Raul nodded, unbuttoning his heavy jacket in the unaccustomed warmth of the control room. Been underground too long.… He sighed. “Proceed.”
Sandoval settled back into his own seat, spoke orders into his headset that would coordinate with the crews of two other ships. There was no video communication; video was used only to impress the enemy. Raul studied the complexity of the control board, banks of indicators spreading up the walls in the cramped space around them. Most of it was prewar artifact computing equipment, installed to give these ships superior maneuverability in combat. They were one segment of the Grand Harmony's high delta-vee defense force, specially designed, specially equipped with a fuel-to-mass ratio of one thousand to one. Although Raul Nakamore ranked in the highest echelons of the Harmony navy, he had always maintained that their existence was a pointless waste of desperately needed resources; and for that reason he had never been on board one of these ships before. But now the starship had changed his mind; as it could change the very future.
He sank heavily into the padded seat as the ship's liquid-fuel boosters ignited and thrust grew to a steady two gravities, more than slightly painful on his Belter's frame. He checked the chronometer on the panel. Thrust would continue for thirteen hundred seconds, boosting them to sixteen kilometers per second … and in that time, expend seven thousand tons of fueclass="underline" the outer stages of the three ships themselves, and of seven drones. And still it would take them over two megaseconds to reach Lansing—and their quarry might not even be there. Raul settled down to wait, trying not to imagine the waste, but rather to remember what had made him so certain it was worth it.…
He had been sitting in his office, studying endless shipping schedules, when the confidential report had reached him: a ramscoop starship, origin unknown, had crossed the path of a naval patrol … and had destroyed one of their ships before escaping. He had studied the report for a long time, with the warmth of the methane stove at his back and the chill silence of Heaven's future ahead of him. And then he had noticed that a meeting was announced, his presence was required.
He left his office and made his way along the endless dank, slightly smoky corridors from the Merchant Marine wing.The government complex made up the greater part of the tunnel-and-vacuole system that honeycombed the subsurface of the asteroid Harmony, that had been the asteroid Perth in the time before the Civil War, before the founding of the Grand Harmony. The chill began to eat its way through his heavy brown uniform jacket; he pushed one hand into his pocket, using the other to push himself along the wall. He was a short man, barely 1.9 meters, and stocky, for a Belter. There was a quality of inevitability about him, and there had been a time when he had endured the cold better than most. But he was a career navy man, and he had spent most of his adult life on ships in space, where adequate heat was the least of their problems. But for the past sixty megaseconds since his promotion he had been an administrator, and learned that the only special privilege granted to an administrator was the privilege of managing a double workload.
He passed through large open chambers filled with government workers, into more hallways identical to the ones he had just left, into more chambers—as always experiencing the feeling that he was actually traveling in circles. Unconsciously he chose a route that took him through the computing center, guided by past habit while he considered the future. The past and the present surprised him as he became aware of his surroundings: of the crowded rows of young faces intent on calculation, or gaping up at his passage.
He looked toward the far corner of the chamber, almost expecting to find his own face still bent over a slate of scribbled figures. He had worked in this room, twelve-hundred-odd megaseconds ago, starting his career while still a boy as a computer fourth class. A computer in the oldest sense, because the sophisticated machinery that had borne the Discans' burden of endless computations had been lost during the Civil War. After the war, the Grand Harmony had learned the hard way that it would never survive without precise data about the constantly changing interrelationships of the major planetoids. And so they had fallen back on human computation, using the inefficient and plentiful to replace the efficient but nonexistent, as they had had to do so many times.
A bright child could learn to do the simpler calculations, and so bright children were used, freeing stronger backs for heavier labor. Raul remembered sitting squeezed onto a bench with another boy and a girl, huddled together for warmth. His nose had dripped and his lips were chapped, and he had stared enviously at the back of his half-brother Djem, who was one hundred and fifty megasecs older and a computer second class. The higher your rank, the closer you sat to the stove in the center of the room.… By the time Djem made first class, Raul had joined him, and been rewarded with warmth and one of the few hand calculators that still worked.
Their common grandfather had proved Riemann's Conjecture, and become the best-known mathematician—and perhaps the best-known human being—to come from the Heaven Belt; but then the war had come, and made him only one more refugee. He had been on vacation in the Discan rings when the war began, and his loyalties had been suspect. But his mathematical skill had been undeniable—and now, two generations later, the residue of his genius had put his grandsons on the path to success in a new regime.
“Only through obedience do we earn the right to command.…” Raul left the computer room, and his youth, behind; the universally colorless moral admonitions from the inescapable wall speakers crept back into his consciousness along with the cold. He wondered how long it would be before the news of the alien starship worked its way into the communal broadcasts, between the Thoughts from the Heart and the lectures on Demarchy decadence—and what form it would take when it did. He did not object to the constant intrusion into his life. He was used to it. It was as much a part of the life he knew as the cold. He realized that it served a purpose, distracting the people from the cold and the endless dreary labor of their daily lives, reinforcing their sense of unity and dedication to the group.
But if he felt no resentment toward the broadcasts, neither did he take them seriously anymore. He had realized long ago that they were just as much propaganda as the Demarchy's own lurid displays of unharmonious advertising.… The Demarchy, that still lived in warmth and comfort—thanks to the distilleries of the Grand Harmony—but which kept the people of the Grand Harmony from sharing that comfort. It refused to sell them the atomic fission batteries that were still the Demarchy's major source of power, for heat, for light, for shipping, for the few factories that still operated. No existing factories operated at more than one percent efficiency in the Grand Harmony—except for the distilleries—and virtually their only source of heat and light came from the inefficient burning of methane (because the Rings had a surplus of volatiles, but that was all they had).
Raul pushed the thought out of his mind, as he pushed aside the more painful truth that his people, all the people in the Heaven Belt, were doomed. Regret was useless. Hatred was counterproductive. Raul faced the truth, and faced it down. He saw the road ahead clearly, saw it grow steeper and more difficult until at last it became impossible. But he moved ahead, one step at a time, strengthened by the knowledge that he had done all that was humanly possible.
There had been a time when he had absorbed every word of the broadcasts, and believed every word. He had hated the Demarchy then, with the blind passion of youth; and because he was young and competent and expendable, he had been sent on a mission of sabotage into Demarchy space. And he had failed in his mission. But to his intense humiliation, the perversity of the Demarchy's media-ruled mobocracy had transformed him into a popular hero, taking his impassioned last denunciation of their own aggression to heart … and the Demarchy had sent him home, a shamefaced messenger of goodwill, to open negotiations for the construction of a distillery that would benefit both the Demarchy and the Grand Harmony.