Two new “worlds” had been designed and opened their gates since Wendy May’s death. Her daughter had been responsible for The Sea My Home, a watery paradise inspired by the stories told by children orbiting Jupiter, looking at the ceaseless seas below them. In it, guests donned rebreathers and swam through blood-warm “oceans,” dove deep for pirate treasures, and dined on seafood farmed across the solar system. Not to be outdone, her grandson had ordered the construction of The Moon on Fire, Mercury’s contribution, where the skies were gray with synthetic ash and columns of flame jetted up to surprise and delight the tourists.
Michael’s father was still working on the construction of his new world, a glorious, jungle-themed tangle of flowers and fantasies, and Michael’s sister was waiting in the wings for her turn, planning a low-gravity wonderland where everything would soar, unfettered, free. The Mays built the solar system’s playground, and to do that, they had to keep wandering. They had to see.
What was Isla seeing now, he wondered. Was she seeing the inside of a box, the back of some broken-down junker of a transport ship, or the heart of a fusion-powered incinerator? Was she still there for them to find, or was the thought that they might see their little girl again just one more dream on Titan?
“Regardless,” said the officer, finally seeming to shake off the confusion at hearing a member of the May family call visiting Titan “a vacation,” when surely they came and went as they pleased, “you should have notified us of your arrival. We would have cleared priority docking space for you, closer to the surface, and there would have been no need—”
“Stop,” said Ange, pleasantly enough. “If you don’t, I’ll remove your sternum through your stomach, and that’s not usually something people survive.”
The officer stopped. Blinked. And tried again. “Mrs. May-Xiang, if you would just—”
“Stop.” This time, Ange’s voice was less pleasant. “I don’t want to hear what you think we should have done, or what we didn’t do to your satisfaction, or whatever other bullshit you’ve been trained to peddle. I want to know where my daughter is, and I want to know now.”
The officer looked from Ange to Kim to Michael, confusion written clearly in their eyes, along with an almost paralyzing fear of saying the wrong thing. “We’re reviewing the footage now. Surveillance in the plaza is... complicated.”
“We discussed the security systems on Titan before we agreed to Michael’s proposal,” said Kim. Her voice was, as always, calm and level. The people of Charon never shouted. Their homes were too narrow, too echoing for raised voices. Her spouses, though, could see the rage in the angle of her jaw, and wisely kept their distance. “Not only the proposal that we visit—the proposal of marriage. We entered this union with open eyes. We are fully aware of the security coverage of the plaza, and more, of the fact that nothing there goes unrecorded. I suppose this means the question is... why has the Titan Corporation stolen our child?”
Silence fell.
It lasted for a few seconds—five, perhaps, no more than eight—before the officer whirled and grabbed the doorknob, trying to yank it open. Just as quickly, Ange was there, slamming them up against the door, her hand tight around their throat, her eyes narrow and blazing.
“Not the right answer,” she said.
The officer whimpered.
VERY FEW OF the megacorps to form on Earth during the last pre-Collapse years survived the transition to orbit. The resources were too different, too undependable, and most of all, too difficult to monopolize; they were forced first to specialize, and then to carve themselves up and portion themselves off to the highest bidders, forsaking size in favor of survival. Families that once controlled continents found themselves controlling single asteroids, or measured percentages of the mining rights of a world whose yields failed to meet projections cycle after cycle, or single shipping lanes. Fortunes could still be made and lost, but in a wider universe, they were made and lost on narrower bands, at least until merchant and monetization came together—as they always had, since the dawn of humankind—to find new ways of doing business. So many of them weren’t new at all, only the same old deal in a spectacular new shell, but oh, how the money rolled in.
In little more than a decade, new dynasties rose, and the moguls at their heads began narrowing their reproduction as their predecessors had done, restricting themselves whenever possible to a single heir, for who wanted to see their empires carved up and scattered to the solar winds when so much effort had gone into creating them?
Some, however, saw the possibility of dynastic conflict as a good thing, a way to be sure their empires were always held by the strongest, and not simply granted to their sole heirs by default. Others believed that their children and their children’s children would be able to find a way to share. There was plenty, after all. There would always be plenty. Why shouldn’t a fortune feed as many as possible?
Wendy May had fallen somewhere between the two camps. She had sunk every penny of her personal fortune into Titan, and there had been no guarantee that her investment would ever bear fruit. At the time, she had been content with the idea that she might travel to her privately owned moon and die in the arms of an amusement park barely half constructed, its gates never opened to the awestruck masses of the solar system. If anything, she had been as surprised as anyone else when Titan had managed to catch the hearts and minds of people everywhere, luring them into Saturn’s orbit as they raced for the chance to sample its wonders for themselves.
By the time her creation had opened its gates, she had been married to one of its primary architects, a gentle man who made chemical bonds dance to his whim. They had had three children before he died, and she had seen them all into adulthood and starting families of their own before she followed him.
Not all of their children had chosen to have children: by Michael’s generation, there had only been six potential heirs to the family business. Two of them had gone into other lines of work, accepting lucrative positions with rivals or with firms whose interests more closely matched their own. One had disappeared in the Kuiper Belt, and had been missing almost long enough to have been declared dead. His sister, Margaret, had accepted the position of heir apparent, and was happily learning the ropes of everything it was to be the latest guardian of Titan, while remaining happily childless. Let her brother produce the next generation of administrators. She had work to do.
That was the problem. Wendy May had been very clear about one thing: as long as there was a suitable heir born to the family line, they would inherit. Her shares in the corporation were protected by a hundred laws and layers of red tape, and unsnarling all that complicated legislation—some of it written solely to protect what she had made—would have been impossible to do without being caught. Her empire was safe in the hands of the children she had made to keep it safe.
What she hadn’t considered was that, by making blood the only requirement of being accepted as CEO, she had placed her eventual descendants in the position of living in constant fear of kidnapping becoming a form of corporate espionage.
Ange slammed the officer against the wall again, knocking their head into the ferrosteel. The officer whimpered. Ange rolled her eyes.
“I’ve only done soft tissue damage so far. That could change. Where is our daughter?”
The officer made a soft choking noise.
“If I let you go, will you tell us?”
Vigorous nodding followed the question. Ange pulled her hand away, allowing the officer to collapse against their desk, clutching at their wounded throat and wheezing. Ange took a step back, watching impassively. Michael and Kim were silent.
“Sir,” wheezed the officer. “This is entirely improper. My staff is loyal.”
“To whom?” asked Michael.
The officer paled, looking to Kim as if she might provide a way out.
Kim looked calmly back. “Charon is a quiet place,” she said. “Out of necessity, yes, but also out of cultural expectation. I know a doz
en ways to hurt you so profoundly that it steals your breath away. You won’t scream if I have to track you down. You won’t have time. Where is my daughter?”
“Our daughter,” said Michael.
Kim waved his objection away with one hand. “Well? I’m waiting.”
“Sir, Miss May—”
“My sister did not kidnap my daughter,” said Michael. “But by now, she knows Isla’s been taken.”
It didn’t seem possible for the officer to pale further. They did. “S-sir?”
“All our children have subdermal medical sensors,” said Ange. “Isla is a fairly excitable child, and when she was snatched, hers probably spiked hard enough to set off the alarms. Margaret knows. She’s probably on her way here right now with her private security firm, the ones who don’t answer to anyone but her. Think she’ll be angry? Because I think she’ll be angry.”
“She’s always angry when she has to leave her office,” said Michael. “She doesn’t like going outside.”
“And she owns an amusement park,” scoffed Kim.
The security officer was looking between them in increasing horror. “You can’t be serious.”
“You’ve enabled the abduction of her niece. She’s not going to be happy about that. How much money did they offer you? Was it worth your job? Was it worth your life? None of the other megas are going to take you after you betrayed one employer and failed another. Hope you enjoy asteroid mining in a habitat that loses atmo as fast as the gennies can make it, because that’s about the only option you’ve got left.” Michael’s voice took on a jeering note. “They love it when they get softies kicked out that way. No adaptations, no hardening of your skeletal structure, no other options. They’re going to break you, and my whole family is going to cheer.”
“Or,” said Ange.
The officer whipped around to stare at her. “Or…?” they repeated, voice trembling.
“Or maybe nothing happened,” said Ange. “Children get lost all the time. Maybe Isla got lost.”
Slowly, the officer nodded. “I know just where to look.”
ISLA WAS ASLEEP in a storage pod waiting to be loaded onto an outgoing freighter. She woke to her mothers bending over her and her father standing nearby, voice low as he conversed with her beloved Auntie Margaret. Isla shook off the last, lingering shards of her confusion and fear and launched herself at her aunt, already laughing, already forgetting the unfamiliar arms that had gripped her tight and pressed the sedative patch to her throat.
She flung her arms around Margaret’s legs just as the older woman said, “—body will never be found. Don’t worry. Here on Titan, we’re still the law. Anyone with May blood is untouchable.”
Michael’s smile bordered on feral. “Thanks, Gramma Wendy.”
“Can we go ride the rides now?” demanded Isla.
“Of course, comet,” said Michael, his smile softening as he looked down at his daughter. “They’re all going to be yours one day.”
He swept her up into his arms and walked toward his wives, Margaret by his side. Somewhere in the distance, a coaster swept by. Tourists cheered, and their voices blended with the artificial air of Titan, wafting upward and away, breaking against the ferrosteel shell of a world turned into a dizzying amusement, fading into the endless manufactured summer of Wendy May’s dream.
LAST SMALL STEP
STEPHEN BAXTER
AS WE CROSSED the orbit of Neptune, heading outward, I woke from coldsleep with my head full of the mental state of our quarry, Stavros Gershon. And with the words of Lemuel Gulliver in my ears.
This lodestone is under the care of certain astronomers, who, from time to time, give it such positions as the monarch directs. They spend the greatest part of their lives in observing the celestial bodies, which they do by the assistance of glasses, far excelling ours in goodness. For, although their largest telescopes do not exceed three feet, they magnify much more than those of a hundred with us, and show the stars with greater clearness. This advantage has enabled them to extend their discoveries much further than our astronomers in Europe; for they have made a catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars, whereas the largest of ours do not contain above one third part of that number...
“Win. Winifred. Win Chambers. Are you with me yet?”
Gulliver was paused. Another voice. A face, looming over mine.
“Joe Salo.”
“You got it,” he said. “Well done.”
“You need a shave.”
“I’ve been all alone in this tub for a month, aside from you in your coffin. Facial hair wasn’t a priority.”
I tried to sit up. The coldsleep pod, my ‘coffin’, was smart. It tipped me up with a whir, and in zero gravity I floated comfortably, my loose gown drifting around. I was in a small, boxy cabin, the walls plastered with smart screens, a couple of couches set before the control stations. A small galley, a door that led to the bathrooms and the cupboards we slept in. Two coldsleep pods. Home from home, for this two-year flight.
Salo was watching me. “You know where you are, right? We’ve had no problems. We got through the acceleration phase and we’re cruising. Once you’re nominal, I’ll duck back into coldsleep myself. You’re up for another month to make sure I didn’t miss anything. And then we’ll snooze side by side until month twenty-one—”
“I know I’m on the Malenfant.” The name of your ship is a standard post-coldsleep memory check.
“Full name?”
“Reid Malenfant, Common Heritage Deep Space Vessel 2248-9D.” A veteran of the Earth-Mars run, the ship was older than its Heritage registration date. Most machines on Earth, and in human space, were decades old at least. I said dryly, “I even remember that the ship was named for the loser who crashed a space shuttle booster in...”
“2019. The booster was called the Constitution. And hey, that loser risked his life to save Cape Canaveral.”
I concentrated. “Whereas we are in pursuit of a character called Stavros Gershon, who took a ship called...”
“Last Small Step. Like the programme. Very unoriginal.”
“Right. Out to a dwarf planet at two hundred AU.” Two hundred astronomical units, two hundred times as far as Earth is from the Sun. A rogue world maybe, passing through that sparse, diffuse realm of minor planets and other debris between the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. “So that Gershon can do the footprint and flags thing, first on a new world. What I don’t know is exactly where we are now.”
That was when I found out the Malenfant was crossing the orbit of Neptune. A mere hundred days out from Earth. Twenty more months before we would reach our destination.
“Shit. Is that all?”
But I had known the mission parameters before we set off. The Malenfant was optimised for short-haul journeys in the inner solar system: a few days from Earth to Mars, if the relative orbital positions were right. It could cross a distance two hundred times further, but it would take two years to get us there. However, it was all we had. Two hundred and fifty years after Reid Malenfant’s moment of glory, mankind had no need for more powerful craft, having turned its back on human space travel almost completely.
Hence the Last Small Step programme, in fact.
Last Small Step. Of course everybody knows Neil Armstrong’s line as he became the first human to walk on another world: “That’s one small step for a man...” Even if, I had learned, 40 percent of people who consult the Answerers about it think that Armstrong was the one who went to the Americas on the Santa Maria. When the Pull Back to Earth movement cut in—when humanity as a whole decided to abandon space, retreat to a slowly healing Earth, and leave the mess we had made on Mars, Venus and the Moon to the AIs—protests had been spiked by the establishment of the Last Small Step programme. It was a kind of compensation. The idea was to allow a last wave of explorers to follow in Armstrong’s footsteps, to send out one last human mission to each remaining virgin “world” in the Solar System—that is, each planet, minor planet or moon large enough
to be compacted into a spherical shape—and, wherever possible, to land there, even just once, to plant a flag and a plaque, and come home again. No harm done to the target world, in the spirit of our age. Just to say we’d been there before we went home for good.
The trouble was, Stavros Gershon seemed intent on breaking the rules. Hence our mission.
Salo handed me a flask. “Drink this.”
A soupy glop that was highly nutritious, and full of helpful nanotech to counteract such extended-spaceflight problems as a loss of bone mass, a lousy fluid balance and a cumulative radiation load. It tasted like cold vomit.
Salo said, “So you do remember our mission.”
I grunted. “Yup.” As scientists, low-grade field workers, we’d done a handful of space missions together, mostly chasing near-Earth asteroids in ships like this.
I was forty-one, Joe thirty-something. We’d spent months in cramped cabins together. We both had strong families back home. We got along well enough.
Usually.
Anyhow, now I pushed down my reflexive irritation at his probing; he had to ask these post-coldsleep questions. “So when Gershon took off, heading beyond the Kuiper Belt—”
“Unauthorised.”
“We volunteered to do the chasing.”
“Right. His destination was recognised as a valid Last Small Step target. The last of all, actually. Well, probably.”
After the Last Small Step programme had been established, it had proven popular. The available targets, mostly minor worlds in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud, had been used up surprisingly quickly, even out to a thousand astronomical units or more. And Gershon’s target was believed to be, maybe, one of the last of all. A ball of ice and rock, probably, a little smaller than Ceres, with a couple of even smaller moons.
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