Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  A brief pause, then the talking box resumed describing the charming habits of the worm colony, accidentally confirming my inference along the way.

  “Oh for— How do I avoid them?” I demanded. Oriented head down, still adrift in the inky darkness, all I could sense was the faint play of currents in the water around me, and a very faint blue glow from below.

  “Bezos worms coordinate by acoustic synchronization around two kilohertz,” the box explained. “They respond actively to challenge using their own distinctive signaling mechanism. Sound sample—” And it emitted a hissing, buzzing noise: Bzzzzz-osss. A second later, a subtly different echo from above made me cringe.

  “Box.” I gritted my teeth, swallowing an obscenity. My flank burned, my back felt as if I’d been whipped, and my scalp ached. “I want you to play that sound sample again. Every sixty seconds or every time I travel a hundred meters. Can you do that? And warn me of anything else we run into that might eat me before, you know, it actually gets its teeth into my skin?”

  “Yes.” A brief pause. “Extended use of acoustic signaling will impair battery life—”

  “Tell me when your predicted battery life drops below one day. Otherwise, give me an optical guide point, stop chattering, and start spooking the parasites.”

  A faint green beam appeared, a scattering of laser light leading down into the darkness. I kicked gently, then eased myself into a slow rhythm as I followed it toward the vanishing point. Ana had obviously gone to some considerable lengths to set this meeting up in a manner that would ensure nobody on the surface had any idea that she was still alive, much less where she was. Best not to disappoint, then.

  But I intended to have some very pointed words with my sister, when I found her.

  * * *

  Marigold turned, slowly, eyes scanning as she took in the room. She took two steps sideways, then performed another slow twirl.

  “Well?” Rudi demanded.

  “Move.” Her thumb jerked sideways. The count moved as she took two steps sideways, twirled, and scanned again. “I’m checking.”

  “This all adds up,” Dent grumbled from the other side of the room. His nose twitched as he rapidly flipped through the pages of the ledger. “There are no keys to the items in this table, but there are currency conversions here, betwixt prices in Argos dollars and the reales of the Windward Republic. If one assumes the numbers for each type of item are unenciphered, then one may attempt to date the transactions by referring to public records of exchange-rate fluctuations—”

  Another twirl and scan. “I have it,” Marigold announced. She referred to the forensic imago that she had so painstakingly constructed in the Cartesian theater of her mind’s eye: “Two individuals present, no violence, but brief physical contact. Then one collapses. A load-bearing truck enters via a service hatch.” She gestured at the wall. “Doubtless very carefully scripted.”

  “How long ago?” Rudi bared his teeth impatiently.

  “Fifty to seventy hours.”

  “Bankrupt her!” Rudi swore, blazingly angry, his focus directed inward. “Why couldn’t she just have— Forget that. They could have taken her anywhere by now.”

  “I doubt it.” Dent, half-blind to social cues, offered his opinion unprompted. “The options are limited. She may have left via ballistic ascent, in which case a look at the passenger manifests of”—Rudi, screening him out, bent to examine the service hatch—“any logged departure will reveal her proximate destination. Otherwise, she is either dead and disposed of, still present in or under Argos, or departed via subsurface excursion. As hydrodynamic drag increases with the cube of velocity, we can infer an upper limit of the distance she may have covered, unless her abductors used a propulsion technology energetic enough to attract attention—”

  Rudi straightened up. “That’s not your problem. Your assignment is to estimate a date range for the transactions in that ledger, and notify me immediately when you have it.” He turned to Marigold. “We now have two missing bodies of the Alizond lineage. The threat surface has just doubled.” Although he almost quivered with suppressed rage, Rudi’s movements and diction remained precise, overcontrolled. “I want to know who our adversary is.”

  At precisely that moment, his earring vibrated for attention. “Yes?”

  “You asked to be alerted when the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease arrived, sir?” The duty officer aboard Branch Office Five Zero prompted him. “We have just confirmed that it is maneuvering for a docking port at Highport. And—”

  “Good—wait. What else?”

  “They have publicly posted a tender for a ballistic descent capsule from Highport to Nova Ploetsk, departure within the next hour, any reasonable price. Or unreasonable. I placed a countertender, just to see how high they were going, sir: They were still throwing silly money at it when I dropped out of the bidding.”

  “Oh, well played, Joris.” Rudi clattered his jaws. “When are they due down here?”

  “You have at least two hours, sir. Even if the descender they’re hiring docks directly and does a fast ballistic drop, they can’t punch through atmosphere before that.”

  “Good. Keep me alerted of any changes.” Rudi preened, then looked pointedly at his team until even Dent noticed. “Dent, you will apply yourself as directed to that ledger. My guess is the transactions will turn out to be somewhere between two days and two years old, but I may be wildly wrong. As soon as you know, you are to inform me. Mari, you and I are going to the arrivals hall. I believe we have something to discuss with Her Grace.”

  “You’re expecting Lady Cybelle?” Marigold asked flatly. “Do you anticipate trouble?”

  “I absolutely anticipate trouble. The only question is whether it will be aimed at us or at parties as yet unidentified . . .”

  Krina Descending

  Iswam for an interminable time, following my guide box’s dim green beam down into the turbid depths.

  I had no idea where I was. Aside from the beam, I was surrounded by darkness in every direction. My inertial sense told me that I was descending at an angle, moving laterally by approximately five kilometers and descending a little less than half that distance in each hour. But I didn’t feel it. My proprioceptive sense was curiously numbed by whatever arcane upgrade my abductors had applied to my techné in the midst of their more obvious surgical modifications: I couldn’t feel the pressure mounting. And there were no other light sources. Here in the anoxic depths, the water flowing through my throat and gills tasted sulfurous and bitter. Again, the subtleties of the depth-survival pack made themselves known to me only by implication: I was still respiring, somehow metabolizing the hydrogen sulfide dissolved in these waters instead of the more familiar oxygen of the sunlit surface. But I was now a creature of the deep, every cavity of my body pressurized and perfused, the enzymes and mechazymes within my ’cytes warped and modified to function under many kilometers of hydrostatic pressure—conditions under which even molecular machinery may bend and twist into dysfunctional wreckage if not carefully tweaked.

  I was effectively blind but for the navigation light: However, I was far from deaf, and there was a lot to hear. Burblings, rapid ticking noises, a buzzing whine, bumps in the dark: The sea was full of sounds. Some of them I could feel trailing ghostly fingers along my spine and up and down a pair of strangely sensitive lines on the flanks of the bulky, meaty travesty that had replaced my fused legs—I refused to dignify it by calling it a tail—but in any event, I could sense roughly which direction most of the noises came from, and somehow knew that most of them were distant. (It was the noise sources I couldn’t locate that worried me.)

  Hours passed. Tired and now feeling the onset of hunger, I continued to push on through the darkness. Presently, I heard a new noise, a quiet metallic ping: It repeated every few seconds, directly ahead of me. “Attention, Krina,” said the guide box: “Waypoint buoy in range.�
��

  “Really?” I stroked onward, following the dim green beam of light. The pinging loudened. Before long, I saw the faintest outline of something silhouetted against the guide light. “What do I do now?”

  “Krina, proceed to the waypoint buoy and retrieve the next guidance capsule. There is a rest platform with feedstock and an inductive power feed: You should rest for at least three hours before continuing. This guide is now expended. Please drop this guidance capsule—”

  “You want me to drop you?”

  “Please drop this—”

  I could see the waypoint buoy now: A tiny red beacon flashed regularly beneath it, effectively invisible from above. I unpeeled the guidance capsule from my flank and let it fall, experiencing a flash of mild pleasure as I did so. It began to sink, slowly drifting down toward the crushing depths below. A few seconds later, the guide beam winked out. Minutes later I heard a faint pop, then it fell silent.

  The waypoint was spartan in its amenities. In form, it was a cylinder full of buoyancy wax hanging vertically in the water: Cables dangling from it supported a mesh platform, which in turn held smaller packages. As I swam tiredly toward it, I recognized another guide capsule, and a tub of what appeared to be food.

  “Hello, Krina.” It was another prerecorded message from Ana. “I’d like to apologize for the roundabout way of bringing you in. As you have doubtless inferred, we have fallen among scoundrels and thieves: All will become clear when you arrive. For now, all I can tell you is that you have a few more waypoints ahead. As long as you rest at each one to eat and allow your pressure modifications time to recalibrate, and as long as you remember to ditch each used guide capsule on arrival, it should be difficult for anyone to follow you. When you activate each new guide, you trigger a watchdog timer: Eight hours later, a heater will melt the wax in the buoyancy platform’s floatation device, and it will sink. Expensive, but as long as you follow instructions, it will be very hard for anyone to follow you.”

  Expensive? For a moment I felt a hot spike of rage at Ana and her accomplices: They’d had me abducted and surgically violated, then sent me on a drudging mystery tour of the abyss, and now Ana was worrying about expense? But then I looked around. In the dim glow of the pilot light, I saw food, a net to nap atop, and an inductive coupler to recharge my half-exhausted electrocytes. Ana was trying to take care of me, after a fashion. And I couldn’t ignore the number of dubious characters searching for my sib, from Rudi to the mutinous clergy by way of my stalker. If Ana was keeping book for some dubious characters, what of it? I was here, now, and on the trail of the lost checksum of the Atlantis Carnet. It was, I supposed, an adventure although I have never considered myself an adventurous person, much inclined to wilderness hikes or associating with piratical scoundrels.

  I ate—pasty, foamy tubespam, tasteless and with a tendency to dissolve if I didn’t squeeze it straight down my throat from the wrapping—and lay down to sleep on the induction charger. I hadn’t felt particularly tired, and the inky darkness of the open waters around me felt anything but reassuringly safe; the next thing I knew, the new guide capsule was vibrating against my hip.

  “Krina, wake up. Krina, wake—”

  “I’m awake.” I rolled over. The red pilot light above me was flashing. “Hey—”

  “This platform will scuttle in three minutes. You must leave now.”

  “Give me a flashlight beam. And warn me if I’m approaching anything dangerous.” I looked around, seeing nothing beyond the faint outlines of the platform’s mesh. Just then, I wanted to be somewhere, anywhere, else—not here, perched on the edge of a shelf suspended over nothingness, with a long trek ahead of me. “The platform will scuttle in two minutes and thirty—”

  I twisted round, flexed lazily away, and turned in the water to watch.

  The end, when it came, was not dramatic. For a few seconds, a red glow lit the underside of the buoy. Then a seal of some sort melted. In the flashlight beam I’d asked for, I could just discern a plume of smoky liquid rising. The buoy crumpled in on itself and began to sink, very slowly, trailing a thinning cloud of differently textured murk into the choking blackness behind it.

  “Krina, please follow the guidance beam—”

  The torch winked out. I would have sighed with frustration if I had lungs and air to exhale. Instead, I rolled round again and followed the beam down into the darkness.

  * * *

  Picture a circle of pen pals, corresponding across a gulf of light-years as they try to construct a forensic analysis of the biggest financial crime in human history.

  We started by working backward: starting with the supposition that the purpose of the Atlantis scam was to fund the post-Atlantis burst of colony formation. That the goal, and the effective result of this monstrous crime, had been to make an emperor of every thief.

  It follows that, by the present day, over two millennia later, many of the conspirators will be either dead or refactored, flensed of earlier memories, their identities so modified that they are no longer the same people. Those who survive will, however, be wealthy beyond belief, stuck in their ways, not easily susceptible to change. Some of them will have founded lineages. And others will—

  —Have gone missing.

  Consider the circumstances of our criminals as they prepare to receive their payoff. They have just put in more than a century of hard toil in a self-imposed penal colony, clinging grimly to a radiation-drenched rock, working long hours every day to paint a confabulatory vision of success for the outside universe to throw money at. Finally, they come to the bust-out. But are they, then, to inject themselves straight into another colony mission, to sign up for and join a starship crew, just to do it all over again, this time for real?

  No. They are criminals—or, to be more precise, they are victims of the mind-set that underlies the perennial get-rich-quick scheme: in this case, of the idea that in return for a century of hard labor, they can retire on the fruits of a millennium of effort. They have mistaken a journey for a destination and suffer from an outsize sense of entitlement. They want to enjoy the luxuries they feel they have earned. So even if they have invested their stolen blood money in starship partnerships, they’re not going to be visible on the founders’ roster. Rather, you can look for them to show up decades or centuries after the hard work is done, second-wave immigrants looking for an easy life. But where do they wait in the meantime, for the centuries it will take for their investment vehicles to reach their destinations and take root?

  There’s one obvious answer. They’re going to spend as much time as possible in transit, bouncing expensively between widely separated beacon stations. Human space is an expanding bubble almost fifty light-years in radius by now. Even sticking to the well-established core systems, you can easily spend half a century in transit between two stations. Arrive, decant into a new body, spend a couple of million seconds as a tourist, then bounce on to the next destination—you can while away half a millennium in a subjective year, and thanks to the durability of slow money, your assets will travel into the future with you.

  But there are problems with this. Put yourself in the skin of an Atlantean: Being too directly traceable back to Atlantis would be dangerous since there will be angry creditors looking for you. So you want to change your face, change your name, change your identity—and meet up with your money down the line, centuries in the future.

  Now, here’s what Ana and Andrea and the rest of us did:

  First, we went looking for the immigration logs at those beacon stations that received outgoing traffic from Atlantis. (We were not the first people to do this.)

  Then we looked at the outgoing traffic logs. And the census archives. And looked for inconsistencies between them: new identities popping up, mismatches between immigrant/emigrant numbers, notarized instantiations of new persons, and actual numbers.

  And we looked for uncompleted slow money transactions
originating at those beacons both before and shortly after Atlantis went dark, to beneficiaries who had departed earlier.

  Of course, we found some interesting very dusty orphan transactions to claim title to—that’s what we were supposed to be doing. But then, to our surprise, we found a clear signal in the noise. We picked up the trail of an investment instrument that left Atlantis fully formed, and traveling by way of three different systems, to a colony venture launched from Hector System—Gliese 581c4—and thence to the vaults of SystemBank Hector, the institution where Sondra Alizond-1 made her fortune and subsequently bought a plutocrat’s share of the migratory habitat New California, aboard which I was instantiated. And which, our subsequent discreet investigations determined, was stalled in the suspense accounts, like any other slow money transaction in progress—only most transactions tended to complete in rather less than the over eighteen hundred years that this one had been hanging fire for.

  What were we to make of it? Could our own lineage mater have somehow been connected with the Atlantis disaster? Worse—if she was—what did it mean for us now that we knew?

  We did what any prudent firm of bankers would do, upon being presented with circumstantial evidence from dusty archives that implicated a senior director in an embarrassing incident that had possibly enriched the institution but which, in any case, had long since been rendered irrelevant by the passage of time: We agreed to bury it deep and not breathe a word about it to anyone. Least of all to mother dearest.

  Except . . .

  * * *

  Iswam on, for hours and then days.

  There were three more platform stops. I had no clear sense of time passing: But by my best guess, I was descending perhaps six or seven kilometers and traveling twenty kilometers horizontally between each resting place. I didn’t sleep for the full eight hours at all of them, but I made sure to recharge and acclimatize and to eat all the feedstock provided.