«Why?»
«Hell. The four innermost divisions of Dante's hell. They form a great ice plain with sinners frozen into it.»
«Stick to the point,» said Ausfaller.
«Start with the cometary halo,» Carlos told me. «It's very thin: about one comet per spherical volume of the Earth's orbit. Mass is denser going inward: a few planets, some inner comets, some chunks of ice and rock, all in skewed orbits and still spread pretty thin. Inside Neptune there are lots of planets and asteroids and more flattening of orbits to conform with Sol's rotation. Outside Neptune space is vast and empty. There could be uncharted planets. Singularities to swallow ships.»
Ausfaller was indignant. «But for three to move into main trade lanes simultaneously?»
«It's not impossible, Sigmund.»
«The probability —»
«Infinitesimal, right. Bey, it's damn near impossible. Any sane man would assume pirates.»
It had been a long time since I had seen Sharrol. I was sorely tempted. «Ausfaller, have you traced the sale of any of the loot? Have you gotten any ransom notes?» Convince me!
Ausfaller threw back his head and laughed.
«What's funny?»
«We have hundreds of ransom notes. Any mental deficient can write a ransom note, and these disappearances have had a good deal of publicity. The demands were a fakes. I wish one or another had been genuine. A son of the Patriarch of Kzin was aboard Wayfarer when she disappeared. As for loot — hmm. There has been a fall in the black market prices of boosterspice and gem woods. Otherwise-2 He shrugged. «There has been no sign of the Barr originals or the Midas Rock or any of the more conspicuous treasures aboard the missing ships.»
«Then you don't know one way or another.»
«No. Will you go with us?»
«I haven't decided yet. When are you leaving?»
They'd be taking off tomorrow morning from the East End. That gave me time to make up my mind.
After dinner I went back to my room, feeling depressed. Carlos was going, that was clear enough. Hardly my fault … but he was here on Jinx because he'd done me and Sharrol a large favor. If he was killed going home …
A tape from Sharrol was waiting in my room. There were pictures of the children, Tanya and Louis, and shots of the apartment she'd found us in the Twin Peaks arcology, and much more.
I ran through it three times. Then I called Ausfaller's room. It had been just too futzy long.
I circled Jinx once on the way out. I've always done that, even back when I was flying for Nakamura Lines, and no passenger has ever objected.
Jinx is the close moon of a gas giant planet more massive then Jupiter and smaller than Jupiter because its core has been compressed to degenerate matter. A billion years ago Jinx and Primary were even closer, before tidal drag moved them apart. This same tidal force had earlier locked Jinx's rotation to Primary and forced the moon into an egg shape, a prolate spheroid. When the moon moved outward, its shape became more nearly spherical, but the cold rock surface resisted change.
That is why the ocean of Jinx rings its waist, beneath an atmosphere too compressed and too hot to breathe, whereas the points nearest to and farthest from Primary, the East and West Ends, actually rise out of the atmosphere.
From space Jinx looks like God's Own Easter Egg: the Ends bone white tinged with yellow, then the brighter glare from rings of glittering ice fields at the limits of the atmosphere, then the varying blues of an Earthlike world, increasingly overlaid with the white frosting of cloud as the eyes move inward, until the waist of the planet-moon is girdled with pure white. The ocean never shows at all.
I took us once around and out.
Sirius has its own share of floating miscellaneous matter cluttering the path to interstellar space. I stayed at the controls for most of five days for that reason and because I wanted to get the feel of an unfamiliar ship.
Hobo Kelly was a belly-landing job, three hundred feet long, of triangular cross section. Beneath an uptilted, forward-thrusting nose were big clamshell doors for cargo. She had adequate belly jets, and a much larger fusion motor at the tail, and a line of windows indicating cabins. Certainly she looked harmless enough, and certainly there was deception involved. The cabin should have held forty or fifty, but there was room only for four. The rest of what should have been cabin space was only windows with holograph projections in them.
The drive ran sure and smooth up to a maximum at ten gravities: not a lot for a ship designed to haul massive cargo. The cabin gravity held without putting out more than a fraction of its power. When Jinx and Primary were invisible against the stars, when Sirius was so distant that I could look directly at it, I turned to the hidden control panel Ausfaller had unlocked for me. Ausfaller woke up, found me doing that, and began showing me which did what.
He had a big X-ray laser and some smaller laser cannon set for different frequencies. He had four self-guided fusion bombs. He had a telescope so good that the ostensible ship's telescope was only a finder for it. He had deep radar.
And none of it showed beyond the discolored hull.
Ausfaller was armed for Bandersnatchi. I felt mixed emotions. it seemed we could fight anything and run from it, too. But what kind of enemy was he expecting?
An through those four weeks in hyperdrive, while we drove through the Blind Spot at three days to the light-year, the topic of the ship eaters reared its disturbing head.
Oh, we spoke of other things: of music and art and of the latest techniques in animation, the computer programs that let you make your own holo flicks almost for lunch money. We told stories. I told Carlos why the Kdatlyno Lloobee had made busts of me and Emil Home. I spoke of the only time the Pierson's Puppeteers had ever paid off the guarantee on a General Products hull, after the supposedly indestructible hull had been destroyed by antimatter. Ausfaller had some good ones … a lot more stories than he was allowed to tell, I gathered, from the way he had to search his memory every time.
But we kept coming back to the ship eaters.
«It boils down to three possibilities,» I decided. «Kzinti, puppeteers, and humans.»
Carlos guffawed. «Puppeteers? Puppeteers wouldn't have the guts!»
«I threw them in because they might have some interest in manipulating the interstellar stock market. Look, our hypothetical pirates have set up an embargo, cutting Sol System off from the outside world. The puppeteers have the capital to take advantage of what that does to the market. And they need money. For their migration.»
«The puppeteers are philosophical cowards.»
«That's right. They wouldn't risk robbing the ships or coming anywhere near them. Suppose they can make them disappear from a distance?»
Carlos wasn't laughing now. «That's easier than dropping them out of hyperspace to rob them. It wouldn't take more than a great big gravity generator … and we've never known the limits of puppeteer technology.»
Ausfaller asked, «You think this is possible?»
«Just barely. The same goes for the kzinti. The kzinti are ferocious enough. Trouble is, if we ever learned they were preying on our ships, we'd raise pluperfect hell. The kzinti know that, and they know we can beat them. Took them long enough, but they learned.»
«So you think it's humans,» said Carlos.
«Yeah. If it's pirates.»
The piracy theory still looked shaky. Spectrum telescopes had not even found concentrations of ship's metals in the space where they have vanished. Would pirates steal the whole ship? If the hyperdrive motor was still intact after the attack, the rifled ship could be launched into infinity, but could pirates count on that happening eight times out of eight?