Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  “You mean, the quantum teleportation device?”

  “Capital! You’ve been doing your homework!” Rudi snapped his jaws again. “I knew offering you a job was the right thing to do! You were wasted on Sondra.”

  “Be that as it may.” I shook my head: Serious job offers were not something I had time to think about right now. “And then there are your other adversaries: anyone who has gone long in slow money. If word were to get out, not only would they try to squash you like a bug, but all your customers would dry up and run away. Otherwise, you’d have gone public centuries ago. Yes?”

  “More or less.” He tilted his head to the right. “The mere fact of the battleship that was sent, right after Sondra murdered everyone on Atlantis Beacon, told us all we needed to know. It never arrived, evidently meeting some misfortune in flight, but it was clear that powerful interests had resolved that it would be best to keep our breakthrough technology from leaking. We were badly damaged, you know, millions dead, their backups, too. The sabotage, a wave of bombs—it was horrible. The problem with the Atlantis program was that it isn’t easy to replicate: It took a monumental effort to assemble ten million researchers and set them to work on a common goal for two or three centuries, in an age not noted for the pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own value. Any attempt to rediscover the device can be suppressed quite easily by assassinating dangerous researchers and spreading the slander that Atlantis was nothing more than a variant on the FTL fraud.”

  “So what happened? After Sondra tried to kill everyone—and presumably failed?”

  “We—the postemergency government of Atlantis, I mean, I myself was not even forked at that time—made a hard decision not to relight the beacon. This was after an initial reconnaissance: We had a prototype, a ship that could reach Hector system in just six years. They went by stealth, gathered intelligence, inserted spies. It took another decade to learn which way the wind blew and six more years to return home, by which time the beacon was nearly rebuilt: But the spreading chaos was obvious. We had not merely been attacked by a corrupt agency, we had been attacked because we posed an existential threat to the banking system.”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So. We chose the appearance of extinction or autarky. But we didn’t remain completely isolated. Atlantis today conducts some limited, very discreet interstellar trade, acquiring information and items that we need. It is entirely denominated in fast money and carried out by a small fleet of vessels not unlike this one: modified intrasystem freighters.”

  “Wait. What, you’re telling me that this is a starship? The Five Zero is capable of jumping between star systems at the speed of light?” I goggled at Rudi in frank astonishment. “And you trade goods and services across interstellar space using fast money? Why, that changes everything! The opportunities are almost unimaginable!”

  “Indeed it does.” Rudi grinned. “And you just bought into the company with a senior officer’s equity. Which brings me to the main reason I’ve been courting you for the past year. How would you like to escape from your mother’s clutches for good?”

  * * *

  While Rudi and I were exchanging confidences, the Five Zero lit its high-impulse drive. I barely noticed it at the time—milligee acceleration is so gentle that to detect it, you need to position a reference object in the middle of a room and watch it drift for a minute—but we were under way, beginning the long, slow spiral out from Shin-Tethys toward what would eventually be a high-energy transit to Taj Beacon.

  It was a bluff, of course. Rudi had no intention of physically visiting Taj, for a beacon laser powerful enough to punch a high bit–rate signal across light-years of interstellar space is, at close range, functionally indistinguishable from a death ray. But our trajectory served its function, which was to leave a gigantic trail of glowing ionized indium exhaust behind us, a banner shouting look at me pointing to the Branch Office Five Zero. There is no stealth in space: So good tactics hinge on making use of this fact to misdirect the enemy.

  There were numerous responses, rippling out from our vicinity at the speed of light as various observers noticed our progress.

  Perhaps the first among them would have been the reaction of Medea and her officers, in their watery orbital defense headquarters: “We’ve been rolled,” I can imagine her intelligence chief saying.

  “Kill them. Now,” two of Medea’s instances snapped simultaneously. “Don’t let them get away,” said the third of the triumvirate.

  “Your Majesty. Are you instructing us to launch on the target?”

  “Yes. At once!”

  At much the same time, the deacon, standing watch in the pulpit aboard the Chapel of Our Lady of the Holy Restriction Endonuclease, would have been alerted to our emissions. “Your Grace.” He lowered his gaze as he turned toward the retina spread across the lectern in front of him. “My apologies for interrupting your prayers, but the pirates have just activated their main engine, as expected. Wait . . . oh. I’m also seeing launch signatures from the surface waters, six hundred kilometers southwest of Nova Ploetsk. Um. Make that fifteen, sixteen . . . high-acceleration signatures! The target is moving, Your Grace.”

  Cybelle stared at him without blinking for several seconds. “Hail the target,” she finally said. “Assure them that we have nothing to do with Medea’s aggression, but I wish to speak with the little accountant, person to person.”

  “Yes, Your Grace. Is there anything else I should be doing?”

  “Unarchive the holy malware suite and prepare it for transmission.” Cybelle’s expression was cold. “If Medea’s missiles miss, they cannot be allowed to spew their lies at the ignorant public.”

  Several minutes later, a similar dialogue will have happened in a command and control center on Taj Beacon. I cannot say with any certainty who would be involved in this one. Perhaps they will have been the regular traffic controllers tasked with coordinating the movement of vehicles in and out of the congested space around the beacon station, preventing collisions and ensuring that nobody accidentally crosses the path of the interstellar lasers. Or perhaps other bodies were in control by then, bodies loyal to Sondra rather than the burghers of Taj Beacon.

  “Something is happening in low orbit around Shin-Tethys. Looks like there’s a lot of traffic from the surface near the equator, and there are at least two vehicles under way . . . logging incoming flight plans . . . we have an arrest-and-apprehension warrant from the Kingdom of Argos citing one of the vehicles for piracy!”

  A senior officer gave it their full attention before responding. “Forward the full details to the standing Defense Subcommittee, for their immediate attention. Oh, and copy it to the Lady Alizond’s staff, with a request for comment. I expect she’ll have something to say about how it’s to be dealt with.”

  Finally, two days later, in the stygian depths beyond the heliopause, where Dojima Prime’s solar wind meets the interstellar medium, a report will have been delivered aboard the bridge of an ancient starship. “Captain, we are receiving relayed signals from Taj Beacon. The traitor is aboard a vessel under acceleration from Shin-Tethys toward the beacon station. There is an encrypted message for your eyes only. Per the envelope, she says she wants to talk.”

  “Excellent,” hissed Sondra. Talons gripped the armrests of her command throne as she leaned forward. “I’ll take the message directly and reply. If she thinks I am willing to negotiate, that will only make this easier.”

  “And the attack plan . . . ?”

  “Continue as ordered.”

  * * *

  “Hello, Mother.”

  (I’d planned my message with care and produced it with the able assistance of Rudi’s corporate relations team. They had arranged a backdrop crafted to give away as little as possible about my real circumstances. To Sondra I appeared to be standing in a virtual boardroom, dressed in a good semblance of the robes of a nun-auditor. They’d progra
mmed in the kinematics and semblance of legs in place of my fishy lower half, added the appearance of gravity to drape my clothing and sag my flesh in place of this free-fall environment. I’d retrieved memories of the palace by the inner sea from Ana’s chip, to pad out the background of the sim. All Sondra would be able to see that was real was my face, and all she would hear was the words that I wanted her to hear.)

  “I want to start by saying how much I admire your work. Seriously. You know full well that I am an expert on the FTL scam. What you’ve done . . . I’m speechless. You’ve created a work of art for the ages. I doubt we will ever see anything to match it. It’s the greatest fraud in history; and billions of people, scores of newly colonized star systems, owe their existence to you.”

  (Sondra had always had a high opinion of herself, and there was nothing to be gained by stinting the effulgent praise. Especially as this was a one-way message transmission. Dialogue was not practical, both because of the distance between us and, to be honest, the embarrassing fact that we didn’t know precisely where Sondra was. Yes, the whole of Dojima System was a-buzz with rumors and reports of her ostentatious arrival at Taj Beacon. But that proved nothing: She was devious enough to be in two or more places at once, and doubtless she had hedged her position against any likely attack.

  (Such as, for example, the tiresome ballistic missiles dogging our tail—some of Medea’s fireworks came equipped with electrical thrusters, so that as we spiraled out from Shin-Tethys, we led a deadly marathon of robot bombs. Or the chapel, lumbering slowly after us, blatting doubtless-toxic high-bandwidth signals—signals that Rudi’s infowar specialists cheerfully advised us to ignore, for the Mother Church was so far behind the cutting edge of the field that they were more of a danger to themselves than to anyone else.

  (The trouble, as Rudi pointed out, was that Sondra had come here for a reason—presumably the division of the spoils—but would doubtless assign a higher priority to suppressing the news of her crime than to making any addition to her already enormous wealth. Probably she’d have preferred to shut me up discreetly, by means of that assassin-doppelgänger. But she was quite capable of bombing a beacon station and attempting to murder its entire population to silence an entire star system: After all, she’d done it before. As far as I could tell, there were no practical limits to her depravity.

  (“And there’s something out there,” Rudi had told me.

  (“Where?”

  (“Incoming.” His ears twitched, a sure sign of emotional disturbance. “Plot a course from Hector to Atlantis and project it ten light-years, and you wind up less than a light-year from Dojima. And the time scale is just about right. The starships they sent to Atlantis, the ones that went missing—they could be arriving in Dojima System if, instead of being sabotaged, they were hijacked. So we set a small satellite to keep a watch on that part of the sky, years ago. Sure enough, the Vengeance is coming. We picked up the thermal signature almost sixty days ago.”

  (“But how could she—”

  (“It’s a battleship, Krina. Of course it’s got a beacon laser! How else would you send an army of occupation?”

  (“What’s she going to do with it when she gets here?”

  (“What makes you think I know? It’s still more than fourteen light-hours away—all we know is she’s heading toward the inner solar system and will get there in a couple of weeks. She’s your mother: You tell me what you’d do if you were her . . .”

  (And so I planned and recorded this message. Which the Branch Office Five Zero would transmit first in the direction of the supposed starship—I could still barely believe in it, despite the thermal telescope’s heat flare of hundreds of gigawatts of energy radiating into vacuum, the telltale spectrum of fusion reactors blue-shifted by the onrushing speed of the vehicle—and then, more than a day later, in the direction of Taj Beacon, so that a response from Sondra at either location would reach us at roughly the same time. The message was unencrypted: Doubtless it would go viral, adding its volume to the gossip channels . . .)

  “Mother, I’d like to express my deepest regrets that our relationship has come to this low point. If I could wind it back and undo this unfortunate argument, I would do so in a moment. But I don’t suppose anything I can say at this point will result in our reconciliation. You may take this message to be my formal resignation from the family firm—I don’t suppose I’ll be going home after this. But we still have unfinished business to discuss.”

  (I’d argued this case with Rudi. “She’s capable of extreme violence,” I pointed out. “If she’s on Taj Beacon, she could very well attempt to destroy the entire habitat just to keep word from leaking out. The only way to stop her is to ensure there’s no chance of her hushing things up—and to give her a target to shoot at that isn’t surrounded by innocent bystanders.”)

  I continued with my script: “So I’d like to propose an old-fashioned face-to-face meeting. We can rendezvous in deep space. Or, if you’re still aboard Taj Beacon, I can come to you. The main point is that we should meet somewhere with a beacon transmitter, because one of us will be leaving Dojima System immediately afterward.” I waved a hand. “Cut—version for the deep-space object. Mother, I know about your starship. It’s a rather astounding gambit! And I know about the beacon transceiver it’s carrying—which is, of course, why you’re seeing this message. What I propose is this: You rendezvous with me in deep space. I’ve left my soul chip behind, in the hands of a reliable escrow service. If they don’t receive a certain message from me, from out-system—I’m not going to tell you where—within fifty years, they will resurrect me from backup, and I will feel compelled to share my secrets with the universe at large. But if they receive the right message, countersigned by Hector SystemBank to prove it has been sent from out-system, they’ll delete my backup. So you need only point your beacon laser at the destination of my choice, and I can be out of your hair for good.”

  (The purpose of this version of the message was simple: to convince Sondra, if she was indeed aboard the battleship, that I was desperate enough that I would willingly trust her equipment to help me escape. It would be the height of naive stupidity for me to do so—suicidal, even—but I was counting on Sondra’s low opinion of her offspring to snare her into a deep-space rendezvous with the Five Zero. Which, doubtless, she would discount as a threat.)

  I waved my hand again. “Cut—version for Taj Beacon. Mother, I know you’re occupying Taj Beacon, and I know you’re probably planning something drastic and terminal for me when I arrive there. That would be stupid. So I’ve left my soul chip behind, in the hands of a reliable escrow service. If they don’t receive a certain message from me, from out-system—I’m not going to tell you where, yet—within fifty years, they will resurrect me from backup, and I will feel compelled to share my secrets with the universe at large. But if they receive the message, countersigned by Hector SystemBank to prove it has been sent from out-system, they’ll delete my backup. I intend to proceed to Taj Beacon, and once there, I will go direct to the departure terminal and transmit myself elsewhere. I have retained bodyguards to ensure my security during serialization and upload. You are welcome to send your own people to confirm I speak to no one during the process. Keep your hands to yourself, and I will be out of your hair for good.”

  (And the purpose of that version was similar: to gull Sondra into thinking I was cutting and running, via Taj Beacon. The same calculation applied. As Rudi put it, “You can’t seriously expect to do that and survive!” At which point I confess I smirked, and said, “Of course not! All that matters is that Sondra thinks I’m stupid enough to try it.”)

  “And cut.” I waved my hands, then turned to look at Rudi. “Do you think it’ll work?” I asked, a trifle anxiously.

  “I sincerely hope so.” He spread his arms and slowly sculled up toward the ceiling of the office. “Either way, you have given her a juicy target. Us.”

  “That was t
he idea, wasn’t it? Because if she knew what you had in the propulsion department, she’d already have cut her losses and run away. To stalk us another year.”

  “Yes.” He grabbed hold of one of the tree branches that held the ceiling in place and pulled his face close to it. “I would be happy to wager you that she’s on the battleship.”

  “I’m not taking that bet.” I thought back to my oldest memories, and Sondra’s punitive approach to child rearing. “Authoritarians have an instinctive attraction to the tools of force.” A thought struck me. “How is our herd of bombs doing? Are we in danger of outrunning them?”

  “That’s a good question.” Rudi grinned, baring sharp teeth. “I’m sure Marigold would be happy to enlighten us. Why don’t we go to the war room and ask?”

  * * *

  “Jean!”

  “Yes, my captain?”

  “The transmission from the traitor. Are we tracking the source?”

  “Yes, Captain. Let me put it on the main plot.” Nightmare fingers clattered across a twilit display in the red gloom of the warship’s combat center. “Observe: The origin is this vehicle, which appears to be on a six-milligee high-energy continuous acceleration trajectory outbound from Shin-Tethys. If it continues as projected and makes a midpoint turnover here, it will arrive in the vicinity of Taj Beacon in ninety-eight standard days. Or it could make a flyby considerably sooner, but there is no clear reason for it to do so . . . in any case, the vehicle is squawking the identification code of Branch Office Five Zero of a financial institution known as the Crimson Permanent Assurance Cooperative of—”

  “Enough.” Giant dark eyes embedded in a rigidly armored face surveyed the retina wall. “What are these?”

  “There appears to have been an altercation in orbit around Shin-Tethys. The, ah, traitor appears to have attracted the ire of various parties, who are engaged in a pursuit. This one is a mendicant chapel of the Mother Church, and as you can see, it can barely muster four milligees: It is falling behind. This cluster of sixteen is more troubling: they exhibit low-observability characteristics and are engaging in crude jamming, and they are averaging five point five milligees—bursting to twenty milligees, then coasting while they dissipate waste heat. Intel isn’t certain what they are but speculate that they’re uncrewed long-range pursuit missiles, in which case the traitor will be unable to decelerate and rendezvous with Taj Beacon until they run out of reaction mass. A stern chase is a long chase, ha-ha. Ha.” Sondra fell silent for a minute, pondering. “I see a cornered fugitive who thinks she can blackmail me . . . hah. Jean! A question for the navigation team. Assuming we change course and acceleration in the next few hours, can we in principle make a zero-speed rendezvous with this Branch Office vehicle?”