Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  And here we see the gap between the well-off and the truly rich. For such as myself, interstellar travel is expensive—the cost of a transmission is the hoarded earnings of a handful of years—and we travel light, buying what services we need upon arrival. But Sondra traveled embedded in a retinue dedicated to her safety and comfort: prevetted, prebriefed in her specific requirements, and motivated by the promise of a substantial bonus upon her safe return.

  First to arrive were Sondra’s personal safety detail: four bodyguards and two security analysts. They, downloaded into regular bodies in the arrivals hall. As soon as they revived, however, it was upgrade time: They carefully supervised the medical contractors they hired while they installed radiation and vacuum-hardening mods, weaponized reflexes, better electrosense and hearing and eyes. Newly upgraded, the bodyguards then checked each other for signs of tampering: Then, while the next wave began to install in new bodies, they conducted a preliminary threat analysis on the beacon station, identifying factions and criminal parties who might pose a hazard to their charge.

  The first body out of the arrivals hall after the security vanguard was a personal concierge, traveling with an expense account fat enough to require the bodyguards’ attendance. His tasks were preassigned: find the most suitable available residence, arrange a lease on it, then turn the security analysts loose. There was more to this than dormitory facilities for the retinue and a suite for the owner. Not for Sondra a humble worker’s pod in a service district! Sondra required secure office space from which to establish and coordinate a support operation that would extend her reach across the entire star system. She required palatial facilities in which to entertain the movers and shakers and diplomats and owners of Taj Beacon and outlying territories. She required accommodation for the senior executives within her retinue, and space for the local agents her people were preparing to hire. For although bodies in various stages of download and assembly were beginning to fill, then to overflow the beacon station’s interstellar arrivals hall, this was but the faintest outline of the organization under construction.

  Sondra was, dare I say it, the de facto head of state of New California. I will freely concede that she was not the head of state in name: But presidencies or crowns require the wearer of the office to attend interminable and tedious committee meetings, state banquets, conferences, and public hearings. It was many centuries since Sondra had last taken any joy from such pomp and ceremony, the repetitive affirmation of majesty and authority: So she had long since withdrawn from direct governance, save of the SystemBank of New California itself, of which she remained Chancellor-in-Perpetuity. Since that time a succession of presidents had left their mark (or at least their portrait) in what had once been her palace. They generally ruled wisely: which is to say that they consulted Sondra’s office, and Sondra always gave her approval for the policies they proposed to follow, for no initiatives were ever set before her that had not been anxiously scrutinized for any hint that they might offend such an august person whose net worth, by some estimates, exceeded that of the state itself.

  You will therefore be unsurprised to know that Sondra’s arrival was accompanied by all the pride, pomp, and circumstance of a visit by a head of state, aggravated further by the beacon station’s status as home of the Dojima SystemBank cartel and the assorted bourses, exchanges, credit unions, mutual societies, merchant bankers, and rent-seeking slime who made their margin by inserting themselves as close to the beating heart of interstellar commerce as they could get.

  The arrival of her bodyguards and security staff and concierge and managers rapidly came to the attention of the news and gossip channels. But the ramping up of rumor only truly got under way when the aforementioned concierge and, latterly, two private secretaries, signed a lease on the headquarters of the temporarily-liquidity-embarrassed First Mutual (L6) Shiny Society. (The shiners had invested unwisely in the now-stalled project to build a space elevator down to the surface waters of Shin-Tethys. Over budget and behind schedule (as could have been predicted of a speculative civil-engineering project that combined all the most irritating characteristics of bridge-building and railroad laying), the beanstalk had sucked their pension fund dry, belched, and sucked harder: Leasing their headquarters to a visiting dignitary would help keep them going a little longer.)

  The gossip gathered pace faster when two auditors from SystemBank New California arrived, to assume control of the presidential purse: The rumors then rose to fever pitch when a small human-resources team arrived and began hiring staff. By now a hive of activity was buzzing, complete with rumors that Sondra herself was downloading, or a body double, or perhaps Sondra and three body doubles. Whatever the truth, a team of security guards took up a discreet watch position at the arrivals hall, with the permission (however obtained) of Taj Beacon’s Board of Control. Finally, late one nightshift evening, a small army sortied from the former First Mutual and took over a private suite adjacent to the arrivals hall. Doors opened. Discreet packages were ferried into the decanting room. An immigration officer was challenged peremptorily and searched before being admitted to ask the usual questions of a new arrival, after which he left, hurriedly.

  Finally, the door opened. Outside, in the plaza fronting the beacon terminal’s main entrance, a small crowd of rumormongers and gawkers and tourists and the pickpockets who preyed upon them had formed; but they were to be disappointed, for a solid phalanx of bodyguards emerged, clustered tightly around an unseen superior. Their eyes and other senses pointed outward, aggressively probing the onlookers for threats. A boringly discreet limousine drew up, opened leaf-shaped body panels and unrolled a red velvet tongue of carpet toward the feet of the cortège. It swallowed the core of the group as more guards held the onlookers at bay: Then reextended its legs and loped away toward a cargo duct.

  “Are we clear yet?” asked one of the unsleeping, ever-vigilant security analysts.

  “Looks like it.” A pause from the guard monitoring the limo’s telemetry: “Yes, it appears to have left the zone without picking up any bugs. We can go now.”

  “My lady . . .” The security analyst turned to the private secretary. She was not unlike me in appearance: thin, with pale, colorless eyes, and a skin tone of turquoise blue. Her hair was as black as the ancient formal suit of her office.

  She raised an eyebrow. “Yes, Jean?”

  “The public have now been made fully aware that Sondra Alizond-1 has arrived at Taj Beacon, without incident.”

  “Good.” The private secretary nodded. Finally, after twenty days of frantic activity, her lips relaxed into an approximation of humor. “Then our work here is done and it’s time to upload to our next destination.”

  “The dark coordinates?” The security analyst had been asked to do many things in the service of his employer, but uploading into a beacon station’s outbound channel over a laser pointed at empty space, well away from any settled star system, was one of the most unsettling experiences he had ever had.

  “Yes. Except they won’t be dark when we arrive.” She turned and headed toward the corridor leading to the departures terminal: The two remaining bodyguards hurried to place themselves ahead of her. “It’s time to activate Plan B. It’s a shame the zombie failed: This would all have been so much easier to deal with if there were only one meddling daughter to silence.”

  * * *

  “You are probably wondering why I sought this audience, Your Highness,” said the priestess to the Queen. (An onlooker might have thought them sisters, from their matching expressions of hauteur.) She stood before the royal pool, flanked by a pair of robed and space-suited deacons, with such poise that their roles might have been reversed, visiting supplicant and entrenched monarch.

  “Wondering? No, not really.” Medea’s lower lip curled. “You’re chasing the same prize as everybody else, that much is perfectly clear. Whether on your own behalf or that of your Church is unimportant”—she ignored the barely
suppressed bristling of the priestess’s retinue—“beside the fact that you entered my kingdom harboring an assassin. Who, to add insult to injury, successfully slew one of us. That is not a cause of wonderment, Your Grace, but of rage and the desire to make an example of the miscreant lest others follow their lead. Uneasy lies the head, and so on. You have cost us time, you have cost us money—but those are insignificant compared to the fact that you have cost us security. So, if you still wish to do so, say whatever you think will save your sorry mission.”

  The priestess showed no sign of alarm at this sinister intimation even though she could hardly be unaware of the barbed fence separating her party from the royal pool, or of the palace guards stationed on every side. Or indeed of the naked and bound body of the assassin, fastened by barbed staples to the stainless-steel cross behind the queen, still twitching from time to time. While the Church had relatively few followers on Shin-Tethys, it was not without leverage on the larger stage of interstellar relations: While Medea might fulminate and threaten, the likelihood of her making good such threats had to be balanced against her sure knowledge of the trade sanctions that would follow.

  “I was sent here to bring the blessing and the light of the Fragile to this world,” Cybelle said evenly. “This I have done, albeit no less imperfectly than is usually the case with such missions. I was also charged by His Holiness the Bishop Mallory to bring surcease to the soul of one of our elder parishioners and preachers, the Reverend Gould.” She gestured minutely at the body to her left. Gould slouched in the grip of his high-gee exoskeleton, mumbling prayers in a quiet monotone: He showed no sign of awareness of his surroundings. “His former name I shall not trouble you with: His sins are washed away in the service of the holy double helix. But in his previous life, he was one of the perpetrators of a crime, and as the beneficiary of an ill-gotten fortune, he expected to receive a substantial payoff. That payoff . . . suffice to say it never arrived. The most perplexing aspect of the affair, however, is that it was supposed to be received by way of a slow money transfer; that was to originate with an individual who at that time was a senior trustee of SystemBank Hector. You might have heard of her? For her name is Sondra Alizond-1.”

  Medea had indeed heard of her: Her involuntary tail spasm slapped the surface of the royal pool like a depth charge, sending a wave rippling over the edge and across the mosaic floor of the audience chamber. “You can substantiate this?” she demanded, leaning forward eagerly.

  “Of course.” Cybelle shook the leash she held in one hand, taking in the slack: Father Gould took a shuffling step closer to her. “My brother in Fragile flesh here took a vow of poverty and assigned his entire worldly estate to Mother Church. I have the notarized statement he made to prove it. The bulk of his estate is in the form of a slow money instrument that was sent on his behalf from SystemBank Hector to his account at SystemBank Dojima—but committal of which was not completed, for Trask, the banker acting as proxy for my humble brother, disappeared.” Cybelle met the monarch’s disbelieving stare. “And now we know what this is about, do we not? The two halves of the missing transaction have been located by searchers in different systems. The Alizond sisters are evidently working against the wishes of their proprietor. All it would take would be for the body or soul chips of Ivar Trask-1 to be discovered, and . . .” Her shrug was eloquent. “Do you know where Trask disappeared, Your Majesty?”

  “You are going to tell us that your presence here in this system at this time is not a coincidence,” stated the Queen. “And then you are going to add that your church believes in paying its dues for the services of the temporal authority, are you not?” She held Cybelle’s gaze, unblinking. “Fifty percent. Take it or leave it.”

  “You pose an interesting conundrum for Mother Church, Your Majesty. Does your government provide anything of use in return for this windfall tax?”

  “Yes, we believe it does.” Medea looked aside for a moment, nodded at a courtier. “Let us see. You have a claim to the instrument, and a vehicle in orbit. We have a kingdom that just happens to be located above the Antares Deep, in which you expect to find our miscreants, and a judicial system recognized throughout Dojima System. And the miscreants in question, in turn, came here because Ivar Trask-1’s last recorded sighting was in the Ballard Republic, which at that time was located over the Antares Deep. One may surmise that one of the victims of this, ah, conspiracy caught up with him. Or that he was up to something else and paid the price for it. (Once a criminal, always a criminal.) But in any case, it left your priest here high and dry, but with a claim to the asset. And you would now like the Kingdom of Argos to assist you in retrieving the funds from their current illegal custodians, even if it means paying a windfall tax on the lump. How much are you expecting?”

  “Five million eight hundred thousand slow. Give or take a few thousand.”

  Medea’s cheeks dimpled. “We believe the state’s share of that sum will cover a lot of services. Now, if you are to work together with us, we believe we should be fully aware of the depths we are swimming in. So perhaps you could start by telling us all you know about the real Krina Alizond-114 . . . ?”

  * * *

  Lest you question my sanity in trusting that flying fox Rudi, I should say in my defense that he seemed like the least bad option on the unappetizing menu available to me at the time.

  Consider my circumstances:

  Ana could look after herself, I think. Certainly with a squid-nation to back her up, and her share of our mutual treasure trove, it would be possible for her to vanish into the depths in such a manner that it would be very hard to find her. And if she made good with her avowed intent of merging her wealth with that of her chosen people, there could be no motive for anyone (except, perhaps, Sondra at her most dementedly vengeful) to go after her.

  Andrea was out of play. So: Either dead or safe, it made no difference to me for the immediate future.

  I, however, had just inherited nearly two million slow dollars. Not only that, but I had inherited the soul chips of a long-dead and suspiciously missing banker who had clearly been implicated in the money-laundering chain handling the proceeds of the Atlantis scam. The money in my second soul-chip socket was evidence of the scale of the crime. After nearly two thousand years, it was vanishingly unlikely that the original victims would be in a position to come after me. However, the surviving members of the criminal network were another matter altogether—meaning: Sondra, my own lineage mater and former slave owner. Moreover, that kind of quantity of money is a magnet for muggers on all scales, from street-corner thugs to heads of state. Two million slow is approximately equal in scale to the value of the entire infrastructure of a medium-sized nation on Shin-Tethys. It’s enough to buy you a founder’s share of a colony starship—a very large founder’s share at that: sufficient to guarantee a place on the board, if not the presidency.

  The correct place for such sums is in a vault, under guard, with access controlled by barriers of protocol and process, for use as a capital reserve held against interest-bearing loans. But right now it was clogging up my soul chip. And to make matters worse, it appeared that everybody knew about it. Or if they didn’t know, they suspected. The crew of the Chapel of our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease had been in the game, directly or indirectly; perhaps the treasurers of the Mother Church itself had gotten wind of the scam over the centuries and sent the chapel to sniff around Dojima System. Rudi, for his part, had assured himself that I didn’t actually have it but that I was in play—at which point he had pivoted briskly from piratical captor to friendly life-coach. One could reasonably assume that Queen Medea had her suspicions, as—for all I knew—so did every half-assed tribe of crooked accountants within a dozen light-years.

  Finally, the presence of my stalker and Andrea’s increasingly frightened messages told me that Sondra was at the very least aware that our conspiracy existed and was reaching out after me. How desperate she might bec
ome was an open question. If it were merely the loss of nearly six million slow dollars from the Atlantis fund that troubled her, then she might content herself by sending a stream of assassins and slandering me from one end of settled space to the other. But if she felt herself to be vulnerable—either from conspirators incensed by her loss of their investment or from fear of retribution by victims of the scam (after all, some of those victims had been insane enough to launch an interstellar military-industrial complex in response), then she might decide to dedicate herself to making my life as short and miserable as possible.

  It was enough to set my skin a-crawl, with the sensation of a target tattooed between by shoulder blades. Which is why I turned to Rudi. Rudi’s cupidity was transparently obvious, but as a banker and underwriter, I felt I could understand his motivation. And more to the point, his institutional framework would prevent him from simply scrambling my soul sockets and stealing my assets. It would be bad for future business to sacrifice investor goodwill so crudely. Why bother, when he could offer me a deposit account, then nickel-and-dime me to death with bank charges?

  The best kind of deposit account for slow money is in another star system. My escape plan was becoming clear: Firstly, retain the services of a bank-affiliated privateer. Secondly, deposit my wealth with his parent institution—taking, in exchange, sufficient shares in that august body to guarantee both oversight and a modicum of transparency. Given the amount of money in play, a nonexecutive directorship was not out of the question. Thirdly, I intended to arrange for my own transfer out-system to a destination where Sondra couldn’t get her claws into me. And after that, I could think about building a new life for myself.

  There were certain obstacles, of course.

  * * *

  “So, what are you going to do, now you’re fabulously, unimaginably rich?” asked Ana.