CHAPTER ELEVEN
Leiting’s “compliance device” did exactly what it was designed to do: The half-kiloton antimatter blast was focused into twin lances of fire, one stabbing up, the other down. The armor plate absorbed about three-quarters of the energy of the downward blast, but that just turned the millimeter-layered laminate of diamondoid, graphene, smart matter, and aerogel into a plasma of ionized carbon and trace elements punching into Pelagia’s guts.
However, her own drones had been cutting through the edges of the armor panel, and the void space below contained four tons of pure water. When the superheated plasma hit the water, it caused a steam explosion which blasted the armor panel, the water, and most of the energy of the antimatter bomb off into space. Unfortunately, most of Pelagia’s work bots went with them.
One of her laser emitters melted the docking clamps holding her nose and Pelagia pulled back with her maneuvering thrusters on full. She rotated herself just enough to aim her nose past the edge of Multipurpose Bay 453, then slammed her main drive to maximum power. Trailing fusion fire she screamed away from Taishi—literally screaming, as she switched her electronic countermeasures broadcast to a tirade of some of the finest invective heard in Uranus space for centuries, centering on Leiting’s personal habits, honesty, and ancestry.
Taishi bombarded her with penalties and sanctions for unsafe operation in controlled space, ignoring assigned vectors, and failure to secure an approved flight plan before maneuvering.
She disregarded them all. She wasn’t on a collision course with anything, and that meant Taishi could only fine her. The hab would have to get in line with everybody else who wanted to bankrupt Pelagia.
What did worry her was the rest of Leiting’s mercenary unit. The force was configured for ground assault, but it still included escorts and space-superiority units. Even with Leiting cracking the whip, Pelagia doubted any of the other ships would risk crash-starting their systems, so she had a good five minutes before any of the others could launch in pursuit.
Lasers, of course, could catch her no matter how much of a head start she could steal, so Pelagia took a curving path that put the bulk of Taishi Habitat Three between her and Multipurpose Bay 453.
Taishi control must have been royally pissed off at Pelagia, because it pre-approved the rest of Leiting’s force for launch and “discretionary maneuvers” without any plan. So, three hundred and twenty seconds after she lit her own drive, Pelagia detected fusion flares behind her. One had the same emission spectrum as her own main drive, and was clearly Repun. Hoping for a little payback, no doubt.
The other two were a bit heavier, running hotter but still not accelerating as rapidly as Repun. Pelagia guessed they were Azeno and Keldai, a pair of assault transports with pretty impressive weapon loadouts, heavy on hypervelocity guns and missiles. They were run by digital intelligences, not brains in jars. Putting them together with Repun made Pelagia’s job a lot harder—she could mess with a biological, and she could surprise a mech, but the techniques were very different and what worked against one usually didn’t fool the other.
By the time her pursuers cleared the safety exclusion zone and cranked up to full power, Pelagia had built up a head start of more than a thousand kilometers—well beyond the effective attack radius of the close-in laser weapons and slugthrowers the three ships chasing her carried. They could lob missiles, but her own lasers could intercept them. The two dozen escort drones in her belly bay were unusable when Pelagia was under constant acceleration, so her own defenses were all she had.
She also had a velocity advantage of about six kilometers per second. With Pelagia and her pursuers burning at maximum thrust she would gradually open the range.
The critical unknown was propellant. She knew that Repun had exactly the same amount of delta-v in her tanks as Pelagia herself. But she wasn’t as sure about Azeno and Keldai. From their drive output and acceleration she could estimate their masses, but she didn’t know how much of that mass was cargo and ammunition, and how much was helium and deuterium for the drives.
Ultimately the outcome depended on who could keep burning longest. If Pelagia shut down her drive first, her pursuers would close in and chop her to bits. She suspected they would have to keep enough reserve to get back to Taishi, while she was ready to dive through Uranus’s clouds again and reach Miranda with empty tanks.
She got her answer half a minute later, as Repun and the two assault transports passed through the invisible bubble in space marking ten kilometers from Taishi, at which point they all opened up with everything they had. Evidently they had done the same quick analysis and decided this was their best chance to damage her.
Eight torpedoes surged forward from the assault transports, pulling ten gees atop bright pillars of decomposing metallic hydrogen. Repun didn’t fire—keeping her own torps for later? Pelagia couldn’t imagine Repun had launched with empty tubes. Lasers flickered at Pelagia from all three ships, and the big transports also blazed away with their guns.
A real fight, with real enemies, real weapons, and the real possibility of real death if she missed a step in the dance. Pelagia never felt more alive than at moments like this.
Her own laser pulsed at the oncoming torpedoes, and six of them veered wild out of control or blew apart. The remaining two were either smart or lucky. Pelagia zapped them both, and felt a surge of genuine alarm when one of them kept coming, showing no sign of damage at all.
Twenty kilometers and closing. The longer she waited the better her chance of hitting it—but she had no idea what kind of warhead it was carrying. Maybe it was a kinetic-kill vehicle just trying to smash into her with a pointy nose of diamond-clad tungsten. Or maybe it carried a directed nuclear energy lance which could hurt her from ten kilometers away.
Pelagia didn’t want to find out. She held her laser on the torpedo for five seconds, getting more and more nervous until a telltale expanding cloud of ionized carbon told her she’d damaged something, and a second later the torpedo came apart into fire and fragments.
That should have settled it. Her pursuers would have to turn back if they wanted to return to Taishi without spending years on a long loop around Uranus. But to Pelagia’s dismay, their drive flames didn’t waver.
Beyond them she noticed a sudden increase in optical and thermal emissions. With one laser emitter she looked past her three pursuers and suppressed a whistle of surprise. She could count sixty-one spacecraft under power. Leiting’s entire mercenary force was coming after her.
Which was crazy. Half the ships in that fleet were transports, either unarmed or carrying only defensive systems. They couldn’t catch her, and they couldn’t hurt her if they did.
Azeno and Keldai throttled back, setting their acceleration just under that of Leiting’s fleet so that the other ships would eventually catch up.
Repun, however, didn’t waver. She was still on Pelagia’s tail, still matching her acceleration, not firing anything.
“Hey!” Pelagia signaled. “You know this is pointless, right? I’ve got a head start and I can burn anything you launch. You can zap anything I launch. We’re perfectly matched.”
Silence.
“If we both run until our tanks are dry, what then? You still won’t be able to close the range.”
For a moment Pelagia wondered if some stray munition had maybe damaged Repun, so she wasn’t hearing anything, or couldn’t answer. But that was silly: Any ship had triple-redundant comm systems, and Repun could use her whole hull as an antenna if she needed to.
“I can’t believe you’re still holding a grudge about that time I hit your drive. You’re acting like a corvid. This is ridiculous.”
No response.
Pelagia’s propellant hit effective zero, leaving her with just a little maneuvering reserve, and she shut down her drive. A few seconds later Repun’s fusion flame died out. The two of them flew in formation for a minute or two.
Repun had more work drones left, so she got her plasma sail set first. A kilometer-wide ring of superconducting cable around her charged up and a faint red nimbus of ionized hydrogen surrounded her, catching the particle wind from the dim distant Sun. Pelagia hurried to get her own sail ready.
Acceleration with a sail was slow, and Leiting’s suicide drone had left Pelagia a little more than a ton lighter than Repun thanks to the loss of water and hull plates. So even though it took her an agonizing couple of minutes to spin her own sail and get it charged, Repun still wasn’t overhauling her.
The two ships fell down Uranus’s gravity well, going faster and faster. Things were going to get very exciting in about eighty hours, Pelagia thought.
Adya put on a travel suit which could handle Miranda’s cold airless surface, and took a bubble to Surface Access 293-15 South. She wanted to get a last look at the Cryoglyphs, if this area truly was going to be developed. Surely someone would preserve scans of them—maybe even cut away the section of ice that held them and preserve it in a climate-controlled display case. But it wouldn’t be the same as seeing the markings all by themselves in a wilderness of ice and rock.
She spent a good half hour in the cleft, and as usual nobody disturbed her. Adya looked at the markings from different angles, and couldn’t keep herself from speculating about who had made them and why. Was it really an early explorer, poking into an ice cleft hundreds of kilometers from the first recorded landing sites? Or was it made later—perhaps a soldier or refugee during the Great War with the digital minds of the Inner Ring, hiding in the cleft from deadly machines in orbit? Was the message an epitaph, a clue, a slogan, or the most successful prank in human history?
As a child she had preferred the wartime-fugitive theory, and had come here with only a nanny bot, to hide in the cleft with the lights off, breathing quietly so that the death machines wouldn’t hear her through the ice. She’d tried to recruit Kavita for that game, but her sister got bored with it quickly.
When she left the Cryoglyphs for what might be the last time, a thought occurred to Adya. What use would some offworld development interest have for this tract of surface? Maybe some accommodation could be worked out?
She found a section of the valley wall which wasn’t as steep, and climbed up to the surface in just a few minutes. Where the ice was solid she could leap up a hundred meters at a time, but in places with less secure footing she had to climb over snow and loose fragments of ice. At the top she was a little surprised by how hard she was breathing. Her suit’s oxygen recycler was also working hard, and she resolved to go down more cautiously.
Uranus overhead was nearly full, and Adya’s parents had bought all their children excellent low-light vision, so she didn’t even need the lamp atop her suit cowl. The open surface above the Cryoglyphs looked almost pristine. Millennia of bio and mech footprints and vehicle tracks had been smoothed by nitrogen drizzle and covered by dust and carbon dioxide snowflakes. She certainly couldn’t see any sign of recent activity.
Adya made one last vertical jump, just to look around and see what was nearby to make this land attractive. From a hundred meters up she could see about five kilometers before the curve of the little moon’s surface hid what was beyond. Great parallel ridges and channels ran from south to north, dotted here and there with craters. Except for the lights of the surface access station and a faint glow of gas and dust beyond the northern horizon, she could see no sign of habitation. Not even bots at work.
During the bubble ride home, Adya closed her eyes and did a virtual tour of the Miranda surface. About ten kilometers north of the Cryoglyphs was an industrial complex separating hydrogen isotopes, and far off to the south was the launch laser installation, but otherwise she couldn’t find anything near the tract.
A transport route, maybe? There were plenty of roads and tube trains on the surface already. Adya set up a map of economic activity on and within Miranda, and then had it show the flows of passengers, matter, and data among them. The decline was shocking. Miranda’s economy had contracted by a good ten percent for two years in a row.
Of course, if you have the resources, investing in the bottom of a recession is the best time. As her bubble sped along Adya looked at growth rates by sector—seafood and energy were comfortingly stable—and at forecasts, then plotted how those changes would affect transport demands across the surface. Even then, she couldn’t see any routes which might be made shorter and more efficient by cutting through the Cryoglyph preserve.
Either this well-funded offworlder was pouring gigajoule credits into a monumental folly, or his plan wasn’t simply a land deal. She was starting to believe Daslakh’s suggestion: Qi Tian was trying to cause chaos in Miranda’s ruling class. And, apparently, succeeding.
A black graphene sphere, frosted with centuries of accumulated dust, shot toward Uranus at a hundred kilometers per second. It came in at an angle to the plane of the Solar System, aimed directly at the blue-green crescent of the planet ahead.
Telescopes and radars among the Ecliptic habitats spotted it when it entered Uranus’s sphere of influence, just over sixty million kilometers from Uranus itself. The sub-Baseline minds operating the radar net estimated its mass, determined its vector, and plotted its course. The sphere’s inclined path would miss the outer belt of Ecliptics by several million kilometers, then curve inward toward Uranus, bending into a course aimed directly at Miranda. The radar bots relayed the information to Miranda Space Control and turned their attention elsewhere.
Miranda Control sent a query to the object. Something aimed right at a moon and travelling at several times Solar escape velocity fit the profile for a cargo payload rather than a comet chunk from deep space—but freight could do just as much damage as rock or ice if it hit something, especially at such a speed.
Seven minutes later Miranda Control got a reply. The sphere was indeed a cargo, and it invoked a prepaid braking contract, nearly five hundred years old. Control verified that the payment was still valid, and passed the whole problem to the laser launch array.
The laser system took the cargo’s stated mass, calculated the length of the deceleration required to land it, and added the payload to its queue. The laser would begin pushing it in six days, fifty-two hours before it was scheduled to hit Miranda.
At no point were any Baseline or higher minds involved in the process. The bank holding the funds for the landing contract sent out autonomous messages searching for whoever owned the incoming payload, hunting through Miranda’s data networks with a code key known only to the payload itself.
Zee opened the door of the Iris Room and stopped. Adya was already there, sitting elegantly on the edge of the bed with nothing on. She looked up at him and smiled. “I changed my mind,” she said. “I decided to surprise you.”
“Oh—well, you succeeded.” He stretched and peeled off his travel suit, then picked up a vial of cleaner nano from the bedside table and began rubbing the gel over himself. “Can you get my back?” he asked.
“I suppose so.” She took the container from him and smeared it from his shoulders to the small of his back in precise strokes, using just one finger. As soon as she was done he took back the vial and pressed the recall button. The gel flowed homeward across his skin, carrying with it all the dirt, salt, oil, dead hairs and skin cells, and assorted gunk and goo that accumulated on a human body during an active day.
“You may kiss me,” she said, smiling archly at him.
He put his lips to the side of her neck and nuzzled her gently, giving a sigh which had a hint of a growl behind it. His hands went to her hips and then slid upward. Her skin was warm and she was light pink all over. Her head tilted back as he kissed his way up the side of her throat. Her eyes were closed and her lips were slightly open. His lips were just a centimeter from hers.
Zee stopped and let go of her, as if her skin was too hot to touch. He took a step back. “You’re . . . not Adya,” he said. “Kavita?”
“Nonsense. Kiss me some more.”
“What did you and Kusti decide when you had your meeting aboard Pelagia, back at Summanus?” The only person in Miranda who could answer that question was Adya.
She looked at him for a moment, then sighed and sat down. “All right. How could you tell?”
“You don’t act like her.”
“Let me guess: I’m not prim and inhibited enough?”
His only answer to that was a burst of loud laughter. “You really don’t know your sister very well. That was the thing I noticed—you were acting too restrained.”
Kavita stood again and put her arms on his shoulders. “I’m pretty unrestrained myself, most of the time.”
“Sorry,” he said, and pushed her arms off him. “Adya’s enough for me. By the way, how did you copy her tag?” He waved one hand through the spot in the air where the comm tag identifying her as “adya elso” floated in his field of vision.
“Trivial,” she said. “I customized my comm to use any alias I want.” The tag over her head switched to “zee sadaran” then “jothi rayador” and finally settled on “kavita!”
“Neat.”
“It comes in handy when I don’t want attention.”
“I’d appreciate it if you don’t use Adya’s tag again.”
“Sure. In return, I’d like you to stop digging into the matter of Great-Grandmama’s payload. You’re not going to get it back and you’re bothering people I don’t want bothered.”
“It belongs to Adya and I’m going to get it back for her.”
She took another step closer, pressing herself against him. “She’s going to be terribly upset when she finds out I seduced you. Drop the whole thing and I won’t tell her.”
“You haven’t seduced me, and you’re not going to.”
She glanced up at the ceiling. “That’s not what the house network is going to show her. It’ll show you fucking me like a pod of horny dolphins.”
“Your family’s house network—”
“Is old and full of back doors and security holes, and I’ve had twenty years to find them all. It will show whatever I want it to show. Adya will see you cheating on her with me.”
“She’ll despise you for it.”
Kavita shrugged. “Adya’s opinion doesn’t matter to me anymore. But I think it does matter to you, doesn’t it?”
He pushed her back gently and grabbed his suit. “We trust each other. Show her whatever you want. She’ll believe me.”
Kavita moved to block his path. “You’re making a big mistake.”
Zee’s expression hardened, and he raised his hands, gripping Kavita’s upper arms without gentleness and lifting her a couple of centimeters off the floor. For just an instant her mocking smile faded and she looked genuinely worried.
Then he stopped. He let go of her and sighed. “All right, you win,” he said, taking a step back. “Adya’s got a lot to cope with right now. Money troubles, your parents pushing her to marry someone. She doesn’t need any more worries, even if they’re just a pack of lies.” His eyes met hers. “I’ll drop it.”
Kavita smiled. “I knew you were sensible. And don’t fret about that other stuff. It’ll all come out fine in the end, you’ll see. Everything will be wonderful. Just don’t interfere.” She stepped closer and ran a finger down the center of his chest. “Since she’ll never hear about it . . . want to seal the deal?”
He grabbed her wrist before her finger got below his sternum. “No.” Zee stepped into his suit and pulled it up.
“You know, I did a lot better in the sexual technique class than she did. This is your last chance.”
“I have to go now.” He pushed past her, a little rudely, and opened the door. “Don’t try this again.”
“You’ll always wonder what you missed!” she called just before he slammed the door behind him.
Outside, on the gallery, Zee sealed up his suit in front, then said “Daslakh?”
The mech dropped from the ceiling to his head. “I thought you were going to sleep.”
“You heard it all.”
“It’s not my fault this house has inadequate soundproofing.”
“We need to get going.”
“Where?”
“I want to go talk to Dai Chichi right now. Give him everything we know about Qi Tian so he’ll tell me who has that payload.” Zee put one hand on the gallery railing and vaulted over into empty space.
“Why not just call him?” asked Daslakh as they slowly fell to the courtyard below.
“I don’t trust the house network. In fact I don’t trust any network here in Miranda right now.”
“I see I’ve been a good influence on you. In time you may achieve wisdom. But . . . what happens when Kavita finds out?”
Zee touched down and headed for the Water Salon. “Kavita can go fuck herself.”
Zee borrowed one of the Elso family impellers and made sure it had extra energy stored for the long trip. Then he put on some gills, sealed his suit over his face, and set out for the sea bottom below Svarnam.
“Can you make sure this impeller isn’t emitting anything?” Zee asked as they passed out of the house and began angling down into the black water.
“No problem,” said Daslakh. “I can navigate us there.”
The impeller hummed steadily along at seven kilometers per hour, which meant the journey from the Elso mansion to the Abyss club would take six hours. Zee took the opportunity to get some sleep, tethering himself to the impeller and letting Daslakh do the steering.
Four hours later he woke suddenly as a mechanical arm tapped him on the back of the head. “Trouble,” Daslakh said, speaking directly into Zee’s skull. “Two impellers vectoring in from the west, coming fast. Fourteen kph. They’re on an intercept course and they pinged a couple of times with active sonar.”
“Any idea who they are?”
“They’ve got fancy impellers with sonar, and they’re coming from Ksetram—that’s the capital city. Maybe cops?”
“How far?”
“Three and a half kilometers off to your right. They’re coming in perpendicular to our course. Intercept in fifteen minutes.”
Zee gripped the impeller handles again and cranked the throttle to the maximum, veering left and dropping to just a meter or two above the sea bottom.
“They’ve both sped up,” said Daslakh. “Moving at sixteen klicks now. They’re sending a comm message.”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Miranda Security Service! Shut down your impeller!”
“Just so you know,” said Daslakh, “they haven’t given any authentication or ID codes. They’re just saying stuff.”
“Anyplace we can hide?”
“Those lights ahead are a sea farm, about a kilometer away. We can get there before they catch us. Can you pretend to be kelp?”
“I’ll do my best.”
With the impeller straining to manage seven and a half kilometers per hour, they fled through the silty water toward the blue-green column of lights.
“Incoming!” said Daslakh about three minutes later. “Down!”
One of their pursuers had launched a microtorpedo, which left an exhaust of steam bubbles as it shot through the water at a hundred meters per second. Zee steered the impeller to the sea bottom, looking desperately for anything to shelter behind. Something exploded behind him, and his suit went rigid as the shockwave hit. The noise was deafening, and the spike of pressure from the gill tendrils trailing from his shoulders gave Zee a sudden, intense headache.
The words get moving appeared in his vision, followed by i stopped that one but i can’t keep detaching limbs. It showed Zee a jerky video image of one of its legs separating from its body and swimming in front of the torpedo as a sacrificial defense.
Zee moved in short bursts, dropping to the bottom every few seconds. As they got closer to the sea farm he could get among schools of fish and floating clouds of krill. No more microtorps followed—either the pursuers didn’t want to waste ammo or they were afraid to annoy the farm operators. Zee’s scoot-and-freeze progress slowed him down considerably.
THEY’RE GAINING, said Daslakh’s text message.
“We’ll make it,” said Zee aloud. His voice sounded muffled and distant, even to himself.
The ocean bottom around the sea farm was a tangle of plant life competing for the light from the great strings of lamps extending up to the surface. Among the kelp fronds and seagrass Zee could see scores of fish and invertebrates—which ruined any concealment he might get from the plants by fleeing as he approached, like a giant virtual sign showing where he was.
Ahead he could see the bottom of the sea farm: a great bulbous shape twenty meters across, floating a few meters above the bottom. Six water intakes gaped wide around its base, and he could feel the pull of the current getting stronger as he approached.
i can see them about 300m back, Daslakh displayed in Zee’s vision. suits match miranda security, impellers look like cop models. still no i.d.
Even with his ears still ringing from the microtorpedo Zee could hear—or maybe feel—the hum of turbines inside the intakes. Above them the farm base bulged out around its three fusion reactors, and at the top of the power section three outflow vents directed jets of nearly boiling water out into the ocean. Where the water was hottest nothing could live, but the cloud of microorganisms and algae in the merely warm areas around the plumes made them clearly visible in the glare of the lights.
Zee steered across the intake currents, spiraling in toward the power plant and upward, until he suddenly left the suction of the intakes and had to slow to avoid shooting off into open water. He hugged the surface of the power plant as he cut between the vents, but the water was uncomfortably hot even outside the outflow jets. Above them a massive central pylon, as wide as Zee was tall, led from the power plant to the floating farm buildings on the surface, and Zee tried to keep it between him and the two claiming to be security officers. Just above the outflow jets he found a patch of cooler water, masked from sonar by the turbulent hot streams and camouflaged by lush plant growth. He flattened himself against the pylon among the kelp fronds and held still.
“Can you see them?” he whispered aloud, inhaling and expelling the same little volume of air inside his suit’s hood—the gills attached to his shoulders made it useless for anything but speech.
“They’re being stealthy but they have to communicate somehow. Let me just—ha! Got it! Green laser light. It goes right through the water but lights up all the little critters along the path. Okay, one of them’s to our right, about a hundred meters out and fifteen meters above your head. The other one’s moving, looks like he’s circling the pylon about twenty meters out, going up in a helix.”
“Okay,” said Zee. He let himself slide slowly down the pylon, back toward the gap between the hot water outflow vents. As soon as he passed through into cooler water below he did a backflip away from the side of the power plant and steered straight down to hide in the circle of shadow on the sea bottom directly underneath it, where the bulk of the plant blocked the lights.
“I can’t detect them from under here,” said Daslakh.
“They can’t see us, either. How long do you think it will take them to get up near the surface?”
“At the rate they’re going, that would take more than an hour. It’s five kilometers up.”
Zee waited a little more than ten minutes before zooming off in the direction of Svarnam and Dai Chichi’s club. If the hunters were focusing their attention on the pylon they might not—
“We’re spotted! One of them must have waited. Fifty meters up and closing at two meters per second!”
Zee swung his legs down to dig into the bottom while twisting his body to flip the impeller around. In just two seconds he had reversed course back toward the cover of the dense kelp around the sea farm’s main pylon.
Another blast deafened him again, as a microtorpedo exploded just past where he had turned around.
i didn’t even hear that one, Daslakh projected into Zee’s vision.
Zee followed an irregular course, trying to make himself impossible to target, as he raced for the power plant. The inflow current pulled him along at increasing speed, and as the suction increased he tried desperately to veer off, but the current was too powerful for the little impeller.
Ahead the intakes loomed, dark like open mouths. The hum of the turbines and the ringing in Zee’s ears drowned out everything else.
Zee transmitted an all-spectrum distress call—“Mayday Mayday Mayday”—before he was sucked into the power-plant intake and disappeared. Aside from a slight fluctuation in the sound of one turbine, he was gone without a trace.