Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  Nine minutes to impact, said the screen.

  I began to wonder (not for the first time, I will admit) whether finding the missing half of the Atlantis Carnet was really worth the fuss.

  * * *

  We hit the atmosphere at over twenty thousand kilometers per hour, flickering red and yellow bursts of plasma flashing off the heat shield on the base of our discus-shaped flying coffin: It was altogether too much excitement for my taste even though I was trussed up in shock absorbers and drenched in crash jelly. Our deceleration was abrupt, if not violent, peaking at an eyeball-warping fifty gees. Finally, the clouds of flame began to clear from the camera on the outside of our hull as we fell through the stratosphere. There wasn’t much to see, however. The vast floating continents of leviathan grass tended to congregate in the subtropical zones, away from the scorching solar zenith and the turbulent currents around the frozen ice caps: None of them were visible. The surface of Shin-Tethys, at least in these near-equatorial reaches, was water from horizon to horizon, a pale blue wall the size of the sky into which we were falling.

  Impact in two minutes, said our craft’s display. With my vestigial electrosense, I could feel Rudi discussing something with Dent, as if from a great distance: But I lacked the specialized vacuum adaptations to join in their conversation. “What happens next?” I tried to ask, but only produced a gargling rumble that made my larynx sore, and I’m not sure the sound even made it out of my throat.

  Impact in one minute. Impact in thirty seconds. Impact in ten seconds—I felt a moment of core-numbing terror, certain that I was about to die, as the horizon rose up and slammed into me. Then everything went dark.

  * * *

  I’d now like to share with you a few reminiscences about the niceties of arrival in a monarchy afloat in the upper waters of Shin-Tethys.

  The pressure of the water column above one’s head—ten kilopascals per meter—forces significant metabolic adaptations if one is to travel up or down, for a variation of just a few megapascals is sufficient to wreck delicate nanostructures like proteins that rely on weak Van der Waals forces and disulfide bridges to maintain their shape. We post-Fragiles can adapt our mechanocytes by applying high-pressure firmware upgrades, but the process is not instantaneous. So the polities of Shin-Tethys are stratified not merely by lineage and natal nobility, and distinguished not merely by their geographical extent, but by their altitude. Hence their colloquial name: the laminar republics.

  Despite this, very few of them are actual republics. Most of them were founded by individuals, early shareholders aboard the starship that first colonized Dojima System. They replicated themselves, spawning many bodies to house copies of their core identity, for life in Shin-Tethys during the early days was unimaginably hazardous. With the passage of time, many of the original rulers senesced and were replaced by new successor states, but even to this day some of the original founders survive, and the petty kings and queens jealously guard their demesnes and keep a close watch on visitors.

  We came hurtling down from the zenith, decelerated at a Fragile-crunching rate, then crashed into the wave tops at over a hundred kilometers per hour. Parachutes, I learned later, found no favor with Rudi because he half expected us to be shot out of the sky by various disgruntled duty evaders; hanging around in the breeze might make for a more comfortable splashdown, but only if we lived to make it. And so our sturdy capsule survived its brusque arrival and subsequent ditching but promptly submerged. And sank, bubbling air from its remaining gas reserves, until it fell into Poseidon’s net at a depth of nearly fifty meters.

  During this process, were I to have to pick a single word to describe my state of mind, “terror” would fit quite accurately. I recovered consciousness rapidly after the impact-induced shutdown and self-test—we sustained over two hundred gees momentarily as we splashed down—but took a couple of seconds to reorient myself and look at the retinal ceiling so close to my nose, and even longer to realize that what I was looking at was a cloud of rapidly dispersing bubbles and the mirror-rippling surface of the water receding slowly above us.

  “Rudi, we’re sinking!” The crash and reboot seemed to have reset something in my laryngeal cavity, so that I could make my voice work again. It sounded deep and sonorous in the chlorofluorocarbon bath.

  The count grinned, tongue lolling: “Ain’t it great?”

  “We’re sinking!”

  “Dive rate zero point six nine meters per second,” droned Dent. He was reading from a personal display: “Crush depth in, ahum, three hundred and nineteen seconds. Make that three hundred and twenty to three hundred and eighty, actually. If we were to go that deep.”

  “We’re all going to die!” I wailed.

  “No we’re not,” Rudi assured me. He reached out sideways and squeezed my hand. “Just lie back and enjoy the ride, Krina. Everything’s going entirely according to plan.”

  “Ugh-ugh!” I wibbled incoherently. Something disturbingly flaccid and meaty shimmied vertically past the camera viewport on the outside of our hull. It had numerous suction cups lining its inner surface. The suckers surrounded viciously barbed hooks that pulsed in and out of the tentacle’s bulbous trunk. Half the ceiling fell into shadow as it lazily wrapped itself across our upper surface. The sarcophagus rocked alarmingly from toe to head, tilting me alarmingly downward, and our sink rate increased.

  “Ah, we have a tug.” Rudi seemed inordinately pleased by this development.

  “Docking in fifty seconds,” Dent informed us. He made it sound as routine as a tax return. Perhaps it was, to him: But this whole business of landing on a water world was wholly new to me, and more than a little overwhelming.

  We lurched sideways just then. There was a grinding bump and shuffle, then a thud that rattled my teeth—and our descent stopped! I would have vented a sudden sigh of relief, but the viscosity of the carrier fluid filling my lungs made it hard to breathe other than regularly. A metallic clang followed. Then the hatch through which we had entered the flying coffin began to unlatch slowly, from the outside.

  “Welcome to gargle goosh—” There was air on the other side of the hatch; our shock fluid poured out as gas bubbled in, drowning out the canned announcement. I spluttered and heaved, unlatched all seven straps, sat up, and vomited runny blue foam until my chest hurt. Finally I was able to inhale, panting and shuddering. We were not, it appeared, destined to die horribly just yet. The breathing mix down here had a sharply astringent edge, almost ammoniacal. “—Ustoms and immigration. Please proceed to the interview area as directed once you have disembarked.”

  “What are we (cough) supposed to—” I asked, but Rudi was already climbing through the hatch, closely followed by Dent.

  Marigold gave me a look. “What?” I asked.

  “Proceed to the interview area.” She sounded just like the canned announcement, only three degrees colder.

  “I’m proceeding! I’m proceeding.”

  Sloshing through the residue of shock fluid (it still filled our sarcophagus to the lower lip of the hatch) I clambered out onto the sloping aeroshell, then slid down onto the metal grid it had come to rest on. I looked around. We were parked inside an underwater dome, beside a well of some sort—a well through which the docking tentacle had lifted our capsule and deposited it in this parking area. Just how we had managed to land so close to a submerged dock mystified me momentarily, but I dismissed it for now as irrelevant: We had arrived, and now I would have to deal. Rudi and Dent were already at the door on the other side of the dome, about thirty meters away. I stumbled after them, nauseous and uncoordinated from the sudden transition into a deep gravity well. It could be worse, I suppose: I gather the Fragile used to take whole days before they could walk again after returning to their home world following a period in microgravity. (Just another of the countless ways in which we are better adapted to spaceflight than they.)

  Not many people arrive in an unde
rsea polity by ballistic reentry capsule: the laminar republics are generally paranoid about off-planet contamination. Consequently, I found myself funneled into a receiving station with a coffin-sized capsule waiting for me. “Speak your full formal name,” said the wall, “under penalty of perjury.”

  “Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114,” quoth I.

  “Place of origin.”

  “I was initialized on New California, but my last instantiation was—”

  “Purpose of visit.”

  “I’m here to look for my sister, who is missing—”

  “Get in the capsule.”

  I glanced round. The door behind me had merged seamlessly with the wall. Suppressing my apprehension, I climbed into the coffin-sized cylinder and lay down. The last thing I remember is the lid coming down, sealing me in.

  * * *

  When I opened my eyes again I found myself in a very different place. The upper half of the cylinder had risen again, and I was staring at the high, vaulted ceiling above an almost claustrophobically small chamber. The ceiling itself gleamed with the luster of aragonite, illuminated by bright pinpoints of bluish light. I tried to sit up, gasping for breath in the hot, moist air, and looked over the edge of my transport cylinder. There was no floor, only water: and, waiting to talk to me, an instance of the Queen.

  “Welcome to Argos immigration control,” she said, her voice a slightly lighter echo of my interrogator from the arrivals terminal: “We have some questions to put to you, Ms. Alizond, in view of your irregular arrival here.”

  There is an eccentric custom among the monarchs of the laminar republics (or, indeed, the laminar kingdoms): They originally carved out their kingdoms by making multiple duplicates of themselves, working together briefly, then merging their deltas. It’s a risky strategy—let a copy of yourself run around gaining experiences for too long, and it will eventually become, effectively, a separate person—but if bodies are cheap and minds are expensive, as in the early days of a better nation, it’s the way to go. As a consequence of this custom, the small principalities have no need to employ civil servants for most purposes, and indeed, many of their rulers have a positively paranoid aversion to doing so—a fear of la trahison de bourgeoisie, the treachery of the unaffiliated individual professional—and so they only use out-lineage employees for tasks they do not want to be associated with. (Such as the secret police, or the judicial bench when it is convenient to convey the appearance of impartiality). This was clearly the case with Medea, Queen-creator of Argos: which is why the first person I met upon my arrival was Medea herself, incarnate in her role as Senior Immigration Comptroller.

  But I didn’t know she was an instance of the Queen at this point. Rudi hadn’t explained her somewhat eccentric approach to human resources to me, and as an outlander, I was insufficiently aware of such local quirks to have investigated how I could expect to be received. All I knew at the time was that I was about to be questioned by a mermaid with close-cropped green hair and a condescending, officious manner.

  (And, hovering discreetly behind and above her head, the menacing black shapes of a pair of police hornets, primed to paralyze or kill on command. Like any other monarch presiding over a hotbed of intrigue balanced above a lawless hinterland, Medea was not shy about displaying her monopoly on violent force.)

  “Ask away,” I said, looking at her in some puzzlement (I believe I was wondering where Rudi and the others had gone).

  “You said you came here to find your sister. But you’ve never been here before. What did you mean by that?”

  At this point an icy-cold awareness of my precarious position should have overwhelmed me with an urge to caution: But for some obscure reason, I didn’t feel remotely perturbed. My emotional affect was entirely flat, comfortably numb. “My sister Ana?” I explained: “Ana immigrated to Dojima System about seventy-one point six years ago. We—I mean, my mater—originally sent her here to handle the family accounts and provide currency triangulation services to SystemBank Hector, our own New California Credit Union, and other agency services as specified, while continuing her work as a—”

  “Define your relationship to Ana—Ana Graulle-90.” The mermaid was scowling at me: Her left cheek dimpled, slightly detracting from the intimidating effect, but the slow lashing of her fluke below the surface of her pool created a churn that almost reached the surface, lifting her halfway out of the water. “She’s not of your lineage, is she?”

  “She is,” I protested (but not too hard): “She’s just offset to one side. Mater—Sondra Alizond-1—has refactored herself more than once. The Graulles are descended from her last-but-one incarnation. They took up a new name to avoid confusion, they’re very different in personality. She used to be a risk analyst and commodities broker—” I managed to rein myself in as much as I could before my tongue ran away with me again. It was disconcertingly hard. “Why, what else do you want to know?”

  “Why are you looking for her here?” the mermaid persisted.

  “Because Argos is her last-known address.” I tried to focus but couldn’t quite detach myself from the need to answer her questions. “I was going to stay with her for a year, studying: She was in one of the outer habs, but when I got to Rosen, she’d sent word that she was moving down-well to Shin-Tethys, some sort of scholarship arrangement. She said she was getting involved in tracking demand flows in real commodities, part of a consortium investigating long-term sustainability of transport energy economies. Then when I got to Taj Beacon, she’d disappeared with no forwarding address. So I came here as fast as I could.”

  “As fast as you could.” Was that skepticism in her voice? “Leading to your arrival in the company of Rudolf Crimson-1102 and two of his assistants, descending by ballistic reentry vehicle from the armed privateer Branch Office Five Zero. For although you originally signed on as an unskilled ship-hand aboard the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonculease, you were observed departing that vehicle aboard a fast cutter owned by a notorious insurance salesman and pirate.” She fell silent, but her closed counsel was easy enough to decode: How do you explain that?

  “He sold her a life insurance policy before she vanished—” It sounded weak, even to my ears. “What exactly are you asking me?” Despite my distractedness, my sense of unease was growing, like a white rime of mold attacking the dead tissues of a body whose ’cytes had curled up and died of the despair that killed their collective’s mind. Why was I telling her all this? It wasn’t like the debugger Rudi had used on me: This was something altogether more subtle. “I’m a mendicant academic: I came to this system to study with my distant sib; all this nonsense that has happened to me is just bad coincidences—”

  The mermaid held me with her glittering eye: “Do you really believe that? Wait, forget we asked. Forget. You boarded one vehicle and arrived on another: We hope you can appreciate why this might lead to our questioning your bona fides as a legitimate scholar and speculate as to your motive for entering the kingdom.” She paused for a moment. “Do you have anything to add?”

  “Um.” I licked my suddenly dry lips. “I don’t understand? Are you saying I can’t look for my sister? Where is everyone, anyway?”

  She waved my questions off with a dismissive gesture. “Ms. Alizond, we do not believe you are being entirely forthcoming. I am not prepared to discuss the location of your traveling companions—” She looked directly at me. “So, by royal command, we are placing you under arrest, on suspicion of, let’s see: attempting to obtain illegal entry into the Monarchy of Argos will do for starters. We may need to consider adding conspiracy to smuggle antiquities to the list of charges in due course. But first, you will help my police with their inquiries into the murder of Ana Graulle-90.” The lid of the transport cylinder fell toward me again, nearly blocking her final words: “She’s all yours, boys. Take her away!”

  * * *

  Like the vast majority of my lineag
e, I am by disposition a law-abiding citizen. Consequently, I had managed to reach a considerable age without ever being arrested. As with most unfamiliar and threatening experiences, I found the actual event all the more stressful because of the uncertainty attached to it rather than because of the event itself.

  “Take her away!”

  With those words ringing in my ears, I fell backward, headfirst into the depths of Nova Ploetsk, protected from the crushing pressure outside only by the flimsy-seeming walls of my transport cylinder.

  Now, as to the rest—

  Medea might have been the Queen-in-Manifold, present in many instantiations to execute the activities of the government, but she was not, I subsequently learned, ubiquitous. Without my knowledge, I had become a person of some notoriety throughout Dojima System, at least in certain circles: My name was on a watch list. Rudi, to his discredit, had not anticipated this. So, while he and his entourage passed through the Customs and Immigration chambers under assumed identities (aided by the discreet crossing of certain palms with cash), it had not occurred to him to disguise my arrival. I was noticed and diverted toward the tender mercies of the police, but they had already slithered through Medea’s grip before they noticed my absence.

  I imagine the subsequent conversation went something like this:

  Rudi: “Where’s Krina? Marigold, I thought you were keeping an eye on her.”

  Marigold: “We exited the capsule together. She was right behind me.”

  Rudi: “Behind you? When you went through customs?”

  Marigold: “I’m not stupid, I saw her enter a carrier pod right before I—”

  Dent: “Did she make a run for it? Or was she snatched?”

  Rudi: “Doesn’t matter, we have to get clear before whoever she’s with makes a play for us. Driver, I say, driver! Take us to the Hotel du Lac, right away . . .” Sotto voce: “We will discuss our response once we have switched vessels. Do not say anything until I tell you to.” Even more quietly: “The game’s afoot.”