Thirty-nine
Fragment from the Fall of Titan
Citizens of Laketown, Titan, do not be alarmed. Steps are being taken for your own safety and security. At Systematic time 0:01:01 (128– 13) a curfew will go into effect that will allow six hours an e-day of work time followed by two hours of personal time. After that, you will be expected to be indoors. Violators will be shot. The hours will be in graduated shifts, and will be assigned to you at your workplace.
A new era is upon you. Progress has come to the outer system. Many of you are law-abiding citizens, and you may have wondered how long your corrupt government could stand. Justice has finally arrived. It is my pleasure to welcome you into full Met citizenship, with all the privileges thereto attached.
In compliance with Justice Directorate code JD-31-K19, all free converts must register forthwith. Check your tax schedules for important announcements. Thinking of signing up to become a DIED soldier? See your local recruiter for details.
So ordered,
C.C. Haysay, General, Department of Immunity Enforcement Division
“It’s almost unreadable,” said Thomas Ogawa. “How does he expect us to comply if we don’t have any idea what he’s saying?”
“I think that’s the idea,” Gerardo Funk replied. “Ambiguity in the service of order.”
“Uh-huh,” said Ogawa. “I wanted to thank you for saving my ship.”
“You saved it yourself.”
“I’d never have made it off Titan without your warning,” Ogawa said.
He and Funk were in a bare room with a single light, somewhere in the virtuality. Funk had rigged up this illicit merci channel between himself and the remaining free forces, in ships that had escaped Titan into space. Neither Ogawa nor Funk knew how long the merci-cheat would last, and there was not enough information flow-through to establish much more than two basic iconic presences in this plain room.
Ogawa had been friends with Funk since they had both migrated to Titan from the Diaphany. They didn’t have very much in common. Funk was an engineer, and Ogawa ran a small shuttle service that was doomed to failure as soon as the new Lift completed spinning itself out of material from the rings and down to the surface. For the time being, it was a living, and Ogawa appreciated the freedom it gave him. Maybe that was really what united him and Funk—they both knew what it was like to live in the Met and work for corporations whose employees ran into the millions.
They had been practically the only ones who had taken all the Directorate threats for tax compliance seriously. It had been Funk who figured out what the strange snowstorm really was. And now Ogawa found himself the de facto commander of a tattered “navy” of merchant vessels in space. Funk was the leader of the sad remnants of resistance on the ground. The Met victory had been crushing and absolute, but neither man was prepared to give up just yet. Or ever. To give up would be to return to the lives they had before and the conformity they’d migrated to the outer system to escape.
“I’ve got a couple of ships loaded to the gills with chemical explosives. We’ve got your jamming gear on board, too,” Ogawa told Funk.
“And the Mary Kate is ready?”
“As ready as she’ll ever be. So where will you be?”
“Muñoz Park.” Funk glanced at Ogawa over the table and grimaced. Ogawa had always thought his face looked rubbery, and now it was practically hanging from his bones like a stretched and deflated basketball. “I have something else to tell you.”
“What?”
“It’s going to be more like five hundred.”
“We said four hundred maximum.”
“I know, Tom.”
“Do you remember how big my hold is? We’ll never cram them all in there. And even if we could get them in standing up, do you remember that little factor called acceleration? G forces?”
“I understand, Thomas,” said Funk. “But each and every one of them has said he or she wants to take his or her chances.”
“Uninformed consent, if you ask me.”
“They know what they’re getting into, Thomas. And what they’re getting away from.”
Ogawa shook his head. But what was he going to do? Turn away people who wanted to escape? He would have to figure out something.
“When?” he asked.
“One hour,” Funk replied. He would have to figure out something very fast. Or just hope for the best.
Exactly fifty-nine minutes later, Funk flashed him the codes that would get the Mary Kate and the two decoy ships through the planetary defenses, and Ogawa began his dive. The other ships—old freighters that would never make it far from Saturn in the evacuation that was to follow—homed in on what Funk thought was Met Command and what they hoped would be old Haysay himself.
“How the hell did you get those codes?” Ogawa wanted to ask Funk. But after the codes filled up every free particle in his ship’s grist matrix, Ogawa knew the answer. These codes were free converts, and very likely they were friends of Funk’s. He seemed to know every stray bit of programming on Titan.
The decoy ships began their dive, and Ogawa angled in right behind them, nosing as close as he could to their reentry envelopes. When they were a kilometer over the city, he threw the Mary Kate into a screaming turn, pushing to the edge of his own reinforced skeleton’s structural limits, and then some. The “then some” broke one of his arms, but Ogawa piloted with mental commands and using his hands was strictly a backup system. He set his body’s pellicle to healing the arm as quickly as it could. Fortunately, nothing else failed, and the Mary Kate turned thrusters down and burned through the pressure dome covering Muñoz Park. The trees caught fire from the pure-energy flux of the ship’s engines and, the moment the heat was off them, froze in whatever charred state they had just been in. The ship set down with a thump, the hold swung open, and five hundred people emerged from the shelter of a nearby underground accessway. Some of them were Titan-adapted, and some wore pressure suits. They formed into groups of ten or so and took the shape of five-sided stars, with one person being a “tip,” another a “side” and so on. Each “side” lined up with another “side” in the hold, and each “tip” was in contact with two others. In this way, the refugees quickly packed themselves into Ogawa’s ship. He had to hand it to Funk. The guy sure as hell made sure everyone was briefed and ready. Or maybe one of Funk’s convert friends had come up with the packing arrangement. It had the look of algorithmic thinking to it.
Within thirty minutes, everyone was in. Ogawa said a quick prayer and blasted off, incinerating the remainder of Laketown’s formerly most beautiful park.
The decoy ships had more than done their job. The Hebrides section of downtown was a blasted, flickering ruin. Excellent. He ran a check on planetary defenses.
Shit. They were back up. Shit.
If he made a break up the gravity well, he would be detected and blown out of the sky. The Mary Kate was fast, but nothing in comparison to Titan’s ground-based rocketry. It was designed to track and kill anything from a ten-kilogram meteor to a straying asteroid. You needed such a system when you were this close to Saturn’s rings. At least twice a year, some major shit penetrated the atmosphere and fell out of the sky, brought from the rings by gravity perturbations and the workings of chance. Like the Mary Kate, the interception rocket engines ran on small bottles of anti-matter—positrons, mostly—but the rockets were unmanned and didn’t have to worry about killing anyone by accelerating too rapidly.
So Ogawa couldn’t go up. Maybe he could hide in the fault zone a thousand klicks to the north, or even under Lake Voyager. There was no reason his ship couldn’t survive a dunking in liquid methane. But all of this would defeat the purpose of coming in the first place. Five hundred people were depending on him to get them off this rock. What could he do? They were trapped. Hiding was not really an option.
“We’ll have to su
rrender,” Ogawa said. “What else can we do?”
He’d been speaking to himself, and was very surprised to hear a voice answering him.
“They couldn’t have gotten a proper cipher up and running this quickly,” It was a female voice.
“It must be a modification off some hardware they brought down with them. No one on this moon would knowingly collaborate.”
“What about the bank?” said the first voice.
“Well, yes, there is the bank.”
“Who the hell are you?” Ogawa said. He turned the Mary Kate into a parabola that he hoped would keep him low enough for the time being to avoid a rocket launch.
“We’re the former cipher keys to the Titan Rocketry Shield, of course,” answered the male voice. “No real time for introductions. We’re complementary keys. You can call me Ins and her Del, if you’d like.”
“If one of us were still in the system, we could easily disable whatever it is they’ve got plugged in.” said Del.
“Obviously,” replied Ins. “But we erased all copies of ourselves.”
“There is the back door.”
“Del, we left that in place for the counterattack.”
“There isn’t going to be a counterattack if these people don’t get off the moon,” said Del. “One of us has to stay here, and one of us has to go back.”
“Why not send a copy?” Ogawa quickly suggested. What the hell am I talking about, he thought. What do I know about any of this?
“There wouldn’t be space in your ship’s matrix for the new passwords I’m going to send back up,” replied Del.
“Del, you’re not seriously thinking of going back?”
“I’m opening up protocols with the back door guard even as we speak, Ins.”
“But Del, we’ve . . . never been apart.”
“It’s the only logical choice.”
“I know, but—”
“I’m in,” said Del. “Good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Del,” said Ins. There was a short silence, then a moment later Ins spoke up again. “I have the cipher keys. The shields are deactivated. Del is going to wait until we are safely out and then she’s going to . . . purge herself from the moon’s system.”
“I’m sorry, guy,” Ogawa said. “Let’s make what she did worth it and get the holy hell out of here.”
He turned thrusters down and blasted up into foggy red sky, a reverse meteorite. Within seconds, he’d cleared the atmosphere. Within minutes, he was out of the rockets’ range.
It wasn’t until hours later, when Ogawa was sure he wasn’t being followed, that he rendezvoused with the remaining ships of the Titan “fleet.” They divided the passengers up among them and each set off for farther out in the system. They had learned on the merci that all of Saturn’s moon’s were taken, as were Uranus’s, that Neptune was hard pushed and would soon fall to Amés, and that Jupiter was under siege. Pluto had surrendered without a fight. Ogawa’s arm hurt, but it was almost healed.
They would stealthily approach Neptune and see what was going on there. And if Neptune fell? Maybe the Oorts.
Or, hell, maybe the Centauris, Ogawa thought. He’d always wanted to go there.
Funk pulled himself into the control room of the Mary Kate and used the handholds on the bulkheads to maneuver himself into the copilot’s seat, which was usually empty. He was smiling his big, rubbery smile.
“Of the five hundred and eleven evacuees,” he said to Ogawa, “guess how many survived.”
“I don’t know,” Ogawa replied. “You did.”
“We all did!” Funk exclaimed. “Thanks to you.”
The display screen in front of them showed the minute drifting detritus and the icy chunks that made up Saturn’s rings all about them. They were hidden away in the densest sector, inside the Cassini Division. Normally Ogawa would have been quite tense in this situation, using the full power of his convert side to calculate and avoid space-debris trajectories. But now he had a full, unbound convert doing the work for him. Ogawa had set Ins to the task as soon as they’d entered the rings. He had no way of knowing if the convert felt anything like grief over the loss of his complementary key. But as far as Ogawa was concerned, both of the algorithms had met the Turing test for heroes. He was going to treat Ins as he would any other man who had lost a loved one—give him something to do to take his mind away from the pain.
“All of us survived but one,” Ogawa said to Funk. “If we ever get out of this alive, I’m going to see that something beautiful is named after her. She saved all of our lives, not me.”
“Well,” said Funk, and he pulled at his cheek until it stretched a good two inches away from his face. “Nobody’s come up with any name for these rings, yet. For all of them, I mean, as a system. How about calling them after her?”
“Why not?” said Ogawa. “I guess we’re the government in exile of Titan and Saturn and all her moons.”
Funk released his facial skin. It made a sucking sound at it wobbled back into place. “Shall we get the hell out of here, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“Absolutely, Mr. President,” said Ogawa.
He powered up his thrusters and, with the free convert to guide him, soon cleared the Del Rings of Saturn and sped away from his native sun as fast as antimatter propulsion could take him.
Forty
Aubry woke up before Leo. She slipped from beside him and gently made her way over to press her nose against the side of their bubble. It was warmer in there than it had been, and the air was noticeably stale. She had been dreaming that she was lost in a gigantic department store—the kind that advertised a billion kinds of goods and services, with a square kilometer of display space. Choose an item and get an instant instantiation of it from the grist at the service counter. She had had to give the store her full name upon entering (which you never had to do in real life) and she’d wandered bewildered among all the items as they screamed advertisements for themselves and called out her name whenever she passed them by as if she had personally insulted them beyond measure. In the dream, she kept apologizing to things like swimsuits and household appliances, but none of them would take her word that she was sorry, and they all kept yelling at her through what sounded like tears of rage.
A few minutes of gazing out at the sluice calmed her down, but then she began thinking of her family once again, and her frustration was replaced with sadness. Leo woke up after a while, and the two of them spent about an hour of wordless sluice-watching. It was amazing how what she had once thought of as snot now appeared incredibly pretty to her and fascinating to be within.
Finally Leo told her that they were approaching their destination and to get ready. She had awakened feeling very hungry. Leo said he would show her some stuff you could eat that grew in the Integument. Then he had described what it looked like, and she had instructed her pellicle to do what it could to dampen down her hunger. Maybe you could get to like swimming through snot, even breathing it. But eating boogers . . . she was going to wait on that one until it became absolutely necessary.
Aubry couldn’t tell, but Leo said that they had slowed down considerably relative to the speed that they had been traveling. She saw him carefully noting several side passages that they passed. Try as she might she couldn’t see any special markings on these. Then Leo saw the one that he wanted, and he told her how to exit the bubble. She gave one last look around. The place was starting to feel, not like home, but comforting, at least. Then she jumped as high as she could up from the stickiness of the “floor.” When she came down, she wriggled her hips like a belly dancer . . . and slid right through the surface tension of the air bubble and into the sluice juice once again.
Leo quickly followed her, and she once again held on to his ankle and let him lead her. For a moment, Aubry couldn’t get herself to suck in the juice. But then she did and it filled her lungs with oxygen—more t
han had been left in the bubble, actually. She felt giddy and light-headed for a moment, but she held on to Leo and the feeling passed.
Again they made their way through a series of passageways. These did not have the red markings at their entrances as the others had, but were differently shaped. Leo always took the ones that were elliptical rather than circular. Finally, they squirted through an opening and when the juice pressure stopped, Aubry raised her head into—air. An e-mix of atmosphere. She was in a cavern very similar to the one where she’d first encountered the sluice juice. Leo helped her up out of the juice and Aubry found herself standing on firm ground for the first time in almost one e-day. Her legs felt wobbly, and she stumbled a couple of times before she found her footing.
“Take your time getting used to walking again,” Leo told her. “We’re almost there.”
Without another word, Leo led her back into the Integument. After an hour or so of scrambling and crawling, they emerged into a passageway that seemed very harsh and geometrically arranged. It took Aubry a moment to realize that they were back in the Met proper, and that this was just a regular corridor in a bolsa somewhere. The spin was a little greater than Mercury’s pull, but not, Aubry thought, a full Earth gee.
“This is still a serviceway,” Leo said. “We want to stay away from DI sensors as much as possible.”
“Where are we?” Aubry asked. “Are we still on the Diaphany?”
“Indeed we are,” Leo answered. “This is actually a pretty famous bolsa. It is the remains of the 2993 Diaphany Conjunction span. Some important historic events took place in these parts.”
“Don’t tell me, I know,” said Aubry. “It was the Conjubilation of ’93, right? The Merge?”
“That’s correct, miss. And this bolsa is known as Conjubilation East—though how they decided what was east and west, I do not comprehend.”
After only a few more minutes of walking, a door portal opened for them, and Leo and Aubry stepped into a small room that looked like the reception area of an office. In a corner there was a table that might have been a communications console, but nobody was present in the room.
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