Joan Vinge - The Outcasts of Heaven Belt

But Rusty struggled in Shadow Jack’s arms, meowing with sudden impatience as they caught sight of her. Shadow Jack let the cat drop, still half afraid of its strangeness. Rusty trotted ahead to butt against Bird Alyn’s bare ankles; Bird Alyn leaned over and picked the cat up, and a pink tongue sandpapered her chin joyfully. Rusty settled, purring, onto her shoulder. She thought of the embroidered hanging in the room that was hers now: a cross-stitched portrait of Rusty, and the words, A HOME WITHOUT A CAT MAY BE A PERFECT HOME, PERHAPS—BUT HOW CAN IT PROVE ITS TITLE? Bird Alyn let herself imagine an entire world filled with living creatures, and music; not a fruitless dream, but reality. The kind of world Lansing must have been, in the time she had never known; the kind of world it could never be again.

“I thought Rusty was looking for you,” Shadow Jack murmured, self-conscious. “I’ll bet if there were ten animals on this ship, every one would want to be with you.”

She met his eyes hesitantly, forgetting everything in the miracle of his smile.

Raul Nakamore, Hand of Harmony, settled back into the padded acceleration couch, weightless, held down by straps. He wedged the light wire headset into a slot on the panel, through with the radio, through arguing with his half-brother Djem. So he was wasting the Grand Harmony’s resources… risking his life… risking the crews of three ships to pursue a phantom. So he was leaving Snows-of-Salvation unprotected from a Demarchy attack to chase a ship that could run rings around the ships of the Grand Harmony, even this high delta-vee strike force. A ship from Outside… a crippled starship, that had left behind a tiny spreading cloud of debris and human remains. A ship that had eluded their grasp once—but that might not be able to do it again. It was worth the gamble. But poor Djem; he never could see beyond the end of his own nose. Raul half-smiled.

Somewhere five thousand kilometers below him, silhouetted against the silvered detritus of the Discan rings, the lump of frozen gases that was Snows-of-Salvation held the Grand Harmony’s chief distillery. It had been constructed with Demarchy aid, and it was crucial to the Harmony’s survival, and the Demarchy’s. His brother was in charge of Snows-of-Salvation, would do anything to maintain its safety. But if the Demarchy decided to attack here in the Rings, even this “secret weapon” couldn’t stop them from doing fatal damage. And in spite of what too many in the Navy believed, the Demarchy would never try it, anyway. Djem would never be able to see that, but Raul would stake his career on it— had staked his career on it. The Demarchy would never attack them… unless it had that starship. But if the Grand Harmony took it first—

“Sir.” Sandoval, the balding ship’s captain, interrupted his pattern of thought diffidently. “Everything’s secure for ignition. At your command—”

Raul nodded, unbuttoning his heavy jacket in the unaccustomed warmth of the control room. Been underground too long… He sighed. “Proceed.”

Sandoval settled back into his own seat, spoke orders into his headset that would coordinate with the crews of two other ships. There was no video communication; video was used only to impress the enemy. Raul studied the complexity of the control board, banks of indicators spreading up the walls in the cramped space around them. Most of it was prewar artifact computing equipment, installed to give these ships superior maneuverability in combat. They were one segment of the Grand Harmony’s high delta-vee defense force, specially designed, specially equipped with a fuel-to-mass ratio of one thousand to one. Although Raul Nakamore ranked in the highest echelons of the Harmony navy, he had always maintained that their existence was pointless waste of desperately needed resources; and for that reason he had never been on board one of these ships before. But now the starship had changed his mind; as it could change the very future.

He sank heavily into the padded seat as the snip’s liquid-fuel boosters ignited and thrust grew to a steady two gravities, more than slightly painful on his Belter’s frame. He checked the chronometer on the panel. Thrust would continue for thirteen hundred seconds, boosting them to sixteen kilometers per second… and in that time, expend seven thousand tons of fuel: the outer stages of the three ships themselves, and of seven drones. And still it would take them over two megaseconds to reach Lansing—and their quarry might not even be there. Raul settled down to wait, trying not to imagine the waste, but rather to remember what had made him so certain it was worth it…

He had been sitting in his office, studying endless shipping schedules, when the confidential report had reached him: a ramscoop starship, origin unknown, had crossed the path of a naval patrol… and had destroyed one of their ships before escaping. He had studied the report for a long time, with the warmth of the methane stove at his back and the chill silence of Heaven’s future ahead of him. And then he had noticed that a meeting was announced, his presence was required.

He left his office and made his way along the endless dank, slightly smoky corridors from the Merchant Marine wing. The government complex made up the greater part of the tunnel-and-vacuole system that honeycombed the subsurface of the asteroid Harmony, that had been the asteroid Perth in the time before the Civil War, before the founding of the Grand Harmony. The chill began to eat its way through his heavy brown uniform jacket; he pushed one hand into his pocket, using the other to push himself along the wall. He was a short man, barely 1.9 meters, and stocky, for a Belter. There was a quality of inevitability about him, and there had been a time when he had endured the cold better than most. But he was a career navy man, and he had spent most of his adult life on ships in space, where adequate heat was the least of their problems. But for the past sixty megaseconds since his promotion he had been an administrator, and learned that the only special privilege granted to an administrator was the privilege of managing a double workload.

He passed through large open chambers filled with government workers, into more hallways identical to the ones he had just left, into more chambers—as always experiencing the feeling that he was actually traveling in circles. Unconsciously he chose a route that took him through the computing center, guided by past habit while he considered the future. The past and the present surprised him as he became aware of his surroundings: of the crowded rows of young faces intent on calculation, or gaping up at his passage.

He looked toward the far corner of the chamber, almost expecting to find his own face still bent over a slate of scribbled figures. He had worked in this room, twelve-hundred-odd megaseconds ago, starting his career while still a boy as a computer fourth class. A computer in the oldest sense, because the sophisticated machinery that had borne the Discans’ burden of endless computations had been lost during the Civil War. After the war, the Grand Harmony had learned the hard way that it would never survive without precise data about the constantly changing interrelationships of the major planetoids. And so they had fallen back on human computation, using the inefficient and plentiful to replace the efficient but nonexistent, as they had had to do so many times.

A bright child could learn to do the simpler calculations, and so bright children were used, freeing stronger backs for heavier labor. Raul remembered sitting squeezed onto a bench with another boy and a girl, huddled together for warmth. His nose had dripped and his lips were chapped, and he had stared enviously at the back of his half-brother Djem, who was one hundred and fifty megasecs older and a computer second class. The higher your rank, the closer you sat to the stove in the center of the room. .