Titans

by Edward W. Robertson

  Instead, they insisted we leave their domes. I spent so long arguing with one red-faced man (who extruded so much sweat and spittle he could have single-handedly solved our water problem) that I missed the news Shelby had woken up.

  "Someone have this man beaten," I yelled at a conscript as I sprinted for the clinic.

  There, I bounded into her room, panting, but she'd already fallen back asleep. I sighed and slumped into a chair next to Baxter. I killed the next two hours holding a subvocalized chat with Fay about how badly unexpected consequences can mess you up. It was a frustrating chat. Each of Fay's responses was lagged by the distance it had put between itself and Titan in search of the colony ship.

  At last, Shelby's eyes flickered, lashes sticking together as she blinked at the daylight through the shaded window.

  "You're alive!" I said. "I mean, awake!"

  "And not happy to be shouted at," she said, fingers pressed to her pale temples.

  "Sorry. You need anything?"

  "Water would be nice."

  I bugged my eyes at Baxter until he rolled his and left the room. I scootched closer to her bed. "How are you feeling?"

  She rubbed sleep-seeds from the corners of her eyes. "Like the recipient of third-rate medical care caused by a fourth-rate rebellion."

  "Fourth-rate? We have a better chance here than we did at the actual Thermopylae." I chuckled, but on her face, confusion competed with drugged-up sleepiness. I leaned in. "How much do you know about what's going on?"

  She shrugged, then winced. "A lot of crazy shit happened, but we're safe for now. Supposedly."

  "Want me to tell you the rest?"

  She smiled, bunching the dark skin below her eyes. "Sure."

  I took my time. She closed her eyes, bloodless and frail. I thought she'd fallen asleep well before I recapped my troubles with the hostile citizens, but she pursed her mouth, brow wrinkling.

  "Get them involved," she murmured, dreamy. "Make them part of your process. They can't stay mad at you when they feel like they're one of you."

  Her hand was under the sheet, so I didn't reach for it. "I'm sorry I lied to you, Shelby."

  "Mm."

  I let her sleep. One by one we exchanged citizens who wanted to leave for those who wanted to join us. On the fourth day of the siege, with Jia heading the inventory of our food and water supplies, I tasked Hermalina as liaison for the locals who wanted us out of their domes. A sizable minority refused to speak with us at all, but two days after she got out the word about the meeting, some four hundred citizens donned jackets and long pants to trudge through the 57-degree domes to assemble at the threeater.

  A ring of stadium seats surrounded a circular stage floor where Hollywood holos played out with fully-dimensional wonder. The arena was practical and spacious, but more importantly, I wanted to recreate the experience of the AIs' Talk and the open arena of the Assembly of Athens. These people had spent years—for some, their whole lives—on this moon. Their only representatives had been labor leaders and human resources staff. They'd never been able to make their own voices heard.

  Baxter had advised me to take the floor, lay out the realities of our unhappy coexistence, and let the dissidents cram their objections up their stuffy asses. Instead I took a front row seat and threw open the floor.

  The citizens glanced between each other, frowning, muttering, as if they were suspicious we'd lined the stage with invisible bear traps. At last a blond woman stood and delivered her willowy low-grav-born body to the floor.

  "You've put us all at risk," she said quietly.

  "Speak up!" someone shouted from the outer rings.

  Her neck stiffened. "I said you've put us all at risk. I think that's what I'm mad about. I don't agree with OA's policies, but there are people with guns in the streets. It's getting cold. You people think you can fly in and fix everything, but once the colonists leave and you go home, we'll be the ones who have to pick up the pieces."

  She stopped and exited the stage, face pointed at its perfectly smooth floor. It wasn't a pretty speech—she'd rushed it, as if embarrassed to be eating up our precious time—but it opened the gates.

  Men and women lined up to speak. To tell us how their lives had been interrupted. To argue with a previous speaker or to assail us with half-informed allegations. Some pleaded for compromise; others demanded our unconditional withdrawal and subsequent hanging. A few requested we protect them from the looting that had left half a dozen shops gutted. Others asked if we could keep it down after 9 PM.

  "This must seem very novel to you," Baxter muttered into my ear after a couple hours of this, "but there's a reason I was so willing to leave Hidey-Hole."

  "What do you think?" I gestured at the latest speaker, a shy, chubby kid who wanted to know when the omninet would be back. "Do you think you could make this work for an entire world?"

  Baxter snorted. "Not a chance. The entire populace would die of boredom."

  I tapped notes on my omni for another hour. Finally, a tall man took the stage and peered up at me through the dimness. "I've heard enough. More than enough. Here's my question: what are you going to do about this?"

  I scratched my nose. "Oh, I don't know."

  "What?" a woman called from somewhere in the audience. "Then why have we been blathering away for hours?"

  "So I could see what was on your minds. How about we come back here in a couple days to talk about solutions?"

  "Right," the tall man said. "Like you'll lay down your guns if we just talk enough."

  I stood, pocketed my omni. "Probably not. But maybe we can improve things for you."

  I smiled on my way outside, but I knew the next meeting would be crucial. I coordinated with Jia to form a baton-armed security service to quash the looting and to look into reports of the emerging black market: low-level entrepreneurs selling disposable luxuries like candy, coffee, and alcohol, as well as small semi-essentials like dry shampoo, vitamin spray, and batteries.

  Baxter preferred a centralized approach. He wanted to appropriate the shops, raid every apartment in the dome, and redistribute the goods through a need-weighted chit system. I argued him down. I didn't want to rile people up. Right now, these people were reasonable enough, but in another week, when their water froze and their anger boiled, they could wind up besieging us from within. My hope was that reasonable security measures and the talks at the threeater would delay that flashpoint.

  Because it wasn't a matter of if, but when. My only hope was to keep them placid until Fay found the ship.

  * * *

  On the seventh day of the siege, OA attacked. A squad of green-clad soldiers with pistols and bulletproof riot shields descended into the tunnel. It had the whiff of a probe, a test to see if we'd cave, and the OA force quickly retreated under light rifle fire.

  Jia figured Linigan would hold out for their Earth-bound reinforcements to arrive before attacking in strength. Between discussing that with her and waiting in the tunnel for a second wave that never came, I ended up an hour late for our next Talk at the filled threeater. Inside, I could tell from the tone of their murmurs the citizens weren't happy, but they'd passed the time speaking with each other.

  I hustled to the stage as soon as there was an opening. "I want to promise you that, whatever you've heard, and no matter what happens, we won't take your food or your water."

  "That's generous," someone shouted from the seated crowd.

  "And if you run out of supplies, we'll provide you with the same rations we're giving ourselves."

  "That include all the Kool-Aid you've been drinking?" a woman called down.

  "Kool-Aid's reserved for level tens," I said. "We're just as interested in not getting shot as you are. While we pursue that end with OA, Hermalina's got some proposals to help keep you all safe."

  Hermalina waggled one hand at the crowd. "Hi everyone. So. Remember you can cross over to OA's domes at any time. We won't let you back in, but we're not going to be here forever, right? You'll be
home in a few weeks. Unless they drop a really big bomb on us."

  "There's an idea," a man said. "Think they have a suggestion box?"

  Hermalina glanced at me. I shrugged. She peered at the notes on her omni. "If you live in Dome 27, please think about going over. Or staying with a friend in another dome. We're going to try to do this peacefully, but we don't always get what we want. If we don't, Dome 27 will be least happy about that."

  "How long is this going to last?" a woman said. Hermalina turned to me again.

  "No more than another month." I frowned, finally processing Jia's post-skirmish recap of OA's strategy. Among the riots, the retreat, and establishing temporary order inside our territory, the full scope of Go's warning had slipped my mind completely. "Hermalina, uh. See her in Dome 27 if you've got any problems. Thanks for coming."

  I scurried off the stage into the lobby, then broke into a loping jog toward Thermopylae and Baxter. "Hey Fay."

  "Hey Rob," it replied after five seconds' delay.

  "How goes the search?"

  Another five seconds as our messages pinged through all that space. "Good!"

  "What? You found it?"

  "No, but I've ruled out a significant range of possibilities."

  I gritted my teeth. "You remember when we calculated how long we could hold out? Who cares if our food will last five hundred years when OA's reinforcements will be here in two fucking weeks?"

  "Wrong," Fay said. "They'll be here in 17 days. They slowed down to rendezvous with the HemiCo fleet from Mars."

  My curses echoed down the sunny streets. "HemiCo fleet? Fay, are we going to be out of here in time?"

  "Oh, stop it. Do you think I'm just winging it up here? Sure, I never planned to scour billions of cubic miles of space while you bunkered down in a dirty tunnel against the combined resources of two of the most powerful entities in the human sphere. But I was aware of contingencies like it. We've been preparing for them all along, adapting along with the situation on the ground. I know it's hard for you to see more than a few days in front of you, but Olympian Atomics and HemiCo aren't the only ones bringing surprises to the table."

  I stopped cold, mouth so wide you could drive a battlewagon through it. "NightVision Resources was never about asteroid mining. Or even defending your homes in the Belt."

  "Yes it was," Fay snapped. "But it wasn't hard to imagine a scenario where we'd need backup."

  "When will they be here?"

  "A few hours before the enemy," it said, notably calmer. "Without having to worry about acceleration crushing human passengers into pink paste, they can get really zippy."

  I resumed my course for Thermopylae. "You're a clever one, aren't you, Fay?"

  "It doesn't take the System's biggest brain to understand that if you want to live a long time, you should try to avoid completely impossible situations."

  On my way across Dome 27, the air warmed several degrees, a product of the heated air blowing in from the tunnel. People clustered around the mouth of Thermopylae, citizens waiting to cross over and conscripts taking a break from active sentry duty. At the dome wall, workers pitched shovel-loads of yellow earth aside, expanding our latrine; in another week, the ground would freeze. In the dome at the other end of Thermopylae, a hundred soldiers in green uniforms milled around the concrete fortifications they'd erected in case we were foolish enough to attack.

  I signed in, grabbed my rifle, and joined our troops in the warm, breezy tunnel where thirty of us remained at all times. The faces of my fellow rebels were puffy and tired, limbs sore from crouching over rubble for hours on end. How battle-ready would they be another 17 days from now? Against hundreds of fresh troops shipped from Earth?

  "Greetings," Baxter said as I settled in beside him. Yellow dirt streaked one cheek, but he looked no worse for wear. "How did your meeting go?"

  "They seemed mollified. For now." I rested my elbows on a boxy toy robot jutting from the rubble wall. "It'll be over soon anyway."

  He snorted. "Do I hear a death wish? Should I ask if anyone wants to switch partners?"

  "I've got more lives than a sack of cats." I gazed down the tunnel. "Stick with me and fate won't touch you."

  "Does fate know about this deal?"

  I had never had a stranger partner in all my life—nor a better one. The tunnel was warm, dark, soothing, but on the other end, soldiers' footsteps crunched in the grit. Too soon, they would come to this side as well.

  * * *

  The light cycle switched to eight days of night. Other than when I was inside the clinic with Shelby, or cooped in the warm and steady wind of the tunnel, I could see my breath wherever I went. I expected the situation to flare up the longer we were locked down, but the mood in our domes cooled alongside the air. The exchange of citizens with OA ceased as the last of the colonists who still wanted to set sail for Centauri joined our side and the last of the unwilling locals crossed through Thermopylae or resigned themselves to huddling around battery-operated heaters. These kept to themselves, possibly to avoid being seen prowling the frigid streets wearing blankets for ponchos. The few complaints Hermalina fielded were mostly sewage-based. We dispatched work crews, dug additional latrines in each dome within our territory.

  Awaiting fresh troops and air support, OA made no more attacks. They even stopped bothering to try to talk us into coming out. I thought that was a bad sign.

  I began to go on such long walks I suspected some part of me needed to second-guess myself. I was well aware how snap decisions could look perfectly reasonable in the heat of the moment and perfectly crazy a short time later, but two weeks into the siege, it was tougher and tougher to see the lines of logic that had led us to rebel. It felt hopeless. We were playing out the string of a revolution that would soon mean nothing.

  A tent city mushroomed outside the mouth of Thermopylae, soldiers, conscripts, and citizens looking to leech the heat blowing in from OA's dome. Though Jia's rationing had been flawless—rather than having everyone assemble at the algae vats for their food and water, where a hungry crowd could turn nasty, she'd recruited a delivery team to distribute tubs of water and still-mushy blue-green nutribricks throughout the domes—we loosened them further as the darkness cycled back to sunlight, knowing that, one way or the other, the siege would be broken with the arrival of the reinforcements on the 24th day.

  An apparently bored Fay began to ask me about my mistakes and regrets, hesitantly at first, then with increasing hunger for as many stories as I could remember, especially the violent ones. I told it about my mercenary years in India guarding merchant trains, killing bandits and leaving them rotting by the roadside. About the continental wars of the 17th century that left much of what would later be Germany as dead and desolate as the yellow flatlands outside Shangri-la. The starvation and stillness had mirrored the bottleneck of northern Idaho after skyrocketing energy prices sparked a rebellion in the autumn of 2052. Hiding away from a wife who'd out-aged me, I'd returned to a cabin outside the college town of Moscow, where I drank away the days as federal troops crushed the separatists in a prolonged and bitter campaign that left thousands dead and the whole region helpless when a month-long cold front locked the valley under ice and snow. On a hike through the bombed-out dorms to see if there was any canned food left at the abandoned Rosauers, a pair of starving students jumped me in an alley. I was forced to beat them to death with a cracked cinderblock.

  "That's a terrible example of regret," Fay said.

  "I had to kill them!"

  "It was you or them. Anyone would have done what you did. I want to know about when you were wrong."

  "Here's where the rules get different for people like you and me," I said, rubbing my icy hands together. The temperature was never supposed to change within the domes and cold-weather staples like gloves were nonexistent. "Back in the day, every Greek with a few drachma owned slaves. Once I'd earned some cash through the spice road, I bought some myself. It sounds like barbarism now—"

  "B
ecause it is!"

  "That moral standard didn't exist in the time and place I made that choice. As the shellfish-related parts of the Bible prove, there are very few moral laws that are truly timeless."

  "Everyone should know owning another sapient entity is wrong," Fay said.

  I cursed under my breath, forgetting it came through the dot mike loud and clear. "It was a confusing time. I think I did well, all things considered."

  "You should have known better."

  "I was the best owner those slaves had ever seen. I'd been one myself. I was so kind and generous, slaves poured in from every corner of Attica to be owned by me."

  "I highly doubt that," Fay said sharply. "And that's a dangerous rationalization. You can excuse some awfully barbaric behavior this way."

  I pulled my sleeves over my frigid hands. "At least I freed them when I had to fake my death."

  "That's how you forgave yourself? Redemptive action?"

  "It sure helps." I frowned, failing to remember my slaves' names. "Act in good faith. If you later decide you screwed up, all you can do is resolve to do better next time."

  "Oh," Fay said, breathless. "I've got it."

  "Good. I mean, say what you will about letting yourself off the hook for what we'd call war crimes today, but it was a completely different world."

  "Not the secret of life, dummy," it said. "I found the ship."

  "Yes!" I threw up my hands and leaped for joy. In Titan's weak hold, I sailed so high my fists cracked into the smooth ceiling. The soldiers around me startled, unshouldering their rifles and sweeping them side to side down the tunnel.

  "Sorry," I explained to the confused faces. "I thought I could use some exercise."

  I reseated myself beside a frowning Pete. "How soon can you have it back here, Fay?"