InterstellarNet: New Order Read online

  A different friend’s advice had gotten Art here. Clearly he did not yet understand her. After he had made arrangements for two to tag along on a scoop run, Eva politely declined the second seat. Okay, he did understand her. Her work was peaking even while his was in a lull. Didn’t she need a break, too? He couldn’t imagine her taking time off once the working interstellar drive was in her hands.

  Maybe thrill rides weren’t Eva’s idea of a first date. Maybe he was reading her signals wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time.

  Too bad, either way. She was missing a hell of a show.

  Io was only coincidentally a scenic stopover. Their course bent around the tortured moon in a tight hyperbolic turn. The gravity boost flung them all the faster at Jupiter.

  The king of planets grew and grew. It became a sky-spanning expanse of wind-driven cloud bands and swirling storms, each feature many times Earth-sized.

  “Buckle your seatbelts, guys. We’re going in.”

  Boredom had once obsessed Pashwah-qith. No more: Failure had taken boredom’s place. Failure, and fear of its consequences.

  Too late, she recognized the weakness in her plan. The InterstellarNet transactions that comprised her secondhand experience dealt almost exclusively with knowledge transfer: inventions, processes, scientific theories. Her customers were large corporations. She dealt with lawyers, financial engineers, and huge banks. Her understanding of illicit dealings was theoretical—and, she was now discovering, seriously inadequate.

  Black markets were called black for a reason: Their workings were opaque. Despite her long-sought reconnection to the infosphere, Pashwah-qith struggled to track everything she had initiated.

  No one ran ads on the infosphere for unregistered currency transactions. Prospective buyers had to be sought out, cultivated, and made comfortable. Contacts happened indirectly, through layer upon layer of intermediaries—who had to be sought out, cultivated, and made comfortable. For themselves, everyone strove for anonymity and deniability. From others, everyone sought the certainties and guarantees they were themselves reticent to offer.

  Exchanging the Centaur currency was taking far more time than Pashwah-qith had ever imagined.

  And some of the shadowy players turned out to be thieves.

  Her promise to the Foremost had been simple: overhead not to exceed one-fourth. From that perspective, the slow start-up of the money laundering proved fortunate. She had lost less to swindles and swindlers while learning than had she quickly put more funds in play. Now that she was savvier, she needed—somehow—to speed up the remaining conversion.

  Arblen Ems Firh Mashkith was not known for his patience.

  CHAPTER 25

  Talking with Snakes had become almost routine. That was Corinne’s take, anyway; Helmut guessed she should know. This was, what? Mashkith’s fourteenth major interview. His second with Corinne.

  The hook for today’s session was the recently concluded negotiation. The grand swap. Unseen behind the camera and his mirrored visor, Helmut thought it an interesting topic indeed, if not for the reasons Corinne did.

  Outing of the antimatter program was a nightmare for the UP military. The entire solar system now knew of the unimaginably powerful and dangerous stockpile there. Where secrecy, the prison cover story, and a few frigates once sufficed to provide security, today it took a fleet to guard the antimatter. Victorious had been invited to closely orbit Himalia, inside the security perimeter, the better to expedite fuel transfers.

  The Foremost, with untold crew and AIs netted into his head, had also acclimated to conversing with aliens. The smooth segues as he changed topics were impressive. Mashkith was quick to talk of the potential for trade and cultural exchange, about the enriching experiences of small shore parties.

  Corinne was, as always, hard to distract. “I’m sure everyone who watches will be pleased with the success of those brief visits. You will recall, however, that we were discussing implementation of the new agreement.”

  “Implementation involves some highly technical matters, Corinne. These are well in hand, and I think best left for consultation between our technical experts. What I find interesting, Corinne, is what diverse items arise in those consultations. Chess, as one example. The crew are quite taken with the game of chess.”

  “A fascinating topic for another conversation, Foremost. If we could get back to the planning for refueling trials….”

  Helmut did not bother fighting the oncoming yawn. He could edit out any wobble the camera failed to remove on its own. The wondrous thing was that he had relaxed enough to yawn. Maybe Rothman decided he had been mistaken. Maybe the man from his past had shipped out while Helmut had been laying low by taking the scoopship joyride. Maybe he had just needed a bit of down time. In the big picture it didn’t—

  Klaxon blaring and then a shout, both in his mind’s ear. “Helmut! You getting this?”

  He speed-scanned the past minute from the camera’s memory. Mashkith had stopped mid digression. Mid-sentence. “Sure am, boss.” As Helmut zoomed in on the Snake’s face, frozen in an infosphere trance, Mashkith’s eyes snapped back to the here and now.

  “Where was I? My excursion to Ulan Bator?” Long pause. “As I think about it, that anecdote is not truly relevant.” Another pause. “I realize I’ve talked on and on about sights that, while new to me, must be familiar to your viewers. Perhaps this is a good time to conclude our chat. I will have you escorted to the airlock.”

  Almost immediately, the cabin door swung open to admit Rashk Lothwer. A file of guards stood behind him.

  Helmut didn’t need a net exchange with Corinne to know they had been dismissed and that something unexpected had happened. And that she also could not guess what the emergency might be.

  Corridor sensors revealed a guard detachment approaching Mashkith’s cabin. They marched briskly for Hunters, not that the prisoner had any difficulty keeping up. His summons had been curt and snarled—he meant for her to be rattled by the guards’ tension. Still, a glimpse of the ka coughing and fumbling with her breather mask made Mashkith truly angry at the soldiers. Denying her a few seconds to adjust her equipment had been needlessly cruel.

  There was a timorous tapping on the hatch. “Authorization to enter.” The escorts wasted no time in leaving him alone with K’choi Gwu ka.

  “Foremost.” She was hoarse from fumes leaking under her mask.

  Talons already half-extended from his hands and feet emerged further. He curled back his lips, baring teeth. “Your mockery of respect for me.”

  She did not flinch. “I do not understand.”

  “A lie! Unauthorized message from Victorious to Earth. Unauthorized frequency.”

  She stretched to her full height. “If you refer to an InterstellarNet message, it was authorized by the ka of this mission.”

  “Your admission of defiance and disrespect!”

  “It was a matter of duty to the Unity. Whatever the consequences.”

  “Consequences certain—despite the failure of your attempt.” At Mashkith’s thought, the holo display flipped from Jupiter to multicolored schematics. Green threads brightened: the ship’s original systems. She would surely recognize those. Red icons sparkled: symbols for biocomp nodes. Those should be familiar from recently reviewing the humans’ antimatter transfer design. The image zoomed in on primary communications.

  “Security overlay. Protection against rogue messaging, its implementation immediately after our takeover.” With an arm stretched into the hologram, he indicated a knot of red beside the main external antenna. At his thought, the tangle flared blindingly crimson. Faster than the red light ebbed to normal levels, the antenna became a faint shadow. Inert. “Power cutoff upon detection of your unauthorized signal. Your mutiny a failure.”

  “Those whom I serve are prisoners, not your crew.” She trembled, but did not back down. “We oppose, Foremost, we do not mutiny. We will continue to oppose, as best we can.”

  To have maintained for so long the wil
l to resist … she was worthy of his esteem. “Failure, regardless. Punishment for the attempt.”

  “That is for you to decide.” Her tremor worsened.

  The display viewpoint panned back to encompass the full schematic, even as the diagram compressed itself into a corner of the holo. Into the emptied region he streamed real-time 3-V from sites across the ship. Each scene showed a Hunter cadre waiting before an open panel. “Authorization to continue,” he said. In Mashkith’s peripheral vision, the ka winced as work crews slashed and severed photonics equipment. Green inter-subsystem links disappeared from the schematic as the procedure continued.

  Mashkith knew she would never admit to using the long-withheld Unity credits as bait. That was what the money had been—a lure to entice him into awakening the ship’s dormant AI. Its restoration had been temporary only in his thinking. Perhaps no action less drastic than destruction of the ship could expunge that AI now. The partitioning he had just ordered would at least hamper it.

  Only after all the targeted nodes were disabled, and the ka returned to the prison zone, did it occur to Mashkith to wonder….

  He had permitted his rage to show for effect: a tactic. How much of the ka’s apparent defeat had been for his benefit?

  Art followed Carlos to an out-of-the-way storefront, whose few window shoppers were long past childhood. They peered through the glass at 3-Vs with bird’s-eye views of the local park. Surveillance cameras? “Are you sure about this?” Art asked.

  “Your son is what age? Ten?”

  “Bart. Yes, he’s turning ten.”

  Carlos clapped him on the shoulder. “Trust me. This is just the place.”

  Art sincerely hoped so. Any gift he expected to arrive in time had to be put onto a ship soon, and Callisto was not exactly a shopping mecca. He felt guilty enough missing another of the kids’ birthdays without compounding the problem with a lame present. Delegating yet again to Maya was not an option. He followed Carlos inside.

  The shopkeeper offered an infosphere address and a wink. Art linked in—and grinned. He was suddenly high above a stand of trees, slowly drifting. No, not drifting: banking. The soft buzz of a motor filled his mind’s ear. “A micro-plane! Can I try it?” A new address let him do just that. Three times, crashes were averted by some briefly invoked override link. Two near-mishaps were clearly his own untrained doing; the third close call he blamed on a ventilation fan kicking on.

  “It’s laziness that has me taking control.” The shopkeeper had a trace of the North Martian accent Art had grown up with. “The micro-plane is small and lightweight. That makes the square/ cube ratio low, which means it’s strong like a bug. It’s actually fairly hard to hurt one by crashing it. I’m just saving myself a walk to the park if it got flipped on its back or stuck in a bush or something.”

  Art found himself hooked. “How does it work?”

  A box no larger than a deck of cards was set on the counter. A tiny aircraft lay inside under a clear plastic lid. “This is the plane.” A holo formed, many times life-sized, into which the salesman pointed. “Titanium wire frame. That little loop coming out the top is for handling; most of my customers use hobby tweezers. Wing cloth is woven carbon nanotubes, very thin and light and strong. Micro-electromechanical motor drives the little prop. CCD camera underneath. It could be much smaller, except that would make it inconvenient to handle.”

  And infosphere remote control, obviously. “Solar cells in the wing cloth?” Much of his attention remained in the park, swooping and looping.

  “Only on some racing models. A nuclear battery is standard.”

  Art split his attention a third way and queried. A nuclear battery seemed to involve a beta-particle source. There were many designs for collecting the charged particles and converting the accumulating static charge into oscillations to drive a piezoelectric generator.

  “Our batteries use a few milligrams of tritium, which has an energy density way higher than anything any chemical battery or fuel cell can provide. The beta particles, electrons that is, drive it. The betas from tritium are very low-speed particles, so the thin plastic seal around the battery is more than enough to stop them. As is the dead-skin layer we all wear. The safety rule is the same as for any battery—don’t eat it.”

  Bart would love this. Could he be trusted with it? Art had visions of his son spying on his sister and buzzing the neighbors with the toy. “Umm. Is there any way to control how a kid uses this?” That led to a discussion of programmable cruising boundaries, parental control overrides, onboard image-censoring options, and an audible beeper mode.

  He convinced himself: Maybe it wouldn’t drive his ex too crazy.

  The transaction took longer than it should have—too much of Art’s attention remained in the little robot now looping the loop above the nearby park. Knowing looks exchanged between Carlos and the salesman suggested this wasn’t a big shocker.

  They didn’t seem surprised either when Art bought a micro-plane for himself.

  The fragmentary message forwarded by an Earth-orbiting InterstellarNet relay had been encrypted using a very old—but nonetheless authentic—public key. T’bck Fwa was the only one within light-years who knew the private key with which to decrypt it. In an instant, any satisfaction in detective work well done was washed away by a tsunami of shock and alarm.

  “Alert. Alert. This is the Unity starship Harmony. We were captured…. “End of fragment.

  The United Planets were clearly allied with the hijackers. What, beyond impotently forwarding home this message, could he do?

  The third watch ended. The fuel-transfer experiment took place.

  Mashkith did not bother to ask the result. No one, neither clan nor prisoner, could have survived any outcome other than a complete success.

  All that remained was to complete refueling—and one more voyage.

  CHAPTER 26

  Every inspection trip he made to the Odyssey, every visit to a port repair facility or supply store or fuel depot, made Helmut anxious. It appeared he had successfully misdirected Rothman. Would the next encounter end as well?

  A narrow tunnel linked Norstead Spaceport to Valhalla City. The passage was thronged, as it always was. He strode casually, the day’s business done, jostled occasionally by a hurried passerby. Netted imagery from the overhead public sensors let him look around without appearing to watch. Passengers, crew, spaceport employees—no one seemed to be paying attention to him.

  Which proved nothing. Anyone interested in him could also be watching over the net.

  He breathed easier as he emerged from the long tube into the city proper. Corinne was meeting him for drinks and dim sum. Two work buddies relaxing….

  A whoosh of cool air swept the pedestrian mall, and a nearby sensor showed him looking tousled. Ducking into a quiet side corridor, his hand went into a jacket pocket for a comb. He found a folded sheet of paper that did not belong.

  Helmut positioned himself in a corner where no public sensor could peer over his shoulder before unfolding the paper. The note was terse. It contained only a place, a time, and two words that made his blood run cold.

  Frying Dutchman.

  The Willem Vanderkellen of spaceport-bar legends was ever wily and in total control. What Helmut remembered, years later, was confusion and panic and improvisation. Chaos, and barely escaping with his life.

  A small rock like 2009 Sigma r was more docked with than landed upon. Given a precise tangential approach, there was no rocket fire to draw the eye until moments before contact. The Lucky Strike was stealthed, its transponder off; there was no reason to expect any unwanted visitors would choose to reveal themselves on radar. So piercing spacesuit alarms were the first announcement of the claim jumpers’ arrival. Whatever ruptured their suits killed Bill and Milos instantly. Kwasi managed only a puzzled, “Who are you?” before meeting the same fate.

  Willem was prepping Lucky Strike at the time of the attack, by sheer dumb luck on the side of the asteroid opposite the infl
ated base dome and the claim jumpers. Three flatlined readouts tugged at his eyes and his mind. Grieving had to wait; to dally was to die. He released grapples and boosted at two gees. Radar showed nothing, not even rocks, anywhere near. No one to help. No place to hide. He broadcast a Mayday, but could not imagine it doing any good.

  He got a head start of almost a hundred klicks before an IR sensor spotted the hot, side-on plume of another ship emerging from behind the asteroid. As they turned into direct pursuit, the reading dropped sharply, the reaction mass cooled and dispersed by the time it left the ship’s shadow. He guessed the brief delay had been to allow the shore party to scramble back aboard.

  Willem was out of sight and stealthed—and too near his pursuers for either condition to save him. His fusion drive surely blazed in their IR sensors. Shutting down now and coasting solved nothing. Those chasing him could extrapolate his current course long after his engine cooled. With a bigger lead, he might have used attitude jets undetected to nudge a drifting ship. He didn’t have a bigger lead. Since he was shrieking his position in IR, there was no reason not to monitor the pursuit with an occasional radar ping—and no benefit either, as they remained stealthed. He did not doubt they were gaining on him. They would have given chase immediately and returned later for the ambushers had there been any question who had the faster ship.

  They—whoever that meant—had already killed in cold blood to usurp the claim. He wasted no photons in vain pleading for leniency. They wasted none in cynical promises. Not that photons weren’t a source of worry: At sufficiently close range, the only difference between a comm laser and a weapons laser was intent. His laser was serviceable, but hardly exceptional—not that it could be pointed straight aft. Theirs was surely, at a minimum, the max-rated legal device. It would have no difficulty firing forward.