Bascal considered that for several seconds before replying, “Yes, and it might take us months to mount a rescue, to retrieve them from that perilous orbit. Or longer, but Fist's crew are hard men, accustomed to sacrifice. They'll do their jobs. There are weapons capable of killing a person from that range, you know. Without harming the ship.”
“It's not like we're cowering in a metal can,” she countered. “We can repel your grasers and nasen beams. And if you have something subtler than that—some Marlon Sykes superweapon—or something cruder like a cannon or an ultra-high-powered laser, we'll just fire the engines again. The ertial shield puts acceleration on our side; we'll just scoot out of the way.”
Bascal smiled, thinly and unhappily. “Not if you want to reach the Queendom you won't. You need to fire from a particular point over Barnard's face, at a particular moment. You haven't got time or fuel to waste on evasive maneuvers.”
“We have some,” she said. “We have more freedom than Fist does. We are a starship, Your Highness, where Fist is not.”
“No,” he agreed, “she's not. If you're determined to outrun her, you probably can. So we'll have to catch you the long way around. Your departure course is fixed. It has to be, because there's only one straight line connecting Barnard to Sol. And if Ho waits for you along that line, then when you come around the sun you can't help but encounter him, at a range and location of his choosing.”
Oh, shit, Conrad said to himself. Here was his overlooked detail. He was a good Naval officer—Feck and Xmary even more so—but they weren't warriors. They didn't think or plan like warriors. Shit, shit, that would have to change. Quickly.
“Now you see,” Bascal told them all. “Now at last you understand. This is not a democracy or an anarchy, where you're free to do whatever you fuffing please. How can it be? We rely on the economic edge that monarchy provides. Thirty percent better than the free market!”
“Ideally,” Feck told him, with a dismissive, derisive flutter of his hands. “If you, King Bascal, do everything perfectly.”
“You think I haven't?” Bascal asked, with less rancor than Conrad would have expected. “You think I'm just ignoring my advisors, my hypercomputers, my models and simulations? Could you do better with the same tools?” He looked around. “I can't see who's speaking. Is that you, Feck? Yes? Well listen, it may be true that we don't hit thirty percent on the best of days, but I'll tell you something: we don't hit fifteen percent either. Not on our worst, slowest, stupidest day. We're that much better than the sum of random chances. And if we fell back to a free market, do you know what a prolonged fifteen-to-twenty-five percent recession would do to this colony? Do you?”
“So you strip away the final illusions of freedom,” Feck admonished. “You ask people to live and die for you, all the while checking every economic action against some master plan. And what action is not economic in some way? You're talking about total control, backed up by the threat of lethal force. Will it be the death penalty for selling berries below the official price? A flogging, perhaps? All for the hope of some hypothetical resurrection, thousands of years in the future. What I'm saying is, that's much worse than what we left behind in the Queendom. Sire. Much worse.”
Bascal smiled, and this time it was genuine. “Ah, yes. A fair objection. But at the end of that time, think what we'll have achieved! Total freedom: physical, economic, political. Complete liberation from those moribund Queendom power structures. We will resurrect our dead, restore the neutronium trade, install the luxuries of collapsiter travel and meritocratic advancement. But these are not mere bread and circuses; long before Barnard is full we'll launch starships of our own, a colony wave done properly, carrying our ideas to the stars. And space is infinite, Feck. We can have our cake and eat it too. Live forever and continue to breed. All the cake in the universe is ours for the taking.”
The king's eyes had gone out of focus, as if he were looking not at the holie window and the bridge of Newhope, but at this glorious future off in the distance somewhere.
“Just ignore him,” Xmary told her crew. “We've got work to do. Battle plans to draw up. Fist may be a match for mining colonies and pirate sloops, but we've got a hundred times her reactor power and probably five hundred times her programmable mass. We can throw a lot of energy in a lot of different ways. If they want to stand in our path, that's their prerogative, but it doesn't mean they can stop us.”
“I'm standing right here,” Bascal said. “I can hear every word.”
“Just ignore him,” Xmary repeated.
Although he grew increasingly angry, Bascal had too much dignity to press this point. If they weren't going to talk to him, then neither was he going to talk to them. He watched for a while as normal bridge chatter resumed: the scanning and neutralizing of debris, the shifting of ballast mass to minimize the pressure on station-keeping thrusters.
“If you make it through, it's going to be a long trip,” he injected at one point. “No fax storage. I did a shorter version on the way out here, and believe me it was loooong. Are you people sure you can handle it?”
But nobody responded to that, and a king really did have better things to do than sit there all day staring quietly at his enemies. After ten more minutes of quiet standoff, his image got bored and winked out.
“Alone at last,” Eustace said.
But Conrad shook his head. “Don't count on it. He'll have sensors in the walls by now. Our king is quite a talented programmer.”
“Damn right he is,” said a disembodied voice. Bascal's.
It was hardly a timely quip, though; his signal could only travel at the speed of light, whereas the distance between Newhope and Planet Two (Sorrow, Conrad reminded himself. Would that name ever stick?) was increasing rapidly. With the ship already doing better than thirty kps—one ten-thousandth of the speed of light—every seventy minutes of travel added a full second to the round-trip signal lag.
“This complicates our battle planning,” Conrad noted. “We have no security at all. We have to assume that everything we do and say is being analyzed, at least until we get the sun between ourselves and the planet. Possibly even then. And any weapons we produce from the wellstone of the hull will be difficult to trust.”
“It does make things interesting,” Xmary agreed.
The next time Bascal appeared in a visible form, the ship was nine light-seconds from Sorrow, meaning the round-trip signal lag was eighteen seconds. He didn't even bother trying to hold a conversation like that, but simply haloed himself and fired off an interactive message. A large and complicated one, judging by the hours its upload spent choking Newhope's comm systems.
“It doesn't have to be like this,” the king said, appearing translucently as a crouching figure, leaning right into Conrad's face as he lay on his bunk trying to catch a few hours of sleep. “I still want you on my team. Whatever has driven you to this desperate act, I need to know about it. That's advice you should be giving to me. I should be accounting for it in my planning.”