Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “So, as I was saying, I have an offer of employment for you. The work is eminently suited to your specialty—a mendicant doctor of the historiography of accountancy practices. I believe it will keep you amused for the next three hundred days, as we make our way in-system, and I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable if you have something to do with your time.”

  “Why don’t you compel me?” I had to ask. Rudi had already demonstrated that he had the wherewithal to turn me into a zombie.

  “Because.” Rudi looked round, his neck alarmingly supple: “I can’t. As I told you, we operate under letters of marque that set out in great detail what we may and may not do. We are not allowed to steal your personal effects, for example. We may only use compulsion under certain limited circumstances to investigate suspected barratry, or while conducting a hostile boarding action. We may only use interrogation devices in the strictly regulated conduct of certain types of criminal investigations. But this is not the former, and you have been ruled out of the latter, unless you are plotting to take over this branch office, ha-ha. Ha. Ha. Rule of law, Ms. Alizond! Without it, where would we be?”

  Three hundred days of sitting on my thumbs in an oubliette did not appeal. Furthermore, I had to admit that he made a plausible case. And how better to gather the intelligence I would need to revenge my mistreatment than by working from within his business? I determined to give no sign of my long-term plans, and instead leaned closer. “This job. Tell me about it . . .”

  * * *

  Before I can explain the full horror and glory of the Atlantis Carnet, I need to tell you about the Spanish Prisoner.

  Long, long ago on a planet far, far away, where the Fragile roamed free in the biosphere, they developed a complex and dizzying array of tricks, lies, and fraudulent schemes that have served us well to this day.

  Spain was the name of one of their polities; it was attached to the archetypical confidence scheme more or less at random. It could be any other location chosen purely for its remoteness and the difficulty of traveling yonder from hither.

  The Spanish Prisoner is a fabulous person! Rich and powerful in your homeland, this person (who is a personal friend and benefactor of mine: I must introduce you at the first opportunity) has traveled to Spain on a matter of highly confidential business, to which end they are employing a false identity. While there, they have been unavoidably detained due to a minor misunderstanding: Trivial, but they have lost their wallet and passport, and consequently need some help. Surely you could find it in your heart to send them the price of a meal, the down payment on their bail money, the cost of a ticket home? They will be eternally grateful and reward you appropriately upon their return, I assure you. Just remember, though, that they are traveling under conditions of secrecy, and if their true identity is declared to the Spanish authorities, there will be embarrassing (and expensive) questions to be answered.

  Are you with me so far? Can you be trusted? Are you sincere and good-hearted and will you help keep my friend’s secret?

  It’s the oldest con in the book because the victim’s greed reels them in, and they pay, and pay again, bit by bit, for one small service after another. More sophisticated versions emphasize the borderline illegality of the prisoner’s activity, the better to tangle the victim up in a knot of guilty criminal complicity and thereby deter them from seeking aid. But the pattern is the same: A too-good-to-be-true opportunity is presented to the victim, an opportunity to ingratiate themselves with the rich or to buy shares in a dubious but highly profitable venture. And then they are suckered into paying one fee after another in hope of the ultimate payoff.

  Well, Spain no longer exists. But we have some new and exciting twists on the Spanish Prisoner to offer you in its absence! Foremost among these is the FTL breakthrough. Everybody knows that faster-than-light travel is impossible. Except that, conveniently for con artists, it isn’t entirely ruled out; quantum entanglement, wormholes, tachyons, you name it, the devil is in the details that lurk at the edges of experimental physics, in the corners of the map that might as well be labeled “here be dragons.” The gold mine of experimental physics played out thousands of years ago, even before the Fragile went extinct for the first time; it ran into the law of diminishing returns. The machinery required to break new ground got more and more expensive, until finally the construction costs of a bigger particle accelerator—Bigger than the rings of Saturn! Cheaper than fifty colony starships!—priced the privilege of squinting at a new quark-trail squiggle right out of the market. And so, FTL hasn’t been completely ruled out, and therein lies a new twist on the Spanish Prisoner.

  I happen to know that someone a very long way away was experimenting with an FTL drive! And miraculously, they managed to get it to work! But on their first trip—a test flight to this very star system—they met with an unforeseen malfunction. They’re trapped here, hiding out in slowtime hibernation in the outer belt until they can buy certain rare and expensive materials with which to repair their drive, hoping nobody unpleasant stumbles across them. They’re not poor: Here, see these slow dollars, signed by a bank a very long way away? Won’t you hold them as collateral and front me a sum of fast money to help my friends make their repairs? We’ll accept a ruinous conversion rate, just in return for the money we need to get our space drive working again; when the bank-countersigned certificates for these slow dollars reach you, you’ll be rich!

  Alternatively: I happen to have friends who have built and are right now testing an FTL drive. Do you know what that means? It will detonate under the foundations of our financial system like a nuclear mine! Suddenly, it will be possible to trade fast money across interstellar distances. Meanwhile, slow money will depreciate disastrously. They are less than a year away from completing their work, but they’re running short on cash. But they’re not poor—see these slow dollars, signed by a bank a very long way away? We need to off-load them fast, regardless of the exchange rate, by way of a friend who won’t lead the bankers back to our secret laboratory, where they might recognize the significance of our research and destroy our test vehicle before it can fly . . .

  Yet again: My friends have developed an FTL drive. As you know, this will cause a crash in the slow money market once word gets out, so it is essential that we keep it secret until we have tested it. However, on the upcoming test flights, there will be an opportunity for a select few investors to entrust us with slow money instruments that need negotiating via the bank of (some plausible destination a few light-years away). We’ll go there, get the bank to countersign the bitcoinage you entrusted us with, and as soon as we get back, you’ll be able to complete the transaction, convert your slow dollars (drawn on the bank of plausible destination) into fast money and incidentally prove the bona fides of our FTL drive! Everyone wins! You just need to buy slow dollars in the bank of plausible destination, then use them to buy fast money, nominating me and my friends as your proxy . . .

  Faster-than-light travel is the new-old Spanish Prisoner. Do you want me to go on? I could keep this up for hours. It’s my primary field of study. I’ve published numerous papers on the subject. I am an avid student of the history of FTL frauds and can enthrall and expound at academic symposia and after-dinner speaking engagements alike. I am, in fact, one of the only people ever to make an honest living from FTL fraud. You’d think people would be tired of hearing about yet another faster-than-light scam, but it’s so amazingly attractive—a breakthrough in the frontiers of physics that permits a revolutionary new technology that offers you, and you alone, the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make a gigantic financial killing (just so long as you keep your mouth shut). It keeps coming up every few centuries; indeed, it runs in waves. It just won’t die.

  And then there’s the history of the Atlantis project—which some people believe was the real thing.

  * * *

  The difference between merchant banking and barefaced piracy is slimmer than most people imagine. O
ver the months I spent aboard Permanent Crimson Branch Office Five Zero, I discovered that I was disconcertingly comfortable with the profession. But I am getting ahead of myself.

  Count Rudi and his fellow privateers were not, of course, native to Dojima System. Most of them, males, females, and hermaphrodites alike, affected a bat-winged, long-muzzled phenotype that was a common affectation of the residents of the rain forests of Shin-Kyoto’s northern island chain, from where they claimed to come—for the opening of an interstellar branch office by an insurance company was a not-insignificant enterprise, and in order to inculcate the correct corporate culture, they had sent a large cadre of clerical officers and financial-combat operatives. (That: And, being a gregarious people, they were simply more comfortable working in a loudly bickering but affectionate tribe of their own kind.)

  The branch office itself was a repurposed asteroid-mining tug, its bulbous forward cargo tank (originally designed for shipping around large volumes of aqueous salt solutions) repurposed to conceal the tools of the organization’s trade, from the assault auditor’s high-speed skiffs to the forced boarding tubes. Behind it, the life-support system, habitat spaces, and nuclear/ion-drive engineering truss of a regular rock pusher remained virtually unchanged.

  The habitat sphere was brightly lit, overwhelmingly green, somewhat hot and humid, and smelled of sessile hermaphrodite genitalia (or “flowers,” as the bat-folk called them), but it was vastly less depressing than the flying charnel house I’d initially booked passage on. It was spacious, if nothing else: Cubic volume filled with air is cheap to accelerate, so walls were out and batwings were de rigueur among the branch staff. It spent its time migrating slowly back and forth between Shin-Tethys and the Shiny! Asteroids, occasionally waylaying some unfortunate vessel suspected of smuggling (but usually only within a few days of departure/arrival in orbit around a destination: otherwise the delta vee required for rendezvous made such tactics prohibitively expensive). In the meantime, its highly skilled crew of insurance underwriters and accountants sold policies and processed claims, while the elite cadre of merchant bankers handled investments and risk control, and the regular crew kept the ship running and its occupants entertained. It was, in short, just like any other respectable space-borne institution but for the sideline in ion rockets and forced boarding teams: Indeed, it reminded me of a smaller, cozier, and somewhat less ruthless version of New California, my first home.

  Once I got over their odd appearance, I found life around the Five Zero comfortable. With the count’s permission I was allowed out of my cell, albeit shackled to an irritable ankle-crab that screeched and pinched me with its claws if I tried to enter a restricted area by mistake. I ate in the same corner of the mess deck as the other nonchiropteroid crew members (of whom there was a double handful, for unlike the chapel I had been rescued from, this vehicle was not shorthanded), and worked . . . well, I worked wherever I fancied so long as there was a flat surface and a sufficiently large retina to display my research materials.

  Of which there was an embarrassing superfluity. Among other things, the forward cargo tank held a compact but devastatingly dense storage farm, with over a hundred tons of memory diamond: It included a comprehensive log of every financial transaction that the corporation and its affiliates had been able to get its leathery little paws on, whether by begging, borrowing, or barratry. Some of them went back more than three thousand years. Incomplete and fragmentary and balkanized by incompatible storage protocols as it was, it was nevertheless a mother lode of data—an incredible asset if one wanted to trace the ebb and flow of slow money between the stars, or the medium money investments locked up in long-term bonds and assets within Dojima’s habitats: from Taj Beacon to the glass-windowed spinning baubles of the Leading and Trailing Pretties, the Shiny! Asteroids, the colonies on the moons of Zeus and Cronos, the zeppelin-castles of Mira and the hundred warring laminar republics of Shin-Tethys.

  Rudi made it quite clear what he wanted me to do, or rather, what he wanted me to think he wanted me to do. (For it is almost always easier to manage a willing paid subordinate than to control a hostile prisoner; if nothing else, the overhead in guard labor is lower.)

  “When we arrive at Shin-Tethys, I think we shall go on a little excursion in search of your missing sister. But before we do that, it would be prudent to know who else is taking an interest in her, don’t you think? There is Dennett, of course, but we will arrive in orbit first. There is whoever sent that charming body double after you. And there may be others. Your sib appears to have come to the attention of important people. Don’t you think it would be wise to know whom we face before we go looking for her?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea.” (I was lying, of course.)

  “Oh really?” Rudi lolled. “I’ll tell you what I think: There are plenty of skeletons clogging up the closets of the banking and accounting industries of Shin-Tethys, and I think your sister became involved in a conspiracy involving one of them. In so doing, she has made a nuisance of herself to powerful people. And so, we are going to work out who in this system she could possibly be working for, or working with, or have offended, and who might stand to benefit from her finding them.”

  “But she’s only really interested in”—I thought for a moment—“the history of accountancy. Like me.”

  “Yes, exactly. So I want you to prepare a report on the history of investment frauds and scandals in Dojima System.”

  * * *

  Iam now going to bore you to death with the political economy of Shin-Tethys.

  (Pay attention: There will be an exam later.)

  Dojima System revolves around a young G1 dwarf star, slightly brighter than the Sol that illuminated the skies of our ancestors. It was first visited by a starship one thousand five hundred standard years ago: long enough that the locals have established habitats on and around several bodies, and numerous governments and sovereign institutions.

  The planetary system consists of a couple of warm gas giants, Zeus and Cronos, orbiting within a couple of astronomical units of Dojima Prime. There are debris belts, both in the shape of leading and trailing trojan clouds co-orbiting with Zeus and in the shape of a conventional debris belt. A Venusiform world with a runaway greenhouse atmosphere, Mira, orbits beyond the gas giants, just close enough that if not for the greenhouse effect, it would be a freezing iceball; and then there’s Shin-Tethys.

  Shin-Tethys is what planetographers refer to as a “Hydrated Goldilocks Super-Earth.” That means it’s wet, it’s just the right size, and it belongs to a class of planet bigger than the legendary cradle of Fragile civilization. Actually, it’s about three times as massive as Earth—but two-thirds of that is water and ice, surrounding an unseen rocky core. It’s so low in overall density that at the wave tops, the gravitational pull is a little over three-quarters of standard, and orbital velocity is just right. Escape velocity is not so low that it loses much hydrogen to the solar wind, but gravity is not so high that it’s hard to reach orbit from the equator.

  Shin-Tethys is young. Dojima System formed only a billion years ago. Consequently, below the shell of rock and ice nestling within the three-hundred-kilometer-deep ocean is an unseen mantle rich in heavy isotopes. The natural plutonium that was present when the star system formed has all decayed by now, but the uranium is frisky-free and neutron poor! Bright blue glowing smokers periodically light up the crushing abyssal depths, bubbles of prompt criticality rising toward the surface of the ocean, where they boil until they pop in a searing cloud of superheated radioactive steam. The natural dissolved uranium in the oceans of Shin-Tethys contains more than 1 percent U235. It’s rich enough that you can extract it and feed it straight into a reactor.

  Do I need to draw you a diagram to explain the economic relation between Shin-Tethys and the rest of Dojima System’s habitats?

  (Yes, I probably do.)

  Everyone needs energy. Close to Dojima Prime, photovoltaic
cells work well enough. But the farther you go into the cold night beyond Cronos, toward the steeply inclined orbit of the methane giant Hera, deep into the outer belt, the worse solar power works. Running in slowtime will help you conserve what energy you have, but eventually, you have to go nuclear.

  There are, of course, the seven classical forms of nuclear energy: chain-reaction fission, externally induced fission, thermal radioisotope batteries, coherent isomeric emission batteries, muon-catalyzed cold fusion, hot deuterium-tritium fusion, and extremely hot aneutronic fusion . . . each have their pros and cons. But of them all, only one variety ticks all the boxes: fission, subtype classical chain-reaction. Nuclear isomer batteries are all very well, but you’ve got to charge them up somehow. And every type of fusion reactor ever developed is bulky, complicated, fiddly to keep running, and requires inordinate amounts of supporting infrastructure.

  By the time you add it all up, fission is vastly simpler, more compact, and weighs less than any other kind. The only kind of space vehicle that really needs the efficiency of fusion is a starship: For all other purposes, it’s cheaper and simpler to throw lots of uranium at the problem.