Blood-Dimmed Tide, Chapter IV

"But I know what happened there, because someone made it out. He stowed away on the fleet and managed to survive the passage back to Earth, and then looked me up. I'm surprised he found me, but he had connections within the Battalion, and they got word to me in a dropbox I have in New Jersey."

"So," I said, getting a little impatient, "what's the real story, then?"

I hang motionless slightly above the plane of the elliptic in lotus posture and look down. Below me I can see the amber spark of our ship, floating with slightly increasing speed toward the sun. Behind it stretches a thin blue line, gently curved, with one sideways kink in it. As the line approaches Earth it sweeps in a dramatic loop (actually beneath the skin of the moon in its current position) and catches fire, headed toward atmosphere like a curving laser beam. Of course, a curved laser beam is impossible, unless you are uncomfortably close to a singularity. And despite the hopes of theoretical physicists a few generations ago no singularities had been found wandering this backwater solar system. No, I was looking at the mapping of our last thruster fire, curving away from Earth.

Thull had laid it out simply. New Utopia had been privately financed by several major corporations during the days of rampant overpopulation and environmental destruction, seemingly in a rare moment of collective guilt over the part that they had played in the ongoing rape of Earth.

Uncharacteristically, apparently altruistically, the corporate officers of ten major companies had met and penned the agreement which eventually resulted in the orbital construction of the New Covenant, the second largest colony ship ever built; second only to the lost Wanderer, which some wags, years after its failure to send its tenth annual update report, had said was too aptly named.

I allowed my eye to follow the thruster burn, now falling slowly behind the Earth as it continued its ponderous pirouette through the sky. The terminator had just swept past the island of California, and the North American continent looked like a galaxy inside-out. Its edges blazed with light: on the east, the New York - Washington megapolis, and on the west, California and the Portland Sprawl. The light gradually became more milky and indistinct until in its interior one could see individual towns in the wastes of the Great Western Desert, populated only by miners, madmen and mesas.

It was from this world, which had changed little in the intervening years, that New Covenant, burdened with frozen adults, chicken embryos, and seed stock, had launched, taking a route similar to ours: a lunar sling followed by a a solar. Crews on intrasystem tugs set out at the same time with mining equipment and railguns the size of supercranes, landing on comets and sawing chunks of dirty ice free to be fired into orbital paths where the giant net of carbon-chain cable attached to Covenant's bulbous head would eventually sweep them in, to act as shield against spacedust as well as supplemental fuel source. At the end of its journey, in-system maneuvering at sub-ramscoop speeds would mean that its electromagnetic wings could not harvest the hydrogen atoms from the depths between the stars and they would need fuel; This is one of the perennial ironies of spaceflight, since in-system solar winds provide the richest source.

Someday perhaps System Sol, the birthplace of mankind, would look like earth itself: teeming with traffic, every inch of it alive with terraformed comets, zero-g globe cities, spindles spun for gravity, and the white-hot sparks of shipdrive winking through the darkness like the fireflies which still survived on the homeworld. But I doubted it. For now, it looked as empty as the oceans. Which in a sense it was, in the imaginations of 80 billion souls. The depths of cold space were the new oceans; a means of transport, a dumping ground, but never a destination. Aside from the few Deep Space Police ships, a few mining research camps in the asteroids, cislunar traffic, and the cloud of gnatlike satellites swinging over ear like bluebottles over roadkill, space was empty and quiet. If cartographers of Columbus' day had mapped space, it would be a blank space on parchment, perhaps with that subtle warning so popular at the time: "Here be Dragons."

After my time on the homeworld, I liked it. Nobody was trying to sell me anything.

Aside from the winking of com lasers and the intermittent yellow waves of computer-controlled, randomized deep radar scans, space was empty. Picked up from reflection on space dust and micrometeorites, the radar (expressed in bright yellow, sweeping well-nigh continuously) looked like the lights of deep-sea remote submersibles looking for strange undersea life. Inky black and floating with the current, were we some sort of undiscovered squid? None had yet picked us up, and I saw no pursuit.

At slightly past the halfway point of it's journey, the Covenant's one-gee thrust was cut to a mere trickle, enough to keep the heavy mass of iron-rich compacted snow in its carbon net from drifting free. Traveling at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light, onboard astronomers had a field day that lasted a year, collecting observations on stars ahead a little quicker than they might have on Earth, while unfrozen physicists conducted complex string-theory observations in a shielded compartment containing a minute particle accelerator in the bowels of the ship. The rest of the crew might have been bored out of their minds, but they were Ph D's to a man, and some with two; they settled down with books and holos and interactive archive stacks for most of their time and spent the rest eating and keeping muscle mass in the mandatory thrice-weekly trips to the small onboard gym. Two years later, the physicists were refrozen under protest - very exited with their results, some almost got violent - the ship spun end over end, and the crew retired to high gee beds, plugged in their neural shunts, and settled down to the first week-long four-gee burn, which would slow the ship enough to deal with the inevitable particles which they would encounter. After that, a constant one-gee thrust should destroy or deflect most of the dust in their path.

I gazed upward, and with a thought illuminated the known objects in the Oort cloud. Immediately, the limits of my sight, once infinite space, jumped closer. In a rough sphere which had its center in the sun, the solar system was marked off. It was as though I sat in the midst of an infinitely slow sandstorm, or an eggshell made of dust. Even with a mile-long flame the temperature of a star proceeding them, the crew and passengers had been brave men to risk even such a tenuous fence of matter demarcating the Utopian system from the galaxy proper. It had not been mapped. They played a complex sort of Russian roulette by throwing themselves at a field of bullets and hoping they missed most and could steer around the rest. The very
thought of such a risk caught my breath in my throat, and mine was a life full of risks. But my risks were chosen and, as much as possible, reduced: to do what they had done required an optimism, a faith, which had been denied me.

Eventually, of course, they had navigated the Oort cloud outsystem from New Utopia, though a cometary impact damaged one of the stanchions holding the net and threw cometary fragments from our own system into the depths of a strange sea, where, teased by microgravity, they would eventually meld into distant cousins. Decelerating into a tight stellar orbit, the Covenant's drive from afar must have looked like splinter of the sun itself, some sort of tiny offspring glowing pinprick-bright as the solar wind, rich in
hydrogen, was compressed and fired forward to slow its headlong dive. Cameras, seeded in passing, caught the sight and relayed it to onboard databanks as the ship's rudimentary AI calculated and advised. With the last anemic yet fiery breaths of the ramscoop, the ship eased away from Apollo (as it was newly named) and drifted toward New Utopia's orbit.

Inboard now, the cometray sludge had acted as the coolant core; connected to all decks with superconductor conduits and melting during the eight weeks of three-gee deceleration which killed two crewmembers in their creches. It prevented them from being cooked like beans in a can. Melted, filtered for heavy metals, split into hydrogen and oxygen, it was recombined in minute amounts with explosive results, teasing Covenant's into a stationary orbit six standard months later. The hydro and oxy tanks were nearly empty when they arrived, without even the planned-for maneuvering margin; it had been lost in the Oort cloud. The Covenant's was now nearly adrift, but in the right spot. The colonists were unfrozen and shipped dirtside on lifting-body shuttles shaped not unlike Thull's ship, and the terraforming began. A muted klaxon, like an afterthought, drags at my attention, and I look down. The pulsing yellow cone of a deep-radar sweep has just passed beneath my feet, and it would appear to have hit us. We're now almost half a
light-minute out from the Deep Space Police ship from which it originated, yet I hold my breath, and a minute later it begins to swing back toward us, moving fast enough that I can see the curve induced by that lagtime. The klaxon sounds again, and I breathe out with a murmurred, "Ah, fuck."

I key the command overrides and cut the external alarm; Thull's asleep after his first decent meal in weeks (a hearty roast turkey sandwich with real bacon) and I see no reason to wake him for what's about to happen. Sure enough, ahead of me, seemingly mere feet , a ship winks into being at the same time as a yellow cone of radar as we pick it up and the triangulation warning sounds. Though I am expecting this, I am taken slightly aback as the radar passes straight through my chest, seemingly pinning me like an entomologist's prize specimen, and behind me the yellow passes our ship and continues streaming toward infinity. The computer shows the ship which projects it drifting only slightly sideways, nearly motionless.

The radar snaps off like a searchlight and only a glowing nimbus around it lets me perceive its matte black shape against the background at all. At this scale, it's the size of a minnow, but something about the shape raises images of shark in my monkey hindbrain. The radar signature has exposed it as a Republic Fast Destroyer, and a column of rapidly decreasing numbers next to it shows me the probability of the ship's projection of its route just
within the Oort Cloud. RFD's have some sort of black ops reactionless thrusters which, though slow, leave no ion trail: I wouldn't mind having one. But they're mainly a weapons platform, despite their name; they have enough energy and ballistic ordinance to reduce the Portland Sprawl to a heap - I correct this thought - a crater of bubbling slag. Though they have FTL capability, the Republic's tacticians generally use them as intersolar snipers. As one who has drunk with Space Navy enlisteds, I know what the popular expansion within the corps for RFD is: Really Fucking Deadly. I keep watching, but space is quiet. No point in worrying about it yet. My
mind drifts back to New Utopia.

The terraforming had gone very well, and just as the colony became not merely self sufficient, but actually began to thrive, had come the vote to annex the colony into the Republic. This is where Thull's informant came into the picture. George Culbertson was an ex-navy man who had graduated from West Point Space Tactical Command College. He had served two five-year stints in an earlier model of RFD, rising through the ranks quickly during the first because it had fallen during the Second Belt Mine Uprising. Though ultimately unsuccessful, it saw many field promotions as the Navy replaced
commanders who had fallen in battle. After his second tour, already a Lieutenant Colonel, he had taken his small pension and gone into the private sector, amassing large sums as a successful consultant to the larger corporations on tactical defense matters for their independent asteroid mines. Pirates, formerly the Glorious Army of the Belt Democracy, had become a problem.

After his first consulting gig, a remnant of this army turned their swarm of small ships, armed with modified mining railguns and tweaked cutting lasers, toward a mine on which he had worked Though warned to turn away, they continued to sweep toward it, filling the com channels with boasting and braggadocio. An ultimatum was issued: Turn aside in twelve hours or your fleet will be destroyed.

Twelve hours later, George watched on a tightbeam as the leader of the pirates called to taunt the Mine Governor, and realizing this was not capitulation, he gave the order. In the middle of the spittle-laden tirade, everything went white, and the transmission ceased. The ships were lanced out of the sky while still forty thousand miles away, some from locations nearly as far away from the mine as the fleet itself.

Other corporations heard about it. His bank account grew and piracy all but ceased, though there were still rumors of rogue asteroids where pirates lay in wait for hapless ships. George, with more than enough money, turned his thoughts to retirement in greener pastures, and heard about the capitalization of the forthcoming Covenant mission. He inquired how much of his savings would be necessary to get him on board; they responded that they had been wondering how much to offer him to skipper the mission.

So after some hemming and hawing, the lifelong bachelor put most of his funds into escrow accounts and spent much of the remainder on a party in Times Square which rivaled the annual New Year's extravaganza. He cannily charged for this and even got a small profitable return on the investment via arrangements with area hotels. He took this money and earmarked it for the mission, with a single codicil: it was to be spent only at his discretion.