+ 300 KILOSECONDS
Raul Nakamore, Hand of Harmony, settled back into the padded acceleration couch, weightless, held down by straps. He wedged the light wire headset into a slot on the panel, through with the radio, through arguing with his half-brother Djem. So he was wasting the Grand Harmony’s resources…risking his life…risking the crews of three ships to pursue a phantom. So he was leaving Snows-of-Salvation unprotected from a Demarchy attack to chase a ship that could run rings around the ships of the Grand Harmony, even this high delta-vee strike force. A ship from Outside…a crippled starship, that had left behind a tiny spreading cloud of debris and human remains. A ship that had eluded their grasp once—but that might not be able to do it again. It was worth the gamble. But Djem never could see beyond the end of his own nose. Raul half-smiled.
Somewhere five thousand kilometers below him, silhouetted against the silvered detritus of the Discan rings, the lump of frozen gases that was Snows-of-Salvation held the Grand Harmony’s chief distillery. It had been constructed with Demarchy aid, and it was crucial to the Harmony’s survival, and the Demarchy’s. His brother was in charge of Snows-of-Salvation, would do anything to maintain its safety. But if the Demarchy decided to attack here in the Rings, even this “secret weapon” couldn’t stop them from doing fatal damage. And in spite of what too many in the Navy believed, the Demarchy would never try it, anyway. Djem would never be able to see that, but Raul would stake his career on it—had staked his career on it. The Demarchy would never attack them…unless it had that starship. But if the Grand Harmony took it first—
“Sir.” Sandoval, the balding ship’s captain, interrupted his pattern of thought diffidently. “Everything’s secure for ignition. At your command—”
Raul nodded, unbuttoning his heavy jacket in the unaccustomed warmth of the control room. Been underground too long…He sighed. “Proceed.”
Sandoval settled back into his own seat, spoke orders into his headset that would coordinate with the crews of two other ships. There was no video communication; video was used only to impress the enemy. Raul studied the complexity of the control board, banks of indicators spreading up the walls in the cramped space around them. Most of it was prewar artifact computing equipment, installed to give these ships superior maneuverability in combat. They were one segment of the Grand Harmony’s high delta-vee defense force, specially designed, specially equipped with a fuel-to-mass ratio of one thousand to one. Although Raul Nakamore ranked in the highest echelons of the Harmony navy, he had always maintained that their existence was a pointless waste of desperately needed resources; and for that reason he had never been on board one of these ships before. But now the starship had changed his mind; as it could change the very future.
He sank heavily into the padded seat as the ship’s liquid-fuel boosters ignited and thrust grew to a steady two gravities, more than slightly painful on his Belter’s frame. He checked the chronometer on the panel. Thrust would continue for thirteen hundred seconds, boosting them to sixteen kilometers per second…and in that time, expend seven thousand tons of fuel: the outer stages of the three ships themselves, and of seven drones. And still it would take them over two megaseconds to reach Lansing—and their quarry might not even be there. Raul settled down to wait, trying not to imagine the waste, but rather to remember what had made him so certain it was worth it…
He had been sitting in his office, studying endless shipping schedules, when the confidential report had reached him: a ramscoop starship, origin unknown, had crossed the path of a naval patrol…and had destroyed one of their ships before escaping. He had studied the report for a long time, with the warmth of the methane stove at his back and the chill silence of Heaven’s future ahead of him. And then he had noticed that a meeting was announced, his presence was required.
He left his office and made his way along the endless dank, slightly smoky corridors from the Merchant Marine wing. The government complex made up the greater part of the tunnel-and-vacuole system that honeycombed the subsurface of the asteroid Harmony, that had been the asteroid Perth in the time before the Civil War, before the founding of the Grand Harmony. The chill began to eat its way through his heavy brown uniform jacket; he pushed one hand into his pocket, using the other to push himself along the wall. He was a short man, barely 1.9 meters, and stocky, for a Belter. There was a quality of inevitability about him, and there had been a time when he had endured the cold better than most. But he was a career navy man, and he had spent most of his adult life on ships in space, where adequate heat was the least of their problems. But for the past sixty megaseconds since his promotion he had been an administrator, and learned that the only special privilege granted to an administrator was the privilege of managing a double workload.
He passed through large open chambers filled with government workers, into more hallways identical to the ones he had just left, into more chambers—as always experiencing the feeling that he was actually traveling in circles. Unconsciously he chose a route that took him through the computing center, guided by past habit while he considered the future. The past and the present surprised him as he became aware of his surroundings: of the crowded rows of young faces intent on calculation, or gaping up at his passage.
He looked toward the far corner of the chamber, almost expecting to find his own face still bent over a slate of scribbled figures. He had worked in this room, twelve-hundred-odd megaseconds ago, starting his career while still a boy as a computer fourth class. A computer in the oldest sense, because the sophisticated machinery that had borne the Discans’ burden of endless computations had been lost during the Civil War. After the war, the Grand Harmony had learned the hard way that it would never survive without precise data about the constantly changing interrelationships of the major planetoids. And so they had fallen back on human computation, using the inefficient and plentiful to replace the efficient but nonexistent, as they had had to do so many times.
A bright child could learn to do the simpler calculations, and so bright children were used, freeing stronger backs for heavier labor. Raul remembered sitting squeezed onto a bench with another boy and a girl, huddled together for warmth. His nose had dripped and his lips were chapped, and he had stared enviously at the back of his half-brother Djem, who was one hundred and fifty megasecs older and a computer second class. The higher your rank, the closer you sat to the stove in the center of the room…By the time Djem made first class, Raul had joined him, and been rewarded with warmth and one of the few hand calculators that still worked.
Their common grandfather had proved Riemann’s Conjecture, and become the best-known mathematician—and perhaps the best-known human being—to come from the Heaven Belt; but then the war had come, and made him only one more refugee. He had been on vacation in the Discan rings when the war began, and his loyalties had been suspect. But his mathematical skill had been undeniable—and now, two generations later, the residue of his genius had put his grandsons on the path to success in a new regime.
“Only through obedience do we earn the right to command…” Raul left the computer room, and his youth, behind; the universally colorless moral admonitions from the inescapable wall speakers crept back into his consciousness along with the cold. He wondered how long it would be before the news of the alien starship worked its way into the communal broadcasts, between the Thoughts from the Heart and the lectures on Demarchy decadence—and what form it would take when it did. He did not object to the constant intrusion into his life. He was used to it. It was as much a part of the life he knew as the cold. He realized that it served a purpose, distracting the people from the cold and the endless dreary labor of their daily lives, reinforcing their sense of unity and dedication to the group.
But if he felt no resentment toward the broadcasts, neither did he take them seriously any more. He had realized long ago that they were just as much propaganda as the Demarchy’s own lurid displays of unharmonious advertising…The Demarchy, that still lived in warmt
h and comfort—thanks to the distilleries of the Grand Harmony—but which kept the people of the Grand Harmony from sharing that comfort. It refused to sell them the atomic fission batteries that were still the Demarchy’s major source of power, for heat, for light, for shipping, for the few factories that still operated. No existing factories operated at more than one percent efficiency in the Grand Harmony—except for the distilleries—and virtually their only source of heat and light came from the inefficient burning of methane (because the Rings had a surplus of volatiles, but that was all they had).
Raul pushed the thought out of his mind, as he pushed aside the more painful truth that his people, all the people in the Heaven Belt, were doomed. Regret was useless. Hatred was counterproductive. Raul faced the truth, and faced it down. He saw the road ahead clearly, saw it grow steeper and more difficult until at last it became impossible. But he moved ahead, one step at a time, strengthened by the knowledge that he had done all that was humanly possible.
There had been a time when he had absorbed every word of the broadcasts, and believed every word. He had hated the Demarchy then, with the blind passion of youth; and because he was young and competent and expendable, he had been sent on a mission of sabotage into Demarchy space. And he had failed in his mission. But to his intense humiliation, the perversity of the Demarchy’s media-ruled mobocracy had transformed him into a popular hero, taking his impassioned last denunciation of their own aggression to heart…and the Demarchy had sent him home, a shamefaced messenger of goodwill, to open negotiations for the construction of a distillery that would benefit both the Demarchy and the Grand Harmony.
But relations between the Harmony and the Demarchists had never improved past that one act of cooperation, the real purpose of which lay in their shared needs: independent Demarchy corporations still violated Discan space, and only their overall economic weakness kept them from outright seizure of the Harmony’s vital resources. The Grand Harmony still denounced the Demarchy, and blamed them for its own marginal existence.
But because of his experience in the Demarchy, the conviction that good and evil were as easily marked as black and white, that every question had a simple answer, had been lost to him forever. And as he came to see that the Demarchy was not totally evil, he had realized that it was not totally to blame for the Harmony’s precarious survival, either. He had come to see the greater, totally amoral and totally inevitable fate that drew the Grand Harmony, and the Demarchy as well, down the road of no return.
And when he had seen that there was no turning back, no turning aside, he had transferred from Defense to the Merchant Marine; to serve where he believed he could function most effectively, and make the Harmony’s passage down that road as easy as possible.
Raul reached the hub of the government complex at last, felt the eddies of cold draft catch him as he moved out into the suddenness of open space. Overhead the ceiling was dark and amorphous, but he knew that its vault was a surface of clear plastic, not solid stone. Once it had opened on the stars, and the magnificence of Discus—when the Rings of Discus had been the water-well for the entire Heaven Belt. But now the clear dome was blocked beneath an insulating pack of snow; the dome had become too great a source of heat loss.
He made his way across the multiple trajectories of other drifting government workers, most of them navy men like himself. He returned their raised-hand salutes automatically, his mind reaching ahead of him into the restricted meeting room where his fellow Hands sat in a private conference with the Heart.
Raul settled quietly into his seat, waiting for the meeting to be called to order. He sat at the end of the long table farthest from the position of the Heart, as the newest officer to achieve the rank of Hand. He nodded to Lobachevsky on his right, looked past, identifying the faces of officers and advisers down the table. He noted without surprise that they had split into opposing factions, as usual—the defense faction on one side, the trade faction on the other. He had settled with the trade faction, as usual. Seeing the bare, shining tabletop as a kind of no-man’s-land between them, he smiled faintly.
A single word silenced the muttered speculation; Raul turned his attention to the head of the table, rose with the rest, acknowledging the arrival of the Heart—the triumvirate that controlled power’s ebb and flow in the Grand Harmony. Chatichai, Khurama, and Gulamhusein: like a many-faceted Hindu deity, indistinguishable from one another, or from their staff, in the drab sameness of their bulky clothing…but unmistakably set apart by an indefinable self-satisfaction—and the unharmonious ambition that had taken them to the top, and made them struggle to stay there. Raul knew the kinds of stress that worked on them, and was grateful that he had already risen above the level of his own ambitions.
The three men at the head of the long table settled slowly onto the seat, a sign for the officers to do the same.
“I assume you all read the communications that brought you here”—Chatichai spoke, taking the initiative as usual—“and so I assume that you all know that fifty kiloseconds ago our navy encountered a ship like nothin’ that exists anywhere in this system…” He paused, looking down; Raul recognized a tape recorder on the table before him. “This’s a report from Captain Smith, who was in charge of the patrol fleet that encountered the craft.” He pressed a button.
Raul drifted against the table, listening, and watching expressions change along the table’s length. They had taken the intruder for a Demarchy fusion ship violating Discan space, at first. Then, as they began to close and a woman’s voice answered their challenge, they realized that what they had come upon was something totally unexpected. The ship had broken away from them, accelerating at an impossible sustained ten meters per second squared; it had destroyed one of their own closing craft almost casually, with nothing more than the deadly effluence of its exhaust. But they had fired on the escaping ship, and they had recorded a small, expanding cloud of debris…
An undercurrent of irritation and excitement spread along the table. “Why the hell didn’t Smith give that woman port coordinates, when she asked for ’em?” Lobachevsky muttered beside him. “Damn sight more reasonable than tryin’ to take the ship by force. Losin’ a ship—serves him right.” He glared across no-man’s-land at the opposition. Raul kept his own face expressionless.
Chatichai raised his eyes, and his voice. “The question before us now, gentlemen, is not whether Captain Smith acted in the best interests of the Grand Harmony—but what further action should be taken concernin’ that ship. I don’t think anybody here will disagree that the ship had to come from outside the system…” He paused; no one did. “And I don’t think we have to detail for anybody here what a ship like that could mean to our economy…or to the Demarchy’s, if they get hold of it instead.” Another pause. “But is it feasible, or even possible, for us to get our hands on that ship? And in any case, what action should be taken to ensure that it doesn’t fall into the Demarchy’s hands instead?”
Raul studied the dull sheen of the table’s scarred plastic surface, seeing beyond it as he listened with half-attention to the debate progressing along the table’s length: the ship was damaged…the ship could still outrun anything that Heaven Belt could send after it. The ship might seek out the Demarchy because of the attack…there was no reason to believe its crew would trust anyone in the Belt, now. The ship was the answer to the Harmony’s survival…the ship was a phantom, and pursuing it would only waste more resources they couldn’t afford to lose…
Raul glanced up, pushing his own thoughts into order. He rarely spoke out unless he had been able to consider all sides of a question; he had learned long ago that selective silence was a more effective tool than a loud voice. Since his promotion to Hand, he had used it to good effect to earn himself a reputation for getting what he wanted, for building up the efficiency of the Merchant Marine and the influence of the trade faction. Finding a lull, he broke into the discussion: “As you all know, I’ve been opposed to the development and support of our hi
gh delta-vee force from the beginnin’…” He searched the faces along the table, seeing resentment glance along the far side, feeling the gratification that spread from Lobachevsky along his own side. He had believed, along with the minority of others, that the Demarchy posed no realistic threat to the safety of the Grand Harmony, that the resources used to maintain a defense fleet would serve the Harmony’s interest better if they were employed to bolster trade within the Rings, and even with the Demarchy itself. Because he understood that the status quo was deterioration, and that nothing could overthrow that order…“But this’s a situation I never foresaw. In this situation, I have to admit I’m glad we have a high delta-vee force available…and I am in favor of usin’ it to pursue that ship—” Voices indignant with betrayal cut him off; he saw the hostility re-form into surprise across the table. “I know it’s a gamble. I know it’s probably a futile one, and the odds against us capturin’ that ship are damned high. But they’re not astronomical: the ship’s damaged, we don’t know how severely. It may be that they’ll lie low at Lansing, if Lansing’s still alive; it’s worth the loss, worth the gamble, to find out. We’ve got this damned high delta-vee force whether we want it or not—let’s put it to some rational use! If we know this much about the starship, you can count on the Demarchy knowin’ just as much—and bein’ just as interested. I don’t believe they’re any threat without that ship; but if we don’t get the ship, and they do, anything we do is goin’ to be academic from then on.
“I propose that the closest available high delta-vee force be readied as soon as possible to pursue the starship toward Lansing. And I request that I be given command…”
The acrimony of the final debate faded from his mind as acceleration’s false gravity abruptly ceased, leaving his body free in a sudden release from tension. He had won, in the end, because there was no one in the room who could question his sincerity, or his determination to achieve whatever goal he set himself. And so these ships would continue in a drifting fall toward Lansing. And if the life-support systems held out, they would find—something; or nothing. The cards had been laid down; the Grand Harmony had gambled on the last chance it would ever have.