PART ONE: LIFE IN BABYLON

Tali Talasea fell. All around her extended the curved world wall of Babylon Port and the sun was a funnel stretched across the thirty-five kilometres of the zero-g spine. Her acceleration remained low; she estimated that she had about six minutes before reaching the middle layer of the cylinder, where the centrifugal gravity would become too high for her terminal velocity to be survivable. In a split second of morbid curiosity, Talasea wondered if her splat on the ground would be more red or blue, on account of her purple blood, and how the light would diffract through her dead eyes, open and aimed at the elongated sun. Down below stood the white domes and aquamarine pools of a polyclinic for retired astronauts: what a way to go. She exhaled. In her youth on Alcyone Port, in the distant Pleiades, she had learned the intricacies of O’Neill skydiving, of the subtle transition between zero, limited and full gravity as one descended through the atmospheric layers. A familiar vertigo took hold of her stomach. She knew of more unpleasant ways to die, but today would not be the day.

The wind caught her. It ran counterspinwards. It was born of the thermal gradient between the cool equatorial mangroves and the warm sun above, an artificial creation for skydivers, kite dancers and other amateurs of the tubular firmament. Talasea began drifting towards the nearest world-tree, which towered many kilometres above the ground, and aimed for the thick leaves of the uppermost layer, hoping that the branches and sap pouches would cushion her impact.

The greenery swallowed her, and she smashed into the spongy trunk beneath. Pain seared through her ribs. She started to fall again, ripping her shawl on a dead branch, managing to tilt herself upright, and her feet finally touched the cragged body of a primary fork. She checked herself: no blood, no haematomas. Her monad remained silent. She looked around: the branch was as large as an oceangoing boat, and formed a small, self-contained dominion, from which protruded thousands upon thousands of secondary limbs, like the trees of a deciduous forest that would have decided to become both linear and rotund. A thick fog covered the base of the plant in a pearlescent shroud. Talasea made her way towards a maintenance staircase and hoisted herself down with the railing until she reached a platform that hung from a secondary branch and linked up with the flitter network that criss-crossed Babylon Port. A cleaning drone interrupted its vacuuming of the benches and rolled in her direction.

“Hello!” the drone said, in a reedy voice. “You seem lost. May I be of assistance?”

“No, thanks. I’m just waiting for a ride back home.”

“Are you hurt? You look like you’ve fallen.”

“Yes, I come from the sky. Nothing serious. I am alright. You can return to your chores.”

“Oh. Okay. Good day!”

The drone whistled and went back to its dutiful cleaning of already-pristine furniture. A flitter buzzed in the fog, oriented its ducted fans downwards, landed on the platform at the end of the station and opened its canopy. Talasea limped inside and typed an address in the equatorial city. The drone beeped.

“Hey, hey, hey, are you sure you’re alright?” it asked one more time before the glass bubble closed and the flitter departed in the comforting murmur of its electric engines.

Oh, yes, she was alright, as much as one could be after their first assassination attempt in fifteen years.

Walking the streets of the equatorial city, Talasea could still feel the railing cracking under her weight, along the delicate, nigh-invisible fault line drawn by a low-powered laser. Beginning the day with an assassination attempt had not been part of her agenda, but neither had been the letter from the Astropostale urging her to investigate the gnarly incident of the Theodora. The affair was most odd: a postal ship from the early interstellar era, a big machine with engines and radiators and not much else, found drifting in the Kuiper belt, the hull pierced by a crude coilgun, the two pilots murdered, and, in a secured case, fifteen desiccated, radiation-sterilised cocoa beans. The techies from Pluto had managed to trace the ammunition to a former arms dealing outfit, once owned by one G.S. Harrow, a distinguished Tideless from Babylon Port. The Astropostale had sent a letter and received a polite response: Harrow had been very adamant he needed not to be seen, and had to meet Talasea in the world-tree forest, far from prying eyes, on platform seventeen at the five-kilometre mark.

Was it truly murder, though? As a denizen of Babylon, Harrow had to be familiar with the physics of spin habitats, and surely aware that Talasea’s fall would be a protracted affair, giving her ample opportunities to recover and escape unscathed. In this light, the scenario seemed cohesive enough. Harrow had gunned down the Theodora a whole era of human history ago, killing the crew to satisfy some obscure Kinetic Age feud, and the inquiries from the Astropostale had startled him enough to try and scare the mailfolk away. Talasea had already been roughed up in service of the interstellar post office, and an impromptu skydiving session looked meagre in comparison to sword-fighting atop a burning submarine or battling the Eloran tax ministry. Yet, the morning had left the taste of blood in her throat, and a lingering question: why such wanton violence?

Talasea sauntered towards the downtown convent, where she had found a room. The equatorial city of Babylon Port was no exception to the tortuous urbanism practised in Sol-based spin habs, some of which predated the civilisation of the Pleiades by a good century. Babylon was a mishmash of Terran influences, from the Art Nouveau fantasies of the Kinetic Age to the brutalist excess of the early interstellar era, when Saturn, once the glorious vanguard of human expansion, had become a mere stop for outgoing spaceships in search of cheap reaction mass. The Babylon Republic made no effort to organise the resulting tissue, and this sprawling mass of history impeded Talasea’s attempts at understanding the station. Still, she found her way back to the convent. The sisters of the Outer Church were hard at work in the apotropaic garden, raking gravels to form delicate pathways that swirled between thyme and cypress trees. Talasea bowed to the mother superior, who was busy pruning a rebellious wisteria.

“Ah, mistress Talasea. Your friend Takemura is waiting for you in your room. You know, the solar envoy?”

When she entered her chamber, Talasea found Hideyoshi Takemura sitting by the window that overlooked the bustling boulevard on the other side of the convent. The Astropostale’s solar envoy had a Martian shape: thin, but not slender, and with his long dark hair tied in a high bun. Yet, the air of distant sadness in his eyes was unmistakably Terran. He turned around and shot a smile at Talasea. She bowed in the Pleiadian fashion, palm against her heart.

“I came from Phobos as fast as I could,” he said in Japanese, which Talasea spoke fluently. “I have parked the Hashima Maru outside.”

“I’m surprised you’re still flying it.”

“The old beast is getting long in the tooth, but she’s computing interplanetary translations in seconds flat. She’s enough for me.”

“And she’s sporting a gas-nuke on an open core. Does Babylon tolerate such an engine?”

“It does, after a generous donation to the directorate of transportation.”

“You can do that?”

“I can do that.”

The statement was not prideful, merely matter-of-fact. In truth, the entire man had always been matter-of-fact. His tailored shirt had this allure of practical elegance that belonged to bureaucrats and genocidaires alike, and Talasea had never seen him wear anything else.

“My encounter with Harrow did not go well. He didn’t show up. For good reason; the railing we were supposed to meet on had been sabotaged. The wind saved me.”

“Alas, it doesn’t surprise me. I took a look in Laniakean files. Harrow is part of a Saturnian smuggling cartel. Dark lane business. Small fleets of hydrogen steamers. You know what these are, right?”

“Thermal stealth ships, cigar-shaped, almost invisible on scopes, perfect for ferrying illegal cargo. Please. I’m a navigator. The Babylon Authority will investigate, yes?”

“Likely. The maintenance teams will find the sabotaged platform sooner or later. This man is an enemy. We have to move fast.”

“We? What do you have in mind, Hideyoshi?”

“Not here. We need to discuss this in a more secure place. Come, I have a boat.”

The tramway hissed and a faint aquatic breeze entered the carriage. Talasea and Takemura disembarked. Five kilometres north of the convent, the equatorial city scattered into a myriad of villages that stood atop bamboo pilings in a vast wetland, built to mimic the biogeography of a river delta. Birds flocked in the warm air: most were extinct on Earth, and the thought tainted Talasea’s contemplation of the sprawling treeline and meandering riverlets at her feet. This place was a mausoleum. As it continued northwards, the suspended railway dissolved into a sea of ghosts, the coral stilts supporting the bridge like the ribs of a fallen titan. Talasea and Takemura made their way towards the pier that lay beneath the tramway station, and reached a diminutive ship that looked like an asymmetric teardrop pierced in its middle by a turbosail.

“Hop on,” said Takemura, shooing a seagull away. “Don’t get weird ideas as to my personal wealth; this is not my ship. I am merely borrowing it from the marina, but it has all the implements to prevent spying.”

“Eh. I’ve never been one for watercraft. In the Pleiades, if you want to go somewhere, you fly.”

“I have refreshments.”

“Ah, I see. Corruption.”

She followed him inside. The innards of the watercraft consisted of a single room, which folded unto itself like a cocoon carved into the whitewood hull. Talasea tapped the wall, which gave back a muted thump. Soundproof. The half-submerged bay windows had the characteristic tint of one-way mirrors, treated with an additional layer of transparent coral to prevent laser spying.

Takemura’s lie as to the provenance of the boat was a childish game, and the Pleiadian opted not to press the matter: the vessel was probably just another toy from the deep bag of tricks the Astropostale’s solar envoy possessed. She sat on the sofa. Takemura served her a glass of Martian rum, with an orange quarter instead of lime, which did not agree with a Pleiadian’s stomach. Takemura snapped his fingers. The boat raised anchor and began drifting towards the nearest riverlet, attracting the attention of wide-eyed pikes that crowded against the bay windows.

“Alright,” Takemura said. “Harrow is older than the Astropostale, older than Laniakea, older than the Low Age itself. He is a necrocapitalist.”

A man from before the collapse: a god, a monster, a fiction fished from the mud, whispers from across the unbridgeable abyss.

“Babylon Port does not care,” Takemura continued. “He is a citizen of Saturn, and like everyone else has a right to a long and peaceful existence, even if he shot a ship down a century ago and killed two innocent fellows.”

“We’re not going to try and press charges?”

“For what? It’s been a century. The prescriptive period for murder in the solar system is forty years.”

“He tried to assassinate me.”

“It would take months to prove. I do not have the time for that.”

“It is personal, isn’t it? There’s a glimmer of rage in your eyes.”

“Do you recall the names of the *Theodora*’s pilots?”

“James Evans and Hajime Okoda, why?”

“Hajime was my father. I took my mother’s name out of practicality. He was one of the founding members of the Astropostale. His name was hard to bear for a son who found little affinity with space. I admired him, despite everything. He did not deserve to die like this, suffocating in a tin can at the edge of the solar system. For decades, I believed he had died *after* the *Theodora*’s translation to Tau Ceti, that the geometry drive had malfunctioned and stranded him and Evans in interstellar space. To discover that he never left Sol and that I can bury his body is a relief, but it is not enough.”

Takemura tapped the wall twice and a safe emerged from the centre of the room. The armoured recipient contained a pair of large, dark seeds. Cracked and odourless, they looked as ancient as Terran ruins: Talasea realised they were facsimiles made of plaster.

“Cocoa beans. You know what Terrans used to make with these? Chocolate. A tasty, often sugary sweet Europeans stole from the freshly genocided Americas, before flooding the Earth with it, and destroying a fair few tropical biomes attempting to grow it. The culture of cocoa died a few decades before the entire industrial civilisation collapsed. It must have been a shock for the first world to see chocolate tablets and beverages disappear from their supermarkets. They sure loved their treats. Now, Harrow owned an agribusiness megacorp. That’s how he made enough money to get a ticket on a hibernation program and a straight trip to the twenty-fifth century. His personal legend is that he woke alone and impoverished, with nothing but his rags and a bag of cocoa beans. I don’t know if it’s true, but he did manage to get cacao trees to grow on this very station.”

“Hence the dark lane business.”

“Yes. He’s trading chocolate for favours. Free passes and illegal ownership titles, in exchange for the most exclusive treat in Sol.”

“So your dad…worked for him?”

“Quite the opposite. My father stole from him. He sought to accommodate cocoa beans on other worlds. At the time, no one had found Elora yet, and the closest Earth analogue was Tau Ceti. I don’t know if Dad would have succeeded, but it was worth a try.”

While habitable and host to complex life, Tau Ceti had yet to house a true human colony: five hundred light-years out, a heartbeat in the age of the geometry drive, the superhabitable worlds of the Traverse had sucked all the air from the settlement effort.

“And your father died for defying the mummy of Babylon Port.”

Takemura stared intently at Talasea. The boat kept sailing downstream. A dancing line of lights shimmered on the horizon, revealing the slow procession of cargo ships en route to the boreal sea.

“I don’t strive for revenge, Tali. It’s been ninety-seven years. I do not hold grudges for that long. I merely seek to fulfil my father’s mission.”

Takemura tapped the bay window. His index rested on the kilometric towers that surged over the northern city, faint and overly stretched pyramids whose tips grazed the tubular sun.

“Harrow lives up there, in the Ardent Pyramid, his arcology. Although he theoretically does not *own* anything. He has a vault, which holds the last cacao trees in the galaxy. I want to steal the seeds and spread them to the rest of human space, settle this affair once and for all. Are you in?”

“This goes way beyond our functions as Astropostale operatives.”

“This wasn’t my question.”

“Look. I do not know the solar system. I do not know the industrial era. But I know people like Harrow, because we have battled them in the Pleiades for decades: the founders, the great centenarians, the tideless who think wisdom comes with age and right comes with wisdom, we have many and we’ve squashed them all, we’ve curtailed their ambitions with the bludgeon of communal democracy. I’ve been a little cog in this beautiful machine and I wouldn’t mind revisiting this part of my past. On a moral level, I’m in; I’ve always been in. But do we even have a plan?”

“I know someone who does. Her name is Luna. She’s a bartender at Charon’s Den, in Akiva Harbour, at the southern end of the maglev lane. We have an agreement; she expects somebody, but people know my face on Babylon Port, so I can’t risk seeing her in public. Could you make contact tomorrow?”

“Alright. Bring me back ashore.”

Takemura clapped his hands, the turbosail revved up, and the boat began the slow process of cruising upstream and back towards its pier. As a crimson twilight rose in the circular sky, the reeds came alive with the eyes of a hundred muskrats.

Travelling to the south tip of Babylon Port proved a pleasant affair. Four maglev lines linked the two ends of the cylinder in fifteen minutes flat: Talasea slept for five and disembarked one stop away from the cap, under a narrow sky that curved towards the webbed superstructure supporting the tubular sun. The air was clear and dry, the maglev station perched atop a ridge. At Talasea’s feet lay a quaint town made of brick houses, vertical windmills and red-leaved world-trees. A placard showed a name, Akiva Harbour, and a founding date, Interstellar Era 0.08, three years after the opening of Babylon Port to human settlement. Akiva had seen a lot of life and done a lot of living; now it looked exhausted, the streets empty and nary a boat on the shallow lake that gave the city its epithet. Talasea took the stairs down.

She quickly found Charon’s Den, on account of it being the only open building in town, as the rest of Akiva had closed for the day, month, or perhaps century. A tall communal house, the bar rested on stilts by the lake, and a roaring dragon hung from the balcony of the second floor. The beast was the winner’s trophy from the 0.56 edition of the twenty-four weeks of the Trojans, a sublight endurance race between Mars, Jupiter and the asteroids. Upon pushing the revolving doors of Charon’s Den, Talasea became acutely aware of how foreign she looked, with her laced shirt and pleated skirt and ocean skin, this allure of the Pleiades she carried with her, and expected the patrons to stare at her in disbelief.

The bar, however, was empty. When Talasea reached the counter, the bartender materialised out of the delicate glow of plant candles and gave her a bow.

“Hello. It is always a joy to see a new face. What do you fancy?”

The bartender towered a good head above her and wore her mass of silvery hair piled high and free of the bangs and curls that plagued Saturnian fashion. Her aquiline nose hinted a Terran origin, but the gold in her eyes was unmistakably Selenite. She spoke a delicate branch of Sanskrit.

“Morning,” Talasea said. “My name is Tali Talasea. I am looking for one Luna.”

“And who sends for her?”

“Takemura. It’s about Harrow.”

The bartender let her glass rest on the counter.

“Help me with the dishes and we’ll talk.”

Noon closed in on Akiva Harbour. The tubular sun gleamed in gold and sapphire. Luna and Talasea sat by the lake, looking at the seagulls that came and went in the breeze. The bartender had freed her hair, whose silvery strands flew in unison with the discoloured flags of a half-sunken boat left by a rotting pier.

“So,” said Luna. “I’m a ring diver.”

“What’s this? A syndicate?”

“Yes. We used to be the third or second-largest anarchist organisation in the outer solar system. Our mutual aid network went from Europa to Triton. Now, humankind stretches thinly across the plane of the Milky Way, the solar system is asleep, and we barely have the membership to exist. Mutual aid becomes irrelevant when Babylon Port keeps all the stations from there to Rhea fed and content. The people of Saturn gave up and so did we. A century ago, I would have been at the helm of a ship, running interference against the High Fleet on Iapetus, or coordinating emergency relief on Titan. Now, we barely ever see a USRE ship, and no one lives on Titan anymore because they grew fed up with this methane-drowned hellhole. So I work as a barkeep and, sometimes, as a fixer.”

“How do you know Takemura?”

“Often run errands for him. He pays well and doesn’t ask questions.”

“The dragon on the façade…is it yours?”

“Yup. I ran the twenty-four weeks back in 125 and came third. Ran again in 132 but my ship broke and I haven’t been to space ever since. I’ve never felt the need to visit more of the world. I know it’s the same everywhere. Anarchy settles the stars, then the state comes, and its coffers are deep, and its bureaucrats are talented, and a constant shower of treats makes us all into sycophants. It happened on Earth at the end of the Low Age, and it will happen to your islands in the sky. I do not exclude myself from the docile horde. My electricity comes from Babylon’s fusion core, my water from the lake, my food from the hydroponics, it’s just convenient, and convenience is where utopias come to die.”

“But you still fight.”

“I take what I can from people who have too much. Takemura was only the catalyst. I’ve had my eyes on Harrow for a while. I have the plans of the arcology, and I know how to get there from the inside. Like all towers on Babylon, the Ardent Pyramid was built with catastrophe in mind…”

“Like an emergency cylinder braking.”

“Yup.”

“So the designers of the arcology intended for it to bend to absorb the ripples that follow a brake manoeuvre. It must have a hollow spine, filled with springs and beams. If you have an access point in the lower area, you can climb up. The higher you get, the lower the gravity, so it’s much easier than it looks.”

“But Harrow isn’t an idiot. He sealed his habitat off from the inside, even the emergency access hatches. That’s why I need someone else to open the section from the vault side, allowing me to get in, hack the security systems and steal the beans. So, I have a question for you, Talasea. Does Harrow know your face?”

“I see no reason for it. Sol is not my usual playground, and the letter we sent him wasn’t in my name. The Astropostale doesn’t like its mail inspectors to become public faces, so we take precautions. I had no idea whom he would meet, only where and when.”

“Perfect. Then, you can help me. See, Harrow holds weekly auctions for his Low Age baubles. The next one is in forty-two hours. It’s a flawless point of entry for a saboteur, except he’ll never invite me because everyone on Babylon knows about the anarchist fixer at Charon’s Den. And Takemura is a public person, at this point. But you’re unknown. A *pièce rapportée* from the Pleiades. I can provide you fake papers, cool clothes, an invite, the works. Do you want details or are you out?”

“Give me the full breakdown.”

“Follow the guide. My workshop’s in the old gym.”

The gym of Charon’s Den was as spacious and empty as the bar upstairs. Thick dust layered the benches, tatami mats and boxing ring. A television sat in a corner, tuned to an Enceladian sports channel. The laser-com feed was weak and missed a few colours, thus turning the boxers into ghosts, followed by the remnant image of their own silhouette from a heartbeat ago. Shouts, whistles and the heavy thumps of gloves against faceplates echoed in the dusty emptiness.

“Why are you keeping this on?” Talasea asked.

“Sometimes, when the night becomes too cold, I take the stairs down and sit here with a beer. The channel always broadcasts a match, and the public is unruly. They cheer, they scream, they dish out insults like they’re watching two kids having at it in the kindergarten. For a moment, it feels as if the other ring divers are here with me, that the boys from Dione and Pan managed to drag me to the arena once again, and we’re shouting at the dastardly Martian champion who almost KO’d me last season.” She smiled. “These old plasma screens have a mind of their own. If I switch it off, I’m not sure it will ever turn back on. And, hey, if you want a beer, be my guest.”

She gestured at a large fridge beneath the television.

“I’m fine, thanks. What happened to your friends?”

“Nothing dramatic; they just stopped coming. One day, your sparring partner, a guy you’ve spent years working with in the rings, goes up to you and says, hey, Luna, I’ve just met this wonderful man from Dione, I think we’re gonna have kids together, but he doesn’t feel like moving, so I’m moving, don’t worry, we’ll keep in touch. And then, we don’t keep in touch. Repeat that a few dozen times, and that’s it. Life just caught up with us. We’ve become unnecessary. Our little anarchist cliques, our little spaceships and our little hidden stations are just hobbies. And hobbies are the first casualty of a busy adult life.”

“What about the retired folks?”

“They have better things to do and I do not blame them. Even without rejuvenating treatments, they’re gonna live to, what, a hundred and thirty, a hundred and sixty? Enjoying every waking moment of their life because we killed most diseases and aging is more of a pleasant way down than a cliff. Why would they bother with a cabal that’s been out of the game for almost half a century? So, yeah. We’re gone. I’m just keeping the lights on. And when that TV dies, I’m out. Shit, Talasea, I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

Luna took a tablet from a countertop and roused it from sleep. The radiation-hardened device complained with a loud whirr of its fans, but the Selenite managed to coerce it into displaying the schematics of Harrow’s arcology. The thin pyramid topped at two kilometres above ground, with the vault and living spaces located at the one-and-a-half kilometre mark. Harrow’s den adopted a hexagonal shape, with a reception hall at the top and the vault and apartment at the bottom.

“Does he *manage* the place?” asked Talasea.

“No. This part of the arcology is a historical monument, and he’s merely keeping the lights on, not unlike me.”

“And it’s legal to build a house in a historical monument?”

“When you’re four centuries old, the list of people and institutions in your pocket becomes a serious asset. I wouldn’t just say that he’s been pulling strings: his whole life is a bed made of strings. That’s why I’ll never convert into a tideless. I don’t want to hold that much power.”

Luna waved to highlight a pipe that ran through the arcology and bisected Harrow’s den.

“Here’s where I plan to enter. The conduit connects to a ventilation duct that takes air from the outside and blows it into the vault to oxygenate the trees. There’s a maintenance access in the toilets. The idea is that I’ll ascend through the arcology and wait right under the vault. You go to the toilets, enter the ventilation duct, and open the hatch for me.”

“I can fit in there?”

“Yes, it’s man-sized to facilitate maintenance as per Babylon regulations. But Harrow isn’t an idiot. The vault-facing part of the duct is rigged with cameras. They probably trigger an alarm.”

“Can you deactivate them?”

“Not from the outside. Harrow’s vault is airtight on the net. You’ll need an optical camouflage suit to slip in front of the cams.”

“I don’t have one.”

“I do. Once you’re at the airlock, you’ll be outside the cameras’ gaze. Then, you’ll just break the hinges with a laser stylus. After I’m in, we both get to the vault. It’s sealed with a biometric lock, standard model, I know how to hack it. From there it’s a smash and grab. We take the beans and exit through the conduit. Less than five minutes on the clock if you move fast enough.”

“What about security?”

“There’s no outgoing alarm, Harrow lives and works alone, but it is better if we startle him as late as possible. He has a butler drone, an antique, pre-Low Age. It should not be an issue. If push comes to shove, I can neutralise it.”

“I’m surprised you have all this intel at the ready.”

“Remember the guy who left us for his husband on Enceladus? Name was Zhao. He is now the proud father of two kids, but in his youth, he was a thief, and a damn good one at that. He’s had his eyes on Harrow’s vault for a decade. I helped him spy on the old man, I even went to an auction once, before getting thrown out when Harrow realised who I was, though I had time to recon a good part of the building. I told you I’ve been setting this score up for years. Takemura just gave me the incentive to actually do it. And a recruit…you’re still in?”

“I want to see your gear.”

“Follow the guide.”

Luna led Talasea to a warehouse on the Akiva lakefront, where a pair of containers waited under a crude neon light that erased shadows and turned the room into a textureless void. Luna opened a chest stamped with the screaming firehawk of the Titanian marines: an institution that Talasea had never heard of, lost in the depths of Saturnian history, and with a logo that looked more like that of a fantasy sports team than an actual military unit. In a way, it made it more authentic: she knew the solar system had always had an inclination for the oft-dreaded cult of the operator, of which edgy insignias were a core element that fed into the masculine urge to collimate into a regiment of expendable mooks.

Talasea was mildly surprised when Luna pulled a veil and a sari out of the crate. The design was Terran, with intricate ornamentation and a modest cut, suitable for a megalopolis as well as a classy restaurant. However, the material came from an orbital factory: smooth pseudosilk with superconducting loops. Luna pulled a string and the sari went from white to dark red, then blue, and finally the shimmering transparency of visible/near-infrared optical camouflage. The effect was not perfect, noted Talasea; she saw minor ghosting around the edges of the fabric, but good enough to fool a surveillance camera, especially the low-end models available on Babylon. Luna pulled the string a third time, and the sari returned to its original state.

“The first two hue changes are for deception,” she said. “There is no way you are going to get a visual camouflage sari through a security checkpoint; however, when this thing was manufactured, colour-switchable outfits were all the rage, and the technology was close. A modern, milspec optical camo suit would give you better gamma coverage, shape rendition and virtually zero ghosting, but it would be immediately flagged because you can’t pass it off as a normal item of clothing. Old tech is much more likely to pass for high fashion.”

“Old? Where does this sari come from?”

“Same place as the Titanian marines. Ten years ago, Zhao and I discovered a Kinetic Age wreck in the rings, a corvette disabled during the Titan-Enceladus war of the early 2480s…the ship bore civilian markings, but we found booby traps and killer drones inside, I believe it belonged to a spec ops unit.”

“What happened to the crew?”

“Five mummies. The hull was all scorched on one side, so the likeliest option is that they got a glancing shot from a Casaba. These marines were a good two metres tall, though, and the sari is tailored for a Terran baseline…so I don’t think you’ll be wearing a dead woman’s clothes. At least not a dead woman I saw.”

Talasea unfurled the sari and began wrapping it around herself.

“How is it powered?”

“I replaced the original batteries with a string of SMES beads embedded in the fabric. They are opaque to scanners, so they look like pearls. I tried the sari myself a few times, a full cloak lasts for five minutes with moderate physical activity.”

“Hmmm. It’s not too heavy, so I’ll be able to wear it normally… I’m taller than a Terran, but a Nivi drape should do it.”

“Great. There’s a necklace with the sari, internal pocket, right side. It’s got a throat mic, pretty much invisible, linked to an intra-auricular earpiece. Effective range is two kilometres on an encrypted channel. Now, the laser stylus.” Luna removed a pair of guns from the crate, then a guided dagger, and finally threw Talasea a heavy, pen-shaped emitter covered in gold and rubies. A removable sapphire covered the lens. Talasea weighed the contraption, found it too thick to rely on biological batteries, and too small to be powered by superconducting chips like a modern stylus.

“Chemical laser,” indicated Luna. “Blue light, high kilojoule range. You have three charges.”

“Glare protection?”

“Initial low-power pulse to trigger the blink reflex.”

“Where’s the trigger?”

“Biggest ruby.”

“Do you have spare charges?”

“Plenty.”

“Can I try on the crate?”

“Be my guest. I removed all the valuables.”

Talasea uncovered the sapphire, aimed the beam at the firehawk logo and pressed the ruby. She heard a high-pitched thump, like a kettle whistling, then the loud crack of heavy metals vaporised by a high-power laser impulse; a thumb-sized hole appeared in the crate, still warm to the touch, and the scent of white-hot aluminium filled the room. Talasea put the sapphire back in place and gave the laser back to Luna with a nod.

“Are you sure this will get through screenings?”

“I wore a similar stylus when I went to Dione for my son’s birthday last year. Got through customs twice, the drones did not even flinch. The Titanian spec ops knew what they were doing.”

“And yet this kills a man at short range.”

“You think the Titanian marines intended to rob a casino or something? Optical camouflage sari, high kilojoule contact laser, unmarked guns, this crate belonged to an assassin.” She placed the weapons back inside the chest and closed it. “Come on. We are putting this equipment to better use.”

The wind whistled around Akiva Harbour: four kilometres above, the colours of the tubular sun died as they carried Babylon Port to the edge of night. Luna fished on the shore, her legs dangling from the half-buried pillars of a ruined pier, watching her net undulate in the muddy waters below. As Talasea sat down next to the Selenite, she tugged on the fishing apparatus and reeled a pike in. The animal had eyes like a pair of gleaming lanterns, and Luna quickly sent it back to the lake.

“A year ago, I still found trout, now I only get these weirdos,” she remarked. “They come from the equatorial wetlands. Our biologists say that they shouldn’t dwell here, but the pikes don’t listen. Old O’Neill problems, I suppose. The biomes are settling in, and in ways we can’t always predict. You’ll see, one day it’ll happen to the Pleiades as well. Your cosmic gardens will begin to breathe. But in the meantime, I miss my trout pies.”

“Couldn’t you eat the pikes?”

“They taste like mud. They’re terrible. Terrible!” Luna unanchored her net and shifted it to the other side of the pier, then resumed her watch. “I used to cook for the patrons at Charon’s Den, too. You should have seen my gratin and salads! I jest. They weren’t great, but ring divers who’ve spent two months straight in space would eat anything. I’m going to order takeout. There’s a good restaurant two stations north, they deliver via the maglev. I’m thinking of getting rice, fried vegetables and falafels. You vegan?”

“Vegetarian.”

“Surprising for a Pleiadian.”

“The folks on Merope are vegan, but on Alcyone, we eat dairy and eggs. Even though our stomachs don’t really agree with lactose. It is a matter of pride because cheese and goat milk used to be luxuries in the first years of settlement, and Alcyone is the paradise station, while Merope is the industrial centre.”

“So you’ll eat dairy even if you can’t digest it? Your parties must be fun.”

“Provincialism makes you dumb.”

“It’s better than whatever deal we have here around Saturn.” Luna rolled to the side and lay on a bench, watching as the tubular sun switched from violet to deep purple, heralding a nascent shutdown. Talasea joined her in the contemplation of the last minutes of twilight.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“You’re on Babylon Port. First deep solar system O’Neill, home to six million inhabitants, the political and cultural heart of Saturn, the great city in the golden sky, and yet…have you discovered something, *anything*, that you couldn’t find on another world? On Earth? On the Moon? On Mars, or even on Elora? We didn’t have time to build a culture, a language, and a civilisation. Our ancestors colonised the Cronian moons, had their petty squabbles, and didn’t get the time to catch their breath, because bang, the interstellar age began and we morphed from the nascent capital of the outer solar system into a backwater with deep negative population growth. People come in, do their thing, and leave. Like you, like Takemura. We’re a megalopolis of imports. And one day someone’ll board the last shuttle, and they’ll leave the world-trees and sparrows and pikes in peace. You ever wondered when an O’Neill dies? Is it when the last human leaves, when the hull breaks, or just when you stop thinking about it? I’ve seen the broken cylinder at Earth-Sol L1. Fifteen kilometres of silence and hard vacuum, but it’s not dead. Terrans and Selenites visit the ruins, play zero-g games in the walls, or paint the beams so that they bear the images of Jesus Christ, Saraswati, Allah and the stars know who else, I don’t remember the names…but no, it’s not dead. Yet, when Babylon dies, I wonder who will mourn us.”

“I may, for one.”

“Why?”

“We spacers have forgotten too much. We look at Sol and spot a memory of the Earth, but we do not know what it means, the hopes and sorrows it carries. We understand nothing, in truth, beyond the image, and if I did not live with a Terran, I would be as ignorant as the others. My love told me about the cities and plains and mountains of their youth, about the rains and the winds and the scents of spring, about the ruins in the marshes and the skeletons in the soil, and they gave me a glimpse of a world I will never observe, because the Earth is deadly for me. Likewise, you told me about the ring divers, you welcomed me into Charon’s Den, you got me to see this city, this lake and the weird pikes under the water, and it counts for something. So no, Luna. I don’t think I will forget Babylon Port.”

The tubular sun blinked and turned into a beam of darkness that bisected the peaceful night; on the opposite side of Babylon, factories and fisheries and coastal towns gleamed in faint caresses of white and gold, following the smooth patterns of human settlement. The whitewood of the pier remained warm to the touch, and Akiva’s windmills creaked all around the lake. The last maglev passed with a hurry of birds and the whistle of superconducting rails, then the carriage dissolved in the foggy distance of the wetlands. Talasea yawned and, as Luna opened her arms for her, she cuddled against the Selenite.

“You are comfy,” Talasea whispered. “That’s good. More people should be comfy.”

“But our bench isn’t…do you want me to carry you to your room?”

“I have a room?”

“You do. Charon’s Den, second floor. It’s free.”

“Then I would not mind.”

Luna stood up and caught Talasea in her arms with a gentleness that surprised the Pleiadian. The Selenite was far stronger than her, and yet handled her with joyful carefulness; as they made their way back to Charon’s Den, Talasea found herself not quite sure whether she was a damsel carried by her knight, or a drunken friend who had half-passed out in Luna’s arms, but this uncertainty did not bother her. As she gave in to sleep, Luna held her closer.

“Hey. I’ll tell Takemura you’re in. Your dinner will be downstairs. Breakfast is at nine. Guaranteed without dairy.”

Talasea smiled.

The night was peaceful; a chorus of birds saluted Talasea in the morning, and she took her bath watching the slow ramp-up of the tubular sun. A cool breeze flowed in from the north.

“Come!” Luna said after breakfast. “We have to rehearse. Would you mind getting dressed?”

“Give me a second. I need to remember how to put on a sari.”

Sharp daylight fell through the sun wells when Talasea entered the gym under Charon’s Den, wearing her sari arranged in a loose Nivi drape and using the remainder of the fabric as a headscarf; she had adorned her neck and arms with golden jewels, among which she had artfully hidden the laser stylus. Her high heels clicked on the parquet floor as she bowed to Luna. The Selenite answered in kind. Talasea sized herself up in the mirror, looking for a flaw in her posture or a minute detail that would betray the optical camouflage embedded in the sari. She found none.

“It is perfect,” Luna said. “Though the heels may be a problem if you need to run or jump.”

“Do not worry. No self-respecting spacer would ever wear non-retractable high heels. We know too well how dangerous sharp protrusions can be for your surroundings when you move in zero-g.” Talasea tapped the floor twice, and her evening shoes shifted shape: the heels collapsed and the platform merged with the sole, turning it straight and flat without impairing the Pleiadian’s balance. “This is a pure gadget, and I can find alternatives. I just assumed it would fit my character better. Tali Talasea is a fancy Pleiadian who’s come to see Harrow’s famed auction, and she dresses the part.”

“Oh, about that. I filed an invitation for you, but I decided not to use your real name.”

“How am I called, then?”

“Ishi Sindris. You’re an antiquarian from Merope. I hope the name is accurate, I asked a blue friend.”

“It is!”

“Oh, I was afraid it’d be too exotic. I mean, it sounds like the name of the main character in a soap opera. Ishi Sindris, last heir to her family’s fortune, meets a dark and sexy pirate lady in the Serene Sea. Will she give in to lust, or defend her honour? All episodes are on Pleiades Seven, airing daily.”

Talasea chuckled.

“Soap opera heroines are precisely how we are named.”

“Even you?”

“There’s a good reason why I use a diminutive of my family name, and not the first name my mothers gifted me.”

“Am I allowed to know it? Or is it too dreadful?”

“It *is* dreadful. But one day, I may tell you.”

“I’d pay for this information, you know!” Luna sidestepped in front of Talasea and filled the mirror. Her outfit was several orders of magnitude less fancy: a reversible high-visibility vest, stamped with the seal of Babylon’s maintenance department, a hard hat and a tablet.

“This is how I move around Babylon’s underbelly.”

“No one’s asking questions?”

“Look. I’m two metres tall and look like I bench press spaceship engines for breakfast. If *you* saw me in a dark underalley with my high-viz gear, muttering something about a gas leak in sector seventeen, would you interfere?”

“Excellent point.”

“Once in the conduit, I’ll switch to a jumpsuit; it’s more practical for the ascent. I can carry a change of clothes for you.”

“That would be great.”

“Now, let’s make sure this drape works for you. Tali, please, show as little skin as possible.”

Talasea unfolded the sari in a few strategic places, as to cover her ankles, forearms, neck and face, leaving only a slit for her eyes. The folds dropped with a natural straightforwardness: the sari had been designed for a quick transition. She pulled on the command string, transitioning from gold to red, then blue and finally dissolving into a shimmer of pixels. She walked, bent and dropped to her knees before jumping back up: the camouflage held with a surprising regularity for such an old piece of technology, only showing noticeable ghosting at the folds when she mimicked a strike to the back of the neck with her fist. Luna parried her with ease and massaged the sari, allowing the screens to reconfigure.

“Watch out, you are not supposed to fight with this sari. No kung fu. Or…do you have martial arts in the Pleiades?”

“We have dances, but they are for show, even though they may mimic the allure of lethality. In the Astropostale, I got to learn a few tricks, but martial art is a generous term here. I was taught gutter fighting.”

“If everything goes smoothly, you will not have to fight. Now, let’s review the plans of the airlock. I need to show you where to apply the laser impulses, then we’ll go over the maps of the arcology until they’re drilled into your mind.”

The afternoon was quickly consumed, and at five in the evening, Talasea called it quits: she felt prepared enough. At six in the evening, Luna packed her gear and left for the maglev station; Talasea followed soon after and, by seven, was waiting for Takemura in an empty airfield, two kilometres spinwards of the equatorial city. She was not surprised to find herself perfectly calm, in the same state of mind she entertained before a risky flight. Takemura’s flitter touched down soon after. She climbed in. 

CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO: THE HEIST

Illustration by Viktor Titov for Eclipse Phase, distributed by Posthuman Studios under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-alike 3.0 Unported Licence.