“I can speak for the Church but not the state.” Cybelle glanced at the triumvirate. “You have grievously offended Her Majesty.”
“Yes, well, the relationship between interstellar capital and the temporal powers has always been somewhat fraught, has it not? They create bottomless pits of debt, we help them dig their way out, and what do we get for it? But I digress. Does the Church declare an interest in this business?”
“Yes, we do.” Cybelle’s smile was wintry. “The disposition of an inheritance that was stolen by a corrupt banker is at stake. The inheritor has assigned their entire estate to the Mother Church, and we thus inherit an interest in their—”
“Bullshit.” Rudi lolled. “You would have us believe that your mission turned up in Dojima System just in time to assert an interest in an instrument retrieved at this very moment by skilled forensic technicians who were not even born, much less old enough to have commenced their training, until after your chapel departed from its parent cathedral?” The Queens, still locked hand to hand in high-bandwidth communion, startled and glared at Cybelle as one. “Or that the banker with whom this instrument originated might just happen to be setting up headquarters in one of Taj Beacon’s most expensive hostelries right now, purely by coincidence? This train of random happenstance defies logic, not to mention causality, Your Grace. You might as well drop the pretense: We know about Atlantis, we know all about money laundering. A gathering of thieves at a preordained location a fixed period after the deed was done, there to divide up the remaining spoils, is hardly unexpected.”
Cybelle shuffled from foot to foot, focusing on the screen with wide-eyed intent. “You have no evidence,” she said, taking a moment to glance over her shoulder at the Queens, who were now focusing on her person with pinch-browed concentration, as behind them a squad of royal guards adopted a pose that spoke more of vigilant readiness than of formal salute. “There were no witnesses, and you can’t prove anything.”
“Oh. Really?” Rudi moved, then, making some off-viewport adjustment: The image changed. A dim blue light illuminated, from above, a prisoner, cocooned and trussed to a metal framework dangling in darkness. The prisoner stared helplessly at the viewport: gagged, hands bound, a picture of vulnerability. “This is your witness: Krina Buchhaltung Historiker Alizond-114, as I captured her, fleeing into the depths to join her sister. You will note the merform morphology: She evidently had her escape route well planned out. But that is not relevant to the point I would like to make.
“Sera Alizond is a historiographer of accountancy practices, with a special interest in the history of a particular type of fraudulent practice, the ‘FTL scam,’ as I believe it is called. Yes, she was induced to pursue this interest by her lineage founder, Sondra Alizond-1—I see from your expression that you are familiar with her—and at the time I captured her, she was in possession of what I believe to be a copy of the uncommitted counterpart to the very large financial instrument we are discussing. Unfortunately she had stored it in a memory palace in one of her cranial backup slots, and when capture was clearly inevitable she deep-sixed it, because, as you are no doubt already aware, she’s a vindictive little shrimp.”
At this point in Rudi’s narrative I flopped around angrily and rolled my eyes as convincingly as I could, doing my best impression of a vindictive little shrimp who had been caught red-handed in possession of her employer’s stolen property. (Whatever a shrimp might be.) I don’t know whether I succeeded in convincing the priestess that I was afraid of Rudi, but I certainly came close to blowing the entire setup by losing my grip on the “restraints” I had improvised from my depth-acclimation kit and the webbing beneath the bathyscaphe.
Rudi grinned, baring his fangs. “Despite losing the financial instrument and depriving me of a not-inconsiderable fortune, Dr. Alizond managed to hold on to her primary backup chip. Which, you will be pleased to learn, is no longer occupying a socket in her head. I have it, and I also have the necessary schematic for assembling a blank body into which to download a new instance of her twisty little mind. More to the point, I have already uploaded the schematic and a serialized dump of her soul chip to Branch Office Five Zero, from whence it has already been transmitted to a secure off-site backup location. Encrypted, of course. However, if I don’t regularly confirm that I am alive and at liberty, a trusted escrow agent of mine will release the decryption key and make copies of Dr. Alizond available to anyone who wants to interrogate her.
“And none of you want that to happen, do you? Because she knows more about your little conspiracy than you realize.”
“Have you finished monologuing yet? Or was there meant to be some point to this?” asked the priestess, just as the three queen-instances behind her dropped each other’s hands and gave vent to a collective howl of heartfelt frustration and rage.
“Yes, there’s a point,” Rudi snapped, as if at an invisible quadrotor bug looping around his muzzle. “I’m leaving. No, seriously. This has been a complete waste of money and time for me: a most annoying loss. But I know better than to try to recover sunk costs—a-ha ha—so you may take it as read that I do not really want to be shot out of the sky or to release the miscreant’s memories to all and sundry. What I desire is to put this sorry episode behind me and get back to the business of underwriting winners. So I’m going to offer you a once-in-a-lifetime bargain. You let me return to my branch office and depart from orbit without trying to blast me out of the sky, and I’ll tell you where to find Dr. Alizond. How about it?”
“We do not negotiate with—” “How do we know you’re telling the truth?” “Drop it, sis, he’s a fundamentally untrustworthy lying little shitweasel.” The Queens spoke simultaneously again, colliding in a hubbub of internal disharmony. While they were preoccupied, the priestess peered at a small retina wrapped around her wrist. Her eyes narrowed. “Your Majesties?” She attempted to get their attention. “Medea?”
“What?” Heads whipped toward her, simultaneously drawn by the implicit lesé majeste in her informality.
Cybelle bowed her head. “My recommendation would be to accept the privateer’s terms. He has already sucked Dr. Alizond dry; our priority must be to prevent her particular insights from escaping into the wider discourse lest they cause the general public at large to scrutinize our projects with undue cynicism.” She raised her head, attempting to make eye contact, but the Queens were too agitated to notice anything so subtle. “You”—she pointed at the communications officer—“please put the call on hold?”
“Your Majesty—”
“Do it,” said one of the Queens, then turned back to face Cybelle. “This had better be good,” she threatened.
“Oh, it is. Are we private . . . ?”
“He can’t hear you.”
“Good.” Cybelle smiled at Medea’s third body. “I think we should take Rudi’s kind offer to run away and leave us the prize. (Not that it’s much of a prize.) He’s outfoxed himself this time.”
“Why?” Medea asked sharply.
“I have just received word that Sondra isn’t on Taj Beacon after all. And I do believe that if you allow our annoying privateer to think he’s gotten away free, she will do our dirty work for us . . .”
* * *
We were nearing the surface, departing the Hadean depths for the photic zone: The waters around the bathyscaphe were no longer completely black. We had been ascending for more than a day. It had been at least four hours since Rudi’s attempt to bluff the Queen of Argos and her sacerdotal allies, and there had been no further underwater detonations to telegraph Medea’s frustration. “I think they’ve taken the bait,” Rudi told me during a brief reactivation of the bathyscaphe’s external retina. “Not long now. I’ll cut loose when we reach ten meters below surface level. Then we can put this behind us.”
“You spin an excellent lie,” I told him, finding it difficult to keep a note of admiration out of my voice.
“It’s the first and most necessary skill of the grifter. You, of all people, should understand that.”
The waters had brightened to sunlit turquoise, and I could see a shoal of feral piscoids grazing the underside of a leviathan grass field in the middle distance when I felt the ’scaphe’s ascent cease once more. We hung from the roof of the sky like the aerostat fliers of prehistory. Which meant I was shortly going to discover whether there was, indeed, honor among thieves—or at least enlightened self-interest and a willingness to forgo short-term profit for long-term business goodwill. Goodwill: one of those things that bankers and accountants hate because it is so inevitably unquantifiable, existing only in the eye of the beholder.
The retina above me flashed alight again. “Krina? We’ll be reaching our rendezvous in five minutes. You need to be ready to swim free as soon as you see the ascent capsule. Understood?”
I looked up at the display. It was Marigold: the ’count was clearly preoccupied elsewhere. I nodded. “Ready,” I said, and began to cut away at the restraining tapes that held me in on the mesh platform slung below the ’scaphe. (They’d given me a small cutting disk before departure, perhaps overly confident that I wouldn’t seek to use it to sabotage their submersible or my own circulatory system.)
Off in the distance, something spooked the swarm of fishlike feral ’cyte collectives feeding on the grass. It was vast and cylindrical, looming out of the turbid waters like an ancient vision of a submarine riding on the surface, the keel and stabilizers of a narrow surface ship visible to either side of it, like a whale being ravished by a catamaran. A small, bluntly conical cap sat at one end of it, disturbingly phallic, surrounded by some sort of boarding platform. The capsule, I realized. Probably the very same one we had made our descent aboard. The cylinder behind it must be the freighter the Hadeans had discussed with Rudi.
A roaring rush of bubbles churned the water immediately above my head into white foam, making me flinch: Air was rushing out of the bathyscaphe’s pressure sphere. I swam free and turned to stare as the sphere fizzled and dissolved, disgorging its occupants. A trio of familiar figures dropped into the water, with much graceless flapping of legs and membrane-encumbered arms: Rudi and his cohort had clearly not bothered with more than the most rudimentary water-breathing modifications, presumably because they didn’t expect to be here for very long.
“Ah, Krina! I take it you enjoyed the relaxing ride?” Rudi asked, his electrospeech crackling badly in the water.
I flipped and arrowed toward Rudi, turned and oriented to face him just short of impact. He flinched. “I’ve had better,” I announced. Marigold was flailing, trying to turn to face me, and Dent, the bag-carrier, was clearly in some difficulty. I swam over and steadied them. For the first time since my arrival, I felt as if I had the advantage. “What’s the cover story?”
“There isn’t one,” Rudi buzzed, clearly ill at ease with underwater speech. “It’s just a regular cargo launch by the deep dwellers, destined for rendezvous with their freight broker in synchronous orbit. Which just happens to be where Five Zero is sitting, right now. We paid them handsomely to reduce their payload and look aside while we strap our lander to the front—
“This payload. Would it also happen to be insured by way of a policy backed by your office?” I asked.
Rudi tried to draw himself up, to assume a dignified posture: He failed badly. “I have no idea what you’re implying! In any case, time is fleeting. We need to go on board immediately—”
“Barratry,” I pointed out. “Not to mention insurance fraud, piracy on the high seas, theft of weapons-grade nuclear materials, doubtless compounded by failing to file a flight plan—”
“Because you’re worth it, my dear. Anyway, I purchased the entire cargo fair and square: I have a perfectly legitimate use for it. Now, do you want the ride I’ve arranged? Or would you rather wait here until Medea’s minions arrive, or the Church, or any of the other parasites who are circling?”
Marigold was showing signs of getting her shit together. “Certainly,” I said. “Let’s go.”
As it happened, I made it to the boarding platform beside the capsule end of the vehicle well before Rudi’s crew. I found the chance to swim across a quarter kilometer of open water refreshing after spending so much time in a hammock. As I neared the platform a squid-person jetted toward me. “Ultimatum: Identify yourself!”
“I’m Krina Alizond-114. Who are you?”
The squid spun round, flaring his mantle at me. “Identify: This one is Chi scent-of-skinned-worms-in-the-water. Assertion: Would like to express satisfaction at your accomplishment, and assistance in resolving a small matter.”
“Huh. The small matter. Would it happen to involve a certain privateer?”
“Confirmation: Of course. Assertion: Your sister sent you a gift. She said, ‘Use it wisely.’”
“What—” The squid curled one tentacle back inside his mantle and produced a tiny box of familiar design, then presented it to me. “Oh!” An emotion I couldn’t name made my vision blur for a moment. “Please thank her for me.” I carefully transferred it to my belt, attaching the soul-chip carrier beside the talking box that had replayed my decompression instructions. There would be time to identify its contents later. It might be Ana’s way of politely telling me she thought my suspicions were misplaced; and then again, perhaps its contents would allow us to undertake our study seminar after all. “What about Rudi?”
I glanced over my shoulder: The privateers were bobbing along slowly. “Assertion: Accountant Rudi Five Zero advised The People to short all slow dollar funds. All of them. Assertion: This is, outwardly, insane. Assertion: Accountant Rudi Five Zero knows something. Interrogative: You should ask him why do that?”
“That’s crazy! There’s only two reasons to do that, and there’s no probability of a Slow Jubilee anytime soon. That leaves faster-than-light—” I stopped suddenly, a cold chill running down my lateral lines. “Thank you, I think. Ah, I see they’re catching up. Show me the way on board?”
* * *
The privateer’s landing capsule looked very different when viewed through the hatch as it lay attached to the front of the booster stack, itself floating horizontally in its catamaran cradle. I could see signs of modifications made during my absence: a contoured couch that was perfectly tailored to accommodate a mermaid, for example. I suppressed a brief flicker of anger. Doubtless it was an off-the-shelf item here, but it indicated that Rudi had known what was going on for some time. Or anticipated it.
“Can you board it yourself?” Rudi asked me. “Do you need help?”
I glared at him. “I can make it,” I said, pushing myself up on my forearms. The sun hammered down on my skin, drying me, and the weight and bulk of my torso and tail were unwelcome reminders of how I had been mutilated without consent. The sensation of air rushing in and out of my newly decompressed lungs felt breathless and strange. In my pisciform body I was a fish out of water: beached, ungainly, and sluggish. I kicked, pushing against the deck of the boarding platform, forcing myself up on my elbows, then down, dragging my trunk toward the hatch. It was horribly undignified, but I urgently wanted to assert my autonomy. Once we entered free fall, I should be as mobile as ever: Then I could see about having the Five Zero’s surgeon-engineer resect the fishy tail and restore my legs to their original plan.
By the time I managed to crawl into my recliner, Rudi, Marigold, and Dent were already strapped in, and the hatch was closed. (Our surface crew, I gather, remained underwater for the whole process, relying on remote manipulators.) “Are you ready?” asked Marigold, “because there’s a promising minimum-energy window opening in less than a thousand seconds.”
“Go for it.” Rudi looked, and sounded, satisfied. He glanced at me: “Do you need a hand?”
“No.” I stared back, mulishly: When he looked away, I continued to grapple with my restraints. As the capsule was tilted o
n its side, this meant “lying” almost vertically: With no toes or feet, I dangled from my shoulder straps.
“Well, if everyone’s strapped in . . .” This from Marigold: “I just told them to start the launch sequence. We should be moving very soon now.”
And, indeed, she was right: I felt a faint thrumming run through the floor of the capsule, then a wondrous sense of relief when the floor tilted as the launcher rose toward the vertical. I hastily tightened my restraints. “How does this thing work, again?” I asked.
“Like an ancient war rocket,” Marigold reassured me. “Our booster sits in a silo that floats with its nose just above the surface. When we’re upright, the launch crew will eject us, then the nuclear rocket ignites once we’re airborne.”
“The motor—” I paused. “What if it doesn’t light?”
“Oh, that never happens!”
Something cold and leathery grabbed my hand: I startled for a moment until I realized it was Rudi. He caught my gaze: “Don’t worry,” he said. “If it fails, it’ll all be over too fast to hurt. But that won’t happen. We’re safe as a five-hundred-year bond.”
I smiled at him, pretending for his sake to be reassured. “Let me get this straight. We’re sitting in a capsule on top of several tons of barely subcritical plutonium liquor, powered by a nuclear rocket operated by communist-squid technology, the nearest thing to a government hereabouts has been threatening to shoot us out of the sky on sight, and you think we’re safe—”
I didn’t get to finish the sentence. I nearly didn’t get to finish anything at all, for that matter: The booster stack beneath us suddenly lit, with a roar like the end of the world, and I discovered that, ungainly as I’d felt when I boarded the capsule, having my weight quintuple in under a second felt even worse. I barely had time to recover from being shoved abruptly back into my couch when the booster cut out with a violent jolt, then another, marginally gentler shove commenced. Scratchy white lines fogged my vision. “Don’t worry, that’s just secondary neutrons from the cargo,” Rudi shouted above the thunder of the main engine. “It gets a bit frisky when the reactor goes critical!”
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