Wil McCarthy - To Crush the Moon

“Target identity confirmed,” he said. “She’s QSS Newhope , apparently out of Barnard. Carrying what? Carrying whom? This makes no sense.”

And while Bruno had always loved a good mystery, this one was a bit too personal, for his own son had been a passenger onboard this ship. Had been the King of Barnard, just as Bruno was, now and always, the King of Sol. And though it be foolish—there was no reason to suspect his exiled progeny had escaped the colony’s fall—the sight of those words on the hull of the ship were enough to bestir in Bruno a pathetic sense of hope. For he loved his pirate, poet son as dearly as any father must.

What must it be like in there? Could anyone have survived? Those repairs had probably been carried out robotically, and in an ordinary spaceship that centrifugal tumbling would produce, what, almost six thousand gee at the fore and aft ends? Enough to crush a human into broth, to rend any possible hull or superstructural material. Even impervium—that strongest of wellstone substances, that perfect arrangement of quantum dots and confined electrons—should have given way long ago.

But this wasn’t an ordinary spaceship; it was an ertially shielded starship . Even sweeping sideways through the ether, those ertial shields would have a deadening effect on the space around them. Absorbing and destroying the vacuum’s delicate resonances, yes, clearing a bubble of supervacuum and greatly reduced inertia. And the so-called centrifugal force was inertia, nothing more.

Were there habitable, ertial spaces within the ship? Were there safe (or quasi-safe) regions where he could dock, for search and rescue purposes? Mathematically speaking the situation was appallingly complex, but here before him was a cheat, a peek at the answer, for QSS Newhope had not flown apart in a haze of carbon and silicon and black-hole hypercollapsite. Having been a professor and a laureate and a declarant long before he’d been a king, Bruno knew something of these matters, and though he declined to slog through the formal calculations, it seemed to him that attaching at the center and poking around would be safe enough.

And if not—if he destroyed himself— Boat Gods would simply withdraw, and print a fresh copy of him from its onboard fax machine. Or perhaps it would be flung away in ruin, and a fresh Bruno would have to be printed on Earth. Either way, it promised to be an interesting ride.

“Attempting a docking maneuver,” he informed Traffic Control. For all the good it would do them; by the time they received the signal, he’d already be dead, or several hours into his rescue. Boat Gods and Newhope had encountered one another in the vast, cold wastes of the Kuiper Belt, where the sun was little more than a bright star, and the waste-ice dredging of a few dozen unpiloted neutronium barges was the only activity in some sixty thousand cubic light-hours of space. Civilization was a long way off.

Anyway, survivors or no, if he could stop this ship or change its course there was profit to be made, for the hypercollapsites used in ertial shielding were among the most valuable commodities in existence. And God knew the cash would be useful! Bruno would fax himself back home and return with the Queendom’s finest salvage teams. And then the derelict, stripped of any special spacetime properties, could be vaporized by any superweapon his navy (or rather, his wife’s navy) preferred.

Nor was this some trifling bureaucratic matter, for QSS Newhope was, alas, on a direct collision course with the sun. Her navigators, setting out from Barnard over six light-years distant, had done their job too well; aiming at Sol and driving their error sources to zero. So, in thirty-two days’ time the derelict Newhope —moving at 2,500 kps, nearly 1% of the speed of light—would come screaming into the Inner System, passing the orbits of Mars and Earth and Venus and Mercury and then plunging (if grazingly) into the photosphere of their mother star.

The results would not be pleasant; the sun would escape destruction—probably—and the 90% of Queendom citizens nestled beneath bedrock or planetary atmospheres should be safe enough. But the flares would be colossal, and the Vacuum Cities’ billion-odd residents would have to be evacuated as a precaution. And there was no bloody place to put them . Ergo, the naval response.

But first an investigation, hmm?

How the lords and ladies of Tamra’s court had struggled against that suggestion! Or rather, against his doing it himself, without assistance.

“Dear,” Queen Tamra had said to him, intruding upon his study in the way she almost never did, except in times of real trouble. “There’s a tumbling starship on a collision course with the sun.”

“Hmm?” he’d said, looking up from the equations and sketches on his desk. His mind was bursting with wormhole physics; he barely heard her. He barely noticed the storm outside, lashing rain and tattered palm fronds against his windows while the waves hammered the beach below. He was close—he was close —to understanding the dynamics of the throat collapse that had destroyed every one of his test holes. And this was as important politically as it was scientifically, for a functioning wormhole would solve nearly all of the Queendom’s problems. Nearly all!

But Tamra knew this, and would not have broken his concentration without good reason. She could have printed an alternate copy of him from the palace archive, and given it the news, and let the two of him reconverge later on in the day. For an ordinary emergency, she’d’ve done exactly that.

Ergo this was no ordinary emergency, so with some effort he processed her words. “A starship, you say? One of ours?”

“Presumably,” she’d answered testily, for no bug-eyed aliens had ever been detected out there in the void, whereas Sol had sent ships out to a dozen and one colonies. Still, the king could be forgiven his surprise; none of those ships had ever come back . “It’s traveling out of Ophiuchus.”

“Ah, the Barnard Express! Any sign of our boy?”

Unhappily: “No. The ship appears to be derelict; perhaps her crew is in storage. But Bruno, she’s ertial, and on a collision course with the sun. Thirty-nine days from now.”

“Ah. I see.” Bruno nodded at that. As a young man not yet to the century mark, he’d made his greatest fame by rescuing the sun from the fall of the first Ring Collapsiter, which would surely have destroyed it. He rose from his chair. “Well, I suppose I have work to do.”

At this, Tamra simply rolled her eyes. “Your swashbuckling days are over, darling. We have a meeting with the navy in fifteen minutes.”

And this was true; he’d been king for eleven hundred years, whereas he’d been a swashbuckling hero for barely more than a decade, and only then by accident. Declarant-Philander Bruno de Towaji! It seemed an improbable history now, even to him. Before that he’d been a teacher, a drunken lover, a layabout courtier, and a wilderness hermit. Ah, but like everyone in the Queendom, he had the immorbid body of a twenty-five-year-old; his soul might grow old, but his physical self could not. Was he less capable of heroism now? Surely not! So he had dutifully attended his meetings, dispensing judgments and calculations and recommendations while his wife faxed herself to the navy’s flagship, the QSS Malu’i —Tongan for “Protector”—and ordered her seat of government temporarily transferred there.

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.