“Like an ancient war rocket,” Marigold reassured me. “Our booster sits in a silo that floats with its nose just above the surface. When we’re upright, the launch crew will eject us, then the nuclear rocket ignites once we’re airborne.”
“The motor—” I paused. “What if it doesn’t light?”
“Oh, that never happens!”
Something cold and leathery grabbed my hand: I startled for a moment until I realized it was Rudi. He caught my gaze: “Don’t worry,” he said. “If it fails, it’ll all be over too fast to hurt. But that won’t happen. We’re safe as a five-hundred-year bond.”
I smiled at him, pretending for his sake to be reassured. “Let me get this straight. We’re sitting in a capsule on top of several tons of barely subcritical plutonium liquor, powered by a nuclear rocket operated by communist-squid technology, the nearest thing to a government hereabouts has been threatening to shoot us out of the sky on sight, and you think we’re safe—”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence. I nearly didn’t get to finish anything at all, for that matter: The booster stack beneath us suddenly lit, with a roar like the end of the world, and I discovered that, ungainly as I’d felt when I boarded the capsule, having my weight quintuple in under a second felt even worse. I barely had time to recover from being shoved abruptly back into my couch when the booster cut out with a violent jolt, then another, marginally gentler shove commenced. Scratchy white lines fogged my vision. “Don’t worry, that’s just secondary neutrons from the cargo,” Rudi shouted above the thunder of the main engine. “It gets a bit frisky when the reactor goes critical!”
I closed my eyes: The light show didn’t go away, but it helped me fake the illusion of self-control.
Shin-Tethys may be a massive world, but thanks to all the water, it isn’t very dense: And so orbital velocity is relatively low. It took less than five minutes for the single-stage nuclear rocket to boost us out of the atmosphere and up toward the window for our transfer to synchronous orbit. I opened my eyes when the bubble-chamber scribble of particle tracks inside my eyeballs dropped off, then felt a gentle bump as the carrier rocket detached, presumably to complete a single orbit and return to the surface to collect its next payload.
“Ah, excellent.” Rudi released his straps. “Marigold, please contact Five Zero and request a pickup at their earliest convenience. I think we should be on board in four, five hours at the most—”
The prospect of spending several hours locked in this floating canister with Rudi in preening self-congratulatory mode did not appeal, but I was short of distractions. And I found myself badly in need of distracting. Nothing that had happened to me in the past year and change since I had arrived in Dojima System made sense if taken at face value. Everyone I had met was pursuing a covert agenda, skewed at some slight strange angle to reality: Nothing was what it seemed. Rudi had slid from hijacker and kidnapper to—what? Ally? Prospective business partner?—backing away from threats and aggression toward blandishments and seduction. Why?
And then there was the Church: An even more bizarre mismatch between public image and interior goings-on would be hard to imagine, even without contemplating the machinations of Deacon Dennett against his rightful priestess. Queen Medea . . . well, she was at least comprehensible as the usual intersection of greed and leviathan-like will-to-power, tempered by just enough subtlety to try to get what she wanted by letting me run. But the stalker who had stolen my face and attached herself to the Church—what was that about? And Sondra. Don’t forget Sondra. What had bestirred her after all these centuries, to suddenly cut loose from her moorings and hurl herself screaming at the stars? Was it as simple as an urgent desire to conceal her corrupt involvement in a long-ago money-laundering scandal? Or was there something more at stake?
Almost without thinking, my hand went to the small soul-case fastened to my belt. Ana had sent it. A gift, she had implied. Use it wisely. Use what?
I glanced sidelong at my companions. They were, as I expected, busy elsewhere: Rudi nattering micromanaged instructions at Marigold, Marigold ignoring him as she grappled with the complexities of the capsule’s long-range router, Dent lost in the comforting certainties of a spreadsheet. Careful to give no outward sign of what I was doing, I opened the small case and removed the chip. Then I raised it to my neck and slid aside the flap of skin covering the empty slot—the one where my backup usually sat, the running copy of my personality that I had left with Ana as a promise and a life insurance policy.
I slid the chip into place and composed myself, closed my eyes, and slid off into a waking hallucination as I opened the doors of the memory palace Ana had gifted me (in form, a ghostly reproduction of Sondra’s palace, where we had both grown up). There was, as I expected, a README waiting in the entrance hall behind the outer doors: a lectern, chest high, bearing a codex, bound in the skin of dragons, locked with a brass key that I found on a chain around my neck. I walked toward it—the memory palace came complete with the memory of legs, for which I was grateful—and unlocked the cover of the book, opening it to the first page.
I began to read. And the universe changed around me.
Let me tell you what really happened in Atlantis System.
(I recognized Ana’s writing in the README, for it was signed with a hash of her mind’s state vector, as directly traceable to her as a slow dollar to its issuing bank.)
This is a secondhand account based on research documents that Andrea succeeded in copying under our mother’s nose and forwarded to me. I hope for her sake that Andrea fled in time. As soon as I read them, I left my previously secure position in the Corporate History faculty of the College of the Outer Belt and fled via Argos in Shin-Tethys to my refuge with the People of the Deep, because this is the sort of material that gets you hunted down and killed, however thorough your backup-and-resurrection insurance policy may be.
You can find the original documents in the mezzanine level of the library, second wing, third bay, fourth galley. There are many shelves of them. So let me summarize.
Sometime after you left on your pilgrimage, it occurred to Andrea to wonder if anyone in our lineage had previously pursued interests quite like our little hobby. After all, if we have predecessors, they would have depleted the pool of available trophies, wouldn’t they? Andrea searched . . . and the result was a negative. We are, it seems, the first generation of Sondra’s offshoots to take an interest in orphaned slow money transfers. Then Andrea looked further. You know, as do I, the necessary specialist skills of our profession. Andrea checked the tuition archives. She checked them most thoroughly and came to the conclusion that we had been systematically channeled in this direction. It’s a telling list of coincidences, sis: Not only Church and State and bankers arriving in Dojima System on schedule, but carefully trained and sublimely unaware forensic accountants hunting long-lost treasure.
Before the dawn of history, when humanity was entirely Fragile and confined to a single planet, there was a species of wild organism that was highly prized as a feedstock by those protohumans. It was called a “truffle,” and it was rare, and grew underground. Truffles were noted for their characteristic smell, but Fragile noses were not strong enough to detect them. So they took a different species of animal, a thing called a “pig.” Pigs liked truffles and had a good sense of smell, so they were easily trained to hunt for truffles: But the truffles were valuable enough that, once found, the pigs were not allowed to eat them.