The impression of chaos didn’t last more than the first few seconds. The crew circuit lit up with a message of a kind that Horrocks had only seen in drills and sims: an Order of the Day. The top-level objective cleared up any confusion about what was going on, and left Horrocks for a moment slack-jawed: separation of the cones from the habitat in the shortest time consistent with component integrity. Target completion time: ten hours.
Successive levels of the Order spelled out what that meant. The top priority was to shift fusion plants to the axis. The next was to have these on line and standing by to replace the drive in powering the sunline after separation. Third was to have the cones’ auxiliary and attitude jets fuelled and ready to fire. The fourth was to have the cones’ anti-meteor defences on full alert. Fifth and finally, the habitats and other constructions in the tanks were to be evacuated. On completion of the tasks, or on command at any time, everyone was to return to the normal living and working quarters of the crew.
Beneath these general levels and breaking down the tasks into a rational division of labour, an organization chart proliferated like an inverted tree. Each person had a job to do, highlighted in the version of the chart that reached them. For Horrocks and Genome it was scooter and tug work, ferrying people and equipment.
As soon as he tabbed his acceptance, a message flared across Horrocks’s faceplate: Your performance of this task and others in fulfillment of the above Order of the Day are covered by the below cited emergency clauses in the Contract covering a breakdown in relations between Crew and other sections of the Complement. If you do not wish to take part for any reason, you are required to stand down at once. No sanctions will apply and arrangements for evacuation or resettlement will be made on request and implemented as soon as possible.
A scrolling screen of legal boilerplate followed. Horrocks didn’t even skim it. What mattered was the digital signature at the foot, authenticating the entire Order and signing off on it: Constantine the Oldest Man.
Horrocks looked across at Genome and chinned their private band. “You in?”
“I’m in if you are.”
“If Constantine asks it, that’s good enough for me,” said Horrocks.
“OK,” said Genome. “Let’s do it for the Man.”
Synchronic expected trouble as soon as the call to arrest Constantine went out. She expected grumbling from the crew, protests from citizens, and angry exchanges in the Council, already in an uproar over what Constantine’s brazen admission had revealed. She was right. Lost in the virtual spaces in which she followed these developments, she didn’t hear the distant thunder until a small girl ran in from the garden and shook her shoulder.
“Mummy mummy there’s a fire in the sky!”
Synchronic scooped the breathless, anxious child up in her arms and rushed outside. Looking up, all was normaclass="underline" the sunline shone, white clouds drifted, the far side of the habitat lay in a dim shade pricked by faint clusters of light like a washed-out image of a night sky.
The infant squirmed around and pointed toward the central ring of the forward end of the cylinder. Synchronic almost dropped her.
Around the rim of the spinning axial plate, kilometres wide, that joined the cylinder to the cone, lightning flared and flickered. Thunder rolled down like the sound of a waterfall. In the electric inconstant light from far above the remaining shards of the slag heap, all the way around the bottom of the cylinder’s end-plate, flashed black and white like broken glass. On the more distant rearward plate a similar ring of fire encircled the far end of the sunline.
Apocalyptic and unexpected as the sight was, Synchronic recognised it. She would have seen such a spectacle at some point in the next few years. The gigantic electromagnetic baffles of the frictionless flange between the axial plate and the rest of the endplate within which it spun were being readied to lock down and friction-weld into place, searing the ship and turning off the field at the moment when the cones disengaged.
Synchronic made a supreme effort to retain her composure in front of the fast-growing crowd of her younger carechildren. Knowing that most of her older carechildren were now on the other side of that fiery barrier did nothing to help.
She put the little girl down on the ground and stroked her head and smiled around. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “What an amazing sight! And listen to that thunder!”
“What is it, Synch?” somebody shouted. The cry was taken up.
Synchronic waved her arms. “It’s all right,” she said. “It’s just some engineering work. The crew have to do it every so often. You’re all too young to have seen it before. Say, why don’t you all fetch your cameras and make some pictures of it?”
All but the smallest children, and one or two of the older, were satisfied with that. She told Magnetic Resonance and the other older ones a less than complete truth about what was going on, and set them to work distracting their younger caresibs. Then she went inside and sat down and tried to take stock before returning the insistent calls of her friends and allies.
This was mutiny, total and irrevocable. Worse, in a way, than the secret scheme of Constantine and his cabal of crew scientists. That at most had seemed — only hours earlier, in her furious confrontation with Constantine — a probably illegal and certainly unethical and underhanded circumvention of the established, albeit contested, will of the ship’s community. This was the literal breakup of the community itself.
The personal betrayal left her with a dark sense of abandonment. Constantine had not been her lover in a long, long time; but in their centuries of friendship she had felt she had come to know him to the bone. Cities had risen and fallen around them, fashions and philosophies had come and gone, fortunes had been made and lost, styles of art and customs of courtship and subtle techniques of intrigue had been refined and trashed like the buildings in which they’d flourished and faded. At the end of the great enclosed adventure of the one-generation ship, that had turned the emptying of the tank into the founding of a world, she stood here on what they’d made of the last dregs of the regolith and the mulch and realised she didn’t know him at all.
Above and beyond that, less personal but more disquieting and disorienting, was what the mutiny told her about people in general. Separating the cones could not be done without a sustained cooperative effort of the crew, and no doubt of the ship generation on the same side. In all her long life politicking had been polite: the fights fierce, the stakes small. You went along with decisions you’d been defeated on and expected others to go along with those you’d won, because there would always be another round of the game, another roll of the dice. Was this all an illusion? Did it all come down to personal influence in the end? If so many people were eager to troop along when a coal-black alpha, a respected senior, the Oldest Man, kicked over the table and walked away — then it seemed so.
If that much of her experience had fallen, far more still stood. She began taking and making calls. The Red Sun Circle and its allies would give Constantine the fight of his life.
Awlin Halegap had been surprised to find himself directed to his normal workspace by the Order of the Day. He’d always considered his work as vital as anyone’s, but he’d never have expected “speculator” to be a reserved occupation in an all-hands call. He regretted missing the fun: a day spent shoving and stopping large and dangerous masses sounded like sport.