Firstborn

  Edna’s frozen image came alive again.

  Edna’s voice, having spent twenty-four minutes crawling across the plane of the solar system, sounded strongly in Bella’s Mount Weather office. And Thales smoothly produced pictures to match the words, images captured by a variety of ships and monitors.

  There was the Q-bomb, a ghostly droplet of smeared starlight, hovering over Bella’s desk. It was passing through the asteroid belt right now—the navy’s A-line—and she was shown a distant sprinkling of rocks, magnified and brightened for her benefit. There was something awesome about the image; six years almost to the day since the object had first been spotted swimming past Saturn’s moons, here it was among the asteroids, home to a branch of mankind. The Q-bomb was here, in human space. And in just six more months—at Christmas time in this year of 2070—the Q-bomb was destined to make its rendezvous with Earth itself.

  But the bomb’s passage through the belt gave one more chance for an assault.

  Edna was talking about the attempts so far. Thales showed images of nuclear weapons blossoming against the bomb’s impassive surface, and ships, manned and robotic, deploying energy weapons, particle beams, and lasers, even a stream of rocks thrown from a major asteroid fitted with a mass driver, an electromagnetic catapult.

  “Pea shooters against an elephant,” Edna commented. “Except it isn’t quite. Every time we hit that thing it loses a little mass-energy, a loss in proportion to what we throw at it. Just a flea-bite each time, but it’s non-zero. Lyla Neal has been doing some modeling of this; Professor Carel will brief you. In fact we hope one outcome of the Big Whack, assuming we don’t knock the thing off its rails altogether, is to confirm Lyla’s modeling, with a data point orders of magnitude away from what we’ve been able to deploy so far. Anyhow we’ll find out soon.

  “As for the cannonball, the tractor is doing its job so far. All systems are nominal, and the cannonball’s deflection is matching the predictions…” In her quiet, professional voice, Edna summarized the status of the weapon.

  When she was done, she smiled. Despite her peaked cap, she looked heartbreakingly young.

  “I’m doing fine in myself. After more than a year aboard this tub I need some fresh air, or fresher anyhow. And under a dictionary definition of ‘stir crazy’ you could write down ‘John Metternes.’ But at least we haven’t killed each other yet. And if you look at this cruise as an extended shakedown of the Liberator she’s performed fine. I think we have a good new technology here, Mum. Not that that’s much consolation if we fail to deflect Q, I guess; we’ll all be in deep yogurt then.

  “The other crews are doing fine too. I guess this is an operational test for the navy itself. A few veterans of the old wet navy say they feel out of place on board ships where even the rawest nugget has passed out of the USNPG.” That was the U.S. Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey. “Right now, while we’re waiting for the drama to begin, there’s a sort of open-loop church service going on. Those who choose to are saying their prayers to Our Lady of Loreto, the patron saint of aviators.

  “As for the Spacers, they are cooperating, mostly, with the cordon and other measures. But we’re ready to take whatever action you see fit for us to take, Mum.

  “Sixty minutes to showtime. I’ll speak to you after the Whack, Mum. Love you. Liberator out.”

  Bella had time for only a short reply, for it would reach Edna with only minutes left before the strike. “I love you too,” she said. “And I know you’ll do your duty, as you always do.” She was horribly aware that these might be the last words she ever spoke to Edna, and that in the next hour she might lose her only daughter, as poor, angry Cassie Duflot, waiting outside, had already lost her husband. But she could think of nothing else to add. “Bella out. Thales, close this down.”

  The holographic display popped out of existence, leaving a bare desk, with only a chronometer counting down to the time of the Big Whack assault, and the still more important moment when news of it would reach the Earth.

  Bella composed herself. “Show Cassie in.”

  Somehow Bella had expected Cassie Duflot to show up in black, as when Bella had last met her when she had handed over her husband’s Tooke medal: still in widow’s weeds, after all this time. But Cassie wore a suit of a bright lilac color, attractive and practical. And nor, Bella reminded herself, was Cassie going to be sunk in grief as she had been during that visit. It would be easy to underestimate her.

  “It’s good of you to see me,” Cassie said formally, shaking Bella’s hand.

  “I’m not sure if I had much choice,” Bella said. “You’ve been making quite a splash since we last met.”

  Cassie smiled, a cold expression almost like a politician’s. “I didn’t mean to make any kind of ‘splash,’ or to cause anybody any trouble. All I am is the widow of a navy engineer, who started asking questions about how and why her husband had died.”

  “And you didn’t get good enough answers, right? Coffee?”

  Bella went to the percolator herself. She used the interval to size up her opponent, for that was how she had to think of Cassie Duflot.

  Cassie was a young woman, and a young mother, and a widow; that gave her an immediately sympathetic angle to snag the public’s attention. But Cassie also worked in the public relations department of Thule, Inc., one of the world’s great eco-conservation agencies, specializing in post-sunstorm reconstruction in the Canadian Arctic. Not only that, her mother-in-law, Phillippa, had moved in senior circles in London before the sunstorm, and had no doubt kept up a web of contacts since. Cassie knew how to use the media.

  Cassie Duflot looked strong. Not neurotic, or resentful, or bitter. She wasn’t after any kind of revenge for her husband’s death or for the disruption of her life, Bella saw immediately. She was after something deeper, and more satisfying. The truth, perhaps. And that made her more formidable still.

  Bella gave Cassie her coffee and sat down. “Questions with no answers,” she prompted.

  “Yes. Look, Chair Fingal—”

  “Call me Bella.”

  Cassie said she had known a little of her husband’s activities in his last years. He had been a space engineer; Cassie knew he was working on a secret program, and roughly where he was stationed.

  “And that’s all,” she said. “While James was alive that was all I wanted to know. I accepted the need for security. We’re at war, and during wartime you keep your mouth shut. But after he died, and after the funeral and the ceremonials—you were kind enough to visit us—”

  Bella nodded. “You started to ask your questions.”

  “I didn’t want much,” Cassie said. She was twisting the wedding ring on her finger, self-conscious now. “I didn’t want to endanger anybody, least of all James’s friends. I just wanted to know something of how he died, so that one day the children, when they ask about him—you know.”

  “I’m a mother myself. In fact, a grandmother. Yes, I do know.”

  It seemed the navy had badly mishandled queries that had initially been valid and quite innocent. “They stonewalled me. One by one, the navy’s liaison officers and the counselors stopped returning my calls. Even James’s friends drew away.” This blank shutting-out had, quite predictably, incensed Cassie. She had consulted her mother, and had begun her own digging.

  And she had started drafting queries for Thales.

  “I think because Thales exists, whispering in the ear of anybody on the planet who asks him a question, people believe that our society is free and open. In fact Thales is just as much an instrument of government control as any other outlet. Isn’t that true?”

  Bella said, “Go on.”

  “But I found out there are ways even to get information out of an AI’s nonanswers as well as its answers.” She had become something of a self-taught expert on the analysis of an AI traumatized by being ordered to lie. She produced a softscreen from her bag and spread it over the desk. It showed a schematic of a network laid out in gold thread, with s
ections cordoned off by severe red lines. “You can’t just dig a memory out of an AI without leaving a hole. Everything is interconnected—”

  Bella cut her off. “That’s enough. Look, Cassie. Others have asked the same sort of questions before. It’s just that you, being who you are, have become more prominent than most.”

  “And where are those others? Locked away somewhere?”

  In fact some were, in a detention center in the Sea of Moscow, on the far side of the Moon. It was Bella’s own darkest secret. She said, “Not all of them.”

  Cassie took back her softscreen and leaned forward, her face intent. “I’m not intimidated by you,” she said softly.

  “I’m sure you’re not. But, Cassie—sit back. The office has various features designed to respond to any threat made against me. They’re not always very clever at decoding body language.”

  Cassie complied, but she kept her eyes fixed on Bella. “Space-based weapons systems,” she said. “That’s what my husband was working on, wasn’t it?”

  And she spoke of hints from the sky, traces, fragmentary clues that had been assembled by conspiracy theorists and sky-watchers of varying degrees of sanity and paranoia. They had seen the straight-line exhaust trail of a ship sliding across the sky at impossible speeds. The Liberator, of course. And they had seen another vessel, slow, ponderous, massive, moving in the asteroid belt, leaving behind the same kind of trail. That was clearly the tractor, preparing for the Big Whack. These ships had all been shrouded, but mankind’s invisibility shields were not yet perfect.

  Bella asked, “So what do you think all this means?”

  “That something is coming,” Cassie said. “Another sunstorm, perhaps. And the governments are preparing to flee with their families, in a new generation of superfast ships. That’s not a consensus view, but a common suspicion, I’d say.”

  Bella was shocked. “Do people really think so little of their governments that they imagine we’re capable of that?”

  “They don’t know. That’s the trouble, Bella. We live in the aftermath of the sunstorm. Maybe it’s rational to be paranoid.” Cassie folded away her softscreen. “Bella, I have followed this path not for my husband’s sake, or my own, but for my children. I think you are hiding something—something monstrous, that might affect their future. And they have a right to know what that is. You have no right to keep it from them.”

  Time for Bella to make her judgment about what to do about this woman. Well, Cassie was not a criminal. She was in fact the sort of person Bella had been appointed to protect.

  “Look, Cassie,” Bella said. “You’ve picked up some of the pieces of the jigsaw. But you’re assembling them into the wrong picture. I don’t want any harm to come to you, but on the other hand, I don’t want you to do any harm either. And by spreading this sort of theory around, harm is what you may inflict. So I’m going to take you into my confidence—the confidence of the Council. And when you know what I know, you can use your own judgment on how best to use the information. Is that a deal?”

  Cassie thought it over. “Yes, Bella, that’s fair.” And she looked at Bella, apprehensive, excited. Scared.

  Bella glanced at the clock on the wall. Thirty minutes before she would receive news of what had become of the Big Whack experiment. That desperate drama must be playing itself at this very moment, out among the asteroids, twenty-eight light-minutes away.

  She put that aside. “Let’s start with the Liberator,” she said. “Your husband’s legacy. Graphics, please, Thales.”

  They spoke of the Liberator. And of the Q-bomb it had been shadowing for months.

  And then Bella showed Cassie Bob Paxton’s last option.

  “It’s just another asteroid, drifting through the belt,” Bella said. “It has a number in our catalogs, and whoever landed that mining survey probe on it”—it was a metallic spark on the asteroid’s coal-dust surface—“probably gave it a name. We just call it the cannonball. And here is the ship whose exhaust your conspiracy-theorists saw.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t call them that,” Cassie murmured. She leaned forward to see. “It looks like another asteroid,” she said. “A rock with a silver net around it.”

  That was pretty much what the tractor was: a minor asteroid, much smaller than the flying-mountain cannonball. The rock had had a net of tough nanotube rope cast around it, and an antimatter-drive engine was fixed to its surface. “We used one of the early prototype engines from the Trojan shipyards. Not human-rated but it’s pretty reliable.”

  Cassie began to see it. “You’re using this to steer the bigger asteroid, the cannonball.”

  “Yes—with gravity. It turns out to be surprisingly hard to deflect an asteroid…”

  Turning aside the path of an asteroid had been studied for a century or more, since it had become understood that some asteroids crossed the path of the Earth, and, at statistically predictable intervals, collided with the planet.

  A dangerous rock was generally too big to destroy. An obvious idea was to knock it aside, perhaps with nuclear weapons. Or you could attach a drive to it and just push it. Or you could attach a solar sail to it, or even paint it silver or wrap it in foil, so the pressure of sunlight pushed it aside. Such methods would deliver only a small acceleration, but if you could catch the rock early enough you might do just enough to keep the rock from hitting its undesired target.

  As the asteroid belt was gradually colonized, all these methods had been tried; all failed, to varying degrees. The trouble was that many larger asteroids weren’t solid bodies at all, but swarms of smaller rocks, only loosely bound by gravity—and they were generally rotating too. Try to push them, or blow them up, and they would just fragment into a cloud of smaller impactors that would be almost as lethal and all but impossible to deal with.

  So the idea of the gravitational tractor was developed. Position another rock near your big problem asteroid. Push the second rock aside, gently. And its gravity field would tug at its larger sibling.

  “You see the idea,” Bella said. “You have to keep pushing your rock just too feebly to be able to escape the asteroid’s gravity field, so your tractor remains bound to the target. And the target will be drawn away no matter how broken-up it is. The only tricky part is orienting your tractor’s exhaust plume so it doesn’t impact the target’s surface.”

  Cassie nodded, a little impatiently. “I get the idea. You’re deflecting the orbit of this rock, this cannonball—”

  “So that it hits the Q-bomb. The bomb and the cannonball are on radically different trajectories; the impact will be fast—high-energy.”

  “When will this happen?”

  “In fact,” Thales said gently, “it did happen, nearly half an hour ago. Two minutes until the report comes in, Bella.”

  The graphics of tractor and cannonball vanished, to be replaced by a steady image of the Q-bomb, that eerie sphere visible only by reflected starlight, floating in a cloud of velvet above Bella’s desk. And beside it was a matchstick spacecraft.

  Cassie understood. It took her a few seconds to compose herself. Then, wide-eyed, she said, “It’s happening now. This impact. And your daughter is out there, in her shrouded battleship, observing. You brought me in at a time like this?”

  Bella found her voice was tight. “Well, I need to keep busy. And besides—I think I needed to see your reaction.”

  “Thirty seconds, Bella.”

  “Thank you, Thales. You see, Cassie—”

  “No. Don’t say any more.” Impulsively Cassie leaned across the table and grabbed Bella’s hand. Bella hung onto it hard.

  In the graphic, bomb and escort hung silently in space, like ornaments.

  Something came flying into the desktop image from the left-hand side. Just a blur, a gray-white streak, too fast to make out any details. The impact brought a flash that filled the virtual tank with light.

  Then the projection fritzed and disappeared.

  Bella’s desk delivered scrolling status re
ports and talking heads, all reporting aspects of the impact. And there were calls from across Earth and the Spacer colonies, demanding to know what was going on in the belt; the explosion had been bright enough to be seen with the naked eye in the night skies of Earth, as well as across much of the rest of the system.

  By pointing, Bella picked out two heads: Edna, and then Bob Paxton.

  “…Just to repeat, Mum, I’m fine, the ship’s fine, we stood off sufficiently to evade the debris field. Quite a sight, all that white-hot rock flying off on dead straight lines! We got good data. It looks as if Lyla’s projections on the likely loss of mass-energy by the Q-bomb have been borne out. But—”

  Bella flicked to Bob Paxton; his face ballooned before her, ruddy, angry. “Madam Chair, we haven’t touched the damn thing. Oh, we bled off a bit of mass-energy, even the Q couldn’t eat a fucking asteroid without burping, but not enough to make a bit of difference when that thing gets to Earth. And get here it will. It’s not been deflected at all, not a hairsbreadth. It defies everything we know about inertia and momentum.

  “And—okay, here it comes. We got the numbers now to do some extrapolating about what happens to the Earth if the Q-bomb hits, on the basis of how the rocks we have been throwing seemed to have drained the bomb. Umm. The bomb is not infinite. But it’s big. The bomb is big enough to destroy Mars, say. It won’t shatter Earth. But it will deliver about as large an impact as the planet could sustain without breaking up. It will leave us with a crater the size of Earth’s own radius.” He read, “‘This will be the most devastating event since the mantle-stripping impact that led to the formation of the Moon…’” He ran down, and just stared at the numbers off camera. “I guess that’s that, Madam Chair. We did our best.”

  Bella had Thales hush his voice. “Well, there you are, Cassie. Now you know everything. You’ve seen everything.”

  Cassie thought it over. “I’m glad your daughter is okay.”