The Four Thousand, the Eight Hundred

by Greg Egan

  Camille closed the hatch, turned around, and retreated as fast as she could. She was running ten seconds ahead of schedule—but that still only gave her three minutes before enough jammers were expected to be found and shut down to render her movements visible again. She needed to be home, out of the cameras’ view, or the surveillance software would spot the continuity error in her journey, and pluck her out from the masses for special attention.

  Near the entrance to the maintenance tunnel she paused in the dark, listening. The thrum of a guide rope being plucked echoed down the corridor. She waited interminable seconds for the body to glide past, then she advanced—only to retreat again. There were voices approaching, slowly. Painfully slowly.

  Camille huddled in the shadows, watching the seconds flicker in the corner of her vision. She had barely two minutes to get home. Less than two. One and a half.

  The dawdlers passed. She waited for them to move far enough beyond the tunnel for there to be some chance that they’d fail to make the connection when she overtook them out of nowhere. One minute. How fast would she need to dash, and how innocent could she make it seem? Could she leave no other impression to be summoned from memory—once the call went out for every citizen to report suspicious movements—than a blur of a woman rushing past, presumably in urgent need of a toilet?

  When she entered the corridor, she knew it was too late. She took hold of the guide rope and accelerated gently, ensuring that the people ahead would feel her approach rather than her moment of attachment, but it was plain now that she couldn’t make it home in the next fifty seconds without turning herself into an indelible spectacle.

  As she closed on the dawdlers, one of them glanced back at her. The man’s expression was neutral but not unfriendly. There were six people in the group, chatting pleasantly, taking their time. And they were almost at the turn-off to her apartment.

  Camille slowed down a little, waiting for them to pass the junction, then she sped up and drew closer, listening for snatches of intelligible conversation rising out of the overlapping voices and insider shorthand. Thirty seconds. The jammers’ active life could only be guessed; she might already be under scrutiny. Or she might have forty, fifty seconds more.

  She caught up with the group.

  “Excuse me?” Twenty seconds.

  “Yes?” The woman’s expression was open, welcoming: they weren’t going to snub her and doom the whole plan. Camille imagined a scalpel slicing her own eyeball, to keep herself from bursting into tears of gratitude.

  “I heard you mention Crystal Pavilions, and I just wanted to know what you thought.”

  “You don’t read player reviews?” a man asked, his tone more bemused than suspicious.

  “You know…” Camille shrugged ambiguously, not quite suggesting that they could ever be rigged. “I was going to try it out for a day, but there’s so many times I’ve got hooked on something, and ended up heavily invested in it, only to find out a month later that it’s all just…” She made do with a gesture again. She didn’t know the right jargon, and she’d make a fool of herself if she improvised.

  The woman who’d greeted her rolled her eyes empathetically. “I’ve been there!”

  Camille detached from her body and drove it like a puppet, putting it through all the right moves, only resorting to speech when there was no other way to lubricate the interaction. The group of friends, evangelising on their favourite topic, remained unhurriedly rooted to the spot. Given their varying pace as she’d witnessed it, they could easily have arrived at this junction much earlier during the blackout—early enough to bump into Camille on her way home from work, and for all of them to have lingered here for a few minutes of conversation. So long as she’d seemed engaged at the moment the cameras started up again, there was a chance she wouldn’t raise any flags at all.

  The Pavilion fans might have proselytised forever, but she was the one who’d look suspicious if she showed no sign of wanting to move on. Once she’d heard enough detail that she could plausibly claim that she’d been talked out of her reluctance to take a trial run, she thanked everyone warmly and excused herself.

  The smile on her face lingered naturally as she headed home at a normal pace; she didn’t need to devise a new mask for the cameras. When she closed her apartment door behind her, fragments of encomia were still running through her head. The next time she bumped into these people there would be no hope of faking it: she would absolutely have to try out the game.

  But not yet. A sudden change in her comms usage pattern—at precisely the time when a saboteur might be desperate to know if the most power-hungry servers had gone down—could place her, at least, in some second tier of suspects worthy of ongoing extra attention.

  She showered, then brought up an overlay with a news feed to watch while she ate. For the moment, everything interesting was happening elsewhere: the latest developments in various political disputes in different nations on Earth took more than half an hour to summarise. Camille sat and marvelled at the thought that she’d once judged it vital to stay on top of all this nonsense. Earth might as well have circled another star for all it mattered to her life.

  By midnight there was still no mention of anything on Vesta more dramatic than an upset win in the volleyball leagues. She contemplated shutting off the feed and heading for Olivier’s apartment; he’d told her he expected the whole thing to be over in a couple of hours, and though a visit now would be a departure from their routine, that would hardly be enough to rise up out of the background noise to condemn her.

  Then the feed’s narrator said, “A male suspect has been taken into custody, attempting to re-enter the city from the surface after mounting an attack on vital infrastructure. The engineering department has confirmed that a solar collector went offline almost fifty minutes earlier, but they were able to draw on stored power to keep supplies level for that period—preventing the act of sabotage from becoming widely known, in order to safeguard an operational response that was still in progress. The suspect will face an initial hearing within the next eight hours, and multiple charges are expected to be laid in coming days.”

  That was it. No name, no face, no eye-witness shots of the arrest or subsequent movements of the prisoner. As the feed moved on to other matters, Camille stared into the flow of images, numb at first, then cursing softly. Her shoulders began to tremble, but she forced herself to be still. If it was Olivier, at least he was still alive. If it was the other saboteur, anything was possible.

  She could not go to his apartment now: the timing would be too suspicious. The lack of detail in the news story could have been a deliberate attempt to flush out a response. Camille buried her face in her arms, trying to remain disciplined. If he was free and safe, he would contact her as soon as he was able. If he was in custody, his name would have to be disclosed at the first hearing. Either way, she had no choice but to be patient.

  She lay on the couch, letting the feed play on in case some new detail was announced. This was it, she decided. They’d taken their stand, they’d made a grand gesture, but it wasn’t worth the risks to push it any further. Mireille was dead, and someone was in prison. Whoever it was, the cost was already too high. Let the Taxers wallow in their triumph for another decade, or another generation, until they stumbled on another, more satisfying form of self-aggrandisement.

  There was a knock on the door, soft and tentative. Camille felt blood drain from her face before she even knew why; she was thinking of Laurent’s visit, bearing bad news. She couldn’t bring herself to look through the security camera; she just propelled herself across the room and swung the door open.

  Olivier said, “I know it’s late, but I needed to be with you.”

  Camille waited until he’d closed the door behind him before she started weeping.

  “What?” he teased her. “What’s this about? Don’t worry about the other guy, we’ll find him a good lawyer.”

  “What happened out there?”

  “To him?
I don’t know. It all went smoothly for me. And we might not have shut down the game servers, but someone’s going to get an image of that melted dish online eventually, and it’s going to hit hard.”

  “We have to…” Camille faltered.

  “Keep up the pressure on the bastards? Absolutely!” Olivier geckoed his feet and lifted her up into his arms, elated. “Nothing on Vesta is safe now. That’s what they need to understand. Everything is in our hands!”

  14

  “Arcas, you are cleared to dock at bay seventeen. Can you confirm receipt of the approach route?”

  “Confirmed. Thank you Ceres. See you in two hours.”

  The image of Captain Burton’s face blinked out. Anna felt her jaw aching and wondered if she’d been beaming idiotically throughout the exchange. Her Assistant could have handled the whole procedure, but she was damned if she was going to spend this moment in history napping in her hammock while the machines swapped data.

  Her Assistant said, “Incoming call from the Scylla.”

  “Ha!” Anna slapped her knee in delight. “It’s a bit early to be reserving a dock, at their velocity.”

  “Will you take the call or should I?”

  She composed herself. “I’ll take it.”

  A middle-aged man’s face appeared, tagged as “Captain Vieira.” He hesitated, perhaps unsettled by the lack of synchrony in their eye contact; his ship was still so far behind the Arcas that the time lag was perceptibly longer.

  “Go ahead Scylla,” Anna encouraged him. “It’s disconcerting, but we’ll do our best.”

  “Ceres, I have a request to make. Over.”

  Anna almost smiled; she’d never had a conversation before where this convention was necessary.

  “Scylla, please state your request. Over.”

  “The Arcas is en route to dock at your facility. We have presented documentation to Ceres law enforcement establishing that more than two hundred war criminals are on board. Accordingly, we ask that you refuse the Arcas permission to dock. Over.”

  Anna resisted the temptation to lapse into sarcasm. “Ceres law enforcement has advised the port authority that these matters can only be pursued through the courts. I have no instructions to turn the Arcas away. Over.”

  “Ceres, I request that you reconsider. Over.”

  Anna frowned, momentarily lost for words.

  “Scylla, your request is denied. The Arcas has permission to dock. This is not negotiable. Over.”

  Vieira’s face showed no surprise at her reply, but then why was he going through the motions? Just to make some superior fractionally less angry that he’d failed to catch his quarry?

  “Ceres, I wish to inform you that we’ve made some adjustments to our outgoing cargo stream. Over.”

  Anna wondered if she’d misheard him somehow, but the audio was coming through flawlessly. What kind of non sequitur was this—unless he was threatening to pelt her with blocks of stone, in some weirdly ineffectual fit of pique?

  “Scylla, can you clarify the nature of these adjustments? Over.”

  “We’ve moved new faces to the axes of rotation. All other parameters are unaltered. Over.”

  Vieira’s demeanour remained deadpan. Anna invoked a filter to hide her own reaction, even before she fully understood the significance of his words.

  Riders rode the stone blocks glued to the axes of rotation. While each of the other four faces of the sheathed cubes suffered collisions, the “north and south poles” were safe throughout the trip.

  “Scylla, what is the purpose of this adjustment? Over.”

  Vieira said, “Evening-out wear on the cargo sheaths. Over.”

  The sheaths were systematically rotated when they were reused at the end of each run. As a pretext, this wasn’t even half believable.

  “Scylla, could you please supply logs of these changes. Over.” Whatever the Vestans had done, there ought to be enough propellant left in the attitude jets to reverse it.

  “Ceres, we would be happy to comply with your request if you comply with ours. Over.”

  Anna’s bowels turned to ice. The conversation had never been heading anywhere else, but part of her had been clinging to the hope that somehow it would veer away—that the sheer formality of their words would render it impossible to utter a threat of mass murder.

  “Scylla, we will contact you again shortly. Over and out.” She cut the link and shouted at her Assistant, “Get me the Cargo Engineer!”

  Mira listened patiently as Anna stumbled over her words. “Can they really do that?” Anna asked. “Without our knowledge, without our permission?”

  “All the security is against tampering by third parties,” Mira replied. “And outgoing cargo is the exporter’s responsibility, until it enters the controlled space of the recipient.”

  “But if they’ve sent commands to the attitude jets…there must be logs in the jets that we can read?”

  “Not if they’ve wiped them, or corrupted them. Give me a second.” Mira looked away, interacting with another overlay. “I’ve just queried the closest few blocks; the others will take time to reach. The ones I can see have empty logs.”

  Anna’s spirits rose. “Could that mean this whole thing’s a bluff? There was no flipping?”

  “The logs shouldn’t be empty—they should have a record of the adjustments that centred the faces for all the collisions over the trip. The only certain thing is that they’ve been wiped.”

  “Fuck.” Anna had left her hammock to stand geckoed to the floor, but now she felt as if she was in free fall.

  Mira said, “Wait, I can check propellant levels.”

  “They can’t fake that?”

  “Not unless they planned all of this three years ago, when they filled the jets at the start of the trip. I can query the levels directly from the hardware, and we know how much should have been used for legitimate trimming.”

  Anna waited. It was a bluff, it had to be a bluff. If they’d really been willing to go after the riders, they could have done it at any time. The fact that Olivier, Laurent and the others were safe on Ceres was proof that the Vestans didn’t just slaughter their enemies when they were fleeing.

  Mira turned back to face her. “There’s unexplained propellant loss. Enough to do what they’re claiming.”

  “Is that proof that they actually did it?” Anna pressed her.

  Mira hesitated. “No. They could have vented the same amount doing pointless adjustments with no net effect.”

  Anna struggled to see a way forward. “Suppose they did flip the blocks. What’s the fastest way we could identify the precise faces the riders are on?”

  “The heat signature’s invisible at this distance. We’d need to send some kind of probe to tour the cargo belt.”

  There were collisions every few days—each with a one-in-four chance now of killing a rider. A probe would take months.

  “We could shift a pair of non-axial faces onto the axis, for every block,” Mira suggested. “Chosen at random. If they really flipped them all, at least that would put half the riders back in safe positions.”

  Anna was horrified—and sorely tempted. Gambling with people’s lives was abhorrent, but better Russian roulette than a bullet in every chamber. Except…they wouldn’t know for sure if they were taking bullets out, or adding them. “What if they didn’t do it? Or they only flipped some fraction?” The counter-move would save half the riders on flipped blocks, but it would have the opposite effect, with certainty, for those on every block that had been left unflipped.

  “Then we’re screwed,” Mira conceded.

  “There must be something else we could do with the jets,” Anna begged her. “Nudge the blocks out of orbit, so they miss the collisions? Or just turn them edge-on?”

  “There’s nowhere near enough propellant for the first. And collisions where the impact isn’t spread over a full face are known to shatter both the cargo and the helper rock. There might be a small chance of surviving that, if the pods r
emain intact and we can track them down—but again, if we do it to anyone who was actually safe on the axis to start with…”

  Anna was silent; she was out of ideas. If the Vestans could wipe the logs remotely then they had probably also patched the controlling software to veto any commands to the jets that they didn’t authorise themselves. A counter-hack might be possible, but to what end? Without knowing exactly which blocks had been flipped, there was no manoeuvre guaranteed not to make things worse.

  Mira said, “How many riders do you think are in transit?”

  The arrivals had reached one or two daily, but the conflict had worsened even further since those people had departed. “Three thousand, four thousand,” Anna guessed. Her legs were beginning to cramp, but she stayed rooted to the spot.

  “Can you…negotiate something?” Mira asked tentatively. “Maybe the Arcas will agree to hand over the people there are warrants for?”

  “I’ll talk to them.”

  Anna raised Captain Burton.

  He said, “Tell them anything you need to. Tell them that when they dock, we’ll all be waiting there on Ceres by the airlock, in manacles.”

  A promise like that would be meaningless. “What if you bypass Ceres, and coordinate a voluntary boarding by the Scylla?”

  Burton shook his head. “They’re not interested in sending a boarding party. If they ever get so close that we can’t dodge their missiles, they’ll just blow us apart.”

  “I know there’s that risk,” Anna conceded. “But there are thousands of riders—”

  “I’m not the one endangering them!” Burton snapped back. “My responsibility is to my passengers and crew. If you’re asking me to commit suicide and to take them all with me, I’m respectfully going to have to decline.”

  Anna said, “And what will you do if I withdraw your permission to dock?”

  “Do it anyway. And I don’t think you have time to block every bay.”

  “I don’t need to block the bays. I could seal all the airlocks.” Anna could feel blood pulsing in her neck. She was talking about slamming the door in the face of people who’d come to her seeking protection. Needing protection. “If you’re unable to disembark, what do you think will happen when the Scylla flies past?”