Neptune's Brood

by Charles Stross

  When this happens, a transaction is said to have stalled. And if you can pick up all the necessary signatures and encrypted tokens, it is possible to reassert ownership of the stalled payment. But to do so, you need to buy up the scattered shards of half-signed coins from the soul chips of whomever they are vested in, or the banks who hold them in escrow—or in extremis, pay for the raw download transcript of a soul chip in transit between star systems and resurrect the bearer in order to pick their pocket—a messy, slow job that requires collusion across interstellar distances with half-trusted allies, pen pals, correspondents, and exiled copies of copies of one’s first sibling twice removed.

  Slow money, by its nature, is not amenable to investment vehicles. It is an investment vehicle in its own right. It’s so stable that interest rates are microscopically low—0.001 percent compound interest really racks up over a few centuries. All new colonies start off by going heavily into debt, in order to attract the new skilled specialists they need to address whatever critical problems they failed to foresee and plan for before departure; once they’re stable, it can take them millennia to earn their way up to a positive balance of payments, and so they tend to avoid borrowing further. But sometimes people in mature planetary civilizations do borrow slow money, for certain long-term projects.

  It’s risky. Not advisable. Only done when the project will take thousands of years, and the payoff is gigantic. Terraforming worlds, for example. Or the Atlantis project.

  And sometimes such projects go wrong . . .

  * * *

  An indeterminate time later—it felt like days, but it might have been as little as a couple of hours—the hatch of my cell slammed open. “Prisoner! You come! Count Rudi wants ’ter see ye. Come nice now, or we cut neck!”

  We were still in microgravity. Rather than letting me flail around and jump from handhold to surface, they grabbed me by their hind paws and sculled along rapidly through the corridor, using their leathery finger-to-waist wing surfaces. (One of them had my go bag in tow: more consideration than a prisoner warranted and, perhaps in retrospect, a sign of respect I should have paid attention to.) I thought at first the two pirates were going to drag me back to the kitchen or perhaps the control crypt, but instead we ended up in the main air-lock vestibule. A gust of warm, too-recently-breathed air slapped me in the face: it smelled of stale, half-digested tubespam and methanogenic bacterial endosymbionts. The docking tunnel of a pirate vehicle—a fast cutter, I gathered later—had thrust itself through the air lock like a parasite’s ovipositor; its walls, inflatable sheets of brute-repurposed mechanocytic connective tissue, pulsed slightly as it sucked nutrients from deep in the chapel’s belowdeck supply tankage.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “Ee’s going aboard the Permanent Crimson,” grunted one of my abductors. “Come along smartly!”

  And with that, they dragged me aboard their cutter for a six-hour flight back to the mother ship.

  I retain only confused impressions of the journey and of my arrival on the hijacker’s mother ship. It was hot, and dimly lit, and it stank, and it echoed with the shrill whistles and whines of its crew. There was no local vertical, no “up,” but a myriad of cables and webbing straps linking every available surface so that it was impossible to fall far without finding a support to grapple with. A low-gee vehicle, then, that part of my mind that was forever engaged in a running commentary noted: efficient and good for long-haul transits but not ideal for boarding actions, unless the target was a church or a sluggish bulk carrier.

  They gave me little time for sightseeing: dragging me willy-nilly to a new cell and drawing a thin, flexible film lid across it to hold me inside. Banging and shuddering ensued. And then, after perhaps an hour, I felt the unmistakable distant rumble of some sort of motor and felt myself drifting toward the overhead membrane. We were under way.

  Permanent Crimson

  Two subjective years of my mendicant scholar’s pilgrimage had not prepared me for this crisis, or indeed for anything remotely similar.

  To undertake a pilgrimage is a drastic and alienating experience, albeit an exciting one; you will visit strange nations and meet people with backgrounds and outlooks quite unlike your own. You expect to study and work hard, to approach life with an open mind and to learn things that will challenge your view of your place in the universe. But you expect to be in control of your own schedule, manager of your own destiny, accountable only to your self and your sponsors, until your successful return to your origin (and probable subsequent promotion).

  I began to experience a loss of control from the moment I boarded the chapel and discovered that what I had expected to be a staid, hidebound, institutional vehicle was in fact a flying madhouse. And the loss of control had spiraled outward, to engulf my entire life, from the first intimation of our hijacking through Dennett’s ad hoc gambit to convince them that I was an ordained priestess—while in fact his priestess lay comatose and undead within a sarcophagus—gathering momentum with my discovery that not only did I have a murderous stalker but that Dennett knew of her presence and had been manipulating us!

  Then there was the burden of fear and uncertainty unleashed by Andrea’s bombshell of a message. One of our number had snitched: or, quite possibly, Sondra herself had kept a closer eye on her vaults than we had anticipated. Either way, I could not expect my successful return from my pilgrimage to be followed by congratulation and a promotion. Most likely, Sondra wouldn’t hesitate for an instant before having me interrogated via slave chip. And when she uncovered the parcel of secrets nestling in my second slot, the mere fact of my having attained independent citizenship would not shield me from her revenge. I had just lost my long-term future and had no idea what to do next.

  Indeed, the pirates were the least of my worries. I confess, if it hadn’t been for the harsh lessons of my upbringing in Sondra’s child garden, I believe I would have completely lost my shit.

  * * *

  The hijackers’ vehicle had been under way for two days when Count Rudi finally got around to sending for me.

  Being a prisoner aboard a pirate ship turned out to be, happily, far less unpleasantly eventful than I would have expected. In fact, it was one of the most restful experiences I’d had in a very long time. When I was young and irresponsible and fancy-free, I occasionally acted out, as did various of my sibs: in response to which, the Proctors would use confinement as a punishment. Unlike some of my more rebellious sisters, I learned the virtue of patience and ways of quietly entertaining myself while giving no outward sign of activity. With the not-insubstantial freight of diaries and private files piling up in my spare socket, I had more than enough reading material, not to mention recorded and interactive one-person entertainments, to keep me occupied for a while. I could outstare a blank wall for years on end, given an otherwise stress-free environment.

  But being hugger-muggered and carried away aboard a pirate ship at the same time as one discovers that one’s employer might have discovered one’s treachery is sufficiently stressful to rattle anyone’s equanimity; and by the time the guards came for me, my metaneurocytes were all but growing legs and crawling out of my nostrils from a toxic mixture of boredom and fear.

  At first when they came for me, I thought it was just another meal call. They’d taken to rattling the frame around the door membrane to get my attention, then sliding a squeeze bag of pureed nutrient broth inside—boring, bland, tasteless stuff, but at least it kept me running. This time the membrane peeled all the way back. “You come!” barked one of the guards—the one I’d begun thinking of as Dogface 2 in the privacy of my head. (Jagged teeth, pointed muzzle, smelled musty, had all the poise and etiquette of a cement wall.) “Count boss person want you interview job opportunity now!”

  I let go of the floor (to which I had been clinging by my toes, using the hooks provided for that purpose). I had already concluded that in the short term, resistance would be no
t only futile but stupid: Not only would my abductors be expecting it, but my life was now as wholly dependent on their goodwill as it had ever been on Sondra’s, at least until some opportunity for escape made itself available. And escape from a spacegoing vehicle under acceleration was a questionable proposition at the best of times. My position was precarious, but they had made it clear that as long as I was useful to them, I would be preserved. So I allowed myself to be directed into the hive of villainy, through the tubes and fistulae and stomachs of their biomorphic home (the better to heal from damage inflicted in combat, I gathered) and thence to the big bat’s office.

  “Ah, Ms. Alizond.” He was hunched over a broad desk, yet another grid of soothing numbers scrolling across its surface, green and red flickering commodity prices fluctuating in real time as the pirate vehicle soaked in the incoming market stream. “Make yourself comfortable.” He gestured distractedly at a low-gee hammock on the other side of the desk. “Has Garsh been feeding you adequately?”

  “Feeding me—” I stifled an inappropriate laugh. “What?”

  He stared at me, his giant dark pupils unreadable. “Ms. Alizond. That was a serious question. Please answer it as such.”

  “I—” I closed my mouth, hesitated a moment. “I’ve been kidnapped and stuck in an oubliette and subjected to unspeakable indignities and you want to know if your minions have been feeding me adequately? Pardon me, but if you don’t already know the answer to that question, shouldn’t someone else be occupying this office?”

  Rudi—that was indeed his name—hissed breath through his nostrils: I interpreted this as a sign of mild exasperation. “You misunderstand. We are not used to accommodating your phenotype. I would rather not starve you to death by accident simply through neglecting some essential micronutrient! Are we feeding you correctly? Yes or no?”

  “Uh.” I drifted backward into the hammock. “I think so. Not getting any uncontrollable urges to eat strange things. At least, not yet. But you could have left me with the chapel; they had a balanced—”

  “Ms. Alizond. If I had left you among those scheming criminal sacerdotes, you would almost certainly be dead by now!” he snapped irritably. “I saved your life, confound it! Not that I expect gratitude, oh no, but there is another side to the balance sheet, and your lack of interest in it is—” He stopped himself in midrant, with a visible effort.

  I kept my face still. “You saved me? What from, and why? Surely you’re not declaring yourself to be an altruist?”

  “Hardly. Although in my not-inconsiderable experience, a reputation for fair dealing will stand one well when entering future business dealings.” The pirate leader emitted another leaky-duct hiss. “I have a deep and abiding interest in your missing relative, Ms. Alizond, whom I would dearly love to meet—if she is still alive. It is a matter of some embarrassment to this institution that one of my subordinates sold her a rather substantial insurance policy without performing adequate due diligence first, to ensure that she was not, for example, about to be assassinated—so it should be perfectly obvious to you that I would like you to lead me to her. But you don’t appear to understand what a lucky escape you’ve had! Or why it is absolutely in your best interests to help me.”

  “Really?” This was not turning out to be remotely like any of the conversations I had imagined holding with him during my captivity. “You expect me to help you?”

  “Yes.” A long, prehensile tongue squeezed from one corner of Rudi’s muzzle and swept around to the other side, smoothing whiskers as it went. “Here are the facts of the matter, Ms. Alizond: Your arrival asking questions after your missing sib Ana was noted from the outset by various local parties. The chapel you took passage on—did you really think they needed you as an unskilled ship-hand? Or that the original leader of the mission, Lady Cybelle, was confined to that sarcophagus by accident? Or that your oh-so-friendly deacon, Ser Dennett, survived the incident aboard the chapel that damaged or killed every other officer aboard the vehicle merely by happenstance? Or that they had lost all their Fragiles but still had the capability to produce cultured liverwurst by the tankload?” He yawned, revealing neatly polished rows of very sharp teeth: “There had been a mutiny, Ms. Alizond. The cause of the mutiny was a falling-out among thieves: At question was not the issue of whether it was worth abducting you but whether to do so by stealth or by violence, and what to do with you once they had you. I don’t think much of Dennett, but I will concede that he is a devious little bonebag. It’s your good fortune that we got you away from them before he finished reprogramming Cybelle, or a little encounter with a remote debugger interface would be the least of your worries.”

  I realized with some dismay that everything he said confirmed my own worst fears. Either he was reading my mind by some mechanism more subtle than a slave chip or the situation I had inadvertently become enmeshed in was indeed dire.

  “But you”—I swallowed—“your guards shoved me in a room with Cybelle and Dennett! I mean, before—”

  “Yes, well, every once in a while someone fucks up.” Rudi grunted. “In this case, it was the boarding party. Whom I do not employ for their brains, bless ’em. Luckily for you, Dennett is basically a coward. He lacked the determination to act on the spur of the moment, and I got you out of there as soon as I learned about the mistake.”

  “What have you done with them?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “What do you think I’ve done with them—made them walk the plank?” He hissed again, but this time I sensed amusement in the mannerism: “I let them go before we undocked. They may have a hard time reconnecting their high-gain comms antenna, but the chapel is otherwise undamaged. Including the undeclared cargo Dennett had filled the number three midships carbon-cycle buffer tank with, now that it is so regrettably surplus to requirements due to the absence of Fragile passengers.”

  “Cargo? Dennett was a smuggler? But why, I mean, you let him go—”

  “What? You think I’ve got room for an extra three thousand tons of high-purity molten indium in the paint locker? No, if he wants to waste energy hauling that stuff around, let him.” Rudi grinned, tongue lolling. “What do you expect me to do?”

  “Eh—” I paused for a moment. “Indium. That would be reaction mass for ion thrusters, hmm? Isn’t that rather a lot, um, is there enough to be worth—” I paused again. Shock fought with chagrin that I hadn’t worked out what was going on and gave way to amusement: “You didn’t. Did you?”

  “They call it piracy, you call it hijacking; I call it taking advantage of an unscheduled rendezvous to audit the undeclared cargo of a suspicious long-haul vehicle and order put options on the raw material prior to its arrival on the commodities market at its destination.” His grin widened into a yawn. “And meanwhile saving a little lost scholar who had fallen in with a hive of villainy and criminality along the way. Assuming that is your story, and you’re sticking with it. Now, Ms. Alizond. I’d like to make you an offer.”

  “An”—I came crashing back to reality—“offer?”

  “Yes.” He gestured at the spreadsheets floating around his office: “This occupation is not called ‘going to the books’ for nothing. Ms. Alizond, let me be clear; I want you to lead me to your sister Ana, preferably alive. If you can do that, I will be somewhat in your debt because you will have saved me from having to make good on an unfortunate subordinate’s badly gauged decision. To that end, we are making our way toward Shin-Tethys. Indeed, right now, this is your fastest route to your destination. We are due into Highport more than a hundred days ahead of that flying junkyard you took passage on. However, the operation of this vehicle . . . we’re a subsidiary of a larger enterprise, and must pay for our running costs. Right now, you are an overhead on my balance sheet. But it so happens that we have been shorthanded for some time. If you were to make yourself an asset, a Post-human resource, so to speak, I could move you from column A to column B, and thereby just
ify to my superiors the expense of providing you with more comfortable quarters, better food, a modest stipend—all the perquisites of employment.”

  “With respect, uh, Count—”

  “That’s a-count-ant, Ms. Alizond.”

  “—I’m sorry, er—”

  “Rudi will do. And may I call you Krina?”

  “—Uh, um, I suppose so . . . Rudi. Ahem. With respect, you’re pirates. Forgive me for saying this, but I have some misgivings about the legality and enforceability of any employment contract you might be in a position to offer—”

  “On the contrary, my dear: We are a privateer. We carry letters of marque signed by a genuine recognized sovereign government, authorizing us to enforce customs regulations and collect tolls and taxes on their behalf from traffic not in possession of a license from the government in question. We’re recognized by more than a third of the autonomous governments of Dojima System—almost a plurality! Which is why I can assure you that if you accept employment aboard Permanent Crimson Branch Office Five Zero, it will be recognized and enforced by the full majesty of the law of the Federal Inhabited Republics of Shin-Kyoto—”

  “You’re telling me you’re carrying letters of marque signed by a government in another star system?” I tried not to squeak, but not, I fear, entirely successfully. “What use is that if someone arrests you?”

  “None whatsoever in the short term although they’d risk economic sanctions. Specifically, they’d suffer total key revocation for all slow money transactions denominated in FHR/S-K dollars that are in progress. A not-insignificant portion of their interstellar balance-of-trade deficit.” Rudi licked his whiskers again, in what I was coming to recognize as the chiropteran cognate of a sly grin. “Krina, I am disappointed in you. Consider: Branch Office Five Zero has been trading in this system for more than a century now! If we were mere pirates, we would have been hunted down and destroyed decades ago. We are in point of fact a trading entity—actually a local subsidiary of an out-system bank—that occupies an extralegal niche which is sufficiently convenient for certain governments that a blown-out photoreceptor is directed toward us. It would cost them a lot of money, resources, and time to provide their own customs infrastructure. Much more convenient to leave it to the free market—us—and then to rake in a commission by selling us consumables and other supplies. If nothing else, they can deny all liability for consequences arising from our actions.