Rolling Thunder (49 page)

One of them was my uncle, Fleet Admiral William Redmond. He died at his post, directing the combat operations.

We buried him with full military honors, his closed casket draped with the Martian flag and his posthumous Medal of Valor. Inside with what was left of him was my Navy Cross. I didn’t want it anymore.

All hail Admiral Redmond! All hail the Martian Navy!

OUR VENGEANCE WAS
not swift, but it was terrible.

It took a while for our own Black Fleet to descend like nightmare bats on the solar system from their distant orbits. They existed as a deterrent, like the massed nuclear weapons that nations stockpiled after 1945, and the promise was implicit: You fuck with us, and we will destroy you. The crews of the Black Fleet were carefully chosen, and thought to be reliable if punishment had to be meted out. That punishment could include the squeezing of entire cities, but
not,
contrary to what the powers on Earth were told, the squeezing of the entire planet. We would not destroy the planet … but we’d do almost anything up to that point. That threat had held the Earth powers in line for a long time, but no more.

As in the previous wars, it was far from clear who had attacked us. No declaration of war had been made; no one had announced who they were before they started shooting. That made it easier to deny responsibility if things went bad.

The political situation on Earth was far too complex for me to follow, but the military situation was fairly simple. Very few military ships were landing or taking off from Earth. The winds were usually so strong that going through the atmosphere was extremely hazardous to all forms of aviation. The Martian Navy had lost several ships over the past year.

The generals on Earth had solved the problem several years earlier, when the climatic trend became clear. They based their fleets in orbit, mostly at the Lunar Lagrange points, ahead of and behind the moon’s orbit. I’m sure these huge bases had formal names, but everybody called them “battlestars.” There were five of them, all run by a Byzantine consortia of nations and corporations and individual power brokers—many of whom were more powerful than nations. Alliances shifted constantly.

It proved impossible to determine which battlestar or combination of them had launched the attack, and they all stood together, neither admitting anything nor ratting out any of the others.

So we destroyed them all.

An announcement was made:

Your bases and all your ships are about to be destroyed. You have one hour to evacuate. All lifeboats leaving your ships and bases will be spared; all armed ships leaving your bases will be destroyed. Your one hour begins now.

Lifeboats began leaving in thirty minutes.

Two of the battlestars decided to fight it out. As soon as the first ship undocked, the bases and ships were surrounded by thousand-mile bubbles and compressed. Sixty minutes later, the three remaining bases asked for and were given one additional hour to evacuate. Then those empty bases were compressed, too.

The five squeezer bubbles were taken to high-Earth orbit, about ten thousand miles, and detonated where everyone on Earth could see it, and the Black Fleet returned to its hiding place.

In two hours, the nations and institutions of Earth went from being the most powerful force in space to being totally unarmed. From that moment, Earth became irrelevant to solar-system politics, a beggar planet.

Do I regret the lives lost on those battlestars whose commanders decided to fight? You bet I do. A lot of the people who died were certainly grunts like I had recently been, just serving out their terms of enlistment.

But if you want sympathy, go to the families of those civilians killed in the bombing of Thunder City. I’m fresh out.

LONG BEFORE THESE
events, while I was still sleeping under the ice, something else was going on, quietly, under the radar. On Earth, on Luna, on Mars, everywhere, Travis’s agents were hiring.

“How did you keep it secret?” I asked him, once.

“Nothing secret about it. We just didn’t take out ads on the Net. It was mostly word of mouth. I let it be known I was building a ship and that I was looking for crew and passengers.”

They didn’t have to be rocket scientists—though some were—and they didn’t have to be ecologists, though he attracted plenty of them, too. Grumpy’s arrival had given Travis a sense of urgency concerning the
Rolling Thunder
. At that point no one had any idea if the crystals were going only to Earth, or if they’d hit Mars, Luna … everywhere. Having a ticket on the first ship out of the system, or maybe the only lifeboat leaving the
Titanic
, looked pretty attractive to a lot of folks.

There were conditions.

You worked for nothing but your food and lodging, and a ticket out of Dodge. Those few who had a problem with that were simply not taken on. Travis’s agents recruited carpenters, masons, steelworkers, anyone with a skill to help build the ship. Travis already knew that even his billions might not cover everything he needed in a project this size.

You didn’t have to be blue-collar, an artisan, a farmer, or a scientist. Travis recruited artists of all sorts, scholars, historians, librarians.

But there was one other condition. You had to be prepared to spend part or all of the voyage in a black bubble.

The capacity of
Rolling Thunder
to support life in its huge centrifugal terrarium was not unlimited. In fact, the ecologists told him there was a population cap that could
not
be exceeded,
ever
, or the whole thing might collapse. That number was a lot smaller than Travis would have liked.

“When we get to wherever we’re going,” he told me, “some Earthlike planet, the more people we have, the better our chances of survival are. I’d like to hit the beach with a hundred thousand,
minimum.
Twice that would be better. Maybe more. One thing I’ve got, though, is room.”

That’s when he took us down to the catacombs.

NOTHING DANK OR
gloomy about these underground caverns. What we saw was a series of tunnels about a hundred feet in diameter, encased in insulation but still quite chilly. There was no need to heat them much, and cold seeped in from the surrounding rock. We were given warm clothing and taken on a tour, riding on railed vehicles equipped with grappling devices. The temperature was just above freezing.

The tunnels were arrow-straight, lit by overhead strips, and so long they seemed to reach to the geometrical vanishing point. All along each side of us were standard warehouse racks in all sizes from shoe box to Dumpster or even larger. They were not at all heavy-duty, because they didn’t have to be. All they supported were black bubbles. Thousands and thousands of black bubbles in nets to hold them in place.

Each net and each rack was clearly labeled with a description and a bar code.

“Once you’ve made the bubble, there’s no way of telling what’s inside,” Travis was saying, as we rolled swiftly by this fantastic … warehouse? Library? Attic? A little of all those, I guess. He stopped beside a row of some of the larger bubbles. One of them said: “Elephant, African, Male, about twenty years old,” and a lot of other information.

“From now on I’m calling you Noah,” Grandma Kelly said.

“Noah was a piker,” Travis said. “Two by two isn’t enough for genetic diversity. I’ve got dozens.”

“Why elephants?” Dad asked.

“Why not? They’re extinct in the wild now, and nobody on Earth is going to have the time or resources to care for captive ones. Do I think we’ll
need
elephants where we’re going? I doubt it. But they cost me nothing. Nothing to transport since they have no mass, nothing to feed since they’re frozen in time. When we get where we’re going, there may already be something like elephants filling that ecological niche. We may never open these bubbles. But I don’t like a world without elephants. I think it’s a poorer world.
All
the big mammals on Earth will soon be extinct. I’m saving everything I can.”

“Sounds good to me,” Mom said.

“I’ve got little blue poison-dart frogs. I’ve got rats and snakes and dragonflies. I’ve even got mosquitoes, because, who knows, maybe they’re necessary for the ecology in here. We’re playing a lot of this by ear.”

“I hope we don’t need skeeters,” someone said.

“Me, too.”

We didn’t go all the way down that tunnel. There was a cross tunnel with a curving floor, and we took it to the next storage tunnel to the west.

“Books,” Travis said. “Some are cataloged, some are just what could be salvaged, tossed into big bins and then put in bubbles. They won’t deteriorate.”

He took us to bigger tunnels that held boats, aircraft, land vehicles, all in bubbles. Zero maintenance, zero dry rot, zero deterioration of any kind.

The last tunnel we visited—though there were many more— contained people. There were already a lot of them in there, but there were endless empty slots.

Everyone was quiet as we rolled down the tunnel. It was silly, of course. These people were alive, or at least potentially alive. But the atmosphere was that of a mausoleum, and respectful quiet seemed to be called for.

Travis stopped the vehicle and we all got out and browsed. You could shop for people here. Need somebody who could work in decorative ceramic tiles? Just enter the job description and three names and locations pop up. Can’t remember where you left your son, Skipper? Enter his name, and the machines retrieve the proper bubble for you. It was all a little creepy, especially when I thought of myself sleeping in one of them for a decade, but it was the best solution to a bad problem, and I’d have to get used to it. It was going to be a big part of my life for some time to come.

I wandered, reading the labels. So many names, so many occupations, and yet such anonymity.

/Tranh Van Minh. Age 35. Occupation, rice farmer.

/“Peasant, really,” Travis said, from behind me. “But that sounds condescending.”

“You know him?”

“Never met the dude. But here.” He called up the bar code, and I saw a picture of a small, smiling man. There was a picture of his wife and his three children. Then there was an extensive written biography.

“I ask them all to write about themselves,” Travis said, quietly. “A biography, as long as they’d like to write it. And hopes, dreams, stuff like that. Poetry. Anything.”

“He wrote this?”

“And his family. We only accept literate people.”

“In English?”

“That doesn’t hurt, but it’s not necessary. We want to bring as many languages with us as possible, and keep them in use. But English will be the working language.”

We were still quiet as we climbed back aboard, and not much was said as Travis took us to the inner surface, boarded us on the train, and we rolled back to the ship.

Everyone had a big decision to make.

THERE CAME A
time when all the decisions had been made.

All the preparations had been made. All the people we were interested in taking were loaded aboard, peacefully, timelessly sleeping. Everything that we could afford had been bought and stored away.

Travis was broke. I was broke. Neither of us cared. I was glad to be shut of the money, to tell you the truth. There had been far more of it than I could ever have used, my tastes being fairly simple.

I did one last tour, going only to Martian locations, saying good-bye to the planet of my birth. It was no secret that I was leaving. There was no resentment, no hard feelings. Most of the people in the audience were related to someone or knew someone who was going with us. I donated all the proceeds to Earth rescue operations. Soon, no ships would be going to Earth at all. They would have to fend for themselves.

So there came a time …

WE WERE ALL
assembled on the village green, of the village that still had no name. None of them did, they were just Village 1 or Village 20; there hadn’t been time for frivolities. Places were going to be named by the people who lived in them after we made sure the place wasn’t going to fall apart. They were mostly in suspended storage now. The asteroid that had become
Rolling Thunder
was sturdy rock, through and through, but acceleration was going to stress it.

No bands played, though there was food and drink. It was not a festive occasion. You might have expected Travis to be excited, pumped by the culmination of this long project, but he was gloomy, almost despondent. For once, it was Jubal who had to try to cheer him up, not the other way around.

“We’re leaving with our tails between our legs,” he moaned at one point. Travis hates to lose, and he hates to run.

“No,
cher,
no. We doing the smart thing. We seen how dangerous a place can get, practically overnight. We need to be other places, too.”

Travis knew he was right, logically—hell, he was the one who started this thing in the first place. But logic doesn’t always mesh with emotion. Some part of Travis really did think he
was
Superman, or at least he ought to be, or the combination of his daring and Jubal’s brains should be. And Superman never ran from a fight. He never gave up. He never lost.

And he lived in a comic book.

There was the traditional countdown. Though it was hardly necessary, I saw people bracing themselves as the clock neared zero. I realized I was doing the same thing. Travis was sitting at a control console, and we were all watching from a drone camera about a mile away, focused on the stern of
Rolling Thunder.
At zero, the scene lit up. Eight fantastically bright lights in a circle around the axis of rotation, balanced around the center of mass, began to shove the huge rock. These were the bubble engines, powered by the unimaginably compressed rock excavated from the asteroid. There was enough energy in those bubbles and the many others aboard to keep firing for ten thousand years. Total mass/energy conversion is a frightening thing, if you do the math with the good old E=mc
²
. Nuclear bombs only release a small fraction of the energy in matter. Bubbles convert it
all,
but luckily for us, they could do it a little at a time.