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CHAPTER NINE

Zee didn’t want to interrupt Adya’s father during his morning swim, so he waited until almost midday before contacting him. He’d spent the night in a cheap all-purpose room in the bowels of the floating Svarnam arcology. Zee left as soon as he woke, and wandered about, eating a printed breakfast, until he found a quiet spot in a public garden, where mist fountains played on chunks of natural stone coated with colonies of carefully created algae and fungus in a rainbow of colors. Zee seated himself on a bench and stared at nothing as he contacted Achan Elso. Daslakh amused itself by studying the algae.

“He’s not taking contacts,” said Zee a moment later.

“Why do humans bother with communication implants if they don’t want to communicate?”

“Sometimes it’s distracting.”

“Just set up a sub-persona to deal with calls. I know—you can’t. It must be awful, being an emergent property of a bunch of neurons and glial cells. I don’t know how you stand it.”

“I’ve got a message from the Security Service.”

“Anything interesting?”

“They found the bot. After it shot at me it apparently crawled into a storage locker and pointed its laser at its main processor.”

“Anything left to identify?”

“Only the mechanical parts. The bot and the laser were both printed recently, pirate editions of commercial templates. That’s about it.”

“Very slick.”

“Oh, and they warned me not to travel or see anyone until the matter is resolved.”

“Well, that was certainly a waste of electrons.”

Zee paused. “Wait, he’s getting back to me. Adya’s father.”

Without waiting for an invitation, Daslakh eavesdropped on the comm. Achan Elso’s face appeared in Zee’s vision, with no visible backdrop. It looked like a genuine image, though—Adya’s father was puffy and unkempt, as if he had just gotten up.

“Well, what is it, young man? If you’re trying to find Adya I can’t help you. She’s not at home.”

“No, I wanted to ask you something. I’m trying to learn about Miranda government and politics, and I figured you’re an expert.”

Nicely done, thought Daslakh. Achan’s expression mellowed and his skin shifted from a pale orange to a more olive tone.

“Well, some of my colleagues might dispute my expertise, but at least I have plenty of experience. Ask away.”

“Do you know anything about an offworlder named Qi Tian?”

Achan scowled and turned maroon. “I know little about him, but more than I would like about what he has done. He is a menace! A barbarian! He came to Miranda about a standard year ago and since then has been sowing corruption and division on the Coordinating Committee.”

“How?”

“He has bottomless wells of wealth, apparently, and this makes him very appealing to the sort of Committee members who are willing to sacrifice honor and heritage for a profit. Jothi Rayador—who leads the ruling coalition—has been positively pandering to Qi Tian.”

“I guess it’s good that someone like you can stand up to him,” said Zee.

Achan smiled a little at that, but then he seemed to sag and turned a deep blue. “I wish I was. He wishes to wreck the Cryoglyphs, and the craven cowards on the Committee support his scheme. The only thing I have accomplished by my opposition is to cut myself off from the only people who could help my family.”

“You seem really concerned about them. The Cryoglyphs, I mean.”

“They are part of our past. The only older features are those carved by blind natural forces and impacts. Men made marks on Miranda, and now lesser men wish to erase them.” Achan smiled sadly. “My only consolation is that the coalition will not survive this crime. My opposition to Qi Tian’s schemes means Rayador and the rest of those wretches refuse to help save the Elso fortune. I will have to resign my seats when I can no longer fund those departments. As soon as they convene the Committee to open bids for a replacement, the opposition can take over control of policy. Without my seats, the coalition will lose its majority. I wish I could see Jothi’s face when he realizes it.”

“Do you know how I could find out more about this Qi Tian? Maybe learn who’s backing him?”

“Why are you so interested in that scoundrel?”

Daslakh watched Zee carefully, both in physical space and via his biomonitor, ready to interfere with the comm link if he seemed about to say something foolish.

“It’s—I guess you’d say it’s confidential.”

“Hm. So you are at least capable of discretion, when you choose. I wasn’t sure. Very well, scheme away. I won’t pry. Give me a little time to think about who might be able to tell you more.” Achan rubbed his eyes, and then his color brightened a bit. “How about this? Meet me at Surface Access 293-15 South. An hour from now—no, make it an hour and a half. I will give you some suggestions and you can see the Cryoglyphs for yourself.”

“Sure!” said Zee.

Achan gave a satisfied-looking nod, and broke the link.

“I’ll bet you half a ton of chameleon particles he’s going to bury your body in a crevasse,” said Daslakh.

“I don’t think he’d do anything like that. Maybe challenge me to a duel. I could see that.”

“Duels are for social equals. You’re just an offworld prole. He could have one of the family bots give you a thrashing.”

“Adya wouldn’t—” Zee stopped. “I don’t know any more. I don’t think she’d go along with that, but if it’s her family, who knows?”

“I do,” said Daslakh. “She wouldn’t. Stop being a self-pitying fool.”


Zee got to Surface Access 293-15 South fifteen minutes before he was to meet Adya’s father. Achan himself was ten minutes late, so Zee had a lot of time to hang around the little museum in the vestibule between the lift and the airlock. Both doors were built to handle full-sized vehicles, and the vestibule included parking space, but one slot had been partitioned off and housed images of the Cryoglyphs and some of the notional “artifacts” recovered nearby. Virtual tags provided helpful information and linked to the extensive corpus of scientific papers, pop-science instructionals, and borderline-crackpot material about the Cryoglyphs and their history.

“Those aren’t artifacts, those are trash,” said Daslakh, looking at a case displaying printed replicas of some crumpled scraps of ancient plastic film. A virtual tag noted that the originals were in the Mohan-Elso Center, carefully preserved in a nonreactive neon atmosphere.

“Archaeologists learn a lot from trash.”

“Sure. But it’s kind of funny to see humans venerate trash simply because it’s very old. And it’s even funnier to see them venerating copies of trash.”

“We like to feel a connection to the past. It helps us feel like we belong.”

“It would be trivial to demonstrate that humanity’s hardwired need for approval and fear of social isolation have caused more irrational and destructive behavior than anything else. At least your sexual compulsions keep the species going.”

“It’s good to have friends,” said Zee. “I guess you could say there’s a practical benefit to being social, but we just like it.”

“Evolution uses both the carrot and the stick.”

Zee read the physical text signs for a while, and Daslakh absorbed all the linked data. After filtering out the obvious falsehoods and poppycock, the actual lore about the Cryoglyphs could be summarized quite simply. “These marks were made by somebody, at least five thousand standard years ago and maybe long before that. Nobody knows what they mean or why they were made.”

Achan Elso emerged from the lift, wearing a smart-matter outfit carefully shaped to look like an ancient surface excursion suit. “Ah, good! You’ve had the chance to see our museum. If you like, I can take you to observe the original artifacts when we’re done outside.”

“I thought the Mohan-Elso Center was closed,” said Daslakh.

“Closed?” Achan looked into the middle distance for a second, and got a little orange. “What kind of idiocy is Kav’s husband playing at? I shall have to speak to him.” He gave an irritated-sounding sniff and led the way to the airlock.

The airlock structure was surrounded by a pad of level ice, but beyond that the wild landscape looked nearly untouched by any human or mech. To the west a group of rounded hills, or maybe small mountains, were silhouetted against the sky, which was dusted with thousands of tiny shining specks, some of the millions of habs in Uranus orbital space. In the northeast the jagged rim of a crater looked like teeth.

“This way,” said Achan. He followed a walkway of sculpted carbon foam, made to blend in with the natural ice and snow of the surface. Zee followed, with Daslakh clutching the back of his hood.

The path led across a flat section of surface which sloped gently upward, until they came to the edge of a deep channel, nearly straight, running roughly north-south. The sides were steep and the whole thing was several hundred meters deep. The trail here featured a handrail, but Achan disregarded it, taking ten-meter steps down. He was careful to stay on the trail surface, though.

At the bottom the trail turned to follow the floor of the channel for half a kilometer, until it reached a jagged fissure. Evidently some great fault or crack crossed the channel here, as the sides were displaced by a few meters and on the east side a gap opened three meters wide, extending deep into the icy slope. The walkway led into it.

“A good place to hide a body,” said Daslakh privately to Zee.

Zee was too busy admiring the view to respond. It certainly was scenic. On the western side of the channel the snow shone blue-white in the light of the distant Sun, while overhead the blue half-circle of Uranus dominated the sky against a dusty orange background. The east side of the channel was dark, faintly green in the light of Uranus.

They followed Achan into the dark gap. He turned on his suit lamps and pointed up. Four meters above the trail surface the lights caught some markings in the ice at an oblique angle, making shadows that showed them very clearly.

Daslakh could see a dozen markings in all, cut four or five centimeters deep into the ice, likely with some kind of metal pick or axe. They were definitely symbols, with vertical and horizontal strokes, but Daslakh couldn’t recognize any alphabet or ideograms. Four of them were the same, and another pair looked like duplicates, but the rest were all different. All twelve of them were about thirty centimeters high, aligned more or less horizontally, spaced evenly.

Definitely not natural. Someone, mech or bio, had come to this remote place and put a fair amount of work into carving those twelve marks into the ice. A message? A record? A work of art? A prank?

Achan stood looking up at them. Through the clear bubble of his old-style helmet his skin was a calm pale blue-green. Daslakh could see his heart rate was lower than at any time since they had first met him.

Zee peered up at the marks, tilting his head this way and that, concentrating as if he could discover their meaning even after millennia of failure by higher-level minds. After a couple of minutes he gave up and looked around the rift, peeking over the edge of the walkway at the depth of the crevice.

Achan finally noticed Zee’s restlessness. “Bots have searched every square millimeter of the surface countless times. There are no other markings. In fact, it’s not even clear how they were cut, as this walkway is only a couple of centuries old.”

“Nobody knows what they say?”

“Terabytes of theories have been put forth. Third- and fourth-level intellects have attempted to decipher the markings. The problem is that the string is so short. I have seen hundreds of words or phrases which might be the proper translation. Unfortunately humans have been creating languages and writing systems for ten thousand years, and mechs have been doing the same for almost as long and much faster.”

“What do you think they are?”

“I?” Achan turned to look back up at the Cryoglyphs again. “I think they were made to mystify. Some early explorer wanted to create a conundrum. An elegant, eternal enigma! That villain Qi Tian wants to acquire this whole area—as if Miranda doesn’t have millions of hectares of undeveloped surface without historic relics he could use.”

“What’s he doing here, anyway?”

“I wish I knew. He has a lot of wealth, or at least he spends a lot. The source is unknown. Somewhere offworld, I know that. My spies—when I could afford spies—said he was drawing on a bank based at Oterma, but of course one could set up an account there without ever even visiting the place.”

“Oterma banks are pretty hard-nosed,” said Daslakh. “They don’t usually give lines of credit to shady characters.”

“True,” said Achan. “Whoever he is, his money is real. Though not as great in quantity as when he arrived here. Through a dummy company he invested in the Kiran family’s isotope-separation venture, and Lila Kiran in turn introduced him to Jothi Rayador—she and Jothi have been lovers for decades. I know Qi Tian also put some gigajoules into the Nagaram family resort development. Again, through a cutout. He keeps his involvement quiet.”

“Investments can come and go,” Daslakh pointed out. “He could cash out and leave tomorrow.”

“I wish he would. Then maybe the coalition leaders would come to their senses.”

“Has he bought the surface here yet?” asked Zee.

“No, that will require the approval of the Committee. And of course the vote has been scheduled for after I must surrender my seats.”

“Hang on,” said Daslakh. “You said that might change the balance in the Committee. If you lose your seats, will Qi Tian still be able to get what he wants?”

“I’m not sure. The minority faction don’t care about the Cryoglyphs, either—otherwise I would simply join their coalition instead, and snap my fingers at Jothi Rayador! But, alas, that is not to be. I know Qi Tian has put some cash to use among them, as well. He bought some of the Kadam family’s short-term notes and has deferred collecting the interest, which I’m sure they are grateful for. They are key members of the other voting bloc, so when our coalition loses power, Qi Tian will still have friends on the Committee.”

“It sounds like everybody wins but you,” said Zee.

“Myself and Miranda! Our world will lose this legacy.” Achan gestured at the Cryoglyphs overhead, and turned to regard them for a while.

“We need more,” said Daslakh to Zee over a private link. “Dai Chichi could find out all this stuff without leaving his office.”

“Um, do you know if there’s anyone who turned him down? Qi Tian, I mean? Is there anybody he tried to influence but failed?”

“Achan Elso, for one. And I believe he approached Nikhil Urukku and offered a loan on very favorable terms. Nikhil was having some cash-flow problems of his own right then and I’m sure it was terribly tempting. Nevertheless, he declined—it turned out the Urukku family had emergency reserves nobody knew about. Literal stockpiles of uranium tucked away in caches on the sea bottom. That got Nikhil through his own financial difficulties, and Qi Tian never got a grip on him. If Urukku wasn’t such a miserable miser I would ask him to help, but I know what his answer would be.”

After a minute he faced Zee again. “I have a private purpose in bringing you here. In this rift we are safe from any spies, even my own family. We can speak plainly, you and I.”

“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”

“I want to make sure you understand something. Our family fortune is gone. In just a few weeks we will lose all our holdings—investments, properties, licenses, the house, the farm, everything.”

“I know,” said Zee. “I’m trying to help with that.”

“The Oort payload is a mirage. I asked Vasi this morning, just to be sure, and it is certain that the cargo is nothing more than common trade goods: original artworks and crafts, possibly historical artifacts. No vast treasure—not nearly enough to reduce our debts.”

“I want to get it back for Adya.”

“You will gain nothing for your trouble.”

“That doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it? I am trying to be as clear as I can: Adya has nothing, do you understand? No wealth, and soon she will have no more high status, either. There is nothing to keep you here. Leave her now.”

“She’s the only one who can tell me that,” said Zee. “I don’t care about her money or anything else.”

“Then what do you want?”

“Adya. That’s all. I love her.”

Achan regarded him for a moment. “But can you provide for her? She has never known want, or hardship. She is always absorbed in abstractions. Kavita is much more practical.”

“I’m sure the two of us can get by.”

“She is not some—” Achan stopped himself. “She is not used to drudgery. And as an Elso she deserves better. You may be sincere, but you are not rich and I do not think you will get rich anytime soon. How long will she remain happy in poverty?”

“Adya’s tougher than you think she is. And even if I can’t make us rich, she’s smart enough to do well at anything she wants to do.”

“I think I know my own daughters better than anyone else, thank you,” said Achan. “Adya isn’t even thirty standard years yet. Hardly more than a child!”

Zee just shook his head. “I wish you could see her when she’s out on her own. She’s smart and confident and brave, and—and wonderful.”

Achan smiled a little. “I will say this: You are sincere. I am sure of it. For good or ill, you do love her. So it is for that reason alone that I beseech you, Zee: leave her. With you gone she can make a marriage which at least will keep her in comfort, even if the family fortune is forfeit.”

“The only way I’m going to leave her is if she tells me herself. And even if she does, I’ll try to change her mind before I go anywhere.”

“What a stubborn fellow you are! I suppose like calls to like. You should be glad my reverence for the traditions of the Sixty Families doesn’t extend to assassination. Right now you have me wishing I had some bravos or killbots at my disposal. I’ve said all I wish to say to you. I hope you see the wisdom of my words. And now I take my leave.”

He pushed a little rudely past Zee, and once free of the ice cleft he bounded toward the airlock structure.

Zee shook his head and sighed inside his sealed suit. “What a mess.”

“I thought it went rather well,” said Daslakh, speaking directly into the back of Zee’s head, which gave its voice a buzzy quality.

“Are you serious? He wants to kill me!”

“He told you specifically that he won’t. Or can’t, anyway. I’d file all the rest under empty rhetoric. Meanwhile he gave us some useful intel. With luck that will satisfy Dai Chichi.”

“I wonder what this Qi Tian guy’s really up to.”

“Well, whatever his other purposes might be, he’s certainly done a superb job of breaking up the ruling coalition on the Miranda Coordinating Committee. I expect there’s a lot of people who think that’s a pretty good goal in itself.”

“Politics here is so complicated. Back in Raba we just let the hab make all the decisions itself.”

“Yes,” said Daslakh flatly. “It’s a real sweetheart.”

“Are you done here?”

“I saw as much of those ice divots as I needed to within the first two seconds.”

Zee left the crevice, moving more carefully than Adya’s father had. Neither man nor mech said anything until they were just a few meters from the airlock.

“So when are you going to see Adya again?” Daslakh asked innocently.

Zee didn’t answer. The airlock slid open and he stepped inside.

“This afternoon, maybe?” Daslakh continued.

“I don’t want to put her in danger,” Zee mumbled.

“‘Adya’s tougher than you think she is.’” Daslakh replied, playing back Zee’s own voice. “‘She’s smart and confident and brave, and—and wonderful.’”

“Stop it.”

“I’m not the one who’s been sleeping in guest boats and rented pods because his feelings got bruised.”

“She—” Zee stopped.

Daslakh played another audio snippet. “‘The only way I’m going to leave her is if she tells me herself,’” said Zee’s voice, slightly muffled by his suit cowl and his hair.

“You really are a jerk sometimes.”

“I accept that,” said Daslakh. “Now: I’ll stop being a jerk—for the moment, anyway—if you ping Adya right now and tell her you’re all right, tell her you love her, and tell her you’ll see her soon.”

Zee’s suit relaxed around him and the facemask retracted as the inner door of the airlock slid open. He took a breath and let it out through his nose in a cross between a sigh and a snort. “Okay,” he said aloud. “Now stop nagging me about it.”

“Humans created digital intelligence to do jobs they couldn’t manage on their own. Apparently this is one of them,” said Daslakh. It was silent after that, and didn’t even listen in on Zee’s comm as he contacted Adya.


While Zee was occupied with a fond reunion with Adya, Daslakh decided to do a little direct information gathering about the mysterious Qi Tian. Adya’s father had told the two of them a lot, but even Zee would probably admit that Achan’s perspective on this issue was highly subjective. Daslakh wanted data, as unmediated as possible.

Determining Qi Tian’s physical location was surprisingly hard. His name wasn’t in any directories, and apparently he had invoked privacy the moment he set foot on Miranda’s surface.

Daslakh reviewed the conversation with Adya’s father and looked for any record of the business deals he had mentioned Qi Tian being involved in. That gave Daslakh the names of some of the shell companies the man of mystery used to hide his participation. A couple of milliseconds’ work gave Daslakh what it was looking for: One of the front companies was renting a vacation house.

Specifically, the business called General Investments had rented a luxury eyrie, suspended from the icy roof of Miranda’s ocean, just below the light panels, with a private bubble tube and a spectacular view of the capital city Ksetram. If Qi Tian was anywhere, he’d be there.

It took Daslakh twenty minutes to reach the eyrie, using bubble tubes and freight conveyors.

In the rental ads, the place boasted high security, but Daslakh found that laughably overstated. Bubble cars required “authorization” to use the private tube, but there was nothing to stop a small mech from simply strolling along the inside of the tube to the house entrance. The eyrie’s internal network demanded a security code for both physical and data access, but after a few minutes of sitting still and eavesdropping on emissions Daslakh determined that the bots inside the house had nothing but manufacturer-installed code keys.

Daslakh found a cleaning bot working its way along the windows and reached into its simple little brain. It interrogated the bot thoroughly and then copied its emission profile, impersonating it. The sub-Baseline mind of the eyrie recognized Daslakh as one of its own bots and opened the door to let it in, without worrying about how it had gotten out. Daslakh crept inside, clinging to the ceiling and adjusting its color to match.

Qi Tian’s pied-à-ciel was certainly roomy. The eyrie boasted three levels, each twenty meters across with four-meter ceilings. The top level held a big fancy entrance hall and service spaces—matter printers ranging from micro down to femto scale, waste dismantlers, feedstock for the printers, heat management, charging stations for the bots, and a startlingly large refrigerator for natural food. Daslakh listened and tasted the air. The entryway was full of human traces—lingering molecules in the air, shed hair and skin cells on the floor, all the inevitable casualties of a biological fighting entropy. Most of them were from the same person, presumably Qi Tian.

Daslakh tasted some of the skin cells and did a quick analysis of the DNA. Male human, legacy type; all the usual gene mods to prevent disease, bone degeneration in microgravity, and aging. The extrapolated phenotype matched known images of Qi Tian. A few of the cells held DNA from other people, all Mirandans, and all at least fourth cousins of Adya’s father.

In the center of the floor a spiral staircase with diamondoid steps led down to the second level. Daslakh crept down. According to the house network, this floor was all bedrooms—four large rooms and a double-sized master suite. More biotraces on this floor, all concentrated around the stairs and the big bedroom. Daslakh couldn’t hear any sound of breathing or movement on this level, so it crept over to the master bedroom for a good snoop.

The room took up a bit less than a third of the whole level, and currently featured a party bed covered in pseudobiological fur, a soaking tub big enough for four legacy humans, some handsome chairs, a four-person dining table with its own food printer, a wardrobe, and a couple of soothing sculptures. Flower and fruit vines covered the walls, and heavy cloth drapes covered the windows.

All very posh—but also very generic: the furniture was smart matter configured to expensive templates, with proprietary logos to make sure visitors knew how expensive they were. Even the plants displayed their designer labels. Daslakh didn’t see any of the unique handmade items or genuine natural materials that made the Elso house so impressive.

Daslakh asked the wardrobe what it contained. Not much: two sets of programmable clothing, a smart-matter travel suit, and a printed pair of loose pants suitable for casual entertaining. As soon as Daslakh spoke to the wardrobe, the travel suit came online, revealing a mind that was at least near-Baseline and possibly higher.

It probed the mind of the “simple cleaning bot” Daslakh was still impersonating, and Daslakh watched the interplay between the suit mind and the shell persona of the bot with great interest. The suit cut through the bot’s security with brutal efficiency, copied up its entire memory, and planted several instructions, cunningly disguised. The commands were all security related: report any contact from anything other than the house mind, and give the travel suit a daily memory download. There was also a back door which would allow the suit to take control of the bot remotely, cunningly hidden so that it would survive any ordinary updates and purges. In effect, the suit was recruiting the “bot” as an agent-in-place inside the eyrie.

Daslakh scuttled out of the room again, admiring the sophistication of the suit’s intrusion and subversion. It was almost as good as Daslakh’s own work.

Almost. It purged and reloaded the entire bot simulation.

The bottom level of the eyrie was for dining and lounging, with a big reconfigurable room surrounded by a wide gallery looking out over the city and the ocean below. A pool offset from the center of the room extended down through the floor into a diamond hemisphere.

The central stair spiraled down to the lower level, and Daslakh crept along the underside. The steps themselves were clear diamondoid, which meant it couldn’t change color to match them, so Daslakh made its outer carapace a neutral gray midway between the color of the floor and the sky outside. It walked silently and very slowly, moving just one leg at a time. It put all its senses on maximum sensitivity. On the third step down it paused.

All the windows on the lower floor were retracted, leaving the room open to the air. Qi Tian sat in a lounge chair on the gallery, his back to the main room, with a tall drink and a plate of thattai on a little table in easy reach. He had a board propped up in his lap with a sheet of paper on it, and was writing on the paper with an ink brush, in archaic Xiyu characters. Daslakh zoomed in on the page and read what Qi Tian had written.


Icy sky, bright sea.

Flat calm covers the deep wave.

When will peacocks cry?


Not bad, thought Daslakh, though the peacocks seemed a bit out of place.

It crept closer. When it got within six meters of the lounge chair it froze. At that distance it could pick up faint emissions from Qi Tian’s comm implant. It risked a single coded pulse, and the response made it head for the stairs as fast as it dared. The man in the chair didn’t stir.

Daslakh was just at the top of the stairs when it felt a signal pulse from the travel suit, and to its horror saw the suit standing in the hall on the second level, colored neutral gray so that it looked like a ghost out for a stroll. It pinged Daslakh again—or rather pinged the back-door software it had installed in the “simple cleaning bot,” demanding to know what Daslakh was doing prowling around the living room when the boss had given orders that he wasn’t to be disturbed.

To make things worse, Daslakh also detected a surge of data between the suit in front of it and the man downstairs. The jig was definitely up.

Well, no point in lingering, or in trying to be inconspicuous. Daslakh used its cleaning bot persona to inform the house system that there were multiple fires, intruders, water leaks, environmental contamination, medical emergencies, and structural failures happening at once. Audible alarms began to sound and projected images appeared directing residents to safety. All the service bots began scuttling about, searching for the danger spots. Daslakh joined them, doubling back down the stairs and sprinting across the ceiling of the lower level toward the nearest open window.

Qi Tian got out of his chair with superhuman speed, and suddenly had a weapon in his hand. The travel suit cartwheeled down the stairs and wrapped itself around him, taking on a mirrored surface.

Daslakh took advantage of that momentary delay to hurl itself out of the window. The next two minutes were the closest thing to a human nightmare Daslakh had ever experienced: falling helplessly but with infuriating slowness, with no way to hide, waiting for Qi Tian to shoot at him and wondering whether it would be a laser, a needle gun, or a micromissile.

It used its limbs to assume a vaguely aerodynamic shape and steer toward the city of Ksetram below, as it didn’t relish the idea of falling into deep water with no Zee handy.

The shot from above never came, and Daslakh landed with a solid thump on the roof of a building shaped like a dodecahedron. It moved fast, getting under cover, getting hidden, and getting as far away as quickly as it could. It didn’t stop running until it was safely in a bubble shooting through the tube across the sea bottom.

It knew who Qi Tian was, and now it was very worried.


Pelagia and Repun were the last two space combat units left. Ground defenses on the moon they were preparing to assault had accounted for all the others, so it was up to the two orca cyberships to find and destroy the remaining threats on the surface before the landing craft got in range.

During the initial attack the other ships in the fleet had spotted all the lasers and hit them with missiles—armored kinetic penetrators optimized for laser killing. But the enemy still had a pair of hypervelocity railguns hidden underground. The guns were cooled to eliminate any thermal signature, so there was no easy way to spot where they were shooting from. With enough velocity a single thirty-millimeter slug could mission-kill a spaceship, and unless you were looking right at the launch point it was hard to tell exactly which three-centimeter patch of surface was the muzzle of a hidden battery.

No sense in hanging around out in space like a pair of practice targets. The two of them accelerated at max thrust toward the ground, jittering and swerving to mess up targeting, and throwing out electronic countermeasures to interfere with any sensors. Repun took a grazing hit which peeled away all the armor on her left flank, and another slug took a meter-wide bite out of Pelagia’s folded right wing, but that left both orcas with eyes, weapons, and drives intact.

The two split up, rotating to thrust laterally as they fell toward the icy surface below. Repun tipped her nose up and burned hard, vectoring into a path which would just miss the limb of the moon, while Pelagia flipped completely over and waited until the last instant before a braking burn to set down on the surface.

Hidden by the horizon, Repun launched her two remaining combat drones and swung into an orbit just meters above the mean surface datum. She kept her drive lit, dodging mountains and buildings as she shot across the surface. The drones were there for point defense and electromagnetic spoofing, radiating extra heat to look like a full-sized cybership.

Pelagia dropped to the surface on her wheels, then warmed up her own drive and taxied across the ice at a lunatic thirty meters per second. The local gravity was feeble, just two percent of Earth standard, so she could hop over obstacles with her maneuvering thrusters.

One of Repun’s defending drones flew apart in a spray of fragments.

“SPOTTED!” she called over the comm channel, sending precise coordinates for the defending railgun.

“I’ll be in position in thirty seconds,” said Pelagia.

Repun’s orbit took her beyond the horizon, safe from the gun, just as Pelagia belly-flopped onto the ice and skidded to a stop atop a hill with a line of sight on the gun emplacement Repun had identified. She had two surface-strike missiles left, and lobbed one at the coordinates Repun had given her. The underground gun couldn’t depress enough to stop her flat-trajectory shot. The warhead—ten kilos of nitrogen buckyballs jacketed with iron-silicon composite—blew a satisfying crater, exposing the spherical cavity hiding the gun and showering the inside with shrapnel.

That left just one gun. Pelagia did a little inductive reasoning based on the location of the one she had just blown up and another weapon emplacement which one of the mech ships had taken out with a lucky toss of a nickel-iron chunk during the space battle. Logic suggested the third gun would complete an equilateral triangle around the spaceport. Pelagia informed Repun and then set out across the surface on a twenty-kilometer race.

Repun must have done some high-thrust maneuvering once she was below the horizon, because she reappeared from the south just six minutes later, moving much faster than orbital speed, passing right over the location Pelagia had flagged.

She was almost in position, and at first couldn’t figure out what Repun was doing. When the gun opened up on the other ship Pelagia realized it was a sacrifice play. A pair of slugs tore Repun apart, but the heavily armored pod holding her whale brain ejected in time.

Pelagia moved up to a hilltop to fire on the last railgun—but something was wrong. She wasn’t moving. External images showed scores of combat bots erupting from under the ice. Titanium tentacles grabbed and tore, wrecking her landing wheel assemblies. Something managed to get inside the nose wheel bay and then Pelagia’s entire front end flew to bits. Her senses went dark.

They cut in again, displaying the home screen of the training program. Leiting’s white-haired avatar floated in Pelagia’s visual field. “Overall assessment: ninety-two percent success. Clever use of surface terrain to sneak up on the target,” it said. “But if you are attacking a populated moon you have to assume the enemy has its own ground units.”

“I know you’re going to tell me that you can’t tell me, but please tell me the real target won’t have defenses this brutal. This is the third time we’ve done this exercise and they’ve managed a clean sweep of space assets every time.”

“Leiting believes one should train harder than one fights. Also, these scenarios serve a dual purpose: You can practice operations while Leiting observes and evaluates you.”

“Maybe the mech ships with external backups won’t mind getting fried, but I’ve got a real brain in here and I don’t want it getting boiled, scrambled, or splattered when we go into action. I’ve designated an heir, by the way—if you do manage to get me killed you still have to pay my salary to the Saturn Rescue Alliance.”

“Leiting is not attempting to avoid paying any personnel. Current casualty estimates for the operation are less than one percent.”

“Those local assets we’re not supposed to think about? Oops, I just thought about them.”

“Discussion of topics for which you do not have authorization is forbidden by contract.”

“But I’m talking to you, and you do have authorization, so it’s okay.”

“Discussion of topics for which you do not have authorization is forbidden by contract,” said Leiting, repeating itself precisely, right down to the waveforms.

“Fine, fine,” said Pelagia. “Can we do the debrief later? Repun and I have to rest our fragile mammalian brains.”

“Leiting will resume the discussion in twenty-three minutes.” Leiting’s avatar vanished.

“I think I know why Leiting is so fanatical about not telling us what the target is. It’s afraid we’d all switch sides just for the chance of shooting at it,” said Pelagia.

“Operational security matters,” said Repun. “You know that.”

“I do know that. Which means I’m not going to leak anything, and I’m kind of insulted at being treated like I can’t be trusted.”

“You could always resign.”

“Yeah, forfeit all my pay and stay parked here until after the first phase of the operation’s done. That could be weeks with me losing a gigajoule every hour for docking and consumables. No, thank you. I’m going offline now. I’ll see you in twenty-one minutes.”

Pelagia shut off all outside access and prepared for a few minutes of sleep. Before she started the inducer she thought about the mission some more.

Leiting had run her through twenty-six attack simulations so far. Three of those had been straight space battle scenarios, eight had involved hab assaults . . . and the other fifteen had been attacks on moons. Unless this all was a massive mindfuck by Leiting (which was not impossible), the assault target was probably a moon.

In the sims the target moon had been the fictional Uranian moon “Calpurnia,” which was a dead ringer for Saturn’s moon Tethys. There was no way that Leiting’s mercenary force was actually going to the Saturnian system—the orbital positions were bad and getting worse. So Calpurnia was standing in for one of Uranus’s remaining natural moons. But which one?

Not Titania, that was for sure. The hierarchy of digital minds and augmented biologicals which ran the Titania Consolidated Technocracy might be isolationist and weird, but they had a defense force which was ten thousand times the size of Leiting’s mercenary unit, armed with top-tier weapons. Even a limited-objective raid would be simply suicidal. Given that the gorillas seemed to expect a long occupation, Titania was out of the question.

Oberon also seemed very unlikely to be the target. It wasn’t quite as heavily populated as Titania, but the Oberon Free State’s citizen militia was immense—theoretically the entire population. Pacifying a few billion heavily armed and fanatical minarchists in a labyrinth of tunnels and natural caves below the surface would take more than a team of gorillas, no matter how many bots they brought along. Plus, Pelagia reflected, there weren’t many cetaceans on Oberon, which made Leiting’s dolphin Civil Affairs team redundant.

That left the three smaller moons—Ariel, Umbriel, and Miranda. Pelagia was inclined to rule out Umbriel for a couple of reasons. The sims were all about attacking a moon with limited surface facilities, where the population were all below the crust. That fit well with Ariel and Miranda, but Umbriel’s surface was a dense ecumenopolis, with almost no primordial terrain left. The other reason was that Umbriel didn’t have much water habitat. No dolphins there.

Pelagia suddenly didn’t feel like napping. Adya, Zee, and that annoying little contraption Daslakh were still on Miranda, and now it appeared there was at least a fifty percent chance that was the target of the upcoming mercenary operation. The idea of attacking a moon where her friends (and Daslakh) were staying didn’t sit well with Pelagia. Finding out Leiting’s target wasn’t just an intellectual puzzle for her anymore.

Leiting’s obsession with security meant there wasn’t any point in trying to find out anything by talking to other members of the mercenary force. They were all just as ignorant as Pelagia herself. And it wasn’t really feasible for a biological mind to try anything shady in the data networks.

Time for some clever use of terrain. Leiting’s mercenary force were all based in and around Multipurpose Bay 453 North, but that was just a miniscule part of the enormous Taishi hab complex. Surely someone, somewhere in Taishi had a clue about the mercenary fleet’s destination. All Pelagia had to do was find that person and get them to talk. There were only seventy million Baseline or higher beings in Taishi—how hard could it be?

So while her biological brain linked back up with Leiting for the post-sim debriefing, Pelagia detached one of her maintenance drones and sent it crawling along the massive bundle of structural framework and transport tubes which Multipurpose Bay 453 North was attached to. The whole giant beam formed one edge of the fifty-kilometer-wide hexagon that was Taishi habitat.

Each point of the hexagon was the axis of a spinning hab cylinder. The closest was nine kilometers away, so Pelagia’s drone began the long walk along a maintenance catwalk. Over the centuries the surface of the beam structure had gained an accretion of little private habs, workshops, storage bins and tanks, and random machinery.

Pelagia bypassed all of that. A prudent commander—and Leiting was prudent to the point of obsession—would have made a sweep through the area around the base of operations, making sure no spies were hidden among the squatters and recluses. There might even be sensors to watch for suspicious activity.

Along the way her drone placed some private comm repeaters in inconspicuous places, so that Pelagia could link up without going through the network under Leiting’s control at Multipurpose Bay 453 North. She had no illusions about her ability to beat a digital mind at encryption, and the moment Leiting realized Pelagia was trying to find out where the force was headed, there would be chum in the water for sure.

A mercenary’s biggest asset was her reputation. Betraying the mission would wreck Pelagia’s rep more effectively than a barrage of railgun slugs. Well, she’d never been cautious before—why start now?


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Framed