And it will take them at least two weeks to dispatch a response, assuming they have a quick-reaction force on standby, she thought. They knew very little about enemy fleet dispositions; there was no way to know if the Druavroks had a fleet of battleships orbiting a nearby star or if their heavy warships were further away. But we can't sit here waiting to be hit.
She turned to look at him. “Did you enjoy your time on the surface?”
“It was ... hair-raising,” Kratzok said. “I wasn't counting on being dropped straight into the war.”
“Think of the recordings you made,” Hoshiko said, wryly. “The entire Solar Union will be accessing them. Or is that a bad idea?”
“I didn’t run off screaming,” Kratzok said, reddening. “But I think the public would prefer a sensory from one of the marines.”
“Which isn't an option, at the moment,” Hoshiko said. She gave him a smile. “I did read your report, Max. It was very ... dramatic.”
“It should be,” Kratzok said. “But it’s also accurate.”
Hoshiko nodded. There was always a difficult balancing act between freedom of the press, subject to the limitations laid down in the Solar Constitution, and preventing the accidental release of information that would be used against the military. Here, she suspected, it wouldn't matter. By the time anyone in the Solar Union saw the reports they’d be six months out of date. Still, she’d insisted on reviewing the full report before authorising its transfer to a courier boat.
“They’ll like it, back home,” she said. “Where do you want to go now?”
“Unless we’re leaving within the next couple of days, I’d like to go from ship to ship, recording the crews at work,” Kratzok said. “Is that acceptable?”
“Check with the alien captains first,” Hoshiko said. “Some of them may object to being recorded, even for propaganda purposes. And make sure you don’t get in their way.”
“Understood,” Kratzok said.
Hoshiko silently gave him points for being so understanding. Aliens weren't human. The triggers that offended them, that started fights, were often different to human triggers. She knew a race that had sex everywhere, as casually as a human might take a breath of air, but regarded eating in public as an unbearably offensive act. And another that was so obsessed with personal privacy that recording a conversation, with or without permission, was essentially a declaration of war. It was unlikely Kratzok would encounter any aliens who weren't experienced in interracial communications, but it was something to bear in mind.
“I’m authorising the release of your recordings,” she added. “Do you have anything you want to add?”
“No, Captain,” Kratzok said. “I may do a follow-up, after checking the alien ships, but nothing as yet.”
“The courier boat will leave this afternoon,” Hoshiko told him. “You have until then to change your mind.”
She smiled, although she couldn’t help feeling a little nervous. Kratzok’s report would be accompanied by her report, reports from her captains and XO and personal messages from the crews to their friends and relatives back home. God alone knew which way the Solar Union would choose to jump, once they heard what she was doing. Everything she’d done so far could be technically justified, under their standing orders, but ...
The hatch opened behind her. She turned to see Commander Wilde, looking tired. Like the rest of her crew, he’d been worked to the bone over the last two weeks, struggling to build up a defence force that would give any attackers pause. And he had every reason to be annoyed with her, for more than just politics and disagreements over their orders. He hadn't been assigned one of the alien warships to command. She needed him on Jackie Fisher.
“Captain,” Wilde said.
“I’ll go arrange transport now,” Kratzok said. “Thank you, Captain.”
Hoshiko nodded and watched him go, then looked at Wilde. “Success?”
“The final fabber has been unlocked,” Wilde said. “There are some programming hiccups to be evened out, but we should be on the way to producing another fabber within the month.”
Hoshiko nodded as she turned back to the transparent bulkhead, seeking a particular point of light orbiting Amstar. The commercial-grade fabber was a five-kilometre long structure, a gigantic orbital factory that took raw materials in at one end and churned out everything from starship components to farming tools at the other. It was, in many ways, proof that high technology liberated men and women from endless drudgery, and yet ... there were some curious limitations worked into the design. A commercial-grade fabber needed to be given the right instructions before it could produce weapons - the Tokomak hadn't been keen on the idea of their subjects using fabbers to churn out defences - and duplicating itself ... that had been right off the menu without some intensive reprogramming. But humanity had solved that problem too ...
“As long as we keep supplying the raw materials,” she said. “In a month, we’ll have two fabbers; in two months, we’ll have four. And so on.”
“We’ve passed instructions on to the other races,” Wilde reminded her. “They’ll all start churning out new fabbers of their own.”
“That should give us a great deal of additional firepower,” Hoshiko said. She stared into the darkness, towards where she knew the fleet to be massing. “And everything else we need to turn this hodgepodge into a real navy.”
“It will also have effects on the sector’s economy,” Wilde warned. “And create potential new threats.”
Hoshiko smiled, remembering the history lessons she’d been forced to endure as a young girl. The Stuarts had always been soldiers, she’d been told; they’d donned their armour and picked up their weapons when the call came, then marched off to war to defend their wives and children from the threat. It was practically bred into them from a very early age, along with a ruthless pragmatism. Sure, the methods used to solve one problem might easily create the next problem, but that didn't mean the first problem should be allowed to fester.
But we were never leaders, she thought, ruefully. Grandfather was the only one of us who held any real political office. It was never a Stuart making the decisions.
“We have to deal with the current issue,” she said, gently. “If our current crop of allies turn into the next generation of threats ... well, we’ll deal with it when the time comes.”
“There’s an awesome amount of untapped industrial potential in this sector,” Wilde pointed out. “Giving them the bypass hacks might turn several different races into major powers in their own right.”
“They wouldn't have so much need for war,” Hoshiko said. She shook her head in disbelief as she looked towards the distant fabber. “Why didn't they ever use their technology?”
It was a galling thought. The Tokomaks could do so much. They had practically-infinite energy at their disposal, they could literally teleport someone from place to place, they could put together automated factories that could build almost anything, given time and raw materials, yet they hadn’t created a paradise. It hadn't taken more than ten years for the Solar Union to build enough productive capability to feed and support itself indefinitely, then absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants every year. Surely, with a head start of thousands of years, the Tokomak could have done the same. They could have built an interstellar civilisation that made the Solar Union look like a handful of primitive islands in the middle of an endless desert.
And all they did was build an empire that kept everyone else firmly under their thumb and slowed scientific progress to a crawl, she thought. What would have happened to them if even one of their subject races made a major breakthrough and turned it against them?
Wilde stepped up next to her. “I think they were scared.”
Hoshiko turned to look at him. “Scared of what?”
“Scared of the potential of their own technology,” Wilde said. “And the prospects for good and ill.”
Hoshiko shook her head, dismissively. “Idiots,” she said. “They could ha
ve built themselves a heaven and instead they built a hell for everyone else.”
Wilde frowned. “Permission to speak freely, Captain?”
Hoshiko nodded, curtly.
“You're too young to understand,” Wilde said.
“You’re a babe in arms compared to ninety percent of the Tokomak,” Hoshiko pointed out, tartly. She wasn't that young. “The youngest prisoner we took during the battle was over a thousand years old.”
“Bear with me a little,” Wilde said. “When I was a child, computers were gigantic calculators and very few people imagined the world would need more than a handful of them, while spaceflight consisted of rockets and a much-overrated space shuttle. The world was changing even before Contact. Suddenly, there was a computer in every home; suddenly, one could be exposed to all manner of material on the internet; suddenly, the world was no longer a certain place. Every new development brought dangers as well as benefits.”
He shrugged. “There were people who predicted nanotech would eventually free us from the curse of having to work,” he noted, “and people who predicted that one terrorist would eventually release a strain of grey goo that would melt the entire world like a sugar cube dropped into a mug of tea. There were people who predicted that the internet, the precursor to the datanet, would destroy social morals once and for all ... and people who predicted that the internet would unleash a wave of innovation and social reform.”
“It did,” Hoshiko said.
“It did both,” Wilde said. “You know what put the first pornographers out of business?”
Hoshiko shrugged. She didn't see the point.
“The internet,” Wilde said. “Why would someone pay for a filthy magazine or a video tape when they can just download porn from the internet? But because it was harder to keep pornographic materials from teenagers, even children, it started to cause other social problems. On one hand, teenagers were being corrupted by what they saw online; on the other, they were withdrawing from normal society because it didn't match up to their expectations.”
“I’m not sure that makes any kind of sense,” Hoshiko said.
“Every little technological change has unexpected side effects,” Wilde explained. “For example, the internet broke the information stranglehold held by old media - what we used to call the mainstream media. But, at the same time, it made everything now. There was no longer any sense of perspective, no longer any time to come to a measured judgement. The slightest mishap, during a war, would instantly become a defeat on an unprecedented scale.
“Reliable birth control technology liberated women from the tyranny of their bodies, from the social structures that controlled their sexuality. That was a net gain because the former social structure had perpetrated countless injustices to keep women under control. But it also destroyed marriage. Young men were no longer committing themselves to marriage, because they could get sex without it, while on the other hand marriage was no longer regarded as sacred.
He shrugged. “If you happen to be old, and a little set in your ways, you find the pace of change disconcerting,” he added. “I imagine the Tokomak felt the same way too.
“You grew up on an asteroid. You worked with mature technology and learned to embrace it, for good or ill. Your ancestors, however, didn't have that option. For them, technology was a curse as much as a blessing.”
“But technology made their lives better,” Hoshiko objected.
“Not always,” Wilde said. He waved a hand at the bulkhead. “We already have AIs that can think and react faster than any biological life form. What happens when they start putting AIs in ships permanently, as the sole commander? It isn't as though it’s beyond us. An AI core could handle everything from combat operations to repairs while under fire. They might even do a better job. What would you say when they came to you and said that your captaincy is no longer necessary?
“That’s what happened on Earth. Every advancement brought gains to some and woes to others. Spinning machines ruined the livelihoods of thousands of people; robotic cash machines and library counters cost the jobs of thousands more. Captain, the Solar Union bears some responsibility for the crisis on Earth because we sucked away hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have saved civilisation!
“If your job was under threat by some newfangled piece of technology, wouldn't you object?”
He shrugged. “And there’s a more cynical point,” he concluded. “For the Solar Union, making sure that everyone has enough to eat and drink - the bare minimum - isn't anything more than a tiny percentage of our GNP. But if you expand the fabbers, if you cut the price of everything until giving someone a starship made of gold becomes nothing more than an exercise in logistics, you don’t need a system to control the distribution of resources any longer. Why would you even need a government?”
“So their people were scared of reaching for a prosperous future,” Hoshiko said. “That makes no sense.”
“Not to you,” Wilde said. “To them ... I imagine it must have been terrifying.”
He smiled, rather tightly. “Right now, putting together a genetically-engineered disease and unleashing it on Earth would be easy,” he warned. “There’s no shortage of biological labs in the Solar Union that could do it. Or building an antimatter production plant ... a single lone maniac with a murderous grudge against society could do real damage. The more technology advances, the more risks as well as benefits.
“And it wasn't us who created the fabbers in the first place,” he concluded. “Or FTL. Or antigravity. We stole the technology and reverse-engineered it, then started to make improvements. The Tokomak might well have had good reasons to be scared.”
“I don’t believe that,” Hoshiko said. “I can’t.”
“I know,” Wilde said. “Back when I was young, there was a book about a race of super-Nazis, a twisted society that eventually split into two genetically-modified races: masters and slaves. The slaves were genetically programmed to submit to the masters. Their free will could be overridden at any time, if their masters commanded it.”
“It sounds horrific,” Hoshiko said. “How did it even work?”
“The hell of it is that their society seems ideal, at first,” Wilde added. “You have to look below the surface to realise just how twisted it is, just what an offense it is against everything we hold dear ...
“And we could make it real, using our technology. And if that happens, freedom will become a distant memory. Advanced technology could bring servitude instead of freedom.”
“My grandfather said the same,” Hoshiko said.
“And he was right,” Wilde finished.
Chapter Twelve
Reports of a disease that targets only white or mixed-race individuals have been coming in from Africa over the last two days. Sources on the ground suggest that the disease is genetically-engineered to target those with European ancestry. The Solar Union Health Commission has dispatched a team to Africa to investigate the threat, but notes that - so far - there is no evidence the disease can infect or kill anyone with even basic immune system biomods.
-Solar News Network, Year 54
Griffin Wilde had wondered just what the Captain had made of his little speech, but by the time the senior officers - and a handful of alien representatives - gathered via hologram to discuss their next move, the Captain had said nothing to him about it. Perhaps she hadn't had the time to consider his words - or, perhaps, she’d simply dismissed them out of hand. Finding the balance between advancing technology and protecting society wasn't easy and, over the years, far too much damage had been done in the name of the latter. The stagnancy that bedevilled the Tokomak and the social exclusion that had urged so many to flee to the Solar Union had their root cases in conservatives who’d been afraid of the future.
Afraid of losing what they had, he thought, as he took his seat. The aliens, somewhat to his surprise, had enthusiastically agreed to attend via hologram, once the first set of face-to-face meetings had been
concluded. And afraid of being rendered irrelevant by the future.
He sighed inwardly at the thought. Unlike Hoshiko, he felt a certain regard for Earth, the homeworld of the human race. The thought of a collapse of civilisation, a fallback into barbarism, was horrifying. And yet, he doubted the Solar Union could truly save Earth from itself, not without a major commitment that would turn the Solar Marines into an occupation force and open the gateways to a moral and ethical corruption that would risk everything the Solar Union had built.
But at least we should try to support the civilised men, he told himself. And perhaps, through them, Earth could be saved.
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