A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  During the long climb up the side of the crater, Jak touched the communication spot on his purse so often that it finally asked him if he was thinking of sending a message; a little curtly, he told it to mind its own business, and then a moment later realized that he might be alienating it, and ended up spending most of the rest of the drive trying to explain to it how to tell when he was thinking about talking but toktru didn’t want to.

  Jak had only passed briefly through one small corner of Bigpile before; this time they had grounded at a rocket port on the periphery, on the westernmost of the outer corners of the rough, lumpy Maltese cross that formed the shape of the city as it spilled around the intersection of a wrinkle ridge and a fracture fault. It would be about a three-kilometer walk to the central area where the Bigpile Marriott was. Unfortunately, one of Bigpile’s several distinctions was that it was the largest human city without Pertrans service.

  “Is it always like this?” Jak asked.

  “Usually only in the central shopping areas or around a shift change at a factory,” Sinda said. She whispered to her purse for an instant. “Thought so. About twenty percent more people than usual in the city, this morning. Mostly in from the kriljs. So it looks like your side is doing all right for mobilization.” She raised her left hand to her face and spoke into the purse. “What’s the difference between a cheap sprite and an expensive one?”

  “They’re all expensive,” her purse said, in its resonant baritone.

  “Are there differences?”

  “None, really.”

  “Get me one from the middle of the alphabet.”

  A moment later a sprite appeared, and she turned to follow it. Jak asked, “This place has different sprites?”

  “Competing sprite companies. No public utilities here, remember?” She turned and plunged into the crowd.

  Jak simply couldn’t go through the thick, milling, buzzing crowds in the rock-blasted corridors as quickly as the tiny woman. Her sprite had to pause every two hundred meters or so and dance around, waiting for Jak to work his way through a knot of people or out of a blind corner. The closer they came to the center of the city, the tighter people packed, and the more a tense electric connection seemed to fuse the crowds together. Miners in pressure suits, workers in coveralls, gamblers and hookers dressed up in their best clash-splash-and-smash, mercs in the uniforms of half a dozen units employed by the corporations, children in school uniforms, and drunks in whatever they’d slept in, all pushed and tried to ease themselves through the city in one direction or another, all apparently feeling that if they could only get to somewhere else they could be where something was just about to happen. The air was dense; the CO2 and water scrubbers must be having a hard time with the extra load.

  The thicker, more contentious crowd near the Marriott slowed them, but they made their way through the big doors into the lobby, among a mob of people pouring in, apparently hoping to be safely behind the Marriott’s security perimeter if trouble started, pushing through a lobby crowded with people wandering in little circles around their piles of luggage, talking to their purses, scrambling to find passage on any outgoing sunclipper.

  “Travelers,” Sinda said, shaking her head. “As soon as anybody mentions that some politics might happen and there might not be ice for the drinks, they fill a suitcase and go stand around in the least comfortable area they can find, asking questions nobody can answer and demanding that somebody do something. Three-quarters of them not in a pressure suit, so if any real trouble started, they’d be dead anyway. This way up to my room.”

  Sinda had done this many times before, and it only took her a few minutes to put microcameras and concealed microphones onto Jak’s pressure suit and cap them with metal to make them look like rivets.

  At the downtown offices of MLB, ropes were up to bend a long line of applicants back and forth in the front lobby, several times. The line seemed to be moving, so he got into it; within minutes, there were many people behind him. From halfway up the line, Jak looked around. Either this job has fabulous pay and benefits, or else there just aren’t too many other positions open for big thugs.

  Jak put in an earpiece so he could listen and keyed a question to his purse, his fingers dancing over the little spots of the keyboard.

  “Yes,” the purse said in his ear. “The unemployment rate on Mercury is high, it’s higher in Bigpile, and seventeen percent of Bigpile’s new immigrants are convicted violent felons from somewhere else, traveling on an exile ticket. In fact four percent of the total population arrived in the max security brigs of military vessels.”

  Jak keyed “Done,” and touched the reward spot; the purse cheebled in his ear and added, “Be careful.” As Jak retracted the earphone into the suit collar, he felt oddly touched by that; he’d never had any machine reach the point of feeling any concern for him before.

  There really weren’t as many heets in line as it had looked like, Jak realized after a while. It was just that most of them sized each other up and decided to allow a lot of personal space.

  When he went through the door at the end of the line, he was already cutting it close for getting to the demonstration on time, but there was still some time to do some good here. Then he saw that the “reception desk” was just a camera and mike set hooked to an AI; he would have just left, but he was at the head of the line, so he walked up and answered the standard questions—name, occupation, and so on. There was no way to probe for any good quotes, for Sinda.

  “How long will I have to wait to be interviewed?” Jak asked, looking at the dozen or so goons roosting on the bench along the back wall of the waiting area, bodies bent forward because most of them were too large for the narrow bench.

  “Wait your turn. Your name will be called in the order in which you arrived. Next.”

  Jak sat and keyed his purse to time the interval; after a minute or so, another heet was called in. It was ten minutes and seventeen seconds before he emerged and the next one was called. There were thirteen heets in front of Jak, now, he realized, counting. About two and half hours, far too long. He got up to go, and was actually walking through the door when the voice said, “Jak Jinnaka. Jak Jinnaka, please come in for a special interview, proceed directly to the president’s office.”

  Maybe they wanted him for an executive position or something. Jak turned and walked back, past the bench of goons, and through the small door that dilated at the end. It slammed shut behind him in an emergency seal, and reflexively Jak grabbed for his helmet—normally that sound meant a major pressure breach somewhere—so Jak was reaching back over his shoulder and bending down when a thrown knife rang against the door behind him, right where his head should have been.

  Jak looked up. Bex Riveroma, the man he had the most cause to fear anywhere at any time, was coming at him.

  Jak had studied the Disciplines since before he could remember, and he had practiced even more ever since Riveroma had beaten him so thoroughly on Earth. He sometimes practiced with an image of Riveroma’s face on the viv attacker. The situation was surprising, but familiar; Jak did not hesitate.

  Riveroma lunged for a grip. Jak sank, swept Riveroma’s hand away with a left block, caught the hand, and pivoted into the body drop, jabbing sideways at Riveroma’s temple. Riveroma hip-blocked and ducked, freeing his arm, his hands trying to slide into Jak’s collar, and Jak followed the motion, folding around the big man, hooking a leg and rolling it.

  His blood screamed through his veins, the world was rimmed in red, and a rough tornado howled in his throat. He wanted to attack, but in a sustained fight, Riveroma, master that he was, would surely win. So as Riveroma rolled, Jak kicked the tall, muscular heet on the top of his bald head, then threw himself back against the light partition wall.

  The wall went over as a unit, and there were shouts and bellows and the odd sensation of sliding down a wall under which several heets were trying to stand up. Jak had crashed back into the room with the long weaving line of applicants.

/>   As he bounded for the door, over the heads of the confused crowd in the middling grav, Jak shouted, “Police sting! Big bald pokheet in there! They’re checking records and executing fugitives!” He charged through the door and down the corridor.

  Behind him, slug-throwers popped, and a fighting laser hissed, amid screaming and shouting. Someone must have believed him.

  Jak dodged at every corner, in the direction of less traffic, stopping for breath when he could no longer hear the uproar. He had his purse shut off Sinda’s mikes and cameras, ran through a few more corridor intersections, and took the time to pry them off and crush them under his boot. No sound of pursuit.

  So Riveroma was president of MLB. It made sense. A heet with many different prices on his head, all of them large, couldn’t hide anywhere forever. And fearsome as his skills were, he was becoming a liability to hire. Probably like many people before him, finding that he could not get hired to do what he was good at, Riveroma had gone into business for himself.

  His choice was bold but offered a real chance of success. While he was starting out, Mercury was as safe a place for an outlaw as one might find in the solar system. And if Riveroma went on to gain control of Mercury, he would be too tough ever to dislodge. Every international expedition ever sent to Mercury to put down a revolt had taken months to ship troops, bring them down on the loop to a loyal city, and then move to take back areas in revolt. And in more than fifteen hundred years of space travel, no one had ever successfully invaded an armed, hostile planet. In the Seventh Rubahy War, the Rubahy attempt to storm Mars, and the human counterinvasion of Pluto, had both failed miserably, and nothing had changed in the seven hundred years since; a planet gave too much cover, and space was too exposed. Trying to storm a planet from space was like trying to take a medieval castle atop a perfectly smooth glass mountain on a bright sunny day.

  So, if he got control of Mercury … Riveroma could proclaim himself whatever title he wanted to take, emperor if he liked, and make it stick by the traditional right of conquest. And in a few hundred years no doubt his bloodline would be as honored as the Karrinynya.

  Jak shuddered. He splurged on a confidential, untraceable sprite to guide him to the rally. The strike leaders needed to know what was going on.

  As he neared the rally site, the flow of the crowd became against him—sad, grim people walking away from the space where the rally was to be held, rather than toward it. Then he saw the little knot of the Eldothaler Quacco coming on, Durol at the center of it talking with Kyffimna, with Dujuv and Shadow walking a little farther away—No, Dujuv at point guard, Shadow at rear, Jak realized. He pushed through the crowd to join them

  “What’s going on? Where’s everyone going?” Jak asked.

  “Where have you been?” Dujuv sounded angry.

  “I got a chance to check out something about MLB. Bex Riveroma is the president of it—”

  Dujuv looked stunned. “Weehu. Well, I guess that explains a lot.” He never took his eyes off the crowd, and Jak realized that his tove was not just angry at Jak, but also alert and psyched and expecting an attack at any moment. “Well, great, we can use that later to get some bounty hunters in here after him. For right now, listen up because there’s a lot for you to catch up on. Watch my left rear for me while I talk, okay, and keep a general eye out in all directions.

  “Now, while you were off playing detective or playing media star or whatever your game was today, MLB bought the public space we were going to demonstrate in, revoked our permission to use it, and sent the pokheets to arrest the whole demonstration. So all these people are going to walk a kilometer and a half out of the big doors on the south side of Bigpile, to a mine that belongs to one of the quaccos that’s with us—we’re hoping that doing this as a march, even an illegal one, will keep enough of our people together so that the pokheets will be too scared to try to break it up.

  “Now, why we’re guarding. A heet tried to stab Durol Eldothaler, as we came out of our rocket, and there was a dud bomb thrown at the feet of the leaders at the start of the rally.”

  “It wasn’t a dud,” Kyffimna said, behind them. “Somebody grabbed it and stuffed it into a hazardous materials chute so that it went out onto the surface before it went off.”

  “Kyffimna, I’m trying to keep you and your father safe,” Dujuv said, impatiently. “We can cover exact details later. It was no big deal. I need to brief Jak right now. Anyway, one pokheet shot at Durol—and Shadow shot back, which made the pokheet think about another line of work and hurry off to apply. So besides opposing scum we have to watch out for police scum. Durol is listed as a ringleader, and Shadow will probably be wanted for assaulting an officer soon, so they both have to be hidden out in the kriljs somewhere. And they’re so inconspicuous.

  “So while you were off doing all that doubtless fascinating stuff, and yes it’s good that we know that it’s Riveroma, old tove, we just developed a few little problems, which are kind of urgent, and if you’re not doing anything else, and can take time out of your busy schedule, maybe you could help Shadow and me guard the leadership, because you might have noticed this is a big crowd, and there’s only two trained fighters to guard Durol, with thousands of people all around, and I’m normally only this nervous during urological surgery.”

  Jak didn’t blame Dujuv for sounding angry—Jak was late, he’d been needed, it was justified. He did dread Dujuv’s finding out he had been late because he was dealing with Mreek Sinda.

  Well, time enough to explain everything later. Meanwhile, he moved into the position where Dujuv wanted him, and put all his attention into being a guard.

  It became more of a march as they went on. People pulling on pressure suits joined them; shopkeepers stood at their doors and cheered them on; there was a crowd along the streets, and Jak caught sight of Mreek Sinda, over to the side in one of the large spaces, talking to one of her drones while a dozen of them buzzed around the crowd. As the side walls came to be lined with spectators, the miners packed closer together, and as Bigpilers who had run home to grab their pressure suits rejoined the march, it became still more compact.

  Jak was at right rear, Shadow at left. The back of Shadow’s pressure suit, where there were small pockets to accommodate the rage spines, had an odd bubbling motion that indicated that at the least, Shadow on the Frost was getting precessed by the number of places that had to be watched for a threat, and the number of people moving through them.

  Dujuv, up ahead, working point, was better at this. His level, even voice—“Keep back, please, clear the way, please, sorry, security, I need you to move back”—cut right through the crowd noise, and people seemed to comply with his directives as if he were the voice of authority.

  At the center of the group, Durol had his head down close to his daughter’s, talking fast and low; from the few words Jak caught, he gathered that they were replanning the program—conducting it outside in vacuum, some things like group singing had to be omitted, and they urgently needed to assign radio channels for each function, and to work out contingencies for things like radio jamming.

  By the time the marchers sealed helmets and walked into the big airlock, things were in at least some sort of order. Without a pressing crowd around, the march widened and slowed, like a river coming out of a narrow canyon into a broad shallow valley.

  The south side of Bigpile fronted on a long, boulder-covered slope, and going around the larger boulders further divided them into small groups. They were a straggling rabble by the time they reached the outer rise of the small, round crater and passed through a narrow tunnel into the inside.

  The crater was perfectly round, with very high walls that rose almost to the vertical, jagged-topped and very narrow. Durol and the other quacco leaders would speak from a ledge that had been excavated across the foot of the crater wall, standing in front of an ore separator that was still finishing the day’s run in a blur of plates and catchers. There was no sound, of course, in the vacuum, and it seemed to Jak
that it was sort of a waste that everyone would hear perfectly anyway due to digital radio; if there had been air, this crater would have resonated beautifully.

  Shadow’s voice crackled in Jak’s ear; the yellow telltale on Jak’s helmet faceplate display told him that this was private channel and that only he and Dujuv were hearing it. “Here I am being a guard in a Bombardment crater. I’m not sure whether this qualifies as your human idea of irony.”

  “It’ll do,” Dujuv said, and Jak agreed. The Bombardment—the initial Rubahy attack, a thousand years ago, when they had tried to conquer the solar system—had been made up of many thousands of quartz balls, about the size of coffee mugs, arriving at more than ninety-nine percent of the speed of light, aimed at the four lower planets, about fifty a day for about fifty years on each planet. The Bombardment was the reason why Earth, north of 21°S, was dotted with tiny circular lakes, and why Mars now had a dense atmosphere after the release of deep frozen volatiles deposits north of 23°S. But on Mercury, the craters of four billion years had never eroded, and a mere million additional kilometer-and-smaller craters had been barely noticeable. Nonetheless, Shadow was right—the steep high sides, indicating very fast liquefaction and very great recoil forces (more energy released in a smaller space than ever occurred with a natural meteoroid)—meant that this had to be a Bombardment crater.

  When everyone had come into the crater, Durol announced, over the general speech channel, “We’re going to start now.”