I just submitted the manuscript for my next novel, The Ishtar Deception. My elevator-pitch description of the book is “a James Bond novel set in the year 10,000.” Writing it was fun, and I hope reading it will be, too.

So, as a reward to everyone for being patient while I let the blog languish during the writing of the book, here’s an excerpt. I’ll keep everyone posted about when it becomes available.

Chapter One

We were half an hour out from Venus capture when my traveling companion woke up. His name — one of them, anyway — was Sabbath Okada, and he had spent the trip down from Uranus in hibernation, his body chilled to just above the point at which ice crystals would turn his cells to mush.

         The revival process had been going on for about six hours before he regained consciousness. His hibernation coffin had to replace the cryo-support fluid in his arteries with blood, warm him up, adjust his glucose and hormone levels, check for damage, add various drugs, restart his heart, and bring his brain up from stasis to ordinary sleep before waking him.

         Being a digital intelligence myself, I didn’t have to bother with any of that. During the voyage I did slow down my processor cycle time a thousand-fold, so that the journey of half a standard year seemed to pass in just a few hours. I could have shut down completely, but I don’t like losing continuity of experience — you never know what might happen while you’re not aware.

         “Daslakh?” he said aloud as soon as he was fully awake.

         “Daslakh’s not here right now,” I replied, just to mess with him.

         “Status, please.”

         “We’re twenty thousand kilometers from the catch point, lined up perfectly. This pathetic excuse for a spacecraft is working fine, thanks to my constant vigilance.”

         “I figured you would find a way to take over. Anything happen while I was asleep?”

         “Oh, a few hundred wars, coups, revolutions, and such. The big news was the end of the millennium. Every biological in the Billion Worlds decided to act like lunatics all at the same time because an arbitrary calendar flipped from four digits to five. Some of them are still at it — one rich idiot at Juren decided to throw a party for ten thousand hours in honor of the event.”

         “Let me guess: Voskemat Urvakan. I’ve been to one of his parties. Strictly in the line of duty, of course.”

         “Nice to hear you get to have some fancy snacks while doing shady stuff for Deimos. Fifteen hundred seconds to capture, by the way.”

         “Can you show me a visual?”

         “If you insist. Or I could link directly to your comm implant like a normal person.”

         “Sorry, Daslakh. I just don’t trust you with access inside my skull.”

         “I’ve had six months alone with your hibernating body. Plenty of time to overcome all the security software you installed in the coffin’s idiot brain. If I wanted to do anything to you, I’d have done it. Maybe I have.”

         “Nevertheless. Visual only, please.”

         So I positioned myself over the clear diamondoid window of the hibernation coffin and turned my underside into a visual display of what our vehicle’s forward cameras could see.

         I hesitate to call the object surrounding us a spaceship. It was a one-ton projectile, with room inside for Sabbath’s support coffin, a few kilograms of luggage, an antimatter battery, and a ten-kilo spider mech body with me in it. The launch laser on Uranus’s moon Miranda boosted us up to nearly four hundred kilometers per second on departure, and then our vehicle spun a plasma sail and braked all the way to Venus. All this cost a staggering amount of gigajoule-equivalents, but Sabbath Okada worked for Deimos, and Deimos is very rich indeed.

         That kind of interplanetary travel requires great precision, and since I had no desire to go shooting off into the void if we missed our catch at Venus, I spent the first few hours of our trip taking over the vehicle’s little idiot brain so that I could handle all the maneuvers myself. I had to adjust our sail diameter during the voyage to avoid smashing into one of the hundreds of millions of habitats in the Main Swarm between Mars and Venus, while still making sure we were lined up to be at a very specific point above Venus’s surface at a very specific instant in time. Trivial for me, even in slow mode, but I did make sure to come up to normal processing speed just before Sabbath’s wake-up sequence began.

         Venus was seventeen thousand kilometers ahead of us now, a big black disk spangled with city lights, silhouetted against the haze of orbiting habs and the distant stars. We were still in full sunlight, not yet in the cone of shadow from the giant sunshade keeping Venus cool.

         Normal planets rotate in ten to thirty hours, so it’s fairly easy to build orbital elevators connected to a ring in synchronous orbit. Not Venus. It barely rotates at all, and goes backwards just to be even more perverse.

         Instead of elevators, Venus has Epicycles: three giant wheel habitats, each half as wide as the planet itself, linked together in orbit by a chain of smaller habs and transport tubes. The big wheels spin to create one standard gee on the inner surface, and that spin exactly matches their orbital velocity plus a fudge factor for Venus’s own rotation. In effect, they roll around Venus once every three hours, as if the planet has a giant set of bearings.

         The result: at the bottom, where the rim of the Epicycle is just a few hundred kilometers above the surface of Venus, the outside of the hab is stationary relative to the ground below. To get from Venus surface to orbit, you simply ride up an active-support tower about five hundred kilometers, then jump the last few hundred meters straight up. If you’ve timed it all just right, you’ll get grabbed by the docking arms on the outside of the spinning hab, and can then dock and go about your business in orbit. Not quite as simple as riding an elevator, but certainly better than trying to get to orbit with a rocket.

         And of course on the opposite side of the Epicycle, seven thousand kilometers higher up, the rim is going eleven kilometers per second, so that a projectile screaming in from the outer Solar System can get scooped up by the electromagnetic “runway” on the rim of the hab for a smooth capture. And if you’re leaving Venus, a very modest boost will send you pretty much anyplace.

         Which is why I was using most of my processing power to make sure our little pod was on target for the catch rings on the giant wheel looming larger and larger ahead. If I missed the rendezvous, then we’d go looping out beyond Uranus again, and instead of a high-energy minimum-time trajectory, it would be a long lazy Keplerian ellipse taking decades. That would be highly boring, and Sabbath would probably die.

         At three hundred seconds to go we were over the wheel of Epicycle Two itself. Ahead, the edge of the rim against space looked perfectly still, while the view down toward Venus showed the curve of the hab rising to meet us, while far below that the lights on the dark surface moved briskly past.

         The rim got closer and closer, turning from a line to a ribbon to a road before filling the horizon on either side, a hundred and forty kilometers wide. Even Sabbath’s old-school eyes could make out details on the outer surface of the hab: docking arms, the rings of the electromagnetic runway, docked ships snug in cradles, radiators and antennas.

         “One minute,” I told Sabbath. His fancy smartmatter suit, which had spent the whole voyage in sullen silence, packed into the little luggage space behind Sabbath’s head, oozed its way into the hibernation coffin and enveloped him.

         Our apparent velocity was just a little greater than the motion of the wheel, so as we dipped down, the scenery began to fly past at a couple of hundred meters per second. A decelerator ring loomed ahead, and I used the projectile’s thrusters for the first and only time in the voyage to nudge it a few meters to one side, putting us exactly through the center of the first loop.

         I can sense electromagnetic fields, but even a biological could feel the tug of deceleration which showed the system was working. The landscape outside slowed, and slowed some more as we entered a second ring, and finally after a third the only motion visible was a great arm swinging up from the rim to grab our vehicle and pop it neatly into an airlock. And all of a sudden the little pod was no longer a spacecraft at all, just a piece of cargo being moved through the hangars on the lowest level of Epicycle Two by a pair of bots.