Wil McCarthy: To Crush the Moon

“You’re welcome,” Bruno says dryly. His grief burned out a long, long time ago, and if he starts bogging himself down now in pointless guilt, then where will it lead? Whom will it benefit? “If you had seen the Queendom in its heyday you’d understand. It seemed worth any price. Truthfully, it still does.”

Yes, and there is a damning indictment, for he and Tamra had built, in the words of Rodenbeck, “a house of collapsium and straw.” And they knew it at the time. How could they not? It took a lifetime of determined self-deception to ignore the generation problem, the population problem, the limits of mass and energy and physical law. What had they been thinking?

But then, in all fairness to himself, what could he, Bruno de Towaji, have done differently? He didn’t create the Queendom; he was conscripted by it. And he hadn’t known—couldn’t have imagined—how thoroughly his early discoveries would rewrite the human story. Once collapsium was out of Pandora’s hands, into the ham fists of Prometheus, Bruno had been as hard-pressed as anyone just to keep up. Perhaps if he’d guessed the future better, or raised a gentler child, or succeeded in his later research…

“Well,” he says, suddenly glummer, “if my apology helps, then be assured you have it. We’ve left some terrible messes behind.”

“I can’t understand your prattle, old man,” says Zuq.

“Maybe you should shut up,” Natan suggests.

And in spite of everything, Bruno finds his neck growing warm, for no one has spoken to him like that since his earliest days at Tamra’s court, and rarely then. Even the megalomaniac Marlon Sykes had been polite—often deferential—toward his fellow declarant-philander. Well, usually.

He waves a hand at the yellow uniforms, and in his best professorial tone he advises, “Overconfidence is the chief failing of elites, boy. The robots will have no trouble finding you in these canary suits.”

“We don’t hide from our enemies,” says Zuq. “Our enemies hide from us. That’s not overconfidence, it’s psychology. And my rank is ‘squad leader,’ not ‘boy.’ This is Deceant Natan.”

“Well,” says Bruno, “‘old man’ isn’t my rank, either. I won’t invoke ancient titles that mean nothing here, but I was fighting robots when the Queendom itself was young.”

And so he was. They’d made him king for it! But the Dolceti’s point is taken nonetheless: he isn’t a king here, nor a soldier, nor even a guest. If anything, he’s a sort of commandeered munition, hauled from the mothballs of history and pressed back into service. He can’t really imagine what knowledge Radmer thinks he possesses, to turn the tide of this war. His Royal Override has already failed to halt the enemy’s advances, though in fairness to Radmer it did give them pause. They do carry within them some vague memory of the old allegiances.

Bruno raises the binoculars again, and sees to his mild surprise that Lyman’s Olders have already engaged the enemy, with Radmer and the canary-colored Dolceti not far behind. The robots fight well—they fight perfectly , with the fluidity of dancers and the cool precision of clockwork. Their swords flash in elaborate sweeping arcs, as if spelling out glyphs in the afternoon air. But oddly enough, the Dolceti are faster. And the Olders are certainly more cunning, and anyway the robots are—for once!—badly outnumbered.

One of them manages to raise an antenna—the robotic equivalent of a scream for help—but it’s quickly cut down by the swords of human beings. The mast is a telescoping wand of impervium, theoretically unbreakable, but it isn’t all one piece, and everyone seems to know where to hack, where the vulnerable joints are. Meanwhile, the box on the robot’s head explodes in a hail of metal bullets. The other robots are down just as quickly, and the only casualty Bruno can see is a single Dolceti guard, holding her throat while a spray of blood jets between her fingers, turning her yellow tunic bright red. She looks calm, but she’ll be dead within the minute.

And Bruno takes this as a bad omen indeed, for if twenty robots can strike a blow against the elite guard of this world’s strongest nation—with Queendom technology assisting, no less!—then what will happen when the robots return in their hundreds of thousands? In their millions? Radmer has been right all along: without a miracle, the city of Timoch doesn’t stand a chance.

Damn Conrad Mursk anyway, he can’t help thinking. This isn’t the first time the boy has swept into Bruno’s life, turning everything on its head. Even in the days of the Queendom, Mursk had always had an uncanny talent for trouble.

The ship had seen hard use over long years; her sides were streaked with burns and gouges, with dead spots where the hull’s wellstone plating had given out, leaving man-sized squares of inert silicon. She was one of the old starships, no doubt about that: a round needle thirty meters across and seven hundred and thirty long, capped at either end by a faintly glowing meshwork of blue-green dots: the ertial shields—essentially a foam of tiny black holes, emitting weakly in the Cerenkov bands. The ship was otherwise dark, her running lights extinguished. There was no sign of her photosail; the compartments that should hold it were open to vacuum, their doors torn away. The streaking patterns suggested this had happened long ago.

But the worst of the damage looked slightly less ancient: a round, meterwide hole punched through the portside hull of the ship, just in front of the engines, and out again through the capside in a shotgun-patterned oval large enough to admit an elephant. Interestingly, there were some intact pipes and ducts visible through the hole, running right through the path of destruction. These were shiny in the middle, and looked duller toward the hole’s edges, as if they’d been grafted in place after the accident. Structural damage to the hull itself was minimal; the hole edges looked almost cauterized, suggesting the projectile had been very small and moving very fast—a sand grain flying through at 1% of lightspeed. The actual damage had been done by heat, and by plasmified hull material entrained in the particle’s wake.

The fact that the ship was tumbling end-over-end at 2.06 revolutions per second also supported this theory. Getting that much mass moving that quickly required a substantial momentum transfer.

“Visual contact,” said Bruno de Towaji into the microphones of his space suit helmet. “Running lights and station-keeping thrusters are inactive, but there are signs of… well, perhaps not life, but activity at any rate. Something on that ship survived the accident, at least briefly. The severed plumbing between the reactors and deutrelium tanks has been repaired.”

Here in the hundred and thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol, Bruno himself was aboard the grappleship Boat Gods , which had its own ertial shield and its own deutrelium reactor, plus gravitic grapples whose use would be illegal for 99.9999% of humanity. With these, Bruno could grab on to anything—moons, planets, the sun itself—to pull Boat Gods around the solar system. The grappleship was tiny as such things went, but its interior was nicely appointed, and filled of course with breathable atmosphere. Bruno’s space suit—actually a set of full battle armor, with high-domed helmet and thick wellcloth shielding all around—was strictly a precaution.

The starship whirled in his view like a fan blade, like a dizzying wheel of enigma and peril and his own damned confusion. Irritated by the blurring motion, he switched to a snapshot view that updated every five seconds. And in one of these frozen views, in bold red letters affixed to the ship’s port side in some ancient chemical paint he read: QSS NEWHOPE. Which made sense on the one hand, for this ship had come out of the constellation of Ophiuchus, just off the Snake Holder’s right shoulder. And Newhope was the name of the ship that the Queendom of Sol had launched, long ago, to Barnard’s Star, which lurked invisible to the naked eye in precisely that location. The first of the great colony ships, yes. But on the other hand it made no sense at all, because the Barnard colony had been silent for hundreds of years—presumed extinct—and the QSS Newhope had been reported destroyed hundreds of years before that, in some sort of freak collision during an ill-advised sun-grazing maneuver.