Ah.”

“That’s why us STANDs were sent in.”

“Mmhmm.”

“And we blew them up.”

“I see.”

“They were really bad people,” Susan stressed.

“I didn’t say they weren’t,” he said wearily. “And these terrorists? Not the ones you blew up, but their past versions who hadn’t yet committed the crime? What happened to them.”

“We put them back where we found them, before we returned to the True Present to raid their base.”

“Doesn’t that risk branching the timeline?”

“Not with an interaction that small, no. The differences are absorbed back into the original timeline. Or at least”—she gave him a little shrug—“that’s what I’ve been told. I’m not an expert. But I can tell you our operating doctrine changed significantly after the Gordian Division made contact with us last year. We do our best to minimize our footprint when working in the past.”

“Interesting.” Isaac leaned back in thought. “From what I gather, Gordian isn’t eager to provide Themis with that kind of support. First, our caseload is way too large for them to even make a dent in it at their current size. And second, between exploding universes, imploding universes, temporal knots entangling universes, branched timelines trying to destroy our universe, and who knows what other nutty stuff they deal with over at Gordian, they don’t want to do any time traveling if it’s the least bit risky.”

“I’m not surprised,” Susan said. “I wonder if time travel will become stricter for us, too.”

“Who can say?”

The saucer flew into a towering thunderhead of tan ammonia ice, which blotted out the sun. Lightning flashed outside, and liquid ammonia ran across the window in thin rivulets until the saucer broke through to reveal a vast sun-kissed expanse of puffy mist. A great cloud chasm yawned open, revealing rusty storms of ammonium hydrosulfide tens of kilometers below.

“Saturn,” Susan exhaled with an almost dreamlike quality.

“First time?” Isaac asked.

“First time.” She nodded. “Never been to the planet before. There isn’t much here back home. Just a colony on Titan, a dozen or so mining colonies on the moons, and a handful of fuel collectors in the atmosphere. I’ve been as far as Jupiter’s moons, personally.”

The saucer dipped lower, skimming the cloud tops. The running lights from other spaceships and aircraft twinkled in the distance, and a wide white shape glinted behind a choppy crest of clouds.

“Is that…” She stood and walked up to the window.

“Yes,” Isaac said, joining her.

The saucer cruised in, and the great bow of Janus-Epimetheus parted the clouds like an impossibly tall sailing ship. The megastructure floated out into one of the deep cloud canyons, but even then, only the top thirty or forty kilometers of its downturned fin-shaped body could be seen. The rest was obscured by the swirling reddish-orange storm below.

“Amazing,” Susan breathed. “Pictures don’t do it justice.”

“Home sweet home,” Isaac sighed.

She turned to him. “You’ve lived on Janus before?”

“You could say that.” He gave her a half smile. “I was born here.”

“Oh.” She frowned a little.

“Right…there, actually.” He pointed to a spot near the prow.

“Sorry. I must seem silly to you, then, reacting like this.”

“Not at all,” he assured her. “We Saturnites like it when our home impresses people.”

The ship slowed, and their flight path took them around the megastructure’s upper plateau, a wide oval two hundred kilometers long and fifty wide with towering metropolises rising all across its surface. Hundreds of spacecraft and aircraft took off and landed in a constant flow of traffic along the outer lip.

“How does it stay up? Counter-grav?”

“Nothing so fancy. And nothing that requires a source of power. Just good, old-fashioned buoyancy.”

“But two whole moons went into its construction, right? It must be immensely heavy, even if a lot of the interior is empty space. How does it generate enough buoyancy to stay afloat?”

“Tanks full of exotic matter foam.” He pointed. “There. See that bulge along the lip? The one right beneath that airport? That’s one of them, and there are thousands spread all throughout the megastructure, providing it with buoyancy and stability.”

“But what if they leak?”

“They can’t. That’s one of the advantages of using a foam instead of a gas. Sure, you can break it off piece by piece, but a punctured tank is basically a nonissue. Plus, the exotic matter has negative mass. The stuff’s more buoyant than vacuum. Very space efficient. Let’s us jam more inside. Plus, the megastructure’s verticality helps, too. External pressure is around ten atmospheres near the bottom, while the interior is consistently Earthlike from top to bottom.”

“I see.” Susan watched as the saucer flew over Janus, slowing as it approached a city near the bow that towered above the rest. “So you add more of these tanks as Janus grows?”

“Eventually, but we won’t have to do that for a while.”

“What do you mean?”

“The tanks we have make Janus so light we need added weight to hold it down. Many of the tanks have detachable ballasts built into them.”

“Detachable?” Susan pondered this. “Ah. So if there’s ever a truly catastrophic failure…” She fluttered her fingers and raised her hand.

“Exactly. We drop the ballasts and float on up.” He indicated the dense, towering city below. “Though mostly we add and remove them over time as Janus evolves. That’s where the name ‘Ballast Heights’ comes from. Back then, when the city was founded, Janus was much smaller, and that part of the crown did have ballasts underneath it.”

“Hey, kids!”

Both Isaac and Susan turned to see a LENS float up behind them with Cephalie riding on top. The spherical body of the LENS resembled a silvery metallic eye slightly larger than the average head, and its tough outer shell of fast-reacting prog-steel shielded its small graviton thruster, internal capacitors, and sensitive equipment.

“Hello, Cephalie,” Isaac said.

A portion of the shell eased outward to form a long, blunt pseudopod, and Isaac’s left eye twitched when he saw the weapon and magazine belt it held.

“I come bearing gifts,” Cephalie announced cheerfully.

Susan’s face lit up with a quick moment of glee, but the expression vanished when she realized Isaac was watching, and she hid it behind an indifferent mask.

“Thank you, Cephalie,” she said with stiff professionalism.

“My pleasure.”

Susan took the hand cannon and placed the holster against her right thigh. The smart fabric in her uniform interfaced with the holster, and the two surfaces locked together. She placed her hand on the pistol’s grip, and the holster released automatically. She pulled the weapon out, confirmed it was unloaded, then inspected it while not pointing the barrel at anyone.

She gave the weapon a curt, satisfied nod, though Isaac suspected that was a carefully regulated response for his benefit. She slotted the pistol back into the holster and removed her hand. The holster constricted around the weapon once more.

Isaac picked up the belt from the LENS and held it before him at arm’s length, almost as if it reeked with a foul stench.

“Six, seven, eight,” he muttered, counting the magazines. “Isn’t this a little excessive?”

Cephalie leaped from the LENS to his shoulder and poked him in the neck with her cane. Isaac ignored her.

“Can’t be too careful.” Susan took the belt from his unresisting hand and looped it around her waist. The two pieces of smart fabric interfaced, then locked into a semi-rigid form.

“I suppose not,” Isaac said with mild resignation.

The saucer slowed to a halt over a quintet of circular platforms that sprouted out of a thin, pastel green spire. They descended gently, and Isaac caught sight of a virtual Polaris Traveler company logo rotating over the building’s apex.

The saucer came to rest on the landing pad with feathery lightness.

“Attention all guests,” a warm feminine voice spoke over their shared virtual hearing. “This is Amelia with Guest Services. The Arcturus has just arrived at our private Polaris Traveler spaceport on Ballast Heights, largest city on Janus-Epimetheus. The local time is fourteen hundred twenty-two, and the outdoor temperature is a brisk negative one hundred and thirteen degrees Celsius. Please bundle up if you plan to go outside.”

“Ha. Ha,” Isaac said dryly.

“If this is your final destination or you have a connecting flight in Ballast Heights, please disembark at this time. We hope you’ve enjoyed your stay with us. To everyone else, we look forward to serving you as we head next to Promise City on Titan.”

“This is our stop,” Cephalie said.

“Right.” Isaac stepped away, but then paused and turned back to find Susan still gazing out the window. “Something wrong?”

“Not really.”

He walked back. “What’s on your mind?”

“It looks, I don’t know.” She frowned, as if searching for the right word. “Less exotic from this angle?”

“It’s a city like any other.”

“Only it’s in the atmosphere of a gas giant.”

“Well, yeah. There’s that.”

“This is going to take some getting used to,” she sighed, taking a half step away from the window.

“Welcome to the Shark Fin.” He nudged his head toward the exit. “Come on. Let’s not keep the state troopers waiting.”


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