A Princess of the Aerie (28 page)

Passing pieces of the bridge to each other, they had just removed it from the cargo hold, and the people who dakked the djeste
of the bridge were arranging the parts, when the general freq crackled. “This is MLB Operations. Anyone working near the accidental
magma pool, please be aware that to save vital facilities inside the structure we will be dumping additional magma in five
minutes. Magma level will rise about a half meter. Everyone clear the area. Dumping in five minutes.”

The voice clicked off.

Durol’s voice on the radio was frantic. “Hailing the controller inside the MLB facility. Hailing the controller inside the
MLB facility. There is an emergency in progress with human life at stake and Treaty Law prohibits turning off your radio.”

The silence continued.

“Hailing the controller inside the MLB facility. You have two employees stranded on an island in that lake and they are much
less than a half meter above the magma. They will not survive if you dump more magma.” He clicked to the group frequency and
added, “Keep working on the bridge. They can’t do this. We’re going to get to use that bridge, so get it ready.”

All the workers scrambled, following the directions of the Thomagatz technicians, linking strut to truss, frame to brace,
and piece to piece. Jak had no idea exactly how this thing would do it, but it was a bridge that could reach those people,
and he did his best to follow directions as quickly as he could.

After almost a minute there was a scratchy sound on the emergency frequency. “This is MLB central. Please repeat.”

Durol did, carefully.

“Our records show that all our employees are inside, safe.”

“These are contract workers, I’m sure! They don’t have rocables and they’re in regular pressure suits without gauntlets or
therm boots. From the way they’re staggering I’d judge they already are near heat prostration, and I speck their cooling systems
may fail at any moment. We will be ready with a creeper bridge in just a couple of minutes. If you wait another fifteen minutes
before dumping that magma, then—”

“Thank you for advising us of the situation,” the voice said.

On the work frequency, a cry. “They’ve dumped it! They’ve dumped it!”

Some evil streak in human nature—a streak which is its own punishment—compels us to see the worst. The crowd ran to the ridge
top, just in time to see the thick red rolling wave of magma sweep across the island. It was only about waist height, but
being many times denser than water, it hit with overwhelming force, and the two pressure-suited figures were thrown headlong
into the magma. One lay still; the other struggled for an instant, then seemed to stop like a running-down movie of a swimmer.
A moment later, one suit, and then the other, burst open, and the distant mountains wavered, refracted by the briefly rising
column of steam.

Shadow rushed by Jak and Dujuv; both of them cried out for just an instant, on the frequency they shared with him, but a moment
later he was coming back from the lake. He seemed to have run down to its very edge, bent over for one instant, and come back
immediately. As he returned, they could see that he was holding a sampling bucket. “We ought to see what is in this magma,”
the Rubahy said. “If it is what I fear and hope, we have a real crisis here—opportunity and danger.” He glanced back toward
the lake of magma, in which the shapes of the two bodies were still just barely visible. “Over on one of the other channels,
I heard that they dictated their wills and then turned off their transmitters, not wanting to burden their friends and relatives
with the death cries that your media would surely have picked up and broadcast. They died with honor.”

Jak shuddered. He was mostly remembering Principle 116: “The dead can have honor, but
they
can’t eat it, either.”

Kyffimna said that Durol normally prohibited business discussion until the dishes were cleared away and the last of dessert
was eaten, but tonight at dinner in the krilj the whole quacco watched as Bref and Shadow walked through a set of graphs,
showing what had been in the magma. The first surprise was that it had been unexpectedly radioactive, not at all common with
any material with which they would normally work on Mercury. Even the isotopes used to tag metal were usually either stable,
or, if radioactive, had such long half-lives that they were barely even detectable in the trace quantities used. “What does
this mean and why did you look for it?” Durol asked.

“Well,” Shadow said, “my friends, a thought crossed my mind. Before they dumped the red, almost-cool magma, that lake was
white-hot, and there was barely any trace of surface cooling—only at the extreme edges, where the liquid was very shallow,
am I correct?” They all nodded, and then the implications sank in. “So if that second wave of magma had started off white-hot,
they’d have dumped it, not waited for several minutes, and anyway they appeared to be able to contain it … so it wasn’t the
heat that was the problem. That meant there was something dangerous about it otherwise—toxins or radioactivity. So I thought
we’d better grab some of the material before it was mixed and diluted by other things, because it might be our best chance
to find out what they were doing. Well, material at that temperature, highly radioactive, means just one thing—”

“They lost containment on a hot-metal, liquid-mix reactor,” Durol said. His heavy gray eyebrows shot far up. “That’s the only
thing that would do that. Those things are basically just a big tank of mixed fissionables and moderators in solution in liquid
metal, masen? So if they lost containment, or maybe if it overheated and breached, you’d get a lake like that, till it spread
out enough to be in a geometry where the neutrons escaped enough to take it below criticality.”

“Uh,” Narav said.

Durol looked at his youngest son. “Told you to keep up with schoolwork, even when we can’t afford the good stuff. Look, nuclear
reactors run on neutrons; if lots of neutrons get out, it cools off and stops, if most of them stay inside, it heats up. Neutrons
escape through the surface area, and a sphere—which is the shape of the container for those things—has very little surface
area for the volume it encloses. Now, when it spreads out into a big old molten pancake, like this did, it’s the same volume
(because it’s the same amount of stuff) but far more surface area. So eventually it cools off. What Shadow is saying is that
they needed to hide the fact that they had a huge reactor there—what, probably half a million cubic meters in volume?—and
then had an oopsie with it.”

“I have already reported the ‘oopsie’ to the Duke of Uranium,” Shadow said. “Unfortunately, he seems to be sequestered for
the next four days—revisiting at Greenworld, for some reason—and he won’t hear of it till he is done with whatever he is doing
there. There are people at Fermi who can start all the preparations for an expedition to come here, investigate, and shut
them down, but it will be a matter of several weeks, at least, before any such effort gets here. And in that time, given that
they have that isotope separator, the MLB people can remove most or much of the evidence. After all, very likely that reactor
itself was legal, and I have no doubt that the facility built around it was designed for quick concealment whenever an inspector
from the Duchy of Uranium popped in.”

“What is that facility?” Dujuv said. “Shadow, you have me talking like you. I just mean, so what were they going to do with
this thing?”

“Well, first of all, power for the isotope separator, of course,” Shadow said, “because the solar array they would need for
a really large separator would be very conspicuous, and someone would ask what they needed all that electricity for. But secondly,
those hot liquid metal reactors are extremely good for producing isotopes, as well. Very high neutron flux inside and you
can lower materials in a thermos basket, or just dissolve it in the reactor and pull it out with tunable-matter plates. Then
run it through your separator, throw the short-lived radioactives somewhere (in this case, apparently they flowed right into
that molten lake) and you have all you need to dope lots of metal with false IDs, in quantity. And my offhand estimate—Bref
helped tremendously with this—was that the amount of metal they were planning to reprocess, redope, and thus label for resale
without having to pay the miners any of what’s legitimately theirs—would be right around ten percent more than what Mercury
currently produces. Oh, yes. They are definitely in it for the long haul and for a full conquest.”

Durol was grinning broadly, now. “More opportunities.”

Dujuv bolted an unusually large bite—which, for him, meant practically as big as his head—and said, “Opportunities? I’d say
this sounds like a disaster.”

“Only if they win,” Durol said, grinning. Jak realized that even though Durol Eldothaler’s face was a record of all the poisons
poured into him, radiation shot through him, and burdens imposed on him since before he was born, it had the kind of character
that you saw in medieval Italian paintings or movies. And somehow, his very facial deformity, the record of his murderous
environment, enhanced the effect of his confident tone. “But they’re in motion, and I seem to remember that they teach you
in the Disciplines that ‘to move—’ ”

“ ‘—is to be vulnerable,’ ” Jak finished. “I see what you mean. They also teach that ‘to stand still is to be defeated.’ So
I hope you have something in mind.”

“Not yet,” Durol said: “I’m going to have to spend a while in multiple conference messaging tonight. But I know there’s much
more to work with now than there has been. The isotope separator makes MLB a threat to everyone, first of all, so a lot of
people will take it more seriously. And when someone comes galloping in to overthrow the Treaty; and the first thing they
find a way to go after is one of the few things that protects the miners in any way at all … well, that doesn’t look good.

“And it happens to happen that we have some recordings of that incident this afternoon. Dumping that second load of magma
was pure murder, and if they had done it to shut those men up it would have been damning—but you know, I really don’t think
they did. I think they were just that indifferent and just that careless. Or in short, as the saying used to be back on Earth
where I grew up, ‘They’re just not from around here.’ Nobody who was would have done that, at least not the way they did.

“So I’m going to start messaging everyone I can, and see how they all react to this.” He leaned back, his eyes seeming to
search the ceiling for his memory. “Oh, yeah, there are plenty of people out there who I’ve heard begin a conversation with
‘What kind of bastards …’ and end with ‘MLB.’ They always came to me to complain because MLB is right here in Crater Hamner,
but they never wanted to get together and do anything when it was just that we didn’t like MLB and they’d got bit once.

“Well, now I can remind ’em they got bit, and then show them that MLB plans to go right on biting, and show just how bad they
bite. And get them all talking to each other. This is looking better than things have looked in months. Just have to remember
everyone who has some fresh grievances against MLB.”

“Norinez Quacco, Dad,” Bref said. “MLB underbought them last week, three days short of their final payment on their drilling
gear.”

“Oh, yeah,” Durol said, making a note in his purse. “Something about having everything you own grabbed, getting Invisible
Thumbed deep as it goes, just when you were about to get yourself clear of debt, probably precesses you pretty good.”

Kyffimna nodded. “Thomagatzes were there for the mess this afternoon, but remember two months ago, that split-off quacco they
were just launching, the Melozjians?”

“Oh, yeah. Thomagatzes and Melozjians need to be among the first I call,” Durol said to his purse. “A brand-new quacco with
three pregnant women in it, and MLB leased them a chamber for a new krilj, over in Crater Jiang, and never mentioned it was
crawling with cadmium and radiophosphorus.”

Within twenty minutes, he had a list of more than a hundred quaccos to message, all with one awful story or another. He got
up with a strange smile, saying, “Lots of messaging to do. Take it easy on the wine, those of you that want to find out how
this comes out, ’cause I’ll be up late on this one. But I think with all this, plus what happened this afternoon, plus what
we found out … well, we’ll get some action. Not necessarily effective action, these are Mercurials after all, but at least
action.”

No one was in much of a mood to tell stories or sing, with the fate of the planet being discussed in the next room; everyone
had long been in bed, and the Eldothalers, Dujuv, Shadow, and Jak were sitting around drinking coffee and not bothering to
talk any more when Durol returned.

“Not the best idea we’ve ever had,” Durol admitted. “But the leaders and elders of lots of different quaccos have been talking,
and a lot of the little guilds and cults and families in Bigpile, and we’ve settled on at least trying to make our voices
heard and trying to make the outside world aware of what’s going on. So there will be a one-week strike, all over the northern
Caloris Basin and the rim and scarp around it, against any activity for export—we can’t very well make it a general strike,
we want the power workers and the heets that make air on the job!—and everyone who’s taking the time off will be going into
Bigpile for a week of demonstrations in the public areas—well, actually, every square centimeter of Bigpile is privately owned,
and we can expect that MLB will keep buying the ground under us and ordering us to move, but that, too, ought to do us some
good if it gets in front of the cameras.

“We’ll also be picketing the offices of the big offplanet companies, and we think most of their local workers won’t cross
our picket lines. Plus there’s five sunclippers making a pass by the Bigpile loop in the next few days, and with the loading
crews on strike, they won’t be able to do cargo switches. They can divert to other loops, offload, and get other cargoes,
and they all carry strike insurance, we checked that, so they’ll be okay, able to pay off everyone whose loads they don’t
pick up, but since a sunclipper can’t turn around, anything that doesn’t get picked up at Bigpile has to wait for the next
one. Deliveries will be months late for metals to all kinds of industrial plants all over the solar system, and even though
they’ll get cash to cover from the insurance, mostly the businesses in the upper system don’t
want
money, they
need
metal. So that should get a lot of attention.”