Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “I’m going to—” I stopped. “You know, I’ve never spent much time thinking about what I would do if I became fabulously, unimaginably rich. Apart from not following Mother’s example, of course. That much is obvious.” My sister nodded soberly.

  “You could give it back to her,” Ana proposed. I stared at her, trying to determine whether she was serious or not.

  “She’d still want to punish me. For plotting behind her back, if nothing else: for retrieving a fortune she had thought forever lost, without her permission. For withholding your share. For Andrea. And what good would it do, anyway? Even if I were able to buy my way out of the debt of honor she doubtless believes I owe her in the currency denominated by her own identity, she will always view us merely as extensions of her will—treacherous, unreliable fingerlings, to be used and discarded at her convenience.”

  “Well, then.” Ana’s smile was a fey thing, angles and shadows in the twilit office. “I ask again: What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to—” Again, I stalled. The possibilities were both limitless and suffocating. I tried again. “It’s slow money. It’s good for all debts. It’s good for lives. I’ve got so much I could buy a starship, build an interstellar colony, set myself up as a monarch—”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  I shook my head, felt the invisible fingers of the water tugging on my braided hair. “You ask the most awkward questions, sis!”

  “Not really.” She tilted her head to study me from a different angle. “Consider the origins of money: Money is what we create to pay off debts, no? Slow money is created to pay off a very specific type of debt—the debt incurred by the colonization of new star systems. It’s a debt so huge that there’s not much we can do with it other than shuffle it around to paper over the cracks when we exchange information of value across interstellar distances. Use it as a store of value? It’s too slow for anything other than underwriting asset-backed instruments, medium money. You can comfortably while away the rest of your life expectancy in luxury using a ten-thousandth of what you now hold, Krina. You can even continue as a mendicant scholar, writing your fascinating papers about the history of fraud. But the slow money will still be there. Convert it to fast money and you’d drown under the weight of it. You couldn’t spend it fast enough: You couldn’t even give it away in pieces. Your fortune, Krina, can only realistically be depleted by founding a new solar system or two. And unless you choose to do that, it’s going to hang over you for the rest of your life, dwarfing anything else you do.”

  “Is that why you’re throwing your share away?” I asked.

  Ana could have chosen to take offense at my characterization of her actions, but she just nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Only I’m not throwing it away. The People know what to do with it. There is a plan: We’re less than three light-years away from a not-yet-claimed M-class dwarf star that hosts a promising water giant. Tidally locked, of course, and a nuisance to reach orbit from, but it has more than six times the habitable volume of Shin-Tethys. We think it should be habitable with only minimal upgrade patches to our ’cytes and techné. With my share added to the people’s resources, there will be barely any foundational debt; we plan to establish a world completely free of money, a world populated by new teuthidian humanity, with a society based on consensus, not debt, and respect for collective autonomy, not competitive commerce. A world where the word ‘free’ will not be needed because nothing will cost anything and everything will be attainable!” Her skin shone with the pearly luster of her enthusiasm for the radiant future of the communist squid-nation: “I’m going to bring about the Jubilee! For the squid-folk, anyway.”

  “I think you’ve taken leave of your senses,” I said. “But if you’re trying to thumb your nose at Sondra, I can’t think of a better way to do it.”

  “You’re welcome to join us if you want. You’d be very welcome.”

  “But I don’t want to found a colony!” I struggled to understand my own visceral conviction that this would be the wrong course of action to choose for my future.

  “Tough. When you have a slow dollar, you hold a fortune. When you have a million slow dollars, the fortune holds you. You need to move soon, or Sondra will attempt to take her loss—whether it was ever truly a loss or not—out of your skin. But even if you succeed in evading her, you’re going to have to work out what you mean to do with the rest of your life sooner or later. Otherwise, the Atlantis Carnet will ride you like a bad dream.”

  “Thanks, sis.” I put my most heartfelt sarcastic emphasis behind the words. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

  “No, but I’ve got a request. Message for Rudi: Tell him I still think of him fondly, and everything is going according to plan . . .”

  * * *

  It is a well-understood truism that interstellar warfare is impossible.

  Starships are prohibitively expensive. They cost millions of slow dollars, with a construction time measured in decades and a flight duration in centuries. In view of which inconvenient fact, it’s almost impossible to imagine how an aggressor might recoup the cost of a warship’s construction. Nor is it easy to conceal such a project: Starships are big, expensive prestige projects—if anyone built such a vehicle and launched it toward an already-inhabited solar system, the locals would have centuries to prepare a warm reception for it. There is no sensible way to profit by invasion and conquest: Interstellar commerce travels by light, in the form of information, rather than as physical commodities. By any rational reckoning, money spent on a warship would be better invested on a colony project targeting an uninhabited star system; and in any event, it takes so long to build a starship that any temporary insanity motivating such a gesture would evaporate long before the battleship could be built and launched.

  Unfortunately, nobody told my mother.

  Cold Vengeance

  In a darkened, half-frozen vault aboard a hulk drifting between the stars, something stirred.

  (Darkness, cold, and dust.)

  For most of two millennia, the Vengeance had drifted in chilly isolation, systems mothballed, its surviving skeleton crew so deep in slowtime that it amounted to suspended animation.

  Let me sketch you a plan of the Vengeance:

  The front of the roughly cylindrical ship is a flat disk of beryllium armor that was originally nearly thirty centimeters thick; it’s pitted and eroded to half that depth, the result of many centuries of exposure to the dust and gas of the interstellar medium. Sheltering behind it, active radar and phased-array installations to detect and vaporize incoming dust grains.

  Behind the forward shield and sensors, a bulky series of fuel tanks and mothballed machines surround the central service and command core. Off to one side, the interstellar communicators—telescopes and laser transmitters—lie shielded by the fuel tanks, slaved to a beacon station now just a fractional arc second off-center from the star toward which the Vengeance is drifting. Behind them wait the cold, quiescent, fusion reactors needed for deceleration and maneuvering on arrival; and then more fuel tanks.

  The Vengeance was built to cruise at almost 1 percent of light speed: at full tilt it would flash across the gap between Old Earth and its moon in fifteen seconds flat, racing the gulf from Earth to distant Pluto in weeks. That it would take centuries or millennia to fly between the nearer stars speaks to the immense scale of interstellar space.

  This much of the Vengeance was like any other starship. Where it differed lay in the minds and training of her crew, and the nature of her cargo. A normal ship might carry survey probes and asteroid-mining tools, mechanocyte incubators and eager colonists. The Vengeance carried a thousand tons of enriched uranium, and the fast breeders and reprocessing tanks necessary to turn the stockpile into plutonium, and the bomb factories with which to murderously redeem some dreadful debt.

  (Cold, dusty, darkness.)

  Built after the mad
frenzy that greeted the disappearance of Atlantis and the first true depression to impact the interstellar economy in over two millennia, the Vengeance was the third (and final) starship dispatched to that star system. The first two ships abruptly lost contact after they reached cruise velocity: The remaining creditors, incensed, drew the most obvious conclusion. Once might be accident, twice might be coincidence . . . but why take risks? Nobody had ever built an interstellar warship (although vicious squabbles between rival low-gee colonies and asteroidal republics occasionally degenerated into fighting—usually terminated by the abrupt rediscovery of the fact that the universe itself was more than happy to help the killing sprees along). But the principle seemed obvious enough: It would be a specialized variant of the well-understood normal starship architecture, one designed to transport and implant a military-industrial complex into the heart of an already-colonized system. On its arrival it would open its optical receivers and download updated weapons blueprints and personnel, to provide a beachhead on stranger shores, and the manufacturing industry it bore the kernel of would bear only bitter fruit. Of course, only the most desperate creditors were crazy enough to buy into this theory: But they were crazy enough to bet their all on it.

  Then, fifty years after its departure, the Vengeance, too, went dark.

  (Dusty, dark, cold.)

  * * *

  “Are you sure this is entirely safe?” I asked, as the squid-folk fastened me to the underside of the bathyscaphe and threaded pressure-relief cannulae into my arteries.

  “I’m sure it’s safe,” Rudi buzzed from somewhere on the inside of his twenty-centimeter-thick hyperdiamond sphere. “We’re not going to ascend so fast that you don’t have time to unroll your pressure adaptations, are we? It wouldn’t do to turn your brains into spam before you open your new deposit account, would it?” High-pitched crackling laughter ensued.

  The empty soul-chip sockets at the back of my skull itched. I gritted my teeth and focused my attention on the squid medics as they bounced and fluttered around me, wielding scalpels and makerbot tanks and slimy gobbets of adhesive gel. “How does this work again?”

  “Assertion: Is very safe,” said one of the squid—Yankee color-of-erythrocytes, I think this one was called. “Assertion: Is standard medical-safe procedure for rapid ascent to surface altitude. Maximum ascent rate two kilometers per hour, ten-minute pause at each two-kilometer level. There will additionally be three major reset stages of one hour each during which mechanosomal restructuring must proceed. System is entirely automatic, speeded by external blood perfusion to prevent emboli during final decompression.”

  Wonderful: They were going to plug me into an external heart/lung machine to prevent decompression sickness! Doubtless they knew what they were doing: But if anything went wrong, I could bleed out in minutes, long before we reached the surface. I rolled my eyes and lay back as two other squid wove a hammock around me.

  “Assertion: We do this regularly to those who need to visit the surface,” said Yankee color-of-erythrocytes. (I think they were trying to be reassuring.) “It almost never fails. And if it does, death is painless.”

  I tried not to think about death through explosive decompression. “Rudi. What happens when we reach the surface?” I asked.

  A chittering as of angry flying foxes filled my ears for a moment. Then: “It all depends on which way Medea decides to jump,” he said, not entirely reassuringly. “But your tentacle-friends claim to have a plan. There’s a cargo vehicle fueled and waiting to go up, they say. There’s room for our capsule on top.”

  “A cargo—” I paused. “We’re talking about highly enriched uranium solution here, aren’t we?”

  “That is the stuff,” Rudi agreed.

  “We’re talking about multiple critical masses of the stuff, aren’t we?”

  “Many thousands of critmasses of boom-juice, yes!”

  “They launch those things using a nuclear saltwater rocket, don’t they? How often do they blow up?”

  “Only one percent of the time.” Rudi’s voice slowed, as if overcome by a momentary uncertainty. “But it’s safer than pinning your hopes on Medea, I think.”

  “Oh, really? Why do you think that?”

  “I gather she has been entertaining the Priestess Cybelle. Who has doubtless been poisoning her ears and blackening both our reputations.”

  If my lungs had been functional, I would have sighed. “Do you have any good news to pass on, Rudi?”

  “Nothing. Well, rumors of a very rich dignitary from New California arriving at Taj Beacon, but that’s obvious nonsense and disinformation. Your line mother wouldn’t follow you in person, would she?”

  I kept quiet although my guts turned to ice at his words. If Sondra had actually followed me in person, then I needed to ensure that Rudi had as little contact with her as possible: He might decide to sell me out. That was one of the major risks. The other . . . well, what did she think she could achieve here? Stop me uploading through the beacon station? Destroy the beacon station? Kill everyone who had the merest inkling of her involvement with the crime of the millennium? I had no idea. All I could be certain of was that her presence here implied a certain degree of derangement, which made her extradangerous.

  “We’ve got to shut down the retina soon, Krina—don’t want to risk emitting identifying signals during the ascent—but I left Dent in Argos with instructions to get the lander out of hock. Hopefully by the time we need it he’ll have found a way to return it to orbit without alerting the authorities. He’s good at locating, ah, unconventional markets.”

  A forensic accountant with a knack for locating unconventional markets? I supposed a privateer would need someone with such abilities. I would just have to hope that Dent was good enough at it to avoid detection.

  Time swam by in a haze of apprehension as our preparations for launch continued. Finally, their job done, the ground crew—for want of a better word—jetted away, leaving one figure behind: a mermaid, silvery blue against the glittering background of the city beneath us. She swam slowly toward me, then took a turn around the bathyscaphe. “Ana?” I called.

  My sister swam toward me, closing until she hung in the water mere centimeters away. “Krina,” she said awkwardly.

  “Take care,” I said. “I mean, look after yourself.”

  “We haven’t had nearly long enough together.” Another awkward pause. “I was looking forward to your visit for so long. And then, this.”

  “And this,” I agreed. “You’re sure you’re going to join them?”

  She smiled sadly. “Yes.” And I could see that she meant it. Our sib-hood is not a close and loving family. “The People have got something I’ve always needed. I’m not as self-sufficient as you, Krina. I just hope you eventually find something that loves you.”

  “I’ve got my research.” I experimented with my facial muscles smiling back.

  To my surprise, she leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Go now,” she said. “Get away from Mother’s shadow and find out who you are. Create wealth rather than hoarding it. Live life.”

  “I’ll do my best,” I began, as a jolt ran through the hammock around me. “Oh! Ana. Good luck!”

  She was still watching me as the ’scaphe rose, pulling away into the dark, oily layer above the drowned city of Hades-4. And then I was alone in the crushing darkness and cold, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake.

  * * *

  Sondra awakened slowly in her cocoon: blinked, then opened eyes in her new body.

  Did she pause a moment to savor her triumph? I don’t believe she did. My lineage mater was nothing if not purposeful, remote, and in control. She had planned for this eventuality so long ago that it had become one with the ephemera of history, merging into the definitional detritus of her existence. She’d refactored her identity many times, reinventing herself around this constant: that she was the
banker for the conspiracy, that the shareholders would be gathered in due course in Dojima System for the final assembly and winding-up of the investment vehicle . . . and that she would have an ace up her sleeve. Vengeance, the vessel she had invested in during the centuries of chaos: the vessel she had picked a tenth of the crew of, selected and carefully trained retainers who, when the time came, had assembled at their watch stations, acknowledged her order, and calmly consigned their unconscious slow-timed crew mates to the vacuum of interstellar space.

  Once control was established, they fired up the main engines for an unscheduled burn. Vengeance had launched from Hector toward Atlantis. Dojima was a mere ten degrees off the direct line from Hector to Atlantis, almost ten light-years farther out. After the burn, Vengeance’s new course was set to miss its original destination by more than a million light seconds . . . and would converge with Dojima System rather more than a thousand years later.

  Vengeance had never been intended to reach Atlantis. But now it was nearing the end of its voyage, and its true destination: And Sondra had a use in mind for it.

  Hand-claws tugged at the outside of her cocoon, pulling away the fibrous insulation. Sondra reached up, feeling circulatory fluid pulse in her arms, and fumbled for the internal fastener. Her lungs filled: There was air here, musty and cold and metallic-tasting. “Assist, please,” she said, transmitting via electrosense rather than crude acoustic vibrations.

  “Yes, Captain.” The cocoon began to split.

  Sondra hatched into the red-lit twilight of the warship’s bridge, surrounded by warriors born of nightmare. The ship was still in free fall, main engine unlit. High-gee webbing stretched from walls to ceiling to floor throughout the space gave it the atmosphere of an ancient, abandoned funnelweb lair, for much of the mesh was ancient and friable, the graphene tapes damaged by long radiation exposure and coated with the dust of ages. Fresh yellow webbing, newly strung by the pair of marines in spiderlike battlebodies working diligently at the far side of the bridge, showed where the process of refurbishment was under way. Meanwhile, the night watch on the bridge paid attendance on their captain: humaniform skeleton-figures with huge, chibiform eye sockets housing black-lensed optics, their muscles deliberately attenuated to save mass in microgravity, skin replaced by armor. “Captain,” hissed the nearer figure, “we are ready to commence crew revival and predeceleration refurbishment on your word.”