Investments

by Walter Jon Williams

  *

  Severin had considered not telling anyone of his plan to use Titan to shut off the pulsar. He was afraid that someone, frightened of the super-powerful bursts of x-rays that would both precede and follow the pulsar’s brief time of quiet, would refuse him permission to act.

  He certainly knew better than to ask his own superiors on Laredo. The Exploration Service was an organization that had been starved of funding for ages: every time the government was reminded that the Service existed, it had only inspired them to trim the budget still further. The entire institutional culture of the Service was based on not calling attention to itself, and the culture hadn’t changed even though the budget had grown. Throwing away a whole ship full of antihydrogen was calling for attention, and with a vengeance: if Severin approached them with his scheme, their first instinct would refuse to do anything.

  Yet it would be hard to carry out the operation secretly. Titan wasn’t exactly inconspicuous, and when its crew took to the lifeboats while the giant ship itself burned for the pulsar at an acceleration that would have killed anyone aboard, someone might well take notice.

  So Severin had decided to contact Martinez personally, trusting that the relationship that had developed in the war would continue to function. In the meantime he had told Titan’s crew to prepare to abandon the ship and to place it under remote control, and also ordered them to keep their orders secret for the present and not to transmit anything but routine messages to Chee or to anywhere else.

  Severin didn’t want Titan asking their superiors for advice, either.

  He was sleeping in his cabin when Martinez’ reply arrived. Severin was dreaming of warships that were also, secretly, submarines, submarines that fought a lonely covert war in the chill seas of watery planets like Hy-Oso, and he slowly became aware that the insistent chiming he heard wasn’t the sound of sonar, but his sleeve display.

  The sleeve display was Severin’s only electronic contact with the universe, because the comm unit in his cabin was still nonfunctional. Severin called for lights, then remembered that fuse hadn’t been replaced either, and groped through the dark cabin for the uniform jacket that had been hung over the back of a chair. He triggered the display, heard from Chamcha that Lord Inspector Martinez had send him a message logged personal, urgent, and confidential, and told Chamcha to send it.

  “Permission is tentatively granted to proceed with your project,” Martinez said. His face appeared upside-down in the display, and Severin craned his neck to get a better view.

  “I’m ordering complete secrecy on this matter,” Martinez said. “You will censor all communication off Surveyor and order censorship on Titan as well. Absolutely nothing must get out. I’m going to explain Titan’s movements as a maneuver ordered by the Exploration Service high command.”

  Severin could only stare at the inverted image.

  Martinez’ eyes took on a more confiding glance. “Let’s hope you’re right about all this. I’ll check the math, and enjoy talking with you when it’s all over.”

  The orange End Transmission symbol flashed into place on Severin’s sleeve. Thoughtfully he felt his way across the cabin and turned on the lights manually.

  Total secrecy, he thought. Now that was interesting.

  Clearly he wasn’t the only one here with a scheme up his sleeve.

  *

  “Total secrecy,” Martinez told Shon-dan. “I want this to be strictly between the two of us.”

  “Yes, my lord.” The astronomer clacked her peg teeth in thought, then spoke hesitantly. “May I ask your lordship the reason for the secrecy?”

  “People might be less than committed to the evacuations and the shelter-building program if they thought the shelters weren’t going to be needed. Even if the math checks there’s still too much that can go wrong with this scheme, and if the plan blows up, those shelters will be necessary.”

  Shon-dan hesitated again. “Very good, my lord.”

  “I want you to check these figures,” Martinez said, “and I’ll check them as well. And no one else is to know. Understand?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “Because if anyone else finds out, I’ll know who blabbed, and I’ll throw you into that x-ray beam with my own hands.”

  After hearing a series of heartfelt assurances from Shon-dan, Martinez ended the conversation. His dinner lay cold on the table before him. Terza lowered the cup of coffee from her lips and said, “I hope this means I’m not going to have to take that refugee ship.”

  Martinez considered this. “No,” he decided, “you’re going aboard.”

  Her mouth tightened. “Why?” she asked.

  “Because you’re the Chen heir and mother of the next Chen heir,” Martinez said. “And so you will go on board the refugee ship and be gracious and accepting and thoughtful and considerate of the other passengers, because that’s what people expect of the next Lady Chen.”

  Terza looked cross. “Damn,” she said.

  “Just as I’ll be last off this station,” Martinez said, “and first on, because it’s what people expect of a war hero.”

  Reluctant amusement tugged at Terza’s lips. “I haven’t noticed that you find being a hero much of a hardship.”

  Martinez sipped his cold coffee. “Well,” he said, “not yet. But when I’m old and mumbling in my rocking chair by the fire, and multitudes of citizens come to me begging to be rescued from some cosmic menace or other, I’m probably going to find it all very inconvenient.”

  “No doubt,” Terza said.

  Martinez signaled to Alikhan to fill his coffee cup.

  “You’ll have to excuse me for the next few hours,” he told Terza. “I have to confirm all of Severin’s calculations.”

  Terza rose from her chair. “I’ll start the job of being gracious and accepting, then, and leave you to your work.”

  *

  Martinez’ calculations supported those of Severin, and more importantly Shon-dan’s supported them both. Martinez called Ring Command to tell them that Titan and Surveyor would be engaged in a series of maneuvers, and that the sensor operators should be told to disregard them. “Put a memo on the sensor display,” Martinez said. “I don’t want to get a call from Command whenever a new sensor operator goes on watch.”

  Then it was back to the endless series of planning meetings. Shelters were being dug with furious efficiency, roofed, and then covered with dirt. The accommodations were primitive, but few conveniences were required by a population that would be in the shelters for less than an hour.

  The first of the two refugee ships was sent off, with four thousand aboard, mostly children. The ship would boost far enough away to be safe from the pulsar, and could then return to Chee or continue on to Laredo, depending on whether Chee Station survived or not.

  The second ship left two days later. Martinez kissed Terza goodbye at the airlock door, and watched her drift aboard in an elegant swirl of grace and gallantry. Martinez paused for a moment of admiration, and then turned to drift past long lines of refugees patiently waiting to board, each tethered to a safety line as they floated weightless in the great docking space.

  Some unused to weightlessness looked green and ill. Martinez sped past them before the inevitable consequences began to manifest themselves.

  He made his way to Command, and encountered Lord Ehl leaving. Ehl braced in salute as he drifted past, then recovered in time to snag a handhold on the wall. He made a nervous gesture with his free hand, then stuffed a sheet of paper in a pocket.

  “Is something wrong?” Martinez said.

  “No,” Ehl began. “Well, yes. There have been some arrests, people who got onto the refugee ship that weren’t supposed to be there. Officials of the shipping company, apparently.” He lifted the paper from his pocket, then returned it. “I have their names, but they’ll have to be checked.”

  “Do you need my help?”

  “No, my lord, I thank you.”

  “Very well. Once you find out
for certain who they are, ship them down the skyhook and put them in the deepest dungeon on Chee.”

  There were no dungeons on Chee, so far as Martinez knew, but perhaps they’d build one.

  From Command Martinez followed the saga of the stowaways, who were marched off the ship by the military constabulary. The refugee ship was given permission to depart, and the enormous vessel gently backed from the station until it reached a safe enough distance to light its torch.

  Martinez said another silent farewell to Terza as the displays showed her ship building speed, then took a covert look at Titan. Titan itself was boosting at nearly twenty gravities toward its rendezvous with the pulsar, a speed that would have killed any crew on board. The icon representing Titan on the sensor displays had a large text box attached to it, saying the ship was engaged in maneuvers. The two lifeboats containing its crew were on their way to their rendezvous with Surveyor, and had been given the cover of a mission to resupply the crippled craft.

  If anyone in Command ever bothered to check the ship’s heading and acceleration, they would have had a surprise. But the staff had an emergency on its hands, and much to occupy them; the sensor displays were tuned to the awesome might of the x-ray beam spinning ever closer, and a distant ship that did not call attention to itself was something that floated only on the margins of their attention, like a lily floating in the distant reaches of a pond.

  No queries regarding Titan came to Martinez’ attention. One shelter after another was certified, and the population put to rehearsing their evacuation schemes. At the last moment the Lady Mayor of Port Gareth came up with another plan: she wanted to put much of the population of her town into several of the large containers that had brought goods from orbit, and sink them below the surface of the bay for the duration of the emergency. Martinez, torn between irritation and hilarity, told her that it was too late to change the plans, and she should complete all conventional shelters in her town.

  Lord Pa and Allodorm were on the ground, coordinating last-minute emergency and evacuation work. Personnel on Chee Station were sent to the surface, leaving a skeleton crew behind. The two huge rotating wheels were braked to a stop, and the antimatter reactor powered down. Even the emergency lighting was turned off in most of the station to keep surges from following the power cables. Kayenta was readied at the airlock, with Marcella and select Meridian Company personnel aboard, a team that would return to the station with Martinez for a survey before anyone else was allowed to return to the station. One by one the displays and work spaces at Ring Command were shut down, leaving live only the boards that would be needed to begin the restart.

  Martinez, Lord Ehl, and the other crew left the darkened, eerily silent Command room and floated along guide cables to the entrance to the great elevator car. Martinez accepted their salute, wished Ehl luck, and watched them file aboard. The car began its descent, diving smoothly along the cable to its vanishing point in the green land mass below, and then Martinez headed for Kayenta’s berth.

  When Kayenta departed the station, it would go into a polar orbit calculated to place the mass of the planet between itself and the pulsar for the critical few seconds, just as the shuttles were doing. Martinez would be able return to the station after less than an hour’s absence.

  With all the ventilators shut down the air was perfumed by the scent of decaying polymers. Empty and without lights the docks were a monumental, indistinct darkness, vast as space itself. The beam of Martinez’ hand flash vanished in the blackness. At a great distance Martinez saw the glow that marked Kayenta’s docking port, lit not by station power but by the yacht’s own power supply. Martinez placed his feet carefully against a wall and kicked off, and was pleased to find that he was straight on course for the airlock.

  Two figures bulked large by the door, their feet tucked into handles on the wall, their arms reaching for Martinez. As he drifted closer, he saw they were both Torminel. They wore only shorts and vests over their thick grey and black fur, and their huge eyes, adapted for hunting at night, glittered as they tracked Martinez.

  Two of Marcella’s survey team, apparently.

  Martinez flew into their arms, and they caught him and absorbed his momentum with ease. A furry hand closed on each of his, and placed his hands on handholds by the airlock.

  “Thank you,” Martinez said. He tried to shift his left hand, but the Torminel on his left kept it pinned.

  The other Torminel, he saw, had a med injector in his free hand.

  He barely had time to register alarm before he felt the cool touch of the injector against his neck.

  And then he had all the time in the world.

  *

  There was silence in the control room, broken only by the sound of his breath, by the pulse that beat a quick march in his chest.

  Severin watched from his acceleration cage as Titan flew toward its objective, its engines firing a last series of powerful burns that would inject it into the pulsar’s accretion disk at exactly the right angle.

  The colossal gravity of the pulsar would tear the ship to atoms, hurling its cargo of antihydrogen into the spinning disk. A great swath of the disk’s hydrogen would be annihilated in a ferocious burst of gamma rays, energetic neutrons, and pi-mesons. A percentage of these particles would fall into the neutron star and pump up its x-ray emissions. Another percentage would fly outward into the accretion disk, heating the hydrogen there to blazing temperatures so that when it fell into the pulsar another fierce megaburst of x-rays would blaze forth.

  But in between the two ferocious blasts would come eighteen minutes of silence. The mechanism that produced the life-destroying double lance of the pulsar would be shut down.

  Or at least it would if Severin’s calculations were correct.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Chamcha reported unnecessarily. The seconds were ticking down in a corner of Severin’s display.

  Titan was standing on a vast, blazing tail of annihilated matter. Severin was using the cargo ship as a giant torpedo, aimed straight for a deadly enemy.

  “Ten seconds,” Chamcha said.

  “Oh shut up,” Severin murmured. Chamcha must have more acute ears that Severin thought, because the sensor tech maintained a resolute silence right up till Titan vanished into the larger blip that was the pulsar and its brown companion.

  Severin’s attention immediately turned to the pulsar’s rotating x-ray beam, which his display had colored a lurid green. The reaction was immediate: the beam, rotating twelve times per second, blazed into an emerald fury. If the beam hit Chee now, it would strip the planet down to its mantle.

  Severin could only hope that the pulsar would switch off when it was supposed to.

  And suddenly he thought: the statue!

  That’s how he’d work it. Frenella, the gamine, would send Eggfont the little statue of Lord Mince, and that would tip Eggfont to Mince’s relationship with Lady Belledrawers.

  He felt a little shiver of delight as he contemplated the perfection of the device. And, as he waited to see whether his plan for Titan would work, he thought about what Eggfont would do next.

  *

  There was a faint grey mist that swirled through the air, an insistent electric humming in his ears. His fingers and toes tingled as if he’d rubbed them with sandpaper. A furry animal seemed to have got lodged partway down his throat.

  With a convulsive heave of his chest he tried to expel the object in his throat. He made several attempts before he realized that the animal was in fact his tongue. His mouth was absolutely dry and his tongue scraped painfully against the roof of his mouth.

  He closed his mouth and tried to summon saliva. He worked his jaw and throat muscles for several long moments before he managed to produce a little moisture.

  Having relieved some of his discomfort he then he tried to work out where he was. The grey mist had darkened, and the humming sound had largely faded. He could feel nothing, not even air moving against his skin. It was as if he’d been packed in cotton u
p to his neck.

  He touched himself just to assure himself that he was still there. He felt the familiar uniform tunic, the medal of the Golden Orb at his neck, and he bent— knelt?— to feel his legs in their trousers, with the shoes still on his feet. There was something that bobbed and interfered with his right hand, and he took hold of it and realized it was his hand flash, attached to his wrist with an elastic lanyard.

  At this point he came to the realization that he was in free fall. He was in darkness and in free fall and probably he had never left Chee Station, he was floating somewhere in one of its huge overdesigned open spaces.

  A jolt of adrenaline hit Martinez then, a sudden hot burning along as his nerves as he remembered the pulsar. If he’d never left the station, then he was still vulnerable to the burning x-rays.

  He raised his left forearm before his face and whispered, past his painfully dry tongue and through dry lips.

  “Display: show time.”

  Yellow numerals flashed onto Martinez’ sleeve, pulsing in time to the speeding of the seconds. Through the grey fog Martinez tried to fit to the numbers to the chronology of the last days, and with a chill of horror he realized that the pulsar’s beam should have struck nearly five minutes before.

  Without willing it he began patting himself again, as if in search of a wound. Partway through the action he realized its absurdity, but he couldn’t make himself stop until he had assured himself, again, that his parts were all where they were supposed to be.

  He didn’t feel as if he’d been blasted through with x-rays. He felt strange, with the grey fog drifting past his eyes and the deep electric hum a distant presence in his ears, but he didn’t feel ill.

  He tried to remember what might have happened to put him in this situation. He recalled leaving Command with Lord Ehl and the last of the station crew. He couldn’t remember anything that happened after that.

  Then, with a song of relief that chorused in his bones, he remembered Severin. Severin must have succeeded in his effort to switch off the pulsar.

  Good old Severin! he thought wildly. Severin had come through! It made Martinez want to sing the “Congratulations” round from Lord Fizz Takes a Holiday.