The peacekeepers came to take me offworld while I was eating ramen down in Kamintown, surrounded by rickety three story colony mudbricks and flickering neon. Kamintown was thick with Bos who had taken over the old, abandoned buildings from First Landing, renovating them to their own uses after the last recession.
We all watched the peacekeepers bleed off the last of their momentum, a long trail of black smoke from their deorbit trailing the sky behind. Then they curved in toward town. Sensible people started getting inside and off the street. But quite a few Bos just stared sullenly as the retro-rockets flared to light up the dark brown streets, washing out the colorful neons with bright light.
“Fucking Lynns up to no good,” the old Bo woman on the other side of the ramen stall muttered.
I gave her a weary nod.
“No offence,” she said.
The pair of peacekeepers hit the street, all worn steel and faded paint, but still as lethal as ever. Robot golems, ID numbers spraypainted on their legs, camera eyes scanning the world around them.
Someone tossed a bottle at one. It shattered harmlessly over its head, and it didn’t bother to engage.
They stomped their way up the compacted dirt street to the stall.
“Lynn-Hale?”
I nodded.
“The harbormaster needs to speak with you in person.”
“Can I finish my dinner?”
The camera eyes flicked to my bowl, focused, then switched back to me. “No.”
A loud crack made the Bos around me jump in their seats. The peacekeeper’s chest cracked in the middle. Then the ribs splayed out, and I looked at the restraints dangling inside the cavity of the machine.
Four minutes later I was choking in antiacceleration foam as the peacekeeper launched out of the nearest city railgun.
***
I was still pushing a handtowel against my nose to stop the bleeding in the harbormaster’s office. It had a dramatic view of the Ring here. The office was in the center of the drum that was the orbital station. That meant there was no gravity, so I watched globs of blood floating in the air when I missed dabbing them up with the towel.
A two kilometer structure in low orbit, anyone could see the ring from the ground. It was our link to the old world. It was also an ever-present reminder of who we were and where we came from. Up close, one’s eye wandered over the mega-capacitors and dark energy storage dumps.
It was a technological wonder, and to me, not just a reminder of where we came from, but what we always compared ourselves to. Our world could never build this.
Maybe, one day.
The harbormaster had a desk next to a massive portal looking over the ring. Rank had its priveleges. I could see why one would build an entire life around trying to get here.
“Lynn,” I said in greeting. For he was clearly Lynn. I was staring into my own face, but older. Lots of gray, lines, a sense of tiredness that I usually only acquired after a few nights of no sleep and some great existential crisis or two.
The harbormaster’s face twisted. It was rude to use the original name without a unique secondary.
“Detective Lynn-Hale,” he said crisply, correcting my faux pas by adressing me properly.
“I already showed the peacekeepers my ID,” I said.
“I’m Harbormaster Lynn-Anichio.” The harbormaster twisted in place so that he could also look at the ring.
“Why am I here?”
“There’s a shipment coming,” Lynn-Anichio said.
“In a year and a half,” I said. They came through every seven years. Forcing the wormhole open took incredible amounts of energy.
“Tomorrow,” Lynn-Anichio said. “The secondary rings have been powering up for the last week.”
I had to hide my shock. For seventy five years there’d been a strict schedule. The portal opened, and in came necessary materials that Earth thought could help the distant world that nine of us had originally made it to.
The dark energy could only hold the mouth open for a moment, so the cargo came through fast, and there was never very much. Starter nano feedstock for replication machines. Quantam chips. Nutrient kits. Data on a tiny drives.
All of it had to fit in a pod the size of a watermelon that would strike the capture arms waiting on this side.
“Why?” I ask.
“The Lynns down in Capital think there’s a weapon coming in,” Lynn-Anichio says. “Things are turbulent down there. Aira dissidents may have sent messages through back to Earth asking for help.”
“And how do you know that?”
“The Airas up here programmed the capture arms to handle more force. When the pod comes through, it will be heavier than normal, and the arms are going to compensate. They didn’t think we’d notice the force tolerance difference, it’s very subtle. A Lynn going over the arm parameters noticed the difference and reported it on up the chain, among Lynns only.”
“How much?”
“The pod will be five point three milligrams heavier than normal.”
“I’m a ground-based detective for the outskirts of the big city, why are you asking me up here? Don’t you have your own people?”
The harbormaster shook his head. “Edgars handle security, usually. But you’re a rare Lynn that does law and order and we’re trying to keep this close to our chests. And you’re known for dealing with a variety of people. You’ll be talking to Edgars, Airas and Siennas. Times are explosive right now. You’re the right Lynn for the job.”
“Why did you wait this long?”
The harbormaster sighed. “It was assumed to be a calibration flaw. It wasn’t until several hours ago that we were able to determine it was purposeful. You’ll have all the clearance and staff you’ll need, and budget. Time is not on our side.”
***
Five point three milligrams.
It didn’t seem like much, until you realized it had been slung across the hundreds of light years that separated us from Earth.
Of course, it wasn’t supposed to be this limited. No one had expected the failure on the seventh dark energy node when the *Oppurtunity* passed through, severing the ringship in half.
The Ring had been launched from Earth as a micro package of nanobots, hit an asteroid insystem, and built the Ring from a pattern. But there was no one on this side back then to check things over. No Airas to make sure all systems were optimal.
Sure, they sent drones through at first to make sure the Ring worked. But each passage stressed out the Ring systems, and when the *Oppurtunity* came through, the Ring failed.
It was a miracle the first generation of Airas ever got it to work again, even as reduced as it was.
It was a miracle that Ravi, after realizing the Nine Survivors were sterile and dying, their bodies fried by the lashing tentacles of dark energy released by failing Ring systems, was able to make clones.
So many miracles.
And now this one to solve.
Five point three milligrams.
***
Someone knew that extra mass was going to come through the portal. The obvious first step was to head to the capture facilities.
In the old days, there was the station and a giant net slung between a hoop on the side of the station. The Airas had switched to a set of arms that snagged the pods. They knew where the pod was coming, and exactly how fast, and when. Three fast-moving arms could catch the pod and move into the airlock without worrying about rebound.
Pod Capture was in zero gravity, just like the harbormaster’s office. I threw up, twice, on the way over, my head spinning as I moved between floors and tunnels. An aide, a polite Ravi, offered me vertigo pills, but I declined. I needed my mind sharp and unaffected by drowsiness.
There was a Lynn in charge, of course, a younger but eager woman with an eye toward advancing her career. Her eyes widened when I arrived with four Edgars with me for muscle and the Ravi. I hadn’t learned their names yet.
“I’m in charge of twenty Airas and ten Siennas,” she told me. She’d gotten a call telling her to cooperate in any way, and I was older than her. Lynns tended to defer to each other by age, as a Lynn working the career ladder usually advanced in a fairly predictable way. “They run the arms. The pods usually come in at about a hundred and thirty seven point nine kilometers an hour.”
“That’s fast.”
“They need to clear the event horizon quickly. Otherwise they get affected.”
The three arms reached down, like a squid from the old world, and reached for the pod, whipping out to match speed and then gently snag them.
“The outer skin is impact gel, in case of error the pod will embed itself in the arm.”
“And if the arms miss?”
“In that event, unlikely though it is, there is a smaller net in the path further out. There are also capture drones that can head out for it.”
I did interviews with the pod capture division, backing everything up to video and forwarding it to a Lynn assigned to the task force who would report back to the harbormaster.
The Airas were all dark-haired, dark-eyed, with sharp cheekbones and full of distress that the arms had been tampered with. Everyone denied it was them. The Siennas, round-faced and blonde, were fascinated by the puzzle.
Sienna-Fields leaned forward to explain it to me. “Lynn-Winter set up several authentication levels, everything has to be co-signed and approved. The security is rigorous. I don’t think this was done by someone here, we’ve been thinking about it and we’re betting you’ll find that someone outside of the capture division figured out how to access arm control.”
I leaned forward. “Is there a way we can do that within a day?”
Lynn-Winter, the administrator, leaned in. “I doubt it. We’re already pulling all the logs, but it’s grunt work. We’re going through every single communication. We’ll figure out where this came from, just not for another few days.”
I was watching Sienna-Fields, and I could tell that she didn’t *quite* agree, but kept her counsel.
“What do you think I should be paying attention to?” I asked her.
She glanced at Lynn-Winter, not wanting to cause trouble with administration and she was reading me as potentially a higher up, not a detective. She’d only been ordered to talk to me, it hadn’t been explained who exactly I was. But I was a Lynn, and that likely meant admin.
“You won’t be getting Lynn-Winter into any trouble,” I assured her. “Nor causing any for you or your people.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe this is something that Earth wants to send and Lynns are trying to meddle with. This is way above my paygrade and I haven’t figured out what’s happening. How do I know helping you is the right call? Logically, all I know is that a pod is coming early, and whoever hacked the arms knows about it. It’s a *good* thing they got in there.”
“The extra weight was not warned about in the header broadcast,” I said. “Whatever it is, even the people over on the Earth side don’t know it’s going to be in the pod.”
“Oh.”
I sat with her a long moment, and then she shrugged. “Well, someone had to know to make the changes. Logically, I’d start in the communications department. If time is valuable, you’re wasting your time by starting here.”
The next Sienna, a male, agreed with the logic.
***
I added the two Siennas from pod control to the task force, and then asked the harbormaster for a combination of Bos, Kits, Airas and Siennas he trusted.
“Airas and Siennas, yes, there might be a few Bos on station, but no Kits that I know of. What would be the point?”
“Send over who you have.”
To the task force’s consternation, I held everything up to run a search of personnel records until I verified that there was not even a single Kit on staff.
What would a clone from a famously artistic-minded line be doing up here? They were down on the ground acting in dramas, reading news, or just generally entertaining everyone. That was what human resources would say. But I wanted an artist’s eye on my team, looking for the clever and human hack.
I always built teams from across the various lines. You never knew where the crucial piece of insight would come from. For all the obsession over ‘types’ with clones, I found a varied team could chip away at the issue.
After all, no one expected a Lynn to be running with the law-and-order types, hunting down criminals and solving cases.
But here I was.
My team swept into communications like a horde. The Edgars locked everything down and lined everyone up for interviews, watching for any nervous or suspicious people, with my assistant Ravi, who was empathetic, helping them.
The Siennas and Airas got into the systems, and with the two Lynns in charge of comms, gave us all the authorization to crawl through the Ring logs that the Sienna’s needed while I did interviews.
Our Ravi, Ravi-Rama I found his name was, ordered us all tea once the hours started to get long.
***
Sienna-Fields found it. Three hours in, she pulled one of the logs and found a piggybacked compressed file going out on the laser that punched through the portal for that brief moment it was open and the pod was flung through to us.
While Earth, with its greater numbers and research abilities, passed along what information and resources it could, we passed along our stories. Stellar probe analysis, planetary data, and cultural history. Pictures and video of our world was well-received by our distant cousins.
Sienna-Fields found video that had been compressed down for the laser beam burst of comms to the other side, and inside the compression, low resolution text files riding along.
I didn’t understand much of it, but the look on two of the comms techs who were still in the room told me all I needed to know. This was it.
“So what is it?” I asked.
“It’s anti-Lynn propaganda,” she said. “You won’t like it. They’re calling us a caste society, and asking for help.”
*And help has come*, I thought.
Five point three milligrams of it.
“This still doesn’t tell us who did it, and what came through,” I said. “And we’re just a few hours away from Ring open.”
***
In some ways, it didn’t surprise me that I was positioned to fail here. Barely a day to solve a case rooted in complaints that went all the way back to the First Generation.
And here was the Lynn detective, failing at trying to be something he wasn’t. There were some high level Lynns that would be happy to see that.
In fact, I was beginning to wonder if that was the reason for snatching me out of Kamintown to come up here.
Leave to a Lynn to start seeing political intrigue when the story was likely just that the harbormaster only trusted his own kind. Affinity was the easiest explanation. I was being slightly narcissistic.
“Do you know how hard it is to set up a reception ceremony in two days?” the harbormaster eagerly asked me when I showed up to report on what we found.
“No?” I didn’t enjoy social planning.
“Horrific.” The harbormaster waved his hands around. But his voice didn’t make it sound like it was that bad, in fact, he sounded somewhat pleased.
“You should probably delay all that until we figure out what’s happening,” I told him.
“Not the celebration,” he said. “But we will quarantine the pod. That’s not outside normal, the security will just be heavier until we get an answer. We’ll get our top Edgar to coordinate that.”
I’d seen the man around. A beefy man with eyes that flicked at everything with some faint air of suspicion.
“Good job finding what you did,” the harbormaster said. “It gives us some idea of what this is all about.”
“Thank you, sir.” Even as I said it, I felt a faint annoyance at my Lynn-like deference based on his age and position. It was one of the reasons I’d joined the force. Say what you would about Edgars, they viewed competence as worthy of respect and that was it.
***
There were riots happening down in the capitol. I watched some video of peacekeepers dropping down out of orbit. But as one Airan commentator noted, the metal machines were nearing eighty years old. They were Earth-tech, hitched over in the *Oppurtunity* and redesigned in the second generation to be security machines.
The force was taking over and more and more of that. And I wanted to be back with all those Edgars in their riot gear, staring down large mobs shouting anti-line slogans.
***
As the head of the task force, I was given free reign to wander the ceremonies. I chose to watch from security feeds with Edgar-Ramos and Edgar-Frida, hanging inside a tiny closet of a monitoring room tucked away in a service tunnel.
The sting of initial defeat, and not knowing what was going on, left a bad taste in my mouth. I’d beeen a little edgy, but so was everyone else on the station. This was the first off-schedule delivery in all of our recorded history.
What the hell was going on?
I watched as the Ring lit up. I could have been seeing it with my own eyes, out there with VIPs in the viewing cupola. When the raw power of the portal snapped on, I could have seen the distortion ripple in the space between us. I could have watched the very rift in space appear in the heart of the ring, and briefly glimpse a sight of a blue that was old Earth itself.
The Lynn in me wanted to be next to the VIPs, and all that power.
But I had a job to do. Monitoring the faces and actions of people in the capture and comms departments. Studying patterns of movement throughout the station.
Being just generally suspicious.
When the pod snapped out of the portal and struck the arms, I was leaning over a tiny monitor looking out over the comms team.
I called the Lynn there. “Do you have the answer?”
Why had Earth sent this package early, and what did it mean for the schedule. As we understood it, the energy required to open the Ring cost dearly. And there were other Rings, to other worlds, where they worked properly.
There was a new Ring, being built on the edge of our system. It had been sent through in the second opening. It would take another seventy years to build a new Ring from the asteroids and dust out there.
Until then…
“The Enka Virus,” I was told. Earth heard about the alien virus we were reduced to fighting with quarantine methods and had studied all the information we’d sent. They’d decided to help as early as they could.
A few hours later, after all the drunk VIPs were sent back to their shuttles and send home, I stood outside a cleanroom and watched as Airas in full encounter suits slowly opened the pod and pulled everything out.
There was nothing in there but what the manifest told us to expect.
“That makes no sense,” I said. And Edgar-Ramos agreed. So we had them do it again.
I had to go back to the harbormaster with the taste of failure in my mouth again. He licked his lips, and glared at me with all the dissapointment an older Lynn could gather.
“They said you were unconventional, and our best chance of breaking this open,” he said. “I thought it was a strange thing to bring up here, a Lynn policeman. A whole wasted life, grubbing around with no managerial aspirations.”
“I have an idea,” I said, doing my best to ignore his line-based bigotry. It wasn’t the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.
“What’s that?” he asked with scorn.
“I need all the Lynns on the station need to get in the cleanroom and take a look at the pod.”
***
It didn’t take that long. One of the Lynns in the science department found the ampule as we weighed and individually checked all the aerogel packing, canisters, and instructions against the manifest.
The ampule was the size of a thumb, nestled inside a nano-fuel cell, and it weighed five point three milligrams.
It was a line thing. I didn’t want to engage with that at first, I was reluctant to see it. But I shouldn’t have been so naive. The Airas just kept looking over it. Which meant that the station Airas, or at least enough of them in the station to hide the ampule twice, were responsible.
An Edgar tagged it, and three Lynns went with him to have a Sienna team analyze it.
***
I watched the harbormaster give the order to arrest every single Aira in the station.
“Do you think that’s wise?” I asked the harbormaster.
The older Lynn looked at me with barely disguised fury. “They conspired. Most of them.”
“And they likely had a great deal of help from down below,” I added.
“Well, my superiors will deal with that.”
I thought about the riots and shook my head. Things would get worse. The station couldn’t run without Aira line workers, the way technical trades were passed on. And to just bar a whole line from the station outright? It was a denial of birthright.
But I wasn’t in charge here. I was just the detective. I was someone who took orders, I didn’t give them.
Sienna-Winter called. “We know what it is,” she said.
“And?” I could hardly contain my curiosity.
“They can fix the damage to our DNA. It’s a sterility cure.”
The harbormaster looked horrified.
“And,” Sienna added. “DNA samples. Three hundred. For genetice variation.”
The harbormaster shuddered at the word ‘variation.’
“Lines have been protesting about castes for generations,” I said. “And the Aira, they saw a simple, technical fix.”
“I have to admire it,” Sienna said, “even if I can’t condone it.”
“We have it in our control,” the harbormaster said. “Earth can’t interrupt our entire culture just because they are a variant lot. I’ll send it to the council Lynns. In the meantime, I’ll have more Edgars on security.”
***
A peacekeeper took me back down to the ground. An expensive, acelleration-gel filled nightmare of rattling around before I was disgorged back onto Kamintown’s muddy, beige streets.
I looked back up to the sky, enjoying the taste of real air and the lack of fan noise.
Then I made a call to a Kit I knew from a phone in a nearby grocery store. The owner knew me, though several of the Bos loitering by the door glared openly at me.
Kit-Kyliki met me in a park, and I handed him the chemical analysis and summary report by Sienna-Fields.
“Why?” he asked. “You know the ground is going to *erupt* when the other lines see this.”
“I know,” I said. “Job security.”
“Don’t be flippant,” he said. Kit-Kyliki and I had a long history of working together. We’d met when he tried to apply to the force, and then his parents had pressured him out of it. Now I fed him stuff, helped keep him ahead of the other newsmen. “If I show this, I’ll get fired. Or worse.”
“I’ll give it out to a lot of other people. And the Lynns won’t be able to stop it all, not if the Edgars are pissed off as well. And they will be. Hiding this, they won’t like that violation of law.”
“But the lines have held since we first arrived.”
“But they shouldn’t,” I said to the man who should have been my first partner on the squad. There was no reason he couldn’t have been a good detective. Hell, half his shows were really just cover for him tracking down something he’d gotten his teeth into. “They don’t have too anymore. You can feel that pressure, too, I know it. We all do, down here, following in the lanes they want us to.”
I left him there on the street.
We’d survived worse, coming to this world. We’d survive this.
Better. Like an old detective running down a lead, trying to get it wrapped faster than his department Edgars, whatever came next, we’d thrive on it.
Only a multi-line team could have solved what we did so quickly. Only a multi-line world would open that Ring back up, and join our cousins on the other side as we were meant to.
Five point three milligrams.
That was all it would take to change everything.