CHILDERS_Absurd Proposals

by Richard F. Weyand

  Howell considered the proposed message on her display.

  "Shouldn't that be 'inalienable?'"

  "It's an historical reference. From Earth history. Let's see if they can take a hint."

  The negotiations were being handled on a dedicated mail drone that cycled back and forth between the planets. It was only three hours later Howell signaled back to Jan.

  "We've received their answer, Admiral," Howell said.

  "Let me guess, Minister. They're unimpressed by my knowledge of Earth history," Jan said.

  "You might say that. They say they do not recognize any such human right, and will fire on our ships if we enter their system."

  "Ah, good. So we have them on record as denying the human rights of their people. That's important. Who are you communicating with on Stadt?" Jan asked.

  "Directly with the foreign minister."

  Jan consulted the data the Intelligence Division had worked up on all the Outer Colony planets as they had built toward war.

  "We have the coordinates of their foreign ministry, in the capital city of Dorf, and that is the office location of the foreign minister," Jan said.

  She was typing as she talked, and consulted the current time on Stadt, as well as the most recent travel schedule for the Stadt foreign minister from the most current news feed from Stadt.

  "It's currently 14:00 hours on Stadt. The foreign minister isn't traveling today. He should be in his office," Jan said.

  "You may proceed, Admiral."

  Jan sent a message to Jessen. Five minutes later, a single kinetic energy drone transitioned to hyperspace from its location at the drone's hyperspace-1 limit.

  The next message in the Commonwealth's communications with Stadt read as follows:

  FROM: SALLY HOWELL, FOREIGN MINISTER, CFP

  TO: JASON MEIER, PRIME MINISTER, STADT

  SUBJECT: FOREIGN MINISTER APPOINTMENT

  Stadt Foreign Minister Karl Bauer has denied the human rights of the people of Stadt and threatened an act of war against the Commonwealth of Free Planets. For these crimes, we have therefore removed him from office. Please advise the name of his replacement at your earliest opportunity.

  First Colonists

  Four ships hyperspace transitioned into Stadt several days later. Stadt was the first pickup of colonists for the first colony. If there was going to be any unpleasantness, dealing with it without thousands of other colonists aboard would be easier.

  The four ships accelerated toward Stadt. As they approached the planet, fifty drones hyperspace transitioned around them and accompanied them on the way in. There were four hunting parties of nine beam weapon drones and one survey drone each, five kinetic energy drones, and five warhead drones.

  "Sir, we have Stadt warships throughout the system changing vector to intercept our path."

  "Warn them to keep their distance or they'll be destroyed, and implement Operation Flashlight," said Rear Admiral Jensen Nunes, commanding the colony squadron from his flagship, the heavy cruiser CSS Roman Chrzanowski.

  "Yes, Sir."

  "They're warning us to keep our distance or we'll be destroyed, Sir."

  "Maintain profile," said Admiral Gunter Bloch, commanding Stadt's patrol squadrons.

  "Yes, Sir."

  This was no war fleet of the Commonwealth. He had twenty-four ships, a squadron each of heavy cruisers, light cruisers, and destroyers. He wasn't supposed to fire on the Commonwealth vessels, just scare them off. Given the destruction of the Foreign Ministry just three days ago, the Stadt Prime Minister was in no mood to push too hard. The Commonwealth knew where his office was, too.

  "Hyperspace transition, Sir. Thirty of those small unmanned contacts just hypered out."

  "Fleet orders. Keep alert. Guns free. Fire on those drones if they come in within your range."

  Before his orders could even propagate to all his vessels, the Commonwealth drones transitioned back into normal space.

  "Hyperspace transition, Sir. One contact, ninety mark zero at eight-light seconds. He's firing. He's transitioned out, Sir."

  "Missed us?"

  "No, Sir. Hit us square amidships. It was a minimum beam, like we use in exercises."

  "Flashlight tag?"

  "Yes, Sir."

  If they could hit him with a practice beam, they could hit him with a full-force beam, and there was nothing whatsoever he or any of his ships could do about it.

  "Messages coming in, Sir. Other ships are reporting the same event."

  "Fleet orders. Veer off. Resume patrol positions. Establish and maintain separation from the Commonwealth vessels of one light-minute minimum. Take no vector toward them."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "They're veering off, Sir."

  "Call the drones back, Ms. Kmetz."

  "Yes, Sir."

  The three passenger liners and one heavy cruiser took up orbit around Stadt. Shuttles separated from the ships, two large passenger shuttles from each of the liners, the CCS Morning Star, the CCS Evening Star, and the CCS North Star, and two smaller passenger shuttles from the CSS Roman Chrzanowski. They were directed by the spaceport control to land in a large open area on the spaceport in Dorf. They landed in a rough half circle, with the Roman Chrzanowski's shuttles in the center, and one from each liner on either side.

  "OK, you guys. Let's get set up. Like we drilled it, by the numbers," Senior Chief Ashok Gonzalez bellowed.

  Officers and enlisted men spilled out of the smaller shuttles. Some formed a cordon around the shuttles, while others brought out folding tables, chairs, and computer terminals. A couple of enlisted started unrolling cable from one of the smaller shuttles.

  "Here, here, here, here," Chief Charlie Gunderson pointed out four spots to set up the tables, a ways out from and across the open portion of the half circle of shuttles, which was open toward the spaceport building.

  A command car and a troop truck approached from the spaceport building a couple hundred yards distant. They stopped about twenty-five yards away, and a young officer in a captain's uniform of the Dorf Police Department got out and approached the shuttles.

  Lieutenant Commander Dwight Chen walked forward to meet the police captain.

  "Lieutenant Commander Dwight Chen," Chen said, shaking hands.

  "Police Captain Mark Lieber. Pleased to meet you, Commander."

  "Somehow I doubt that, Captain."

  "I should explain, Commander," Lieber said. "I am not part of the Stadt Polizei, the planetary police. I am part of the city police department of Dorf, the DPD. My orders are to ensure order, and to get you on your way as fast as possible. My interpretation of those orders means I should facilitate your boarding however I can. We've been holding people in the spaceport until your shuttles were down, for safety reasons, but we can release them to your boarding process whenever you're ready."

  "Really."

  Lieber nodded.

  Chen looked back to where his men had set up chairs and tables with thumb readers and computer terminals, hooked back to the power supplies in the smaller shuttles. They looked like they were about ready.

  "I guess we can start any time, then, Captain."

  Lieber nodded again. He reached to the mike at his throat and said, "We're going to begin to load them up now. Deploy the cordon, and then let the passengers go from the terminal."

  Men in police uniforms both ran back from the trucks and out from the terminal building. They formed two loose lines about ten yards apart, standing at ease. Once they were in place, people started walking from the terminals between the two lines.

  As people got up to the tables, there were eight stations where they could swipe their thumb, two on each table. The swipe brought up their application on that terminal. The person manning the terminal, usually a petty officer, asked them their name, checked it and motioned them toward the shuttles.

  "All the ships are going to the same colony, so it doesn't matter which one you get on," Gonzalez called out to the line of passengers. "The shut
tles are going to different ships for the trip, though, so family groups stay together."

  They got a pretty good pace going. Each of the big shuttles would hold two-hundred and thirty people, and each had ten staff aboard from the liners to help people who had never traveled get seated. Everybody got an anti-weightlessness-sickness pill and a small paper cup of water right at the door of the shuttle. No one was allowed aboard until they had taken the pill.

  All of the passengers were first sent to the shuttles on the left. When those were full, they started loading the ones on the right as the shuttles on the left took off and headed for orbit. More staff on board the liners started filling the big ships from the bottom decks up. They didn't do anything to sort people out in the cabins other than to make sure all cabins were full, and all occupants in one cabin were all one gender unless they all agreed to be together.

  The passengers themselves were a mixed lot, in dress, in apparent social status, in the amount of baggage – though never more than a person could carry. They were fifty-fifty men and women, and all were between about fifteen and thirty-five years of age.

  They made good time, but there were five thousand people to process. The actual number of virtual tickets for Stadt was fifty-two hundred, on the theory four percent or so may not show up. That was a guess; they would refine it as they gained experience. It took over seven hours before they got to the end of the line. You could only move that many people to orbit so fast. Much of the delay was waiting for shuttles to return.

  Lieber and Chen sat to one side and watched the whole process. At the end of the line were two young women and a young man traveling together. Each of the young women had a single suitcase, per instructions, while the young man had two suitcases. As they came up to the tables, the last to board, Lieber and Chen stood up. Lieber used his mike to call one of his lieutenants. The lieutenant walked up to Lieber from where he had been watching the line.

  "Yes, Sir?" the lieutenant asked.

  To Chen's astonishment, Lieber took off his badge and handed it to the lieutenant.

  "You're in command, Lieutenant."

  As the lieutenant stared at him, Lieber turned to Chen.

  "That's my brother and sisters, Commander. We thought this day would never come."

  Lieber pushed something into Chen's hand and said, "Give this to your commanding officer."

  Lieber strode up to the tables, took his suitcase from his brother, and swiped his thumb.

  "Mark Lieber," he announced to the petty officer at the terminal.

  Chen looked down into his hand. It was a memory chip.

  The passenger shuttles took off for the liners for the last time. Each of the six shuttles had made a total of four trips to orbit. The spacers on the ground packed up all their equipment and loaded it into the smaller shuttles, the cordon was withdrawn, and the last shuttles took off.

  It took another two hours of preparation before they got under way. The biggest thing during that period was to make sure all of the passengers – all five thousand twenty-seven of them – were in their bunks and belted in for zero-gravity maneuvers.

  While that was going on, Admiral Nunes called Lieutenant Commander Chen to his ready room.

  "Reporting as ordered, Sir."

  "At ease, Commander. Have a seat."

  "Yes, Sir."

  "How did it go on the planet, Commander?" Nunes asked.

  "It went really well, Sir. The local city police department was a lot of help. Completely unexpected. And then at the end, I got a bit of a surprise that might explain at least some of that. The police captain in charge on the scene handed his badge to his lieutenant and checked aboard, Sir."

  "Really."

  "Yes, Sir. And he gave me this, and asked me to give it to you," Chen said.

  Chen held out the memory chip to Nunes. Nunes took it and looked at it curiously.

  "I guess we ought to look and see what it is."

  Nunes put the chip into the terminal on the conference table, and watched it load.

  "It scans clean. No security issues."

  He opened the index.

  "Well, I'll be damned."

  "What, Sir?"

  "Look at this, Commander."

  Nunes swung the terminal to Chen. The index was titled:

  THUMB SWIPE RECORDS FOR THE STADT POLIZEI

  "What would a police captain being doing with that, Sir?"

  "I guess if you detain someone and he claims to be a member of the Stadt Polizei, you need to be able to check it, right?"

  Nunes turned to his chief of staff.

  "Frank, run this for me and see if we have any matches on our passenger list."

  "Yes, Sir," Captain Frank Nilson said.

  Nilson swung the terminal over and ran the check.

  "Looks like ten matches, Sir."

  "Did any of them disclose their affiliation with the Stadt Polizei?"

  "Yes, Sir. Two of them did. That part of their application basically says 'Get me out of here.' The other eight, no mention. Four on the Morning Star, two each on Evening Star and North Star."

  "Get in touch with the security details on each of the passenger ships. Have these eight rounded up. Something quiet. Medical check or something."

  "Yes, Sir. What should they do with them then?"

  "Shoot them, and space the bodies," Nunes said.

  "Yes, Sir."

  The four ships accelerated away from Stadt, and hyperspace transitioned, without incident. Eight bodies remained in orbit behind them.

  Their stops at Feirm, Wolsey, and Paradiso were unopposed. They performed the same check-in process on the ground. At Paradiso, President Harold Anderson himself came out to the spaceport to meet Lieutenant Commander Chen. His staff took pictures of him with Chen, as well as talking to some of the people waiting to board the shuttles.

  With twenty thousand, one hundred and eighty-nine passengers aboard, over ninety-seven-percent capacity for the three liners, the four ships accelerated out of Paradiso. On their way, they sent a mail message through the drone on station they were sailing for their destination, the first colony planet, Horizon.

  When that message reached Jablonka, three enormous freighters stopped spin, folded cylinder, and accelerated for their hyperspace-1 limit.

  Horizon

  The small personnel shuttle from the Roman Chrzanowski had settled on the edge of the prairie near the woodlands and dropped CSF work crews, then taken back off again. A passenger shuttle from one of the liners had dropped a hundred male passengers, then taken back off again. They all wore shipsuits, work boots, hard hats, and work gloves. One of the big cargo shuttles from the freighters was coming down with a block of eight of the big containers. The shuttle landed the containers and headed directly back to orbit.

  "All right. Load 'em out and get rolling," bellowed Senior Chief Gonzalez.

  CSF work crews walked over to the container and opened the bottom row of four. These were heavy equipment containers. The row of four containers above them each held seventy thousand gallons of diesel fuel. They fueled up the machines inside and then fired them up and drove them out of the containers.

  A tree-cutting machine, a mobile wood chipper, bulldozer, loader with claw, a grader, and even a mobile saw mill all drove out of the four containers. The tree-cutting machine started on the edge of the woods, cutting trees and cleaning and topping them. The tops and limbs were fed to the wood chipper, while the stick was fed through the sawmill machine. Lumber started to pile up on the rack behind.

  "All right, let's get this lumber stacked up so it can dry out a bit. Don't touch anything until the machine is shut down. Let's go."

  After the first trunk had been fed through, the operator throttled the sawmill machine back to idle and opened the safety cage over the output rack. Colonists began carrying the raw cut boards to one of the empty machine containers, where a CSF work crew stacked it with spacers between layers.

  Gonzalez looked out across the prairie, to where
two more stacks of containers had been landed. A tractor with a bush-hogger was clearing a large space, followed by a tractor with a raker, and another with a baler. A fourth tractor was picking up the bales and stacking them. A fifth tractor dragged a roller, smashing down the stalks. CSF work crews directed colonists unpacking dozens of large tents from one of the containers. Off to both his left and right, two more sets of containers had been set down, and two more sets of tractors were clearing large open areas. In the distance, to his left, large cargo shuttles were coming down with blocks of containers and setting them down in long lines, offloading materials from the three freighters for later use.

  Gonzalez could just see the line of trees across the horizon, where the valley of a large navigable river ran parallel to the line of the woods they were working.

  Chief Gunderson walked up from getting the work crews underway, and followed Gonzalez's gaze.

  "Sure is pretty here," Gunderson said.

  "Yep. You know, it wouldn't be a bad place to retire, Charlie," Gonzalez said.

  "Become a ground-pounder, Ashok?"

  "Sure, why not? Get some nice gal, probably some older gal out of CSF, settle down. What the hell."

  "Yeah. Yeah, I could see that."

  The first day, they got enough tents built to shelter the teams already on the planet. They also used the stinger on a tractor to dig a cesspit, and assembled a sixteen-stall outhouse kit from a container to place over it. The outhouse block was lifted and set over the cesspit by one of the passenger shuttles between runs to orbit. The mess tent was the first tent put up on the first day. It was the most popular tent in the camp. Anyone with cooking experience was pressed into service there.

  They also started bringing down the animals. The cattle, all calves, had been kept heavily sedated with tranquilizer drips for the trip, packed up in boxes like any other supplies. They pulled the boxes out one at a time with the fork lift, opened them, administered the antagonist to the tranquilizer, and let the animals stagger off to begin grazing. The colony would be open range for quite a while.