"I can do something about it," interrupted a dark man who had slid up unnoticed.
Robinson looked over at the newcomer. Then he looked up… and up.
The man was tall, nearly two meters in height. In front was a long, untrimmed beard, half gone to gray, that hung to his waist. His head was covered with a checked cloth, held in place by a retaining band made of cylindrical beads interspersed with spherical ones of gold. Robinson thought the cylindrical beads might be of some precious stone, though he could not immediately identify it.
"I can do something about it," the dark man repeated. "I am Mustafa ibn Mohamed ibn Salah, min Sa'ana, emir of the Ikhwan."
"Oh, Mustafa, piss off, won't you?" said Unni. "You've tried that trick with the FSC so many times and nothing has come of it."
"Silence, infidel houri," Mustafa commanded. "I lacked the means. The high admiral can give me those means."
Wiglan stiffened under the insult. Robinson made a moue. He asked, "What "means?" And what is this Ikhwan of which you are… the leader?"
"The Ikhwan is the Brotherhood, the Brotherhood of true believers," Mustafa answered. "What we need are nuclear weapons. Give me a dozen such and I will break the FSC."
"That, I am afraid," Robinson answered, "will never happen. Our weapons are identifiable as ours. And, while we could-and did-use them on the FSC in past days, those days are long past."
"Then help me in other ways."
Interlude
21 January, 2037, 51.716 AUs Out From Sol
The trickiest part had been the sail. It had to resist tearing, or be self-repairing, or be otherwise repairable, while also avoiding becoming overly charged, electrically. It had also to be very lightweight and highly reflective; the amount of propulsion provided by photons from the Sun and other sources striking the sail being very low except in the aggregate.
In the end, and after frightful expenditures, it was decided that self-repairing was too hard. The nanites that did effect repairs on the sail were not, strictly speaking, a part of it. They worked though, even in the vacuum of space and even while under bombardment by the sun's unfiltered rays. The sail was quite porous, the diameter of the pores being less than the wavelength of the light that forced the sails forward.
The mechanism for setting the sail was simplicity itself. Instead of a complex mechanical operation to raise and lower it, a series of gastight tubes were sewn around the exterior and connected to the main ship by much thinner tubes. Gas was pumped into the tubes to set the sail, pumped out while thin filaments were retracted to furl it. Heating elements within the tubes kept the gas from freezing and collapsing in the cold of deep space.
Other problems, microminiaturized electronics and an extremely lightweight spacecraft body, had been easier. Indeed, they had been almost natural outflows of ongoing, purely terrestrially oriented, research. It was a short step from nanotube body armor for soldiers to a nanotube spacecraft body, for example. The programming had been even easier if not precisely simpler.
Not to say that the ship was cheap. It had eaten up almost all of the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration's somewhat constrained budget for the better part of two decades. The less said about the scandals, the overruns, the bribes from various foreign subcontractors, however, the better.
The ship, if one could call a robot a ship, was named the Cristobal Colon. Many had held out for a different, generally more culturally sensitive and less eurocentric, name. These ranged from Saint Brendan and Leif Eriksson (obvious nonstarters) to Sinbad to Cheng Ho. Since the Americans were footing the bill, however, they got to choose. Moreover, they were, at the time, going through one of their periodic bouts of extreme nationalism. "Cristobal Colon" seemed good to them and the rest of the world could lump it.
The robot, or ship, was just under two meters in diameter and approximately nine long. Various projections-a radio telescope here, an antenna there-were attached to the outside. The computer that controlled it was deep inside, or as deep inside as one can get with a cylinder two meters across. The sail dwarfed the robot ship, though the sail massed very little and the ship several tons.
The ship was very fast, as men reckoned such things. Boosted by lasers fixed to the moon and floating in space, by the time the ship reached the point it was at it was going a very appreciable fraction of c. Everything was operating normally, though there was a bit of trouble in the Number Thirty-three vent. There were nearly a hundred such, however, which allowed Mission Control or the robot to steer the thing a bit. Even with one such operating at suboptimal efficiency, there was no danger.
Imagine the consternation at Mission Control, then, when the robot and sail seemed to wink out of existence completely…
Chapter Two
I loved you
And so I took the tides of men into my hands
And wrote my will across the sky in stars…
Cochea,
Provincia del Valle de las Lunas, Republica de Balboa,
Terra Nova, 10/7/459 AC
Art, precious metals and the occasional young slave were not the only in-demand product of Earth. Music, too, was popular, in particular the wild and violent sounds of the twentieth century. Earth literature also had its place on the new world. Both had been brought by the original immigrants in the form of computer discs. Much had been lost, of course, but much had survived the days from when the old computers wore out. Indeed, developing new machines capable of reading the old discs had given Terra Nova a leg up in artificial intelligence, generally.
As with many immigrant tongues on Old Earth-American English, Quebecois French and South African Dutch, for example- many of the languages of Terra Nova retained many features that had been lost to their mother tongues. Indeed, a man or woman of the twentieth century would likely have found the English of the Federated States more comprehensible than that commonly used by the Anglic-speaking proles of Old Earth. In any case, this made much of the older music of Old Earth quite in tune with Terra Novan listeners.
Of course, Latin hadn't changed in millennia. It was LatinSatanic flavored Latin at that-which flowed from the speakers in the book-stuffed library:
O Fortuna
Velut Luna…
High on one wall of the library hung an ornate, embossed certificate, in Spanish, signifying a high decoration for valor from the Republic of San Vicente. The gilt name emblazoned on the award was Patricio Hennessey de Carrera. Posted beneath the certificate, framed with obvious pride, hung a letter of reprimand-in English-from a general officer of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia. It was addressed merely to "CPT Patrick Hennessey." Both certificates-dated fifteen years prior, long before Hennessey's promotion to his terminal rank-described the same series of events, though in rather different terms.
The library was large, with bookcases covering three of the substantial room's four walls. Against the fourth, under the certificate and the letter of reprimand, stood a desk and chair, each made in the main of dark-finished Lempiran mahogany, hand crafted and richly carved. A man approaching middle age, just beginning to go gray at the temples and with a face weathered beyond its years with the wear of sun and rain, sat at the desk, eyes fixed on a book.
The book was one of many. Reaching floor to ceiling, the volumepacked shelves of the library held the essence of a lifetime's interest and study, more than seven thousand volumes in all. Even over the broad, deep desk more bookshelf space was stacked and-like the other shelves-filled to overflowing. Still more reference material resided on computer micro-discs inside cases stuffed to the brim.