“You look troubled all of a sudden,” Bascal said to him.
Conrad looked around the bridge, then back at his king. “I just feel that something is slipping away. Our precious youth. Look at us: we aren't playacting, here. We are actually doing this thing. We'll never be young again.”
“No,” Bascal said with a wistful, half-pleased look. “We won't.”
“How does this happen?” Conrad mused. “When does it steal upon you? The green-hot fires fade into cool wellstone light. Five years ago we would have screamed and jumped at a moment like this; now we just look at each other. I wonder why that is.”
Bascal's face broke out in a smile, and he got up from his seat. The bridge's little fax machine was not far from his elbow, and he whispered something to it. A number of objects spilled out into his waiting hands, and he took one of these and threw it hard against the floor. It made a popping sound, and burst with a spray of ribbons and confetti which covered a radius of nearly two meters. Ho Ng and Brenda had it all over their shoes. The king turned his smirk on Conrad. “Feel better?”
“Actually, yes.” Conrad could feel some tension going out of him. Whether this was a moment of triumph or gloom was entirely up to them, right? And really, if all this was being recorded for posterity, then the tone they set here today would speak directly to the future society they hoped to build. “Give me one of those things.”
Bascal tossed one to him, and it exploded with a snap in Conrad's own hands. “Ha!” he cried, and would have said more if not for Xmary's hard glare, directed first at him, and then at Bascal.
“Majesty, can I ask you to cut that out? This may be the time, but it certainly isn't the place.”
The tone in her voice set off a cascade of memories in Conrad. Years ago, onboard the pirate ship Viridity, he had been the voice of reason. Not because he'd wanted to, or was particularly good at it, but because there'd been no one else. People were too afraid, too angry, too wrapped up in their own affairs to think about any bigger picture. But here, now, the opposite seemed to be true.
Okay, messing around with confetti was fun, but it didn't fundamentally change the fact that they were doing as they were told: meekly exiting the Queendom of Sol. It seemed a strange answer to their years of rebellion. They had lost their revolution—they'd always known they would—but the fact that they'd fought at all, taken on such hopeless odds, was a kind of victory all by itself. It had won them a star of their own, and a starship to carry them there. But did they have to be so obedient about it?
“Information,” he asked, “are there any isolated sensor platforms within one hundred kilometers of our current position?”
“There are three holding steady in our forward arc,” Agnes answered crisply, “with matched velocity. They're leading the way, essentially.” Then added: “Um, sir.”
“Hmm. How about the aft arc?”
She frowned. “May I send out a wideband ping? I get forward readings from Navigation, but the aft data is much sparser.”
Conrad looked to Xmary, who nodded uncertainly.
“Wideband ping, please, Information,” Conrad said to Agnes.
“Aye, sir. Pinging now, all frequencies.”
Conrad was impatient. After only about five seconds, he asked, “Well?”
“Eleven targets in our aft hemisphere, sir. Seven of them running silent, in addition to the three pingers. They all look like news cameras to me, but it's hard to be sure. They're the right size anyway, half a meter or less, with a wellstone reflection signature. Most of the targets are clustered just aft of our equator, probably hoping for a cinematic angle on the motors and sail.”
“Posterity wants a good view,” Robert said.
“Let's give them one,” Conrad suggested, feeling suddenly, wickedly playful. “Robert, how difficult would it be to fry one of those bastards?”
“Beg your pardon, sir?”
“Fry it. With the fusion exhaust. It's a stream of monochromatic helium, right?”
“And protons, I think. Ask Engineering. Let me see if I understand you correctly, sir: you want to orient the main motor not at our navigational optimum, but at a piece of private property? A reportant device, a news camera? For the purpose of destroying it?”
Conrad cleared his throat. “Too many damn voices of reason onboard this ship. Yes, Astrogation, that is exactly what I'm asking you. It might be nice to leave this system in style. Give them something to remember us by. And the question stands: how difficult would it be? We needn't use the main motor; we have the four nav exhaust ports as well, right? I just want to point something hot at the nearest target of opportunity. I am asking you—correction, I am ordering you—to plot a solution.”
“All right,” Robert said unhappily. “Solution plotted. It's, uh, not difficult. About 12.6 degrees off optimal, if we use the portside nav motor. A three-second toot ought to do it. Sir.”
King Bascal burst out laughing. The old gleam was back in his eyes, and he said, “It was wanton vandalism that got us in this fix in the first place. I like it. What are they going to do, punish us? Fine us? Add an extra year to our sentence? Make no mistake: my parents have spy devices all over this ship. Our wellstone's programming must be lousy with them—microscopic sensors that move and shift and disappear when examined—so as long as we remain in comm range, maybe five AU for low-gain transmissions, they'll be watching our every move. And that by itself is a good enough reason for me: because they'll see us do it. But I can't give the order myself. Captain?”
Xmary frowned at the king, and then even harder at Conrad. It was they, more than anyone, who'd led her to a life of crime. Well, Yinebeb Fecre as well. Feck the Facilitator. But that whole August Riot thing was small-time mischief against the larger backdrop of piracy and plunder. Bascal's crew had been gearing up to destroy a neutronium barge, cargo and all, when the Navy finally caught them.
The captain's gaze wandered over to the astrogation niche. “Robert, confirm your solution, please, and forward it to the steering program. We'll give that camera six seconds in the fusion stream, and then reorient to our departure vector. There's no sense telling a joke and then leaving out the punchline.”
“Now, ma'am?”
“Yes, please.”
The motor had been fired at low power when they departed from Mars orbit, and its reactors had operated continuously since then in a nonpropulsive mode, generating power for the ship and crew. And yes, it had been fired propulsively during drydock testing, for small fractions of a second. But this was the first time they'd opened her up, jamming the throttle to full power. The sound of it was incredible: low and shrill and visceral, like a continuous punch in the gut. Like the end of a world, or the beginning of one.
“Bloodfuck,” cursed the Chief of Security. “We're really gone now.”
And so they were.
Chapter three.
In which a wake is keenly felt
Queen Tamra-Tamatra Lutui and her king, Bruno de Towaji, stood on the balcony of their Summer Palace on the island of Tongatapu. Above them, the stars of the night sky were washed out by a single pinpoint of indigo, painfully bright. That was Newhope's sail, illuminated by the launching lasers, racing past the Earth's orbit at one-twentieth of the speed of light and still accelerating madly. The ship was actually quite far from the Earth itself: nearly as far from it as the sun. But even so, the laser light reflected from its sails—bright as a hundred full moons—was painful to behold against the blackness.