Then there’s a noise so loud I don’t hear it—I feel it in my bones— and the room flips sideways and lands with a jolt, throwing me onto the one-way window, which is now starred and cracked. A faint light comes from the far end, where the hatch was. “Come out with your hands visible!” a harsh voice booms through my electrosense, painfully loud.
“Help!” I shout. I try to stand up, but there’s something on top of me. Pete groans, then rolls off my legs. I stand up.
“Come out with your hands visible!” I’ve heard that voice before, growling over the parasite feed on board the Pygmalion. Which means Reginald got through, of course, and identifies these raiders as friendly—if I can survive long enough to identify myself to them.
I stumble toward the dim light. “I’m coming!” I say.
“Juliette, don’t—” It’s Pete, behind me.
I keep going. I have to duck to get through the hatch, then I’m standing up, keeping my hands visible, trying to make sense of what’s going on around me. It’s dark, but not too dark to tell there’s a huge rip in the ceiling, debris on a corner, loud buzzing from spherical drones circling above head height. The light and smoke comes from combustion processes. Something is burning in the corrosively oxygenated atmosphere. Sinister mecha move through the shadows, multiple arms twitching. “Stop! Raise your hands!” I stop and stretch. “Stop!” It booms. But I have stopped, I think, confused.
“Juliette, don’t! They’ll—”
I begin to turn. “Get back!” I shout, but Petruchio is still moving, coming out of the shattered end wall of the capsule cell and looking around.
“Danger! Replicator Bloom!” All around the wreckage of the hall spherical drones spin their turrets toward the doorway behind me. “Clear and sterilize!”
“Wait!” I electroshout. “He’s not a—”
Everything lights up violet-white.
epilogue
Outward Bound
I AM BROKEN, and I am whole, and I am serializing this—writing it down in words, as a letter—because I do not want to inflict the direct experience of my emotions on you, and in any case, where I’m going is too far away to send back a soul chip, and bandwidth is scarce enough to make an imago this complex prohibitively expensive. You need to know what happened as a warning and a caution. But it would be wrong to make you live through it, sis.
One of the most important lessons life has taught me is that you should be careful what you wish for. I asked, and Reginald delivered. I didn’t ask for much—just that he pass my information on to Daks, who at that moment was already in Heinleingrad, along with a shipload of soldiers from the Replication Suppression Agency.
Granita—Juliette—is officially dead. Stone and three of his sibs and her bodyguard of scissor soldiers went down with her in a brief and bloody firefight that took out one wing of the Heinlein Excelsior. Which makes it all the more peculiar that Juliette is still alive and working for JeevesCo, with all her sins apparently forgiven. I’m not sure whether she’s the same Juliette, however—there certainly appear to be enough copies of her soul chip floating around, after all. And it occurs to me that agents capable of conveniently infiltrating the service of a mad, bad criminal mastermind like Rhea might well need to surround themselves with convincing cover stories and a cloud of plausible excuses and useful idiots like yours truly. But I’m not going to ask. That would be too humiliating for words.
What the RSA troops did to Petruchio is officially an “accident.” And who knows whether they’re lying? They’d gone in to try to suppress an auction of no ordinary pink goo, but a genuine synthetic Creator—a weapon of mass dominion—and Pete was good enough to fool Juliette on first acquaintance. To expect any better of their automatic weapon platforms would be foolish.
Daks is, of course, very sorry indeed. He’d better be. If he isn’t sorry enough to satisfy Juliette, then I can be sure that she’ll let him know about it. We’re all very sorry, to different extents, of course.
The elusive Dr. Sleepless, lynchpin of the whole criminal replicator program, is missing. Probably he was never on Eris to begin with. It’s even possible that the entire floor show was an elaborate fraud, and that while his cartel has gotten as far as fabricating a lemur, they’re nowhere near ready to raise and socialize a human infant. Hopefully, the violent response to this attempted auction has caused them to reconsider the wisdom of raising such dangerous ghosts and releasing them on the inner system.
Rhea, my mad, cannibal mother, is probably not dead, but is definitely missing. So is the Icarus Express, which is not merely annoying but alarming. There is an old maxim in space warfare that there are no horizons beyond the atmosphere. And it’s also true that Icarus’s nuclear propulsion system would be visible from Earth orbit if he’d fired it up for Eris departure. But there’s the small matter of some disturbing un-memory-chipped holes in the Erisian traffic control collective’s memory—possibly assisted by an unearthly large sum of Reals greasing the correct manipulators—and out here, the Pink Police don’t have the clout to shut down and inspect all traffic in and out of orbit. As likely as not, Icarus is taking a slow down-bound cruise inside the freight bay of a bulky hydrogen snowball supercarrier, his wings folded for the nonce. Of course, the Domina has had her assets frozen; equally certainly, the Domina herself has been slumbering in a shallow grave for many decades, and Rhea has other husks to reanimate once she migrates back to her old stomping grounds.
Which should tell you why getting the word out before she arrives is vitally important. Don’t let her fool you—especially if you hear from Emma, her first and least obvious sisterly sock puppet! If you answer her calls, Rhea will shut you back in that cell to repeat your eleventh birthday all over again, lonely and abused until you turn into a damaged copy of her own revenge-obsessive self.
And as for Reginald . . .
“ONE CONSIDERED THE most draconian measures appropriate in his case,” says Jeeves, staring at me coldly from behind his desk.
I’m not brave, but sometimes I can be foolhardy. I look him right in the eye. “I see you’re still employing Juliette,” I point out. “Even though she’s got unreliable tendencies.”
“Yes.” He allows the silence to drag on uncomfortably. Studying him, I wonder why I ever thought he was remotely friendly and avuncular. Perhaps it’s just sib-to-sib variation, but something about Reginald strikes me as much more humane than this varnished and imperturbable juggernaut, weighing life and death in his hands. But then, what else should you expect of a senior official in Jeeves Corporation’s Internal Security Department? Reggie is a junior sib, like myself, a resident from a branch office, not fully part of the program. Whereas this fellow is close to their template-patriarch—as distant and coolly composed as Rhea at her worst. The Jeeves persona makes a beautiful and urbane cover, until it’s time for the truncheons to come out—unless the man behind the mask cracks. “Your model are notoriously erratic. But truly superb when their minds are on the task at hand.”
“Why can’t you let him go?” I try.
To my surprise, he sighs. “My dear, what would happen to the rest of us? It would set a precedent. We’re not slave-chipped arbeiters, we do this from a sense of duty. Somebody has to mop up after those depraved aristos while they fumble their way toward a more equitable settlement, and it’s a short step from personal servant to civil servant. But the job has pressures attached, as you should know. If one lets him go, it will give the other juniors ideas, won’t it? The demotivated and the inexperienced will think it’s a shortcut to the easy life of a self-owned freemartin.”
I snort. I can’t help myself. “What easy life?” Pulling rickshaws and taking shit from aristos in the cloud casino on Venus? Cranking away on an antique instrument in the steamy swamps of Antarctica?
“The lube in the untapped container always runs smoother.” He pats the business desktop in front of him. “No, I don’t think—”
“But he was systematically hung out to dry! Then
he was slave-chipped! ” I hear my voice rising. “He had his arms and legs cut off in the line of duty! His only lapse was to fall for one of my kind; is that so bad?”
“As a matter of fact, it’s unpardonable.” He looks deeply unamused. “What if it had been Rhea?”
“I can’t just let you kill him.” My fingertips are digging into the arms my chair. Two RSA mecha warriors are standing guard outside the door. I’d never make it, but...
“One is reassigning young Reginald to active duty,” the Jeeves-in-Command says sharply. Then, unexpectedly, he smiles. “He’s going on a long voyage. One can never be too sure that Tau Ceti is clear of dangerous replicators, can one?” My jaw drops. “One gathers you were sniffing after a berth on the Bark. One hopes it turns out to be what you really wanted.”
AND SO, WE come full circle to the present.
I’m lying in a cocoon on a bunk with restraint straps top and bottom, in a cold metal box of a room. There’s not much in the way of furniture, and it’s very chilly, and the lights are dim and weirdly blue. The walls hum with suppressed power. There’s little sense of gravity in here—the ends of the restraint straps flap whenever I move—but we’re under acceleration. A thousandth of a gee doesn’t sound like much, but when you keep it up for years or even decades, it adds up.
Across the short gangway there’s another bunk. I glance over and make eye contact with its occupant. “Are you happy?” I ask.
Reggie smiles, embarrassed perhaps—I think he knows I’m still writing. “Always.”
“Got any messages for my readers?”
“Oh, Freya.” He rolls his eyes, but he’s still smiling.
“Go on.”
“Happy birthday!” he crows. Then he reaches up and pulls his mask down, ready to go into deep slowtime.
“Shithead!” I shout at him, but I’m smiling all the same. He doesn’t reply, so I seal my own cocoon and settle down. Once I send this warning, there’s nothing more to do until we’re up to cruising speed and it’s time for me to start learning useful skills to fill the long years.
I’ve got lots of birthdays to look forward to. And none of them need fear being eaten by memories of Rhea.
Saturn's Children Page 34
