The occasion: perihelion. Newhope's closest approach to the sun. “When we fire the motor,” Robert was saying, “a ten kps nudge here at the sun becomes one hundred kps excess at escape. It sounds like a free ride, but that's how the orbit numbers work out. Of course, ten kps is nothing in the grand scheme of things. We need almost thirty thousand kps—a tenth of lightspeed—to get where we're going in a hundred years. The fusion burn is mainly to correct our course, to change the plane of our orbit so that we're actually aimed at Barnard's Star. We'll get most of our actual impulse from the sail. Once we unfurl it, the sun is going to push the loving shit out of us, and laser stations are going to push even harder. If we weren't ertially shielded, the acceleration would squish us all to paste in a fraction of a second.”
“Who are you talking to?” Conrad asked. There wasn't a soul on the bridge—on the whole of the ship—who didn't know these facts backward and forward.
“Posterity,” Robert said with a shrug, and then, thinking about it, added a theatrical flourish. “This is all being recorded, sir. This is a major event in human society. The dawn of a civilization.”
“True and true. Shall I say some grand words?” Bascal asked of no one in particular. “We leave behind us the troubles of the old . . . ahem. Hmm. We leave behind us the troubles of the old, to find and create a set of new troubles which are entirely our own. We do this . . . because a civilization which cannot die, and cannot grow old, also cannot grow young. All it can do is give birth to fresh civilizations.”
“Very nice,” Conrad said, clapping politely in the air.
“Oh, dry up. Captain, what's your status?”
Xmary frowned at a display on the arm of her chair, then turned to Robert. “Astrogation: status report.”
“Position is only 9.16 kilometers off nominal, ma'am,” Robert answered grandly. “Velocity is off by 1.34 meters per second. Position uncertainty is less than two centimeters, and velocity uncertainty is 18.4 nanometers per second. Orientation uncertainties are well below the vibrational tolerances of the vehicle. In a quantum universe, you don't get much more accurate than this.”
“How's our dust count?”
“Zero impingements, ma'am. Agnes has got the nav laser firing once every five seconds, clearing the path ahead, so what hits us is a gas of single atoms, highly ionized.”
“I'm familiar with the principle.”
“Anything else, ma'am?”
“Thank you, Astrogation. That will be all. Engineering?” She turned to look at the bulkhead behind her. The word and gesture together formed a command which opened a holographic window to the engine room. This was actually twenty-eight decks below, or aft if you wanted to be technical about it, but the resolution on the holograms was orders of magnitude finer than the human eye could discern. The illusion was perfect: that the engine room, with its reactor controls and status displays, was located immediately capward of the bridge itself, when in fact there was nothing but empty space there, rushing by at six hundred kilometers per second.
Conrad could see Peter in the background, leaning intently over something and frowning. Money Izolo, another Blue Squatter who'd long ago reverted to his natural shade of deep purple-brown, looked up at the sound of the captain's voice and found himself staring into the bridge.
“First Engineer, what's your status?”
“Well hi, Xmary. Captain, I mean. Our status is good, yah. The fusion motor is generating fifty kilowatts, mainly for lighting and environmental controls. The deutrelium stream is focused and crystallized, with no detectable density anomalies. We are prepared to go propulsive at any time. Antimatter reactors are idle, with full hermetic sealing on the storage cells. Failsafes three layers deep. Would you like me to read you the temperatures?”
“Thank you, no,” Xmary said. She looked away, and the engine room winked out of existence. Like many an object in the quantum universe, it did not exist when there was no attention being paid to it.
Xmary glanced pointedly at Agnes. “Information?”
“I have nothing to report, ma'am.”
Xmary turned a serious expression on Bascal. “Your Majesty, my status is good. I mean nominal. We are ‘go' for fusion burn, after which we will unfurl the sail and begin accumulating our departure velocity. Would you like to give the orders?”
The king frowned, thinking about it. Conrad understood, or thought he did: if Bascal gave the orders, he was micromanaging, and undermining the authority of the ship's duly elected captain. But declining the invitation was a consequential act as well, which could make him look indecisive or something. Overly delegatory. But he had to say something, so he leaned forward, fingering the black curls of his new beard, and said, “As you were, Captain. This moment belongs to you.”
“Well,” Xmary said, glancing at her armrest panel, “the moment is still a few minutes away.”
Conrad didn't know what to think about all this formality. He really didn't. The last time they'd done anything like this, they had been criminals, or at least delinquents. Squabbling among themselves, making it all up as they went along. It was recklessly, foolishly dangerous—commandeering a pocket star to launch them across the wastes of the Kuiper Belt!—and everybody knew that and was okay with it. Well, mostly okay. There had, after all, been a mutiny, and there'd've probably been another if the Navy hadn't caught them when it did.
Hell, as recently as eighteen weeks ago they'd all still been criminal wards of the state. Even Bascal had had no official rank; he was the Prince of Sol, but that meant very little given that he'd been banished from Sol for a period of not less than one thousand years. In training, the exiles had all taken turns at different jobs, under strict orders to figure out who was good at what. There had been no fixed chain of command, no hierarchy. All for one and one for all. But here they were: a king, a captain, a crew.
In his Poet Prince days, Bascal had written frequently about the “verdant fires of youth,” but where were those fires now? Co-opted in some way. The Queendom authorities had grabbed them, molded them, forced them unwilling into these roles. The queen had in fact given the child rebels exactly what they'd always asked for: a chance to grow up. To take on responsibilities of genuine consequence. Well, they had that now. All that and more.
And somehow it all felt very premature, very forced. Except on pirate ships, Conrad had never met a captain who was any younger than fifty, and most of them were much older than that. In fact, the oldest person in Newhope's memory cores was just forty-five, and Conrad had never met anyone that young who was in any position of responsibility. They were children, these Newhope exiles. Like all the revolutionaries, Conrad had railed against that label, which seemed destined to cling to them forever like a bad smell. Children with no room to grow up, no space to grow into. But now, at age twenty-five, he felt nearly as resentful at being made responsible for himself. For a whole ship and crew.
Damn it, adulthood came too suddenly, and at too steep a cost. There was a lot to worry about; it wasn't fun. And he supposed that was the whole point. There was no use complaining about it, but it did feel eerie, watching his friends behave this way. Himself, too.