Tony Daniel (28 page)

“Can I ask you a personal question?” said Aubry, her voice getting stronger.

“Sure.”

“How come you’re so short?”

She looked up at Leo, probably to make sure she hadn’t offended him. Leo smiled back at her. “This is on purpose,” he said. “I’m Integument-adapted. Being smaller lets me get into a lot of places a bigger person can’t, as you’ve seen. But I am also adapted for some of the higher-spin-rate bolsas. I can go anywhere on the Met—with complete freedom.”

“You’re high-gravity-adapted?”

“It ain’t gravity, kid, it’s centrifugal force. And I can take about twenty gees without passing out.”

“There’s places in the Met where things weight twenty times normal?”

“Sure. Special processing plants and the like. And garbage compactors.”

“Have you been there?”

“I’m like a rat, kid,” Leo replied. “I go everywhere in the Met.”

“You’re not a rat,” Aubry said. He could tell she was drifting off again. “More like a leprechaun. Did you ever go to the outer system?”

“Kid,” said Leo, “I haven’t left the Met in twelve e-years, and that’s a fact. I like it here.”

“But before that?”

“Yeah, I lived on Europa for a while,” Leo replied. “But I don’t belong out there. I belong here, in the Met. I’m not going to let the bad guys take this away from me.”

He gestured out at the sluice, and the luminescent air bubbles that surrounded theirs—all headed at breakneck speed to maintain the ecological balance.

“It’s rip as all hell,” Leo said. “Wouldn’t you agree?”

“It’s . . . rip,” said Aubry. She settled into his arm crook again, and this time she really did fall asleep soundly.

Rip or not, he had to get her out of there.

Citizens of Laketown, Titan, do not be alarmed. Steps are being taken for your own safety and security. At Systematic time 0:01:01 (128– 13) a curfew will go into effect that will allow six hours an e-day of work time followed by two hours of personal time. After that, you will be expected to be indoors. Violators will be shot. The hours will be in graduated shifts, and will be assigned to you at your workplace.

A new era is upon you. Progress has come to the outer system. Many of you are law-abiding citizens, and you may have wondered how long your corrupt government could stand. Justice has finally arrived. It is my pleasure to welcome you into full Met citizenship, with all the privileges thereto attached.

In compliance with Justice Directorate code JD-31-K19, all free converts must register forthwith. Check your tax schedules for important announcements. Thinking of signing up to become a DIED soldier? See your local recruiter for details.

So ordered,

C.C. Haysay, General, Department of Immunity Enforcement Division

“It’s almost unreadable,” said Thomas Ogawa. “How does he expect us to comply if we don’t have any idea what he’s saying?”

“I think that’s the idea,” Gerardo Funk replied. “Ambiguity in the service of order.”

“Uh-huh,” said Ogawa. “I wanted to thank you for saving my ship.”

“You saved it yourself.”

“I’d never have made it off Titan without your warning,” Ogawa said.

He and Funk were in a bare room with a single light, somewhere in the virtuality. Funk had rigged up this illicit merci channel between himself and the remaining free forces, in ships that had escaped Titan into space. Neither Ogawa nor Funk knew how long the merci-cheat would last, and there was not enough information flow-through to establish much more than two basic iconic presences in this plain room.

Ogawa had been friends with Funk since they had both migrated to Titan from the Diaphany. They didn’t have very much in common. Funk was an engineer, and Ogawa ran a small shuttle service that was doomed to failure as soon as the new Lift completed spinning itself out of material from the rings and down to the surface. For the time being, it was a living, and Ogawa appreciated the freedom it gave him. Maybe that was really what united him and Funk—they both knew what it was like to live in the Met and work for corporations whose employees ran into the millions.

They had been practically the only ones who had taken all the Directorate threats for tax compliance seriously. It had been Funk who figured out what the strange snowstorm really was. And now Ogawa found himself the de facto commander of a tattered “navy” of merchant vessels in space. Funk was the leader of the sad remnants of resistance on the ground. The Met victory had been crushing and absolute, but neither man was prepared to give up just yet. Or ever. To give up would be to return to the lives they had before and the conformity they’d migrated to the outer system to escape.

“I’ve got a couple of ships loaded to the gills with chemical explosives. We’ve got your jamming gear on board, too,” Ogawa told Funk.

“And the
Mary Kate
is ready?”

“As ready as she’ll ever be. So where will you be?”

“Muñoz Park.” Funk glanced at Ogawa over the table and grimaced. Ogawa had always thought his face looked rubbery, and now it was practically hanging from his bones like a stretched and deflated basketball. “I have something else to tell you.”

“What?”

“It’s going to be more like five hundred.”

“We said four hundred maximum.”

“I know, Tom.”

“Do you remember how big my hold is? We’ll never cram them all in there. And even if we could get them in standing up, do you remember that little factor called acceleration? G forces?”

“I understand, Thomas,” said Funk. “But each and every one of them has said he or she wants to take his or her chances.”

“Uninformed consent, if you ask me.”

“They know what they’re getting into, Thomas. And what they’re getting away from.”

Ogawa shook his head. But what was he going to do? Turn away people who wanted to escape? He would have to figure out something.

“When?” he asked.

“One hour,” Funk replied. He would have to figure out something
very fast
. Or just hope for the best.

Exactly fifty-nine minutes later, Funk flashed him the codes that would get the
Mary Kate
and the two decoy ships through the planetary defenses, and Ogawa began his dive. The other ships—old freighters that would never make it far from Saturn in the evacuation that was to follow—homed in on what Funk thought was Met Command and what they hoped would be old Haysay himself.

“How the hell did you get those codes?” Ogawa wanted to ask Funk. But after the codes filled up every free particle in his ship’s grist matrix, Ogawa knew the answer. These codes were free converts, and very likely they were friends of Funk’s. He seemed to know every stray bit of programming on Titan.

The decoy ships began their dive, and Ogawa angled in right behind them, nosing as close as he could to their reentry envelopes. When they were a kilometer over the city, he threw the
Mary Kate
into a screaming turn, pushing to the edge of his own reinforced skeleton’s structural limits, and then some. The “then some” broke one of his arms, but Ogawa piloted with mental commands and using his hands was strictly a backup system. He set his body’s pellicle to healing the arm as quickly as it could. Fortunately, nothing else failed, and the
Mary Kate
turned thrusters down and burned through the pressure dome covering Muñoz Park. The trees caught fire from the pure-energy flux of the ship’s engines and, the moment the heat was off them, froze in whatever charred state they had just been in. The ship set down with a thump, the hold swung open, and five hundred people emerged from the shelter of a nearby underground accessway. Some of them were Titan-adapted, and some wore pressure suits. They formed into groups of ten or so and took the shape of five-sided stars, with one person being a “tip,” another a “side” and so on. Each “side” lined up with another “side” in the hold, and each “tip” was in contact with two others. In this way, the refugees quickly packed themselves into Ogawa’s ship. He had to hand it to Funk. The guy sure as hell made sure everyone was briefed and ready. Or maybe one of Funk’s convert friends had come up with the packing arrangement. It had the look of algorithmic thinking to it.

Within thirty minutes, everyone was in. Ogawa said a quick prayer and blasted off, incinerating the remainder of Laketown’s formerly most beautiful park.

The decoy ships had more than done their job. The Hebrides section of downtown was a blasted, flickering ruin. Excellent. He ran a check on planetary defenses.

Shit. They were back up. Shit.

If he made a break up the gravity well, he would be detected and blown out of the sky. The
Mary Kate
was fast, but nothing in comparison to Titan’s ground-based rocketry. It was designed to track and kill anything from a ten-kilogram meteor to a straying asteroid. You needed such a system when you were this close to Saturn’s rings. At least twice a year, some major shit penetrated the atmosphere and fell out of the sky, brought from the rings by gravity perturbations and the workings of chance. Like the
Mary Kate
, the interception rocket engines ran on small bottles of anti-matter—positrons, mostly—but the rockets were unmanned and didn’t have to worry about killing anyone by accelerating too rapidly.

So Ogawa couldn’t go up. Maybe he could hide in the fault zone a thousand klicks to the north, or even under Lake Voyager. There was no reason his ship couldn’t survive a dunking in liquid methane. But all of this would defeat the purpose of coming in the first place. Five hundred people were depending on him to get them off this rock. What could he do? They were trapped. Hiding was not really an option.

“We’ll have to surrender,” Ogawa said. “What else can we do?”

He’d been speaking to himself, and was very surprised to hear a voice answering him.

“They couldn’t have gotten a proper cipher up and running this quickly,” It was a female voice.

“It must be a modification off some hardware they brought down with them. No one on this moon would knowingly collaborate.”

“What about the bank?” said the first voice.

“Well, yes, there is the bank.”

“Who the hell are you?” Ogawa said. He turned the
Mary Kate
into a parabola that he hoped would keep him low enough for the time being to avoid a rocket launch.

“We’re the former cipher keys to the Titan Rocketry Shield, of course,” answered the male voice. “No real time for introductions. We’re complementary keys. You can call me Ins and her Del, if you’d like.”

“If one of us were still in the system, we could easily disable whatever it is they’ve got plugged in.” said Del.

“Obviously,” replied Ins. “But we erased all copies of ourselves.”

“There is the back door.”

“Del, we left that in place for the counterattack.”

“There isn’t going to be a counterattack if these people don’t get off the moon,” said Del. “One of us has to stay here, and one of us has to go back.”

“Why not send a copy?” Ogawa quickly suggested. What the hell am I talking about, he thought. What do I know about any of this?

“There wouldn’t be space in your ship’s matrix for the new passwords I’m going to send back up,” replied Del.

“Del, you’re not seriously thinking of going back?”

“I’m opening up protocols with the back door guard even as we speak, Ins.”

“But Del, we’ve . . . never been apart.”

“It’s the only logical choice.”

“I know, but—”

“I’m in,” said Del. “Good-bye.”

“Good-bye, Del,” said Ins. There was a short silence, then a moment later Ins spoke up again. “I have the cipher keys. The shields are deactivated. Del is going to wait until we are safely out and then she’s going to . . . purge herself from the moon’s system.”

“I’m sorry, guy,” Ogawa said. “Let’s make what she did worth it and get the holy hell out of here.”

He turned thrusters down and blasted up into foggy red sky, a reverse meteorite. Within seconds, he’d cleared the atmosphere. Within minutes, he was out of the rockets’ range.

It wasn’t until hours later, when Ogawa was sure he wasn’t being followed, that he rendezvoused with the remaining ships of the Titan “fleet.” They divided the passengers up among them and each set off for farther out in the system. They had learned on the merci that all of Saturn’s moon’s were taken, as were Uranus’s, that Neptune was hard pushed and would soon fall to Amés, and that Jupiter was under siege. Pluto had surrendered without a fight. Ogawa’s arm hurt, but it was almost healed.

They would stealthily approach Neptune and see what was going on there. And if Neptune fell? Maybe the Oorts.

Or, hell, maybe the Centauris, Ogawa thought. He’d always wanted to go there.

Funk pulled himself into the control room of the
Mary Kate
and used the handholds on the bulkheads to maneuver himself into the copilot’s seat, which was usually empty. He was smiling his big, rubbery smile.

“Of the five hundred and eleven evacuees,” he said to Ogawa, “guess how many survived.”

“I don’t know,” Ogawa replied. “You did.”

“We all did!” Funk exclaimed. “Thanks to you.”

The display screen in front of them showed the minute drifting detritus and the icy chunks that made up Saturn’s rings all about them. They were hidden away in the densest sector, inside the Cassini Division. Normally Ogawa would have been quite tense in this situation, using the full power of his convert side to calculate and avoid space-debris trajectories. But now he had a full, unbound convert doing the work for him. Ogawa had set Ins to the task as soon as they’d entered the rings. He had no way of knowing if the convert felt anything like grief over the loss of his complementary key. But as far as Ogawa was concerned, both of the algorithms had met the Turing test for heroes. He was going to treat Ins as he would any other man who had lost a loved one—give him something to do to take his mind away from the pain.

“All of us survived but one,” Ogawa said to Funk. “If we ever get out of this alive, I’m going to see that something beautiful is named after her.
She
saved all of our lives, not me.”