A Princess of the Aerie

by John Barnes

  Four human heads shook in unison. The Rubahy nodded once, gravely, and said; “Sinda’s accesscast will bring help, but if the evidence is destroyed, this will all just have to be done again, when all the rats come back after the cat is gone.” He raised his head and looked at each of them in turn. “I derive great honor from being permitted to direct an operation with four very brave people in it. I thank you for the honor. This is not the time for the discussion of any other points of honor.”

  Jak said, “I do have an explanation and an apology, the moment that there’s time.”

  “Of course, you would,” Dujuv said. He pulled his helmet on and closed up for outside work. The boys, then Jak, closed up and com checked.

  Shadow closed up last. “Now, my friends, quiet and quick, and let us see how much honor we can wrest from so estimable an enemy. Shut off your default sends—I think it best that we maintain radio silence.”

  “Tell me, again,” Dujuv said. “And don’t tell me like I’m stupid.”

  Jak hoped his nodding would show through his pressure suit: “All right, then. First team on the surface, that’s Shadow, Narav, and Bref, scoots for cover. Second team, me and you, activates the dead man trigger on the slagger. Each of our purses checks with us and sends the dead man switch a signal every twenty minutes, via the Spirit of Singing Port, which will be in orbit overhead, where it’s line of sight from us, for about two hours. Phrysaba and Pabrino will be monitoring com links the whole time, too, so if things go badly there’s at least some human judgment in the loop.”

  “That makes me feel better,” Shadow said dryly.

  Jak went on. “If it doesn’t get signal from any of us, the dead man switch starts a clock. If we still haven’t called in six minutes later, it turns on that slagger Kyffimna planted earlier. The slagger sprays the upper part of the west wall of the crater, where MLB is, with positrons. That will trigger a big, fast flow of magma down onto the crater floor, and it will keep doing it until the flowing magma overruns the slagger itself. Check your rocable, because that’s how we get rescued if we get trapped outside with a magma flood.”

  “I can’t wear one because they haven’t made them for anyone with rage spines,” Shadow said, “so I will either have to die with great honor or be extremely quick and clever. Either way, actually, will get me great honor.”

  “All right,” Jak said. “Now, the objective is for Shadow and Bref to get across there, to the main storage cave, and hack the recordkeeping system so that it will upload everything to general access, along with any pictures they can shoot. Everything else is just a diversion from that. But if we’re all captured before we can get there, then the flood of magma will keep them pretty busy, and seal over the outside of the cave. That will tie everything up in dozens of courts until they can excavate and confirm that Kyffimna was telling the truth, and, uh—just possibly kill those of us who don’t get to high ground fast enough. So let’s hope Plan A works.”

  “All right, everything’s what I thought it was,” Dujuv said. “Sorry to make us all review.”

  “Dujuv Gonzawara,” Shadow on the Frost said, “a human of your honor and accomplishments is entitled to as many reviews as he wants. Now let’s move. As Duke Psim often says, plans are like fresh mayonnaise, best used just after they are made, dangerous if the least bit old.”

  They used only passive infrared to guide them through the old tunnels.

  The Eldothaler boys needed no navigation device; Bref would simply pop up into a shaft and begin chimneying up, Narav would follow, and Dujuv, Shadow, and Jak would turn to each other, shrug, and follow. Or Narav would inexplicably veer right or left as they walked down a dark tunnel, its walls a mess of confusing shadows in the infrared, into what had seemed to be a big spot on the wall; Bref would stop to guide them into the spot, and they would find that they had entered a different tunnel.

  All around them the surfaces gleamed in weird shapes under the infrared, reminding them that many times they were walking through a tunnel that had been bored through a chamber that had been filled with melted waste from yet another chamber, which might itself have been carved into a big vault that, after the slaggers it housed had been removed, had then been filled with melted tailings from a surface operation. There must be rocks around here that were on their tenth human melting.

  After a while Bref gestured. The five of them bent over at the waist, helmets together, to hear each other by conduction rather than risk radio. “Up this chimney, about twenty-five meters.” Bref shouted so that they could all understand him clearly. “Opens in a cluster of rocks; should be invisible except overhead.”

  “We don’t want any sensor pointing toward the main party,” Shadow said. “So Jak and Dujuv, whichever of you gets to the surface first starts the dead man. Six minutes after I’m out of the hole, get going on the diversion.”

  “From the time you pop, six and go,” Jak said.

  “Got it,” Dujuv added.

  The vertical tube was narrow enough to chimney. Jak put his back against one wall, his feet against the other, and walked and humped his way up. It had probably been an outlet shaft for substitution pumping, Jak decided.

  Jak noticed a slight pittering sound on his helmet; tiny pellets of metal were falling off the walls from the three climbers above him. The walls were peppered with metal droplets no bigger than a period on a page, which showed as dark spots in the passive infrared.

  The dark dots became “stars” sporadically; some visible light was coming down into the shaft. A little higher, and there was more light as Bref climbed out, up above, and then Narav, and finally Shadow. Jak saw a few bright stars in the tunnel mouth. He started the clock and chimneyed up farther.

  At the top his helmet adjusted to the brilliant glare pouring into the top of the shaft, and the stars were lost in that. Another heave and kick, and he lay on the surface on his back. He rolled over, staying low, set the dead man, checked his time, blipped a com check through a rerouter to the Spirit, and heard Phrysaba’s voice murmur in his ear, “Com check successful, we’re here, good luck.”

  Two more minutes till go time.

  Beside him, Dujuv thumped onto the surface, rolled, and put his helmet to Jak’s. “Just wanted you to know that I know you have a dozen good reasons to accomplish the mission, so I’m sure you’ll do it, but I also know it’s got nothing to do with your personal honor or your loyalty to a friend or anything like that. You’re a useful bag of shit, but you’re still a bag of shit. Masen?”

  “Toktru. Ten seconds to go. We’ll talk later.”

  The little red bar in Jak’s helmet display winked out. Jak and Dujuv leapt onto a boulder between two spires, then down a long slope covered with the black carbon tailings, trying to stick out like a head of cabbage in a banana split.

  Dujuv unslung his flash bomb, set the timer on the blasting cap for ten seconds, and tossed the bomb down the slope. It was a flask of liquid oxygen packed into a metal toolbox full of powdered aluminum, with the blasting cap’s timer sticking out through a hole on top.

  Even on a slope bathed in Mercurial sunlight, the flash was bright, and would have alerted any sensor pointed this way.

  Jak and Dujuv ran across the carbon slope. When they were about a hundred meters from the gully on the other side, Jak said, “Purse, execute cover noise.”

  His purse switched through two general frequencies several times, to help MLB’s sensors lock on. He played back the recording Jak and Dujuv had made back in the krilj—neither of them was much of a playwright, but perhaps audience interest would make up for it:

  “Dujuv, you complete idiot, how could you have done that? How are we going to accomplish our mission without that bomb? And you set it off right where they’ll see it!”

  “Yeah, well, who’s broadcasting open channel with power and volume all the way up?”

  “Whoops!”

  That was the curtain line. Jak followed Dujuv into the gully. The panth was bounding along easily ahead
of him, kicking up sprays of carbon.

  His scanner was picking up plenty of encrypted noise, but his purse wasn’t having much luck with decrypting it. Once he heard the high beep-squeak of Duj squeezing off a message to Phrysaba and Pabrino, in the Spirit of Singing Port.

  The whole plan depended on Jak, with that sliver in his liver, being a bigger draw to Riveroma than anything else, and on Riveroma’s being completely in charge. If everything was working right, Riveroma’s scanners would have identified Jak’s voice pattern and linked it to the suited figures and the flash bomb; Shadow on the Frost, Bref, and Narav would have gone undetected; and a mass hunt for Jak and Duj, over here on the wrong side of the crater, should be starting.

  Jak and Dujuv scurried down the long gully. The surface here was probably aboriginal, pitted and rough, but without melting or flows. In the long dark shadow, Jak could see that he was mostly kicking up white regolith.

  Dujuv motioned for Jak to hold. High-pitched squeaks in Jak’s scanner—some message from the Spirit, or a relay from Shadow and the boys? The panth hesitated, then made an overhand gesture, and bounded directly into the sunlight and down the slope.

  Jak swallowed hard and followed. His purse said, “I have a request via scrambled text channel for you to say something loud and rude to your friend, on Channel 87. You should specifically sound very angry.”

  “Set 87. Dujuv, you idiot, get out of the sunlight, they’ll see us for sure.”

  “Get off open channel, asshole,” Dujuv replied. Jak thought his acting might be a little too convincing.

  “Now who’s on open channel?”

  “Get into the shadow over here, dumbass,” Duj said, “follow me to it, haven’t you heard me all that time asking you to get into the shadow?”

  “There’s lots of shadows around here, I don’t know which one you mean, and don’t call me a dumbass.”

  Jak saw Duj flash his helmet lamp on and off in the deep black shadow that hugged the north side of a bedroomsized boulder; on airless Mercury, with its harsh bright sunlight, shadows made things nearly invisible to the naked eye. “Oh, that shadow. Okay, coming down to you.” He bounded down the slope in the bright sunlight, kicking up more gray-white regolith.

  Jak guessed that Shadow and the boys had had to make some use of radio, and Pabrino, monitoring from the Spirit, had found the word “shadow” in decrypts of the malphs’ communications, which would imply that the malphs had heard and decrypted some of what the other party had said. On the chance that MLB hadn’t heard too much, and in the interests of keeping them preoccupied with hunting Jak, Dujuv had contrived a situation in which the word “shadow” would go out from his suit a couple of times, hoping to confuse the other side’s analysis.

  Or it might be something completely different.

  Dujuv leading, they broke from the shadow and bounced back down into the steepening gully. A hundred fifty meters farther on, the gully ended in an enormous pile of white powder, perhaps fifteen meters high and stretching half a kilometer across their path, that must be some sort of tailings; Dujuv tried jumping up onto the pile but immediately rolled back, scrambling, flinging the powder everywhere. Jak could see him shrug even in the pressure suit, seeming to say, Oh, well, old tove, the point of this was to attract attention, masen? Except that Jak was not sure that Duj would ever call him “old tove” again.

  They dashed around the dark side of the pile. Jak was following Dujuv when he disappeared. A moment later the ground opened under Jak, and he plunged into darkness. Barely over a second later, he thudded, hard, into a pile of sand or dirt.

  He rolled over and looked up; he had fallen into a pit which faced away from the sun, and its mouth was completely within the shadow of the old bit of crater rim, so the slice of sky he could see was spattered with stars. He let his helmet’s passive vision adjust to the sudden change and looked around. Dujuv was just sitting up, pounding the soft dirt in frustration; though it was hard to tell in the starlight, probably this was the same white stuff that formed the huge pile outside. Dujuv ambled over and put his helmet against Jak’s. “You hurt?”

  “I’m fine. Are you okay?”

  “Other than a bad case of the frustrateds, I’m great. I guess we climb out and get moving again.”

  “Yeah,” Jak said. “Well, at least we suddenly vanished; that should make us harder to find.”

  “Not necessarily.” The panth’s tone was oddly tense and quiet. “Look up.”

  Ten people in pressure suits stood at the mouth of the pit, blotting out the stars. A floodlight clicked on. The pit was shallow, blind, completely a trap. In the harsh new light, Jak could see that each pressure suit bore an MLB logo, and each person was carrying a military laser.

  A tall one stepped forward. Though Jak could not see through the faceplate, the way he moved marked Bex Riveroma.

  The tiny blue bar to the left in Jak’s vision showed that Shadow and the boys still had almost thirty minutes to go; maybe no one had seen them yet—

  A harsh scream filled his headphones, and all except the life-support displays on his helmet faceplate went out. They had tried to grab control of his purse, and it had self-erased to prevent that. A voice in Jak’s earphones ordered him to put his hands behind his back.

  As someone back there tied his wrists, Jak winced with grief. He had worked with that purse for two years, trying to coach and encourage it, and it had gotten very good at knowing what he needed and wanted. Now it was gone, just as gone as a dead person; he could restore from a backup, of course, but somehow a purse was never the same after that.

  The MLB men tied their prisoners to the railings on the platform of a big fifteen-wheeler. The driver got into the cabin and headed the big, spidery vehicle down the slope toward the central pinnacle. “Now,” Riveroma said, in a warm conversational tone, “what would two little boys be doing out on a mountain slope with a bomb that was barely big enough to hurt anyone?”

  “We weren’t out to hurt people,” Jak said, hoping to sound petulant and whiny.

  “Well, with that bomb you couldn’t have hurt much of anything. The instruments got a clear fix on it and the temperature and energy output weren’t more than what might be used in a big firework. So that’s what I think it was. Probably to get my attention, so I would come out and do what I’m doing. Now since I can’t imagine you wanted to be captured, my fine little boys, and since I don’t think that Jak wants me to remove his liver, particularly not with him alive and unanesthetized, and most especially since Dujuv is surely aware that I have no reason to keep him alive, it seems to me that trying to attract my attention is a very odd behavior. This makes me think, in turn, that if you want my attention drawn to yourselves, there must be something you want attention drawn away from … and I’m having the whole crater searched.”

  The fifteen-wheeler lurched over the rise and came down a gentle slope toward the base of the pillar. Jak had no idea how his hands were fastened together behind his back, and nothing to cut with even if he had known.

  “Now, Jak,” Bex said, “the real question is whether you are going to be cooperative, in which case the sliver will come out of your liver in a relatively gentle fashion managed by a professional surgeon, or uncooperative, in which case I shall simply lop off the parts of you that are hard to fit into a storage canister—that would be your head and limbs—and hand your torso over to qualified personnel for disassembly at some more convenient location. Dujuv, I’m afraid all that I can offer you is your life. If you should tell me what is going on, and where I should look for what threat, right away, then you will get to keep it. For either of you, the answer to that set of questions—‘what operation is this a diversion for, who is involved, where are they, and what do I need to do to foil it?’—is all I will be interested in.

  “Now what I propose is this. Whichever of you takes my very generous offer first, will get the full benefit. Going second will do no good; once I have the information from one of you, I will dispose of the
other.”

  “I’m not stupid enough to fall for that trick,” Dujuv said. “It’s the prisoner’s dilemma problem. You study that in school when you’re, what, ten? It’s not even a very hard one.”

  “Oh, on the contrary, there’s nothing harder than a dilemma. By definition, it’s a situation where there’s no good solution. Of course, one man’s dilemma is another man’s ironclad guarantee. I’ll let you think about which man is which. Don’t overtire that panth brain.”

  “Can we make you a counteroffer?” Jak asked.

  Riveroma waited a few seconds before answering. They were almost at the central pinnacle now, a massive tower of broken-faced rock perhaps eighty meters high. There were crevices and chimneys enough, Jak realized, so that in the low gravity he could climb it easily—if only he were there and if only his hands were untied. Well, the former was happening pretty fast; the fifteen-wheeler was now less than half a kilometer from the dark broken cathedral of melt-glass.

  “If you have a counteroffer to make,” Riveroma said, “I suggest you talk fast.”

  “Untie my hands first.”

  “Tell me everything I need to know, and then I certainly will. You’ll need your hands free to carry Dujuv’s body.”

  Jak said, firmly, “If I talk we both live. You have no reason to let Dujuv live, I understand that, but you also have no reason to kill him. Untie my hands, let us both live, and I’ll talk.”

  “Is that the best offer you can make?”

  The fifteen-wheeler rolled into the flat area that had been glazed into a parking lot. Two ten-wheelers and a little five-wheeler sat on the lot. No sentries or guardposts; must be robot guns in shadows somewhere. The main door stood to one side of a tall outcrop; on the other a dark zigzagging line up the cliff face marked a crevice. There would be lots of handholds in there, and it ought to take them at least twenty minutes to get him surrounded and pinned down and force him to surrender. …