Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  And Shin-Tethys is by far the richest known source of uranium 235 within a dozen light-years.

  Which means I need to brief you on the politics of mermaids.

  * * *

  Once I agreed to his proposal, Rudi formally released me from the oubliette. He also released me from my state of incommunicado. I worked, he paid me, and I spent the lifestyle tokens he provided on various luxuries, including a mail-forwarding service. To my sisters back home I transmitted a terse I’m on my way signal, of necessity abbreviated by the cost of interstellar bandwidth (not to mention the certain knowledge that the communications crew were discreetly listening to everything I sent). To the various people I had heard from on Shin-Tethys, I sent . . . well, there wasn’t much to say: to Ana’s concerned friend, an offer of a meeting upon my arrival; to the police, ditto: and to the debt-collection agency a polite offer to discuss the rent on her vacuole in person. (Anything to keep them from tossing her personal effects overboard before I had a chance to rummage through them.) And that was that.

  As for Rudi’s assignment, here’s how I explained my findings to him when I made my report:

  “To a first-order approximation, there is no signal in the noise.”

  “Bah.” Hanging upside down in the middle of his nest of retinas, Rudi looked as disgusted as I felt. I’d spent more than a hundred days plowing through records, drilling for hidden dependencies between investment trusts and holdings, and looking at published company reports filed in a variety of aquatic micronations at varying depths in the upper oceans of Shin-Tethys. “That’s ridiculous. There are scandals and frauds everywhere! You’re not going to convince me that those people are an exception. What’s out there?”

  “What’s out there is a disturbing lack of naughtiness. Almost as if all signs of it are being deliberately suppressed.”

  I waved at the retina coating the far wall of his nest. “Observe.”

  I’d been working toward this presentation for months. Declining good-natured invitations to orgies from the crew because I had pivot tables to analyze. Mumbling my way through it over my food at mealtimes until I found myself eating alone. Dreaming of dark currents flowing beneath the ice caps of frozen slow money reserves. There were 497 mutually recognized governments in Shin-Tethys; while all of them recognized the Taj Slow Dollar as the rock-bottomed foundation of fiscal probity, more than half of them—316—maintained their own medium-investment vehicles with floating exchange rates (in the shape of bonds with various maturity terms), and almost all had their own cash standards (except for three alliances comprised of smaller but mostly prosperous nations who formed customs unions). Around 70 percent of these governments had their own national banks, and another 26 percent allowed private but highly regulated banking industries to exist. These naturally ran on top of other currencies and media of reputational account, for not all of these nations were marketized—indeed, at least eighty of them were communist, and a hundred had nonexchangeable primitive currencies used solely for reproductive courtship purposes and marking changes of social status. There were even three oddball kingdoms that ran gift economies mediated by the frequent exchange of small, polished spheres of metallic plutonium. (People in those polities learned very rapidly to give money away as fast as it came in. Depressions were rare, and tended to end explosively.)

  In any event, I’d been able to follow the declared medium holdings of most of the governments and banks and major off-world investors via various government property registers and gazetteers.

  “Look.” I pointed. “Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don’t export directly, but there’s a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes—the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgravity or vacuum or very high temperatures or an anaerobic environment. In other words, it’s your typical pattern for an energy-exporting planet, with the added twist that because it’s very damp, a lot of planetary surface activities—smelting metals, manufacturing ceramics—are expensive to perform locally. The only interesting thing is how little slow money is going into their economic system. As for banking corruption, there’s the usual, but no more than the usual. Around one government per decade—out of nearly five hundred, mind—gets into bad trouble one way or another. But the system is self-stabilizing: What usually happens is that a consortium of their trading partners and main creditors get together and mount a hostile takeover—I believe they call it a “war”—and place the defaulter under administration until it digs itself out of the hole. But there’s not much of that going on. You have to go back nearly a thousand years to find anything really bad; for example, the Trask affair—”

  “What was that?” Rudi interrupted.

  “Nothing relevant. Ivar Trask-1 was one of the system founders—set up the systembank at Taj Beacon, established the Dojima slow dollar on the interstellar exchanges. There was some sort of scandal over money laundering, and he went missing, believed murdered, but as I was saying, that was nearly a thousand years ago. Dojima System’s bankers are very staid, even by slow money banking standards.”

  Rudi snorted, and one ear tip twitched, as if he was keeping his opinions to himself: But presently he nodded. “Continue, please.”

  “Shorter version: What you’re looking for doesn’t seem to exist. Either that, or there’s a conspiracy of silence so vast as to defy human nature—you’d need to have more than two thousand institutions in different jurisdictions agreeing to stash their dirt behind the reaction-mass tankage, and nobody leaking.”

  “That big?” Rudi looked at me sharply. “Are any of them showing signs of changing internal power structures? New ownership?”

  I shrugged. “That’s a political question. You didn’t ask me to report on their politics.”

  “Well, you’d better look into that,” he grumbled. “Immigrants may come entangled with slow dollars. Start with the Kingdom of Argos and specifically any events in Nova Ploetsk, and spiral out from there to anywhere your sister might have taken an interest in. After all, she didn’t disappear by accident. She must have blundered into something.”

  “There’s a limit to what I can achieve from up here—”

  “Yes!” Rudi snapped his jaws in a manner I was coming to recognize as emphatic agreement. “So when you’ve done it, we will have to go down-well to continue our investigation in person. But that is then, and this is now! So get to work.”

  * * *

  Ibelieve I mentioned that the surface gravity of Shin-Tethys is about three-quarters that of Earth. However, Shin-Tethys is a big world—over seventy thousand kilometers in circumference. It has no land surface; rather, its surface is all water, with small, floating ice caps around the north and south poles, and sargasso rafts of vegetation the size of continents afloat in the tropics. The water forms a thin layer around an outer mantle of mixed rock and ice, for ice under extreme pressure changes into strange crystalline phases that are denser than liquid water: The boundary is only two to three hundred kilometers down.

  At the surface of the outer mantle, there is a layer consisting almost entirely of heavy ice contaminated by intrusive threads of fractured rock, the remains of lava tubes and hot spots that thrust their way to the surface and burst in a catastrophic verneshot. There are volcanoes, some of them cold but glowing pale blue from Cerenkov radiation generated by the fission reactions that power them. The critical mass of uranium is significantly reduced in aqueous solution because hydrogen atoms slow thermal neutrons, making them easier for large nuclei to capture: Consequently, deposits of uranium salts leached from the rocky intrusions from the lower mantle frequently achieve criticality and fire up a fission chain reaction.

  Somewhere thousands of kilometers below the outer mantle
, there lies a mesomantle of rock, the outer mantle of the Earth-like world drowned within Shin-Tethys’s watery caul—but that does not concern me. We can’t get to it directly, so it is of no economic interest.

  The main significance of the hydrosphere is that it is both a promise and a threat: the promise of huge wealth from mineral-resource extraction and the threat of hydrostatic pressure.

  Pressure kills. It kills Fragile cells and human mechanocytes alike because the molecular machinery of which such cells are composed relies on phase boundaries between oily and aqueous compartments to organize and orient these large molecules, and increasing pressure warps and distorts them because lipid bubbles don’t expand or contract at precisely the same rate as watery ones when you crank up the pressure. You can adapt gradually, of course, tweaking a hydrogen bond here and a covalent structure there, but persons who go swimming in the oceans of Shin-Tethys without extreme modifications are vulnerable to pressure-induced necrosis if they travel even a couple of hundred meters up or down. And the hydrosphere is hundreds of kilometers deep.

  Hence the laminar nations.

  Local Customs

  One morning I was awakened by thumping and vibrations which, transmitted through the meshwork of my sleeping nest, put me in mind of the approach of a gigantic predator. Alarmed, I connected my pocket retina to the shipboard net, to see a storm of arcane instructions and communications among the navigation crew. Branch Office Five Zero was maneuvering under power, popping thrusters and spinning up gyros at a rate I’d never seen before. It reminded me of the maneuvering when Dennett’s chapel departed from Taj Beacon.

  While I hadn’t been formally ordered not to inquire as to our precise arrival time, any questions I’d put to the flight-deck crew had been met with polite evasions. (And indeed, this was not totally unreasonable; Branch Office Five Zero might well be planning to divert on the way into orbit to rendezvous with some miscreant suspected of smuggling or insurance fraud, in which case my awareness of this could constitute a security breach.) But 286 sleeping periods had passed since I was carried on board, and so it was no great stretch of imagination to conclude that either we were maneuvering toward rendezvous with one or another of the orbital republics, or that we were preparing for a final orbital insertion burn using the vehicle’s high-impulse motor.

  I crawled out of my nest and looked around the inside of my room. It was cramped and sparsely furnished, but I’d spent most of a year living in it. It had taken on some of the emotional resonance we call home: a more spartan, but somewhat less stressful way of life than the institution of my childhood. I was going to miss it, I realized. I shook my head, then pulled on my shipboard outfit (a vest-of-pockets, knee and elbow pads, and split-toed socks) and stuffed everything else into my go bag. There was no guarantee that I would be debarking in the next day or two . . . but it would be imprudent not to be prepared to depart at a moment’s notice.

  I’d known this day was coming for the best part of a year, but it still swept me up in a fit of excitement and enthusiasm. A new planet lay at my feet! Rudi would have to let me descend to the surface, for if nothing else he’d need my collusion to help find Ana. And then, and then . . . well. I’d spent many a twilight rest shift considering my options in the privacy of my own head: Once free of Rudi and his minions for even a few hours, I could cut and run to Shin-Kyoto. Or, if Ana was indeed in trouble, I could help find and extricate her, maybe find a way to clone her soul chip under Rudi’s nose and smuggle it out-system. Or—but these speculations were the wild figments of imagination of a much younger version of me, much less aware of my own mortal shortcomings. Worse, they all dead-ended in the roiling fogbank of the uncertain future: For if I had become the object of my lineage mater’s enmity, what future was there for me? It was all quite dismaying. However, returning my focus to the immediate future, it seemed to me that my first job was to extricate myself—and Ana, if she was still alive—from Rudi’s proprietorial interest as cleanly as possible, then take stock of the situation. Which might be possible if I were to request asylum from the Kingdom of Argos, where Ana had lived—

  “Krina. Please report to Conference Room D on Level Two for briefing. Acknowledge.”

  I swore quietly at the public-address system that had so rudely interrupted my situational analysis. “Acknowledged,” I said. Then I sealed my go bag, stuck my head out of my cell, and went where I was told.

  The grandly named Conference Room D was actually an empty bubble hanging off the side of one of the main throughways, walled only to provide a modicum of security against being casually overheard by passersby. I stuck my head in the hatch to find Rudi already there, along with two others. “Ah, Krina! Come in, come in. You’re just in time. This is Dent”—he gestured at one of his companions, a lugubrious-looking bat-banker with a spreadsheet tattooed on his left wing in smart ink, so that he could pivot his tables with a flap of the wrist—“and this is Marigold. Marigold is a debt termination officer,” he added as an afterthought.

  I swallowed as I looked at her. Marigold was one of the few orthohuman people I’d glimpsed on the vehicle but not been formally introduced to. She could have been dropped into one of the seething cities of preextinction Fragile Earth, and nobody would have noticed anything unusual about her, as long as she replaced her snaking orange locks and angular antibiometric facial camouflage with something more traditional. But: a debt termination officer! Banks and their offshoots (such as this very hive of villainy) are about risk management and avoidance—matters should never reach the stage where they need to terminate a bad debt! Far better to stir it up with a bunch of lumpen credit properties and shuffle it off to a long-term investment trust for toxic assets, there to depress the bottom line’s growth by a fractional percentage point. Debt termination is not a practice I have ever had much to do with. So I stared, slightly appalled, until Marigold winked at me, and I dropped my gaze to hide my expression.

  “Her job will be to watch your back,” Rudi explained. “Assuming you are still hoping to find your missing sib?” I nodded. “We will travel to Nova Ploetsk in Argos together. You will need to examine your sib’s apartment and take custody of her personal effects.” He smiled, baring his teeth. “Meanwhile, we will accompany you to provide assistance. Mari as your bodyguard, and Dent . . . Dent is a forensic accountant, with credentials recognized by the Eyes of Argos: He is at your disposal. Oh, and you’ll all be needing a change of skin.”

  “Hey, wait a moment—” I began.

  “Or don’t you want to find your sister?” Rudi asked, dangerously reasonable.

  “What kind of skin?” Marigold’s diction was precise, but emotionally barren: She might have been a machine, like the stalker that Dennett had been playing games with.

  “Skin with scales and flukes,” Rudi hissed. “Nova Ploetsk is two hundred meters down, and if your sib has gone any deeper, we’ll all need to adapt ourselves. I have made arrangements with a body shop on the surface port above it. Time to go.”

  * * *

  Rudi led us to the main air lock into the forward cargo hold; then through a twisty little maze of tunnels and claustrophobic tubes that terminated in a tiny room with six acceleration couches bolted to one wall. “Strap yourselves in,” he said. “It’s going to be a bumpy ride.” I worked my way into the nest of straps (gently twisting in the airflow like a bed of kelp in an ocean current). It resembled the Soyuz sarcophagus back aboard the chapel, if somewhat larger and less classically proportioned. Marigold took it upon herself to pull the hatch shut and lock it closed, then lay down beside me: We were packed so close in the can that our shoulders and knees were almost touching, and the ceiling was barely a meter above the back of my head. A minute later, the sound of the air circulation changed.

  “Take deep breaths,” Marigold said tonelessly. “Inhale deeply. If any air is left in your pleural chamber, you may be injured when we impact.”

  “Impact?” I asked
: “What do you—”

  Pale blue liquid, very cold and runny, began to gush into the sarcophagus. I struggled against my straps, straining to hold up my head, until I saw Rudi duck his muzzle into a large globule of the liquid and blow a stream of bubbles out through his nose. I’d heard about this stuff but never seen it myself. “Is this really necessary?” I asked, trying not to panic.

  The liquid flux increased, foaming and rebounding from the ceiling and walls. A wave of it struck my face and stuck, covering my mouth. I exhaled explosively, expecting to choke, and began to breathe in. It chilled and numbed my nasal heat-exchange surfaces and gas reservoirs as I drew it down, but it wasn’t chokingly thick, and there was a reassuring abundance of oxygen dissolved in it: As there should be, for it was some sort of chlorofluorocarbon liquid. (I gather it is used mainly as a hydrostatic buffer during very-high-acceleration maneuvering.) Coldness invaded my nether regions, flooding my inner cavities. It has the strange property of being an electrorheological fluid, I’ve since been told, so that at the moment of splashdown, a brief electrical current turns it stiff as wax with us embedded in it.

  Reentry vehicle departure in ten seconds. The whole of the front of the sarcophagus turned into a retina display, blinking status display icons at me. I marveled at the sight, for behind them was a panoramic view of the interior of the cargo tank, its front end open to the brilliant darkness of the sky. Wheeling across it a perfect turquoise hemisphere streaked with pale pink clouds—

  A giant boot kicked me in the small of the back, ramming me into the acceleration couch. The cargo tank of the Five Zero vanished behind us. We were on our way to Nova Ploetsk, embedded in a tub of breathable blue jelly as our capsule screamed through the outer wisps of the atmosphere of Shin-Tethys.