Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “Eccentricity .987,” Feck announced. “Cutting engines.” The groan of deutrelium fusion had quieted considerably over the course of the burn as the reactor's vibrations damped out, but now it cut off entirely. “Velocity relative to Sorrow is 30.59 kps. Relative to Barnard, 3.7 kps. We are falling, ma'am, and will enter Barnard's chromosphere in 122.5 hours.”

  “The hell you will,” said Bascal. “Turn that ship around. If you do it now, I promise to hear out your grievances and be lenient in your sentencing. If not, I'll set Security on your trail, and by the time Ho's finished there won't be enough left to freeze. I mean it.”

  “King's Fist is docked at Bubble Hood,” Conrad said, “and half her crew, including Ho, are on shore leave at the moment. This was a consideration in choosing our departure time.”

  Bascal clucked his tongue angrily. “My, my. You always were a careful mutineer, Conrad. I give you enough rope to hang yourself, and you spin a fucking hammock with it. Maybe I knew that. Maybe I was sloppy or generous, but I can't let you get away with this. The colony can't afford it.”

  “You could,” Conrad said, “for old times' sake.”

  The king touched his nose, his lips, then trailed his fingers through his hair, brushing it up away from his face. “You could turn around for the same reason, boyo. Just tell me what you're up to. Please. You're my dearest friend. Don't force me to kill you without even knowing why.”

  “I'll tell you when we're safely away,” Conrad said. “When we've gone hyperbolic.”

  “Not good enough. You'll tell me now.”

  “Or what, Bas?” Xmary cut in. “You're not going to catch us. Even if you hustle Fist's crew up the Gravittoir in the next ten minutes, it'd take them all day to match speeds with us, and even when they did they'd be hours behind us in our orbit. And out of fuel.”

  Bascal considered that for several seconds before replying, “Yes, and it might take us months to mount a rescue, to retrieve them from that perilous orbit. Or longer, but Fist's crew are hard men, accustomed to sacrifice. They'll do their jobs. There are weapons capable of killing a person from that range, you know. Without harming the ship.”

  “It's not like we're cowering in a metal can,” she countered. “We can repel your grasers and nasen beams. And if you have something subtler than that—some Marlon Sykes superweapon—or something cruder like a cannon or an ultra-high-powered laser, we'll just fire the engines again. The ertial shield puts acceleration on our side; we'll just scoot out of the way.”

  Bascal smiled, thinly and unhappily. “Not if you want to reach the Queendom you won't. You need to fire from a particular point over Barnard's face, at a particular moment. You haven't got time or fuel to waste on evasive maneuvers.”

  “We have some,” she said. “We have more freedom than Fist does. We are a starship, Your Highness, where Fist is not.”

  “No,” he agreed, “she's not. If you're determined to outrun her, you probably can. So we'll have to catch you the long way around. Your departure course is fixed. It has to be, because there's only one straight line connecting Barnard to Sol. And if Ho waits for you along that line, then when you come around the sun you can't help but encounter him, at a range and location of his choosing.”

  Oh, shit, Conrad said to himself. Here was his overlooked detail. He was a good Naval officer—Feck and Xmary even more so—but they weren't warriors. They didn't think or plan like warriors. Shit, shit, that would have to change. Quickly.

  “Now you see,” Bascal told them all. “Now at last you understand. This is not a democracy or an anarchy, where you're free to do whatever you fuffing please. How can it be? We rely on the economic edge that monarchy provides. Thirty percent better than the free market!”

  “Ideally,” Feck told him, with a dismissive, derisive flutter of his hands. “If you, King Bascal, do everything perfectly.”

  “You think I haven't?” Bascal asked, with less rancor than Conrad would have expected. “You think I'm just ignoring my advisors, my hypercomputers, my models and simulations? Could you do better with the same tools?” He looked around. “I can't see who's speaking. Is that you, Feck? Yes? Well listen, it may be true that we don't hit thirty percent on the best of days, but I'll tell you something: we don't hit fifteen percent either. Not on our worst, slowest, stupidest day. We're that much better than the sum of random chances. And if we fell back to a free market, do you know what a prolonged fifteen-to-twenty-five percent recession would do to this colony? Do you?”

  “So you strip away the final illusions of freedom,” Feck admonished. “You ask people to live and die for you, all the while checking every economic action against some master plan. And what action is not economic in some way? You're talking about total control, backed up by the threat of lethal force. Will it be the death penalty for selling berries below the official price? A flogging, perhaps? All for the hope of some hypothetical resurrection, thousands of years in the future. What I'm saying is, that's much worse than what we left behind in the Queendom. Sire. Much worse.”

  Bascal smiled, and this time it was genuine. “Ah, yes. A fair objection. But at the end of that time, think what we'll have achieved! Total freedom: physical, economic, political. Complete liberation from those moribund Queendom power structures. We will resurrect our dead, restore the neutronium trade, install the luxuries of collapsiter travel and meritocratic advancement. But these are not mere bread and circuses; long before Barnard is full we'll launch starships of our own, a colony wave done properly, carrying our ideas to the stars. And space is infinite, Feck. We can have our cake and eat it too. Live forever and continue to breed. All the cake in the universe is ours for the taking.”

  The king's eyes had gone out of focus, as if he were looking not at the holie window and the bridge of Newhope, but at this glorious future off in the distance somewhere.

  “Just ignore him,” Xmary told her crew. “We've got work to do. Battle plans to draw up. Fist may be a match for mining colonies and pirate sloops, but we've got a hundred times her reactor power and probably five hundred times her programmable mass. We can throw a lot of energy in a lot of different ways. If they want to stand in our path, that's their prerogative, but it doesn't mean they can stop us.”

  “I'm standing right here,” Bascal said. “I can hear every word.”

  “Just ignore him,” Xmary repeated.

  Although he grew increasingly angry, Bascal had too much dignity to press this point. If they weren't going to talk to him, then neither was he going to talk to them. He watched for a while as normal bridge chatter resumed: the scanning and neutralizing of debris, the shifting of ballast mass to minimize the pressure on station-keeping thrusters.

  “If you make it through, it's going to be a long trip,” he injected at one point. “No fax storage. I did a shorter version on the way out here, and believe me it was loooong. Are you people sure you can handle it?”

  But nobody responded to that, and a king really did have better things to do than sit there all day staring quietly at his enemies. After ten more minutes of quiet standoff, his image got bored and winked out.

  “Alone at last,” Eustace said.

  But Conrad shook his head. “Don't count on it. He'll have sensors in the walls by now. Our king is quite a talented programmer.”

  “Damn right he is,” said a disembodied voice. Bascal's.

  It was hardly a timely quip, though; his signal could only travel at the speed of light, whereas the distance between Newhope and Planet Two (Sorrow, Conrad reminded himself. Would that name ever stick?) was increasing rapidly. With the ship already doing better than thirty kps—one ten-thousandth of the speed of light—every seventy minutes of travel added a full second to the round-trip signal lag.

  “This complicates our battle planning,” Conrad noted. “We have no security at all. We have to assume that everything we do and say is being analyzed, at least until we get the sun between ourselves and the planet. Possibly even then. And any weapons we produce
from the wellstone of the hull will be difficult to trust.”

  “It does make things interesting,” Xmary agreed.

  The next time Bascal appeared in a visible form, the ship was nine light-seconds from Sorrow, meaning the round-trip signal lag was eighteen seconds. He didn't even bother trying to hold a conversation like that, but simply haloed himself and fired off an interactive message. A large and complicated one, judging by the hours its upload spent choking Newhope's comm systems.

  “It doesn't have to be like this,” the king said, appearing translucently as a crouching figure, leaning right into Conrad's face as he lay on his bunk trying to catch a few hours of sleep. “I still want you on my team. Whatever has driven you to this desperate act, I need to know about it. That's advice you should be giving to me. I should be accounting for it in my planning.”

  “I tried,” Conrad told him tiredly. “You're not an easy man to advise. You respond much better to actions, as you've amply demonstrated today.”

  “So fine, I'm responding. Now talk to me.”

  Conrad sighed. “Bas, why do your plans always involve this pressure cooker of pain and death and suffering? Why are the rewards always so far in the future? People don't want that. They never have and never will.”

  “But we're immorbid,” Bascal answered. “Some of us. Planning for the future never used to be a personal thing. Our parents were the first crop of humans to map out a future they themselves would inhabit. And they pissed the job, didn't they? We've got to do better. Forget twenty-year plans and even century plans; we have the opportunity, the duty, to plan across the millennia, across the eons. And if we can see paradise, not just in dreams but in the hard, cold numbers of mathematical certainty, does it not behoove us to be brave? To take the first hard steps down that road? The easier roads all lead to ruin, my friend. I've seen it.”

  Conrad sighed. “Jesus and the little gods, Bas, quit the act. You can bamboozle children, but you're not fooling me. By the time you solve the economic crisis, the colony's dead will be irradiated into frozen goo. There's no resurrection; the only place you can send them is heaven itself. But there's a lesser paradise much closer at hand.”

  The king's eyes filled with cold certainty. “You've taken the Cryoleum. Twenty-five thousand sleeping bodies. Taking them ‘home' to a place they've never seen. I've sent word back to myself on Sorrow, to verify that the Cryoleum is actually missing, but you can save me the trouble.”

  “Yes,” Conrad admitted. “We've taken the Cryoleum.”

  “Damn you,” the recording said. “Do you realize what you've done? Do you know how destabilizing that'll be? No matter how ruthless I am—and I hate being that, believe me!—this will distort the morale equations, further eroding our productivity, further postponing the dawn of our indigenous Eden.” Then the hologram's eyes widened a bit. “Ah, but it's a secret. Yes? If I kill you, if I kill everyone on the ground who knows about your plans, the whole thing can be covered up. We'll just need to find a way to explain the loss of Newhope. And that shouldn't be difficult. She's an old ship; accidents happen.”

  These words made Conrad very happy and proud not to be on Bascal's team, to be instead on his own team and struggling for his own vision of the least-worst future. But at the same time the words triggered a deep mourning, because he and Bascal really had been good friends, best friends, for hundreds and hundreds of years. They still were.

  “Even your barely sentient messages dream of homicide,” Conrad said.

  The recording shook its head. “Sadly, it makes sense. And fortunately, I have the fortitude to press onward, even with plans that make me personally ill.”

  “You can't stop us,” Conrad said.

  Here the recording smiled: a cold, holographic smile. “You'd be surprised what I can do. You'd be amazed what I can do, with centuries of thought and planning. I always knew there'd be rebellions to put down. And it occurs to me, seeing you lying there half asleep, that I have still another weapon at my disposal.” He looked down at himself. “This ghost will haunt you, Conrad. It will deprive you of rest until such time as you surrender Newhope and return home in chains.”

  Oh, dear God. “Go away, Bas.”

  “No, indeed,” the recording said. “I'm tireless, drawing my energy directly from your own reactors. And as you say, I'm barely sentient. Thus, I'm incapable of boredom. The volume of my speech is unfortunately capped by safety interlocks—I can no more shout you to death than I can command the wellstone in your hull to disintegrate. Alas for you, because it would be a kinder death than what Ho has in store.

  “However, the duration of my speech has no such constraints. We shall begin, I think, with one million recitations of the “Fuck You Song,” and follow up with a long, detailed list of your personal faults. I will not enjoy this, for I cannot, but perhaps the real Bascal will be satisfied when all is done, that all has been done that can be, to bring down this house of cards you call a conspiracy.”

  “Go away,” Conrad repeated as the first stanza of the “Fuck You Song” began. “Little gods, Bascal, you can't be serious.”

  Ah, but he could. And was.

  chapter twenty-four

  flashfight

  That Newhope could be unwilling to receive any further malicious uploads was a possibility, given that she was a highly intelligent and protective entity in her own right. However, she should not have been capable of resistance when presented with Royal Overrides. Perhaps, then, there was a communications problem of some sort, although this is also unlikely in a ship constructed of wellstone and hypercollapsites. Or perhaps Bascal—the singled king of a world and a people—was too busy or distracted to halo himself for another recording. But could he not have duplicated the original transmission, and filled the spaces of Newhope with a thousand holie copies of himself?

  In point of fact, he did not. For whatever reason, only one ghost haunted the ship, with one crewmate—Conrad—bearing the brunt of its attentions. Perhaps Bascal felt a twinge of love or pity, or simply couldn't bring himself to send himself off, again and again, to certain doom. There was something wrenching about sending a piece of your soul on a one-way trip to data heaven, never to be heard from again. Conrad had abandoned the practice years ago.

  But King Bascal was harder-headed about these things, and it's difficult to imagine he'd've foresworn such an action if it offered some strategic or tactical advantage, or hastened the day when his visions of Eden could be instantiated in the physical universe. Some light might be shed on the subject if the site of his palace could be examined by quantum archaeologists, but failing that, we can simply acknowledge the mystery, and agree that Newhope's habitable spaces were neither as loud nor as chaotic as they might have been.

  Nevertheless, her crew—even Eustace—were all pulling long shifts, scheming in their heads and trying to communicate ideas to one another while simultaneously keeping them obscure from the prying ears presumed to surround them. The industrial-grade fax machine—the only one onboard—produced stimulants in abundance to keep them all on their toes, and between that and the lack of sleep, the general stress, and the specific nagging and singing and joking of Bascal's one message, they were all pretty fuzzed out by the time they reached the bottom of their orbit.

  “Velocity with respect to Barnard is 615 kps,” Feck announced loudly, over the ninety thousandth refrain of the “Fuck You Song.” “If we have forever to get home, the minimum needed for escape boost is 620, but ideally we'll need something closer to ten thousand. I'll kiss the engines for good luck, ma'am. As for the sails, I am unfurling them . . . now.”

  There was a lot more to the boost sequence than just that, but while the sails were unfurling, and before Feck had gotten to the next step on the checklist, red lights began flashing and alarms blaring.

  “What's happening?” Xmary demanded.

  Conrad, sitting now at the Systems Integration station instead of his own chair, reported, “It's a broken thread alarm. From the bow she
eting, just aft of the ertial shield. Something's evaporating the outer layers of the wellstone there.”

  “What kind of something? I need more information.” There was no hint of love in her voice, nor should there be. She was the captain of a vessel under fire. “I didn't expect trouble this early, but it makes sense for them to disrupt us before boost if they can.”

  “It's . . . coherent light. Sorry, coherent X rays.”

  “Could it be the spalling laser on King's Fist?”

  “That would be my first guess,” Conrad agreed. “Although the range must be pretty extreme, or the damage would be much worse. That laser's frequency is tuned specifically to interfere with wellstone's command-and-control signals, and to set up destructive resonance in the fibers. Wait a minute, I'm getting broken threads in the sail as well. The laser's spot diameter is about sixty meters, so according to the computer it's firing from a range of just over three light-seconds.”

  Luna was almost exactly 1.29 light-seconds from Earth, and although Conrad would never admit it publicly, after years of intensive training in near-Earth space he still measured it that way in his mind: three light-seconds was nine hundred thousand kilometers, about two and a half Earth-moon distances. Also very close to the Limit of Influence or LOI, where Sol's gravity began to dominate over Earth's, making stable orbits impossible. Not that that mattered here and now, but it was how he'd been trained.

  “It's a probing shot,” he speculated. “They don't expect to do any real damage. In fact, they may be using the spalling laser just to light us up, to make it easier to target some other weapon. The spot is shrinking, though. We're closing fast with the source.”

  “Find it.”

  “Trying to, ma'am, but King's Fist is stealthed. Anyway, all the light and heat are confusing the sensors.”

  Indeed, for practical purposes they were inside Barnard at the moment. It was a smaller, cooler star than Sol, but that did not by any means make it a clement environment to pass through. At this depth in the chromosphere, Sol was at least predictable; navigating through it was like flying a kite in a steady gale. But Barnard, with less power output per hectare of surface, was a knotted mess of flailing magnetic fields that spiked and dropped away without warning. The particle flux alone was enough to snow out most of the preprogrammed sensors in Newhope's hull, and for all his programming expertise, Conrad knew almost nothing about sensor design. Stuck with the ship's normal, unmodified arrays, he felt as though he were peering out through the pores of a blindfold.