A Charter for the Commonwealth

by Richard F. Weyand

  “Professors, come in, come in. Please, be seated.”

  As he had three years before, Westlake waved his guests to his side seating arrangement, where the refreshments requested last time had already been laid out. He shook hands with both before they all took their seats.

  Westlake waved to the humidor on the table, already placed for Ansen’s use.

  “Go ahead, Professor Ansen. Please.”

  “Thank you, Excellency.”

  Ansen took one of the Earth-import cigars, long missing from his humidor, cut the end, and lit it. He drew in the first puff and then exhaled luxuriously, while Westlake and Kusunoki poured their coffee and tea, respectively.

  “Thank you so much for stopping by to meet with me. I will mention that this meeting, like our last, is not being recorded and is off the record,” Westlake said.

  Ansen nodded. He had already put Westlake’s invitation on the coffee table.

  “Understood, Excellency.”

  “So here we are. Remarkable. With many thanks to the two of you, we have a good framework for a charter, we have a navy, and we are on the verge of becoming our own polity. I wanted to express my thanks personally for your roles in making my dreams possible.”

  “We’re not quite there yet, Excellency.”

  “No, Professor Ansen. But we are very close. Closer than I dreamed we could be.”

  “But you set all this in motion, Excellency.”

  “Yes, Professor Kusunoki. But a life in administration teaches you not to be too hopeful. Many things one starts in motion either do not play out as one might hope, or fizzle out altogether. I’m happy this has not been one of them.”

  Kusunoki nodded.

  “That being said, with you having done so much already, I nevertheless have some further requests to make of you.”

  “Please, go ahead,” Ansen said.

  “First, Georgy has told me of your plans to name the planetary governors to the council and to nominate me as council chairman. Despite the increased risk to me personally, I think – as you do, Professor Kusunoki – this greatly increases our chances of success. I have already begun thinking through my approach to my fellow governors and to Earth.

  “But it would greatly assist me if you would send me a copy of your charter as it then stands perhaps two months before you pass it. With six weeks round-trip travel time on fast mail courier ships, that gives me a chance to look through it and get back to you before final passage.”

  Ansen nodded. “Sensible.”

  “I hoped you would think so. Also, I would like you to advise me on final passage, and then hold your announcement for two weeks. That means I will be able to get a message to my father on Earth before he gets news of the charter.”

  “Agreed.”

  “Thank you. I think it will help our chances considerably to get our argument before my father. Suzette’s father as well, for that matter.” Westlake sipped his coffee, then set the cup back on the table. “Finally, I would ask that at least interim ministers in the government not be required to be members of the council. I need Georgy Orlov at defense.”

  “That makes sense as well, Excellency. Since we don’t know which planetary governors will side with us, and the academics that comprise two-thirds of the initial council have little or no administrative experience, requiring that ministers be from the council in the first, oh, ten years or so, is a recipe for disaster.” Ansen considered. “Should ministers be from the council on the longer term, though? That’s an interesting question.”

  “That’s for the conference to decide, I think. My only caution would be that it might give individual planets too much power. Were the minister to do something their own planet doesn’t like, they could replace him on the council, and now you’re out one minister. It might make ministers too compliant to their planet’s policy preferences.”

  “An interesting point. Well, we will consider the longer term requirement, and put in the short-term exemption as well.”

  “Thank you, Professor. And with that, my own questions are complete. Unless you have any questions for me?”

  Both Ansen and Kusunoki shook their heads.

  “Very well, then. Good travels, my friends, and the best of luck in your endeavors at the conference. You hold all our futures in your hands.”

  When Ansen and Kusunoki arrived at the Jablonka shuttleport for transfer up to their ship to Doma, porters carried their substantial trunks into the shuttleport terminal building. Packing for a year was no small matter. Thankfully, the days of carrying one’s books and papers in physical hard copy were long gone, or there would have been twice as much.

  The head porter greeted them inside. Several hundred other passengers bound for Doma were already there.

  “Professor Ansen? Professor Kusunoki?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. Very good.” He checked them off a list. “Your other trunk arrived earlier.”

  “What other trunk?”

  The head porter waved to another trunk, every bit as large as theirs, sitting over by the pile of luggage to be boarded. Ansen walked over to it curiously. It was already tagged for Doma, and had his name prominently labeled on it. He unlatched the lid with a thumb swipe, glanced inside, and closed it again. He walked back to the head porter.

  “Ah, yes. Of course. I had completely forgotten about it.”

  He and Kusunoki walked over to waiting area chairs to wait for the arrival of the shuttle.

  When they were out of earshot of the porters, Kusunoki asked, “What’s in the other trunk?”

  “It is full to the brim – to the very brim, my dear – with those wonderful cigars, bourbon, and tea. And this.”

  Ansen handed her a small card, inscribed in a precise, decorative hand she recognized.

  With all best wishes. W.

  In Transit

  They were in the Goat Locker, and Senior Chief Lloyd Behm had the floor. Stardust had made its transition to hyperspace on departing Jablonka yesterday.

  “OK, so now that we can get to general quarters the same day they’re sounded, we need to practice what we do when we get there. Some people have obvious assignments, like the computers, engines, weapons, and environmental sections. Everybody else goes on damage control parties. So what kind of damage are we likely to take in a battle?”

  “Punctures from ESN projectile launchers,” Chief Wood said.

  “Right. Now on this trip, we’re not gonna be doing any attacking. We’re just gonna defend ourselves if we need to run away. So where are we likely to take punctures? What’s our aft aspect look like?”

  “Deck One of the cylinders,” Senior Chief Southard said.

  “Engines,” Chief Tom Wallace said.

  “Radiators,” Senior Chief Swogger said.

  “Aft beam cutters. You know, beams 9 through 12,” Chief Gaffney said.

  “Right. All the above. Now, if we’re runnin’ away, and the engines are runnin’ hard, we don’t need to worry about engines because any projectile headed for the engines is gonna be vaporized before it hits us. If we lose a beam cutter, we lose one. Can’t do anything about that on the run, but we could mount a spare once we escape, if we carried spares. I should look into that for next trip.

  “Cylinders and radiators is the issue. So we need damage control parties suited up, with patches and shit, on the lower decks of every cylinder. And we gotta have all the airtight doors shut so we can limit air loss, particularly on lower decks. We don’t know how many decks those damn things will go through.”

  “Sounds right. What about the radiators?” Swogger asked.

  “We need to be monitoring all four radiators for pressure. Any pressure drop on a radiator, we can assume it’s been holed and we need to valve it off and lean harder on the others. We can fix it and refill it once we escape. So that’s all on the engines people.”

  “We’ll run hot if we lose a radiator,” Chief Wallace said.

  “Yup. Don’t know how hot, but we probably
ought to try it in one o’ these drills and see what we get. Could get warm in here. We’ll deal with it. We wanna figure it out now, not then.

  “But that’s what we’re about. So let’s think up some ways to practice this stuff. Then I’ll run it all past the XO and get approvals. And then we’re gonna drill patching, and valving off radiators, and anything else we can think of. Our job is to preserve the ship and the crew while continuing to carry the fight to the enemy. We better figure out how to do that, ladies and gentlemen. We got two months in hyper before we get to Earth. I wanna know – not guess; know – we can do that before we get there.”

  Seamen 1st Garland Noel and Toby Cobb and Seamen 2nd Jason O’Toole and Paul Clithero were in the stairwell on Deck One of Cylinder Two. Petty Officer 2nd Pamela Stump was in charge.

  “All right. So what we’re gonna do is patch the deck, like we got a hole from a projectile launcher. I put a screamer on the ceilin’ somewhere on Deck One. It’s gonna make a loud whistlin’ sound, and shine a spot o’ light down on the deck. That’s your hole. You gotta find it and patch it. Got it?”

  “Sure, Petty Officer,” Noel said.

  “Yeah. No problem, Petty Officer,” Cobb said.

  “OK. Noel and O’Toole, you’re first up.” Stump pushed a button on a remote, and a loud whistling noise started off in the distance. “Go.”

  O’Toole picked up the patch, a flexible eighth-inch steel-mesh-and-rubber plate twenty-four inches in diameter with two folding handles on one side, and Noel grabbed the tool box. They walked off down the aisle after the sound. Stump watched dumbfounded, but said nothing.

  They found the screamer in one of the bunkrooms. Noel put down the toolbox and rummaged for the spray can of rubber gasketing. He found it and sprayed it around the light spot on the floor. O’Toole set the patch plate on it.

  They looked up to see Stump standing in the doorway. She turned off the screamer with her remote, and they all went back to the stairwell.

  “OK, Cobb and Clithero. Your turn.”

  Stump turned on another screamer, and Cobb and Clithero set off to find the screamer and patch the ‘hole’ much as Noel and O’Toole had. They all met up back in the stairwell.

  “OK. First, you guys did it just like a trainin’ movie. Problem is, those movies are an hour long. Both teams took almost fifteen minutes to find and seal the damn hole. This whole deck would be depressurized in that time, as well as any decks further up that got punched as well.

  “I wanna count the time it takes to seal a hole in seconds, not minutes. You need to arrange your toolboxes so the items needed most often are on top, not rummage around for ’em. You need to head off down the aisle at a dead run to find that hole. And you can slam the plate over it and spray the gasketing around it after the plate is down. Vacuum will pull the gasketing into the gap. Got all that?”

  “Yes, Petty Officer,” Cobb and Noel said together.

  “All right, then. Organize your stuff and then let’s try it again.”

  They made four more practice runs before Stump was satisfied.

  “OK. That’s it for now. Tomorrow we do it suited up.”

  They didn’t audibly groan. Not quite.

  “Hey, you guys wanna get home or not? We could get GQed in the middle of the night. You guys gotta be able to do this in your sleep. And we’re gonna practice it until you can.”

  Stump practiced the other two teams for Deck One that afternoon. There would be four teams on each of the lower decks of each cylinder.

  “So how we doin’ on the patchin’ teams?” Behm asked.

  “Libis, Stump, Kuhn, and Edwards have their teams performing pretty well. Most of the others, not so much,” Chief Christine Chase said.

  “That’s Steven Libis, Pamela Stump, Alan Kuhn, and Valerie Edwards?” Behm asked, looking at his crew roster.

  “Yeah. They have their times down under three minutes. Pami Stump says if we keep the decks sealed but leave all the compartment doors on each deck open in GQ, four teams per deck ought to be able to get their time down around a minute. Checking compartments takes up a lot of the time. With the doors open, they can hear where it is.”

  “Well, this is a freighter. The compartments on a deck aren’t airtight from each other anyway.”

  “That’s what Pami said,” Chase said.

  “All right, Chris. Let’s do that. And I think what we ought to do is bump these four to petty officer 1st, and have them each supervise all the patching crews in one of the cylinders. I left some openings in the petty officer ranks so we could promote people who earned it.”

  “I think that makes a lot of sense, Lloyd. They clearly know how to get teams to perform. Let’s see if they can teach others how to get teams to perform.”

  Chief Wallace was in Radiator Control in Cylinder Two for a test of shutting down one radiator to see how bad their heating problem would be.

  “We have all the readings on our current status?” Wallace asked.

  “Yes, Chief. We have our recordings running all the time, and we’re showing they’re updating,” Petty Officer 1st Lindsay Harwood said.

  “All right. Let’s go ahead and shut one of ’em down.”

  “You heard the man. Shut down the coolant pump on Radiator One.”

  “Shutting down the coolant pump on Radiator One,” Seaman 1st Jennifer Lowenthal said. “Radiator One flow rate dropping. Radiator One flow rate zero.”

  “Close inlet valve on Radiator One.”

  “Closing inlet valve on Radiator One. Radiator One pressure dropping.”

  “Close outlet valve on Radiator One.”

  “Closing outlet valve on Radiator One. Radiator One isolated.”

  “Yount. Watch your temps. Call ’em out,” Harwood said.

  “Monitoring temps. Stable at 180 degrees inlet temperatures on Radiators Two, Three, and Four. No significant rise yet,” Seaman 1st James Yount said.

  They all watched for several minutes.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 190 degrees.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 200 degrees.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 210 degrees.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 220 degrees.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 230 degrees.

  “Inlet temperatures now at 240 degrees.

  “Temperatures stable at 240 degrees.”

  “And that’s at eighty percent on the engines, Chief,” Harwood said to Wallace. “If we’re running at a hundred percent, they’re going to go higher.”

  “And our safety limit is, what? 280 degrees?”

  “Yes, Chief. Though I hope not to go that high. The option is to shut off the air conditioning compressors in the crew spaces and go to emergency lighting systems to cut back on waste heat in electricity generation.”

  “Well, if we gotta do it, we gotta do it. Cutting back on the engines when somebody’s shootin’ at us ain’t my idea of a good time.”

  “I’m with you there, Chief. I guess the bottom line is, as long as we only lose one radiator, we’re good.”

  Stardust continued to have patching drills and general quarters drills throughout the first month of the hyperspace transit.

  They were into the second half of the transit, after they had flipped ship for the long deceleration to Earth, when the klaxon sounded and five bells rang general quarters at 3:00 in the morning. About five minutes into general quarters, two screamers went off without warning on Decks One through Five in each of the four cylinders, the first time a screamer had sounded during general quarters. The patching crews reacted automatically, without thinking, and all forty of the ‘holes’ were patched and the entire ship sealed within two minutes.

  That night, Chief Christine Chase invited Petty Officers 1st Steven Libis, Pamela Stump, Alan Kuhn, and Valerie Edwards to dinner in the Chief’s Mess. When they entered, Senior Chief Lloyd Behm led the assembled chiefs and senior chiefs in a standing ovation.

  Stardust was ready for battle.

  Gerald
Ansen and Mineko Kusunoki had a first-class suite on the passenger liner Jewel Of Space. A central sitting room connected to a small office, bedroom, and bathroom on each side. It was luxurious accommodations shipboard, and they appreciated each having an office in which to work in addition to the central suite for their conversations. They had the porters fold up the double bed in one bedroom and strap their three trunks to the floor stanchions, as a measure against having them fly around in zero-gravity.

  The Jewel Of Space, plying routinely between Jablonka, the largest and richest of the colonies, and Doma, the premier resort planet, was one of the most luxurious liners in service, and they had its premier accommodations. They were thus not crowded in the way typically associated with space travel.

  “Well, this is very nice for being aboard ship,” Kusunoki said. “I remember my trip out from Earth as being much more crowded than this.”

  “Indeed,” Ansen said. “As with my student travels to and from Earth decades ago. Still, six weeks is a long time. It’s particularly a long time to do without cigars.”

  “Did you not see there was a first-class smoking lounge on this floor?”

  “Excuse me. What did you say?”

  “There’s a first-class smoking lounge across the hall. I’m not sure how that works with recycled air, but there it is.”

  Ansen jumped up from his chair in the sitting room and went out the door. He returned three minutes later.

  “Marvelous. Momentous. Miraculous.” Ansen reseated himself next to Kusunoki. “I have decided I will not, in fact, go out of my mind on this trip. Thank you, my dear.”

  “You’re welcome,” Kusunoki said, smiling hugely. “So, if you are not going to go out of your mind during the trip, what are you going to do for the next six weeks?”

  “Build a decision tree for the charter, with historical references for each of the branches.”

  “Every decision, from the beginning?”

  “Yes,” Ansen said. “Every decision I can think of. Unicameral or bicameral. Per planet or per capita. How many legislators. President or prime minister. Which cabinet ministers. Each civil right, in or out. Each government power or authority, in or out. Commonwealth crimes, in or out. Commonwealth courts, in or out. Requirement for amendments. Everything. Top to bottom.”