And yes, it might be the job of a woman to manage a fleet in time of disaster, and to rule over a Queendom in times of peace, but surely it was the job of a man to rush forward willy-nilly to survey the scene ahead of her.
“Let the navy handle this,” his courtiers had urged as he finalized his plans. “Your Majesty, we need you here.” Which was blatant flattery and foolish besides, for he was first and foremost an inventor, and impatient—after all this time!—with the fussy details of governance and the inane formalities of court. The courtiers and ministers needed him more as a symbol than as a living, breathing human, and what could be more symbolic than this?
“The navy hasn’t the proper expertise,” he’d answered. For that was true; almost no one in the Queendom truly understood the mathematics of ertial shielding.
“Then let the navy transport you,” they’d urged, as he fitted himself into his space armor, flexing and testing the joints one by one.
“They haven’t the speed,” he answered, for indeed the fastest interplanetary vessels were the ertial grappleships, and none were faster than Boat Gods.
“It’s bad for the Queendom if you’re hurt or killed,” they’d tried, as he’d powered up the ship’s systems and rolled aside the hangar roof to reveal, in a shower of loose palm fronds, the bright blue sky left behind by the storm.
“I’ve made my backups,” he told them sternly. “If anything happens, restore me and await instructions. That’s a command, good sirs and madams, from your king. Even from Earth, from these very islands, I can reach this mystery vessel three days ahead of the navy’s best picket boats out of Neptune, and five days ahead of Her Majesty.”
“May I come?” asked Hugo, his own pet robot, who’d been emancipated for more than a millennium but still chose to remain at home, learning how to be alive.
“Not this time,” Bruno told him. “I can’t spare the mass.”
“But Sire,” his manservant Adelade said cannily, “who’s to develop the wormhole in your absence?”
And that had almost stopped him. Almost. But if there was one thing he’d learned about the hard problems of physics, it was that they often yielded when the body and mind were otherwise engaged. And he missed this derring-do, and feared that his people—even his own servants!—thought him no longer capable of it. And anyway, blast it, saving the sun was his job. Not Tamra’s.
Almost as an afterthought he’d said to Adelade, “Will you take stewardship of the Earth, please, until Tamra’s or my return?”
“Er, well…”
“There’s a good fellow. Mind the impending holidays.”
He’d closed his hatch then, stoked his reactor, fired up his sensors and hypercomputers. Engaged his gravitic grapples, yes, latching them on to the crescent moon and yanking himself right off the Earth.
And in a rare moment of perspicacity, as the stars came alive around him and he wheeled the ship for a new, more distant grapple target, he had muttered under his breath, “Oh, yes, my friends, this vagabond heart lives on, smothered in census figures. None among you can refuse me now! Surprised though I am to say this, sometimes it’s good to be the king.”
Chapter Two
in which a revolution is halted
There are moments for musing. Not moments of truth, but moments before the moment of truth, when the mind squirts sideways, time stretches, thoughts race. Insights leap across the gray matter like fleeing deer. For Bruno it went thusly:
Given the Nescog, that glittering network of black-hole matter which linked every part of the Queendom to every other, he could step through the print plate of the fax machine behind him and, in a few hours’ transit time which he himself would not perceive, step out through an equivalent plate in the palace foyer back on Tongatapu. Or anywhere else! The bulk of this journey would happen, alas, at Einstein’s lightspeed, although ring collapsiter segments—long, thin tubes of collapsium with high-speed supervacuum inside—would shave a few minutes off it here and there.
Ah, but with wormholes in place of collapsiters, the journey could be instantaneous! Not just to Earth, or to any other corner of the Queendom, but to the stars themselves. To the failed and failing colonies scattered among the nearby stars and dwarfs. Bruno and Tamra had sent too many young men and women out there to their deaths. Their deaths! But it was an error on which they could still, in some small measure, make good. If Bruno could just build a damned wormhole.
The whirling fan of Newhope expanded in his view, and expanded some more. Belatedly, Bruno pulled up a schematic of the ship from Boat Gods’ library, and then sketched an outline of the entry and exit wounds upon its hull. Presumably, the projectile had been stationary, at least in comparison to the starship’s own large velocity. And that meant Newhope had not been facing forward or backward at the time, as she should have been for safety’s sake, but rather broadside to the dust and debris of interstellar space. Oops.
So what had happened? From Boat Gods’ myriad sensors, a story began to emerge. The accident had occurred hundreds of years ago, the ship taking first a freak hit to its forward ertial shield, slightly off-center. The shield was hard to damage, and would have absorbed almost all of the kinetic energy, releasing it over several minutes as a blue-green flare of Cerenkov photons. A survivable event, yes. But compressive interactions had probably sent shockwaves and electrical surges all up and down the hull and superstructure, stunning the wellstone and preventing the navigation safety lasers from receiving power.
This much at least, the starship was designed to handle. But it had gotten unluckier; the collision tipped it slightly, and before the nav systems could recover or the lasers could vaporize it, a second particle—probably larger—had struck, and the resulting plasma had flashed straight through the hull at near-relativistic speed, sending her into a wild, chaotic tumble while her fuel supply squirted away into vacuum. And without its deutrelium the ship’s reactor had run down, and the ship itself had gone to sleep, perchance to wake at some future date.
Well, with any luck, that day was now at hand.
Bruno adjusted his grapples and set about the task of attaching himself to the center of the tumbling ship. The rest should be easy enough; Boat Gods was outfitted with a universal airlock and augmented with the Royal Overrides which guaranteed Bruno access to, and control over, any enlivened device designed or constructed in the Queendom of Sol. Which included QSS Newhope herself, yes. And although the starship had no matching airlock—no hatches of any kind in the region of concern—the mere feather-touch of his grapples stirred piezoelectric voltages in the wellstone there, bringing it to some weak semblance of life.
The ship exchanged handshakes and data packets with the airlock, accepted an automated welcome-home message, and requested an infrared beam from which it could draw additional power. Then, more fully awake, it prostrated itself before the Royal Overrides, and agreed to allow itself to be damaged. And although the tiny hypercomputers inside it would not pass a self-awareness screening, and were at the moment no more collectively intelligent than a frog, the wellstone did express a sort of relief at finding itself, after all this time, among properly enlivened programmable materials rather than the mere metals and ceramics of the Barnard colony. It was good, apparently, to be home.