Lost in Transmission

Chapter twenty-three. By tuberail to the stars

Mechanically speaking, Conrad's plan was simplicity itself. Over a period of several years, the Cryoleum had become five separate structures, each mounted on tuberails and capable of traveling across the face of Planet Two. And for various historical reasons, the tuberails of the ground network were fully compatible with those running up the sides of the Orbital Tower, which by now was itself a historical anachronism that no one paid much attention to.

Traffic there was less than a tenth of what it had been in the glory days, even though it was cheaper than the Gravittoir. The Gravittoir was simply faster, and also more comfortable, with no sense of acceleration and none of the vibration or loud noises associated with tuberail travel. So when P2's morning was over, and with it the funeral season, it was very easy for Conrad to clear the Cryoleum's personnel on the trumped-up excuse that he needed to refinish the interior surfaces.

Then he simply stole the entire facility.

From a control station in the Orbital Tower itself, he whisked the buildings to Tower Base so quickly that it would be a day or two before anyone even realized they were gone. He did this neatly and with precision, allowing no interruption to the structures' power supplies or other services. From there things got even easier, since Murskitectura owned and operated the Orbital Tower. The Cryoleum buildings had been designed to fit side by side in Tower Base's large maintenance hangar, where Mack and his small team of loyalists tore the facades off them, revealing the more-or-less ordinary cargo podships beneath. Then, these pods were simply scooted up the tower like any other cargo.

“This is politically dangerous,” Conrad warned. “I hope these people don't know what they're doing, or why.”

“Let me worry about that,” Mack said with a wave of his hand.

“Yeah? And what about you personally?”

“None of your concern, Boss.”

“The hell it isn't! I needed trustworthy help, so I called you. I'm not going to leave you hanging when I'm through.”

“They don't do that anymore. Hanging.”

“Not that specifically,” Conrad said, “but what happens when you're caught?”

“If I'm caught,” Mack corrected. “Don't worry. I love a good lie, a good sneak behind the bushes, and if it falls apart and I'm standing there with my trousers down, well, that's a challenge of a different sort.”

“But—”

“I can take care of myself, Conrad. Think who my teacher was.”

Well, that was hardly reassuring. But what could he say?

Soon the cargo pods were stripped and ready, and it was time to get things moving again. Conrad had considered swiping the Data Morgue as well, but its memory cores were much more valuable than the Cryoleum, much harder for the colony to replace, and for the most part the images contained inside them were of people who were not, in point of fact, dead. Including Conrad himself, for what little that mattered. Perhaps Bascal would find a way to print that copy out, and punish it for what Conrad was about to do, but it was a risk he would just have to live with. He had no access to the records himself, could not simply delete his image.

It would be nice if Xmary could meet him at the top of the tower, but the orbital mechanics of P2 and its environment forbade this. If Newhope came to rest on the top of the tower, it would not be orbiting, and the mass of the ship itself—to say nothing of its ertial shields—would crumple the tower like a tube of paper. Instead, a complex system of orbital rendezvous was necessary, and herein lay one of the great risks of Conrad's plan. Newhope's failure to be in the right place at the right time would strand the pods in useless, unlicensed orbits where they would eventually bang into each other, or into the tower itself. Or worse, into something moving along a different orbit with much higher relative velocity.

That is, if Naval Security didn't get them first.

The first pod climbed away from the ground with a sonic rumble—never a boom, as booms were a symptom of wasted energy, of sloppy design—and was, within minutes, a mere gleam of sunlight on the tower's black face. The second and third pods quickly followed, and then the fourth. Twenty-five thousand frozen corpses. Twenty-five thousand children, bound for a kind of heaven. If he could save more, he would. If he could think of a better plan, he'd implement it without a second thought. But Conrad had always believed it was better to salvage something than to salvage nothing at all. And if those were the only choices, then his conscience was as clear as the path ahead of him.

“You should come with us,” Conrad said, in a last-ditch effort to save Mack from himself.

But Mack just snorted. “Will you stop already? Locked in that ship I'd go crazy in a week. Besides, I've eaten at the king's table, and partaken of his daughter. There are limits to how far my treacheries extend, you know? That's no reflection on you, sir—I admire what you're doing here—but this place is my home. I'll stay. I'll cope.”

“Jesus,” Conrad said, with a hand on his brow. “You be careful, Mack. Do you hear me? You live a good life.”

“Always have,” the troll said simply. “And when death comes for me, as it surely will someday, why, then I'll be back with my princess again. What could be finer? Quite frankly it's you I'm worried about.” He paused a moment and added, “I'll miss you, Boss. I hope you make it.”

People say a troll cannot weep. People say a lot of things.

Conrad rode up with the fifth and final pod, in an acceleration couch Mack's team had installed in the big, empty chamber that had been the Cryoleum's reception hall. Conrad wished he could fill this space with frozen corpses as well, but that would have been impossible without drawing unwanted attention. So the chamber, which had been designed to hold as many as two hundred live, grieving people, instead held only one.

If the walls had been of wellstone, then he might have seen the spectacular view as induction motors yanked him up the side of the tower for two and a half hours, shrinking the ground beneath him until its curvature was apparent and the atmosphere was just a thin yellow haze clinging to the ground far below. But instead the walls were made of titanium—one of the commonest metals in the silicate crust of P2—and through a crude material like that, Conrad could see nothing.

Thus, weightlessness was a bit of a shock when it came, and even a seasoned space veteran like Conrad was not above releasing some globs of vomit to float in the air around him like smelly, brightly colored ornaments. If he weren't maintaining radio silence, Conrad might have called Xmary to see where she was, to find out when exactly she would be retrieving him. But instead he sat in the glare of artificial lights, afraid to leave his seat for fear of being slammed without warning into the walls or floor when Newhope's grapples finally took hold and reeled him in.

He sat like that for a long time, contemplating the fact that he should have brought a jacket. In the old days, such considerations had been unnecessary, since the shipping containers would be insanely well insulated and his own wellcloth clothing would have kept his skin temperature constant anyway. But Conrad had only two wellcloth outfits left—one a formal suit and the other a Polar Rangers uniform—and he stupidly hadn't thought to wear either one today, possibly because neither one would have felt appropriate for the occasion. So, as the metal cargo pod bled its heat away into the cold vacuum, he huddled and shivered and cursed himself, wondering what else he might have overlooked. Sadly, years of planning were not always enough to prevent these stupid oversights.

Did the cold, in some way, make him hallucinate? Did it trick his eye, his optic nerve, his brain? For he saw a flickering at the corner of his eye, and turned to find himself staring straight into the face of a ghost.

He knew it was a ghost, for it was pale and translucent, all but colorless, and hung in the air just above the floor in exactly the way that ghosts are supposed to. But there were problems with this theory as well. First of all, Conrad had always understood ghosts to be an electromagnetic phenomenon, a sort of quantum imprint in the area where an event—usually traumatic—had taken place. Detecting them took sensors of incredible power and subtlety.

And yet, what good was a word like “ghost” if it couldn't be applied to a thing which fit it so precisely? Had there ever been an era, a time or place or society, where people didn't claim, at least occasionally, to have seen them? With their own eyes, in a moment of shock and horror, when contact with the dead had in fact been the farthest thing from their minds?

The second problem with the theory was that ghosts were, science insisted, merely a recording, not unlike the patterns of a chemical photograph or the acoustically etched grooves in a medieval phonograph record. They could be reconstructed, played back . . . but not interacted with. And yet this ghost of Conrad's appeared to be looking right at him, its tear-streaked face pulling down into a mask of horror at the sight of him. And the mask was one he recognized: Raylene Pine, who had died years before in the Polar Well.

What can be said about it? No man is a stone. Conrad let out a shriek, and the ghost beside him vanished before he could so much as tap the releases on his couch restraints and flail away in terror. Even so, he drew back, gasping and shaking. Then, with a trembling hand, he probed the air where the thing had been, and felt nothing. No ripples or vapor or cold spots. A shiver ran through him.

Had the walls been of wellstone, he might have dismissed the apparition as an accidental hologram, an anomalous burping of stored data released by the flash of a cosmic ray. But he had built this room himself, or overseen it anyway, and he'd conducted a thorough inspection just a few hours ago. So he knew—he knew—there was nothing in here that could produce an effect like that.

“Ah, mystery,” Rodenbeck had written once. “That things should feast themselves before us which have no rightful cause! If living long means seeing much, then I fear we shan't escape it, this whimsy of the gods that writes its scorn upon us.”

Fuff. There were too many goddamn Rodenbeck quotes kicking around. You could frame your whole life in them, knowing an infinite supply of new ones waited just around the corner. But they didn't keep you warm.

When the docking came, it was much gentler than Conrad had feared. Newhope had nice, old-fashioned gravitic grapples, like smaller versions of the graser beams at the heart of the Gravittoir, and the movements they imparted did not feel like acceleration. More like falling, which he was already doing anyway since he was in zero gravity—that state of never-ending fall. Rotation, of course, could not be masked in this way, and he did feel the pod wheeling around at one point, and then the bump and clatter of physical docking clamps taking hold. And then, because the pod was wider than Newhope's ertial shields, there came a series of handclap noises as the explosive pins in the pod wall blew, and the left and right thirds of the pod, under considerable spring tension, folded in under it. Now it was shaped less like a building, less like a tuberail car, and more like a manta ray with its arms wrapped around a wellstone piling, where the piling was the cargo spindle of Newhope, within which lay the central staircase and the narrow air, water, and power conduits.

Finally, Conrad's ears popped as the air systems mated. The pressure inside the pod—starting out at sea level, which for Planet Two meant just over three bars, had bled down to less than half that much over the course of the launch, and as it equalized with the much thinner, cleaner air of Newhope, it halved again to just seven hundred millibars. Technically speaking, a person could get the bends from such a dramatic pressure change, but that was rare, and time was short.

Fortunately, Newhope's internal gravity was turned off; otherwise Conrad's floor would have become a wall, and he would be dangling from his straps. But it was in the actual floor, directly in front of the bishop's podium, that a metal hatchway opened, connecting him at last to the interior of Newhope. He unmoored from his seat, launched himself at the hatchway, and caught himself on a cold metal handgrip mounted on the open hatch's inside.

Once free of the chamber, he found the matter of the ghost a bit easier to dismiss. It was just too quiet in there, too cold and still, where stepping into Newhope was like coming home. With practiced ease, he pulled himself into the stairway, placed his feet against the handrail, and launched himself up toward the bridge.

Ah. Once your balance adjusted, there really was nothing like zero gravity. As he glided up the stair shaft, correcting his course with occasional pushes from feet and hands, the levels slid past him one by one. He could fly, yes, in this space where gravity normally reigned! It was a feeling he never got tired of.

At the top of the shaft, on the bridge, he found Xmary in her captain's chair, and Useless sitting over at Information. Useless' actual name was Eustace; she was the painfully young wife of the ship's only other crewmate: the Facilitator, the superlative spaceman, the one and only Yinebeb Fecre, who was presently down in Engineering. There were people who were competent to run a starship, and there were people whom Conrad could trust; and of the dozen or so who were both, there were only these two, Xmary and Feck, who were so firmly attached to Newhope—and so loosely to the colony itself—that they would make this sacrifice. That he would even consider asking it. Poor Eustace was just along for the ride.

“Welcome aboard,” Xmary told him, motioning him toward his old seat. “You look . . . shaken.”

“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.”

Bascal smiled, and this time it was genuine. “Ah, yes. A fair objection. But at the end of that time, think what we'll have achieved! Total freedom: physical, economic, political. Complete liberation from those moribund Queendom power structures. We will resurrect our dead, restore the neutronium trade, install the luxuries of collapsiter travel and meritocratic advancement. But these are not mere bread and circuses; long before Barnard is full we'll launch starships of our own, a colony wave done properly, carrying our ideas to the stars. And space is infinite, Feck. We can have our cake and eat it too. Live forever and continue to breed. All the cake in the universe is ours for the taking.”

The king's eyes had gone out of focus, as if he were looking not at the holie window and the bridge of Newhope, but at this glorious future off in the distance somewhere.

“Just ignore him,” Xmary told her crew. “We've got work to do. Battle plans to draw up. Fist may be a match for mining colonies and pirate sloops, but we've got a hundred times her reactor power and probably five hundred times her programmable mass. We can throw a lot of energy in a lot of different ways. If they want to stand in our path, that's their prerogative, but it doesn't mean they can stop us.”

“I'm standing right here,” Bascal said. “I can hear every word.”

“Just ignore him,” Xmary repeated.

Although he grew increasingly angry, Bascal had too much dignity to press this point. If they weren't going to talk to him, then neither was he going to talk to them. He watched for a while as normal bridge chatter resumed: the scanning and neutralizing of debris, the shifting of ballast mass to minimize the pressure on station-keeping thrusters.

“If you make it through, it's going to be a long trip,” he injected at one point. “No fax storage. I did a shorter version on the way out here, and believe me it was loooong. Are you people sure you can handle it?”

But nobody responded to that, and a king really did have better things to do than sit there all day staring quietly at his enemies. After ten more minutes of quiet standoff, his image got bored and winked out.

“Alone at last,” Eustace said.

But Conrad shook his head. “Don't count on it. He'll have sensors in the walls by now. Our king is quite a talented programmer.”

“Damn right he is,” said a disembodied voice. Bascal's.

It was hardly a timely quip, though; his signal could only travel at the speed of light, whereas the distance between Newhope and Planet Two (Sorrow, Conrad reminded himself. Would that name ever stick?) was increasing rapidly. With the ship already doing better than thirty kps—one ten-thousandth of the speed of light—every seventy minutes of travel added a full second to the round-trip signal lag.

“This complicates our battle planning,” Conrad noted. “We have no security at all. We have to assume that everything we do and say is being analyzed, at least until we get the sun between ourselves and the planet. Possibly even then. And any weapons we produce from the wellstone of the hull will be difficult to trust.”

“It does make things interesting,” Xmary agreed.

The next time Bascal appeared in a visible form, the ship was nine light-seconds from Sorrow, meaning the round-trip signal lag was eighteen seconds. He didn't even bother trying to hold a conversation like that, but simply haloed himself and fired off an interactive message. A large and complicated one, judging by the hours its upload spent choking Newhope's comm systems.

“It doesn't have to be like this,” the king said, appearing translucently as a crouching figure, leaning right into Conrad's face as he lay on his bunk trying to catch a few hours of sleep. “I still want you on my team. Whatever has driven you to this desperate act, I need to know about it. That's advice you should be giving to me. I should be accounting for it in my planning.”

“I tried,” Conrad told him tiredly. “You're not an easy man to advise. You respond much better to actions, as you've amply demonstrated today.”

“So fine, I'm responding. Now talk to me.”

Conrad sighed. “Bas, why do your plans always involve this pressure cooker of pain and death and suffering? Why are the rewards always so far in the future? People don't want that. They never have and never will.”

“But we're immorbid,” Bascal answered. “Some of us. Planning for the future never used to be a personal thing. Our parents were the first crop of humans to map out a future they themselves would inhabit. And they pissed the job, didn't they? We've got to do better. Forget twenty-year plans and even century plans; we have the opportunity, the duty, to plan across the millennia, across the eons. And if we can see paradise, not just in dreams but in the hard, cold numbers of mathematical certainty, does it not behoove us to be brave? To take the first hard steps down that road? The easier roads all lead to ruin, my friend. I've seen it.”

Conrad sighed. “Jesus and the little gods, Bas, quit the act. You can bamboozle children, but you're not fooling me. By the time you solve the economic crisis, the colony's dead will be irradiated into frozen goo. There's no resurrection; the only place you can send them is heaven itself. But there's a lesser paradise much closer at hand.”

The king's eyes filled with cold certainty. “You've taken the Cryoleum. Twenty-five thousand sleeping bodies. Taking them ‘home' to a place they've never seen. I've sent word back to myself on Sorrow, to verify that the Cryoleum is actually missing, but you can save me the trouble.”

“Yes,” Conrad admitted. “We've taken the Cryoleum.”

“Damn you,” the recording said. “Do you realize what you've done? Do you know how destabilizing that'll be? No matter how ruthless I am—and I hate being that, believe me!—this will distort the morale equations, further eroding our productivity, further postponing the dawn of our indigenous Eden.” Then the hologram's eyes widened a bit. “Ah, but it's a secret. Yes? If I kill you, if I kill everyone on the ground who knows about your plans, the whole thing can be covered up. We'll just need to find a way to explain the loss of Newhope. And that shouldn't be difficult. She's an old ship; accidents happen.”

These words made Conrad very happy and proud not to be on Bascal's team, to be instead on his own team and struggling for his own vision of the least-worst future. But at the same time the words triggered a deep mourning, because he and Bascal really had been good friends, best friends, for hundreds and hundreds of years. They still were.

“Even your barely sentient messages dream of homicide,” Conrad said.

The recording shook its head. “Sadly, it makes sense. And fortunately, I have the fortitude to press onward, even with plans that make me personally ill.”

“You can't stop us,” Conrad said.

Here the recording smiled: a cold, holographic smile. “You'd be surprised what I can do. You'd be amazed what I can do, with centuries of thought and planning. I always knew there'd be rebellions to put down. And it occurs to me, seeing you lying there half asleep, that I have still another weapon at my disposal.” He looked down at himself. “This ghost will haunt you, Conrad. It will deprive you of rest until such time as you surrender Newhope and return home in chains.”

Oh, dear God. “Go away, Bas.”

“No, indeed,” the recording said. “I'm tireless, drawing my energy directly from your own reactors. And as you say, I'm barely sentient. Thus, I'm incapable of boredom. The volume of my speech is unfortunately capped by safety interlocks—I can no more shout you to death than I can command the wellstone in your hull to disintegrate. Alas for you, because it would be a kinder death than what Ho has in store.

“However, the duration of my speech has no such constraints. We shall begin, I think, with one million recitations of the “Fuck You Song,” and follow up with a long, detailed list of your personal faults. I will not enjoy this, for I cannot, but perhaps the real Bascal will be satisfied when all is done, that all has been done that can be, to bring down this house of cards you call a conspiracy.”

“Go away,” Conrad repeated as the first stanza of the “Fuck You Song” began. “Little gods, Bascal, you can't be serious.”

Ah, but he could. And was.