Investments

by Walter Jon Williams

  The smell of it was unforgettable. It wasn’t quite the smell of burning and wasn’t quite the smell of roasting. It was the smell of ten men dying, and it came with moans and cries. The ones who weren’t crying were listless with the apathy that was a symptom of a heavy dose of radiation. Severin went from one rack to the next and administered the doses of endorphin-analog, and by the time he’d finished his anger had passed. He only had the energy left for emotions that might be useful. The emotions that would track down the enemy, whoever they were, and somehow— somehow, given that he was in a crippled, unarmed ship with only seven crew— somehow destroy them.

  He went to the warrant officers’ cabins, then to that of Lord Barry Montcrief, and then he returned to the control room.

  In the control room the emergency lights were on. More than half the displays were glowing softly. Bhagwati sat at the comm board with the lid of the board raised. She was replacing fuses. Chamcha was bent over the sensor board, a puzzled expression on his face. Both were trying to ignore Lord Go, who was curled into a fetal ball and crying.

  Severin floated to the captain and placed the injector against his neck and touched the trigger. Lord Go gave a long, ragged sigh, and his clenched body relaxed.

  Severin went to the command cage, took the picture of the captain’s family, the children and wife and parents and stuffed Torminel, and he returned to the captain and put the picture in Lord Go’s hand where he would see it if he ever woke.

  “Report, please,” Severin said.

  “Replaced breakers in Main Busses One and Two,” Bhagwati said, “but the engine isn’t lit, so we can’t get power from anything but the emergency batteries. Battery power should be enough to send a message, though, so I’m trying to get the comm station up.”

  “I’m looking at the spectra from just before we got fried,” Chamcha said. He turned to Severin, his wiry hair floating around his moon face. “There was nothing, and then wham!— x-rays.”

  “X-rays?” Severin said. A missile wouldn’t produce x-rays. He kicked off and floated gently toward the sensor station.

  “They came in pulses.” Chamcha’s voice was puzzled. “Eight pulses in the first three-quarters of a second, and then the fuses blew and it stopped recording.” He looked at Severin anxiously. “Could someone have hit us with an x-ray laser?”

  “Pulses,” Severin repeated, and his heart sank.

  This wasn’t an enemy he could fight with a crippled ship and seven crew. Nor was it an enemy he could hope to vanquish were he a Senior Fleet Commander, with a dozen squadrons of warships under his command.

  This was an enemy that could wipe out entire civilizations without even noticing them.

  “Chamcha,” he said, “what exists in nature that sends out twelve massive bursts of x-rays in one second?”

  Chamcha’s eyes narrowed as he searched his memory. Then the eyes widened, and the color drained from his face.

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “Great Masters help us.”

  *

  After replacing a fuse in the navigation station, Severin located the enemy within half an hour. One of the seven, or possibly eight, stars in the large system of which Chee’s star was an element had been catalogued, over eight hundred years ago, as a brown dwarf, a large gaseous body that wasn’t quite large enough to have properly ignited as a star.

  That categorization was now demonstrably incorrect, and so was the estimate of the number of stars in the system as a whole. There were not seven, or possibly eight, but rather eight, or possibly nine.

  The alleged brown dwarf wasn’t a brown dwarf, but a degenerate star. It had once been much larger, and had a companion star that was larger still, forming between them a binary pair that rotated about each other as they moved in even more complex orbits around the other six, or possibly seven, stars of the greater Chee system.

  The companion star, nearing the end of its life, had exploded as a supernova, hurling vast clouds of its outer shell into space. Much of this material had been absorbed by its neighbor, making it larger still. The companion, dying, collapsed into a neutron star, and began a deadly dance with gravity, spiraling closer to its neighbor with every orbit. Eventually the neutron star had fallen close enough to begin stripping the outer layers of hydrogen gas off its attendant, drawing the infalling matter into a disk. As the material drew closer, the enormous magnetic fields of the neutron star drew the material inward, compressing and heating it, eventually transforming the infalling matter into powerful beams of x-rays that shot from the magnetic poles.

  The neutron star spiraled in, closer and closer, until its orbit was nearly within its companion’s outer envelope. The period of its orbit was less than three hours. It had so consumed its companion star that the companion was now indistinguishable from a brown dwarf, especially if the star was being observed from far away, hundreds of years ago, by surveyors who were far more interested in habitable planets.

  “Right,” Severin said. “Now the question is, what else is the pulsar going to hit?”

  He and Chamcha sat side-by-side in the sensor cage. Severin called other displays onto his own, piloting and astrography displays, and an estimate of the angle of the x-ray beam when Surveyor had been hit, which would provide a figure for the tilt of the pulsar’s magnetic pole and a judgment of what other objects the beam might intersect.

  The computer simulation of the multi-sun system, with the pulsar now added, ran briefly, then stopped. A tone sounded.

  Chee.

  “Well of course,” Severin said. He was surprised by his lack of surprise.

  Chee and the eight, or possibly nine, suns of its system weren’t all in the same plane. The pulsar’s course was to galactic north of Chee, and the beam fired from its southern magnetic pole would intersect the planet for all of three seconds, long enough to kill any unshielded animal life-form either in orbit or on the planet’s surface.

  Severin compiled the information into as terse a message as he could. “Send to Chee Station Command,” he said, “with copies to Lord Inspector Martinez and Astronomer Shon-dan at the Imperial Observatory.”

  “Very good, my lord,” said Nkomo. She had returned to the control room without speaking a word, and had taken her place at the comm board. She looked down at the board. “Comm laser three powering up and— we’ve lost it, my lord.”

  Severin turned to stare at her. “Lost it? Lost what?”

  Nkomo looked uncertain. “Lost the laser, my lord. It’s . . . malfunctioned somehow.”

  “Use another laser.”

  The second laser also failed. Severin thought that perhaps the x-ray flux had turned the metal on the ship brittle as glass, and that the metallic semiconductors used to generate the lasers were blowing part under the strain of excitation.

  When a third laser died, Severin decided that his theory was confirmed.

  “Try a VHF antenna,” Severin said. “Use the emergency channel.”

  They were going to get their message to Chee, Severin thought, one way or another, even if he had to build an antenna himself.

  *

  When Martinez returned to his lodgings at the Mayor’s Palace, the Lady Mayor herself bustled toward him as he got out of the car.

  “I wondered where you had been today, my lord,” she said. She looked in surprise at his muddy boots and informal clothing. “There are a stack of invitations that have come in for you.”

  “Rigger Ahmet was showing me the sights,” Martinez said. He turned to Ahmet and winked. “Right, Ahmet?”

  Ahmet grinned broadly. “Absolutely, my lord.”

  The Lady Mayor hesitated. Martinez smiled at her, and then his sleeve comm chimed.

  “Pardon me, my lady.” He answered.

  The chameleon weave on his sleeve shimmered to an image of Lord Ehl. The feathery dark hairs on the sides of his head were standing oddly, as if he’d just suffered an electric shock.

  “My lord,” Ehl said. “We’ve just received a transmission from Surveyo
r, and— well— I’d be obliged if you could get back to the station as fast as you can.”

  *

  As the coleopter began its descent into Port Vipsania, Martinez looked at Shon-dan in the crystal-clear image of his sleeve display and said, “Do you mean to tell me that despite your entire crew of overpaid astronomers at Chee Station, you failed to detect two beams of deadly energy each over a light-year long?”

  Shon-dan gazed at Martinez with wide golden eyes. “My lord,” she said, “we’re cosmologists. We haven’t looked at anything within a hundred light-years of this place.”

  Martinez looked balefully at the image of Shon-dan, and then realized he was grinding his teeth. He unclenched and spoke.

  “Tell me what’s going to happen, and how long we’ve got.”

  “We’ve got nine and a half days, my lord. Then Chee will move into the path of that beam, and— “ Shon-dan clacked her peg teeth nervously. “Anyone without proper shielding will, ah, be very much in jeopardy.”

  “The atmosphere won’t be shield enough?”

  “Not for beams of this intensity.” Shon-dan tried to look hopeful. “We’ve worked out the orbital mechanics, by the way, and this should happen to Chee only once every forty-nine thousand years.”

  Which, Martinez thought, explained the relatively primitive life-forms on the surface of the planet as compared with the superabundant life in the sea. Every forty-nine thousand years any complex species on land was wiped out.

  Those fern forests were a clue, if anyone had bothered to read it.

  “So,” he said, “we’ll have nearly fifty thousand good years if we manage to survive the next ten days.”

  The avian’s tone was apologetic. “Ah— there will be problems after the ten days, my lord. Electronics may be destroyed. Food crops may not survive. Metals may turn brittle. And— well, I don’t know what will happen to the station and the elevator. I’ll have to think of that.”

  “You do that. I need an estimate of how much shielding people are going to need to hide under.”

  “Ah— yes, my lord.”

  Martinez ended the transmission. The coleopter was making its final approach to its landing pad. Martinez thought of people rising from shelters to find the world above destroyed— crops burned in the fields, no communication, buildings with metal frames unsafe, transport liable to fall apart, those beautiful bridges on the railroad collapsed because the support cables could no longer carry them.

  And possibly Chee Station destroyed. There was plenty of radiation shielding on the station, but it was all on the outer rims of the habitation wheels and in other parts calculated to protect personnel against a solar flare. The x-ray beam would be coming in at an angle, from galactic north, and very little of the station would be safe.

  The wheel and other large structures were made of a tough resinous material, and thus wouldn’t be subject to metal fatigue, but even so enough critical components were made of metal that the structure might be in jeopardy. If it came apart under stress the elevator cable would drop into the atmosphere, where it would burn up, but if the cable dragged enough of the station with it, Chee could be subjected to a dangerous bombardment of large objects burning their way through the atmosphere to strike the surface.

  And crashing with the station would be Chee Company stock, to the ruination of his father and family.

  Helpless anger burned in his thoughts as the coleopter settled to a landing.

  Terza waited by the landing pad with a big Fleet car and a driver. She was wearing her brown Ministry uniform. Martinez walked across the pad and kissed her. Her lips were soft, her eyes hard.

  “You’ve heard?” he asked. He had to speak over the sound of the coleopter’s turbines.

  “Marcella told me.”

  He took her arm and walked with her to the car. “We’ll get you on the first ship out.”

  “I can stay,” Terza said. “I’m an administrator, remember, and I’m sure they’ll find an adequate shelter for us.”

  They paused by the car. Martinez put a large hand over Terza’s abdomen. “I don’t want x-rays getting anywhere near the next generation of Clan Chen.”

  Terza made a face. “I was so looking forward to seeing you in action,” she said. “But I suppose caution may be indicated, since the doctor confirmed just this morning there is a next generation on the way.”

  Despite the oppressive weight of his thoughts a flame of joy kindled in Martinez’ heart, and he kissed her. “What happens next?” he asked. “I’m not quite sure how this pregnancy business works, since I wasn’t around the first time.”

  Terza took him by the hand and drew him into the automobile. “It’s going to be very difficult and taxing, I’m afraid.” Her tone was businesslike. “I shall require first-class pampering from you for, oh, several years at least.”

  “Starting now?” he said hopefully.

  Terza gave a sigh. “I’m afraid not. You’ve got a meeting.”

  *

  “We’ve got power in most of the ship,” Severin said. “Communication between engine control and main control have been restored. Enough of the computers have been brought online so that we can do what we need to. The injured are being made as comfortable as possible for the deceleration, and we’re fighting dehydration with intravenous drips. Since we’re uncertain how the ship will respond to a resumption of gee force, we’ll start with a tenth of a gravity, then gradually increase power to one gravity.”

  Severin paused for a reply, and when none came went on.

  “When I tried to turn the ship with the maneuvering thrusters, the thruster heads blew out— metal fatigue in the joints won’t let them hold pressure. That means we’re going to have to maneuver with the main engine, which is of course designed to resist hard radiation, so if you feel some unusual accelerations at first, that’s what they’ll be.”

  He paused again, then licked his dry lips. “May I have permission to begin deceleration, my lord?”

  There was a long pause before a single word came from the captain’s lips, so soft it was almost a sigh.

  “Proceed.”

  “Very good, my lord.” Severin checked the captain’s intravenous drip, then spun in the air with a flip of his hands and kicked off for the door.

  He didn’t know how much of his report the captain had understood, but Severin felt better for having delivered it. Lord Go was a good captain and deserved to know what was happening in his ship, and perhaps Lord Go himself felt better for knowing.

  The captain had been returned to his bed prior to the commencement of acceleration. Dehydration was a serious problem with radiation burns and Severin and the other six uninjured crewmen had spent the last few hours giving the surviving victims intravenous drips, an arduous process because they had to learn the technique first, practicing on each other by following the steps in a manual.

  Severin had debated with himself over whether the step should be taken at all. Prolonging the lives of the victims was only to extend their suffering without a chance of altering the outcome.

  But Severin wanted to be able to look at himself in a mirror. He wanted to be able to tell the families of the victims that he’d done everything he could for them. He didn’t want to have to say, “I let them die without trying to help them.”

  He made his way to the control room and worked his way into the command cage, then pulled the display down in front of him and locked it there. Bhagwati, Nkomo, and Chamcha were all strapped into their acceleration couches.

  “Engines,” he told Bhagwati, “sound the acceleration warning.”

  “Yes, my lord.” The warning clattered through the ship.

  “Engines,” Severin said, “prepare to maneuver with the main engine.”

  “Yes, my lord.” Bhagwati looked at her board. “Gimbal test successful, my lord. Engine on standby.”

  “Course one-five-seven by one-five-seven relative.”

  “Course laid into the computer, my lord.”

&n
bsp; “Begin maneuvering.”

  The thrust was gentle, and Severin heard the engine fire only as a distant rumble that seemed to come up his spine. His couch swung lightly in its cage, and a faint whisper of gravity reached Severin’s inner ear. The engine faded, then fired again. Severin’s cage rattled. His stomach gave a little lurch.

  “Come on,” Bhagwati urged. The main engine really wasn’t intended for this kind of maneuvering.

  The engine fired again, a more sustained burst. Severin found himself waiting for the sound of something falling.

  Nothing fell. The engine fired thrice more, each minor adjustments. There was triumph in Bhagwati’s voice when she announced, “One-five-seven by one-five-seven relative.”

  “Commence acceleration at point one gravities.”

  The engine lit, a sustained distant rumble, and Severin’s cage swung again. A gentle hand pressed him into his couch.

  “Systems check,” Severin ordered, just to make certain nothing had broken.

  Nothing had. Severin had no worries for the hull, which was tough resin stiffened with polycarbon beams, but there was still enough metal in the ship to cause him concern. There were metal shelves, metal hinges, metal fittings, and the sick crew lay on mattresses placed on metal racks. Pipes and conduits were secured by metal strips. Valves with metal parts pierced the hull to bring in water or electricity from stations, or to discharge waste.

  All Severin needed right now was a hull breach.

  Severin added gravity a tenth of a gee at a time until the ship was decelerating at one full gravity. Only once did he hear a crash, when a shelf gave way in the captain’s pantry.

  “Systems check,” Severin said.

  Nothing was destroyed, nothing breached. Severin began to feel proud of Surveyor. It was a tougher craft than he’d expected.

  He would get Surveyor to Laredo, where there would have to be a complete refit. Surveyor was twenty-eight days out from Laredo, so it would take twenty-eight days to reverse the momentum that had built, plus another twenty-eight days to return to port.