The Vengeance was built to cruise at almost 1 percent of light speed: at full tilt it would flash across the gap between Old Earth and its moon in fifteen seconds flat, racing the gulf from Earth to distant Pluto in weeks. That it would take centuries or millennia to fly between the nearer stars speaks to the immense scale of interstellar space.
This much of the Vengeance was like any other starship. Where it differed lay in the minds and training of her crew, and the nature of her cargo. A normal ship might carry survey probes and asteroid-mining tools, mechanocyte incubators and eager colonists. The Vengeance carried a thousand tons of enriched uranium, and the fast breeders and reprocessing tanks necessary to turn the stockpile into plutonium, and the bomb factories with which to murderously redeem some dreadful debt.
(Cold, dusty, darkness.)
Built after the mad frenzy that greeted the disappearance of Atlantis and the first true depression to impact the interstellar economy in over two millennia, the Vengeance was the third (and final) starship dispatched to that star system. The first two ships abruptly lost contact after they reached cruise velocity: The remaining creditors, incensed, drew the most obvious conclusion. Once might be accident, twice might be coincidence . . . but why take risks? Nobody had ever built an interstellar warship (although vicious squabbles between rival low-gee colonies and asteroidal republics occasionally degenerated into fighting—usually terminated by the abrupt rediscovery of the fact that the universe itself was more than happy to help the killing sprees along). But the principle seemed obvious enough: It would be a specialized variant of the well-understood normal starship architecture, one designed to transport and implant a military-industrial complex into the heart of an already-colonized system. On its arrival it would open its optical receivers and download updated weapons blueprints and personnel, to provide a beachhead on stranger shores, and the manufacturing industry it bore the kernel of would bear only bitter fruit. Of course, only the most desperate creditors were crazy enough to buy into this theory: But they were crazy enough to bet their all on it.
Then, fifty years after its departure, the Vengeance, too, went dark.
(Dusty, dark, cold.)
“Are you sure this is entirely safe?” I asked, as the squid-folk fastened me to the underside of the bathyscaphe and threaded pressure-relief cannulae into my arteries.
“I’m sure it’s safe,” Rudi buzzed from somewhere on the inside of his twenty-centimeter-thick hyperdiamond sphere. “We’re not going to ascend so fast that you don’t have time to unroll your pressure adaptations, are we? It wouldn’t do to turn your brains into spam before you open your new deposit account, would it?” High-pitched crackling laughter ensued.
The empty soul-chip sockets at the back of my skull itched. I gritted my teeth and focused my attention on the squid medics as they bounced and fluttered around me, wielding scalpels and makerbot tanks and slimy gobbets of adhesive gel. “How does this work again?”
“Assertion: Is very safe,” said one of the squid—Yankee color-of-erythrocytes, I think this one was called. “Assertion: Is standard medical-safe procedure for rapid ascent to surface altitude. Maximum ascent rate two kilometers per hour, ten-minute pause at each two-kilometer level. There will additionally be three major reset stages of one hour each during which mechanosomal restructuring must proceed. System is entirely automatic, speeded by external blood perfusion to prevent emboli during final decompression.”
Wonderfuclass="underline" They were going to plug me into an external heart/lung machine to prevent decompression sickness! Doubtless they knew what they were doing: But if anything went wrong, I could bleed out in minutes, long before we reached the surface. I rolled my eyes and lay back as two other squid wove a hammock around me.
“Assertion: We do this regularly to those who need to visit the surface,” said Yankee color-of-erythrocytes. (I think they were trying to be reassuring.) “It almost never fails. And if it does, death is painless.”
I tried not to think about death through explosive decompression. “Rudi. What happens when we reach the surface?” I asked.
A chittering as of angry flying foxes filled my ears for a moment. Then: “It all depends on which way Medea decides to jump,” he said, not entirely reassuringly. “But your tentacle-friends claim to have a plan. There’s a cargo vehicle fueled and waiting to go up, they say. There’s room for our capsule on top.”
“A cargo—” I paused. “We’re talking about highly enriched uranium solution here, aren’t we?”
“That is the stuff,” Rudi agreed.
“We’re talking about multiple critical masses of the stuff, aren’t we?”
“Many thousands of critmasses of boom-juice, yes!”
“They launch those things using a nuclear saltwater rocket, don’t they? How often do they blow up?”
“Only one percent of the time.” Rudi’s voice slowed, as if overcome by a momentary uncertainty. “But it’s safer than pinning your hopes on Medea, I think.”
“Oh, really? Why do you think that?”
“I gather she has been entertaining the Priestess Cybelle. Who has doubtless been poisoning her ears and blackening both our reputations.”
If my lungs had been functional, I would have sighed. “Do you have any good news to pass on, Rudi?”
“Nothing. Well, rumors of a very rich dignitary from New California arriving at Taj Beacon, but that’s obvious nonsense and disinformation. Your line mother wouldn’t follow you in person, would she?”
I kept quiet although my guts turned to ice at his words. If Sondra had actually followed me in person, then I needed to ensure that Rudi had as little contact with her as possible: He might decide to sell me out. That was one of the major risks. The other . . . well, what did she think she could achieve here? Stop me uploading through the beacon station? Destroy the beacon station? Kill everyone who had the merest inkling of her involvement with the crime of the millennium? I had no idea. All I could be certain of was that her presence here implied a certain degree of derangement, which made her extradangerous.
“We’ve got to shut down the retina soon, Krina—don’t want to risk emitting identifying signals during the ascent—but I left Dent in Argos with instructions to get the lander out of hock. Hopefully by the time we need it he’ll have found a way to return it to orbit without alerting the authorities. He’s good at locating, ah, unconventional markets.”
A forensic accountant with a knack for locating unconventional markets? I supposed a privateer would need someone with such abilities. I would just have to hope that Dent was good enough at it to avoid detection.
Time swam by in a haze of apprehension as our preparations for launch continued. Finally, their job done, the ground crew—for want of a better word—jetted away, leaving one figure behind: a mermaid, silvery blue against the glittering background of the city beneath us. She swam slowly toward me, then took a turn around the bathyscaphe. “Ana?” I called.
My sister swam toward me, closing until she hung in the water mere centimeters away. “Krina,” she said awkwardly.
“Take care,” I said. “I mean, look after yourself.”
“We haven’t had nearly long enough together.” Another awkward pause. “I was looking forward to your visit for so long. And then, this.”
“And this,” I agreed. “You’re sure you’re going to join them?”