The Clouds of Saturn E-Book

Michael McCollum

• Herausgeber: JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

When the sun flared out of control and boiled Earth's oceans, humanity took refuge in a place that few would have predicted. In the greatest migration in history, the entire human race took up residence among the towering clouds and deep clear-air canyons of Saturn's upper atmosphere. Having survived the traitor star, they returned to the all-too-human tradition of internecine strife. The new city-states of Saturn began to resemble those of ancient Greece, with one group of cities taking on the role of militaristic Sparta...

Leseprobe

THE CLOUDS OF SATURN

Copyright © 1991, 1999, 2020 by Michael McCollum

All rights reserved.

Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

ISBN 978-1-625675-17-0

Cover design by John Fisk

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

About the Author

Also by Michael McCollum

Prologue

The sun is a variable star. Changes in solar output have sent glaciers marching toward the equator every fifty thousand years or so. The last such episode took place in late prehistoric times and coincided with the displacement of Neanderthal Man by the Cro-Magnons. Nor has Modern Man been immune to the effects of the sun’s variability. During the Little Ice Age of the Sixteenth through Nineteenth Century, a minor reduction in solar output caused the harbors of Iceland and Greenland to be blocked by ice for 6 months out of every year. At least one Viking colony starved to death because of the climatic change.

It was not until the first decade of the Twenty Second Century, however, that humanity realized the true extent of Sol’s variability. Beginning in 2102, the sun was wracked by a series of solar flares. As such, outbursts grew more frequent and violent; astronomers began to reexamine their long held beliefs about the nature of the sun. It was with understandable horror that they realized Sol was about to enter a period of long term instability. Projections called for the sun’s output to increase gradually for several hundred years. While minor on the scale of the universe, the change would render Earth uninhabitable within a century. If nothing were done to stop it, the Mother of Men would become a twin to Venus — a hothouse planet on which liquid water no longer existed.

Faced with extinction, the human race directed its considerable resources toward saving the home world. No possibility was overlooked. Many research efforts were launched in a period that became known as the Golden Age of Pure Science. Despite their best efforts, the scientists could find no practical method for bringing the errant star to heel. After decades of study, Earth’s leaders reluctantly concluded that humankind would have to abandon its ancestral home. They began to search the Solar System for a place of refuge.

The haven they chose was not one many would have guessed.

1

The Battle of New Philadelphia

Larson Sands lay in his acceleration couch and watched the dawn as SparrowHawk raced eastward at a thousand kilometers per hour. Dawn on Saturn was always spectacular, but never more so than on a battle morning. As the sun climbed the sky, it quickly transformed the world from a black-and-silver etching to a blue-white panorama of air and cloud. Lars watched as the rays of the sun chased azure shadows from the deep cloud canyons, and turned The Arch overhead into a pale ghost of its former self.

“Message coming in from Delphi.”

Sands glanced toward his copilot. Halley Trevanon was a brunette in her early twenties (Standard Calendar). Halley possessed a wide mouth, full lips, green eyes, and a scar that bisected her left eyebrow. She was scanning the sensor readouts that told them what ships were in their vicinity.

“Patch him through,” Lars said.

The communications screen on the instrument panel lit to show Dane Sands’s smiling face. Dane was Lars’s younger brother, and Halley’s fiancé.

“Hello, SparrowHawk,” Dane said. “Get enough sleep last night?”

“You know damned well we didn’t!” Lars muttered back. Dane was serving aboard the New Philadelphia flagship, Delphi, some two hundred kilometers to their west. It was his task to act as liaison between SparrowHawk and her New Philadelphia employers. Like them, he had been at his post since just after Second Midnight when the first sighting reports had come in.

Five thousand kilometers to the east, a New Philadelphia scout had reported an unknown aircraft moving west at high speed. Although there had been no positive identification, the commodore commanding the New Philadelphia fleet had ordered his heavier-than-hydrogen craft launched. In the three hours since, SparrowHawk and the other ships of the fleet had been on guard for an approaching enemy. Despite their efforts, they had detected nothing.

“I’ve got some news for you,” Dane answered. “It looks like last night was a false alarm. Dakota may have suffered a sensor glitch caused by atmospheric conditions.”

Lars nodded. Saturn’s thick atmosphere of closely packed hydrogen atoms did strange things to radar performance. Eddy currents and vertical convection cells created ghosts that looked like the wake of a fast moving aircraft. Such mistakes were common.

“What are our orders?”

Dane glanced at something out of camera range. “I show you two hundred kilometers east of Delphi.”

“Correct.”

“Why don’t you work your way back in this direction? If nothing has shown up by the time you arrive, we will take you back aboard. You should be here in time for breakfast.”

“Understood,” Lars said. “We’re turning now.”

He pulled his control to the left and back slightly, sending SparrowHawk into a gentle turn. As he did so, Dane Sands asked, “How’s my girl?”

“Excited, and a little scared,” Halley responded. Like Lars, she was encased in an environment suit, with her helmet visor up. Should the ship be holed, she could seal her suit in a matter of seconds. The other four crewmen aboard SparrowHawk were similarly attired.

“Don’t wear yourself out,” Dane said. “The high command here is still hoping our show of strength will cause the Alliance to back off. We know their fleet left Cloudcroft three days ago, but we still have no evidence that they are coming here.”

“Do you really think that, my love?”

Dane flashed her his most lopsided grin. “That’s the way we’ve been betting all along, isn’t it?”

Larson Sands said nothing. Over the past few weeks, he had started to wonder if their bet had been a wise one. The Delphis were expert geneticists who had long pursued the dream of engineering a life form that could live in the upper Saturnian atmosphere. Rumors that they had developed a viable organism had reached the Northern Alliance, causing it to invite New Philadelphia to join them. The invitation had been couched in terms that caused the Delphis to look to their defenses.

As was the case with most independent cities, New Philadelphia could not afford a full-time navy to challenge the larger, more powerful Saturnian “nations.” Rather, they maintained the core of a fighting force that could be rapidly expanded in time of trouble. In addition to a few customs ships, they had turned one of their large air freighters into a powerful flagship and mobile base. To supplement this fleet, they had sent recruiters throughout the northern hemisphere looking for privateer ships and crews.

The Sands brothers and Halley Trevanon had met the Delphi recruiters in a bar aboard Pendragon City. Lars still remembered the plump songstress who belted out The Ballad of Lost Earth while the Delphi recruiters made their pitch. Afterward, Dane Sands had argued in favor of taking the job. He had thought it easy money, a simple show of force to convince the Alliance that their gain would not be worth the cost.

It was an argument that had the benefit of history on its side. For if there was one thing all the cloud cities of Saturn shared, it was their vulnerability to attack. When a single fanatic with a bomb could send an entire population plummeting into the crushing pressure of the lower atmosphere, those who ruled thought long and hard before challenging their neighbors. If faced with a large enough opposition force, the Alliance would forego its claim on New Philadelphia lest they place their own cities at risk.

Larson Sands and Halley Trevanon had been less certain about the job, but neither had voiced a strong objection to wearing the New Philadelphia livery. At the time, SparrowHawk’s fusion reactors had been more than a standard year past recommended overhaul. Worse, the ship’s half-dozen crewmen had not been paid in months. They had needed the money too badly to say no.

That had been three months ago. For some time after their arrival aboard the Delphis’ capital city, it had appeared the diplomats would resolve the dispute. A week earlier, however, the Alliance ambassador had broken off negotiations. The New Philadelphia high command had also received reports that the Alliance fleet had sortied.

New Philadelphia responded by launching their own fleet. They had sent ships east along the North Temperate Belt flyway to interpose themselves between New Philadelphia’s three cities and the Alliance. Their presence there was both a challenge and a warning. While it would be a simple matter for the Alliance to bypass the Delphi flagship and her covey of fusion powered aircraft, to do so would leave their own cities open to attack. If they were serious about annexing New Philadelphia, they would first have to seek out the New Philadelphia fleet and destroy it. The Delphis hoped to inflict enough damage that the Alliance would lose interest and go home.

As SparrowHawk came westward, it did not take long for New Philadelphia’s massive flagship to materialize out of the blue haze of distance. Delphi was an anachronism, a machine from out of another time and place. It was a dirigible, a giant gasbag half-a-kilometer in length whose whale shape traced its ancestry back to the earliest flying machines. Large stabilizers sprouted from the airship’s stern, while the bow was a blunt curve that sliced the wind with minimum resistance. Behind the great dirigible roiled a long streamer of disturbed air that marked the flagship’s exhaust. Where cargo hatches had once been, there were now weapons locks, long-range sensors, and sally ports.

Heavier than hydrogen craft like SparrowHawk had their uses, but eventually, they had to land. The giant lighter-than-hydrogen dirigibles like Delphi provided them with a place to set down. Like the ancient aircraft carriers of Earth, they were the roving bases from which the smaller craft launched their attacks. However, like those earlier behemoths, the flagship was a fragile construct. It depended on its squadrons for protection.

“Attention, All Ships! Enemy craft sighted. Fifteen hundred kilometers at ninety degrees. All craft form up on Avadon. Prepare to attack!”

Lars glanced once at Halley. The voice was that of Commodore Kraken, the Delphi commander. A flurry of orders came over the command circuit from Dane as the battle center of the flagship came alive. Lars looped SparrowHawk well behind Delphi in order to take his place in the defensive line. There were twenty-one New Philadelphia craft in all. Eighteen of these were assigned to intercept the intruders and to drive them back.

“Everyone tied down?” he asked over his intercom.

SparrowHawk’s four crewmen checked in. Ross Crandall was attending the ship’s fire control computer. Brent Garvich and Hume Bailey were at weapons stations, while Kelvor Reese monitored the ship’s auxiliary systems.

When the squadron defending Delphi had formed up, they accelerated to two thousand kilometers per hour. Even at that speed, they had not exceeded sonic velocity in Saturn’s hydrogen-helium atmosphere.

The two fleets closed to maximum range and began their first cautious probings of one another’s formations. In the thick atmosphere, lasers were limited to short range. Thus, the sky was filled with missiles as ships launched at their distant adversaries. Within seconds, individual sparks of light began to appear as enemy missiles came within laser range and were blotted from the sky.

The two dozen Alliance ships bored in to engage the mixed privateer/Delphi force. The two fleets interpenetrated. Within seconds, the sky was filled with twisting, turning ships that stabbed at one another in a deadly dance.

The Alliance drew first blood as they blasted the wing off one of the Delphi customs craft. Sands watched as the small vessel healed over and began its long dive toward the invisible hydrogen sea two thousand kilometers below. There was no fire because there is no oxygen in Saturn’s atmosphere to support combustion. While he watched, a small object separated from the single seat fighter and grew into a silver balloon with a tiny figure suspended beneath it.

Assured that the pilot had gotten out, Lars went back to the battle. The next two craft to take hits belonged to the Alliance. One of their prowlers was struck amidships by a missile that exploded it. The rain of parts was such that Sands doubted anyone had survived. The second ship, a larger destroyer, took a missile in its reactor spaces. The results were less spectacular, but sufficient to cause it to withdraw.

“We’re winning!” Halley exclaimed after she launched a missile that was destroyed by laser fire scant meters from its target. Even though vaporized, the cloud of molten drops splattered across the wing surfaces of its target, causing it to follow its wounded companion east.

“They’re not as strong as we were led to believe,” Lars said through gritted teeth.

Another Delphi ship died within the next few seconds, along with one of the larger Alliance craft. By now the dogfight was spread across so much sky that SparrowHawk appeared alone. The only nearby ship was a single seat Alliance fighter. Sands bore in as his opponent attempted to flee. His concentration was broken by a sudden cry for help.

“Attention All Ships! This is Delphi. We are under attack. The group you have engaged is a diversion. The main fleet is here. All ships to us!

“Damn!” Sands exclaimed. A high gee turn transformed the curse into an unintelligible grunt. Once lined up to the west, he advanced his throttles to emergency maximum and felt SparrowHawk leap forward.

“What’s your situation, Dane?” he asked over his private command circuit.

Dane’s face was wide-eyed as he came on the screen. Lars did not know when he had seen his brother so frightened.

“They came out of the cloud wall, Lars! Nearly thirty of them. They are boring in on the flagship. Our combat air patrol has gone out to meet them. We are running west as fast as we can. I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

“We’re on our way.”

“Hurry, damn it!”

“How many others are with us?” Lars asked Halley.

She made a quick sensor survey of the sky. She noted six other craft with the green New Philadelphia icon. There were a dozen enemy vessels behind them. The rest of the Delphi fleet was still engaged and unable to break free.

“We should have known something was wrong. No one sends a two dozen ships to attack a city.”

“Do you think Dane’s in danger?” Halley asked, horror suddenly creeping into her voice.

“I think we’re all in danger,” he replied grimly.

As they rocketed through the sky, Halley put up the long-range scanner display. What they saw sent a chill through Sands. A swarm of red icons was being opposed by three green while the flagship symbol attempted to flee. The defending New Philadelphia craft lasted only a few seconds before fluttering into the depths. They left twenty-eight intact Alliance craft free to swarm around Delphi.

“That’s it,” he said as the Alliance fleet reached the flagship. “Kraken will have to surrender now.”

Almost as though the commodore had heard Sands’s comment, the call went out. The two privateers listened gloomily as the New Philadelphia commander struck his colors. One part of Sands was saddened by the loss, another part relieved. Dane would be interned for a while, but would eventually be freed. There was no reason for the Alliance to harm captured privateers.

“Let’s get away from here,” he ordered Halley. “We don’t want to be interned, too.”

“Right.”

Ahead of them, the flagship was just coming out of the blue. It was still so distant that they could not see the smaller Alliance ships darting around it. Lars was about to turn away when the first bright flash appeared on the upper surface of the dirigible.

“What the hell?”

“They’re attacking!” Halley screamed. “They’re not accepting the surrender.”

“Stand by,” Lars ordered. “We’re going in.”

It was impossible for SparrowHawk to move any faster. Despite its headlong speed through the thick atmosphere, it seemed they were barely moving as two more missiles impacted the flagship. Sands watched in horror as the dirigible split open like a ripe grape. With the central gasbag holed and the hot hydrogen spilled to the surrounding atmosphere, the ship was unable to support its own weight. It sagged in the middle, then broke in two as its keel snapped. The stern section, burdened by heavy drive reactors, began immediately to drop toward the distant cloud floor of the flyway. Freed of the weight of the stern, the bow bounced upward as men and machinery tumbled out through the gaping hole in the midsection.

It was then that Sands realized the attack had been no mistake. The bow section was obviously helpless as it rose out of control. Yet, the Alliance ships pressed their attack. More explosions rent the forward gasbags and the bow lost its lift. It, too, foundered and then started on a long downward spiral.

Larson Sands screamed in rage as he watched the calculated cold bloodedness of the attack. Dane was in the forward combat center. Every missile hit was like a knife into his own ribs. No longer was the Alliance shooting at a dangerous enemy craft. Honest battle had been transformed into the murder of helpless men and women.

SparrowHawk reached the Alliance fleet and launched every missile in her depleted magazines. The desperation attack took the Alliance by surprise. Three ships that had been vectored to intercept the surviving New Philadelphia craft were smashed. The resulting gap allowed SparrowHawk free passage through their defense line. The arrival of the rest of the New Philadelphia fleet kept the other Alliance ships too busy to pursue.

Sands dove for the falling flagship remnant, heedless of the pain in his ears as cabin pressure increased with each kilometer of altitude lost. It began to grow warm as well. By the time SparrowHawk overtook the bow section, Delphi had plunged twenty kilometers, yet was still under attack. With no missiles in his magazines, Sands ordered his weapons crews to slash at the marauders with defensive lasers.

The initial attack on Delphi had been centered on the dirigible’s upper surface in order to dump the hot hydrogen that buoyed the ship. Since most of Delphi’s lifeboats were housed atop the gasbag, these were destroyed in the first seconds. Still, there was the possibility that individual crewmen might yet bail out. Sands kept SparrowHawk in a tight circle around the falling bow as he watched intently for the silver balloons of survivors. As the pressure and temperature continued to mount, the Alliance ships broke off the fight and climbed for the safety of the upper atmosphere. SparrowHawk continued its plunge alongside the doomed flagship.

“Come on, Dane! Get out!” Sands muttered to himself through clenched teeth as he kept one eye on the dirigible and another on the pressure readout. Beside him, Halley sobbed quietly. Sands’s universe narrowed to exclude everything but the falling airship until Ross Crandall’s growl came over the intercom.

“For God’s sake, Lars, break off! Cooking us won’t help Dane.”

Lars glanced once more at the outside temperature readout. Then, with his own sob, he pulled back on his controller and sent the ship into a flat circle. They did not gain altitude, but they were not losing any either. For the next minute, he watched as Delphi’s remains sank lower and lower. Finally, it disappeared into the cloud floor of the North Temperate Belt. As Sands scanned the sky, nowhere could he see the silver sphere of a rescue balloon.

He looked at Halley, who was staring at him. There was horror behind the glistening tears in her eyes. Suddenly, Sands felt an emptiness greater than any he had ever known.

“I’m sorry, Halley. He’s gone.”

His comment was answered by nothing save the rushing hydrogen wind beyond the hull.

2

Port Gregson

The Alouette Bar was on the outer rim of the Port Gregson support truss, beyond the protective enclosure of the gasbag, with picture windows overlooking the abyss. At one time, the place had boasted a balcony where patrons could step outside — suitably bundled up against the cold and wearing a nose breather, of course. It had been the custom for drinkers to lean over the waist high railing and spit into the wind. The balcony had been closed when one expectorator had let go with too much enthusiasm, and had nearly followed his saliva into the misty depths.

For the past twenty minutes, Larson Sands had been eyeing the graphite railing through the floor-to-ceiling plastic window and thinking how easy it would be to end his problems forever. All that was required of him was to get up from the table, walk casually to the hydrogen lock, and step through. It would then be three long strides to the city’s outer edge. Once over the railing, Lars would have two thousand kilometers of empty sky in which to soar before plunging into the hydrogen sea that had swallowed Dane. Without a breather, he would pass out from asphyxiation long before the temperature or pressure rose to fatal levels. All things considered, not a bad way to go.

“Ready for another, Lars?”

His drinking partner’s question shook him out of his reverie. Ross Crandall was an old man for a privateer. At 45 standard years, he had been a hired mercenary for more than two decades. He had once had a ship of his own, but had lost it in a brushfire war five years earlier. After bouncing from ship to ship, he had joined SparrowHawk as a weapons specialist. It had been Crandall’s marksmanship that had cleared the way for them to go to the aid of the stricken Delphi.

“Sure, Ross.”

Crandall signaled for the waitress’s attention. She sauntered over to the table. She was a typical Gregsonite, a fact made obvious by a costume that left little to the imagination. Had Lars been in a better mood, he might have been interested in the wares she was so forthrightly advertising. As it was, Crandall ordered two more scotches while Lars stared off into space.

The bar was on the starboard side of the city, which meant that it faced south. The Arch was a pale rainbow of soft white light barely visible in the royal blue sky. From this latitude, it climbed nearly one-third to the zenith. The sun was low to the right, casting darkening shadows over the cloud canyons. In only a few minutes it would dip below the horizon and First Night would begin.

“Stop torturing yourself,” Crandall said. “Dane’s death wasn’t your fault.”

“It should have been me,” he muttered, his voice breaking with emotion. “Fleet liaison is my job. If I’d done my job, Dane wouldn’t have been aboard Delphi when she went down.”

“No, but you would have! You would now be dead and Dane and I would be having this conversation. Dane was a privateer. He knew what he was doing. In our line of work, people get killed.”

“But damn it, they’d surrendered!”

Crandall nodded. “And the Alliance shot them down anyway. Not too difficult to figure their motives, is it? Most of the New Philadelphia brass were aboard that ship. Better for the Alliance that they not be around to cause problems during the assimilation. Dane was just one of the poor bastards unlucky enough to be aboard the ship when the Alliance assassinated it.”

Sands did not answer. One part of him could see the logic of Ross’s words even though most of him burned with rage at the injustice of it all. Then there was the corner of his brain that remembered how he had always laughed at people who mentioned war and justice in the same breath.

Following the disappearance of Delphi into the mist, Sands had evaded the Alliance fleet by heading directly for the nearest cloud wall. In so doing, he had adopted the tactic that the Alliance had used to set up their ambush.

Unlike Earth, which is largely heated by the sun, Saturn derives most of its heat from internal processes. The predominant mechanism is the formation of helium droplets under high pressure. Once formed, the droplets fall as helium rain into the vast hydrogen sea that covers Saturn to a depth of several thousand kilometers. As the helium droplets sink, they generate heat. As the lower atmosphere is heated, vast columns of rising hydrogen form and produce convection cells that cover many thousands of kilometers. The cells are then smeared along the lines of latitude by the planet’s high rate of rotation, forming globe girdling linear storms that give the planet its characteristic banded appearance.

The rising legs of the convection cells are called Zones, and are characterized by dense clouds and unstable conditions. As the organic-molecule-laden hydrogen rises, it cools, causing its load of chemicals to condense out to form multihued clouds at various altitudes. Blue clouds of water vapor form a layer 500 kilometers deep in the atmosphere, while a layer of brown ammonia hydrosulfide mist forms a hundred kilometers higher still. A third cloud layer, this one composed of white ammonia ice, forms at a depth of 320 kilometers from the arbitrary line that marks the edge of the planetary atmosphere. Non-condensing particulates are carried above the ammonia cloud layer by the rising convection cells. There they form the high thin haze that softens the planet’s outlines and mutes its colors when viewed from space.

By the time the rising column of hydrogen reaches the top of its arc, it is cold and largely devoid of impurities. As the column falls back toward the depths, it sweeps away the clouds and creates vast canyons of clear, stable air. The astronomers dubbed these canyons “belts” because of their dark color. It is the alternating pattern of the broad light zones and narrow dark belts that form Saturn’s bands. By diving into the cloud wall, Sands had sent his ship across the zone - belt interface and into hiding.

Once he had won free of the battle area, Sands sought safety for his ship and crew in Port Gregson. He would have preferred a sanctuary farther from the Alliance, but the long dive into the thick, hot atmosphere near the bottom of the flyway had caused SparrowHawk’s reactor to overheat. By the time they regained the heights, Port Gregson had been one of the few independent cities within range of their stricken craft.

Port Gregson was a trading city that made its living by tacking back and forth across the six thousand kilometer wide North Temperate Belt and trading with the other cities as they sailed past. Because of their need to stay on good terms with everyone, they were neutral in the various rivalries of North Saturnian politics. They had a tradition of offering sanctuary to the vanquished so long as the refugees could pay their way. Sands used the last of his crew’s funds for the city’s mandatory docking and port fees.

In the past two weeks, he had contracted with the port authorities to repair and reprovision SparrowHawk. The work was nearly done and payment due. Unfortunately, Sands was broke. If he were lucky, the Port Gregson authorities would only throw him into jail when they realized the truth. Otherwise, they might decide to drop him over the side. On Saturn, the disposal of inconvenient corpses was a matter of the utmost simplicity.

* * *

“You’re Larson Sands, aren’t you?”

Sands looked up bleary eyed at the speaker. His first impression was of an egg. When he focused his eyes, he saw that his interrogator was bald to the point where he lacked even eyebrows. Even though tall, the stranger was obviously not from Port Gregson. His clothes were conservative, but expensive, as was the gold bracelet he wore on one wrist. A diamond stickpin held his cravat in place. The stone dated from the time before Earth’s evacuation. It was priceless for that reason.

“Yes,” Sands answered warily.

“I am interested in hiring your ship. May I buy each of you a drink while we discuss it?”

“Sure,” Crandall replied for Sands. The mention of possible business sobered the old warrior faster than a cold needle shower.

The bald stranger sat down and made a show of taking off his leather gloves. These alone would have cost Lars his previous year’s earnings.

“Might we know your name?”

“Certainly. I am Micah Bolin.”

“Of what city?”

“That is not important at the moment. Let us just say that I am a citizen of Saturn.”

“Very well. You wish to hire our ship?”

“I do if you own that Air Shark Mark III down in the landing bay.”

“We do.”

“She’s beautiful,” Bolin said. “What power plant?”

“Twin Saturn Industries hundred megawatt drive reactors.”

“Range?”

“Enough for ten times around the planet,” Sands lied. When she had been new, SparrowHawk could have done it easily. In her present condition, once around would be risky. Still, at 375,000 kilometers in circumference, Saturn was a big world.

“Armament?”

“Up to one hundred air-to-air missiles with mixed seekers, full circumambient fire control, and two heavy turret mounted lasers.”

“I take it that you are between engagements,” Bolin said.

“You would have to be very ill informed not to know that,” Crandall replied.

“Your last employer?”

“New Philadelphia.”

“Ah, yes. The ill-fated defense of those poor foolish cities,” Bolin said. “I thought as much. In fact, it was New Philadelphia’s loss that spurred me to come here in search of privateers. I figured at least some of you would put into Port Gregson to reprovision.”

“What’s the job?” Lars asked.

“The job is confidential. If you are free, I would like to discuss it at some length. If not, I don’t want to waste your time … or mine.”

“We’ll always listen, Citizen Bolin.”

“Excellent.” Bolin fished in an inside pocket, retrieved a card — of real paper — and wrote a note on the back. He handed it to Sands. “Please meet me at this address at Second Dusk this evening. We’ll talk more fully then.”

Sands glanced at the address. It was in the warehouse district on the underside of the support truss. It was not the sort of neighborhood he would have expected someone who dressed as well as Bolin to visit.

“We’ll be there.”

“Not ‘we’, Captain. I want you to come alone. What I have to say requires the utmost discretion.”

“My crew will have to agree to whatever deal we make.”

“I understand that. However, I must insist that we keep our business quiet. Once you know the job, you will understand the need. Tonight at dusk?”

“Tonight at dusk,” Sands agreed.

“Excellent. I will be expecting you.” Bolin stood and walked away from the table. The two of them watched him go. Sands wished he had not drunk so much. He could not think with his head spinning and thought was what he needed most just now. Something about Bolin hadn’t rung completely true. Yet, considering the current state of their finances, they were in no position to be choosy.

As he downed one final gulp of scotch, he hoped Bolin did not know that.

* * *

Kelt Dalishaar stood on the balcony of his apartment in Government Tower and surveyed his domain. It was near first midnight, with The Notch almost directly over the city. The Notch was the region of the ring eclipsed by Saturn’s shadow. One look at its position in the night sky told one the time to within a few minutes.

Saturn’s rings never failed to fascinate Dalishaar. Their intricate structure was apparent even to the unaided eye. From one of the cloud cities, The Arch looked to have the texture of an ancient phonograph record. With even a small telescope it was possible to see the twisting strands of the F Ring and the spokes that had so surprised Earthbound astronomers when first they noticed them. Gazing at the proportion of the sky that The Arch covered, it was easy to forget that the whole imposing display consisted of a band of ice particles only a few hundred meters thick. Dalishaar remembered a trip to the southern hemisphere many years earlier. As their suborbital transport had reached the apex of its trajectory, the sun had slipped into eclipse behind a knife-edged ring. It had been a moment that had disturbed him greatly, for it had been a reminder of just how insignificant human beings are on the scale of the universe.

Dalishaar let his gaze sweep down the darkened horizon to where the base of The Arch dropped behind the cloud walls of the North Temperate Belt. Stretched out as far as he could see were the cities of the Northern Alliance. In two weeks, they would be passing the Dardanelles Cyclone. The cyclone was a giant storm that intruded into the flyway, narrowing it to less than one-quarter its normal six thousand kilometer width. Since even the cyclone’s outermost winds could blow a cloud city off course, the storm was always given a wide berth. They would be literally hugging the northern cloud wall of the flyway during the passage.

The move north took place at approximately the same time every standard year as the Alliance’s swift passage around Saturn brought it into phase with the equally swift moving thousand-year-old storm. As the fifty Alliance cities maneuvered into line astern order, they bunched closer than at any other time. The sight was a reminder that the Alliance was growing steadily year-by-year.

Kelt Dalishaar had often thought that he had been born into the wrong century. Back before the sun had gone awry, the human race had seemed to be evolving toward maturity. The ancient nation-states and their inefficient partitioning of resources had slowly given way to a larger international order. In another few centuries, the human race would have been truly united for the first time in its history.

The discovery that the sun was flaring out of control had actually accelerated the process for a time. For more than a hundred years, humans put aside their bickering to work together against the traitor star. At first, they tried to find a way to protect the home planet. When that had failed, they cooperated in evacuating the race to the upper reaches of Saturn’s atmosphere. Most had expected the cooperation to continue. They were badly mistaken.

The advent of the cloud city had brought with it a disintegration of human social order. On Earth, people were largely confined to the nations into which they were born. That was because their cities were tied to a particular geographic location. The free-flying cities of Saturn, however, could go where they would. Thus, it was easy for a dissident city to seek other associations if they were unhappy with their rulers. Though some hailed this as an expansion of freedom, Kelt Dalishaar saw it as the road to anarchy. It was his goal and that of the Northern Alliance to someday to bring Saturn under a single political administration.

As he gazed at the line of cities astern, Dalishaar’s eyes dropped to the lights of Cloudcroft itself. The habitat barrier was close enough above him that he could feel the heat radiating from the main hydrogen gasbag overhead. Although transparent and relatively non-reflecting, the barrier did reflect those lights out near the edge of the city. The reflections created a phantom line of illumination just beyond the city’s rim, a “barrier reef” as Dalishaar was fond of calling the illusion.

His attention was drawn to a line of strobing lights far off in the distance. He recognized the hull beacons of an approaching ship. It was, he decided, one of the big dirigibles transporting prisoners from New Philadelphia. He scowled as he remembered how the Militarists had pushed their plan to conquer the geneticists through the Alliance Council. The council had adopted the scheme against Dalishaar’s advice. The Militarists were now stronger because of their success.

Like all members of the council, Dalishaar believed in the Alliance’s manifest destiny to one day rule Saturn. Still, he found the Militarists’ impatience to be childish. Didn’t the fools understand that there were other ways to unification than conquest? Given time, the Delphis could have been made to see the advantages of peaceful assimilation. Moreover, if they had remained reluctant, there were still economic and political pressures that could have been brought to bear. As it was, the Militants had gotten their way and thereby put every independent city on Saturn on their guard. This was an especially bad time to remind them that they had an expansionist power in their midst.

If only the damned admirals had waited until…

Dalishaar clamped down on the thought as quickly as it flowed into his brain. The admirals were ignorant of his special project and he intended to keep them that way. They would learn nothing until he had consolidated his own position and fought back this latest danger to his personal power. So careful was he about keeping the secret that he did not even allow himself to think about it. That way he would be less likely to whisper something in his sleep. Not only did an occasional eavesdropping device turn up in his apartments, at least one of his mistresses was in the pay of the Militarists.

3

Kimber

Port Gregson was a typical Saturnian cloud city. Lift was provided by heated hydrogen trapped inside a ten-kilometer diameter gasbag. A light support truss stretched across the gasbag at its equator and was attached to the ultra-strong membrane around its periphery. The support truss was the structural base to which the city’s buildings were anchored. A fusion power plant was suspended ten kilometers below the city proper where it hung like the basket of an ancient terrestrial balloon. The power plant provided the energy to heat the hydrogen inside the gasbag and produce the buoyancy that kept Port Gregson and its inhabitants aloft in the clouds.

From above, Port Gregson looked like an earthbound city of an earlier century. Imposing (but lightweight) edifices were interspersed between wide thoroughfares and greenswards. Only when one approached the city from below was it obvious that its habitable volume extended throughout the open framework of the truss. Not only were structures built atop the deck that covered the truss, they were buried within its volume and suspended by cables from its lowest levels. Around the truss edges were a series of portals through which aircraft entered and left the city. Also buried inside the support truss were the giant maneuvering engines that allowed Port Gregson to tack back and forth across the flyway.

A few hundred meters above the upper deck, a transparent membrane covered the city. This was the habitat barrier inside which the city engineer maintained a breathable mixture of oxygen and helium. Since both the habitat barrier and the gasbag were transparent, inhabitants strolling through the city’s parks had the illusion of being outdoors beneath Saturn’s rich blue sky.

Like the other cloud cities, Port Gregson hovered at the 500-kilometer depth in Saturn’s atmosphere. At that level, the temperature remained near the freezing point of water. Atmospheric pressure was ten times what had existed at Earth mean sea level before the sun flared, but Saturn’s low-density hydrogen-helium atmosphere robbed the wind of much of its force. This combination of high pressure, low density, and moderate temperature was surprisingly Earth-like for a world that orbited one-and-a-half billion kilometers from the sun.

Nor were those the only aspects of the Saturnian environment that were Earth-like. With an overall density only 60% that of water and a diameter of 120,000 kilometers, Saturn’s surface gravity at the poles was only 16% greater than Earth standard. The planet’s high rate of spin further reduced the gravitational pull. As one approached the equator, centrifugal force subtracted from gravity until it was slightly less than Earth-normal. Overall, a comfortable environment for the refugees from the inner solar system.

The Saturnian day was an annoyingly short one, however. The planet rotated on its axis every 10 hours and 40 minutes. Humanity had solved the problem by adopting a diurnal rhythm that encompassed two complete revolutions of the planet. Thus, each Saturnian ‘day’ was 21.3 hours long and included two sunrises and sunsets. The rising and setting of the sun divided the day into four parts that corresponded roughly to morning, afternoon, evening, and night. To keep the years straight, a calendar of 411 of the short Saturnian days had been adopted. The system was not perfect, but it simplified the problem of adapting to an alien world. Keeping accurate time was further complicated by the varying rates at which the winds blew the cloud cities around the planet, and the progression of seasons as the planet circled the sun once every 29.5 standard years.

Larson Sands thought of none of this as he made his way across the park that fronted the hotel where he and his people were staying. Saturn’s gravity and length of day were as natural to him as breathing, as was the elevated timbre of human voices and other sounds transmitted through the city’s helium-oxygen atmosphere. Indeed, he had heard recordings that had been modified to simulate what human voices would sound like in a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere. The women had all sounded like men and listening to the men had made his throat ache in sympathy.

The hotel was the Saturn Royale, the best in Port Gregson. When one is bankrupt, Sands reasoned, it is important to keep up appearances. Otherwise, the city’s authorities might begin to wonder if SparrowHawk’s crew could afford all the port charges their ship was accumulating down in the landing bays. The secret to keeping out of debtor’s prison was to ensure not only that the question was never asked, but also that it was never even considered.

As he made his way across the spongy surface of the park, past trees anchored in the light foam of their planters, Larson’s thoughts were occupied by the coming interview with Micah Bolin. If anything, the uneasy feeling Sands had experienced in the bar was even greater now that he had had a chance to sober up. Whatever Bolin wanted from him, it was obviously not a normal privateer’s contract. Those were concluded in lawyers’ offices with bonus, penalty, and non-performance clauses spelled out for both sides in dreary detail. This furtive meeting in the bowels of the Port Gregson industrial district reeked of something else entirely.

Larson found a lift and pressed the call button. Moments later he was dropping swiftly toward the lower levels of the support truss. When he stepped out, he found himself in an enclosed corridor deep in the heart of the city. This was a warehouse district where cargo was sorted and stored. Port Gregson’s status as a trading city meant that work never truly ceased in the giant warehouses, but since Second Night was when most people slept, Larson Sands found the corridor deserted.

Sands walked briskly toward the address scrawled on the back of the card he had been given. The meeting place was at the end of a side corridor in a part of the city where factory space was available on a short-term lease. He rapped quickly on the closed door. A moment later, it opened and he found himself facing a hard-eyed guard.

“I’m here to see Citizen Bolin.”

The guard gestured for him to enter. Sands did so and found himself in a large compartment whose sole furnishings consisted of a table, a few chairs, and a battered auto kitchen. An upper level office jutted out over the warehouse facility. The translucent office window glowed with interior light. The guard directed Sands up a set of stairs. He climbed them quickly and was about to knock when Micah Bolin opened the office door.

“Come in, Sands. Welcome.” The bald man held out a hand and grasped Larson’s in a firm grip. Bolin was still dressed in the expensive suit and jewelry that he had worn in the Alouette Bar. Something about his posture suggested to Sands that he was more at home in a uniform. What had begun as a stray thought quickly grew into a strong conviction as Sands watched his potential client move back to the desk at the far end of the enclosure. Bolin walked in the unconscious gait of a man pacing the bridge of an airship.

The furnishings inside the office were only slightly less spartan than those outside. Whoever Bolin was, he obviously had not been the occupant for long and did not appear to be staying for any great period. Bolin offered him a seat in front of the battered desk on which an electronic tablet was open and operating.

“Coffee?”

“Thank you, yes.”

Bolin spoke briefly into the comm unit on his wrist, and moments later, Sands heard a set of footsteps climbing the stairs outside. The door opened and a third man appeared. He had a military air about him, too. The — orderly? — poured coffee from a plastic brewer into two insulated cups, then handed one to Sands. The privateer checked the temperature indicator built into the side of the cup to make sure the liquid would not scald him. The action was purely automatic. At the atmospheric pressure under which Saturnians lived, water did not boil until it reached 180°C.

Micah Bolin took the second cup and set it on his desk. He then waited for the orderly to leave. The bald man regarded Sands with a penetrating gaze.

“Where were you born, Sands?” he asked without preamble when they were alone once more.

“Sorrell Three.”

“That is in the South Equatorial Belt, is it not?”

Sands nodded. “It is now. We started out in the South Temperate Belt. They moved the city when I was ten. My father is still paying his share of the assessment.”

“An agricultural city, isn’t it?”

“We grew grapes and made them into wine.”

“Ah, yes. I had a glass of Sorrell champagne once. Quite tasty as I remember. How does the son of vintners get to be a privateer?”

Sands shrugged. “I didn’t want to be a farmer. You have me at a disadvantage, Citizen. You have told me precious little beyond your name. Who do you represent?”

“That is confidential.”

“I won’t work blind.”

“You won’t have to. But you will learn the name only when I’m ready to tell you.”

“I can keep a secret,” Sands replied. “A privateer who can’t keep his mouth shut concerning his clients quickly discovers that he has none.”

“The same goes for people in my profession,” Bolin said.

“Then you aren’t representing your own city?”

“No, of course not. Like you, I am a professional. I was engaged by my sponsors to find someone to do a job for them.”

“What sort of job?”

“A raid. Although it is to look like a simple grab for resources, the primary purpose is to bring political pressure to bear.”

“A raid against what city?”

Bolin smiled. The expression did not help his looks. “That information will come later as well. First I must know whether you are the right man for the job.”

“You seem to have learned a great deal about me already. What more do you need to know?”

“I have garnered mere facts. Now I must know what sort of man you are.” Bolin glanced down at the desk. He reached out to key his tablet. There was a quiet beeping noise after which Bolin began to read aloud. “Larson Clarke Sands. Age 32. As you said, the son of prosperous merchants aboard Sorrell 3. You attended the Aeronautical School at Nueva Rhoelm briefly, but left after getting into a fight with one of the other students. You returned home, tried to work in the family business, then joined a privateer crew under Gentleman Jacques Le Vesque. You took part in the Battle of the Cusp on the winning side. You used your bonus to invest in a ship of your own. You returned home briefly to recruit your younger brother. The two of you served a number of cities over the last five years. Your brother was killed two weeks ago during the battle between New Philadelphia and the Northern Alliance and you have been grieving his loss ever since.”

“You didn’t come to Port Gregson looking for just any privateer,” Sands said, trying to control his rising anger. “Why me?”

“You would seem to be uniquely suited to the task at hand. Tell me, why did you sign up with New Philadelphia? Surely you must have known that the Delphis would be no match for the Alliance.”

Sands shrugged. “We didn’t expect the argument to come to blows. We thought a good show of force would be enough to dissuade the Alliance. Obviously, we were wrong. They were set on annexing another helpless city and nothing we could have done would have stopped them.”

“You believe the Alliance to be imperialistic then?”

“Anyone who doesn’t is a fool.”

“How would you like the opportunity to avenge your brother’s death?”

Sands sat suddenly upright, a surge of adrenaline boiling through his veins. He had thought of little else these past two weeks. Despite his reaction, he answered cautiously, “How do I go about doing that?”

“The Alliance is pressuring my sponsors to join them. Those I serve would like to divert their attention.”

“By raiding them?”

Bolin nodded.

“What do they want us to do? Waylay one of their freighters?”

Bolin’s eyes flashed with some inner emotion. After a moment, he said, “Nothing so minor. The target is to be Cloudcroft, the Alliance capital!”

* * *

Kimber Crawford sat in the spacecraft lounge and watched the deep canyon of North Temperate Belt glide by around her. Kimber was dark haired, with a wide face that had inherited the best traits of several of her polyglot ancestors. Like most Titanians, she was well above average in height. Titan had largely been settled by people from Luna to whom Saturn’s gravity had seemed oppressive. Although fifty percent larger than Earth’s moon, Titan’s lower density gave it a nearly identical gravity field. As humanity had learned early in the twenty second century, people who live under low gees tend to grow tall.

It had been five hours since the Titanian freighter had slipped under the Ring to enter the vast envelope of hydrogen and helium that is Saturn’s atmosphere. Four times the ship dipped among the outermost wisps of gas before rising once again to space. Each entry shed part of the freighter’s 23 kilometer per second orbital speed. After three hours spent porpoising between atmosphere and vacuum, the freighter dove into the rarified atmosphere for the last time. As it dropped toward the distant cloud tops, it was bathed in a sheath of superheated plasma that lit up the Saturnian night.

The full entry into atmosphere was the most dangerous part of any ship’s return from space. If a vessel’s entry angle were too steep, its wings would snap off under the stress and its broken body would plunge out of control toward the liquid hydrogen sea below. Kimber could not imagine a more horrible death than lying strapped into an acceleration couch while waiting to be crushed and broiled to death.

She was breathing easier now that particular danger was past. The freighter had successfully made the transition from spaceship to fusion-powered aircraft an hour earlier, and was even now approaching Cloudcroft. It was Second Night outside and Kimber could make out the bright string of pearls in the distance that were the Alliance cities. She felt rather than heard the change in the ship’s engines as the captain reduced power for the final approach. The change caused a transformation in her mood. She had been sightseeing primarily to take her mind off the difficult task ahead. Now that they were almost there, she reviewed the speech she would give at the welcoming ceremony that waited in Cloudcroft’s landing bay. This was her first diplomatic mission and she was anxious to see it succeed.

Because Saturn’s rocky core was covered by several thousand kilometers of superhot liquid hydrogen under enormous pressure, the planet’s supply of metals was beyond reach. For that reason, humanity depended on Saturn’s moons for its stocks of metals and a number of important inorganics. There were mining colonies on Dione, Rhea, and Titan. The mines on Titan were the largest and most productive, making the Titanian colonists a power to be reckoned with.

Envon Crawford, Kimber’s father, was the Factor of Titan. Crawford had held his position for nearly twenty years and hoped that his daughter would one day succeed him in office. To this end, he had begun Kimber’s training at an early age. When she was old enough, he had dispatched her to Oxford-in-the-Clouds, the preeminent university on Saturn. Four years of hard work had earned her a Master’s Degree in Industrial Economics. She planned to go for her doctorate, but had been called home when her mother fell ill two years earlier. She acted as her father’s hostess at official functions following her mother’s death. To her own surprise, she discovered a talent for the give and take of diplomacy. As part of her training, the elder Crawford appointed her to head the annual trade mission to negotiate copper prices with Titan’s largest customers. Their first stop was to be the Northern Alliance.

“We’re beginning our approach to Cloudcroft, Miss Crawford,” a voice said from behind her. “Captain Nyquist says that you can observe from the cockpit if you like.”

“I would like that a lot, Miles!” she told the grizzled flight engineer cum steward.

The freighter’s pilot glanced over his shoulder as she entered the darkened cockpit. Saturn’s ring was a broad arch to their left and Cloudcroft was a brilliantly lit pearl directly ahead. Far off through the night, she could see the lightning flashes that punctuated the flyway’s nearby wall. The laminar flow that marked the flyway came to an abrupt end at the cloud wall. Any city that crossed the boundary was liable to be torn asunder within a few minutes. Even if they survived, the first rainstorm they encountered would so weigh them down with condensate that they would slip into the depths.

As they approached the lighted balloon that was their destination, they were able to make out a thin dark band circling its waist. This was outer edge of the support truss. Flashing lights marked the openings where ships could slip inside the vast structure. The freighter banked and slowed, suddenly dropping to a speed where the wind whistling across the wings could no longer support its weight. There was another change in the pitch of the engines as the underjets came alive. The freighter slowed even more.

“Cloudcroft Approach Control, this is Gotham out of Titania. We are in your outer approach zone, ready to come aboard.”

“We have you on our screens Gotham. Place your controls into auto.”

“Auto engaged.”

“Very well Gotham. You will be arriving in Landing Bay Number Six. Stand by.”

The pilot removed his hands from the controls and sat back in his seat. The freighter hovered for a moment longer, then smoothly slid forward. The city grew until it filled the windscreen. Kimber watched as the landing hatch swelled to displace everything else in view. Then, with a barely perceptible bump, they were down on the landing ledge that jutted out from the cavernous open bay. A few seconds later, mechanical arms reached out to hook a cable into the spacecraft’s nose and they were pulled inside the oversize ship lock.

Once through the lock, they found themselves in a giant bay lit by overhead flood lamps. A crowd of dignitaries began to form up on the far side as Kimber slid out of her seat. She took a deep breath and headed for the midships lock. The moment of truth was upon her.

4

Plot and Counterplot

“Raid Cloudcroft? Are you out of your fucking mind?”

Bolin leaned back in his chair and gazed at Sands through steepled fingers. “I don’t believe so. Are you saying that it can’t be done?”

“I’m saying that only a fool would try! The Alliance fleet is the strongest in the North Temperate Belt. Believe me, I should know! If we were to approach within a hundred kilometers without clearance, they would blast us out of the sky.”

“What if a way can be found through the patrols and sensor nets? What if you could board Cloudcroft undetected?”

“Then we might get away with some loot. But it’s still a lousy idea.”

“Why?”

“Look, Citizen,” Sands said, “a successful privateer needs more than a fast ship and a crew willing to risk their lives. Raiders who want to die in bed learn to choose their targets with the same care they put into the genetic makeup of their children. First, there is the matter of finding the right victim. You need a city that has accumulated enough wealth to justify the risk, but not so much that they can put a lot of resources into retribution. Once raided, most cities would rather strengthen their defenses than fund a punitive expedition. The Northern Alliance looks at things differently. If we are successful, there will be no escape for my crew and me. They will track us to Alpha Centauri if they have to. Once they’ve caught us, they’ll wring the name of your sponsor out of us and then send a fleet to punish them.”

“And if we can keep you and your people safe?”

“They’ll still have their suspicions.”

“That you can count on,” Bolin said. “In fact, we are counting on it. Without evidence, however, their suspicions will be unfocused. They will lead the Alliance leaders to become frustrated and more than a little paranoid. They will suspect everyone and launch an investigation. That will monopolize their attention for a very long time, thereby taking the pressure off my clients.”

“You hope,” Lars said sarcastically.