However, as previously noted, Rudi had palmed a trump card: the teleportation engine. In addition to which, we had taken on board nearly two tons of weapons-grade enriched uranium in aqueous solution, stored in narrow, cadmium-walled tanks: about the most energetic rocket fuel imaginable. And he had a plan.
“We’re going to set up a jump that puts us a couple of hundred kilometers behind her starship. Which is decelerating toward a rendezvous with our current vector. We’ll leave a radar decoy behind to hold her attention. Once we’re in place, we’ll be screened from direct observation by her ship’s frontal shield. We’re going to make a continuous acceleration run straight down her throat, using more than half of that bang-juice you asked me about.” Rudi bared his teeth. “We’ll be all over her in less than ten minutes. And then we’re going to board her by force, detain the crew, disable their weapons, and open it to public inspection by neutral witnesses.”
Reader: Space battles are boring. But boarding actions are terrifying.
I had been on the receiving end of one, aboard the Chapel of Our Lady: Now I was to find out what it was like from the other side.
We crouched in the open front of the Five Zero’s payload bay, clad in a motley array of armor, plugged into whatever weapons we were most proficient with. I was armored, but not really armed (unless you count my spreadsheet and the contents of the hollow cylinder strapped to my chest): I was along as supercargo, in the care of an experienced team of raiders. We sat strapped to the open top of a short-range load carrier, ready for the jump. Before us, the fixed stars burned pitilessly: One star in particular strobed with a violet glare, its real motion still barely visible at this range. It was Sondra’s warship, fusion torch lit, backing toward us on a gust of gamma radiation and neutrons. “Stay back,” Li reminded me.
“Yes. Stay behind, and we’ll be able to protect you,” Marigold added. We spoke via encrypted electrosense—an augmentation the ship’s surgeon had installed on my head barely an hour ago. It still tingled, and my jaw felt numb.
“Jumping in ten seconds,” Marigold added. I tightened my grip on the straps that held me to the load carrier, unsure what to expect. “Brace yourself for acceleration immediately afterward.”
I tried counting, and got to fifteen seconds without anything happening. I was about to ask how much longer we’d be waiting when the stars flickered into new positions. Then a momentary tug in my vestibular sense told me that we were turning: And an invisible half-ton weight landed on me. Bright lines scrubbed across the edges of my vision, signaling an alarmingly high radiation flux. I couldn’t move. The acceleration felt as high as anything I’d felt during reentry on Shin-Tethys. (It wasn’t, not by an order of magnitude, but I didn’t have antishock gel packed around and inside me, either.) Stars drifted across the open front of the cargo bay, and a juddering sawtooth-buzzing roar shivered my bones. I strained, but try as I might, I couldn’t get a glimpse of our target. It was, after all, still hundreds of kilometers away.
Not only was it over two hundred kilometers away, it was receding from us at twenty kilometers a second, albeit decelerating, its drive torch pointed away from us and toward the vector we had been following seconds earlier. At ten gees, it would take us close to four minutes to stop the gap from widening further—but then we would close it extremely rapidly, before flipping end over end for the final dive. The starship itself was decelerating constantly, but at less than a thousand milligees: Even though it had prodigious amounts of power on tap, if it tried to sustain any higher acceleration, its crew would find themselves roasting in the fusion reactors’ waste heat. Our main hazards were threefold. The antimeteoroid point-defense devices behind the starship’s frontal shield might mistake us for a snowball on a collision course; Sondra might attempt to bring the beacon laser to bear on us; or she might do something really unfortunate with her drive torch if she realized what was going on. My greatest hope was that she would continue to pursue the radar decoy, which was obscured to her optical sensors by the fiery plume of her rocket exhaust. So I endured several minutes of deepening dread and growing terror as I waited for the circle of sky at the front of our cargo bay to flash brighter than a million suns and melt my face.
I waited, and waited. And then, without warning, the invisible weights holding my limbs down evaporated, and the static in my vision cleared. I jolted forward in my harness, then hung sideways in it as the stars rolled across the cargo opening. The bone-conducted roar of acceleration resumed, but this time I knew we were backing toward our target, slowing, closing for the final transfer.
“Ejecting in twenty seconds,” Marigold said quietly. “Hang on.” And I did.
* * *
Iretain only confused impressions from the boarding operation: the hollow darkness to every side, icy cold. A cylindrical metal fabrication the size of a skyscraper looming out of the darkness, studded with inexplicable nozzles, scarred by ancient microimpacts, a glaring pinpoint light burning holes in the cosmos at one end. Shoving and bashing and jolting as our crude lash-up cargo carrier rocketed across the gap, closing on one of the many blisters that studded the ship’s side. A crazy rocking motion and a brief glimpse of another, smaller vehicle in the distance, sitting atop another glaring knife-bright line of radiation: then a bone-rattling impact.
I remember standing in a hole in the side of a room, surrounded by the murdered chrysalids of ancient warriors, looking out into the abyss, and wondering: I’m still alive! Then a voice rang in my ears despite the vacuum all around, “Krina, get down!” And moments later, glimpses through a blur of terror, the flashing of thruster-driven knives jousting overhead.
Corridors and skeletons—not Fragile carcasses, but something else: bodies flensed of superficial mechaflesh, hard-skinned and bony with nightmare claws, optimized for weight and speed and killing. Then the body of a boarding crewman, batwings slashed and back broken. Sondra’s accomplices had better bodies and equipment, but Rudi’s people had more experience of this kind of action. A sudden flare of light in the shadows, and a cutting charge opened up a path through into a new chamber.
Then it was over. Or rather, Marigold was in front of me, trying to get my attention. “Ms. Alizond? Come with me. We need you to identify . . .”
The captain’s quarters aboard the Vengeance were more austere than I would have expected: a far cry from the luxury and pomp which was all I had known Sondra to travel with. At least they’d restored air pressure, so I no longer had to blink away the shards of ice that formed on my eyeballs. The spaces of the starship were cramped and cold, so dark that I was abruptly relieved that I had not had my eyes restored to their previous size. A mob of piratical bat-boarders proudly surrounded a hunched figure, spot-glued to an acceleration couch from which she roared imprecations. They’d poured a blob of quick-setting foam over her clawed hands and feet: Judging by the contusions and damage on display, they hadn’t taken Sondra without a struggle.
I took a step forward, bouncing slightly in the dreamlike tenth-gee acceleration. “Hello, Sondra.”
The nightmarish features of her warbody looked up at me and she bared her fangs, hissing.
“That’s not very constructive!” I said brightly, forcing up a shield of lighthearted disdain from somewhere: Truth be told, I felt light-headed, almost sick, gripped by the kind of numbness that takes hold when one’s neurohormonal emulation is spiking into overload. “Don’t you want to get this over with? Then we can be on our way.”
“Hsss—” Sondra shuddered in her restraints. Then she went very still. After a few seconds, she flexed her skeletal chest. Then she looked at me. “Which one are you?”
I stared. “I’m Krina, Mother. Don’t you recognize me?”
“Krina. The little historian? Traitor, I call you.” Her contempt was palpable. And it still stung, more palpably than I had expected. “You owe me—everything you are—”
“I owe you nothing! A debt does not
exist merely because you wish it to. If anyone is a traitor here, it’s you—to the people of Atlantis, whose trust you betrayed.” I caught myself, forced myself to count to ten in silence before I continued. “You could have had it all, Mother, if you’d done your job in good faith, managing their systembank. But you didn’t, which is why we’re here now, to hold you to account.”
She made a strange, muffled noise. After a moment, I recognized it for a snort of laughter. “So the little thief comes home to charge her mother with a bigger theft? Nobody’s going to believe you! It’s your word against mine, and I speak loudly, for money talks. Anywhere you try to go in Dojima System, my process servers will follow you. And don’t think you can get away with murder here, either: I have backups. They’ll come after you, too.”
“Not if they don’t have any assets.” I watched her, but she didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. I tried again. “How do you think we learned what happened in Atlantis, Mother? You cashed out too early, and you didn’t follow the job through. Risk management: That’s all banking is about. And now that everyone has come here to wind up the last of the assets left over from your fraud, the citizens of Atlantis have decided to take a place at the table and discuss the small matter of the debt you created.
“It’s over, Mother. The branch manager back there”—I gestured at the wall, the empty gulf of space beyond it, and the Branch Office Five Zero—“is broadcasting a full transcript of Ana’s and my investigation into your fortune to everyone who has an antenna to receive it. And a full description of the entanglement teleporter, although it’ll doubtless take a bit longer for that to turn everything upside down.
“But the upshot is this: Right now, the value of slow money is effectively collapsing, in a wavefront traveling outward at the speed of light. It’s a Jubilee, on an interstellar scale: the end of the debt slavery of worlds. While you’re sitting here, almost out of fuel, your beacon laser disabled and your credit rating trashed.”
She stared at me, uncomprehendingly. “You raised me to always pay my debts,” I explained, making one last attempt. “And I’m done, so I’ll be going now.” I reached over and carefully deposited the cylinder containing a copy of the full transcript on the desktop beside her couch. “I don’t expect we’ll be meeting again, so good-bye, Mother.”
I turned and waited for my bodyguard to make way for me. And then we went home.
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