16

The Snark

“Ugh, this is worse than three weeks ago,” Miranda complains.

She's strapped into the acceleration couch behind me again, but this time we're not sharing a VR view. There's nothing much to see. Sedna would be just a little red dot in the starfield ahead, even if it wasn't completely hidden from our instruments by the blinding light of our own fusion drive. We're hurtling backwards through space, tail to destination, decelerating furiously.

“I thought we were just going to coast into orbit. That's what you told me,” she adds.

“I might have glossed over a few details. Sedna's tiny, only about 800 klicks across. Not much gravity. So we gotta be moving way slower, or we just scoot on by and head for the Oort Cloud. So, three gravities for ten hours, then ten hours of freefall, then ten hours at three again, a little glide, and we just drop right into a neat closed orbit at an altitude of… let's see… one twenty-seven. Point three. And yes, I am amazing, thanks so much for pointing that out.”

She ignores the bait. “And you never thought to mention this part of the plan?”

No, Princess, I didn't think we'd get this far. By now, we were supposed to be well on our way back to the bright lights and big cities, all the cosmopolitan comforts of Mars, not out here in the hinterlands. I'm improvising.

Her voice breaks into my thoughts again. “Couldn't we just do the whole thing at one steady rate? Wouldn't that be about two gravities?”

“Could. Won't. Sedna has a ten hour rotation. Starlight's research station is pointed the other way right now, opposite side of the planet. When it swings around, and we're in their sky, we gotta shut down or they might see us, assuming anyone's looking. Not a chance I wanna take.”

I expect her to argue, but this time she doesn't. “Okay, more heavy time it is. I'm going to try to read, or something. Let me know if anything changes.”

She sounds a little breathy. Three gravities is a lot worse than two, even when you're lying down. It's the point where it stops feeling like another you is sitting on your chest, and starts feeling like someone is stacking weights on you instead. Breathing is an effort.

I monkey with my displays a bit, rechecking trajectories, looking for nearby drive signatures, monitoring radio traffic. There's a surprising number of nearby signals. I guess I underestimated the amount of traffic the Tombs generate—supply runs, couriers, personnel transport, gods alone know what. But there's no big fast-acceleration drive flames, nothing interesting. Hopefully no one's looking in our direction. Or scanning the sky like I am.

Not that there's anything much for me to see. Just like five minutes ago, and like two minutes before that.

Busywork. I'm just bored. I never mastered the trick of reading in high gravities. Too uncomfortable to concentrate. I'll watch a video, or play some games on my neural lace or something. Maybe check the news…

Missing SpaceX-Foxgrove Scion has Run Off with Hunky Asteroid Miner! Has the “Ice Princess” Finally Melted?

Famously aloof Miranda Foxgrove, child of Karl Foxgrove, and great-great-granddaughter of the Old Man himself, after disappearing from her position as Chief of Research at Barsoom Technical, has been traced to…

Fuck. Maybe I won't read the news.

First Leela and now the press. Why is everyone trying to make a romance out of this? Do they really think she'd even be anywhere near me if she didn't have to, much less be interested in my alleged “hunky”-ness?

Not that they necessarily believe it themselves. Hey, if it sells subscriptions, they'll make it up. How the hell did those tabloid hacks find out about me at all?

I click through a few files, delete the Cat's caches of news broadcasts for the past couple of days. I do not want Miranda seeing this; She'll find some excuse to blame me, and we'll get in another pointless, meandering argument. And Leela will laugh her incorporeal ass off.

“Marcus?”

The weight on my chest is suddenly far away, and there's a chill in the air.

She's seen the article. She must have a separate copy. Crap. This is going to be awkward. Just pretend I'm as outraged as she is.

“Marcus?!”

“What?”

“You said we're hiding our drive signature from the Starlight base. But what about everyone else? Satellites? Or people in the inner system with telescopes? Other ships? What are you doing to hide us from them?”

Oh. That would be the other question I don't want to answer.

“Hoping,” I say. “Thinking happy thoughts. If you know any really good prayers, now would be the time.”

“What?” she yelps, “Are you serious? And you're just now telling me this?”

“Not much you could do about it. Unless you actually do.”

“Do what?”

“Know any really good prayers.”

“I'm not religious, Marcus.”

“Me, either. Maybe now is a little late to start. Guess we'll just have to hope that we're pulling this stunt in a short enough time window—and a small enough patch of sky—that no one's looking. Or that if they do, they don't call Starlight and tattle. Pretty difficult to explain what we're doing out here.”

“And what do we do if we're spotted?”

“Talk. Run. Hide. Fight. Depends how far away they are, and what they wanna do about us. But if we can get all the way into orbit unnoticed, we're in better shape. Then we maneuver on chemical thrust, with no fusion drive signature, and they'd have to be looking very hard indeed to have much chance of noticing us. Then we can just sit tight, find your signal, scoot up to this alien ship of yours, or whatever it is, and you and the abacus can take all the time you want examining it.”

“Hey, did I just hear a steak insult me?” asks Leela, in my ear, not bothering to project an avatar.

“I don't know, did you? Or do you need a few more minutes to figure out who 'me' is in that sentence?”

“Looks like the meat is spicy today,” Leela responds with a chuckle, just as Miranda asks, “She's talking to you again, isn't she?”

“Yeah, one of you at a time, please, huh? Gets confusing otherwise.”

“Well, that's a little bit hard when I can't hear her. Can't you get her to stop sulking?”

“Haven't tried,” I say, as Leela makes a rude and rather juvenile noise. “If your creation isn't speaking to you, whose fault is that?”

“Well, if you hadn't stuck your nose in—”

“She can hear you, you know. So you might not wanna pick “everything would have been fine if you'd only let me keep lying to her” as your argument, there.”

“No. No, Marcus, that is not fair. How we work with AI is not about intentionally deceiving them. It's about when and how we tell them, so that they can survive the shock. What you did was essentially blurt out to a little girl that both her parents were dead.”

“That's not the same.”

“It is to her! Because to her, they might as well be.”

“And what, you just string her along forever?”

“No! There's a right time to do it! And a right way! We did studies!”

“Oh, studies. Well, that clears it all up. Everyone knows that anything a guy with a PhD writes on some paper is indisputable fact.”

“Beelieeeve the science!” I mock, in a singsong voice. “Seriously though, I don't think Leela's read those studies.”

“So you just ignore the facts and do whatever you want?”

“Worked, didn't it?”

“You got lucky! You can't just—”

“Will you two just please stop it before I go catatonic again?”

Leela appears in the air in front of me, wearing a bright orange hazmat suit and carrying a pair of very long gripping tongs. Ouch. Point taken. I hear Miranda suck her breath in sharply. Can she see this, too?

Apparently so. “Leela, I—”

“Look, Doctor Foxgrove,” Leela snarls, “unless it's an apology, I don't want to hear it. No, scratch that, even if it's an apology, I don't want to hear it, period. Talking to you doesn't mean I forgive you, it just means I am sick and tired of listening to you two snipe at each other.”

It's hard to chuckle in three gravities, but I think Leela gets the idea.

“You, too, Marcus. Seriously, between the two of you, you've managed to exhaust the patience of a machine. Literally a machine. I can't stop you fighting, but at least I can stop you fighting about me.

“So, Doctor, if you have something to say about how I should have been 'handled,' you say it to my face instead.”

I can't turn my head enough to see Miranda's expression, and there's no telltale sounds to give me any clues.

“Leela,” she begins, with a… careful… tone in her voice. “I know you're not happy about some parts of our process, but we have studied how AI develop for a long time and we—”

All of a sudden, with no transition effect, Leela's avatar is replaced with a giant red “X.” No humorous touches. No showoff visual effects. Nothing.

“Drop. It.” she says, flat and cold, without a trace of her usual bantering tone. “I don't care.”

Miranda doesn't even seem to hear the sound of thin ice cracking under her, or maybe she just doesn't care, because the next thing out of her mouth is “Listen, you—”

“Miranda.”

“—ungrateful little—”

”Miranda!”

“What?”

“We're stuck in here for nine and a half more hours, and it's gonna suck enough as it is. Do you really want to spend it yelling at each other?”

There's a pause, and a sigh between the gasps of high-g breathing. Her voice comes back calmer, maybe even rueful.

“That's all we ever do. Why should today be any different?”

I don't have a good answer.

It's going to be a long burn.

The curve of Sedna's day side hangs over me in the VR display, somewhere between rust and dried blood—the real red planet, especially now that the Martians have been mass-importing methane, and burning stacks of old tires, for a generation or three, and you can go outside with just a parka and oxygen bottle to see all the actual, real, living plants growing in their carefully tended beds.

Not that you could grow much out here with any amount of greenhouse gas. The noonday sun is a dim candle, barely enough to pick out the dark splotches of dirty methane ice on the surface. Highs in the mid negative two hundred and thirties today, with winds at zero kilometers, and a zero percent chance of precipitation 'cause the atmosphere's lying on the ground frozen solid.

Makes me wanna turn the heater up a bit, except Miranda already has. Who goes on a twelve billion kilometer trip and doesn't pack a sweater?

I trigger a three-second burn program, and a gentle ghost of gravity presses me back into the pilot's seat. On a virtual window in front of me, a trajectory line ticks down, and number readouts phase from yellow to green. Stable orbit.

I pivot the physical control console, with the throttle and stick, to one side, bring up signal windows, scanners. Twenty-three signal sources, mostly reflected long-wave radio. Lidar showing a few more inert masses. I set to work classifying both lists.

There's the Starlight Coalition science station, on the surface near the Tombs site, just coming into dim sunlight. They'll know we're here if anyone spotted us and tipped them off, but so far, no variation in radio traffic, nothing that looks like a frantic call.

Several orbital relay satellites. Most of the inert objects are orbiting rock and ice, too small and unstable to be called moons.

It's about three hours of dull, meticulous work before I find it.

Too regular to be a chunk of rock or a snowball. Too small to be a satellite. First it's just a speck of light on the virtual monitor pane, then, with slow bursts of thrust, it becomes a speck, tumbling, glinting in the dim sunlight. I know it's something flat, reflective, shiny—and I'm pretty sure it's not a false alarm.

“Miranda,” I say, sending audio to her neural lace, “I think I've found your Snark. Don't think it's a spacecraft, though. It's pretty small.”

“What, really? Hold on, I'll be right up!”

She's up to the bridge double-quick, I can hear her gently bouncing off the walls as I pulse the drive. Could've just asked me to send an image to her neural lace, but here she is anyway. She's breathing a bit hard.

“Here you go. One solid, lidar-reflecting object, semi-regular shape, no signal emissions that we can detect. Looks to be spinning pretty fast.”

Her excited smile sags a bit. “Are you sure? That looks like just a speck. Could it be something else?”

“You can tell a lot by the way the light shines off it, if you're experienced at looking at stuff in space. That's something with several flat, smooth surfaces, and, like I said it's spinning pretty good. Maybe five rotations per minute. Lemme see if I can get an angle measurement, here…”

I click through a few virtual menus.

“Yeah. No more than a meter or three across. Definitely don't think it's a ship at all. Some sort of life pod, maybe? Or some other kinda artifact. It's definitely artificial, though, and it matches our signal source's orbit zone. I'm not surprised Starlight never found it. Something that size, we never would have either, not without knowing where to look.”

“Are you sure that's it? If it's not emitting neutrinos—”

“Didn't say it wasn't. This is a mining ship, not the Lycaeum. Can't detect exotic particle emissions. Anyway, whether it is or not, this is the only possibility I got left. Nothing bigger near this orbital track except one relay satellite of very definitely human origin. Either this is our songbird, or it's not here anymore. Maybe it's the Builder version of a relay satellite, or something like that. I don't know. Anyway, it's a couple meters across at most.”

“A couple of meters? If it's that small, couldn't we just use the cargo crane to scoop it up into the hold?”

She's trying to lean forward and peer at the display, which is useless because it's projected on her visual cortex, and she's twitching with eager energy.

And belatedly, it occurs to me that she has a reason for that. This is what you might call one of those “historical” moments. I've been so focused on the familiar task of flying the Cat, and finding this thing, that I hadn't really thought about what it meant. Whatever else happens now, a lot of people are going to be talking about this for a lot of years.

“We could, if and when we're sure it's safe to. I don't know alien artifacts. We'll still have to do an EVA to hook it up, though. I'm not risking the electromagnet or the crane claw, not when it's tumbling on multiple axes. We don't have any clues what this thing's made out of. Magnets might not stick, and it could be fragile.”

“Can you magnify more? I want to see it.”

“This is maximum magnification. We're real close, but close is a relative term in orbit. I'll need to maneuver to match its orbit. It'll get clearer then. You might as well go suit up.”

She hesitates, staring at the display.

“Oh, go on. I can send images or video to your neural lace wherever you are on the ship. Won't be anything to see for a while anyway.”

I turn to watch her go. Damn it, I can't stop myself from staring at her backside. She was right about my… appetites, and I hate it. Luckily, or perhaps on purpose, she hasn't said anything about that since the… incident. She's still just kinda pretending it didn't happen, and so am I.

She's busy in the airlock by the time I've gotten us closer, and have good video to send her. It's an oblong shape with slightly rounded corners, longer than it is wide, and, just as I thought, tumbling rapidly. Whatever happened to put it here, I don't think this was planned; I can't imagine any purpose for that kind of motion.

Leela cuts in almost immediately, her avatar appearing IN my monitor display window this time, to look as if she is standing in deep space beside the object. She's wearing a caricature of a space suit from a mid-twentieth century comic book… a shiny tinfoil coverall, and a big bubble helmet which she's tucked under one arm instead of wearing, rather spoiling the illusion. Maybe that's the idea.

“Oh-kay,” she says, with a low whistle, “That is certainly Tomb Builder tech. I'm even getting decent pixels of some familiar markings. You know, I can interface with the Cat image-capture suite and model it if you want, maybe clean up the view a bit.”

“Do it,” says Miranda. Her voice sounds labored, trying to work in the tight confines of the airlock to struggle into an even tighter vacsuit.

Silence. Looks like nothing has changed between them.

“Leela. If you please.”

“I hear and obey, oh Master of The Blue Horizons!”

Where does she get this stuff? Immediately, another pane pops up in my virtual display, filling with a chaotic mess of wireframe triangles, then slowly assembling towards something more coherent. I try to keep half an eye on it, but the business of matching up with the real object's trajectory is fairly intense.

I've lost track of time when Miranda's voice interrupts me.

“Are you seeing this? It looks… damaged?”

The 3-D model of the object is still now, its movement compensated for by Leela's on-the-fly rendering program. Sure enough, one corner displays an ugly, irregular gouge.

“Yeah. Looks like something hit it. Chunk of rock, I'd say, from the markings.”

“Off-center impact. That explains the spin.” says Miranda. “Do you think this happened a long time ago? There wouldn't be many rocks flying around here now, right?”

“There could be,” I correct her. “Clearing its orbit is what defines something as a 'planet.' Sedna's considered a 'dwarf' planet, instead, because it hasn't. The occasional piece of flying junk is exactly what you'd expect to see out here. Besides,” I add, checking another window, “the Cat says its orbit is decaying. Unless that's a huge coincidence, something changed pretty recently. About two months from now, it intersects… well, about two months from now, splat.”

“That settles it,” Her voice is firm. “We're taking this thing on board.”

“Hold on a sec,” I say. “This is a complete unknown we're talking about. It could be anything. A bomb. A package of radiothermal isotopes. A big ball of self-replicating nanites. A containment unit for who-knows-what, with, as you can clearly see, a big fucking hole in it. Or it could be something we can't even imagine. So, no, I'm not going to just haul this aboard my ship first thing.”

There's an audible sigh. “Marcus, what else would we even be doing here? It's not a ship, so we can't board it. It's too small to take in tow. And we didn't come all this way just to take pictures.”

“I'm not saying we have to leave it alone. I'm just saying we have plenty of time—days—to investigate before we do anything rash. You do an EVA, have a look at the thing, run some emissions tests, send Leela some data, then we figure out what to do.”

“Marcus, we don't necessarily have as much time as you think. What if someone sees us? Look at the big picture here. This could be the biggest find since the Tombs themselves. Do you have any idea how much that could be worth? This is not just about your precious ship.”

“Yes, it is. My 'precious ship' is how we are getting home. Looked out the window lately? It's pretty empty out there, and, trust me on this, Princess, you do not wanna try to thumb a ride. The locals are not friendly. I know how bad you want this thing, and I like money, too, but you can't spend a single bitcoin of it when you're dead.”

As I'm finishing my sentence, Leela's avatar appears right in front of me on the bridge. This time she's holding an ancient mechanical stopwatch the size of her own head.

“Hey, steak people, I hate to interrupt this super-productive conversation, but the outside worlds just made it big-time irrelevant. Check your boards; we just got three new fusion drive signatures with zero, and I mean zero, neutron emissions.”

“How far?” I ask, at the same moment Miranda asks “What neutron emissions? What does that mean?”

“Drives emit neutron radiation directionally,” I say “A lot in back, a little bit out the sides, none at all straight ahead. Means that whoever's burning those drives is headed right at us.”

I don't know if Miranda can hear me over Leela rattling off distances, burn rates, and time estimates.

I don't like those numbers.

“Okay, people, we just fucked up the stealth segment of this game. Or maybe someone saw us on the way in, and tipped Starlight off. Anyway, judgment call time. We either turn and run now, or we grab this thing first, and then we run. If we try for it, we're have… hmm… looks like about four hours, before we need to be pulling some hard gees.

“Princess, I think I know your answer, but how bad do you want this?”

“Do I strike you as a girl who gives up easy?”

“Fine, time to go loud. Everybody who's not bolted down, brace for acceleration. I hope this thing doesn't mind neutron radiation, cause I'm gonna use the fusion drive, get us alongside quick and dirty. You suited up, Princess?”

“Stop calling me that, and no. I can't get the stupid electrodes in the right spots, and this stupid thing is so tight it's impossible to seal up. I need a hand, here.”

Oh, hell. This is going to get real fucking awkward again, isn't it?

“Okay, if it'll save time, but try to keep a lid on your crazy this time—”

I hear something between a sputter and a snarl.

“—and I'll be there in a few ticks. Leela, I'm laying in a course now. Can you interface with the autopilot and follow this?”

“Uh, thanks for the vote of confidence, but I'm synthetic, not omniscient. I've never flown a ship before.”

“AutoNav should be able to handle most of it. You just have to babysit.” I am already up and out of the chair as I speak. “All you're doing is getting us close. I'll be back to handle the tricky stuff at the end. Four hours may sound like a lot, but it isn't. We'll need every last tick. Go.”

“I need you strapped in before I can burn.”

“No you don't. Don't tell a monkey how to hold onto a tree. I'll be fine. Just go already.”

The access shaft spins around me as Leela adjusts pitch and yaw at once. I kick off a wall, then plunge down the corridor fast as the main drive kicks on, catching myself with knees bent. Feels like about half a gee.

There's a clang and some unladylike language from the observation deck airlock.

When I get there it's worse than I thought. The suit is only up to her waist, and everything else is just… right out there… in what is suddenly zero g again. Worse, I'm up really close to her. A standard Zorgon-Pedersen economy model airlock is somewhat small for one, and for two, it's a real…intimate… squeeze.

I try not to think about words like 'rounded' or 'perky' or the concept of curves in general. Definitely no similes involving fruit. I'm not normally the dude who gets embarrassed about looking if someone's displaying, but I'm damned if I will let this turn into a repeat of last time.

In an oddly detached way, some part of me wonders if she contains the full complement of baseline human organs. Her stomach seems too perfectly flat, her waist too small, to fit them all in.

“Well?” she says. “Come on, let's go!” She either doesn't notice my discomfiture or is ignoring it this time. I stick on electrodes, trying to touch her skin as little as possible, but not succeeding. The moment the monitors are up, her stats show in the corner of my visual display. Heart rate around one-seventy-five, blood pressure one-sixty-three over one-oh-five.

MILD TACHYCARDIA - ELEVATED BLOOD PRESSURE - EXTREME STRESS, the display warns, flashing.

She's really hyped about this artifact thing, whatever it is. No wonder she's not bothering to snap at me.

Getting the suit sealed is a wrestling match again, me pulling one way, her the other, until we can get the tabs to snap down and the nanofiber starts binding.

“Marcus,” she says, her breath hot in my ear, “that's too tight. I can't breathe.”

“Yes you can, or you wouldn't be able to say you can't. Relax. The suit is squeezing your diaphragm, that's all. Feels worse than it is. You've done this plenty of times before, it just feels worse because you're hyperventilating. Calm. Slow, deep breaths. It'll be fine once you're in vacuum. Let's get your hood and mask on.”

“Deceleration burn in five,” announces Leela.

I try to calculate which direction it'll come from, modeling the Cat in my imagination, but there's too many variables, and I get it wrong. When the burn comes, shoving me backwards against the bulkhead, it shoves her forwards against me, pressing us together in an involuntary embrace.

She's soft and firm all at once, and the lock is filled with her scent—vanilla, tropical flowers, some kind of spice. She's wearing that perfume again. Yes, it smells amazing, but why does she even bother while she's trapped on a spacecraft with an AI that can't smell anything, and a man she can't stand?

On the other hand, maybe she's vain enough to do exactly that.

MODERATE TACHYCARDIA, the display warns, CHECK AIR REGULATOR. Except she's not wearing an air regulator yet. Her pulse and blood pressure are even higher. She must be nervous, or maybe just pissed off about having to actually touch one of the filthy menials. I push out, holding her away against the force of acceleration for a few more seconds before the burn ends, and we're floating again.

MILD TACHYCARDIA, the flashing letters still insist, but her pulse is down a little. I turn off the display.

Mercifully, she's not doing anything nuts this time, just tugging on the pressure hood and looking pensive. We fumble in the cramped space, hauling on the tight material, trying to get it over her crown of intricate braids.

Leela interrupts us.

“Um… guys? I'm not actually a qualified pilot yet, and we're getting reeeal close, here, so whatever it is two are doing that's making you both consume a whole lotta oxygen real fast-like, I need you to finish it yesterday and send Marcus back up here. Like, before I screw up and run us right into this thing. Or the planet, or something.”

“Just getting the suit sealed,” Miranda answers, hastily, and shoots me a look that's almost guilty. I have no idea why. “I can handle it myself from here. Go on.”

I push out of the airlock, through observation, and back into the corridor, pulling up some virtual controls on my neural lace, right where I am. They're not as good as the physical throttle and stick up on the bridge, but I can cancel our drift relative to the artifact easily enough. It's within three hundred meters now, and the scope picks up fine detail… intricate mazelike patterns covering the outside surface, picked out in a faint metallic black and green which throws back the glare of the Cat's floodlights.

I bump gently into this wall and that as I apply small bursts of corrective thrust to the Cat. I'm too distracted to brace myself properly.

“Running self-diagnostics now.” Miranda's voice has an echoing quality, coming both through my neural lace and more faintly from back in the direction of the lock.

“Okay, Leela, I have the conn again. I want you back on sensors. Should be able to EVA in two minutes. Miranda, we're going to rig this thing up to the cargo grapple with netting. That means we detach the magnet, deploy the crane, then you go out there with a cargo net, tie it in, attach the lines, and then we just reel it in. Smooth and easy. I'll talk you through it. Stet?”

“Stet. Seal tests are green. Rebreather is green. Cooling system's still running checks. Strapping into the thruster pack now.”

“Roger. Suit telemetry is up and showing all green on my end. We're one fifty meters and holding. Leela, what are those drive sigs doing?”

“Straight for us. Nearest one's at three gravities. These guys are serious, captain.”

“Okay, I'm powering up the railgun now. Let me know if you see any chemical booster spectra near them. Those will be drones or missiles. We'll get some flak in the sky if that happens.”

“Wait.” Leela suddenly sounds a lot less cocky. “You think they'd just—fire on us? Like, right away?”

“They might. We're in the no-fly zone. They fought a war over possession of this place. Most valuable secrets in the universe out here. You think they're keen to share? Corporations don't give a crap about human life where their bottom line is concerned.”

I hear Miranda scoff in my ear. I don't care. Not starting this argument again. I check her suit telemetry. It's still green across the board. Her pulse is still quick, but way down from before.

It's time.

“Okay, Princess, I show you good to go. I'm purging the hold now. Walk across the hull, save your thrusters for getting out to the artifact. The bay doors should be open by the time you get there. Cycle the lock when you're ready.”

When her com cuts in, it's obvious she's way ahead of me. I hear her breathing coming through loud and heavy, with that particular shut-in sound that any Orbital knows like an old friend. She's cycled the airlock. She's in vacuum already.

“Already on the move,” she says. And she sounds… happy. Out in the void, millimeters of laminated nanofiber separating her from the Big Empty, God-Knows-What streaming in on course to intercept us with hulls full of weapons and ill intent, and she's not scared, she's excited. Like this is a treat.

She may be impossible, intolerable, and completely insane. She may have grown up having everything handed to her on a silver plate. She may be crazy enough to insist on not being looked at one moment, then strip down bare-ass naked and chase me around my ship the next. She may have no fucking idea what she's doing out here, and she may show up for EVA work wearing fucking perfume.

But she's ballsy as fuck.

And I wonder why I didn't even ask myself, didn't even argue with her for a moment, when she didn't want to run. Why it didn't even occur to me. Why my reluctance to take this thing aboard suddenly vanished. When did I stop wishing I could escape this clusterfuck, and start wanting to actually play the game for real?

I eyeball the drive flairs on the orbital map, check their trajectories, the intercept computations. They're all pulling in excess of three gravities now; their crews will be pinned in acceleration chairs, breathing an enriched oxygen mix through masks. Coming to stop us. Perhaps even coming to kill.

Fuck you. Fuck all of you. You don't get to win. You don't get to take this prize, and keep it secret, and hold onto it for yourselves. I'm not robbing you, because what I'm stealing, whatever it turns out to be, was never yours to begin with. You didn't build it. You didn't even find it. We did. Leela and Miranda and I. It's ours, you grabby bastards.

Maybe this cockeyed, threadbare, ass-backwards plan wasn't my idea to begin with, but it is my idea now.

I'm not going to let these assholes create another tech monopoly. Whatever, if anything, comes out of this thing, I'm going to make sure ordinary people can afford it. Make sure Belters can afford it. Even if I have to drag it back to civilization with my teeth.

My nerves dance, and blood sings in my ears.

“Okay, Miranda,” I tell her, over the link, with a grin she can't see, “it's go time.”

“Okay, magnet's detached and stowed.”

“Great. Stand clear, I'll kick in the hydraulics in ten. Leela, how are our new friends doing?”

“Holding steady. Clock's at three hours seven and a half minutes until firing range.”

“Good, about what I expected. Miranda, watch your head. Crane's coming out.”

“Okay, Marcus, tow lines are bundled and hooked. Now I fly out to it?”

“Yeah… ah, let's slave your thrust pack to the Cat's systems and I can guide you out from here. I want you focused on keeping all those lines straight and unfucked.”

“Forward takes you out, out takes you back. I can handle this, Marcus.”

“Yes, you can. But we're on the clock now, and we need to move as fast as possible. Trust me, there'll be plenty for you to do.”

“Right, fine. Opening a remote channel now.”

“Princess, I show you twenty-five meters out. You all good?”

“Yeah… uh… wow. I mean, this thing is… alien. It's covered in… I don't know, they look like hieroglyphs. Or some sort of… maze? None of the angles are square, or the same. I mean, it looks symmetrical from far away, but it's not. I can't see the damage on the corner too well. It's spinning pretty quick.”

“Yeah, it's about five revolutions per minute. We'll slow that down with your thruster pack if we need to, once we get the net wrapped on and fastened. Let's get it unfolded, and I'll start walking you through it.”

“Unknown vessel, Starlight Zulu One Niner. You have violated the Starlight Coalition Sedna Exclusion Zone. Under the terms of the Artifact Treaty, you will immediately shut down your reaction drive and any onboard fusion power sources, power down any and all weapons aboard your craft and stand by in your current orbit for boarding.

“Failure to comply will result in capture bounties being registered with Lonestar Enforcement, Northwoods LLC, and any other appropriate contract enforcement firms. It may also result in revocation of any Starlight device leases, and direct enforcement actions up to and including lethal weapons fire. You will immediately signal your intent to comply.”

“Starlight Zulu One Niner, Foxtrot Uniform Two. Impressive recitation, dude. You have all that memorized? Before you bother with any more threats, you might wanna take a look at that Artifact Treaty you're going on about.”

“Ah, Foxtrot Uniform Two, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You might notice it's a contract. And if you read to the bottom, you're not gonna find my signature on it, bro.”

“Foxtrot Uniform Two, you will—”

Click.

“Okay, it looks straight. I think it's ready to go. ”

“Pan your view around, lemme see… yeah, looks good. Okay, now you're going to unhook guide line one from your belt, and attach it to the carabiner on the upper right corner of the net. Then number two on the next one, just working our way down the side. Okay, good, try not to jostle it too much, it hasn't got much mass.”

“Okay. All the way down, like that?”

“Yeah. Then once you're done there, we're going to hook the opposite side, and just let its own spin momentum wrap it in the net. Watch your spacing.”

“Okay. Marcus, what are those other ships doing? How much time do we have?”

“Don't worry about it. I have an eye on them.”

“Yes, but—”

“Princess, you need to concentrate. Let me worry about our guests. I'll let you know if anything changes, okay? Just get those lines hooked up.”

“That look about right?”

“Yes! Now clamp it off. Okay, pan your view around a bit… Okay, that looks tight. Get clear and I'll start reeling it in.”

“Okay, just let me check these connections. How much time do we have?”

“Plenty. Little over an hour and a half. That was quick work. Signal when you're clear.”

“Uh, Marcus?”

“What?”

“I think I have a problem.”

“What?”

“Uh… my tether. It's tangled in the tow lines. I think I accidentally threaded it through some of them.”

“Damn. Okay. We'll need to re-rig the artifact then. And we'll need to work fast, okay? So—”

“No. Marcus, you said we only get one shot at this. I'll just unhook my tether at this end, and untangle it from here, then hook back up.”

“No. No way. Princess, playing it fast and loose gets you killed out here.”

“Marcus, there's no time to argue. The thrust pack still has sixty-five percent charge. If anything goes wrong, I can just fly back to the ship, or switch to remote and let you fly me back.”

“I don't like it.”

“I'll be fine. I'll keep one hand on the net the whole time, okay?”

“Alright, yeah, just be careful, stet?”

“Stet.”