Torchship Pilot

by Karl K Gallagher

  “No, he didn’t know cattle at all. He knew grass. Worked a golf course on Sukhoi. When he hired on to Great-Grand this land was all first-stage invasive plants and a few rows of saplings. Now it’s the best grazing land between the icecaps. Montana has a side business selling grass seed to steaders breaking new ground.”

  “I see.”

  Guo moved on to a battered paper map framed under glass. The bottom edge was rough, torn at a fold. “Oh, this is where the names come from.”

  “Yes, it’s the only thing we have from Old Earth. Great-grandpa brought it with him during the Betrayal. They’d look at it during winter nights and talk about the names.”

  “Are all the kids named off the map?”

  “They were for a while. Then Montana tried to name his daughter Saskatchewan and Jerri put her foot down. That was the end of it. I think York would be a good name for a boy though.”

  Guo turned to her. Mitchie had never mentioned naming children before. “Then our first boy is York.”

  Her face assumed its rare bashful expression. “Okay.” She turned toward the far end. “There’s a book with pictures printed out before the great data purge. Let me find it.”

  He turned back to the map. The land of “Michigan” was in two disconnected parts. That fits.

  Partial Map of Star Gate System

  Chapter Nine: Wilderness

  Staying at the Long Ranch was a perfect honeymoon. Akiak houses had thick walls to deal with the harsh winter cold. Soundproofing was a side benefit.

  Alverstoke interrupted their idyll with a call. “Your favorite immigrant has found something. Can you come to Muir City tomorrow?”

  They flew down to meet at the Security Department building. Mitchie and Guo found the secure room occupied by Pete, Alverstoke, and two suits who weren’t introduced.

  “Is Chief Kwan’s presence necessary?” asked the female suit.

  “Yes,” answered Mitchie. “He owns the largest share of the archive.” Guo twitched but didn’t correct her.

  “It’s the archive I want to talk about,” said Pete.

  The male suit said, “The Demeter infoweapon is the top priority.”

  “Yes, we’re working on it,” said Pete. “We’ve measured larger portions of its capability envelope.”

  “Finding more things that don’t work on it gets us no closer to an operational weapon.”

  “If you don’t want to hear what I have to talk about I can leave.”

  “I want to hear it, Pete,” said Mitchie.

  Alverstoke nodded.

  Pete launched into his presentation. He opened with a defensive explanation that fabricating new test equipment for the infoweapon left his team with a lot of downtime. Then he described how they’d broken the encryption. Guo asked a couple of clarifying questions. They were as incomprehensible to Mitchie as the original explanations.

  “Once the decoy noise was removed we found a mix of Eden government records and Frankovitch family information. Which are, to be fair, tightly overlapping sets.”

  Mitchie felt blood surge back into her brain as Pete changed topics. The suits were perking up too.

  “What interested us most were reports from the first wave of refugee ships from Earth as the Betrayal broke out. I believe we have found—” he paused with dramatic intent “—proof of the Vetoer Hypothesis!”

  The capital letters were clear in his tone. Mitchie looked around the table. Everyone else looked as baffled as she felt. “The what?” she asked.

  Pete’s face fell. “Are you familiar with the personal AI vetoes?”

  Everyone else shook their heads.

  “Ah.” He thought a moment. “Okay. Before the Golden Age, when AIs were just getting deployed, there was a lot of public fear of them.”

  “Not enough,” muttered a suit.

  “Laws were passed to reduce the risks. Hardware kill switches, verbal shutdown commands, authorization timers, and the personal veto. Anyone could say ‘no AI can touch me’ and they’d establish a keep out zone. Whole cities prohibited any physical impact from AIs.

  “As the Golden Age went on vetoers changed their minds or died off. Eventually there was only one left, Jordan Hammerstein. When he died every AI order blocked by the vetoer code executed at once. That’s what we call the Betrayal.”

  Guo said, “Wait—you’re claiming it wasn’t initiated by the AIs?”

  “No. They were simply carrying out orders they were given.”

  The male suit scoffed. “That’s ludicrous. There’s documented cases of Betrayers killing hundreds of people at a stroke.”

  Pete glared at him. “Humans have killed each other with every tool ever invented. AIs are just another one. The archive had records of Earth’s Code Police. There were millions of them working to keep griefers from circumventing the AI safeguards.”

  “Griefers?” asked Alverstoke.

  “Someone wanting to hurt other people as an end in itself, or to increase their perceived social status. Typically bottom-status males. A successful attack would make them feel higher status than their victims.”

  “How could all AIs be blocked by one guy?” asked the other suit.

  “Vetoer code was mandated by law. And global treaties. It was in all the AI core variants. Just modifying it was ground for the Code Police to shut everything down and put programmers in jail. Any command that had a planet-wide impact, or North America-wide, was cancelled or queued for later execution. So the code police spent their time chasing local-impact plots.”

  Pete pulled up an animation on the room’s screen. A map of Earth shone green with healthy network status. “Once Hammerstein died all those queued commands were executed.” Patches of yellow appeared, spread. Their centers turned red. Other areas went black with defensive shutdowns. A few green outposts remained when Pete froze the animation. The rest of the land masses were red on black. “That took less than an hour.”

  “Why were griefers trying to shut down the whole planet?” asked Guo.

  “It may not have been them,” answered Pete. “If a thousand well-intentioned people set global programs running at the same time they’ll overload the system with processing demands. That would have crashed the network without any griefers. But while the code police tried to fight the crash griefers ran wild.”

  “This is a fascinating feat of historiography,” said the female suit. “But I don’t see how it relates to our current issues.”

  “It’s obvious,” retorted Guo. “This completely refutes the Fusion’s rationale for attacking us!”

  “I doubt the Council of Stakeholders would listen,” said Alverstoke. “Even if they did the horrific example of Demeter would outweigh any argument attributing the Betrayal to human error.”

  “I can’t see one of those griefers ordering his enemies pureed,” said the male suit.

  Guo asked, “Why not? Humans have done worse to each other many times in history.”

  “Nothing about this will make the Fusion less afraid of leaving us out of their control. They’ll just label the entire Disconnect as griefers.”

  “More likely they’d ignore it,” said his counterpart. “There’s no way we can confirm this ‘Vetoer Hypothesis.’ It’s not like we can ask an AI.”

  “Yes, we can,” said Mitchie. “The Terraforming Service has friendly AIs.”

  The thought of voluntarily approaching the TFS shocked everyone except Guo. Mitchie described the job they’d been hired to do for the TFS, leaving out how it went to hell once they ran into poachers.

  Alverstoke checked his datasheet. “The last sighting of a terraforming ship in the Disconnect was over a year ago. They’re all in deep space. We have no way to find them.”

  “Sounds like a job for an analog ship,” said Mitchie. “We’d need supplies and orders from the Space Guard.”

  The female suit said, “Finding out the terraformers’ opinion of Fusion aggression could be useful. They’d be next after us.”

  Guo leane
d over to Pete. “Up for a trip with us?”

  “He can’t be spared,” said Alverstoke. “We need him focused on research.”

  ***

  They had two more weeks of honeymoon while the politicians argued. The Ecology Department forced through approval of the expedition. Their price was a long list of technical questions for the terraformers.

  Freeing Joshua Chamberlain from the shipyard was trivial. The surveyors found the repairs after the Kronos Incident had amounted to a full refit. The superintendent was delighted to have his docking slip back, and even more delighted to have a ship captain asking less of him instead of more.

  Retrieving their crew took work. The shipyard staff were hideously overworked. Mitchie short-circuited a shouting match between Guo and a senior chief coxswain’s mate by grabbing Mthembu’s arm and pulling him out of a tug’s cockpit. The rest were easier.

  Once the supplies were on board Mitchie ordered them to the outbound gate.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t get your three-month leave, ma’am,” said Hiroshi.

  “Thanks. But we did have a good break. Hopefully we’ll get you a nice leave sometime,” she said.

  Mthembu laughed. “After the shipyard this feels like leave.”

  “Especially with this.” Hiroshi patted the navigation box. It had the sensors and processors to find their position, velocity, and course.

  “Don’t get used to that toy. I’m expecting you two to maintain analog proficiency.”

  “Yes’m,” they chorused.

  ***

  The nav-box identified the system with a five digit catalogue number. Mitchie declared it “System Three.” They’d spotted three outbound gates. The marker buoys had different color schemes. The most obvious had blinking red lights.

  “Shall I steer for that one, ma’am?” asked Hiroshi.

  “Looks like it wants attention. Do it,” she answered.

  A day later they were in the groove for the gate. Mthembu took the comm console seat to watch the jump. Mitchie took sextant sights of the flashing red buoys to confirm they were aimed at the center of the gate. Then she sat and relaxed. Her eyes focused on the center of the starfield, trying to spot the moment when the new sun appeared. Hiroshi counted down the jump over the PA.

  Solid white light seared her eyes. Closing them did nothing. Her forearm blocked most of it, but enough light leaked around the top and bottom to hurt. Hiroshi and Mthembu were yelling.

  “I have the con!” yelled Mitchie.

  “You have the con,” answered Hiroshi.

  The human ear was useless for measuring turns in freefall. But Mitchie had been flying this battered ship long enough to have a feel for how she’d respond. Putting her hands on the controls hurt, the glare dazzled her eyes through the lids. She fired the thrusters to yaw the ship.

  Measuring the turn had to be from timing, she couldn’t see anything. But the harsh light moved away to the right. When it was gone she waited a few seconds then fired the opposite thrusters.

  Mitchie opened her eyes. Dark purple blotches swarmed everywhere. She saw nothing. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Can’t see,” said Mthembu.

  “Don’t know,” answered Hiroshi.

  She picked up her mike. The intercom button for the converter room was something else she could do by feel.

  “Chief here,” answered Guo.

  “Is it getting warm down there?”

  “No. Why? Are we going to start boosting?”

  “Yes, soon. We need to get out of here. Watch the temps. Out.” Mitchie blinked a few more times. She could recognize her console now. No stars yet. She’d need her night vision back before they could search for the gate out.

  Mthembu recovered first. Eyeballing the stars didn’t find a gate. He took the telescope and started a methodical search.

  Her eyes still couldn’t make out stars. Mitchie activated the ship’s cameras and rotated through them. They were saturated by the star’s output. The side cameras had enough resolution to differentiate between the white star and light grey spillover. She used that to get them pointed directly away from the star.

  Guo reported measurable heating. “But it’s nothing compared to running the torch.”

  Hiroshi retrieved a pair of binoculars to supplement Mthembu’s work with the telescope. They’d covered nearly half the sky visible from the bridge before finding a candidate.

  “That’s it, it has to be,” said the decurion.

  “It’s not a circle,” replied his junior. “Just a couple of independent buoys.”

  Mitchie borrowed the telescope to settle it. “Yes, that’s the gate. The beacons probably burned out under the radiation. Let’s get a course for it.”

  Two days later they were close enough to see the dead buoys by their reflected sunlight. The extra reference points let them tighten up their course before passing through the gate.

  When System Three’s sun appeared before them as a dim and peaceful dot, Mitchie said, “We know what blinking red means now. Let’s take another gate and see where it leads.”

  The next three months were the most boring of Mitchie’s life. They learned that blue beacons meant a system with only one gate in it.

  The nav-box alerted them when they’d circled around to a system they’d already visited. The hand-written jumpgate map on the bridge gained a new link every week or two. The rarity of terraformable worlds was heartbreaking when Mitchie dwelled on it.

  The lonely cruise did have its compensations. Mitchie and Guo cuddled in their free-fall hammock as Joshua Chamberlain coasted through another empty system.

  “Life is good,” she murmured into his neck.

  “And here I’d been worried about you going stir crazy.”

  “Me, no. The rest of the crew might if they had nothing better to do than play dodgeball in the hold. But it looks like Setta and Hiroshi are making nice again.”

  “They are? But she and Waja . . . huh.” Guo looked thoughtful.

  Mitchie said, “I don’t know. I don’t need to know. That’s official.” She thought a moment. “Has Mthembu displayed any interest?”

  “No danger there. He’s a Pure Water Baptist.”

  “Oh, Christ have mercy. No, he can’t be. He’s never said anything about it.”

  “He used to. Seems he needed some quality time with the chaplain to escape a Mast for harassing his bunkmates.”

  “Ha! Well, good. I’d hate to ruin the tradition of all our crew escaping some dire punishment.”

  “Be fair. Waja’s record is clean.”

  “How do you know? His record was wiped out with his planet.”

  Before Guo could defend his assistant Hiroshi’s voice came over the PA. “Captain to the bridge.”

  Mitchie squirmed out of the hammock. Pushing off against Guo’s thigh sent her to the intercom panel. “Captain here.”

  “Ma’am, I just spotted a torchship moving across the system. It’s decelerating toward the purple-green gate.”

  A surge of adrenaline made her mouth dry. “Right. Plot a pursuit course. Thirty gravs. Warn everyone to brace for high acceleration in ten minutes. I’ll be right up.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Guo found her flight suit and tossed it to her. “Honeymoon over?” he asked.

  “Yep. Time for some real work.”

  Joshua Chamberlain’s vector pointed away from the stranger’s destination. Even at three times normal boost they reached the gate four days after it had left the system.

  To Mitchie’s relief the stranger was still boosting when they came through. Spotting a torch plume was easy. Finding a ship without one took sensors they didn’t have.

  The stranger boosted continually across the system, not even turning her torch off for the flip. Mitchie stuck with coasting through the middle of the trip. She could save a tenth of the fuel while only adding less than a percent to the trip time.

  Must be nice to not need to save fuel for the trip home, she thought. The othe
r ship only boosted at ten gravs. Using triple their acceleration let them cut the stranger’s lead to only one day at the next gate.

  Spotting their target didn’t take long. Mitchie stayed on the bridge. The pilot couch was more comfortable than her bed under high acceleration.

  The comm console was tuned to the standard emergency channel. After months with nothing but the occasional bit of static they’d tuned it out. And turned it down. The first message was unintelligible over the background noise of the ship’s torch.

  “Cut accel to five gravs,” ordered Mitchie.

  Hiroshi obeyed, sighing in relief as the pressure came off his chest.

  She stepped to the comm console and turned up the volume.

  “Unknown vessel, identify yourself,” came from the speaker.

  Mitchie picked up the mike. “This is the analog ship Joshua Chamberlain, out of Akiak. We’re looking for the Terraforming Service.”

  An hour later the reply came. “This is Terraformer Gaia’s Heart. You may come aboard.”

  Yukio’s ship, thought Mitchie. That’s a lucky break.

  They followed the other ship to a large comet. At first it looked like a colony had been built into the iceball. Then Mitchie recognized some of the modules from pictures of terraforming ships. Apparently Gaia’s Heart had disassembled itself to form a cup against the comet. Now it was thrusting at full power to change the object’s orbit.

  Hiroshi measured the change in their destination’s vector as they approached. “Looks like they’re putting eight gravs on the thing. Remind me not to piss these people off.”

  At ten thousand klicks out Joshua Chamberlain was ordered to cut thrust and wait for a tug. The bridge relaxed and watched the terraforming ship.

  “Soak it in, boys,” said Mitchie. “The last surviving Wonder of the Golden Age.” No two modules were alike. Even the torches flinging superheated comet ice into the stars were individuals. Yet it was obvious which modules would mate with which when the giant ship reassembled itself.

  Three windowless tugs appeared, braking gently to meet with Joshua Chamberlain. Hiroshi made an acceleration and maneuver warning on the PA. The bridge crew strapped themselves in. Muffled thumps sounded from below.