Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

Nor had there been any reason they should have been, for there’d been absolutely no point in sending out a cry for help seven hundred years before Adrienne Warshawski made hyper-space safe for colony ship-sized transports.

Still, the colony ought to have been able to build the capacity to at least tell the rest of the human race it was there. It hadn’t, and when a survey ship with a hyper generator and proper Warshawski sails was finally sent in 1306 to see what had become of the expedition, it found no evidence Calvin’s Hope had ever even reached KCR-126-04. And so she had vanished into history, There were all too many interstellar “Flying Dutchmen,” like the Agnes Celeste, but Calvin’s Hope had the distinction of being the earliest of that long, long list of legendary shipwrecks and mysteries.

For Bradley Thoreau and his crew, it had been like setting out for an exciting day in the galaxy’s biggest amusement park only to arrive in a bleak, desolate tomb. But the Cabinet, immune to the poignancy of the long-ago tragedy, had immediately started laying ambitious plans to utilize the warp point. After all, it lay only two hundred light-years from Old Earth and only a hundred and fifty from Beowulf. Surely that had to be useful!

Unfortunately, it wasn’t.

The nearest inhabited star system, Bryant, was little more than fifty light years from Calvin. It also had absolutely nothing to offer the People’s Republic in trade. The same was pretty much true of Conestoga and Yasotaro—the latter a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Office of Frontier Security—the next two closest star systems. And there weren’t any other candidates for human settlement in the vicinity. While KCR-126-04 might be only two hundred light-years from the Sol System, J-156-18(L) was most inconveniently placed from a lot of perspectives. Astronomers had given the area a close look long ago, but with universally negative results. Many of the stars and its vicinity were in complex multi-star systems, where planetary orbits were unlikely to be stable long enough for complex life to evolve on their surfaces even if they happened to be in a liquid water zone. There were several singletons or extremely distant components of multiple-star systems, but most of them were cool red dwarfs or orange dwarfs edging towards the bottom of their classification. Most of their planetary satellites were either tide-locked to them or frozen over. None of them had showed the spectrographs the presence of oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres, at any rate.

And the problem wasn’t just at the KCR-126-04 end of the bridge, either. J-156-18(L) was seventy-two light-years from the Haven System, which meant ninety percent of the People’s Republic was closer to Trevor’s Star than to the PRH’s end of the new bridge. And the trip to Sol was a hundred and fifty light years shorter from Trevor’s Star via the Manticoran Wormhole Junction than it would have been from J-156-18(L) by way of Calvin.

Of course, the People’s Republic and the Star Kingdom of Manticore weren’t on what one might call the best of terms. Roger III was not one of Haven’s great admirers. In fact, as crown prince, he’d been the driving force behind the Star Kingdom’s naval buildup for over a decade even before taking the throne twenty-five T-years ago. Which, Parnell admitted, indicated quite a bit of foresight on his part. The People’s Republic’s sights had been set on the eventual… acquisition of the Manticore Binary System—and its massive wormhole Junction—ever since it had first begun planning its expansion under the DuQuesne Plan over a T-century ago.

At the moment, however, everyone on both sides was careful to smile politely in public and the Manticore Junction remained open to the PRH’s trade and even Haven-flagged merchantmen. That made the Trevor’s Star-Manticore route far more economically and logistically valuable than the Calvin System could ever be. And although very few people knew it, within the next year—two years, at the outside—Trevor’s Star would be an obedient member of the People’s Republic, which would simplify matters ever further.

All of which meant KCR-126-04 was something of a white elephant. No doubt the hyper-bridge had a great deal of potential value, somewhere down the road. At the present, it offered very little.

Now if only Ingeborg Rousseau would accept that minor point…

“She genuinely thinks we should be using Calvin as a staging base against the Manties?” he asked, and Laforge shrugged.

“Like I say, I think at least part of this is just that she can’t accept that our shiny new toy isn’t somehow of immense value. She thinks we should be building up a new base in Calvin, rather than plowing funds into Barnett. As nearly as I can understand her logic—I’m hampered, you know, because my brain actually works —she thinks it would let us set up a ‘strategic pincer’ when the centicred finally drops. It would let us attack Manticore from an ‘unexpected direction,’ you know.”

“‘ Unexpected direction ’?” Parnell stared at her in disbelief.

“That’s what she said.” Laforge raised both hands shoulder high, palms uppermost. “I did explain to her that approach vectors aren’t really a factor in assaults through hyper-space. Unfortunately, she seems to think a lookout in the crow’s nest will see us coming before we cross the alpha wall.”

Parnell shook his head, then drew a deep breath.

“Do you think we could find someone else to take over your job when you retire?”

“No such luck,” his aunt told him. “Trust me, this is one job we want to keep in the family. And that means you’re going to have to deal with people like Rousseau for a long time. Get used to it now.”

Parnell nodded glumly. The good news was that there weren’t very many Ingeborg Rousseaus. One was too many, of course, but most of Hereditary President Sidney Harris’ senior advisers had at least a vague notion of how hyper-space and simple physics worked. Rousseau, unhappily, did not. What she did have was an amazing amount of clout through her political alliances and family connections.

“So what the hell do we do?” he asked finally.

“What do you think we should do?” Laforge countered. “Think of that as a Socratic question.”

“Wonderful.” Parnell sat back in his chair, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

“Look busy,” he said finally. Laforge raised an eyebrow, and he shrugged. “The last thing we need is to start diverting funding and resources from Barnett to pursue one of Rousseau’s boondoggles. So it seems to me what we need to do is nod gravely, take her suggestion seriously, promise to explore all the possibilities, and then send a half dozen or so survey ships through to do that exploring. Let me pick the right person to run the operation, and I’ll guarantee reports that keep us looking until even Rousseau gets tired and finds something else to amuse her.”

RHNS Tourbillon

Sanctuary Orbit

Refuge System

March 1916 Post Diaspora

“I can’t believe even Pierre and Saint-Just would have done something like this,” President Eloise Pritchart told Admiral Thomas Theisman. She thought about what she’d just said for a moment, then snorted harshly. “I suppose what I really mean is that I don’t want to believe it.”