Three days later, Grand Admiral, Her Royal Highness Kristine Longknife struggled to keep her mouth shut.
Around her, staff watched from her flag bridge as her escort fleet made its approach to the Imperial planet. Beside her, Jacques and Amanda failed to keep their disinterested cool; their mouths hung open in awe and dismay.
“I would never have believed,” Amanda whispered, “that a planet could support a civilization this over-grown. The population must be huge. Nelly, are you sure all those lights on the night side are cities?”
“The planet is split fifty-fifty, water and land,” Nelly responded. “I believe a significant amount of the water has been used up or expended as fuel. The expanded continents below us are approximately 45% urban. Cultivated land accounts for another 45%. The rest are mountains and arctic wastes.”
“What happened to the deserts?” Jacques asked. “Deserts, grasslands? That has to be land that is worthless.”
Nelly actually chuckled. “As John Junior, will point out to you, the poop has to go somewhere. When you’ve been civilized for ten thousand years or more, that’s a lot of fertilizer to dispose of.”
“I thought that ‘Ten Thousand Years’ was a myth,” Jacques said. “A boast. I begin to believe it just might be possible.”
“Even with the oceans in retreat, they have colonized the waters,” Nelly said. “I can verify that habitats cover about a quarter of the sea area. Some are cities, others are things like fish farms, all in the coastal shallows. Further out in deeper water, I have identified activities on the bottom of the ocean. Much of the equatorial and temperate zones on the continents are fully utilized for crops as well as some of the more spectacular urban areas. Farther north and south you find rather monotonous urban zones. I suspect that is where the workers live.”
“And we beat these people in the Iteeche war,” Jack whispered softly.
“Say, instead, that ‘We both grew sick of the horrible waste and became exhausted by the war effort’,” Kris said, quoting her Grampa Trouble.
“I wonder how many planets they have like this?” Amanda asked.
“Aren’t you the economist?” Jacques, her anthropologist husband asked. “Can a planet this huge make any economic contribution to an Empire? Can it even feed and make what it needs to exist?”
“A good question,” Amanda answered. “If its value added is good governance that allows the other planets to produce more efficiently, then yes, it makes sense, economically, to have all the government here.”
“I have stumbled across a fact,” Nelly said. “They claim they produce so much fecal matter that they ship it off planet to others that need the fertilizer. Is that economically feasible?”
“If they’re shipping exotic foodstuffs to the planet, they’d have to do something with the additional sewage that goes down the drain,” Amanda said.
“And what would happen to a place like this,” Kris whispered softly, “if the wheels came off the wagon? What would happen if there was no more Empire to feed it?”
“Mass starvation,” Amanda answered.
“Rioting, total collapse, mass slaughter, and finally, cannibalism,” Jacques added.
“How badly must the civil war be going that an Emperor faced with this at his doorstep has called for a human, and even worse, a Longknife, to lend him a hand?” Jack asked.
“And him having four already,” Jacques quipped.
Kris’s sigh might have outweighed a battlecruiser.
I’ve fought massive alien base ships to keep them from lazing planets from space. Billions would have died under their fire. Now all I have to do is persuade a bunch of Iteeche that they want to make nice and not destroy the roots of their own civilization.
A piece of cake.
Yeah, right.
The space station they approached was weird beyond belief. Kris chuckled. Alien.
Like a human station, it perched atop a space elevator that went down and a counterweight that went up. Beyond that, Kris had never seen anything quite like it.
Every human station that Kris had ever seen had been a rotating can. The A Deck was the outer hull of the station and piers projected from the A Deck for ships to dock to. It had always seemed perfectly reasonable to Kris.
Trust an alien to do it different.
What she now studied was an impossible arrangement. However, as the Princess Royal changed her angle of approach, so did Kris’s perspective. Seen from a three quarters view, it all fell into place.
Sort of.
At the top of the bean stalk, was a central spindle. It had to be at least a hundred kilometers long. Strung along that spindle were nine . . . snowflakes.
Each one of the structures spreading out perpendicular to the spindle was a unique creation. They had five, six, seven and even eight spines pointing out from the spindle, and each one of those spines had various spars reaching out at ninety degree angles. From the distance, Kris was viewing it from, each of the spars seemed to have hair on them.
“Magnify,” Kris said, and Nelly quickly did.
The station jumped at Kris and filled the screen. The “hair” became piers with ships docked to them. Lots of ships attached to lots of piers.
“The cross-bar things,” Lieutenant Longknife said. “Look like they must form the equivalent of our decks,” she said slowly.
“Each of the decks would have different gravity,” Kris muttered.
“Want to bet that we’re directed at one of the middle ones?” Jack said.
“No bet,” Kris answered. “It must be harsh on those docked close in or far out. Little gravity or heavy gravity, take your pick.”
“Maybe not,” Amanda said. “Maybe they have people born on planets with lighter or heavier gravity and they like the different berths. Plus, bulky things like machinery and food would be easier to handle in light gravity. And as we all know, shit flows downhill. I bet you the extra weight at the end of the pipes creates a vacuum that sucks the sewage right along without too much pumping.”
“Could they be shipping that much sewage off world?” Jacques asked.
“Hard to tell,” Amanda answered. “All the Iteeche merchant ships still look like puff balls to me. Maybe they ship the steerage customers off planet from those high gravity piers.
“In boats that are totally steerage, or partially loaded with sewage,” Kris concluded with a sour scowl. “Stinky ride.”
“Kris,” Nelly put in, “I’ve done the numbers on this, and it seems to me that this planet might be supporting a population somewhere between a hundred and a hundred-fifty billion. Maybe more. I don’t know how to factor in the urban areas in the shallow coastal seas.”
That got a low whistle from the people around Kris.
“Hold it,” Meg Longknife said, looking very puzzled. “I know we have a high birthrate on Santa Maria. When I left we’d just dropped our birthrate to three percent. Even if they’ve only got theirs down to one percent, that would mean a billion live births a year! Wouldn’t it? Nelly, did I get the numbers wrong?
“You have them right. If their birth rate is anything like that, and their death rate doesn’t do something to balance matters better, they would need to ship a whole lot of people off planet every year.”
“But would they, Nelly?” Kris said. “They may spawn lots and lots of tadpoles, but how many get “chosen” from the breeding pools and allowed to mature into adults. Ron is very proud of his Chooser. Maybe they don’t choose any more than they need to maintain the population at a desired level?”
“But they chose to let their planet become this populated,” Amanda said, pointedly.
As one, they all turned toward the screen. Nelly replaced the space station with a view of the dark side of the planet. Close to half of it was lit up like a yule tree.
Amanda shook her head. “We need more information on the Iteeche. The more I see of this place, the more questions I have, and I’m not getting any answers”
“Maybe there was a reason they didn’t want humans wandering into their Empire,” Kris said thoughtfully.
“A very good reason,” Jack added.