Gods of Risk (9 page)
Authors: James S.A. Corey
He saw it when she recognized him; a widening of the eyes, a shift in the angle of her shoulders. Her expression tightened with something like anger. Fear looking for somewhere to go. The man sitting beside her touched her shoulder and said something. She shook her head, faced away. The man turned, scowling at the crowd. He met David’s eyes for a moment, but there was nothing like understanding in them. David looked away from her for the last time.
“Here we go,” Cassie said as the first results began to come. David put his elbows against the table as one by one values within his error bars clicked into place. He watched Dr. Fousek’s eyebrows lift, watched Jeremy start to grin.
The euphoria came.
James S.A. Corey is the pen name of fantasy author Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck.
M
anéo Jung-Espinoza—Néo to his friends back on Ceres Station—huddled in the cockpit of the little ship he’d christened the
Y Que
. After almost three months, there was maybe fifty hours left before he made history. The food had run out two days before. The only water that was left to drink was half a liter of recycled piss that had already gone through him more times than he could count. Everything he could turn off, he’d turned off. The reactor was shut down. He still had passive monitors, but no active sensor arrays. The only light in the cockpit came from the backsplash of the display terminals. The blanket he’d wrapped himself in, corners tucked into his restraints so it wouldn’t float away, wasn’t even powered. His broadcast and tightbeam transmitters were both shut off, and he’d slagged the transponder even before he’d painted the name on her hull. He hadn’t flown this far just to have some kind of accidental blip alert the flotillas that he was coming.
Fifty hours—less than that—and the only thing he had to do was not be seen. And not run into anything, but that part was in
los manos de Dios
.
His cousin Evita had been the one who’d introduced him to the underground society of slingshots. That had been three years earlier, just before his fifteenth birthday. He’d been hanging at his family hole, his mother gone to work at the water treatment plant, his father at a meeting with the grid maintenance group he oversaw. Néo had stayed home, cutting school for the fourth time in a month. When the system announced someone waiting at the door, he’d figured it was school security busting him for being truant. Instead, Evita was there.
She was two years older and his mother’s sister’s kid. A real Belter. They had the same long, thin bodies, but she was
from
there. He’d had a thing for Evita since the first time he saw her. He’d had dreams about what she’d look like with her clothes off. What it would feel like to kiss her. Now here she was, and the place to himself. His heart was going three times standard before he opened the door.
“Esá, unokabátya,” she said, smiling and shrugging with one hand.
“Hoy,” he’d said, trying to act cool and calm. He’d grown up in the massive city in space that was Ceres Station, just the way she had, but his father had the low, squat frame that marked him as an Earther. He had as much right to the cosmopolitan slang of the Belt as she had, but it sounded natural on her. When he said it, it was like he was putting on someone else’s jacket.
“Some cayos meeting down portside. Silvestari Campos back,” she said, her hip cocked, her mouth soft as a pillow, and her lips shining. “Doch mit?”
“Que no?” he’d said. “Got nothing better.”
He’d figured out afterward that she’d brought him because Mila Sana, a horse-faced Martian girl a little younger than him, had a thing, and they all thought it was funny to watch the ugly inner girl padding around after the half-breed, but by then he didn’t care. He’d met Silvestari Campos and he’d heard of slingshotting.
Went like this: Some coyo put together a boat. Maybe it was salvage. Maybe it was fabbed. Probably at least some of it was stolen. Didn’t need to be much more than a torch drive, a crash couch, and enough air and water to get the job done. Then it was all about plotting the trajectory. Without an Epstein, a torch drive burned pellets too fast to get anyone anywhere. At least without help. The trick was to plot it so that the burn—and the best only ever used one burn—would put the ship through a gravity assist, suck up the velocity of a planet, and head out as deep as the push would take them. Then figure out how to get back without getting dead. Whole thing got tracked by a double-encrypted black net as hard to break as anything that the Loca Greiga or Golden Bough had on offer. Maybe they ran it. It was illegal as hell, and somebody was taking the bets. Dangerous, which was the point. And then when you got back, everyone knew who you were. You could lounge around in the warehouse party and drink whatever you wanted and talk however you wanted and drape your hand on Evita Jung’s right tit and she wouldn’t even move it off.
And just like that, Néo, who hadn’t ever cared about anything very much, developed an ambition.
“The thing people have to remember is that the Ring isn’t magical,” the Martian woman said. Néo had spent a lot of time in the past months watching the newsfeeds about the Ring, and so far, he liked her the best. Pretty face. Nice accent. She wasn’t as thick as an Earther, but she didn’t belong to the Belt either. Like him. “We don’t entirely understand it yet, and we may not for decades. But the last two years have given us some of the most interesting and exciting breakthroughs in materials technology since the wheel. Within the next ten or fifteen years, we’re going to start seeing the applications of what we’ve learned from watching the protomolecule, and it will—”
“Fruit. Of. A poisoned. Tree,” the old, leathery-looking coyo beside her said. “We cannot allow ourselves to forget that this was built from mass murder. The criminals and monsters at Protogen and Mao-Kwik released this weapon on a population of innocents. That slaughter began all of this, and profiting from it makes us all complicit.”
The feed cut to the moderator, who smiled and shook his head at the leathery one.
“Rabbi Kimble,” the moderator said, “we’ve had contact with an undisputed alien artifact that took over Eros Station, spent a little over a year preparing itself in the vicious pressure cooker of Venus, then launched a massive complex of structures just outside the orbit of Uranus and built a thousand-kilometer-wide ring. You can’t be suggesting that we are morally required to ignore those facts.”
“Himmler’s hypothermia experiments at Dachau—” the leathery coyo began, wagging his finger in the air, but now it was the pretty Martian’s turn to interrupt.
“Can we move past the 1940s, please?” she said, smiling in a way that said,
I’m being friendly but shut the fuck up
. “We’re not talking about space Nazis here. This is the single most important event in human history. Protogen’s role in it was terrible, and they’ve been punished for it. But now we have to—”
“Not
space
Nazis!” the old coyo yelled. “The Nazis aren’t from
space
. They are right here among us. They are the beasts of our worst nature. By profiting from these discoveries, we
legitimize
the path by which we came to them.”
The pretty one rolled her eyes and looked at the moderator like she wanted help. The moderator shrugged at her, which only made the old one angrier.
“The Ring is a temptation to sin,” the old coyo shouted. There were little flecks of white at the corners of his mouth, which the video editor had chosen to leave visible.
“We don’t know what it is,” the pretty one said. “Given that it was intended to do its work on primordial Earth with single-celled organisms and wound up on Venus with an infinitely more complex substrate, it probably doesn’t work at all, but I can say that temptation and sin have nothing to do with it.”
“They are victims. Your ‘complex substrate’? It is the corrupted bodies of the innocent!”
Néo turned down the feed volume and just watched them gesture at each other for a while.
It had taken him months to plan out the trajectory of the
Y Que
, finding the time when Jupiter, Europa, and Saturn were all in the right positions. The window was so narrow it had been like throwing a dart from a half klick away and pinning a fruit fly’s wing with it. Europa had been the trick. A close pass on the Jovian moon, then down so close to the gas giant that there was almost drag. Then out again for the long trip past Saturn, sucking more juice out of its orbital velocity, and then farther out into the black, not accelerating again, but going faster than anyone would imagine a little converted rock hopper could manage. Through millions of klicks of vacuum to hit a bull’s-eye smaller than a mosquito’s asshole.
Néo imagined the expressions of all the science and military ships parked around the Ring when a little ship, no transponder and flying ballistic, appeared out of nowhere and shot straight through the Ring at 150 thousand kilometers per hour. After that, he’d have to move fast. He didn’t have enough fuel left to kill all his velocity, but he’d slow down enough that they could get a rescue ship to him.
He’d do some time in slam, that was sure. Maybe two years, if the magistrates were being pissy. It was worth it, though. Just the messages from the black net, where all his friends were tracking him with the constant and rising chorus of
Holy Shit It’s Going to Work
, made it worth it. He was going down in history. In a hundred years, people were still going to be talking about the biggest-balled slingshot ever. He’d lost months building the
Y Que
, more than that in transit, then jail time after. It was worth it. He was going to live forever.
Twenty hours.
The biggest danger was the flotilla surrounding the Ring. Earth and Mars had kicked each other’s navies into creaky old men months earlier, but what was left was mostly around the Ring. Or else down in the inner planets, but Néo didn’t care about them. There were maybe twenty or thirty big military ships watching each other while every science vessel in the system peeked and listened and floated gently a couple thousand klicks from the Ring. All the Navy muscle there to make sure no one touched. No one even got close. Scared, all of them. Even with all that metal and ceramic crammed into the same tiny corner of space, even with the relatively tiny thousand klicks across that was the inner face of the Ring, the chances that he’d run into anything were tiny. There was a lot more nothing than something. And if he did hit one of the flotilla ships, he wasn’t going to be around to worry about it, so he just gave it up to
Dios y la Virgen María
and started setting up the high-speed camera. When it finally happened, it would be so fast he wouldn’t even know whether he’d made the mark until he analyzed the data. And he was making sure there was going to be a record. He turned his transmitters back on.
“Hoy,” he said into the camera, “Néo here. Néo solo. Captain and crew of souverän Belt-racer
Y Que
. Mielista me. Got six hours until biggest slipper since God made man. Esta being for me Mama, the sweet Sophia Brun, and Jesus our lord and savior. Watch close. Blink it and miss, que sa?”
He watched the file. He looked like crap. He probably had time; he could shave the ratty little beard off and at least tie back his hair. He wished now he’d kept up with his daily exercises so he wouldn’t look so chicken-shouldered. Too late now. Still, he could mess with the camera angle. He was ballistic. Wasn’t like there was any thrust gravity to worry about.
He tried again from two other angles until his vanity was satisfied, then switched to the external cameras. His introduction was a little over ten seconds long. He’d start the broadcast twenty seconds out, then switch to the exterior cameras. More than a thousand frames per second, and it still might miss the Ring between images. He had to hope for the best. Wasn’t like he could get another camera now, even if a better one existed.
He drank the rest of his water and wished that he’d packed just a little more food. A tube of protein slush would have gone down really well. It’d be done soon. He’d be in some Earther or Martian brig where there would be a decent toilet and water to drink and prisoners’ rations. He was almost looking forward to it.
His sleeping comm array woke up and squawked about a tightbeam. He opened the connection. The encryption meant it was from the black net and sent long enough before that it would reach him here. Someone besides him was showing off.
Evita was still beautiful, but more like a woman now than she’d been when he’d started getting money and salvage to build the
Y Que
. Another five years, she’d be plain. He’d still have a thing for her, though.