“Good luck,” I said to Andrew, afterwards. “You’re going to need it.”
A day later, we opened a wormhole and headed onwards to the Beyond.
Chapter Thirty
The UN’s decision to leave various tiny asteroid colonies – even a handful of planet-bound colonies – alone comes as a surprise at first, but the truth is that the ‘grey’ colonies are simply not that important, compared to more productive worlds like Heinlein. While the UN would like to bring them under its formal authority, there is little point in wasting military resources occupying the asteroids. The UN chooses, instead, to content itself with ensuring that the grey colonies do not support interstellar resistance efforts.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
It was the best of times.
We spent nine months cruising in the Beyond, moving from star to star. Some of them were completely empty, as far as we could tell, although the Captain insisted on treating them as potentially-hostile systems anyway, just in case. It would have been easy to hide an entire population right under our noses with the right level of technology and not all of the human settlements needed Earth-like worlds to survive. Others had isolated human populations, known to the UN and generally ignored, few of whom were pleased to see us. They’d come out so far to get away from the UN and enjoy their blessed isolation.
It surprised me just how diplomatic the Captain could be, as we moved from isolated settlement to isolated settlement. It helped that there was no one looking over his shoulder, apart from Jason Montgomerie, and even he understood that there was little point in bullying the tiny grey colonies. We called in, asked if they needed any help and if they’d had any contact with resistance forces, but otherwise left them largely alone. A couple of religious colonies invited us to send over people for shore leave – in hopes, perhaps, of converting crewmen to their religions – but other than they, they didn’t seek to harm us, nor did we seek to harm them. They had nothing that the UN wanted or needed.
I stood on the icy surface of Planet Eskimo and wondered at the settlers who had somehow managed to set up a functional settlement on the planet. It was further away from its sun than Earth and was completely covered in ice, inhabited only by deep-water fish that swam in the warmer water under the ice. Humans couldn’t eat the native animals – not without getting very ill, at least – but Earth stocks had taken well to the alien sea and the Eskimos lived off them, and the products they grew in their underground farms. They were even more isolated than some of the odder settlements, even Botany, and I suspected that they might even consider Earth a legend as they dug deeper under the ice. Some of their foodstuffs might become delicacies in the years to come – if the UN survived its current crisis, or something else arose in its place – but for the moment, everyone was content to leave them alone. What did they have their pirates might want? Fish?
The Amish Colony was very similar in outlook, although they had inhabited a much more welcoming world. I wasn't sure what to make of a sect that had largely abandoned technology in favour of a simpler life, but after a week’s shore leave on the planet – a dreadfully boring experience for spacers used to Luna City – I had decided that they were completely insane. The vast majority of their population worked from day to day on back-breaking labour, trying to pull enough crops from the soil to feed themselves for another year. They spoke of happiness in simplicity, but I saw little of it. I only saw people who didn’t know what they were missing. They could have replaced their horses and carts with cars easily, or even built aircraft or airships, but they seemed content with what they had. It was a deeply boring planet. They, too, had nothing the UN or anyone else wanted.
“Captain,” I asked, one day, “why are we checking in on all these places?”
The Captain shrugged. He’d been happier, if anything, than I was. This far from the Human Sphere, his word was law. “They might become a threat later, or someone with more hostile intentions might use them as a base,” he said. “The Amish won’t have mentioned it to anyone, but fifty years ago a pirate tried to extort food and supplies from them, before a UNPF cruiser chased him away. It’s worthwhile just to keep an eye on him.”
“Yes, sir,” I agreed. I wanted it to last forever, even though I knew better. Back home, the conspiracy I had created would be burrowing into the UNPF’s structure, trying to reach as many starships as possible and prepare to seize control. I had to go back to trigger the takeover, but…I didn’t want to go back. I understood, now, why so many starships had gone renegade over the past hundred years. They couldn’t bear to return to the tarnished world they’d left, where honour was a joke and they were compliant in atrocity after atrocity.
The Wonderland Asteroid Federation was easily the oddest colony – set of colonies – I’d seen. They had moved out to their asteroids – thousands of asteroids circling a dull red star – nearly a hundred years ago and burrowed into the rocks using technology that had been outdated even before humanity had taken the first steps into space. Their technology could keep them alive, but it couldn’t do much else, let alone challenge a starship. If they had crashed on a planet’s surface, they would have been utterly unable to escape, even assuming they survived. They’d lived years under lower gravity than Earth, or almost any other world, apart from the moon. Their bodies had adapted to the low gravity. We took shore leave on one of their resort asteroids and watched a sexual ballet between girls who seemed to fly through air on wings. It was profoundly moving and yet, somehow, very sad. I slipped away early.
It was there that I saw my first Transhuman. The process was officially banned everywhere the UN held sway – and, oddly, Heinlein and most of the other colonies were in full agreement. The process had created a human spliced with animal DNA in hopes of creating a superior form of life. The UN’s files were scarce, but reading between the lines, I suspected that the process didn’t always work perfectly. The Chimps – as they were called in impolite company – might not be fertile, or might grow into immensely retarded adults. The whole process made me sick and I complained to the Captain, who told me to ignore it. The asteroid federation could go to hell in its own way.
It chilled me and the next time I went to the flying ballet, I allowed myself to wonder if the wings were actually part of the girls’ bodies. I even asked one of the girls afterwards and she laughed at me, before removing the wing and offering to allow me to examine her in private. She was so slight that I was terrified that I would break her in half – I was only average on Earth standards, but I was a lot stronger than her – and I was no longer sure that I liked the colony. They did have something the UN wanted – asteroid ore – but with all the stresses being placed on the freighters and transport networks, it would probably be centuries before someone attempted to set up trade links. If the UN was still around, I wondered, what would they make of the colony? Would they all be Chimps by that time?
We also spent months inside the wormholes and I spent the time, apart from training the Ensigns, studying the UN carefully. It wasn't an easy task. There were so many lies and half-truths in the files that I found it hard to work out what was true and what wasn't, and the Heinlein files weren't much of an improvement. They were sound, historically speaking, but there was a ideological bias against the UN running through them. It was hard to know just what was truth…and what was nothing, but a lie.
No one had intended to create the UN, I worked out slowly. I wished I could have discussed it with the Captain, but I didn’t dare. The system had originally been nothing more than a place where humans from different nations could meet and talk in relative safety, although the most powerful nations had always been able to go their own way. As technology advanced and the world grew smaller, the UN had ended up assuming more and more of an oversight role, over everything. I was vastly amused to discover that there had been an environmentalist movement even that far back. They hadn’t known how lucky they had been! The development of the Ju
mp Drive had allowed those who hated the thought of a world government to escape, while leaving Earth in a desperate state. Terrorism and wrecker attacks had the entire population scared to death and willing to support anything to eliminate the terrorists.
The nations could have vetoed laws, but no one had thought to prevent the UN from creating regulations, until it was far too late. The UN hadn’t intended to create a massive bureaucracy itself, but as it was forced to create regulation after regulation, it ended up with a massive support base, demanding pay. It had ended up taking over the power of taxation and securing its position as the master of Earth. It imposed harsh new laws intended to curb pollution, but the bigger corporations had simply paid massive bribes and carried on polluting. The smaller ones had been unable to either pay the bribes or meet the regulations and, eventually, most of them had either collapsed and thrown the employees onto welfare, or emigrated to other stars. I wondered, absently, if that had been deliberate. The UN had known from the start that there was a population problem.
I couldn’t understand that, at first, until I did the maths. If a child costs money to raise, parents will have fewer children, but if the costs are met by someone else – the UN’s welfare department, for example – there is actually an incentive to have more children. This put more pressure on the system, but repelling the legislation would have been politically impossible, forcing them to try to extract more taxes and resources from the colonies. There, in short, was the tragedy of the United Nations. It could neither cure itself nor allow anyone to break free of its grasp. The people who really ran the UN, the beauecrats, were resistant to any change. The colonies were resistant to being robbed to pay for the UN’s mistakes. The civilians…had no control over their lives at all.
“You’re not doing badly with the Ensigns,” the Captain said, one afternoon over tea. I hadn’t realised that he drank tea with his First Lieutenant and Political Officer on a regular basis, but it made sense. The Captain had to be aloof to the remainder of the crew, particularly the Ensigns. “Allen and Geoffrey will make quite competent tactical officers, apparently, and Yianni would make a good engineering officer in the future.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. The Captain had invited me to relax, but how could I call him anything else? Yianni had expressed a keen interest in the engineering compartments and the Engineer had reluctantly agreed to give her additional training. She had a keen mind that all the public schooling down on Earth had failed to ruin completely. It was a minor miracle. “She was talking about applying for a transfer to Engineering School, out in the belt.”
The Captain smiled. “Jason, what do you think of that?”
“She’s always a productive person in the group discussions,” the Political Officer said, sipping his own tea. I had caught a whiff of it and realised that his tea included a large dose of whiskey. It was still a mystery how he managed to bring so much alcohol onto the ship. “Very intelligent, very understanding…I see no reason why she shouldn’t apply for the transfer. I’ll even put in a good word for her myself if you wish.”
I smiled. The group discussions were attempts to reason out how the United Nations worked and how it was superior to all other systems, past and present. I had realised years ago that it really worked on the Garbage In, Garbage Our principle. If a person accepted political doctrine as fact, the entire system worked, provided that one didn’t take a careful look at the foundations. It was hard to believe that the system worked perfectly when people seemed to be happier on Heinlein, or even among the Amish.
But a good word from the Political Officer would take Yianni far.
“Please do,” the Captain said. He smiled, rather dryly. “There is a considerable shortage of engineers, as you well know. If Yianni was to become a proper engineer, I’m sure some Captain would be pleased to see her.”
“It would take her out of command track,” I said, slowly. “I think that that’s why she’s reluctant to ask for the transfer now.”
The Captain nodded. Ensigns on the command track, like I had been, were expected to be generalists, not specialists. I might have qualified as a Tactical Officer, or a Helm Officer, but I didn’t have the skills of the Pilot, or even the tactical staff in their compartment. My task was to set policy; theirs was to carry it out. If Yianni did transfer to Engineering and go to Engineering School, she would never have a chance to become a Captain in her own right. Engineers weren't in the chain of command.
“Don’t push her,” he advised, with a glance at the Political Officer to suggest that he shouldn’t push her either. “If she decides to become an Engineer of her own free will, she’ll be a better Engineer than if we pushed her into volunteering for the transfer.”
“Yes, sir,” I said. I was still wondering why Yianni hadn’t transferred back at the Academy, back when it would have been easier, but I thought I understood. The Academy hadn’t given any of us a real chance to understand what Engineering was all about, merely tested us when all of us were keen to become Captains ourselves. Yianni would never have had the chance to realise that she wanted to become an Engineer. “I’ll allow her to make up her mind.”
“See that you do,” the Captain said. “It wouldn’t do for her to think that we were taking an interest in her development, would it?”
I smiled. It was something else I hadn’t realised back when I’d been an Ensign, but the senior staff had kept a close eye on me than I’d understood. I’d thought that they’d been watching for mistakes that could have imperilled the ship, but they’d also been watching for signs of promise, signs that they could push me forward for promotion, or maybe change my career path into one of the non-commissioned departments. I hadn’t even suspected that the Captain knew or cared who I was…
But then, there had been his order to train with the Marines, after Terra Nova.
“No, sir,” I agreed. “I’ll wait and see what happens.”
Day followed day as we sailed on through the Beyond. We entered an unexplored star system and discovered two Earth-like planets orbiting around each other, with a smaller planetoid in the barycentre between them. I took a shuttle down to the surface with two of the Ensigns, and three Marines for security, and we walked on a beach under an alien sky. I looked up and saw the other planet hanging in the sky, seemingly far closer than the Moon on Earth, and shivered. It was irrational, but I felt that the planet was going to come crashing down on me. Settlers on Jupiter’s moons had felt the same – they’d also seen the Great Red Spot as an eye glaring at them – and some of them had gone insane. I wondered who would come willingly to settle this planet, if they knew the truth. Perhaps people from the mountainous areas of Earth, I decided; both planets were covered in mountains.
The Captain formally named the two planets Romulus and Remus, after the legendary founders of Rome, but I doubted the name would stick. The UN would go looking for some nice inoffensive name for the twin worlds before they started settlement – even assuming that there were enough colonist-carriers left to settle the colony – and the first city would probably end up being called Landing City, again. The Captain shrugged when I asked him if they’d change the name, merely noting that whatever happened, he’d named the planets. We left a satellite in orbit to mark our visit and headed back onwards to our final destination, Bellefonte.
I had wondered if we would get any finders reward for locating the new planet – planets – but the regulations suggested that any discoveries made by UNPF personnel automatically belonged to the UNPF. It was quite possible that the planet was the location of a black colony and they wouldn’t be happy at being disturbed, but they wouldn’t get any reward either. If they were lucky, they'd be integrated into the settlement population. It had happened before. The unlucky ones would get a harsh lesson in how the UN treated deviant populations and probably wind up enslaved, or dumped on somewhere like Botany. I mulled on that as we sped onwards to our final destination.
“Captain,” Yianni said, as we emerged from the wormhole,
“I’m picking up a distress signal.”
“Put it through,” the Captain ordered. Bellefonte might not be a UN system, but all starships were obliged to offer aid if required.
“This is…station alpha…under attack…”
The signal broke off in a wash of static. “Signal lost, sir,” Yianni said.
The Captain nodded. “Sound battle stations,” he ordered. “Helm, take us in.”
Chapter Thirty-One
On first glimpse, there appears to be no economic basis for piracy in the UN’s sphere, but that is a false impression. Depending on what the pirates loot, they can sell it to black or grey colonies – or even back to the UN or the colonies. Even farming equipment, sold to the right people, can bring a high price. High tech is worth more than gold to the black colonies. Although the UN would wish to deny it, it cannot be doubted that many pirates are UNPF renegade ships, determined to eke out a life for themselves on the fringe.
-Thomas Anderson. An Unbiased Look at the UNPF. Baen Historical Press, 2500.
“Power up weapons units,” I ordered, as I brought the tactical console on line. One hand moved down a line of switches, unlocking the starship’s weapons. “Load torpedo tubes. Load missile racks. Power up laser cannons and activate the point defence systems.”
Martial Law 1: Patriotic Treason Page 30