Balance Point

by Robert Buettner

  I swallowed, myself. “But it’s beautiful, too.”

  The moonlet spun slowly in vast, empty space, silhouetted as black and as tiny as a peppercorn against Leonidas’ boiling orange disc.

  She cocked her head at me. “Especially for you, I guess.”

  I nodded.

  Born to Trueborn parents on Yavet, and raised there by the midwife who delivered me, I grew up inside a layer cake, where a park chamber fifty yards long with a twelve-foot ceiling was the wide open spaces. I was a wandering orphan in reality, if not in technical fact. But if I felt anyplace else had become my second home, it was Mousetrap.

  My view of home shifted as Gateway shifted her mile-long mass toward the main entry portal at Mousetrap’s North Pole. Through the plasteel grab bar I felt the old girl quiver. Maybe she was excited.

  Mousetrap was my second home but it was Gateway’s first. Her skin and bones were mined and refined from the moonlet’s own body, and Gateway was fabricated on the ways and in the vast shops of Mousetrap’s north end.

  After the War was won, the north end where Gateway was born was abandoned to the unemployed miners and shipwrights who built her and so many like her, and became the Free City of Shipyard, where, they said, nothing was free but everything was available if you paid cash.

  Gateway yawed nose-on toward the north portal, matched rotation, and shuddered again beneath my hand, almost in the way Kit had sobbed. In that instant it struck me that, like me, Gateway was a sort of orphan.

  In the way of history’s great capital ships, whether they traveled wet oceans or black vacuum, Gateway’s first captain had lived with her every day for the three years between her keel-laying and commissioning, like an expectant father. He had memorized her every system and rivet the way a father memorized his daughter’s eyelashes and laughter.

  Few of those original keel-up starship captains had survived the war-winning battle for which Gateway was named. Fewer still had survived the mundane physical ravages of the decades since. And so, like most daughters, Gateway survived her father.

  Starships nowadays were remade, not born. Too expensive to build without the goad of imminent human extinction, cruisers were now repeatedly repainted, refurbished, rebooted, and repurposed. Hardly a new idea, though. During the Cold War I era, Trueborn pilots sometimes flew aircraft older than their fathers, and sailed in wet-bottom warships older than their grandmothers.

  Today, starships, repurposed as interstellar buses, were driven by teams of prodigiously skilled and trained officers who were in a way little more than bus drivers. No one driver knew exactly how the whole bus worked. Partly, team command was used to fly starships today because starships were the most complex buses in history. Mostly, team command was used to fly starships today because compartmentalization of information assured that no one person could spill all the C-drive technology beans to the Yavi during a time of Cold War.

  As we floated there, my ‘puter pinged. We were close to Mousetrap, so it was likely spam, so I ignored it.

  Once a starship emerged from a jump, the port for which the ship was bound and the ship could “see” one another line-of-sight. Once that sight line got short enough that message traffic traveling at light speed could pass between the starship and the port in minutes, the ship’s directional antennae began downshipping everything from hotel reservation requests to holo wedding albums. Simultaneously the port began spewing uptraffic to the starship, mostly advertising.

  Ting-ting. Kit’s ‘puter double pinged.

  I cocked my head at her. “Howard?”

  Before he packed us off with Mort, Howard had told us he would be at Mousetrap on other business when we arrived. Not, I suppose, because he was anxious to share his itinerary but because he knew we were traveling with a mind reader who could blow his cover anyway.

  Kit nodded, rolled her eyes when the message didn’t come in immediately. “Who else?”

  The double ping that Kit and I had just heard her receive announced that her ‘puter was receiving an encrypted message. The delay in that message actually coming up on her ‘puter’s screen meant that the receiving ‘puter was reformatting Military Spec Encryption, the only kind of encryption that really worked. MSE was absurdly expensive. MSE was usually unnecessary. Naturally, Howard Hibble used MSE for everything.

  Kit finally read her message, then frowned. “Something new in Mousetrap.”

  I frowned back. “Howard’s inviting you to tour the Gateway wing?”

  She shook her head. “If he did, I’d plead a headache.”

  Kit and I had both visited the Pseudocephalopod War Museum, but the Gateway wing was new. The Museum’s extremely well done, and admission’s free, even if you use an audio ‘bot. But if you’re a soldier you cry more than you listen.

  Gateway was overdue for its own wing at the museum. Not Gateway, the ship aboard which we were traveling, but the place for which she was named. Gateway, the place where mankind finally won the War. Although “place” is not a term that really applies to fifty million cubic miles of vacuum at the end of the explored universe. People called the battle that won the War “Gateway” because the official name, “Strategic Engagement of the Massed Fleets of the Human Union and the Forces of the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony, Contested in Interstellar Space Earthside of Temporal Fabric Insertion Point Situated at Grid Reference Golf Alpha Tango Echo Whisky Alpha Yankee,” was too long to fit on a cruiser’s nose, much less into the chorus of that crappy country-and-western song that cheapens the battle’s memory.

  I answered her comment. “I’d fake a headache too.”

  Neither of us wanted to be reminded about Gateway. The Slugs had attacked Earth, killed sixty million people, and tried to extinguish mankind as a species. But the best solution mankind had been able to come up with was extinguihing the Slugs first.

  Kit, even more than I, was unapologetic but ambivalent. Neither of us wanted mankind’s eventual tombstone to read “Their greatest talent was exterminating other species.”

  I asked, “Then how has Howard decided to ruin our layover?”

  She shook her head. “Not ours. Mine. Coordination conference on suspension of covert field ops. Field Grade officers and above.”

  I smiled. Captains are company grade, Colonels are field grade. “Rank hath its privileges.”

  “Bite me, Parker.” Kit slapped my arm, smiled. “How will you amuse yourself wihout me?”

  I shrugged. “Go north, maybe.”

  Shipyard was in Mousetrap’s north end. Kit’s smile disappeared like an unplugged holo.

  “Just to check my P-mail.”

  P-mail was illegal, but compared to what Kit and I did for a living, hardly immoral. P-mail wasn’t what was bothering her. We both knew what was.

  She stared ahead as Mousetrap’s mile-wide North Portal irised open to admit Gateway.

  I winced. “Problem?”

  “No. No problem.” She kept staring.

  Oboy.

  An hour after Kit and I disembarked and went our separate ways, I stepped off the tuber at Lockheed Station, in Shipyard.

  Shipyard was, basically, the north half of the football that was Mousetrap.

  Mousetrap was originally mankind’s interstellar Gibraltar, our bulwark against the Pseudocephalopod Hegemony. Since we won the War, the South End had remained the crossroads of the Human Union, the gateway (little “g”) to the temporal fabric insertion points that led, directly or indirectly, to the five hundred twelve planets that comprised the Human Union. As such, the South End of Mousetrap was insufferably bright and clean and boring.

  After the war, the abandoned North End, where the great ships that won the War for us had been built and berthed, had been abandoned by the Human Union. Eventually Mousetrap’s unemployed shipwrights had squatted there, then declared themselves an independent and, uh, socially liberated community. Today the Free City of Shipyard was the graffiti-tagged nest of addicts, villains and libertines that I had called home during the two y
ears after Kit and I split and before Howard Hibble weaseled me into reenlisting.

  The basic look and smell of Lockheed Station hadn’t changed much since my first visit, when I was a laid-over Legion Basic skinhead bound for his first duty station.

  Lockheed was a fifty-foot-ceilinged neon and steel cave hollowed out of the nickel-iron captive meteor that was Mousetrap. Music and voices still echoed out of a half dozen bars, and four establishments with active picture windows still offered other distractions for hire if you didn’t care to drink. The crowd that clattered across the deck plates was as raucous and as drunk as ever.

  Directly across from the platform, Lockheeds’ pink-and-green sign had faded, but still blinked. There had been a time when the joint, which had once been the tank plant’s cafeteria, was a friendly place that offered two-for-one well drinks with a Legion Tanker ID. Later, refurbished, the place had attracted Trueborn tourists who sought a homogenized taste of North Mousetrap.

  Somebody told me, in those days after the Trueborn tourists began arriving, that the urine on the deckplates in front of Lockheed’s still smelled the same, but the customers who staggered out and deposited it had become much better dressed. At the time, I thought the comment clever.

  Maybe I had spent too many years on neat and tidy Earth, with Kit and her neat and tidy rich friends. Because today my nostalgia for home had evaporated like the urine on the deckplates, and nothing was left but an unpleasant smell.

  I ignored the crowds, and most especially ignored one passage I knew too well, and walked seven minutes to Shipyard’s P-mail office.

  I glanced once over my shoulder to assure I wasn’t followed, but my motive was to be sure I wasn’t mugged, not because I was worried to be visiting the P-mail office.

  P-mail was a creature of the fourth generation of the digital information age. That generation began when encryption technology at any level below military or diplomatic spec, which only the military and diplomats could devise, maintain and afford, became so hackable that it was more speedbump than firewall.

  Would generally available encryption technology hide porn downloads from mom, or fart jokes about the boss? Sure. Secure your paycheck from hackers? Mostly. Keep client lists safe from your competitors? With luck, maybe.

  But any digital information about subversive or criminal activity that passed across government-monitored digital media or hung in the government-monitored Cloud and its successors was an open book to The Big Eye. And what the government didn’t monitor automatically it monitored whenever it chose to.

  So, in the field of secure communication among the shady, or even among the merely shy or private, everything old became new again. And thus P-mail was born.

  If your life has been more sheltered than mine, you may never have heard of P-mail. Most people who have heard of it think the term “physical mail” derives from the definition in the statute that first outlawed it: “unlicensed physical carriage for hire of (1) regulated substances, and/or (2) uninspectable intellectual property.”

  Like much of what most of us “know,” that’s a crock. The term “P-mail” actually originated last century, for “paradise mail.” The Americans were hunting the Islamic terror cabals of the day to extinction, tracking the terrorists by their use of digital media. So the terrorists shifted to courier-delivered physical messages. “Paradise” was where the couriers wound up when they got caught, which they usually did.

  P-mail’s come a long way since then.

  Once you arrived at the P-mail office, its interior physically resembled the “post office” you might see in some Trueborn cop-and-robber holo set fifty years before the War. Behind a counter stretched along one wall, a clerk collected dropped-off parcels and handed out incoming ones, and opposite that was a wall of locked, numbered boxes of various sizes. But a central retinal scanner console substituted for physical key slots on each box.

  However, getting to Shipyard’s P-mail office resembled getting to no post office Holowood had ever depicted. The facility was built originally as a ready room for interceptor pilots, just a bored-out cave, barely a hundred feet below Mousetrap’s cratered suface. Deep enough to survive a tactical-sized Slug kinetic projectile, or an above-surface nuke, shallow enough to allow an interceptor crew to race from easy chairs to launch in three minutes.

  That ready room could be accessed from inside the moonlet only by a twenty-minute trip up from Mousetrap’s inhabited core levels through eleven miles of solid nickel-iron, via a series of high-speed elevators, staggered to slow any attack down the elevator shafts. The elevator series began from an unnumbered suite, behind an unmarked armored door, on a back passage in Shipyard. The suite and each way point were guarded by armed goons who would turn you back or crack your skull if your box rental wasn’t paid up or you scanned wrong on the retinal.

  As the three-hundred-pound goon at the first waypoint packed me in to the shoulder-wide next-stage elevator then slammed its wire gate closed across my face, I smiled out at him through the mesh. He stared back like a stone with hairy nostrils.

  I managed a narrow shrug.

  Most P-mail customers considered a visit to the Mousetrap P-mail office a claustrophobic nightmare. I, having been raised downlevels on Yavet, found it nostalgic.

  From the office’s ready-room-become-lobby, man-sized crawl tunnels radiated out like a starburst to the interceptor sally ports, long empty of defending fighters. Today the sally ports remained tight and secure enough to recover and launch a hodge-podge fleet of small, stealthy and unregistered craft. Those craft shuttled contraband and P-mail onto and off of slowly approaching cruisers via the lifeboat ports, now empty, that had once served the cruisers’ vast troop-carrying spaces.

  Politicians, and so the cruiser drivers who served at the politicians’ pleasure, didn’t crack down on P-mail for the same reasons that the politicians didn’t crack down on numbered account banking havens like Rand and Funhouse. First, some politicians were paid not to crack down. Second, if one’s enemies seized control of the ship of state, it was wise to have lifeboats available.

  In the P-mail office the clerk behind the counter looked up, then ignored me, even though I’d been coming there for years. The system thrived on anonymity.

  I thumbed the contents of my box, chucked the physical spam into the inst-cinerator and began reading the rest. First I opened the dupe sheets for Jazen’s, and found a check so big that I whooped, which caused the clerk to frown at me.

  When I reenlisted, I had sold my bar to the proprietress of the business next door to Jazen’s. It was a long-term installment sale, with payment amounts tied to profits, and the duplicate ledger sheets that accompanied the check showed profits had soared.

  Jazens’ official ledger showed Jazen’s was losing its ass, but so did the official ledgers of every bar, whorehouse, poko parlor and janga den in Shipyard. That was because Mousetrap was a Trueborn Territory, and the taxes that the Free City of Shipyard kicked up to the territorial government were calculated from the official ledgers.

  The Free City of Shipyard was also supposed to collect and kick up to the territorial government confiscatorily high point-of-sale taxes on imports like Trueborn single-malt whisky and slow-burn janga from Bren. The Trueborn politicians like Kit’s father, who thought these taxes up, believed they shielded the citizens of developing economies from societal burdens like alcoholism and drug addiction. Us shielded citizens believed the Trueborns were simply annoyed that someone, somewhere, who was not them, was having a good time.

  Shipyard ignored the taxes, and so, having done their moral duty, did the distant Trueborns. Don’t believe me? On any day when a cruiser from Earth is laid over you’ll find Trueborn politician passengers passing their layovers guzzling untaxed single-malt and blowing untaxed janga at Shipyard’s finest whorehouses.

  I eyed the whopping check payable to cash from Jazen’s, LLC one more time, shook my head, then tucked it into my jacket pocket along with my remaining wad of P-mail,
still unopened. Payments like this one wouldn’t make me as rich as a Trueborn. But they would make me self-sufficient enough that I would no longer feel like a charity case every time I rubbed shoulders with Edwin Trentin-Born.

  I exited the down elevator and passed Lockheed’s again. But this time I didn’t return to the station. I dodged through drunks toward the passage that led to Jazen’s.

  Since I reenlisted I normally kept my distance from Jazen’s when I passed through Mousetrap. Orion had taught me that pain and temptation are best dealt with by avoidance. That’s why I got my statements and payments through third parties. But a businesslike drop-in to offer congratulations on a job well done surely couldn’t hurt.

  EIGHTEEN

  Two minutes later, I turned down the side passage opposite Lockheeds for the first time since I had reenlisted. The ambient light was dimmer down all the side passages in Shipyards, and I ducked by long-conditioned reflex as the ceiling and walls squeezed down to a Yavi-friendly seven feet by seven feet.

  I stopped at the sign glowing above the first door on the left. It still read jazen’s, and the sign next door to Jazen’s still read maison dessele. The two businesses were now commonly owned, but operated better as complimentary providers than competitors.

  Jazen’s was known for reliable scotch, quality blow and a tolerance for GI dustups. Maison Dessele was Shipyard’s only companionship salon staffed exclusively by courtesan-class Marini hostesses. And a few hosts, if that floated one’s boat.

  Jazen’s and Maison Dessele were considered tame by Shipyard standards. After all, at a place around the corner you could buy oral sex with a six-eyed catfish.

  Jazen’s was open but empty most mornings, even when a cruiser was in, and this morning was the same. When I stepped through the door, though, I cocked my head. Something was not the same.

  Jazen’s occupied an asymmetrical, vaulted cavern that had originally been filled by a blob of pure copper. The copper had been scraped out and sent to war as starship wiring. By the time I took the joint over, the humid exhalations of thousands of drunks had oxidized the copper residue on the walls and ceiling to verdigris, the gray-green color of those statues in those open-air parks that the Trueborns have so many of.