by Wil McCarthy
“Ah. Too bad. There could have been a medal in it for him. You’ll be receiving a Distinguished Service, by the way.”
“Whee,” Alice said, unimpressed.
“We’ll hold it for your return,” Tompkins said, also unfazed. She was a Democrat from Illinois, long accustomed to dealing with ingrates and cranks. Then, on a more serious note, she said, “The Kiwis will expect the return of Sergeant Powell’s body, along with some kind of explanation.”
“If I had one, I’d give it to them,” Alice said. “I don’t know what her deal was.”
“Hmm. All right. We’ll see what we can find out at this end.”
“And returning the body would be a lot easier if you guys would drop the fucking blockade. It’s tight rations up here, ma’am, and that trip requires a bathtub full of xenon.”
“Hmm. I’ll take it under advisement. Watch your language, please.”
“Sorry.”
For a few seconds, nobody said anything. Then, with a smile, the President said, “Your country thanks you for your service, Major. Really. We owe you a great debt.”
Again without thinking, Alice saluted. “Ma’am. It’s my great pleasure to serve.”
Tompkins returned the salute, then leaned on a button to hang up the call.
The Earth reappeared in the windows, full and bright as the day it was made.
“Well,” said Igbal Renz, “by my count, that’s twice you’ve saved us, in the space of half an hour. You’re a hell of a sheriff. And hibernation medic, and whatever the hell else. Do you maybe want a job?”
5.3
28 April
✧
H.S.F. Concordia
Moored to Transit Point Station
Low Earth Orbit
When Tina Tompkins announced a “new cooperative agreement with Renz Ventures” that “puts U.S. Air Force personnel on-site at Esley Shade Station in an advisory capacity,” nobody was much fooled by the careful wording of her speech—least of all Dan Beseman. It didn’t help that on the very same day, Tompkins lifted the naval blockade of Suriname, and cut back sharply on the list of embargoed goods, or that an unfortunately timed “industrial accident” had claimed the life of an ESL1 staffer that same morning. Yeah, right.
Orlov Petrochemical and Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot issued a joint statement to the effect that government interference in private enterprise was un-American and in opposition to multiple treaties and U.N. covenants. The terse statement stopped short of expressing solidarity with Renz Ventures in general or ESL1 in particular, and also stopped short of warning against any such action with regard to Clementine. But there was, Dan thought, an edge of menace to it nonetheless. It was a well-known fact that Orlov Petrochemical facilities had always been armed, and did not rely on national armies or governments for their safe functioning.
Lawrence Killian took a nearly opposite tack, saying in a personal statement issued by his public relations office, “Actions that affect the entire world should not be undertaken in a vacuum, so to speak. Igbal Renz’s behavior has been worrying people for some time now, and it’s gratifying to see some adult supervision brought into the mix. I have every confidence in the U.S. Air Force to steward this power as they have so many others, in the interest of peace and global security.”
Dan Beseman, for his part, issued no statements and made no public comments, either for or against the U.S. action. He did, though, make an entry into his daily journal.
Dan was an extremely famous person already, and he expected to be remembered fondly by history even if his Mars colony somehow failed, so his journal, while private, was written with an eye toward future audiences for whom Dan was a long-dead historical figure. No matter how his thoughts might wander, he tried to steer clear of petty politics, or really anything that had no direct bearing on the colonization of space.
With regard to the blockade he had written,
The very governments that have declined to meet the demand of ordinary people for access to space, are now throwing muscle around to prevent private parties from doing it for them. This shameful demonstration is no doubt meant to intimidate, and it succeeds handily. Guess what, Horsemen: it’s still Earth’s decision whether you succeed or fail! But still, it makes an opposite point as well, that space-based enterprise must do its level utmost to cut these ties and dependencies, so people like Tompkins can only watch and ask, as opposed to dictate. I would rather face ten Orlovs than a single Tompkins, and if a colonized Mars can only speak to its parent as a beggar or a child, then we will have failed in one of the most important tasks history has ever set. Thus, with creativity and poise, we must make a world that can, as quickly as at all possible, stand tall and alone upon the face of eternity.
Now, faced with the reality that the U.S. military had infiltrated, attacked, and violently seized a privately owned space station, he thought long and hard about the implications (which were disturbing in the extreme), before writing:
I hope it’s a matter of record, and infamy, that on this date, the U.S. Air Force killed a civilian while illegally seizing control of ESL1 Shade Station. At least, I presume it was illegal; I’m going to have our team look into it, with an eye toward filing a lawsuit for, at the very least, wrongful death. If not illegal, then the situation in space is even more precarious than it had seemed, with governments assuming the right to such piracy.
The lesson is, we simply cannot launch Concordia soon enough. Until we’re too far away to invade or harass, and until our critical supply lines pass over the countries of Earth rather than through them, we are similarly at risk of governmental bad actors.
And the situation is even worse and even more troubling than that, because (reading between the lines) it appears to me that the attack on ESL1 was perpetrated from within, by active military posing as civilian recruits. Are such tactics limited to only Renz Ventures? I doubt it very much, given how very insistent the U.S. government has been about placing their own four handpicked individuals at Antilympus Township. Allegedly NASA personnel, but who can say what their actual orders might be? What they might actually be trained and willing to do on behalf of the U.S., and failing governments everywhere?
So, placing our own trust in these four NASA Feds would be insane. At best, they serve two masters, and at worst they serve only whoever their commander in chief happens to be when they land and de-hibernate. But what does it mean to distrust? Is it sufficient to set four or eight or twelve trusted people the task of watching over them, and tie up precious resources of time and human capital? Can such a small military be curtailed and overpowered by determined civilian overthrow? Or are the potential costs simply too exorbitant?
No, it seems to me that if people like Tompkins assume the right to conquer, then people like us should assume the right to keep Federal stooges in a state of hibernation, and ship them back unopened on the first rocket to Earth.
Is it fraud, to accept U.S. money under that pretense? Not, I think, if refusing the money merely shifts the mode of attack. We have the right to self-defense, and that has to include the right to strike first where the threat is clear. Certainly we have as much right to prevent interference as they have to interfere in the first place. It troubles me to think along these lines, but it does feel that our hand is being forced, in this and other matters.
The only reluctance I feel, aside from general unease at the necessity, is that any decisive action on our part may provoke an even larger and more decisive response. Just how long are America’s arms? How long are Earth’s? And why in God’s name do they care what we’re up to on a faraway planet, except to satisfy a deep-grained need for control?
This much I know: the sky is too vast to be owned, but we will carve out a piece of it for ourselves and ourselves alone, no matter what.
He was about to save the file, when it occurred to him that his cloud backups could well be under government surveillance. Then he was about to mark the file exempt from cloud backups, but it occurred to him th
at if his systems were compromised, that could be a surefire way to mark it for particular government scrutiny. Was he being too paranoid? Did the concept of “too paranoid” even make sense in the context of known villainy?
In the end, he simply backspaced over all the text, and exited the word processor without saving, and wrote the whole thing out longhand in a paper journal, like a goddamn caveman.
1.15
20 May
✧
ESL1 Shade Station
Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1
Extracislunar Space
Over the next several weeks, Alice saw to security upgrades throughout the station. IT upgrades from world-class vendors, beamed up here a gigabyte at a time. Radar and other sensors, manufactured here on the station, with paranoid AIs monitoring them 24/7. And guns! She had one 3D-printed for herself from online blueprints that didn’t look like a goddamn leg shaver, and she got one each for Derek and Igbal who, as the only unfrozen men currently onboard the station, felt left out without penis extenders of their own. She also got one for Maag, who had agreed to serve as interim deputy until someone more qualified could be recruited and trained and shipped up here. Alice also set up a crude but hopefully effective armed sentry robot on the roof of the antimatter containment building, that would fire on anyone or anything that approached without displaying a special bar code; and she installed 3D-printed facial recognition deadbolts on the two egress airlocks, so that strangers could get into the lock but not actually enter the station without assistance from someone inside. It was pretty basic stuff, but so much better than nothing.
Meanwhile, Pam was increasingly agitated about the fact that her pregnancy was advancing and the state of her hibernation technology was not.
“If I have the baby here, everything is ruined. I’ll never get to Centauri.”
“You want a planet named after you?” Alice joshed.
They were in the hibernation lab, surrounded by beeping, buzzing equipment. They’d been warming up Hobie Prieto for the last ninety minutes, and both of them were busy with their hands and minds, so the conversation progressed slowly and with frequent pauses.
Nevertheless, Pam glared back. “Don’t trivialize this. I’d be stuck raising a kid for twenty years, here, when I should be there. I’ve earned the right to be there.”
Alice didn’t understand that. Raising a kid did sound hard, yes, but wouldn’t it be a million times harder at Alpha Centauri, a decades-long journey away from everything Pam had ever known? Hell, with the speed-of-light round trip, if she called someone back home for parenting advice, the kid would be nine years old before an answer came back.
Alice had always figured if she ever had a kid, she would invite her mother to help her out for the first few months—maybe even the first few years—because she didn’t expect a baby’s father to stick around in her life. The men she wanted to sleep with tended not to be the sort of men who could be counted on for anything else! And yeah, incompetent, chaotic help was better than no help at all. But “no help at all” was exactly what Pam could expect out there. Just a bunch of first-time mommies, thawed out alone in the wilderness.
But Alice had learned there was no point arguing with colonists.
“It’s hard to explain,” Pam admitted.
“Evidently.”
“Are you saying you never thought about it? Being a Founding Mother of a whole civilization?”
Alice snorted. “I’m more of a second wave kind of gal. Or fifth. Or never. But I guess it’s possible, maybe. Someday.” She would first have to figure out what was in it for her, and whether it was worth the obvious sacrifices. That seemed unlikely, but her whole life seemed unlikely, so you never knew.
“Okay, we’re going to start shocking the heart with some very gentle voltages,” Pam said.
It made sense; Hobie was still as cold as a ham straight out of the fridge, but his tissues were almost fully thawed. The scanner showed that only the marrow in his long bones remained in a vitrified state, and she could see the last of that melting away while she watched.
“Four hundred volts,” Pam said, touching a control on her tablet.
Nothing happened.
“No problem,” Pam said. “Stepping up to five hundred volts.”
She hit him again.
“Oh,” said Alice, “that worked. I got a beat. Is it . . . wait, there’s another one. Yes, we’ve got a sinus rhythm. Thready and weak, but regular at . . . five beats per minute.”
“Excellent.”
That meant they could start active warming of the blood, and from there it was pretty much a normal de-hibernation routine. It also meant Pam hadn’t killed Hobie with the freezing process, which was probably a great relief to her Hippocratic oath.
“So what are you going to do?” Alice asked. “Really, actually. You wake up twenty, twenty-five years from now, pregnant and very far away. Everyone’s giving birth, and you’re, what, deploying gatherbots and setting up a factory? In your spare minutes between diaper changes, on a ship full of screaming babies? I’m not picturing this.”
“It’s never been done,” Pam admitted.
“Yeah. So what if you fail?”
“We don’t. I mean, we just don’t. When Cortez landed his army on the shores of Mexico, he burned the ships, so there was no way out except through victory. They had to succeed. Not that he’s a good role model, but the same thing happened on Pitcairn Island. The Bounty mutineers found the very remotest habitable rock, and marooned themselves there. And survived. Maybe they’re not the best role models, either, but it’s like that. It’ll be like that for us. In the worst possible case, we actually could spend a few years refueling the ship and then return home. Or, I suppose, go back into suspension and await rescue by the second wave. But at that point, you’d have to wonder if you’d ever wake up again. That’s what you choose instead of dying outright.”
“Great, Pam. You’re a hell of a salesman.”
“You think we can’t do it? Except for the starship itself, we could do it right now. Think about all the manufacturing technologies we’ve developed here. We start with a skeleton crew and a handful of machines. Gather the materials for more machines, build a Shade, build a much nicer station than this one . . . Even here, we don’t really need the Earth, not really.”
“Blood warmers are on,” Alice said, changing the subject. “Leg squeezers are on. Electrolyte drip is on. Brain stimulator is on. Oh, that did something. He’s warming up faster, like a tenth of a degree every . . . six seconds? So, about one degree per minute?”
“Good, good.”
“Should I hit him with the epinephrine?”
“Hmm. The protocol is still a work in progress, but let’s wait till he hits room temperature. Maybe fifteen minutes. See how that goes.”
They waited in silence for a while, but Alice’s curiosity continued to get the better of her, and she asked, “Do you plan to breastfeed?”
Pam didn’t look up. “Huh? Oh, you know, probably. Or maybe one of us will be the designated dairy cow for several kids at once. We need to be very loose and flexible, about everything. Nobody said creating a new society is easy.”
“Hmm.”
That sounded a little pat to Alice. She could think of a hundred problems with that. Did Pam even care what Alice thought? Probably not.
More silence, and then more silence still.
She began to notice Hobie was warming up a little faster. He was, in fact, shivering. His pulse was up to twenty-five bpm.
“Is that a good sign?” she asked. It certainly looked like one, although Hobie’s long dreadlocks and very dark skin color made it hard to judge how well the blood was really circulating. He didn’t look dead anymore, so that was something.
“I would say so,” Pam allowed, “although we need to watch for cerebral rebound edema, which is a risk in patients waking up from deep hypothermic ischemia. I’m also seeing an uptick in neural activity.”
She paused for a minute
, and then said, “We’re going to need to find a way to automate this process.”
“We? You’re going to be frozen. Are you saying I need to find a way? Because that’s a little outside my realm.”
“Actually,” Pam said, “your old crewmate Rachael Lee is going to do that. She’s been doing well at Transit Point Station, so we’re going to bring her up in the next crew shipment. What’s the status on Delta Corridor, by the way?”
“Ten furnished apartments, ready next week. Where are we going to install it? Right here?”
She pointed to a blank spot on the wall, where a plate could be removed and a hatch installed. The hibernation lab was one of two modules hanging off the gymnasium, and one of the few currently available on the station that offered room for expansion. The whole place had grown in a haphazard manner, one crazy module at a time, with no advance planning, and it seemed that was likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
“I suppose we’ll have to,” Pam said. “By which I mean, I suppose you’ll have to. As you say, if things go well here today, I’ll be frozen by then.”
“Yeah. Lucky you.”
Pam waited another minute and then said, “Let’s go ahead and hit him with the epinephrine, and also the vasopressin. Let’s see what that does for him.”
“Got it.” Alice tapped the appropriate controls, adding a tenth of a milligram per minute of the one, and 0.03 of the other, to Hobie’s drip. Enough to rouse his body’s systems, without significantly raising the risk of cardiac arrest.
Almost instantly, the heartbeat sped up and got stronger.
“Shall we open the cryotube?” Alice asked. “I’d hate for him to wake up inside there.”
“Go ahead.”
Alice popped the latches and folded the clear, rubber-edged, oval-shaped cover aside on its pneumatic hinges, so it sat flush with the side of the tube.