Charles Stross - Saturn's Children

“What’s going on?” I ask, trying not to panic as straps descend from what is now the ceiling and wrap around me, locking my limbs and torso in position.

“I’m securing you. Please don’t struggle. Have you traveled in a highgee cocoon before? If so, this will be familiar. Open wide.” A questing tentacle inches up around my throat and nudges at my mouth.

“Mmph!”

“I won’t hurt you,” Icarus says, a little tetchily. “But if you’re not properly padded when I start accelerating, you may be damaged.”

“Aagh.” I try to surrender to the inevitable, but there’s a problem: Granita’s instructions. Unlike my encounter with Lindy, I’m not allowed to let go and enjoy it. I feel grotesquely, unpleasantly invaded. Maybe this is what space travel is like for other folks? In which case, it’s no wonder our Creators never went any farther than Mars.

Syrupy liquid begins to flood the coffin around me. “Keep ventilating, ” Icarus says, as I choke around the throbbing organ he’s rammed past my tonsils. “You need to draw as much of this liquid as possible into your gas exchangers.”

Oh great, now I’m going to “ drown ,” I hear myself think/say, as speech suddenly comes back to me.

“No you’re not. I just hooked up your speech driver, by the way,” Icarus tells me. “Are you alright?”

I twitch. No, I think, unhappily. “Is this really necessary?”

“Only if you don’t care whether you survive a sixty-gee burn.” I feel fluid oozing into my abdominal service bay. “Good, we’ll have you pressurized soon enough.”

“What’s it like in second class?” I ask, trying to distract myself.

“A bit tight. I had to stack the courtiers carefully. Madame Ford seems to travel with rather a large entourage.”

Large? By aristo standards it’s vanishingly small. “Why so?” I ask innocently. The auxiliary speech driver is beginning to feel more natural, at least in comparison with the overall experience. (Which isn’t saying much.)

“It seems large when you consider she’s paying nine thousand Reals per kilogram for shipping…”

I try to blink, but somewhere along the way he’s slid tiny probes in around the backs of my eyeballs, and my ocular motors are paralyzed. “You mean she’s paying you more than half a million for a tentacle rape bondage scene?” I’m clearly in the wrong line of work—

“No, she’s paying me more than half a million to deliver you to Eris alive. Now, will you excuse me for a few minutes? I’ve got a nuclear rocket to supervise.”

I’VE BEEN FLOATING alone and immobilized in my cell for hours when my vision flickers to black for a moment, then comes back showing an external view. I gasp — or I would if I could move any of my actuators — as I see Icarus Express for the first time. He’s spliced the passengers’ viewpoint into an external observation satellite, to give us a ringside view of our own departure. He’s a big ship, with the familiar structure of a magsail balanced on his snout, but my built-in sense of scale tells me that his payload pod is tiny — a drum about five meters high and five meters in diameter, perched atop some intricate machinery, then a long, cylindrical tank. (Callisto is a huge, curving hemisphere of darkness beneath him; Jupiter rides gibbous and orange overhead.) Past the tank there’s some kind of shielding arrangement, a long pipe, and finally something that looks like a rocket nozzle. I’ll swear the thing’s glowing .

“Attention, passengers.” It’s Icarus. “We’re about to get under way, and you should all be locked down by now. If not, tough. Prompt criticality will commence in five seconds. And four, three, two…”

Have you ever seen a nuclear explosion close up? In vacuum, so it glows eerily ultraviolet with a spangling of soft X-rays, and it’s so pinprick star-bright in the optical range that it’s like someone’s torn a hole in the universe to let the big bang in? Now imagine that the nuclear explosion is going thataway , directly aft from the nozzle at the back of the ship. It’s like a laser-straight bolt of lightning, growing out from the nozzle at a goodly fraction of the speed of light: and it’s so bright it splits the universe in two.

Icarus launches on the back blast of a nuclear saltwater rocket. It’s a flashy, dangerous, and insanely powerful fission motor, effectively a liquid-fueled reactor meltdown — at full thrust it’s pumping out more energy than every power plant on Callisto, and if a fuel pump jams, the resulting explosion will scatter us halfway to Neptune. But Icarus knows what he’s doing. Nothing malfunctions — and moments after the torch ignites, the Icarus Express is dwindling into the distance.

“Twenty gees. Throttle stable at thirty percent. Everything looking good… throttle up to ninety percent.”

I don’t feel much: just a hollow rumbling vibration and a huge surge. I know that if my eyes were still working, they’d be blurring beneath the weight of their own lenses, and if Icarus hadn’t stuffed me like a chicken — Why are chickens stuffed, anyway? — I’d be a puddle all over the rear bulkhead, but he’s done his job well. Half a million Reals, just for a ticket to Eris that takes less than ten years, I think, and try not to giggle with fear. Five hundred gigawatts of prompt criticality is burning a hole in space behind me, kilograms of weapons-grade uranium solution blasted into plasma — the equivalent of a megaton explosion every two and a half hours — and all because Granita wants to get her hands on a deadly piece of archaic replicator technology that could enslave half the solar system. Why couldn’t they just hold the auction over the net? I wonder, then I think about the cost of putting in an appearance in person. Well, I suppose it keeps the riffraff out…

After about two minutes, the vibration dies away. The line of light stretching across the starscape dims and fades, diffusing like mist; then my vision blanks again, and returns as a view from the rear of the Icarus Express . Jupiter bulks just as large as ever, but Callisto has begun to show more of a curvy horizon, and over the next half hour it shrinks visibly until it’s no more than a large disk. I am bored and extremely uncomfortable, and I want to move around. Eventually I try to electrospeak. “What happens now?” I ask.

“I’ll be with you in a few minutes.” Icarus refuses to be hurried. When he comes back, after a seeming eternity, I tense in anticipation. “Madame Sorico? Sorry to leave you, but I had some postburn checks to complete. The good news is, we’re now on track for orbital departure. We’re going to make a closer flyby of Jupiter in about four hours, and another burn, then we just drop right back down into the inner system.”

“The inner system?” I can hear my voice rising. “I thought we were going to Eris!”

“We are, if you’ll pay attention.” Patronizing junk heap. (I keep my speaker shut down.) “You know how far away Eris is? It’s currently twice as far out as Pluto. My main motor is very powerful, but I have to conserve fuel so we can slow down at the other end. If I did a direct burn-and-decelerate, it’d take us about eighteen years to get there. But there’s a shortcut available. You may have noticed I’m carrying a magsail? We’re carrying out a brief burn and a close Jupiter flyby to cancel out our orbital velocity around the sun. If we’re not in orbit, we fall — and in this case, we fall all the way back down the solar gravity well until we’re inside the orbit of Mercury. Then we spread the magsail and accelerate up to cruise speed for Eris, and arrive with about eighty percent of our fuel still available for deceleration.”