The Year’s Best Science Fiction Twenty-Sixth Annual

by Gardner Dozois

  “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 which 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 which 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 it 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.”

  I picked an outrageous sum. “A hundred grams.”

  “Okay.”

  Just like that? “Paid in advance.”

  A pause, about long enough for two message-and-reply cycles from Dione. “It’s done.”

  I didn’t call Dione, just in case the return message would be an override signal. Instead I pinged Mimas and asked for verification. It came back a couple of seconds later: the Company now credited me with venture shares equivalent to one hundred grams of Helium-3 on a payload just crossing the orbit of Mars. There was a conditional hold on the transfer.

  It was a good offer. I could pay off all my debts, do a full overhaul, maybe even afford some upgrades to increase my earning ability. From a financial standpoint, there was no question.

  What about the non-quantifiables? Betraying a client—especially a helpless human passenger—would be a big negative. Nobody would hire me if they knew.

  But who would ever know? The whole mission was secret. Bob would never talk (and the human would probably wipe the incident from her memory anyhow). If anyone did suspect, I could claim I’d been subsumed by the human. I could handle Edward. So no problem there.

  Except I would know. My own track of my non-quantifiable asset status wouldn’t match everyone else’s. That seemed dangerous. If your internal map of reality doesn’t match external conditions, bad things happen.

  After making my decision it took me another couple of milliseconds to plan what to do. Then I called up Bob through my little cut-out relay. “Never.”

  Bob began maneuvering again, and this time I started evading. It’s hard enough to rendezvous with something that’s just sitting there in orbit, but with me jinking and changing velocity it must have been maddening for whatever was controlling Bob.

  We were in a race—would Bob run out of maneuvering juice completely before I used up the reserve I needed to get back up to Mimas? Our little chess game of propellant consumption might have gone on for hours, but our attention was caught by something else.

  There was a booster on its way up from Saturn. That much I could see—pretty much everyone in Saturn orbit could see the drive flare and the huge plume of exhaust in the atmosphere, glowing in infrared. The boosters were fusion-powered, using Three from the aerostats for fuel and heated Saturn atmosphere as reaction mass. It was a fuel extractor shuttle, but it wasn’t on the usual trajectory to meet the Mimas orbital transfer vehicle. It was coming for me. Once the fusion motor cut out Ramblin’ Bob and I both knew exactly how much time we had until rendezvous: 211 minutes.

  I reacted first while Bob called Dione for instructions. I lit my ion motors and turned to thrust perpendicular to my orbit. When I’d taken Edward’s offer and plotted a low-orbit ren
dezvous, naturally I’d set it up with enough inclination to keep me clear of the rings. Now I wanted to get down into the plane of the B ring. Would Bob—or whoever was controlling her—follow me in? Time for an exciting game of dodge-the-snowball!

  A couple of seconds later Bob lit up as well, and in we went. Navigating in the B ring was tough. The big chunks are pretty well dispersed—a couple of hundred meters apart. I could dodge them. And with my cargo deck as a shield and all the antennas folded the little particles didn’t cost me more than some paint.

  It was the gravel-sized bits that did the real damage. They were all over the place, sometimes separated by only a few meters. Even with my radar fully active and my eyes cranked up to maximum sensitivity, they were still hard to detect in time.

  Chunks big enough to damage me came along every minute or so, while a steady patter of dust grains and snowflakes pitted my payload deck. I worried about the human in its container, but the box looked pretty solid and it was self-sealing. I did park two of my mobiles on top of it so that they could soak up any ice cubes I failed to dodge.

  I didn’t have much attention to spare for Bob, but my occasional glances up showed she was getting closer—partly because she was being incredibly reckless about taking impacts. I watched one particle which must have been a centimeter across hit her third leg just above the foot. It blew off the whole lower leg but Bob didn’t even try to dodge.

  She was now less than ten meters away, and I was using all my processing power to dodge ring particles. So I couldn’t really dodge well when she dove at me, ion motor and maneuvering thrusters all wide open. I tried to move aside, but she anticipated me and clunked into my side hard enough to crunch my high-gain antenna.

  “Bob, look out!” I transmitted in clear, then completely emptied the tank on my number three thruster to get away from an onrushing ice boulder half my size.

  Bob didn’t dodge. The ice chunk smashed into her upper section, knocking away the payload deck and pulverizing her antennas. Her brains went scattering out in a thousand directions to join the other dust in the B ring. Flying debris went everywhere, and a half-meter ball of ice glanced off the top of the cargo container on my payload deck, smashing one of my mobiles and knocking the other one loose into space.