To Crush the Moon (4 page)

chapter two

in which a revolution is halted

There are moments for musing. Not moments of
truth, but moments
before
the moment of truth, when the mind squirts sideways, time stretches, thoughts race. Insights leap across the gray matter like fleeing deer. For Bruno it went thusly:

Given the Nescog, that glittering network of black-hole matter which linked every part of the Queendom to every other, he could step through the print plate of the fax machine behind him and, in a few hours' transit time which he himself would not perceive, step out through an equivalent plate in the palace foyer back on Tongatapu. Or anywhere else! The bulk of this journey would happen, alas, at Einstein's lightspeed, although ring collapsiter segments—long, thin tubes of collapsium with high-speed supervacuum inside—would shave a few minutes off it here and there.

Ah, but with wormholes in place of collapsiters, the journey could be instantaneous! Not just to Earth, or to any other corner of the Queendom, but to the stars themselves. To the failed and failing colonies scattered among the nearby stars and dwarfs. Bruno and Tamra had sent too many young men and women out there to their deaths. Their
deaths
! But it was an error on which they could still, in some small measure, make good. If Bruno could just build a damned wormhole.

The whirling fan of
Newhope
expanded in his view, and expanded some more. Belatedly, Bruno pulled up a schematic of the ship from
Boat Gods
' library, and then sketched an outline of the entry and exit wounds upon its hull. Presumably, the projectile had been stationary, at least in comparison to the starship's own large velocity. And that meant
Newhope
had not been facing forward or backward at the time, as she should have been for safety's sake, but rather broadside to the dust and debris of interstellar space. Oops.

So what had happened? From
Boat Gods
' myriad sensors, a story began to emerge. The accident had occurred hundreds of years ago, the ship taking first a freak hit to its forward ertial shield, slightly off-center. The shield was hard to damage, and would have absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy, releasing it over several minutes as a blue-green flare of Cerenkov photons. A survivable event, yes. But compressive interactions had probably sent shockwaves and electrical surges all up and down the hull and superstructure, stunning the wellstone and preventing the navigation safety lasers from receiving power.

This much at least, the starship was designed to handle. But it had gotten unluckier; the collision tipped it slightly, and before the nav systems could recover or the lasers could vaporize it, a second particle—probably larger—had struck, and the resulting plasma had flashed straight through the hull at near-relativistic speed, sending her into a wild, chaotic tumble while her fuel supply squirted away into vacuum. And without its deutrelium the ship's reactor had run down, and the ship itself had gone to sleep, perchance to wake at some future date.

Well, with any luck, that day was now at hand.

Bruno adjusted his grapples and set about the task of attaching himself to the center of the tumbling ship. The rest should be easy enough;
Boat Gods
was outfitted with a universal airlock and augmented with the Royal Overrides which guaranteed Bruno access to, and control over, any enlivened device designed or constructed in the Queendom of Sol. Which included QSS
Newhope
herself, yes. And although the starship had no matching airlock—no hatches of any kind in the region of concern—the mere feather-touch of his grapples stirred piezoelectric voltages in the wellstone there, bringing it to some weak semblance of life.

The ship exchanged handshakes and data packets with the airlock, accepted an automated welcome-home message, and requested an infrared beam from which it could draw additional power. Then, more fully awake, it prostrated itself before the Royal Overrides, and agreed to allow itself to be damaged. And although the tiny hypercomputers inside it would not pass a self-awareness screening, and were at the moment no more collectively intelligent than a frog, the wellstone did express a sort of relief at finding itself, after all this time, among properly enlivened programmable materials rather than the mere metals and ceramics of the Barnard colony. It was good, apparently, to be home.

Bruno felt a moment of dizziness as
Boat Gods
pulled itself toward the whirling baton that was
Newhope
. But he had, at various times in his youth, found himself trapped in the ertial supervaccum of a ring collapsiter, or standing on the windblown surface of the very first neutronium-cored planette, or falling into a hypermass somewhere. Hell, one of him had fallen into the sun itself, and never returned. A bit of spinning wasn't going to stop him!

In the last few meters of closure,
Boat Gods
itself began to spin. And because it too was ertial, it matched the rotation of
Newhope
in no time at all, and with almost no sensation.

The airlock knew its business, too; once the two hulls had kissed, it commenced tearing an opening in the wellstone plates of
Newhope
, shuffling the atoms aside into a sort of docking collar. From the inside of
Boat Gods
, this activity sounded like the crack of billiard balls followed by a light rainfall. And when it came time to leave, the airlock could just as easily pull the atoms back again, restoring
Newhope
's wellstone to something very like its original condition.

Bruno had invented this technique long ago. Bruno had invented a lot of things. Why, then, must something as truly useful as a wormhole generator elude him? Perhaps he
was
getting old and slow, alas. He didn't even throw off his safety harness and fling open the airlock to see what lay behind it. Instead he studied his scans again, more intently.

The results were not encouraging; living people would show up as hot spots, of which he detected none. They would require atmosphere, of which he detected none. This was not surprising; at 29 Kelvin—barely above the four-degree cosmic background—every gas but helium would have condensed out as liquid or settled as a frost. But he didn't detect liquids, either; the ship's crew compartments had leaked or been deliberately evacuated. There might of course be
stored
human beings in a temporary fax buffer somewhere. These would show up as dense charge patterns in a wellstone matrix, and he found a few of those behind a structure that might be some sort of low-quality print plate. But over hundreds of years the cosmic-ray flux would have scrambled much of the data into total nonsense. If those were human patterns, the people they represented were dead. To survive the journey, any stored human images would need to reside in shielded memory cores, of which Bruno detected none.

What he did detect, in the cargo pods attached to
Newhope
's midsection, just aft of the crew quarters, were cylindrical masses of water ice, roughly three meters long and one meter wide. Thousands of them; tens of thousands. The ice was shot through with complex organics which he couldn't identify from here, and by tuning his sensors to a calcium channel he was able to pick out fine, solid structures within the cylinders. Human skeletons, surrounded by greasy envelopes of frozen human flesh, drowned in ice-filled tubes of glass and metal.

Twenty-five thousand frozen people. Interesting. Troubling. There would be a lot of bureaucrats busy on this one.

Freezing was not considered a lethal event in the Queendom of Sol, any more than heart failure or drowning were lethal events. A few people had even been reanimated after
hundreds of years
of cold storage. This was one of those “civic-duty” things Tamra had enacted in the Queendom's earliest days—hunting down from the Age of Death all the frozen and mummified and pickled bodies which might conceivably be restored to life. Most of these efforts had been pro forma, mainly an archaeological exercise with little chance of
medical
success, but a few—twenty or thirty, Bruno thought—had been resurrected, and were brief celebrities in that heady time when anything seemed possible. Look, look! We can bring history itself to life!

Ah, but there were limits to human achievement. Painful limits, as Bruno and Tamra had learned through the blood and toil of their exiled subjects. Projects could fail; lives could end. Whole star colonies could suffer economic collapse so severe that the air tankers stopped running, their scattered habitats suffocating one by one while the Queendom stood helplessly by. Indeed, whole civilizations could lurch from seeming health to agonizing death in less time than the signals took to reach Mother Sol. Theirs was a hard universe, which granted no clemency.

In many cases, the only “survivors” of a colony's demise were those who had managed, by hook or by crook, to have a summary of their neural patterns transmitted back to the Queendom. Hardly more than interactive mail—just a few petabytes, or a few hundred petabytes. They were not people, though they sometimes believed they were. But their transmission consumed precious energy and transceiver time which an ailing colony could ill afford.

And even if they were people, didn't the Queendom have enough already? Was there room for more? Copy-hour restrictions had been tightened and retightened, to the point where most individuals—even those who'd once sent whole herds of themselves out into the world—counted themselves lucky to be plural at all. The waiting list for a birth license was now
five hundred years long
. And yet the cities grew taller and wider every year, encroaching not only on the precious primordial wildernesses of Earth, but the invented ones of Mars and Venus, which were far more delicate.
Half the population
was living in caverns and domes, dreaming in vain of fresh air. Should these very citizens be expected to fund the creation of an expensive new person from the tatters of a dead one?

So the messages remained, for the most part, in the limbo of quantum storage, against the day when resources might exist to birth and house them properly. If, indeed, such a day could be expected at all.

And here before Bruno was a similar question: what were the rights of a frozen, cosmically irradiated corpse from outside the Queendom? Doctors would have to be consulted before any decisions were made here—certainly before anything was vaporized by the navy. But why had someone gone to the trouble of bringing these corpses here, across the vastness of interstellar space? To be resurrected? Had the Queendom of Sol become a kind of afterlife, a dream of heaven for the children of the colonies?

Alas, there was almost nothing else onboard this ship. She was oversized for the job, her crew quarters mostly empty. The only other feature of note was a much smaller cluster of bodies—four, in fact—just forward of her engine control rooms, in a space that looked like a workshop or laboratory of some kind. For what? For whom? This ship had seen heavy modification in its long years abroad.

The chamber was not far from Bruno's own docking site. And presently, the sound of rain ceased; the burrowing airlock had gently punched through. Bruno threw off his restraints and rose from his couch.

“Sire,”
Boat Gods
said, in a basso voice rich with gravitas. “You'll want your helmet on.”

“Ah!” Bruno said, eyeing the transparent, nearly invisible dome tucked under his arm. “So I might! I'd've opened this hatch on hard vacuum.”

“Hardly, Sire.” The ship could not truly be offended, but it managed to sound that way. It would not have allowed the hatch to open.

“Well,” Bruno said, popping his helmet in place and listening to it crackle itself sealed, “do please open it now.”

“Aye, Sire.”

It would take a steady, hundred-kilowatt feed to wake up
Newhope
's higher functions, and given the level of cosmic-ray scrambling and the long absence of functioning maintenance routines, the wellstone was inclined to take this process very slowly indeed. Still, unseen and unsensed by Bruno, the starship's running lights came on, and its interior began, gradually, to warm.

When he stepped through the hatch, the head- and taillights of his battle armor came on automatically, casting pools of glare and gloom around a wedge-shaped compartment—a crew cabin—covered in frost, unused, undisturbed by anything but his own featherlight footsteps, crunching faintly against the jags and spines of frozen atmosphere.

By now, the wellstone's awareness was no longer limited to a handful of lightly powered hull plates. Indeed, almost the entire structure had come alive, and was slowly charging itself, rearranging its electronic structure, becoming a proper starship hull and skeleton once again. And in its newfound powers the starship remembered its manners, and produced a soft yellow glow from the cabin's frosted ceiling.

“Ah. Thank you,” Bruno said, though it wasn't clear whether the ship could actually hear or understand him yet.

Bouncing lightly along the hoarfrost-crackling floor, he moved to the cabin's only exit. He smiled, for here was an actual
door
, not some temporary aperture but an actual plate hung on mechanical hinges and enclosed within an actual door frame. There was even a little knob or handle which, if he recalled correctly, one had to turn in order to release the latching mechanism. He grasped the handle, turned it, and with delight felt something click and release between the door and its frame. He pushed, and felt a sort of crunching through the wellcloth of his armor as the frost-sealed door broke free and swung open. Marvelous!

Bruno himself had grown up in Old Girona, before the Queendom, at the very peak of the Catalan love affair with ancient habits and technologies and social mores. The Sabadell-Andorra earthquake had of course smashed that daydream—and Bruno's own parents, and thousands of other human beings besides. It was the last great disaster of Old Modernity. But before then he had turned his share of doorknobs, uncorked his share of glass bottles, even knotted his shoes to his feet with laces of hand-woven cotton! He was careful not to overromanticize those days, but he wasn't above the occasional reminiscence.