burning logs in Tomas Nau’s big fireplace. The Podmaster gestured them toward a conference table. There were Nau, Brughel, and Reynolt. Three other figures were silhouetted against the windows and the gray light beyond. One was Qiwi.
“Well hello, Jau,” said Ezr. “Welcome… back.”
Sure enough, it was Jau and Rita. Tomas Nau brightened the room lights. The warmth and brightness were nothing more than in any civilized habitation, but somehow the cold and gloom so expensively maintained outside made this inner light a joyous security.
The Podmaster waved them to seats, then sat down himself. As usual, Nau was a picture of generous and high-minded leadership.But he doesn’t fool me for a moment, thought Gonle. Before this mission, she had had a long career, dealing with a dozen Customer cultures, on three worlds. Customers came in all the sizes and colors of humanity. And their governments were even more varied—tyrannies, democracies, demarchies. There was always a way of doing business with them. Big boss Nau was a villain, but a smart villain who understood that he had to do business. Qiwi had seen to that, years ago. It was too bad he held the physical upper hand—thatwas not part of the standard Qeng Ho business environment. Things were dicey when you couldn’t run away from the bad guys. But in the long term, even that didn’t matter.
The Podmaster nodded to each of them. “Thanks for coming in person. You should know that this meeting is being shown live on the local net, but I hope you’ll tell your friends what you’ve seen firsthand.” He grinned. “I’m sure it will make for good conversation at Benny’s. What I have is incredibly good news, but it’s also a great challenge. You see, Pilot Manager Xin has just returned from low Arachna orbit.” He paused. I bet there’s total, awesome silence in Benny’s. “And what he discovered there is… interesting. Jau—please. Describe the mission.”
Xin came to his feet a little too quickly. His wife caught his hand and he stood on the floor, facing them. Gonle tried unsuccessfully to catch Rita’s eye, but the woman’s entire attention was on Jau.I bet they kept her on iceuntil he was back; that was the only thing that would have kept her mouthshut about this. Rita’s expression was one of vast relief. Whatever this news was, it couldn’t be bad.
“Yes, sir. Per your instructions, I was brought on-Watch early, to undertake a close approach of Arachna.” As he spoke, Qiwi passed around some Qeng Ho–quality huds. Gonle mouthed a buy offer at Qiwi as she passed; the other grinned and whispered “Soon!” back at her. The big bosses still didn’t let peons own these things. Maybe finally that would change, too. A second went by as the huds synched on the consensus image. The space above the table rippled and became a view of the L1 rockpile. Far away, beyond the floor, there was the disk of the Spider world.
“My pilots and I took the last functioning pinnace.” A thread of gold arced out from the rockpile; the tip accelerated to the halfway point and then began to slow. Their pov caught up with the pinnace; ahead, the disk of Arachna grew wide. The world looked almost as frozen and dead as when the humans had first arrived. There was one big difference: a faint glitter of city lights across the northern hemisphere, webbing here and there at major cities.
Pham Trinli’s voice came from beyond the dark, an incredulous hoot. “I bet you got spotted!”
“They pinged us. Show the defense radars and native satellites,” he said to the display. A cloud of blue and green dots blossomed in the space around the planet. On the ground, there were arcs of flashing light, the sweep of the Spiders’ missile radars. “It’s going to be more of a problem in the future.”
Anne Reynolt’s voice cut across the Pilot Manager’s. “My network people deleted all the hard evidence. The risk was well worth it.”
“Hunh! That must have been something motherloving important.”
“Oh Pham, tas. Tas.” Jau stepped to one side of the consensus image, and jabbed his hand deep into the haze of satellites, marking one blue dot with the labelKINDRED GROUND RECON SATELLITE 543 followed by orbital parameters. He glanced in Pham’s direction, and there was a quiet smile on his face, as if he were expecting some reaction. The numbers didn’t mean anything to Gonle. She leaned to one side, looked at Trinli around the edge of the image. The old fraud looked just as mystified as any, and not at all happy with Xin’s smile or Silipan’s smug chuckle.
Trinli squinted into the display. “Okay, so you matched orbits with Recon543.” Beside him, Ezr Vinh sucked in a surprised breath. This made Trinli’s frown even deeper. “Launch date seven hundred Ksec ago, booster chemical, period synchronous, altitude…” His voice trailed off in a kind of gargle. “Altitude twelve thousand damn-all kilometers! That must be a mistake.”
Jau’s grinned widened. “No mistake. That’s the whole reason I went down for a close look.”
The significance finally percolated through to Gonle. In Supplies and Services, she dealt mainly with bargaining and inventory managment. But shipping was a big part of price points, and she was Qeng Ho. Arachna was a terrestroid planet, with a 90Ksec day. Synchronous altitude should have been way higher than twelve thousand klicks. Even for a nontechnical person, the satellite was a magical impossibility. “It’s stationkeeping?” she asked. “Little rockets?”
“No. Even fusion rockets would have trouble doing that for days at a time.”
“Cavorite.” Ezr’s voice was faint, awed. Where had she heard that word before?
But Jau was nodding. “Right.” He said something to the display, and now the view was from his pinnace. “Getting a close look was a problem, especially since I didn’t want to show my main torch. Instead, I fried the satellite’s cameras and then did an instantaneous match from below…. You can begin to see it now, at the center of my target pointer. The closing speed has fallen from fifty meters a second, to an instant now where we’re stopped relative to each other. It’s about five meters above us now.” There was something in the pointer, something boxy and dead black, falling toward them like a yo-yo on a string. It slowed, passed a meter or two below them, and started back up. The topside was not black but an irregular pattern of dark grays. “Okay, freeze the image. This should give you a good look. A flat architecture, probably gyro-stabilized. The polyhedral shell is for radar evasion. Except for the impossible orbit, this thing is a typical low-tech stealthed satellite….” The satellite slid upward again, but this time was met by grappling hooks. “This is where we took it aboard the pinnace—and left behind a credible explosion.”
“Good flying, man.” That from Pham Trinli, acknowledging someone almost as good as himself.
“Ha. Tas even tougher than it looks. I had to run my zipheads near the edge of a nonrecoverable panic all through the rendezvous. There were just too many inconsistencies in the dynamics.”
Silipan interrupted cheerily, “That will change. We’re reprogramming all the pilots for cavorite maneuvers.”
Jau killed the imagery and frowned at Silipan. “You screw up, and we’ll have no pilots.”
Gonle couldn’t take much more irrelevant chitchat. “The satellite. You have it here? How did the Spiders do this?”
She noticed Nau grinning at her. “I think Miss Fong has identified the immediate issue. Do you remember those stories of gravity anomalies in the altiplano? The short of it is, those stories weretrue. The Kindred military discovered some kind of—call it antigravity. Apparently they’ve been pursuing this for ten years now. We never caught on because Accord Intelligence missed it, and our penetration of the Kindred side has always lagged. This little satellite massed eight tonnes, but almost two tonnes of that was ‘cavorite’ cladding. The Kindred Spiders are using this remarkable substance simply to increase their rockets’ throw weight. I have a little demonstration for you….”
He spoke to the air. “Douse the fireplace, cut ventilation.” He paused, and the room became very quiet. Over by the wall, Qiwi closed a tall window that had drawn a taste of moistness in from the lake. The park’s fake sun peeked between breaks in the clouds, and streamers of light glittered on the water. Gonle wondered vaguely if Nau’s zipheads were so good that they could orchestrate his world for these moments. Probably.
The Podmaster took a small case out of his shirt. He opened it, and held something that glittered in the lowering sun. It was a small square, a tile. There were flecks of light that might have been cheap mica, except that the colors swept in coordinated iridescence. “This is one of the cladding tiles from the satellite. There was also a layer of low-power LEDs, but we’ve stripped those off. Chemically, what is left is diamond fragments bound in epoxy. Watch.” He set the square down on the table and shined a hand light on it. And they all watched…. And after a moment the little square of iridescence floated upward. At first, the motion looked like a commonplace of the microgravity environment, a loose paperweight wafting on an air current. But the air in the room was still. And as the seconds passed, the tile moved faster, tumbling, falling… straight up. It hit the ceiling with an audible clink—and
