The imaging assembly hung on its pivot high above her ship. It was far enough out from their thermal shield to feel the full glare, so it was heating up fast. Pretty soon it would melt, despite its cooling system.
Let it. She wouldn't need it then. She'd be out there in the sunlight herself.
She swiveled the mirror by reaching out and grabbing it, tugging it round. All virtual images had a glossy sheen to them that even Erma, her simcomputer, couldn't erase. They looked too good. The mirror was already pitted, you could see it on the picture of the arch itself, but the sim kept showing the device as pristine.
“Color is a temperature indicator, right?” Claire asked.
RED DENOTES A LEVEL OF 7 MILLION DEGREES KELVIN.
Good ol' coquettish Erma, Claire thought. Never a direct answer unless you coax. “Close-up the top of the arch.”
In both her eyes the tortured sunscape shot by. The coronal loop was a shimmering, braided family of magnetic flux tubes, as intricately woven as a Victorian doily. Its feet were anchored in the photosphere below held by thick, sluggish plasma. Claire zoomed in on the arch. The hottest reachable place in the entire Solar System, and her prey had to end up there.
TARGET ACQUIRED AND RESOLVED BY SOLWATCH SATELLITE. IT IS AT THE VERY PEAK OF THE ARCH. ALSO, VERY DARK.
“Sure, dummy, it's a hole.”
I AM ACCESSING MY ASTROPHYSICAL CONTEXT PROGRAM NOW.
Perfect Erma; primly change the subject. “Show me, with color coding.”
Claire peered at the round black splotch. Like a fly caught in a spider web. Well, at least it didn't squirm or have legs. Magnetic strands played and rippled like wheat blown by a summer's breeze. The flux tubes were blue in this coding, and they looked eerie. But they were really just ordinary magnetic fields, the sort she worked with every day. The dark sphere they held was the strangeness here. And the blue strands had snared the black fly in a firm grip.
Good luck, that. Otherwise, Sol-Watch would never have seen it. In deep space there was nothing harder to find than that ebony splotch. Which was why nobody ever had, until now.
OUR ORBIT NOW RISES ABOVE THE DENSE PLASMA LAYER. I CAN IMPROVE RESOLUTION BY GOING TO X-RAY. SHOULD I?
“Do.”
The splotch swelled. Claire squinted at the magnetic flux tubes in this ocher light. In the x-ray they looked sharp and spindly. But near the splotch the field lines blurred. Maybe they were tangled there, but more likely it was the splotch, warping the image.
“Coy, aren't we?” She close-upped the x-ray picture. Hard radiation was the best probe of the hottest structures.
The splotch. Light there was crushed, curdled, stirred with a spoon.
A fly caught in a spider's web, then grilled over a campfire. And she had to lean in, singe her hair, snap its picture. All because she wouldn't freeze a man.
She had been ambling along a corridor three hundred meters below Mercury's slag plains, gazing down on the frothy water fountains in the foyer of her apartment complex. Paying no attention to much except the clear scent of the splashing. The water was the very best, fresh from the poles, not the recycled stuff she endured on her flights. She breathed in the spray. That was when the man collared her.
“Claire Ambrase, I present formal secure-lock.”
He stuck his third knuckle into Claire's elbow port and she felt a cold, brittle thunk. Her systems froze. Before she could move, whole command linkages went dead in her inboards.
It was like having fingers amputated. Financial fingers.
In her shock she could only stare at him—mousy, the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for the job. A nobody out of nowhere, complete surprise.
He stepped back. “Sorry. Isataku Incorporated ordered me to do it fast.”
Claire resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. Maybe with more kilos than she carried, but a fair match. And it would feel good.
“I can pay them as soon as—”
“They want it now, they said.” He shrugged apologetically, his jaw set. He was used to this all the time. She vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex. There weren't more than a thousand people on Mercury, mostly like her, in mining.
“Isataku didn't have to cut off my credit.” She rubbed her elbow. Injected programs shouldn't hurt, but they always did. Something to do with the neuro-muscular intersection. “That'll make it hard to even fly the Silver Metal Lugger back.”
“Oh, they'll give you pass credit for ship's supplies. And, of course, for the ore load advance. But nothing big.”
“Nothing big enough to help me dig my way out of my debt hole.”
“'Fraid not.”
“Mighty decent.”
He let her sarcasm pass. “They want the ship Lunaside.”
“Where they'll confiscate it.”
She began walking toward her apartment. She had known it was coming but in the rush to get ore consignments lined up for delivery, she had gotten careless. Agents like this Luny usually nailed their prey at home, not in a hallway. She kept a stunner in the apartment, right beside the door, convenient.
Distract him. “I want to file a protest.”
“Take it to Isataku.” Clipped, efficient, probably had a dozen other slices of bad news to deliver today. Busy man.
“No, with your employer.”
“Mine?” That got to him. His rock-steady jaw gaped in surprise.
“For—” she sharply turned the corner to her apartment, using the time to reach for some mumbo-jumbo “—felonious interrogation of in-boards.”
“Hey, I didn't touch your—”
“I felt it. Slimy little groups—yeccch!” Might as well ham it up a little, have some fun.
He looked offended. “I'm triple bonded. I'd never do a readout on a contract customer. You can ask—”
“Can it.” She hurried toward her apartment portal and popped it by an inboard command. As she stepped through she felt him, three steps behind.
Here goes. One foot over the lip, turn to her right, snatch the stunner out of its grip mount, turn and aim—and she couldn't fire.
“Damn!” she spat out.
He blinked and backed off, hands up, palms out, as if to block the shot. “What? You'd do a knockover for a crummy ore-hauler?”
“It's my ship. Not Isataku's.”
“Lady, I got no angle here. You knock me, you get maybe a day before the heavies come after you.”
“Not if I freeze you.”
His mouth opened and started to form the f of a disbelieving freeze?—then he got angry. “Stiff me till you shipped out? I'd sue you to your eyeballs and have 'em for hock.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Claire said wearily This guy was all clichés. “But I'd be orbiting Luna by the time you got out, and with the right deal—”
“You'd maybe clear enough on the ore to pay me damages.”
“And square with Isataku.” She clipped the stunner back to the wall wearily.
“You'd never get that much.”
“OK, it was a long shot idea.”
“Lady, I was just delivering, right? Peaceable and friendly, right? And you pull—”
“Get out.” She hated it when men went from afraid to angry to insulted, all in less than a split minute.
He got. She sighed and zipped the portal closed.
Time for a drink, for sure. Because what really bothered her was not the Isataku foreclosure, but her own gutlessness.
She couldn't bring herself to pong that guy, put him away for ten mega-seconds or so. That would freeze him out of his ongoing life, slice into relationships, cut away days that could never be replaced.
Hers was an abstract sort of inhibition, but earned. Her uncle had been ponged for over a year and never did get his life back together. Claire had seen the wreckage up close, as a little girl.
Self-revelation was usually bad news. What a great time to discover that she had more principles than she needed.
And how was she goin
g to get out from under Isataku?
The arch loomed over the Sun's horizon now, a shimmering curve of blue-white, two thousand kilometers tall.
Beautiful, seen in the shimmering x-ray—snaky strands purling, twinkling with scarlet hotspots. Utterly lovely, utterly deadly. No place for an ore hauler to be.
“Time to get a divorce,” Claire said.
YOU ARE SURPRISINGLY ACCURATE. SEPARATION FROM THE SLAG SHIELD IS 338 SECONDS AWAY.
“Don't patronize me, Erma.”
I AM USING MY PERSONALITY SIMULATION PROGRAMS AS EXPERTLY AS MY COMPUTATION SPACE ALLOWS.
“Don't waste your running time; it's not convincing. Pay attention to the survey, then the separation.”
THE ALL-SPECTRUM SURVEY IS COMPLETELY AUTOMATIC, AS DESIGNED BY SOLWATCH.
“Double-check it.”
I SHALL NO DOUBT BENEFIT FROM THIS ADVICE.
Deadpan sarcasm, she supposed. Erma's tinkling voice was inside her mind, impossible to shut out. Erma herself was an interactive intelligence, partly inboard and partly shipwired. Running the Silver Metal Lugger would be impossible without her and the bots.
Skimming over the Sun's seethe might be impossible even with them, too, Claire thought, watching burnt oranges and scalded yellows flower ahead.
She turned the ship to keep it dead center in the shield's shadow. That jagged mound of slag was starting to spin. Fused knobs came marching over the nearby horizon of it.
“Where'd that spin come from?” She had started their parabolic plunge sunward with absolutely zero angular momentum in the shield.
TIDAL TORQUES ACTING ON THE ASYMMETRIC BODY OF THE SHIELD.
“I hadn't thought of that.”
The idea was to keep the heated side of the slag shield Sunward. Now that heat was coming around to radiate at her. The knobby crust she had stuck together from waste in Mercury orbit now smoldered in the infrared. The shield's far side was melting.
“Can that warm us up much?”
A SMALL PERTURBATION. WE WILL BE SAFELY GONE BEFORE IT MATTERS.
“How're the cameras?” She watched a bot tightening a mount on one of the exterior imaging arrays. She had talked the SolWatch Institute out of those instruments, part of her commission. If a bot broke one, it came straight out of profits.
ALL ARE CALIBRATED AND ZONED. WE SHALL HAVE ONLY 33.8 SECONDS OF VIEWING TIME OVER THE TARGET. CROSSING THE ENTIRE LOOP WILL TAKE 4.7 SECONDS.
“Hope the scientists like what they'll see.”
I CALCULATE THAT THE PROBABILITY OF SUCCESS, TIMES THE EXPECTED PROFIT, EXCEEDS SIXTY-TWO MILLION DOLLARS.
“I negotiated a seventy-five million commission for this run.” So Erma thought her chances of nailing the worm were—
EIGHTY-THREE PERCENT CHANCE OF SUCCESSFUL RESOLUTION IN ALL IMPORTANT FREQUENCY BANDS.
She should give up calculating in her head; Erma was always faster. “Just be ready to shed the shield. Then I pour on the positrons. Up and out. It's getting warm in here.”
I DETECT NO CHANGE IN YOUR AMBIENT 22.3 CENTIGRADE.
Claire watched a blister the size of Europe rise among wispy plumes of white-hot incandescence. Constant boiling fury. “So maybe my imagination's working too hard. Just let's grab the data and run, OK?”
The scientific officer of SolWatch had been suspicious, though he did hide it fairly well.
She couldn't read the expression on his long face, all planes and trimmed bone, skin stretched tight as a drum-head. That had been the style among the asteroid pioneers half a century back. Tubular body suited to narrow corridors, double-jointed in several interesting places, big hands. He had a certain beanpole grace as he wrapped legs around a stool and regarded her, head cocked, smiling enough not to be rude. Exactly enough, no more.
“You will do the preliminary survey?”
“For a price.”
A disdainful sniff. “No doubt. We have a specially designed vessel nearly ready for departure from Lunar orbit. I'm afraid—”
“I can do it now.”
“You no doubt know that we are behind schedule in our reconnaissance—”
“Everybody on Mercury knows. You lost the first probe.”
The beanpole threaded his thick, long fingers, taking great interest in how they fit together. Maybe he was uncomfortable dealing with a woman, she thought. Maybe he didn't even like women.
Still, she found his stringy look oddly unsettling, a blend of delicacy with a masculine, muscular effect. Since he was studying his fingers, she might as well look, too. Idly she speculated on whether the long proportions applied to all his extremities. Old wives' tale. It might be interesting to find out. But, yes, business first.
“The autopilot approached it too close, apparently,” he conceded. “There is something unexpected about its refractive properties, making navigation difficult. We are unsure precisely what the difficulty was.”
He was vexed by the failure and trying not to show it, she guessed. People got that way when they had to dance on strings pulled all the way from Earthside. You got to like the salary more than you liked yourself.
“I have plenty of bulk,” she said mildly. “I can shelter the diagnostic instruments, keep them cool.”
“I doubt your ore carrier has the right specifications.”
“How tricky can it be? I swoop in, your gear runs its survey snaps, I boost out.”
He sniffed. “Your craft is not rated for Sun skimming. Only research craft have ever—”
“I'm coated with Fresnel.” A pricey plating that bounced photons of all races, creeds, and colors.
“That's not enough.”
“I'll use a slag shield. More, I've got plenty of muscle. Flying with empty holds, I can get away pronto.”
“Ours was very carefully designed—”
“Right, and you lost it.”
He studied his fingers again. Strong, wiry, yet thick. Maybe he was in love with them. She allowed herself to fill the silence by imagining some interesting things he could do with them. She had learned that with many negotiations, silence did most of the work. “We…are behind in our mandated exploration.”
Ah, a concession. “They always have to hand-tune everything, Lunaside.”
He nodded vigorously. “I've waited months. And the worm could fall back into the Sun any moment! I keep telling them—”
She had triggered his complaint circuit, somehow. He went on for a full minute about the bullheaded know-nothings who did nothing but screen-work, no real hands-on experience. She was sympathetic, and enjoyed watching his own hands clench, muscles standing out on the backs of them. Business first, she had to remind herself.
“You think it might just, well, go away?”
“The worm?” He blinked, coming out of his litany of grievances. “It's a wonder we ever found it. It could fall back into the Sun at any moment.”
“Then speed is everything. You, uh, have control of your local budget?”
“Well, yes.” He smiled.
“I'm talking about petty cash here, really. A hundred mil.”
A quick, deep frown. “That's not petty.”
“OK, say seventy-five. But cash, right?”
The great magnetic arch towered above the long, slow curve of the Sun. A bowlegged giant, minus the trunk.
Claire had shaped their orbit to bring them swooping in a few klicks above the uppermost strand of it. Red flowered within the arch: hydrogen plasma, heated by the currents which made the magnetic fields. A pressure cooker thousands of klicks long.
It had stood here for months and might last years. Or blow open in the next minutes. Predicting when arches would belch out solar flares was big scientific business, the most closely watched weather report in the Solar System. A flare could crisp suited workers in the asteroid belt. SolWatch watched them all. That's how they found the worm.
The flux tubes swelled. “Got an image yet?”
I SHOULD HAVE, BUT THERE IS EXCESS LIGHT FROM THE SITE.
“Big s
urprise. There's nothing but excess here.”
THE SATELLITE SURVEY REPORTED THAT THE TARGET IS SEVERAL HUNDRED METERS IN SIZE. YET I CANNOT FIND IT.
“Damn!” Claire studied the flux tubes, following some from the peak of the arch, winding down to the thickening at its feet, anchored in the Sun's seethe. Had the worm fallen back in? It could slide down those magnetic strands, thunk into the thick, cooler plasma sea. Then it would fall all the way to the core of the star, eating as it went. That was the real reason Lunaside was hustling to “study” the worm. Fear.
“Where is it?”
STILL NO TARGET. THE REGION AT THE TOP OF THE ARCH IS EMITTING TOO MUCH LIGHT. NO THEORY ACCOUNTS FOR THIS—
“Chop the theory!”
TIME TO MISSION ONSET: 12.6 SECONDS.
The arch rushed at them, swelling. She saw delicate filaments winking on and off as currents traced their find equilibria, always seeking to balance the hot plasma within against the magnetic walls. Squeeze the magnet fist, the plasma answers with a dazzling glow. Squeeze, glow. Squeeze, glow. That nature could make such an intricate marvel and send it arcing above the Sun's savagery was a miracle, but one she was not in the mood to appreciate right now.
Sweat trickled around her eyes, dripped off her chin. No trick of lowering the lighting was going to make her forget the heat now. She made herself breathe in and out.
Their slag shield caught the worst of the blaze. At this lowest altitude in the parabolic orbit, though, the Sun's huge horizon rimmed white-hot in all directions.
OUR INTERNAL TEMPERATURE IS RISING.
“No joke. Find that worm!”
THE EXCESS LIGHT PERSISTS—NO, WAIT. IT IS GONE. NOW I CAN SEE THE TARGET.
Claire slapped the arm of her couch and let out a whoop. On the wall screen loomed the very peak of the arch. They were gliding toward it, skating over the very upper edge—and there it was.
A dark ball. Or a worm at the bottom of a gravity well. Not like a fly, no. It settled in among the strands like a black egg nestled in blue-white straw. The ebony Easter egg that would save her ass and her ship from Isataku.
SURVEY BEGUN. FULL SPECTRUM RESPONSE.
“Bravo.”
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