Alliance Rising

by C. J. Cherryh

  Alpha’s engineers, no matter how competent, had never, ever built an FTLer, let alone something like Finity. Alpha couldn’t begin to match the experience of Pell’s best, and considering that aborted first run . . .

  Truth was, the theft, while Pell used the incident to give itself a few years without a well-staffed EC presence on the station, just had not been that troubling. JR actually suspected Pell security of setting the whole thing up to give Pell an excuse to boot the EC office and allow them back again only on condition. The policy all along had been to give the FTL tech to Sol—for exactly the reasons Cyteen, who had built the first FTL engines, had sent the design to Pell. Do what you can with it when you can. Let’s have trade, not war.

  Well, yes, all the while knowing they were cutting Sol out of the picture, because in the plans and data Cyteen had sent to Pell, and that Pell had sent to Sol, the map of jump points didn’t extend beyond Venture.

  Cyteen was nothing if not forward thinking.

  The jump limit for the smaller-scale FTLers was about 4.69 lightyears, in safety, give or take relative motion, a major issue; and the Hinder Stars beyond Venture all lay at a convenient three and four lights from each other. Venture itself was too far from Pell to single-hop . . . but there was an intervening point at 3.7 lights, a nice, safe, clean point of mass that for the next, oh, ten thousand years, would be comfortably within small-ship range.

  So there was traffic all the way to Alpha, though most of Alpha’s shipping was just a hop from Bryant’s to Glory, Glory to Bryant’s to Alpha, old places, old sub-lighter routes. The direct Glory-to-Alpha run was a shade too far for Alpha’s ships. Finity might do it, Dublin might, and Rights of Man might make it, if it was ever more than an ornament, but there was hardly profit to be had there. Glory was moribund, a drain on Alpha’s resources, and with no station reachable but Bryant’s and haunted Beta.

  That was the crux of things. Within the scheme of FTL trade, the Hinder Stars were dying. The old trade with Sol was sustenance from Sol in return for labor on the station and information sent back; and gradually, shorting themselves on luxuries from Sol had given the Hinder Stars something to trade with the Beyond markets, which functioned far more directly on exchange of goods. Now . . . even that little trade was gone. Everything that came in from Sol funneled straight into that ship. Rights of Man had cost Alpha too much, way too much for a display project. It was a good bet Sol, which had the materials and the design, was doing its best to get out of its bottle with a sizeable and authoritarian EC presence.

  But so far, it wasn’t working.

  For the ships that depended on the Hinder Star trade, FTL from Alpha to Sol could be the answer to their prayers. Direct, on-demand trade for raw materials that could be turned, by the local creative types, into station-specific trade items . . . the way it worked in the Beyond . . . that could be the saving of the Hinder Stars, both stations and merchanters. Alpha could go from outermost of the Hinder Stars to main gateway to Sol.

  Presupposing the EC let it happen. That . . . was the underlying question. Where it came to regulating authority and policy-setting, the EC was Sol. When the EC could get here in a timely manner, with ships and personnel to back their demands . . . well . . . the star-stations beyond Alpha just had to be ready to maintain their own positions, that was what. The question was . . . just how loyal were the locals of this key system to the Earth Company that claimed to own them?

  If the EC at Sol was building FTL ships on a more sensible scale, and working up sims to crew them—how long would it be before the fools that populated EC boardrooms at Sol ran out of patience, decided that it must be safe by now, and tried the one sure route: Beta Station, over at Proxima? That was the truly worrisome thought in the minds of those whose business it was to worry about Sol’s moves. Proxima, at a remove of slightly more than 4 lights from Sol, was reachable even by a small FTL—while Alpha, at something closer to 6, was not. A ship from Sol could hop to Beta, then to Glory, following the old pusher route, but that was not a route anybody wanted Sol to take. No one, no one remotely in their right mind, would tempt the region of space around Beta. An entire station emptied of people virtually overnight, without a hint of the reason? No. Whatever lurked there was best left alone. That route was a no-go.

  But no one had ever accused EC Central as being in their right mind where it came to corporate power and infighting.

  There was another possibility, almost as unthinkable. One had to wonder if the problems Rights had encountered were not due to design changes made by engineers under pressure from Sol to scale up to a six-light jump, exceeding Finity’s jump capability with a lighter mass ship. And that was . . . insanity, pure and simple. A ship in jump accelerated. The longer it was in jump, the greater the energy—essentially borrowed mass—you had to throw off on exit. Exceed what your target point of mass could pull down? Exceed what you could then throw off? No. Not a good idea.

  And the farther you jumped, and the bigger the energy you could throw, little factors became bigger ones. The bowshock was massive. You ran a risk of a less stable star—like the Hinder Stars in general—spitting back. Alpha’s red dwarf star was that sort, which was why they’d skipped out a bit further on entry, and fast. The potential effect of a hyper-accelerated ship entering a thickly populated and developed system like Sol was inconceivable. Better, far better, to have Sol as the tail end of a relatively short hop.

  All in all, Sol appeared at least to acknowledge the dangers so far. So far, contact with Sol—through the EC offices on the various Hinder Star stations—was still friendly, still cooperative. Of course Pell wanted to see Sol solve its problem. Of course probes would be launched from Pell, hunting for that all-important jump point. Of course if they discovered it, they would share. Absolutely. It took years to have a complete lightspeed conversation, but yes, of course, they were concerned. They’d get right back to you.

  Feed Sol information, that was Pell’s tactic. Feed them. Talk to them. Make them feel they were still a part of things. Assure them that no, Cyteen was not at this point a threat, but Pell was keeping a watchful eye on them.

  Had those probes truly been deployed? Not his problem, though Emilio Konstantin, Pell’s stationmaster, would be a fool to risk being caught in a lie. Pell’s future depended on trade and peace and cooperation with the stations closest, and on their expertise in a region Sol had no way to understand. A probe or two in Sol’s direction would be a small price to pay.

  So one could call that ship on A-mast a return message from the EC. We’re coming. One way or another, Sol was going to arrive and inject its own orders into the situation, and every station, every ship, every planet would do well to be prepared.

  A message named Rights of Man, with its unreasonably large crew and limited cargo space. Not an autonomous, generations-deep family such as Finity had, or that ran any other cargo-moving FTL going, but a handful of imported officers from Sol and a mass of jobless stationers grateful for the steady paycheck. The EC intended to break the Family ship tradition. That . . . was the second truly ominous message being sent by The Rights of Man.

  Even Cyteen respected the capital-f Families that had grown up on the old pushers: eleven original Families that had fissioned into sixty-three, and more if one counted the secondaries. If goods moved even in Cyteen’s space, it used those same sixty-three ships. Family ships that could talk to other Families, that could make sense to each other for reasons grounded in trade and common necessities and shared knowledge.

  The Families had begun with small populations destined for decades of isolation in the sub-lighters. With FTL a reality, a ship-Family meant the common experience of people who knew what it meant to lose contact with reality and return again, ready to make life and death hindbrain decisions. Time passed differently for them, and station years and station politics were just irrelevant to shipboard lives. They were the only ones who lived exactly in their tim
e: everybody else—did not.

  Now the EC, who had resented the Families since Gaia’s crew had refused to give her up, was going to entrust that expensive monster, Finity’s unrefined cousin, to a bunch of sim-trained stationers who had no experience in deep space at all.

  Never mind the insult to the handful of ship-Families who had remained loyal to Alpha, who had kept the Hinder Stars alive for decades. Never mind the neglect those Families’ ships had had to endure because of the priorities given to that ship. There’d be no link for Rights into the web of connections and shared history that informed and connected every other ship this side of Cyteen. Rights was the property of the EC, and anyone who thought the EC would stop at one ship . . . was a fool.

  So now the universe had this huge creature ready to back EC notions that an EC committee could issue orders and policies and make it all work. Of course a committee could hire a stationer crew and train them in a few months to do what the Families had selected and trained to do for generations.

  It had been possible for everybody in deep space to ignore EC’s ideas so long as it had taken over a decade to exchange messages that were ultimately irrelevant to each other. Since FTL, they’d all had Cyteen on one side, going way too fast, Sol slogging along sublight on the other, and Pell trying to keep peace in the middle and modernize trade, create markets, match Cyteen’s expansion, and negotiate with them as equals—everything in delicate balance.

  But Sol wouldn’t stay in its bottle forever. Cyteen’s population was expanding like a yeast culture, but by artificial means, and they were living . . . well, not forever, but long. There was going to be a meeting, and one hell of a culture shock—and humanity that didn’t come from Sol system or Cyteen birthlabs had everything at stake.

  That was why Finity, running very little cargo, had made the trip out to this bag-end of all commercial space.

  “Alpha’s not going to like us much in a few hours,” JR said soberly. “Less, when we go ashore.”

  “Wouldn’t expect it,” Fletcher said.

  “We don’t start anything,” JR said. “If it starts, we just become scarce, get back to the sleepover and don’t involve ourselves in any quarrel we don’t understand. We’re missing two ships we wanted. We work with what we’ve got.”

  “These are the tough nuts,” Fletcher said. “The ones with damned few options. Alpha’s it, for them.”

  “They’re it for Alpha, the same, aren’t they? Station’s going to be upset with what we have to offer. I really don’t want to get afoul of the EC office here. But it’s likely we will.”

  “Afraid that’s going to be the case,” Fletcher said. “But that’s their choice.”

  Chapter 1 Section iv

  Another velocity dump, a vector change . . . Abrezio requested approach data . . . and Finity’s path fell, somewhat anticlimactically, within a standard pattern.

  Delicate, delicate matter to have a ship like that touch the mast under its own guidance. Abrezio thought of ordering Finity to shed all relative motion and leave it to station assistance, which, for one thing, would give them another number of hours; but if Finity thought it needed that—and reputation swore they were beyond good—Finity could make that request. If he ordered it, Finity could outright ignore the order, and the EC would be left looking foolish if they made it—while Pell would be the villain if they damaged the mast.

  Let an incident happen—God, what were the odds of real damage to the station? To the other ships linked to B-Mast? If he judged wrong . . . loss of his job might be the least of his worries.

  Abrezio stayed still. He watched the progress of it, telling himself at any time down to the last few seconds, he could tell that behemoth to brake and abort. But if it didn’t listen—what could he do? The entire fleet of runabouts and tenders wouldn’t be enough to stop it.

  Ops and that ship were in communication. Decisions were being made. When Rights had done this maneuver, tugs had pushed her slowly into position.

  He watched as that mammoth ship followed the graph without a hitch, velocity curve and position all right on the numbers. They had three, four ships balancing Rights’ presence on the A-mast. Now they had removed two, and that might not be enough, by the numbers ops was throwing out. They were going to need to use the tanks to even it out, one pumping madly, as was.

  Docking proceeded. Once coupling was complete, the data feed would begin—they had no damned choice about that. Station’s feed would go to Finity’s black box, and Finity’s content would go to station’s, no defense, no argument. It was the system Cyteen had designed, and an integral part of the physical hookup for an FLT ship. Of all the data Cyteen had handed out free, the nature of the link between the black box and the FTL engine controls had never been explained . . . or cracked. And Cruz’s team had tried, oh, how they’d tried.

  They were fools to fight it, in Abrezio’s opinion. Information was, and always had been, one of the most valuable commodities a ship carried, though it wasn’t until FTL and the black boxes that it actually achieved specific trade value. Just how much of the data coming in on Finity would be useful to Alpha was a question. Digital entertainment, published scientific papers, anything copyrighted or trademarked . . . those were the reliable commodities. Not just the new ones, but the statistics on usage of established goods. Vids, books, music: Alpha’s creative citizens waited eagerly for usage figures . . . and the station credit that came with those figures.

  That feed also contained data on current market prices, prices on goods that flowed freely between Cyteen and Pell, Mariner and Viking. For the most part, those figures were irrelevant to Alpha. Venture got only the table leavings of luxuries, and what passed on down the line from Venture got absorbed by Bryant’s.

  Except for essentials. Those, purchased directly from Pell, did get through to Alpha, and possibly the worst aspect of those painfully transparent trade figures was the fact that he knew damned good and well that what Alpha paid for those essentials in no way reflected what, say, a Viking baker, at a single remove from Pell, paid for them. Konstantin had made Alpha a deal, back when the first shipment designated entirely for Rights put them in crisis for simply feeding their citiziens. That special pricing continued to this day, for which Abrezio was reluctantly grateful. Reluctantly because the fact was, thanks to Rights, Alpha hadn’t the return trade to be a truly viable market for Pell at this far remove, but without those foodstuffs from Pell, well, the EC’s hand-picked execs would be building their own ship.

  Which reality of interstellar economics didn’t stop him from feeling like a damned welfare case. Didn’t stop him from lying awake at night wondering when Konstantin was going to wake up and realize that long-ago agreement was still on the books and cut them off, or worse, what Konstantin was going to expect in return for not cutting off that supply.

  It hadn’t always been like that. Time was, Alpha had had plenty to offer in return, when the pushers from Sol actually brought Sol exotics. From Sol these days they got precious little to send out along the trade routes, except information, and much of that came in on the Stream: news, political scandals . . . all a minimum of six years out of date, but certain parties up the line paid well to have that data entered into the black box system. Other digital information, things requiring usage tracking, those came in on the pusher ships. Slower still, but more secure. Formulae and processes for products, flavors, pharmaceuticals, books, pictures, vid games, and entertainment vids—of which only those based on Sol’s notions of life beyond Sol system sold all that well.

  Spacers did like their comedies.

  With every Sol shipment going straight to Rights, all local interest in the Farther Stars exotics vanished. Alpha simply couldn’t afford them. The handful that trickled through, mostly special orders, helped keep their loyal ships operational. Alpha rarely saw the ships that traded directly with the planeted stars.

  And now . . . they had f
our. The dose of fairly current trade stats that had already hit the boards from the first arriving outsiders had sent jitters through the markets . . . mostly from what wasn’t there. They’d offered goods, but nothing like the quantity they might carry.

  What were they holding back? Alpha was a bare-bones economy. They didn’t need it driven home to them.

  And then, there was the issue of what Alpha had to send back to Sol system in return for their nonexistent support. Data from the Farther Stars—patents, books, vids . . . the same sort of low to no-mass, security-requiring goods as they received . . . and with a similar, arrogant bias regarding life on the far side of the pusher-ship’s route. He’d often wondered how those were received, back on Sol, or if they ever actually got distributed. Black box tech made such things available to everyone. Secure data feeds to the EC back on Sol Station went only as far as the EC wanted them to.

  News feeds from Pell and beyond required a vastly different approach. Everything, everything had to be vetted. Some things could simply be added to the Stream, to get to Sol in six years, and available for anyone with the right equipment to capture. Some were simply too potentially volatile to send that way. Those they put onto secure chips and sent via the massive pushers to his superiors to decide what could be turned loose to Sol at large, all traveling sub-light, slower than the antiquated Stream.

  Fortunately, his predecessors had had the same problem and he’d inherited a system of vetting and a trained team to do all the work along with the office.

  Damn the whole breed the Farther Stars were cultivating. Arrogant. Contemptuous of the planet that had birthed the entire human race. And of the stations still owing allegiance to it.

  Then he thought of Hewitt and of Cruz, who arrived with their own sort of arrogance. And the people in Sol system making those vids, who damned well hadn’t done their homework. And the Company that sent metal for a damned expensive A-mast ornament rather than goods to keep their station’s economy alive while they built that monster . . .