Lost in Transmission (32 page)

“It was an interesting ride,” Conrad told her. “The Cryoleum is haunted.”

She nodded without really processing that. “We'll be changing orbits in about fifteen minutes, to rendezvous with a high-orbit refueling station. There, we'll top off our tanks, and leave from a higher potential in the gravity well.”

“Sounds good,” Conrad said. Generally speaking, details like that were left up to the captain's discretion, a fact which did not change merely because Conrad had hatched this particular conspiracy.

“How do I find the station again?” Useless asked.

“Never mind, dear,” Xmary told her sweetly. “The nav solution has already been entered.”

She pressed a lighted circle on her armrest and brought up a view of Engineering in a holie screen on the wall. “Feck, are you about ready for main drive propulsion?”

Life-sized, like a man looking in from an adjacent room, Feck looked up and nodded. “The reactors are online, obviously, drawing about one hundred kilowatts for internal power and maneuvering thrusters. The deutrelium pumps are already primed. All I have to do is open the valves. What I'm saying is, I don't need a warm-up period. I can light the fuse anytime you say.”

“Ah! You've streamlined the boost ignition sequence, then. Very good.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” he said, in easy tones which belied the words' formality.

“Good for you, baby,” Eustace added. Then, fiddling with the controls on her own panel, she managed to cast half the bridge into darkness.

Useless, indeed.

Conrad supposed he should take a more charitable view. After all, he had been young and green once, too. It had taken him quite a while to learn how to do things onboard a ship, and still longer to do them confidently and with style. And it was hard to begrudge Feck his young bride. He'd been a spaceman for quite a long time, and that was not a profession for lovers, or at least for would-be family men. But sooner or later, everyone seemed to get the urge to settle down for a while, and Feck, knowing he would be leaving for a very long, very isolated journey, had grabbed the first handy female who might agree to come with him. Which was not a stupid way for him to approach the problem.

Unfortunately, Eustace had no way of knowing what lay ahead: the stresses and deprivations of space travel, the confined quarters, and most of all the boggling ennui of living onboard this ship, with nowhere else to go, for eighteen decades. Conrad himself could barely get his arms around that one, could barely imagine how they would cope at all, much less thrive.

There was no quantum storage for them to crawl into this time, no medical-grade fax machines or memory cores. If they froze themselves—which was certainly an option if things got bad enough—they could not be thawed out and returned to life without Queendom technology. Medically speaking, it was a treatment of last resort.

So it was tempting—almost inevitable, really—to brand Eustace's enthusiasm as foolish in the extreme. But Conrad could remember very well the days of his own youth, when he would've leaped at such an adventure without hesitation. A whole new star system, a whole new society, and the promise of immortality at journey's end! Really, Conrad should be ashamed of himself for thinking unkind thoughts about her at all.

But still, even so,
Newhope
had been the first of the great Queendom starships, and even after 250 years she was still the pride of the Barnardean fleet. She had never—truly never—had a crew person this green, even at the very start when she'd been designed to keep as many hands busy as possible. Eustace's training for the mission had, Conrad imagined, consisted of nothing more than a few weeks in bed with Feck. And that was a poor preparation indeed for what lay ahead.

“I suppose we could go right now, then,” Xmary mused.

“Absolutely, ma'am,” Feck replied.

Xmary looked at Conrad. “Any objection?”

Conrad was about to deny it, and give his blessing for the journey to begin, when a second holographic window opened beside Feck's, and within it was the image of King Bascal, as real as life itself. He was wearing his diamond crown, whose weight pulled down the skin around it, giving his face a saggy appearance, an air of gravity. But this was his only concession to majesty; he was otherwise dressed in loose gray pajamas, with no adornment of any sort.

“Ah, Conrad, I thought I might find you here,” he said. This was technically a breach of protocol, since he should first address the Information officer and request an audience with the first mate. But Bascal's adherence to Queendom-style protocol was spotty at best, and today he seemed particularly irate.

“Hi, Bas,” Conrad said to him.

“What're you doing?” the king asked. It was an honest question. He knew something was going on, and he didn't like it; but at the same time he was curious, and part of him was maybe even a little bit amused.

“Just running a little errand,” Conrad answered.

Bascal nodded absently at that. “Uh-huh. Except that the crew of
Newhope
was off-loaded at Bubble Hood about four hours ago. As near as I can figure, you've got three people onboard that ship.”

“Four, actually,” Conrad corrected.

Bascal scowled, his voice growing firmer. “I'll ask you again: What are you doing?”

If Conrad had had any say in the matter, he would have cut the channel right there and then. But
Newhope
was a giant block of nanobe-tended wellstone, intelligent all the way down to the molecular level, and Bascal's Royal Overrides could command the obedience of all but the most critical systems. Those, fortunately, were safety locked and required biometric authentication, which could not be performed at a distance.

“I think maybe we should skip the refueling,” Conrad said to Xmary. “Let's just light up and go. Just go, now. That refueling is only for safety margin anyway, right?”

“Yes, I concur,” Xmary said. Then, glancing at the other window, “Feck?”

Feck nodded firmly. “Firing the engines now, ma'am.”

“You people are in a lot of trouble,” Bascal said, in a manner that was almost friendly. “You do know that, right? That starship is a very valuable—in fact irreplaceable—piece of property.
My
property. Using it without authorization is a serious crime,” his eyes settled on Xmary, “even for a captain.”

Then, anything else he might've said was drowned out by the rising groan of
Newhope
's engines. Fully loaded like this, kicking directly to full thrust, the start-up transients were at once louder and gentler—more damped by mass—than usual. And thanks to the ertial shields, the effective mass of
Newhope
was very small, so that the acceleration, which was barely perceptible from the inside, was in fact quite impressive. On holie windows all around the bridge, Planet Two could be seen shrinking beneath them.

“Planetary escape velocity . . . now,” Feck was saying. He had moved most of the helm functions down to Engineering, so he could steer and navigate while keeping the engines stoked. “We have broken orbit and are falling sunward. Eccentricity of our Barnard orbit is 0.2 and climbing.”

“Good,” Xmary said. “When it gets to 0.987, cut the engines and resume coasting.”

“Aye, ma'am.”

Eccentricity was a measure of their orbit's height and narrowness—its resemblance to a parabola rather than a circle. Numbers just under 1.0 meant the orbit was a flat ellipse, long and thin and very fast, like the trail of a short-period comet. As in their long-ago departure from Sol, the orbit would graze the chromosphere of Barnard—its hot middle atmosphere—and then the sails would unfurl and the engines would light up again, and the eccentricity would blow right past 1.0, breaking the top of the ellipse, opening it into a parabola whose arms stretched out to infinity. And then as their speed continued to build, a hyperbola, which reached infinity a hell of a lot faster, and also happened to be pointed back at Sol.

“Jesus,” Bascal said, the color draining from his face. “That's a sun-grazer. Unless you're committing suicide, which would be damned peculiar under the circumstances, there's only one reason for an orbit that tight: to fire at the bottom and boost your apogee. You bastards, you're going interstellar. Back to Sol? To Mommy and Daddy? Why are you doing that? Just four of you, sneaking away like dogs. In
my ship
.”

“Not sneaking,” Conrad said, unable to help himself.

“Not sneaking,” Bascal repeated. “Hmm. What are you up to, then? You and Xmary and some freshly printed
ta'ahine
I've never seen before.”

“Eustace Faxborn, Sire.”

“Be quiet, dear,” said Xmary.

“And who else?” the king asked. “Feck the Programmable Spaceman? My people tell me you're carrying five cargo pods which went up the tower just this morning. That's quite a load. What's in the pods?”

“Eccentricity .987,” Feck announced. “Cutting engines.” The groan of deutrelium fusion had quieted considerably over the course of the burn as the reactor's vibrations damped out, but now it cut off entirely. “Velocity relative to Sorrow is 30.59 kps. Relative to Barnard, 3.7 kps. We are falling, ma'am, and will enter Barnard's chromosphere in 122.5 hours.”

“The hell you will,” said Bascal. “Turn that ship around. If you do it now, I promise to hear out your grievances and be lenient in your sentencing. If not, I'll set Security on your trail, and by the time Ho's finished there won't be enough left to freeze. I mean it.”

“
King's Fist
is docked at Bubble Hood,” Conrad said, “and half her crew, including Ho, are on shore leave at the moment. This was a consideration in choosing our departure time.”

Bascal clucked his tongue angrily. “My, my. You always were a careful mutineer, Conrad. I give you enough rope to hang yourself, and you spin a fucking hammock with it. Maybe I knew that. Maybe I was sloppy or generous, but I can't let you get away with this. The colony can't afford it.”

“You could,” Conrad said, “for old times' sake.”

The king touched his nose, his lips, then trailed his fingers through his hair, brushing it up away from his face. “You could turn around for the same reason, boyo. Just tell me what you're up to. Please. You're my dearest friend. Don't force me to kill you without even knowing why.”

“I'll tell you when we're safely away,” Conrad said. “When we've gone hyperbolic.”

“Not good enough. You'll tell me now.”

“Or what, Bas?” Xmary cut in. “You're not going to catch us. Even if you hustle
Fist
's crew up the Gravittoir in the next ten minutes, it'd take them all day to match speeds with us, and even when they did they'd be hours behind us in our orbit. And out of fuel.”

Bascal considered that for several seconds before replying, “Yes, and it might take us months to mount a rescue, to retrieve them from that perilous orbit. Or longer, but
Fist
's crew are hard men, accustomed to sacrifice. They'll do their jobs. There are weapons capable of killing a person from that range, you know. Without harming the ship.”

“It's not like we're cowering in a metal can,” she countered. “We can repel your grasers and nasen beams. And if you have something subtler than that—some Marlon Sykes superweapon—or something cruder like a cannon or an ultra-high-powered laser, we'll just fire the engines again. The ertial shield puts acceleration on our side; we'll just scoot out of the way.”

Bascal smiled, thinly and unhappily. “Not if you want to reach the Queendom you won't. You need to fire from a particular point over Barnard's face, at a particular moment. You haven't got time or fuel to waste on evasive maneuvers.”

“We have some,” she said. “We have more freedom than
Fist
does. We are a starship, Your Highness, where
Fist
is not.”

“No,” he agreed, “she's not. If you're determined to outrun her, you probably can. So we'll have to catch you the long way around. Your departure course is fixed. It
has
to be, because there's only one straight line connecting Barnard to Sol. And if Ho waits for you along that line, then when you come around the sun you can't help but encounter him, at a range and location of his choosing.”

Oh, shit,
Conrad said to himself. Here was his overlooked detail. He was a good Naval officer—Feck and Xmary even more so—but they weren't warriors. They didn't think or plan like warriors. Shit, shit, that would have to change. Quickly.

“Now you see,” Bascal told them all. “Now at last you understand. This is not a democracy or an anarchy, where you're free to do whatever you fuffing please. How can it be? We
rely
on the economic edge that monarchy provides. Thirty percent better than the free market!”

“Ideally,” Feck told him, with a dismissive, derisive flutter of his hands. “If you, King Bascal, do everything perfectly.”

“You think I haven't?” Bascal asked, with less rancor than Conrad would have expected. “You think I'm just ignoring my advisors, my hypercomputers, my models and simulations? Could you do better with the same tools?” He looked around. “I can't see who's speaking. Is that you, Feck? Yes? Well listen, it may be true that we don't hit thirty percent on the best of days, but I'll tell you something: we don't hit fifteen percent either. Not on our worst, slowest, stupidest day. We're that much better than the sum of random chances. And if we fell back to a free market, do you know what a prolonged fifteen-to-twenty-five percent recession would do to this colony? Do you?”

“So you strip away the final illusions of freedom,” Feck admonished. “You ask people to live and die for you, all the while checking every economic action against some master plan. And what action is not economic in some way? You're talking about
total control,
backed up by the threat of lethal force. Will it be the death penalty for selling berries below the official price? A flogging, perhaps? All for the hope of some hypothetical resurrection, thousands of years in the future. What I'm saying is, that's much worse than what we left behind in the Queendom. Sire. Much worse.”