Ken MacLeod - Learning the World

The ambiguity of the remark seemed to escape him.

“You can abort the transmitters, yes,” said Constantine. “You can’t burn out the new neural structures. And you can’t stop the nano infection spreading. We made sure of that.”

“How?”

“The assemblers don’t have self-destruct mechanisms. So the only way you can limit the damage is to intervene before the whole situation gets out of hand — a servile insurrection, a massacre of the slaves, or more likely, both.”

“I know what this is about!” Synchronic said. “It has nothing to do with concern for the brutes! It’s all about the interests of the crew. You want to bounce us into making contact, because then you can go ahead with your projects.”

“Believe that if you like, my lady,” said Constantine. He grinned. “Look on the bright side. When you make contact, you’ll at least be able to talk to them.”

Synchronic said nothing. She was scanning the Contract in ship memory for an arcane legal term that had just become relevant. Ah, there it was. The word was “arrest.”

The all-hands call brayed through Horrocks’s brain and woke him with a jolt that set him bouncing off the elastic mesh of the free-fall hammock. Genome woke in the same way, with the same result. She grabbed him on their second collision.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know.” The conditioned reflexes of emergency training overrode everything. “Suit up! Suit up!”

He thumbnailed the hammock open and they both dived to the opposite corners where their space suits were stashed. Into the loose garment feetfirst, close it, hood over head and faceplate sealed. It took five seconds and felt like longer. They had both been drilled in this since childhood; for their final crew qualification, in explosive decompression and the dark. But as the suit hardened around him, going from the look of loose cloth to the feel of metal and glass, Horrocks could see nothing wrong. The room and the lights were normal, no alarm sounded, and the suit monitors were nominal.

In the corner of his eye the crew circuit light flashed. He chinned the pickup.

“All available crew to the reserve tanks! If you think you’re not available, check the following list of exemptions…”

He didn’t need to look at the list scrolling down the corner of his eye to know he wasn’t on it.

“Everybody else — to the tanks!”

Virtual tags guided them as they kicked, drifted, strap-hanged and just plain got carried along to the nearest mass airlock. The lock could cycle a hundred through at a time. They had to wait three cycles, and still the press behind them piled up. Still nobody knew what was going on. Wild theories flashed around: a collision, a viral outbreak, an accident. All that was known for certain, because queries were flying back and forth the length of the ship, was that a similar scramble was going on in the rearward cone. Horrocks and Genome stayed together in the crush inside the airlock, and together in the surge out. For three months they had lived and worked together; the training-habitat business had boomed as more and more of the ship generation had chosen the confined but real opportunity the cones afforded. The fees earned had more than made up for the collapse of Horrocks’s small fortune in terrestrials shares.

Now, for the first time, Horrocks saw the cone’s interior hollow space with his own eyes. Its vast volume overwhelmed any sense of confinement. Above the swarming thousands of crew members emerging from the access locks, scores of rocks hundreds of metres across hung in what he could only see, looking up, as the sky. Bubble shack habitats beaded most of them. Structures and construction equipment bristled from every side: booms, manipulator rigs, mineheads, power plants, greenhouses. In the spaces between the rocks the habitats’ builders, the ship kids, on scooters or rocket packs or lines or tumbling free, milled about like gnats. Threaded through it all were numerous long and thick cables in a complex three-dimensional mesh like the web of some gigantic drunken spider, strung from wall and brace.

The impression of chaos didn’t last more than the first few seconds. The crew circuit lit up with a message of a kind that Horrocks had only seen in drills and sims: an Order of the Day. The top-level objective cleared up any confusion about what was going on, and left Horrocks for a moment slack-jawed: separation of the cones from the habitat in the shortest time consistent with component integrity. Target completion time: ten hours.

Successive levels of the Order spelled out what that meant. The top priority was to shift fusion plants to the axis. The next was to have these on line and standing by to replace the drive in powering the sunline after separation. Third was to have the cones’ auxiliary and attitude jets fuelled and ready to fire. The fourth was to have the cones’ anti-meteor defences on full alert. Fifth and finally, the habitats and other constructions in the tanks were to be evacuated. On completion of the tasks, or on command at any time, everyone was to return to the normal living and working quarters of the crew.

Beneath these general levels and breaking down the tasks into a rational division of labour, an organization chart proliferated like an inverted tree. Each person had a job to do, highlighted in the version of the chart that reached them. For Horrocks and Genome it was scooter and tug work, ferrying people and equipment.

As soon as he tabbed his acceptance, a message flared across Horrocks’s faceplate: Your performance of this task and others in fulfillment of the above Order of the Day are covered by the below cited emergency clauses in the Contract covering a breakdown in relations between Crew and other sections of the Complement. If you do not wish to take part for any reason, you are required to stand down at once. No sanctions will apply and arrangements for evacuation or resettlement will be made on request and implemented as soon as possible.

A scrolling screen of legal boilerplate followed. Horrocks didn’t even skim it. What mattered was the digital signature at the foot, authenticating the entire Order and signing off on it: Constantine the Oldest Man.

Horrocks looked across at Genome and chinned their private band. “You in?”

“I’m in if you are.”

“If Constantine asks it, that’s good enough for me,” said Horrocks.

“OK,” said Genome. “Let’s do it for the Man.”

Synchronic expected trouble as soon as the call to arrest Constantine went out. She expected grumbling from the crew, protests from citizens, and angry exchanges in the Council, already in an uproar over what Constantine’s brazen admission had revealed. She was right. Lost in the virtual spaces in which she followed these developments, she didn’t hear the distant thunder until a small girl ran in from the garden and shook her shoulder.

“Mummy mummy there’s a fire in the sky!”

Synchronic scooped the breathless, anxious child up in her arms and rushed outside. Looking up, all was normal: the sunline shone, white clouds drifted, the far side of the habitat lay in a dim shade pricked by faint clusters of light like a washed-out image of a night sky.

The infant squirmed around and pointed toward the central ring of the forward end of the cylinder. Synchronic almost dropped her.

Around the rim of the spinning axial plate, kilometres wide, that joined the cylinder to the cone, lightning flared and flickered. Thunder rolled down like the sound of a waterfall. In the electric inconstant light from far above the remaining shards of the slag heap, all the way around the bottom of the cylinder’s end-plate, flashed black and white like broken glass. On the more distant rearward plate a similar ring of fire encircled the far end of the sunline.