Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  The occasion: perihelion. Newhope's closest approach to the sun. “When we fire the motor,” Robert was saying, “a ten kps nudge here at the sun becomes one hundred kps excess at escape. It sounds like a free ride, but that's how the orbit numbers work out. Of course, ten kps is nothing in the grand scheme of things. We need almost thirty thousand kps—a tenth of lightspeed—to get where we're going in a hundred years. The fusion burn is mainly to correct our course, to change the plane of our orbit so that we're actually aimed at Barnard's Star. We'll get most of our actual impulse from the sail. Once we unfurl it, the sun is going to push the loving shit out of us, and laser stations are going to push even harder. If we weren't ertially shielded, the acceleration would squish us all to paste in a fraction of a second.”

  “Who are you talking to?” Conrad asked. There wasn't a soul on the bridge—on the whole of the ship—who didn't know these facts backward and forward.

  “Posterity,” Robert said with a shrug, and then, thinking about it, added a theatrical flourish. “This is all being recorded, sir. This is a major event in human society. The dawn of a civilization.”

  “True and true. Shall I say some grand words?” Bascal asked of no one in particular. “We leave behind us the troubles of the old . . . ahem. Hmm. We leave behind us the troubles of the old, to find and create a set of new troubles which are entirely our own. We do this . . . because a civilization which cannot die, and cannot grow old, also cannot grow young. All it can do is give birth to fresh civilizations.”

  “Very nice,” Conrad said, clapping politely in the air.

  “Oh, dry up. Captain, what's your status?”

  Xmary frowned at a display on the arm of her chair, then turned to Robert. “Astrogation: status report.”

  “Position is only 9.16 kilometers off nominal, ma'am,” Robert answered grandly. “Velocity is off by 1.34 meters per second. Position uncertainty is less than two centimeters, and velocity uncertainty is 18.4 nanometers per second. Orientation uncertainties are well below the vibrational tolerances of the vehicle. In a quantum universe, you don't get much more accurate than this.”

  “How's our dust count?”

  “Zero impingements, ma'am. Agnes has got the nav laser firing once every five seconds, clearing the path ahead, so what hits us is a gas of single atoms, highly ionized.”

  “I'm familiar with the principle.”

  “Anything else, ma'am?”

  “Thank you, Astrogation. That will be all. Engineering?” She turned to look at the bulkhead behind her. The word and gesture together formed a command which opened a holographic window to the engine room. This was actually twenty-eight decks below, or aft if you wanted to be technical about it, but the resolution on the holograms was orders of magnitude finer than the human eye could discern. The illusion was perfect: that the engine room, with its reactor controls and status displays, was located immediately capward of the bridge itself, when in fact there was nothing but empty space there, rushing by at six hundred kilometers per second.

  Conrad could see Peter in the background, leaning intently over something and frowning. Money Izolo, another Blue Squatter who'd long ago reverted to his natural shade of deep purple-brown, looked up at the sound of the captain's voice and found himself staring into the bridge.

  “First Engineer, what's your status?”

  “Well hi, Xmary. Captain, I mean. Our status is good, yah. The fusion motor is generating fifty kilowatts, mainly for lighting and environmental controls. The deutrelium stream is focused and crystallized, with no detectable density anomalies. We are prepared to go propulsive at any time. Antimatter reactors are idle, with full hermetic sealing on the storage cells. Failsafes three layers deep. Would you like me to read you the temperatures?”

  “Thank you, no,” Xmary said. She looked away, and the engine room winked out of existence. Like many an object in the quantum universe, it did not exist when there was no attention being paid to it.

  Xmary glanced pointedly at Agnes. “Information?”

  “I have nothing to report, ma'am.”

  Xmary turned a serious expression on Bascal. “Your Majesty, my status is good. I mean nominal. We are ‘go' for fusion burn, after which we will unfurl the sail and begin accumulating our departure velocity. Would you like to give the orders?”

  The king frowned, thinking about it. Conrad understood, or thought he did: if Bascal gave the orders, he was micromanaging, and undermining the authority of the ship's duly elected captain. But declining the invitation was a consequential act as well, which could make him look indecisive or something. Overly delegatory. But he had to say something, so he leaned forward, fingering the black curls of his new beard, and said, “As you were, Captain. This moment belongs to you.”

  “Well,” Xmary said, glancing at her armrest panel, “the moment is still a few minutes away.”

  Conrad didn't know what to think about all this formality. He really didn't. The last time they'd done anything like this, they had been criminals, or at least delinquents. Squabbling among themselves, making it all up as they went along. It was recklessly, foolishly dangerous—commandeering a pocket star to launch them across the wastes of the Kuiper Belt!—and everybody knew that and was okay with it. Well, mostly okay. There had, after all, been a mutiny, and there'd've probably been another if the Navy hadn't caught them when it did.

  Hell, as recently as eighteen weeks ago they'd all still been criminal wards of the state. Even Bascal had had no official rank; he was the Prince of Sol, but that meant very little given that he'd been banished from Sol for a period of not less than one thousand years. In training, the exiles had all taken turns at different jobs, under strict orders to figure out who was good at what. There had been no fixed chain of command, no hierarchy. All for one and one for all. But here they were: a king, a captain, a crew.

  In his Poet Prince days, Bascal had written frequently about the “verdant fires of youth,” but where were those fires now? Co-opted in some way. The Queendom authorities had grabbed them, molded them, forced them unwilling into these roles. The queen had in fact given the child rebels exactly what they'd always asked for: a chance to grow up. To take on responsibilities of genuine consequence. Well, they had that now. All that and more.

  And somehow it all felt very premature, very forced. Except on pirate ships, Conrad had never met a captain who was any younger than fifty, and most of them were much older than that. In fact, the oldest person in Newhope's memory cores was just forty-five, and Conrad had never met anyone that young who was in any position of responsibility. They were children, these Newhope exiles. Like all the revolutionaries, Conrad had railed against that label, which seemed destined to cling to them forever like a bad smell. Children with no room to grow up, no space to grow into. But now, at age twenty-five, he felt nearly as resentful at being made responsible for himself. For a whole ship and crew.

  Damn it, adulthood came too suddenly, and at too steep a cost. There was a lot to worry about; it wasn't fun. And he supposed that was the whole point. There was no use complaining about it, but it did feel eerie, watching his friends behave this way. Himself, too.

  “You look troubled all of a sudden,” Bascal said to him.

  Conrad looked around the bridge, then back at his king. “I just feel that something is slipping away. Our precious youth. Look at us: we aren't playacting, here. We are actually doing this thing. We'll never be young again.”

  “No,” Bascal said with a wistful, half-pleased look. “We won't.”

  “How does this happen?” Conrad mused. “When does it steal upon you? The green-hot fires fade into cool wellstone light. Five years ago we would have screamed and jumped at a moment like this; now we just look at each other. I wonder why that is.”

  Bascal's face broke out in a smile, and he got up from his seat. The bridge's little fax machine was not far from his elbow, and he whispered something to it. A number of objects spilled out into his waiting hands, and he took one of the
se and threw it hard against the floor. It made a popping sound, and burst with a spray of ribbons and confetti which covered a radius of nearly two meters. Ho Ng and Brenda had it all over their shoes. The king turned his smirk on Conrad. “Feel better?”

  “Actually, yes.” Conrad could feel some tension going out of him. Whether this was a moment of triumph or gloom was entirely up to them, right? And really, if all this was being recorded for posterity, then the tone they set here today would speak directly to the future society they hoped to build. “Give me one of those things.”

  Bascal tossed one to him, and it exploded with a snap in Conrad's own hands. “Ha!” he cried, and would have said more if not for Xmary's hard glare, directed first at him, and then at Bascal.

  “Majesty, can I ask you to cut that out? This may be the time, but it certainly isn't the place.”

  The tone in her voice set off a cascade of memories in Conrad. Years ago, onboard the pirate ship Viridity, he had been the voice of reason. Not because he'd wanted to, or was particularly good at it, but because there'd been no one else. People were too afraid, too angry, too wrapped up in their own affairs to think about any bigger picture. But here, now, the opposite seemed to be true.

  Okay, messing around with confetti was fun, but it didn't fundamentally change the fact that they were doing as they were told: meekly exiting the Queendom of Sol. It seemed a strange answer to their years of rebellion. They had lost their revolution—they'd always known they would—but the fact that they'd fought at all, taken on such hopeless odds, was a kind of victory all by itself. It had won them a star of their own, and a starship to carry them there. But did they have to be so obedient about it?

  “Information,” he asked, “are there any isolated sensor platforms within one hundred kilometers of our current position?”

  “There are three holding steady in our forward arc,” Agnes answered crisply, “with matched velocity. They're leading the way, essentially.” Then added: “Um, sir.”

  “Hmm. How about the aft arc?”

  She frowned. “May I send out a wideband ping? I get forward readings from Navigation, but the aft data is much sparser.”

  Conrad looked to Xmary, who nodded uncertainly.

  “Wideband ping, please, Information,” Conrad said to Agnes.

  “Aye, sir. Pinging now, all frequencies.”

  Conrad was impatient. After only about five seconds, he asked, “Well?”

  “Eleven targets in our aft hemisphere, sir. Seven of them running silent, in addition to the three pingers. They all look like news cameras to me, but it's hard to be sure. They're the right size anyway, half a meter or less, with a wellstone reflection signature. Most of the targets are clustered just aft of our equator, probably hoping for a cinematic angle on the motors and sail.”

  “Posterity wants a good view,” Robert said.

  “Let's give them one,” Conrad suggested, feeling suddenly, wickedly playful. “Robert, how difficult would it be to fry one of those bastards?”

  “Beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Fry it. With the fusion exhaust. It's a stream of monochromatic helium, right?”

  “And protons, I think. Ask Engineering. Let me see if I understand you correctly, sir: you want to orient the main motor not at our navigational optimum, but at a piece of private property? A reportant device, a news camera? For the purpose of destroying it?”

  Conrad cleared his throat. “Too many damn voices of reason onboard this ship. Yes, Astrogation, that is exactly what I'm asking you. It might be nice to leave this system in style. Give them something to remember us by. And the question stands: how difficult would it be? We needn't use the main motor; we have the four nav exhaust ports as well, right? I just want to point something hot at the nearest target of opportunity. I am asking you—correction, I am ordering you—to plot a solution.”

  “All right,” Robert said unhappily. “Solution plotted. It's, uh, not difficult. About 12.6 degrees off optimal, if we use the portside nav motor. A three-second toot ought to do it. Sir.”

  King Bascal burst out laughing. The old gleam was back in his eyes, and he said, “It was wanton vandalism that got us in this fix in the first place. I like it. What are they going to do, punish us? Fine us? Add an extra year to our sentence? Make no mistake: my parents have spy devices all over this ship. Our wellstone's programming must be lousy with them—microscopic sensors that move and shift and disappear when examined—so as long as we remain in comm range, maybe five AU for low-gain transmissions, they'll be watching our every move. And that by itself is a good enough reason for me: because they'll see us do it. But I can't give the order myself. Captain?”

  Xmary frowned at the king, and then even harder at Conrad. It was they, more than anyone, who'd led her to a life of crime. Well, Yinebeb Fecre as well. Feck the Facilitator. But that whole August Riot thing was small-time mischief against the larger backdrop of piracy and plunder. Bascal's crew had been gearing up to destroy a neutronium barge, cargo and all, when the Navy finally caught them.

  The captain's gaze wandered over to the astrogation niche. “Robert, confirm your solution, please, and forward it to the steering program. We'll give that camera six seconds in the fusion stream, and then reorient to our departure vector. There's no sense telling a joke and then leaving out the punchline.”

  “Now, ma'am?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The motor had been fired at low power when they departed from Mars orbit, and its reactors had operated continuously since then in a nonpropulsive mode, generating power for the ship and crew. And yes, it had been fired propulsively during drydock testing, for small fractions of a second. But this was the first time they'd opened her up, jamming the throttle to full power. The sound of it was incredible: low and shrill and visceral, like a continuous punch in the gut. Like the end of a world, or the beginning of one.

  “Bloodfuck,” cursed the Chief of Security. “We're really gone now.”

  And so they were.

  chapter three

  in which a wake is keenly felt

  Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui and her king, Bruno de Towaji, stood on the balcony of their Summer Palace on the island of Tongatapu. Above them, the stars of the night sky were washed out by a single pinpoint of indigo, painfully bright. That was Newhope's sail, illuminated by the launching lasers, racing past the Earth's orbit at one-twentieth of the speed of light and still accelerating madly. The ship was actually quite far from the Earth itself: nearly as far from it as the sun. But even so, the laser light reflected from its sails—bright as a hundred full moons—was painful to behold against the blackness.

  It made Bruno's heart stir with pride, because even by Queendom standards, the energies at play here were enormous. Newhope's ertial shields—among the largest hypercollapsites ever constructed—had consumed the entire output of Mass Industries Corporation for eleven whole months, single-handedly tripling the price of collapsium on the futures markets. The launching lasers were sacrificial—trillion-dollar platforms that were melting themselves down and pushing themselves up out of the Queendom as they fired. Like slow-motion bombs, exploding in a highly directional way over a period of ten days.

  Fortunately, that was the most complex piece of hardware involved, and while its construction was exacting, it took no great genius or mathematical insight to operate. The starship's internal technology was generally quite crude—open faxes and enclosed reactors, with tanks and plumbing to shuttle material around, and wellstone plating and cabling to control the flow of information and the semblance of matter. And crude was good, for it was safer that way, and cheaper, and gave the wayward children of Sol their best chance of success. The boys and girls were on their own now, separating themselves from the Queendom across the widening chasm of lightspeed communications.

  The king and queen had thought to send a historic transmission, a final message. And here the moment was at hand, the microphone waiting expectantly in the balcony's railing, grown
a few minutes ago for expressly this purpose. But tears had begun to spill from Tamra's eyes, trailing down her walnut cheeks, and she seemed at a loss to make any sound at all. Choked up, as it were. Mute with grief. For who had conceived and imposed this sentence, if not Tamra herself?

  In the end, it was Bruno who leaned down to the microphone and murmured, “Godspeed, children. May every chance be in your favor, and if love makes any difference, be assured you have ours in abundance.”

  Now Tamra was sobbing aloud, and the king felt his own eyes grow misty. He put an arm around her shoulder and hugged her, offering what comfort he could. Their only child, perhaps the only child they would ever have, was gone now to seek his own way.

  “His heart's desire has been granted,” Bruno said. “He is a king, duly elected by people who love and admire him.”

  “Barely.”

  “Ah, so you've found your voice.”

  “Barely,” she repeated, with a laugh and a cry.

  It was true, though: Bascal's election had been somewhat less than a landslide. Only thirty-nine percent of the transportees had actually voted for him, while a shocking twenty-four percent had voted for alternative political systems: republics and democracies and communist utopias long discredited. Bascal's camp friend, Conrad Mursk, had gleaned fifteen percent of the vote himself, as had Xiomara Li Weng. Xmary.

  Bruno wondered if Bascal regretted letting that girl escape into the arms of his friend. Perhaps not; perhaps they hadn't been suited for each other and were wise enough to recognize the fact. But she would make a formidable woman. She was a formidable woman, the captain of mankind's greatest adventure.