Saturn's Children (15 page)

My skin crawls briefly as we near the plasma shell, then we’re inside. A couple of blue sparks flash across the surface of my chain-mail hot suit, but there’s no arcing. A mimetic reflex makes me try to breathe a sigh of relief, which is very disconcerting in vacuum.
Down.
The empty gulf swings below me, as the ship decelerates at ten centimeters per second squared. From this side of the barrier the far side of the magsail is almost invisible, many kilometers away.

I hang in the bubble, with nothing to do but watch my power consumption and keep an eye on the stealthy feed
Pygmalion
has fed to Bill and Ben. I’ve got maybe twelve hours before I have to start shutting down limbs to save juice. In the worst case, I’ll have to rely on the terrible twosome to get me out of here when
Pygmalion
reaches Marsport and powers down her sail. But at least I’ve got a good view of the other passengers. Which is why I’m watching events in the saloon, with mixed feelings of boredom and wistfulness, when things start to happen.

It’s early morning, shipboard time, and Pygmalion has alerted everybody that something is happening. The Lyrae twins squat in their usual corner, stolidly chewing their way through a platter of pancakes. Reza Agile and Sinbad-15 sit nearby, sharing a go board while Mary X. Valusia dances attendance to Granita’s entourage, who are gathered in a gaggle at the opposite end of the saloon from the dreadful duo. As for the venerable Granita Ford herself—

“Attention.” Brash electrospeak ripples through my head, forwarded from
Pygmalion
’s general announcement feed: I tense. “Attention passengers and spacecraft
Pygmalion
. This is Port Control. You are ordered to stand to for boarding and inspection. A police cutter will come alongside shortly. Any resistance constitutes a violation of quarantine regulations and will be punished severely.”

“What?” shouts Reza Agile, jumping so suddenly that she bounces off the ceiling. “What’s going on? Ship! Are we delayed, or waylaid? I demand an explanation!” Then she’s drowned out by a hubbub from the other passengers.

“Attention. Coming alongside now.”

“It was too good to be true,” Sinbad-15 moans.

“Has anyone seen the other passengers today?” One of the Lyrae twins asks thoughtfully. “I find it interesting that Ford and her floozy are absent.”

“It’s a conspiracy!” Agile is clearly very agitated indeed. “She’s been studying us for the entire voyage—she’s going to have her minions chip and file us! We’re being press-ganged!”

At which precise moment Granita storms into the saloon. Two arbeiters trail behind, desperately battling to finish dressing her. “What is this disturbance about?” she demands.

“Attention! You will comply with all instructions on pain of immediate arrest. We are coming aboard now.”

I look away from my stealth feed. Above me, beyond the blue nimbus of the drive field, I see a slim black knife shape. Painfully bright lights flash on and off along its flanks as it maneuvers toward the
Pygmalion
. Lightning plays across the glowing magsail ceiling; the intruder’s exhaust stream is doing strange things to the plasma bubble.

“Hey, do you
see
that?” (I stitched a patch cable into the neck of my sack of troublesome assistants, just in case I needed their withering sarcasm for a change. Now it seems like a good thing I took the precaution. ) “Do we need to think about moving?”

“Yep.” I can’t tell whether it’s Bill or Ben, but he doesn’t sound happy. “Looks like a VASIMR on high thrust. They can’t hold it for long, but if they don’t dock quickly, it’ll short out the plasma bubble. Look down.”

I take his advice, and wish I hadn’t. The blue nowhere beneath my feet is rippling and shimmering like an ocean surface before a storm front. Pinpricks stipple it like rust. “That’s not good, is it?”

“I think it’s going to be alright,” says Ben, or Bill—the other one, anyway. “They’re on final approach. Won’t be long now. Look at it move! That’s military thrust, alright.”

I look back at the approaching intruder.
Pirates? Or police?
I’m not sure it really matters at this point. Neither of them would be good news. The ship is slim and smooth-edged, with triangular-tiled surfaces that make my eyes hurt as I try to trace its outline. The stubby cone of its main drive is just visible now, the bell nozzle glowing violet-hot even through the hazy plasma overcast. It sideslips toward
Pygmalion
, and for almost a minute I’m frozen with fear, terrified that it’s going to ram the ship we dangle from, or quench the ionized bubble, or angle its main engine just wrong and blast us all to white-hot shrapnel with its plasma rocket . . .

Then the glare vanishes, and there’s a ripple in the cable that tells me the two ships have locked together above us. And part of me realizes,
Of course. They don’t want to destabilize the sail, not with us riding the Phobos magbeam on final approach.

“It’s time for stage C,” says Bill (or Ben), presumably reading off Pygmalion’s detailed checklist.

“Is it?” I check the other bag dangling from my belt. Yes, it’s the one we made up earlier. “Okay, I’m ready. Let’s keep an eye on what’s going on in the saloon, yes?” I start the ascent, climbing hand over hand and reeling in the cable as I go. I feel like I only weigh about a kilogram here, even with my passengers. The trick is going to be not overdoing things and ramming the underside of the air lock headfirst.

The air in the saloon is steaming. The passengers are engaged in furious recriminations; Granita is tearing a strip off the Lyrae twins, Reza Agile is demanding my head (she appears to think I’m a police spy, of all things), and Mary X. is huddled in a corner, desperately trying to convince anyone who’ll listen to her that she’s nothing to do with whatever is happening.

Meanwhile, the steam is thickening, pumping into the saloon in great gouts.
Pygmalion
has fallen silent, evidently succumbing to whatever pressure our assailants can bring to bear on a spaceship over a direct docking link. I can’t tell precisely what’s happening, but I’m sure of one thing—the best place to be, when your spaceship is being boarded by bad bots who’re looking for you, is on board another vessel.

A rasping voice of authority comes over the broadcast channel again. “Attention, passengers and ship. Your pressurized compartments are being fumigated. Police agents will come aboard once fumigation is complete. This is an official Replication Suppression Agency inspection. You are suspected of harboring illegal replicators. You will be inspected and sterilized before you are allowed to proceed to Marsport; resistance will be punished severely.”

It
is
the Pink Police. Of all my luck; pirates would actually be preferable. You can usually negotiate a ransom with extralegal capitalists, but the Pink Police are distressingly short of venality. I pause, pressing a hand against the base of my abdomen. I can see the payload inside me with my mind’s eye, restlessly replicating.
Do magnetic fields damage pink goo?
I suddenly wonder. I could have blown the mission completely! But I don’t have time to worry about that now if I’m going to save myself.

On the other hand,
I think, as I close in on the docking tunnel above me,
the last place they’re going to look for it is aboard their own ship. Right?

Gouts of hig h-temperature water vapor blister the delicate paintwork of the
Pygmalion
’s saloon, soak into the colorful nylon-and-polyester padding, and steam up the sensors. There is some complaining and grumbling from the passengers, but the announcement that it is an official RSA inspection damps down the state of near panic. Nobody likes the Pink Police, but the prevailing state of public opinion is that they fulfill a nasty but necessary requirement. And so, the reaction is muted and the atmosphere steamy when the police jet in.

I don’t know what I was expecting of the Pink Police, but this isn’t it; they’re using drones, basketball-sized metal spheres studded with thrusters and sensors.
What, no villainous cops swarming aboard with DNA scanners clenched between their teeth?
Two spheres, three—they spin around with unreal grace, bouncing between floor and walls and ceiling, pointing their sensors everywhere. The steam gouting through the companionway obscures my view of them, but I can see the passengers cringing. Then—

“Hello? Big Slow? You can let us out, now. Remember us?”

It’s Bill, or Ben, in the bag at my waist. With a start, I notice that the sky outside my eye slit has turned black, the ghostly blue haze stretching away to an indefinite horizon beneath my trailing feet. The boarding tube looms just overhead, a violent tentacle thrusting into the unwilling
Pygmalion
’s air lock.

“Right.” I loosen the flap holding them in, and Bill (or Ben) pops a prehensile, beady-eyed head out and looks around. Then he grabs hold of my face and swarms up to the cable, followed closely by his sib, along with the bag. I’m not used to being used as a stepladder. “Hey!”

“Keep it low, Big Slow. We’re trying to be sneaky. You wanna get ready to make with the decoy?”

“If you think it’s time.” I tie the other bag to the line, then open it and start preparing its contents. There’s a suit of clothes that the Honorable Kate Sorico never really liked, and a bunch of stuff to fill it out. Bulky stuff, massive . . . and padded with feedstock from the room printer that Pygmalion swore blind would look like a body on radar.

“Nearly there, Big Slow. Get ready.”

What we’re about to try is really stupid, but it beats all of the alternatives we’ve come up with. (I check the parasitic feed, but all it shows me is billowing steam; someone—I think it may be Mary X.—is complaining about the humidity wrecking her hairdo.)

The plan is simple, if not simple-minded. (a) Send out a bunch of encrypted decoy messages addressed to Jeeves, purely by way of distraction.
Done.
(b) Get out of
Pygmalion
before the police come storming aboard, and stay out of sight.
Done.
(So far.) (c) Let them search the ship. (d) Dump a decoy, so they go haring off after it. (e) Reboard
Pygmalion
, and hope they conclude that we left earlier, or were never there in the first place, or that they need to conserve fuel for their own orbital injection, or
something
. Like I said, it’s completely stupid. It’s just that, as Pygmalion pointed out, it stands a faint chance of keeping us out of the hands of the Pink Police. Unlike any of the alternatives on offer.

"Ready.”

It’s best not to think too hard about all the holes in this plan, even though I can see plenty. Really, short of sitting there and waiting for them to arrest us, there’s not anything else we can do. And who knows? Maybe it’ll even work.

“Okay, Big. Give it some elbow.”

I draw my legs up and shove the decoy hard in the small of her well-padded back. She floats away at a good clip, picking up speed rapidly and falling through the flickering blue curtain in only a few seconds. She’s got to cross another few kilometers of nearly empty space inside the plasma sail, dropping away from us as we continue to decelerate at ten centimeters per second squared. It all adds up; in a few minutes she’ll be making nearly two hundred kilometers per hour relative to the ships. If they’re as monomaniacally thorough as their reputations would have us believe, the cops will take time to finish sterilizing
Pygmalion
and withdraw their drones, before they undock; which will leave them trying to track down a human-sized target tens of kilometers away.

And then . . . we’ll see.

A thought strikes me as I dangle on the rope. I look up at Bill and Ben. “How are we going to get back aboard?” I ask.

“Worry about that later.” They’re busy tying the bags to the same anchor point as the rope. “Come on up here. We’ve got to get out of sight inside these sacks before they undock.” People clinging to the underside of a hatch would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn’t they? “Get in.”

And so I spend the next two hours hanging upside down from the underside of an air lock, swearing quietly to myself,
not
crying, scared out of my wits, and periodically peeping through the steam-blinded cameras in hope of picking up some hint, anything at all really, of what’s going on aboard the
Pygmalion
.

The things I do to earn a living ...

“HELLO, JULIETTE. CAN you hear this?”

“Can you hear this?”

(I’m tired. So very tired. It’s good to lie here, in this soft, warm bed. But he’s talking to me, and I need to, to do something. I ought to do something. Say something. But it’s hard.)

“Juliette?”

(I make a monumental effort.) “Boss?”

“That’s better, we knew you were going to pull through! You’ve done very well, but maintenance say you went into temporary shutdown. We were very worried for a while, but you’re going to be alright. Just a few repairs, of course, but you’ll be good as new again in no time. Fit as a fiddle. Isn’t that your instrument? Never mind. What one would mean to say is, ah, if there’s anything you need, just tell us.”

(An awful fear floats in the back of my mind, almost out of reach; I try to connect it to my vocalization system.) “Boss. The sample.”

“The sample?”

“Is it . . . ?”

He sounds regretful. “Yes, I’m afraid it is.”

(Which means . . . )

“The rumors are true, or at least plausible. Whoever broke in last year—we cannot count on them not having procured a viable sample of their own.”

(Which means he doesn’t know about the other thing . . . )

“Go back to sleep, Juliette. We can talk about this later.”

(Footsteps, diminishing.)

“There’ll be time enough for war.”

“HEY, BIG SLOW. Can you hear me?”

I come awake slowly. “Bill?”

“No, It’s Ben. Listen.”

I listen with electrosense and old-fashioned vibratory hearing. There’s bumping and banging in the boarding tube above me. Sounds of a hurried retreat. “Got it. Any news?”