“Open up,” Maxwell said. He popped a bit of honeycomb into her mouth. Sweet.
An operator gave a long, low whistle. “Look what just came up on visual!” His supervisor was at his side at once, a big woman with a bulldog jaw. “Now that ought to be a lightsail,” the man said. “Spectroanalysis gives us a solar signature, ever so slightly blueshifted. But it’s not registered, and it’s headed right down our throats.”
“Velocity?”
“Hard to say.” The tech’s fingers flickered, coaxing up data. “If it’s a standard-size sail, though, and assuming a median range load of five kilotons, then it’ll rip through the Kluster sometime tomorrow.”
“Shit!” The supervisor pushed him from his station.
“Grab something vacant and restructure the programming to give me more capacity. Take it off of, um, the holos. Let them drift a bit. Set them to correct only once every point-zero-three seconds, okay?”
The operator bounded toward an empty terminal, not bothering with the catwalks. He left a smudge of bare footprints across the starry floor.
“That can’t be—” the supervisor said. “No, that doesn’t make any sense at all. That’s not an industrial delivery.”
“More honey?”
“Mmm.” Maxwell’s fingers lingered on her lips, and she kissed them absently.
Another tech said, “We’re having trouble estimating mass. There’s something screwy about the way it’s slowing down.” Rebel stopped motion, and asked the briefcase to give her the terminal display. It appeared, a chart in seven colors, showing every pinprick of light as it appeared from the EKTC station. It pulsed, and the lights shifted to an earlier configuration. A speck of light, circled in red, raced sunward, from beyond Jupiter. A sidebar identified it as COMET: COMMERCIAL CARRIER (LUMBERED TREE
FARM).
The EKTC system was crammed with economic warfare programs. Reflexively, it showed the positions of other lumbered comets moving into the system. It also showed a pod of young comets climbing up from the Sun, their tails of ionized gases winking out as new vegetation covered their surfaces. An operator wiped them off the screen.
“What a pig. You’ve got honey on your chin.”
“Hey, I’m busy, okay?”
“Hold still and I’ll lick it off.”
Now a sidebar appeared with the comet’s registry. It was a small, uncolonized comet, carrying a lumbered first growth of some seventy gigatons of oak, teak, and mahogany hybrids. The trees had been grown over one long swing down to the sun and back out to the edge of the Oort Cloud. There, archipelago lumberjacks had coppiced the comet, leaving roots intact for a second growth, and then artificially accelerated it for its trek back into the System. Eros Kluster speculated heavily in timber, but this was not a local deal. The freight was due to Ceres Kluster as per a contract signed some two decades ago. Since Eros had no financial interest in it, the traffic computer had never before seen fit to bring it to human attention.
Maxwell followed a trail of dribbles down the side of Rebel’s neck, toward her breasts. She giggled and pushed him away. “That tickles.”
The display shifted to fast replay. The comet rushed down on Jupiter. It dipped into the giant planet’s gravity well, was slewed around, and emerged on a new orbit. It dumped velocity in the process, shifting to a shorter ellipse that would take it within the orbit of Mercury, and then out again to its client Kluster. The readout shifted momentarily to show the Inner System with old and new orbits displayed as dotted yellow lines.
“How about this? Does this tickle too?”
“No. That’s nice.”
Midway between Jupiter and Eros, the comet’s brightness quadrupled. There was an explosive flare of light, which quickly fell behind the comet—a lightsail unfurling. It bobbed slightly on the solar wind, tacked gracefully. The computer ran a projected course for it. It was headed straight into the heart of Eros Kluster.
Rebel switched back to live action. “Go on,” the supervisor said.
“The sail is tacked away from the sun. So the drag ought to be easy to calculate. But it’s slowing down too fast for anything I’ve ever seen. Even a single kiloton shipment ought to—”
“Could the treehangers be dumping some kind of bomb on us?” the supervisor muttered to herself. “No, that’s stupid. Maybe they— wait. Try calculating the rate of deceleration for a shortsail with a payload of a third of a ton.”
Fingers danced. “Damn! It works.”
“That’s it, then. One human in a vacuum suit, plus the mass of a frame, controlling mechanism and cables. I’d say that what we’ve got here—” she tapped the screen—“is someone using a small lightsail as a drogue chute.”
“Beg pardon?”
“A drogue chute. Like a parachute—um, it’s hard to explain. Just contact Perimeter Defense and tell them we’ve got a space cadet that needs rescuing. Dump the whole thing in their laps.”
The scene shifted to the exterior of a Perimeter Defense multipurpose cruiser.
“Hey,” Rebel said. “I don’t think you’re going to find any honey down there.”
“Want to bet?” Maxwell was kissing and nuzzling her belly. Now he slowly moved his hands up her thighs and even more slowly pulled down her cache-sexe.
“Please stop,” Rebel murmured. The briefcase shut itself off. In the dim light seeping through the ill-fitting edges of the tin walls, she saw that Maxwell was already naked.
And interested.
Definitely interested.
They made love twice, and then she sent Maxwell out with her bracelet to bring back lunch. He returned with a huge meal and no change. They ate, and then somehow they were making love again. It just seemed to happen. At last she had to say, “No, really. I’ve got to listen to this.”
She flicked the briefcase back on.
The multipurpose cruiser had matched speeds with the lightsail. A dozen Perimeter Defense employees launched themselves at the rigging. Clumsily, surely, they cut away the harness, drew in the sail, and disentangled an unmoving vacuum-suited figure.
Back inside the cruiser, workers swarmed about the vacuum suit. It was worn and frayed; crystalized patching ooze covered several small cuts. “Look,” a medtech said.
He pointed to a fine crazing of lines in the visor. “Poor bugger miscalculated acceleration stress. The internal organs are probably mush.” He turned off the coldpackunit and somebody else yanked off the helmet.
Acceleration jelly gone liquescent sloshed onto the deck, revealing a woman’s face. It was angular, with high cheekbones. The hair, short and wet, was a mousy blond.
Her skin was a bloated and unhealthy white, almost blue in places. There were small globs of jelly caught in her nostrils. A tech wiped them away, and the woman took a sudden, gasping breath. She shivered and opened her eyes. It was Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, in her own body.
A trickle of blood came from the corner of her mouth.
She grinned weakly. “Hey, sports,” she said. Then she looked puzzled. “I feel kind of sick.”
Then she died.
Maxwell was not looking when it happened. He was rummaging in a small corner chest for body jewelry.
When he found a piece he liked, he’d try it on, preening for her. Now he turned, a string of pearls about his waist.
“You like it?” He swiveled his hips making the string spin.
“It takes a good body to wear pearls.”
The hologram drew slowly back, the scurrying Perimeter Defense people growing smaller as they vainly tried to revive the body. “Coldpack revival shock,” a medtech muttered. “Damage to brain tissue complicated by cumulative radiation damage. Compression, shear, and tidal effects to liver, pancreas, heart…” Her voice droned on monotonously as she read the diagnostics into the record. Someone else put a cryonics unit over the head and flash-froze the brain. Later, the personality and surface memories could be teased out with supercooling induction techniques, if the traffic investigators needed an interview.
I died, Rebel thought flatly. She remembered it happening very clearly now, the faces bent over her, their concerned expressions and the way it had all drawn away into whiteness as…