Jubilee
“This institution of yours, the Crimson Permanent Assurance,” I said. “Where exactly does it come from?”
On arrival and docking, Rudi and I had retreated into his private nest aboard the Five Zero. It was a small, cozy bower of felted fur and colorful silks, anchored to the trunk of one of the free-fall palms that lined the accommodation bubble of the vehicle. Rudi hung from the nominal ceiling, grooming his underarm fur, while I made casual use of the waterspout to damp down my scales and fins: It was humid in the accommodation spaces, but it was also hot, and my ocean-adapted body was inconveniently bad at retaining moisture. Rudi had done me the courtesy of dimming the lights, for I had acquired a stinking headache almost as soon as we emerged into the shriek and glare of the privateer’s engineering decks. (I’d ordered up a pair of mirrored goggles from his personal fab as soon as we arrived here, but they were still growing.)
Rudi paused his grooming. “Why don’t you tell me what you suspect?” he asked.
“You said your head office was incorporated in, where was it—”
“—Mombasa Six,” he volunteered.
“Indeed. And I am absolutely certain that a corporate entity called the Crimson Permanent Assurance was indeed incorporated in Mombasa Six nearly five hundred years ago, and it’s your nominal headquarters, because you’re not stupid enough to lie about that.” I smiled, remembering not to bare my teeth. He cocked his head and looked at me politely.
“Do continue . . . ?”
“You suggested I might invest in your corporate hedge fund. But I gather you have also been advising the People to short any investment vehicles denominated in slow money.” Now I showed him my toothy grin. “Assuming I hand you the thick end of two million slow dollars to invest on my behalf, what will you do with them?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious.” He snapped his muzzle at a tangled tuft in one elbow, peeping out suspiciously at me over the top of his wing membrane. “I’d throw them away, taking whatever I can get in fast money, regardless of the exchange rate. Probably a ninety-five-percent loss, but it beats losing it all, and you’ll still be independently wealthy. Isn’t that what you were hoping to hear?”
I fanned myself through the stream of droplets from the water spigot, spraying watery baubles in all directions. “I believe you came from Atlantis, Rudi. After the blackout. None of this is a coincidence, is it?”
“Of course not.” Over the past year, I had become attuned to some of the bat-privateer’s mannerisms: What Rudi was showing me now was perhaps closest in intent to a piratical grin. “It’s all about your lineage mater.”
“Who succeeded in blowing the beacon station,” I offered. “And who will make a serious attempt to kill you just as soon as she works out who and what you are.”
“Which is?”
“A privateer, with letters of marque and reprise authorizing military action against the enemies of the nation which issued them. Yes?”
“And what nation would be . . . ?”
“Atlantis.” There, I said it.
Rudi chittered. “Well done! Yes. I do indeed have a certificate from my government, calling for the arrest or destruction of the notorious renegade Sondra Alizond-1, for mass murder, attempted mass murder, crimes against humanity, and a laundry list of lesser offenses. But at the same time, the Permanent Crimson is entirely reaclass="underline" We are, indeed, insurance underwriters. It’s very hard to move openly against a power such as your lineage mater, given the nature of her allies—”
“The Church?”
“Among others, yes. They were largely responsible for the Atlantis research program in the first instance—one imagines they believed that a successful FTL drive would finally bring the prospect for founding a New Eden for their Fragile charges to fruition—but they subsequently changed their minds, concluding that what our researchers had actually found would merely undermine the pyramid scheme they had engineered to drive the continual wave of colonization and expansion—”
“You mean, the quantum teleportation device?”
“Capital! You’ve been doing your homework!” Rudi snapped his jaws again. “I knew offering you a job was the right thing to do! You were wasted on Sondra.”
“Be that as it may.” I shook my head: Serious job offers were not something I had time to think about right now. “And then there are your other adversaries: anyone who has gone long in slow money. If word were to get out, not only would they try to squash you like a bug, but all your customers would dry up and run away. Otherwise, you’d have gone public centuries ago. Yes?”
“More or less.” He tilted his head to the right. “The mere fact of the battleship that was sent, right after Sondra murdered everyone on Atlantis Beacon, told us all we needed to know. It never arrived, evidently meeting some misfortune in flight, but it was clear that powerful interests had resolved that it would be best to keep our breakthrough technology from leaking. We were badly damaged, you know, millions dead, their backups, too. The sabotage, a wave of bombs—it was horrible. The problem with the Atlantis program was that it isn’t easy to replicate: It took a monumental effort to assemble ten million researchers and set them to work on a common goal for two or three centuries, in an age not noted for the pursuit of scientific knowledge for its own value. Any attempt to rediscover the device can be suppressed quite easily by assassinating dangerous researchers and spreading the slander that Atlantis was nothing more than a variant on the FTL fraud.”
“So what happened? After Sondra tried to kill everyone—and presumably failed?”
“We—the postemergency government of Atlantis, I mean, I myself was not even forked at that time—made a hard decision not to relight the beacon. This was after an initial reconnaissance: We had a prototype, a ship that could reach Hector system in just six years. They went by stealth, gathered intelligence, inserted spies. It took another decade to learn which way the wind blew and six more years to return home, by which time the beacon was nearly rebuilt: But the spreading chaos was obvious. We had not merely been attacked by a corrupt agency, we had been attacked because we posed an existential threat to the banking system.”
“So . . . ?”
“So. We chose the appearance of extinction or autarky. But we didn’t remain completely isolated. Atlantis today conducts some limited, very discreet interstellar trade, acquiring information and items that we need. It is entirely denominated in fast money and carried out by a small fleet of vessels not unlike this one: modified intrasystem freighters.”
“Wait. What, you’re telling me that this is a starship? The Five Zero is capable of jumping between star systems at the speed of light?” I goggled at Rudi in frank astonishment. “And you trade goods and services across interstellar space using fast money? Why, that changes everything! The opportunities are almost unimaginable!”
“Indeed it does.” Rudi grinned. “And you just bought into the company with a senior officer’s equity. Which brings me to the main reason I’ve been courting you for the past year. How would you like to escape from your mother’s clutches for good?”
While Rudi and I were exchanging confidences, the Five Zero lit its high-impulse drive. I barely noticed it at the time—milligee acceleration is so gentle that to detect it, you need to position a reference object in the middle of a room and watch it drift for a minute—but we were under way, beginning the long, slow spiral out from Shin-Tethys toward what would eventually be a high-energy transit to Taj Beacon.