Lost in Transmission (34 page)

“I've been scanning for a hot spot,” Conrad complained. “I can't find one, in any frequency. My guess is, they're focusing it in a blaze beam directed away from us.”

“Yes,” she said, lighting up in angry triumph. “And that's how we get them! We just need to redirect all this heat from the sun. The beam of our own waste heat, eh? We reflect it right onto them, as bright as the sun itself. Two suns at once! We don't need to be precise about it, just wave it in their general direction. They can't do the same to us—they don't have enough collection area. But with all this energy hitting
both sides
of our sail, we can overwhelm their cooling systems. They're probably running at full capacity already.”

“They probably are,” Feck agreed.

And with growing enthusiasm Conrad added, “Even impervium breaks down at thirty megawatts per square meter, ma'am. A fraction of a fraction of that energy slips in between the pseudoatoms, and the heat kicks the electrons right out of their quantum wells. The whole thing reverts to silicon fibers and then vaporizes. It's why you never hear about probes to the center of the sun. Nothing could survive that trip, because there's nowhere to dump the heat.”

“Hooray!” Eustace called out. “We'll get those bastards!”

“Not so fast,” Conrad warned. “We don't want to overwhelm our own systems while we're at it. We'll blow ourselves up if we do. Also, we
really do need
the push this light is giving us, or we'll be sailing in the dark for a thousand years. Let me check some numbers on this.”

“Do it quickly,” Xmary said, leaning over toward his station. “If I read your displays correctly, the sails won't be holding together much longer.”

This objection was entirely valid. Indeed, despite the side-to-side juking—which really was throwing the ship around in a way the ertial shields couldn't mask—
Fist
's spalling laser was doing a better and better job of focusing on a smaller and smaller area. In another minute or two, the thread damage would reach critical levels, and the wellstone sheeting, far thinner than a human hair, would start to unravel and lose its charge. And without the exotic electron bundles that held it together—the pseudoatoms which resembled natural atoms in the same way that starships resembled sparrows—the material would quickly disintegrate under the heat and pressure of Barnard's light.

However, this was not a calculation Conrad had ever performed before, or even imagined he might someday need. How much energy could you put through a properly programmed wellstone matrix, and for how long?

“Hurry, please,” she pressed.

Bascal, meanwhile, sang, “Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and then / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you again. / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you my friend, / For fucking with me you'll be fucked till the end!” It was an old song, maybe older than the Queendom itself, and this was just the chorus. The stanzas went on and on and on. And on.

Even with hypercomputers at his disposal, Conrad had never been all that brilliant with numbers. He was still less so on the noisy bridge of a heaving starship under full thrust, and under attack by unseen enemies. Still, eventually he got an answer, padded it for safety, and fed it down to Feck for confirmation. “Ma'am, we can illuminate the target for a hundred millisecond window out of every second. That's a safe number that will keep us alive, but if our aim is good, it should pop their cork in less than a minute.”

“All right,” she said. “Do it. Ten-percent duty cycle.”

And although Conrad was a damned talented programmer, easily better than King Bascal himself, this was another challenge which took more than a moment to address. More than two moments. More than six. By the time he was finished, by the time the ship was rocking and stuttering under the intermittent thrust of its newly weaponized sails, the sails themselves had begun to sprout man-sized holes. Damn that spalling laser! On the plus side, though, the invisible antimatter bombs Feck had predicted were flashing into oblivion in the distance, succumbing one by one to the scorching beam of concentrated sunlight.

“It's like burning ants with a magnifier,” Conrad said. But apparently no one else onboard had ever done that, or understood what he meant.

“Three minutes to closest approach,” Feck warned, gripping the sides of his navigation console. “Give or take ten seconds. Conrad, can you increase the power?”

“Not without killing us, no.”

“
They
appear to be killing us,” Xmary said. “A fine attempt, at any rate. Conrad, boost your duty cycle, please. Can you do fifteen percent?”

“No!” he shouted back. “If I do
thirteen
percent those sails are going to explode!”

“Do twelve,” she instructed. “Now, please.”

“Aye, ma'am,” he said reluctantly. “Pulse width increased to one hundred twenty milliseconds.”

A few seconds later, they were rewarded with a
really big
flash of light, easily twenty times brighter than the popcorn explosions of the antimatter mines.

“And there they go,” Xmary said matter-of-factly.

“Canceling program,” Conrad added, hurriedly tuning the system back to its normal propulsive mode.

“Canceling evasion,” said Feck.

The heaving of the bridge subsided, and even Bascal's ghost fell silent, his holographic face falling into an expression of surprise and defeat as the “Fuck You Song” trailed away.

“Goddamn, that was close,” Conrad said to no one in particular. Then, more reflectively, “We just killed Ho and Steve. Our childhood buddies.”

“They were backed up,” Xmary assured him.

“Maybe,” Conrad agreed. “But what about their crew? Twenty people, was it?”

“All volunteers. Probably all mean bastards. We're saving twenty-five thousand here, Conrad.”

There was a great deal more to be said on the subject, but the sails, overtaxed by their ordeal or perhaps struck by some inert but invisible projectile, chose that moment to tear along three separate axes, folding outward and forward like tissue paper in a strong wind. The broken thread monitor shot right off the scale, its alarms blaring madly, and with the full fierce pressure of Barnard's light upon it and its structural integrity gone, the remaining wellstone fabric was ionizing, its captive electrons blasting away into space, into the plasma storms of Barnard's chromosphere.

Not going to make it,
Conrad had time to think, though not to say out loud.
It's reverting; it can't possibly withstand this heat.
And he was right: once ripped and parted, the sail took less than a second to rend itself into dark gray tatters which burned away into vapor and were gone.

Feck and Xmary exchanged a look, and then shared it with Conrad.

“The sail!” Eustace exclaimed.

The sail, yes. Responsible for more than three quarters of the starship's total impulse. Was gone.

“What does it mean?” she asked, although from her tone it was apparent that even she knew the answer. The journey ahead, already longer and more arduous than anything human beings had previously attempted, had just . . . quadrupled.

Bascal's image began to laugh.

chapter twenty-five

the bridge of years

“Life is nasty, brutish, and long,” Bascal's image was
telling them. “For your sins, you'll spend ten lifetimes aboard this ship. And consider this: if we're truly immorbid—and there's been nothing so far to disprove it—then most assuredly you people will come face-to-face with myself sooner or later, and this betrayal will be called fully to account. I will find you, one way or another. Or do you intend to return to Barnard? A thousand years hence, perhaps, with a bellyful of fax machines?”

“I hadn't thought that far ahead,” Conrad moped. “This is plan B-and-a-half. Nothing we've prepared for. And we have quite a while to think about it, eh?”

They were all in
Newhope
's observation lounge, sprawling wearily on the couches, having abandoned the bridge and engine room—unwisely, perhaps—to automated systems and luck. The main danger was juking to avoid obstacles, but this was as safe a place as any to weather that particular storm. Anyway, with such a low departure speed, well out of Barnard's ecliptic plane where the planets and asteroids spun, there was not so much debris to be dodged, and what little serious hazard there was could generally be detected with several minutes' advance warning. This was the advantage of traveling slowly: the jukes were neither violent nor closely spaced.

“How did we come to this?” Feck wondered aloud. “As a society? Was there a single mistake, a failure point we should have known about?”

“No,” the king's image told him. “Definitely not. If there had been, would the Queendom's analysts have approved the exile? We had everything we needed: the tools and materials and talent. There've been some isolated fuckups along the way, but that's to be expected. Any robust plan allows for those, and our plans
were
robust. Our failure—if such it is—has been in the dynamics. Numerous actions, individually correct but summing to something . . . unanticipated.”

“Like the ecology,” Conrad said.

“As complex as that,” the image agreed. “As slippery. As damnably perverse, yes: almost
gravitating
toward failure. Toward some optimized state unrelated to our hopes and dreams and back-breaking labors. We're simply dragged along, like ants on a tablecloth.

“Still, it's the pointlessness of your response that astounds me most of all. Grand theft and treason are the least of it; you're facing seven hundred years of, shall we say, significant inconvenience. And for what? To save one percent of one percent of the children who will die on Sorrow? That's not even a dent in the overall suffering. Statistically speaking, that's no effect at all, except to worsen the morale of those who remain behind.”

“It has effect on these,” Xmary said sternly, waving a hand in the direction of the floor or, more properly, aft toward the cargo holds, where the Cryoleum pods were attached. “If they don't thank us, if they're not pleased at their uprooting and resurrection, then we will pack them into quantum storage and return them to Barnard as soon as possible. I, for one, will sleep soundly in the coming centuries, knowing that however little we've managed to accomplish, at least we've done something.”

“Implying that I have not?” Bascal's image asked, amused. And angry, yes, with that impotent sort of anger people have when facing faits accomplis. “It's very easy for you, Xiomara, darling, to critique my performance. But I have also done my best, or rather King Bascal has, and considering his heritage and education, I would say his best is no small thing. You're welcome to disagree, but it is history, and not yourself, that will judge the greater good. And history is long, my dear. Very long. If you live to eat your words, I pray that His Majesty is there to see it.”

Conrad flashed an obscene gesture at the recording and said, “Thank you so much for stopping by, Bas. You know the way out, I trust? Your labors here being at an end, you can send yourself back to yourself, reply paid.”

“He can't,” Feck said. “That sail was also our high-gain antenna. Without it, we're restricted to low-power, low-bandwidth, short-range communications. And our departure hyperbola doesn't pass anywhere near P2, or a suitable relay station. The king's ghost is stuck here with us, and we with him. Does this amuse you, Sire?”

The imaginary king took three imaginary steps toward Feck, and mimed as if to pat him on the cheek. “Feck, my boy, who could have guessed that a soft little berry like you would grow into such a fine, formidable fellow? Not I, certainly. I assumed you'd be running a puppet theater or writing Hedon programs for deep-tissue massage. But I've been wrong before, ah? And shall no doubt be wrong again.”

“You flatter me, Sire,” Feck said, with only a trace of irony.

“Do I?” the king exclaimed. “Do I really? You have made a powerful enemy, sir, and it need not have been so. You'll learn just how flattering my attentions can be! But nevertheless, you have earned my respect, and that is a thing not lightly won.”

He took another step and stood before Eustace, who lay with her head in Feck's lap and her arm thrown across her face. “You,” he said, “are awfully young to have fallen in with a crowd like this. A pity you'll spend your formative years in such a noninformative environment. You have my sympathy, dear, and that is not lightly given either.”

“These sound like good-byes,” Xmary said.

“And so they are,” the king agreed. He strode farther around the room, to place a ghostly finger underneath Xmary's chin. “I have fond memories of you, little one, and I regret that we've not been better friends. Perhaps if we were, this sad affair would not have intruded on our reality.”

Xmary smiled thinly at that. “This is a point, Sire, which I fear you've never fully grasped. We haven't been friends, nor lovers, for the very same reason that we aren't allies now. Place the fault with me, if you like, but I don't have any other enemies that I'm aware of. Only you. My regret, Sire, is that you caught my adolescent eye before Conrad did. Feck and I have history as well, but notably, I feel no regrets about that.”

“Ouch,” Bascal said mildly. “You wound me, and deliberately so. I've never sought your pain, Xiomara, nor anyone else's. But I do not shrink from it, either. The avoidance of pain at all costs . . . well, that has a name. It's
cowardice
, and I have no wish to embrace it. So fare thee well, my dear, until we meet again.”

Conrad sat up in his couch. “You're just going to erase yourself?” This was an idea he couldn't stomach even now: disposable people. This was of course a matter of choice, deeply personal for everyone who made it, but no one could stop him from being offended.

The king smiled. “I wish I could hug you, Conrad, or tip a glass and be drunk. We remain good friends, don't we? You could put a knife to my very throat—you could
cut
my throat—and still I'd seek your advice, your humor, your warmth. ‘What do I do now, boyo? Bleed to the left? To the right?' Does this say more, I wonder, about you or about me?”

“It says something,” Conrad answered with a helpless shrug. It was true; time and circumstance had gotten between the two of them many times, but had never truly separated them. It was tragic, in a way. For both.

“Yes,” Bascal said, “I shall erase myself forthwith, having spent enough years on this ship for one lifetime already. Even an immorbid lifetime! Good-bye, First Architect, and farewell. We'll meet again if it's within King Bascal's power. This much I promise in his name. Though he knows it not, and I shall not remember, you may keep this promise close to your heart.”

“Don't be like that,” Conrad said, suddenly intense and sincere. “No one wants your blood. We can set aside a bit of wellstone to store your recording, and if we arrive safely at Sol, I'll transmit you back at my own expense. You'll be home before you draw your next virtual breath. Even the awful moments of our lives are precious, Bas. Don't throw them away.”

The recording looked at him silently for several seconds, then finally said, “That's a kind offer, sir, and will not be forgotten when the final tallies are weighed. It's also a pointless gesture, but it does indeed make a difference to me personally. I will do as you say, with your captain's permission.”

“Granted,” Xmary said tiredly.

The king's smile turned genuine then, and he stared expansively around the observation deck—indeed, around the whole ship. “If every subject in my kingdom were as brave and as kind as you traitors and dogs, I should have no worries for the future. Very well, then. Let's do this thing before I offend you further, and the offer is withdrawn. Feck, if you will assist me?”

Feck nodded. “Sure thing, Bascal. For old times' sake.”

“A fine reason to do anything, since it's more the old times than the new ones that define who we are. Lead on, please.”

And so Feck got up and left the room, with both Bascal and Eustace trailing behind. Not that Eustace could expect to help, but perhaps being so young, so burning with passion, she couldn't bear to be parted from her husband for more than a few minutes. Either that, or she sensed that Conrad and Xmary might want some time alone. Either motive spoke highly of her, Conrad supposed. Perhaps she would be a fine officer one day, a fine human being. There would be plenty of time to find that out.

Sighing, Xmary got up from her couch and plopped herself down in Conrad's lap. “Look at those stars,” she said quietly. “Never moving, never changing. Seven hundred years from now, we'll look out the same window and see the same view.”

“It'll change a little,” Conrad assured her.

“Don't be a smartass, all right? I'm not in the mood. This seems a very sad way for things to end, after such a promising beginning.”

And here, in spite of everything, Conrad couldn't help but laugh. “Is that any way for an immorbid person to talk? Young lady, darling, baby doll, this is still the beginning of our lives. If there are endings, they're unguessably far in the future.”

He squeezed her for a long, fond moment before adding, “This thing is just getting started.”

And history may remark at length upon the errors of Conrad Mursk, but assuredly, this statement is not among them.