Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 (3 page)

"From almost the very moment they are born," Helise finished, "the Pahlati Diamonds are falling to their deaths."

In the years of the
Ama,
the divers had all had large rings attached to their backs, so that after they'd made a good catch the crew on skimmers could hook them and pull them back onboard. Not everyone was successfully retrieved; more than a few of Cjoi's friends, facing despair or illness or increasing attention from the crew as they matured, turned themselves belly-up as they flew, ring out of reach, masters of their own fates at last.

Now, Cjoi had tech on her side.
Or, technically, above my head,
she thought. The sphere, linked to her through her wrist controls, would stay a half kil overhead as she rose and fell, and hunted.

When she was ready, she could call it down to pick her up, and she'd return to the rest of human space with the largest Pahlati Diamond ever seen. It would be all hers, and she and the other
Ama
girls would be remembered at last, and forever.

She spread her arms and legs out, letting the thick fabric between them unfurl and fill with the wind. She had never been this far down before, or felt so high. Cjoi soared. The upper left field of her goggles kept a translucent scanner map up, showing wind conditions, changes in pressure and atmospheric density, and scanning for any of the deployed Protectorate sensors that dotted the interior of the gas giant. Her body was small enough to pass undetected, and her sphere was kitted out with a fortune's worth of illegal stealth tech, but if either she or it crashed into one it would be hard to stay unnoticed.

The rest of her goggles were set to enhance what little existing light remained this deep, and mark out anything ahead of her with the faint heat signature and density of the Diamonds.

She had expected to be able to take her pick of the best and most beautiful of many, but for the longest time she saw nothing at all.
Am I in the wrong place?
she wondered, but she had a lifetime of gut instinct to know she was not.

The idea that Helise was right, and the Diamonds were nearly extinct, began to creep like a shiver up the back of her mind, and fearing failure—
after all this!
—she pulled her elbows and knees in, cannonballing, and let herself drop faster and further.

Helise turned off the diagram, letting it go back to the live vista of the planet below. "This is why the Protectorate is here," she said. "The larger and more valuable the specimen on the black market, the more its loss reduces the next generation. Even today, despite our patrols, and our aggressive pursuit of Diamond poachers, their numbers continue to dwindle toward dangerously low numbers."

"Can't you put them back?" the boy asked.

"The creature itself is very delicate. Take it out of the planet's atmosphere, and they die almost instantly. Also, the Diamonds need a certain population density to reproduce; from the time they reach about four centimeters in interior diameter, they begin releasing spores into the air; as others take those spores in with other atmospheric and organic material, it fertilizes the growing polyps inside. Fewer Diamonds means less spores, fewer viable polyps, and the cycle continues to degrade. We've tried—"

She was interrupted by a familiar figure stepping up on stage. "Hello, gentlepeoples!" Ryon called out when he reached her mic. He was wearing his uniform now, and he looked like a holonovel hero in it, too perfect to be entirely real. "I just got back from some planetary science work and need to go out to meet our supply ship, but I wanted to check in and see how everyone is doing. Are you learning lots of good things tonight?"

There was a smattering of yeses and clapping from the audience. Ryon stood beside Helise, snuck an arm around her waist. "Helise here is the Protectorate's best and brightest," he said, "but you have a rare treat here with you, among you, tonight."

Cjoi saw Helise's expression change, figuring out where Ryon was going just moments after she had herself. Helise started to shake her head, opening her mouth to speak, but Ryon was ahead of her. "Up there, at the very back, we have the last of the
Ama
divers!"

A spotlight zoomed in on her, and she was blinded. She threw an arm up over her face, and scrambled to get out of her chair, intent on fleeing.

"She's coming down to tell us about what it was really like, in the golden age of Pahlati," Ryon said, and more of the audience began to clap and cheer. He jumped down off the stage and intercepted her, holding out his hand.

Reluctantly, she let Ryon guide her up onto the stage, pulling her hand free of his as soon as she was up. Helise moved to stand beside her, and her hand replaced Ryon's, squeezing gently, as if to say either
I'm sorry
or
I'm here.

"So, tell us," Ryon said, directing the mic at her. "What was it like?"

She took a deep breath, trying not to stare out at the sea of expectant faces in front of her. When the words came, they were calm, clear, and relentless.

"No one knows how many of us there were to start with, but many hundreds. We were all either stolen or bought as small children, and taken to an illegal genmod lab outside of Alliance space. We were all girls, because girls are cheaper to buy, and fewer people care about what is done to us, and because we handled modding and radiation better than boys. Those of us who survived their 'treatments'—one hundred and sixty-four of us—were then brought to Pahlati," she said. "Many of us were too young to even remember our real names, so we named each other, and tried to be a family. We were cold and hungry, and we were beaten if we didn't find good-sized Diamonds, or if we damaged them. A few of us who were too clumsy were killed, in cold blood, to motivate us to be more careful. Most of the rest of us died out there, in the clouds, freezing or having our lungs fill with carbon dioxide too heavy to exhale, or on the floor of our dormitory after a dive, decompressing too fast, or our lungs collapsing, or from an embolism or nitrogen narcosis or just from too much exhaustion and malnutrition and radiation and despair. Our masters made a fortune off our work, and we didn't even own the clothes on our backs. There were seventeen of us left alive when the Protectorate raided the Giardal ships, broken and abused and half-feral adolescents. We spent six years here, in a special Protectorate rehabilitation facility, learning to read and write and take care of ourselves, learning how to be human. I am the last still alive. That, there, is what your golden age was like."

Letting go of Helise's hand, she stepped off the stage and walked out of the auditorium, leaving dead silence in her wake.

Her suit display was a frantic chorus of yellow pressure-warning lights when she found the Diamonds at last, a loose cluster dropping down through the clouds a halfkil away. The smallest of them was easily bigger than the Orbach Diamond, and the largest...

My grail,
she thought. Unfurling her suit again, she halted her plummet, gliding laterally now toward the cluster. Nothing mattered, now, except that one falling Diamond. She was the hunter, the predator, the power.
One final time.

The cluster blinked out.

"What the hell?" she swore. Her lungs full of foam, she could only mouth the words. The mouthpiece picked up the movements and translated them in her own synthesized voice, so quickly it seemed exactly and always her own.

The Diamonds couldn't just disappear.
Could they?
She pulled back the zoom on her goggles, and found her answer: a large ship, also running dark, had parked itself between her and them. She repeated her oath; her momentum was going to carry her straight into it. Using her suit's folds, she did her best to slow herself down as she flew, and to try to gain altitude. She was mere meters above the large engines as she crashed into the back hull. Scrambling, she got her feet up against it and switched on her magboots, adhering instantly to the slippery surface.

Straightening, she walked up the hull away from the heat and radiation of the engines, and toward answers.

Painted on the ship's exterior in letters taller than she was, she found the word
Veresiel,
and the Protectorate coat of arms.

Ryon's survey ship.

Bastard,
she thought. She wanted to pound her fists on the hull, call him out for a fight. Why the fuck did he have to take atmospheric samples here, now, when she was so close? Why
dark?

She could feel vibration in the hull through her boots, and moments later, a dozen drones launched from the underside of the ship. They were an odd configuration: a standard hauler drone with a large, transparent dome, open end down, mounted underneath.

Puzzled, then dumbfounded, she watched on full zoom as the drones fell in just above falling Diamonds, and slowly caught up until their dome began to eclipse it.
No, you'll break them, you idiots,
was her first thought. But as soon as the Diamond was within the dome, jets mounted in the top filled the entire thing with a thick, hardening foam. It was, she had to admit, genius.

Each drone now occupied with its illegal haul, they turned back toward the
Veresiel.
Cjoi walked down the side of the hull, staying close enough to the engines that she trusted they would mask any noise her magboots made on the hull, and watched as bay doors opened wide to admit the drones.

Stacked inside, dozens high and wide, layers thick, were more glass tubes, opaque interiors concealing what she already knew was inside. "Oh, Helise," she said out loud. "Your Protectorate can't catch the poachers because they
are
the poachers." It made sense; who else would have the technology, resources, and inside knowledge to systematically strip the world of its Diamonds? It had taken her nearly all the enormous Giardal Trust to prepare for stealing one.

Sick, she turned her goggles on record as the drones, free of their cargos, picked up new domes and sped out again toward the diminished cluster.

It was clever. Go out on "survey," strip-mine as many Diamonds as you can from well down in the atmosphere. Meet up with the supply ship and hand them off. Once the Diamonds were extinct, sell them slowly off one by one, for huge, ever-escalating prices.
I do hate to miss out on rare treasures,
Ryon had said. An honest liar.

Ahead of them, one of the drones turned and dove toward the Diamond she had picked out.
Oh, no, you don't,
she thought.
That one's mine.

Running along the top of the ship toward the front, she no longer cared what noise she might make. Racing over the bridge window—no time to look for startled faces, to enjoy that
gotcha
moment—she hit the
Veresiel's
nose and launched herself back out into the air. Cannonballing, she hurtled past both drone and Diamond.

Throwing her arms out, the updraft slammed into her like a wall, and she braced herself as it threw her back upward.

Reaching out both hands, she grasped the Diamond, feeling the spires puncture gloves and skin, just as they always had, as her grip on it closed just enough to hold.

Mine!

The drone, detecting a larger object than it could handle heading toward it at speed, veered away just moments before collision, and she spun with the Diamond up past it, momentum still pulling her upward.

Something flew past her, horizontally, very close and fast. She spun around and saw the next hull-puncturing missile coming just in time to tuck and drop below it. The status lights on her suit slowly started flickering from yellow into orange; she was getting too low, too close to the recommended tolerances of even her genmodded body and cutting-edge breathing apparatus.

The Diamond's razor limbs cut into her through her suit, sending more warning lights flaring across her display, as she held it against her chest with one hand, to free the other. Quickly, she tapped out the start code on her control for the retrieval sequence, and then deployed her chute.

Once again she was accelerating skyward as the air filled her canopy and lifted her high and fast. She needed to get clear of the
Veresiel
and rendezvous with her sphere, before it caught up.

Now far below her, the
Veresiel
turned and was banking upward. As it finally got its nose pointed at her, another hull-missile—a brilliant lightning-bolt of white in her goggles—streaked up toward her. "You're wasting your time," she said, tugging her canopy supports and shifting her position well out of its path. Even if she hadn't, it would have missed her by a fair width. Would it crest the atmosphere, give away the poachers by their own hand? She glanced up, but her chute canopy blocked her view of it.

Proximity alarms started going off on her link to the sphere.
Shit,
she realized.
They weren't shooting at
me.

She scrambled her sphere out of the way, just in time; it registered the projectile passing less than three meters off its port side. Hitting her would be nearly impossible, and the sphere was nimble enough that it could dodge indefinitely if set to auto-evade, but the sphere would have to stop moving for her to get on board.

They can't afford for me to tell anyone what I've seen, or they lose everything,
she realized.
They have no choice but to kill me.

Using her wrist panel, she tried to open a connection out, but her signal was being jammed. The
Veresiel
had slowed its climb, recognizing that time was on its side, and it merely had to wait for her to either panic and try to reach her sphere, or die when her air ran out.

"Fuck you!" She shouted down at the ship. "I choose option number three." The option she had always had, waiting for her.

With her free hand, she sent her sphere up and away, at a bone-crushing speed even she could not have survived. When it crested the upper levels of the troposphere, outside the range of the
Veresiel's
jammers, she opened a comm channel through it, bouncing off the shuttle station back toward the Protectorate Orbital, and Helise's node.