"I've been following the attempts to contact the cycler," he said. "Which you should have been doing, too. Between times I talked to my lawyer and verified that if it proved to be a relic, that you would have salvage rights according to the laws of the Cycler Compact. Well, they won't announce it officially, but a guy I'd been paying off at the ministry just told me that they can't raise anyone on the cycler. Long-range telescopes show minimal energy signature except from the plow sail, so either it's a very efficient heat radiator or it's dead."
"Dead? But it's moving fast, isn't it?"
Max grunted a laugh. "Fast, yeah— point eight five light-speed. It'll pass Erythrion in a little over two days. If it was manned, we would have received a message from it months ago offering cargos and asking if any passengers wanted to rendezvous with it. Takes that long to set up the braking beams and allocate power for acceleration beams, normally. So normally speaking, 'round about now there'd be a magsail or two braking into the system with passengers and cargo and the monks at Permanence would be getting ready to send an outbound magsail to catch up to it on the way out. There's none of that."
"So maybe it's a cargo packet, not a cycler." Cargo packets were small, weighing only a few tonnes; they were used to send nonliving cargoes between adjacent stars or halo worlds. Even they were rare, these days— and nobody launched a cargo packet without first arranging for its deceleration and capture at its destination. Max confirmed that none of Erythrion's neighboring colonies had announced that they were sending a packet. Anyway, whatever it was that was coming was far larger than any packet.
They swung out over the foot hills and Max leaned back from the controls. He slumped back in his seat. "It looks like we lost them."
"Max! Lost who?"
He glanced behind them. "Government officials, newshounds, the military… who knows? Whoever they are, they're after you for the same reason I came: the cycler."
"But… they don't even know it's a cycler," she said incredulously. "Maybe it's a ship from High Space. They don't use cyclers because they've got faster-than-light ships, right? So if they visit us in the halos, they do a direct flight."
Max shook his head. "Yeah, but when they visit, they come in faster than light. They can come here that fast, Rue, they just can't start the FTL engine again for the trip home; halo worlds like Erythrion don't have enough mass for that. Anyway, this thing's not on a direct trajectory to us; it's nudging itself into a course correction. It's not stopping here, it's using a ramscoop to bend its trajectory, like any cycler would. It's come from nowhere, Rue and where it's going we don't know— though if its new course holds, it'll be passing close by Chandaka in about two years."
"Chandaka!" She had often gazed at that star in the observatory at Allegmagne. It was the nearest star in High Space— once part of the Cycler Compact, now a habitation of the mysterious, despised Rights Economy.
"The point is, Rue, the thing behaves like a cycler; it's alive but seems to have no life support right now."
The last cycler to pass Erythrion had come twenty years ago; once, Rue knew, there had been at least one every month. But that was fifty years before, when all inhabited worlds— lit stars and brown dwarfs alike— were part of the Compact.
Then faster-than-light travel was discovered; unfortunately it only worked between massive enough worlds. Chandaka and the other lit stars had joined the FTL Rights Economy and stopped maintaining their parts of the cycler rings. Cycler traffic to Erythrion had dwindled over the years and finally stopped.
Cut off from the rest of the universe, Erythrion was turning in on itself. The coup at Treya was the latest symptom of the slide.
"That cycler may not be manned," Max continued, "but it's at least partly operational, because its plow sail is doing a course correction.
"And you, cousin of mine, own it."
The aircar skimmed above fields and forests and a black snaking river. Auroral light reflected off the water. In the distance inhabited hillsides glittered with lights, the way the docks of Allemagne had. As they approached Rue made out dozens of huge, sprawling mansions— not mere houses, certainly— each with its own grounds and pool. Private roads snaked through the forest. Private air cars sat on pads or roofs.
"I'm a billionaire," she whispered.
"Multi multi," observed Max laconically. "But it's not a done deal yet. The next few days will be critical."
"Why?"
Max didn't answer; he was concentrating on spiralling them down toward a big sprawling villa with red roofs. He hovered the car over a broad landing pad, hit a switch and lights bloomed around the pad. Apparently on automatic pilot now, the car settled slowly down, landing with the barest thump.
Max pumped a fist in the air. "Yes! I am so good." He banged open his door and hopped out. Rue followed reluctantly. This was not the sort of place where one just dropped in; even a bumpkin like her could recognize that.
"Max, whose house is this?"
He was halfway around the pool. Glass doors were sliding open before him. Max turned, scratched his head and said, "Well, whose place do you think it is? It's mine, Rue."
He went in, while she stood there with her kit bag at her feet.
"THERE IS ABSOLUTELY nothing like a good drink at times like this," said Max. He handed her a tumbler with some dark liquor in it.
"Times like this?" Rue could hear a slight tinge of hysteria in her own voice, but there was nothing she could do about it. "You've had other days like this, then?" She stood in a living room of such opulence that she was sure the characters of her favorite star serial would emerge from the corridors at any second. The carpet was a self-cleaning bio-mimic, the walls held paintings on real canvas and there was even a little fountain in the corner. At the same time, there was no possible way Max could have been lying about owning the place, because every surface was covered with gaming scrip, empty bottles, dirty laundry, and ragged balls of plastic packaging. One of the paintings was askew and some sort of primitivist electronic device, with vacuum tubes and knobs, was upended in the fountain.
"You'll be safe here," declared Max as he turned and let himself collapse onto a sock-festooned couch. "Drink up."
Rue took a sip, then a stiff shot of the scotch, which tasted like soil and smoke. She kicked a shoe off the armchair opposite the couch and sat down, back straight.
"Oh, I've had days like this," said Max. "The first was when I was sixteen and I won the Treya lottery. Didn't that newshound friend of yours tell you? I won twenty-seven million dites. It tore my life apart. Mother would have taken it all, you know… The second time was when I won my first Penrose Go tournament. I'm the world champion. Shit, I just started playing because I was bored." He threw an arm across his face, seemingly intent on sleeping here with one foot on the couch and one on the floor.
Overwhelmed, she just sat and drank until the scotch was all gone and she felt ten kilos lighter. Max began to snore.
"What do I do?" she blurted.
"Wha?" Max blinked and sat up. "You get a good night's sleep, that's what. Tomorrow we have to face the wolves."
"What do you mean? I'm a billionaire now, aren't I? Doesn't that give me… anything?"
Max scowled. "Not really. You see, according to the laws of the Cycler Compact, you own the salvage rights to this starship— provided you can take possession of the cycler."
She remembered now— there had been all kinds of legal stuff when that shuttle collided with Allemagne. Rue had been more focused on what she could get out of it herself, but her brother had talked about the salvage rights. "You normally establish your salvage on a wreck by going out to get it," Jentry had gloated. "But this time it came to us!"