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Synopsis
Solana Sina is a scarab, salvaging wrecked and abandoned space habitats among the Billion Worlds of the Tenth Millennium. She and an oddball crew—a raven, a cyborg, and a dinosaur—board the derelict colony Safdaghar hoping to score some loot before the colony gets catapulted into the outer reaches of the Solar System. But Solana and the scarabs come face-to-face with a gang of vicious pirates looking for slaves and treasure, and a mysterious stranger intent on preserving an explosive secret. Solana must overcome her own horrifying past to survive and escape before it’s too late. But there’s an even more dangerous threat lurking in the dark passages and ruined buildings of Safdaghar . . .
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About The Godel Operation:
“With this freewheeling story of an ancient, cunning artificial intelligence and its naïve human companion, Cambias (The Initiate) mashes humor, mystery, and looming apocalypse into a roundly satisfying space epic. —Publishers Weekly
Praise for Arkad’s World:
“Cambias has achieved a feat of world-building: an expansive, believable setting with fascinating aliens, compelling mysteries, and a rich sense of history.” —Bookpage
Praise for the work of James L. Cambias:
“Beautifully written, with a story that captures the imagination the way SF should.” —Booklist starred review
James L. Cambias is a writer, a game designer, and the cofounder of Zygote Games. He has been nominated for the James Tiptree Jr. Award and the 2001 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. He lives in western Massachusetts.
Release date: January 3, 2023
Publisher: Baen Books
Print pages: 341
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The Scarab Mission
James L. Cambias
CHAPTER ONE
Yanai looked at Safdaghar and didn’t like what she saw, not one bit of the image.
Yanai was fifty-five million kilometers from Jupiter—just behind and Sunward of its orbital empire, gaining fast. But she wasn’t thinking about Jupiter. Her mind and her sensors were focused on a big wobbling wheel twenty kilometers behind her. That was Safdaghar, a space habitat, and Yanai was the first spacecraft in sixteen standard years to try docking with it.
Safdaghar was moving a little faster in its orbit than Yanai was, so the two were converging at about ten kilometers per hour. She could feel the occasional ping of debris on her hull, from the sparse cloud of bits and pieces surrounding Safdaghar. No danger at these velocities, but still annoying.
The danger was Safdaghar itself. Like most of the billion habs orbiting the Sun in the Tenth Millennium, Safdaghar spun on its axis to create the illusion of gravity for its occupants. But maintaining a stable spin requires constant management. After sixteen years of neglect—not to mention considerable damage—Safdaghar was completely out of control. Its axis was precessing like crazy, just like a spinning top about to fall over. And Yanai could see chaotic motions as well, likely the result of irregular mass distributions inside the structure.
Her task was to dock with this tumbling wreck, stabilize it, and then shove the whole thing into a new orbit which would take it closer to Jupiter. The king of the sky would then flick Safdaghar out into the darkness of the outer system, where in a few decades Yanai’s clients would catch the wreck and take it apart. This was a once-in-a-millennium window, and even as the low bidder on the job Yanai expected to make a once-in-a-millennium profit.
If she could clamp on safely, and if she could get the tumbling ruin stabilized in time for a high-power burn. The problem was that Yanai was a big girl herself—three hundred meters long; five hundred tons of fuel, radiators, and fusion engines, with a little life-support system strapped on for her four biological crew. She had the power to move a city, but wasn’t what anyone would call maneuverable.
So she took it slow, approaching Safdaghar very cautiously, analyzing its motion to pick the perfect time and place to grab hold. Until she was safely clamped on, Yanai had no spare capacity to keep an eye on her crew. They were on their own.
“Can I have a word with you?” Solana asked Atmin. The corvid was in the ship’s galley, holding onto the back of a seat with one foot and daintily eating a layered meat-pop. He bit off part of the outer layer with his sharp beak and swallowed it whole before answering.
“You may have one word or many, though I think you will not have them long, but rather toss them out at me. My own mouth I shall fill with honest meat,” said Atmin to the human woman.
“Who are those two?” Solana grabbed the back of the seat across from Atmin and with her free hand gestured toward the passage leading forward. In the observation bubble at the end of the passage, a raptor dino dressed in black stood next to a man-shaped mass of mismatched machine parts, watching the wrecked hab approaching.
“The dino’s name is Pera and I guess from how she speaks her home is somewhere in the many Venus rings. She fights in others’ wars for pay—or so she says. The borg is called Utsuro, and with that you know as much as I.” He tore off another strip of meat.
“Why are they here at all? What’s going on? Yanai won’t talk to me.”
“Yanai has more important work: not crashing into things. Those other two came on the ship when you already were in hibernating sleep. I know that Pera joined our crew to reach the Jovian moons. She works for passage, not for gain. I did not get the chance to ask Utsuro—he revived himself without my aid.”
The maneuver alert tone sounded and the lights momentarily flickered orange. Solana swung herself into the seat and it grabbed her securely. “We don’t need any help,” she said.
For a moment the deck of the galley became the ceiling as Yanai fired her braking thrusters. Atmin ignored the fact that he was hanging rather than perching, and concentrated on digging out the soft liver core of his meat-pop before answering. “In truth I think we do. This job may want a broader set of skills than we possess. I judge the price of things we find, and you are good with tools, but neither would be any use to shift a heavy load. If nothing else, both Pera and Utsuro look quite strong.”
“We can print up a bot if we need muscle. Are they getting shares?”
“A partial deal. As usual we two get five percent of gross, whereas they both will split that share of what remains when all the costs are paid. Yanai assures me that this will be fair to all.”
“I don’t care if it’s fair. I just don’t want to lose any gigajoules because Yanai decided to pick up a couple of strays.”
“Yet here they are, and neither you nor I can change that fact. Why don’t you go and say hello, and let me eat my food? It’s been two years since last I had a meal.”
Solana looked forward again, then spoke aloud, looking at the ceiling the way humans did when speaking to homes or vehicles. “Yanai? Safe to move about?”
“Next burn in forty seconds.”
Solana pushed out of her seat and floated to the passage. Yanai’s life-support pod was definitely a low-end model—instead of reconfigurable smart matter, the interior was partitioned with panels of plain graphene. But some long-departed crew member had attacked the walls of the passage with a paint pen and a surprising aesthetic sense. At the galley end of the two-meter passage an incredibly complex, detailed pattern of curving strokes in dark green covered the walls, almost hiding the hot magenta background. As Solana moved down the passage the pattern simplified and lightened, while the background got softer and paler, so that she emerged from a light mauve end lightly scored with spring green.
“Good morning,” she said aloud.
The two in the observation bubble turned to greet her. Pera swung her seat around, while Utsuro merely rotated his head a hundred and eighty degrees. The cyborg’s face, such as it was, featured an assortment of sensors on the left side, and an old-fashioned visual display panel on the right. At the moment it showed a single question symbol.
“Time for breakfast?” said Pera, showing a wide row of curved meat-tearing teeth.
Solana had never met a dino in person before. Pera was big—probably two hundred kilos—but she looked lean and swift rather than bulky. The word predatory came to mind. Her long tail coiled securely around the post of the seat she was sitting on, with her massive legs tucked in on either side. She wore a simple dark skinsuit with lots of pockets, and had gloves on her feet with openings for her huge hooked claws—which were coated in blue enamel. Her skin was dark gold and the crest of feathers on her head was brilliant blue, matching her eyes. More blue feathers ran along the outer edge of each bare forearm.
“You’ll have to get it yourself,” said Solana. “I’m Solana Sina, one of Yanai’s senior crew. Tell me about yourselves. What are you good for?”
“I can tear apart any mammal who pisses me off,” said Pera. “That good enough?”
They were interrupted by the maneuver alert. Solana launched herself at the third of the four seats in front of the diamond window and it secured her with a second to spare before Yanai thrusted to the left and then down.
“We don’t need a ratcatcher,” said Solana drily as soon as the lights went back to normal. “What technical skills do you have?”
“Combat engineer,” said Pera, suddenly sounding a lot more professional. “Explosive ordnance disposal, hull and barrier breaching, general demolition. I’ve worked in freefall, surface, and tunnel environments. Served in two wars and three counterinsurgency operations—first in Kreyda hab militia, then as a volunteer in the Radunitsa Freedom Army, and after that as a contractor for Screaming Death Security Consulting.” She tapped her wristband and a text box appeared in the corner of Solana’s vision.
“All right, good,” said Solana as she scrolled through the list of jobs, commendations, and impenetrable acronyms. Presumably Yanai had verified all of this during the voyage out from Vesta. “What about you?” she asked Utsuro.
“I’m afraid I have nothing to boast about,” said the cyborg. He had a nice voice, probably some long-dead actor’s. The display half of his face went from showing one question mark to a whole pattern of them. “My history only goes back nine years. I crewed on a sweeper ship, did some odd jobs in an industrial hab, and for the past four years I’ve been in the Ceres Rescue Service.”
“Nine years? You mean nine Martian?”
“No, nine standard. That’s all I can remember. The sweeper Marokintana Maru found me in space. I was wearing a fancy suit that had me in medical stasis, but I’d obviously been out way too long. Lots of radiation damage—and some major injuries, too. Marokintana Maru’s crew were all mechs, with no bioprinter aboard. Their only medical gear was a little crash kit that nobody had opened since the ship was built. They couldn’t heal me, so…” The cyborg raised one metal hand and flexed the three stubby fingers. “They fixed me instead. A remarkable job, given that they just had scraps and free printables to work with.”
“You don’t remember anything before that?” asked Solana, trying not to sound skeptical.
“Bits and pieces, but nothing useful. I seem to know a lot of languages, I recognize most music from Mars and Deimos over the past few centuries, and I have very good manners.”
“Well, who were you before? What about your genome?”
“That’s another mystery. I’ve sent out dozens of messages to search all over the system, but none of them found any match for my DNA. I looked about like this.”
“No, don’t—” began Solana, but before she could finish the display on Utsuro’s face showed a very ordinary-looking man with black hair, light brown skin, and dark eyes.
“Do you recognize me?” the image on the cyborg’s face asked.
“No! Turn it off!” she shouted, and shielded her eyes. Then Solana launched herself hard at the passage, bounced off the painted panels, and fell through the galley toward the crew quarters. She got into her own little cabin and slid the door shut, then floated in the center of the room, curled into a ball.
After a minute she heard Atmin’s beak tapping on the door.
“Go away.”
“Your introductions did not go as well as one might hope. If either of our new-waked crew did wrong, just speak and I shall deal with them in manner stern.”
The image of a two-kilogram bird giving a stern lecture to a cyborg and a dinosaur a hundred times his mass almost made Solana smile. She swallowed and spoke a little hoarsely. “He didn’t know. The cyborg. He displayed a face and I panicked. It’s not his fault.”
Atmin was silent for a moment. “The fault is ultimately mine. I failed to ask what visage he might show, nor did I warn of danger if he did.”
“It’s okay.” She sniffled and wiped tears with her sleeve.
“I shall explain to Utsuro that he must needs hide his human face. Fear not: I will not tell him why. I go.”
Solana heard the flutter of wings in the passage. She rotated two or three times more, uncurled herself and pushed against the ceiling, then grabbed the edge of her bed and reached underneath it to open the storage bin.
In an age of smart matter and printers, only the rich and the mad kept hoards of things. All of Solana’s material goods fit into a single bag: a few unique items with sentimental value, or things she might need in a hurry without waiting for printer time. The goggles were both a tool of her trade and a comfort for her fears.
She slipped them on and her perceptions expanded. Now she could see everything, in wavelengths from nanometer soft X-rays all the way to centimeter microwaves. She could see polarization, phase and Doppler shift, and magnify a thousand times. They showed her electric and magnetic fields, and told her the composition of every surface. It was like having the senses of a mech, or even a ship.
But Solana needed her goggles for a different purpose. They could also filter what she saw. A simple software hack replaced every human face with a featureless oval. Whenever she went among humans—or even primates and human-shaped mechs—she kept her goggles on, stuck to her skin at maximum adhesion, with the face filter active.
A world of faceless people meant freedom.
Solana took a deep breath and opened the door. The others were all still up in the observation bubble. Solana headed that way, moving slowly, forcing herself to go on. She paused in the galley to get something to eat, and while her cheese dumplings printed she listened to Atmin’s harsh voice from the other end of the passage.
“…and if I did I still would guard her privacy. So I will tell you only this: Solana must not see a human face. It causes harm to her, and injury to any one is deadly to us all.”
“Please tell her I am terribly sorry,” said Utsuro. “I promise it won’t happen again.”
“I just want to know what other little mines are hidden in her head,” said Pera. “Salvage work is dangerous enough without worrying about whether one of your crew is going to decohere because of something she sees.”
“Solana will not fail us on the job. Of that I am most sure,” said Atmin. “She—”
“Came back to apologize,” said Solana, drifting into the observation bubble. “What happened before was my fault. I was careless and didn’t wear my protective gear.” She tapped the goggles. “I’m safe now.”
The lights went orange again, and Yanai’s voice sounded through the crew pod. “Prepare for spin. Portside will be down.”
Atmin and Solana got themselves secured as Yanai jolted from side to side, running her thrusters at maximum. The spinning ruin before them seemed to slow as the ship matched its once-per-minute rotation. But the second-order precession remained as the axis of the station swung around every five minutes.
“Contact in two minutes. Suits on and secure yourselves,” said Yanai, and the lights went red.
Solana’s loose coverall suddenly became skintight, protecting her against depressurization by sheer mechanical force. The cowl that she wore over her hair slid down to cover her face and went transparent, and the little air bladders on her shoulders inflated. A readout in her vision said she had four hours of oxygen, currently on standby since the crew pod was still pressurized.
Pera’s suit did much the same. Atmin’s suit came flying into the observation bubble from his cabin and snapped him up. Unlike the others, it wasn’t skintight. The bird sat inside a diamond bubble with four limbs that could be either hands or feet, and thrusters to move about in microgravity. Utsuro merely turned off his convective cooling fans and extended a filmy radiator fin along the center of his back.
The ship wasn’t aiming exactly at Safdaghar’s axis. She was off-center by sixty meters—deliberately, since she’d need some leverage to stabilize the hab. Even spinning in sync meant there would be relative motion when they touched.
Yanai extended her six arms. They were massive and strong, each twenty meters long and three meters wide where they joined Yanai’s main truss. Like the rest of the ship’s skeleton the arms were tensegrity structures of diamond fiber and graphene rods—and like the rest of her skeleton they were tremendously overdesigned. Each was tipped with a door-sized adhesion pad for a good grip. Cables ran from the back of each pad to Yanai’s center of mass, so that once she clamped on there would be no flexing, no shear stress on her nose.
“Twenty meters,” said the ship. “Nineteen, eighteen, seventeen.” A meter-wide chunk of debris thunked against the observation bubble and went tumbling off into deep space, making everyone start in surprise. “Fourteen, thirteen.”
“If any claims to feel no fear, I call that one a liar,” said Atmin. “Six times have I aboard Yanai made lock-on with a tumbling wreck, and six times have I wished to be in some safe world instead.”
“Three, two, one, contact!” said the ship. The final word was drowned out by the audible crunch of the arms slamming into the spinning hull, the creak and twang of Yanai’s structure adjusting to sudden loads in new directions, and the clatter of some loose objects back in the crew quarters.
Everyone was silent for a second, looking about and listening. Then Solana and Pera said “Pressure check” aloud in unison. Solana almost chuckled.
“Crew pod pressure is steady,” said Yanai, and the lights turned back to orange.
“I’m here,” said Utsuro, and his voice sounded full of wonder and delight.
The next five days were uncomfortable and annoying. Yanai had to stabilize Safdaghar’s wobbling axis before she could shift the hab’s orbit. Steady thrust would make the precession worse. Instead, the ship had to give the habitat a precise shove once every revolution, over and over and over again. This meant a five-second burn at full power every sixty-four seconds, for more than a hundred hours. The inconvenience of living in fifty-nine-second intervals between rocket bursts meant all four of Yanai’s crew spent most of that time in bed doing entertainments or chatting.
On the third day Solana lay flat in bed, linked up with Atmin and Pera via her implant. She had mounted her bed in the corner where the outer wall met the aft floor. Most of the time she felt a ghostly pull down, caused by the spin of Yanai and the habitat to which she was docked. But once a minute she found herself lying on her side for five seconds as the down vector swung around to the aft floor. The sheet held her in place so she didn’t roll involuntarily. It wasn’t ideal, but it would have to do. Images of Atmin and Pera floated in front of her.
“Okay,” said Pera. “I’ve looked at the old design schematics, I’ve read the histories—so now give me the real story. What happened to Safdaghar?”
“We do not know much more than this,” said Atmin. “It was a small and simple hab, with twenty thousand baseline folk aboard. What little wealth they had was made from art. The humans crafted things by hand, then sold the scans across the billion worlds. From time to time they even sent out pods which held unique original creations for the rich of Juren and of Mars.”
“And then boom,” said Pera.
“And then some fate—we know not what—wrecked Safdaghar and took the lives of all within. A single rescue mission came to search for any who survived, and found here no one but the dead. For sixteen standard years the lifeless hab has spun untouched.”
“That’s what I don’t get,” said Pera. “Why leave it? We’re just beyond the Old Belt, a prime orbit. Plenty of habs within easy reach of this place in energy and time. You’d think it would’ve been repaired and resettled, or already taken apart. There has to be a reason.”
“The rights to Safdaghar were caught in legal webs, and stuck there while the spider courts of Deimos, Ceres, Mars, and even Juren all drew strands about its corpse. No salvager could sell the scrap, no bank would lend to pay for restoration of the hab, no colonist could come with title clear to any place within. Add to that the tumbling of the wreck, the halo of debris, the unknown hazards still inside, and one can hardly wonder Safdaghar has had no visitors but dust.”
“Then why are we here?” asked Pera.
“A Deimos group at long last won the fight to claim the wreck of Safdaghar, and paid off all the rest. With title clear they sold the mass to patient folk amid the outer ice. Yanai in turn put in the lowest bid to do the job of boosting Safdaghar to dance with Jupiter and send it flying out to Kuiper space.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Why are we here?”
“We four scarabs come in search of loot,” said Atmin. “This hab, though small and poor and badly hurt, still holds the goods of all who once did call it home. Some few of them had modest wealth or came of ancient lines with heirlooms fine and rare. No inventory could be made before disaster struck, so who in Kuiper space, when finally the wreck arrives in forty years, can tell if anything is gone? Then, too, the main export of Safdaghar was creativity—what work of agile minds may still be here unseen?”
“You do your looting and nobody minds because the buyers out in the Kuiper Belt just want the metals. Okay. Still seems like a lot of work just to sell somebody’s knickknacks and unpublished doodles.”
“And yet there is a chance—not certain, but the odds are good—that what we four may find within may be worth more than Safdaghar itself.”
“Somebody sell you a map to buried treasure?”
“The treasure hid in Safdaghar was not a hoard of thorium, nor some great Inner Ring device like magic to a baseline mind. It was, in fact, a man.”
“Hardly a treasure,” said Pera. “There’s half a quadrillion men in the solar system. That drives the price down.”
Solana spoke up for the first time. “The going rate for specialized slaves is ten million right now. There’s nine thousand habs where it’s legal to own someone, and forty thousand where it’s illegal but nobody cares.”
“And there’s millions of habs where everyone’s a slave because they have no rights,” said Pera.
“I fear we stray from civil speech—” Atmin began.
“That makes it okay?” Solana demanded. “Doesn’t it botheryou that there are places where owning a human as a plaything is just fine with everyone?”
Pera’s voice became a predator’s growl. “It bothers me to see some scarab getting all righteously ionized about a few million crazy pervert mammals when there are trillions being oppressed and tortured and murdered by crooks and fanatics.”
Solana was about to reply when Utsuro’s image appeared alongside the others. “Please forgive my lateness,” he said. “I was speaking to Yanai about a private matter.”
“You did not miss the most important bits,” said Atmin. “For as I was about to say, the wreck of Safdaghar may hold a treasure of great worth. There was a Martian poet known as Pasquin Tiu. Have any of you heard his work? His verse was famed on Mars and far beyond. In both Old Belt and Jovian space his words were loved—except in Deimos, where bold Pasquin gave offense. For those with wealth unmatched and sovereign might do tremble at a jest, and cannot stand to hear a laugh directed at themselves.”
“I just looked him up,” said Pera. “He disappeared twenty standard years ago.”
“He dared to give offense and Deimos took it without grace. He took another name, another face, and took to hiding what he wrote. Thus hidden and suppressed his fame grew exponentially. The Martians found his verse on walls or read it printed out by hand in ink on cellulose. They whispered poems mouth to ear, and sang them set to famous tunes, so that the music soon become a kind of secret hymn.
“Assassins sought him out and nearly got him twice. His worried friends arranged for Pasquin to leave Mars to save his life. He wrote a final book of verse with brush on silk two decades past, and nothing since. ...
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