Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  The skeletal horror across the table from her froze momentarily. “I shall ask, Captain. It will mean a major change from our current boost program, but I see no reason why not . . . I shall ask.”

  “I do not intend to let the traitor escape, Jean,” Sondra murmured. “But there is no point in telling her we agree to her proposal if it is obvious that we cannot make such a rendezvous.”

  There was silence in the cramped command center for a few minutes. Then the lieutenant spoke. “Captain, we have sufficient reaction mass to make a zero-zero rendezvous with the Branch Office Five Zero. To do so, we will need to make an initial course-correction burn in less than eighty thousand seconds. However, the navigators also volunteered the opinion that the Branch Office Five Zero cannot make a rendezvous with us—if they attempt to do so, the pursuing missiles will overhaul them at least two days before our closest approach.”

  “How annoying.” Black-buffed claws dug into the torso restraint bars of Sondra’s acceleration cradle. “We can’t have that. Lieutenant: I intend to reply to the traitor, agreeing to her request. I will also notify her that we shall dispose of her pursuers as a gesture of goodwill. We will then execute the necessary course correction to rendezvous with her, and resume deceleration.”

  “Yes, Captain.” A pause. “Are there other instructions?”

  If Sondra’s battlebody had teeth, she would have bared them. “We will proceed as I ordered. Once we are established on the deceleration-and-rendezvous trajectory, you will instruct Weapons Factory Two to intercept the traitor’s pursuers and destroy them. Ideally, the flyby and destruction will take place no more than a thousand seconds before rendezvous.” She paused.

  “Are we actually going to rendezvous with the traitor?”

  “No. While the interceptors are detonating, we will execute a lateral burn on maximum impulse. The detonations and the burn are to conceal the release of free-fall bombs from Weapons Factory One, targeted on the Branch Office Five Zero’s course to rendezvous. I want them to have as little warning as possible.

  “I want to be so close to the kill that I can see the explosions myself. So close that I can feel them on my skin. So close that I have to grow new eyes afterward.”

  * * *

  Space battles are boring.

  This came to me as an unexpected and unwelcome discovery. But consider: Space is vast, and for the most part our vehicles accelerate slowly, at rates measured in milligees—approximately a centimeter per second squared. Yes, there are exceptions, the high-impulse flare of a nuclear-thermal rocket and the continuous-centigee burn of a starship. And in the final seconds and minutes of an engagement, there is the gut-punching shove and roar of chemical thrusters, prodigiously wasteful of reaction mass, jinking and weaving and desperately trying to make or break a targeting lock. But for the most part, space battles are a slow dance of orbital dynamics and continuous low-thrust acceleration for days or weeks or even years: a dance that culminates in a terrifying minute of battering, deafening evasive maneuvers followed by sudden death or survival, and more weeks or months of slow, steady thrust. If anything, the course of a space battle resembles a gambling game in which both sides make some preparations in private, expose other aspects of their strategy to their rivals—and the match is determined by a final throw-down. But it’s a game which one or more of the participants never gets to play again. There is no guarantee that there will be a winner, but there is always at least one loser. If you peer closely at it, you might even discern a resemblance to certain types of option trades.

  As a banker, I did not find this to my taste. So after a couple of days I went to talk over my anxiety with Rudi.

  “Yes, it’s a gamble,” he agreed. “But we’re going to win. We have palmed several cards, yes? Doubtless your mother believes she is the one who is going to win, and she, too, is concealing cards about her person. But she clearly doesn’t have a teleport engine aboard her vessel, so we’re going to win.”

  “How do you know she doesn’t?”

  Rudi cocked his head and stared at me. “Because we’re not dead. Honestly, Krina, I expected better!”

  “I’m an accountant, not a warrior!” I protested. “I don’t murder people for a living. Not like Mother.”

  “Well, you’ll have to learn. At least enough to keep up, if you aspire to become a branch manager for the Permanent Assurance.”

  “Where do you suggest I—” I broke off, for Rudi was no longer looking at me. A chime from the retina on his wall drew his attention.

  “Incoming message,” he noted. “From your mother, for your eyes.” (That it had found its way to Rudi’s attention first did not escape me.) “Would you like to see it?”

  “‘Like’ is not the word I’d choose, but I suppose I have to . . .”

  The retina flashed, then reconfigured to display a stylized boardroom. My mother sat enthroned at the head of the table, robed in the ceremonial pinstripes of her calling: Arrayed on either side sat a row of corporate officers, all sisters of mine, dressed alike in the sober priestly vestments of the merchant banker. I recognized the room, with a pang of homesickness, as the Blue Committee Room of SystemBank New California, the holy sanctuary wherein the wealth of star systems was parceled up and lent to the supplicant debtor colonies. It was, of course, more than twenty light-years away (and therefore this whole diorama was just as much a fake as my message to my mother had been), but it affected me deeply all the same.

  “Daughter.” Sondra addressed me directly, with hauteur and dignity. “That I am distressed and perturbed by your activities should be no surprise. I wish that you had harnessed your hitherto-undemonstrated talents in service to this institution rather than conspiring in secrecy with traitors to defraud us. But under the circumstances, I can see no circumstances under which you could restore my trust in your good faith. So your resignation is accepted.

  “I understand your desire to skulk in shame from Dojima System. And you are correct about this vessel’s possession of a general-purpose beacon laser. Of your crude attempt to blackmail me into giving you access to it, I shall say no more. Your request for a direct rendezvous is accepted, and as your crew will have noted, I am already decelerating toward the indicated meeting point. I am curious as to how you intend to deal with your pursuers, though: Aren’t they going to overhaul you if you stop accelerating ahead of them?

  “I look forward to accepting your surrender in person once we are less than a light-minute apart.”

  The message window closed. I looked at Rudi. “I’d better give her the cover story about the bombs,” I suggested. “Otherwise, she might start to suspect the truth.”

  “Yes. Why don’t you do that?” Rudi’s tongue made a leisurely pass around his muzzle, then he winked at me coyly. “I have some more cards to mark. Might as well get started now . . .”

  * * *

  Days passed. Then a week. Then most of another week.

  Shortly after we received Sondra’s message agreeing to a face-to-face parley, the drive flares from the flotilla of interceptor missiles trailing us out of Shin-Tethys’s gravity well sputtered and faded out, one by one, leaving the interceptors adrift and falling farther behind. To all appearances, they were not designed for a deep-space pursuit of such duration. It was a most convenient result, for they wouldn’t catch up with the Five Zero again until almost two hours after the scheduled rendezvous with Sondra’s starship: And even then, drifting helplessly, they would be trivially easy to evade.

  I wished them the best of luck, in the privacy of my own head.

  Of the other parties to the battle, there was no news. The chapel fell ever farther astern, blatting obsolescent viruses and trojans at the sky with ever-increasing desperation. They were nothing more than a nuisance, but the various planetary traffic-control agencies were clearly becoming annoyed, going by the increasingly strident injunctions against spamming on the emergency channe
ls: If they kept it up for much longer, they were going to find themselves blacklisted by port authorities and unable to dock anywhere. And there was a complete news clampdown from Nova Ploetsk in particular and the Kingdom of Argos in general: Someone was clearly keeping something quiet.

  I spent much of the time working and studying. As per the terms of our agreement, Rudi was required to issue me with an officer’s assignment of shares in the Branch Office Five Zero; at a later time, we would formally vest these as shares in the parent institution, but right now I was merely to be an equity-holding first lieutenant and officer of the audit, not to mention a major deposit-account customer. The learning curve was steep: I had many operational manuals to study, and much of the business of a proactive assurance agency was new to me. However, nothing concentrates the mind like starting a new management job in the middle of a space battle: Getting it right first time was a matter of life or death. And so I threw myself into my new routine with gusto and a degree of enthusiasm that I will admit came as a surprise to me.

  As a new-minted officer of the corporation, I spent most of my time in the financial services suite, learning the ebb and flow of bonds and loans and other financial instruments from the experienced clerical officers. I didn’t have much contact with the executive arm of the Branch Office, so I was somewhat taken aback one evening shift when a semifamiliar muzzle stuck her nose over my shoulder and announced its presence. “Graah! Skipper sends ’is compliments and be asking after ye’er presence the noo! Ye be coming along smartly, heh?”

  I blinked mildly, refusing to recoil. “Li, isn’t it?” The piratical boarding specialist who had dragged me aboard the Five Zero in the first place, over a year ago, looked back unblinking. “Rudi wants me? Where?”

  “The combat information center on boarding deck two. You be following now?”

  “Show me,” I commanded, locking my retina and swimming into the middle of the room to follow her. I had become much better at identifying bats by their gender over the past month. I had also found time in my schedule for an appointment with the ship’s surgeon, and had functional legs again—albeit with webbed feet and prehensile toes. But I’d kept the embarrassing big-eyed face, and the gills, and many of the other modifications for now, and hadn’t made up my mind about asking for wings and fur and a pointy muzzle yet, the better to fit in: Major surgery and bodily fluids work better under gravity or centrifugal spin, and there just wasn’t time to fix everything all at once.

  Pirate Li led me toward the central service core of the vehicle, down past the habitat and life-support spheres, then into a cramped world of gray passages lined with automatic pressure hatches and racks of equipment, from reels of patch tape to radiation detectors. The grim guts of the enterprise, the tools of last resort when negotiation and contract law gave way to the rule of force.

  The CIC was buried within a rodent-friendly maze of these passages and ducts, behind surprisingly sturdy walls. Within its spherical confines was a surprisingly small capsule, barely bigger than a Soyuz crypt, rotating freely on gimbaled mounts. Li waved me toward it; I swam toward the open hatch and poked my head in.

  “Come in! Come in!” Rudi flapped at me, clearly jittery. “Shut the hatch, jolly good.”

  “What is this—” I lowered myself into one of the unoccupied couches.

  “The bunker. From which some lucky officer has to manage the branch when all the accounts are in the red.” Rudi glanced at me. “This is your final chance to back out, you know.”

  It took me a long time to frame my reply. The quiet—broken only by the hum of the ventilator fans and the gurgle of acceleration gel in the tank beneath our seats—seemed to stretch out.

  “You set this up with Ana, didn’t you?” I finally asked. “All of it. My abduction, this confrontation, the sucker punch the People are lining up to deliver.”

  Rudi nodded. “Are you angry with me?”

  I sighed. “I would have said as much already. How long have you been working with my sister?”

  “For longer than I care to recall. We first met in the Trailing Pretties, shortly after the Five Zero arrived in Dojima—I was looking for an expert on certain aspects of local trade law.”

  “And that’s when she told you about the Atlantis Carnet . . . ?”

  “Not immediately.” Rudi’s smile was slow to emerge. “There was a small matter of mutual trust. But she had already resolved to make a clean break from your lineage before she arrived here. Discovering more reasons to hate your mother was . . . well, it served as glue for our mutual trust and respect.”

  “For your . . .” I stopped. Something about his tone sounded wistful. “What is it?”

  Rudi drew a wing membrane across his face. “She is joining the People. I suppose it was inevitable that we would drift apart: The passion of such a relationship can only last a handful of years, a decade or two at the most. But we agreed, long ago, that when this was over, we would combine our lineages and spawn infants.” He peered at me bashfully over his arm. “She gave you a soul chip, did she not? With a message—and an up-to-date backup.”

  I stared at him. “You’re a bat, Rudi! She’s a mermaid. What were you thinking?”

  “You’d be surprised,” he said drily. “I know that Sondra minimized your libido function when she spawned your sib-hood. That was another of the things that angered Ana. She, too, was uninterested in concupiscence when she first arrived in Dojima.”

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing this.”

  “Your belief is entirely optional, I assure you, my dear. But in any case, I didn’t call you here to tell you that you are going to become an, ah, aunt. I called you here because your mother’s vehicle just changed course.”

  “She’s—” My head spun. “Wait. What’s she doing? Where are we in the time line?”

  “Attend.” Rudi focused suddenly, snapping wing-fingers at the retina that formed an arc around our seats. “This is our current vector. Here, behind us, are the drifting capsules from the, ahem, ‘interceptor missiles.’ We’ve now slowed sufficiently that they’re closing again. And here is Sondra’s current vector. It’s a log-log scale, by the way.”

  I boggled. The arrow representing Sondra’s vector was huge. And it was changing direction visibly.

  “Until half an hour ago, she was indeed decelerating toward the intersection point we agreed on. But then she executed this maneuver.” The screen depicted an intricate spiral, the magnitude of her acceleration fluctuating. “We are not painting her with active radar at this point—she is still many hundreds of thousands of kilometers distant—but that maneuver was consistent with pointing her flank at us and dropping something overboard. Something that will reach us shortly before she does.”

  “Mines. Or missiles?”

  “Possibly both. If she continues on her present course, her bombs will reach us a couple of hundred kilometers before she makes her closest approach. I fear your challenge may have unhinged her completely. Most annoying. We may have to switch to Plan B.”

  “You’re actually planning on shooting her?”

  “No: I have something better in mind. But Plan B does require in-person intervention . . . if we shoot her without resolving the fundamental problem, we would merely make everything worse.”

  “I think I see: If you shoot her, she respawns from backup and denounces you as an outlaw. But if you can leave her adrift with no fuel, exposed and completely discredited, it would be far better for everyone.”

  “Yes. But we have to disable her beacon laser and ensure that she doesn’t have an opportunity to escape—or to suicide, or to murder our witnesses.” The witnesses aboard the gaggle of small low-acceleration squidcraft dispatched by the People to monitor our negotiations with Sondra and hold her to account, cunningly misidentified as missiles by the allies behind the palace coup that had silenced Medea shortly after their launch. It was a devastatingly ri
sky task: If Sondra realized they were anything other than derelict warheads, she could kill them in an instant and claim self-defense.

  “I think we are going to have to cut this short,” Rudi continued. “The delta vee for an intercept is just barely manageable, thanks to the extra fuel we took on board—and as long as she’s got her main engine burning and pointing our way, her drive flare will make it very difficult to tell the difference between the Five Zero and a decoy drone.

  “So, Krina. How do you feel about boarding actions?”

  * * *

  B oarding actions are situations where the crew of one space vehicle physically transfer aboard another craft in flight, hijacking it by force.

  It’s a dangerous maneuver at the best of times, usually conducted by armed privateers against the likes of a defenseless freighter or a semidisabled chapel. The idea of a privateer boarding an interstellar dreadnought armed with a gigawatt laser and a portable military-industrial complex tuned for the rapid manufacture of thermonuclear weapons is . . . well, the word “suicidal” springs to mind.