And then came the coup de grace.
The announcement on Arcadia came from Milbank himself, who walked into a press conference being held by his new foreign minister, Haruki Tanaka. When Milbank made his surprise appearance, Tanaka ceded the podium to him.
“Thank you, Mr. Tanaka. I have a short announcement to make. I will take no questions.
“It has become eminently clear to me over the last six months that Amber has no interest in entering a free-trade agreement with Arcadia and Earthsea. I can no longer justify the waste of resources our mission to Amber represents. We now have six new colony planets to approach with our trade agreement.
“I am therefore recalling our ambassador to Amber.
“Thank you, everybody.”
Milbank ignored the shouted questions and left the press room.
Sellick was meeting with her faction in the majority caucus room of the Assembly. She was assuring them they could weather this storm. With elections coming up, they needed a lot of reassuring.
“This will all be fine. Don’t you see? This just emphasizes how easy it is to build these ships, that they can just punch them out at six-month intervals like that. We just need to stick with what we’re doing and–“
Bertrand Leland burst through the door.
“Madam Chairwoman. Arcadia just withdrew their ambassador. He’s leaving, ma’am.”
In the uproar of conversation that followed, no one heard Sellick’s muttered, ‘Oh, shit.’
The ambassador’s departure was broadcast live on the Amber news wires. They smelled blood in the water now, and they were covering every nuance.
Ivanov, Moore, McKay and Costa all walked up the mobile staircase to the shuttle’s cockpit door, carrying their small personal bags. The shuttle was on just one container, carrying their personal cubic for the trip back.
Whether Costa should go on this trip or not had been a question. But the plan was for the shuttle to go to Earthsea first, and pick up three of the two-channel self-contained QE radios. They would test one in hyperspace on the way back to Arcadia, then all three would be available for mounting on Star Runner, Star Tripper, and Star Gazer. Whether they worked in hyperspace or not, a way for a stranded ship to call for help was a good idea.
So Costa went along, which the news wires picked up on. Not only was Arcadia’s ambassador leaving, but so was the one Earthsea representative on Amber.
The incoming message queues into the Assembly delegates exploded.
When the Assembly met the next morning, there was general bedlam as delegates sought to get permission to speak. Sellick pounded the gavel in futility trying to bring the meeting to order.
And then one loud voice bellowed and cut through the chatter.
“Madam Chairwoman. The President of the Republic of Amber.”
A hush fell over the chamber as Jean Dufort walked up the aisle toward the dais. Sellick sat back in her chair in shock. There was only one circumstance in Amber’s constitution that allowed the President to appear uninvited before the Assembly.
To call for a no-confidence vote on the Chair.
Dufort walked up the aisle, onto the dais, and up to Sellick. He held out his hand, and, mechanically, she handed him the gavel and ceded the chair and the dais to him. She went down to the floor of the chamber and took the seat for her district. She looked dazed.
Dufort rapped for order and the chamber fell completely silent. The chamber’s proceedings were always run live on the Assembly’s video channel, but all the news wires cut live to this once they picked up on Dufort having appeared in the Assembly.
Not one to overdo it, Dufort kept his comments short.
“Delegates of the Assembly:
“For almost a century and a quarter, the colony planets have been isolated from each other. That period is finally coming to an end. We have been invited to join with our sister colonies in forming a trading network, to unite all the colonies in one trade consortium, pooling our resources and our talents and our products, for the benefit of all.
“We have been invited to join this trading network as an equal partner with Arcadia and Earthsea, and on the same terms. Another six colonies have now been found, and they will be invited to join as well. We stand to profit from much larger markets for our products, as well as from the availability of exciting new products from our trading partners.
“A large majority of Amber citizens support our joining this network. I believe a large majority of this Assembly does as well. But one person, out of a combination of petulance, politics, and prerogative, stands athwart this path to a brighter future for everyone, Chairwoman Josephine Sellick.
“Therefore I appear before you to call no confidence in the Chair.”
The floor erupted in calls to speak. Dufort pounded the gavel to restore order, and, as the floor quieted down, one voice called out.
“I call the question.”
“Seconded,” yelled another.
Dufort had to restore order again. He spoke softly, forcing delegates to be quiet to hear him.
“The question has been called and properly seconded. We will vote by show of hands to limit debate. Ayes will vote to move to the question. Nays will vote to debate the issue further.
“Ayes?”
Dufort scanned the room for the Aye votes as delegates held up their hands.
“Nays?”
Dufort scanned the room for Nay votes.
“In the opinion of the chair, the Ayes have a two-thirds majority. We are voting on the question. ‘Has the Chair lost the confidence of the Assembly.’ For this vote, you must vote with the voting system, and your vote will be recorded and published. The vote will end in fifteen minutes.”
Dufort sat back in the chair to wait out the vote.
Sellick sat stunned in her seat on the floor. It had all moved so fast. It had been engineered by Dufort, of course, to pick the perfect moment to spring, but that didn’t matter. That was politics. It was a game she knew, a game she had played, and, very likely, a game she had lost.
With an election coming up, the news out of Arcadia, the recall of their ambassador, and the delegates’ certain knowledge their votes would be made public, Sellick knew she stood no chance on this one. She had scanned the room, too, and Dufort hadn’t tipped the scales. He’d had his two-thirds for cloture.
He would have no trouble getting a three-fifths majority on the no-confidence vote.
With the shuttle just approaching the hyperspace limit, and still in touch with the Amber network, Sasha Ivanov called Dufort that afternoon.
“Congratulations, Jean. Well played.”
“Thank you, Sasha. It went well for us.”
“And your faction leader is now Chair?”
“Yes, the first thing after the no-confidence vote was to move to the issue of electing a new Chair. Victor has been one of my lieutenants in the Assembly for years.”
“Victor indeed,” Ivanov said, chuckling. “Please pass on my congratulations to Mr. Brouwer when you have a chance.”
“I will, Sasha.”
“Will the Assembly now take up the trade agreement, Jean?”
“That is the first thing on Victor’s agenda, and he now controls the agenda on the floor.”
“Excellent. And you have the copy of the trade agreement I signed yesterday morning?”
“Yes, Sasha. I expect to be able to sign it tomorrow.”
“Wonderful. Well, we are approaching the hyperspace limit, so I will speak to you again in six weeks, Mr. President.”
“Bon voyage, Mr. Ambassador.”
Deployment vehicles were sent out to perform flybys of the new colonies as they were found. As each came in they learned which colony planet it was, something about its governance, and a lot about how it had developed.
One of those colony planets stood out, though.
Rob Milbank was surprised to get a call from Chen JieMin. They had both sat in ChaoLi’s meetings early in the project, and had become friends
, but it was unusual for JieMin to call him in the middle of the business day, and to put a priority tag on the call.
“Yes, JieMin. What is it? What’s happened?” he asked.
“The latest flyby results, Rob?”
“Yes?”
“We’ve found Olympia,” JieMin said.
“Olympia?”
“Yes. Olympia was the twenty-first colony on the drop-off list. They know where everyone is. All the colony planets. All but three.”
Quant
Janice Quant had watched the situation unfold in Arcadia, Earthsea, and Amber. There were several things that had caught her attention.
Chen JieMin and Chen ChaoLi were definitely the up-and-coming power couple of the Chen-Jasic family. That was very good news for Quant. If she had to intervene in human affairs, she might be able to do it through them, from the sidelines, without exposing herself more widely to humanity and triggering conquered-culture syndrome.
That Arcadia had been the colony to develop the hyperspace drive had been a stroke of luck. Quant had searched hard for a suitable colony planet in the gap – not so much a true gap as an area of lesser star density – between the Orion and the Sagittarius Arms. That planet would be a natural hub for the interstellar colony traffic she had anticipated.
Quant had done the same thing with the other gap, between the Orion and Perseus Arms. That gap was larger and had taken two colony planets to bridge, but she had eventually found them.
While Quant had put concentrations of certain specialties on some of the colony planets, anticipating the trade that would develop, she had not done so on her bridge colonies. Big hubs were better off being generalists, she figured, and so she had given them a broad mix of colonists.
Quant had also placed the Jasic family on Arcadia, her primary bridge colony, on something of a whim. That had worked out, in a very big way.
The only thing still to worry about was war. War between colonies. War between the colonies, collectively, and Earth. Quant’s big transporter was coming along nicely, though. Ahead of schedule. By the time she needed it, she would have it.
Quant had done nothing to interfere with what was happening on Earth. She didn’t feel the responsibility toward Earth that she did toward her colonies. She had driven the colony effort, she had persuaded the colonists to emigrate. If they failed, that would be on her.
Earth was another matter entirely.
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Author’s Afterword
After the discovery of hyperspace in Arcadia, the next book in this series would be about getting hyperspace exploration under way and finding the other colonies. That much was clear going in. And the first thing they would need was some means of propulsion that was consistent with the hyperspace they had found.
This is not the propulsion of the Childers series, nor of the EMPIRE series. This hyperspace was corrosive. Protecting the ship from hyperspace also meant those propulsion methods wouldn’t work. It would have to be something else.
We solved that problem, my characters and I, first thing in this book. We could now go out and look for the colonies.
Galactic Survey didn’t work out the way I’d originally conceived it when I started the series, however. I had thoughts of people in exploration ships spacing around, sort of like Star Trek, but without knowing where the other human settlements were.
That’s not how it turned out. In Galactic Survey, they find the other colonies with analysis of star records for the first two drop-offs, and with unmanned probes for the others. That makes more sense to me now. Sending large manned ships out into space needs an income stream to support it. But interstellar trade cannot come until after finding the other colonies.
So the search for the other colonies comes down to unmanned probes, looking for their radiation signatures. Which means you need to get close enough to see them. Within the expanding sphere of their colony radiation.
During the course of this process, Chen JieMin stumbles onto the reality of Janice Quant, and Jessica Chen-Jasic contacts Quant to make sure they don’t step outside whatever her rules are. Quant answers her, but obliquely.
One of the hardest parts of writing this book was figuring out what the other colonies were like, and why they were like that. Which got me to thinking about what Arcadia was like and why Arcadia was like that.
What opportunities for trade would there be? What frictions might develop because of their differences? How would they solve those?
A bigger question for the next book is, What are the other colonies like? Why are they like that? Twenty-one more times. I haven’t answered those questions yet. And I won’t deal with them in the detail I dealt with Amber and Earthsea here. That would be another ten books, and I couldn’t maintain my own interest or yours.
And that doesn’t include whatever is happening on Earth, another question I haven’t answered yet.
For those who’ve read my other two series, this one will stand out a bit. There’s no war. No space navy. No big space battles. At least not yet. I’m not sure there will be. There’s a bunch of possibilities, but, since I haven’t written the future of the series yet, I don’t yet know where it’s going.
But I’ll have fun with it, and I hope you will as well.
Richard F. Weyand
Bloomington, IN
August 9, 2021
GALACTIC SURVEY (COLONY Book 3) Page 28
