Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON when I landed in Nerrivik, which is on the equator, and it’s edging slowly toward dusk as I step out. (Callisto’s diurnal period is more than sixteen standard days long.) Jupiter is a gibbous streaky horror riding across the zenith of the night black sky — it covers almost as wide an angle as Earth, seen from the Lunar equator — while the sun, a shrunken, glaring button, sinks slowly toward the horizon. There is never a truly dark night on Callisto, although total solar eclipses are not uncommon and bring an eerie twilight to the crumpled desolation.

It’s chilly outside, and I’m very glad for the cold-weather mods I installed on Mars. Out beyond the edge of town, distant flecks of light inch across the broken horizon. I can’t tell if they’re bulk carriers crawling along the ground or more distant freight buckets riding the magnetic catapult up to their parking orbit. In the opposite direction, the domes and dildos of pressurized buildings cast slowly lengthening shadows. My map-fu is loaded, and I let it guide me toward a paraboloid structure that claims to be a run-down office complex occupied by a variety of mining-support businesses and body shops. JeevesCo supposedly maintains a presence there, although I can’t for the life of me see why — this isn’t exactly a high-class joint. There are gambling dens and juice joints and whorehouses galore, for even mining overseers have needs, but there’s precious little market for a gentleman’s gentleman. Still, I suppose he has his reasons…

I wait impatiently for the air lock to cycle and flush me with warm carbon dioxide. The sooner I can get off this ball of mucky ice, the better. Hopefully this particular Jeeves simply wants me to carry something back to the fleshpots of the inner system. There’s a reception desk at the front of the atrium, and it tracks me with beady eyes as I cross the rough aggregate floor. “Where’s Jeeves?” I ask.

The reception desk blinks at me. “Fourth floor,” it says. “But there’s a visit—”

“Never mind; he’s expecting me.” I head for the elevators.

I step out of the elevator into a drab vestibule. It’s completely empty but for two doors at either end. One of them has a discreet plaque, brass untarnished by exposure to oxygen. Facilitators Unlimited. I approach it and electrospeak the lock: “Freya, to see Jeeves.”

“Come in.”

The lock clicks and the door opens before me and hands close around my wrists and drag me inside. And in a split-second instant of crystalline clarity, I realize I’ve been very, very stupid.

“Please — be — seated,” croaks the thing they’ve made of the Jeeves-in -Residence. He’s sitting behind the trademark desk, but his arms end in complicated stumps at the shoulder, one of his eyes is a splashed iridescent mess hanging half out of its socket, and something about his posture tells me that they’ve hacked his legs off too, leaving a pitifully immobile cognitive stump to talk to me.

I’ve been grabbed by two spiny horrors, bigger than I am and far stronger, their humaniform arms and legs sculpted in strange geometric surfaces. I yank hard with my right hand and begin to bring my leg up, heel extending, but my captor just glares at me and gives my wrist a tug, and I realize it’s not a hand that’s gripping me — his wrists terminate in great scissorlike shears. His carapace is armored, too. I’d break a heel and he’d snip clean through my wrist and I’d be no nearer escape. I wriggle and tug like a ductcleaner that’s fallen on dry ground, but they’re not having any of it, and that’s an end of the matter. So after a few seconds I give up and hang loose between them, biting back hysteria as I stare at Jeeves.

“That — is — better,” says Jeeves, as if reading from a script. “She — will — arrive — shortly.” He sounds like that staple of drama, the robot , soulless and grim. Someone’s stripped out everything I found attractive about his kind, leaving an object of horror and sympathy.

I glance around surreptitiously. The signs of struggle are everywhere, from the trashed inner door frame to the wreckage of his arms lying discarded behind a plinth bearing an antique urn — I swallow, aghast. “What happened?” I ask.

“My — mistress — came — for — me.” His remaining eye is as expressionless as a stone embedded in a gray silicone rubber mask. “If — you — don’t — remember — She — will — explain.”

My. The definite article. He’s speaking for himself, not for One , the collective Jeeves. So whatever’s happening here is personal. I very nearly lose it and start struggling again, but a quick glance reminds me that resistance is futile. These things — what are they, some kind of soldier line? — are big and wickedly fast. Two of them grabbed me the instant I walked in the door, and there are two more standing behind Jeeves. By the look of things they’ve had him in their snicker-snack hands for some time… “Jeeves,” I say slowly, “who owns you?”

“I — am — property of — no—” He begins to shudder. The eyelid contracts; a thick bead of something like moisture slides down his cheek. Icy terror clutches at me as behind my back the door slides open. “Mistress!” His face clears.

“Hello, Kate ,” says a familiar voice, setting spidery chills racing up and down the skin in the small of my back. I lose track of who and where I am for a moment, imagining myself back on my eleventh birthday. When my head clears I’m lying facedown on the floor, arms and legs spread-eagled, a searing pain cutting into each wrist and ankle. “Stop that!” she shouts, her voice ringing in my ears. “Stop that at once , you bad, bad girl!”

“I — I—” I’m choking back panic. I remember her bed on the Pygmalion . Granita’s got me in her web again, hasn’t she? My fingers scrabble, then I feel the floor through them, and I begin to collect my scattered selves. I’m being held down by the two soldiers, but they haven’t snipped off my — yet — “What do you want?”

“That’s better,” she soothes. “You’ve got something of mine.” Her voice drops a notch. “Where is it?” Her dress rustles loudly as she kneels beside me, and I feel her fingers parting my hair. I begin to buck and spasm again as her painted claws dig into the skin at the nape of my neck.

“No, Granita—” But she’s not listening, and everything goes black and tastes of electric roses and blue ice for an infinite instant.

I come to slowly, dully aware of a conversation flowing around me. “—him to the operational center and have them box him up for transport.” She’s talking to someone else, obviously, and I’m still lying on my face, but the sharp, crushing sensation in my wrists and ankles has gone — the scissor-hand soldiers have let go of me with their terrible shears. My limbs are tingling painfully, but I can still feel my fingers and toes. I try to move an arm — slowly, in case it’s damaged, control runs severed, muscles crushed, or bones bent. I have some vague idea that I can scuttle away and hide behind the planter while she’s giving her minions instructions about Jeeves. The back of my neck aches where she ripped a chip out, but it doesn’t feel empty. Some nerve damage for sure, I decide. Why did she want my soul chip?

There’s a dripping noise coming from somewhere near me. I open Katherine Sorico’s too-large eyes and see a viscous puddle of blue fluid spreading beside my nose. It’s hydraulic fluid, riddled with Marrow techné. Somebody is bleeding out. Is it me? I wonder, spreading the fingers of my left hand and pushing against the floor very gently. No: good. I twitch underused muscles, and my heels extend a couple of centimeters before I pull them back in. That’s something I remember from Juliette — the solid crunch of a chest plate or a skull beneath my flying kick. As long as my legs work, I’m not disarmed. And I’m still intact, I think, embracing the realization like a lover’s body.