The Accidental War

by Walter Jon Williams

  Martinez shrugged. “In reference to the colligative properties of pressure across a semipermeable membrane. Naturally.”

  Roland nodded gloomily. “Of course.”

  Martinez inhaled the aroma of his whisky and felt a tingle across the fine hairs of his nasal cavities. “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me what disaster has occasioned this meeting,” he said.

  “Not till everyone’s here,” Roland said. “It will be depressing enough going into it only once.”

  “My father-in-law won’t be patron to Rol-mar, will he?”

  Roland only looked at him.

  “Who got Rol-mar instead?”

  Roland swept his glass from the bar and carried it to one of his overstuffed chairs. “We’ll talk about it when everyone gets here.”

  Vipsania and Walpurga arrived a few minutes later, found refreshments, and sat in the crepuscular light beneath a dim window. Not drinking but swirling the amber liquid in his glass, Roland related the substance of the report from the Committee for Planetary Settlement. Though the report was full of compliments to Lord Chen, the committee had decided that the patron of Rol-mar would be the Daimong patrician Lord Gonihu.

  “Who is he, exactly?” Martinez said.

  “Very old, very grand,” Vipsania reported. “He keeps company so exclusive that I’m not sure any of us would ever have seen him.”

  “He has that Nayanid-style palace on the Boulevard of the Praxis,” Walpurga added. “The one with the alternating courses of black and white stone.”

  “The place that looks like a layer cake,” Martinez said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “Hideous and pretentious at the same time. I’ve wondered who had the bad taste to live there.”

  “Lord Gonihu’s represented in Convocation by his grandson Lord Pyte Gonihu,” Roland said. “Lord Convocate Pyte condescended to call upon me this afternoon, just after the committee issued its report, and he informed me that it would not be necessary for the Chee Company or Meridian to tender any bids as contractor or planning authority.”

  Martinez ground his teeth. “It’s going to cost them a fortune to ship in new contractors. You did explain that, didn’t you?”

  “I did. But apparently Lord Gonihu has a fortune to spare.”

  “Or thinks he does.”

  Vipsania’s brows contracted. “Who’s behind this?”

  Roland shrugged. “The Gonihu clan has not taken a position on the Terran criminals,” he said. “They’re not part of the Steadfast League, though that may be because some of the principals are too unrefined for Lord Gonihu’s taste.” He made an equivocal gesture with one hand. “As are we, for that matter.”

  “Are the only workers allowed on his planet from the Peer elite?” Martinez asked. “How is he going to find only acceptable people to work for him?”

  Roland made an angry gesture with one hand. “I don’t know how some of our smaller subcontractors will survive this.” His eyes glanced over at his siblings. “If any of you are planning any rebuilding or redecorating, maybe you can employ them. It won’t be work on the same scale as settling a planet, but it might make a difference.”

  “I need to rebuild the Corona Club,” Martinez said. “Though the insurance company is delaying payment until the police report is filed.”

  “Whatever you all can do,” Roland said.

  “I can call Lord Chen again,” Martinez said. “Lord Gonihu would probably talk to him, since they probably claim descent from the same ultimate globule of primary protoplasm, or whatever.”

  Roland managed something like a smile. “We would appreciate that very much, thank you.”

  “Otherwise, can we outflank them somehow?” Martinez asked. “Gonihu might not want us, but can we work through the Planetary Settlement Committee or someone else to make sure we’re a part of the picture?”

  “Unlikely,” Roland said. “I will do my best, however.” He looked at his siblings again. “I think we may have to concede defeat with as much grace as we can,” he said. “We can shift all the contractors to Chee or Parkhurst, but that’s half the empire away, and it’s going to cost us. It’s going to cost more than it’s worth to ship a lot of our equipment home.” He looked at his brother. “Gareth, we’re going to need someone with experience in logistics. I hope you’ll be able to contribute.”

  “I’m not a logistician, but I’ll do what I can,” Martinez said. “But if we have to leave, I recommend scorched-earth tactics.”

  Roland gave him a warning look. “I have cautioned you about applying military solutions to political problems.”

  “I’m not saying scatter bombs or booby traps around. But we leave nothing behind,” Martinez said. “My guess is that Lord Gonihu’s expecting a windfall. You said yourself it makes economic sense to abandon a lot of our equipment—well, my advice is not to do it. Take everything. Leave them with roofless buildings and half-built infrastructure. Leave the breakwaters half built and hope the cities flood, leave the crops to rot in the fields. We own anything that Lady Gruum hasn’t paid for, so we take all that with us—and the things she did pay for, we leave in the rain with the windows open.”

  “That would be emotionally satisfying, I admit,” Roland said. “But how much do you really want to spend to achieve that satisfaction?”

  “If the equipment costs too much to ship, destroy it. Burn the buses, sink the barges with the trucks parked on them, drive the trains off a bridge. If we have to leave so much as a toilet behind, fill it with concrete.”

  He looked from his brother to his sisters and back, and they all seemed to be probing the idea with what seemed to be cautious pleasure. The satisfaction might only be emotional, as Roland had said, but it was still satisfaction.

  “We might be making unnecessary enemies,” Roland said.

  “We already have enemies. We’ll be teaching them not to screw with us. Just as we taught Lord Minno and his friends not to manipulate our stock prices.”

  Roland decided to concede. “I’ll be in touch with the managers, and see what we can do.”

  Lord Chen paid a call upon Lord Gonihu and was received with polite, immaculate condescension. Lord Chen argued Roland’s case and was turned down flat. Lord Gonihu appointed a nephew as general manager of Rol-mar, and the nephew set about forming a company. Clearly Lord Gonihu intended to keep as much in the family as possible.

  What no one had anticipated was that the situation would be taken out of the hands of the managers, the Martinez clan, Lord Gonihu, and his nephew. When the first draft of Roland’s complex evacuation plan was transmitted to Rol-mar, the workers flat refused to carry it out.

  They’d had plenty of time to make their plans. They had traveled to Rol-mar to build settlements and live in them, and that’s precisely what they intended to do. They weren’t interested in Roland’s shipping them to another world, and they certainly weren’t interested in falling in with Lord Gonihu’s plans, whatever those were. They took command of their own fate—and, in addition, an entire new world.

  They didn’t stop work. They weren’t on strike. They just went on building their own communities quite independent of anyone else’s plans. A few of the managers joined them, and the rest cast up their hands in despair and flocked to the elevators for evacuation.

  Roland had no leverage over the workers save a threat to withhold their pay, which in time he did. But once he made that decision, he had no power over the workers at all, and they seemed not to need the money, having instead the possession of an entire world. There were plenty of supplies left, including years’ worth of antimatter for generating electricity, which had been kept high above the world, in the terminals of the skyhooks, until the workers went up the elevators and secured it for themselves. Then they went on using Meridian’s equipment as if they owned it, a fact that made Roland snarl.

  There were more than three hundred thousand workers on the planet. It would take an army to stop them, and the empire had no army
—only the Fleet. Lord Gonihu would not be permitted to raise an army of his own, for fear he might use it to challenge the government. And in any case, the workers weren’t offering violence—in fact they were working at their jobs quite peacefully. Who would an army shoot at? Who would the police arrest? No one was in rebellion.

  Roland failed utterly in his long-distance negotiations with the workers, and in frustration he asked his brother if he would travel to Rol-mar and negotiate in person.

  “What could I do?” Martinez asked.

  “Be useful for a change,” Roland snarled. “You can get together with Nikki Severin—he’s returned to the system, yes?”

  “I’d like to see Nikki,” Martinez said, “but tell me what I’m supposed to accomplish there, and I’ll consider going.”

  At that moment Roland was too harassed and angry to offer a plausible, or even a coherent, scheme; and so Martinez was left wondering just what he could achieve, and how he could do it. Go down to the planet, grab workers by the elbow, and tell them how wonderful life would be on Chee?

  Still, by the next day he had almost talked himself into the trip to Rol-mar, when he got a call from Roland.

  “The Commandery’s decided to send a cruiser to Rol-mar,” he said.

  “A cruiser?” It took Martinez a moment to process the information. “You mean a cruiser from the Fleet?”

  “Yes,” Roland said, “the Beacon.”

  “Beacon’s a Daimong ship,” Martinez said. “Who’s commanding her?”

  “Lord Oh Derinuus.”

  Martinez searched for a memory and failed to find it. “I don’t know him.”

  Roland offered a brief laugh. “It probably doesn’t matter,” he said. “What can a cruiser do?”

  Martinez was on the verge of laughing himself, when a sudden realization caught him by surprise, and he felt a cold, sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.

  “What a cruiser can do,” he said, “is annihilate a rebellion.”

  Chapter 13

  “Depressurize and withdraw boarding tube,” said Shushanik Severin. “Crew to secure for zero gravity.”

  “Yes, Lord Captain.” This from Pilot First Class Liu.

  “Maneuvering thrusters gimbaled,” said Warrant Officer Falyaz. “Pressure at thruster heads nominal.” The shrill zero-gee warning rang out, and then there came Falyaz’s redundant announcement, “Zero-gravity warning sounded.”

  “Boarding tube retracting,” said Liu. Then, “Boarding tube secured. Outside connectors sealed. Outside electrical power withdrawn. Ship is at one hundred percent internal power.”

  “Main engines gimbaled,” said Falyaz. “Gimbal test successful. Engines standing by.”

  Severin checked the heads-up display on the inside of his helmet. There was no traffic in the area, and therefore no chance of collision.

  “Launch,” he said.

  The pilot pressed two buttons, the docking clamps released, and Severin began to float in his restraints as Expedition drifted away from the elevator terminal. The docks were always positioned just at escape velocity, so that any ships would sail away from Rol-mar, not fall toward it.

  As Pilot Liu accelerated away from the terminal with short bursts of the thrusters, Severin triggered the virtual display and Rol-mar expanded before his eyes, as if it were painted on the interior of his skull. Blue oceans, swirling white clouds, green-and-brown mainland, silver winding rivers . . . from this distance there was no sign whatever of habitation. The foreshortened elevator terminal hung in space before him, its exterior painted in bright geometric patterns to aid pilots in finding their way to the right berth. Its edges were marked by jigsaw crenellations, designed so that new modules, or new counterweights, could be slotted into place as necessary.

  Severin felt tugs at his inner ear as Liu oriented Expedition onto its new heading, which meant that Expedition was far enough from the terminal to ignite its antimatter torches. Severin took himself out of virtual and looked at his displays.

  “Ready for orbital injection, my lord,” Liu said.

  “Sound acceleration warning.”

  Another, deeper alarm clattered through the ship. “Warning sounded.”

  “Engines,” said Severin, “fire on Miss Liu’s mark.”

  Falyaz confirmed. Liu gave her countdown and the cruiser’s big engines fired, punching Severin back into his couch and sending his acceleration cage swaying on its gimbals.

  Pilot Liu placed Expedition in a higher orbit, not quite geostationary, drifting slowly over the surface of the planet below. The engines cut, and the crew floated again in zero gravity.

  Severin switched to virtual again and looked through the hull toward Rol-mar Wormhole One, where he saw the bright deceleration flare of Beacon, coming ever closer. The flare had been visible for days, and the cruiser was on course to enter Rol-mar orbit in something like thirty-seven hours.

  He frowned as he looked at the flare, and he wondered again how he was going to approach the problem that Beacon and its captain represented.

  Severin and Expedition had been on exploration duty for almost a year. Rol-mar itself was a world discovered only years before, and its system contained two newly discovered wormholes that had the potential to lead to even more useful, undiscovered worlds.

  Rol-mar Wormhole Two had led to a star orbited only by seven gas giants and bands of stony rubble—apparently the tidal stresses of so many giant worlds had torn apart any rocky planets before they’d formed. The rubble might be of interest to mining firms, and possibly a survey would one day be conducted, but Severin’s job was to locate habitable worlds, not mineral deposits. His sensing team discovered a wormhole on the far side of the system, and Severin took Expedition through it. There he found a binary system bathed in the ferocious radiation of two giant blue-white stars. It was impossible for life to exist in such a massive storm of high-velocity particles, so Severin, glad of Expedition’s comprehensive radiation shielding, turned around and began the long voyage back to Rol-mar Wormhole Two, and from there to Wormhole Three.

  Wormhole Three led to a system with a roaster world, a gas giant actually orbiting within the corona of its primary, careening along with a “year” of only 1.4 days. This was the first such world seen close-up, so Expedition’s science team spent a month studying it before the ship continued into another wormhole. This one led to a barren system, a white dwarf surrounded by rocky planets with only the most tenuous of atmospheres, completely uninhabitable.

  By this point Expedition had been gone for ten months and food supplies were running low, so Severin laid a course for Rol-mar. After entering the system, he sent his formal report, asked Exploration Service headquarters for instructions, and sent off greetings to everyone he’d left behind. Because he knew Martinez would be interested, he included in his message to Gareth Martinez his report of the trip and much of the data, along with spectacular video of the roaster world.

  Ten days later a reply arrived from Martinez, explaining the unique situation on Rol-mar and strongly suggesting that Expedition arrive on the scene before Beacon. So Severin began drilling the crew in tactical problems involving single-ship combat and reduced his deceleration burn, arriving at Rol-mar a comfortable two days before Beacon transited Wormhole One.

  The Exploration Service had gone into a long decline after the Shaa had decided their empire had grown to its limits and ceased looking for new worlds, but the Naxid War had proved a boon to the near-moribund service. Severin himself, a mere warrant officer commanding nothing more than an unarmed lifeboat, had distinguished himself at Protipanu; and the larger Service vessels had taken part in combat. More importantly, the Exploration Service had got a share of wartime shipbuilding funds, and the result was newer and larger ships, equipped not only for exploration but for war. By now the Exploration Service had a sizable little fleet, for all that its ships were usually deployed alone on missions taking them far from home. To keep its crew comfortable during its extended missions, Expedi
tion was large for a light cruiser, with twenty-eight missile tubes, a full set of antimissile batteries, and a sensor array more advanced than any in the Fleet, with a large science team trained to use it.

  The Exploration Service had been unfashionable for centuries, officered by members of a few Peer families for whom such service was a long-standing tradition. Most Peers preferred the Fleet, with its pomp, its rigid traditions, its glamorous social hierarchy, and its glittering squadrons that traveled from world to world as if on parade. The wartime expansion of the Service required new officers, and the few Peers in the Service were not enough. Severin, a commoner, had risen to captain on what he liked to think were his own merits, and in the emergency other experienced warrant and petty officers had received their commissions. The Peers had flooded in as well, but by the time they were graduated from the academies the commoners had not only received commissions but were pleased to wield seniority over their social betters. Only two of Severin’s four lieutenants were Peers. With their missions taking them away for long periods, and with fewer aristocrats, the Service was considerably less formal than the Fleet; and Severin spent most of his time on the ship in jumpsuits or sweats, and only buttoned himself into his formal blue jacket when making video reports, conducting an inspection, or convening a disciplinary board.

  Not that he’d needed to devote a lot of time to ship’s discipline. Expedition was a contented ship, doing exactly the sort of thing people joined the Exploration Service to do. Even the miscreants who made wine from kitchen scraps, or ran a dice game in one of the holds, made their own contribution to the ship’s happiness. If the captain’s closet was full of puppets and bits of scenery, that was entirely his own business.

  But even in the Service, a captain still carried the authority of an absolute tyrant when he wanted to, and he had no need to justify his extra drills. What he worried about was that the drills might, ere long, prove necessary.

  Severin examined the problem of Beacon with slow care, as if he were probing a missing tooth with his tongue; and then he put on a clean shirt along with his blue jacket and his medals, sat at the desk in his office, and recorded a message to Captain Derinuus. He identified himself and his ship, of which he had no doubt Derinuus was already aware, and offered to host Derinuus and his officers at a dinner. He received his reply within the hour.