Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

“I have no solution to that,” Bruno said grumpily. “At the moment, I’m not certain there is one.”

The cameras met that remark with stunned silence. Oh. So much for his being reassuring.

“Er, that is, I’ve only been here a few hours. And as such things go, they’ve been rather busy hours. When I’ve had time to study the problem more completely, I’ll… Well, it’s just premature right now.”

Bother it, he was bad at this. Annoyed, he cut the channel and walked away. Tamra should have had better judgment than to send him out here like this, unsupervised.

On his way, he nearly walked into one of the many Cheng Shiaos that filled Sykes Manor; the Shiao was standing there in the gloom, his back turned, his lights pointing up at distant rubble, and Bruno half mistook him for a pillar until the lights turned suddenly toward him.

“Goodness, Shiao, you startled me.”

Shiao gave a ritual nod. “Excuse me, Declarant. The fault is mine. To update you on what’s happening: the suspect vessel has been pinpointed, and has refused radio contact or else been unable to establish it. Its registration number, which we’ve been able to read optically from the exterior hull, shows ownership by something called the Titania Mineralogical Concern. This registry may be forged or stolen, though; the application was filed eighty years ago, for an eight-berth personnel ferry much smaller than this vessel, by the name of Lupin II .”

“Ah,” Bruno said. “I see, yes. And this other ship, the one you’ve actually spotted, does it have a name?”

Shiao looked troubled. “It does, sir. HMS De Towaji’s Bane . You’ll, ah, be pleased to know that the nearest Constabulary cruiser is already en route toward it, with a SWAT boarding party and a full suite of armaments. ETA five hours, twenty-two minutes.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, taken aback. “My own bane, is it? I should be flattered, I suppose. And a boarding party, you say? You’ll certainly want to identify the nasen beam projector—it should be outside the hull, possibly in a pod of some sort, with its heat sink located opposite the projection aperture. The device also needs to be completely free of mechanical vibrations for several minutes before it’s fired, so if anyone aims it at your cruiser there should be ample warning to move out of the way. You needn’t move far—even a few meters would suffice. Just enough that the beam will miss if it isn’t realigned.”

“Thank you, Declarant,” Shiao said, sounding impressed and concerned and genuinely grateful. “That advice could well save lives today.”

“Think nothing of it,” Bruno returned, waving a hand. “My own life may well be among them, as this bears directly on the Ring Collapsiter investigation. You’re prepared to fax the Royal Committee aboard for the encounter?”

Shiao’s jaw tightened visibly, but all he said was, “Absolutely, sir. Arrangements are already underway.”

A Constabulary boarding action turned out to be a remarkably dull affair. This one did, anyway, since the “suspect vessel,” Bruno’s very own personal bane, his hashashin , his self-styled mortal enemy, never once engaged its engines or aimed its nasen projector or reoriented its hull in any way. It might almost have been a derelict, a ghost ship drifting empty through space, if not for the winking of running lights, clearly visible through the new cruiser’s telescopes. Too, the cruiser’s captain reported that the suspect vessel did occasionally fire a puff of gas from its maneuvering thrusters. “Momentum wheel desaturation,” he explained cryptically. “For control of their altitude, which appears to be fixed in inertial space.”

Ordinarily, Bruno would have pressed for a more detailed explanation, but he’d been drawn into a royal game of doubles poker and dared not let his attention wander too far for too long lest young Vivian kick his armored shin with the remarkably armor-rattling toe of her space boot. They’d all taken a quiet dinner and fresh-air break back on Tongatapu before coming here, but they’d been back in suits and helmet domes for over two hours now, and it had been getting somewhat tiresome. Finally Vivian had faxed up a set of magnetic playing cards and convinced Tamra to make their use an Official Business of the Royal Committee.

Ordinarily, Bruno would have objected to such gross misuse of his person at a time like this. He’d done so often enough in his days at Tamra’s palace, when matters were—to put it mildly—a good deal less urgent. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to refuse Vivian Rajmon; if the Queendom could put its children to work in such hazardous circumstances, chasing after their elders’ banes and suchlike, then said Queendom should at least indulge, when possible, said children’s need for play. He’d even surprised himself by enjoying the game a little. He and Vivian had narrowly won the match with three games out of five, although Deliah and Marlon had won the other two, and the odd pairing of Tamra with Cheng Shiao had presented substantial resistance throughout. Vivian seemed more childish than ever, or perhaps the term would be childlike , since she manifested it mainly in pleasant ways. Even Tamra seemed to notice the difference, and to look on her little Commandant-Inspector a bit more thoughtfully.

But another hour later even that was finished, and the SWAT robots were strapping them all into recessed acceleration couches as the final rendezvous and boarding action approached. The ship’s bulkheads swam with wellstone designs, hypercomputers forming and reforming and vanishing and forming again, their innards no doubt buzzing with strategic and tactical analyses. Ironically, this superficial turmoil required nothing of Bruno and was in fact his first real chance to sit still and think. He took full advantage of it by refining, in his mind, the exact scenario by which a single ship, with a single nasen beam projector, might weaken and contaminate nearly a third of the Ring Collapsiter’s arc. He came up with a number of plausible mechanisms and finally settled on one that best fit the observed facts: the ship had sat up here in the asteroid belt and fired almost tangentially, the most glancing of blows, cutting a chord about half a kilometer sunward of the collapsiter’s rim.

At that range, the beam would be about twice as wide as the collapsiter itself, but the sun’s gravity—and indeed the collapsiter’s own gravity—would pull the beam out of true, curve it around like a stream of water firing out of a hose. If the top of the beam’s arc touched the Ring Collapsiter just so , then instead of punching two neat holes through the ring, as it had through Marlon’s house, it would instead follow the ring’s curvature around, plowing a swath right through it, perhaps for millions of kilometers. Hmm. He’d have to work the actual math on that one; curiosity aside, the results might be needed as evidence in court.

Cheng Shiao settled into the berth across from his and was instantly immobilized by straps and webbing.

“So,” Bruno asked him, “if you don’t mind my asking, how does one rise to the rank of lieutenant in the Royal Constabulary?”

Shiao, still attempting to settle into a more comfortable position, looked puzzled. “Rise, sir? I was appointed to this rank directly.”

“Truly? With no prior experience?”

“Correct.”

“How strange. On what… basis was this appointment made?”

“Exam scores, sir. And general inclination. I won’t bore you with the story.”

“No, indeed, I’m asking you to. I begin to realize how little I know about the modern Queendom.”

Shiao met his gaze. “Are you certain you want the full details? Because there’s some violence involved. I was in Qingdao, walking along the Yanan Lu on my way to the job interview, which was well outside the business district, in a warehouse area I didn’t know well. It was two-ten in the afternoon; there wasn’t much traffic. As I was walking, I passed what appeared to be an abandoned building, with two males standing on the front steps. They were dressed in reflective jackets and sunglasses, and appeared unusually alert.”