Hegemony (33 page)

It
would
be a good idea to check up on his crew, Persios thought. He framed a command calling all of his senior officers to the bridge and sent it. Or tried to. The communication link was down. For a moment he was incredulous. How could a Fleet ship have such problems? But then the answer suggested itself. The ship had been in battle, under maximum acceleration for a long time. That sort of prolonged high acceleration, and even more, combat maneuvers that involved sudden changes in acceleration, were hard on a ship's systems. Persios frowned. It would have to be fixed, immediately. He reached for a direct interface cable and plugged in to send the command again. There was no link. There was no access to the ship's computer, no data available. The entire connection was dead.

That was intolerable. Making sure his uniform was perfectly in order, he glided quickly down the short passage-way to the bridge. This might be a Fleet ship, her crew might be among the best, and proud of it, and he might be
only
a system defense fleet officer; but even so, he was the captain and they would have some explaining to do.

Persios floated into the bridge and stopped himself, looking around. There were several officers here, including his executive, in his spare avatar. The man's face was the same, but the spare avatar was of a standard size and build, looking rather generic. Standing with the executive officer was a woman in Fleet blacks. Like the executive officer, her avatar had only the most minimal customization, but her face was recognizable.

"What in the Suns are you doing aboard my ship, Demi-Captain Tralk?" Persios said.

The woman turned to face him, and he noticed for the first time that she held a laser sidearm in her hand. She smiled, and said, "Actually, Demi-Captain Talso, I'm taking it back."

"Don't be ridiculous. I've been appointed to command here. You have command of one of the Yuro fleet's guard-ships!"

"This may be many things," Tralk answered, "but ridiculous is not one of them. Demi-Captain Talso, please plug in this data cable." She held out a high density data cable. "I'm sorry, Demi-Captain, but you're going to have to spend some time in a holding 'net. I assure you that you will have a full explanation of this, as well as a chance to protest through formal channels."

The woman nodded to one of the other crew members and handed over the laser. The man took it and looked pointedly at Persios.

"Arrest that woman," Persios said. "If needs be, set that laser to electro-static and stun her."

"I can't do that, sir," said the man, and leveled the laser at Persios.

It might be set to electro-static stun, Persios thought. In that case, the laser would be set to a pulse frequency and energy level that would disrupt human and biosim neural signals, stunning its victim, sometimes knocking him out. Biosims were somewhat less susceptible, but not immune. A human body or a full bio-avatar such as he wore would be utterly vulnerable. Of course, the weapon could just as well be set to a fatal power level. So long as they did not shoot him in the head, his neural net would survive the death of his avatar, and so he would survive, to be put wherever they wanted him.

"Please do not resist, sir," the man said. "I'd rather not shoot you, but under the circumstances, I will do so if you give me the slightest reason."

"This is mutiny!" said Persios.

"That's really debatable," said Tralk, "but as I said, you will get your chance to report and make your claims before proper Fleet authority."

Persios held still as the executive officer plugged in the data cable and initiated the link into a storage neural net. The world went dark.

---

Nas Killick was "pacing" in free-fall as he talked, absorbing his momentum with bent legs and then launching himself back across the compartment; bouncing off the walls.

"Alright, people, let's get this started," Nas said. "As soon as the EVA crew gets the outer hull masked, we're going to put ourselves on a maximum priority courier vector for the habitable planet. Ylayn, you make sure that the local traffic control tags us as a courier. Can you do that?"

"Sure, Captain. We've been drifting for a while after an FTL emergence, and they'll see that as soon as they review their wide-scan optical sensor logs. But 'we just had a little singularity trouble, is all,' Ylayn said.

"Counterfeiting an out-system courier ident... no problem at all," she continued. "So long as it doesn't have to hold up to any non-automated scrutiny."

"OK," Nas said, "do it."

Nas turned next to look at his engineering chief. "Senny, as soon as we're in orbit, find me an orbital service tanker and buy us some reaction mass. I want full tanks, Senny, but don't get gouged. This business has been too expensive already."

His crew moved to obey. Nas kept "pacing."

The answer was almost certainly here, in this system, Nas knew. The trap could not have been a simple timer. The nano-triggers had been built into the warheads before the
Whisperknife
had loaded them, but there was no way for his would-be killers to have known how long the job against the freight-liner would take. So a timer would have been nearly useless; set too short, and his ship would be destroyed before he finished their job for them; set too long, and he might have fired or traded the warheads away before the trap was sprung.

So that left a command-activated setup, and that meant there had been a signal to activate the trap. Knowing that, Nas had ordered Ylayn to scan sensor recordings for any signal that might have been the activation code. That had taken her a while, but in the end there had been only a few dozen signals that coincided with the activation time of the nano-modules built into the warheads. It had not taken long to rule out all but one signal, a signal that had been broadcast from the New Capital City of the system's main habitable planet.

Yuro wasn't a system where the Brotherhoods had vast resources, but there would be
some
resources; some people who owed favors, or could be bought. No one tried something like this with a Brotherhood captain and just walked away from it. There would be traces, Nas knew, and he would track them, however long it took. And when he found them... Brotherhood "policy" demanded that he leave a strong object lesson. But even if Brotherhood policy had been silent, or opposed, Nas was going to make sure there would be a lesson here. No one was going to get away after doing this to his ship and his crew.

It was a
strange kind of dark, Zandy thought. There was nothing here. Nothing to see. Nothing to hear or feel. Nothing to see or hear or feel
with
. And she had been here before. Once before, when it had all started, it had been dark like this.

"You can't be serious," her mother had said, when Zandy had told her.

Zandy remembered those words with such vivid clarity. She remembered the start of it all, now, with a clarity that surprised her. She remembered her mother looking at her with disbelief and annoyance, standing in the kitchen of their apartment, with the yellow-flower print walls and the fake-wood-textured plastic furniture crowding the little kitchen.

The apartment they lived in had been a ground floor unit, which was a luxury of sorts, since the ten-storey pre-fabricated plasticrete buildings in this residence zone did not have elevators. Even so, Zandy had made the climb up the exterior stairs almost every day. When she had been a child, there had been friends living on the higher floors. Later there had been a boy from floor eight, who had been her first lover. And always, there was the view from the roof.

From the roof, you could see the City Center dozens of kilometers away. The towers of the City Center rose like narrow crystal fingers into the sky, shining mirror-bright in the daylight. At night they were lit with rainbow fire; dozens and dozens of towers, maybe a hundred all together, most about a kilometer high, picked out with gold and blue and red lights. A few towers stood much higher, spires of pearl and gold gleaming in the day's sun, or lit from below with massive floodlights against the night sky. At night the lights of the aircars flowed around the towers like streams of fireflies, aerial rivers of light.

There were no aircars in Residence Zone Garnet. No towers. No buildings more than ten floors, none less than five, and, for that matter, nothing in between; only two patterns of pre-fab buildings had been used to build the residence zone. Along the main streets the ground floors were commercial and office space with residential space above. On the side streets the buildings were pure residential.

From the roof of her building, Garnet C-9, Zandy could watch the high altitude stream of aircars flying a few kilometers overhead, too high for the sound to be more than an ambient hum. She could see the neighboring residence zones, with their different pre-fabs and different color patterns. She could even see the distant orbital elevator, just a faint silver line bisecting the sky; the elevator was three hundred kilometers away, at the heart of the vast New Ionia Surface Port, which dwarfed the older city of Neomiletus, the city where she lived, even though Neomiletus had 20 million people living in it.

Zandy had never been to the New Ionia Surface Port, but she had been to the Neomiletus City Center before, up in one of the towers, and had seen the city from above. From a kilometer up, the patchwork of residence zones spread out from the City Center in an odd checker pattern, as if the outer city was pixelated in one kilometer squares.

But it was the orbital elevator that had drawn her imagination. At school she had seen vids of the capsules that ran up and down the elevator, like huge vertical train cars, carrying cargo and passengers into space, bringing back people and goods from other worlds. And yet, for all that New Ionia was one of the core worlds of the Hegemony, for all the amazing things and people that came down the elevator or went up, Zandy lived in an apartment that would, she thought, have fit right in on one of the backwater colonies that had never regained space travel.

It wasn't that life was bad, for Zandy, for the Neel family. Her father had a decent job working as a clerk at the main food emporium which served the residence zone. She, her mother and her siblings were provided for. The apartment was cramped, but clean and warm and always full of the smells of good food and cooking.

But it was such a closed-in life, thought Zandy. When the fact that she and Gregr were lovers had reached the ears of building's rumor mill, the building's families had smiled and started wondering aloud about a marriage. It was good, the unofficial match-maker of the building, an old woman from floor four, had said. It was good that Zandy had found someone from her own building; that was how a community lived, she had said.

That was how Alekzandra Neel would rather die, Zandy had thought. To marry Gregr, good looking as he was, good in bed as he was (or so she thought then) would be a sort of death. She would have nothing, except a pre-fab apartment in the same building, to go with a pre-fab life. She was only just over fifteen tenkays, one hundred and fifty thousand hours old, (seventeen in Old-Earth years, her brother had told her, since he was avidly studying ancient history in school.) And she could already see how her life would be at the end: a seventy-tenkay-old matron, smiling at some young couple in the same building, watching them take the same path she had taken, once before.

Zandy had desperately wanted something else, anything else. It wasn't that Zandy had consciously wanted to become
aristokratai
. She had barely ever even seen one. Sometimes one could guess that they must be there, in the gleaming aircars overhead, and in the towers that loomed in the distance... and aboard the sleek passenger capsules that surged up and down along the orbital elevator. She
had
seen
aristokratai
when she had taken the class trip to the City Center. For the most part, they had not looked so very strange to her. Their biosim bodies had looked human, though their clothes, and their manners, had a
look
to them. It wasn't just opulence, though. There were rich
demoi
; some commoners were richer than some
aristokratai
. But there was an... edge to how the
aristokratai
looked. The
aristokratai
all looked beautiful, of course, and they dressed and moved with a confident, almost wanton grace, skin tight clothes showing off their perfect artificial bodies.

But it had not been that look that had been in her mind when she applied to take the Academy admission tests. It had been the orbital elevator, and tiny night-time lights of the orbiting stations and shuttles... sometimes she would catch a bright fast star streaking across the night; the drive of a starship. It had been
those
things, and the stars and the... not the hope, but at least the
chance
that Alekzandra Neel might somehow share in that bright, un-pre-fabricated life, that she could see every day from the roof of her pre-fabricated apartment building.

She had not entertained much hope. Every school offered the tests to any
demos
, any commoner, who was not barred by a punitive judgment. The odds of passing were known to be much worse than a thousand to one. A million to one, some said. Even passing the tests was no guarantee; the Academies were demanding enough that of the few who were allowed to enter, many did not finish.