Curse of the Iris

by Jason Fry

  “I see,” Diocletia said. “We’ll take the other device now—the one that my grandfather left in your safekeeping.”

  “I—I’ll need his key card for that,” Hohenfauer said.

  “We don’t have it. But surely you aren’t questioning my identity or my rights under the Collective agreement?”

  “No, but regulations—”

  “Very well,” Diocletia said. “We’ll discuss it with Alfonso. Unlike his subordinates, he is capable of showing a little imagination.”

  “Just a moment, Captain Hashoone—let me see what I can do,” Hohenfauer babbled, typing frantically. A moment later he extracted a blank key card from within his uniform, yanked his white gloves back on, and pressed the card into the slot below Johannes Hashoone’s name. The light beside the slot turned green. The teller removed the strange device and handed it to Diocletia, who studied it for a moment, brow furrowed.

  “Are there instructions?” she asked.

  “No . . . there’s nothing,” Hohenfauer said, waving for his colleagues to come and take the box away. “But as per the Collective agreement, you are entitled to review the association’s articles of incorporation. I can print them out or send them to your mediapad. Or both, of course.”

  “Mediapad will do,” Diocletia said. “Now that your records have been magically repaired, what else is in them?”

  Hohenfauer scanned his terminal’s screen. A bead of sweat ran down his forehead.

  “There’s a conditional transmission. When a slot is activated, a prearranged message is sent to all other members of the Collective, using receiver codes specified at the time of the agreement.”

  “There’s no need to send the transmission,” Diocletia said. “We’ll see to it that the others are informed.”

  “I can’t stop it,” Hohenfauer said. “I really can’t. It’s automatic—set up decades ago!”

  Diocletia scowled.

  “What does the message say?”

  “I don’t know that either. But there’s something else—it says ‘The quantum signal will now activate for the next twenty-one days.’”

  Tycho looked at his father, who shrugged.

  “Right, the quantum signal,” Diocletia said. “Now, is there anything else in there I need to know?”

  “I—I don’t know what that means,” Hohenfauer stammered.

  Diocletia handed the strange device to Mavry, then took a step toward Hohenfauer, her lips pressed together in a thin line. The teller took an involuntary step back and bumped into his computer console.

  “It means, Mr. Hohenfauer, that you don’t want me to come back here because there was something else in those records that you didn’t tell me. Because that would be bad customer service. And bad customer service makes me angry.”

  “Th-there’s nothing like that,” Hohenfauer said.

  “Good,” Diocletia said. “Now let’s go see Alfonso.”

  “But why? Captain Hashoone, please! I’ve done everything you asked!”

  “What choice do I have? When Alfonso learns his old friend Huff Hashoone has been jailed at the Bank of Ceres’s request, he’ll of course want to know what happened. I’m afraid he’ll be very upset.”

  “The earlier incident? Why, anyone can see that was a misunderstanding. I’ll contact the authorities and have him released right away.”

  Diocletia considered that for a moment, then nodded. “In that case, I suppose I could visit Alfonso another day, when I’m not so tired from court. And now, Mr. Hohenfauer, our business really does appear to be concluded.”

  The teller babbled pleasantries as he escorted them back to the vestibule, then bade them a good day with undisguised relief.

  “You never told me you spent your childhood hanging around with bank chairmen,” Mavry said as they pushed their way through the crowded corridors.

  “Please. I looked up the chairman’s name on my mediapad while we were waiting in line. Though Ulrika Hashoone really was a founding director—the Bank of Ceres was started to give us pirates a safe place to stash our loot.”

  “So you’ve never met Alfonso Armi-What’s-His-Name?” Mavry said.

  “Of course not,” Diocletia said. “Hang around with bankers? Honestly, Mavry. As the daughter of a respectable pirate, I was raised better than that.”

  8

  THE MYSTERIOUS MESSAGE

  The Shadow Comet wasn’t scheduled to depart Ceres until late the following day, when the minor planet came into ideal alignment for traveling to Jupiter without burning excess fuel. Despite Tycho’s and Yana’s frantic warnings that they only had three weeks to figure out how to find the mysterious signal that had been activated, Diocletia insisted that they weren’t going anywhere until then.

  The extra time, she said as the gig rose from the landing field, would allow Huff and Mavry to ensure the Comet was fully repaired and to make another sweep for tracking devices. The children, meanwhile, could use the hours to do something more useful than arguing with her: Yana would study the scanner, while Tycho and Carlo investigated the pirates who had made up the Collective.

  Aboard the Comet, Diocletia clambered up the ladderwell for a rest, leaving Yana poking and prodding at the scanner while Tycho and Carlo offered suggestions.

  “This is one weird machine,” Yana said. “It’s only sensitive over a very narrow range of frequencies. It would be pretty much useless for detecting anything outside of that.”

  “That sounds like it was made to detect a specific signal,” Carlo said.

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Yana said.

  “Hohenfauer called it a quantum signal,” Tycho said. “What’s that?”

  “It works based on quantum physics, which Vesuvia hasn’t made you guys study yet,” Carlo said. “Basically, you have a pair of signals, and when one activates, so does the other—no matter how far apart they are. Engineers have never been able to use it for a message more sophisticated than yes-no, but it works.”

  “And any kind of signal can be a quantum signal?” Yana asked.

  “I don’t see why not,” Carlo said.

  “Interesting,” Yana said. “Because look at the bell on this thing. It’s clearly made to detect sound. But you could make an acoustic scanner by just wiring together a few parts, and this baby was built like an attack cruiser. I’m not kidding—you could use this housing for hull armor.”

  “Or the other way around,” Tycho said. “It did belong to pirates, after all.”

  “Well, Yana, you’ve got a couple of hours to play with it before we give Mom an update,” Carlo said. “Tyke, I told Dad I’d run diagnostics on our propulsion systems, but after that we’ll try to figure out the workings of the Collective.”

  Tycho nodded, then turned at a beep from his console.

  “You guys get a message?” he asked, strolling over for a look. Their father probably wanted them to look at something in the Comet’s fire room. Or perhaps their aunt Carina had sent something to all of them—they’d already been warned that family meetings awaited them at home on Callisto.

  “Not me,” Yana said, settling into her chair with the scanner in her lap.

  “Me neither,” Carlo said, calling up the diagnostics for the Comet’s steering and rudders.

  “Looks like you’re the lucky one,” Yana said. “Let us know what you did wrong.”

  Tycho tapped the message indicator on his screen. The sender’s recognition code was a scramble of nonsense letters and numbers. But the words were clear enough.

  TYCHO HASHOONE, I’VE GOT SOME PROFITABLE INFORMATION FOR YOU. INTERESTED?

  “Good news—somebody’s gonna tell me I won the Martian lottery,” he scoffed. “Amazing, since I never bought a ticket.”

  “What was that?” Yana asked distractedly.

  “Nothing,” Tycho said. “Just a junk message.”

  He went to delete it, but before he did, his console beeped again.

  YOU DID US A GOOD TURN CRACKING THE THREECE SUUD CASE. SOME HER
E WANT TO REWARD YOU FOR THE EFFORT.

  “Very funny, Yana,” Tycho said.

  “What’s funny?” Yana asked, looking up from the scanner.

  “Okay, fine. Carlo, cut it out,” Tycho said.

  “Cut what out?” Carlo asked. “I’m a little busy for jokes, Tyke.”

  Tycho silenced his console’s message indicator.

  Who is this? he typed. He looked at the message for a moment, trying to figure out which of his siblings would be laughing at him in a minute, then sent it.

  The reply came back almost immediately.

  IT DOESN’T WORK THAT WAY. I’M SOMEONE YOU WANT TO KNOW, AND I CAN HELP YOU. LET’S LEAVE IT AT THAT.

  Tycho pulled up the origin code for the message and saw it had been run through one of the public broadcast servers on Ceres, hiding its origin. A message sent from within the ship would have moved over an internal channel. Still, there were ways around that. And both Carlo and Yana had the technical know-how to pull off such a prank.

  Help me with what? he typed.

  One second turned into five, then ten.

  BECOMING CAPTAIN, OF COURSE. ISN’T THAT WHAT YOU WANT?

  Tycho sighed.

  NOT FUNNY, YANA. OR IS THIS CARLO? NEVER MIND—I DON’T REALLY CARE WHICH.

  This time the response came back almost instantly.

  GOOD FOR YOU FOR BEING SUSPICIOUS. I’LL PROVE MYSELF. AS PRIVATEERS OPERATING UNDER A LETTER OF MARQUE, YOUR FAMILY GETS THE SECURITAT’S DAILY INTEL BRIEFING, CORRECT?

  Yes, he messaged back.

  In truth, Tycho rarely bothered to scan the document when it arrived each morning. The briefing didn’t contain truly sensitive information—that was reserved for the highest ranks of the Jovian military. Occasionally there was a roundup of pirate activity, but mostly it was boring political stuff that only adults cared about.

  READ IT TOMORROW. I’LL WAIT TO HEAR FROM YOU.

  Tycho looked at the message for a moment. Suddenly the faintly glowing letters on the screen seemed filled with menace.

  What am I looking for? he typed.

  IF YOU CAN’T FIGURE THAT OUT, WE HAVE NOTHING TO TALK ABOUT.

  On any other night, Tycho would have savored dinner, which included hydroponic vegetables and actual lab-grown beef, both welcome changes from the usual shipboard burgoos. As they served themselves in the familiar confines of the cuddy, the Hashoones were more cheerful than they’d been for weeks, with Huff even managing to guffaw about his brief time back in the Ceres jail. But Tycho’s smile felt pained and fake—his curiosity about the mysterious message had curdled into anxiety.

  The others ate heartily enough to make up for his lack of enthusiasm. When the ruins of a flummery had been cleared away and the cook had gone back down the aft ladderwell to belowdecks, Diocletia poured herself a mug of flip and cleared her throat.

  “Now then,” she said, “let’s hear what you’ve found out about our scanner and the Collective.”

  “Blasted unlucky affair from bow to stern,” growled Huff. “Best to leave the whole mess wherever it lies. That’s what Father believed, leastways.”

  “And maybe that’s what I’ll decide too, Dad,” Diocletia said. “But first I’d like a better idea of what we’re dealing with. Yana, go ahead.”

  Yana had brought the scanner up from the quarterdeck and now placed it on the table.

  “This device was built to detect sound waves in water,” she said. “It contains an acoustical receiver and a decryption module that will only pick up a very specific signal. And look here: whoever built this used high-quality gaskets and heat-sealed the seams. It’s waterproof, and built to withstand high pressure.”

  “You say waterproof, but do you really mean liquid-proof?” Carlo asked.

  “As in, made to detect a signal in a lake of methane? That was my first thought too. But no, it was made for water. In one of Titan’s lakes, an acoustic signal would fade so quickly that you’d have to get really close to the signal.”

  “How close?” Carlo asked.

  “Reach-out-and-poke-it-with-the-other-end close,” Yana said.

  Mavry laughed. “And how close would you have to be in water?”

  “Ten or fifteen kilometers, maybe.”

  “Why does it have a decryption module?” Tycho asked. “If everyone can still hear the signal, what’s the point of encrypting it?”

  “Probably to make sure you’re hearing the right signal,” Yana said. “Which implies that you’d be hearing other noise while you were searching.”

  “Interesting,” Diocletia said. “Unfortunately, an underwater signal doesn’t limit the possibilities much.”

  “That’s true,” Yana said. “Subsurface oceans are pretty common in the solar system—the early settlers picked moons that had them. There’s Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in the Jupiter system, plus Titan and Enceladus in the Saturn system, Titania and Oberon at Uranus, and Neptune’s moon Triton.”

  “Don’t forget the Martian aquifers,” Huff interjected. “Hopin’ I go to my reward never seein’ that horrible rust ball again.”

  “And then there’s Earth,” Mavry said.

  His children looked at him quizzically.

  “What? I’ve heard Earth has rather extensive oceans.”

  “Why would a band of Jupiter pirates hide a stolen treasure on Earth?” Carlo asked.

  “The mind of a pirate is a curious place,” Mavry said, perhaps a bit defensively.

  “All right, Yana. Good work,” Diocletia said. “Now let’s hear what Carlo and Tycho have found out about the Collective.”

  Carlo and Tycho dug out their mediapads.

  “So the Iris raid happened in 2809, and the Collective was created a year later,” Carlo said. “We started by comparing its articles of incorporation to documents drawn up by other pirates over the years. They’re similar—lots of pirates stashed stolen goods until the heat from the authorities died down, and they made agreements to make sure nobody cheated and grabbed the loot for themselves.”

  Huff chuckled.

  “I ever tell you ’bout the fortune Madame Chang and her Crimson Raiders stashed in a surplus science balloon? Set it adrift in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere with a tracker on it. Which worked great till an electrical storm fried the tracker. Somehows they found the thing in all that soup, ’cept it was caught in the outer bands of a cyclone, an’ so—”

  Diocletia reached over and put her hand on her father’s arm. Huff glanced at her, then scratched at his beard with his forearm cannon.

  “Arrr, ain’t got time to tell that yarn proper. You kids’ll have to wait. Go ahead, Carlo.”

  “The bylaws of the Collective allowed members to transfer or sell their shares, but none of them ever did—they passed them down to their heirs instead,” Carlo said. “Which means we can get our hands on them.”

  “Why not skip all this paperwork and just take the treasure?” Yana asked. “Isn’t the old saying that possession is a hundred percent of the law?”

  “Now that’s proper pirate thinkin’,” Huff rumbled.

  “Thanks, Grandpa,” Yana said.

  “If there’s a treasure left to take,” Diocletia said.

  “You think it’s gone?” Tycho asked.

  “I do,” Diocletia said, then held up her hand as Yana began to protest. “But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Go ahead, Carlo.”

  “If the treasure’s still out there, and we find it, there are reasons we can’t just grab it,” Carlo said. “For one thing, the articles of incorporation are still legally binding: any legal heirs to the Collective could sue us for their shares and expect to win. On the other hand, as far as we know, there have been no real leads on the Iris cache for decades. That means the people who own those shares may have forgotten about them, or see them as worthless paper. We might be able to get them cheap.”

  “Except that a message went out to the Collective members when the case was opened,” Diocletia reminded him.

  “A me
ssage sent over channels set up eighty-five years ago,” Tycho said. “Carlo and I were curious, so we messaged Aunt Carina to ask whether she received it at Darklands. She didn’t get anything on any channel she could think of.”

  “The pirates who formed the Collective must all be dead by now,” Yana said. “So who has their rights under the agreement?”

  “That’s what we looked into,” Carlo said. “We only had one afternoon, so we couldn’t dive too deeply into the records, but we found them all. They’re a mix of children and grandchildren. Some are still starship captains, some aren’t. Johannes we know about, of course. After that—”

  “Let’s see if we can make this simpler,” Diocletia said, arms folded. “Start with the members whose scanners were missing from the case—Moxley, Saxton, and Unger.”

  “Very well, Mother,” Carlo said, tapping at his mediapad. “Orville Moxley was born on Io and became the captain of the Emin Pasha, which he passed down to his nephew Thaddeus. But then it gets weird. The ship registration lapses in the 2840s.”

  “Under that name, sure,” Mavry said with a smile. “She was reregistered, probably on Cybele, where they’re more casual about legal matters. By then her captain had renamed himself and wanted to rename his ship, too. So he called her the Hydra.”

  Tycho gasped. “Thaddeus Moxley is Thoadbone Mox?”

  “One an’ the same,” Huff said. “Bad idea to call him Thaddeus, though. There’s a long list of folks he’s shot for that.”

  “So Thoadbone has a way to find the Iris cache?” Tycho asked.

  Yana grinned, her eyes bright. “This is good news.”

  “How is that possibly good news?” Tycho asked. His sister’s delight in dangerous situations never failed to surprise him—the last thing he wanted was to cross paths again with Mox.

  Yana rolled her eyes.

  “Because even if he got the message, we don’t have to worry about giving him his share,” she said. “What’s he going to do, take us to court? He’s wanted everywhere in the solar system.”

  “Never mind that for now,” Diocletia said. “Moxley’s scanner is gone. How do we know Orville or Thoadbone didn’t use it to find the treasure decades ago?”