"Ahead of the curve, as usual," Pierre cuts in, with something that sounds like admiration to her uncertain ears.
"You too," she says, a little too fast: "Come visit when I've got the life-support cycle stabilized."
"I'll do that," he replies. A red glow suffuses the flank of the capsule next to her head, and she looks up in time to see the glaring blue laser line of the Sanger 's drive torch powering up.
Eighteen million seconds, almost a tenth of a Jupiter year, passes.
The imam tugs thoughtfully on his beard as he stares at the traffic control display. These days, every shift seems to bring a new crewed spaceship into Jupiter system: Space is getting positively crowded. When he arrived, there were fewer than two hundred people here. Now there's the population of a small city, and many of them live at the heart of the approach map centered on his display. He breathes deeply – trying to ignore the omnipresent odor of old socks – and studies the map. "Computer, what about my slot?" he asks.
"Your slot: Cleared to commence final approach in six-nine-five seconds. Speed limit is ten meters per second inside ten kilometers, drop to two meters per second inside one kilometer. Uploading map of forbidden thrust vectors now." Chunks of the approach map turn red, gridded off to prevent his exhaust stream damaging other craft in the area.
Sadeq sighs. "We'll go in using Kurs. I assume their Kurs guidance is active?"
"Kurs docking target support available to shell level three."
"Praise Allah." He pokes around through the guidance subsystem's menus, setting up the software emulation of the obsolete (but highly reliable) Soyuz docking system. At last he can leave the ship to look after itself for a bit. He glances round. For two years he has lived in this canister, and soon he will step outside it. It hardly seems real.
The radio, usually silent, crackles with unexpected life. "Bravo One One, this is Imperial Traffic Control. Verbal contact required, over."
Sadeq twitches with surprise. The voice sounds inhuman, paced with the cadences of a speech synthesizer, like so many of Her Majesty's subjects. "Bravo One One to Traffic Control, I'm listening, over."
"Bravo One One, we have assigned you a landing slot on tunnel four, airlock delta. Kurs active, ensure your guidance is set to seven-four-zero and slaved to our control."
He leans over the screen and rapidly checks the docking system's settings. "Control, all in order."
"Bravo One One, stand by."
The next hour passes slowly as the traffic control system guides his Type 921 down to a rocky rendezvous. Orange dust streaks his one optical-glass porthole: A kilometer before touchdown, Sadeq busies himself closing protective covers, locking down anything that might fall around on contact. Finally, he unrolls his mat against the floor in front of the console and floats above it for ten minutes, eyes closed in prayer. It's not the landing that worries him, but what comes next.
Her Majesty's domain stretches out before the battered module like a rust-stained snowflake half a kilometer in diameter. Its core is buried in a loose snowball of grayish rubble, and it waves languid brittlestar arms at the gibbous orange horizon of Jupiter. Fine hairs, fractally branching down to the molecular level, split off the main collector arms at regular intervals. A cluster of habitat pods like seedless grapes cling to the roots of the massive structure. Already he can see the huge steel generator loops that climb from either pole of the snowflake, wreathed in sparking plasma; the Jovian rings form a rainbow of darkness rising behind them.
At last, the battered space station is on final approach. Sadeq watches the Kurs simulation output carefully, piping it directly into his visual field. There's an external camera view of the rockpile and grapes. As the view expands toward the convex ceiling of the ship, he licks his lips, ready to hit the manual override and go around again – but the rate of descent is slowing, and by the time he's close enough to see the scratches on the shiny metal docking cone ahead of the ship, it's measured in centimeters per second. There's a gentle bump, then a shudder, then a rippling bang as the latches on the docking ring fire – and he's down.
Sadeq breathes deeply again, then tries to stand. There's gravity here, but not much: Walking is impossible. He's about to head for the life-support panel when he freezes, hearing a noise from the far end of the docking node. Turning, he's just in time to see the hatch opening toward him, a puff of vapor condensing, and then —
Her Imperial Majesty is sitting in the throne room, moodily fidgeting with the new signet ring her equerry has designed for her. It's a lump of structured carbon massing almost fifty grams, set in a plain band of asteroid-mined iridium. It glitters with the blue-and-violet speckle highlights of its internal lasers, because, in addition to being a piece of state jewelry, it is also an optical router, part of the industrial control infrastructure she's building out here on the edge of the solar system. Her Majesty wears plain black combat pants and sweatshirt, woven from the finest spider silk and spun glass, but her feet are bare: Her taste in fashion is best described as youthful, and in any event, certain styles are simply impractical in microgravity. But, being a monarch, she's wearing a crown. And there's a cat, or an artificial entity that dreams it's a cat, sleeping on the back of her throne.
The lady-in-waiting (and sometime hydroponic engineer) ushers Sadeq to the doorway, then floats back. "If you need anything, please say," she says shyly, then ducks and rolls away. Sadeq approaches the throne, orients himself on the floor (a simple slab of black composite, save for the throne growing from its center like an exotic flower), and waits to be noticed.
"Dr. Khurasani, I presume." She smiles at him, neither the innocent grin of a child nor the knowing smirk of an adult: merely a warm greeting. "Welcome to my kingdom. Please feel free to make use of any necessary support services here, and I wish you a very pleasant stay."
Sadeq holds his expression still. The queen is young – her face still retains the puppy fat of childhood, emphasized by microgravity moon-face – but it would be a bad mistake to consider her immature. "I am grateful for Your Majesty's forbearance," he murmurs, formulaic. Behind her the walls glitter like diamonds, a glowing kaleidoscope vision. It's already the biggest offshore – or off-planet – data haven in human space. Her crown, more like a compact helm that covers the top and rear of her head, also glitters and throws off diffraction rainbows; but most of its emissions are in the near ultraviolet, invisible except for the faint glowing nimbus it creates around her head. Like a halo.
"Have a seat," she offers, gesturing: A ballooning free-fall cradle squirts down and expands from the ceiling, angled toward her, open and waiting. "You must be tired. Working a ship all by yourself is exhausting." She frowns ruefully, as if remembering. "Two years is nearly unprecedented."
"Your Majesty is too kind." Sadeq wraps the cradle arms around himself and faces her. "Your labors have been fruitful, I trust."
She shrugs. "I sell the biggest commodity in short supply on any frontier …" A momentary grin. "This isn't the Wild West, is it?"
"Justice cannot be sold," Sadeq says stiffly. Then, a moment later: "My apologies, I mean no insult. I merely believe that, while you say your goal is to provide the rule of law, what you sell is and must be something different. Justice without God, sold to the highest bidder, is not justice."
The queen nods. "Leaving aside the mention of God, I agree – I can't sell it. But I can sell participation in a just system. And this new frontier really is a lot smaller than anyone expected, isn't it? Our bodies may take months to travel between worlds, but our disputes and arguments take seconds or minutes. As long as everybody agrees to abide by my arbitration, physical enforcement can wait until they're close enough to touch. And everybody does agree that my legal framework is easier to comply with, better adjusted to trans-Jovian space, than any earthbound one." A note of steel creeps into her voice, challenging: Her halo brightens, tickling a reactive glow from the walls of the throne room.