My screen blacked out the discharge, but even the multiple reflections that flashed through the turret hatch were blinding. There was a gout of burning stone. Torque had shattered the arched concrete roof when it lifted, but many of the reinforcing rods still held so that slabs danced together as they tumbled inward.
Riflemen had continued to fire while the tribarrel raked toward them. The 20 cm bolt silenced everything but its own echoes. Servants would have broken down the outside doors minutes before. The surviving soldiers followed them now, throwing away weapons unless they forgot them in their hands.
The screen to my left was a panorama through the vision blocks while the orange pips on the main screen provided the targeting array. Men, tank lords in khaki, jumped aboard the other tanks. Two of them ran toward me in the vehicle farthest from the gatehouse.
Only the west gable of the banquet hall had collapsed. The powergun had no penetration, so the roof panel on the palace’s outer side had been damaged only by stresses transmitted by the panel that took the bolt. Even on the courtyard side, the reinforced concrete still held its shape five meters from where the bolt struck, though fractured and askew.
The tiny figure of the baron was running toward me from the entrance.
I couldn’t see him on the main screen because it was centered on the guns’ point of impact. I shouted in surprise, frightened back into slavery by that man even when shrunken to a doll in a panorama.
My left hand dialed the main screen down and across, so that the center of the baron’s broad chest was ringed with sighting pips. He raised his mob gun as he ran, and his mouth bellowed a curse or a challenge.
The baron was not afraid of me or of anything else. But he had been born to the options that power gives.
My foot stroked the firing pedal.
One of the mercenaries who had just leaped to the tank’s back deck gave a shout as the world became ozone and a cyan flash. Part of the servants’ quarters beneath the banquet hall caught fire around the three-meter cavity blasted by the gun.
The baron’s disembodied right leg thrashed once on the ground. Other than that, he had vanished from the vision blocks.
Lieutenant Kiley came through the hatch, feet first but otherwise with as little ceremony as I had shown. He shoved me hard against the turret wall while he rocked the gun switch down to safe. The orange numeral blanked from the screen.
“In the lord’s name, kid!” the big officer demanded while his left hand still pressed me back. “Who told you to do that?”
“Lieutenant,” said Lord Curran, leaning over the hatch opening but continuing to scan the courtyard. His pistol was in his hand, muzzle lifted, while air trembled away from the hot metal. “We’d best get a move on unless you figure t’fight a reinforced battalion alone till the supports get here.”
“Well, get in and drive, curse you!” the lieutenant shouted. The words relaxed his body and he released me. ’No, I don’t want to wait around here alone for the Lightning Division!"
“Lieutenant,” said the driver, unaffected by his superior’s anger, “we’re down a man. You ride your blower. Kid’ll be all right alone with me till we join up with the colonel and come back t’kick ass.”
Lieutenant Kiley’s face became very still. “Yeah, get in and drive,” he said mildly, gripping the hatch coaming to lift himself out without bothering to use the power seat.
The driver vanished but his boots scuffed on the armor as he scurried for his own hatch. “Gimme your bloody key,” he shouted back.
Instead of replying at once, the lieutenant looked down at me. “Sorry I got a little shook, kid,” he said. “You did pretty good for a new recruit.” Then he muscled himself up and out into the night.
The drive fans of other tanks were already roaring when ours began to whine up to speed. The great vehicle shifted greasily around me, then began to turn slowly on its axis. Fourth in line, we maneuvered out through the courtyard gate while the draft from our fans lifted flames out of the palace windows.
We are the tank lords.
We Hold These Rights, by Henry Melton
Editor’s Introduction
We recently celebrated the 200th birthday of the Constitution of these United States. That document established a government intended to put into concrete contractual terms the ideals expressed some years before in the Declaration of Independence. Although the Declaration was largely a Bill of Indictment against King George (one of the things we didn’t like was that the king had “erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance”), it also expressed the public philosophy of the leaders of the War of Independence.
These were no wild revolutionaries. They wanted the rights of free Englishmen. However, because the Declaration of Independence was in part intended to secure the sympathy of the French court, whose intellectuals weren’t particularly impressed by appeals to the rights of free Englishmen, Jefferson and the Committee on Style drew on other sources.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.
“That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Of course the men who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the Declaration fully understood that rights were a much trickier proposition than the document indicates. For one thing, one or two were atheists, while half a dozen of the others subscribed to a form of Deism that rejected any notion that God might intervene in the affairs of men; meaning that the Creator could hardly be the source of rights, and if He wasn’t, who was? For the most part, though, the signers were men of their times, willing to accept the proposition that things long established had some right to exist; that custom and tradition were important; that there was a very great deal more to government than sheer power.
That’s still the public philosophy of the United States. It’s not a philosophy universally accepted among intellectuals, of course. They have other views about the rights of man, as well as the natural place of the elite in governing. We have, in this century, charged government with a very great deal more than the signers and framers ever supposed possible.
The purpose of government is, according to the framers, to secure rights; in particular, to establish justice. In their thinking, without government there could be no rights, for each man would do what he had the power to do; and that did not lead to peace, but to what Hobbes had called “the war of everyone against everyone else.” Life in a state of Nature was no peaceful idyll. It was a state of “no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
That’s one view of natural right. There are others.
We Hold These Rights
Henry Melton
“And I’m telling you that I won’t have a coward on my ship!”
I tried to reason with the maniac: “Come on, Quail! It’s my ship, too. We have to have an engineer.”
“We’ll get another one!” His voice echoed off the walls of the control room. I hadn’t seen him like this before, and Quail Gren and I had been shoving rocks for six years. It was frightening.
“Where, Quail? Where will we get another engineer? After today, there won’t be an unemployed beam controller anywhere in the Asteroid Belt—and if there were, he’d be somebody worse than Willis Fario.”
“What’s the matter with you, Clement Ster? Why are you sticking up for him? Are you wanting to sell us out to the Terrans, too?”
That was too much. My fist caught him clumsily in the chest. He was bigger than me, but he rocked back a little. “You shut up!” I yelled. “The Belt is my home, just like it is yours. I know you’re worried about Marine and the kids, but don’t be crazy. I�
�m not about to let some Earthside commission steal the Belt out from beneath me. You make another crack like that, and I’ll deck you!”
Quail looked away toward his control console. My punch couldn’t have hurt, but I think my trying it shocked him. I didn’t often lose my temper. I stalked over to my seat at the geologist’s station and automatically stabbed the keys on the geotyping files. It would be another three days before I would be needing to search them in earnest, but it was something to do until the air cleared.
He spoke, finally, in a lowered voice. “Okay, Clement. You’re my friend. I know you’re loyal to the Belt. But why’d you defend that neon?”
I signed. It had been a very long and exhausting day, and I had no hope it would get any better. I reviewed my arguments again. “Two reasons. Like I said before, we’re not going to be able to find a beam controller who can handle our beam projector the way we have it jury-wired, with no computer controls. You can plot your courses all you want up here, but unless we have someone down in the engine room who can make the beam move the ship like it’s supposed to, then the Monarch isn’t a ship—it’s just a funny-shaped asteroid. And, secondly, I’m not so sure that he said anything wrong.”
“Nothing wrong! Are you deaf? Didn’t he, just a few minutes ago, tell us that it is perfectly all right for the Earth Assembly to move right in and order us off our own rocks? Now, didn’t he?” Quail’s face started getting red again.
I tried to keep my voice calm, but my impatience stuck out with every word I said. “Quail, I really don’t know what he said. Now, leave me alone for a while!”
It was the truth. I didn’t know what Willis had said. He had a funny way of talking and I was never exactly sure. But I promised myself right then that I was going to find out what he had meant by his crack—but after I got some sleep. We were at war with Earth, only hours into it, and my nerves needed rest.
When I woke, Quail was still up in the control room. I didn’t think he had gotten any sleep, and that worried me. I hoped he could take the strain.
It took a war to make me glad, for the first time, that I hadn’t married. I remembered when the Terrans took over Mars in their insane desire to make over the entire solar system into a pattern of habitable planets. For their own safety—so they said—three generations of colonists were uprooted and shipped back to Earth. Many couldn’t adjust to the crowded, smelly home planet. I didn’t imagine we would fare much better under Terran control. They surely had some plan to use even Quail’s home rock, Greenstone, as raw material for their terraforming engineers. I hated to think that such a thing might happen.
I marveled that Quail could resist the impulse to boost straight home. We were only a six-day trip from there. I wouldn’t have argued. Ceres had no authority over us. If they had ordered us on the mission, rather than asking, I doubt we would have done it. No Belt miner would have. But Quail thought it would be best to act with the others.
The volunteer navy at Ceres had formed about thirty seconds after the bad news from the Terran Assembly arrived. As usual, we didn’t find out about it until two hours later, when we turned the radio on to get an orbit allotment from Ceres Port Control. We grabbed the first slot we could get, and Quail and I took the scooter straight to Core’s place. In the excitement, we both forgot about Willis.
It had been a good bet. Jake Coro—that is, Admiral Jake Coro, T.P.N., Ret.—had been blowing the independence trumpet for years, not that anyone had paid much serious attention to him. The Belt, or so everybody thought, already was independent. But when the Terrans tried their move, he had been ready. We landed the scooter near his place, almost setting down on a couple of people who were scurrying about the place. A couple of dozen scooters were about, as Jake’s Restaurant and Club had become general headquarters for the Ceres Defense Brigade. Jake had been retired from the Terran Navy for ten years, but those ten years had made him every bit a Belt man. As Quail and I walked into his place, I saw that he was still every bit an admiral. The Defense Brigade was his show, and he had the right. Seven years worth of contingency plans worked out for this very day were spread out in a couple of hundred sealed envelopes on the pool table. When he saw us come in, he took several minutes to talk to us and to ask our help. We left with one of those envelopes and a hope that we just might be able to hold the rocks we called home.
I really had no home other than the Monarch, but that hope of victory meant a lot to me—because Quail did have a home, and he had shared it with me. Every few months, when we had a bit more cash than bills, the Monarch would dock at Greenstone and Quail would take up being a family man where he had left off last time. For the first day or so he and Marine would disappear somewhere down in the rock and I would babysit the kids.
Baby Stephen was barely human the last time we were there, but then, Emme had looked like that not too many trips ago, and she was a little angel. She may have had a crush on me, hanging around wherever I was. I could visualize her, hovering over my shoulder in zero-g as I reset the house tractor field back up to normal after the baby had come. Toby and I were good friends. He had been around before I started visiting. We’d played a lot together over the years. I taught him how to use the rifle last trip. I’d hoped he would never have to use it.
Willis hadn’t come up from the engine room for the night, but that was nothing unusual. We had hired him to monitor and control the machines down there when we limped into Vesta Village a month or so before with a fried computer. He slipped into the computer’s place as if he were a repair module. He did the jobs well, executing orders Quail called down over the intercom. But he acted like a machine, too. He was quiet, impassive, and he stayed in his place. He ate and slept down there. It was always a shock when he did come up into people country.
Crawling down the cramped tube connecting the engine room with the rest of the ship, I felt maybe it wasn’t so odd he rarely came up. The tube was narrow and too long. It was slanted downward and had an uncomfortable bend in the middle. It was dark at the bottom. The tube had come out next to the massive chamber that held tractor-pressor beams in a dynamic equilibrium, the accumulator that held all of our power.
“Willis? Are you asleep?” In the dim light shed by the indicators, I could make out his sleeping bag, strung, hammock-wise, between two supports. He said nothing, but the bag started moving and he began to crawl out. He was brown-skinned, hairy, and massive. He looked like a brown bear awakened from its winter nap, blinking his eyes as the light came on.
“What do you want?” he mumbled.
“I just wanted to talk. A lot has happened.”
Willis gestured to a place where I could sit, as he slumped into the control seat we had moved down for his use. “Is there anything to say?”
I thought of Toby and Emme and that Terran fleet probably already on its way, and bit back the cutting answer that came to mind. I wanted to find out what he felt, in spite of his cynical manner. He looked at home, sitting there before the uprooted mass detector and among the various emergency-wired hand controls. But he was a big unknown to me. How he looked was about the limit of what I knew about him.
I took a stab at opening communications. “Quail got upset by some of the things you said yesterday. I hope we can clear the misunderstanding.”
Willis grunted and nodded. “I could tell Mr. Gren didn’t know what I was talking about. But I didn’t figure you comprehended any more than he did.”
“I can’t say that I did. I just don’t want a bunch of bad feelings to keep the Monarch from doing its best. Too much is at stake.”
He just shrugged, and, inside, I sympathized with Quail’s dislike of the man. I could tell he couldn’t care less about what I was ready to fight and die for. We had been free men in the Belt far too long to take annexation with only a shrug. It didn’t sit right.
“Don’t you care?” I asked. I suddenly had a moment of doubt—Quail and I hadn’t explained to him what was up when we left Ceres City at full speed, and we hadn’t
really discussed it when he was up in the control room. “You are aware of what is going on, aren’t you?”
He shrugged again. “Mr. Ster, I really don’t know how to answer you. All I’ve heard is a bunch of nonsense. And I can’t get upset about nonsense.”
“What kind of nonsense?”
“A bunch of gibberish on the radio as we left Ceres—in violation of port ordinances, by the way. I hope you’ve got a good reason for that; I’ve got enough marks against my record at Ceres Port. Anyway, the radio was full of it. On the Voice, instead of news, I was getting a horrible mishmash of vile treachery, sacred rights, loyal miners, and of all things, the defense of our home spaces. There was a lot more of the stuff, all variations on the same rabble-rousing theme. A lot of nonsense?”
“You said that in the control room. What do you mean? Are you saying it’s nonsense that we want to defend our right to live our own lives? Do you think we don’t have the right to defend our rocks from being stolen put from beneath us?”
Willis visibly sagged, as if disappointed in the conversation. “I’ve given up trying to make people understand. You won’t understand—but yes, that is what I think. You don’t have any rights.”
I stopped listening right there and got to my feet. What kind of man, I thought, wouldn’t blink an eye at Terran goons forcing Toby and Emme down into their rat-hive cities in that high-gravity and fouled air? No right to resist! I clamped my jaws. I wasn’t about to lose my temper in front of him. I mumbled an excuse to leave and turned to go. Quail is right. Even I won’t be able to stomach working with him. We’ll have to replace him. And this is the worst possible time!
“Mr. Ster?” he asked calmly, stopping me. “Where are we going? You haven’t said.”
“Maybe it’s best if I don’t!” I snapped, hating myself for letting my feelings show. But I wanted to get out of that dark little room, fast. He turned my stomach. A man couldn’t ignore what the Terrans had planned for ten million innocent people. Only a machine.
There Will Be War Volume VII Page 7