A Princess of the Aerie (6 page)

“So I don’t know about all this, Jak. Of course it would look fine to Dujuv—she’s a friend to him because once a friend, always
a friend. And it would look good to your uncle and to the Dean, because as far as they’re concerned, it doesn’t really matter
what Sesh actually wants, it’s a chance for someone from the Hive to do some big favors for the Karrinynya heir. But I’d rather
know what the other players are playing for,
before
they deal me in to the game.”

“But you’re going.”

“Weehu, yeah, I’m
bored,
Jak.”

“Me too, Myx.” Jak turned toward her and found himself lost in the green and blue star patterns of her eyes. “Toktru, sometimes
I think I’m just bored stiff being here, bored stiff with being an ornament in Fnina’s social life, bored stiff with all the
things in my life that weren’t those few weeks of adventure a few years back. Just plain bored stiff.”

Myxenna smiled and turned on her side; Jak stroked under the curve of her full breast. “Mmm. Well, I do know something that
will get you stiff, besides being bored. Do you want to think or have more sex?”

“How about one then the other?”

The second time was slower, gentler, with more laughter. When they were both sated and happy, lying in each other’s arms,
Myxenna traced a finger down Jak’s sternum and said, “So it’s in your liver.”

“Unh-huh. Uncle Sib wrote that down on the agenda for that mission, back then. Deliver the sliver in the liver to River. Not
that anyone actually calls Riveroma ‘River.’ He’s not the kind of heet who gets nicknames—I speck that Sibroillo just figured
that if word of it ever got to him it would precess him. Imagine two petty ten-year-olds who hate each other—that’s Sibroillo
Jinnaka and Bex Riveroma.”

Myxenna sighed. “So the sliver is still in there?”

“ ’Fraid so. I’m safer with it than without it. No one would ever believe I’d had that little sliver of silicon removed, and
if I’m ever captured by Riveroma, or by Triangle One, or by any of a dozen other malphs … well, chances are they’ll just kill
me and pick through my liver at leisure, but they might speck that the sliver might be booby-trapped or that I might have
some value as a hostage. If there’s no sliver, they’ve got no reason at all to keep me alive—and at least one thing they’re
going to be toktru precessed about. So no matter how you look at it, I’m better off with that sliver.”

She shuddered. “I hate the idea of anyone cutting into your body. Or anybody’s body. If you left it up to me we’d all spend
our three hundred and fifty years eating and making art, dancing and telling jokes, and fucking. Especially fucking.” She
kissed him just at the base of the sternum, feeling and savoring his skin with her full, soft lips. Her hand gently pressed
his thighs apart. The tip of one finger brushed gently up and down until it found the singing-on place to flick, quickly and
lightly. “If only Shadow on the Frost hadn’t rescued you—if he’d known about the sliver—”

“But he didn’t know,” Jak said, squirming from her airy touch, “and he’s Rubahy. Honor-bound to protect an oath-friend. Shadow’s
honor and loyalty make Duj’s look mild by comparison.”

“And by comparison to Dujy, you and I have none at all,” she whispered. “Don’t you love that?” Before he could answer, her
tongue was deep in his mouth.

S
wift as death itself, the Republic of the Hive battlesphere
Up Yours
shot through the dark between the worlds, toward the Aerie, just half a day away. Though
Up Yours
was two kilometers in diameter, with the volume of a medium-sized mountain, it was nearly invisible in war mode. Nothing
protruded above the spongy black vacuum gel armor. Trillions of microfiberoptics carried starlight from each point on the
ship to a distribution of millions of points on the other side, so that it did not occlude stars for any observer farther
away than about a thousand kilometers (which the ship itself traveled in less than five seconds). Radar that entered the snarl
of tunnels in its absorbent surface never emerged again to reveal its position; perfect insulation left its heat traces apparently
as cold as the dark between the stars, and if necessary
Up Yours
could store all waste heat inside for more than a year. No exhaust of mass or energy betrayed the battlesphere’s position;
the ship ran ballistic after each brief eight-g burst of acceleration from its quarkjets, in an almost straight line, much
faster than solar escape velocity, to its destination, where it matched orbits with a similar burst.

Within five minutes of thrust shutdown, the vacuum gel armor regrew over everything, and the ship vanished from all but the
most sophisticated and subtle detectors. It could be spotted, sometimes, barely, by faint radar bounce back (if it was nearly
on top of you), by a probe with a sensitive gravimeter (if the probe happened to pass close enough), by the scintillation
of starlight passing through it (which lasted only a fraction of a second), or when it crossed the disk of a planet in a telescope
(which, in most of interplanetary space, would happen about one ten-thousandth of one percent of the time). In battle, its
quark-soup exhaust itself jammed many detection systems. Otherwise, in war mode, the ship was invisible.

Up Yours
ran in war mode most of the time, for the solar system swarmed with enemies of the Hive, and battle-spheres—the pride of
the Spatial—were prime targets. Beneath her self-healing foam of vacuum gel, practically her whole surface was either thrust
nozzles or weapons.

Yet though a battlesphere was the most concentrated collection of destructive force ever to carry a crew, and though the solar
system was always at war, their presence inspired no fear. The Aerie’s seventeen arms were each long enough to reach across
the Pacific Ocean, it was home to a full two billion people and more than four hundred independent nations, the biggest manmade
object of all time, yet
Up Yours
could have torn the entire Aerie to pieces no more than a meter across in less than ten minutes.
Up Yours
was allowed to approach, not because there was no danger of war, but because, all thanks to Paj Nakasen’s Principles, war
was not the danger it had been. Humanity, after millennia of slaughter piled upon slaughter, had at last admitted to and studied
its own vicious and bloody nature, painstakingly worked out a few rules of war, and made them stick. Foremost of these were
Principle 174 of the Wager: “Every habitat must stay habitable,” and Principle 209: “When the common interest is survival,
individuals must gang up or be ganged up on.”

Wars were fought with little weapons where there were people, or big weapons where there were not, and to violate that principle
was to be hunted down like vermin. Any nation or corporation that seized or destroyed a neutral sun-clipper faced an immediate
and total embargo on food, water, power, and air; a nation attacked while taking its turn patrolling the approaches to Pluto
could count on thousands of allies, including the Rubahy themselves; tyrants and madmen could seek power by means as cruel
as ever, but if they took one step that might make any human habitat unfit for life, their own forces would turn to slay them.

Thus though war was endemic, a warship able to rip civilization off the face of a planet, or to reduce a planet-sized station
to rubble, could approach the solar system’s biggest population center, defended by an equally awesome set of weapons, with
no fear on either part. Such was the power of the Wager.

This was the lecture playing to the three CUPVs as they worked their way down the auxiliary accelerator tube, replacing panels
as they went. When
Up Yours
needed to sacrifice stealth for speed, it could gain about 10% more acceleration by recycling the stray quarks from the synthesizers
that drove the main jets. Here in the tubes, quark-plasma condensed into a demon’s-goulash of subatomic particles, whipped
around in opposing directions to collide at the foci of the auxiliary propulsion dishes, creating a powerful secondary thrust.

On merchant sunclippers, where Jak had worked before, a work crew selected music for its work area. On a battle-sphere, the
public address system ceaselessly broadcast political/philosophic/religious lectures, to keep crewies loyal—to the Wager,
to Nakasen’s vision, to the Hive, and to Nakasen’s vision of what the Wager meant to the Hive. Thus Jak, Myx, and Duj airswam
after their sprites (which looked like stage tinkerbells) through the tunnels, replacing panels as they went, in a constant
drone of lecture.

Jak had learned to tune it out; he had no idea whether Myxenna or Dujuv listened to it, because as CUPVs they were temporarily
members of the Spatial—subject to punishment for seditious remarks. On a battlesphere, microphones and cameras, like the political
officers who monitored them, were ubiquitous.

Jak had CUPVed on the sunclippers
Spirit of Singing Port
to Earth, and
Promeithia
back to the Hive, on his single mission two years ago, and spent most of his first Long Break the year before as a CUPV on
a short-hauler,
Lakshmi’s Singing Joy,
on a Hive-Mercury-Venus-Hive voyage. He was almost halfway to a full-fledged union card. His experience had mattered not
at all. The Spatial put CUPVs on any old job that had to be done but was normally a waste of a good crewie, and kept them
there till there was reason to move them.

Physically, Spatial ships were far more comfortable than sunclippers; there was more room and more energy available, so the
facilities were more extensive.

But socially, it was quite another matter. This voyage was helping Jak to realize that he’d rather take a sunclipper anytime
he wasn’t in a hurry or going to a war. Even though
Up Yours
was going directly from the Hive to the Aerie in seventeen days (a sunclipper would have taken four months and at least one
flyby of Venus or Mercury), it was seventeen very long days. Plenty of work but no griping (except within your skull). Plenty
of time off and exercise facilities, but no locker room socializing. Plenty of pizos but you’d better bring your toves with
you. Myxenna might have added plenty of midshipmen and ensigns but no fraternizing; Dujuv might have added plenty of food
but no variety.

Jak spent his spare time trying to pass the correspondence version of Solar System Ethnography, or asleep, or in brief, necessary
bouts of peacekeeping between Myx and Duj.

They went on replacing panels in the tubes. The lecture on the Principles and war law ended, and was followed by short interlude
lectures before the next long one.

Jak had rather enjoyed the two-minute interlude of ship’s history, at first, but it played at least twice per shift, and now
he knew it by heart.

It was intended to make sure that you dakked why it was an honor for a crewie to serve on a battlesphere in general and
Up Yours
in particular.
Up Yours
was a
Nuts
class battlesphere, almost five hundred years old, one of the largest warships in the solar system, though it lacked the
sheer speed and better ablative armor of the more modern
Like So Not
class battlespheres. Fourteen battlespheres in all, a quarter of all those existing, made up the main line of the Hive Spatial.

Up Yours
had been named, like all battlespheres, for a message of defiance from an important historical human commander, in this case
Ralph Smith’s message to the Rubahy during the desperate fighting on Titan. She was the third battlesphere of that name, the
first having gone completely dead to communications at far above solar escape velocity, and continued ballistically up out
of the solar system, never to return, too fast for any ship to catch, presumably with its crew unable to get the quarkjets
back on.

The second had instantly become white-hot plasma in the suicide crash of a Rubahy fighter pilot during the Seventh (and so
far last) Rubahy War. After a respectful few centuries, a Hive Spatial orbicruiser had been named after the fighter pilot,
and
Tree Bowing to the Storm
was now regarded as a “good luck” ship, though traditionally it never served in the same fleet or task force as
Up Yours.

Jak followed his sprite down the poorly lit tube, swimming in the thick gas that had been injected to make maneuvering easier.
I always wondered why Spatial crewies couldn’t wait to hit port and stayed off the ship as long as possible. I thought it
must be the harsh conditions, and now I speck they just wanted to get away from the loudspeaker.
That was seditious; good thing that Jak never talked in his sleep.

He fitted yet another panel into yet another square, passing the old pitted one back to Dujuv, who airswam away with it. Tube
maintenance was to spaceships what painting had been to sea ships; you didn’t get done, you just got to do it somewhere else.
Crewies on sunclippers rotated through a variety of jobs to provide cross-training and ward off deadly boredom, but crew on
Up Yours
spent weeks or months of the same duty every shift. This might not be a bad basis for the required paper in his Solar System
Ethnography course; merchant crewies were a recognized ethnic group, and one possible paper topic was to compare a recognized
ethnic group with a similar, identifiable sub-category of people within the Hive.

Jak turned and handed off another rough panel to Myx, accepting a smooth one in return; he placed the smooth one carefully,
released the special grips from it, and let it self-fasten into place. The soft glow of light in the tube was pleasant, and
the swimming gas, designed to be sticky and thick, made maneuvering easy in free fall. Since the panels couldn’t be exposed
to any gas that wasn’t inert, workers had to wear rebreathers, but they were lightweight and comfortable, and the air they
supplied was pleasantly odorless, unlike ship air.

“How long till shift end?” Duj asked.