Conrad sighed. “It isn’t the deed, Bas, it’s the means. If you can do great things without losing your honor, that’s when I’ll bow. I’ll stand on my head if you do that.”
“I see. Hmm. So you, a paver’s boy from County Cork, are giving me advice on how to behave nobly. Is that it?”
Conrad thought for a moment before answering, “Absolutely. It’s my right as a citizen. Your job as monarch is to fulfill my expectations, however unreasonable. These people seem to have their shit together. Why can’t we?”
“Ah.” Despite his impatience, Bascal actually smiled at that. Actually seemed interested, even maybe a little bit grateful, for the observation. “Promise me you’ll never change, Conrad.”
“I will change,” Conrad answered. “That’s the whole idea. That’s the very right we’re fighting for.”
“Oh, so now we’re fighting again? How curious. Does that mean you’re ready to hear my plan?”
“Sure. Enlighten me.”
“I’m thinking we rebuild Viridity, then dump this vessel’s neutronium overboard. We hide behind a rigidized sail, right? Then go back into fax storage and detonate a neuble. The energy release will be huge . It could push us back into Queendom space in just a few months.”
Conrad sighed. “Bascal, you’re crazy. I mean crazy. Never mind the danger—to these people as much as ourselves—or the legal ramifications. Think of the cost. Even your splendid allowance doesn’t cover these kind of big-ticket items. Does it?”
“It doesn’t need to,” the prince said, his eyes sparkling merrily.
But at that very moment, there was a sound from the bridge: a shrill, insistent pinging.
Bascal stiffened. “Proximity alarm. Shit. Something’s approaching from the stern. Probably stealthed, or the scans would’ve—”
Then came a huge, hollow groaning noise from one end of the barge to the other. And its walls shimmered for an instant, and then laid themselves out in a series of broad metal traces against a green-white insulative background. Something was reprogramming all the wellstone, making connections through it, tracing out the Queendom’s largest circuit board. Then the barge groaned again, and Conrad heard clanking noises from far away, as if something very large were attaching itself very firmly to the barge’s other end.
They were back on the network.
And then the fax machine in the inventory gave off a sizzle and a flash, moments before a swarm of armored, black-and-bronze SWAT robots began pouring out of it— literally pouring like a fluid, rolling and swirling through the inventory chamber and the corridor beyond it, flowing onward and outward to fill the human spaces of the ship. An army of beetle-black, statue-bronze man-things, overwhelming in number, built up from the eight hundred tons of base matter in the ship’s mass buffers. Faxborn for this very moment, this very instance, this very fight.
One of the bronze troopers restrained Conrad, grabbing him gently but firmly by the wrist and ankles. Another pair grabbed Bascal, and a struggling, space-suited Robert M’chunu drifted by with three of them attached, swarming and grabbing at his arms and legs.
“Please remain calm,” said a high, mechanical voice in Conrad’s ear. “By authority of the Queen’s Navy and the Royal Constabulary, you are under arrest on suspicion of vandalism, hijack, and space piracy. You have the right to consult with an attorney. You have the right to be interrogated by disposable copies. As a minor, you do not have the right to commit suicide without entering a plea, but you do have the right to blame your parents. Do you understand these rights?”
“Fucking finally,” Conrad snarled at the robot that held him. “Thank you, you’re welcome, and Jesus H. Bloodfuck. What took you guys so long?”
Chapter nineteen.
Single-celled life
Conrad half expected to wind up in the same interrogation room as before, with Officer Leslie of the Dandelion Sweater. It seemed like a very Queendom-of-Sol way to handle the situation: assign a caseworker to each unruly child, build a rapport, write a series of lengthy analyses.... But instead he was led to a windowless holding celclass="underline" larger and darker, with an actual cage door that slammed shut with the clang of metal and the mirrored gleam of impervium bars.
He was in a basement somewhere; he didn’t know what city, or even what planet. Could be Venus for all he knew; there were towns there now, on the highlands, and the gravity was indistinguishable. Why they would ship him there he had no idea, but he also had no idea why they’d separated everyone, and locked him up alone. This wasn’t the Denver police station, he knew that much, but the cool, processed air provided no other clues.
How long they left him there alone was something he never learned, because in point of fact he was exhausted. It had been a long day, commencing with the fax deaths and ensuing argument aboard Viridity. More than a week had passed since then, and though he’d been stored as data for most of that time, he’d still lived through twenty or thirty hours of it, all in one big subjective push. He was running, he realized now, on a pure adrenaline high.
But with the action suddenly over, the fear and uncertainty ended, and the heavy Refuge breakfast still weighing him down, he simply stretched out on one of the cell’s bunks and went straight to sleep. Ah, night, Bascal had said to him once in the early days of Camp Friendly. That puts to rest the work of men.
His waking came harshly and too soon: a brightening of lights, a clanging open of the cage door.
“Hello,” said a man’s voice.
Conrad rolled over onto his side, facing the wall. “I’m sleeping.”
“Lad, we need to talk.”
Oh, shit, he knew that voice. His father’s. And presently his mom’s chimed in. “We came as soon as possible. Dear, you have no idea how worried—”
“Please, I’m so tired,” Conrad complained, but his voice sounded too whiny in his ears, too childish. After everything they’d been through—the daring, the recklessness, the sacrifice and deprivation—he had earned the right not to sound like that in front of his parents. He wasn’t a hundred years old, all right, but he didn’t feel seventeen either. And with a shock, he realized he wasn’t: it must be August by now. Since Denver, he hadn’t paid any attention to the calendar, and his late-July birthday had come and gone unnoticed. He was eighteen now, and since Bascal was a few weeks older, so should he be as well.
He didn’t feel eighteen any more than he felt seventeen, but that number at least seemed less jarring, less alien to his recent experience. Did eighteen-year-olds make credible space pirates?
“All right,” he said in a deliberately deeper voice, and hauled himself up to a sitting position. He rubbed his eyes blearily. “Hi.”
Maybel Mursk smiled, and rushed forward to crush him in a hug. “Oh, my brave, clever boy. Welcome home, lad.”
“Where am I?” Conrad asked.
“City and County of Cork,” she said, still squeezing him. Her auburn hair was a frizzy mess that tickled his face. Her company blazer was rough against his bare arms. “Very near to the house, about ten kilometers. We could almost have walked from there, on your father’s own roads.”
When she finally disengaged herself, Conrad found himself staring at his father’s hand, held out for him to shake. He did so.
“We’ve worried,” Donald Mursk said. “We’ve worried a great deal.”