Greg Egan - The Clockwork Rocket

“And then what?” she asked.

“Nothing else,” Nino said. “If I didn’t get caught, I was meant to blend in again: just go back to my station and do my job.”

“So after the sabotage was over, you’d be ready to pull your weight?” Yalda asked sarcastically. “Ready to be part of the team again?”

“I never wanted to harm anyone!” Nino protested vehemently. “The Peerless was meant to drift in the void for a while—that’s all. Once the Councilor got what he wanted, why would I bear any ill will toward you?”

“Whatever your background really is,” Yalda replied, “you’ve seen more than enough since we recruited you to know how dangerous this was. Don’t pretend that it never crossed your mind that you could have killed us all.”

Nino tensed angrily at the accusation, but his silence stretched on too long to end in an indignant denial. “I asked the Councilor about that,” he admitted finally. “He said if the mountain crashed into the ground, it would be a mercy.”

“ A mercy? ”

Nino looked up and met Yalda’s gaze. “He said the whole idea of a city in the void was insane. One by one, things would go wrong—things that couldn’t be fixed without help from outside. Within a generation you’d all be starving. Eating the soil. Begging for death.”

Yalda sent a message up to the nearest construction workshop, summoning people with the skills to create a secure prison cell, but she expected it would take a couple of days for them to arrive, lugging supplies. As a stopgap she shifted the food out of the pantry that served the navigators’ post and improvised a latch for the door, using tools and spare parts from the adjacent feed chamber. The navigators would be sleeping in shifts, so there would always be at least two of them awake—and by moving the bed right next to the pantry door, it provided a barricade and allowed even the sleeper to act as a third guard.

Babila had offered to escort Nino up through the mountain and organize his incarceration in a distant storeroom—for the sake of getting him as far away as possible from anything vulnerable to further sabotage—but Yalda preferred to have him nearby, in case she thought of something important that she’d failed to ask him about Acilio’s scheme. According to the recruitment records Nino was unschooled, but as an experienced farmer he’d been destined for the same job on the Peerless . Yalda had no reason to trust him to tell the truth about anything, but his account of his own actions struck her as plausible, even if he was probably embellishing the story or omitting details in order to portray himself in the best possible light.

As her sense of shock and anger faded, Yalda found herself feeling a kind of battered exhilaration at the way things had actually unfolded. The Peerless had been tripped, three times, but it had kept its balance—and if the test had been unwelcome, the outcome was still worth celebrating. They had proved that the machinery on which their lives depended was every bit as resilient as they’d hoped—and they had humiliated an enemy in the bargain.

Perhaps she and Eusebio had been foolish not to anticipate how far Acilio would go. But what more could they have done to protect themselves? Hired people to travel the world and check every crew member’s story? That would have done wonders for the recruitment rate—and told them nothing of value, since every runaway lied, with good reason.

If Nino’s actions really were the end of it—the old world’s last feeble swat at the new—that was cause for celebration, too. As Daria had said, separation was painful, but it was time to break away from the old influences.

We can’t spare his life, Frido told Yalda, raising the words across his chest. Perhaps his silence was out of concern for the prisoner’s feelings—but then, Babila was sleeping, and they all grew tired at times of shouting over the sound of the engines.

Why not?Yalda wasn’t surprised by his advice, but she’d been dreading its eventual arrival from some quarter or another.

Once we have all the information we can get from him, Frido replied, the most important thing is deterring anyone else in Acilio’s pay. If we can’t find the other agents, the next best thing is to make them too afraid to act.

Yalda did not find this persuasive. Once we’re no longer visible from the ground, Acilio has no stake in doing anything more to us. Whatever setbacks we suffer, they can’t embarrass Eusebio if they go unseen. And even if Acilio did want to harass us further, how could any agent be rewarded for carrying out his wishes when the payoff couldn’t possibly depend on it?She could understand Acilio’s deal with Nino: even if Nino had no way of seeing it honored, his brother could have gone to Acilio and said “Everyone knows the rocket went dark, so where’s the money you promised us?” But given that Acilio had made no effort to annihilate the Peerless at launch, she couldn’t see him offering a second saboteur money for his family conditional on the Peerless failing to return at all.

You may be right about that, Frido conceded, but even if Nino wasn’t trying to kill us, he certainly betrayed us. He has no place among us anymore. People won’t accept anything less than his death.

“So are you planning on staging an uprising if I don’t agree?” Yalda hadn’t trusted her intended sarcasm to come across in symbols alone, but after shouting the words over the engine noise she wasn’t sure that the shift in modes had been particularly helpful.

“All I’m saying is that it will weaken your authority,” Frido shouted back.

So I should kill a man for the sake of my authority?

Frido considered the question seriously. I suppose that depends on how many people you think will die, if you lose control here.

Yalda said, “I don’t flatter myself that I’m the one pillar of sanity that can keep the Peerless on course.”

“I’m not suggesting that either,” Frido assured her. But whenever power changes hands, there’s a risk of violence—unless you just resign at the first hint of dissatisfaction.

Yalda didn’t know how to reply to that. Did Frido covet her position? It had been less than two days since the launch, less than four since Eusebio had given her this role. She found the burden so unwelcome that the thought of anyone aspiring to take it from her had never crossed her mind before. But if it was so unwelcome, perhaps she should relinquish it? If Eusebio had appointed Frido ruler of the Peerless she would never have objected; why not correct his decision before anyone grew too attached to the status quo?

And then instead of Nino dying to keep her in power, he could die to give her an easy life.

The observation chamber was a shallow cave cut into the side of the mountain, sealed against the void by a tilted dome of clearstone panes. Standing at the edge of the cave, Yalda gazed down the slope and confirmed that the plains from which the mountain had once risen truly were gone. A haze of scattered light from the engines spilt past the rim of the mountain’s base, like the harbinger of some spectacular dawn, yet it was above that glow—though still unprecedentedly downhill —that the blazing sun was now fixed. Yalda stretched out her arm, and with her rear eyes saw the shadow it cast on the roof of the cave.

The polygons of clearstone around her had become pitted by debris during the launch; the flaws caught the sunlight, creating distracting specks of brightness that competed for her gaze with the true sky beyond. She would have struggled to locate her target, had she not known in advance where to search for it: about halfway between the sun and the “horizon” implicitly defined by the chamber’s floor.