Vanguard

by Jack Campbell

  “I’m sorry to hear you’re leaving,” her boss said, sounding almost sincere but also too tired and worn-out to care. Like most of Earth, he had seen too many wars and too many half-failed efforts to save people who stubbornly refused to cooperate in their own deliverance. “You’re not going to try heading up the spiral arm, are you? The colonies in that direction are still refusing to let any new people move in.”

  “I wouldn’t go up even if they’d take me,” Carmen scoffed. “Them and their Original Blood of Terra nonsense. No, I’m going down the spiral arm, where the colonies are expanding as fast as ships can jump to new stars. There’s a ship leaving for one of those new colonies next week.”

  “Which colony?” her boss asked, not even trying to sound as if he were actually interested.

  “Kosatka.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “You will.” Carmen had been preparing for this moment for a long time, not knowing when she would finally make the leap but knowing it would happen. She powered down her system, logged out for the last time, swept the few personal items allowed on her desk into her backpack, and nodded good-bye to her boss. “Farewell.”

  Her boss rubbed his face with one hand, nodding back, his own attention already shifting back to processing the next interstellar court order that would very likely be ignored by every party involved. “Good luck, Carmen. You’ll need it.”

  • • •

  Many light years down the spiral arm of the galaxy that contained Earth, Lochan Nakamura helped one of the other survivors off the lifeboat, then stood gazing around at the plain metal walls and overhead of the enclosed surface docking station. Having gotten this far, he wasn’t sure where to go next.

  The star humans had named Vestri was a red dwarf, about a third the size of Earth’s sun, putting out a fraction of the light and heat of brighter stars, puttering along as it had for billions of years and would continue doing so for much longer. Vestri had no worlds worthy of the name orbiting it, just several airless asteroids that were not quite large enough to be labeled planets and countless smaller rocks that had mostly formed into two impressive belts about the star. Fortunately for Lochan and the others who had been passengers aboard the merchant freighter Brian Smith, one of those large asteroids held a way station and had been within range of the lifeboat from the ship.

  One of the way station employees, wearing coveralls and a smile, stuck a pad in front of Lochan. “Thumbprint, bio-scan, and signature,” she requested.

  “For what?” Lochan asked, still bemused from his escape.

  “Agreement to pay for rescue services, lodging, provisions, and life support until someone picks you up,” the local said cheerfully. “You’ve still got your universal wallet, right? Great. You’ll need to compensate the station for everything you receive.”

  Wondering at her attitude in the wake of the hijacking of the freighter, Lochan scrolled through the document he was being asked to sign. “These rates are ridiculously high.”

  Her smile widened. “You’re welcome to get your food, water, heat, and air from another place, sir.”

  “And you’re the only source for those things in this star system, aren’t you?” Lochan asked, finally understanding why the woman was so happy.

  “That’s right. And we’ve got bills to pay.”

  Having left the Old Colony at Franklin in part because he was tired of paying taxes for government services he didn’t think he needed, Lochan took a moment to savor the irony of his situation. In Franklin’s star system, this station would have been run by the government and provide rescue and aid without charge. “Are you going to report that pirate who took the freighter and dumped us here?” he asked as he pressed a thumb to the pad.

  “Of course,” she said absentmindedly as she checked to make sure everything had been done right.

  As the local went off to put the screws to another castaway, a young woman paused beside Lochan. He had seen her on the freighter but hadn’t spoken with her before. Even if her bearing and attitude hadn’t proclaimed her a veteran, the small brass sword-and-shield clipped to one earlobe would have given her away as having once been part of Franklin’s tiny force of Marines.

  “She didn’t seem too upset about that pirate,” Lochan commented.

  The woman smiled. “I’ll bet you that pirate hits ships passing through Vestri all the time and shares profits with this station. Why do you think the pirates let us all keep our wallets?”

  “That’s why they let us go so easily?” Lochan shook his head. “Nice scam.”

  “Who’s going to stop them?” The woman nodded to him. “I’m Mele Darcy.”

  “Lochan Nakamura. What’s a Marine doing out here?”

  “Former Marine,” Mele said, her eyes studying the crowd. “Force reductions to save money, so I decided to give the new colonies a try.”

  “What do you think so far?”

  “It sucks.” She grinned. “Where are you headed?”

  “Down and out. I haven’t decided exactly where, yet. What about you?”

  “Same. Figured I’d go until I found a place worth staying.” Mele looked around. “I can already tell that Vestri ain’t that place.”

  “You got that.” Lochan and Mele followed the rest of the group as they were led down stairs toward the station’s accommodations beneath the surface.

  “You know what I am. What are you?” Mele asked as they trudged along bare-walled corridors mined from the rock of the asteroid.

  “Me?” Lochan shrugged. “Failed business owner, failed politician, failed husband.”

  “Oh? What are you planning on doing down and out?”

  “Find something else to fail at, I guess.”

  Mele laughed. “I think you can do better than that. Stick with me. We’ll watch each other’s backs until we get off this rock.”

  Lochan had been wondering why the Marine had attached herself to him. He knew he wasn’t the sort of man that younger women gravitated toward. But self-interest. He could understand that.

  The room the former passengers were brought to proved to be a single large space lined with bunks. The only privacy was offered by a bathroom. Several vid screens were on the walls, but as Lochan suspected, the first involuntary guests who tried them discovered that they had a per-minute viewing charge. “This is what a cash cow looks like,” Lochan said to Mele.

  A nearby way station employee looked offended. “We’re providing a service. Where would you be if this station hadn’t been here?”

  “Probably still on the Brian Smith, approaching the jump point for the next star,” Lochan said.

  The employee glared at Lochan. “You’d better be careful what you—” He paused in the act of raising a fist, looking to the side where Mele stood with her arms crossed and her eyes fixed on him, then lowered his hand and walked away.

  Lochan nodded to Mele. “Thanks. I’ve got a big mouth.”

  “You did say you’d been a politician.” Mele gestured toward the rest of those from the freighter, who were milling about in various states of despair and distress. “How about using those skills to organize these people? The vultures running this station will pick them clean if we don’t all look out for each other.”

  Startled, Lochan looked over the group. “Are you going to help?”

  “That depends on how you work. I’m feeling a need to stay in the background, and I’ve learned to listen to my instincts. But show me a good leader, and I’ll follow.”

  Lochan nodded once more. He couldn’t explain why, but he didn’t want to let Mele Darcy down. Maybe it had just been too long since anyone, himself included, had thought he could do anything right. Or maybe he was already tired of trying to run away from past failures. Sooner or later, he would have to stop running and start trying again. “I’ll give it a shot.”

  She gazed at him, then abrup
tly pulled him close in a tight hug, burying her face next to his ear and whispering so low he could barely hear. “They’ve probably got these rooms bugged. If we need to pass on serious warnings to each other, use this old code.” One finger tapped the back of his neck three times quickly, three times with a slight pause between each, then three times quickly again.

  Mele stepped back, looking sheepish for the benefit of onlookers. “Sorry. I get physical sometimes.”

  “No problem,” Lochan said, wishing she had held the hug a little longer and wondering if she would be interested in something more later.

  But she smiled again and shook her head slightly at him, answering that unspoken question before Lochan could build up any false hopes.

  He turned to the others and raised his voice to command attention. “Hey, everybody! I’ve got a couple of suggestions.”

  • • •

  Carmen Ochoa hadn’t been in space since leaving Mars for Earth, but the experience hadn’t changed all that much in a decade. Take the regular shuttle up to the orbital station, then transfer to the ship, in this case a large, newly built craft whose boxy lines contained enough room for hundreds of passengers in conditions ranging from luxurious to cramped, as well as plenty of freight compartments holding goods that would be snapped up by the growing colonies on the edges of human expansion.

  Her walk through the orbital station was hindered by the presence of a lot of Earth Fleet sailors. Men and women in uniform were seemingly everywhere, some of them lined up to get into crowded bars but most standing around in somber groups. Whatever was happening didn’t seem to be a celebration.

  “What’s going on?” Carmen asked one small gathering of sailors.

  An older man with several service stripes on the sleeve of his uniform gestured toward space beyond the station. “The fleet just decommissioned the last three Founders Class destroyers.”

  A woman about the same age nodded morosely. “The George Washington, the Simon Bolivar, and the Joan of Arc. The ceremonies ended about an hour ago. I spent three years on the Bolivar. Now the only people aboard her are contractors shutting down all the systems before the ships get hauled to join the ghost fleet at Lagrange 5.”

  “Are you going to other ships?” Carmen asked.

  “There aren’t enough other ships left in the active fleet. Most of us are being let go,” the older man said. “Early retirement or just kicked out as surplus.”

  “They’re talking about demilitarizing the solar system,” the woman sailor said, sounding both bewildered and angry. “Getting rid of the fleet completely. Who’s going to defend Earth? Who’s going to help the Old Colonies if they need it?”

  An officer passing by stopped to partially answer the question. “The Old Colonies up and out have cut themselves off from us already. The colonies down and out will have to help themselves. There are rumors that Earth gov is trying to set up an arrangement for the Old Colonies to protect us,” he finished.

  “Maybe we can get positions in their fleets,” the woman sailor said.

  “You can try,” the officer agreed. “But the Old Colonies don’t have much because they’ve depended on our forces if things got really bad.”

  Carmen spoke up. “There are all the new colonies. They’re going to need something.”

  The sailors looked at her with various degrees of curiosity and skepticism. “Where are the new colonies going to get ships?” the older sailor asked. “It takes a while to develop shipyards.”

  “They can probably get our old ships cheap,” the officer remarked. He fixed a tired, cynical gaze on Carmen. “Are you going down and out? Let them know Earth has a lot of warships with plenty of light hours of sailing time left on them just drifting in the ghost fleet.”

  “They can recruit crews when they buy the ships, too,” the woman sailor said. “There will be plenty of us sitting around wishing we had a deck under our feet again. I’d rather be part of something growing than wait until I’m the person who turns out the last light and locks the last hatch for good in the Earth Fleet.”

  “I’ll remember that,” Carmen said. “I’m sorry I can’t do more.”

  “You’re just being smart, getting out of a game with worn-out players and nothing left to score. There’s not much left to do here except remember when we made history instead of being history.” The officer squinted at the nearest wall panel showing an image of space outside. “I may go down and out, too. Why not? Hey,” he told the sailors. “Come on. I’ll buy you all a last round before the final crew of the Bolivar breaks up for good.”

  The sailors went off toward one of the bars while Carmen boarded her shuttle. She shifted the view on the entertainment panel in front of her seat until she spotted the long, lean shapes of three destroyers near the transfer station. Compared to the big, stout merchant ships around the station, the destroyers looked like the predators they were, three barracudas drifting amid schools of fat, slow fish.

  When she tapped the images on her panel, the information that popped up identified all three as “inactive—surplus.” No names left to them, nothing to mark what they had done in the service of Earth or the crews who had served on them. Just “inactive—surplus.” In some ways, that felt like a metaphor for what Earth was becoming. Still there, but passive and no longer heeded by the children she had sent out to seed the stars.

  Boarding the new ship Mononoke was a welcome relief from thoughts of decline and decay.

  She dumped her luggage on the bunk of a stateroom barely large enough to hold her and the three other women who would share it with Carmen. The medium-sized carryall and her backpack didn’t hold much, but Carmen had learned in the dog-eat-dog shantytowns of Mars that clinging to material possessions was foolish.

  The displays on the walls, one by each bunk, were all showing the path the Mononoke would take down and out. Out beyond the previous bounds of human settlement, and down this spiral arm of the galaxy in the direction of the center of the Milky Way. Carmen zoomed in the display to see the details of the crooked path the ship would take as it jumped from star to star.

  Another woman came in and claimed the other bottom bunk. “How far are you going?” she asked Carmen.

  “All the way.”

  “Seriously? I’m just going back to Brahma.” She stretched out on the bunk. “Old Colony is fine with me. Have you ever been in jump space?”

  “No,” Carmen admitted. “Is it as bad as they say?”

  “Not at first. It gets worse with each day. It will only take six days to reach Brahma, which will just leave us feeling uncomfortable. The longest jump you’re going to face after that is, um, about two weeks. Your skin will feel like it belongs to someone else by the time you end that jump.”

  Carmen sat down on her bunk, gazing at the route ahead. She knew why the ship had to jump from star to star, not skipping any. Partly it was because the jump drives didn’t have enough range to go farther than the closest stars to whichever star they were jumping from. And partly it was because, as her new roommate said, jump space made people feel more and more uncomfortable the longer they were in it. There were already a lot of frightening rumors about what had happened to the people on ships that had spent too long in jump space. “Have you heard anything about piracy beyond the Old Colonies?”

  “It’s happening,” her new roommate said. “That’s about all I know. The more isolated the star, the worse your odds are. I’ve heard ships are getting waylaid more frequently the farther out you go. Enough ships that people are starting to talk about doing something. But it’s all just talk. I doubt anything will actually be done.”

  “Aren’t the Old Colonies worried that it might spread their way?”

  “We’ve always been safe enough. It’s not our responsibility to bail out a bunch of malcontents who headed down and out and ran into trouble.”

  That didn’t leave much room for
discussion, so Carmen changed the subject. “It’ll take two weeks to get to the first jump point?”

  “Yeah,” her slightly-more-experienced-as-a-space-traveler roommate replied. “The Mononoke is faster than the average freighter, but not nearly as fast as a warship, so it’ll be, uh, thirteen and a half standard days from Earth orbit for us to reach the jump point for Brahma. You know how the jump drives work, right?”

  “Space gets stretched by the mass of stars,” Carmen said. “That creates thin spots in the fabric of the universe that ships can use to enter and leave jump space. Jump points are the thin spots that give access to thin spots at other stars.”

  “Uh-huh. We can’t just jump from anywhere.”

  “I’ve heard jump space is gray.”

  “Ha!” Her roommate’s laugh startled Carmen. “It’s the gray to end all grays, a gray so gray that you can’t even imagine any color in it. It’s the most boring kind of space imaginable. Except for the lights, whatever they are. Have you heard about them? They show up sometimes, then go away.”

  “What are the lights?” Carmen asked. “What causes them?”

  “Um . . . no one knows what they are yet, but they’ll find out soon, I’m sure,” her roommate predicted confidently. “You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Carmen said.

  “Sorry! Are you a physicist?”

  “Me? No. My job’s a lot more difficult than physics,” Carmen said. “Conflict resolution.”

  “Conflict resolution? At least you’ll have job security down and out,” the woman from Brahma observed. “You’re originally from Earth?”

  No way was she going to admit the truth to this woman. “Yes.”

  “And you’re going to the end of the line? That’s . . . Kosatka?”

  “Right,” Carmen said.