Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  * * *

  “Get here! Not there, here!” The pirates—four of them, all armed—hovered above the Soyuz in the crypt, intimidating us with beats of their leathery wings. Escape was not an option: With their chiropteroid low-gee adaptations, they’d have no trouble running me down if I tried to flee. Moreover, I had to carry Cybelle, for she could barely control her arms and legs. Their leader shrieked, his (or her: I could not tell) voice a high-pitched rasp: “Respect! Get down, Churchling! Get down there, not here!”

  “I’m getting, I’m getting!” I tried to move to the indicated spot without accidentally kicking myself halfway to the ceiling. “What do you want?”

  “This way! Not that way!” The seniormost pirate gestured, making short stabbing indications with his (or her) power blade. “To the storage room, third door along! You wait there! You try escape, we cut neck.” (Punctuation: an unmistakable sawing gesture. Hovering behind his shoulder, one of the quadrotor blades echoed his motion.)

  I hauled Cybelle in the direction indicated: neck-cutting did not appeal. In what appeared to be an outbreak of playful spirit, the pirates had decorated the storage-room hatch with a chain of Gould’s skulls: they buzzed and clattered their jaws angrily as one of our hijackers chittered and yanked at the wheel of the field-expedient dungeon. I slid Cybelle through the opening, then (with a glance at the pirate leader, who bared his or her fangs at me) followed her inside.

  “Your Grace—” It was the deacon. He recoiled as he saw me, a very strange expression on his face. “They captured you both?”

  “You didn’t leave me any opportunity to escape,” I said, as Cybelle simultaneously announced, “I demand to know what is going on! Why aren’t we at Taj Beacon yet?”

  “Gruffle,” mumbled Father Gould. He was hanging upside down from an air-conditioning duct, his habit wrapped around his torso, as if imitating our captors’ leathery wings. As situationally unaware as ever, he wore an expression of rapt concentration: His eyes were screwed tightly shut. “Grumming bat crypt belfry.”

  “What are they going to do to us?” I asked. I noted the absence of certain parties—the Gravid Mother and Cook in particular.

  “I don’t know.” Dennett twitched, then swiveled his gaze toward Cybelle. “Do you remember the accident?”

  “There was an accident?” Cybelle might have regained the power of speech and relinquished her insensate appetite for flesh, but she was still coming up to speed. “No, I don’t remember any accident. When do we arrive at Taj? Who are these people?”

  “We’ve been hijacked.” Dennett glanced sidelong at Father Gould, then back at Lady Cybelle. “I should warn you that they’ve broken his remote network and are most certainly monitoring it—including his eyes and ears. He’s trying to subvocalize and not look at any of us, but you should assume that anything you say will be overheard. As I was about to say . . . the accident was a total disaster. We were forced to put in at Taj Beacon, where Sister Ang and the three engineering officers deserted. I had to petition the vicar-in-residence for a line of credit to buy new techné for your regrowth, and six hundred kilos of plutonium for the second reactor—it wasn’t cheap. Shorthanded and damaged, I also advertised for additional crew: That’s where Ms. Alizond comes in.” Another strange look. “And Willard, the new life-support engineer. Cook. Oh, and there’s a stowaway. Looks just like Ms. Alizond, but is less talkative. Seems to want to kill her for some reason, which is why I put Ms. Alizond in the sarcophagus with you.”

  I startled. “You saw her?” I asked.

  “Saw her?” Dennett raised an eyebrow: “She was a much more diligent cleaner than you, and didn’t even ask for pay. Not a very interesting conversationalist, though—a bit too focused on murderous thuggery. But I diverted her away from your cell: You should be grateful,” he added, offhandedly. “Don’t worry, I’ll look after you.”

  “I should be—” I forced myself to stop.

  “I don’t understand this.” Cybelle raised her arms ineffectually, framing her face. “Who are these hijackers?”

  Suddenly, the hatch swung open. “Which of you is Alizond?” barked one of our captors. “Boss want talk you right now! Come, or I cut neck!” As if to emphasize this, one of the quadrotor knives whirred menacingly into our midst, causing the other captives to scatter. “Come! We go now!”

  There didn’t seem to be any alternative options on offer. So I went.

  Kidnapped!

  The pirates hustled me away from the improvised brig, toward the refectory, where their leader had established his office. They had dragged the tables together and plastered their tops with retinas, displaying black-and-white text that marched in pleasingly regular patterns across their eating surfaces.

  “Ah. You must be Krina Alizond-114.”

  I stared at the pirate chief with mixed apprehension and curiosity. In body plan he resembled his minions: furry and sharp-faced with low-gee batwings and spindly legs. He hunched over the largest retina, a stylus clutched in each hand. I noticed that he wore gold, chain-link bands to hold his wings in place at elbow and wrist and a visor above his eyes that shone with a pale green light. “Um.”

  He gestured at a low-gee chair on the opposite side of the table. “Please take a seat,” he said, not unkindly.

  I sat. The retina, I realized, was gridded out in the soothing, familiar patterns of a purchase/sales ledger and an inventory-accounting system. How unexpectedly civilized! “Um . . .” I felt my facial chromatophores flush, an autonomic response in lieu of vocal communication. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes. Ms. Alizond.” My captor leaned toward me, grinning—he could hardly do otherwise, with his sharp-toothed muzzle topped by a black olfactory bulb. “I have been looking forward to meeting you. You’ve led us a merry dance, you know. Nearly slipped through our claws twice now.” He tapped one stylus on the retina in front of him, drawing a double line beneath a column of figures: “But now we have your number! Ahahaha!”

  “I beg your pardon?” I stared at him in perplexity.

  “Granted.” His grin widened. “If you can tell us where she is?”

  “Who?”

  “Come, now! There’s no need to be coy. All you need do is tell me where your collaborator is, and we can be on our way, with no further need to detain you. Where is she?”

  I shook my head. “You mean Ana?”

  He nodded, tongue lolling for a moment until he remembered his manners and closed his jaws with an audible snap. “Yes. Ana Graulle-90. I believe you know of her?”

  I nod. “Why do you think I’m here? She’s been missing for over a hundred days!”

  “Of course.” The pirate leader’s permanent expression of feral humor belied his tone. “And you’re going to tell me where she is, aren’t you? I am very anxious to make her acquaintance.”

  “I can’t help you.” I stared at the marching figures embedded in the white surface of his boardroom-sized retina: “I don’t know. I only arrived at Taj Beacon”—some quick math—“eighty-six days and fourteen hours ago. Approximately, I mean. She was supposed to have sent word of where I was to meet her: I was supposed to spend the next year collaborating with her in a course of intensive study in one of the outer belt orbitals, you know. But first she went to Shin-Tethys, then she disappeared. And I’ve got no idea where she’s gone.”

  “Come now, Ms. Alizond.” The teeth reinserted themselves into his grin. “Surely your sisterhood have prearranged bolt-holes and agreed contact procedures? Scattered across such vast distances, you must know where she would expect you to rendezvous if circumstances became, ah, temporarily unfavorable to your business?”

  I shuffled uneasily against my seat. “Yes, we do—but you don’t understand! She’s missing! Yes, we have preagreed rendezvous points. I’ll tell you for free, hers were in GJ 785—where I have come from—and again, in one of the high orbital kingdoms of the Trailing
Pretties. She hasn’t left for GJ 785, and you can verify that: The immigration and emigration logs at the beacon are matters of public record. As for the Trailing Pretties, that’s where she ought to have gone: There is no defined rendezvous point on Shin-Tethys because she wasn’t meant to go there! I mean, it’s a planet. So massive it has its own gravity well. You can’t get away in a hurry without spending huge amounts of energy! Much less make a break for the outer system without being noticed. Why she went there—” I shrug. “That’s what I want to find out.”

  I watched the pirate chief uneasily. He radiated a disturbing feral intensity, a ferocity of purpose I associated with senior executives: He was somewhat less chilly than my mother, I thought, but no less determined. “Do you have any idea who I am?” he asked.

  “Not really.” I set my jaw. “Obviously you have declared yourself to be the leader of a pirate band: What else should I know?”

  He whistled between his teeth, an astonishingly high-pitched noise that I could barely track. The avuncular amusement disappeared. “Ignorance is dangerous, Ms. Alizond. It can be mistaken for close-lipped cynical insight, you know. I am going to ask you again: What do you know about your sister’s current whereabouts? I ask for her own good.”

  “Really?” I raised an eyebrow.

  “Yes.” Was that an aggrieved glare? Or was I simply misinterpreting the facial expressions and body language of his kind? “We are not simple pirates, Ms. Alizond. We are, in point of fact, a local branch of an interstellar financial agency. And among other things, we are the underwriters of her not-insubstantial life insurance policy. Hah! You were unaware that she had such a thing? How touching. We have a distinct interest at stake in her continued existence, not to mention considerable curiosity about the nature of certain of her business activities, which have attracted the attention of a wide cross section of Dojima System’s reprobates. Observe.” Styli flashed across the retina before me, summoning up an imposingly detailed contract signed, I was reluctantly forced to concede, with what appeared to be Ana’s checksum. “We have a shared interest. What can you tell me about her?”

  Pirate underwriters: what next? “She disappeared from home, which is one thing, but then she missed her first contact and her second contact. If she’s gone on the run, she’d only do that if she expected someone to come after her, someone who knew what signals she’d use, someone who had been reading her mail. It’s very upsetting. Nobody I’ve been able to contact has any idea where she is: It’s as if she’s died, or been abducted. That’s why I’m on this vehicle: It was the first available transport I could find that would take me to Shin-Tethys.” I shivered. “What do you suspect has happened?”

  The pirate chief yawned. “Insurance fraud. Or worse.” Strong arms grabbed my shoulders, holding me down. “So we’re going to start by verifying that you are telling me the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” he added. “Under authenticated oath, ordered this day in my capacity as a certificated independent arbiter investigating the possible fraudulent discharge of the life insurance policy of Ana Graulle-90. Sorry about this,” he added to my face with evident sincerity, then, over my shoulder: “Debug her.”

  “Wait—” I began, as one of them shoved my head forward. But I was too late. A sharp tugging and a sense of emptiness at the base of my skull where a soul chip belonged was followed by a moment of icy coldness; darkness crossing my vision, static pins and needles in every extremity, a sense of extreme violation as something simultaneously sharp and blunt that smelled green and tasted of chlorine thrust into the unoccupied socket—

  Hiatus.

  For the most part, it is a good thing that we are no longer built from the same chaotically evolved watery lipid foam as the Fragile. Mechanocytic life is far more robust, able to operate within a far wider environmental envelope. (We may breathe an oxygenated gas mix, metabolize hydrocarbons and other feedstock, and crap processed waste, but we don’t have to do so all the time: We can run off juice, crack oxygen from water, and recycle almost everything.) But there are certain disadvantages, too. Unlike the Fragile (whose brains contain over a trillion cells), our brains are built from mere tens of millions of mechaneurons, each of them a complex device that emulates many thousands of more primitive neurons. Our brains are multiply redundant—it takes more than a simple bullet through the head to stop one of us from continuing to think, albeit at an impaired rate. And they are designed for metaprogramming, to allow their state to be copied to or from a soul chip carried in one of our two interface slots, or to allow them to be modified by an external device. Such devices have many names, names that change depending on context, from the anodyne to the malign: A remote debugger, our artificers call them when they connect them to nonsentient systems, or a slave chip, when someone stabs one into another’s thinking, feeling brain.

  Private ownership of a fully configured slave chip is illegal in many polities: It tends to be a government monopoly, much like other forms of violence.

  But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters. Surely it should be no surprise that such dubious practices might be everyday business among such persons!

  “First question. Has Deacon Dennett interfered with you?” my captor demanded.

  “I, I don’t understand?”

  I cannot, even now, quite describe what it felt like. I would say that a great glassy wall had slammed down between me and my sense of identity; that my I was missing, that my will was wholly entrained to his desires—but it would not be correct. Something missing, something added. It was not an unpleasant sensation at the time, but I would die before I would willingly submit to it again because it was like a living death—the death of will. And so, I stuttered.

  “Has Deacon Dennett interfered with your mind? For example, by subjecting you to a remote debugger?”

  “N-No!”

  “So: We got to you in time. Provisionally.” He made a notation on his grid, then leaned forward. “Where is your sister Ana? Where are you going to meet her?”

  “I, I, I—”

  “What?” he demanded. “Where is she?”

  “Don’tDon’tDon’tKnowOwOwOwOwOw . . .”

  He glared at someone behind me. “Can you fix the feedback?”

  A high, sibilant voice: “I don’t think so. She’s not supposed to respond like that. Let me damp her”—Nothingness—“no, that didn’t work. You’re going to have to put up with it.”

  “Gah.” He stared at the desk in distaste. “Let’s try that again. Do you know where your sib Ana is, Krina?”

  Easy enough: “No-o.”

  “Where were you going to meet Ana?”

  “I—I—going to Shin-Tethys, to Nova Ploetsk in TheTheTheKingdomOm of Argos, ApartApartment 164 Ring 3 West—”

  “That’s her home, sure enough,” my captor commented, rapidly scritching a note on the tabletop retina. Back in my direction: “What were you going to do when you got there?”

  “Find-ind her.”

  The pirate chief whistled irritably, in a manner I would probably have found amusing had I been in possession of my own will: “How were you going to find her?”

  “Don’tDon’tDon’tDon’tDon’t—Know.”

  “Oh.” He hunched back on himself, drawing his wings in close with an expression of evident frustration: “So you do not know where she is, and her disappearance is unexpected?”

  “YesYesYes—”

  “Wonderful.” His voice dripped irony. “Was she, do you know, planning to commit insurance fraud against this institution?”

  “NoNo.”

  He looked past me. “Release her. Add this transcript to the case record under seal: Also note that subject told the truth when questioned without debugging override.”

  Volition returned, with a tearing, sucking void at the back of my neck. I startled and began to shake as clumsy fingers replaced the chip th
ey’d removed to make way for the debugger; some obscure reflex threw my ocular lubricant ducts into repeated self-cleaning cycles, and I began to weep at the ghastly memory of death flowing through me, washing away my self-control.

  “Are you done yet?” My interrogator asked after a minute as painful as any I’d experienced in many years.

  “You—you—” I managed to catch myself before I said anything unpardonable (an icy existential terror lurking in the shadow of my mind: Don’t let them plug that thing into me again)—“that was unnecessary! I’m not trying to hide—”

  “You are wrong, Ms. Alizond, that was entirely necessary.” He hissed and bared his fangs, leaning toward my face until I recoiled: “Because now we know that you’re telling the truth, don’t we? Which is a matter of some importance. Your missing sister, if she has been so inconsiderate as to die, will completely wipe out this branch office’s trading profit for the last standard year. Now we have confirmed under judicial interrogation that you are not a participant in an attempt to defraud us, we can put this unfortunate incident behind us and discuss what happens next—which is, how to find your missing sister before the mob of murderers and robbers who are attempting to track her down.”

  “The—what?” I stared at my interrogator through blurry eyes, and noticed, with a flash of something like hatred, as an expression of sympathy flickered across his face before he composed himself.

  “Word gets around, Ms. Alizond: Surely you must know of the rumors?”

  “Rumors?” Gut-deep terror struck at me.

  “Rumors about a certain high-value financial instrument, Ms. Alizond. Rumors that you and your missing sister are in possession of the two halves of an unsettled transaction with a value in the million slow dollar range. Or hadn’t you heard?”