Of which there was an embarrassing superfluity. Among other things, the forward cargo tank held a compact but devastatingly dense storage farm, with over a hundred tons of memory diamond: It included a comprehensive log of every financial transaction that the corporation and its affiliates had been able to get its leathery little paws on, whether by begging, borrowing, or barratry. Some of them went back more than three thousand years. Incomplete and fragmentary and balkanized by incompatible storage protocols as it was, it was nevertheless a mother lode of data—an incredible asset if one wanted to trace the ebb and flow of slow money between the stars, or the medium money investments locked up in long-term bonds and assets within Dojima’s habitats: from Taj Beacon to the glass-windowed spinning baubles of the Leading and Trailing Pretties, the Shiny! Asteroids, the colonies on the moons of Zeus and Cronos, the zeppelin-castles of Mira and the hundred warring laminar republics of Shin-Tethys.
Rudi made it quite clear what he wanted me to do, or rather, what he wanted me to think he wanted me to do. (For it is almost always easier to manage a willing paid subordinate than to control a hostile prisoner; if nothing else, the overhead in guard labor is lower.)
“When we arrive at Shin-Tethys, I think we shall go on a little excursion in search of your missing sister. But before we do that, it would be prudent to know who else is taking an interest in her, don’t you think? There is Dennett, of course, but we will arrive in orbit first. There is whoever sent that charming body double after you. And there may be others. Your sib appears to have come to the attention of important people. Don’t you think it would be wise to know whom we face before we go looking for her?”
I shrugged. “I have no idea.” (I was lying, of course.)
“Oh really?” Rudi lolled. “I’ll tell you what I think: There are plenty of skeletons clogging up the closets of the banking and accounting industries of Shin-Tethys, and I think your sister became involved in a conspiracy involving one of them. In so doing, she has made a nuisance of herself to powerful people. And so, we are going to work out who in this system she could possibly be working for, or working with, or have offended, and who might stand to benefit from her finding them.”
“But she’s only really interested in”—I thought for a moment—“the history of accountancy. Like me.”
“Yes, exactly. So I want you to prepare a report on the history of investment frauds and scandals in Dojima System.”
I am now going to bore you to death with the political economy of Shin-Tethys.
(Pay attention: There will be an exam later.)
Dojima System revolves around a young G1 dwarf star, slightly brighter than the Sol that illuminated the skies of our ancestors. It was first visited by a starship one thousand five hundred standard years ago: long enough that the locals have established habitats on and around several bodies, and numerous governments and sovereign institutions.
The planetary system consists of a couple of warm gas giants, Zeus and Cronos, orbiting within a couple of astronomical units of Dojima Prime. There are debris belts, both in the shape of leading and trailing trojan clouds co-orbiting with Zeus and in the shape of a conventional debris belt. A Venusiform world with a runaway greenhouse atmosphere, Mira, orbits beyond the gas giants, just close enough that if not for the greenhouse effect, it would be a freezing iceball; and then there’s Shin-Tethys.
Shin-Tethys is what planetographers refer to as a “Hydrated Goldilocks Super-Earth.” That means it’s wet, it’s just the right size, and it belongs to a class of planet bigger than the legendary cradle of Fragile civilization. Actually, it’s about three times as massive as Earth—but two-thirds of that is water and ice, surrounding an unseen rocky core. It’s so low in overall density that at the wave tops, the gravitational pull is a little over three-quarters of standard, and orbital velocity is just right. Escape velocity is not so low that it loses much hydrogen to the solar wind, but gravity is not so high that it’s hard to reach orbit from the equator.
Shin-Tethys is young. Dojima System formed only a billion years ago. Consequently, below the shell of rock and ice nestling within the three-hundred-kilometer-deep ocean is an unseen mantle rich in heavy isotopes. The natural plutonium that was present when the star system formed has all decayed by now, but the uranium is frisky-free and neutron poor! Bright blue glowing smokers periodically light up the crushing abyssal depths, bubbles of prompt criticality rising toward the surface of the ocean, where they boil until they pop in a searing cloud of superheated radioactive steam. The natural dissolved uranium in the oceans of Shin-Tethys contains more than 1 percent U235. It’s rich enough that you can extract it and feed it straight into a reactor.
Do I need to draw you a diagram to explain the economic relation between Shin-Tethys and the rest of Dojima System’s habitats?
(Yes, I probably do.)
Everyone needs energy. Close to Dojima Prime, photovoltaic cells work well enough. But the farther you go into the cold night beyond Cronos, toward the steeply inclined orbit of the methane giant Hera, deep into the outer belt, the worse solar power works. Running in slowtime will help you conserve what energy you have, but eventually, you have to go nuclear.
There are, of course, the seven classical forms of nuclear energy: chain-reaction fission, externally induced fission, thermal radioisotope batteries, coherent isomeric emission batteries, muon-catalyzed cold fusion, hot deuterium-tritium fusion, and extremely hot aneutronic fusion . . . each have their pros and cons. But of them all, only one variety ticks all the boxes: fission, subtype classical chain-reaction. Nuclear isomer batteries are all very well, but you’ve got to charge them up somehow. And every type of fusion reactor ever developed is bulky, complicated, fiddly to keep running, and requires inordinate amounts of supporting infrastructure.
By the time you add it all up, fission is vastly simpler, more compact, and weighs less than any other kind. The only kind of space vehicle that really needs the efficiency of fusion is a starship: For all other purposes, it’s cheaper and simpler to throw lots of uranium at the problem.
And Shin-Tethys is by far the richest known source of uranium 235 within a dozen light-years.
Which means I need to brief you on the politics of mermaids.
Once I agreed to his proposal, Rudi formally released me from the oubliette. He also released me from my state of incommunicado. I worked, he paid me, and I spent the lifestyle tokens he provided on various luxuries, including a mail-forwarding service. To my sisters back home I transmitted a terse I’m on my way signal, of necessity abbreviated by the cost of interstellar bandwidth (not to mention the certain knowledge that the communications crew were discreetly listening to everything I sent). To the various people I had heard from on Shin-Tethys, I sent . . . well, there wasn’t much to say: to Ana’s concerned friend, an offer of a meeting upon my arrival; to the police, ditto: and to the debt-collection agency a polite offer to discuss the rent on her vacuole in person. (Anything to keep them from tossing her personal effects overboard before I had a chance to rummage through them.) And that was that.