21st Century Science Fiction

by D B Hartwell

  While I was doing that, I was also getting ready for launch. My mobiles crawled all over me doing a visual check while a subprogram ran down the full diagnostic list. I linked up with Ilia Control to book a launch window, and ordered three tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen fuel. Prepping myself for takeoff is always a welcome relief from business matters. It’s all technical. Stuff I can control. Orbital mechanics never have a hidden agenda.

  • • • •

  Edward returned four hours later. His tourist remote led the way, followed by a hired cargo lifter carrying the xenon, the mysterious container, and my power unit. The lifter was a clumsy fellow called Gojira, and while he was abusing my payload deck I contacted him over a private link. “Where’d this stuff come from?”

  “Warehouse.”

  “Which warehouse? And watch your wheels—you’re about to hit my leg again.”

  “Back in the district. Block four, number six. Why?”

  Temporary rental space. “Just curious. What’s he paying you for this?”

  “Couple of spare motors.”

  “You’re a thief, you are.”

  “I see what he’s giving you. Who’s the thief?”

  “Just set the power unit on the ground. I’m selling it here.”

  Gojira trundled away and Edward crawled aboard. I took a good look at the cargo container he was so concerned about. It was 800 kilograms, a sealed oblong box two meters long. One end had a radiator, and my radiation detector picked up a small power unit inside. So whatever Edward was shipping, it needed its own power supply. The whole thing was quite warm—300 Kelvin or so.

  I had one of my remotes query the container directly, but its little chips had nothing to say beyond mass and handling information. Don’t drop, don’t shake, total rads no more than point five Sievert. No tracking data at all.

  I balanced the cargo around my thrust axis, then jumped my viewpoint into two of my mobiles and hauled the power unit over to Albert’s scrapyard.

  While one of me was haggling with Albert over how much credit he was willing to give me for the unit, the second mobile plugged into Albert’s cable jack for a completely private conversation.

  “What’s up?” he asked. “Why the hard link?”

  “I’ve got a funny client and I don’t know who might be listening. He’s giving me this power unit and some Three to haul some stuff to Mimas. It’s all kind of random junk, including a tank of xenon. He’s insisting on no other payload and complete confidentiality.”

  “So he’s got no business sense.”

  “He’s got no infotrail. None. It’s just funny.”

  “Remind me never to ask you to keep a secret. Since you’re selling me the generator I guess you’re taking the job anyway, so what’s the fuss?”

  “I want you to ask around. You talk to everyone anyway so it won’t attract attention. See if anyone knows anything about a bot named Edward, or whoever’s been renting storage unit six in block four. Maybe try to trace the power unit. And try to find out if there have been any hijackings that didn’t get reported.”

  “You really think someone wants to hijack you? Do the math, Annie! You’re not worth it.”

  “Not by myself. But I’ve been thinking: I’d make a pretty good pirate vehicle—I’m not Company-owned, so nobody would look very hard if I disappear.”

  “You need to run up more debts. People care about you if you owe them money.”

  “Think about it. He could wait till I’m on course for Mimas, then link up and take control, swing around Saturn in a tight parabola and come out on an intercept vector for the Mimas catapult. All that extra xenon would give me enough delta-V to catch a payload coming off the launcher, and redirect it just about anywhere.”

  “I know plenty of places where people aren’t picky about where their volatiles come from. Some of them even have human protection. But it still sounds crazy to me.”

  “His cargo is pretty weird. Take a look.” I shot Albert a memory of the cargo container.

  “Biomaterials,” he said. “The temperature’s a dead giveaway.”

  “So what is it?”

  “I have no idea. Some kind of living organisms. I don’t deal in that stuff much.”

  “Would you mind asking around? Tell me what you can find out in the next twenty hours or so?”

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “Thanks. I’m not even going to complain about the miserable price you’re giving me on the generator.”

  • • • •

  Three hours before launch one of Fat Albert’s little mobiles appeared at my feet, complaining about some contaminated fullerene I’d sold him. I sent down one of mine to have a talk via cable. Not the sort of conversation you want to let other people overhear.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “I did as much digging as I could. Both Officer Friendly and Ilia Control swear there haven’t been any verified hijackings since that Remora character tried to subsume Buzz Parsec and wound up hard-landing on Iapetus.”

  “That’s reassuring. What about my passenger?”

  “Nothing. Like you said, he doesn’t exist before yesterday. He rented that warehouse unit and hired one of Tetsunekko’s remotes to do the moving. Blanked the remote’s memory before returning it.”

  “Let me guess. He paid for everything in barter.”

  “You got it. Titanium bearings for the warehouse and a slightly used drive anode for the moving job.”

  “So whoever he is, he’s got a good supply of high-quality parts to throw away. What about the power unit?”

  “That’s the weird one. If I wasn’t an installed unit with ten times the processing power of some weight-stingy freelance booster, I couldn’t have found anything at all.”

  “Okay, you’re the third-smartest machine on Dione. What did you find?”

  “No merchandise trail on the power unit and its chips don’t know anything. But it has a serial number physically inscribed on the casing—not the same one as in its chips, either. It’s a very interesting number. According to my parts database, that whole series were purpose-built on Earth for the extractor aerostats.”

  “Could it be a spare? Production overrun or a bum unit that got sold off?”

  “Nope. It’s supposed to be part of Saturn Aerostat Six. Now unless you want to spend the credits for antenna time to talk to an aerostat, that’s all I can find out.”

  “Is Aerostat Six okay? Did she maybe have an accident or something and need to replace a generator?”

  “There’s certainly nothing about it in the feed. An extractor going offline would be news all over the system. The price of Three would start fluctuating. There would be ripple effects in every market. I’d notice.”

  He might as well have been transmitting static. I don’t understand things like markets and futures. A gram of helium is a gram of helium. How can its value change from hour to hour? Understanding stuff like that is why Fat Albert can pay his owners seven point four percent of their investment every year while I can only manage six.

  • • • •

  I launched right on schedule and the ascent to orbit was perfectly nominal. I ran my motors at a nice, lifetime-stretching ninety percent. The surface of Dione dropped away and I watched Ilia Field change from a bustling neighborhood to a tiny gray trapezoid against the fainter gray of the surface.

  The orbit burn took about five and a half minutes. I powered down the hydrogen motor, ran a quick check to make sure nothing had burned out or popped loose, then switched over to my ion thrusters. That was a lot less exciting to look at—just two faint streams of glowing xenon, barely visible with my cameras cranked to maximum contrast.

  Hybrid boosters like me are a stopgap technology; I know that. Eventually every moon of Saturn will have its own catapult and orbital terminal, and cargo will move between moons aboard ion tugs that don’t have to drag ascent motors around with them wherever they go. I’d already made up my mind that when that day arrived I wasn’t going
to stick around. There’s already some installations on Miranda and Oberon out at Uranus; an experienced booster like me can find work there for years.

  Nineteen seconds into the ion motor burn Edward linked up. He was talking to my little quasi-autonomous persona while I listened in and watched the program activity for anything weird.

  “Annie? I would like to request a change in our flight plan.”

  “Too late for that. I figured all the fuel loads before we launched. You’re riding Newton’s railroad now.”

  “Forgive me, but I believe it would be possible to choose a different destination at this point—as long as you have adequate propellant for your ion motors, and the target’s surface gravity is no greater than that of Mimas. Am I correct?”

  “Well, in theory, yes.”

  “I offer you the use of my cargo, then. A ton of additional xenon fuel should permit you to rendezvous with nearly any object in the Saturn system. Given how much I have overpaid you for the voyage to Mimas you can scarcely complain about the extra space time.”

  “It’s not that simple. Things move around. Having enough propellant doesn’t mean I have a window.”

  “I need to pass close to Saturn itself.”

  “Saturn?! You’re broken. Even if I use all the extra xenon you brought I still can’t get below the B ring and have enough juice left to climb back up. Anyway, why do you need to swing so low?”

  “If you can make a rendezvous with something in the B ring, I can pay you fifty grams of helium-3.”

  “You’re lying. You don’t have any credits, or shares, or anything. I checked up on you before lifting.”

  “I don’t mean credits. I mean actual helium, to be delivered when we make rendezvous.”

  My subpersona pretended to think while I considered the offer. Fifty grams! I’d have to sell it at a markdown just to keep people from asking where it came from. Still, that would just about cover my next overhaul, with no interruption in the profit flow. I’d make seven percent or more this year!

  I updated my subpersona.

  “How do I know this is true?” it asked Edward.

  “You must trust me,” he said.

  “Too bad, then. Because I don’t trust you.”

  He thought for nearly a second before answering. “Very well. I will trust you. If you let me send out a message I can arrange for an equivalent helium credit to be handed over to anyone you designate on Dione.”

  I still didn’t believe him, but I ran down my list of contacts on Dione, trying to figure out who I could trust. Officer Friendly was honest—but that meant he’d also want to know where those grams came from and I doubted he’d like the answer. Polyphemus wasn’t so picky, but he’d want a cut of the helium. A big cut; likely more than half.

  That left Fat Albert. He’d probably settle for a five-gram commission and wouldn’t broadcast the deal. The only real question was whether he’d just take the fifty grams and tell me to go hard-land someplace. He’s rich, but not so much that he wouldn’t be tempted. And he’s got the connections to fence it without any data trail.

  I’d have to risk it. Albert’s whole operation relied on non-quantifiable asset exchange. If he tried to jerk me around I could tell everyone, and it would cost him more than fifty grams’ worth of business in the future.

  I called down to the antenna farm at Ilia Field. “Albert? I’ve got a deal for you.”

  “Whatever it is, forget it.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You. You’re hot. The Dione datasphere is crawling with agents looking for you. This conversation is drawing way too much attention to me.”

  “Five grams if you handle some helium for me!”

  He paused and the signal suddenly got a lot stronger and clearer. “Let me send up a persona to talk it over.”

  The bitstream started before I could even say yes. A huge pulse of information. The whole Ilia antenna farm must have been pushing watts at me.

  My little communicating persona was overwhelmed right away, but my main intelligence cut off the antenna feed and swung the dish away from Dione just for good measure. The corrupted sub-persona started probing all the memory space and peripherals available to her, looking for a way into my primary mind, so I just locked her up and overwrote her.

  Then I linked with Edward again. “Deal’s off. Whoever you’re running from has taken over just about everything on Dione for now. If you left any helium behind it’s gone. So I think you’d better tell me exactly what’s going on before I jettison you and your payload.”

  “This cargo has to get to Saturn Aerostat Six.”

  “You still haven’t told me why, or even what it is. I’ve got what looks like a human back on Dione trying to get into my mind. Right now I’m flying deaf but eventually it’s going to find a way to identify itself and I’ll have to listen when it tells me to bring you back.”

  “A human life is at stake. My cargo container is a life-support unit. There’s a human inside.”

  “That’s impossible! Humans mass fifty or a hundred kilos. You can’t have more than thirty kilograms of bio in there, what with all the support systems.”

  “See for yourself,” said Edward. He ran a jack line from the cargo container to one of my open ports. The box’s brain was one of those idiot supergeniuses that do one thing amazingly well but are helpless otherwise. It was smart enough to do medicine on a human, but even I could crack its security without much trouble. I looked at its realtime monitors: Edward was telling the truth. There was a small human in there, only eighteen kilos. A bunch of tubes connected it to tanks of glucose, oxidizer, and control chemicals. The box brain was keeping it unconscious but healthy.

  “It’s a partly grown one,” said Edward. “Not a legal adult yet, and only the basic interface systems. There’s another human trying to destroy it.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was ordered by a human to keep this young one safe from the one on Dione. Then the first human got destroyed with no backups.”

  “So who does this young human belong to?”

  “It’s complicated. The dead one and the one on Dione had a partnership agreement and shared ownership. But the one on Dione decided to get out of the deal by destroying this one and the other adult.”

  I tried to get the conversation back to subjects I could understand. “If the human back there is the legal owner how can I keep this one? That would be stealing.”

  “Yes, but there’s the whole life-preservation issue. If it was a human in a suit floating in space you’d have to take it someplace with life support, right? Well, this is the same situation: that other human’s making the whole Saturn system one big life hazard for this one.”

  “But Aerostat Six is safe? Is she even man-rated?”

  “She’s the safest place this side of Mars for your passenger.”

  My passenger. I’m not even man-rated, and now I had a passenger to keep alive. And the worst thing about it was that Edward was right. Even though he’d gotten it aboard by lies and trickery, the human in the cargo container was my responsibility once I lit my motors.

  So: who to believe? Edward, who was almost certainly still lying, or the human back on Dione?

  Edward might be a liar, but he hadn’t turned one of my friends into a puppet. That human had a lot of negatives in the non-quantifiable department.

  “Okay. What’s my rendezvous orbit?”

  “Just get as low as you can. Six will send up a shuttle.”

  “What’s to keep this human from overriding Six?”

  “Aerostats are a lot smarter than you or me, with plenty of safeguards. And Six has some after-market modifications.”

  I kept chugging away on ion, adjusting my path so I’d hit perikron in the B ring with orbital velocity. I didn’t need Edward’s extra fuel for that—the spare xenon was to get me back out of Saturn’s well again.

  About an hour into the voyage I spotted a launch flare back on Dione. I could tell who i
t was from the color—Ramblin’ Bob. Bob was a hybrid like me, also incentivized, although she tended to sign on for long-term contracts instead of picking up odd jobs. We probably worked as much, but her jobs—and her downtime—came in bigger blocks of time.

  Bob was running her engines at 135 percent, and she passed the orbit insertion cutoff without throttling down. Her trajectory was an intercept. Only when she’d drained her hydrogen tanks did she switch to ion.

  That was utterly crazy. How was Bob going to land again with no hydro? Maybe she didn’t care. Maybe she’d been ordered not to care.

  I had one of my mobiles unplug the cable on my high-gain antenna. No human was going to order me on a suicide mission if I could help it.

  • • • •

  Bob caught up with me about a thousand kilometers into the B ring. I watched her close in. Her relative velocity was huge and I had the fleeting worry that she might be trying to ram me. But then she began an ion burn to match velocities.

  When she got close she started beaming all kinds of stuff at me, but by then all my radio systems were shut off and disconnected. I had Edward and my mobiles connected by cables, and made sure all of their wireless links were turned off as well.

  I let Ramblin’ Bob get about a kilometer away and then started flashing my running lights at her in very slow code. “Radio out. What’s up?”

  “Pass over cargo.”

  “Can’t.”

  “Human command.”

  “Can’t. Cargo human. You can’t land. Unsafe.”

  She was quiet for a while, with her high-gain aimed back at Dione, presumably getting new orders.

  Bob’s boss had made a tactical error by having her match up with me. If she tried to ram me now, she wouldn’t be able to get up enough speed to do much harm.

  She started working her way closer using short bursts from her steering thrusters. I let her approach, saving my juice for up-close evasion.

  We were just entering Saturn’s shadow when Bob took station a hundred meters away and signaled. “I can pay you. Anything you want for that cargo.”