A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  “They lost containment on a hot-metal, liquid-mix reactor,” Durol said. His heavy gray eyebrows shot far up. “That’s the only thing that would do that. Those things are basically just a big tank of mixed fissionables and moderators in solution in liquid metal, masen? So if they lost containment, or maybe if it overheated and breached, you’d get a lake like that, till it spread out enough to be in a geometry where the neutrons escaped enough to take it below criticality.”

  “Uh,” Narav said.

  Durol looked at his youngest son. “Told you to keep up with schoolwork, even when we can’t afford the good stuff. Look, nuclear reactors run on neutrons; if lots of neutrons get out, it cools off and stops, if most of them stay inside, it heats up. Neutrons escape through the surface area, and a sphere—which is the shape of the container for those things—has very little surface area for the volume it encloses. Now, when it spreads out into a big old molten pancake, like this did, it’s the same volume (because it’s the same amount of stuff) but far more surface area. So eventually it cools off. What Shadow is saying is that they needed to hide the fact that they had a huge reactor there—what, probably half a million cubic meters in volume?—and then had an oopsie with it.”

  “I have already reported the ‘oopsie’ to the Duke of Uranium,” Shadow said. “Unfortunately, he seems to be sequestered for the next four days—revisiting at Greenworld, for some reason—and he won’t hear of it till he is done with whatever he is doing there. There are people at Fermi who can start all the preparations for an expedition to come here, investigate, and shut them down, but it will be a matter of several weeks, at least, before any such effort gets here. And in that time, given that they have that isotope separator, the MLB people can remove most or much of the evidence. After all, very likely that reactor itself was legal, and I have no doubt that the facility built around it was designed for quick concealment whenever an inspector from the Duchy of Uranium popped in.”

  “What is that facility?” Dujuv said. “Shadow, you have me talking like you. I just mean, so what were they going to do with this thing?”

  “Well, first of all, power for the isotope separator, of course,” Shadow said, “because the solar array they would need for a really large separator would be very conspicuous, and someone would ask what they needed all that electricity for. But secondly, those hot liquid metal reactors are extremely good for producing isotopes, as well. Very high neutron flux inside and you can lower materials in a thermos basket, or just dissolve it in the reactor and pull it out with tunable-matter plates. Then run it through your separator, throw the short-lived radioactives somewhere (in this case, apparently they flowed right into that molten lake) and you have all you need to dope lots of metal with false IDs, in quantity. And my offhand estimate—Bref helped tremendously with this—was that the amount of metal they were planning to reprocess, redope, and thus label for resale without having to pay the miners any of what’s legitimately theirs—would be right around ten percent more than what Mercury currently produces. Oh, yes. They are definitely in it for the long haul and for a full conquest.”

  Durol was grinning broadly, now. “More opportunities.”

  Dujuv bolted an unusually large bite—which, for him, meant practically as big as his head—and said, “Opportunities? I’d say this sounds like a disaster.”

  “Only if they win,” Durol said, grinning. Jak realized that even though Durol Eldothaler’s face was a record of all the poisons poured into him, radiation shot through him, and burdens imposed on him since before he was born, it had the kind of character that you saw in medieval Italian paintings or movies. And somehow, his very facial deformity, the record of his murderous environment, enhanced the effect of his confident tone. “But they’re in motion, and I seem to remember that they teach you in the Disciplines that ‘to move—’ ”

  “ ‘—is to be vulnerable,’ ” Jak finished. “I see what you mean. They also teach that ‘to stand still is to be defeated.’ So I hope you have something in mind.”

  “Not yet,” Durol said: “I’m going to have to spend a while in multiple conference messaging tonight. But I know there’s much more to work with now than there has been. The isotope separator makes MLB a threat to everyone, first of all, so a lot of people will take it more seriously. And when someone comes galloping in to overthrow the Treaty; and the first thing they find a way to go after is one of the few things that protects the miners in any way at all … well, that doesn’t look good.

  “And it happens to happen that we have some recordings of that incident this afternoon. Dumping that second load of magma was pure murder, and if they had done it to shut those men up it would have been damning—but you know, I really don’t think they did. I think they were just that indifferent and just that careless. Or in short, as the saying used to be back on Earth where I grew up, ‘They’re just not from around here.’ Nobody who was would have done that, at least not the way they did.

  “So I’m going to start messaging everyone I can, and see how they all react to this.” He leaned back, his eyes seeming to search the ceiling for his memory. “Oh, yeah, there are plenty of people out there who I’ve heard begin a conversation with ‘What kind of bastards …’ and end with ‘MLB.’ They always came to me to complain because MLB is right here in Crater Hamner, but they never wanted to get together and do anything when it was just that we didn’t like MLB and they’d got bit once.

  “Well, now I can remind ’em they got bit, and then show them that MLB plans to go right on biting, and show just how bad they bite. And get them all talking to each other. This is looking better than things have looked in months. Just have to remember everyone who has some fresh grievances against MLB.”

  “Norinez Quacco, Dad,” Bref said. “MLB underbought them last week, three days short of their final payment on their drilling gear.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Durol said, making a note in his purse. “Something about having everything you own grabbed, getting Invisible Thumbed deep as it goes, just when you were about to get yourself clear of debt, probably precesses you pretty good.”

  Kyffimna nodded. “Thomagatzes were there for the mess this afternoon, but remember two months ago, that split-off quacco they were just launching, the Melozjians?”

  “Oh, yeah. Thomagatzes and Melozjians need to be among the first I call,” Durol said to his purse. “A brand-new quacco with three pregnant women in it, and MLB leased them a chamber for a new krilj, over in Crater Jiang, and never mentioned it was crawling with cadmium and radiophosphorus.”

  Within twenty minutes, he had a list of more than a hundred quaccos to message, all with one awful story or another. He got up with a strange smile, saying, “Lots of messaging to do. Take it easy on the wine, those of you that want to find out how this comes out, ’cause I’ll be up late on this one. But I think with all this, plus what happened this afternoon, plus what we found out … well, we’ll get some action. Not necessarily effective action, these are Mercurials after all, but at least action.”

  No one was in much of a mood to tell stories or sing, with the fate of the planet being discussed in the next room; everyone had long been in bed, and the Eldothalers, Dujuv, Shadow, and Jak were sitting around drinking coffee and not bothering to talk any more when Durol returned.

  “Not the best idea we’ve ever had,” Durol admitted. “But the leaders and elders of lots of different quaccos have been talking, and a lot of the little guilds and cults and families in Bigpile, and we’ve settled on at least trying to make our voices heard and trying to make the outside world aware of what’s going on. So there will be a one-week strike, all over the northern Caloris Basin and the rim and scarp around it, against any activity for export—we can’t very well make it a general strike, we want the power workers and the heets that make air on the job!—and everyone who’s taking the time off will be going into Bigpile for a week of demonstrations in the public areas—well, actually, every square centimeter of Bigpile is privately ow
ned, and we can expect that MLB will keep buying the ground under us and ordering us to move, but that, too, ought to do us some good if it gets in front of the cameras.

  “We’ll also be picketing the offices of the big offplanet companies, and we think most of their local workers won’t cross our picket lines. Plus there’s five sunclippers making a pass by the Bigpile loop in the next few days, and with the loading crews on strike, they won’t be able to do cargo switches. They can divert to other loops, offload, and get other cargoes, and they all carry strike insurance, we checked that, so they’ll be okay, able to pay off everyone whose loads they don’t pick up, but since a sunclipper can’t turn around, anything that doesn’t get picked up at Bigpile has to wait for the next one. Deliveries will be months late for metals to all kinds of industrial plants all over the solar system, and even though they’ll get cash to cover from the insurance, mostly the businesses in the upper system don’t want money, they need metal. So that should get a lot of attention.”

  “Is it going to get sympathy?”

  “Hell, no, not at first. The sunclipper crewies will be mad at us, and the industrial companies will hate our guts, and our own unions aren’t authorizing this—most of their members aren’t here, they’re in factories in the Hive and on Ceres and so on, and we’ll be throwing a lot of members out of work. But it means they’ll all be paying attention.”

  “I see all kinds of risks,” Dujuv said.

  Durol shrugged. “There’s risks either way, so you might as well pick the way that leaves the person in the mirror more attractive. Did you see those two heets this afternoon? No doubt they didn’t want to risk another day without a job, so they took that one.”

  CHAPTER 14

  A Principle 4 Case, if Ever There Was One

  The strike would begin at noon, General Solar System Time; coincidentally, it was almost noon by local solar time anyway (and would be for some days; Mercury’s day is one and one-half times as long as its year).

  No one would come back from lunch. Instead, they would all meet in Bigpile that afternoon, to be assigned locations and places for the picket lines and demonstrations. The objective was to make it impossible for offplaneters to move through any part of Bigpile without running into protests, to flood the solar system with messages that there was big trouble here.

  But to make an impact, it was thought to be better for it to appear suddenly, in the middle of the day. That also gave all the quaccos a chance to get some last-minute essential work in before they would have to start clearing it through the central committee.

  Jak’s morning job was to move probes. About as tall as his knees, and very light, they looked like chicken wire teepees. The chicken wire was both the solar collector that powered them and the antenna by which they talked to the base station about what they found. Each probe gradually pushed a centimeter-wide spherical bit, made of tunable matter, down through the crust of the planet, sometimes going to a depth of ten kilometers. Inside the bit, NMR probes read the composition of the surrounding materials. On the face of the bit, pseudoatoms flipped through their phases from fluorine to francium to helium, forming a pattern without moving like a crowd in a stadium doing the wave.

  The pattern was two parallel helixes—a double screw—one of francium and one of fluorine, microscopic in width, separated by an equally narrow band of helium, turning thousands of times on their way up past the wide part of the sphere. At that wide point, the fluorine helix ended in a band of helium, which deposited a mixture of metals that formed the electrically conducting wall of the shaft; the francium helix continued up into the center of the tube, releasing oxidizers (mostly gases) into the same slender hose that carried down the power lead from the surface. The oxidizing gases rushed up the hose into the vacuum of space, the metals were deposited in a dense layer on the side of the shaft, and the ball sank steadily into the earth, needing only its little trickle of power to keep going.

  In about forty days of sunlight, each little station could drill down to ten kilometers, mapping everything it encountered with millimeter accuracy. Since on Mercury the synodic day (the actual time from sunrise to sunrise) is 175 Earth days, this meant that in each synodic day there was time for each sampler to check two sites. It was close to Mercurial noon, so it was time to move them all; if they waited till after the strike, precious data might be lost.

  Since the machines told Jak, via his purse, what to do, the job was barely more complicated than watching the readouts the day before had been. Jak drove to each sampler, detached the old hose and bit, and left them in the ground, put the sampler on the five-wheeler, drove it to its new site, put on another bit and hose, and told it to start. He was certainly learning how to follow directions on this mission.

  He was just placing the last one, running way ahead with more than an hour to go in his shift, when a five-wheeler leapt over the horizon and headed straight for him. It wasn’t carrying either the MLB or the Eldothaler insignia, so it was odd that it was in Crater Hamner at all, and it was being driven badly, with lots of unnecessary bounces and spinning out, moving like a drunken mechanical spider in a hurry, so that Jak realized after a moment that it couldn’t be a Mercurial driving.

  The suited figure climbed awkwardly down, falling from the tire before getting up and hurrying toward him. There was something about it—

  “Jak Jinnaka,” a voice said in his earphones, and he realized.

  “Mreek Sinda,” he said, “I heard that you were here on Mercury.”

  “Well, yes, I am. Still pursuing the story that happens to have you in it. Much to my regret because you’re not cooperative and animation is expensive. And before you check, no, that didn’t go out on general frequency. I’m here to present you with an opportunity. MLB has just opened an office in Bigpile to recruit ‘security people.’ Which some people might call ‘goons.’ Looks like they’re getting ready to play rough.”

  “Thanks, I’ll pass that on to the strike leaders.” Jak didn’t know why she had driven out to tell him this.

  “I said an opportunity.” Sinda was petite and her pressure suit carried no extra supplies or rescue pack—another thing no Mercurial would have done—so she looked preternaturally tiny. But she stood up very straight, hands on her hips, as if prepared to defy him to the death if need be. Whatever argument she thought she had, she thought it was a good one.

  Jak sighed. He had to know. “All right, what is it?”

  She put her helmet against his so that he could hear by conduction, the almost-unbuggable way to talk. “MLB doesn’t know you from anyone and you haven’t yet put Eldothaler markings on your pressure suit.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “So pretend to be a stranded crewie (that happens all the time if a longshore capsule isn’t fit to fly back just as the ship is moving out of range) and go to the new MLB office in Bigpile and see what happens if you try to enlist in their goon squad. I’ll wire you with so many cameras and mikes that someone could open the Jinnaka channel. See what MLB’s pitch is to the hired thugs. If you’re actor enough, maybe suggest that you’d like to rape a prisoner or interrogate young children in front of their parents, your standard evil-tyrant’s-henchman behavior, and see if they start nodding and promising that you’ll have a chance to beat up old people or batter orphans or whatever. Anything like that you can get them to say will be terrific for both of us.”

  “Suppose you explain that part.”

  “Well, when they strike, the miners are going to be everyone’s whipping boy. The media are owned by the same people that own the factories, masen? And the miners aren’t exactly photogenic. But if you can provoke MLB into saying some really outrageous things, they get some bad coverage and they’ll have to cut back on goons. That’s good for your friends. Plus this will tie the story of the miners and all that esoteric stuff about mineral prices and working conditions and people getting hurt and all that boring, boring, boring stuff into a story about a beautiful young princess and her man of myst
ery. You see? No one gives a shit if MLB burns a miner alive every day before breakfast, Jak. That’s not news. But if you’re involved, dragging along the Princess Shyf story, then it’s interesting. Suddenly my little backwater oppressed-miner story is an important public issue, which is good for me and the miners.”

  “Hunh. You’re right, I think. I’m going to call back to the krilj. If they say okay, I’ll do it.”

  “Jak, the krilj is bugged so heavily that MLB probably knows which side you sleep on. My own smart bugs walked in there—how do you suppose I knew so much about the strike?—and found at least two MLB bugs in every room. I don’t speck anyone will place you, but if they have a voice-print file with a quick-access search, you might get caught. I guess I shouldn’t have concealed that from you. But if you call home to tell them what you’re doing, you will get caught.”

  Unfortunately, it sounded like she was telling the truth. He could explain things to his toves afterward, easily enough, and he wasn’t due anywhere until thirteen thirty; there would be plenty of time. “All right, let’s go,” he said.

  As he drove toward the point where Sinda’s rocket had landed, he watched her five-wheeler ahead of him bounce all over the broad, switchbacking ledge cut into the crater wall at a low spot, perhaps by the Eldothalers, possibly by anyone in the last twelve hundred years, for without rain or wind, every surface stayed the same forever, and it all looked as if it had been done ten minutes ago. The burned and melted floor of Crater Hamner spread out before him in sharp-edged contour lines marking where past magma floods had spread out or been dumped. As Jak reached the top, the central pinnacle looked more like a necromancer’s tower than ever.