Lost in Transmission (33 page)

Bascal smiled, and this time it was genuine. “Ah, yes. A fair objection. But at the end of that time, think what we'll have achieved! Total freedom: physical, economic, political. Complete liberation from those moribund Queendom power structures. We
will
resurrect our dead, restore the neutronium trade, install the luxuries of collapsiter travel and meritocratic advancement. But these are not mere bread and circuses; long before Barnard is full we'll launch starships of our own, a colony wave done properly, carrying
our
ideas to the stars. And space is infinite, Feck. We can have our cake and eat it too. Live forever
and
continue to breed. All the cake in the universe is ours for the taking.”

The king's eyes had gone out of focus, as if he were looking not at the holie window and the bridge of
Newhope,
but at this glorious future off in the distance somewhere.

“Just ignore him,” Xmary told her crew. “We've got work to do. Battle plans to draw up.
Fist
may be a match for mining colonies and pirate sloops, but we've got a hundred times her reactor power and probably five hundred times her programmable mass. We can throw a lot of energy in a lot of different ways. If they want to stand in our path, that's their prerogative, but it doesn't mean they can stop us.”

“I'm standing right here,” Bascal said. “I can hear every word.”

“Just ignore him,” Xmary repeated.

Although he grew increasingly angry, Bascal had too much dignity to press this point. If they weren't going to talk to him, then neither was he going to talk to them. He watched for a while as normal bridge chatter resumed: the scanning and neutralizing of debris, the shifting of ballast mass to minimize the pressure on station-keeping thrusters.

“If you make it through, it's going to be a long trip,” he injected at one point. “No fax storage. I did a shorter version on the way out here, and believe me it was loooong. Are you people sure you can handle it?”

But nobody responded to that, and a king really did have better things to do than sit there all day staring quietly at his enemies. After ten more minutes of quiet standoff, his image got bored and winked out.

“Alone at last,” Eustace said.

But Conrad shook his head. “Don't count on it. He'll have sensors in the walls by now. Our king is quite a talented programmer.”

“Damn right he is,” said a disembodied voice. Bascal's.

It was hardly a timely quip, though; his signal could only travel at the speed of light, whereas the distance between
Newhope
and Planet Two (Sorrow, Conrad reminded himself. Would that name ever stick?) was increasing rapidly. With the ship already doing better than thirty kps—one ten-thousandth of the speed of light—every seventy minutes of travel added a full second to the round-trip signal lag.

“This complicates our battle planning,” Conrad noted. “We have no security at all. We have to assume that everything we do and say is being analyzed, at least until we get the sun between ourselves and the planet. Possibly even then. And any weapons we produce from the wellstone of the hull will be difficult to trust.”

“It does make things interesting,” Xmary agreed.

The next time Bascal appeared in a visible form, the ship
was nine light-seconds from Sorrow, meaning the round-trip signal lag was eighteen seconds. He didn't even bother trying to hold a conversation like that, but simply haloed himself and fired off an interactive message. A large and complicated one, judging by the hours its upload spent choking
Newhope
's comm systems.

“It doesn't have to be like this,” the king said, appearing translucently as a crouching figure, leaning right into Conrad's face as he lay on his bunk trying to catch a few hours of sleep. “I still want you on my team. Whatever has driven you to this desperate act, I need to know about it. That's advice you should be giving
to me
. I should be accounting for it in my planning.”

“I tried,” Conrad told him tiredly. “You're not an easy man to advise. You respond much better to actions, as you've amply demonstrated today.”

“So fine, I'm responding. Now talk to me.”

Conrad sighed. “Bas, why do your plans always involve this pressure cooker of pain and death and suffering? Why are the rewards always so far in the future? People don't want that. They never have and never will.”

“But we're immorbid,” Bascal answered. “Some of us. Planning for the future never used to be a personal thing. Our parents were the first crop of humans to map out a future they themselves would inhabit. And they pissed the job, didn't they? We've got to do better. Forget twenty-year plans and even century plans; we have the opportunity, the
duty
, to plan across the millennia, across the eons. And if we can see paradise, not just in dreams but in the hard, cold numbers of mathematical certainty, does it not behoove us to be brave? To take the first hard steps down that road? The easier roads all lead to ruin, my friend. I've
seen
it.”

Conrad sighed. “Jesus and the little gods, Bas, quit the act. You can bamboozle children, but you're not fooling
me
. By the time you solve the economic crisis, the colony's dead will be irradiated into frozen goo. There's no resurrection; the only place you can send them is heaven itself. But there's a lesser paradise much closer at hand.”

The king's eyes filled with cold certainty. “You've taken the Cryoleum. Twenty-five thousand sleeping bodies. Taking them ‘home' to a place they've never seen. I've sent word back to myself on Sorrow, to verify that the Cryoleum is actually missing, but you can save me the trouble.”

“Yes,” Conrad admitted. “We've taken the Cryoleum.”

“Damn you,” the recording said. “Do you realize what you've done? Do you know how destabilizing that'll be? No matter how ruthless I am—and I hate being that, believe me!—this will distort the morale equations, further eroding our productivity, further postponing the dawn of our indigenous Eden.” Then the hologram's eyes widened a bit. “Ah, but it's a secret. Yes? If I kill you, if I kill everyone on the ground who knows about your plans, the whole thing can be covered up. We'll just need to find a way to explain the loss of
Newhope
. And that shouldn't be difficult. She's an old ship; accidents happen.”

These words made Conrad very happy and proud not to be on Bascal's team, to be instead on his own team and struggling for his own vision of the least-worst future. But at the same time the words triggered a deep mourning, because he and Bascal really had been good friends,
best
friends, for hundreds and hundreds of years. They still were.

“Even your barely sentient messages dream of homicide,” Conrad said.

The recording shook its head. “Sadly, it makes sense. And fortunately, I have the fortitude to press onward, even with plans that make me personally ill.”

“You can't stop us,” Conrad said.

Here the recording smiled: a cold, holographic smile. “You'd be surprised what I can do. You'd be
amazed
what I can do, with centuries of thought and planning. I always knew there'd be rebellions to put down. And it occurs to me, seeing you lying there half asleep, that I have still another weapon at my disposal.” He looked down at himself. “This ghost will haunt you, Conrad. It will deprive you of rest until such time as you surrender
Newhope
and return home in chains.”

Oh, dear God. “Go away, Bas.”

“No, indeed,” the recording said. “I'm tireless, drawing my energy directly from your own reactors. And as you say, I'm barely sentient. Thus, I'm incapable of boredom. The volume of my speech is unfortunately capped by safety interlocks—I can no more shout you to death than I can command the wellstone in your hull to disintegrate. Alas for you, because it would be a kinder death than what Ho has in store.

“However, the
duration
of my speech has no such constraints. We shall begin, I think, with one million recitations of the “Fuck You Song,” and follow up with a long, detailed list of your personal faults. I will not enjoy this, for I cannot, but perhaps the real Bascal will be satisfied when all is done, that all
has
been done that can be, to bring down this house of cards you call a conspiracy.”

“Go away,” Conrad repeated as the first stanza of the “Fuck You Song” began. “Little gods, Bascal, you can't be serious.”

Ah, but he could. And was.

chapter twenty-four

flashfight

That
Newhope
could be unwilling to receive any further
malicious uploads was a possibility, given that she was a highly intelligent and protective entity in her own right. However, she should not have been capable of resistance when presented with Royal Overrides. Perhaps, then, there was a communications problem of some sort, although this is also unlikely in a ship constructed of wellstone and hypercollapsites. Or perhaps Bascal—the singled king of a world and a people—was too busy or distracted to halo himself for another recording. But could he not have duplicated the original transmission, and filled the spaces of
Newhope
with a thousand holie copies of himself?

In point of fact, he did not. For whatever reason, only one ghost haunted the ship, with one crewmate—Conrad—bearing the brunt of its attentions. Perhaps Bascal felt a twinge of love or pity, or simply couldn't bring himself to send himself off, again and again, to certain doom. There
was
something wrenching about sending a piece of your soul on a one-way trip to data heaven, never to be heard from again. Conrad had abandoned the practice years ago.

But King Bascal was harder-headed about these things, and it's difficult to imagine he'd've foresworn such an action if it offered some strategic or tactical advantage, or hastened the day when his visions of Eden could be instantiated in the physical universe. Some light might be shed on the subject if the site of his palace could be examined by quantum archaeologists, but failing that, we can simply acknowledge the mystery, and agree that
Newhope
's habitable spaces were neither as loud nor as chaotic as they might have been.

Nevertheless, her crew—even Eustace—were all pulling long shifts, scheming in their heads and trying to communicate ideas to one another while simultaneously keeping them obscure from the prying ears presumed to surround them. The industrial-grade fax machine—the only one onboard—produced stimulants in abundance to keep them all on their toes, and between that and the lack of sleep, the general stress, and the specific nagging and singing and joking of Bascal's one message, they were all pretty fuzzed out by the time they reached the bottom of their orbit.

“Velocity with respect to Barnard is 615 kps,” Feck announced loudly, over the ninety thousandth refrain of the “Fuck You Song.” “If we have forever to get home, the minimum needed for escape boost is 620, but ideally we'll need something closer to ten thousand. I'll kiss the engines for good luck, ma'am. As for the sails, I am unfurling them . . . now.”

There was a lot more to the boost sequence than just that, but while the sails were unfurling, and before Feck had gotten to the next step on the checklist, red lights began flashing and alarms blaring.

“What's happening?” Xmary demanded.

Conrad, sitting now at the Systems Integration station instead of his own chair, reported, “It's a broken thread alarm. From the bow sheeting, just aft of the ertial shield. Something's evaporating the outer layers of the wellstone there.”

“What kind of something? I need more information.” There was no hint of love in her voice, nor should there be. She was the captain of a vessel under fire. “I didn't expect trouble this early, but it makes sense for them to disrupt us before boost if they can.”

“It's . . . coherent light. Sorry, coherent X rays.”

“Could it be the spalling laser on
King's Fist
?”

“That would be my first guess,” Conrad agreed. “Although the range must be pretty extreme, or the damage would be much worse. That laser's frequency is tuned specifically to interfere with wellstone's command-and-control signals, and to set up destructive resonance in the fibers. Wait a minute, I'm getting broken threads in the sail as well. The laser's spot diameter is about sixty meters, so according to the computer it's firing from a range of just over three light-seconds.”

Luna was almost exactly 1.29 light-seconds from Earth, and although Conrad would never admit it publicly, after years of intensive training in near-Earth space he still measured it that way in his mind: three light-seconds was nine hundred thousand kilometers, about two and a half Earth-moon distances. Also very close to the Limit of Influence or LOI, where Sol's gravity began to dominate over Earth's, making stable orbits impossible. Not that that mattered here and now, but it was how he'd been trained.

“It's a probing shot,” he speculated. “They don't expect to do any real damage. In fact, they may be using the spalling laser just to light us up, to make it easier to target some other weapon. The spot is shrinking, though. We're closing fast with the source.”

“Find it.”

“Trying to, ma'am, but
King's Fist
is stealthed. Anyway, all the light and heat are confusing the sensors.”

Indeed, for practical purposes they were
inside
Barnard at the moment. It was a smaller, cooler star than Sol, but that did not by any means make it a clement environment to pass through. At this depth in the chromosphere, Sol was at least predictable; navigating through it was like flying a kite in a steady gale. But Barnard, with less power output per hectare of surface, was a knotted mess of flailing magnetic fields that spiked and dropped away without warning. The particle flux alone was enough to snow out most of the preprogrammed sensors in
Newhope
's hull, and for all his programming expertise, Conrad knew almost nothing about sensor design. Stuck with the ship's normal, unmodified arrays, he felt as though he were peering out through the pores of a blindfold.

“Look at the shape of the spot,” Xmary suggested. “The beam is circular, right? But I'll bet you're seeing an oval smear across our bow, and from that you can compute the incidence angle. And from the changes in the spot size you can get the divergence angle, and therefore the range. Trace the beam right back to its source.”

This surprised Conrad. It was an ingenious idea, and certainly nothing his childhood Xmary, the Denver party girl, would have come up with. He loved her as much now as he had back then—or so it seemed, at any rate—but he supposed people
did
change, slowly, like wax dolls in the warmth of a closed hand. Decade by decade the differences were imperceptible, but across the span of centuries that fiery girl had changed almost beyond recognition. Was the escape from childhood a special case? Would there be changes this large in her future as well?

“Conrad!”

“Tracing,” he acknowledged. Then: “Okay, the error bars are half the size of the data, but . . . we're coming in clockwise around the sun, and it looks like they're orbiting counter. I guess they'd have to, to be able to catch us this early. If these estimates are valid, we're closing with them at twelve hundred kps, with closest approach occurring about fourteen minutes from now.”

“Shit,” she said. “They're already damaging us from the outer limits of their weapons range. Things can only get worse.”

“Surrender now,” Bascal's recording suggested, breaking off from his song for a moment. “It's not too late. I'll be merciful, truly.”

“Dry up,” Xmary told the image. Then, to the holie window where Feck could be seen fussing with his reactor feeds, “Feck, I need you to go live with the engines a minute early, but not at full thrust. Go to seventy-five percent, and then institute a random walk program.”

“Dispersing our downrange?” Feck asked.

“Precisely.”

A kilometer beneath them, the engines began to groan.

“I don't understand,” Conrad said, feeling suddenly ignorant and out of place. He was an experienced naval officer, yes, but these two had worked together for almost two hundred years, facing heaven knew what sort of surprises and freak accidents along the way. They had a whole vocabulary about it, a rapport that went far beyond the merely romantic. This was hardly a time to be jealous, but just the same his heart cringed self-consciously. Here was a rival he could never match.

“Me either!” Eustace chimed in. “Can you explain?”

“We can't vary our course,” Xmary said, her tone bordering on impatience. “Not much, not enough. We can juke to the side, as in a collision-avoidance maneuver, but then we'll have to juke back again or our net velocity will be in the wrong direction. Very slightly, but over six light-years those slight errors become very costly in terms of distance, in terms of fuel. But what we
can
do is vary our acceleration along the direction of travel. This changes our arrival time without also changing our destination, and it makes our velocity and position harder to predict. It's a stealthing trick for vehicles like this one, which are inherently unstealthy. Comes in handy sometimes when the miners decide to get cute.”

“I can hear every word,” Bascal's image told her. “You are compromised, Captain. Why fight when your opponent knows your every move?”

Grinding her fists, Xmary turned her eyes on the thing. “First of all, the real Bascal Edward is forty-five light-seconds away, with Barnard in between us. You can't communicate with him—not in real time. And if you're relaying this conversation directly to
Fist,
which I imagine you are, even
they
have to wait three seconds to get it, and then three more for their beam to get back here to us, by which time we can be kilometers off from where they think we are. Try hitting
that
.”

“The spot is gone,” Conrad reported as, at the ertially shielded edges of perception, the ship whined and jerked around him. “They've lost track of us.”

“For now,” warned Bascal. “They will find you again, and make you the martyrs you're so determined to become.”

“I see something!” Eustace said, from the Information seat beside Conrad. “On the radar, it's a blip. It's a
cloud
.”

“Confirmed,” Conrad said, checking his own radar display, which by default was much smaller than Information's. He enlarged it. “They've released a swarm of projectiles in our path.”

“Size and number?” Xmary demanded.

“A few thousand pinheads. It's nothing the nav lasers can't handle,” Feck said, peering into some display of his own. “But why aren't they stealthed? I think these are decoys, Captain. We shoot at these, vaporizing a path, but the real danger is somewhere in front or behind. Pebbles of antimatter, I'll bet, suspended in a jacket of superabsorber. With propulsion modules, so they can stay out of our path, then juke into us at the last moment.”

Xmary thought that one over. “Okay. Okay,
something
like that, surely. What do we do about it?”

“Good question,” Feck said.

On Conrad's board, the damage alarms lit up again, more insistently this time. This time the broken threads were on the capward edge of the sail, which was still filling out to its full expanse. The spot was smaller—only fifty meters across now—and it wandered fitfully around a square kilometer of sail, but did not leave it.

“The spalling laser is back,” he reported. “They're having trouble keeping it focused, but it's definitely a threat to the sail. Not so much the hull.”

Xmary sighed. “The sail is a one-way mirror, right? Clear on the forward face and superreflective on the aft? Go superreflective on the fore as well.”

“That'll reduce our photon thrust,” Conrad warned.

“Until we pass out of Barnard, yes,” she agreed. “Once the star is behind us, it won't matter.”

“This is where the sail does us the most good,” he pressed. “You're cutting into our net impulse, prolonging the journey.”

“Understood,” she snapped. “But let's get there alive, shall we? Feck, I want you to start a juking program as well. Full lateral thrust at a ten-percent duty cycle. And yes, that's going to waste fuel, making the journey longer still. Do it anyway.”

“Aye, ma'am.”

She fretted for several seconds, while Bascal's image launched back into its “Fuck You Song.” Finally, over the racket, she said, “We can't stay on the defensive like this. We've got to shake them up. Conrad, what kind of beam can you throw their way?”

Conrad spread his hands. “I can generate a laser, ma'am, but they're stealthed, and probably juking as well. And they're a much smaller target than we are. All I can do is aim at my best guess.”

“Without ertial shielding they're limited by fuel,” Xmary said, “and they haven't got nearly the thrust that we do. If they're juking, it's minor. And we have the whole sail to use as a beam generator. Wasting power, yes, but a laser beam
ten kilometers wide
ought to be rather difficult to avoid. Feck, are you up for that?”

“No, sorry. Ma'am, if we're willing to sacrifice half our thrust, I can deliver you two gigawatts. Unfortunately, spread out over a hundred square kilometers of sail, that's about the power of a desk lamp. They're already fighting off Barnard's heat at sixteen megawatts per square meter, so we want to be
at least
as big a problem as that. Meaning the beam needs to be, uh, less than eleven meters across.”

“I can't hit them with that,” Conrad warned. “Not bloody likely. I can't see them. They're two seconds lagged, now, but I can't even see where they
were then
. They're invisible.”

“Shit,” Xmary said, throwing up her hands. And then a tentative expression broke out across her frowning face. “Wait a minute. Feck, they're absorbing all this heat from Barnard, right? And they're dumping it in the opposite direction. Every watt, or they'd be slowly cooking in there.”

“We're doing the same,” Feck said. “Blackbody emissions on the shadowed upward face. The radiator flux is called
huela puho,
a blaze beam.”

“Yeah, but we're not invisible and they are. Unless they're immediately upsystem from us, we
should
see a hot spot. Maybe they're hiding the emissions in a narrow frequency, longwave radio or something, but one way or another, all that energy has to go somewhere.”