She smiled sadly. “Yes.” And I could see that she meant it. Our sib-hood is not a close and loving family. “The People have got something I’ve always needed. I’m not as self-sufficient as you, Krina. I just hope you eventually find something that loves you.”
“I’ve got my research.” I experimented with my facial muscles smiling back.
To my surprise, she leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. “Go now,” she said. “Get away from Mother’s shadow and find out who you are. Create wealth rather than hoarding it. Live life.”
“I’ll do my best,” I began, as a jolt ran through the hammock around me. “Oh! Ana. Good luck!”
She was still watching me as the ’scaphe rose, pulling away into the dark, oily layer above the drowned city of Hades-4. And then I was alone in the crushing darkness and cold, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake.
Sondra awakened slowly in her cocoon: blinked, then opened eyes in her new body.
Did she pause a moment to savor her triumph? I don’t believe she did. My lineage mater was nothing if not purposeful, remote, and in control. She had planned for this eventuality so long ago that it had become one with the ephemera of history, merging into the definitional detritus of her existence. She’d refactored her identity many times, reinventing herself around this constant: that she was the banker for the conspiracy, that the shareholders would be gathered in due course in Dojima System for the final assembly and winding-up of the investment vehicle . . . and that she would have an ace up her sleeve. Vengeance, the vessel she had invested in during the centuries of chaos: the vessel she had picked a tenth of the crew of, selected and carefully trained retainers who, when the time came, had assembled at their watch stations, acknowledged her order, and calmly consigned their unconscious slow-timed crew mates to the vacuum of interstellar space.
Once control was established, they fired up the main engines for an unscheduled burn. Vengeance had launched from Hector toward Atlantis. Dojima was a mere ten degrees off the direct line from Hector to Atlantis, almost ten light-years farther out. After the burn, Vengeance’s new course was set to miss its original destination by more than a million light seconds . . . and would converge with Dojima System rather more than a thousand years later.
Vengeance had never been intended to reach Atlantis. But now it was nearing the end of its voyage, and its true destination: And Sondra had a use in mind for it.
Hand-claws tugged at the outside of her cocoon, pulling away the fibrous insulation. Sondra reached up, feeling circulatory fluid pulse in her arms, and fumbled for the internal fastener. Her lungs filled: There was air here, musty and cold and metallic-tasting. “Assist, please,” she said, transmitting via electrosense rather than crude acoustic vibrations.
“Yes, Captain.” The cocoon began to split.
Sondra hatched into the red-lit twilight of the warship’s bridge, surrounded by warriors born of nightmare. The ship was still in free fall, main engine unlit. High-gee webbing stretched from walls to ceiling to floor throughout the space gave it the atmosphere of an ancient, abandoned funnelweb lair, for much of the mesh was ancient and friable, the graphene tapes damaged by long radiation exposure and coated with the dust of ages. Fresh yellow webbing, newly strung by the pair of marines in spiderlike battlebodies working diligently at the far side of the bridge, showed where the process of refurbishment was under way. Meanwhile, the night watch on the bridge paid attendance on their captain: humaniform skeleton-figures with huge, chibiform eye sockets housing black-lensed optics, their muscles deliberately attenuated to save mass in microgravity, skin replaced by armor. “Captain,” hissed the nearer figure, “we are ready to commence crew revival and predeceleration refurbishment on your word.”
“Good.” Sondra sat up and began to claw her way out of the cocoon. She, too, was unnaturally etiolated, thin and armored, a parody of the form she had worn into the departure terminal at Taj Beacon: a battlebody. “Where’s Jean?”
“The lieutenant is inspecting the primary bomb factory, Captain. He indicated that he would have a full report for you shortly after your arrival.”
“Good.” Sondra floated free of the cocoon. She reached out, grabbed a webbing support, then turned to orient herself on the captain’s chair at the center of the module. “Who’s next on the roster?”
“Our incoming buffers are fulclass="underline" We are expecting full crew resurrection in four standard days, but for the moment, the lieutenant ordered Arrivals to prioritize construction of your body, Captain. Chief Operations Officer Mao will be the next to hatch, then we will work our way down the list.”
“Hmm.” Sondra thought for a moment. “And how far are we from beginning our initial deceleration burn?”
“Your patience please . . . we are less than eighteen light-hours from the entry gate.” The watch officer consulted a checklist retina hanging from one wall. “One hundred and fifty shipboard days, and the main drive will be ready to come online. At which point we will be another sixty light-hours from Dojima’s primary. Call it a year to decelerate to stellar orbital velocity—”
“We won’t be doing that. Events have run ahead of schedule, and it will take far too long to slow down and execute the original mission profile. We have personnel aboard Taj Beacon already, and a working bidirectional link.”
“Captain?” The skeletal ensign sounded uncertain.
“We’re not going to decelerate. Our task is to press our attack until all reaction mass and energy reserves are expended. Then we will abandon ship and upload to Taj Beacon, leaving a scuttling charge behind. We have momentum and surprise on our side: I don’t intend to waste it.” She grinned at the darkness: “My traitorous daughters and their allies must be taught a lesson. One that they won’t live long enough to forget.”
What goes down must come up, especially when there’s a pressure gradient driven by a forty-kilometer-high pressure column behind it. On the other hand, the drag of an irregular body forcing its way through all that liquid is not inconsiderable. And so I dangled in the darkness beneath the bathyscaphe for a very long time indeed, trying not to ponder the things that could go wrong with the ascent, and focusing instead on the alluring opportunities that lay ahead of me.
I couldn’t think of any.
I am Krina Alizond-114, and I was born into debt as a slave within the banking mills of New California. Over decades I paid off my debt of instantiation and acquired a modicum of security as an autonomous citizen. I performed my allotted tasks and pursued my hobby in my spare time, a hobby that had been suggested to me by my work: a profitably distracting amusement that coincidentally filled in gaps in my employer’s record-keeping and turned a trivial profit. Until Andrea and Ana (and others whom I shall not name) sucked me into the biggest game of alclass="underline" trying to run down proof that the disappearance of Atlantis was the blowout at the end of a monumental fraud. But that, too, was a diversion and an amusement: I never, at any point, imagined that it would explode under my feet, that we might simultaneously prove our hypothesis and offend our creator and—whisper it—owner.
Yes, I was suddenly, shockingly, abruptly wealthy. But by the same token, my life was over. I could never go back to New California. I couldn’t possibly reenter my life within the tissue-wrapped shell of a nun-accountant. To resume my scholastic pilgrimage would inflict chaos on my colleagues, for great concentrations of money exert a gravitational field that tugs strongly upon the minds of the unhinged and desperate. Having become rich, I could not disclaim it—even if I publicly gave it away, there would always be people who imagined that I was hiding a secret fortune. I was, in fact, utterly adrift between worlds. Ana was right: If you come into too much money, the money will eat you.