The Pilots of Borealis

by David Nabhan

  Peerless was already decelerating and had been doing so for a while now, having long since passed the half-way point between Terra and Valerian-3. Slight adjustments now would guide the ship’s elliptical path around the Sun into a cotangential orbit with the asteroid. Rittener buckled himself into the captain’s swivel on the bridge, gauging the angles closing between the two orbits. A glance at the Near Bow Console—showing everything in front of the ship out to 1,000 kilometers—indicated almost nothing. The Intermediate Console was starting to show some debris. The Far Console though, which scanned out from 50,000 to 500,000 kilometers, made it clear that the ship was definitely advancing into the environs of the Belt.

  Rittener sat mostly silently watching space hurtle past on the screens for close to half an hour, only querying the ship’s amanuensis to decide how much velocity to squander, and how subtle maneuvers would affect the direction from which Peerless should make her final approaches to Valerian-3.

  “Lieutenant Andrews, make your speed . . .” Rittener never finished giving the order.

  A HORRIFYING ALARM SOUNDED in every quarter of the ship. It was accompanied with the simultaneous locking of every hatch on board. No crewman had ever heard this alarm before; few crews ever heard it twice. Rittener reacted instantly, screaming a pre-programmed protocol at the ship’s amanuensis, “Evasive critical!”

  Peerless’ amanuensis hadn’t waited for the captain’s voice command. It had already judged the situation hyper-critical; Rittener had only called out the words in a moment of understandable human nervousness. A nanosecond later the ship’s fusion reactor exploded into action. The autopilot used that power to throw the ship into an unbearable, hairpin, corkscrew course that slammed any crewman standing to the deck. They had a brief second or two to frantically attempt to connect their safety belts to something before everyone on board passed out. The best g-suits in existence were automatically deployed on each crewman or else death would most certainly have quickly ensued. As it was, though, even under the best circumstances, the crew wouldn’t escape unscathed. Those crewmen unsecured, pinned unconscious to the deck by crushing g forces, now a half second later were squeezed against the starboard hull, subsequently slapped flattened against the deck above, then dragged along that surface toward the port hull by forces that shifted too quickly and too powerfully for human endurance. The Peerless though was less concerned for her human passengers; she was saving herself.

  THERE WERE STILL WAYS to bring down a man of war. The never-ending pas de deux between offense and defense bizarrely left only the more primitive stratagems—methods used more or less by slingers in the first armies ever fielded in the Fertile Crescent in the third millennium BC, or the cold-blooded, cock-sure fighter pilots of the 20th century’s World Wars. Every warship was clad in a thin outer sheet of molyserilium. It was tough, durable, and reflected laser beams better than mirrors on communications and navigation satellites. Turning a laser on Peerless would be an incomprehensible waste of power.

  Particle bursts would be just as fruitless. All ships, warships or otherwise, flew with a tightly woven magnetic shield around the hull—proof against solar storms. Military class shields were certainly capable of handling focused bursts exponentially more powerful. One could still punch Peerless though, physically. Nothing prevented that. One way would be to send a scattering, buckshot blast of high-velocity projectiles into her path. Another would be to detonate a tactical nuke in her vicinity. The defenders of Valerian-3 had opted for both. They’d weaponized a commercial ore cargo cannon on one of the nearby asteroids Peerless was passing on her starboard side. It was designed to hurl shipments of metal to the Earth system, and now had been adapted to fire thousands of chunks of titanium, just like a planetesimal-sized shotgun would.

  Peerless’ amanuensis could have targeted some of the largest projectiles and blasted them with her particle beam and laser. All that would have accomplished would be to turn the deadly swarm of thousands of killer projectiles into hundreds of thousands of molten globs that would have burned through her hull anyway when they struck. Instead the amanuensis obeyed Rittener’s prescribed orders and directed the autopilot to take the random corkscrew path programmed—even though it calculated that this trajectory assured moderate damage. A stream of football-sized projectiles tore into the port side shuttle pod bay, thankfully at a very oblique angle. A few seconds later, stressed beyond tolerances, a section of the hull simply gave way and was flung by the centrifugal force into space. Everything in the shuttle bay bled into the vacuum; that included all the oxygen and nitrogen, the broken and loose implements within, and the bodies of Seaman Berti Werth and Chief Warrant Officer Kendrick.

  Two seconds later the tactical nuke went off. It was nestled deep within another seemingly nondescript piece of space debris on Peerless’ port side, a chunk riddled with uranium to disguise the bomb’s presence. Peerless should have been making toward this trap should she have taken the most appropriate evasive action. Fortunately, her random zigzag flight was taking her away from the epicenter of the blast when it exploded. The ship was protected by her radiation shield from the blistering electromagnetic fury of the blast, but a bit closer and her molyserilium coat at least would have been melted. By sheer luck she careened past the ambush in one piece—but wounded, trailing gas and jetsam from the gash in her hull.

  A FEW HOURS LATER, this angry, bloodied bird of prey wheeled into cotangential orbit around the Sun, a safe distance behind Valerian-3. Her port side shuttle bay had been jettisoned. Like all warships, Peerless was compartmentalized, and a fresh exterior hull now presented itself where the shuttle bay had been, a second, previously interior, gleaming molyserilium laser barrier taking the place of the one blown into space. She was built to take blows like she’d received without diminishing in the least her power to continue on. The only sign of what she’d been through was the fact that she flew now with only one asymmetric shuttle bay, the one on her starboard side. The enemy had no idea what the human damage had been, but there were serious casualties. Aside from Kendrick and Werth, another crewman had been killed and two others, including the ship’s physician, seriously injured in the evasive action.

  The image on Peerless’ communication board was more or less expected. Even so, the bald, grizzled aspect of the man, with an absurdly wild and unkempt red beard, dressed in 15th century Scottish attire, and wearing the most bellicose expression, was enough to cause Yeshenko to mutter under his breath.

  “Oh, man, what a sight!”

  With only seven crewmen fit for active duty left, all able hands were strapped in on the bridge in the interior of the ship. Yeshenko was understandably furious at the death of his friend, and spoke loud enough for everyone—including the Valerian—to hear. Rittener flashed him a look that said that Yeshenko’s failure still to govern his tongue might cost him more than the three days of Hell he’d recently endured. When Rittener turned back to face the screen his expression was quite different. He addressed the man in purely diplomatic tones, without mentioning a word about the attack and his losses.

  “This is Clinton Rittener speaking, commander of the man of war, Peerless.”

  The ship’s amanuensis had facially recognized the Valerian on the screen. It wasn’t the outpost’s chief, William Byrne, it was another clansman, one Patrick McTaggart. His bio and vitals were being scrolled next to his image.

  “Mr. McTaggart, whatever business the chief is attending to, I can assure you, this matter takes precedence. Where is William Byrne?” Rittener demanded to know.

  “He’s dead,” McTaggart answered in a thick brogue. “You’ll be parleying with me,” he said bluntly.

  Rittener responded bluntly too. “I didn’t come halfway across the Solar System for a parley, McTaggart.” Rittener cared very little about the obviously recent demise of the previous chief. If Byrne was dead, so were three of his own crew.

  “I hold a valid privateering marque from the Terran Archonate, and am here to enforce the
terms of the Pallas Commercial Agreement. The boycott in which Valerian-3 is taking part has been declared illegal, and due to the strategic nature of the goods embargoed, a casus belli. Regular shipments are to resume—immediately.” He paused for emphasis. “Be advised, Peerless will use whatever force is required to effect those orders.”

  The Valerians were a strange bunch, yet every mining outpost had its particularly peculiar culture. Living on the fringes of civilization, settlements had always attracted the defeated, the footloose, the non-conformists of society. This wasn’t Terra or Borealis or even Mars. This was the frontier, the next place where humanity was remaking itself, in serene and morose darkness, far from the heat and light of the Sun. The intrepid traveler could come upon anything in the Asteroid Belt—from purely female Amazonian settlements, to outposts run by every and any of the bizarre cults in existence, governed as democracies, fiefdoms, theocracies, and anything else. Valerian-3 had been founded by Scottish refugees. They had gone back to the old ways, or rather, the “auld” ways, which led to the rather condescending nickname “auldie,” though they themselves preferred “clansman.”

  Valerian’s auldies had carved a home for themselves—literally. The founders had bored into the core of the asteroid and set it spinning on a proper axis for artificial gravity. Year by year, as the population grew and mined, so did the void inside Valerian, the “floor” inching ever closer to the exterior of the asteroid. Someday, and rather soon actually, the miners’ industriousness would seal the fate of their home. It was being taken apart, piece by piece, and shipped to all ports-of-calls in the Solar System.

  Three thousand miners hunkered within the hole they’d made in the heart of Valerian, protected from the pitiless, sunless vacuum outside by the titanium exterior shells they’d yet to have bitten into, and carefully blowing on the embers of life they’d managed to keep burning within through fusion reactors fed by helium-3. Captured icebergs and frozen volatiles which glided past from time to time provided the clansmen with the rest of their needs. Valerian was impressive as a living museum of what humans could accomplish, even at these astounding distances from Sol. Every erg of energy though had gone toward establishing a bare, hard-scrabble existence. Valerian’s only shield was the thinned walls of the asteroid itself, a barrier hardly sufficient to defy Peerless’ weaponry.

  McTaggart ignored the ultimatum. “If ye have come that far, a thought or two along the way must have been given to the fact that more than half the population here is women and bairns. Do you intend to open fire like a villainous demon, or are we to exchange a few words first?”

  Rittener let out a half-exasperated sigh. “Say your piece, McTaggart.”

  The clansman explained Valerian’s plight succinctly, even though at times difficult to follow owing to his use of terms from Earth’s Middle Ages. Terra was putting Valerian between “the devil himself and the deep blue sea.” She could barely afford the requisite helium-3 to keep the place running, much less churn out titanium for export. Cutting the price for Valerian’s exports in half spelled the end—plain and simple.

  “How would piling on such burdens to crush Valerian serve Terra’s interests? Would the Archonate cut off its own nose to spite its face?”

  Rittener listened politely. It all was true, and yet irrelevant.

  “I’m not a plenipotentiary. I have no power whatsoever to conclude new treaties nor amend old ones, so I’m afraid that path is closed. Your future problems will have to take care of themselves. Right now I need to see shipments to Terra resumed—immediately.” Then Rittener added in a graver tone, “And, just as importantly, I’m sure the Archonate is going to require some assurance that your embargo won’t take up again as we move out of your orbit. You’re going to have to satisfy me of that, McTaggart.”

  The Scotsman stared blankly from the screen, then in a bitter tone answered.

  “We do nae want conflict with Terra nor anyone else. We simply wish to be left alone. It’s peace we want, not war, nor anything else.”

  If Valerian-3 had wanted peace, Rittener thought, it should have prepared for war. That’s what he told McTaggart and repeated it in the Latin it came in: “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” This belated, pedantic advice got the highlander’s blood up.

  “Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant,” the Scotsman retorted quite unexpectedly, saying the words as one would utter a curse. His lingo obviously went a bit further back than the 15th century. “That’s what my ancestors told the Romans when they came bearing the same fiats you’ve just issued. You’d make an empty desert of Valerian, and then call it peace. Your peace is slavery to Terra, a peace found in graveyards, nothing more. That sort of peace can’t last, and never has.”

  Clinton Rittener only responded with a clear warning. “You have six hours.”

  McTaggart had an undisguised mixture of hatred, dejection, defeat, and—most importantly—stoic acceptance on his face. Rittener could see it clearly. Valerian-3 had no choice; it had never had any real option other than submission.

  “You’ll have my answer shortly,” McTaggart said nonetheless, as if any council on Valerian could change the obvious facts.

  “Six hours,” Rittener repeated grimly.

  BY THE EVENING WATCH’S third bell a shipment from Valerian-3 had been fired into space. It scanned good, almost pure titanium, and on a trajectory to intersect Earth and the Terran Ring. A weight lifted from Rittener’s shoulders and he now saw to a number of things that the prior emergency precluded. Near the top of the list was Seaman 3rd Class Ibrahim Hadad’s body. Muslim tradition required burial within twenty-four hours. With the crew thinned by casualties, and in such close proximity to a hostile target, no other crewmen could be spared for the ceremony. Rittener saw to it himself, enshrouding the body, saying the Arabic janazah for no one but Hadad, and crisply saluting in front of nobody, as he jettisoned the seaman into space. He’d almost memorized the prayer, having recited it for so many fallen cohorts from Jakarta to the Gulf of Aqaba. It might have been a most trifling funeral, but it was all the more dignified, for Rittener upheld to the letter everything to which his dead comrade in arms was entitled, with not a soul to witness the event one way or the other.

  A few hours later a second cargo capsule was jettisoned to Terra. A simple, terse message was simultaneously beamed to the Peerless from Valerian-3. It was just a few seconds of audio. “Valerian-3 will abide fully with all the provisions of the Pallas Commercial Agreement. Our embargo against the Terran Ring is lifted, and will not be renewed. Valerian-3 deeply regrets any prior hostilities, and will take no further part, with any other party, in any conflict against the Terran Ring.” This was heartening, really the best to be hoped for. Rittener was on empty and needed sleep. He would have liked nothing more than to drag himself to his quarters and buckle himself into his bunk. As it was he gave orders to open fire immediately on anything that moved that wasn’t titanium fired toward Earth and then simply donned the sleep casquette. He was out like a light, and after sleeping for a couple of blissful hours, was awakened. Ensign Gutierrez was shaking him.

  “I’m really sorry, sir,” she said. “But there’s a level one missive from Terra for you. You’ll have to take it in your quarters.” Peerless’ amanuensis couldn’t deliver these encrypted messages anywhere else but in the captain’s private station.

  “You’ve been asleep two hours and ten minutes,” she told him. “There’s nothing to report except the transmission.”

  Rittener threw off the grogginess as quickly as he could, rubbing his real eye and doing the math in his head. There was a light lag of half an hour between the Ring and here. So Terra hadn’t ruminated very long on the latest information streaming automatically back to her, that of the surrender of Valerian-3. As he closed the hatch which sealed him in his quarters and asked the amanuensis for his orders, he was still pondering what the swiftness meant.

  “This is ‘word of mouth,’” the amanuensis, who ironically had no mouth, caution
ed him. That was the Terran Ring’s highest secrecy protocol. The record was being scrubbed and erased even as they spoke. The amanuensis went through the standard warning routine, with Rittener responding a brusque “acknowledged” at each of the requisite junctures. Then it gave Rittener his orders.

  “Peerless is to aerate Valerian-3. Care is to be taken, though, to leave the outpost intact. Destruction to the infrastructure is to be avoided as best as possible. Valerian-3 though should be rendered inhabitable. Hostile intentions on the part of Valerian-3 still present a clear and present danger to the interests of the Terran Ring, and her population is declared traitors and mutineers.”

  The unfeeling, inhuman, electronic messenger attempted nonetheless to assuage these bitterest of orders with a supposed empathy it couldn’t begin to fathom. “The Archonate sincerely regrets such stern actions, but owing to circumstances of which Peerless is unaware, and in keeping the ship’s safety and the completion of her mission as the two utmost important factors, such severe directives as those ordered are most definitely required.”

  Clinton Rittener didn’t flinch or blink an eye, real or biosynthetic. “Acknowledged,” he said, and not another word. When the amanuensis asked if he’d like the orders repeated he declined.

  “Negative.” He paused for the briefest of moments and then gave the amanuensis a terse order. “Have Seaman Yeshenko report to my quarters immediately.”

  WAITING FOR YESHENKO TO arrive, Rittener’s thoughts turned over a great number of weighty matters, things he’d been thinking about for some time now. He set his jaw and grit his teeth, chewing the fact that three thousand Valerians had no say whatsoever in whether they were to take their next breath or not. This was not the first time he’d be required to send whole populations to their deaths. As daunting and terrible as the task in front of him was, he made up his mind very quickly in the end. It turned out to be much easier than he had ever imagined.