A Princess of the Aerie (7 page)

Jak turned his left hand up to check his purse. “Sixteen minutes. Time for three more panels.”

“This was challenging when we started but it’s kind of routine now.”

Jak chuckled. “I’m glad you retain your gift for under-statement.”

The constantly-on lecture switched over to an account of the history of the Aerie, which toktru Jak needed anyway as a review
of background for his next exam. The frustrating part of trying to learn it, though, was that it was too simple at the abstract
level and too complex at the detailed level.

In broad outline, he only needed to know that after the Bombardment and the attempted Rubahy invasion, there had been thousands
of surviving space habitats all over the solar system, most of them centuries old. Though they had mostly begun in orbit around
Earth or Mars, fifty years of the Bombardment and ten years of Rubahy surface raids had made planetary orbits dangerous; by
the end of the war the planets were really just vast high-gravity refugee camps anyway, so there was little economic reason
to move back. So the energy-poor habitats had gravitated economically, as much as physically, to the stable Lagrange libration
points in the solar system, where an object would stay in place without expending energy to station-keep, and the concentration
of those stations into tight nests created free trade zones, which developed rapidly and made the decision to move to a libration
point more and more inevitable for each successive station. Since most of the free-floaters orbited between Earth and Mars,
and the Mars libration points are much weaker and hence less stable positions, the cheapest stable libration points to reach
were the Earth-sun L4 point, sixty degrees ahead of Earth in orbit, or the Earth-sun L5 point, sixty degrees behind.

At L5, Nakasen’s Wager had led many of the habitats to pool resources, fuse themselves into a single design, go to the enormous
expense and effort of constructing a small black hole for a central waste sink and power source, and create the Hive. Over
four hundred habitats which chose not to give up their independence clustered at L4, where, to reduce the risk of collision,
they had all tied in permanently to a gigantic common docking body; the hundreds of stations on long arms extending out from
the docking body now formed the Aerie.

But though the broad outline of Aerie history was easy, it was doubtful that any human being could really have comprehended
the whole detailed history of the Aerie. Hundreds of nations each had an origin, a history before the Bombardment, a history
free-floating in deep space, a migration to L4, a period of free-floating in the cluster, a reconstruction during tie-up,
and finally a history since complete conversion into a unit of the Aerie.

The lecture didn’t hesitate to point out how neat and coherent Hive history was by comparison; all the 723 founding nations
had been abolished and mutually assimilated into the new culture of the Wager. The nations of the Aerie were simply disorderly,
something which they could easily have fixed if only their Confederacy charter didn’t prohibit the annexation or colonization
of habitats in the Aerie by the Republic of the Hive. Jak wondered why the Confederacy charter did that; all he could remember
was that for his teachers it was a matter for indignation. Had he missed something or was it one of those things not to be
talked about?

Their earphones told the three CUPVs that they were done for the day, and they gladly airswam back to the gaslock.

Moments later, in the corridor, Jak could finally pull back his rebreather hood and wipe his face. Duj’s hairless scalp shone
with sweat; Myx was running a hand through her sodden hair with disgust. “Thank Nakasen for a shower before final acceleration,”
she said. “And a clean dress uniform still left.”

Dujuv stared at a spot on the wall, not admitting that Myx was there.

Jak shrugged, keeping up his personal pretense that he was on good terms with both the other CUPVs. “I’m just looking forward
to no duty for a while. They work you hard on Spatial ships, compared to sunclippers.”

Sesh had saved money by booking the three of them into a “three-passenger suite,” as the Spatial called a closet-sized space
with a toilet/shower and three adjoining coffin bunks. As Myx showered and Duj sulked and waited, Jak pretended to read ethnography.

Dujuv obstinately insisted that he was not jealous, angry, or upset with Myxenna, and maintained that he toktru had never
liked her. Myxenna, for her part, was happy to be friends with anybody, and lovers with anybody attractive, but she was absolutely
not about to try to deal with any of Dujuv’s emotions. On Jak and Myx’s last night together in his apartment, when she had
sneaked in after Jak had seen Fnina for quick sex and the obligatory romantic public passionate farewell scene, Myx had said,
“All right, there’s a medical explanation for Dujuv. But it’s not a compliment to have someone devoted to you like a codependent
Saint Bernard.”

The shower turned off. “You can have the next one,” Jak said to Dujuv, who silently rose, grabbed his towel and shower things,
and floated patiently by the door till Myx emerged wrapped in her towel. He airswam in.

The moment the door closed, Myx gave Jak a big smile, took off the towel, made sure he took a good look, winked, and airswam
into her bunk to dress.

It probably helped her feel attractive, but it ruined Jak’s concentration on solar system ethnography. Today’s topic was
Unit 15: The Mars Origin Cults and the Eleven Martian Nations with MOC Beginnings, Part 1: Four Nations that Still Maintain
MOCs.
Privately Jak still thought of the topic as “the four dumbest gangs of savages in the solar system, and how to humor them,”
but he had at least learned to suppress such thoughts while taking his exams, and had a passing mark on all six of them so
far, with three to go.

This time, he reminded himself. Then only six more times through the whole course before graduation. Unless he finished at
the top of the class … he smiled. He had finally thought of something to make himself laugh.

The acceleration alarm sounded all clear, and instantly the enormous weight that had been crushing Jak down into the safety
couch turned off, and he returned to near-weightlessness. The last, hour-long burst of the quarkjets had been the worst, not
because the acceleration was any greater, but because it had all become extremely familiar and there had been nothing to do
about it. The gray-sleep drugs, the painkillers, and the breathing assister all helped, and making sure you peed before lying
down really helped, but eight g is eight g, and an hour of it feels just like lying on a bed with seven of yourself stacked
on top of you. And after five previous one-hour bursts, with an hour break between each, as
Up Yours
zigged and zagged its way down to orbital velocity to match the Aerie, the knowledge of what was coming and how it would
feel had settled into Jak’s bones.

Beside him, Myxenna sat up, groaning, and even Dujuv looked pale and tired. The one consolation about their utter unimportance
to the ship was that they didn’t have any immediate duties after any of the acceleration bursts, and therefore they had a
few minutes to stretch out the kinks before anything else came at them.

As they all floated, stretching, in their small cabin, trying not to bump into each other, a subtle force caused them all
to drift toward the wall of coffin bunks. “Cold jets,” Jak said, “they’ve started the last course corrections.”

The speaker in the room beeped once for attention, and then said, “CUPVs, be prepared for muster out processing in your quarters
in forty-five minutes.”

As
Up Yours
slipped between the whirling arms of the Aerie, only the minute, ever-changing accelerations from her hundreds of cold jets,
poking through her fuzzy black skin like the spines of a sea urchin, indicated that anything unusual was happening. The crew
were all singing-on where they were supposed to be at every instant,
more
spit-and-polish and by-the-book than ever—the Aerie was every crewie’s favorite port of call. No one wanted to draw one extra
second of on-ship duty during a stopover there.

So wherever you looked, every possible regulation was being conspicuously obeyed, yet the overwhelming feeling was of carnival
just erupting. On the muster deck where the B&Es were doing final check-and-stow, gear whipped from hand to hand and slapped
into place with the speed and precision of an ecstatic tapdancer. Unaccustomed camaraderie swept the engine room as engineers
throttled back the Casimir reactors and walked the synthesizers through cooldown. The chief officers in the worryball were
as singing-on precise as ever about keeping more than four hundred million tons of battlesphere moving at several kilometers
per second from crashing into densely populated human space, during an approach that had to be singing-on to the centimeter
in its last few kilometers, but with a disconcerting sense of fun. Everywhere on board the letter of every rule was respected
reverently, but the rules as a whole were stretched like shrink-wrap, barely containing the roiling spirit of joyful impending
anarchy.

In their passenger suite, a deeply bored ensign, who clearly wanted to be anywhere else, took forever about mustering out
the three CUPVs, making sure everything was done Spatial-style (i.e., officially, punctiliously, and with no sense of proportion).
Yet even Ensign Petrawang was smiling shyly as she checked off information and took voice prints.

Finally she said, “All right, as far as I can tell, I’ve put you through every single procedure I’m supposed to put you through.
You can stay here, or hang out on one of the observation decks, but either way since there’re no windows in the ship, what
you’ll be doing is watching a screen. Most of us crewies on board prefer to use the goggles because you get a holo view and
you can hop from camera to camera to give yourself a real djeste of what’s going on.

“But whichever you do, make sure you make it to Muster Deck A in plenty of time. The Captain always does his farewells in
order of rank, starting from the bottom up, which means you’re first—so it would sure be noticed if you weren’t there or weren’t
ready.” She smiled again. Jak thought that if Petrawang hadn’t been depilated for the Forces, and if she had been wearing
something more flattering than a shapeless coverall, she might have been pretty.

Dujuv smiled back and said, “Thank you for the warning and thank you for reminding us where we stand around here.”

“My lieutenant would have wanged me good if I hadn’t warned you. If you precess the Captain one millisecond before you’re
off his ship, he can brig you till you die of old age. So be on time, and be serious—the Captain’s all right, but he’s still
a captain, and if captains have senses of humor, maybe I’ll see that when I’m a captain, but not much before.

“And as far as where you stand goes, CUPV, that’s singing-on, what I said, you go first because you’re at the bottom, and
that’s what your standing is. If we were also dismissing a toaster, a vacuum cleaner, and the ship’s cat today, you’d still
be first in line. Now enjoy the view, be
where
you’re supposed to
when
you’re supposed to, and remember to be grateful when you’re a civilian again.”

After she left, they pulled on visors to catch the view. By now
Up Yours
was well within the whirling seventeen arms of the constantly precessing Aerie, each arm a string of twenty-five habitats,
each habitat a flat disk two hundred kilometers across, separated from its neighbors above and below by a little less than
five hundred kilometers of space.

As Jak clicked from camera to camera, sometimes cross-monitoring in two different eyepieces so that he could get a wide-angle
stereo view, he saw the many habitats moving slowly in their turning, bending columns, and the little fires on their edges
of quarkjets coming on to adjust position. The cables between them were too thin and dark to see, so the dozens of disks,
each covered with cities and forests and farmland, appeared to be flying in formation against the black of space. Near ones
would sometimes all but fill the sky and even the farthest ones were still almost twice the size of the Moon seen from Earth.
In edge on view, you dakked that the disks were truly wafers, only a few hundred meters thick with roofs not more than a kilometer
above their surfaces. Passing between the cables to go through an arm—a procedure that the guide-recording assured Jak was
safe—gave him a momentary glimpse of a wide landscape below, low-g forests retinated with streams and falls and dotted with
what could only be castles, each on a hill surrounded by a broad lawn. The near side of the battlesphere was only about five
kilometers above the clear roof, perhaps six kilometers from the treetops; from this close, you could see that it was a world,
or at least a big fragment of one, and somehow the term “habitat” felt wrong. Slowing as they were for landing, they were
moving at only about eight thousand kilometers per hour, and it took almost two minutes for the landscape to roll past beneath.

Jak checked with his purse. The place was called Scadia, and it was position ten on branch three, population seven million,
deliberately with only five small cities, principal products handicrafts, gravity averaging 13.7 percent with 30 percent variability,
average temperature twenty-two Celsius, the locally defined principal social groupings are—

He switched back to the general channel. For one awful second he’d almost been exposed to more ethnography. Now that he thought
of it, Scadia was one of Greenworld’s allies in the Confederacy of the Aerie, part of the blocking coalition that kept the
Aerie from merging into a single large polity with the potential to threaten the Hive’s hegemony. So besides the pretty castles
and park-like land between, they were toves. If he had to know what table manners to follow on a visit there, he could always
look it up. Comfortable with being exactly as ignorant as he wanted to be, Jak went back to watching
Up Yours
approach the docking body.