A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  “But he didn’t know,” Jak said, squirming from her airy touch, “and he’s Rubahy. Honor-bound to protect an oath-friend. Shadow’s honor and loyalty make Duj’s look mild by comparison.”

  “And by comparison to Dujy, you and I have none at all,” she whispered. “Don’t you love that?” Before he could answer, her tongue was deep in his mouth.

  CHAPTER 4

  Outranked By a Toaster

  Swift as death itself, the Republic of the Hive battlesphere Up Yours shot through the dark between the worlds, toward the Aerie, just half a day away. Though Up Yours was two kilometers in diameter, with the volume of a medium-sized mountain, it was nearly invisible in war mode. Nothing protruded above the spongy black vacuum gel armor. Trillions of microfiberoptics carried starlight from each point on the ship to a distribution of millions of points on the other side, so that it did not occlude stars for any observer farther away than about a thousand kilometers (which the ship itself traveled in less than five seconds). Radar that entered the snarl of tunnels in its absorbent surface never emerged again to reveal its position; perfect insulation left its heat traces apparently as cold as the dark between the stars, and if necessary Up Yours could store all waste heat inside for more than a year. No exhaust of mass or energy betrayed the battlesphere’s position; the ship ran ballistic after each brief eight-g burst of acceleration from its quarkjets, in an almost straight line, much faster than solar escape velocity, to its destination, where it matched orbits with a similar burst.

  Within five minutes of thrust shutdown, the vacuum gel armor regrew over everything, and the ship vanished from all but the most sophisticated and subtle detectors. It could be spotted, sometimes, barely, by faint radar bounce back (if it was nearly on top of you), by a probe with a sensitive gravimeter (if the probe happened to pass close enough), by the scintillation of starlight passing through it (which lasted only a fraction of a second), or when it crossed the disk of a planet in a telescope (which, in most of interplanetary space, would happen about one ten-thousandth of one percent of the time). In battle, its quark-soup exhaust itself jammed many detection systems. Otherwise, in war mode, the ship was invisible.

  Up Yours ran in war mode most of the time, for the solar system swarmed with enemies of the Hive, and battle-spheres—the pride of the Spatial—were prime targets. Beneath her self-healing foam of vacuum gel, practically her whole surface was either thrust nozzles or weapons.

  Yet though a battlesphere was the most concentrated collection of destructive force ever to carry a crew, and though the solar system was always at war, their presence inspired no fear. The Aerie’s seventeen arms were each long enough to reach across the Pacific Ocean, it was home to a full two billion people and more than four hundred independent nations, the biggest manmade object of all time, yet Up Yours could have torn the entire Aerie to pieces no more than a meter across in less than ten minutes. Up Yours was allowed to approach, not because there was no danger of war, but because, all thanks to Paj Nakasen’s Principles, war was not the danger it had been. Humanity, after millennia of slaughter piled upon slaughter, had at last admitted to and studied its own vicious and bloody nature, painstakingly worked out a few rules of war, and made them stick. Foremost of these were Principle 174 of the Wager: “Every habitat must stay habitable,” and Principle 209: “When the common interest is survival, individuals must gang up or be ganged up on.”

  Wars were fought with little weapons where there were people, or big weapons where there were not, and to violate that principle was to be hunted down like vermin. Any nation or corporation that seized or destroyed a neutral sun-clipper faced an immediate and total embargo on food, water, power, and air; a nation attacked while taking its turn patrolling the approaches to Pluto could count on thousands of allies, including the Rubahy themselves; tyrants and madmen could seek power by means as cruel as ever, but if they took one step that might make any human habitat unfit for life, their own forces would turn to slay them.

  Thus though war was endemic, a warship able to rip civilization off the face of a planet, or to reduce a planet-sized station to rubble, could approach the solar system’s biggest population center, defended by an equally awesome set of weapons, with no fear on either part. Such was the power of the Wager.

  This was the lecture playing to the three CUPVs as they worked their way down the auxiliary accelerator tube, replacing panels as they went. When Up Yours needed to sacrifice stealth for speed, it could gain about 10% more acceleration by recycling the stray quarks from the synthesizers that drove the main jets. Here in the tubes, quark-plasma condensed into a demon’s-goulash of subatomic particles, whipped around in opposing directions to collide at the foci of the auxiliary propulsion dishes, creating a powerful secondary thrust.

  On merchant sunclippers, where Jak had worked before, a work crew selected music for its work area. On a battle-sphere, the public address system ceaselessly broadcast political/philosophic/religious lectures, to keep crewies loyal—to the Wager, to Nakasen’s vision, to the Hive, and to Nakasen’s vision of what the Wager meant to the Hive. Thus Jak, Myx, and Duj airswam after their sprites (which looked like stage tinkerbells) through the tunnels, replacing panels as they went, in a constant drone of lecture.

  Jak had learned to tune it out; he had no idea whether Myxenna or Dujuv listened to it, because as CUPVs they were temporarily members of the Spatial—subject to punishment for seditious remarks. On a battlesphere, microphones and cameras, like the political officers who monitored them, were ubiquitous.

  Jak had CUPVed on the sunclippers Spirit of Singing Port to Earth, and Promeithia back to the Hive, on his single mission two years ago, and spent most of his first Long Break the year before as a CUPV on a short-hauler, Lakshmi’s Singing Joy, on a Hive-Mercury-Venus-Hive voyage. He was almost halfway to a full-fledged union card. His experience had mattered not at all. The Spatial put CUPVs on any old job that had to be done but was normally a waste of a good crewie, and kept them there till there was reason to move them.

  Physically, Spatial ships were far more comfortable than sunclippers; there was more room and more energy available, so the facilities were more extensive.

  But socially, it was quite another matter. This voyage was helping Jak to realize that he’d rather take a sunclipper anytime he wasn’t in a hurry or going to a war. Even though Up Yours was going directly from the Hive to the Aerie in seventeen days (a sunclipper would have taken four months and at least one flyby of Venus or Mercury), it was seventeen very long days. Plenty of work but no griping (except within your skull). Plenty of time off and exercise facilities, but no locker room socializing. Plenty of pizos but you’d better bring your toves with you. Myxenna might have added plenty of midshipmen and ensigns but no fraternizing; Dujuv might have added plenty of food but no variety.

  Jak spent his spare time trying to pass the correspondence version of Solar System Ethnography, or asleep, or in brief, necessary bouts of peacekeeping between Myx and Duj.

  They went on replacing panels in the tubes. The lecture on the Principles and war law ended, and was followed by short interlude lectures before the next long one.

  Jak had rather enjoyed the two-minute interlude of ship’s history, at first, but it played at least twice per shift, and now he knew it by heart.

  It was intended to make sure that you dakked why it was an honor for a crewie to serve on a battlesphere in general and Up Yours in particular. Up Yours was a Nuts class battlesphere, almost five hundred years old, one of the largest warships in the solar system, though it lacked the sheer speed and better ablative armor of the more modern Like So Not class battlespheres. Fourteen battlespheres in all, a quarter of all those existing, made up the main line of the Hive Spatial.

  Up Yours had been named, like all battlespheres, for a message of defiance from an important historical human commander, in this case Ralph Smith’s message to the Rubahy during the desperate fighting on Titan. She was the third battlesphere of that
name, the first having gone completely dead to communications at far above solar escape velocity, and continued ballistically up out of the solar system, never to return, too fast for any ship to catch, presumably with its crew unable to get the quarkjets back on.

  The second had instantly become white-hot plasma in the suicide crash of a Rubahy fighter pilot during the Seventh (and so far last) Rubahy War. After a respectful few centuries, a Hive Spatial orbicruiser had been named after the fighter pilot, and Tree Bowing to the Storm was now regarded as a “good luck” ship, though traditionally it never served in the same fleet or task force as Up Yours.

  Jak followed his sprite down the poorly lit tube, swimming in the thick gas that had been injected to make maneuvering easier. I always wondered why Spatial crewies couldn’t wait to hit port and stayed off the ship as long as possible. I thought it must be the harsh conditions, and now I speck they just wanted to get away from the loudspeaker. That was seditious; good thing that Jak never talked in his sleep.

  He fitted yet another panel into yet another square, passing the old pitted one back to Dujuv, who airswam away with it. Tube maintenance was to spaceships what painting had been to sea ships; you didn’t get done, you just got to do it somewhere else. Crewies on sunclippers rotated through a variety of jobs to provide cross-training and ward off deadly boredom, but crew on Up Yours spent weeks or months of the same duty every shift. This might not be a bad basis for the required paper in his Solar System Ethnography course; merchant crewies were a recognized ethnic group, and one possible paper topic was to compare a recognized ethnic group with a similar, identifiable sub-category of people within the Hive.

  Jak turned and handed off another rough panel to Myx, accepting a smooth one in return; he placed the smooth one carefully, released the special grips from it, and let it self-fasten into place. The soft glow of light in the tube was pleasant, and the swimming gas, designed to be sticky and thick, made maneuvering easy in free fall. Since the panels couldn’t be exposed to any gas that wasn’t inert, workers had to wear rebreathers, but they were lightweight and comfortable, and the air they supplied was pleasantly odorless, unlike ship air.

  “How long till shift end?” Duj asked.

  Jak turned his left hand up to check his purse. “Sixteen minutes. Time for three more panels.”

  “This was challenging when we started but it’s kind of routine now.”

  Jak chuckled. “I’m glad you retain your gift for under-statement.”

  The constantly-on lecture switched over to an account of the history of the Aerie, which toktru Jak needed anyway as a review of background for his next exam. The frustrating part of trying to learn it, though, was that it was too simple at the abstract level and too complex at the detailed level.

  In broad outline, he only needed to know that after the Bombardment and the attempted Rubahy invasion, there had been thousands of surviving space habitats all over the solar system, most of them centuries old. Though they had mostly begun in orbit around Earth or Mars, fifty years of the Bombardment and ten years of Rubahy surface raids had made planetary orbits dangerous; by the end of the war the planets were really just vast high-gravity refugee camps anyway, so there was little economic reason to move back. So the energy-poor habitats had gravitated economically, as much as physically, to the stable Lagrange libration points in the solar system, where an object would stay in place without expending energy to station-keep, and the concentration of those stations into tight nests created free trade zones, which developed rapidly and made the decision to move to a libration point more and more inevitable for each successive station. Since most of the free-floaters orbited between Earth and Mars, and the Mars libration points are much weaker and hence less stable positions, the cheapest stable libration points to reach were the Earth-sun L4 point, sixty degrees ahead of Earth in orbit, or the Earth-sun L5 point, sixty degrees behind.

  At L5, Nakasen’s Wager had led many of the habitats to pool resources, fuse themselves into a single design, go to the enormous expense and effort of constructing a small black hole for a central waste sink and power source, and create the Hive. Over four hundred habitats which chose not to give up their independence clustered at L4, where, to reduce the risk of collision, they had all tied in permanently to a gigantic common docking body; the hundreds of stations on long arms extending out from the docking body now formed the Aerie.

  But though the broad outline of Aerie history was easy, it was doubtful that any human being could really have comprehended the whole detailed history of the Aerie. Hundreds of nations each had an origin, a history before the Bombardment, a history free-floating in deep space, a migration to L4, a period of free-floating in the cluster, a reconstruction during tie-up, and finally a history since complete conversion into a unit of the Aerie.

  The lecture didn’t hesitate to point out how neat and coherent Hive history was by comparison; all the 723 founding nations had been abolished and mutually assimilated into the new culture of the Wager. The nations of the Aerie were simply disorderly, something which they could easily have fixed if only their Confederacy charter didn’t prohibit the annexation or colonization of habitats in the Aerie by the Republic of the Hive. Jak wondered why the Confederacy charter did that; all he could remember was that for his teachers it was a matter for indignation. Had he missed something or was it one of those things not to be talked about?

  Their earphones told the three CUPVs that they were done for the day, and they gladly airswam back to the gaslock.

  Moments later, in the corridor, Jak could finally pull back his rebreather hood and wipe his face. Duj’s hairless scalp shone with sweat; Myx was running a hand through her sodden hair with disgust. “Thank Nakasen for a shower before final acceleration,” she said. “And a clean dress uniform still left.”

  Dujuv stared at a spot on the wall, not admitting that Myx was there.

  Jak shrugged, keeping up his personal pretense that he was on good terms with both the other CUPVs. “I’m just looking forward to no duty for a while. They work you hard on Spatial ships, compared to sunclippers.”

  Sesh had saved money by booking the three of them into a “three-passenger suite,” as the Spatial called a closet-sized space with a toilet/shower and three adjoining coffin bunks. As Myx showered and Duj sulked and waited, Jak pretended to read ethnography.

  Dujuv obstinately insisted that he was not jealous, angry, or upset with Myxenna, and maintained that he toktru had never liked her. Myxenna, for her part, was happy to be friends with anybody, and lovers with anybody attractive, but she was absolutely not about to try to deal with any of Dujuv’s emotions. On Jak and Myx’s last night together in his apartment, when she had sneaked in after Jak had seen Fnina for quick sex and the obligatory romantic public passionate farewell scene, Myx had said, “All right, there’s a medical explanation for Dujuv. But it’s not a compliment to have someone devoted to you like a codependent Saint Bernard.”

  The shower turned off. “You can have the next one,” Jak said to Dujuv, who silently rose, grabbed his towel and shower things, and floated patiently by the door till Myx emerged wrapped in her towel. He airswam in.

  The moment the door closed, Myx gave Jak a big smile, took off the towel, made sure he took a good look, winked, and airswam into her bunk to dress.

  It probably helped her feel attractive, but it ruined Jak’s concentration on solar system ethnography. Today’s topic was Unit 15: The Mars Origin Cults and the Eleven Martian Nations with MOC Beginnings, Part 1: Four Nations that Still Maintain MOCs. Privately Jak still thought of the topic as “the four dumbest gangs of savages in the solar system, and how to humor them,” but he had at least learned to suppress such thoughts while taking his exams, and had a passing mark on all six of them so far, with three to go.

  This time, he reminded himself. Then only six more times through the whole course before graduation. Unless he finished at the top of the class … he smiled. He had finally thought of something to m
ake himself laugh.

  The acceleration alarm sounded all clear, and instantly the enormous weight that had been crushing Jak down into the safety couch turned off, and he returned to near-weightlessness. The last, hour-long burst of the quarkjets had been the worst, not because the acceleration was any greater, but because it had all become extremely familiar and there had been nothing to do about it. The gray-sleep drugs, the painkillers, and the breathing assister all helped, and making sure you peed before lying down really helped, but eight g is eight g, and an hour of it feels just like lying on a bed with seven of yourself stacked on top of you. And after five previous one-hour bursts, with an hour break between each, as Up Yours zigged and zagged its way down to orbital velocity to match the Aerie, the knowledge of what was coming and how it would feel had settled into Jak’s bones.

  Beside him, Myxenna sat up, groaning, and even Dujuv looked pale and tired. The one consolation about their utter unimportance to the ship was that they didn’t have any immediate duties after any of the acceleration bursts, and therefore they had a few minutes to stretch out the kinks before anything else came at them.

  As they all floated, stretching, in their small cabin, trying not to bump into each other, a subtle force caused them all to drift toward the wall of coffin bunks. “Cold jets,” Jak said, “they’ve started the last course corrections.”

  The speaker in the room beeped once for attention, and then said, “CUPVs, be prepared for muster out processing in your quarters in forty-five minutes.”

  As Up Yours slipped between the whirling arms of the Aerie, only the minute, ever-changing accelerations from her hundreds of cold jets, poking through her fuzzy black skin like the spines of a sea urchin, indicated that anything unusual was happening. The crew were all singing-on where they were supposed to be at every instant, more spit-and-polish and by-the-book than ever—the Aerie was every crewie’s favorite port of call. No one wanted to draw one extra second of on-ship duty during a stopover there.