Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 Read Free Page A

keep watch on their enemies.
    I further worked some controls to bring up an image, from orbit, of the Cleaver colony raft as Madeleine replied, "We stole it from the Cleavers. We found out they were bringing in something valuable from the North and ambushed them."
    I glanced round at Harriet, who had moved with eerie silence to stand at my shoulder.
    "Squabbling children," she said, in one of her moments of clarity.
    So it seemed, and a plot by the Cleavers to put the Frobishers in my bad books, nicely exacerbated by Madeleine Frobisher's greed and intent to extend her off-world interests. I'd been dragged into a silly feud, my time had been wasted, my body had been damaged and the Client would be pissed off. However, before I could furtherconsider what the Client's reaction would be, the bathysphere arrived with a shuddering crash in its docking cage. I would find out soon enough, I decided.
    "Goodbye, Madeleine," I said, and cut the connection.
    The bathysphere door opened into an oval tube twenty feet across and ten high. Everything aboard the
Coin Collector
was of a similar scale—this tube apparently matching the size of burrows made by prador yet to grow into huge father-captains and lose their legs in that process. The interior was plain metal, the lower half roughened with fingertip-sized pyramidal spikes for grip, tubes of varying sizes branching off for the different iterations of prador children. Its design was obviously an old one, made long before the prador started designing the décor of their ships to match their home environment, and long before the father-captains dared to come out of their lairs. As I strode into it, the human lighting from induction blisters grew brighter, revealing a group of about twenty thetics marching in perfect synchronization across a junction. I headed over to a parking platform for various designs of scooter, Harriet pacing at my side like some faithful hound.
    I mounted a gyroscope balanced mono-scooter, engaged its drive, and using the detached throttle and steering baton, guided it from the platform and up along the tunnel to the end where a steep switchback took me up another level. Harriet followed me all the way, still hound-faithful for, except on the odd occasions when I allowed her to let her instincts reign, she never left my side. Five levels later I arrived at a massive oval door, dismounted and walked toward it. With a loud crump it separated diagonally and the two halves revolved up into the walls, whereupon I entered a small captain's sanctum packed with human equipment plugged into the ancient prador controls. As I approached the consoles, with their hexagonal screens above, they abruptly came on to show me the views I had been seeing in the bathysphere. I stared at them for a long time, utterly certain now of what was to come, then I turned away.
    It was time for me to deal with my injuries and the inevitable upbraiding from the Client—a prospect I did not relish at all. I walked over to a case against one wall, a thing that looked very much like an iron maiden, woodenly stripping off my jacket as I went. I tossed the jacket into a bin beside it, then struggled with my boots, trousers, shirt, and undergarments—a thetic would collect them later and clean and repair them. Naked, I opened the front door of the case to reveal a human-shaped indentation inside, turned round and backed into it, Harriet watching me like a curious puppy. I closed up the lid and immediately I felt the bayonet connections sliding into my body, then everything began to shut down.
    Next I gazed from old dying eyes, reality broken into thousands of facets easily interpretable to a distributed mind, even though the dimensions it could perceive were beyond reason to a human one. However, the facets were going out. Pheromone receptors were stuttering too, and synaesthetic interpreters churning nonsense. Meanwhile, down below, the hot tightness came in peristaltic waves and something was