The Duke Of Uranium (20 page)

lost

and if both pizos in a pair are lost, that takes a while longer to detect. Then once they rerun the pizo check on the missing people, they’ll start looking for the moment-to-moment record, and see if they can find what happened where the missing person last was. But once it’s been this long, the news is never good.”

Jak looked from face to face of all the people around him. Every one of them was nodding; apparently everything the girl was saying was toktru. He and the girl floated there, treading air to station-keep in the microgravity that shifted quickly because they were so close to both the sun and Mercury. They had nothing to say, but they did have a terrible need for company. Ten more minutes crawled by. In all the huge space, with everyone floating idly, there was hardly a word spoken; many people were quietly staring at some surface near themselves, breathing deeply, getting ready for the news.

Jak worried that he wouldn’t respond right, would interfere with their grief by not feeling or expressing it

in the way the spaceborn did. He wasn’t afraid of being rude—Uncle Sib had schooled him too well for that— but he did fear that he would intrude, would just not fit in, because it would be obvious that he couldn’t grieve for someone he didn’t know.

As it turned out, that worry was pointless; the reason it had taken so long was that two pizos had been lost together. Brill and Clevis had been outside, trimming sail, when the Spirit had run onto the substorm, and were still trying to get back to the ship in the little two-person line car when the sails had collapsed and enfolded them, sweeping down past the ship and into the loop.

With so much sharp monomolecular material around and so much energy in the loop, whatever had happened to them had been quick. A directed microwave signal had found and turned on their purses in the wreckage, and the recovered records showed immediate cessation of vital signs in each of them, less than a second apart, less than three seconds after the loop coil was jettisoned.

In the next few days, the Spirit of Singing Port felt as if its every hold were crammed with sadness. The memorial services were attended by everyone, and Jak discovered that what everyone said was true—crewies were thorough about their emotions. He had been to two funerals on the Hive, and in both of those people had appeared to be more embarrassed than anything else about the fact that a friend was dead. Here, people wailed and screamed and shouted, and faces were drenched. Jak didn’t quite feel like doing that himself, but it was comforting to be able to cry openly for Clevis and Brill. They had been two toktru toves, and Jak had never lost anyone before.

The funerals had released some feelings, but only time would heal them. For many days the Bachelors’

Mess, which had always seemed about to explode with lively energy, was a place where people ate quickly, most leaving as soon as they were done, a few sitting silently with coffee for hours afterward.

Often Jak was one of the ones who sat quietly, with Pabrino and Piaro, sometimes talking about their toves, more often just being company for each other. Jak and Phrysaba sometimes had coffee or played some game, but the energy seemed to have gone out of that too.

The Spirit of Singing Port limped upward to Earth like a beaten dog, as if the ship itself understood how defeated they were. The captain, the CEO, and the officers spent long hours in conference with the insurers, and returned to their families to say that everyone was being polite, everyone was being nice, and nobody was being specific.

Insurance would not cover a full re-outfit Insurers did not do that. They wrote riders onto the contracts to make sure a crew didn’t carry supplemental insurance, because a ship in a bad corner, obligated to the insurers, was more profitable than any premium that any free ship could hope to pay; to a great extent the purpose of insuring free merchants was to capture them into the short-haul trade.

Some bank in the insurers’ pocket would be happy to offer them a short-term loan at ruinous interest to cover re-outfitting the ship, as long as they signed away all control over their own operations. Then the Spirit of Singing Port would pay it back by doing a hundred or so of the lucrative runs of the sinusoid

trade—Hive to Mercury to Aerie to Mercury to Earth to Mercury and back to the Hive, with contractual obligation to make no ventures out into the dark beyond Mars until the loan was paid off. It would be a harsh way to live—a full cargo switch at every port, port flybys not more than three months apart—but ships had gotten out from under such obligations before, and Phrysaba and Piaro might not yet be fifty at the time the debt was paid off and they could resume free-trading. (Of course, by then they would have to retrain the whole crew.)

Or perhaps something high risk and high profit could be found, “Just a shot at an OBS,” Phrysaba said, as she and Jak sat holding hands and looking out a viewport at the steady tumble of the stars in their slow eternal corkscrew around the ship. “We could pay for the sails and lines practically out of petty cash, and the loop isn’t that much, but it takes a fortune to cover what we’re being charged for delivering our cargo at least five months late, which is what’s happening—a bit over a month to Earth, a month to refit, a month to work up to Earth escape velocity, and two months back to Mercury. Not to mention that we’ll probably end up with an extra week here and there in refit, and an extra week here and there waiting for a window. The Spirit is pretty well trapped, and it could be a century—think about that, a third of our lives—before we’re all the way back to normal free operations.”

“What’s an OBS?” Jak asked.

“It’s another one of our legends, I suppose. One Big Score. Taking a load of a cargo so valuable to someone who wants it so much that we can name our own price. Plutonium to the Rubahy, for example.”

“You’d do that? You’d sell something you can make atom bombs out of to the terriers?”

She winced at “terriers,” but she just said, very mildly and reasonably, “Only about half of the thousands of nations have signed that treaty, and we don’t belong to any nation anyway, and besides the ban is just a political gesture, Jak. The Rubahy have to have fissionables, for their power reactors—they’re living on Pluto and Charon, for Nakasen’s sake, they can’t use solar power, the sun just looks like a star out there, and do you want them getting Casimir power?—besides the Rubahy do get fissionables, one way and another. Human politicians like to strike postures about the subject, but you can’t expect an intelligent species to agree to starve and freeze just to make our voters happy. And there are a half-dozen other cargos that would work if you don’t like the idea of fissionables to the Rubahy. Slaves from Earth to some of the mining settlements. Three or four different drugs I could name. Certain necessary parts for Casimir bombs to Triton, or maybe just a few hundred meres under cover, enough to overrun the occupying forces.

“Helping another rebellion on Triton get going might actually be the best we could do, financially, actually. Every time they rebel, the Tritonians always set up a hard-cash government that pays in gold or fissionables, so you always get something you can spend.

“So if we want to save the ship’s feets, do or die, here’s what we’d do: pick up four hundred meres and four hundred slaves on Earth. Swing by a mining settlement somewhere in the main belt. Dump the

slaves, pick up Casimir melters, which convert to bombs very nicely. Out to Triton to sell the melters and deliver the meres. Go into Neptune orbit till the rebels win and can pay us—that wouldn’t take long. They pay in plutonium, and we take the nine-year haul to Pluto, sell the plutonium to the Rubahy, fill our holds there, and bring tons and tons of platinum and xleeth back on Earth. Actually just enough platinum to provide a plausible cover for trafficking in xleeth, and we’d probably offload that to a smuggler rather than bring it in.”

Jak stared at her. “You’d actually—”

“Just trying to give you a context. Our regular bank would probably do a nudge-nudge wink-wink arrangement with us to just take plutonium to the Rubahy on a straight shot. And unlike the drugs, slaves, meres, or Casimir bombs, the plutonium wouldn’t get used for anything bad; let’s face it, the Rubahy are not going to jump us all. They’ve built an impressive little civilization out there, and individually they’re great fighters, but they aren’t a military power and a few hundred tons of fissionables won’t make them one.”

“So is that what you’re going to do?”

“I suspect that the captain, her pizo, and the senior officers are looking at every possible thing, including some that are dirtier than what I mentioned. We’ll do whatever we can, or whatever we have to. But so will the other side, and insurers would really prefer it if every single ship were on a routine back-andforth milk run, with the outer dark reserved for old ships that couldn’t make a dime. Left to themselves, the insurers would starve half the settlements in the solar system. So now they’ve got us tied down on the bed, and it might be that the only way we get untied is to be cooperative and keep telling them how much we really like it, and just hope that they’ll get careless and trust us and we can suddenly take their balls off.”

“That’s a vivid way to put it.”

She shrugged. “The Spirit of Singing Port was a free ship the day she was born and her company has been free for two hundred fifty years. Every irritating little rule and reg on board, every long-term policy, every goal, everything we dream about and every frustration we make for ourselves, is our own, made by us, for reasons we dak. And some of our reasons have to do with getting stuff to where it’s going, and doing our part for humanity, and all that, and some of them have to do with necessities like profit, but there’s also coming around Neptune to see the sun’s dim light washing over its cold face, and looking at the Aerie from a distance and knowing that that monstrous tangled mishmash of metal and glass, big as a Jovian moon, over four hundred independent nations, or just making the long drop from an upper world down to Mercury and knowing that you’re warm and safe and cozy with your toves but you’re also streaking like a comet through the solar system. Without the way we feel about things, this all might as well just be a job.”

*

For the first time in generations, the Spirit of Singing Port was in Singing Port, at the great shipyards where she had been built, waiting for negotiations to finish so that her re-outfitting could begin. Her power was on trickle, her remaining sails furled, and to all appearances she was no more than a pod attached to the inside of that huge metal cavern, twenty by ten kilometers, open to the vacuum via the great open doors above and below.

Through the viewport in the passenger area of the Spirit, Jak could see through the Earthside entrance to the shipyard; fifteen hundred years of spaceflight had not made the view less spectacular. Between the bands and whorls of cloud, the plains of Asia spread out in the noon sun, dotted everywhere with the little circular lakes that marked the pocks, the impact points from the Rubahy bombardment.

Coming straight from Alpha Draconis, the projectiles had pounded Earth’s northernmost reaches hardest; wherever the Dragon’s Eye had gazed steadily, as it did north of the twenty-first parallel, pocks were strewn thick across the Earth’s face. Where the Rubahy’s home system had risen and set, between the north and south twenty-first parallels, the pocks thinned until there were hardly any at 21° S. Below that, Earth had sheltered her children, and Antarctica, southern Australia, and large parts of South America remained untouched, except by the terrible tsunami that had pounded the coasts of the whole planet during the Bombardment.

Jak tried to visualize what the view must have been like from orbit, a thousand years ago when a projectile had hit every half hour or so. He remembered the recordings from school: bright flashes on the night-dark ocean, the dark silvery waves spreading out in concentric circles; brighter flashes and visible dust clouds as the projectiles tore into the land. Arriving at 99.99 percent of light speed, the little projectiles, each a sphere of quartz smaller than your fist, had blasted holes a kilometer and a half wide in the Earth’s crust, the equivalent of a good-sized fusion bomb, and they had struck the Earth and the other inner worlds at a rate of about fifty a day for more than fifty years, until the system of defense devised by Ralph Smith (or had it been Julius Caesar? Jak always had trouble remembering ancient names) had put an end to the attack.

What remained now was beautiful—all of the northern and much of the southern hemispheres were dotted with clear, shining circular lakes, and when you crossed the noon line, the ones more or less directly under you all reflected the sun back into space, forming thousands of bright dots of lights wherever you looked. From here in geosynchronous orbit, each was just barely big enough to have a distinguishable shape, like a period in tiny print.

The biggest problem with saying good-bye is that you always want a few more minutes of it, and you never have anything to say if you suddenly get them. Jak had shaken hands with Lewo, Pabrino, and Piaro, and hugged Phrysaba any number of times; they had all said “Well” and agreed that they must keep in touch. They had all agreed that there was no good reason for any of them to come visit him in Fermi, especially since he would probably be spending his time there under house arrest. They had all agreed that if the fates delivered the Spirit of Singing Port back into free-trading, Jak would be a very welcome applicant for a company member. Phrysaba had whispered, “I’ll miss you,” in his ear several times, and he

in hers.

Unfortunately, the descent launch that was forever about to come by and pick him up kept getting more pickups added on the way, and getting delayed. It was now about an hour past time, so they had all done all their good-byes thoroughly with some extra good-byes thrown in.

This was perhaps a good thing after all, because when the descent launch, a small, old thirty-seater called the Vespertilio Tartan, finally appeared, the pilot only called Jak about twenty seconds before it nosed into the construction docks and pulled up to the passenger pickup. The launch was shaped like the lid of a teapot glued to the top of a shallow bowl, with its wings already tucked for descent forming an A shape over three battered old fins. The pilot’s cabin in the top cupola bore, for some inexplicable reason, the ancient “Batman” emblem. The way it scraped the airlock suggested that its pilot was inexpert, its microcontrols needed adjusting, or very likely both.