He took a swig of his beer and lit a cigarette, blatantly enjoying our startled looks and Tamara’s smouldering outrage—this was apparently news to her, too.
‘To do what?’ I asked, shouting above the rest.
Reid leaned back and clasped his hands and made cracking noises with his knuckles. ‘To trade,’ he said. ‘What else?’
I laughed. ‘They won’t get much profit out of trading with us,’ I said. ‘And anyway, they don’t know the way through.’
‘Indeed they don’t,’ Reid said. ‘But I do. I got it from the fast folk, remember, just as I got the path for going the other way. And I’m going to sell it.’ He affected a glance at a wristwatch. ‘Any time now, the bids should be coming through.’
Tony leaned forward. ‘Very clever,’ he said. ‘But quite frankly, they’ll be wasting their money. The businesses you’re about to sell this secret to aren’t going to be too happy when they find we don’t need anything you’ve got to offer, and nothing on our side is for sale at any price. Either because we’ll share it for free, or we won’t give it to you for anything. Like Ellen said—not much profit in that.’ He took this as his turn to sit back and look smug.
‘I wouldn’t be too sure of that,’ Reid said. He waved his hand airily. ‘Not that it matters. Most of the companies I’m talking about aren’t that interested in trading with people in the Solar Union, anyway.’
‘So who—?’ I stopped, unwilling to accept the obvious answer. ‘Oh no. You’re not.’
‘We are,’ Reid said calmly. ‘We’re going to trade with the Jovians.’
For a moment we were all stunned into silence. It was Yeng who spoke first, her normally high voice raw with anger and concern.
‘This is insane,’ she said. ‘Just
look
at yourselves! I’ve seen how comms work here—you have radio for everything, electronic computers everywhere, including your bodies, and lots of you have cortical downlinks! Direct electronic interfaces with your brains, right? You’re just
ridiculously
vulnerable—
absolutely naked to viral assault and takeover. You’re a
culture medium
for the things! The Jovians could
eat
your minds alive, and you’d never know.’
‘We’ve considered that,’ Reid said calmly. ‘We’re confident that our countermeasures will hold them off, should the Jovians behave as treacherously as you people seem to expect.’
‘
Countermeasures!
’ Yeng’s voice spat contempt. ‘We’ve had two centuries of front-line struggle against their virus plagues to develop countermeasures, and we still wouldn’t contemplate what you suggest.’
Reid shrugged and smiled. ‘We’re pretty sure we’ve done better, because—’ He stopped. ‘We have better computers,’ he finished, rather lamely I thought; but he might have had more to say, and not said it.
‘I don’t—’ I began, then Boris raised his hand and shot me a quick glance.
‘All irrelevant,’ Boris said. ‘Because if your ships go through the Malley Mile, you can rest assured the Cassini Division—our defence agency, our ships—will destroy them. The Division will assume anything coming through is hostile, unless they hear different from us.’
‘Then,’ said Reid, ‘I most strongly suggest you do just that. Contact your Central Committee—or whatever—and tell them to let us through. Because if you don’t, and your ships attack ours, the Mutual Protection fighters covering the traders will take whatever action is needed to defend them.’
Boris and Andrea guffawed at the same moment. The rest of the team looked at least amused. Even Malley had a faint, sceptical smile at Reid’s apparent bluster. Malley had seen our ships, and Reid had not.
‘They can try,’ Boris said. He laughed again. ‘They can try!’
Reid stood, and wandered over to the wall and leaned on his hand against it, beside a picture of himself alongside a sleek machine, something like a World War Three jet fighter aircraft. He drew on his cigarette and gave us a cool, appraising look. I knew what was coming next, so I spoke first.
‘I presume you’ve already checked over the
Carbon Conscience
,’ I said. ‘Scanned it, maybe tried sending a little fly-camera in. Do tell us what you’ve found.’
‘Indeed we have,’ Reid said, with a slight involuntary backwards sway that cheered me a little. Boris bristled; my quick black look made him back down. ‘We got a lot closer to it than we did to the
Terrible Beauty
.’ This time it was his turn for a brief inward gloat, as I betrayed my surprise. ‘Oh, yes, Mr Powell had our remotes on the job as soon as you’d left,’ Reid went on. ‘Very helpful and friendly bloke, absolute soul of kindness, as I’m sure you’ll agree. Now, about the
Carbon Conscience
.’ He gazed over our heads, his eyes flicking back and forth in the way of someone looking at a virtual image. ‘It’s a good fighter, I’ll give you that. But so was the MiG-29, and we all know how that performed against the Polish EFAs.’ He paused, frowning. ‘Maybe we don’t all know. Not very well, is how. And let me tell you, if
your fighter-bombers come up against
these
‘—he jerked his thumb at the spaceplane in the photo—‘they’ll never know what hit them.’
‘So you didn’t get inside it?’ I asked, in as casual a tone as I could manage.
Reid shrugged. ‘Didn’t need to,’ he said, equally lightly. ‘Outside inspection was enough.’
Boris almost made another forward lurch; at my sharp gesture, he sat back again, glowering. I hoped Reid had seen that—I was only just able to restrain myself from punching the air and shouting, ‘YES! Just you try it, you banker!’
Because if they hadn’t been able to penetrate the fighter-bomber’s passive defences, they would certainly not be able to defeat it in combat. It was an ugly, insectile thing, that fighter; it looked more like an ornithopter than a spacecraft, let alone a spaceplane; but it was built for the most difficult combat imaginable, close-quarter fast manoeuvering in space, and it had evolved out of two centuries of zapping anything bigger than a molecule that dared to lift from Jupiter, and from even longer experience of split-second work within disintegrating comet nuclei.
The only problem I could foresee with pitting our fighters against Reid’s was one he almost certainly wouldn’t have thought of: so few of our pilots had ever killed a human, and those few so long ago, that they might fatally hesitate at the death. It wasn’t a weakness that those on his side were likely to share.
‘Our fighters are fully automated,’ Reid said, ‘no humans in the loop at all. That puts your side at a further disadvantage, don’t you think?’
Oh no it doesn’t
, I thought with a surge of joy. We’d cream them without a fleck of carbon on our consciences.
‘I see you disagree,’ he went on. ‘Perhaps you should see how they’re made.’ He made a slapping motion with his hand. The lights dimmed further, and above the table a hologram flashed into view. Six feet high, it showed a dark, pitted nodule, slowly tumbling end over end. On its surface, smudges of light seethed; and small bright things, like iron-filings, drifted off.
‘Carbonaceous chondrite, with nanofactories,’ Reid said. ‘Now let’s look a little closer.’ The hologram shrank to a patch of the body’s surface, which then expanded. The seething smudges became vast constructions of pipework and drillheads and vats: the small bright things, tens and hundreds of space-planes like the one in the picture.
‘This is speeded up, of course,’ Reid allowed. ‘Each fighter takes a day to be put together by the assemblers. But as you can see’—the view zoomed back again—‘we have a
lot
of assemblers.’
The hologram vanished and the lights came back up. While we were still blinking, Reid strode over and sat down again.
‘Even if you think your fighters can beat ours one-to-one—which I don’t—you have the attrition to consider. It won’t be one-to-one. More like hundreds to one, and they’ll keep on coming.’
The room fell silent. We could still beat them, I thought. We had more than the fighter-bombers to count on. We had the far more powerful lasers on Callisto; the nuclear-armed orbital forts; the entrenchments on the other moons. We had the Inner System defence-forces. If it came to the last ditch, we had the population of Earth itself.
But the New Martians would have more than fighter-bombers, too, and they might have gods on their side—and not just the Jovians, even if they did find allies there. They had their own fast folk, in their smart-matter storage tanks up in the mountains; assuming they weren’t already up and running, a deception of which I reckoned Reid was wholly capable.
The attrition would indeed be terrible, on both sides; and we still had the Jovians to deal with. We couldn’t afford the diversion.
I smiled and rose to my feet. ‘Isn’t it great how talking things over can prevent fighting?’ I said. ‘How did we get into all this talk about fighting, anyway? Of course you can come through. If you want to deal directly with the Jovians, you’re welcome to try. It’s at your own risk, as the capitalist small print always puts it. You may even be doing us a favour, by running that risk on our behalf. We can look after ourselves, whatever happens.’
My crew were looking at me with barely concealed dismay. Even Malley and Suze looked troubled. I turned completely away from Reid and his partners, and gave the comrades a tremor of a wink.
‘So, Dave,’ I went on, turning back to him, ‘about that offer of a secure communications room? I think it’s time to take you up on it.’
‘Hard suits, radio comms, deep crypto,’ I said. Our clothes gelled, then set to armour around us. The small room at the top of Reid’s tower had a shelf all around it of communications-control panels, with more help menus than we could use. All idiot-proof, Reid had cheerfully assured us, closing the door behind him.
In their reconfigured suits the comrades resembled faceless humanoid robots with anodized aluminium finishes in a variety of bright colours. No one could so much as read our lips, and the deeper masking of cryptography would keep our communications safe, unless New-Martian computation was so far ahead of ours that we might as well give up now. The comrades’ voices contended in the dead spaces of the crypto channel.
I hit my override control. ‘Try to talk one at a time,’ I said wearily. I was hungry, and irritable, and among the first people in history to suffer starshiplag. ‘Boris, the chair recognizes you.’
‘Ha, ha, Ellen. What are you playing at? We can’t let them through, definitely not now.’
‘We can’t fight them
now
,’ I said. ‘None of us, I hope, has mentioned the impact event. Eight days away now. We need our forces intact for that, just in case … We could stop a determined breakout from this side,
or
we could make sure the comets don’t get diverted the wrong way. We can’t count on doing both.’
‘These aren’t the only options,’ Tony said. ‘And we still have to do—’
‘I know, I know,’ I said.
‘Do what?’ asked Malley.
‘Make sure Reid doesn’t touch off another runaway Singularity,’ I said. ‘If he hasn’t already. Don’t worry, we’ll deal with that. Right now, the decisions aren’t up to us. What we have to do is contact the Division, and let them decide. Yeng, please go to it.’
Yeng complied, and while she was setting up a laser-link to the communications relay satellite (by now, presumably, somewhere among a growing fleet of ships that shared its orbit, and the wormhole’s) I called up a display inside my helmet and did some rough editing of the suit’s record of recent events. I made sure that Reid’s most informative statements were there in full, so there’d be no doubt as to what he was saying.
‘Ready,’ Yeng’s voice said. ‘Encrypted conference link—you’ll all see the committee as a virtual view in you helmets, and they’ll see our faces.’
Worried faces, on both sides.
‘Are you all right?’ Tatsuro asked. ‘We haven’t had any contact for over an hour, since you went into that tower.’
‘We’ve been in a Faraday cage,’ I said. ‘We’re all right. There’s been an … unexpected development. Tell you about it in a minute. How are things at your end?’
Tatsuro massaged his eyebrows, leaving tiny, paired dishevellments. ‘Fine, fine,’ he said. ‘The Jovians have finally managed to shut off the viral transmissions. That’s at least a token of goodwill, but we aren’t opening any radio channels just yet. Their own atmospheric traffic has started to increase again. Also, they’ve detected the incoming comet-train. They can see it’s heading for a slingshot orbit, but they raised the matter with every appearance of concern.’
‘Can’t say I blame them.’
‘We’ve told them it’s routine—for Martian terraforming—showed them records of our previous cometary flybys, which they’ve checked against what they call dreamtime archives. They seem reassured. Now, about your position. The relay has detected and reported a build-up of ships on your side. What’s going on?’
It took me about ten minutes to tell them, with clips of our discussion projected straight through from my suit to their screens. The consternation thus sown was almost amusing to watch; the angry, murmured discussions echoed and amplified our own. I concluded with my assessment of the odds.