To Crush the Moon

by Wil McCarthy

  But the worst of the damage looked slightly less ancient: a round, meterwide hole punched through the portside hull of the ship, just in front of the engines, and out again through the capside in a shotgun-patterned oval large enough to admit an elephant. Interestingly, there were some intact pipes and ducts visible through the hole, running right through the path of destruction. These were shiny in the middle, and looked duller toward the hole's edges, as if they'd been grafted in place after the accident. Structural damage to the hull itself was minimal; the hole edges looked almost cauterized, suggesting the projectile had been very small and moving very fast—a sand grain flying through at 1% of lightspeed. The actual damage had been done by heat, and by plasmified hull material entrained in the particle's wake.

  The fact that the ship was tumbling end-over-end at 2.06 revolutions per second also supported this theory. Getting that much mass moving that quickly required a substantial momentum transfer.

  “Visual contact,” said Bruno de Towaji into the microphones of his space suit helmet. “Running lights and station-keeping thrusters are inactive, but there are signs of . . . well, perhaps not life, but activity at any rate. Something on that ship survived the accident, at least briefly. The severed plumbing between the reactors and deutrelium tanks has been repaired.”

  Here in the hundred and thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol, Bruno himself was aboard the grappleship Boat Gods, which had its own ertial shield and its own deutrelium reactor, plus gravitic grapples whose use would be illegal for 99.9999% of humanity. With these, Bruno could grab on to anything—moons, planets, the sun itself—to pull Boat Gods around the solar system. The grappleship was tiny as such things went, but its interior was nicely appointed, and filled of course with breathable atmosphere. Bruno's space suit—actually a set of full battle armor, with high-domed helmet and thick wellcloth shielding all around—was strictly a precaution.

  The starship whirled in his view like a fan blade, like a dizzying wheel of enigma and peril and his own damned confusion. Irritated by the blurring motion, he switched to a snapshot view that updated every five seconds. And in one of these frozen views, in bold red letters affixed to the ship's port side in some ancient chemical paint he read: QSS NEWHOPE. Which made sense on the one hand, for this ship had come out of the constellation of Ophiuchus, just off the Snake Holder's right shoulder. And Newhope was the name of the ship that the Queendom of Sol had launched, long ago, to Barnard's Star, which lurked invisible to the naked eye in precisely that location. The first of the great colony ships, yes. But on the other hand it made no sense at all, because the Barnard colony had been silent for hundreds of years—presumed extinct—and the QSS Newhope had been reported destroyed hundreds of years before that, in some sort of freak collision during an ill-advised sun-grazing maneuver.

  “Target identity confirmed,” he said. “She's QSS Newhope, apparently out of Barnard. Carrying what? Carrying whom? This makes no sense.”

  And while Bruno had always loved a good mystery, this one was a bit too personal, for his own son had been a passenger onboard this ship. Had been the King of Barnard, just as Bruno was, now and always, the King of Sol. And though it be foolish—there was no reason to suspect his exiled progeny had escaped the colony's fall—the sight of those words on the hull of the ship were enough to bestir in Bruno a pathetic sense of hope. For he loved his pirate, poet son as dearly as any father must.

  What must it be like in there? Could anyone have survived? Those repairs had probably been carried out robotically, and in an ordinary spaceship that centrifugal tumbling would produce, what, almost six thousand gee at the fore and aft ends? Enough to crush a human into broth, to rend any possible hull or superstructural material. Even impervium—that strongest of wellstone substances, that perfect arrangement of quantum dots and confined electrons—should have given way long ago.

  But this wasn't an ordinary spaceship; it was an ertially shielded starship. Even sweeping sideways through the ether, those ertial shields would have a deadening effect on the space around them. Absorbing and destroying the vacuum's delicate resonances, yes, clearing a bubble of supervacuum and greatly reduced inertia. And the so-called centrifugal force was inertia, nothing more.

  Were there habitable, ertial spaces within the ship? Were there safe (or quasi-safe) regions where he could dock, for search and rescue purposes? Mathematically speaking the situation was appallingly complex, but here before him was a cheat, a peek at the answer, for QSS Newhope had not flown apart in a haze of carbon and silicon and black-hole hypercollapsite. Having been a professor and a laureate and a declarant long before he'd been a king, Bruno knew something of these matters, and though he declined to slog through the formal calculations, it seemed to him that attaching at the center and poking around would be safe enough.

  And if not—if he destroyed himself—Boat Gods would simply withdraw, and print a fresh copy of him from its onboard fax machine. Or perhaps it would be flung away in ruin, and a fresh Bruno would have to be printed on Earth. Either way, it promised to be an interesting ride.

  “Attempting a docking maneuver,” he informed Traffic Control. For all the good it would do them; by the time they received the signal, he'd already be dead, or several hours into his rescue. Boat Gods and Newhope had encountered one another in the vast, cold wastes of the Kuiper Belt, where the sun was little more than a bright star, and the waste-ice dredging of a few dozen unpiloted neutronium barges was the only activity in some sixty thousand cubic light-hours of space. Civilization was a long way off.

  Anyway, survivors or no, if he could stop this ship or change its course there was profit to be made, for the hypercollapsites used in ertial shielding were among the most valuable commodities in existence. And God knew the cash would be useful! Bruno would fax himself back home and return with the Queendom's finest salvage teams. And then the derelict, stripped of any special spacetime properties, could be vaporized by any superweapon his navy (or rather, his wife's navy) preferred.

  Nor was this some trifling bureaucratic matter, for QSS Newhope was, alas, on a direct collision course with the sun. Her navigators, setting out from Barnard over six light-years distant, had done their job too well; aiming at Sol and driving their error sources to zero. So, in thirty-two days' time the derelict Newhope—moving at 2,500 kps, nearly 1% of the speed of light—would come screaming into the Inner System, passing the orbits of Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury and then plunging (if grazingly) into the photosphere of their mother star.

  The results would not be pleasant; the sun would escape destruction—probably—and the 90% of Queendom citizens nestled beneath bedrock or planetary atmospheres should be safe enough. But the flares would be colossal, and the Vacuum Cities' billion-odd residents would have to be evacuated as a precaution. And there was no bloody place to put them. Ergo, the naval response.

  But first an investigation, hmm?

  How the lords and ladies of Tamra's court had struggled against that suggestion! Or rather, against his doing it himself, without assistance.

  “Dear,” Queen Tamra had said to him, intruding upon his study in the way she almost never did, except in times of real trouble. “There's a tumbling starship on a collision course with the sun.”

  “Hmm?” he'd said, looking up from the equations and sketches on his desk. His mind was bursting with wormhole physics; he barely heard her. He barely noticed the storm outside, lashing rain and tattered palm fronds against his windows while the waves hammered the beach below. He was close—he was close—to understanding the dynamics of the throat collapse that had destroyed every one of his test holes. And this was as important politically as it was scientifically, for a functioning wormhole would solve nearly all of the Queendom's problems. Nearly all!

  But Tamra knew this, and would not have broken his concentration without good reason. She could have printed an alternate copy of him from the palace archive, and given it the news, and let the two of him reconverge later on in the
day. For an ordinary emergency, she'd've done exactly that.

  Ergo this was no ordinary emergency, so with some effort he processed her words. “A starship, you say? One of ours?”

  “Presumably,” she'd answered testily, for no bug-eyed aliens had ever been detected out there in the void, whereas Sol had sent ships out to a dozen and one colonies. Still, the king could be forgiven his surprise; none of those ships had ever come back. “It's traveling out of Ophiuchus.”

  “Ah, the Barnard Express! Any sign of our boy?”

  Unhappily: “No. The ship appears to be derelict; perhaps her crew is in storage. But Bruno, she's ertial, and on a collision course with the sun. Thirty-nine days from now.”

  “Ah. I see.” Bruno nodded at that. As a young man not yet to the century mark, he'd made his greatest fame by rescuing the sun from the fall of the first Ring Collapsiter, which would surely have destroyed it. He rose from his chair. “Well, I suppose I have work to do.”

  At this, Tamra simply rolled her eyes. “Your swashbuckling days are over, darling. We have a meeting with the navy in fifteen minutes.”

  And this was true; he'd been king for eleven hundred years, whereas he'd been a swashbuckling hero for barely more than a decade, and only then by accident. Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji! It seemed an improbable history now, even to him. Before that he'd been a teacher, a drunken lover, a layabout courtier, and a wilderness hermit. Ah, but like everyone in the Queendom, he had the immorbid body of a twenty-five-year-old; his soul might grow old, but his physical self could not. Was he less capable of heroism now? Surely not! So he had dutifully attended his meetings, dispensing judgments and calculations and recommendations while his wife faxed herself to the navy's flagship, the QSS Malu'i—Tongan for “Protector”—and ordered her seat of government temporarily transferred there.

  And yes, it might be the job of a woman to manage a fleet in time of disaster, and to rule over a Queendom in times of peace, but surely it was the job of a man to rush forward willy-nilly to survey the scene ahead of her.

  “Let the navy handle this,” his courtiers had urged as he finalized his plans. “Your Majesty, we need you here.” Which was blatant flattery and foolish besides, for he was first and foremost an inventor, and impatient—after all this time!—with the fussy details of governance and the inane formalities of court. The courtiers and ministers needed him more as a symbol than as a living, breathing human, and what could be more symbolic than this?

  “The navy hasn't the proper expertise,” he'd answered. For that was true; almost no one in the Queendom truly understood the mathematics of ertial shielding.

  “Then let the navy transport you,” they'd urged, as he fitted himself into his space armor, flexing and testing the joints one by one.

  “They haven't the speed,” he answered, for indeed the fastest interplanetary vessels were the ertial grappleships, and none were faster than Boat Gods.

  “It's bad for the Queendom if you're hurt or killed,” they'd tried, as he'd powered up the ship's systems and rolled aside the hangar roof to reveal, in a shower of loose palm fronds, the bright blue sky left behind by the storm.

  “I've made my backups,” he told them sternly. “If anything happens, restore me and await instructions. That's a command, good sirs and madams, from your king. Even from Earth, from these very islands, I can reach this mystery vessel three days ahead of the navy's best picket boats out of Neptune, and five days ahead of Her Majesty.”

  “May I come?” asked Hugo, his own pet robot, who'd been emancipated for more than a millennium but still chose to remain at home, learning how to be alive.

  “Not this time,” Bruno told him. “I can't spare the mass.”

  “But Sire,” his manservant Adelade said cannily, “who's to develop the wormhole in your absence?”

  And that had almost stopped him. Almost. But if there was one thing he'd learned about the hard problems of physics, it was that they often yielded when the body and mind were otherwise engaged. And he missed this derring-do, and feared that his people—even his own servants!—thought him no longer capable of it. And anyway, blast it, saving the sun was his job. Not Tamra's.

  Almost as an afterthought he'd said to Adelade, “Will you take stewardship of the Earth, please, until Tamra's or my return?”

  “Er, well . . .”

  “There's a good fellow. Mind the impending holidays.”

  He'd closed his hatch then, stoked his reactor, fired up his sensors and hypercomputers. Engaged his gravitic grapples, yes, latching them on to the crescent moon and yanking himself right off the Earth.

  And in a rare moment of perspicacity, as the stars came alive around him and he wheeled the ship for a new, more distant grapple target, he had muttered under his breath, “Oh, yes, my friends, this vagabond heart lives on, smothered in census figures. None among you can refuse me now! Surprised though I am to say this, sometimes it's good to be the king.”

  chapter two

  in which a revolution is halted

  There are moments for musing. Not moments of truth, but moments before the moment of truth, when the mind squirts sideways, time stretches, thoughts race. Insights leap across the gray matter like fleeing deer. For Bruno it went thusly:

  Given the Nescog, that glittering network of black-hole matter which linked every part of the Queendom to every other, he could step through the print plate of the fax machine behind him and, in a few hours' transit time which he himself would not perceive, step out through an equivalent plate in the palace foyer back on Tongatapu. Or anywhere else! The bulk of this journey would happen, alas, at Einstein's lightspeed, although ring collapsiter segments—long, thin tubes of collapsium with high-speed supervacuum inside—would shave a few minutes off it here and there.

  Ah, but with wormholes in place of collapsiters, the journey could be instantaneous! Not just to Earth, or to any other corner of the Queendom, but to the stars themselves. To the failed and failing colonies scattered among the nearby stars and dwarfs. Bruno and Tamra had sent too many young men and women out there to their deaths. Their deaths! But it was an error on which they could still, in some small measure, make good. If Bruno could just build a damned wormhole.

  The whirling fan of Newhope expanded in his view, and expanded some more. Belatedly, Bruno pulled up a schematic of the ship from Boat Gods' library, and then sketched an outline of the entry and exit wounds upon its hull. Presumably, the projectile had been stationary, at least in comparison to the starship's own large velocity. And that meant Newhope had not been facing forward or backward at the time, as she should have been for safety's sake, but rather broadside to the dust and debris of interstellar space. Oops.

  So what had happened? From Boat Gods' myriad sensors, a story began to emerge. The accident had occurred hundreds of years ago, the ship taking first a freak hit to its forward ertial shield, slightly off-center. The shield was hard to damage, and would have absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy, releasing it over several minutes as a blue-green flare of Cerenkov photons. A survivable event, yes. But compressive interactions had probably sent shockwaves and electrical surges all up and down the hull and superstructure, stunning the wellstone and preventing the navigation safety lasers from receiving power.

  This much at least, the starship was designed to handle. But it had gotten unluckier; the collision tipped it slightly, and before the nav systems could recover or the lasers could vaporize it, a second particle—probably larger—had struck, and the resulting plasma had flashed straight through the hull at near-relativistic speed, sending her into a wild, chaotic tumble while her fuel supply squirted away into vacuum. And without its deutrelium the ship's reactor had run down, and the ship itself had gone to sleep, perchance to wake at some future date.

  Well, with any luck, that day was now at hand.

  Bruno adjusted his grapples and set about the task of attaching himself to the center of the tumbling ship. The rest should be easy enough; Boat Gods was o
utfitted with a universal airlock and augmented with the Royal Overrides which guaranteed Bruno access to, and control over, any enlivened device designed or constructed in the Queendom of Sol. Which included QSS Newhope herself, yes. And although the starship had no matching airlock—no hatches of any kind in the region of concern—the mere feather-touch of his grapples stirred piezoelectric voltages in the wellstone there, bringing it to some weak semblance of life.

  The ship exchanged handshakes and data packets with the airlock, accepted an automated welcome-home message, and requested an infrared beam from which it could draw additional power. Then, more fully awake, it prostrated itself before the Royal Overrides, and agreed to allow itself to be damaged. And although the tiny hypercomputers inside it would not pass a self-awareness screening, and were at the moment no more collectively intelligent than a frog, the wellstone did express a sort of relief at finding itself, after all this time, among properly enlivened programmable materials rather than the mere metals and ceramics of the Barnard colony. It was good, apparently, to be home.

  Bruno felt a moment of dizziness as Boat Gods pulled itself toward the whirling baton that was Newhope. But he had, at various times in his youth, found himself trapped in the ertial supervaccum of a ring collapsiter, or standing on the windblown surface of the very first neutronium-cored planette, or falling into a hypermass somewhere. Hell, one of him had fallen into the sun itself, and never returned. A bit of spinning wasn't going to stop him!

  In the last few meters of closure, Boat Gods itself began to spin. And because it too was ertial, it matched the rotation of Newhope in no time at all, and with almost no sensation.