by Wil McCarthy
Bruno opened his mouth to protest, to point out how generally poor he was at that sort of thing, but the words didn’t form. He couldn’t convey the idea, because in fact he didn’t believe the idea. How surprising! Yes, he was the expert here, the person who could best explain what had probably happened. Any claims to the contrary would go beyond modesty, into simple cowardice and obstruction. And anyway, the police were busy and Tamra herself was still consoling Marlon, while Bruno had no obvious duties just now.
Finally, he nodded. “Of course, Highness. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
He dithered for a moment, wondering where exactly he should go, until he spied starlight through the one of the gaping holes the nasen beam had left. He strode toward it, crunching over dust and rubble and swaths of bare metal hull, swinging wide around the now barely visible foundations of a couple of structures. The dissolution of Sykes Manor was still ongoing, the remaining bits and pieces slowly losing cohesion and joining the nebula of floating debris. As he approached the hole, he saw there was a good deal of garbage floating outside as well, slowly leaking from the hull’s double wound, forming expanding clouds that would, eventually, become rings encircling the sun itself, like a kind of miniature, invisibly diffuse asteroid belt.
The last few steps were more difficult; he couldn’t suppress the idea that the opening pointed down, that another few steps would cast him, screaming and helpless, into the infinity of space. Rubbish, of course; his boot grapples would simply swing him around, pulling in whatever direction they happened to be facing, until finally he stood on the outside of the hull looking “down” into the inside. But still, the bottoms of his feet tingled, and he wished he could wipe away the mist of sweat that sprang nervously from his forehead.
As promised, the eyes of the news cameras glittered at him like a wall, hundreds or possibly thousands of them hovering right at the limit of their invisible, three hundred—meter cordon around Her Majesty’s person.
He switched the control on his forearm to the PRESS/PUBLIC ACCESS setting. “Hello?” he uttered tentatively.
Questions besieged him instantly, a hundred voices all yammering at once, with a sound like amplified static. He thought he heard the words “queen” and “house” and “collapsiter” in there a few times, but perhaps those were just his expectations, overlaid against the noise.
He held up a hand and shouted. “Please!” The noise quieted somewhat. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. Be silent! Silent!” Within a few seconds, the hubbub stilled. He lowered his hand. “Thank you. Good afternoon. I am de Towaji, summoned here as part of the Royal Committee for Investigation of, uh, Ring Collapsiter Anomalies. There is reason to believe this structure was damaged by a coherent energy burst called a ‘nasen beam,’ fired by a spaceship the police are still trying to locate. This ship may also have been involved in the most recent disruption of the Ring Collapsiter’s suspension mechanisms, although we have no direct proof at this time. Investigation is of course ongoing. I have no predictions as to when, uh, any resolution may come about. And now, if you require more specific information, I’m willing to answer a few questions.”
To avoid a tsunami of replies, he thought to point toward a specific region of the flattened swarm, a cluster of four or five cameras, and to say, “You, yes.”
The response was immediate. “Sir, have you resumed sexual relations with Her Majesty?”
Bruno sighed. “Is that all you people ever think about? The Queendom is in peril, you know. Are there any serious or technical questions?”
There almost certainly were, but something in his tone put them off, made the cameras worried or confused. Sykes Manor sat halfway between the orbits of Earth and Venus and was not, at this time of year, actually close to either of them. So the cameras were almost certainly autonomous, loaded with their owners’ instruction sets and stripped-down personality images and fired off on absurdly hasty trajectories to gather up what news they could. Given a few seconds to collect their miniature wits, or a few tens of seconds to confer with their distant owners, the cameras’ processors might well have come up with an intelligent question or two; surely some of them were from research or educational outfits, or other nontabloid press.
But Bruno, already bored with his role as spokesman, didn’t give them a few seconds. Instead, he waved a dismissive hand and said, “Bah, you have the gist of it already. The details, when we know them, will be released in some sort of interactive document. Meanwhile, Marlon Sykes and Deliah van Skettering are coping with their misfortune, while their murderer is sought.”
“Declarant,” one brave camera finally asked, “will this report include your solution to the Ring Collapsiter’s fall?”
“I have no solution to that,” Bruno said grumpily. “At the moment, I’m not certain there is one.”
The cameras met that remark with stunned silence. Oh. So much for his being reassuring.
“Er, that is, I’ve only been here a few hours. And as such things go, they’ve been rather busy hours. When I’ve had time to study the problem more completely, I’ll … Well, it’s just premature right now.”
Bother it, he was bad at this. Annoyed, he cut the channel and walked away. Tamra should have had better judgment than to send him out here like this, unsupervised.
On his way, he nearly walked into one of the many Cheng Shiaos that filled Sykes Manor; the Shiao was standing there in the gloom, his back turned, his lights pointing up at distant rubble, and Bruno half mistook him for a pillar until the lights turned suddenly toward him.
“Goodness, Shiao, you startled me.”
Shiao gave a ritual nod. “Excuse me, Declarant. The fault is mine. To update you on what’s happening: the suspect vessel has been pinpointed, and has refused radio contact or else been unable to establish it. Its registration number, which we’ve been able to read optically from the exterior hull, shows ownership by something called the Titania Mineralogical Concern. This registry may be forged or stolen, though; the application was filed eighty years ago, for an eight-berth personnel ferry much smaller than this vessel, by the name of Lupin II.”
“Ah,” Bruno said. “I see, yes. And this other ship, the one you’ve actually spotted, does it have a name?”
Shiao looked troubled. “It does, sir. HMS De Towaji’s Bane. You’ll, ah, be pleased to know that the nearest Constabulary cruiser is already en route toward it, with a SWAT boarding party and a full suite of armaments. ETA five hours, twenty-two minutes.”
“Ah,” Bruno said, taken aback. “My own bane, is it? I should be flattered, I suppose. And a boarding party, you say? You’ll certainly want to identify the nasen beam projector—it should be outside the hull, possibly in a pod of some sort, with its heat sink located opposite the projection aperture. The device also needs to be completely free of mechanical vibrations for several minutes before it’s fired, so if anyone aims it at your cruiser there should be ample warning to move out of the way. You needn’t move far—even a few meters would suffice. Just enough that the beam will miss if it isn’t realigned.”
“Thank you, Declarant,” Shiao said, sounding impressed and concerned and genuinely grateful. “That advice could well save lives today.”
“Think nothing of it,” Bruno returned, waving a hand. “My own life may well be among them, as this bears directly on the Ring Collapsiter investigation. You’re prepared to fax the Royal Committee aboard for the encounter?”
Shiao’s jaw tightened visibly, but all he said was, “Absolutely, sir. Arrangements are already underway.”
A Constabulary boarding action turned out to be a remarkably dull affair. This one did, anyway, since the “suspect vessel,” Bruno’s very own personal bane, his hashashin, his self-styled mortal enemy, never once engaged its engines or aimed its nasen projector or reoriented its hull in any way. It might almost have been a derelict, a ghost ship drifting empty through space, if not for the winking of running lights, clearly visible through the new cruiser’s telescopes. To
o, the cruiser’s captain reported that the suspect vessel did occasionally fire a puff of gas from its maneuvering thrusters. “Momentum wheel desaturation,” he explained cryptically. “For control of their altitude, which appears to be fixed in inertial space.”
Ordinarily, Bruno would have pressed for a more detailed explanation, but he’d been drawn into a royal game of doubles poker and dared not let his attention wander too far for too long lest young Vivian kick his armored shin with the remarkably armor-rattling toe of her space boot. They’d all taken a quiet dinner and fresh-air break back on Tongatapu before coming here, but they’d been back in suits and helmet domes for over two hours now, and it had been getting somewhat tiresome. Finally Vivian had faxed up a set of magnetic playing cards and convinced Tamra to make their use an Official Business of the Royal Committee.
Ordinarily, Bruno would have objected to such gross misuse of his person at a time like this. He’d done so often enough in his days at Tamra’s palace, when matters were—to put it mildly—a good deal less urgent. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to refuse Vivian Rajmon; if the Queendom could put its children to work in such hazardous circumstances, chasing after their elders’ banes and suchlike, then said Queendom should at least indulge, when possible, said children’s need for play. He’d even surprised himself by enjoying the game a little. He and Vivian had narrowly won the match with three games out of five, although Deliah and Marlon had won the other two, and the odd pairing of Tamra with Cheng Shiao had presented substantial resistance throughout. Vivian seemed more childish than ever, or perhaps the term would be childlike, since she manifested it mainly in pleasant ways. Even Tamra seemed to notice the difference, and to look on her little Commandant-Inspector a bit more thoughtfully.
But another hour later even that was finished, and the SWAT robots were strapping them all into recessed acceleration couches as the final rendezvous and boarding action approached. The ship’s bulkheads swam with wellstone designs, hypercomputers forming and reforming and vanishing and forming again, their innards no doubt buzzing with strategic and tactical analyses. Ironically, this superficial turmoil required nothing of Bruno and was in fact his first real chance to sit still and think. He took full advantage of it by refining, in his mind, the exact scenario by which a single ship, with a single nasen beam projector, might weaken and contaminate nearly a third of the Ring Collapsiter’s arc. He came up with a number of plausible mechanisms and finally settled on one that best fit the observed facts: the ship had sat up here in the asteroid belt and fired almost tangentially, the most glancing of blows, cutting a chord about half a kilometer sunward of the collapsiter’s rim.
At that range, the beam would be about twice as wide as the collapsiter itself, but the sun’s gravity—and indeed the collapsiter’s own gravity—would pull the beam out of true, curve it around like a stream of water firing out of a hose. If the top of the beam’s arc touched the Ring Collapsiter just so, then instead of punching two neat holes through the ring, as it had through Marlon’s house, it would instead follow the ring’s curvature around, plowing a swath right through it, perhaps for millions of kilometers. Hmm. He’d have to work the actual math on that one; curiosity aside, the results might be needed as evidence in court.
Cheng Shiao settled into the berth across from his and was instantly immobilized by straps and webbing.
“So,” Bruno asked him, “if you don’t mind my asking, how does one rise to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Constabulary?”
Shiao, still attempting to settle into a more comfortable position, looked puzzled. “Rise, sir? I was appointed to this rank directly.”
“Truly? With no prior experience?”
“Correct.”
“How strange. On what … basis was this appointment made?”
“Exam scores, sir. And general inclination. I won’t bore you with the story.”
“No, indeed, I’m asking you to. I begin to realize how little I know about the modern Queendom.”
Shiao met his gaze. “Are you certain you want the full details? Because there’s some violence involved. I was in Qingdao, walking along the Yanan Lu on my way to the job interview, which was well outside the business district, in a warehouse area I didn’t know well. It was two-ten in the afternoon; there wasn’t much traffic. As I was walking, I passed what appeared to be an abandoned building, with two males standing on the front steps. They were dressed in reflective jackets and sunglasses, and appeared unusually alert.”
“Nervous, eh?”
“No, sir, just the opposite. My strong impression at the time was that they were guards. Not professional security, you understand—they were kempt and well dressed, but there was no impression of legitimacy about them. It seemed to me that they were posted there explicitly to intimidate passersby. I suspected that some business was going on inside the building, and there was a desire to prevent interruptions.”
“Or witnesses.”
“Exactly, yes.”
“So what did you do? You weren’t a police officer at all at that point, were you?”
“I belonged to a neighborhood watch organization in Xingtai. But you’re correct: I had no official standing in the city of Qingdao. I wasn’t licensed to carry weapons or interfere with lawful enterprise. But the situation looked bad, like someone could easily get hurt.”
“Including yourself,” Bruno noted.
“Yes, sir. I was acutely aware of the fact—any suspicious action on my part could tip them off. Even simply walking past might do it; the smart thing would have been to just turn around the moment I saw them. But I believe in the law. I believe that no one has the right to violate it, especially in flagrant ways that breed disrespect. Calling the police would have been an option, but I worried the suspects would be long gone by the time an officer materialized.”
“A curious worry. What did you do?”
Shiao shrugged. “I called myself at home, and then while the line was open I rapidly approached the two suspects. ‘I need your help,’ I said to them. ‘Someone is chasing me.’ It’s doubtful they would have believed this story for long, and possibly they saw at once what I was doing, which was capturing their coordinates and their images to a remote location. But what certainly gave me away was my own voice on the telephone, screaming that I should get out of there immediately. I was younger then, more impulsive, but it turned out to be good advice: the nearer suspect drew a laser pointer and burned the left side of my face straight through to the bone.”
“Good gods!”
“He was aiming for the phone,” Shiao explained, “and he hit it. At that moment I myself was still an incidental target. Since I was already running, I took advantage of the distraction to engage the suspect physically.”
Bruno didn’t know whether to be impressed or appalled. “Surely you must have been in agony!”
Again, Shiao shrugged. “I assume so. By the time the city police arrived, I was dead, so I never did learn how it all turned out. We didn’t have the kind of scene reconstructions that we do nowadays; it became something of a town mystery. All I can say is that one suspect was picked up at the scene, having been detained there by an injury, and the other was identified and arrested later based on the video I’d captured. No other associates were ever explicitly identified.”
Shiao’s voice had never once wavered from the precise, restrained, overpolite monotone that had marked good police officers for centuries, perhaps forever. There was no room for boast or modesty in that tone: the account was purely factual and devoid of emotional overtone, laid out plainly for Bruno’s evaluation. Shiao’s eyes had not looked clouded or sentimental as he told the tale of this major turning point in his life.
“I daresay these gentlemen benefited from the lesson,” Bruno ventured.
Shiao nodded. “I like to think so, sir. A policeman’s job is to chill and frustrate crime—merely punishing it is a symptom of failure.”
“I suppose so, yes. Very insightful. I’m surp
rised they didn’t promote you directly to captain.”
Again, a factual monotone. “I failed the aptitude, sir. I hope to grow and season with age, but today the Constabulary has dozens of better cops than myself.”
“Dozens? Really?” Bruno blanched inwardly at the thought. With forty billion citizens to choose from, the Queendom certainly had no shortage of compulsive savants to fill its payroll. Better than filling it with incompetents, obviously, but there was something frightening about a really gung-ho interplanetary police force. “I shall be very careful to obey the laws, I think.”
“That’s the idea, sir.” Then, catching something in Bruno’s look, Shiao said, “It makes some people nervous, this kind of concentrated authority. I understand the feeling. But I can assure you of the Constabulary’s complete intolerance for bad cops. Any crook or bigot in our midst, or even a well-meaning authoritarian, would be disowned and prosecuted immediately. Of the seven thousand, six hundred, and eight applicants for the position of lieutenant, more than eighty percent failed the moral aptitude screening.”
“Seven thousand!” Bruno said, surprised. “Goodness, that’s a lot of applicants. What happened to all of them?”
“A few are taken on each year as sergeants,” Shiao replied, “and since local and regional forces have less stringent entrance criteria, they absorb a lot of our near misses.”
“Mmm. How many is a lot?”
Shrug. “Probably a few hundred, that year.”
“And the rest?”
Shiao considered for a few seconds before answering, “I would guess many of them found work in support roles: admin, theory, equipment testing. And there’s always a need for critics and advocates in the policy arena. And actors for the training demos, and I suppose for commercial movies as well. Actors who really understand the police are rare.”
“And the rest?” Bruno persisted.
Now Shiao began to look uncomfortable, and Bruno sensed he was edging into taboo territory. In a meritocracy, what happened to people who lacked merit? People who were lazy or impulsive or foolish could change, up to a point, but could they want to change?
