And he wondered if arrogance and selective ignorance weren’t simply another commodity being traded freely throughout both systems, each rich enough to slander the other with impunity.
Watching the telemetry coming in from Finity, he was reminded of the pusher ships coming in: It moved with the same delicate precision, reminder, perhaps, that this crew, at least some of them, had once had a pusher of their own. Oldest in the fleet. Royalty, Cruz had called them, and likely, in their own guts if not their minds, that’s exactly what they were.
And wasn’t that going to add another twist to the mix of people gathering in his station? Forget the docking, the diplomacy of the next few days was going to be a nightmare. Spacers. He could almost track the thinking of Pell and Sol, but spacers were a whole different breed.
The two remaining pusher ships’ crews—Alpha’s other contact with Sol-ward humanity—after generations of their own company, weren’t arrogant so much as . . . odd, eccentric in the extreme. But they were an understandable breed, still welcomed as heroes at Sol as well as Alpha, treated with the deference they earned in their long, lonely service to the star-stations. Pushers were the link they had with Sol. They brought, besides the goods, a link with the traditions and the past—and their own load of plain-spoken news that would never make it into the Stream. Pusher crews appreciated the luxurious facilities the EC provided them as thanks for their extended exiles from the rest of humanity. They were glad for what they got.
Pushers, however, were a dying breed, and their culture and traditions were disappearing with them. Pusher crews had had no choice about their difference. Their time-dilated lives and years spent isolated from any other society necessarily set them apart. Friends—and enemies—made during leave were, of necessity, ephemeral. Historically, the pusher crews and station alike had enjoyed those extended leaves free of charge. Historically, a pusher’s arrival heralded a grand free-for-all of sex, alcohol, and good times, couples meeting, packing a lifetime of relationship into a handful of nights, as both station and ship injected new DNA into their isolated pools.
These modern spacers, the FTLers, were yet another breed. They chose to set themselves apart as something above stationers, worthy of the same entitlements their pusher forebears had won, but with none of the personal sacrifices. They complained mightily about high charges from the station, but they were a profit-making operation. A few months lost each jump transit was nothing against the years of human contact the pushers lost. FTL should have helped synchronize the spacers with the rest of the universe and given them common interests with the stations, given them ties with the offspring their sleepovers created . . . but it had done the opposite. These modern spacers—these Families—arrived with a chronic disregard for stationer rules, diametrically opposed cultural expectations—even languages that only a single ship understood.
These days, rules and security gates separated the spacer Strip—where station just let spacers do much as they pleased, charged them for it, enforced law where public safety was threatened, and generally just tried to keep the lid on—from the rest of the station. Any DNA exchanges in this FTL age happened between ships, not ship and station, with rare exception, mostly in the hospitality industry, and often with unhappy outcome. The gulf of distrust between spacers and stationers had grown wide on Alpha . . . except for the stationers who manned the businesses and bars on the Strip. Some of those had become more spacer than stationer, if loyalties and moral expectations were the determining factors.
It didn’t help that commerce, the flow of goods between stations that kept the spacers alive, had changed drastically—heated by a prosperity in the Beyond that the First Stars couldn’t match. The market had become far more interactive and volatile. In the pusher years, stations had been economically as independent as the ships carrying goods. Purchase orders had taken years to fill and all of the goods received had been distributed through the station’s central purchasing, which calculated the margins and doled out to individuals according to calculated need.
These days, market lag was a matter of months, not years, and while those all-important staples still went through central purchasing, station shops often dealt directly with the market for luxuries. Would the station residents willingly go back to more stable times? Certainly not the ones with a foot in the black market, trading directly with spacers, selling contraband to other stationers.
Spacers, for whom the new system meant economic independence, definitely would not go back.
Was it all Cyteen’s fault? If not for that gift of FTL from Cyteen, commerce and colonization would still be running at sublight speeds. If not for that gift, Alpha would still be thriving. Maybe. The fact was, progress happened. Those affected just had to find a way to adapt.
Cyteen. Now there was yet another in the disparate grouping of humanity taking shape in the universe. The First Stars tended to hold Cyteen as the evil lurking in the shadows, madly proliferating population, a clone army with which they intended to take over . . . everything. Corrupting the powerful with drugs. Aiming at universal mind control.
Personally, he doubted Cyteen would bother. Cyteeners had always thought in terms of escaping Sol’s control. Renegade scientists had hijacked a station core intended for Viking—or was it Mariner?—and headed for a reachable star with a biologically viable planet. Cyteen’s founders had wanted out and away, and ultimately FTL had given them the ability to make that dream an unstoppable reality.
Somehow he doubted Cyteen ever wanted to get cozy with Sol, let alone take it over, complete with all the attached problems.
But FTL wasn’t the only game changer Cyteen had bestowed on the rest of humanity; and the last thing Sol needed was the second thing Cyteen had to spread about. FTL had been a gift. This one—cost.
Rejuv. Immortality. Expensive immortality.
If FTL was a gift, rejuv provided the funds.
God, what a pain in the ass Cyteen had become with that one. Who needed a drug that allowed a small handful of already too-powerful people to live a double lifespan? And Abrezio knew that was happening on Pell. Emilio Konstantin had been an old man when Abrezio had been a junior clerk in the former stationmaster’s office. Konstantin had still been an old man when he’d closed Pell’s EC offices and dumped the personnel on Alpha.
And that same old man had christened the first mega-ship.
The same ship, Finity’s End, that was now in process of docking at his station.
Abrezio’s nerves vibrated anew to the shock of seeing that approach, a juggernaut bursting out of nowhere, not the delicate lance of the smaller FTLs, but a force that made the sun itself react . . .
Damn. He’d worked hard to put that memory to rest.
. . . and his glass was empty.
He left it that way. Having seen Finity come in, he needed all his wits about him.
Having seen Finity come in . . .
Suddenly, viscerally, he understood why crews from the old pushers, converted as the first FTLers, had thrown up their hands and overturned their seniority, saying helm was no longer an old man’s position. That was power incarnate. Adjust the entry vector, aim that shockwave at the station rather than the star . . . that was something to fear.
He’d just seen what The Rights of Man was supposed to be, but he’d had it insolently handed him by a Pell-based ship, doing things—doing things that the ship his people had labored years on should be capable of . . . but wasn’t.
From a few minutes of sheer terror—to helplessness.
Maybe that entry had been intended to push Alpha into deploying Rights. Maybe it was just for a look-see.
And maybe . . . maybe it was a warning against what they had been building, frantically, for decades.
Showing out, Hewitt had said. He read it another way. Do you really want, Finity could be saying, this coming in with a rookie crew at the helm, aimed at your star?
He was shaken. He didn’t know how Cruz and Hewitt had reacted, in their guts. But this scared him.
He wanted to hope his gut was right. He sincerely wanted to hope that the entry was more than arrogant bravado.
Maybe, he told himself, Pell wanted to talk. Maybe that had prompted this sudden visit of three ships—and that.
But why now? What fickle god had sent these ships to Alpha, maybe as a long-overdue move toward reason and negotiation, at a time when he already harbored another potential game changer. A guilty secret he’d held for over six months without acting on it. A precious handful of numbers he’d held secret because . . .
Because those numbers—and what they implied for the future of mankind—would create a shockwave as powerful, politically, as the one that ship had created in space. A shockwave with an impact impossible to predict, and the last thing he’d wanted was to put them into the hands of a man like Cruz. He’d been waiting . . . for options, for some clue as to a proper course of action.
Damn it.
Six months ago he’d come in possession of a letter internal to Alpha, a letter from a retired scientist who’d kept working, unfunded, just because it was his lifetime project, which no one else seemed inclined to pick up. For decades, the man had been sifting old pusher data that occupied a massive, seldom-accessed storage in one of the cold sections. Unlike jump transit, in which—by what Abrezio knew—human senses didn’t make sense and most of the ship’s sensors didn’t either, sublighter crews as well as the instruments were up and working for the entire trip, recording years and years of data and observations, including curiosities and things off in the deep dark.
Buried in that data, so the old man claimed, was the long-sought key to Sol’s FTL future—jump points: sufficiently isolated points of enough mass to haul an FTLer down to normal space and let it refine its path to the next one. What they had was not the single jump point they had hoped to find, but two points that zigzagged their way from Barnard’s Star—Alpha—to Sol, a less direct route than they’d hoped, but providing, nonetheless, stepping stones for an FTLer heading from Alpha to Sol and back. The coordinates of the suitable masses—and the paths they followed—nothing in the great dark stayed still—were right now locked in the safe tucked into the floor under Abrezio’s feet, a secret not trusted to anyone else, certainly not trusted to station computers and certainly not shared with the black boxes that sucked up everything and took it elsewhere.
The old scientist himself was currently in a very comfortable, closely guarded and monitored confinement, with any luxury he wanted. Fortunately, that wasn’t much. A library, a computer, read-access to anything he asked . . . including that wealth of public-information pusher data, which he continued to study, just to see what else he could find. The old man was happy. He knew what he’d found: the discovery of a lifetime that would someday put his name in the history files.
It was sad, in a way. The old man’s colleagues and friends were all dead. The only regular outside contact he had was his doctor, the son of the doctor he’d had for years. No one knew why he was sequestered, or even that he was sequestered: the man had been, and still was, a hermit. The only real difference in his life pre-discovery and now was his comfort level, and of that, he had never complained. He probably thought word had gone to Sol, and had just gone back to his beloved data analysis, trusting he’d done all he needed to do.
Luckily. Had the old man been more set on seeing his name in the history books, he could have made a real problem for a stationmaster trying to do the right thing with the old man’s discovery and still struggling with what that right thing was.
Abrezio was not accustomed to feeling like a thief hiding stolen goods. But he felt that now, guilty and desperate. The transfer appropriation of the Rights plans in the first place hadn’t been his choice. The EC rep on Pell had masterminded that matter and passed the plans—along with the responsibility of informing the head offices—on to him, bypassing the Venture office as untrustworthy and the Bryant’s office as incapable.
His first year in this office, and the stolen blueprints had landed on his desk. Life had been simpler then, his duty to the Company more obvious. He’d sent those plans, immediately and without a second thought, on to Sol via the Stream, and twelve years later had received his orders to build Rights the same way.
And a handful of years after those written orders, Cruz had arrived to take control of the project . . . and look how that had panned out.
The EC wanted that ship built at Alpha—and he’d done it. He’d found a way to feed his people and build it, without a whole lot of help from Sol. With the arrival of Hewitt, he’d begun to get a sick feeling just where EC priorities lay, and it wasn’t with the well-being of the faithful at Alpha. It was that ship and the people they sent out to build it.
But while Hewitt and Cruz would get the credit should the project succeed, he and his people, the hard working Alpha citizens who had built it and given up their lives to train on the sims, would be the ones to blame if it didn’t.
And that was why, when—with Rights just back in dock from a test failure—he’d gotten that letter, he’d kept it completely to himself and that dedicated old scientist. He was not about to give Cruz the chance to pull that place in history away from one of his people. He’d been planning to send the coordinates on to Sol via Atlantis when it made dock, the safest and securest transmission, along with its notes, cautions, and original data, with a bio of the old man and his dedication to his project.
But Atlantis was three years off from Alpha, and would take another decade getting back to Sol.
Not that long, really, in historical data transfer with Sol, and he could shorten it by a bit if he had Atlantis transmit it on the Stream, the ancient lightspeed beam to Sol and pushers in transit, once Atlantis was well beyond Alpha’s system, where no spybot was likely. And once that information was in Sol’s grateful hands, Sol authorities could test those numbers, send probes to verify the jump points . . . and have the credit properly established before Cruz ever even knew the data existed.
He hadn’t planned to trust it to the doubtful security of the Stream from Alpha, a transmission that anyone, theoretically, could intercept, if they lurked and waited. Even if he managed to sneak a top security transmission past Hewitt, there was that other, ever-present fear, that some shadow lurked out there, insystem, something dropped by Pell to tap the Stream for information passing between Alpha and Sol; some robot just mindlessly note-taking and downloading to the occasional visitor that wasn’t an Alpha regular.
No, he hadn’t sent that data on that vulnerable beam, and he began to fear that hesitation had been a mistake. It would have been well on its way by now if he had. But now, with what he had underfoot—and these visitors—he had a new worry.
The old man insisted he’d told no one. Abrezio knew he hadn’t told anyone, not his secretary, not even his wife, and definitely not Cruz or Hewitt. But what if the old scientist had acquaintances who’d tried to reach him, people who knew what his work was, and started speculating?
There were, ultimately, no truly secure secrets in a community whose job was creating theories out of isolated facts. And given the gathering of these outsider ships—if he could form a worst-case suspicion what might have lured them—
Dammit.
Or—maybe, maybe the timing was just a nightmarish coincidence. The letter and the test run had just happened to coincide. Maybe it was just the fact Rights had made a test run—maybe Pell just didn’t know it had failed.
Six, seven months . . . and here four Pell ships were. Either event could have triggered this visit.
Alpha was such a fragile blip in the dark, right on the edge of trouble. Alpha had for years dreaded the day that some damned committee at Sol decided to go with what they had, build a smaller FTL, and route it through haunted Beta. Wishful theories proliferated: the disappearance of the co
lony was a combination of circumstances, a mass panic, a wrong decision. It could all be explained. The ship that explored the disaster hadn’t looked in the right place. Somewhere, there were bodies.
Tell that to Santa Maria, which was one of Alpha’s two pushers, still making the Sol run. They weren’t going back there. Nor should anyone else.
The coordinates he had in the safe right under his feet—were possibly the answer. Sol to Alpha. Economic salvation, not a death sentence. He’d just needed three more years, for Atlantis to arrive, and take the burden.
And now . . . he had four Pell ships clogging his B-mast.
Damn the Konstantins.
No matter what he did now, or didn’t do—he risked everything. It was a nightmare.
Confide in Cruz, or Hewitt?
Hell if.
Granted Pell was up to something—his back was against the wall, take it or leave it. His choice right now had to be his choice, and to make a right one, he had to know, first of all, what Pell was after.
Chapter 1 Section v
Rumor didn’t just run wild on the Strip: it bounded from bar to bar, gaining embellishment as it went, and while it might be natural that with so many strangers arriving, there was a doubling of uniformed station security presence on the Strip—rumor said it was because Finity was bringing in Pell security and the EC blue-coats were worried.
Contrary rumor said the issue that brought all these ships was somewhere in the Beyond, that Pell and Cyteen had drifted toward hostilities, and that Pell was out shopping for allies, which might mean a trade deal.
Still another rumor said that Pell was joining up with Cyteen and that it was a takeover move, with more ships to follow.
It was certain that Finity’s crew, the Neiharts, and the rest of these strangers combined would have the weight of numbers on the Strip, and that was not a comfortable feeling. Along with the extra security, there was a growing number of Rights crew on the Strip, fancy blue uniforms, conspicuous in the motley flash of spacer crews, whose ship-color jackets might be the same general shade and pattern, but even that wasn’t a given.
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