The Duke Of Uranium (10 page)

“How did the antibody get there?” Jak asked.

Sib grinned, pulled out a tiny spray bottle, and spritzed Jak in the face. “It’ll be there in about three days.

Meanwhile, sorry about the sniffles you’re going to have.”

“So what’s in the sliver?”

“A set of locations—mostly safety-deposit boxes, but a couple of vacuum bottles buried here and there, and also some physical locations of high-security computer memory. If Bex Riveroma gets to all those locations before authorities do, he’ll obtain the originals, plus all the existing copies, of all the evidence about five different subjects that could each earn him a walk into vacuum or a sleeper bunk in a running reactor.”

“What good does knowing the physical location of a high-security memory do you? If it’s high security, it’s not accessible on the net—”

“But if it’s a physical location you can set off an atom bomb there,” Sib said. “A lot of spies, meres, and ops are subtle people, so they tend to value subtlety, but it can be overvalued. Sometimes unsubtle is just what you need, and Riveroma’s a pro. Give him those locations and he’ll figure out what to do, which is why he’ll trade anything in the universe to get those locations. Clear enough?”

“Guess so.”

“Now, do you want the sliver in your heart, your liver, your lungs

?”

“Why does it have to be in a vital organ?”

Gweshira explained, “If we put it in your hand or your toe or something, they can just cut that part off, one quick chop when you don’t expect it, and search the part at leisure, leaving you with all the hassle of spending a month regenerating. With the sliver in a vital organ, with a limited number of good retrieval paths, they’re going to have to follow directions, or else kill you. And Sibroillo Jinnaka is a name that frightens them—they wouldn’t kill his nephew for any reason that wasn’t really, really important.”

“What if they do think of something important?” Gweshira’s shrug was not reassuring, nor was Uncle Sib’s, and that must have shown on Jak’s face. “Cheer up,” Uncle Sib said. “Fermi’s a great town and chances are you’ll spend more time on nightlife than on intrigue. And do you know how many kids never get to travel at all?”

Why Don’t We Thrash It Out?

Dujuv did nothing but babble about how exciting and fun it was to be in slamball training camp, and after ten minutes of that Jak was bored—but didn’t want to express it. So he begged off quickly, touched the palm of his left hand with his right so that his purse would hang up the call, and turned back to talk to Uncle Sib. “Well, I guess I’m ready to go.”

“Your friend seems a bit preoccupied.”

Jak shrugged, not wanting to seem childish about it. “He’s getting on with his life and career. I guess I envy him that. And I wish he wasn’t quite so cheerful when I’m about to go do something really hard.”

“Well, friends surprise you. They always do. That’s one reason for having them.” Sib watched him intently for a moment, but whatever he was looking for apparently wasn’t there. “And, you know, you are getting on with your life. Very, very quickly. Two months ago you were an indifferent gen school student with a good income, good friends, and a pretty girlfriend. Now the fate of nations is hanging on you. In fact, let’s stop talking about that before it makes me nervous. Now, there’s time for one more review before boarding. What are you going to do?”

“Get on this ferry, and ride it out to the Spirit of Singing Port. Claim my berth. For seventy-eight days, work out, do the Disciplines, and catch the news every single day. Spend no more than my reasonable allowance and watch out for all the hidden charges there tend to be on a sunclipper. Above all else, you said, don’t miss the close flyby of Mercury, because it is, and I quote, ‘one of the grandest views in the

solar system.’”

Sib smiled. “All right, all right. I admit you’ve listened far more than I ever expected you to. Now, what will be your procedure after you get to Earth? Which you know perfectly well is what I was asking you in the first place.”

Living with Uncle Sib for all his life, Jak had gotten a lot of practice at smiling innocently. “Oh. That.

Well. I’m going to take the ferry to whatever the disembarkation station is, and then a launch down to Fermi, where I will go to the Fermi Hilton, and call you. You’ll give me whatever the contact procedure is for meeting Riveroma. When I meet him, I say to him, ‘I am carrying information from Sibroillo Jinnaka, and I am authorized to exchange it for a service from you. The information concerns the location of all the extant, court-admissible evidence regarding the Fat Man, the Dagger and Daisy, the business about the burning armchair, the disappearance of Titan’s Dancer, and KX-126, including all such evidence regarding your involvement. The public key has already been sent to you. The private key, along with the way to retrieve the encoded information, has been coded onto an antigen group in my bloodstream. Here are the specifications for the isolation and decoding of the antigen group, and I will cooperate when you draw a blood sample.’ Then I hand him the directions for isolating that, and offer to let him draw a blood sample. Then I say, ‘We will proceed no further than that until you agree to perform the service which you will find in the same block of code. When the service is performed, I will cooperate fully with your people so that you can obtain the information, locate the evidence, and destroy it. Should you attempt to obtain the evidence without performing the service, I am authorized to tell you that Circle Four will immediately disclose the location of all the evidence to every relevant police and prosecutorial authority.

You may be assured that it will be more than enough to obtain your conviction on serious charges in all five matters in many different jurisdictions.’”

“Then what will happen?”

“Then he’ll draw my blood, go read the offer, possibly communicate with you, and one way or another engineer Sesh’s escape. While he’s doing that he will probably keep me somewhere as a hostage, but he’ll keep me in touch with you to make sure that no misunderstandings lead to the evidence being released.

When I get the message from you that contains the phrase that we never speak or write, I tell Riveroma to go ahead and get the sliver, and by at least three channels not directly in his control, I notify you that I’ve done it. His surgeon pulls out the sliver, supposedly painlessly, and I go back to the Hilton. You transfer funds for my ticket home. I catch the next sunclipper.

“Through this entire thing, I stay within budget, avoid entanglement in anything that isn’t part of the mission, and keep my mouth shut and my ears open.” Jak smiled. “How did I do?”

“You’re letter perfect, which makes me extremely nervous, but too late to worry about that now.”

“Attention all passengers. Boarding for the ferry to the Spirit of Singing Port commences immediately.

Repeat, boarding for the ferry to the Spirit of Singing Port commences immediately. Launch in ten

minutes. Please advance through the boarding doors at once.”

Sib stuck out his hand, Jak shook it, and the two embraced for a moment. Then Sib whispered, “Do good, be lucky.” Jak said “Thanks,” and he turned and walked through the doors into the ferry, a squat little cylinder barely a quarter the size of a gripliner, studded all around with the heavy tanks and nozzles of a freeflight spacecraft. He had barely strapped in when the tractor platform, on which the ferry rested, began its crawl up toward the North Pole of the Hive, where the launch loop was already spun up to speed—through the viewports, Jak could see little streaks of white, flattened curves or straight lines, blazing brightly across the stars, whenever the sun reflected off the loop. “Your first trip?” an older man beside him said.

“Yeah.”

“Thought so. Nobody looks out the window after the first time.” The gwont settled into his reading, comfortably sliding a finger into one nostril. “Boring. Lights and streaks in the sky, then an exciting tangle of pipes and tubes and wires. We’ve got two months of boring ahead of us, and it starts off with the two-hour bore of getting up onto the launch loop. Enjoy the novelty while there is any.” Not surreptitiously enough, he checked his finger, and finding nothing, went back to work on his business report and his nose, bent on digging out everything he could.

Jak resolved that he would look at nothing but the viewport until they were safely aboard the Spirit of Singing Port.

It was not a hard resolution to keep. The loop at the North Pole of the Hive was about 200 km across, an immense circle of dark superconducting material only three centimeters wide and two millimeters thick, spun up to just over one rpm; the loop surface itself moved at about 40,000 km/hour. In principle Jak might have been nervous about that massive ribbon moving at tremendous speed passing within a few meters of him; if a human in a space suit touched it, the human would be converted instantly to bloody rags on a long orbit around the sun, and indeed that had happened a few times in suicides and in careless accidents during outside climbing. But Jak had never heard of any accident involving a ferry, and despite the fact that it was enclosing a superconducting ribbon moving at rocket speeds, rather than an ordinary powered rail, the linducer grapple, visible on one of the many screens in the cabin, seemed ordinary enough. It fastened around the band soundlessly, and the automated voice said, in a bored tone, “We are grappled and waiting for departure on an optimal window in thirty seconds

twentyfive seconds

” and so on down to the words familiar and associated with human spaceflight since before Standard had even been a language—”Five, four, three, two, one, boost!”

As the linducer powered up, it became increasingly magnetically coupled to the band passing through it, transferring an ever-increasing small fraction of the loop’s momentum to the ferry. The ferry accelerated along the outside of the loop at about four g, traveling more than three hundred kilometers as it whipped halfway round the loop, crushing the passengers into their seats for about two minutes. “Release in five, four, three, two, one, gone,” the mechanical voice said. The linducer grapple opened, the loop fell instantly from camera view, and they were moving in space at five kilometers per second relative to the

Hive, in free fall.

Free fall lasted a few seconds, and then the engines cut in for about a minute, putting the ferry on trajectory to intercept the sunclipper. The engine cut out and now they would be in free fall for the next twenty hours.

Jak had seen sunclippers pass the viewports of the Hive many times—the Hive was the busiest port in the solar system, and perhaps three dozen sunclippers passed per year. Since their solar sails were tens of thousands of kilometers across, one could hardly miss them—but they passed at distances of anywhere from a quarter million to a million kilometers, so though their spectacular spread of brightly lit curves, vaults, and bows took up vast parts of the sky for the few hours when they were close by, they had seemed like a comprehensible enough thing, like the pictures of planets from close-in satellites, only a few times bigger than the Earth in the familiar pictures taken from its moon.

But as they neared the Spirit of Singing Port, Jak found himself swept away in awe. His seatmate had pulled on sleeping shades and plugged in a skull jack and was now off in some dreamworld. Jak could hardly imagine how anyone could voluntarily miss this. Though the sails were big enough to wrap Venus and the Earth with enough left over for most of Mars, they were only microns thick and hung on monosil cables too thin to be visible to the naked eye; look at a sail edgewise and it vanished, but seen flat on, it was far brighter than the face of Earth’s moon.

Yet among all these great planes and gentle curves of white light, it was almost impossible to pick out the tiny bright dot of the ship itself. Barely a kilometer across, the little sphere at the center of the sunclipper was its whole reason for being, the place where several thousand human souls were born, grew up, had children, and died, where all the working and thinking happened, holding the precious tenth of a cubic kilometer that was all the inside cargo space, plus the tight little complex of chambers, corridors, shops, and workrooms for the permanent crew and the passengers—the space given over to human beings was less than what might be found in a giant hotel.

As their angle of approach changed and the sails moved and shifted in the sunlight, the tiny dot of the habitat, like a bright star, moved in and out of sails and shadows, now visible, now concealed. The viewports were filled from edge to edge with sails; the sky was nothing but the great spread of monosil; and yet the habitat itself remained a little dot.

Presently the little ferry began to bounce and bob, brief accelerations of no more than ten seconds each, as it made its arrival approach. Now the Spirit of Singing Port’s habitat was a tiny dark circle, with a distinct area, in the center of the vast brilliant expanse of her sails; they were coming in from the sun side, as ferries always did. The automated systems gradually reduced their relative velocity until they shot across the path of the oncoming sunclipper, about sixty kilometers sunward of the habitat, moving at a few kilometers per second. An instant before they aligned with the sunclipper’s loop, it caught the sun in one view camera, and Jak saw the great ribbon, just like the one on the Hive to the naked eye, but if the two had ever been able to be seen together, you’d have known at once that the one on the ship was about a third the size of the one on the Hive.

The linducer grapple closed on the track in a camera closeup. Everyone’s life, at that instant, depended on the machines successfully managing speeds measured in kilometers per second, at distances measured in millimeters. Jak toktru wished he had been nicer to his purse.

The grapple did what it was supposed to. They were slammed by over two g of weight as the linducer grapple pulled against the loop, which carried them around in a great arc, bringing their velocity to zero relative to the ship as they glided soundlessly into the receiving dock. “Everyone on board will deboard now,” the voice of the ferry said. “Relaunch is in nine minutes four seconds, repeat nine minutes four seconds, from now. Everyone off now.” Because so many people had napped through most of the trip, it flashed the lights and made a variety of annoying noises.