He slid into his cubbyhole, invoked Java on his hot-drinks feed, and with a flexure of hands and fingers conjured the markets to the real screens around his head and to the virtual screens within. “A choppy day,” he said.
The great ship’s exchanges already looked segmented. With most crew and all the settlers in the cones mobilized to what amounted to manual labour, their trading had been left in the hands of agents, demons, and bots. It lacked panache. In these early minutes no one could be sure how the day would end, how much would be honoured and how much written off.
In the habitat cylinder, by contrast, immense disturbances stirred in the depths, visible on early trades like the upward bulge of a stretch of ocean that foretold a tsunami on a distant shore. Sharp fluctuations in raw materials prices agitated the surface. Established disreputable futures markets in bets on an early end to the colonization embargo supplied the windblown froth.
Moments ahead of most of his fellow traders, Awlin saw the arbitrage potential of the flatter markets of the cones. Even discounting for uncertainty, it was a sure thing that the gross misallocations imposed by the mobilization would open up gaps that it would be profitable to correct when the dust had settled. He spent a happy hour chasing them, and then was almost caught short by a wave of selling. Wrenching his perspective, he traced that wave to a sharp activity spike in the habitat, to whose markets the selling wave rebounded in seconds. The three parts of the ship were connected again, and not in a good way. The wealthiest cartels of the founder generation were driving down cone futures, leaving only the most risk-prone speculators to shark up the slack. Within minutes they too began to buckle.
In the screen segment devoted to physical activity in the cone reserve tanks, snarl-ups and stoppages reddened the nodes of the decision tree.
“They’re cutting the kids off without a penny,” Awlin muttered. At the sight of their economic futures subliming like carbon-dioxide ice before their eyes, some of the settlers were getting cold feet and shaky hands. He didn’t blame them. Having your head ring with frantic calls from your finance bots while you scrambled to shift fusion plants and salvage machinery from the possibly doomed habitats — Awlin was sure the settlers had no illusions as to the likely fate of the contents of the reserve tanks, once separation was accomplished — couldn’t be anything but crushing. Although the settlers were on the crew circuit and working off the same chart, they didn’t have the crew ethos and morale. But without their continuing involvement the whole thing would bottleneck.
Awlin flashed a comment around the traders’ loop: “This is downright economic warfare.”
Enough agreement came back for him to float a company and coordinate a counterattack. The markets rallied, but not enough. Awlin contemplated an array of downward slopes and a continued flare of red lights on the project board and decided matters were out of his hands. He liquidated the company and kicked the problem up to a finance jury.
The deliberations didn’t take long, and the response crackled with an impatience he suspected was Constantine’s: What are you waiting for? This is separation! So separate already!
Awlin sucked in a deep breath. This was the nuclear option. He hesitated for a moment, then sent out the proposal that would sever financial ties between the cylinder and the cones: currency reform.
The forward cone went through three distinct commodity bases for an autonomous currency in as many seconds, and settled on a basket of carbon, nickel-iron, and helium-3. At once all values of goods and services in the cone were reckoned on the assumption of access to the system’s resources and independence from — and the irrelevance of — habitat capital. The stimulus was in part illusory; it was almost certainly inflationary; but Awlin and his collaborators had bet that it would be enough to carry along the human and virtual agents. He waited for the markets to turn.
They did. The habitat economy went into a sharp downturn while that of the cones shot upward, at least as far as expectations were concerned. For the moment rich and hopeful again, the ship kids began to make good. The red, blocked nodes on the physical chart flipped to green. The cone was as yet a long way from separation, but already its markets had rocketed away from the ship.
Synchronic watched the cones’ break to financial autarky with her knuckles pressed to her mouth. She and the Red Sun cartels had tried to steal the ship generation away from Constantine. Now the crew cartels had stolen them back. She wasn’t worried about the integrity of the habitat. The crew’s work to ensure it was obvious. It was its future as a trading and cultural centre for the new system that had just taken a severe blow. Relations with the settlers, and with whatever market was eventually established with the aliens, could be chaotic for years — perhaps decades. By the time the data colonies and fast probes arrived, the habitat could have lost all the advantages of its prime location and become a backwater, vulnerable to hostile bids and outright attack. She was not complacent about the aliens’ prospects. They seemed a fierce, fast-learning species, and the knowledge that space travel and molecular technologies were possible might have them swarming out of their gravity well long before the ill-equipped, ill-prepared colonisation that the crew evidently contemplated was complete. The premature separation had left whole cohorts of the ship generation stranded in the habitat, and having seen how badly their elder brothers and sisters had behaved in a less fraught situation, Synchronic didn’t look forward to their likely reaction.
She summed her proposal for the Circle: Capitulate and negotiate. Offer reforged links, limited colonization, and accelerated contact.
Her voice was one of many from various cartels that called for a similar policy. The Council, still shaken by the news of the crews’ clandestine intervention and further rocked by the impending separation, considered it seriously. The main alternative proposal shocked her: To allow crew mutiny and unauthorised colonisation a free run sets a very bad precedent. Cripple and recapture.
Synchronic’s outraged demand of How? was met with a likewise laconic retort: EMP.
Electromagnetic pulse.
Nukes. It would work, she was assured. It wouldn’t even harm anyone, if they got the distance right, and the meteor-defence system was good at that.
The proposal passed. Synchronic was having none of it. She zapped through a warning to the cones seconds before communications were cut off.
Hours later, she stood in the garden with the children and waited. The circles of lightning flared and died. A sound too loud and brief to be called a scream split the air. For a moment a red ring glowed in the end plate as the friction welding seized. A vast shudder passed from the ground to the top of every head. In the same second the sunline died, giving a moment of total blackness longer than a blink. The sunline flickered like an old fluorescent tube, steadied, and shone on as if nothing had happened.
Synchronic spoke vague comforting words to the children. She switched her vision to the forward outside view, which was filled with the slowly shrinking circle of the base of the separated cone, and waited for the flash.
14 366:02:23 22:00
These are moments I will always remember in the present tense.
We have the fusion plants in place and on line. All the equipment that can be saved from the interior settlements is piled on the forward side of the rocks. We head for the huge exit airlocks as fast as we can, clinging to scooters and rocket packs and gas-bottle rafts in a great and now empty-seeming darkness. Our little round window on the sunline, our false star, has gone out. Hope your virtual and infrared vision is in synch. The airlocks loom. Brake if we can, jump if we must.
We tumble in heaps of hundreds into the locks. The cycle doesn’t bother to conserve air.