How Dark the World Becomes

by Frank Chadwick

  “Since societies prize major leaps forward, every advanced society we know of has adopted a series of intellectual property covenants which protect major innovations from the leveling effects of the marketplace. They prohibit anyone but the original innovator from using the innovation; they prohibit competition in that field as a reward for progress. The imbalance those laws create cannot be overcome by the market, because the market is specifically enjoined from doing so.”

  “So, you’re saying intellectual property laws are bad because they short-circuit the market?” Ping asked.

  “No, Captain. I’m saying a market is no more good or bad than is gravity. Both are morally neutral forces of nature, to be understood and utilized, not worshipped.”

  Ping lapsed into a thoughtful silence, and my mind went to the short lesson I’d received on intellectual property law courtesy of Walter Wu. I guess I understood the whole “protect innovation” idea as a basis of intellectual property laws, but to my economically naïve brain it seemed like the Cottohazz had managed to screw things up with theirs. They had choked innovation off, not encouraged it. It wasn’t hurting the e-Varokiim’s bank accounts, though.

  “So how come I don’t hear more economists talking like this?” I finally asked.

  She shrugged languidly, and settled back in her chair, eyes half closed, and the teacher vanished.

  “You’ll never hear me talk like this to a client,” she answered.

  “So you’re saying,” I said, “that economic analysis is a commodity subject to market forces as well?”

  She laughed, and I think it was the first time she’d laughed at something I said . . . other than in derision.

  Nice laugh, actually.

  * * *

  Sixteen hours out from Rakanka Highstation we found Ping’s elusive Lagrange point and made the jump—went “into the hole,” as he said—and despite my doubts came out in the K’Tok system with a solid residual vector pointing us almost square at Mogo, the main system gas giant. We did a minor correction and a supplemental burn to speed us up, and then settled back to enjoy the glide in. We’d glide to Mogo, refuel by skimming the gas giant, and do an orbital transit and breakaway maneuver which would slingshot us in-system toward K’Tok.

  The day after we broke into the K’Tok system I was down in our quarters with Barraki teaching him to play twenty-one. I was up about two hundred Cottos. Barraki didn’t have any cash, but I figured his credit was good, and I was about to explain the vig to him when my embedded comm chimed softly in my head. I squinted, opened the line, and Turncrank’s voice filled my head.

  “Hey Naradnyo, you down there in the pod?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Anybody with you?”

  “Barraki. Why?”

  “Maybe nothing, but both of you come on up to con. Dr. Marfoglia and the little girl are already here.”

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “Oh . . . probably nothin’. But we may have to do a maneuvering burn sooner than we thought. Best if everyone’s strapped in, and I’ll need to secure the spin pod.”

  “Okay. On our way,” I answered.

  “We gotta head up to the control room. Lucky for you,” I added to Barraki. “I’d have cleaned you out in another hour.”

  He giggled. “You think so, Boti-Shaashka?”

  “Uncle Weasel? I’m gonna kick your ass from here to dirt-side for that!”

  I grabbed for him, but he was too fast, trailing laughter out the door and up the access tunnel ladder. I took a look around the cabin before following him, and on a hunch grabbed my black carryall. Never can tell when you’ll need a 10mm hand cannon, twenty large in bearer drafts, or a toothbrush. I pulled our travel documents out of the desk where Marfoglia kept them and dropped them in the carryall as well.

  Why? To this day I can’t tell you. I just did.

  Marfoglia and Tweezaa were already strapped into their couches when I got there, and Barraki was fumbling with his straps. His couch was on the far right of the four and mine was on the far left, with Marfoglia and Tweezaa between us.

  “Good thing for you we gotta do this maneuvering thing now,” I told him. “Once it’s done, though, your ass is mine.”

  He giggled again.

  “Yeah, laugh while you can, weasel boy.”

  I stashed the carryall and then strapped myself in. Ping and Turncrank were both already strapped in and engaged in low conversation. I looked at Marfoglia, and she looked uneasy. I looked back at Ping and Turncrank and started feeling uneasy myself. There was something different about their attitude—not worried so much as preoccupied. They were absorbed in the details of the sensor feeds the same way I get absorbed by details whenever the birds stop singing.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked them.

  “Um . . . we lost contact with K’Tok Orbital about forty minutes ago,” Turncrank answered without looking up. “Not sure if it’s a receiver problem at this end or transmitter problems there.”

  I’m no pilot, but I know that a failed communication link by itself wouldn’t make anyone consider an unscheduled maneuvering burn when we were still nearly a day out from Mogo, so there had to be something else.

  “And?” I said.

  Ping and Turncrank exchanged a glance, and then Ping answered, and not in his pirate voice.

  “And we’ve picked up some activity near Mogo—flickers of light and some interference across a lot of the EM spectrum. And no, we do not know what that means, but it is unusual.”

  “Flickers of light on the planet surface?” I asked. That sounded odd, but not that menacing. Mogo was a gas giant, after all. It’s not as if anyone lived down there.

  “No,” Turncrank answered. “Out in nearby space. Close orbital, I think.”

  That meant nothing to me. Them either, apparently.

  For the next three hours we coasted in toward Mogo, with nothing unusual on the sensors but no orbital nav beacon from Mogo and no answer to our requests at the top of each hour for a glide update from K’Tok Orbital. We talked a little, but not much. It started feeling spooky, as if we might be the only ones left alive in the whole system.

  Ping and Turncrank had the long-range scope pointed at Mogo with the image on the big screen. All of us could see it, but it just looked like a gas giant. Mogo had a nice set of rings round it, and a yellow-green tint to its atmosphere, but nothing unusual.

  Then we saw the flash.

  “Oh, shit!” Turncrank said. Ping hadn’t been looking at the screen, so his head snapped up from his monitor.

  “What was it? I just got an EMP reading.”

  “A nuke!” Turncrank answered. “Look! Another one. We’re coasting into the middle of a goddamned naval battle!”

  A naval battle?

  A naval battle with whom? There was only one navy—ours.

  Right?

  “Um . . . somebody’s painting us,” Turncrank said, his voice higher pitched, fear present but under control. “I’m locking down all the airtight doors.”

  I heard the hiss and solid clunk of the control room’s door closing and securing beside me.

  “Okay,” Ping answered quickly, his hands flying across the control console. “Sending our recognition codes on every freq I can reach . . . NOW. We are a civilian vessel, you fool! Stop painting us!” he shouted, as if the other captain could hear through the better part of a light-second of vacuum.

  “Painting us?” Marfoglia asked beside me in a frightened whisper, so the kids wouldn’t hear.

  “Target-acquisition radar,” I answered, my mouth dry.

  “I’ve got him on the CA radar,” Turncrank said. “Oh . . . ,” he added quietly, his voice changed, tired and dead-sounding, “it’s way too small to be a ship.”

  Ping looked at him, looked up at the screen, and then—suddenly calm—took a long, slow look around him at the control room of the Long Shot.

  “I really love this ship,” he said quietly, to no one in particular.

  The
screen went white. There was a simultaneous thunderous explosion that I felt as much as heard, and the ship rocked hard to the side, almost tearing my restraining straps off the acceleration couch. Then the control room went black as the power failed, and we were alone in the darkness, the only sounds being the tortured metallic groans of the Long Shot breaking up and the screams of its passengers and crew.

  I’m not certain, but I think I must have been one of those screaming.

  SEVENTEEN

  Marfoglia was holding my hand in the darkness. Or I was holding hers. Who knows? At the moment you think you’re facing death, you grab for life, wherever you can find it.

  The worst of the metallic groaning had stopped, and I didn’t hear any telltale hiss of escaping atmosphere, so that was good. The kids were both crying, but that meant they were alive, and Marfoglia was almost compulsively squeezing my hand, so she was, too.

  “We should engage the auxiliary power, Jim,” I heard Ping say. “Jim?”

  No answer.

  “Oh no,” Ping said in the darkness.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. That was a pretty boneheaded question under the circumstances, but Ping knew what I meant.

  “Jim’s hurt,” he answered. “Unconscious, but he’s alive. Hold on a second . . .”

  Half a dozen dim emergency lights came on around the cabin. I looked over at Marfoglia and the kids first. Marfoglia was terrified but dry-eyed and keeping it together. Not sure where she got it, but she had some sand in her, that was for sure. I saw a cut on her forehead and some blood, but not a lot. A few small things floated free in the control room, things that had come loose in the explosion, and one must have clipped her. Beside her, Barraki and Tweezaa sobbed, almost hysterical with fright.

  “Hey, settle down, guys,” I said, mostly to Barraki, because he was older and Tweezaa would follow his lead. “We’re okay. We’re alive and we’ve got air.” I patted Marfoglia’s hand with my free left hand and then let go with my right. “You take care of them, okay? I’m going to see if I can help Ping.”

  She nodded.

  I unstrapped and let myself float up to Ping, who was hovering over Turncrank’s couch. I started rotating slowly as I moved, and as soon as I was level with them, I started drifting back “down” toward the acceleration couches and off to one side, which meant we must be tumbling, and centrifugal force was pushing me gently out toward the hull. I grabbed a railing to steady myself and took a look at Turncrank. His neck was pretty obviously broken. Ping looked up at me.

  “Should we straighten his head?”

  “Yeah, he’s having trouble breathing. But we’ll need to use something to secure it. If we get jolted again, we don’t want it flopping around.” I pulled the belt out of my slacks and we used that across his forehead to hold his head steady once we’d straightened it.

  “What hit us?” I asked while we were working on Turncrank. “He said it was too small for a ship. It meant something to you two. What?”

  “A missile. It detonated perhaps a thousand kilometers out. It had to be that far or the collision-avoidance radar would have picked it up sooner, even something that small.”

  “Would the blast travel that far through vacuum?” I asked.

  “There is no real blast concussion in vacuum at all, just a great deal of gamma radiation, heat, and light. The missile has a thermonuclear warhead which pumps a high energy x-ray laser—once. It is the laser that kills, not the blast. They call it a ‘fire lance.’”

  “So the big explosion?”

  “Our hydrogen reaction mass and the ship’s atmosphere all mixed up . . . that and some explosive decompression.”

  “What about your main power plant? Could that have gone up, too?” I asked, but he shook his head.

  “If the fusion reactor had gone critical, we would not be here talking. It was already shut down; we only use it to pump the jump capacitors. Coasting like this we just use the LENR generators. Unfortunately, the explosion took out the forward generator, and we’ve got no live circuit to anyplace else on the ship, so we are on emergency battery power.”

  “How we doing on oxygen?” I asked.

  “Oxygen is not our problem—heat is. We will freeze to death long before we suffocate.”

  That was encouraging.

  “What about Mogo? We gonna hit it?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  “I cannot tell how much the explosion changed our trajectory, but the odds are it was not enough to put us in the capture zone. We will do a pass-by later today, and, without making a correction to put us in a stable orbit, we will slingshot back out. We will probably end in a cometary orbit around the primary with a period of a hundred years or more.”

  I thought that over.

  “How long?” I asked.

  “Perhaps twenty-four hours at the lowest settings which will keep us alive. Possibly a little longer if we pick up some radiated heat from Mogo as we pass it.”

  * * *

  Turncrank woke up a little while later, but he was in bad shape. His spinal cord must have been badly damaged, and everything below the neck started shutting down. Marfoglia floated beside him and talked with him, held his hand, and after about an hour he died. She hadn’t cried before, but she did then.

  The control room wasn’t all that big, and it just didn’t feel right with Jim Turncrank’s body lying there beside us. No way to get rid of him, but Ping and I moved him over to a long locker and settled him in. It wasn’t a real burial, of course, but it felt a little bit like one when we closed the door and the latch clicked. Ping and I floated there for a while, just looking at the locker.

  “He seemed like a pretty solid guy,” I ventured after a minute. Ping nodded.

  “He had a terrible life. I never saw him take it out on anyone else, though. He could not tell a joke to save his life, but I got him to laugh at mine now and then.”

  What do you want people to remember about you when you check out? That you made a lot of money? That you dressed well? Or maybe that you never took your troubles out on someone else. It’s worth thinking about now and then.

  Jim was gone, but we were still here—for a while. Twenty-three hours left and counting. It was already cold enough you could see your breath. Barraki and Tweezaa were huddled together for warmth, we had both of our blankets wrapped around them, and Marfoglia floated with them, her arms around them as well.

  Pointless. Just delaying the inevitable; just prolonging our misery, and I’m not one to pointlessly prolong misery. You may have noticed that I’m not one to give up easily, either, but I was close to stumped this time.

  Think, I told myself. Work the problem through.

  “If there’s no one in orbit around Mogo, we’re dead no matter what we do, right?” I asked Ping. “Because they couldn’t get to us in time anyway.”

  He nodded.

  “Okay. So we assume there’s someone in orbit, because that’s the only bet that can possibly pay off.”

  “Very well,” he agreed. “We will assume that.”

  “Now, if there’s someone in orbit, and they don’t see us, we die anyway. How soon do they have to see us?” I asked. Ping thought for a moment.

  “By now we are about ten hours out from Mogo orbit. Say another two or three hours to make a partial transit. Then, either we hit Mogo itself, or the gravity slingshot takes over, and we begin our course to exit the inner system.”

  “Okay, so about twelve hours, tops?”

  He nodded again, and then shrugged.

  “So what?”

  “I’m just trying to see what we have to work with. Whatever we do, we know that we can invest half our battery power in it, right? Because after twelve hours, we’re finished anyway, and it doesn’t matter.”

  “All right,” he agreed, nodding. “I do not know what good it does us, but yes. For the sake of argument, we can use up half our battery power.”

  “Okay. We’ve got half our battery power to use, and we need to attract the att
ention of whoever is out there in orbit around Mogo. How do we do that?”

  He just looked at me.

  “Come on,” I insisted. “There’s got to be some way.”

  “Well, I cannot think of any,” he said, “and it is not as if I do not want to. Assuming somebody is out there, they will have sensors. They may pick up our wreckage on active radar, but there is nothing we can do to help or hurt our chances there; they either do or they do not. What we can do is try to show up on their passive sensors, and we do that by emitting energy.”

  “And we’ve got some energy,” I said.

  “Yes, but no way to emit it.”

  Marfoglia drifted over to join us.

  “What are you two talking about?” she asked.

  “We’re organizing our rescue,” I answered, and for the first time since the attack, Ping smiled.

  “I like the way you look at things, Sasha,” he said.

  “Is there a chance?” Marfoglia asked, hope showing in her face.

  “We’re about halfway there,” I answered, which was something of an exaggeration, but sometimes you need to keep people positive, just so their brains keep ticking. I brought her up to speed on what we’d figured out so far. The fact that it was a long shot there even was somebody in orbit didn’t seem to occur to her. Or maybe she just looked at it the same way I did.

  “So the problem is, how do we convert our battery power into an emission their passive sensors can pick up?” I finished.

  “Well,” Ping said, “and that is the difficulty. I already tried to transmit on the emergency sets, but according to the readouts still working, we have no antennae. Even transmitting radio white noise, without an antenna to direct the transmission, you could only pick us up for a hundred kilometers or so.”

  “Better than nothing, though,” I said, but he shook his head.

  “No, their CA radar—that’s collision avoidance—would pick up our wreckage long before then. So if we get that close, we are safe, but if not . . .”

  Yeah, and what are the odds of coming—by chance—within a couple hundred klicks of another ship while coasting past a gas giant? Not worth calculating.