Going Interstellar

by Les Johnson

  “This is insanity. As it is, we do not have the passenger capacity for all the Evolved of our own House, much less another’s.”

  “Then you have little to worry about, Overlord Mellis.” The sharp voice, from behind, was Overlord Shaddock’s. “Our alliance with you cost us dearly: half of our compounds—and their occupants—were annihilated by the HouseMoot.”

  Bikrut’s sarcasm was underscored by the bored tonelessness of his response. “If your House was suffering thusly, you should have called it to my attention.”

  “Why? So you could dance with glee? We slew our own Elders to make common cause with you against the HouseMoot. And then you snickered up your sleeves while we died.”

  Verone’s voice was musical with wry mirth. “And so, behold: two pack-sodomized curs attempt to sodomize each other in their bitter disgrace and misery. How quaint: traitors accusing each other of treason. It is edifying, is it not?” he asked his counselors, who almost smiled. “Now let us settle the specifics. You have five years to prepare the Ark and depart. However, there are 3802 Evolved who survive in House Mellis, and 531 from Shaddock. This is far beyond the capacity of the Ark. We suggest a euthanization lottery.” Verone’s smile returned. “To avoid further, needless bickering.”

  Harrod felt Bikrut become rigid beside him—a palpable sensation, even at a distance of six inches—and so, lowered his eyes and murmured. “My Overlord Mellis, may I speak?”

  That seemed to distract the Overlord from whatever injudicious retort he might have been contemplating. “Why, Intendant?”

  “I have considered alternatives, in the event of this situation,” Harrod lied quietly. “Perhaps the Overlords would find them useful as crude stimuli for their own, more informed insights.”

  Bikrut was silent for many long seconds. “Proceed.”

  “Yes, do,” affirmed Verone in an almost amused tone.

  “Overlords, although I have never set foot upon the Ark, I am mindful that we have retained the cryogenic suspension technology that was built into it, and which we now use planetside for medical purposes. Logically, the remaining industrial capacity of the two Exiled Houses could combine to produce more cryogenic units, thereby increasing the passenger capacity of the Ark.”

  Verone began rubbing his lip again. “And why should I allow your Houses to continue to use industrial resources that I have seized, Intendant? Why should my House—and the rest—not immediately enjoy the spoils of our victory?”

  “Perhaps because delaying your access to those spoils might well prove the less expensive option.”

  “How so?”

  “Elder Overlord Verone, it seems likely that, if a euthanization lottery is announced in our Houses, there would be considerable resistance, even if all our Lords order its acceptance. It is not in the nature of any Evolved to blithely accept personal demise; the Words of the Death Fathers inveigh against such complacency, and the Brood Mothers breed against it. Is this not so?”

  “You know it to be. Continue.”

  “Then the Overlords of the Exiled Houses must anticipate a general revolt against such a decree, and thus against their dominion. So, to remain the leaders of their Houses, they will be compelled to choose another path. A nuclear path.”

  “Ah,” said Verone. Bikrut nodded tightly.

  “However,” Harrod finished, “if you allow the Exiled Houses to build enough cryogenic units, euthanization will be unnecessary. The full spoils of conquest may come late, but they will come more surely and with no damage.”

  Verone looked long at Harrod and then shook his head. “He is completely under-appreciated, Bikrut. No wonder you lost. We are done here.” And he turned his back, signaling them to depart.

  As they exited, Overlord Mellis muttered. “Well done, Intendant.”

  “The Overlord honors his servant. But after all, every life in the House was at stake.”

  “No, they weren’t.”

  Harrod blinked as they emerged into the dim orange light of Kalsor. “I do not understand, my Overlord.”

  “We brought no additional rare earths to this system. Indeed, we have fewer nuclear warheads than Verone thinks. We would have done whatever he asked.”

  — 3 —

  Harrod hur-Mellis was surprised when the bow gallery’s armored covers slid back and revealed empty space. Or so it seemed at first. Then he saw a larger, slightly irregular star on the lower port quarter.

  Beside him, Ackley hur-Shaddock—barely thirty and unusually impatient for so successful an Intendant—scanned the diamond-strewn darkness aggressively. “Where is it? I don’t see—”

  “There.” Harrod pointed at the irregular star.

  “That? It’s the size of a cur-mite. Smaller.”

  Harrod reflected upon the dismissive remark: perhaps the intemperate nature of House Shaddock’s Evolved was actively inculcated in their Intendants as well. “I, too, expected it to be larger. But do not be deceived; it is simply hard to see at this distance.”

  “But we are already within a hundred kilometers.”

  “So we are. But watch.”

  The irregular star had already become angular: not a bright, radiant point, but a long, flat, reflective surface.

  “We should be going inside the Ark, today,” griped Ackley.

  “There are safety issues that—”

  “It is a waste of time to conduct a purely external survey first.”

  “Ackley, if we are going to work together—as our Houses have instructed us—you will need to accept that my judgment takes precedence. That I give the orders.”

  “You do not wish input?”

  “I do not wish constant complaining—particularly when you do not even try to learn the reasons for the decisions I make, and the orders I give.”

  “One day soon—when Overlord Shaddock Raises me up, to add my seed to his House’s Lines—it shall be you who listens to me. And insolence will mean your death.”

  “As will be natural and proper, at that time. But that time has yet to come. Here, we are both but Intendants, and I have the benefits of age and long expertise in matters pertaining to our responsibilities. Do I not?”

  Ackley’s response bordered on a petulant sulk. “Yes. You do.”

  The Ark was beginning to burgeon rapidly, the long white keel stretching away into the dark, its length cluttered by irregular protuberances and bulges: modules, cargo containers, electronics arrays. But looming closest were great oblongs and spheres, like an onrushing agglomeration of planetoids and moonlets on a collision course. . . .

  A gentle counter-boost began to tug at them. The terrifying speed of their approach became merely shocking, then alarming, then swift, and finally, leisurely. They floated toward the clutch of white metal moonlets that were the great ship’s inertial fusion ignition chambers and the smaller nodules that held fuel and other volatiles.

  Ackley stared forward, past them. “Where is the Great Ring of the early settlement stories?”

  Harrod shrugged, glancing at the distant bow of the Ark. “The habitation ring was destroyed.”

  “Destroyed? By what?”

  “By war. What else?” What else, indeed? Savage internecine strife was the only cultural constant that limped through the tattered chronicles of all five prior Exodates. It was the sole reason for the Rite of Exile: the Rite was a pressure valve, an alternative to self-inflicted annihilation. It also unfailingly propagated a new wave of expelled pariahs, who staggered to yet another system to begin the cycle again. Indeed, Harrod was tempted to wonder if the Houses, now descended from five-time losers, must therefore contain a genetic flaw that not only predisposed them to intemperate ruin, but also kept them from learning to change.

  Ackley had been studying the immense craft. “And since the war—?”

  “Since then, the Ark and its tug-tenders”—small, distant specks, following the same high orbital track, but to port and starboard respectively—“have been abandoned, secured for long-term storage.”
>
  “But why? The ship’s technology—”

  “The ship’s technology is why, except for a small, automated monitoring station, it has remained off-limits. The Houses could not agree on how to share its advanced machinery.”

  “And they are still unable to do so, after three and a half centuries—of course.”

  Harrod smiled. “Of course.” According to records of the prior Exodates, collaborative use of an Ark was rare. Agreement arose on the matter only when the ship was needed as a garbage scow, to haul the latest batch of undesirables to a still further refuse heap in the stars. And, being the product of that long string of genetic disposal missions, being repeatedly orphaned by gulfs of time and space and strife, the Houses had forgotten their own roots, their true home world. Which, Harrod conjectured, was probably the first and last place that humans had known stability, acceptance, unity with their fellows.

  Ackley had his palmtop computer out. “So, what are we looking for?” He stared up at the six immense thrust bells, arranged in three pods of two engines each.

  “Micrometeoroid damage to the bells and their housing—an easy task, compared to our internal surveys of them.”

  “Where we will be assessing . . . ?”

  “Primarily, the condition of the laser ignition chambers. We must anticipate complete rebuilds of half the systems, and major maintenance upon all the rest.”

  “Even though they’ve been stored in a bath of inert gases?”

  Harrod glanced at the younger man. “Three hundred fifty years is a very long time.”

  Ackley shrugged. “What else?”

  “The mothballing manifest indicates that several cartridges of the deuterium ignition cells—the hohlraums—were stored along with the engines, to provide examples for later reproduction. We will need to be very careful handling the hohlraums: it is unlikely we could produce enough in time without exact models to copy.”

  As they moved past the vaguely spheroid ignition chambers capping each of the thrust bells, they passed a black plate, transfixed by the keel of the ship. Ackley stared at it. “That shielding seems to be very light.”

  Harrod nodded. “An advantage of using deuterium-to-deuterium fusion; far fewer stray neutrons.”

  “And better speed: exhaust velocities of 6.8 percent the speed of light—”

  Harrod turned, summoned a smile, and took pains to ensure that it did not look patronizing. “You speak of the engines of the Dread Parents, Ackley. These engines will achieve only a little bit better than half of what theirs did.”

  “Why? It is the same design.”

  “Our craftsmanship and knowledge is not theirs—does not begin to approach it. After all, they also had—and reserved to themselves—the secret of traveling faster than the speed of light.”

  “Even as their Injunctions forbid us to do the same—along with their prohibition of high-power radio communications.” Ackley snorted. “Assuming you choose to believe such superstitious nonsense.”

  “I need not believe it to know that the Overlord would slay you where you stand for such blasphemy.”

  Ackley’s tone became marginally more careful. “I offer the—hypotheses—that the Dread Parents never existed, that the speed of light is an unbreachable barrier, that no such Injunctions were imposed by whatever world we originated upon, and that we cower in fear of our leaders’ conveniently constraining fabulations.” As Harrod silently conceded the probable accuracy of all those hypotheses, Ackley—cheek muscles bunched—pointed at the long, smooth, tanks clustered behind the shielding and bundled around the keel like a fasces comprised of sausages. “What about the fuel tanks? Anything special to look for?”

  Harrod nodded. “Yes; micrometeoroid impacts and breaches in the tanks.”

  “I thought they are fairly sturdy.”

  “They are, but they held hydrogen for decades. And if they were incompletely vented when the ship was decommissioned—”

  Ackley nodded. “They could have been brittlized by the hydrogen left in them. I don’t see any sign of diminished integrity, though: maybe the old crew did a good job of flushing all the fuel out of the system.”

  “Let us hope so; it would make the restoration much easier.”

  Passing the tanks, they came upon a ring of other, smaller thrusters. For the first time, Ackley’s confident tone sounded genuine, rather than nervously overassertive: “The plasma thrusters appear to be in good shape—and look identical to our own.”

  Harrod nodded. “Not surprising: ours were developed from these. So replacement, if necessary, would be only a minor setback.”

  The last of the gargantuan aft structures finally dropped behind; their craft altered course to stay centered above the keel as it moved forward. Ackley inspected the modular trusses, running quick mental calculations as he did so.

  “A problem?” Harrod asked.

  “The storage superstructures: there are not enough of them, not for all the cryogenic modules. With over four thousand bodies to store, we—”

  “We will not have four thousand, unless I guess incorrectly. Probably only three-quarters that amount.” Harrod acknowledged Ackley’s perplexed stare: “Expect a relaxing of the current marriage prohibitions upon the better Lines of my House’s Evolved—and some other reductions as well. Consequently, I am more concerned about that.” Harrod pointed at what appeared to be a large collar that was sleeved around the keel, its circumference marked by eight evenly-spaced coupling points.

  Ackley squinted, shook his head. “I’m not even sure I know what that is.”

  “It’s the rotational sleeve for the old habitation ring—and judging from the scoring at its aft margin, it appears to have seized during operation—over three centuries ago. That could be quite a job.”

  “Do we still need it to rotate? We don’t have a ring, and no time to build one.”

  “We will still need some rotational habitats, even if they are only pods on the ends of rotating booms. And that means we’re going to need a rotational armature.”

  “We’ll also need a complete rebuild of the navigational sensor arrays and laser clearance clusters.” Ackley nodded in the direction of the bridge module: just beyond it, the irregular booms and dishes that were the ship’s eyes, ears, and shield against high-speed impacts showed extensive pitting by micrometeoroids. In a few instances, whole subsystems trailed at acute angles, or were sheared off entirely. Which inevitably meant that—

  The ramscoop—resembling nothing so much as a bow-opening gossamer parasol—was in tatters, shredded by centuries of intermittent meteor storms.

  Harrod turned to Ackley, and found the younger Intendant already staring at him—now more in desperation than defiance. Harrod nodded and answered his unuttered question:

  “Yes, we have much work to do. Much work, indeed.”

  — 4 —

  Kalsor Tertius (high orbit), 356th year of founding

  Bikrut Mellis’s voice was bored, his face expressionless. “And the ignition trials?”

  Harrod nodded. “Success, my Overlord. We will achieve output sufficient for standard acceleration of .35 gees by the middle of next month. I suspect maximum output will be achieved the month after that.”

  Bikrut’s answering nod was the closest he ever came to fulsome praise. “And the ship’s fusion power plants?”

  “The refurbished originals did not achieve break-even as quickly as the new units, but once they did, they have routinely out-performed our modern copies. We will achieve maximum rated output within three months, unless something dire occurs.”

  “Make sure nothing ‘dire’ occurs, then, Intendant. Or you could experience your own dire occurrence.”

  Bikrut, Harrod reflected, was ever the voice of boundless encouragement. “As you command, my Overlord.”

  “Let us turn to the problems, then.” He fixed dead eyes upon Ackley hur-Shaddock. “You still do not have enough away-craft: what is the delay?”

  To his credit, Ackley did not fl
inch under that lethal stare. “The delay is caused by the intransigence of the HouseMoot, Overlord Mellis. We can only use away-craft secured for House Shaddock’s exclusive access, but the Moot is slow in supplying these vehicles.”

  “The Moot’s lethargy is no excuse for your failure: you should have explained that the biometric security requirements stipulated by Verone must be rescinded.”

  “I did so; Overlord Verone will not relent.”

  —To your relief, thought Harrod. Without the security protocols that require the pilots to be of House Shaddock, the Evolved of House Mellis would kill them in their cold sleep.

  Bikrut’s withering stare did not waver. “I have also learned that House Shaddock disapproves of the energy we have allotted for our magnetic shielding.”

  Ackley remained calm. “Our dispute arises out of hard physics, not House politics, Overlord Mellis. Your House’s scientists assert that doubling the field strength of our electromagnetic protection grid will enable it to repel cosmic rays. This is a fallacy.”

  Bikrut looked at Harrod, who took the cue. “Ackley, we are quite aware that the field emitters cannot ‘stop’ cosmic rays. However, if the shielding is produced by generators tethered to the ship at a range of four kilometers or more, the fields can be biased to slightly alter the trajectory of the rays. Exposure levels in the protected sections of the ship will decrease by over eighty percent—perhaps more. The efficacy of this deflection strategy is well-documented by the surviving accounts of two prior Exodates.”

  If Ackley had heard Harrod’s explanation, he gave no sign of it. “Overlord Mellis, there is a further issue I must raise. Just today, the HouseMoot rejected our third request for uranium. Without fuel for our nuclear back-up plant, how do they expect us to reinitiate fusion if the capacitors lose their charge?”