Friends in the Stars

by Mackey Chandler

  “The trajectory the instrument package took in passing was too obviously intended to get accurate targeting information. Remember the cloud of projectiles North America shot at Home when we were in Low Earth Orbit? They followed a long orbital path designed to try to obscure where they came from. If you do the same again, now that we are beyond the Moon, it is much more difficult to get all your projectiles on target and not waste them.”

  “They’re taking ranging shots to map trajectories,” April said, angry at the idea.

  “Yes, I think so,” Jeff agreed.

  “Do you want to track down the source and destroy them like we did the orbital rail guns that shot at us before?” April suggested.

  “No, not this time,” Jeff said. “I believe it would be better to backtrack and identify them. Let them think we are unaware and will remain a passive target easy to shoot. If we neutralize this scheme then they may adjust it or replace it with something more effective. We can locate the sources and see if they launch a swarm of projectiles. That will give us a speed of light warning to evade as they make a relatively slow ballistic approach. We can destroy the launchers after they have shown hostile intent.

  He paused and thought. “A trajectory has two ends. The data will work either way. Their source may not be something we can target.”

  “If they start shooting at us again. I intend to respond a lot stronger than just taking out the offending launchers,” April said.

  “As you say, you can plan all your responses and preposition everything to take whatever pieces you wish,” Jeff said, making a motion like moving a chess piece.

  I’m not interested in taking a few pawns off the board,” April said. “I want to kick the table over, send the game flying, and kick their butts.”

  “I can’t really fault that at all,” Jeff agreed.

  * * *

  “Eileen? I have a situation on the Kurofune that has me entirely out of my depth. If it is within your ability to help, I’m prepared to make whatever arrangements are needed and stand the cost,” Lee pleaded. “I also won’t argue about what level of favor I owe in return. Do you have the ability to maintain a monitor on a person’s responses to determine their origins and loyalties without a formal interrogation? I’ve always assumed you do a low-level analysis of my own responses whenever we meet. I need something at a higher level, that won’t provoke a possible suicide conditioning in an intelligence agent.”

  “Let me get Vic,” Eileen said.

  “I’m going to make another call while you do that,” Lee said. “Time is of the essence to see that my guard on the ship is safe.”

  Eileen nodded and disconnected.

  Lee called the Red Tree workers the clan kept on the station direct. It was bad enough she was going to need to take the time to explain everything to Eileen without doing the same with the Mothers too. She was sure they would be happy to support Garrett in any way needed and she knew the station Derf had military training.

  When Lee called back to the Foys they were sitting close together in the camera pickup, waiting.

  “First of all, Vic raised an important point,” Eileen said. “Are we speaking of Human intelligence agents or Derf?”

  “Humans,” Lee said. “I wouldn’t expect you to have any idea how to test Derf for veracity or reactions to keywords. They were supposedly Fargoer technicians sent to mount my missiles on the Kurofune. Since the Fargoer navy accepted them and they did mount the missiles for me, they would seem to be the genuine article. The problem is they tried to gain unauthorized access to the flight deck. I can’t think of anything else they could have wanted to steal but the New Japan targeting software, and whatever information they could get on the hardware.”

  Lee outlined the events and the situation aboard right now, while Garrett waited for help to arrive.

  “That was smart to make them remove their helmets,” Vic said. “If it is not a problem to call Garrett again, I’d suggest he set up a one-key pressure dump command on his board. That’s just a little insurance, if those two sit and think on it they might decide they are better off to resist before the cavalry shows up.”

  “OK, but I’d like to tell him he has someplace to send them when I call. Are you agreeable to helping me set up a program to study their responses in custody?”

  “Maybe, it wouldn’t be as sophisticated as what they could do back home. We’d like you to answer a couple more questions. On whose authority can you hold them? I’m not into kidnapping,” Eileen said.

  “The ship was being guarded by the Mothers,” Lee said. “They would regard invading it like trying to break into their Keep. I haven’t talked to them yet. I am short on time to tell this story over and over, but I left them to last because they are the one set of people who I am sure of their response. They are sovereign over their holdings and nobody will check their hand except other clan Mothers. No other clan is going to complain about how our Mothers treat spies who tried to circumvent their security.”

  “As spies, caught in the act in the field, even by Earth standards of behavior they could legally be shot out of hand without apology,” Vic said.

  “But we aren’t at war,” Eileen said.

  “Neither are we at peace,” Vic said. “We are assigned here to guard the system and have been tested once already. Modern states rarely declare formal hostilities. We know they are spies but we don’t have any idea yet for whom they work, let alone what the state of Central’s relationship is with them.”

  “That’s one of the things I want to find out,” Lee said.

  “They came from a Fargone company in a Fargone warship,” Eileen said. “I’d be shocked if they worked for anyone else. I sure wouldn’t trust those missiles either.”

  “No, I can’t agree with that,” Lee said. “We’ll check them out carefully, but I expect them to be clean.”

  “What’s your reasoning on that?” Eileen demanded of her.

  “If everything had gone well for them, they would have stolen everything they wanted and gotten away undetected. The last thing they wanted to do was leave behind signs we’d been compromised. Messing with the missiles would do that sooner or later.”

  “She’s likely right,” Vic told his wife. “Where do you want to take these fellows? Your clan Keep? Do they have some dungeons down in those tunnels?”

  “Derf have never taken prisoners. They always fought until one clan was totally annihilated, their legacy destroyed and lands taken. It was a difficult concept to get them to accept a surrender from North America. They just knew if they won on the basis of total annihilation it would turn all the other nations and worlds of man against them.”

  “That’s horrid,” Eileen said, and then you could see she regretted saying it.

  “It had the advantage of restraining them from starting wars casually,” Lee said.

  “Yes, yes I can see that, but what about Vic’s question? I don’t want to start using our new embassy as a prison,” Eileen insisted. “What is Derfhome City’s status as far as the Mothers are concerned, or the other clans for that matter? Who decided it was the capital city and who will give us a hard time if we have a private jail here?

  “It’s kind of weird,” Lee admitted. “Human’s expected a capital city for trade, so early on the Derf told them Derfhome was the capital because it was the largest town. Before that, they just called it Big Town. It’s doubtful they understood the political implications back then. None of the clans would ever dare claim to be the capital because the other clans would never let them get away with elevating themselves. It’s really just another neutral trade town and took up the mantle of being the capital to satisfy humans. It’s all PR and bluster without any authority to back it. It has all the legal status of names Earth cities give themselves to attract tourists.

  “They have a loose council of trade organizations and merchants like all the other trade towns. It’s only in the last couple of decades they have got enough public support to take a voluntary collec
tion to pave the streets on sections that don’t have privately owned frontage. They don’t have an official police force or a zoning authority like you expect in Human cities. People hire private security and there are customs about what and where you build. Just about everything they do is based on not wanting to provoke a clan to step in and impose laws and orders from outside, which they still can.”

  “Would you fund a safe house in town?” Vic asked. “That’s the usual way of keeping such things at arm’s length, and they are handy for other things.”

  “That’s no great expense to me,” Lee said. “As you say, Garrett or you guys will likely find other uses for it.”

  She and Vic both looked at Eileen expectantly.

  “Yeah, do it for now,” Eileen agreed, aware of the press of time. “But I want to hear that you did eventually check with the Mothers, and they don’t have any objections or want changes, even if it is done off their territory.”

  “Certainly,” Lee agreed. “I’ll visit them, but I’ll call Garrett right now.”

  Chapter 4

  “I want to expand our biological library again and start shipping copies of what we already have to two safe locations outside the Solar System,” Heather decided.

  “Your wish is my command,” Jeff agreed.

  “He thinks it’s stupid,” April said. “The less he argues the less he thinks of it. If he liked it he’d have a list of improvements to add.”

  “How can one win?” Jeff protested. “I do need some guidance on what you want to add. I think we have every plant common to commercial agriculture and most of the wild source plants and heirloom variations. We have decorative plants and drug sources. We have trees out the wazoo and wildflowers. What else do you want?”

  “The junk nobody sees any use for at the moment,” Heather said. “Weeds like poison ivy, ragweed, goldenrod, ferns, lichens, and mosses. Basically anything we don’t already have no matter how useless it seems at the moment. I know we can’t get it all, there are over twenty thousand kinds of moss alone, but we can get a lot more of it.”

  “What inspired this?” April asked. “I’m not objecting, it’s just going to triple or quadruple what we’ve already spent. Not that we’re broke,” she said, to soften that.

  Heather sighed. “Chairman Hu made me think it. The man leads a quarter of Earth’s population and he’s so damn dumb he must need written instructions to breathe.”

  “He doesn’t so much lead as drive them before him,” Jeff said.

  “You’re afraid he will do something so stupid it will be an extinction event,” April guessed.

  “I’m not concerned most of these plants or all the oddball animals we can’t afford to preserve will be gone. Most of them would survive, far better than people. People won’t be extinct on Earth either, even from a nuke war. But it may be a very long time before it is cheap and comfortable to have others do any more commercial collection there.”

  “What is he doing now?” Jeff asked.

  “They are playing games with the satellite navigation signals, trying to spoof them, so they can get a ship or spy plane to encroach on their territory for propaganda purposes, and jamming radio. But the spy planes have been flying with missiles loaded and the North Americans have publicly announced they are ordered to go weapons hot and protect themselves any time they don’t have a data link to command. The ships from both sides have been shadowing the other’s coast far too closely for safety.

  “It makes the chances of somebody starting the shooting by accident much greater,” Heather said. “It’s an ongoing game of chicken, and the longer it goes on the more you have tired stressed crews and equipment. One failure or accident can be misinterpreted as a hostile action.”

  “Why blame Hu, and not the North Americans?” April asked.

  “I’m not a big fan of either, but I’ve been watching this for a couple of weeks, and every time it stabilizes, Hu has been the one to take it to the next level,” Heather said. “Not that Turner has ever backed off a level to try to deescalate it. It may be a cultural thing. If Hu can’t make Turner yield some minor point he may be in danger of losing power.”

  “What could possibly go wrong?” Jeff asked.

  “On the positive side, maybe if they are busy sniping at each other they won’t cooperate on the Claims Commission and that will give us some time before they can get organized to make more trouble for us,” April said.

  “Shucks yeah,” Jeff agreed, “if they have a serious war it could put them off bothering us for a generation.”

  That was a far costlier way for them to gain peace than April wanted to contemplate.

  “How long would it take us to evacuate from the Solar system?” April asked. “If they do have a serious big war, what little supply we still get will probably be lost, and the neighborhood will be more dangerous, even beyond the Moon. Why hang around?”

  “I don’t think even a big war would cut off all trade,” Heather said. “Even if North America and China are in bad shape there are too many other nations with lift capacity now, some of them in the southern hemisphere. There are even people with private ships that can get to LEO. If a billionaire needs a cancer vaccine he’ll arrange it and the fact half his countrymen are dead won’t matter to his needs. But we wouldn’t be getting the sort of bulky luxury goods like wine or seafood that we get now.”

  “Evacuate just Central you mean?” Jeff asked April.

  “Realistically, isn’t that difficult enough? For whom else are we responsible? We can’t speak for Home or Armstrong,” April said.

  “Chen has agents for us in various places,” Jeff reminded her. “It would be difficult to abandon them, but I can see doing it as a matter of national survival. We owe them, and yet our relationship is not a suicide pact. Off the top of my head, if we used both ore carriers and put construction scaffolding in the bays and free-standing environmental packs we could probably do it in ten trips. Call it ten days, seven days to get the carriers ready and three days to do orderly boardings and unload at one of our worlds. We’d have to send a ship ahead with orders to start fabricating shelters.

  “I know we have stars and planets to choose from, but I have an irrational attachment to Central,” Heather said. “I wouldn’t agree to abandon it and all the man-hours we’ve put into it unless things got really bad. I also suspect a number of people wouldn’t want to leave and why should we deny them staying? How could we? Central is much safer from attack than the habitats. The Earthies know they have nuked us before and we’re still here.”

  “You’d get resistance from the landholders,” April predicted. “Even if their lives were threatened, I predict many would stay. And the ones who want to go wouldn’t be happy with packing a bag. I can predict right now we’d have people insisting they bring along things like machine tools and rovers.”

  “The hard part would be feeding them,” Jeff said. “Most of our food growing infrastructure is built in place and not designed to move. It would take months to reproduce the basic stuff to generate sufficient calories. So, if you ever plan to try this, or even want the ability to do so, you better buy a few hundred thousand survival bars and stockpile them in place. None of our worlds have the right kind of biologicals available to feed a sudden influx. That would be kind of obvious too. You might get away with spreading contracts out to several countries and buying something like fifty thousand bars a year before intelligence agencies started asking why. A lot of places on Earth are having trouble feeding their own and it would take us years to dig tunnels and ramp up our own production.

  “As far as Home, it’s interesting you should mention them. We’ve been modeling it. If three or more ships bracketed Home or one of its companions and jumped out together, they might be able to drag it along, in theory. Beta and Gamma would be easier because they’re sturdier. We’ve dragged heavier rocks along to add to our Martian satellite using just two ships and it worked, except for the one that turned into a flying gravel pile. If the pe
ople would vote to go, I’m pretty sure we could move them without anyone needing to even pack a bag.”

  “Are you crazy? Would you ride in Home while that was attempted? Would you risk three or four thousand people to such a scheme?” Heather demanded.

  “If we were under continuing attack, yeah, I might. We weren’t expecting another immediate attack when we moved Home out of LEO. But we still took some risk to do that. I’d ride in the stupid thing if we took three ships and practiced dragging a rock of about the same mass around before trying it with Home.”

  “Wouldn’t that be stealing the hab?” April worried.

  “Maybe, but Japan never objected to moving it the first time,” Jeff pointed out. “Perhaps they should have. We have a precedent for moving it now.”

  “You aren’t thinking clearly,” Heather said. “Under dire circumstances, we might evacuate Central to one of our worlds. But, if we ever had to move Home or Beta or Gamma we wouldn’t take them to one of our worlds. There would be no way to integrate them with a smaller number of Central citizens, it would destabilize us. We might as well give those worlds away. We’d be isolating all these people, cut off from Human space. They would never accept living like that and they’d outnumber us. There’s no way it wouldn’t have a very bad end.

  “No, if we had to move them, we’d take them to a world with Human infrastructure that could gear up rapidly to absorb them. Fargone or Derfhome and even New Japan might accept Home since it has such close ties to Japan. I doubt if any one world could absorb the population increase of all three habs, so you’d have to break them up.”

  “Oh… ” Jeff said, looking sheepish. “I hope we never have to do that, but that makes more sense than what I was thinking. They might not appreciate having a giant space station with a couple of thousand people just show up in their sky you know.”

  “Indeed, it’s all just insurance, not something we want to do unless there are no better choices, and I don’t really ever expect to do it. If it ever does come to that we can always plead that it is a temporary measure until we can make better arrangements. After all, what can be moved once can be moved again,” Heather said.