Neptune's Brood Read online

  (Many years have passed since I departed. My sisters probably think of me seldom by now. And when they do, it’s probably with a sigh of envy at the thought of the adventures I must be having among the stars. Oh, the irony!)

  You’re probably wondering what could possibly prompt a staid, mature professional to set off on a trip to a half-civilized frontier water world. Well, Shin-Tethys wasn’t my original destination, and I had what seemed like a perfectly good reason at the time: But as I said, it’s a long story, and right now the deacon wants me to check that the contents of the chapel are all strapped down for acceleration. I’ve a feeling it’s going to be hard, physical labor for the next few standard days as we get under way, so I don’t have time to tell you everything yet—let’s just say, I’m here because one of my pen pals’ letters was late.

  * * *

  The stalker followed Krina to the air-lock node, where the chapel was docked with all due haste.

  Unlike her target, the stalker had no problem navigating the souk; nor did she pause for introspection before entering the air lock. The stalker’s purpose was simple and direct: to hunt down Krina Alizond-114, extract certain information from her prior to disposal, then continue on her journey while taking her place. Straightforward identity theft and impersonation, in other words. But there was a problem: The target was escaping.

  The stalker cranked vigorously at the air-lock wheel, rotating the cylinder around her until the door swung round onto darkness. She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking: But she had no soul for it to gain a toehold on.

  Someone had cemented a tape to the handrail beside the edge of the door. It dangled before the opening in limp coils, like a dead tapeworm. Beyond it hung the gargoyle-encrusted steeple of a small church, poised end on like a great stone spear aimed straight at the air lock. Glimpsed some way behind and below it, flying buttresses merged with the domed end-caps of reaction-mass tanks, pregnant with icy, deuterated, borane slush. It was hard to judge distances in the sharp-edged monochrome illumination of Taj Beacon’s approach lights, but the chapel looked to be almost a hundred meters away. The firefly flicker of orientation thrusters (artfully set within the gargoyles’ nostrils) told the stalker that it was under way, pushing back in readiness to turn into one of the taxiways that would take it clear of the beacon station before Traffic Control authorized it to light up its main engine.

  The stalker didn’t hesitate. She grabbed the tether, unfastened it from its anchor, then grasped the handrail with both hands and swung herself out of the air lock. She pulled her legs up to her chest, bracing against the side of the docking node, tensing her arms. Somatic memory and military-spec inertial navigation mods told her she was pointing at the chapel. She unrolled her fingers from the grab bar and extended her legs in a single smooth motion. An uncontrolled jump in zero gee would be fatally unstable, but this wasn’t uncontrolled. As with any modern person, the stalker’s musculature put out considerably more power than a Fragile hominid when push came to shove; nearly a thousand joules went into her thrust.

  Five seconds passed; then ten. The stalker was not idle. She swiftly tied a noose in the end of the guide tape, widening it to almost two meters in diameter as she drifted, the tubes and pipes and ducts and radiators of Taj Beacon falling away beneath her feet. There was no leverage, and she had no way of orienting her head to focus on the chapel, but she knew where it was and where she expected it to be. She tied off the other end of the tape to her belt, then spread the noose wide and gently shoved it away from her, keeping a loose hold on the tape.

  Ten seconds. Then twelve. A shadow drifted across her legs, bringing abrupt cold. A modern person (or a zombie in a person’s body) could survive and function in vacuum for whole minutes, but if she missed the chapel, she would drift indefinitely. (If nobody found her, her brain would eventually go into hibernation. After a few days, freezing would do its damage, and only her soul-chip backup would be recoverable. And after a few years, cosmic rays would take their inevitable toll . . .)

  None of these matters were of any concern. The only thing that mattered to the stalker was her target.

  There was a gentle tug at her waist as she was brought up short by the tautening lasso. The chapel’s thrusters supplied rippling jolts, seconds apart, pulling her sideways. Like a pendulum on the end of a long cable, she swung toward the octagonal wall of the sanctuary, toward relative safety and the continuation of her mission.

  Reincarnations

  Ihad no downtime for the first thirty-one hours and sixteen minutes of the voyage. During that time, the chapel gingerly maneuvered, using cold gas thrusters, until it was almost twenty kilometers from the beacon station. Our departure was sluggish, of necessity: both for internal shakedown and to ensure that when the deacon activated the drive, it wouldn’t fry the neighbors.

  The chapel was not designed to undergo radical changes of orientation. Archaic in design, it followed a model for temples that could trace its origins back many thousands of years, to a time when the Fragile thought themselves the only human beings and had yet to lift their vehicles into the skies of Earth. Many of its internal structures were picturesque, ramshackle, and distinctly suboptimal for surviving a redefinition of the local vertical without damage. This might have been a matter of vital living tradition, but I am sure I can’t be the first person to question the wisdom of building spacegoing structures to a stone-age plan from the bottom of a gravity well!

  Dennett spent little time making me feel at home; he showed me an unfurnished cell—I would have time to customize it to my own requirements later, but was only able to leave my bag there for now—then took me to a locker full of cleaning supplies, handed me a talking box, and said, “Do what it tells you to—if you have questions, ask. The process will familiarize you with the layout of the chapel. Once we are under way, I’ll have Father Gould sort you out with some remotes.”

  “Uh, right . . .” But he was already disappearing in a flapping black chaos of robes. “Box? Talk to me?”

  “Hello! I am vehicle maintenance logbook four. Are you my new operator?”

  I thought for barely a moment. “I suppose so. Deacon Dennett just gave you to me.”

  “Initializing. Initializing . . . registered. What should I call you?”

  I rolled my eyes. Like a retina, the talking box was clearly too small to have much of a brain of its own, but designers love to prettify their user interfaces with spurious tricks that waste time and cause confusion. “I’m Krina. Where should I start? What functions do you track?”

  “I coordinate cargo maintenance and handling! Krina, on the wall to your left, fourth shelf up, there is a cleaning kit. Krina, Mausoleum Companionway Three is sixty-nine hours overdue for cleaning. Also, because we are in prelaunch State Two, it is necessary to inspect the fixtures, fittings, and skeletons in Mausoleum Companionway Three for acceleration safety. On the wall to your top, fifth bin along, there is a restraint package and glue gun. Please take the cleaning kit and please take the restraint kit and please take the glue-gun kit and proceed to Mausoleum Companionway Three . . .”

  It was one way to pass the time, I suppose.

  The chapel was divided into two zones: the “aboveground” structures—a steeple-spired building constructed from stone blocks, held together with mortar, framed by a skeleton of carved tree trunks, containing various items of a devotional or religious nature—and the “belowground” structures: reaction-mass tankage, reactors, mass drivers, radiation shielding, telemetry, and everything else that pushed the chapel along and kept the mission running.

  Of course, nothing was quite as it appeared. The stone blocks had aerogel cores as light as soap bubbles and as strong as diamond; the “mortar” was a foamy aggregate of mechanocyte flesh wrapped around polyfullerene cables, ready to heal micrometeoroid damage. The “timbers” were bonemetal structures with marrow techné cores. If it had
a brain and a mind to animate it, the chapel would be a person: But the Church of the Fragile doesn’t approve of xenomorphs, and so they condemn their missions to wander the cosmos in anencephalic bodies.

  My initial duties were strictly confined to the inhabited areas of the “aboveground” side of the mission: My unskilled labor was adequate for polishing the bones in the ossuary, but I would be the first to admit that I am not up to tending a fission reactor, tuning the neutron converters that turn its output into useful power, or monitoring the mass flow through the heat exchangers that keep it from melting. Bone-polishing was boring work, but I suppose I was lucky to have it; a vehicle that wasn’t so intimately constructed around the physical-scale factor of the Fragile or maintained by people prejudiced against xenomorphs would have been better advised to employ a smaller, lighter kind of person.

  To start with, the talking box had me clean Ossuary Crypt Two, a job which might normally have fallen to one of Dennett’s animated skeletons, except that I would need to learn what I was doing before I tried directing a bone robot through the elaborate routine. OC2 was a low-roofed tunnel—if we hadn’t been under microgravity I would have found it claustrophobic—walled with a knobbly basket-weave of leg and arm bones. Some of them were new enough to still be pale brown, but most had been bleached by time and cosmic radiation. Streaks of verdigris stained the edges of the fine holes that had been drilled through them and threaded with copper wire. They’d all been rendered mildly radioactive by that unfortunate reactor excursion, and when I dimmed the lights, the phosphorescent varnish they were sealed in flickered and sparkled charmingly, announcing their secondary decay. A baroque architrave of skulls surrounded the safety portal at the end of the crypt. For all that the architecture seemed morbid to me, in Church doctrine it bespoke the dignity of age and the cosmic importance of the mission. The former owners of these bones had lived long and fulfilling lives within the edenic decks of the cathedral; it was their will and destiny that their relics be shipped to a new star system, there to claim the nearest Earth-like world for unmodified Fragile Humanity.

  If Ossuary Crypt Two was eccentric but charming, Mausoleum Companionway Three was fresh and raw and depressing. Walled and floored in foamed stone with a surface of artificial basalt, it was inset with niches. In many of these there floated pathetic bundles of leather and bone, ritually enrobed in their helmetless space suits. These vestments had not protected their wearers from a ghastly fate; the signs of violent death were obvious and distressing. Their former owners had embarked on this chapel, or been extruded en route, with the highest of hopes, that they might one day descend to the world-ocean of Shin-Tethys, there to breathe the oxygenated atmosphere and sun themselves beneath an alien star. I checked each sad relic carefully. For the most part, their bones were wired together competently enough, but one or two had come adrift from their suspension cords, and here I deployed the restraint kit and glue gun to anchor them back in their niches. (The talking box made itself helpful at this point. “Cable-stabilized objects must be able to withstand plus zero point six slash minus zero point three g normal to verticality, dropping to half that loading when subjected to off-axis jolts. Use the cable tensiometer to verify stability under load, then reattach to anchor point.” With footnotes and diagrams to explain what all of those instructions meant.)

  I worked my way around another six Mausoleum Companionways. Each was the final resting place of twelve skeletons. The last one contained nine which were much smaller—juveniles, I suppose, for the Fragile don’t come in chibiform models, or even in lineages. Every Fragile is a unique type specimen, unlike any other—it’s as if they’re all prototypes for a lineage that never makes it into mass production. The juvenile uniques probably didn’t even understand where they were, much less what killed them. I found this idea quite unaccountably sad, so I hurried my check on their attachment points, quickly dusted their bones, and moved on as fast as I could.

  Companionway Eight differed visibly from the others: it had a side door—an air-lock portal, in fact. As I approached I saw that it was shut, but the passive pressure indicator showed that the other side was at standard temperature and pressure. “Krina, on the outer wall, please open the door to Maternity Cell One and check for acceleration stability of all unanchored fittings.”

  “What’s Mat-Ernity Cell One?” I asked the box, puzzled.

  “Please open the door—” As I said, these things bore only a thin veneer of intelligence: Once you crack the ice and tumble into the howling void of thoughtlessness beneath, the illusion ceases to be comforting and becomes a major source of irritation. (Which is why I prefer my tools to be less conversational and more functional; there is less scope for self-deception if your spreadsheet is too dumb to massage the figures until they show you something pleasing rather than that which is actually there.)

  I pulled the cycle handle, and the door irised open, allowing a gust of hot, moist air to escape.

  “Hey! What do you think you’re—”

  “Excuse me?” I asked.

  “Who are you?” The occupant of Maternity Cell One glared at me from the middle of a huge free-fall web bed. The bed filled the spherical cell from one side to the other, a patchwork quilt of brightly colored embroidery cushions lashed into position with bungee cords: Toys and baubles drifted in the air around it, flashing and glittering distractingly. The occupant was quite tightly cocooned inside it, with only her face visible, roseate and cherub-cheeked, handsome perhaps, but let down by a tousle of matted green hair-fronds and angry, close-set eyes. She was clearly humanoid, but the cocoon made it impossible to tell whether she was Fragile or Post. Fist-sized bots—not xenomorphs but tools—hummed and darted among the cloud of toys, paying court and shepherding the baubles around her.

  “Krina, on the outer wall, please open the door to Maternity Cell One and check for acceleration stability of all unanchored fittings.”

  I displayed the talking box to the bed’s occupant apologetically. “I’m Krina. I’m sorry, I don’t know your name, I didn’t know there was anyone in here; the box just told me to—”

  “I’m not a who, I’m a what! I’m the Gravid Mother!” She pronounced it as if disclosing a valuable piece of information to a potential enemy. “You might be a who, but I am not: I am a valuable component of this mission. What is that box and why does it have the effrontery to think you belong in my boudoir? What’s going on out there? Nobody tells me anything!” Two pairs of golden brown fists emerged from the bedding, petulantly twisting a pillow. Dark, beady eyes tracked me, sullen and suspicious. “Tell me everything! What’s going on out there? I know they’re up to no good!” Another fist pushed out through a fistula between duvets: this one was green and prickly and held a lobster-claw-tipped grip extender. “Did Rosa send you?”

  “Er. Who’s Rosa?”

  This was clearly the wrong thing to say. The Gravid Mother opened her mouth, screwed up her eyes, and began to bawl. Lachrymatory exudate pooled alarmingly around her nose, swelling into gelatinous globules that wobbled like avulsed eyeballs as she sobbed. “Rosa’s gone and deserted the mission, hasn’t she? They’ve forgotten I’m here!” She gasped for breath, causing layers of blankets and quilts and pillows to heave and ripple like an exotic dessert topping. “Nobody remembers! You, you—”

  “Who’s Rosa?” I tried again.

  This time the talking box decided at random to chip in. “Rosa, Lady Cybelle: Head of Mission and Communicant Priestess of the Inseminatory. Located in Sarcophagus Two, Holy Sepulcher of the Body of our Fragile Lord. Attention: consumable status of Sarcophagus Two is off-line. Please inspect.”

  I let go of the box in astonishment; it floated toward the howling emotional vortex. “You don’t know who Rosa is!” she sobbed.

  “She’s the priestess, no?” I felt slow. “I was only hired by Deacon Dennett a few hours ago . . .”

  There was a stupendous snuffling noise,
and the bed shook violently. Then the two giant tears floated away from the face they half obscured, wobbling violently. “Aleksandr hired you?”

  “Would that be Deacon Dennett? Black skin, blue eyes, very thin, works on the engines—”

  “No, Aleksandr is the choirmaster!” She peered at me suspiciously. “You really are new here, aren’t you?”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to say! This box wants me to clean in here. Do you mind if I do that, or would you like me to go away?”

  “Oh clean, clean, clean away!” The spiky arm waved randomly. “It’s not as if I can stop you! Oh, damn. Throw me that monitor box, yes, that one near your head. I need to check my gestatogen levels again.” Her crying jag died down, save for the odd snorting afterquake as she cleared her gas exchangers and plugged a spiky needle from the monitor into one of her arms. “Talk to me while you clean. Where are we? What’s happening outside my demesne?”

  I commenced hunting down dust bunnies and drifting messes, of which there were many. The Gravid Mother’s attendants gave me a wide berth while I worked. “I’m Krina. We just left—are leaving—Taj Beacon, where the chapel put in for repairs. Next stop is high orbit around Shin-Tethys. I’m working my passage to Shin-Tethys because I reached Taj just too late for a regular passenger berth, and I’m not rich enough to buy my own transport. Deacon Dennett said there had been an accident, and lots of people left at Taj Beacon—the ones who weren’t killed.” I glanced at her sharply, but she showed no sign of being affected by my mention of the accident. “Have they left you alone in here? Can’t you come out?”

  “I’m Gravid,” she said gravely: “I incubate Fragile blastocytes in batches of eight at a time, even in high-radiation, microgravity environments. A Fragile female would be worn-out after eight, probably dead after sixteen: I’ve produced more than two hundred during the voyage. But it’s a demanding job, and I don’t like to leave my nest. Especially after, after—” She paused, breathing deeply as she struggled to regain her composure. “I get attached to the poor things: Seeing them die every few decades is very hard. Rosa said we would have a new brood to quicken as we near the promised world, but I haven’t seen her since the accident. She must be very busy.”