When the Admiralty realized what we were up to, they attempted to jam our transmissions. We got a laugh out of that one: our comm techs made a game out of finding relays we could bounce signals off and frequencies they hadn’t jammed. Plus we had a lot of allies who were willing to help out. A lot of independent transport operators have no great love for the Initiative and the way they try to control commerce. The independents understood exactly what was being done to us, and they could imagine it being done to them next. Plus both the Grand Nation of the Celestial Arch and the United Cities of Free Luna have long-standing grievances with the Initiative. Both were still paying off debts from before they gained their independence, and they weren’t happy with how the Initiative manipulated those debts to the independents’ disadvantage. If they could’ve, they would’ve resupplied us, but our cycle orbit was too fast for them to match up. But they were happy to rebroadcast our messages and make jamming more difficult. Some even started broadcasting opinion stories on what was happening and all the regulations the Initiative was breaking—including regulations against interfering with communications in space. None of us had considered a propaganda front, so our allies really helped out there.
So then the Initiative decided to fight the propaganda front as well, smearing Captain Aames in the news (with the help of some journos and publishers who were closely allied with Initiative Council members). They painted him as a modern-day Captain Bligh, a cruel commander driving his crew too hard and risking their lives and their mission. They called him everything short of a mutineer. They stopped there, because they knew a charge like that could only be made through your office. But they clearly implied it, and the opinion channels weren’t so restrained. Surely you saw some of those shows?
Q: I’m in the fact business, Chief. I avoid the news and opinion channels.
We saw them all, and we got a lot of laughs out of how inaccurate they were. The captain’s favorite was Nick Aames: The Man Who Stole Mars. The producers of that one even tracked down his brother, Derick, for an interview. The captain had a strange look when he saw Derick. I asked him why, but he just whispered, “I hope they paid you well, Dek.” He wasn’t talking to me.
On 23 April, we were on approach to Earth. A ship was matching velocity with us, burning fuel like it was free. Her transponder identified her as the transport Poling. Captain Aames looked at the main screen. “Right on time,” he said. “Howarth, is she alone?”
Howarth swept his hand across his console, pulling open every instrument he had. “No comm traffic on any channels, Captain. Nothing’s showing up on the scopes or the radar. She’s alone.”
“All right,” Aames said. “Baker, open a comm channel to the Poling.”
The main screen lit up with the image of a female captain, her face lined and her blonde hair going gray, but her eyes still sharp and her bearing straight. She wore a gray uniform like ours, the most common uniform in space transport. “Captain Austin,” Aames said, “it’s good to see you again. How are things aboard the Poling?”
“We’re crammed to the limit, Captain Aames,” Austin said with a smile. “I figure I owe you some air and water after the DeMarco. We’ve got plenty of both, plus the cargo you’ve contracted for Mars delivery, all ready to off-load.”
“Will you have any trouble docking?”
“No, Captain, no trouble at all. We have sufficient fuel for maneuvering, as long as your docking cradle is working.”
Aames nodded. “They tell me it will break down later today, but it should be good for one more rendezvous.” Captain Aames pulled open a ship-wide channel. “This is the captain speaking. All ashore who are going ashore. Those of you with appointments in the Earth-Luna system, your ride is approaching the Aldrin now. I expect you to be ready to board the moment those docking hatches open, and I expect every one of you to carry as much outbound cargo as you can. We’re not going to have any minutes to spare, so say your tearful good-byes now. Bosun Smith and her team have instructions to shove you through the hatch if you can’t move fast enough under your own power.”
Captain Aames switched to a more private channel. “Cargo crew, we have passengers handling the outbound loads. Your job is the inbound. Austin’s crew will be dumping crates out their cargo hatches as fast as they can move. I want you in the main cargo bay, maneuvering units all checked out, and ready to chase that cargo. Remember: without those payloads, I can’t sign your paychecks. Get the crates fast, and don’t miss any. Captain Aames out.”
Then we waited as the Poling made her final approach to the Aldrin. Since our ship has all the maneuverability of a city block, we can’t do anything during docking except wait for the other vessel to approach the lead end of our central tube. When the other vessel comes within reach, we latch on to it with our docking cradles, extensible arms that have tunnels for cargo and personnel. We depend on the piloting skill of the other captain to bring the ships safely together without wasting time or fuel.
Fortunately Captain Austin was an excellent pilot. She brought the Poling in ahead of schedule, and then she killed the relative motion perfectly. The three docking cradles were able to grab hold of the Poling with only a very slight tremor as the grapples locked down.
Again Captain Aames got on the ship-wide comm. “All right, we’re docked. Move it, move it, move it!” On one monitor, we saw the massive cargo-bay hatch open. The bay was already in vacuum for this transfer, and the cargo crew immediately sped out to start chasing crates. On other monitors we saw the first passengers—the ones who had actually been in the docking cradles during attachment, a risky move that Aames frowns upon under ordinary circumstances—climb through the Poling’s hatches as soon as those opened. They fanned out, guided by signals from their comps, as more pushed in behind them.
We needed to move everything, personnel and cargo, fast. Howarth and Austin’s navigator agreed that we had an eleven-minute window before the Poling would have to launch again to make their next rendezvous, given their available fuel. Otherwise they would be stranded in space, out of fuel and in need of rescue. Besides the risk to the personnel, that could give the rescuers—Admiralty ships, most likely—a salvage claim on our outbound cargo. We would miss our deliveries, our contracts would default, and our credit rating would be destroyed. The added scandal of stranded passengers would make it nearly impossible to find new customers, which would ruin our credit even further. A bankruptcy could ruin us just as surely as the Admiralty could. So Captain Aames wanted the entire operation done in nine minutes. If that meant some inbound cargo would be left in space and would have to be chased down later, so be it. The schedule was more important than any individual crate.
So the captain and I and Loadmaster Kelly and others watched the monitors, looking for trouble and calling out suggestions where people and cargo weren’t moving fast enough. Eventually Bosun Smith and her crew really did have to shove people through the hatch, like pushers on the old Tokyo subway system. At six minutes they had every traveler transferred to the Poling. Then they started passing in the remaining outbound crates, one after another like a bucket brigade. Meanwhile, outside the Poling, Kelly’s cargo team zipped around in their vacuum suits and maneuvering units, intercepting crates and steering them toward our large cargo bay, which was temporarily open to vacuum. Catchers in vacuum suits waited in the bay, snagging crates with hooks and grapples and dumping them into the automated stacker.
At seven minutes, ten seconds, the last of the inbound cargo had been intercepted. Kelly contacted the captain. “We’ve got them all, Captain,” she said. “They match the manifest 100 percent.”
“It appears that we will make payroll,” Aames said to me. Then he turned back to the comm channel. “Austin is ready to drop free. Get your people into the bay and close the main hatch. I don’t want anyone caught in her jets.”
“Yes, sir.” Kelly gave her orders, and the last of the cargo crew sped into the bay, squeezing in just before the giant bay door snapped shut. “We’r
e in, sir,” Kelly added.
Aames changed to another channel. “Smith, clear?”
“Clear, sir.”
“Kelly, release the docking cradles,” the captain ordered; and on the screen, the cradles unfolded and gave the Poling a gentle push away. “Captain Austin, you are separated at eight minutes, forty-seven seconds.”
Austin reappeared on the main screen. “Very good work, Captain Aames. We’ve started our boost back to our target trajectory. My compliments to your team. That’s the most efficient transfer I’ve seen in years, especially under such time constraints.”
“I’ll pass along your compliments.” Aames nodded. “And I have a message for all of our friends who are taking passage on your ship: ‘Good luck, take care, and if the Admiralty gives you any trouble, tell them to talk to me.’”
Austin smiled. “I’ll pass that along. Good luck, Nick.”
“Good luck to you too,” Aames answered. “And that goes double for you: if they give you any trouble—”
Austin interrupted. “If they give me any trouble, I don’t give a damn. You saved my life and my passengers, so I owe you. And I think what they’re pulling on you is pure horseshit. A lot of us in the Corps agree.”
At that the captain almost smiled. “Now if only more in the Admiralty did. Did they give you any trouble?”
Captain Austin shook her head, and her face looked puzzled. “No. They tried, but it was a really lame effort.”
Aames’s eyes grew wider. “Lame? How?”
“Well, they had two Orbital Defense patrol boats in position that could have made things difficult for us. If they had taken after us right away, they could’ve caught us pretty easily. I expected them to intercept and try to board us. I thought I would have to dump cargo to get light enough to stay ahead of them.”
Aames leaned forward, looking intently at the main screen. “But they didn’t try to intercept you?”
Austin shook her head. “They started on an intercept vector, but then they got orders to return to base and refuel. It made no sense to me: those patrol boats always maintain enough fuel for a chase. That’s what they’re stationed out there for. But someone back at their base decided they needed to top off. I don’t know who, but they made it impossible for those boats to catch us. They did us a big favor.”
At that, the captain broke with the usual comm protocols: he just pushed the call closed without signing off. Then he sat and stared at the blank screen, but his eyes were unfocused, as if looking at something no one else could see. I crossed over to see if something was wrong, just in time to hear him whisper one word: “Rosie.”
Q: I assume by that he meant Admiral Morais?
I’m not a mind reader, Inspector, and he didn’t explain himself. That would be my assumption as well, though. Admiral Morais was in charge of Orbital Defense at that time.
Q: So you’re suggesting she deliberately prevented those patrol boats from intercepting the Poling.
I’m suggesting nothing, Inspector. Again, I don’t know. And you wouldn’t want me to speculate on matters I know nothing about, would you?
Q: No, Chief Carver.
Then I won’t. But I can tell you that Captain Aames immediately placed a call to Admiral Morais in Orbital Defense Headquarters. And that call was refused, as were the calls he placed hour after hour in the succeeding days. But it wasn’t just Admiral Morais; all command channels were blocked to us. “Baker, keep trying,” the captain said. “Find some way to get through. I’ll be in my office.” He left, and I took command of the bridge for another shift.
That started the last approach of our orbit. Throughout, our passengers and crew did their part to step up the information war. Every antenna on the ship was flooded with comm calls to friends, relatives, anyone with influence or even just a loud voice. The Initiative tried again to block our signals; but in so doing they fell right into our trap. Our agents on Earth were ready for that moment, and soon the networks were flooded with questions. “Why has the Aldrin gone silent?” “What doesn’t the Initiative want us to know?” “Our families have a right to talk to us. Has the Admiralty locked them up?” “Did the Admiralty destroy the Aldrin and her passengers?” “Doesn’t this jamming violate fundamental rights?” After a few days of growing outrage, the Initiative gave up and stopped jamming us.
But they didn’t stop their counterpropaganda. The network programs were full of lies about life aboard the Aldrin: They painted the crew as a bunch of human traffickers, preying on gullible passengers desperate to reach Mars; and they painted the passengers as virtual slaves. We countered that with reports from Maxwell City on Mars. Many of the citizens there had traveled on the Aldrin to keep their costs down and learn along the way, and they were happy to set the record straight.
The Initiative’s proxies also called us pirates and accused us of taking the Aldrin from her rightful owners. That was a complete lie, of course. First, aside from just the smallest bit of maneuvering capability, we couldn’t “take” the Aldrin anywhere: she was in her orbital trajectory, and there she would remain. We could adjust course a little to find the optimum cycler trajectory; but if we veered too far in any direction at all, we would lose our cycler completely. Then we could either drift in space until the Admiralty declared us a derelict, or we could hire every tug in Earth-Luna space to try to pull us back into the cycler. The costs of that would bankrupt us for sure, so we would lose either way.
But beyond that, we were not endangering the owners’ assets at all. Thanks to Captain Austin, we would still make all our contracted deliveries to Earth—and to Mars, once we got out of this little war—so we would stay current with all debt and dividend payments to our investors. Plus once the Admiralty stopped jamming us, we were able to deliver our data cargo: months and months of astronomic and planetary data from Mars and from our trip back and forth. The highlights of this research were beamed from Mars back to Earth on a continual basis; but the raw data sets, the bulk data, were too massive to send from Mars on the narrow bands available between planets. So we carried copies of the raw data with us, and we started transmitting them as soon as we were in range. And the companies and institutions that supported all that research paid us for every gigabyte transferred.
So no, the Aldrin’s owners were under no financial risk. Lostetter assured us that if anything, the owners were making a better profit margin than we were on that cycle. If they lost a single credit in this affair, it would be through costs imposed by the Initiative, not by us.
Not that it mattered. The Initiative would be the ones judging those costs, so no one expected we would get fair treatment in that department.
Q: Ahem.
I’m sorry, Inspector, that was what we expected. But now we have complete faith in the impartiality of the Inspector General’s Office.
Q: Now that you’re left with no choice.
Yes. Well, the Admiralty had stopped trying to jam our messages (other than on command channels, which remained closed to us). And they continued their counterpropaganda, but it became repetitive: the same shrieking heads repeating the same refuted lies every night. Our agents reported that the journos weren’t persuading anyone new; they were just keeping the Initiative’s supporters from wavering in their calls for our heads. That effort was running on automatic, but we were sure the Initiative had another plan in the works. All we could do was wait to see what it would be.
It was Navigator Howarth who first learned the horrible news. When we were a few days from our closest, fastest approach to Earth, he called out from his station, “Captain, our travel lane isn’t clear.”
Aames looked up at Howarth. “What? Traffic regulations require that our lanes be cleared when we pass through the system.”
“I’m picking up visual and radar readings, all from our Earth perigee. It’s faint, but I’ll put it on the main screen.” Howarth pushed his telescope image to the screen, and the comp added faint blue rings to highlight the unexpected objects. “I don’t
know what they are, sir, but for us to pick them up at this distance they have to be pretty massive. Larger than freighters. Maybe supply barges.”
“Barges?” Aames asked. “All passing through the same space, by coincidence, all at the same time?”
“No, sir.”
Aames frowned at the screen. “But they can’t be in a stable orbit there, that’s not possible. This isn’t a bad video, things have to orbit, boost, or fall. They can’t just sit there.”
Howarth nodded. “Let me reverse the image and then speed up the motion, Captain.” The image suddenly jumped backward half a day, according to the timestamp. “Now that I know what to look for, this is the earliest point we could see them. Now watch.” The image started advancing at 100-times speed. The computer enhancement showed the dots darting out under power, and then slowing, stopping, and falling back. Each dot followed its own trajectory; but every one of them, when it fell far enough, boosted back out again.
“Station keeping,” the captain said, his voice flat.
“Yes, sir,” Howarth said. “It must be hideously expensive in fuel cost, but they’re as close to ‘hovering’ as you can get in space. See here?” He pushed a new program to the screen, and red circles appeared, highlighting smaller dots. “These must be fuel carriers. They come in, dock with the larger dots, and then return to Orbital Defense HQ.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said. “We’re over a week from perigee. They can’t keep this up.”
The Last Dance Page 38