The Duke of Uranium

by John Barnes

  "It's good for my resume for the PSA," she pointed out. "Public service to a friendly nation, namely Green-world. Plus I know Sesh a lot better than anyone else and that might come in handy."

  Dujuv continued, "A Hive Spatial warship was headed out to make a port call here, and it was taking one of those superfast energy-wasting orbits that just drops down to gain orbital velocity and then pops back up to wherever it's going, so we left a month after you did and almost got here at the same time. We were supposed to watch you and see how it went, and we'd just gotten you located in time to see the launch crash," Dujuv explained. "By the way, that is one great way to worry your toves."

  "Toktru," Piaro agreed. "Sis was just idly watching— or at least she wants me to think it was just idle—and she called me as soon as she saw what had happened. There's a Spaceborn Grief Center on Singing Port— that's where you go to have professional counselors break bad news to you, and it's also usually the fastest place to find out if your friends or relatives are still alive. And we ran into Myx and Duj there, found out you were alive from the fact that you were being checked into the Duke's prison, and after discussion with your uncle, we discovered a rocket of untraceable registry that was available for immediate rent, and it happened to contain a small arsenal in its hold. And so here we are, more or less at your service. Depending on whether you have any good ideas beyond this point."

  "Well, getting me out of prison was the best idea I've heard in a long time," Jak said.

  "And Myx—Myxenna, is it?—let me add, thank you for taking me along on the ride," Black said. "I think I can say that I'll make sure you don't regret it."

  "You're welcome." From the way her eyes twinkled at the handsome, older heet, Jak judged that Myx already had no regrets, but he suspected Duj would have enough for both of them. It was really just like being home.

  "Ending free fall in two minutes," Phrysaba's voice said, over the speakers. "We're landing gentler than we took off, but it's still going to be quite a ride. Get stretched out on the padding, and stay that way."

  The cargo area swung rapidly around them, cold jet noise echoing through the little ship, and after a few sickening seconds, settled back into ordinary weightlessness. Jak made sure he was comfortable on the padding.

  "Acceleration in five, four, three, two, one, now," Phrysaba said, and the engines thundered to life again. This time they ran at a fraction of full power, and the descent was mostly at around two gravities; if Jak had really needed to, he could have very carefully gotten up and moved around. As it was, he lay there, trying to feel positive about the fact that shortly the two gees would go back to a mere one.

  The minutes crept by and then Phrysaba said, "All right. Touchdown in twenty seconds…" The engines became almost muffled in their thunder, and acceleration decreased to a mere one gravity; they must be almost hovering. "Descending… coming up on it…" There was the barest of bumps, and Piaro said, "Singing-on piloting, Sis," even before Phrysaba cut the engines and said, "Well, we're here. Everybody out—this rocket is not going to be a healthy neighborhood for long. Pabrino tells me that his data trace shows that the Duke's pokheets have a singing-on fix on us, they've got where we've landed pegged within three meters, and are getting it together right now."

  Chapter 10

  Extremely Rude and Unprofessional

  As they emerged from the rocket, Black said, "Well, this is where I disappear, and I'm going to take a subor-bital to North America—that ought to get most of them chasing me, while you and your friends get on with your business, Jak."

  "Thanks," Jak said.

  "Not a problem. They would chase me anyway—you might as well get some benefit from it."

  "Do you have credit?" Myxenna asked.

  He favored her with a deep, winning smile. "The next time we have a chance to talk, we can both enjoy how funny that question was. But for the meantime, yes, everything is fine, now that I'm out of that pen. I won't forget this, my dear toves." He turned, darted down a passageway between two buildings, and was gone.

  "Strange kind of a heet, but I'm getting to like him," Jak said.

  "So what do we do?" Phrysaba said, practically, as she climbed down the ladder from the rocket. She was car-rying a large, heavy bag. "We have all these weapons left to use, but we've kind of lost the element of surprise. And Pabrino tells me we have about fifteen minutes to get away from this spaceport before all kinds of trouble starts happening here. He suggests that we grab the first ship out and improvise from there."

  There was a suborbital excursion hopper leaving in six minutes, so the five of them got onto that, and breathed a sigh of relief when it took off for Buenos Aires without incident.

  Jak had hoped to get a nap in free fall, and he tried, but he was only able to doze in the constant noise. The robot tour guide nattered on about weather conditions over the Pacific Ocean, and as they reentered and made the close overflight of South America, it spent an unbelievable amount of time explaining how odd it was, on Earth, to see a plain with no pocks; because Alpha Draconis is far to the north, with a declination of just over 69° N, anywhere south of 21° S had been spared the Bombardment, so that the Argentine pampas had been untouched. You wouldn't have thought that there'd be much else to say about pocks that were not there, but the guide seemed to be determined. Aside from Jak and his toves, the only other occupants of the ship seemed to be a few teenage couples who took private rooms, probably for free-fall making out.

  The suborbital touched down on the linducer track at Buenos Aires, selling off its momentum and gliding in to refuel. It announced that they now had one half hour to visit the observation tower above the refueling station, and that it would leave without them if they were not aboard. Jak stretched and yawned and said, "How's our credit supply?"

  "Plenty," Dujuv said. "Are you specking what I'm specking? Good time to change vehicles?"

  "Yeah. Isn't there one of those—what do they call'em, the thing that's like a big Pertrans that runs between fixed stations?"

  "Trains. Yeah, there's one to Africa from here," Phrys-aba said, checking her purse. "It even stops in Fermi. We can catch a taxi, whatever that is, to get there." She stood up. "All right, let's go."

  After they left their compartment, Jak reached back inside and pushed the privacy button, locking the compartment closed; the little tourist craft probably wasn't very sophisticated, and there was a good chance that the compartment would register as still occupied, if anyone looked into it, which he thought likely.

  Right next to the steps marked "to observation tower" there was a sign pointing down a stairway:

  "GROUND TRANSPORTATION AND TAXIS."

  "I wonder if that means that taxis, whatever they are, fly, and you're supposed to land here, whether you're flying a transportation or a taxi?" Myx said.

  "Or maybe this is the place where they put people into departing taxis and recycle the old ones through the grinder?" Phrysaba guessed.

  They didn't see any "ground transportation," whatever it might be, but when they got down to the curb there was a row of brightly colored wheeled vehicles, each labeled "taxi," so that seemed simple enough. They were robots who would take you to any address for a single fee, regardless of how many riders got in; they piled into one and authorized a payment.

  It was just dawn as they shot out of the tunnel from the little secondary spaceport, headed for the train station, and though this was objectively the slowest part of the trip, it felt like the fastest and it was certainly the most terrifying. The taxi apparently monitored a real-time information system for ground traffic (Piaro pointed out afterward that since they never saw any law enforcement, this probably included monitoring where the pokheets were), and rerouted constantly to reduce trip time.

  The taxi shot down big empty roads, made abrupt turns down steep ramps and plunged through narrow alleyways, wove between crowds of pedestrians in marketplaces, veered madly around buildings and through narrow spaces, absolutely destroying any sense of
direction Jak had; everything seemed to be a blur and a smear of color, accompanied by the shrieking wheels of the strange little vehicle. It was bizarre how being less than a meter off the ground, and moving through such crowded spaces, could make speeds that were a fraction of one percent of orbital seem like the fastest he'd ever gone. The taxi didn't even go as fast as a Pertrans car, but a Pertrans ran in a nice sensible tunnel with no obstacles around—not in an open space with hundreds of other vehicles and people drifting about as randomly as the molecules in a gas, to Jak's eyes, yet miraculously not colliding. "Wonder when these things were invented," Phrysaba said. "Surely not before there were robots; I speck no human being could do this."

  When the taxi pulled up at the train station, the sun had not yet cleared the horizon, and Jak realized that the whole ride couldn't have been more than ten minutes. He decided that ten minutes in a taxi in Buenos Aires was probably as much time as he'd ever need to spend in his life. Myx staggered a little getting out. Even Dujuv just got out, without any stunts or vaulting.

  They studied the displays over the train station counter carefully for a while. "I think I dak the djeste," Piaro said finally. "If everyone is going to share a train, then everyone has to leave at the same time, like a ship. So that's what 'departure time' and 'arrival time' mean—everyone going to the same place gets on the same train and goes at the same time. Then there's a fee for a particular trip." He raised his left hand to his face. "Confirm?"

  "You've got it right," his purse said.

  "What are the classes?"

  "Classes are names for qualities of accommodation. 'First class' for long distance means a private space where you can lie down and sleep if you wish; 'second class' means small enclosed areas, bench seating within them; 'third class' means row seating—"

  "Thanks, that's all I needed," Piaro said. His purse clicked off.

  "So in first class I could get a nap?" Jak asked. He was amazed at how tired he felt; he had been up a long time and had already been more than all the way around this unnecessarily big and heavy planet.

  "The train that goes to Fermi leaves in about forty minutes," Phrysaba said. "And it looks like it takes about twenty-five hours to get there. And since none of us is in a hurry, and we can get a luxury suite that lets us all wash up, sleep, and eat for a while, I'm in favor of it."

  Afterward, Jak thought of the train ride as one of the most interesting things on the trip. The train only moved at slightly over 600 kph, but it moved continuously, and very smoothly, and unlike flight in aircraft or spacecraft, you were right there, however briefly, with whatever you were looking at.

  He slept for about ten hours, so that when he awoke it was utterly quiet and dark; they were in the Recife-Banjul tunnel, a few kilometers below the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, and he realized that about as soon as he realized that Phrysaba was snuggled into bed with him, naked.

  He gently disentangled her arm and climbed out into the luxury compartment; he could see by the dim blue lights, when he turned those on, that there were three other beds in there but only two of them were occupied. He hoped that Piaro was by himself. Otherwise this was going to be a classic case of Myx-awkwardness, which, toktru, he really wasn't in the mood for, just at the moment.

  When he checked, he found that he had been asleep for almost ten hours, and that they were most of the way to Africa, but still under the Atlantic. They had bought an anonymous exchange card in Buenos Aires, deliberately walking up the street to buy it where the ground shuttle for the spaceport left, and using one of the "super-clean" account numbers that Uncle Sib had given Jak for emergencies; with luck, the malphs looking for them would have gotten no further than realizing that they had to search through the memories of dozens or hundreds of taxis, and since taxis were arriving and departing constantly at the port where they'd come in, that could be a long and inconclusive process.

  He could also hope that the malphs were all busy chasing Black, and that Jak and his friends were no longer being pursued at all, but hopes like that were probably not wise to harbor. Jak hoped that Black was all right, and something about the man inspired confidence, maybe more than the situation warranted.

  Well, anyway, he had troubles enough of his own, and thinking about Black's wouldn't make his any better. He quietly dressed and called up a quick meal from the foodmaker; that helped a lot as well. He was beginning to feel ready to take on the world, which was good because that was just what he might be doing soon.

  He went up to the observation bubble on top of the car, though there was nothing to see in the tunnel itself; he wanted to be sure he didn't miss their emergence, since he had guessed that it would be impressive.

  He had more coffee and food up there, having staked out a good seat at the front end of the observation bubble, finished eating, and sat quietly, just waiting for the moment.

  His guess proved to be singing-on.

  There was just an instant's warning, as the top surfaces of the cars ahead of him flashed into bright light surrounded by a semicircular patch of blue sky; then almost as if it had been turned on with a switch, African morning leapt into being around him, the high bluffs sweeping back behind him, a herd of wild horses and some kind of horned animal racing momentarily beside the track. The train hurtled on, climbing up through the low, ancient mountains. An hour later, they descended into the soft grasslands that had been all erg and dust just a thousand years before; here, they were far enough north so that every twenty kilometers or so, they passed by a Bombardment pock, sometimes dry, sometimes a small circular lake, its walls still sharp as if it were on the moon or crumbled and eroded as if it were a million years old—it all depended on what sort of soil and rock the fist-sized ball of quartz had penetrated at light speed, and what sort of weather the area had had since. Jak wondered what it had looked like, right down here on the ground, as it had happened. In school they had said that if you had been there, you couldn't have seen the arrival of any of the rocks—just a sudden flash of bright light and a tower of dust many kilometers high, like a fusion bomb set off just below the surface.

  He thought about seeing it the day before, with the Rubahy, and wondered what Shadow on the Frost might think, seeing his species's handiwork all over the Earth. He had said it was "much to answer for" and yet "beautiful." What did he, or any Rubahy, really feel about it? Did it make him proud—we almost beat you bastards— serves you right for that trick you pulled with our sun? Did it fill him with awe that his ancestors had been able to do that, whereas now a puny remnant of his species clung to a couple of frozen snowballs, far out in the dark, on sufferance of the people they had dreamed of conquering? Did it hurt him to see such wounds in a living world? Were the pocks "just there" to him, something that had happened once and had nothing to do with him? Surely not that. Surely the Rubahy had some feelings.

  "The others are moving around and will be up soon," Dujuv said, sitting down beside him. "I just reinforced your order, so there's some more coffee and some rolls coming. And some eggs and meat and bread and cereal. And some other stuff."

  "It's Uncle Sib's credit line," Jak said, "and the good old gwont is loaded, or at least he is until we get done spending it."

  Dujuv vaulted the seatback and sat down next to Jak, comfortably spread-legged, and began unfolding the table. "How long till we get there?"

  "A good part of the day, still. Late afternoon. And as close to the equator as Fermi is, it gets dark right around six. So what we want to do, I think, is talk a little bit about what we're going to do when we get there, and then get long naps and be really up and ready, so that the moment we arrive, we're in business. I don't think I want to be surprised again; 'Getting surprised is distinctly unpleasant, and it nearly always suggests something is wrong with you,' as Uncle Sib is so fond of saying."

  Dujuv stretched and yawned, his panth muscles straining against his coverall. "Weehu, that night of sleep felt good."

  "Tell me about it. High gravity agrees with you," Myx sai
d, plopping down in the forward seating area, her hair a muzzy tangle, a kittenish smile playing across her face. "From the way you slept, I was thinking, toktru, that I had finally killed you."

  Phrysaba slid in beside Jak and rested a hand on his arm; Duj gave him a slight twitch of the eyebrow, which was about as much as he would ever raise the Sesh ques-tion—he'd known Jak long enough. Myxenna would not even lift the eyebrow, ever; unlike her mekko, she not only didn't have a double standard, she had pretty well no standard at all.

  Piaro joined the group a few moments later. He was "very clearly not a morning person—I've seen livelier corpses," Myxenna teased. While he was rubbing his face with his hand, as if either trying to get it on straight or to just wipe it off, Phrysaba added, "Well, he's never been exactly singing-on lucid in the morning, no, but he makes up for it by being completely incoherent later in the day."

  "As soon as I have three brain cells on line, I'll have a riposte," Piaro said.

  The food came out then, and for a while all anyone did was eat and watch the brown and green of the Sahara roll by. After a while, they passed through pastures, and then grain fields. "This was all desert, a thousand years ago?" Phrysaba said. "That's what the guidebook said."

  "A lot of it still is, but not like it was," Myx said. "What they say in school, anyway, is that with more than thirty of the rocks landing in the sea every day for fifty years, so much water got pumped into the atmosphere that—"

  "Do you want that roll?" Dujuv asked, through a face full of his.

  When all of them had stuffed themselves, they ordered another round of coffee. "There's no one else in the observation bubble," Jak pointed out, "and it's no more likely that there'll be a hidden microphone here than that there would be back in the compartment. So it's about four hours till we get to Fermi. Anybody got any ideas about what we should do when we get there?"