Karl Schroeder
Karl Schroeder (born 1962) was born in Brandon, Manitoba, and moved to Toronto in 1986 to pursue his writing career. His family is Mennonite, part of a community which has lived in southern Manitoba for over a hundred years. He is the second science fiction writer to come out of this small community—the first was A. E. van Vogt. His father was the first television technician in Manitoba (quite a distinction at the time) and his mother published two romance novels. (“I grew up with those books on the bookshelf—I always considered it perfectly natural to see ‘Schroeder’ on a book cover.”) He has been active in Toronto SF circles, has maintained the SF Canada list-serve, has won an Aurora Award for short fiction (for “The Toy Mill,” in collaboration with David Nickle), and has published a novel, The Claus Effect (1997) with Nickle developed out of the story. His novel Ventus (2000) is hard SF novel that feels like fantasy. His new book, Permanence, is out in 2002.
Schroeder’s views on hard SF are unconventional:
I write a kind of disciplined fantasy that sticks close to scientific possibility—but I don’t think of myself as a hard SF writer. I am very scientifically literate and follow the progress of most branches of science closely—but I am not a “believer” in Western Rationalism. If the definition of hard SF is that it is storytelling in which the events that occur don’t contradict known science, then I’m not a hard SF writer and never will be, because I simply don’t believe in the distinction between “real” and “pseudo” or non-science. I’m a fan of the philosophy of P. K. Feyerabend in this respect, I am a philosophical subversive in the house of Engineering SF, and I expect that will become evident to people with time … To me, science is a servant of philosophy, and so my stories are about ideas first, and scientific ideas second; in that regard, I admire authors like Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells more than authors of perhaps more technically accurate fiction. Wells in particular showed how you could use science as a gestural language to speak about things that are, in some sense, beyond science. At the moment I admire Greg Egan most of the current generation of writers. Of all of them he appears to understand best how science, philosophy and literary art interact in crafting a literature of the Natural world.
“‘Halo’” says Schroeder, “is an attempt to be both ‘hard SF’ and character-driven fiction; to introduce a new kind of interstellar civilization and a new kind of interstellar travel; and to take the most marginal and hostile environment for life, and make it perfectly believable that people should choose to live there.” This story is in the same future setting as Permanence.
Elise Cantrell was awakened by the sound of her children trying to manage their own breakfast. Bright daylight streamed in through the windows. She threw on a robe and ran for the kitchen. “No, no, let me!”
Judy appeared about to microwave something, and the oven was set on high.
“Aw, Mom, did you forget?” Alex, who was a cherub but had the loudest scream in the universe, pouted at her from the table. Looked like he’d gotten his breakfast together just fine. Suspicious, that, but she refused to inspect his work.
“Yeah, I forgot the time change. My prospectors are still on the twenty-four-hour clock, you know.”
“Why?” Alex flapped his spoon in the cereal bowl.
“They’re on another world, remember? Only Dew has a thirty-hour day, and only since they put the sun up. You remember before the sun, don’t you?” Alex stared at her as though she were insane. It had only been a year and a half.
Elise sighed. Just then the door announced a visitor. “Daddy!” shrieked Judy as she ran out of the room. Elise found her in the foyer clinging to the leg of her father. Nasim Clearwater grinned at her over their daughter’s flyaway hair.
“You’re a mess,” he said by way of greeting.
“Thanks. Look, they’re not ready. Give me a few minutes.”
“No problem. Left a bit early, thought you might forget the time change.”
She glared at him and stalked back to the kitchen.
As she cleaned up and Nasim dressed the kids, Elise looked out over the landscape of Dew. It was daylight, yes, a pale drawn glow dropping through cloud veils to sketch hills and plains of ice. Two years ago this window had shown no view, just the occasional star. Elise had grown up in that velvet darkness, and it was so strange now to have awakening signaled by such a vivid and total change. Her children would grow up to the rhythm of true day and night, the first such generation here on Dew. They would think differently. Already, this morning, they did.
“Hello,” Nasim said in her ear. Startled, Elise said, “What?” a bit too loudly.
“We’re off.” The kids stood behind him, dubiously inspecting the snaps of their survival suits. Today was a breach drill; Nasim would ensure they took it seriously. Elise gave him a peck on the cheek.
“You want them back late, right? Got a date?”
“No,” she said, “of course not.” Nasim wanted to hear that she was being independent, but she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
Nasim half-smiled. “Well, maybe I’ll see you after, then.”
“Sure.”
He nodded but said nothing further. As the kids screamed their goodbyes at full volume she tried to puzzle out what he’d meant. See her? To chat, to talk, maybe more?
Not more. She had to accept that. As the door closed she plunked herself angrily down on the couch, and drew her headset over her eyes.
VR was cheap for her. She didn’t need full immersion, just vision and sound, and sometimes the use of her hands. Her prospectors were too specialized to have human traits, and they operated in weightlessness so she didn’t need to walk. The headset was expensive enough without such additions. And the simplicity of the set-up allowed her to work from home.
The fifteen robot prospectors Elise controlled ranged throughout the halo worlds of Crucible. Crucible itself was fifty times the mass of Jupiter, a “brown dwarf” star—too small to be a sun but radiating in the high infrared and trailing a retinue of planets. Crucible sailed alone through the spaces between the true stars. Elise had been born and raised here on Dew, Crucible’s frozen fifth planet.
From the camera on the first of her prospectors, she could see the new kilometers-long metal cylinder that her children had learned to call the sun. Its electric light shone only on Dew, leaving Crucible and the other planets in darkness. The artificial light made Dew gleam like a solitary blue-white jewel on the perfect black of space.
She turned her helmeted head, and out in space her prospector turned its camera. Faint Dew-light reflected from a round spot on Crucible. She hadn’t seen that before. She recorded the sight; the kids would like it, even if they didn’t quite understand it.
This first prospector craft perched astride a chunk of ice about five kilometers long. The little ice-flinder orbited Crucible with about a billion others. Her machine oversaw some dumb mining equipment that was chewing stolidly through the thing in search of metal.
There were no problems here. She flipped her view to the next machine, whose headlamps obligingly lit to show her a wall of stone. Hmm. She’d been right the night before when she ordered it to check an ice ravine on Castle, the fourth planet. There was real stone down here, which meant metals. She wondered what it would feel like, and reached out. After a delay the metal hands of her prospector touched the stone. She didn’t feel anything; the prospector was not equipped to transmit the sensation back. Sometimes she longed to be able to fully experience the places her machines visited.
She sent a call to the Mining Registrar to follow up on her find, and went on to the next prospector. This one orbited farthest out, and there was a time-lag of several minutes between every command she gave, and its execution. Normally she just checked it quickly and moved on. Today, for some reason, it had a warning flag in its message queue.
Transmission intercepted.—Oh, it had overheard some dialogue between two ships or something. That was surprising, considering how far away from the normal orbits the prospector was. “Read it to me,” she said, and went on to Prospector Four.
She’d forgotten about the message and was admiring a long view of Dew’s horizon from the vantage of her fourth prospector, when a resonant male voice spoke in her ear:
“Mayday, mayday—anyone at Dew, please receive. My name is Hammond, and I’m speaking from the interstellar cycler Chinook. The date is the sixth of May, 2418. Relativistic shift is .500435—we’re at half lightspeed.
“Listen: Chinook has been taken over by Naturite forces out of Leviathan. They are using the cycler as a weapon. You must know by now that the halo world Tiara, at Obsidian, has gone silent—it’s our fault, Chinook has destroyed them. Dew is our next stop, and they fully intend to do the same thing there. They want to ‘purify’ the halo worlds so only their people settle here.”
“They’re keeping communications silence. I’ve had to go outside to take manual control of a message laser in order to send this mayday.
“You must place mines in near-pass space ahead of the cycler, to destroy it. We have limited maneuvering ability, so we couldn’t possibly avoid the mines.
“Anyone receiving this message, please relay it to your authorities immediately. Chinook is a genocide ship. You are in danger.
“Please do not reply to Chinook on normal channels. They will not negotiate. Reply to my group on this frequency, not the standard cycler wavelengths.”
Elise didn’t know how to react. She almost laughed—what a ridiculous message, full of bluster and emergency words. But she’d heard that Obsidian had gone mysteriously silent, and no one knew why. “Origin of this message?” she asked. As she
waited, she replayed it. It was highly melodramatic, just the sort of wording somebody would use for a prank. She was sure she would be told the message had come from Dew itself—maybe even sent by Nasim or one of his friends.
The coordinates flashed before her eyes. Elise did a quick calculation to visualize the direction. Not from Dew. Not from any of Crucible’s worlds. The message had come from deep space, out somewhere beyond the last of Crucible’s trailing satellites.
The only things out there were stars, halo worlds—and the cyclers, Elise thought. She lifted off the headset. The beginnings of fear fluttered in her belly.
Elise took the message to a cousin of hers who was a policeman. He showed her into his office, smiling warmly. They didn’t often get together since they’d grown up, and he wanted to talk family.
She shook her head. “I’ve got something strange for you, Sal. One of my machines picked this up last night.” And she played the message for him, expecting reassuring laughter and a good explanation.
Half an hour later they were being ushered into the suite of the police chief, who sat at a U-shaped table with her aides, frowning. When she entered, she heard the words of the message playing quietly from the desk speakers of two of the aides, who looked very serious.
“You will tell no one about this,” said the chief. She was a thin, strong woman with blazing eyes. “We have to confirm it first.” Elise hesitated, then nodded.
Cousin Sal cleared his throat. “Ma’am? You think this message could be genuine, then?”
The chief frowned at him, then said, “It may be true. This may be why Tiara went off the air.” The sudden silence of Tiara, a halo world half a light-year from Elise’s home, had been the subject of a media frenzy a year earlier. Rumors of disaster circulated, but there were no facts to go on, other than that Tiara’s message lasers, which normally broadcast news from there, had gone out. It was no longer news, and Elise had heard nothing about it for months. “We checked the coordinates you reported and they show this message did come from the Chinook. Chinook did its course correction around Obsidian right about the time Tiara stopped broadcasting.”
Elise couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “But what could they have done?”
The chief tapped at her desk with long fingers. “You’re an orbital engineer, Cantrell. You probably know better than I. The Chinook’s traveling at half light-speed, so anything it dropped on an intercept course with Obsidian’s planets would hit like a bomb. Even the smallest item—a pen or card.”
Elise nodded reluctantly. Aside from message lasers, the Interstellar Cyclers were the only means of contact with other stars and halo worlds. Cyclers came by Crucible every few months, but they steered well away from its planets. They only came close enough to use gravity to assist their course change to the next halo world. Freight and passengers were dropped off and picked up via laser sail; the cyclers themselves were huge, far too massive to stop and start at will. Their kinetic energy was incalculable, so the interstellar community monitored them as closely as possible. They spent years in transit between the stars, however, and it took weeks or months for laser messages to reach them. News about cyclers was always out of date before it even arrived.
“We have to confirm this before we do anything,” the chief said. “We have the frequency and coordinates to reply. We’ll take it from here.”
Elise had to ask. “Why did only I intercept the message?”
“It wasn’t aimed very well, maybe. He didn’t know exactly where his target was. Only your prospector was within the beam. Just luck.”
“When is the Chinook due to pass us?” Sal asked.
“A month and a half,” said the tight-faced aide. “It should be about three light-weeks out; the date on this message would tend to confirm that.”
“So any reply will come right about the time they pass us,” Sal said. “How can we get a confirmation in time to do anything?”
They looked at one another blankly. Elise did some quick calculations in her head. “Four messages exchanged before they’re a day away,” she said. “If each party waits for the other’s reply. Four on each side.”
“But we have to act well before that,” said another aide.
“How?” asked a third.
Elise didn’t need to listen to the explanation. They could mine the space in front of the cycler. Turn it into energy, and hopefully any missiles too. Kill the thousand-or-so people on board it to save Dew.
“I’ve done my duty,” she said. “Can I go away?”
The chief waved her away. A babble of arguing voices followed Elise and Sal out the door.
Sal offered to walk her home, but Elise declined. She took old familiar ways through the corridors of the city, ways she had grown up with. Today, though, her usual route from the core of the city was blocked by work crews. They were replacing opaque ceiling panels with glass to let in the new daylight. The bright light completely changed the character of the place, washing out familiar colors. It reminded her that there were giant forces in the sky, uncontrollable by her. She retreated, from the glow, and drifted through a maze of alternate routes like a somber ghost, not meeting the eyes of the people she passed.
The parkways were packed, mostly with children. Some were there with a single parent, others with both. Elise watched the couples enviously. Having children was supposed to have made her and Nasim closer. It hadn’t worked out that way.
Lately, he had shown signs of wanting her again. Take it slow, she had told herself. Give him time.
They might not have time.
The same harsh sunlight the work crews had been admitting waited when she got home. It made the jumble of toys on the living room floor seem tiny and fragile. Elise sat under the new window for a while, trying to ignore it, but finally hunted through her closets until she found some old blankets, and covered the glass.
Nasim offered to stay for dinner that night. This made her feel rushed and off-balance. The kids wanted to stay up for it, but he had a late appointment. Putting them to bed was arduous. She got dinner going late, and by then all her planned small talk had evaporated. Talking about the kids was easy enough—but to do that was to take the easy way out, and she had wanted this evening to be different. Worst was that she didn’t want to tell him about the message, because if he thought she was upset he might withdraw, as he had in the past.
The dinner candles stood between them like chessmen. Elise grew more and more miserable. Nasim obviously had no idea what was wrong, but she’d promised not to talk about the crisis. So she came up with a series of lame explanations, for the blanket over the window and for her mood, none of which he seemed to buy.
Things sort of petered out after that.
She had so hoped things would click with Nasim tonight. Exhausted at the end of it all, Elise tumbled into her own bed alone and dejected.
Sleep wouldn’t come. This whole situation had her questioning everything,
because it knotted together survival and love, and her own seeming inability to do anything about either. As she thrashed about under the covers, she kept imagining a distant, invisible dart, the cycler, falling from infinity at her.
Finally she got up and went to her office. She would write it out. That had worked wonderfully before. She sat under the VR headset and called up the mailer. Hammond’s message was still there, flagged with its vector and frequency. She gave the reply command.
“Dear Mr. Hammond.
“I got your message. You intended it for some important person, but I got it instead. I’ve got a daughter and son—I didn’t want to hear that they might be killed. And what am I supposed to do about it? I told the police. So what?
“Please tell me this is a joke. I can’t sleep now, all I can think about is Tiara, and what must have happened there.
“I feel … I told the police, but that doesn’t seem like enough, it’s as if you called me, for help, put the weight of the whole world on my shoulders—and what am I supposed to do about it?” It became easier the more she spoke. Elise poured out the litany of small irritations and big fears that were plaguing her. When she was done, she did feel better.
Send? inquired the mailer.
Oh, God, of course not.
Something landed in her lap, knocking the wind out of her. The headset toppled off her head. “Mommy. Mommy!”
“Yes yes, sweetie, what is it?”
Judy plunked forward onto Elise’s breast. “Did you forget the time again, Mommy?”
Elise relaxed. She was being silly. “Maybe a little, honey. What are you doing awake?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s both go to bed. You can sleep with me, okay?” Judy nodded.
She stood up, holding Judy. The inside of the VR headset still glowed, so she picked it up to turn it off.
Remembering what she’d been doing, she put it on.
Mail sent, the mailer was flashing.
“Oh, my, God!”
“Ow, Mommy.”
“Wait a sec, Judy. Mommy has something to do.” She put Judy down and fumbled with the headset. Judy began to whine.
She picked reply again and said quickly, “Mr. Hammond, please disregard the last message. It wasn’t intended for you. The mailer got screwed up. I’m sorry if I said anything to upset you, I know you’re in a far worse position than I am and you’re doing a very brave thing by getting in touch with us. I’m sure it’ll all work out. I …” She couldn’t think of anything more. “Please excuse me, Mr. Hammond.”
Send? “Yes!”
She took Judy to bed. Her daughter fell asleep promptly, but Elise was now wide awake.
She heard nothing from the government during the next while. Because she knew they might not tell her what was happening, she commanded her outermost prospector to devote half its time to scanning for messages from Chinook. For weeks, there weren’t any.
Elise went on with things. She dressed and fed the kids; let them cry into her shirt when they got too tired or banged their knees; walked them out to meet Nasim every now and then. She had evening coffee with her friends, and even saw a new play that had opened in a renovated reactor room in the basement of the city. Other than that, she mostly worked.
In the weeks after the message’s arrival, Elise found a renewal of the comforting solitude her prospectors gave her. For hours at a time, she could be millions of kilometers away, watching ice crystals dance in her headlamps, or seeing stars she could never view from her window. Being so far away literally give her a new perspective on home; she could see Dew in all its fragile smallness, and understood that the bustle of family and friends served to keep the loneliness of the halo worlds at bay. She appreciated people more for that, but also loved being the first to visit ice galleries and frozen cataracts on distant moons.
Now she wondered if she would be able to watch Dew’s destruction from her prospectors. That made no sense—she would be dead in that case. The sense of actually being out in space was so strong though that she had fantasies of finding the golden thread cut, of existing bodiless and alone forever in the cameras of the prospectors, from which she would gaze down longingly on the ruins of her world.
A month after the first message, a second came. Elise’s prospector intercepted it—nobody else except the police would have, because it was at Hammond’s special frequency. The kids were tearing about in the next room. Their laughter formed an odd backdrop to the bitter voice that sounded in her ears.
“This is Mark Hammond on the Chinook. I will send you all the confirming information I can. There is a video record of the incident at Tiara, and I will try to send it along. It is very difficult. There are only a few of us from the original passengers and crew left. I have to rely on the arrogance of Leviathan’s troops, if they encrypt their database I will be unable to send anything. If they catch me, I will be thrown out an airlock.
“I’ll tell you what happened. I boarded at Mirjam, four years ago. I was bound for Tiara, to the music academy there. Leviathan was our next stop, and we picked up no freight, but several hundred people who turned out to be soldiers. There were about a thousand people on Chinook at that point. The soldiers captured the command center and then they decided who they needed and who was expendable. They killed more than half of us. I was saved because I can sing. I’m part of the entertainment.” Hammond’s voice expressed loathing. He had a very nice voice, baritone and resonant. She could hear the unhappiness in it.
“It’s been two and a half years now, under their heel. We’re sick of it.
“A few weeks ago they started preparing to strike your world. That’s when we decided. You must destroy Chinook. I am going to send you our exact course, and that of the missiles. You must mine space in front of us. Otherwise you’ll end up like Tiara.”
The kids had their survival class that afternoon. Normally Elise was glad to hand them over to Nasim or, lately, their instructor—but this time she took them. She felt just a little better standing with some other parents in the powdery, sandlike snow outside the city watching the space-suited figures of her children go through the drill. They joined a small group in puzzling over a Global Positioning Unit, and successfuly found the way to the beacon that was their target for today. She felt immensely proud of them, and chatted freely with the other parents. It was the first time in weeks that she’d felt like she was doing something worthwhile.
Being outside in daylight was so strange—after their kids, that was the main topic of conversation among the adults. All remembered their own classes, taken under the permanent night they had grown up with. Now they excitedly pointed out the different and wonderful colors of the stones and ices, reminiscent of pictures of Earth’s Antarctica.
It was strange, too, to see the city as something other than a vast dark pyramid. Elise studied it after the kids were done and they’d started back. The city looked solid, a single structure built of concrete that appeared pearly under the mauve clouds. Its flat facades were dotted with windows, and more were being installed. She and the kids tried to find theirs, but it was an unfamiliar exercise and they soon quit.
A big sign had been erected over the city airlock: HELP BUILD A SUNNY FUTURE, it said. Beside it was a thermometer-graph intended to show how close the government was to funding the next stage of Dew’s terraforming. Only a small part of this was filled in, and the paint on that looked a bit old. Nonetheless, several people made contributions at the booth inside, and she was tempted herself—being outdoors did make you think.
They were all tired when they got home, and the kids voluntarily went to nap. Feeling almost happy, Elise looked out her window for a while, then kicked her way through the debris of toys to the office.
A new message was waiting already.
“This is for the woman who heard my first message. I’m not sending it on the new frequency, but I’m aiming it the way I did the first one. This is just for you, whoever you are.”
Elise sat down quickly …
Hammond laughed, maybe a little nervously. His voice was so rich, his laugh seemed to fill her whole head. “That was quite a letter you sent. I’m not sure I believe you about having a ‘mailer accident.’ But if it was an accident, I’m glad it happened.
“Yours is the first voice I’ve heard in years from outside this whole thing. You have to understand, with the way we’re treated and … and isolation and all, we nearly don’t remember what it was like before. To have a life, I mean. To have kids, and worries like that. There’re no kids here anymore. They killed them with their parents.
“A lot of people have given up. They don’t remember why they should care. Most of us are like that now. Even me and the fathers who’re trying to do something … well, we’re doing it out of hate, not because we’re trying to save anything.
“But you reminded me that there are things out there to have. Just hearing your voice, knowing that you and Dew are real, has helped.
“So I decided … I’m going to play your message—the first one, actually—to a couple of the people who’ve given up. Remind them there’s a world out there. That they still have responsibilities.
“Thank you again. Can you tell me your name? I wish we could have met, someday.” That was all.
Somehow, his request made her feel defensive. It was good he didn’t know her name; it was a kind of safety. At the same time she wanted to tell him, as if he deserved it somehow. Finally, after sitting indecisively for long minutes, she threw down the headset and stalked out of the room.
Nasim called the next day. Elise was happy to hear from him, also a bit surprised. She had been afraid he thought she’d been acting cold lately, but he invited her for
lunch in one of the city’s better bistros. She foisted the kids off on her mother, and dressed up. It was worth it. They had a good time.
When she tried to set a date to get together again, he demured. She was left chewing over his mixed messages as she walked home.
Oh, who knew, really? Life was just too complicated right now. When she got home, there was another message from Hammond, this one intended for the authorities. She reviewed it, but afterward regretted doing so. It showed the destruction of Tiara.
On the video, pressure-suited figures unhooked some of Chinook’s hair-thin Lorentz Force cables, and jetted them away from the cycler. The cables seemed infinitely long, and could weigh many hundreds of tons.
The next picture was a long-distance, blue-shifted image of Obsidian’s only inhabited world, Tiara. For about a minute, Elise watched it waver, a speckled dot. Then lines of savage white light crisscrossed its face suddenly as the wires hit.
That was all. Hammond’s voice recited strings of numbers next, which she translated into velocities and trajectories. The message ended without further comment.
She was supposed to have discharged her responsibility by alerting the authorities, but after thinking about it practically all night, she had decided there was one more thing she could do. “Mr. Hammond,” she began, “this is Elise Cantrell. I’m the one who got your first message. I’ve seen the video you sent. I’m sure it’ll be enough to convince our government to do something. Hitting Dew is going to be hard, and now that we know where they’re coming from we should be able to stop the missiles. I’m sure if the government thanks you, they’ll do so in some stodgy manner, like giving you some medal or building a statue. But I want to thank you myself. For my kids. You may not have known just who you were risking your life for. Well, it was for Judy and Alex. I’m sending you a couple of pictures of them. Show them around. Maybe they’ll convince more people to help you.
“I don’t want us to blow up Chinook. That would mean you would die, and you’re much too good a person for that. You don’t deserve it. Show the pictures around. I don’t know—if you can convince enough people, maybe you can take control back. There must be a way. You’re a very clever man, Mr. Hammond. I’m sure you’ll be able to find a way. For … well, for me, maybe.” She laughed, then cleared her throat. “Here’s the pictures.” She keyed in several of her favorites, Judy walking at age one, Alex standing on the dresser holding a towel up, an optimistic parachute.
She took off the headset, and lay back feeling deeply tired, but content. It wasn’t rational, but she felt she had done something heroic, maybe for the first time in her life.
Elise was probably the only person who wasn’t surprised when the sun went out. There had been rumors floating about for several days that the government was commandeering supplies and ships, but nobody knew for what. She did. She was fixing dinner when the light changed. The kids ran over to see what was happening.
“Why’d it stop?” howled Alex. “I want it back!”
“They’ll bring it back in a couple of days,” she told him. “They’re just doing maintenance. Maybe they’ll change the color or something.” That got his attention. For the next while he and Judy talked about what color the new sun should be. They settled on blue.
The next morning she got a call from Sal. “We’re doing it, Elise, and we need your help.”
She’d seen this coming. “You want to take my prospectors.”
“No no, not take them, just use them. You know them best. I convinced the
department heads that you should be the one to pilot them. We need to blockade the missiles the Chinook’s sending.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you mean, that’s all? What else would there be?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. Okay. I’ll do it. Should I log on now?”
“Yeah. You’ll get a direct link to your supervisor. His name’s Oliver. You’ll like him.”
She didn’t like Oliver, but could see how Sal might. He was tough and uncompromising, and curt to the point of being surly. Nice enough when he thought to be, but that was rare. He ordered Elise to take four of her inner-system prospectors off their jobs to maneuver ice for the blockade.
The next several days were the busiest she’d ever had with the prospectors. She had to call Nasim to come and look after the kids, which he did quite invisibly. All Elise’s attention was needed in the orbital transfers. Her machines gathered huge blocks of orbiting ice, holding them like ambitious insects, and trawled slowly into the proper orbit. During tired pauses, she stared down at the brown cloud-tops of Crucible, thunderheads the size of planets, eddies a continent could get lost in. They wanted hundreds of ice mountains moved to intercept the missiles. The sun was out because it was being converted into a fearsome laser lance. This would be used on the ice mountains before the missiles flew by; the expanding clouds of gas should cover enough area to intercept the missiles.
She was going to lose a prospector or two in the conflagration, but to complain about that now seemed petty.
Chinook was drawing close, and the time lag between messages became shorter. As she was starting her orbital corrections on a last chunk of ice, a new message came in from Hammond. For her, again.
In case this was going to get her all wrought up, she finished setting the vectors before she opened the message. This time it came in video format.
Mark Hammond was a lean-faced man with dark skin and an unruly shock of black hair. Two blue-green earrings hung from his ears. He looked old, but that was only because of the lines around his mouth, crow’s-feet at his eyes. But he smiled now.
“Thanks for the pictures, Elise. You can call me Mark. I’m glad your people are able to defend themselves. The news must be going out to all the halo worlds now—nobody’s going to trade with Leviathan now! Total isolation. They deserve it. Thank you. None of this could’ve happened if you hadn’t been there.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Your support’s meant a lot to me in the past few days, Elise. I loved the pictures, they were like a breath of new air. Yeah, I did show them around. It worked, too; we’ve got a lot of people on our side. Who knows, maybe we’ll be able to kick the murderers out of here, like you say. We wouldn’t even have considered trying, if not for you.”
He grimaced, looked down quickly. “Sounds stupid. But you say stupid things in situations like this. Your help has meant a lot to me. I hope you’re evacuated to somewhere safe. And I’ve been wracking my brains trying to think of something I could do for you, equal to the pictures you sent.
“It’s not much, but I’m sending you a bunch of my recordings. Some of these songs are mine, some are traditionals from Mirjam. But it’s all my voice. I hope you like them. I’ll never get the chance for the real training I needed at Tiara. This’ll have to do.” Looking suddenly shy, he said, “Bye.”
Elise saved the songs in an accessible format and transferred them to her sound system. She stepped out of the office, walked without speaking past Nasim and the
kids, and turned the sound way up. Hammond’s voice poured out clear and strong, and she sat facing the wall, and just listened for the remainder of the day.
Oliver called her the next morning with new orders. “You’re the only person who’s got anything like a ship near the Chinook’s flight path. Prospector Six.” That was the one that had picked up Hammond’s first message. “We’re sending some missiles we put together, but they’re low-mass, so they might not penetrate the Chinook ’s forward shields.”
“You want me to destroy the Chinook.” She was not surprised. Only very disappointed that fate had worked things this way.
“Yeah,” Oliver said. “Those shits can’t be allowed to get away. Your prospector masses ten thousand tons, more than enough to stop it dead. I’ve put the vectors in your database. This is top priority. Get on it.” He hung up.
She was damned if she would get on it. Elise well knew her responsibility to Dew, but destroying Chinook wouldn’t save her world. That all hinged on the missiles, which must have already been sent. But just so the police couldn’t prove that she’d disobeyed orders, she entered the vectors to intercept Chinook, but included a tiny error that would guarantee a miss. The enormity of what she was doing—the government would call this treason—made her feel sick to her stomach. Finally she summoned her courage and called Hammond.
“They want me to kill you.” Elise stood in front of her computer, allowing it to record her in video. She owed him that, at least. “I can’t do it. I’m sorry, but I can’t. I’m not an executioner, and you’ve done nothing wrong. Of all of us, you’re the one who least deserves to die! It’s not fair. Mark, you’re going to have to take back the Chinook. You said you had more people on your side. I’m going to give you the time to do it. It’s a couple of years to your next stop. Take back the ship, then you can get off there. You can still have your life, Mark! Come back here. You’ll be a hero.”
She tried to smile bravely, but it cracked into a grimace. “Please, Mark. I’m sure the government’s alerted all the other halo worlds now. They’ll be ready. Chinook won’t be able to catch anybody else by surprise. So there’s no reason to kill you.
“I’m giving you the chance you deserve, Mark. I hope you make the best of it.”
She sent that message, only realizing afterwards that she hadn’t thanked him for the gift of his music. But she was afraid to say anything more.
The city was evacuated the next day. It started in the early hours, as the police closed off all the levels of the city then began sweeping, waking people from their beds and moving the bewildered crowds to trains and aircraft. Elise was packed and ready. Judy slept in her arms, and Alex clutched her belt and knuckled his eyes as they walked among shouting people. The media were now revealing the nature of the crisis, but it was far too late for organized protest. The crowds were herded methodically; the police must have been drilling for this for weeks.
She wished Sal had told her exactly when it was going to happen. It meant she hadn’t been able to hook up with Nasim, whose apartment was on another level. He was probably still asleep, even while she and the kids were packed on a train, and she watched through the angle of the window as the station receded.
Sometime the next morning they stopped, and some of the passengers were off-loaded. Food was eventually brought, and then they continued on. Elise was asleep leaning against the wall when they finally unloaded her car.
All the cities of Dew had emergency barracks. She had no idea what city they had come to at first, having missed the station signs. She didn’t care. The kids needed looking after, and she was bone tired.
Not too tired, though, to know that the hours were counting quickly down to zero. She couldn’t stand being cut off, she had to know Hammond’s reply to her message, but there were no terminals in the barracks. She had to know he was all right.
She finally managed to convince some women to look after Judy and Alex, and set off to find a way out. There were several policemen loitering around the massive metal doors that separated the barracks from the city, and they weren’t letting anyone pass.
She walked briskly around the perimeter of the barracks, thinking. Barracks like this were usually at ground level, and were supposed to have more than one entrance, in case one was blocked by earthquake or fire. There must be some outside exit, and it might not be guarded.
Deep at the back where she hadn’t been yet, she found her airlock, unguarded. Its lockers were packed with survival suits; none of the refugees would be going outside, especially not here on unknown ground. There was no good reason for them to leave the barracks, because going outside would not get them home. But she needed a terminal.
She suited up, and went through the airlock. Nobody saw her. Elise stepped out onto the surface of Dew, where she had never been except during survival drills. A thin wind was blowing, catching and worrying at drifts of carbon-dioxide snow. Tom clouds revealed stars high above the glowing walls of the city. This place, wherever it was, had thousands of windows; she supposed all the cities did now. They would have a good view of whatever happened in the sky today.
After walking for a good ten minutes, she came to another airlock. This one was big, with vehicles rolling in and out. She stepped in after one, and found herself in a warehouse. Simple as that.
From there she took the elevator up sixteen levels to an arcade lined with glass. Here finally were VR terminals, and she gratefully collapsed at one, and logged into her account.
There were two messages waiting. Hammond, it had to be. She called up the first one.
“You’re gonna thank me for this, you really are,” said Oliver. He looked smug. “I checked in on your work—hey, just doing my job. You did a great job on moving the ice, but you totally screwed up your trajectory on Prospector Six. Just a little error, but it added up quick. Would have missed Chinook completely if I hadn’t corrected it. Guess I saved your ass, huh?” He mocked-saluted, and grinned. “Didn’t tell anybody. I won’t, either. You can thank me later.” Still smug, he rung off.
“Oh no. No, no no,” she whispered. Trembling, she played the second message.
Hammond appeared, looking drawn and sad. His backdrop was a metal bulkhead; his breath frosted when he breathed. “Hello, Elise,” he said. His voice was low, and tired. “Thank you for caring so much about me. But your plan will never work.”
“You’re not here. Lucky thing. But if you were, you’d see how hopeless it is. There’s a handful of us prisoners, kept alive for amusement and because we can do some things they can’t. They never thought we’d have a reason to go outside, that’s the only reason I was able to get out to take over the message laser. And it’s only because of their bragging that we got the video and data we did.
“They have a right to be confident, with us. We can’t do anything, we’re locked away from their part of the ship. And you see, when they realize you’ve mined space near Dew, they’ll know someone gave them away. We knew that would happen when we decided to do this. Either way I’m dead, you see; either you kill me, or they do. I’d prefer you did it, it’ll be so much faster.”
He looked down pensively for a moment. “Do me the favor,” he said at last. “You’ll carry no blame for it, no guilt. Destroy Chinook. The worlds really aren’t safe until you do. These people are fanatics, they never expected to get home alive. If they think their missiles won’t get through, they’ll aim the ship itself at the next world. Which will be much harder to stop.
“I love you for your optimism, and your plans. I wish it could have gone the way you said. But this really is goodbye.”
Finally he smiled, looking directly at her. “Too bad we didn’t have the time. I could have loved you, I think. Thank you, though. The caring you showed me is enough.” He vanished. Message end, said the mailer. Reply?
She stared at that last word for a long time. She signaled yes.
“Thank you for your music, Mark,” she said. She sent that. Then she closed her programs, and took off the headset.
The end, when it came, took the form of a brilliant line of light scored across the sky. Elise watched from the glass wall of the arcade, where she sat on a long couch with a bunch of other silent people. The landscape lit to the horizon, brighter than Dew’s artificial sun had ever shone. The false day faded slowly.
There was no ground shock. No sound. Dew had been spared.
The crowd dispersed, talking animatedly. For them, the adventure had been over before they had time to really believe in the threat. Elise watched them through her tears almost fondly. She was too tired to move.
Alone, she gazed up at the stars. Only a faint pale streak remained now. In a moment she would return to her children, but first she had to let this emotion fill her completely, wash down from her face through her arms and body, like Hammond’s music. She wasn’t used to how acceptance felt. She hoped it would become more familiar to her.
Elise stood and walked alone to the elevator, and did not look back at the sky.