“You need to make them listen,” he said, urgently. “Bomb-pumped lasers might be the only surprise we can produce before the Horde comes back.”
“I’ve already pushed things as far as I can,” the President said. “You do realise just how badly you shocked the world?”
Steve nodded, sourly.
“Congress isn’t sure just where it will all lead and they’re getting mixed messages from their constituents,” the President continued. “And there are fears that it will change the demographic map of America permanently.”
Steve rather suspected they had a point. The culture wars had turned America into a deeply divided country. If all the conservatives or libertarians left to set up home on the moon, he asked himself, what would it do for the rest of America? They’d be talking about millions of people, but it was quite possible that there would be a major demographic shift. And what would happen then?
“It will definitely change the map if the Horde bomb America into radioactive ash,” Steve said, tartly. “And besides, maybe they should learn to think of America ahead of their own interests.”
“And exactly how,” the President said, “do you intend to ensure that your politicians put the interests of your… colony ahead of their own affairs?”
“Carefully,” Steve admitted. “Very carefully.”
“Best of luck,” the President said, cheerfully. “And thank you very much for this tour.”
His expression softened. “My daughter really enjoyed herself, Mr. Stuart, and so did I.”
“Thank you,” Steve said. He couldn’t fault the President for pointing out the elephant in the room. How did one screen for integrity in one’s politicians? “And please tell everyone that it’s a good place to live up here.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Captain Perry, Ying
“Ready to disengage drive,” Jackson said. “All stations are standing by.”
Kevin nodded, feeling tension running through his body. They’d prepared as best as they could for a month, but none of them had ever set foot on an alien world before. Even those of them who had experience with different human cultures had never experienced anything so completely alien. It was quite possible that they would make a very simple mistake and doom their mission.
“Disengage drive,” he ordered. He’d made the decision not to come out of FTL with shields up and weapons ready to fire, but all stations were ready to snap to alert if necessary. Who knew how the system’s authorities would react to a starship coming out of FTL at full battle readiness? And yet, there was no overall authority in the Ying System. “Take us out of FTL.”
There was a faint indescribable sensation and then the display suddenly filled with light. The stars didn’t look too different to the stars from Earth, at least to Kevin’s untrained eye, but the system was crammed with starships and industrial stations. There were thousands of starships and spacecraft making their way to and from the system’s inhabited planets, while the entire system seemed to be thoroughly developed. Each planet had at least a dozen habitable asteroids surrounding it, while countless more drifted in free orbits around the primary star.
Cold awe threatened to overwhelm him. This was the dream, a solar system so heavily developed that nothing could threaten to exterminate its inhabitants. The human race would be safe from all harm once the Sol System was as heavily developed as this one. And yet it was a very minor system by alien standards, their version of a free city, somewhere without an overall authority. Who knew just how heavily developed an alien core system would be?
“Send the locals our IFF,” he said. It had been carefully modified, although the alien had advised them that hardly anyone on Ying would care. “And request permission to approach the planet.”
He looked down at the display while waiting for the response. A stream of alien starships were making their way through normal space towards the gravity point, a tear in the fabric of reality. The aliens, masters of gravity and antigravity, had concluded that streams of gravity between stars created natural folds in the fabric of space-time, allowing spacecraft to hop from system to system without an FTL drive. Many of the oddities of galactic history, Kevin suspected, came from the simple fact that FTL was a comparatively recent invention. Before then, they’d been completely dependent on the gravity points.
“There’s no defences around the gravity point at all,” Edward Romford pointed out. “You think they don’t consider the system worth defending?”
“Or maybe they think it would be pointless,” Kevin said. “There’s no single authority in this system to coordinate a defence.”
He shrugged. Prior to the invention of FTL, the gravity points had provided a bottleneck that had forced any aggressor to appear in a known location if he wanted to attack. The defenders might be outnumbered, but they would be able to counter with fixed defences and minefields. But FTL had completely undone the defender’s planning and allowed the aggressor to appear from anywhere. It must have been an awful surprise, Kevin considered, for the defenders when FTL had first been invented.
But the whole system was yet another illustration of just how colossal the galaxy actually was, compared to Earth. Kevin had been in lawless cities, in places where enemies met and traded despite mutual hatred, yet they had always been isolated places where no outside power wanted to establish control. Here… it was the same, but scaled up to a whole solar system. Part of him just wanted to collapse in horror, his mind unwilling to grasp what he was seeing. The rest of him just wanted to get on with the mission.
“They’ve assigned us an orbital slot,” Jackson said, shortly. “And they’ve sent us a full set of charges too.”
Kevin accessed the interface, then smiled. They weren’t being charged for being in high orbit, but moving to low orbit would cost… as would hiring a hotel on the planet’s surface or hiring a heavy-lift shuttle. He smiled at just how human it was, despite the inhumanity of the planet’s settlers. Planetary orbit might cost nothing, but everything else came with a pretty steep charge. He’d been on holidays where the flight was cheap, yet everything else was expensive as hell. The basic idea was the same.
“Understood,” he said. “Take us into orbit.”
It was easy to see, as they approached the planet, why no larger interstellar power had laid claim to Ying. The planet might have been habitable once, but it had suffered a massive ecological disaster centuries ago. If there was a native race, it had died out as the surface slowly turned to desert. Even now, sandstorms rolled across the planet’s surface, far more powerful than anything recorded on Earth. The planet’s authorities, such as they were, seemed reluctant to invest in terraforming their homeworld.
But it makes a certain kind of sense, he told himself. If they made the system more attractive, someone might come in and take it.
“Entering orbit now,” Jackson said. He grinned, nervously. “We’re here.”
“So we are,” Kevin said. An odd feeling gripped his chest. It took him a moment to realise it was nerves. He’d been in tight spots before, but this was very different. There would be no hope of rescue if the shit hit the fan. “The away team will gather in the teleport chamber.”
“Good luck, sir,” Jackson said.