The Wellstone

Chapter thirteen. The cold rebellion

The hard part was letting Xmary know. They hadn’t agreed on any sort of signal for the start of hostilities, but if he didn’t get word to her—to someone—then Bascal could simply put the guards on him again, and that would be that. No speaking, no gesturing, no pounding on the walls.... But she needed to know what was happening, and what the teams were, and it wasn’t like he could just tell her right in front of everybody, and it wasn’t like he could whisper in her ear or lead her off for a private conference, or pass her a note. Not Xmary, not without attracting a lot of attention.

That left Martin and Karl, and Conrad wasn’t really sure he trusted Martin. The kid was too quiet; beyond expressing “grave doubts about the present regime,” he hadn’t said much. There was no real clue as to the inner workings of his head, or even if he had much of an inner life. Some people seemed to get by without one. If it came down to a simple brawl, Conrad was pretty sure Martin would at least stick a foot out or something— some small gesture in his own self-interest. But initiating any action seemed unlikely. It was too much to ask.

That left Karl. And because Conrad’s shift at the helm was about to begin, there was no time to lose, and no point in delaying. And no reason to be especially afraid, since the price of failure—death—was identical to the price of doing nothing. But he was afraid. He’d never done anything like this before. He didn’t know how to approach it, where to start, how to keep himself from fucking up along the way. And the threat of immediate bodily harm seemed for some reason more viscerally real than the prospect of crashing and vaporizing in a week and a half.

But the sketchy outlines of a plan were taking shape in his mind, and the time to act was now.

He looked around, studying the room. It was “day,” with the ceiling—now off-limits to Xmary—giving off a diffuse, warm, vaguely sunny glow. Conrad would have preferred to turn the power down on that—they didn’t need that much light—but there was enough stored energy in the capacitors to keep it lit for a year or so, and since that was a lot longer than they had to live, he wasn’t going to make an issue out of it.

And in spite of the “daylight,” Ho was asleep in his closet, or maybe whacking off, and Preston Midrand was cinched down on his mattress and also apparently asleep. Bascal was on the bridge, of course, along with one of the Palace Guards. The other guard was in here, rooted to the spot where it had stood, motionless, for most of the past month. And hovering near it with a sketchplate tucked under her arm was Xmary, half-seriously chewing out Martin for “farting again.”

She must be really bored, really sick of her studies, because their shipboard diet had always centered around beans and franks—one the gassiest and most diarrheic food combos in the known universe. Fortunately, any fart gas that touched the fax machine was absorbed and disassembled and whisked into the mass buffers, so the air never had a chance to grow too foul. But yeah, it was a problem they’d all been living with and grown used to, although it had grown steadily worse as they’d depleted their other meager food supplies.

Which, by the way, Conrad strongly suspected Ho of playing more than his fair part in. He did sleep with the food, after all, and memorize its inventory, and guard it jealously against unauthorized access. The one time Karl had sneaked a handful of pecans out, Ho had looked ready to murder him for it, and probably would have if not for the Guards. But two days later the pecans were gone, and Ho said nothing.

Jamil and Karl and Steve Grush were solemnly playing the handball game Karl had invented as a zero-gee alternative to shirtball soccer. The idea was to bat the shirtball to the next person with an open hand, and keep a three-or four-way volley going for as long as possible. Not terribly exciting, and just like shirtball soccer it lent itself to certain abuses, such as the constant and deliberate targeting of noncombatants. But it passed the time.

Karl’s last duty had been swabbing the main cabin’s ceiling and skylights, so Conrad launched himself to the ceiling, gave it a cursory inspection, and said, “Little gods, it’s filthy up here. Who cleaned this?”

This was delivered in Leadership Tone, a bit of play-acting Conrad had adopted based on studies of Bascal. Far from commanding or stern, it was actually sort of jovial. And yet, when you did it properly there was an edge to it, a not-so-casual hinting at potential consequences that seemed, for whatever reason, to yield maximum response. Steve and Jamil and Karl looked up; their shirtball went skittering off into a corner.

“Karl,” Conrad said, “would you grab a dust mop and meet me up here, please?”

“Do I have to?” Karl answered, glowering vaguely, and Conrad couldn’t have asked for a better response. God bless that boy’s stubborn streak.

“I would like you to,” Conrad told him. This was another trick from the de Towaji School of Management: never give an order if you could give a pointed suggestion instead.

Sighing, Karl went around to the fax and asked it for a mop. His look was sullen when he arrived at Conrad’s side.

“Keep that exact expression on your face,” Conrad murmured, trying not to breathe too hard. He needed a tight rein on his fear if this was going to work. “Look at the ceiling; that’s right. Now wipe it, and listen carefully. Oh, boy. In a few minutes, I’m going to start doing something about our predicament. No, don’t look down there; look at your mop. I’ll be altering the helm settings, and I want you and Xmary to be prepared. It may get... ugly. I may need a distraction, or help with something. We may even have to fight.”

“I don’t want to,” Karl said, and Conrad could practically smell the sudden fear coming off him.

“Neither do I,” Conrad admitted, showing off a shaking hand. “But consider the alternative. Bascal is planning to crash this ship, and kill us all.” He raised his voice a bit. “We’re counting on you to do your part, okay? If you need me, I’ll be on the bridge.”

And that’s where he went.

Bascal, far from suspecting anything, just looked tired.

“Hey,” he said, looking up and immediately moving to untie himself from the chair.

“You look tired,” Conrad said.

“Yeah,” Bascal agreed. “Boredom and terror make a wonderful mix.”

Conrad blinked. What the hell was that supposed to mean? What was Bascal afraid of? Dying? Wasn’t this all his idea in the first place? “You, uh, you should take a nap.” On impulse, he added, “There may be more options than you realize.”

“Yeah,” Bascal agreed vaguely, as he lined himself up and launched toward the open door. “I’ll think real hard about that.”

When he was gone, Conrad closed the door behind him, went to the nav chair, and tied himself loosely into it. He wanted to be able to move if the need arose.

The first part of the plan was something he’d thought of a week ago, based on the wording of Bascal’s threat: kill him if the wellstone broadcasts a signal. He still didn’t know if the guards would follow that command or not; it seemed doubtful, but “doubtful” was a poor thing to stake your life on. Under such bizarre circumstances, there was no telling what the robots would do. On the other hand, the instructions required to generate a signal from the wellstone were fairly straightforward, and there was nothing to prevent him from storing them for later use.

In fact, this took him only about fifteen minutes, and the next part, although fateful and irrevocable and huge, was even simpler: he entered the instructions that would turn the sail, and guide Viridity to a new course which would—just barely—miss the barge. Outside, behind the sail, the stars began, imperceptibly, to drift.

Not too surprisingly, this triggered an immediate alarm: the ceiling flashed red, and dotted itself with speakers emitting a low, staccato buzzing. The mutiny was at hand.

The first to appear in the doorway was Ho. “What did you do, bloodfuck?”

But Bascal was right behind him, and the two entered together. The prince looked more weary than surprised. “All right, boyo. What is it?”

“I’m changing course,” Conrad told him. “We need to miss the barge, or we’ll all be vaporized.”

Bascal pursed his lips. “Isn’t this something you should discuss with me first?”

“Ideally,” Conrad said, and God he was nervous. It was really happening now, and he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to. “But you’ve been sort of immune to reason lately, so I’ve taken the precaution of what they call a ‘deadman switch.’ If I take my hands off this console, or somebody else takes them off for me, then all the energy in the capacitors gets dumped into a broadband SOS, across most of the ... the spectrum. Light, radio, et cetera.”

“Clever,” the prince said grudgingly, after a moment’s reflection. “And what did you hope to gain by this? My full attention?”

“Your common sense,” Conrad answered.

“Ah.”

“If we hit the barge, we’ll all be vaporized. Even the kids in the fax machine. If we miss it ...” Whoa. A sudden stab of excitement ran through him. “If we miss it, we can brake magnetically. The peak accelerations are too high for human bodies. Two hundred gee! But, but ... the fax machine would probably survive. Along with the patterns inside it.”

“Ah!” Bascal said, perking up.

Conrad faced the bridge’s Palace Guard. “Robot, I’m not sure how much you understand about all this, but these helm settings are vital to the prince’s survival. If any alternate course is selected, there’ll be a collision with absolutely no way for him to survive.”

There was no reaction from the guard—no sound or movement, no indication that it had heard.

“They won’t listen to you,” Bascal told him. “Idiot.”

“Oh, I think they will. They’re not stupid. Who knows? They may even send a distress signal of their own, if they sense the ship is in danger. Which it most certainly is.”

The prince sighed. “What do you want, Conrad?”

“Is it so mysterious?” The quaver was leaving Conrad’s voice now. “I don’t see the point of dying. I don’t see how that helps. We’ve already made a dramatic statement. It’s too bad our Nescog gate is down; I’ll bet we’re all over the news channels: the hunt continues for fifteen missing children! Ingenious ship design escapes detection!”

Bascal waved a hand, dismissing these words as foolish. “Do you want to surrender, or do you want to succeed?”

“I want to survive! There are memories which you have no right to take away from me.” My hands on your girlfriend. My fingers in her hair, unresisted.

The prince waved again. “That’s not what I asked. Let’s say we survive, okay? So there’s no concern there. In a survival situation, given a choice between surrendering and succeeding, which do you choose?”

“It’s a false choice,” Conrad said.

“No, it isn’t. You’ve just said so yourself: we can all climb in the fax machine. The robots can leave us in there until the fun is over, and when the ships are docked and they pull us out, we can put on our space suits and climb to an airlock on the outside of the barge. Simple.”

The prince’s voice was reasonable, and his argument made sense. Sort of. But he’d sounded that way before, too, and Conrad knew better than to believe it. “We don’t know that that will work.”

“So simulate it,” Bascal said, and now he was bright and encouraging, his weariness gone.

“Don’t talk like you’re suddenly my friend,” Conrad warned. “I’ll just pick my hands up and we’ll see what happens.”

The prince put his own hands up in gesture of placation or surrender. “Steady, Conrad. You know I was never going to hurt you. Or anyone else. I knew there had to be a way to work this. And I’m glad, I’m glad we didn’t give up before you found it. Just think, man: imagine stepping through that fax into Denver again. Sure, they’ll arrest us, but think what that says, versus simply surrendering now.”

Worryingly, Conrad felt his resolve begin to crumble. He knew better than to trust this Prince of Sol; that wasn’t the issue. The issue was that Bascal’s ruthlessness did not, by itself, make him wrong. It didn’t guarantee or even imply that his plans and conclusions weren’t sound. Quite the reverse: without sentimentality to weigh him down, he might be better equipped to make decisions. This thought led to a most disturbing conclusion: that even the suicidal approach might genuinely be in the boys’ best interest. They were going to live forever, right? What harm was a youthful indiscretion or two, if it gave their surviving copies a stronger voice?

“You’re clouding my mind,” he said.

Bascal laughed. “I wish I had that power, my friend. Really. Your mind is clouded because you keep thinking this is simple, and you keep thinking it’s about you. About us, these copies here on this ship. But when you actually bother to communicate, when you remember the bigger picture, it’s not quite so obvious.”

Conrad had no immediate reply, so Bascal pressed the attack. “You’ve done an amazing job here. I’m very impressed with this ... blackmail exercise. But it’s not necessary. You and I have the same goal, and believe it or not we are still friends.”

“No,” Conrad said, shaking his head. “That’s not correct. If I hadn’t done this, if I hadn’t done it today, we’d have crashed and died. You weren’t on my side. You weren’t asking me for help.”

Bascal shrugged. “Am I perfect? Have I got it all figured out? This is difficult for me, just like it is for you. I apologize for any bad feelings my mistakes have caused.”

Conrad glanced at Ho, who was observing the conversation in sullen silence. Perhaps sensing a threat to his position and power. Oh, yeah, like being beta male on a ship full of troubled children was any great thing anyway. He also glanced at the doorway, mildly puzzled; no one else had come in here, or even poked a head in to look. With the alarms and flashing lights and raised voices, such an absence of curiosity was difficult to believe.

“We don’t trust each other,” he finally told Bascal, without quite looking at him.

“No,” the prince admitted.

“We’re not friends. Not now. Don’t make that appeal to me, because I’m not buying it.”

“All right,” Bascal said soothingly. “All right. We’re not friends. Can we be allies? If we agree on a goal, and the methods for achieving it, is that enough?”

“I ... guess it’ll have to be,” Conrad conceded unhappily.

“Then run your simulations,” the prince said. “And when you’re satisfied, turn off this distress beacon of yours. We’ll shake hands, and work out the details of our final approach and docking. Agreed?”

Well. What exactly had just happened here? Had Conrad’s mutiny succeeded—all his planning and his careful arguments winning the day, forcing Bascal to do the right thing? Had the mutiny failed, with Conrad falling back into error under the spell of the silver-tongued Poet Prince? Had the two of them simply worked things out, or lucked into a solution they could both agree on? It seemed, in a funny way, that all of these things were true at once, and Conrad didn’t know what to make of that, what lesson to draw. Shouldn’t something as basic as right and wrong be easier to figure out?

“We’ll see,” he finally told Bascal.

The prince nodded, accepting that answer although it clearly wasn’t what he’d been hoping for. He gestured to Ho, and the two of them left. But moments later, Bascal burst into laughter, and called out from the other room, “Oh, for crying out loud, let him go!”

“What?” Conrad called back.

“You’ve got to see this,” Bascal said to him, drifting back into the doorway. “Wait, scratch that. Do not take your hands off that panel. But boyo, my hat is off to you once more.”

“Why? What’s happening?”

Bascal laughed again. “Jamil and Preston are gone. In the fax, I guess. And Steve’s ... glued to the ceiling with a shirtball in his mouth. Xmary, for God’s sake, you win. Let him fucking go.”

Oh we’re not too good at rigging, and we’re not too good at scanning,

And we’re lousy at logistics which is why we’re farting beans.

But we know just where we’re headed, and we know just how to get there,

And they’re never gonna ping us till we crash right through their screens!

Working together again, like old chums, Bascal and Conrad managed to create some telescopic sensors, and to project their images in 2-D on the wellstone ceiling of the bridge. Their target: the fat, squat cylinder of the neutronium barge, twelve hundred meters long and nine hundred forty across. You could practically shrink-wrap the thing in the fetula’s sail.

Of course, neither of them knew anything about filtering or image enhancement, and there were certainly no built-in programs for it in any of the wellstone they had on hand, so what they got was a set of straight telescopic images, captured through the equivalent of a two-hundred-meter-wide lens and then magnified a hundred times with no change in detail or resolution.

The sun was too far away to light the scene effectively, so at this range—still nearly a quarter of an AU—the barge’s image was far from clear. You could see nine blooms of yellow light and three of red, which Bascal said were the barge’s running lights: red for the port face and yellow for the capward one, with the green of starboard and the violet of boot hidden behind the cylindrical shape of the barge itself, hulking dimly against the starry background. There was just enough detail to tell—with some staring and squinting and tilting of head—that they were looking at the barge from an aft quarter, seeing most of one side and the six engine bells sticking out from the stern. Of course, the bow would have white lights on it, so their absence here was another clue as to what they were seeing.

“This is raw,” Bascal said, when they’d finally settled on the least-worst focus for the image. “The light we’re seeing takes a minute and a half to reach us from there.”

Conrad whistled. Light was fast, so that must be a very long distance indeed. He didn’t get much sense of speed here aboard the fetula, but considering they’d covered almost four times that distance already, he couldn’t help but be impressed. They were really doing this! He even jotted some figures into a sketchplate to see what fraction of the speed of light they were going, but the result disappointed him: 0.006%. That made it seem slow again somehow.

Still, having not much else to do, he fiddled with the image parameters, eventually deciding that all the magnification was making the barge harder to see, instead of easier. So he pulled back, shrinking the picture and then refocusing, then shrinking and refocusing again. On the third iteration, though, some sort of smudge appeared near the edge of the ceiling, so he pulled back even farther, and focused again.

And gasped. Bascal, fretting with something on the instrument panel again, turned back to look at him, then up at the images on the ceiling.

The smudge, when properly focused, resolved into two separate objects: jagged lumps of translucent, blue-gray material. Like twin fists of icicle-packed snow—the dreaded “mace heads” of a Kildare snowball fight—with pinpoints of light shining between them. The stars, yes, showing through the fist’s worth of empty space that separated the two. But the points of light were too numerous, too large, too dim and glittery somehow. They couldn’t all be stars. The space between the iceballs was populated with something else, something solid. A dust or spume or debris field.

“What ho,” Bascal murmured softly. “What land is this? What shore?”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at,” Conrad said, feeling dwarfed by his own ignorance. Did he belong out here? Did he have even the faintest idea what he was doing?

“A comet,” Bascal murmured. “Everything out here is a comet. Even the Kupier planets are just giant comets.”

“I don’t see tails.”

“They only have those when they swing close to the sun, Conrad. The heat evaporates the lighter ices, and a little bit flies off into space. That’s all the tail is. But there are no warm days out here, right? These Kuiper Belt bodies never swing any closer than Pluto. Nothing evaporates.”

“Are they going to hit each other?”

Bascal studied the objects. “They do—they have. We’re looking at a near-contact binary. Something knocked these fragments apart, and now they’re orbiting each other. Look at those grooves along the side—these guys are in a highly elliptical orbit around their mutual center, and at the low point of the orbit, they touch. They scrape. That’s where all those little shards around them come from.”

Conrad pondered that. It wasn’t difficult to imagine these two mace heads locked in a deadly whirl, swinging close and then far and then close again, their icy spires crashing together thunderously, knocking off pieces of each other in a glittering spray. But wouldn’t that slow them down or something? Wouldn’t they eventually stop, like two sledders colliding at the bottom of a valley?

“I don’t see them turning,” he said. “I don’t see them orbiting.”

“No,” Bascal agreed. “They probably take a hundred years to complete a revolution. There’s some weird shit out here, but none of it’s fast.”

“Will they grind each other up before they stop?”

“Sure. These iceballs are not very tough. But of course their own gravity will keep pulling them back together again. Stop by in a thousand years, it’ll look about the same. A better question is, are they going to grind us up?”

Conrad felt a stab of alarm at the question. Because yeah, if they could see this thing ahead of them, that meant it was in their way. And that was bad.

“Now, if we were going to hit it,” Bascal said, pinching his chin, “it would be eclipsing the barge by now. We’re headed directly for the barge, right? Or where the barge will be, anyway.”

He made a diagram with his hands, miming the location of Viridity and the barge, and then placing an imaginary object between them. He nodded slowly. “So that’s not our problem.”

“I ... guess,” Conrad said uncertainly. “But Jesus, look at all that clutter. It doesn’t matter what we hit, right? How close are we going to get?”

The question partially answered itself: a couple of stars winked out behind one snowball’s jagged edge, and a couple more winked into existence on the far side of the other one. The tiny barge hung motionless against the stellar backdrop, but these things were moving visibly. They must be a lot closer.

“Boyo, let’s kill the magnification. Let’s have just, like, a window. Yeah. Yeah, okay, that’s good.”

The shrunken image was considerably less menacing: the comets were now the size of regular snowballs, or a couple of large scoops of ice cream, moving visibly but definitely not in the path to the barge.

The prince nodded, and scratched briefly at his forehead. “All right, now, jaggy comets like that are less than a thousand kilometers wide. Probably more like a hundred. So if each one is twice the size of Tongatapu—call it a third of an Ireland—that means we’re looking at them from, I dunno, maybe three thousand kilometers away? Damn, that is close.”

“Dangerously?”

“Well, yeah . . . ,” Bascal hedged. “But you have to remember, we’ve been passing this stuff all along. Not as close as this, I guess, maybe not as big, but the density of the Kuiper Belt isn’t a whole lot less than the Asteroid Belt. Pick a Point A and a Point B, and I guarantee you there’s a lot of ice in between. Mostly concentrated in bands and rings, with little shepherd planets nudging them around. The barges follow the high-density corridors, but we’re cutting right across them.”

“Are we in danger?” Conrad persisted.

“Yes,” the prince acknowledged quietly. He watched the mace heads growing visibly, and crawling along toward the ceiling’s edge. “But there are loose pieces everywhere. It’s why the neutronium barges are out here: to grab and squeeze all this wasted matter. But yes, obviously, our chances increase during a close approach like this. Our worst odds are right at closest approach.”

“Which is when?”

“A minute from now? I’m not sure, Conrad.”

“Shit. Should we try evasive maneuvers?”

“Won’t do any good,” Bascal said. “But you knew that, right? Just sit tight, boyo. No concern.”

Conrad cleared his throat. “We’ve been taking a huge chance all along, haven’t we? Any normal ship would be scanning with radar.”

“Yep. That’s true.”

The twin comet—now the size of a Karl Smoit shirtball—moved to the edge of the ceiling and vanished. Neither of the boys said anything for a tense little while, and it was Bascal who finally broke the silence.

“Do you know how to inspect the sail for holes?”

“No,” Conrad answered.

“We do it electrically. Electricity can’t cross a hole, so you lay down a wire from one end of the sail to the other—say, port to starboard—and if you can get a current across it, it’s intact. If you can’t, you log the position and move on, and then match it later with a scan in the boots-caps direction. That gives you the exact size and location of the hole. Shall ... we try it?”

“Um. Definitely.”

Within minutes, they’d found a dozen pinholes scattered all over the sail—places where some speck of matter had punched through at twenty kips, shattering the nanoscopic wellstone fibers. By themselves these holes were no big deal, except that one of them had begun to tear. The opening had probably started out circular, maybe a tenth of a millimeter across, but it had spread in one direction, forming a linear rip that was several millimeters long.

“I don’t know how long it’s been there,” Bascal said grimly. “It shouldn’t spread like that—the force on the sail just isn’t that much. We’d better grommet these holes, just to be safe.”

“Grommet?”

“Encircle them with little rings of impervium. It shouldn’t affect our invisibility—not much. Not as much as the Jolly Roger image on the sail, and that hasn’t given us away yet.”

“Can’t we just close the holes?” This was not an idle question; things made of wellstone were always dividing and recombining in various ways. Any decent shirt—not these camp rags or the Denver kiddie-flash Ho insisted on wearing—could change its cut and fit on a few seconds’ notice. The shrink-wrap on the cabin itself had had a slit over the door, big enough to walk through, that had sealed itself automatically after liftoff.

“I guess we can try,” Bascal answered uncertainly. “It’s not what you’re thinking, though. When you command a parted seam, the wellstone separates in a very particular way. Even when you cut it, it knows it’s being cut, and does the right thing. This is different. Sudden damage like that is a shock to the fibers. Right up next to the hole, I doubt they’re working at all. Anyway, this isn’t exactly fashion-grade sailcloth, is it?”

That bothered Conrad. “I don’t like this, Bascal. Eventually, if we stay out here long enough, we’ll get unlucky. One of these particles will fire right through the cabin, won’t it?”

“Maybe,” Bascal said honestly. “I don’t know. If it was small enough, I think passing through the first layer of wrapping would vaporize it. I doubt it could penetrate the wood after that. But then you’d have a pinhole in your airtight wrapping.”

“And that would be that.”

Bascal thought it over and nodded. “It would be bad, anyway. Maybe we should inspect the wrapping.”

They did this, and quickly discovered another hole. A leak. Fortunately it was small—only a tenth of a millimeter—and there didn’t seem to be any significant air loss through it, although over enough time it would surely bleed away their entire atmosphere.

“Before the advent of programmable matter,” Bascal noted, “spaceships were full of leaks. You just couldn’t make them airtight, not if you wanted to get in and out, or get cables in and out. Or have windows.”

“It only has to last fifteen days,” Conrad agreed weakly, trying for the same casual tone.

There was little point in grommeting the hole, since the wrapping was already as rigid and tough as its invisibility permitted. But they went ahead and did it anyway, swapping a bit of tough inviso-cloth for a circle of tougher impervium. The hole itself, per Bascal’s prediction, was simply an absence of matter, not programmable, not patchable from inside the cabin. Unless maybe they wanted to drill through a log and patch the appropriate section of shrink-wrap by hand.

“I’ll bet a sheet of plastic and some library paste would do the trick,” Conrad moped.

“Nah,” Bascal said. “No need. Let’s just ride it out and hope for the best.”