The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  Dooley took her hand. “We let him back. We took a vote, remember, just like always. The question is what to do about it. Once we’re in range of the Nov Tero worldnet there’s no controlling what gets out.”

  “That’s less than four days from now. If Mom accuses him of trying to steal from the shareholders and can’t prove it…”

  “He can file suit and take my shares,” she finished. “I know TU law better than you do.”

  “It’s worse than that.” Dooley sucked his teeth. “We have valuable salvage on board that we haven’t told the other shareholders about. Rakin could make the case that we were the ones stealing it, and he was just trying to stop us.”

  Hisako blanched.

  “Didn’t think about that, did you? Neither did I.” The captain massaged the bridge of her nose with two fingers. “So, at worst, he’s stealing undeclared shareholder assets, and he hasn’t even done that, yet.”

  “He’ll do something, though,” Adem said.

  “Of course he’ll do something!” The frustration was back in her voice. “We’re talking about Rakin. I’ve known him longer than both of you. He’s always doing something. That’s why my mother chose me as captain.” She got up and paced the small stretch of carpet on her side of the table.

  “What if we take it to a vote? We can’t keep the information from the Hadfield to ourselves anyway,” Dooley said. “Tell the shareholders we just found the mother lode of tech files and let them decide what to do with it. Once we declare it as an asset, we can keep Rakin from selling it off.”

  “He might do it anyway,” Adem said. “He knows a lot of people on Nov Tero.”

  “A lot of them want to kill him.” The captain sat back down and tented her fingers on the table. “Declaring the files as assets means we need a plan for them. Dooley, I suppose it’s too much to assume that you’ll agree with me about what to do with the information. I can already see the waves of populism running through your head.”

  Dooley smiled. “We could make a few rich people richer or we could help a lot of people by giving the information away for free. I know what I’d prefer.”

  “What do you think we should do with it, Adem?”

  Adem had been trying to make up his mind about that since he’d peeked into Hisako’s directory. The food assembler alone could change life on any of the worlds. “I don’t know. I feel like there are pitfalls everywhere.”

  “Hisako?”

  “We should destroy anything in there about the squeezer. The UA discovered it by accident en route to the worm-drive. Someone will rediscover it eventually, but we shouldn’t help them out.”

  Adem and Dooley nodded in agreement.

  “If you destroy the files, I don’t want to know about it. Check with Lucy, and see what she thinks. If we’re not on the same page by the time we go to the shareholders, I want to at least make sure we’re all reading from the same book.” The captain gripped the edge of the table like she was trying to bend it to her will. “I’ll call a meeting in two days.”

  The team’s workspace was empty when Adem returned to it later that night. He’d filled in Lucy and Vee. Hisako was to talk with Odessa.

  Adem worked with the nearsmart to locate all the fabrication and maintenance files for squeezer tech. The search also turned up a batch of video messages, readied but never sent. Adem played one. A member of the weapons crew, a young woman – the name on the message was Maria Alvarez – smiled and joked for her two daughters, Cissy and Raquel. She signed off with, “I’ll be home soon. I love you.” The two girls most likely had died with the United Americas settlement on Freedom. Adem put the cache of messages in a separate directory and searched on. A broader search turned up a few more tech files, nothing important, nothing that hadn’t already been reverse-engineered or replaced by modern inventions, along with a roster of the Hadfield’s crew at the time of the Two-Day War. He searched out the captain, Neleh Martin, and found her logbook. He played the final entry. The recorded voice was weary. “The mission was… successful. The Constitution scored a direct hit on the planet with the mass-compression field. Makkah compressed by approximately fifteen percent and rebounded into rubble. No survivors are expected. The Constitution was also lost. The war is won.” The recording ran in silence for fifteen seconds before the captain cleared her throat. “Our weapons are fully functional, however, we’ve sustained severe damage to our engines and heavy casualties. I’ve activated the distress beacon, but there is likely no one left to answer. The war is won, but the United Americas has fallen.”

  The salvage crew from the Hajj had found Martin’s body on the bridge of her ship. She appeared to have died of a single gunshot wound to the head, presumably self-inflicted. Adem scanned the first log entry of the war and skipped ahead to the third. This time Martin’s voice was crisp and professional. “The Queensland settlement on Freedom reported that a single scout ship, presumably manned, slammed into New Washington at 0930 this morning. Destruction was total. The ship’s trajectory has been traced back to Makkah. My senior officer, Captain Mark O’Neill of the Constitution, has ordered us to counter strike with all possible force. We are en route to Makkah at fastest possible speed. ETA is six months relative.”

  That recording alone was probably worth the trip out to the derelict. Historians and politicians had debated the cause of the war for years afterward, using it as a scare tactic to push policy and manipulate the citizenry. Adem’s great-grandmother had been forced to rename her ship and spend as much time as possible at near c.

  A Caliphate survivor had started the war. It was possible he’d been some kind of religious radical, but the distance between the settled planets had put an end to most of that tension. More likely it had been personal. The freezer pods assigned to the Caliphate had been shoddily made, with far higher death rates than the ones the UA fashioned for its friends. Maybe the pilot of the attack ship, after spending months alone at near light speed, had arrived at his new home to learn that a loved one, maybe all of his loved ones, had died on the way. The settlement on Makkah would have been ignorant of the attack, with no idea why the UA warships suddenly appeared in orbit.

  Adem looked over his work. The squeezer index was complete. Uncle Rakin was right about one thing, certain people would love to get their hands on the information. A resolution to any debate, not to mention a quick fix to the growing refugee crisis. The Hajj shareholders – including the crew – could make a killing on top of the bonanza already headed their way. He rubbed his face. Destroying the files was theft, taking money out of the pockets of people he worked with every day. He ordered the nearsmart to overwrite the lot.

  HISAKO

  Five days from Nov Tero

  I took a seat at the table between Adem and Lucy. Maneera had apologized for threatening to bring me up on a breach of contract charge, but we weren’t ready to be side by side meeting buddies just yet. Dooley slid a plate of cookies across the table to me.

  “What’s this all about?” Rakin said, preempting his sister’s attempt to call the meeting to order. “We’re not close enough to get any news from Nov Tero, so unless you’ve called us here to crow about not killing us with your second-hand worm-drive, I don’t see the point.”

  The captain smiled. “We won’t start seeing the financial advantage of having a worm-drive until we’re back on Gaul in a few months – I have a pretty specific shopping list for our partners there – so I’ll wait until then to pat myself on the back.”

  “Then what are we doing here?” said Kalinda. “I’m not interested in making more blind decisions for the investors.”

  “We had to do this before we interfaced with the Nov Tero network.” Maneera signaled to Adem. “And you’ll shortly understand why.”

  Adem woke his reader and a copy of the new directory Odessa made for me appeared on the main screen and on all the other readers around the table. He cleared his throat. “Looks like we got a lot more than we expected when we downloaded the Hadfield’s dat
abase.” He gave them a few seconds to scan the list of files. “We thought we’d get the logs, maybe some messages home. We ended up with the specs for every piece of United Americas technology worth wishing for. We got mass-grav, the worm-drive, the cancer cure, the works. It’s all there for adapting, copying, and recreating.”

  “How long have you known about this?” Kalinda demanded. She hadn’t been smiling much since she and Jolyon Ong stopped dating. They were sitting on opposite sides of the table now. Rumor had it Tobey had something to do with it.

  “Two days,” the captain answered. “I called this meeting as soon as I was made aware. Adem discovered the records while working on the worm-drive.”

  “It took me a few days to create the directory.” Odessa had helped him to mask the time-date stamps on the files in exchange for deleting everything about the UA androids. “I told the captain as soon as I was sure what we had.”

  Dooley cleared his throat. “I don’t need to tell anyone how important this is. Everything the United Americas kept from us is right there.”

  Rakin flicked his finger to scroll up and down the directory. His face was impassive. “I suppose you want an apology, Maneera. Your gamble paid off.”

  Rakin was either the best liar I’d ever seen, or he really hadn’t known the extent of the Hadfield records.

  “An apology would be nice, Rakin, but I don’t expect it. What I would like is a motion and a vote to proceed.”

  Dooley raised his hand. “I motion we give it away. Dump all the files into the Nov Tero worldnet when we sync and do the same for every planet we visit. It’s not ours to keep.”

  Rakin cursed. “Give up what is yours all you want! Three percent of that data’s value is mine, and I’m not letting it go to anyone for free!”

  A noisy debate spread around and over the table in seconds. Maneera used her gavel to get things back under control. “There’s a motion on the floor,” she said. “Does it have a second?”

  Adem seconded it. “There are a lot of people who need help out there. The highest bidder isn’t necessarily going to give it to them.”

  “We risked lives and resources to get this information.” Rakin glared at Dooley. “Are your children’s lives worth so little to you?”

  “We risked our lives to get the worm-drive, Uncle,” Adem reminded him. “The tech specs were an accident.”

  “Accident or not, the data belongs to all of us,” Jolyon said. “None of us signed on to the Hajj to do charity work.”

  The argument started again. I imagined it was even worse across the ship and hoped Vee had a handle on it. The captain requested order. “We’ll vote on it. Those in favor of distributing the UA files, for free, to all worlds, vote ‘aye.’ Those opposed, vote ‘nay.’”

  Dooley and Adem stood alone on the ‘aye’ side for long moments as the vote trickled in. Two percent of the crew vote joined them, with the rest joining Rakin, Lucy, Maneera, me, and Kalinda in the ‘nay’ column.

  “The motion does not carry.”

  “Had to try,” Dooley said.

  Lucy raised her hand. “I motion we bring this conversation to the Traders’ Union. If we start selling this stuff willy-nilly, we’re going to lose control of it. Say we sell it on Nov Tero tomorrow, then take it to Gaul. What’s to keep someone here from taking it to Freedom or Guatama and selling it before we get there?”

  That was my cue. I seconded her motion.

  Rakin sputtered. “You said yourself we have the fastest ship in the worlds. Who’s going to beat us to Guatama? Who’s going to even try to sell there? They’re broke! The colonies are dying!”

  I smiled at him. “It could happen, Uncle, and, if so, there’s a big chunk of money we won’t get. If we take it to the Union, we can get our claim to it validated. Then anyone who sells it will owe us plus damages.”

  “I’d like to amend your motion to make it ship policy that we keep the information under wraps until we can call up a full meeting of the Traders’ Union. Anyone who leaks will open himself up to heavy litigation,” Maneera added.

  I resisted looking at Rakin’s face. “I second that.”

  “It will take years to summon the full Union!” Rakin fumed. “We’ll have to get messages to every station, every ship!”

  “Fastest ship in the worlds, Uncle,” Lucy grinned.

  “Dooley, you’ll get another chance to pitch your free-for-all plan to the Traders’ Union.” The captain picked up her gavel. “If there is no further discussion, we’ll vote on the amendment first.”

  To: Prof. Manon Toulouse, Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, Versailles City, Gaul

  From: Adem Sadiq, PhD, NSU extension

  Madam:

  I hold a doctorate in Earth History courtesy of an NSU-accredited nearsmart program. My dissertation, “The Jeremiad: An Examination of Themes in United Americas Folk Music, 1940 to 2207,” is no doubt floating somewhere in the NSU archives.

  I write to you with greetings and an opportunity for scholarship. In months or perhaps years to come, you will, if tuned into current happenings, learn that the crew of my vessel, the Hajj, has salvaged many of the artifacts and records of the United America’s battleship, the Christopher Hadfield. The Hadfield, as you no doubt recall, was part of the force assigned to the attack on the planet Makkah during the Two-Day War.

  I would like to bring one artifact in particular to your attention, an electronic reader owned by UAMC Cpl. Ryan Thomas, who was assigned to the Hadfield as part of a rifle squad.

  The Christopher Hadfield took heavy damage in the attack, but contrary to accepted history, it was not destroyed. Cpl. Thomas and his squad were secured within their rapid-deployment pods at the time of the attack and thus survived. The Marines lived for nearly sixteen months aboard the failing Hadfield as it orbited within the Makkah debris cloud.

  Unable to effect repairs, Thomas and the other castaways took extreme measures, including cannibalism of the dead, to survive. Thomas died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound after the death of the penultimate survivor, UAMC Pvt. First Class Ellen Goodman.

  The aforementioned electronic reader was secured in our recent expedition to the Christopher Hadfield and remains in my possession. It contains, among other things, Cpl. Thomas’s personal journal.

  I expect to be in Versailles City sometime in the spring of 3260. Knowing your interest in the military history of the United Americas, I thought to offer you access to Cpl. Thomas’s reader and the data it contains.

  If you are interested, please reply by the usual means.

  I remain your humble servant,

  Adem Sadiq

  HISAKO

  Nov Tero Station, Nov 15, 3269

  The air was thick with pheromones, some of them natural, most of them coming off Dooley’s newest concoction. He called it Chill and swore there wasn’t a single drop of alcohol in it. Everyone had one in hand. It smelled like sandcat shit.

  Vee beckoned me to a corner of Terry’s Place that I was developing territorial feelings about. It was just far enough away from the bar to have an intimate conversation. It was our spot.

  “You want one?” She tapped the tumbler in front of her. It looked worse than it smelled.

  “I’ll just get a beer.” I elbowed my way back through the artificially mellow crowd. By the time I returned to the table, Vee was consulting her reader.

  “Project?” I said.

  “Itinerary. We only have a couple of free days once we finish unloading. I want to get in as much as I can.”

  “Are you going to see your family?”

  “They’ll try to convince me to stay, but their hearts won’t be in it.” She rubbed the side of her neck. “I’ll be happier and make more money on the Hajj.”

  I scanned her to-do list. “You can really do all that here?”

  “It won’t be cheap, but we can get a deal if we both go in on it.”

  I lost interest in follow up questions when Adem stepped up and slid his reader toward me. “W
e got trouble,” he said. “Take a look.”

  The picture’s resolution was fuzzy, like I was seeing the subject through a veil. “Looks like a worm-drive projector.”

  “Try again.” He pointed. “Look at the power transfer and output. Based on what I saw before I erased everything, I think it’s a squeezer.”

  Uh oh. “Where did you get this?”

  “Primary airlock scanner. Rakin just went through it with a crate he pulled out of that pod of his.”

  “He built a squeezer?” My head was swimming. I’d studied the worm-drive for months and was still years away from being able to build one. How had Rakin gotten ahead of me?

  “He didn’t build anything.” Adem’s face was pale. “Someone pulled it off the Hadfield for him.”

  “While you were– How?”

  “Mateo. He had the time and access. He was in the workspace the night I found out about the files. I bet he gave Rakin access to them, too.”

  “But how did Rakin know–”

  “I called the captain, but she’s in a meeting with the partners. No interruptions.”

  “What’s going on?” The alarm in our voices finally got through Vee’s artificial mellow. She was struggling to focus.

  “Bad things. Sober up.” I grabbed Vee’s reader. “The next elevator car to the surface closes up in fifteen minutes. Can we make it?”

  “You should stay here,” he said. “If Rakin grabs you, he’ll have the whole package.”

  He might have said more, but I was moving too fast to hear it. I pushed through the place harder than was polite, relying on Dooley’s cocktail to keep anyone from protesting. Adem followed me out the door.

  “Do you know your way around the station?” I said.

  “Well enough.”

  We jogged to the primary airlock and waited impatiently to be cycled through. Once we were in the station proper, we broke into a run, ignoring the questions launched by the members of the crew on guard outside.

  “It’s not far!” Adem said.