Investments by Walter Jon Williams

Observatory.”
    “Very good, my lord,” said Nkomo. She had returned to the control room without speaking a word, and had taken her place at the comm board. She looked down at the board. “Comm laser three powering up and— we’ve lost it, my lord.”
    Severin turned to stare at her. “ Lost it? Lost what ?”
    Nkomo looked uncertain. “Lost the laser, my lord. It’s . . . malfunctioned somehow.”
    “Use another laser.”
    The second laser also failed. Severin thought that perhaps the x-ray flux had turned the metal on the ship brittle as glass, and that the metallic semiconductors used to generate the lasers were blowing part under the strain of excitation.
    When a third laser died, Severin decided that his theory was confirmed.
    “Try a VHF antenna,” Severin said. “Use the emergency channel.”
    They were going to get their message to Chee, Severin thought, one way or another, even if he had to build an antenna himself.
    *
    When Martinez returned to his lodgings at the Mayor’s Palace, the Lady Mayor herself bustled toward him as he got out of the car.
    “I wondered where you had been today, my lord,” she said. She looked in surprise at his muddy boots and informal clothing. “There are a stack of invitations that have come in for you.”
    “Rigger Ahmet was showing me the sights,” Martinez said. He turned to Ahmet and winked. “Right, Ahmet?”
    Ahmet grinned broadly. “Absolutely, my lord.”
    The Lady Mayor hesitated. Martinez smiled at her, and then his sleeve comm chimed.
    “Pardon me, my lady.” He answered.
    The chameleon weave on his sleeve shimmered to an image of Lord Ehl. The feathery dark hairs on the sides of his head were standing oddly, as if he’d just suffered an electric shock.
    “My lord,” Ehl said. “We’ve just received a transmission from Surveyor, and— well— I’d be obliged if you could get back to the station as fast as you can.”
    *
    As the coleopter began its descent into Port Vipsania, Martinez looked at Shon-dan in the crystal-clear image of his sleeve display and said, “Do you mean to tell me that despite your entire crew of overpaid astronomers at Chee Station, you failed to detect two beams of deadly energy each over a light-year long ?”
    Shon-dan gazed at Martinez with wide golden eyes. “My lord,” she said, “we’re cosmologists. We haven’t looked at anything within a hundred light-years of this place.”
    Martinez looked balefully at the image of Shon-dan, and then realized he was grinding his teeth. He unclenched and spoke.
    “Tell me what’s going to happen, and how long we’ve got.”
    “We’ve got nine and a half days, my lord. Then Chee will move into the path of that beam, and— “ Shon-dan clacked her peg teeth nervously. “Anyone without proper shielding will, ah, be very much in jeopardy.”
    “The atmosphere won’t be shield enough?”
    “Not for beams of this intensity.” Shon-dan tried to look hopeful. “We’ve worked out the orbital mechanics, by the way, and this should happen to Chee only once every forty-nine thousand years.”
    Which, Martinez thought, explained the relatively primitive life-forms on the surface of the planet as compared with the superabundant life in the sea. Every forty-nine thousand years any complex species on land was wiped out.
    Those fern forests were a clue, if anyone had bothered to read it.
    “So,” he said, “we’ll have nearly fifty thousand good years if we manage to survive the next ten days.”
    The avian’s tone was apologetic. “Ah— there will be problems after the ten days, my lord. Electronics may be destroyed. Food crops may not survive. Metals may turn brittle. And— well, I don’t know what will happen to the station and the elevator. I’ll have to think of that.”
    “You do that. I need an estimate of how much shielding people are going to need to hide under.”
    “Ah— yes, my lord.”
    Martinez ended the transmission. The coleopter was making its final