A Princess of the Aerie (10 page)

“Technically,” Kawib said, “I can only be a captain while this thing is off the cable, which is only at intervals. At the
moment I’m the driver at best. Anyway, glad to have you along for the ride. Just don’t touch anything, and if I do anything
brilliant I’ll let you all know to applaud wildly.”

What a hopper could do, and a gripliner could not, was
pass.
Bursts from its cold jets let it leap sideways at the last moment to avoid slower-moving gripliners ahead of it, then return
to the cable in front of them. Or now and then, when traffic was heavy for a few hundred kilometers up the line, Kawib would
jump a few dozen kilometers in space to a hole in the traffic in a less-busy cable, flashing around yet another gripliner,
bouncing off the cable on a burst of the cold jets, seeing the silver flash of the traffic in the sunlight four or five kilometers
away, then rolling 180 degrees and firing the cold jets again to match up with the cable.

Kawib was only flying the humanly-possible parts; he could no more have truly hand-flown at those speeds than he could have
steered a bullet. (In fact a bullet moved much more slowly.) Computers had to do the linducer grapple-and-ungrapple processes,
and even the last kilometer of the approaches. But Jak still noted that their bounces and excursions off the cables and between
them were executed gracefully and cleanly, and he liked the air of quiet satisfaction with which Kawib carried out the maneuvers.
Perhaps no one had been a “real” pilot since the days of biplanes, jet fighters, or the early shuttles—Jak wasn’t sure when
computers and high speeds had eliminated them—but if Kawib’s piloting wasn’t quite real, his panache more than made up for
it.

“Weehu, fun one,” Kawib said. The cold jets hit with all they had and the hopper zoomed away from the cable; before them,
a swath of green and yellow grain fields surrounding little red-roofed villages had been swelling across their forward view.
Now they shot across it as they approached, and Jak could see occasional glints from the transparent upper surface. As they
drew nearer still, getting close to the edge, Jak caught a glimpse of wide rocky beach and stormy deep-blue water. Then beneath
the clear upper surface there was nothing but heavy, dark clouds, rushing up at them.

The black starry sky of space opened beyond the edge, and in an instant the white clouds, the dark air and water, and the
black underside of the habitat flashed by, and they were moving back into Arm Eight.

They went on, leaping from cable to cable, springing over slow-moving gripliners, twice more swinging out to pass around the
edge of a habitat, and the broad circular lands flashed by in front of them, beginning as disks covering much of the sky and
briefly becoming the ground into which they were always about to plunge, just before emerging into a new sky with another
bright disk of a world ahead. Kawib worked the controls like a compulsive gambler playing a hundred screens at once, acceleration
going from almost two g to zero to minus two g in an endless bounce-and-dance.

Finally, they whipped around the dark edge of a habitat that a moment before had been a broad plain that they were bare seconds
from cratering, and Kawib said, “Well, we’re here. Make sure those belts are fastened.” They moved sideways in a single great
swoop and clamped onto the cable; the linducer braked hard, and they hung on their belts for a long few seconds until they
were down to arrival speed. This time, instead of flashing by at the last moment, the habitat became more and more solidly
land, until finally they passed through the swirling gray fog of the cold lock and emerged into the air-filled space beneath
the glass dome of the roof. With what seemed like the painful slowness of an elevator, they descended the last kilometer onto
the platform at the station.

Kawib popped the canopy, and it dilated back into the fuselage. “End of the line. Welcome to Greenworld.”

“Did you beat your time?” Dujuv asked.

“I missed by over two minutes. I didn’t find a hole in the traffic within reach, all the way from Disney to Utopia. And I
did a pretty shabby job rounding Kamakura—swung at least ten kilometers too wide and had to use a lot of cold jet to get back
to a cable. But there’s always another run, masen? Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll get you to Colonel Mattanga, in the Royal
Palace, and after that you’re
her
problem.”

“
Colonel
Mattanga?” Myxenna asked.

“Princess Shyf’s personal chief for security and intelligence?”

“Yeah,” Jak said. “We just hadn’t specked who she was. It just feels funny.”

“You mean it feels funny to discover you’ve been talking with someone who could decide to have you killed, or completely change
your life for their convenience? Yeah, I know something about that.” Kawib fell silent.

Greenworld was a habitat as rich and beautiful as anyone had ever imagined. Houses were shaped from living rock or grew up
out of tangles of trees. Greenswards, tough enough for treaded tractors yet soft enough to sleep on, lay everywhere between
the tall straight trees. The trees themselves formed a high canopy from which green tubes of light sluiced down into the clearings,
where artfully random trails wandered between shops and houses. Hardly anything required any attention, yet a ripe piece of
fruit, a trickle of pure water, or a comfortable place to sit always appeared where and when you wanted it. Furthermore, the
slowly varying local gravity was about one-third g, the most pleasant grav for human walking—just adequate for traction and
keeping the center gliding level, yet requiring little energy.

The walls of the Royal Palace had been grown directly from the stone base that had itself been made from the slagged materials
of the original Greenworld. Checkpoints and guard stations greeted Kawib with flurries of salutes, and they passed through
the series of arches and gates into the Royal Palace.

It was a regular hexagon a kilometer on a side, two kilometers from corner to corner—large because the first few Karrinynyas
in the Aerie had needed it as a fortress and rally point. The slagging of the old habitat, and in particular the systematic
destruction of every site and monument connected with the old Republic, had proven to be unpopular for some generations afterward.

But as the prosperity of the Wager-era reconstruction of human space had continued, wearing on into an economic boom that
lasted for centuries, people had ceased to care, and the Royal Palace had become valuable real estate. The inner citadel,
a clever circular maze on a gently rising hill at the center of the grounds, had been kept for residences, ceremonies, and
administration, and the rest converted to ultra-high-priced residential and retail areas.

When Kawib guided them through the winding green paths of the hedge maze into the inner citadel, late afternoon sun slanted
over the hedge-tops into the broader sculpture gardens, where various stone Karrinynyas of the last millennium stood or sat,
looking brave or wise or whatever they were supposed to have been. Jak wondered what the statue of Queen Shyf would eventually
look like—petulant, or horny?

They came to a crumbling, dark gray, polished stone stairway, constructed to look weathered, with broad steps flanked by unicorns
and spread-winged eagles, ascended to a higher lawn, rounded a zigzag hedge, and entered the Royal Administration Building.
Kawib led them through a corridor to a door of very old natural wood, carved in an elaborate faux-medieval frieze of soldiers
and flags. “Right here,” he said. “This is where I leave you. Good luck with everything; it’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

“And you too,” Dujuv said.

“Thanks for taking so much time from a day,” Myxenna added.

Kawib smiled. “Before you thank someone for that, you should know what they’d’ve been doing otherwise. In my case, I really
should be thanking you. Good luck.” He walked away briskly, seemingly cheerful.

“Do you suppose,” Myx muttered, “that he was refraining from telling us that we were going to need it?”

They knocked and Mattanga’s voice called out, “Come in.”

The office was surprisingly small and spare. Mattanga did not rise; she barely looked up. “Sit down.” She gestured at three
chairs in front of her desk.

She looked them over; Jak was getting used to gray hair, but the wrinkling and cracking of her skin was more apparent in person.
“Well. Now I’ve had time to digest some history, and I was able to get a few thoughts from the Princess. I hadn’t realized
you three were part of her rescue in the Uranium affair.

“The message you got was what the communications pokheets call a cowbird. Its front end hid it on our servers here until it
detected a message from the Princess to Jak Jinnaka. Then it erased that message and sent itself.

“The message is a top-of-the-line fake—they did it the hard way. They must have had at least twenty million frames of Princess
Shyf, from which they then mixmatched at least a trillion frames for their frame alphabet, making light and background consistent
across all of them, and the words, gestures, and expressions they sent were homeosemiotized to at least a ninth degree of
comparison, which would be nearly as expensive as that frame alphabet. The only reason we could detect the faking was that
the Princess told us it was a fake, so that we were looking for how it was done. Without that we’d never have known
that
it was done.

“Now, the kind of facility that can do that is owned either by major media or
very
high end intelligence agencies. If our Intel people had needed something like this, they would have had to hire it out. And
we’re a well-funded national agency, from a rich nation with a lot of enemies.

“The djeste at the heart of all this is mysterious, and eliminating mysteries concerning the Princess and her security is
my job. So what I want to know is who went to all this trouble, for a deception that could only last to this point at most,
and what they hoped to gain by it.” The Colonel drummed her fingers on the table. “I am forced to admit I’m utterly stymied,
or toktru stumped as the Princess might put it. Does any of you have even a possibly relevant thought, or memory, or piece
of data?”

“Well,” Myxenna said, “this is pretty basic—it’s just right out of my text for Deception and Tradecraft class— but if we assume
that they intended the deception to work this far and not any further, then either it has already served its purpose or else
having us discover it is part of the plan—”

Mattanga made a face. “I don’t know whether to hug you or slap you, young lady. I wrote that chapter.”

Myxenna started, and Mattanga’s eyebrows raised again. “We have many friends in the Hive, you know, and many favors are exchanged.
It was an interesting chapter to write, I had the knowledge, a colonel’s pay is not much, and it would have been improper
for Hive Intelligence to give me a direct assist with expenses. Therefore they happened to find that work for me.

“Well, anyway, whoever the mystery enemy may be, the most they could have planned for, is that you are here and talking to
me. To have penetrated far enough into Princess Shyf’s private affairs to be able to carry out this operation, they would
have had to know that she had had no contact with Dujuv, only occasionally old-friend notes with Myxenna, and she was tired
and bored with Jak and in process of getting rid of him.” Colonel Mattanga leaned slightly forward, seeming to probe Jak’s
face with her gaze. “I do trust that this is not too painful to discuss?”

“Not a problem,” Jak said, bleeding internally.

“So the only thing that they could have been certain of accomplishing was
this
meeting. Do any of you see anything that I don’t?”

Jak sighed. “Well, weehu, we all kept saying it was too singing-on perfect. So whoever it was didn’t just really study Se—Princess
Shyf—they dug up plenty about me and my toves, too.”

“Mmmph,” Mattanga said, obviously not pleased with the thought. “And none of you is easy to research, as I just found out.
After all, Jak, you are the nephew of Sibroillo Jinnaka, and he’s been wrapping you in nested blankets of disinformation since
before you were born. And Hive Intelligence starts concealing information about anyone who might be going into their service
well before recruiting them.” She nodded at Dujuv and Myxenna. “You would find some interesting things if you were to try
to hack into your files.”

“I already did, and you’re right,” Myxenna said.

“So all this cost plenty of time, money, and effort. It must be terribly important to whoever it is. And so far as we know,
everything they’ve tried to do has worked perfectly so far.”

Dujuv nodded and said, “So you need to take a spoicke.”

The Colonel looked at him with sudden interest. “I don’t follow slamball.”

“When you have to track all seven balls all the time, a lot of times you can see that the other team is doing something complicated
but you don’t know what they’re trying to do. So if you’ve got a spare ball at the goal—especially if you’re almost at the
penalty bell where you
have
to throw it—you just use a privileged-catch call to send two or three of your players into the middle of that. The other
team has to change what they’re doing, or else take a foul, and cope with a new threat. You don’t always know what you did
to them, but at least you probably spoiled their play.

“So that’s what I’d think about, sitting in your chair. Even just do something real stupid; I sent the ball to my slowest
runner, once, with nobody blocking for him, on a spoicke, and they got so mixed up between trying to do their plan and not
foul and get his ball away from him and still watch our main offense, that I scored a knockback in the confusion.”

For the first time since they’d met her, Mattanga smiled. “You just gave me the first idea I’ve liked since this thing came
up.” She sat back, tenting her fingers in front of her face.

An alarm hooted.

The three toves jumped out of their chairs, floating several centimeters upward, then slammed back into them. Mattanga, who
was comfortably gripping her chair, was obviously doing her best not to smile. “That sound is the perturb alarm,” she said.
“Keeping all the habitats on seventeen arms at their contracted gravity is occasionally a little much for even the best software—sometimes
it’s literally insoluble—and that’s when the software turns on engines on all the habitats and gets us tumbling in a different
configuration. Gravity usually drops close to zero, bounces up close to full right after, and then settles back to normal.
It happens about twice a day.