Everything except danger is in short supply for the next nine standard years.
The colonists live aboard the half-cannibalized starship, working long shifts on the mining and harvesting teams. Foundries are unpacked; ore goes in, finished components come out, ready to be bolted into the scaffolding of larger forges and factories. The photovoltaic factory comes first, feeding energy into the nascent ecosystem. Then the digesters that will turn sunlight, water, and carbon-rich rock into something that mechanocytes can eat. A year on, the first airtight domes are assembled and covered in rubble to protect them from sunlight and cosmic radiation. The electronics group builds its zone-melting furnaces and lithography line. The propulsion group digs blast pits and begins fabricating high-impulse ion rockets. The survey group polishes their telescopes and begins to catalog rocks. And the banking, human resources, and interstellar communications groups begin to put together the tripod of specialties on which the future success of the colony depends.
Working around the clock, the communications team assembles its laser transmitter. Meanwhile, the bankers generate their system-level public key and start producing bitcoins, while the HR office identifies the most pressing skills shortages to afflict the new colony. Finally, as soon as the beacon laser is ready, the bankers prepare their prospectus for transmission to the nearest stars, announcing the existence of Atlantis Bank and its ability to issue currency as surety against debts incurred by the colony.
Nine years on, the first new immigrants beam in to Atlantis Beacon in a stream of massively compressed data packets, ready to fill the vacancies advertised by the Ministry of Human Resources (and the bodies HR have prepared to house the new specialists). Some of them are predictable; structural engineers to build out the city-habs, taikonauts to crew the newly built tugs that will retrieve raw materials from other asteroids, environmental engineers and medics to keep the feedstock cycle stable and fix damage to bodies and minds. But among the first hundred arrivals there are some anomalies, specialties too recondite to find any obvious role in a new colony: scholars of the history of theoretical physics, natural philosophers, electrical engineers with experience of working on particle accelerators.
The founders of Atlantis colony have hit upon a unique and radical plan for paying off the new colony’s debts: a scheme which has never been tried before, which can only work once and which might not work at all. But if it succeeds, nothing will ever be the same again—anywhere.
“Follow me,” droned the police wasp, hovering in the open hatch of my cell.
I had been lying on the bunk with my eyes shut, chewing over memories and dispiritedly wondering how long they would hold me here, when the hatch opened abruptly. I stood, hesitantly, as the wasp drifted backward into the corridor beyond. There were other cells, some of them with noisy occupants, and hatches in the floor that led to watery holding pens. I stepped around them, following as directed, until the wasp stopped beside an open door.
“The inspector will see you now,” it buzzed, then zipped back the way it had come. I ducked as it flew past my head, then looked round the side of the door.
“Come in, Ms. Alizond.” The office had two occupants: my interrogator, Serjeant Bull; and an ectomorphic person of no obvious gender, equipped with huge, somewhat limpid eyes which were currently half-obscured by goggles. Both wore the yellow-and-red motley uniform of the police service, but the thin person’s outfit was adorned with metallic blue piping. The effect was quite eye-watering. “I am Inspector Schram. Serjeant Bull has been briefing me about you. He tells me that you would very much like to find your sib, Ana Graulle-90. Is that correct?”
“Er, yes.” I nodded uncertainly. Something about the inspector made me nervous, mistrusting.
“I am pleased to inform you that we have confirmed your account of your arrival, and you are no longer under arrest. You are free to go. However, you should bear in mind that the disappearance of Ana Graulle-90 is under investigation by this department as a possible kidnapping or murder. Consequently, if you attempt to visit her residence, meet contacts, or examine her possessions, you may be interfering in a police investigation, which is an offense.” The inspector’s face crinkled in something that was not a smile. “Do you understand?”
“What? But! I can’t— That is, yes, I understand, but . . .”
The inspector left me dangling for a couple of seconds before continuing: “Of course, there is an alternative to interfering in our investigation. If you were to voluntarily assist us with our inquiries, it is possible that we would be better able to locate your sib. What do you think?”
I saw at once the trap that the inspector had laid for me: What I didn’t understand was why they were so keen to keep me from looking for Ana on my own. So I decided to play dumb. “That’s an excellent idea! But she’s been missing for over a year. And I’m no detective. Surely, I can’t possibly turn up anything that your officers have missed?”
“That remains to be seen.” Inspector Schram flashed that not-smile at me again. “You must have some ideas of where to start.”
“There was an inquiry from a friend of hers—”
The inspector shook its head. “Sadly, that was us. In case you declined to answer an official inquiry from the police, you see.”
“Oh.” Crestfallen, I glanced away.
“There are some items I should like to ask you to identify,” the inspector said. “Your cooperation might assist us in filling in some of the blanks.” It held out a hand, flickering with the glow of an escrow agreement: “Shake, and I’ll draft you as an external consultant on Serjeant Bull’s cold-case investigation. Or don’t, and you’ll never know.”
I gingerly took the inspector’s hand but withheld my consent glands: “What exactly are the terms and conditions you want me to agree to?”
“You work for us. Everything you learn belongs to us. You do what we say. What else were you expecting?” The inspector could afford to be informaclass="underline" Nobody sensible would want to break a work contract with the Royal Constabulary.
I swallowed. “What about a termination clause?”
“You can walk whenever you want. Or whenever we’re through with you. Just give verbal notice. Now. Do you want in? Or should I assume that your declarations of concern for your sib are—”
I shook. Now the inspector’s not-smile broadened.
“Witnessed,” rumbled the Serjeant.
And that’s how I was drafted by Medea’s police.
An hour later, I found myself standing in Ana’s abandoned apartment, accompanied by the Serjeant and an odobenoid constable, confronting the chaos of a life interrupted.
But first, let me describe the layout of Nova Ploetsk, the interfacial port city that floats on and under the surface waters above the sunlit Kingdom of Argos.
Thirty degrees north of the equator, the Kingdom of Argos is an ill-defined zone of turbid water at the edge of the tropics. It hovers over a mantle hot spot, so its waters are warmed by convection currents from the Deep Below; north of it, the vast continental mats of leviathan grass drift in the sunlit upper waters. It extends across a diameter of perhaps ten thousand kilometers and occupies the surface waters to a depth of around two hundred meters.