Flight of the Vajra (90 page)

—Meaning you?
I CLed.

—
Including me, yes. And Enid, of course.

With that part definitely not being a pose or a
dodge, I thought. Much to everyone’s surprise, mine included.

Kallhander: —
There will be three stories, then:
the one I will claim to have gleaned from her, the one I will tell IPS I
believe is true . . . and the truth itself, which will out in good
time. There ought to be enough congruity between them, when all is said and
done, to satisfy everyone.

—Kallhander, if I didn’t know any better, I’d
say you sounded like a man of divided sympathies.

—I think you know far better than you give
yourself credit.

For a long while, I didn’t do anything except lean
back in the main command couch and watch everyone get unpacked and settle in.
They had a home now—maybe only just a provisional one, until something better
came along, but for now they were making themselves comfortable on couches,
filling cargo boxes with all the little pieces of their life that were most
important and couldn’t just be spat out of a manufaxture.

This, I thought, this is what I want in my life.
Moments like this, when all I see when I look around is people at ease because
of me. My whole life had been nothing but one great desert of that kind of
wanting, with only the most occasional oasis of it happening. The last time it
had happened . . . no, it hadn’t been the
Kyritan
, I knew that
much. It had been right here—in the previous iteration of the
Vajra
,
during all those long and sleepy days on our way to Bridgehead.

I’m going to cherish it all the more it this time,
I told myself. But first, much as I hate to admit it, I do have some work to
do.

“Before I forget,” I said to Angharad, and
presented her with the ship’s master key (via CL, of course). “Technically,
it’s
your
ship—I just fly her and swab the deck.”

“I would like to think it is our ship, not simply
mine. And you do far more than only those things.”

She accepted the key all the same.

That done, I set my do-not-disturb flag and set
about initializing all of the ship’s systems—the engine checks (easy), the
maintenance routines (ditto), and querying the programs that had been scavenged
from the scrap of the previous
Vajra
(not so easy, given how esoteric
and heavily obfuscated most of that code was). And when you get down to it, I
told myself, is all that stuff really going to be so useful anymore? You’re not
bopping around from port to port anymore, trying to fool underpaid customs
officials. Or if you are on the move, it’s not because you have nothing better
to do with yourself.

I must have forgotten I’d left the DND flag up,
because I was still in the middle of musing about whether or not to put the
Reflection Fakeout program back into the outer hull control subsystem—it
had
come in handy when escaping from Cytheria—when I felt Enid’s hand on my
shoulder. Not for sympathy; she was shaking it like I was asleep and snoring.
Her face was wide-eyed, a little hollowed out, like someone who hadn’t slept in
days.

“Henré. Kallhander needs you. He’s been trying to
get your attention for—um, a while now.”

“Oh, all right, why not? There’s always room for
more bad news.” I’d been trying to be flip, but only after I said those words
did I realize it might in fact be very bad news.

We all convened in a CL-virtualized version of the
main cabin, where no one had to part their couches to give everyone else room
to sit down. I also recognized someone looming up from behind Kallhander that I
hadn’t imagined would ever bother enjoying our company: Ralpartha. Even he
looked like he hadn’t been sleeping.

The center of the cabin filled with a seething
hemisphere that, even without the labels and metadata, I knew was Bridgehead’s
G2 sun. It also sported a time-slice slider, and when something like that is
made available to you through CL it’s not just because it looks neat sitting
there. I toggled it back and forth, and noticed the “
solar output, hourly
averages
” graph flicking up and down as I did so.

“About two hours ago local time,” Ralpartha said,
without preamble, “the sunward-locked orbital solar harvester array for
Bridgehead started reporting results that led us to think there was a
malfunction. In the time since then, we’ve confirmed the array is all green,
and that the results we were getting were matched by the ground-based harvest
arrays and the ocean platforms. Bridgehead-Sol should normally be at the bottom
of its brightness cycle, which lasts a little more than two local decades. In
the last day and a half, it’s brightened more than it would in an entire year
of upswing. And the curve is accelerating hour by hour.”

No one knew what to say. Angharad was sitting
straight up on her couch, gripping the edge cushions as if preparing to throw
herself off at something. Enid had approached the solar model and was scrubbing
back and forth through the solar-output chart; no, I thought, you’re not going
to get it to go back to normal that way. Ulli and Cioran just sagged shoulder-to-shoulder.

“Why is this happening?” Enid said. Half-shouted,
more like, as she stood with solar filaments and prominences licking at her
chest.

“We don’t know,” Ioné said, as gentle as Enid had
not been.

“We’re putting outside estimates of survival on
the ground at about two local days, starting now,” Ralpartha said. “I recommend
leaving as soon as possible under your own power, if you can, so others can be
removed in a timely fashion.” He shot a look up at the curves of the ceiling.
“If you’re in a position to take others with you—”

I gestured around the cabin at my friends. “I am,
and I’m full up.”

Ralpartha’s smile was perfunctory. “Then I’d
encourage you to vacate the bay by the end of tonight. We’re going to need the
room.”

“Wait.” His words had pushed me to ask the one
question I was hoping I wouldn’t have had to ask. “Then there’s going to be a
formal rescue effort, right? There’s a lot of people planetside who have no
backups and no ship handy with their name on it. There’s no guarantee they’ll
be able to get offworld in time.”

“Then you clearly understand the issues as well as
I do.”

That sounded like a man who was all but biting his
tongue, I thought. “You didn’t answer me.” I said. “Is there a rescue effort
under way or not?”

“For those IPS are constitutionally obliged to
rescue, yes.”

I started to get a cold feeling, one which looked
like it was spreading to Enid as well, because she spoke before I did. “Meaning
what? That the IPS doesn’t really need to do anything except pull up its own
people, because just about everyone else has a backup?”

Ralpartha didn’t answer her. Or rather, when he
turned to Kallhander and began speaking to him, that by itself was all the
answer he needed to give.

“Kallhander,” Ralpartha continued, “once you’re
clear, you and Ioné file your reports through IPS’s Omn Leva branch. I’ve asked
the commissioner there to take custody of your file, because he owes me favors
and my hands are already too full to deal with the likes of you. Also, I’d
recommend going there in person, when you’re not too busy. That’s always the
best way to have a discussion that pertains to both your futures in the
service.”

He disconnected. The silence in the cabin felt
heavy enough to suck all of us down through the flooring. The slagger hadn’t
even bothered to take that last part of the conversation private, I thought; he
wanted us all to hear it.

“Now I owe him two punches in the face,” I muttered
out loud.

I didn’t get any further
before
everyone broke the rules of polite discourse all at the same time. Enid was
still baffled at how a sun could go nova on such short notice; Ioné tried to
explain how it technically wasn’t a nova, but an early-onset red-giant stage
(she’s said that before, I thought); Cioran and Angharad argued the merits of
clearing off now versus seeing what little we could do on our own. Kallhander
and Ulli tried to direct traffic between all of them and failed miserably.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d put two
fingers into my mouth to whistle for the sake of getting peoples’ attentions. I
hadn’t lost the trick of making it good and piercing—it was loud enough for
everyone to hear, whether or not they were on CL or not. It got their
attention, at the cost of making most of them flinch a bit.

“Sorry about the eardrums,” I said. “If I was
anyone else, I’d be getting a ticket punched to get in line for the elevator
right now. But I’m not just anyone else, and neither are any of you. Because
everything I just heard is turning my stomach.”

Ulli gave the faintest of nods. Angharad’s nod was
a little more assertive.

“Actually . . . Angharad?” I said. “Technically,
this is your ship, so
you
should be the one waving the baton.” I gave
her a take-the-floor gesture.

Angharad had to take a few breaths before the
words would come together. After getting that bit of news, I thought, I’d be
flustered too, no matter what my pedigree.

“Well. I recommend we gather as much information
as we can outside of official channels,” she said. “Since we all seem to have
ways to do that, let us make use of them.”

After a moment, Enid raised her hand, but like
Angharad had trouble actually saying anything at first. I know, I thought; it
always stinks being the first one to stick your neck out.

“I’ll, uh—I’ll keep an eye on the news and feed
everyone else what I find so they don’t have to scratch around for it. They
aren’t going to be able to keep
this
quiet by the end of the night, if
even that long.”

“Excellent idea.” Angharad nodded my way. “Henré?”

I pointed at Ulli. “I just had an idea about what
you
might be able to do, actually. Doesn’t Bridgehead have a disaster-protocol document,
some kind of legalese about what happens in the event of something this ugly?”

“It does. It
should
,” Ulli said. “And yes,
if it does, I out of anyone here ought to be able to make sense of it. If I
remember correctly, the exact role of IPS for a planetary-scale rescue would be
spelled out in total detail. It’s been some time since I examined it, but for a
predominantly Highend world such as this, I don’t imagine they would be bound
to do very much save for evacuate a few tangible resources.”

I grasped at the first straw that came to mind. “What
are the odds there’s a planetside stock of entanglement engines that haven’t
been commandeered by IPS?”

 “That . . . depends,” she said, sounding
as unconfident as I did. “Last I remember, there was not much demand to keep a
standing engine stockpile in the first place.”

Oh lovely, I thought. “Go check into it,” I said
out loud.

“Officers?” Angharad said.

Ioné was first. “We still have access to most
conventional ground-side IPS information services, so we can monitor them for
further word, along the lines of Enid’s mission. In theory we ought to be able
to retrieve anything we need from remote IPS resources, but the time factor
involved would be a problem. We’d need at least five to six hours to get any
kind of answer from the nearest off-world IPS node. And the planet has only
bothered to maintain one elevator because of the relatively small amount of
traffic.”

A typical Highend gesture, I thought: the less
elevators you need, the more independent and “evolved” you look.

I grabbed for another straw. “What about the
off-chance Ralpartha’s got a rescue effort underway and just doesn’t want to
mention it out loud because he’s trying to avoid a stampede?”

“It’s . . . unlikely,” Kallhander said.
“The vast majority of the local populace have backups, as Marius demonstrated
with his kidnap ploy. Many of them may elect to simply receive their share of
the IPS disaster fund payout and be re-instantiated offworld, wherever and
whenever the Bridgehead government decides to re-establish continuity. The
burden of transporting backup images for that many people is a minute fraction
of what it would be to transport them corporeally.”

“Which means of the bunch of us,” I said, “except
for Ulli here, and maybe you two as well—”

“No,” Ulli said, “as a matter of fact, not me.”

I blinked at her, and then blinked at her a second
time. “You
have
a backup,” I said, as if insisting that water was indeed
wet.

“Not anymore.” She was holding herself very
straight, a pose familiar to me from the first time she had sat with us and
owned up to a great many things she’d done wrong. “I purged them as of this
morning.”

I ground my knuckles into my forehead and stared
at the floor.

“It wasn’t something she wanted to own up to this
quickly!” Cioran put in. “But it was something she had been edging towards, you
see—”

“Because a life without Cioran isn’t worth living,
is that it?” I said, looking up back up at both of them. No venom in my voice,
much to my own amazement. Because, yes, I did understand what that was like.

“Yes.” Ulli let her spine go ever so slightly
slack. “And I knew that every day I was not able to invest myself completely in
that belief, I could never say such a thing out loud—I couldn’t even whisper it
to myself. But now I’ve gone and done it. Even if only out of foolish
sentimentality, but I prefer to think it was a matter of . . .” She
was still stuck for the word even after Cioran laced his fingers through hers.

“. . . honor,” Angharad suggested.

If there’s a better word, I thought, I can’t come
up with it myself.

“Back to the issue at hand,” I said out loud. “That
still leaves, what, how many Old Way folks with no backups? And who’ll be
fighting tooth-and-nail to get off-world once word gets out?” Which ought to be
right about
now
, I thought.

Kallhander computed. “Approximately
. . . one hundred thirty thousand. Rounded up.”

I did the rest of the math out loud. “If you
really pack ‘em in and say, cosm take the IPS-treaty safety and health
regulations, you can get . . .
six
people in the space of a
single elevator-transport slot. The fastest you can cycle in a transport slot
is two standard minutes. Even if you run that elevator non-stop—”

“—you’re not going to get more than five thousand or
so out in a single local day,” Cioran said. “Forty-three hundred, for the more
punctilious among us, me included. What?” He frowned at Enid’s perplexed look.
“Just because I’m bad with
money
doesn’t mean I’m bad with
numbers.
”

“Meaning we’d need . . . at least
twenty-nine elevators,” I said, and felt something sink far enough to weigh me
down. “Let’s be generous and assume we have two days’ time to get everyone off,
which I’m dubious about. We’d still need twelve, say thirteen elevators running
side by side. And ships to put them in, and engines for those ships. Instantiating
an elevator assembly from groundside and getting it rigged up would take at
least
as week, two weeks if we were fabbing them ourselves. And I don’t think there
are thirteen spare premade portable elevator assemblies in
any
of the
systems within enough hops of here to matter. And we’d need the time to holler
for them and get an answer back. And even if we forget about the elevators, we’d
still
need the engines and the ships . . . because face it,
the only reason you really need the elevators running is for traffic control,
and you
really
think IPS is going to be tightassed about that now?”Kallhander
heard all this shook his head. “Normally, yes, for the sake of traffic control
and manageability. But given how unprecedented the situation is, it’s entirely
likely they would waive such restrictions entirely and allow free egress for
any ship capable of it.”

“Provided you can get your hands on one, or your
ass
into
one, in the first place. So—” I faced Ioné and Kallhander
again. “—prove me wrong. Please.”

“We’ll do our best,” Ioné said, not sounding very
convinced by her own words.

Cosm take the elevators, I thought; what we needed
was an
ark.

“As for me,” I said to Angharad, “among other
things, I’m going to start checking to see if anyone still planetside knows me
and owes me any favors. If anyone else finds some strings they can pull, pull
‘em; they can’t come in anything but handy right now. There’s got to be
someone
out there who can help, and that’s close enough to us that we can get their
attention in time. Most everyone I can think of who would still be speaking to
me is days away at the
least.
”

Angharad nodded at Cioran. “You?”

Cioran unfolded himself from his couch, faced the
bulkhead behind him (it was ostensibly the one in his own cabin), twiddled it
open, and dragged out a cargo container which clinked suspiciously. He used one
toe to flip the lid off. Nestled inside and spaced apart by foam dividers were
the entire contents of the wet bar from the villa’s common room, like so many
slender-necked glass bombs.

“My contribution to the cause,” he said. “I just
didn’t imagine we’d need it this . . .
urgently
.”

I’d had the good sense
to preload a
week’s worth of provisions for seven in the ship’s hold, which gave us all
something to wash that alcohol down with. Angharad and Enid stuck with the
local fruit juice that Cioran had also nicked from the room—normally used to
make mixers, but they just took it straight. Kallhander and Ioné didn’t touch
anything. Ulli, Cioran and I filled a glass each and turned to our respective
missions.

BRIDGEHEAD: CONTINGENCY DESCRIPTION DOCUMENT
CDD-03, last revised, fifty-one years ago; ratified by such-and-such; IPS
verified and countersigned by such-and-such. Ulli’s first spadeful of digging
had already yielded something. I’d told her to digest the whole thing first and
then
run it down for me, but she couldn’t help but call out each
significant fact as it passed through her hands.

“It’s rather
short
, isn’t it?” Ulli said.
“Normally a document like this would run to many times this length. It has all
the requisite sections for a CDD, but most of them are stubs or placeholders,
or say ‘See this other article’.”

“Well, this being Bridgehead,” Cioran said, “I
imagine most of the rules for other planets simply don’t matter here? Total
ground-side populace in the fifty millions and change, most of them Highend
anyway—you have to imagine the plan is not going to need as much depth or
detail.”

“The word’s out,” Enid said. “Sort of, anyway.
There’s a whole
bunch
of people passing around solar activity charts and
speculating out loud that something’s up. Official word is ‘we’re
investigating’.” She shoved away a whole wall of angry questions (manifested in
CL for the sake of our casual curiosity) with a wipe of the hand. “Nobody’s
buying it, of course. Oh, and there’s already been a total lockdown on
large-scale substrate and engine sales. ‘To prevent hoarding’.”

“Traffic control manifests for all worlds within
one hop of Bridgehead are cached locally,” Kallhander said. “None of them are
reporting anything with a D-4 tag as having passed through or being en route.”
Good thinking on his part: anything big enough to be a temporary elevator would
have to sport at least a D-4 tag.

“I’ll check the planetside parking manifests,”
Ioné said. “It’s unlikely anything of that size would be stowed out of orbit,
but—”

“Check anyway,” I said. “If nothing else it’ll
make our case all the more airtight.”

“What case, exactly?” Cioran refilled his
shotglass.

“That whatever they’re doing,
if
they’re
doing anything at all, it’s not going to be enough.” Or that they don’t
want
it to be enough, I thought.

I popped back into my own archives, the deep
recesses of what I’d squirreled away in the
Vajra
’s memory (stored as
redundantly as it had been, it had all survived the crash) and started looking
for the notes I’d taken on that civil-engineering collaboration initiative that
had gone nowhere. Never throw anything away, not even the things you think
you’ve outgrown; sometimes what you think is an outgrowing of something is just
you losing sight of what made it all the more special.

“Oh
dear,
” Ulli said after taking another
drink. “That
is
a problem.”

“What is?” I said, decided I didn’t mind being
interrupted after all. “Come on, talk to me.”

“This document,” Ulli said. “It’s also supposed to
describe how, in the event of a calamity, how assets are to be transferred
off-world for the re-inception of governance. In theory, it would simply
involve moving all liquid assets into escrow, then using the IPS reconstruction
fund they had paid into to allow a re-settlement.”

“There’s only one problem with that picture,” I
said. “There
are
no settlements. That’s why people were flocking to
Bridgehead in the first place; it’s one of the few places left that
had
that kind of policy. There’s nothing for them to buy with that money. Nothing
they’d want to buy, and not at the price they’d be asking, anyway.”

Convenient thing about those settlement funds, I
thought: they were pro-rated based on total populace per percentage of
planetary landmass. The more of you there were displaced, the greater the fund
to play with. A population of a few thousand “true” Highenders would be sharing
a very slender pot indeed—