by Ken MacLeod
“Even if we grant everything you say,” she said, “why did you and the scientists not take this to the Council?”
“It would never have passed. You would never have permitted it. So we did it without asking your permission.”
“That’s outright rebellion!”
“Is it? There’s been no ruling on it. It isn’t a contact. It’s surveillance, but a different project from the one that I had stopped.”
“It’s more than a contact. It’s an intervention!”
“An intervention, without contact, doesn’t break the letter of the law.”
“We’ll see about that!”
Constantine shrugged. “It’s a fait accompli. You would do better to consider ways to limit the damage.”
“We most certainly will,” said Synchronic. “Just as you did with the beetles.”
The ambiguity of the remark seemed to escape him.
“You can abort the transmitters, yes,” said Constantine. “You can’t burn out the new neural structures. And you can’t stop the nano infection spreading. We made sure of that.”
“How?”
“The assemblers don’t have self-destruct mechanisms. So the only way you can limit the damage is to intervene before the whole situation gets out of hand — a servile insurrection, a massacre of the slaves, or more likely, both.”
“I know what this is about!” Synchronic said. “It has nothing to do with concern for the brutes! It’s all about the interests of the crew. You want to bounce us into making contact, because then you can go ahead with your projects.”
“Believe that if you like, my lady,” said Constantine. He grinned. “Look on the bright side. When you make contact, you’ll at least be able to talk to them.”
Synchronic said nothing. She was scanning the Contract in ship memory for an arcane legal term that had just become relevant. Ah, there it was. The word was “arrest.”
The all-hands call brayed through Horrocks’s brain and woke him with a jolt that set him bouncing off the elastic mesh of the free-fall hammock. Genome woke in the same way, with the same result. She grabbed him on their second collision.
“What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.” The conditioned reflexes of emergency training overrode everything. “Suit up! Suit up!”
He thumbnailed the hammock open and they both dived to the opposite corners where their space suits were stashed. Into the loose garment feetfirst, close it, hood over head and faceplate sealed. It took five seconds and felt like longer. They had both been drilled in this since childhood; for their final crew qualification, in explosive decompression and the dark. But as the suit hardened around him, going from the look of loose cloth to the feel of metal and glass, Horrocks could see nothing wrong. The room and the lights were normal, no alarm sounded, and the suit monitors were nominal.
In the corner of his eye the crew circuit light flashed. He chinned the pickup.
“All available crew to the reserve tanks! If you think you’re not available, check the following list of exemptions…”
He didn’t need to look at the list scrolling down the corner of his eye to know he wasn’t on it.
“Everybody else — to the tanks!”
Virtual tags guided them as they kicked, drifted, straphanged and just plain got carried along to the nearest mass airlock. The lock could cycle a hundred through at a time. They had to wait three cycles, and still the press behind them piled up. Still nobody knew what was going on. Wild theories flashed around: a collision, a viral outbreak, an accident. All that was known for certain, because queries were flying back and forth the length of the ship, was that a similar scramble was going on in the rearward cone. Horrocks and Genome stayed together in the crush inside the airlock, and together in the surge out. For three months they had lived and worked together; the training-habitat business had boomed as more and more of the ship generation had chosen the confined but real opportunity the cones afforded. The fees earned had more than made up for the collapse of Horrocks’s small fortune in terrestrials shares.
Now, for the first time, Horrocks saw the cone’s interior hollow space with his own eyes. Its vast volume overwhelmed any sense of confinement. Above the swarming thousands of crew members emerging from the access locks, scores of rocks hundreds of metres across hung in what he could only see, looking up, as the sky. Bubble shack habitats beaded most of them. Structures and construction equipment bristled from every side: booms, manipulator rigs, mineheads, power plants, greenhouses. In the spaces between the rocks the habitats’ builders, the ship kids, on scooters or rocket packs or lines or tumbling free, milled about like gnats. Threaded through it all were numerous long and thick cables in a complex three-dimensional mesh like the web of some gigantic drunken spider, strung from wall and brace.
The impression of chaos didn’t last more than the first few seconds. The crew circuit lit up with a message of a kind that Horrocks had only seen in drills and sims: an Order of the Day. The top-level objective cleared up any confusion about what was going on, and left Horrocks for a moment slack-jawed: separation of the cones from the habitat in the shortest time consistent with component integrity. Target completion time: ten hours.
Successive levels of the Order spelled out what that meant. The top priority was to shift fusion plants to the axis. The next was to have these on line and standing by to replace the drive in powering the sunline after separation. Third was to have the cones’ auxiliary and attitude jets fuelled and ready to fire. The fourth was to have the cones’ anti-meteor defences on full alert. Fifth and finally, the habitats and other constructions in the tanks were to be evacuated. On completion of the tasks, or on command at any time, everyone was to return to the normal living and working quarters of the crew.
Beneath these general levels and breaking down the tasks into a rational division of labour, an organization chart proliferated like an inverted tree. Each person had a job to do, highlighted in the version of the chart that reached them. For Horrocks and Genome it was scooter and tug work, ferrying people and equipment.
As soon as he tabbed his acceptance, a message flared across Horrocks’s faceplate: Your performance of this task and others in fulfillment of the above Order of the Day are covered by the below cited emergency clauses in the Contract covering a breakdown in relations between Crew and other sections of the Complement. If you do not wish to take part for any reason, you are required to stand down at once. No sanctions will apply and arrangements for evacuation or resettlement will be made on request and implemented as soon as possible.
A scrolling screen of legal boilerplate followed. Horrocks didn’t even skim it. What mattered was the digital signature at the foot, authenticating the entire Order and signing off on it: Constantine the Oldest Man.
Horrocks looked across at Genome and chinned their private band. “You in?”
“I’m in if you are.”
“If Constantine asks it, that’s good enough for me,” said Horrocks.
“OK,” said Genome. “Let’s do it for the Man.”
Synchronic expected trouble as soon as the call to arrest Constantine went out. She expected grumbling from the crew, protests from citizens, and angry exchanges in the Council, already in an uproar over what Constantine’s brazen admission had revealed. She was right. Lost in the virtual spaces in which she followed these developments, she didn’t hear the distant thunder until a small girl ran in from the garden and shook her shoulder.
“Mummy mummy there’s a fire in the sky!”
Synchronic scooped the breathless, anxious child up in her arms and rushed outside. Looking up, all was normal: the sunline shone, white clouds drifted, the far side of the habitat lay in a dim shade pricked by faint clusters of light like a washed-out image of a night sky.
The infant squirmed around and pointed toward the central ring of the forward end of the cylinder. Synchronic almost dropped her.
Around the rim of the spinning axial plate, kilometres wide
, that joined the cylinder to the cone, lightning flared and flickered. Thunder rolled down like the sound of a waterfall. In the electric inconstant light from far above the remaining shards of the slag heap, all the way around the bottom of the cylinder’s endplate, flashed black and white like broken glass. On the more distant rearward plate a similar ring of fire encircled the far end of the sunline.
Apocalyptic and unexpected as the sight was, Synchronic recognised it. She would have seen such a spectacle at some point in the next few years. The gigantic electromagnetic baffles of the frictionless flange between the axial plate and the rest of the endplate within which it spun were being readied to lock down and friction-weld into place, searing the ship and turning off the field at the moment when the cones disengaged.
Synchronic made a supreme effort to retain her composure in front of the fast-growing crowd of her younger carechildren. Knowing that most of her older carechildren were now on the other side of that fiery barrier did nothing to help.
She put the little girl down on the ground and stroked her head and smiled around. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “What an amazing sight! And listen to that thunder!”
“What is it, Synch?” somebody shouted. The cry was taken up.
Synchronic waved her arms. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just some engineering work. The crew have to do it every so often. You’re all too young to have seen it before. Say, why don’t you all fetch your cameras and make some pictures of it?”
All but the smallest children, and one or two of the older, were satisfied with that. She told Magnetic Resonance and the other older ones a less than complete truth about what was going on, and set them to work distracting their younger caresibs. Then she went inside and sat down and tried to take stock before returning the insistent calls of her friends and allies.
This was mutiny, total and irrevocable. Worse, in a way, than the secret scheme of Constantine and his cabal of crew scientists. That at most had seemed — only hours earlier, in her furious confrontation with Constantine — a probably illegal and certainly unethical and underhanded circumvention of the established, albeit contested, will of the ship’s community. This was the literal breakup of the community itself.
The personal betrayal left her with a dark sense of abandonment. Constantine had not been her lover in a long, long time; but in their centuries of friendship she had felt she had come to know him to the bone. Cities had risen and fallen around them, fashions and philosophies had come and gone, fortunes had been made and lost, styles of art and customs of courtship and subtle techniques of intrigue had been refined and trashed like the buildings in which they’d flourished and faded. At the end of the great enclosed adventure of the one-generation ship, that had turned the emptying of the tank into the founding of a world, she stood here on what they’d made of the last dregs of the regolith and the mulch and realised she didn’t know him at all.
Above and beyond that, less personal but more disquieting and disorienting, was what the mutiny told her about people in general. Separating the cones could not be done without a sustained cooperative effort of the crew, and no doubt of the ship generation on the same side. In all her long life politicking had been polite: the fights fierce, the stakes small. You went along with decisions you’d been defeated on and expected others to go along with those you’d won, because there would always be another round of the game, another roll of the dice. Was this all an illusion? Did it all come down to personal influence in the end? If so many people were eager to troop along when a coal-black alpha, a respected senior, the Oldest Man, kicked over the table and walked away — then it seemed so.
If that much of her experience had fallen, far more still stood. She began taking and making calls. The Red Sun Circle and its allies would give Constantine the fight of his life.
Awlin Halegap had been surprised to find himself directed to his normal workspace by the Order of the Day. He’d always considered his work as vital as anyone’s, but he’d never have expected “speculator” to be a reserved occupation in an all-hands call. He regretted missing the fun: a day spent shoving and stopping large and dangerous masses sounded like sport.
He slid into his cubbyhole, invoked Java on his hot-drinks feed, and with a flexure of hands and fingers conjured the markets to the real screens around his head and to the virtual screens within. “A choppy day,” he said.
The great ship’s exchanges already looked segmented. With most crew and all the settlers in the cones mobilized to what amounted to manual labour, their trading had been left in the hands of agents, demons, and bots. It lacked panache. In these early minutes no one could be sure how the day would end, how much would be honoured and how much written off.
In the habitat cylinder, by contrast, immense disturbances stirred in the depths, visible on early trades like the upward bulge of a stretch of ocean that foretold a tsunami on a distant shore. Sharp fluctuations in raw materials prices agitated the surface. Established disreputable futures markets in bets on an early end to the colonization embargo supplied the windblown froth.
Moments ahead of most of his fellow traders, Awlin saw the arbitrage potential of the flatter markets of the cones. Even discounting for uncertainty, it was a sure thing that the gross misallocations imposed by the mobilization would open up gaps that it would be profitable to correct when the dust had settled. He spent a happy hour chasing them, and then was almost caught short by a wave of selling. Wrenching his perspective, he traced that wave to a sharp activity spike in the habitat, to whose markets the selling wave rebounded in seconds. The three parts of the ship were connected again, and not in a good way. The wealthiest cartels of the founder generation were driving down cone futures, leaving only the most risk-prone speculators to shark up the slack. Within minutes they too began to buckle.
In the screen segment devoted to physical activity in the cone reserve tanks, snarl-ups and stoppages reddened the nodes of the decision tree.
“They’re cutting the kids off without a penny,” Awlin muttered. At the sight of their economic futures subliming like carbon-dioxide ice before their eyes, some of the settlers were getting cold feet and shaky hands. He didn’t blame them. Having your head ring with frantic calls from your finance bots while you scrambled to shift fusion plants and salvage machinery from the possibly doomed habitats — Awlin was sure the settlers had no illusions as to the likely fate of the contents of the reserve tanks, once separation was accomplished — couldn’t be anything but crushing. Although the settlers were on the crew circuit and working off the same chart, they didn’t have the crew ethos and morale. But without their continuing involvement the whole thing would bottleneck.
Awlin flashed a comment around the traders’ loop: “This is downright economic warfare.”
Enough agreement came back for him to float a company and coordinate a counterattack. The markets rallied, but not enough. Awlin contemplated an array of downward slopes and a continued flare of red lights on the project board and decided matters were out of his hands. He liquidated the company and kicked the problem up to a finance jury.
The deliberations didn’t take long, and the response crackled with an impatience he suspected was Constantine’s: What are you waiting for? This is separation! So separate already!
Awlin sucked in a deep breath. This was the nuclear option. He hesitated for a moment, then sent out the proposal that would sever financial ties between the cylinder and the cones: currency reform.
The forward cone went through three distinct commodity bases for an autonomous currency in as many seconds, and settled on a basket of carbon, nickel-iron, and helium-3. At once all values of goods and services in the cone were reckoned on the assumption of access to the system’s resources and independence from — and the irrelevance of — habitat capital. The stimulus was in part illusory; it was almost certainly inflationary; but Awlin and his collaborators had bet that it would be enough to carry along the human and virtual agents. He waited for the
markets to turn.
They did. The habitat economy went into a sharp downturn while that of the cones shot upward, at least as far as expectations were concerned. For the moment rich and hopeful again, the ship kids began to make good. The red, blocked nodes on the physical chart flipped to green. The cone was as yet a long way from separation, but already its markets had rocketed away from the ship.
Synchronic watched the cones’ break to financial autarky with her knuckles pressed to her mouth. She and the Red Sun cartels had tried to steal the ship generation away from Constantine. Now the crew cartels had stolen them back. She wasn’t worried about the integrity of the habitat. The crew’s work to ensure it was obvious. It was its future as a trading and cultural centre for the new system that had just taken a severe blow. Relations with the settlers, and with whatever market was eventually established with the aliens, could be chaotic for years — perhaps decades. By the time the data colonies and fast probes arrived, the habitat could have lost all the advantages of its prime location and become a backwater, vulnerable to hostile bids and outright attack. She was not complacent about the aliens’ prospects. They seemed a fierce, fast-learning species, and the knowledge that space travel and molecular technologies were possible might have them swarming out of their gravity well long before the ill-equipped, ill-prepared colonisation that the crew evidently contemplated was complete. The premature separation had left whole cohorts of the ship generation stranded in the habitat, and having seen how badly their elder brothers and sisters had behaved in a less fraught situation, Synchronic didn’t look forward to their likely reaction.
She summed her proposal for the Circle: Capitulate and negotiate. Offer reforged links, limited colonization, and accelerated contact.
Her voice was one of many from various cartels that called for a similar policy. The Council, still shaken by the news of the crews’ clandestine intervention and further rocked by the impending separation, considered it seriously. The main alternative proposal shocked her: To allow crew mutiny and unauthorised colonisation a free run sets a very bad precedent. Cripple and recapture.