Asimov's Science Fiction - June 2014 Read online

  Shaking, she tried to calm herself by checking her med status. Oxygen levels were rising again, back toward normal, as the nanofoam pulsed mechanically through her lungs, adapting itself to the parameters of her immediate environment.

  Last, she pulled her hood up around her head, sealed the faceplate—what claustrophobia that once would have brought no longer noticeable against the overwhelming sensory impact of the breather—and clipped in a thick pair of IR goggles. One final check for paranoia's sake, and then she lay there for a moment, letting the last of the wild panic get eased out of her system by the intense focus that always took her, pre-dive, from scared to angry to invincible.

  Tapping at her arm, she initiated the drop sequence. She reached up and gripped the ring rail's double bars as the countdown in the peripheral vision of her goggles hit single digits, then, her heart racing, zero.

  The hatch doors below her yawned wide, her seat splitting in half to open with them. All that held her now were her own hands, tight on the bars, and that brief recognition that, as always, the odds were against her return.

  She smiled, and let go.

  Helise clicked again, and the Ama disappeared, replaced by an impossibly beautiful, glittering thing, a three-dimensional crystal snowflake set carefully on blue velvet. "This is the largest specimen collected so far, that we know of," Helise said. "It is known as the Orbach Diamond, after the collector from whom it was confiscated."

  It should be Nemi's Diamond, Cjoi thought. It was Nemi who'd caught it, who dove too deep, and came back to writhe and flail and die on the floor of the ship dorm while the masters oooh'd and aaah'd over her prize. They're remembered, but not the names and faces of those who actually died for them.

  "There used to be an entire industry set up around stripping Pahlati of its Diamonds, from the wealthy collectors who coveted them, to the dealers who sold them, to the smugglers who supplied them, to ships like the one I just showed you, to the girls—some as young as five or six standards—who were thrown into the depths of the planet's atmosphere again and again to retrieve them. When the Protectorate was formed, as a collaboration between Earth Alliance and the Gaian Collective, its first mission was to unravel the tangled cord that led us from this very diamond back to Pahlati, and to discover the horrifying circumstances of the industry's smallest employees."

  Employees? Cjoi thought. She shook her head at the idea of it. She hadn't gotten paid, she hadn't gotten credit. If she had a good day, she got just enough food to survive on and just enough sleep to dream she was somewhere—anywhere—else. The irony was that, since leaving, she only ever dreamt about being back here.

  A boy in the front row raised his hand, and Helise pointed to him. "Why didn't they just use machines to scoop them up?" he said, his accent upperclass Haudie South.

  "For one thing, the fractally complex branches of the Pahlati Diamonds are very fragile. They are also razor-sharp. A machine that could collect and hold them without breaking off tips and spires would be very, very expensive to build."

  Cjoi glanced down at her hands, palms up, and the myriad scars from cuts and cold-burns that criss-crossed them, cobwebs etched into her mottled skin where the Diamonds had sliced through her gloves year after year. Sharp, oh yes, she thought. And humans are so much cheaper than machines, both to buy and to replace.

  "Now, I'm sure all of you came here because of the Pahlati Diamonds, and by now probably have already seen our collection of recovered specimens in our gallery on C Deck," Helise continued, "but it may not be clear why the Protectorate is involved here. Our mission is the preservation of unique and endangered ecosystems. Does anyone know how that relates to Pahlati?"

  The front-row boy spoke up again. "Because it's alive?" he said.

  "What's alive?" Helise asked, crouching at the edge of the stage in front of him.

  "The Diamond!"

  "Right!" Helise grinned. "You're very smart. The diamonds are not geological artifacts at all, but the byproducts of a living organism." She stood, pacing back to the lectern, and clicked up a slide of tiny, bluish spheres. "The Diamonds begin life as a tiny gaseous polyp in the upper atmosphere, sort of like a tiny limbless jellyfish, if anyone knows what that is. It feeds on skymoss spores and whatever aeroplankton it comes into contact with, which means they're almost always found along the edges of the stronger updraft zones where there's more mixing of materials."

  Click. A new picture appeared, this time of the clouds from above, glistening under a rising sun.

  "So does anyone know how these tiny polyps turn into these complicated crystalline structures? Or why?"

  No hand from the audience this time. Helise crouched again, in front of the Haudie boy. "Do you know what a pearl is?" she asked.

  "A bead," he said.

  "Well, yes." She reached into her pocket and pulled out a pearl, magnified on the screen behind her, and held it out to the boy. She must have done this a thousand times, Cjoi thought. Part of her wondered if she'd planted the boy in the front row, or at least herded the family in that direction. But no, it was just that Helise was that good. Good with people, comfortable in her own skin. This is her element. Not mine.

  Watching Helise explain pearls made her want to take her to the ocean, find her pearls of her own—real ones—and try to claim some small corner of Helise's comfort zone to curl up in and rest.

  "... polyp, as it expands, builds its diamond shell by an organic process of crystal vapor deposition. It serves to protect the polyp's thin outer membranes, and acts as a mechanism for the polyp to excrete and contain elements that would otherwise be toxic in concentration. The exquisite structure you see behind me is the end result, although no two are the same. The older the polyp, the larger and more ornate the diamond shell. Also, the harder they are to find. Do you know why?"

  One of the adults in the third row raised his hand. "Because they break," he said.

  "Yes," Helise said. "While the external edges of the shell are very fragile, the base that envelops most of the polyp is, literally, as hard as diamond. It would take a significant event to fracture it and expose the delicate interior of the mantle cavity. And yet, ultimately, that's each of the polyps' fate, if not intercepted and removed from their environment."

  "What breaks them?" the boy asked.

  "Asteroids!" Another child in the row shouted.

  "No, something bigger than asteroids," Helise prompted.

  "Comets!"

  "The answer is the planet itself." Helise clicked again, and brought up a cross-section diagram of Pahlati, showing all the layers of atmosphere in the gas giant, from the magnetosphere down to the metallic hydrogen wrapped around the purely theoretical core. "As the polyps grow in size, they accumulate more material and become heavier. Their shape, concave on the underside, is designed to maximize the advantage of the strong updrafts that create the light atmospheric bands we see on the planet's face. But the heavier they grow, the farther and faster they sink. We're not sure how big they can get, but we do know that, eventually, they will fall far enough that they will be crushed, shattered, by the dense atmosphere. We also know that, lining the interior of each Diamond's mantle cavity, is the next generation of polyps, waiting to soar on the updrafts back to the sunlight. There, they start the process all over again.

  "From almost the very moment they are born," Helise finished, "the Pahlati Diamonds are falling to their deaths."

  In the years of the Ama, the divers had all had large rings attached to their backs, so that after they'd made a good catch the crew on skimmers could hook them and pull them back onboard. Not everyone was successfully retrieved; more than a few of Cjoi's friends, facing despair or illness or increasing attention from the crew as they matured, turned themselves belly-up as they flew, ring out of reach, masters of their own fates at last.

  Now, Cjoi had tech on her side. Or, technically, above my head, she thought. The sphere, linked to her through her wrist controls, would stay a half kil overhead as she rose and fell
, and hunted.

  When she was ready, she could call it down to pick her up, and she'd return to the rest of human space with the largest Pahlati Diamond ever seen. It would be all hers, and she and the other Ama girls would be remembered at last, and forever.

  She spread her arms and legs out, letting the thick fabric between them unfurl and fill with the wind. She had never been this far down before, or felt so high. Cjoi soared. The upper left field of her goggles kept a translucent scanner map up, showing wind conditions, changes in pressure and atmospheric density, and scanning for any of the deployed Protectorate sensors that dotted the interior of the gas giant. Her body was small enough to pass undetected, and her sphere was kitted out with a fortune's worth of illegal stealth tech, but if either she or it crashed into one it would be hard to stay unnoticed.

  The rest of her goggles were set to enhance what little existing light remained this deep, and mark out anything ahead of her with the faint heat signature and density of the Diamonds.

  She had expected to be able to take her pick of the best and most beautiful of many, but for the longest time she saw nothing at all. Am I in the wrong place? she wondered, but she had a lifetime of gut instinct to know she was not.

  The idea that Helise was right, and the Diamonds were nearly extinct, began to creep like a shiver up the back of her mind, and fearing failure— after all this! —she pulled her elbows and knees in, cannonballing, and let herself drop faster and further.

  Helise turned off the diagram, letting it go back to the live vista of the planet below. "This is why the Protectorate is here," she said. "The larger and more valuable the specimen on the black market, the more its loss reduces the next generation. Even today, despite our patrols, and our aggressive pursuit of Diamond poachers, their numbers continue to dwindle toward dangerously low numbers."

  "Can't you put them back?" the boy asked.

  "The creature itself is very delicate. Take it out of the planet's atmosphere, and they die almost instantly. Also, the Diamonds need a certain population density to reproduce; from the time they reach about four centimeters in interior diameter, they begin releasing spores into the air; as others take those spores in with other atmospheric and organic material, it fertilizes the growing polyps inside. Fewer Diamonds means less spores, fewer viable polyps, and the cycle continues to degrade. We've tried—"

  She was interrupted by a familiar figure stepping up on stage. "Hello, gentlepeoples!" Ryon called out when he reached her mic. He was wearing his uniform now, and he looked like a holonovel hero in it, too perfect to be entirely real. "I just got back from some planetary science work and need to go out to meet our supply ship, but I wanted to check in and see how everyone is doing. Are you learning lots of good things tonight?"

  There was a smattering of yeses and clapping from the audience. Ryon stood beside Helise, snuck an arm around her waist. "Helise here is the Protectorate's best and brightest," he said, "but you have a rare treat here with you, among you, tonight."

  Cjoi saw Helise's expression change, figuring out where Ryon was going just moments after she had herself. Helise started to shake her head, opening her mouth to speak, but Ryon was ahead of her. "Up there, at the very back, we have the last of the Ama divers!"

  A spotlight zoomed in on her, and she was blinded. She threw an arm up over her face, and scrambled to get out of her chair, intent on fleeing.

  "She's coming down to tell us about what it was really like, in the golden age of Pahlati," Ryon said, and more of the audience began to clap and cheer. He jumped down off the stage and intercepted her, holding out his hand.

  Reluctantly, she let Ryon guide her up onto the stage, pulling her hand free of his as soon as she was up. Helise moved to stand beside her, and her hand replaced Ryon's, squeezing gently, as if to say either I'm sorry or I'm here.

  "So, tell us," Ryon said, directing the mic at her. "What was it like?"

  She took a deep breath, trying not to stare out at the sea of expectant faces in front of her. When the words came, they were calm, clear, and relentless.

  "No one knows how many of us there were to start with, but many hundreds. We were all either stolen or bought as small children, and taken to an illegal genmod lab outside of Alliance space. We were all girls, because girls are cheaper to buy, and fewer people care about what is done to us, and because we handled modding and radiation better than boys. Those of us who survived their 'treatments'—one hundred and sixty-four of us—were then brought to Pahlati," she said. "Many of us were too young to even remember our real names, so we named each other, and tried to be a family. We were cold and hungry, and we were beaten if we didn't find good-sized Diamonds, or if we damaged them. A few of us who were too clumsy were killed, in cold blood, to motivate us to be more careful. Most of the rest of us died out there, in the clouds, freezing or having our lungs fill with carbon dioxide too heavy to exhale, or on the floor of our dormitory after a dive, decompressing too fast, or our lungs collapsing, or from an embolism or nitrogen narcosis or just from too much exhaustion and malnutrition and radiation and despair. Our masters made a fortune off our work, and we didn't even own the clothes on our backs. There were seventeen of us left alive when the Protectorate raided the Giardal ships, broken and abused and half-feral adolescents. We spent six years here, in a special Protectorate rehabilitation facility, learning to read and write and take care of ourselves, learning how to be human. I am the last still alive. That, there, is what your golden age was like."

  Letting go of Helise's hand, she stepped off the stage and walked out of the auditorium, leaving dead silence in her wake.

  Her suit display was a frantic chorus of yellow pressure-warning lights when she found the Diamonds at last, a loose cluster dropping down through the clouds a halfkil away. The smallest of them was easily bigger than the Orbach Diamond, and the largest...

  My grail, she thought. Unfurling her suit again, she halted her plummet, gliding laterally now toward the cluster. Nothing mattered, now, except that one falling Diamond. She was the hunter, the predator, the power. One final time.

  The cluster blinked out.

  "What the hell?" she swore. Her lungs full of foam, she could only mouth the words. The mouthpiece picked up the movements and translated them in her own synthesized voice, so quickly it seemed exactly and always her own.

  The Diamonds couldn't just disappear. Could they? She pulled back the zoom on her goggles, and found her answer: a large ship, also running dark, had parked itself between her and them. She repeated her oath; her momentum was going to carry her straight into it. Using her suit's folds, she did her best to slow herself down as she flew, and to try to gain altitude. She was mere meters above the large engines as she crashed into the back hull. Scrambling, she got her feet up against it and switched on her magboots, adhering instantly to the slippery surface.

  Straightening, she walked up the hull away from the heat and radiation of the engines, and toward answers.

  Painted on the ship's exterior in letters taller than she was, she found the word Veresiel, and the Protectorate coat of arms.

  Ryon's survey ship.

  Bastard, she thought. She wanted to pound her fists on the hull, call him out for a fight. Why the fuck did he have to take atmospheric samples here, now, when she was so close? Why dark?

  She could feel vibration in the hull through her boots, and moments later, a dozen drones launched from the underside of the ship. They were an odd configuration: a standard hauler drone with a large, transparent dome, open end down, mounted underneath.

  Puzzled, then dumbfounded, she watched on full zoom as the drones fell in just above falling Diamonds, and slowly caught up until their dome began to eclipse it. No, you'll break them, you idiots, was her first thought. But as soon as the Diamond was within the dome, jets mounted in the top filled the entire thing with a thick, hardening foam. It was, she had to admit, genius.

  Each drone now occupied with its illegal haul, they turned back toward t
he Veresiel. Cjoi walked down the side of the hull, staying close enough to the engines that she trusted they would mask any noise her magboots made on the hull, and watched as bay doors opened wide to admit the drones.

  Stacked inside, dozens high and wide, layers thick, were more glass tubes, opaque interiors concealing what she already knew was inside. "Oh, Helise," she said out loud. "Your Protectorate can't catch the poachers because they are the poachers." It made sense; who else would have the technology, resources, and inside knowledge to systematically strip the world of its Diamonds? It had taken her nearly all the enormous Giardal Trust to prepare for stealing one.

  Sick, she turned her goggles on record as the drones, free of their cargos, picked up new domes and sped out again toward the diminished cluster.

  It was clever. Go out on "survey," strip-mine as many Diamonds as you can from well down in the atmosphere. Meet up with the supply ship and hand them off. Once the Diamonds were extinct, sell them slowly off one by one, for huge, ever-escalating prices. I do hate to miss out on rare treasures, Ryon had said. An honest liar.

  Ahead of them, one of the drones turned and dove toward the Diamond she had picked out. Oh, no, you don't, she thought. That one's mine.

  Running along the top of the ship toward the front, she no longer cared what noise she might make. Racing over the bridge window—no time to look for startled faces, to enjoy that gotcha moment—she hit the Veresiel's nose and launched herself back out into the air. Cannonballing, she hurtled past both drone and Diamond.