Our archipelagic economy obeys certain fixed rules, according to Jeeves. The inner system is rich in energy and heavy elements, with short travel time but middling-deep gravity wells. The moons of the outer-system gas giants are replete with light elements and shallower gravity wells, but their primaries are far apart. Finally, the Forbidden Cities scattered through the Kuiper Belt’s dwarf planets are loosely bound — and very far apart. Consequently, Mercury exports solar energy via microwave beam, hundreds and thousands of terawatts of the stuff, and uranium and processed metals via slow-moving cycler ship and magsail. Venus exports rare earth metals — albeit in smaller quantities, at greater cost — while Mars contributes iron, carbon dioxide, and other materials.

But beyond the asteroid belt, solar cells perform too poorly to be of much use; transmission loss raises the cost of energy beamed from the inner system; and travel times stretch out exponentially. The result is inevitable — just about everything that moves (and quite a lot that doesn’t) is nuclear-powered.

Now let me tell you about nuclear space rockets: They’re shit. And I hate them. But unfortunately, I’m stuck with them…

There are two types of nuclear power plants, fusion and fission.

Fusion plants are enormous great things that don’t go anywhere, which is good, because it means you can run away from them. They’re expensive, cantankerous, and the only good reason for putting up with them is that they produce lots and lots of heat, without which we would freeze to death. Most of the Forbidden Cities rely on fusion plants, as do the various interstellar projects. You can spot them a long way away because they’re always surrounded by enormous slave barracks. They come with certain maintenance issues — if it’s not the reactor itself, it’s the cooling systems and the heat exchangers and the generators. When your city relies for its power on a machine that takes gigawatts of juice just to keep running and is sitting on top of an ice cap and pumps out enough waste heat to trigger moonquakes and boil the atmosphere, you have certain structural-engineering issues to deal with.

(Personally, I don’t see why they can’t just scrap them and rely on beamed power from Mercury, but Jeeves said something complicated about Energy Autarky and gigawatt futures trading and interplanetary war that I didn’t quite follow.)

Fission reactors are a whole different pile of no fun at all. They’re small and portable, so ships rely on them. Out here, where the solar wind is so attenuated that it might as well not have been invented, most ships use a VASIMR rocket to push themselves about, which takes energy, and without beamed solar power, they rely on a fission reactor for juice.

Now, I have no objection in principle to a machine that makes it possible to travel between planets in something less than decades. But fission reactors put out a lot of radiation, and if you’re in a cramped spaceship, nineteen-twentieths of which consists of fuel tankage, you’ve got a choice. You can do without shielding, or you can do without payload mass. And guess which the Indefatigable does without?

I am really glad I got my Marrow techné upgraded on Mars.

I had been assigned a first-class stateroom. Unfortunately, as I arrived late, the only stateroom available was about three meters directly above the Number Two reactor. I discovered this about half an hour after we undocked, when Indefatigable decided to go critical, and the meter on the inside of my door zipped from zero up to half a Sievert per hour.

My objection to fission reactors is simple: I don’t like being used as shielding. Half a Sievert per hour is enough to kill one of our Creators in about two days. I’m made of tougher stuff, but it still takes its toll on me. I hate gamma radiation — it totally messes with the oxidation states of the pigments in my chromatophores. After a couple of days I go all blotchy, and it takes my Marrow techné ages to fix my skin because it’s also really busy fixing everything else at the same time. I need to deepsleep twice as long as usual, I need to eat more and suck more juice, and I keep getting odd flashes across my visual field.

So, there you have it. In my considered opinion, nuclear power is shit. Interplanetary travel is also shit. Therefore, we have compounded shit with shit to make even more shit. I am, in short, not a happy Freya.

(I tried complaining to Indy, but he told me in so many words that it was all my own fault for being late, and would I prefer a steerage berth? In the end he relented and sent down a nice beryllium underblanket for my bunk, but still…!)

And now for some more shit. (I’m unhappy, which means I have every intention of sharing it with you. Enjoy!) As mentioned earlier, the Indefatigable is a nuclear/VASIMR high-speed outer-system liner. Five percent of his mass is spaceship plus cargo and passengers; the rest consists of huge bulbous tanks full of liquid hydrogen. Now, you might already have realized what my problem is. Indy only carries about fifty tons of cargo, including nearly a hundred passengers. Even those of us in first class are packed in like uninitialized arbeiters in a warehouse. I have a cabin one meter wide, one meter long, and three meters high. I gather that this is much larger than normal, partly because it’s on top of the Number Two reactor, and partly because I wouldn’t fit inside a normal stateroom, which is one meter by one by one and a half because they’re designed for the chibiform aristos. Typical. They have, as usual, gotten there first and wrecked the experience for everyone else.

There’s a first-class lounge; it’s almost five meters long and two meters wide. I had more space in my arbeiter cell on Venus! And I didn’t have to share it with a bunch of nasty, scheming nobles on their way to do whatever it is they intend to do in Jupiter system.

So I lie on the bunk in my metal-walled cell, try to ignore the flashes inside my eyes, and roundly curse Jeeves for booking me onto this flying death trap, not to mention delaying my arrival so that I didn’t get a better berth. (I’ll concede that it takes two to dance the horizontal tango, but I don’t see him spending a whole year frying slowly on top of a nuclear kettle.)

When lying on the bunk gets boring, I reconfigure it as a chaise and practice reclining glamorously — except it’s pretty hard to do that when the ship’s only accelerating at a hundredth of a gee. My wardrobe’s pretty much inaccessible aboard ship, and not much use until we arrive. I could spend hours per day just repairing my chromatophores (have you ever woken up with lips the color of a three-day-old bruise?) but that loses its charm fast. “What can I do?” I moan at Indy, halfway through day two of three hundred and ninety-six.

“You could do what everyone else does, and go into hibernation. Or you could try slowtime,” he says unsympathetically. “I’m told a factor of twenty helps the journey pass quickly.”

I’d go into hibernation, but I don’t dare — not in this line of work. Total suspension of consciousness is too damn dangerous. So that leaves slowtime.

Let me tell you about slowing down time, just in case you haven’t already guessed: Slowing down time is shit.

Sure, all of us can adjust our clock speed downward. It’s normal practice for starship passengers and crew, and common enough on long-haul ships in the outer system. Plus, it’s helpful when your owner doesn’t need you right now, or if you get into trouble and need to conserve juice until someone happens by to dig you out of it — that’s why the capability is designed into us. The advantage over hibernation is, of course, that you’re still awake — and able to come back up to real-time speed fast if something happens. But it’s absolutely no fun whatsoever, and I wish I was still as innocent as I was on the Venus/Mercury run, so that I could contemplate hibernation without breaking out in a cold sweat.