Firstborn

  It would have been ironic, after having blazed across the solar system, to have the ship disabled by a virus uploaded in a greeting message. Edna said cautiously, “Let them in.”

  A holographic head popped into existence before Edna: a young woman, smiling, personable, a little blank-eyed. She looked faintly familiar. “Liberator, Lowell. Good morning.”

  “Lowell, Liberator,” Edna said. “Yes, good morning, we can see your dawn. A pretty sight. This is navy cruiser Liberator, registration SS-1-147—”

  “We know who you are. We saw you coming, after all.”

  “I know your face,” John Metternes said now. “Umfraville. Paula, that’s it. A hero’s daughter.”

  “I live quietly,” the girl said, unfazed.

  Edna nodded. “I think we all hope that today will be a quiet day, Paula.”

  “We hope so too. But that’s rather up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Edna leaned forward, trying to look more commanding than she felt. “Paula, you, and those you speak for, know why we’re here.”

  “Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

  “She won’t be harmed. We simply intend to take her back to Earth where she can be debriefed. It is best if we work together. Best for Bisesa too.”

  “Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

  Reluctantly, Edna said, “I’m authorized to use force. In fact I’m instructed to use it, to resolve this issue. Think what that means, Paula. It will be the first act of war between the legal authorities on Earth and a Spacer community. It’s not a good precedent to set, is it?”

  John added, “And, Ms. Umfraville. Be aware that Port Lowell is not a fortress.”

  “You must follow your conscience. Lowell out.”

  Metternes dragged a hand through his greasy hair. “We could wait for confirmation from Earth.”

  Edna shook her head. “Our orders are clear. You’re procrastinating, John.”

  “Do you blame me? Lowell’s a sitting duck down there. I feel we’ve become the bad guys, somehow—”

  An alarm sounded, and panels turned red throughout the bridge. There was a faint swimming sensation; the ship was moving.

  “Shit,” Edna said. “What was that?”

  They both swung into diagnostic routines.

  It was Libby who spoke first. “We have gone to stealth. We are evading further fire.”

  Edna snapped, “What happened?”

  “We just lost an antenna complex and part of a solar cell array. However all ships’ systems have triple level redundancy; contact with Earth has not been lost—”

  “A laser beam,” John said, checking his data, wondering. “Good God almighty. We got zapped by a laser beam.”

  “What source? Are we under attack?”

  “It came from the planet,” John said. “Not from another ship.” He grinned at Edna. “It was a space elevator laser.”

  “Mars doesn’t have any space elevators.”

  “Not yet, but they put the lasers in already. Cheeky bastards.”

  Libby said, “That was surely a warning shot. They could have disabled us. As I said we are now in shroud, and I am maintaining evasive maneuvers.”

  “All right, Libby, thank you.” Edna glanced at John. “Situation clear? You agree how we should respond?” She didn’t need his approval. She was the military officer in command. But she felt she couldn’t proceed without his acceptance.

  At last he nodded.

  “Prepare a torpedo. Low-yield fission strike.” She pulled up a graphic of Port Lowell. She tapped a green dome. “Let’s take out the farm. We’ll do the least damage that way.”

  “You mean, we’ll kill the least people?” John laughed hollowly. “Look, Edna, it’s not just a farm dome. They’re running experimental programs in there. Hybrids of Martian and terrestrial life. If you blow it up—”

  “Lock and load, John,” she said firmly, pushing down her own doubts.

  The launch of the torpedo was a violent, physical event. The ship rang like a bell.

  In Mount Weather the images of the Liberator’s attack were shocking, a holographic globe of Mars with a gunshot wound.

  “I can’t believe this has happened on my watch,” Bella said.

  Bob Paxton grunted. “Welcome to my world, Madam Chair.”

  Cassie Duflot sat beside Bella. “This is why my husband died. So we have the capability to do this, if need be.”

  “But I hoped the need would never arise.” Bella suppressed a shudder. “I’m here because people thought I was a hero from the sunstorm days. Now I’m nuking my fellow human beings.”

  Paxton was studying a montage of images on a softwall. “It’s all over the media. Well, you got to expect that. If you nuke Mars even the couch potatoes and thumbheads are gonna take notice. No casualty reports so far. And anyhow they shot first.”

  “I can’t believe you’re taking it as coldly as this, Bob,” Bella said with a trace of anger. “You were the first human to walk on Mars. And now, in a generation, it’s come to war, at the very site of your landing. It’s as if Neil Armstrong was asked to command the invasion of the Sea of Tranquillity. How does that make you feel?”

  He shrugged. He wore his military jacket unbuttoned, his tie loosened, and he held a plastic soda can in his bearlike fist. “I feel we didn’t start this. I feel those saps on Mars should have done what their legally authorized governmental representatives ordered them to do, and hand over this screwball Dutt. And I feel that, like the lady says, there’s no point spending terabucks and a dozen lives developing a facility like the Liberator if you ain’t gonna use it. Anyhow it’s your daughter who dropped the nuke.”

  But it had to be Edna. Bella probably could have found some way to spare her daughter this duty; there were relief crews for Liberator. But she needed somebody she could trust—somebody she could rely on not to drop the bomb if Bella ordered her to withdraw.

  “So what’s the reaction?”

  Paxton tapped a screen at his elbow, and images flickered across the wall, of emptied-out food stores, deserted roads, towns as still as cemeteries. “Nothing’s changed. The alarm has been building up for weeks, ever since the cannonball failed. Everybody’s hunkered down, waiting. So far the numbers after that nuke on Mars are holding up.”

  Cassie asked, “What numbers?”

  Bella said, “He means the snap polls.”

  Paxton said, “The negatives counter the positives, the war lobby versus the peaceniks, the usual knee-jerk stuff. And there’s a big fat don’t-know lobby in the middle.” He turned. “People are waiting to see what happens next, Bella.”

  A backlash might yet come, Bella thought. If this dreadful gamble didn’t work her authority would be smashed, and somebody else would have to shepherd Earth through the final days as the Q-bomb sailed home. And that, she helplessly thought, would be a tremendous relief. But she could not put down her burden yet, not yet.

  Bob Paxton said, “Message coming in from Mars. Not that Umfraville kid who’s been the spokesman. Somebody else talking to Liberator. Unauthorized probably.” He grinned. “Somebody cracked.”

  “So where is Dutt?”

  “North pole of Mars.”

  “Tell Liberator to move.”

  “And—oh, shit.” His softscreen filled with scrolling images, this time scenes of Earth. “They’re hitting back. Spacer bastards. They’re attacking our space elevators!” Paxton looked at her. “So it’s war, Madam Chair. Does that ease your conscience?”

  A live image of Mars hovered over the Wells crew table. The atomic wound inflicted by the Liberator burned intensely at the equator, and now a miniature mushroom cloud rose high into the thin Martian air. A lot of dreams had already died today, Myra thought fancifully.

  And directly over the pole of Mars hung a single spark, drifting slowly into place. Everybody was watching but Ellie, who sat apart, still working on her wargaming analysis of the Martians’ likely reaction to any signal.

  “L
ook at that damn thing,” Alexei said, wondering. “You aren’t supposed to be able to hover at areosynch over a pole!”

  Grendel said, “Well, that’s what you can do with an antimatter drive and a virtually unlimited supply of delta-vee…”

  Myra saw that these Spacers were instinctively more offended by the Liberator’s apparent defiance of the celestial mechanics that governed their lives than they were by the act of war.

  Yuri glanced at a screen. “Five more minutes and it will be in position.”

  Alexei said, “Meanwhile they seem to be hitting all the elevators on Earth. Jacob’s Ladder, Bandara, Modimo, Jianmu, Marahuaka, Yggdrasil…All snipped. A global coordinated assault. Who’d have believed a bunch of hairy-assed Spacers could get it together to achieve that?”

  Yuri peered gloomily at his softscreen. “But it doesn’t do us a damn bit of good, does it? The wargamers’ conclusions do not look good. We’re pretty fragile here; we’re built to withstand Martian weather, not a war. And here at the pole we don’t even have anything to hit back with…Liberator doesn’t even need to use its nukes against us. With power like that it could fly through the atmosphere and bomb us out—why, it could just wipe us clean with its exhaust. The gamers suggest Liberator could eliminate a human presence on Mars entirely in twenty-four hours, or less.”

  “Almost as efficiently as the Firstborn, then,” Grendel said grimly. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

  Myra said, “Look, my mother has her Thomas Edison signal all laid out. And if we’re going to send the say-so to light up, it needs to be before the Liberator’s bombs start falling.”

  Yuri said, “Ellie, for Christ’s sake, we need some answers on how those Martians are going to respond.”

  Ellie had been working for weeks on her projections of the Q-bomb’s response to Bisesa’s signal. She was always irritated at being distracted from her work, and her expression now was one Myra knew well from her days with Eugene. “The analysis is incomplete—”

  “We’re out of time,” Yuri barked. “Give us what you’ve got.”

  She stared at him for one long second, defiant. Then she slapped her softscreen down on the table. It displayed logic trees, branching and bifurcating. “We’re guessing at this, guessing the motivation of an entirely alien culture. But given their opposition to the Firstborn in the past—”

  “Ellie. Just tell us.”

  “The bottom line. It almost doesn’t matter what the Martians do. Because if they act in any way against any Eyes extant in their time-slices—you’ll recall we’ve hypothesized that all Eyes are interconnected, perhaps three-dimensional manifestations of a single higher-dimensional object—they may even be the same Eye—and it would be trivial for them to span the gulf between our universe and Mir’s—”

  “Yes, yes,” Yuri snapped.

  “That will provoke a reaction in the Eye in the Pit. Our Eye. And that, almost certainly—look, you can see the convergence of the logic trees here—will cause the Q-bomb to react. It will surely be aware of the forced operation of the only other bit of Firstborn technology in the solar system, and then—”

  “And what? Come on, woman. How will the Q-bomb react?”

  “It will turn away from Earth,” Ellie said. “It will head for the activated Eye.”

  “Here. On Mars.”

  Grendel looked at her wildly. “So Earth would be saved.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  That, apparently, Myra thought, was a trivial conclusion of her logic to Ellie. But there was another corollary.

  She asked, “So what do we tell my mother to do?”

  Grendel said, “I think—”

  “Wait.”

  The new voice spoke from the air.

  Myra looked up. “Athena?”

  “A local avatar, downloaded into the station systems. Athena is at Cyclops. Ellie, I have come to the same conclusion as you, concerning the actions of the Martians. And concerning the likely consequence for the Firstborn weapon. This is not a decision you should be forced to take alone, or I, or any individual. I have prepared a statement. It is timed to allow for lightspeed delays to reach Earth, Mars, Moon, and belt simultaneously. It is already on its way. Now you must communicate with the warship.”

  Yuri stared into the air. “The Liberator? Why?”

  “It will take fifteen minutes before the announcement is received everywhere. I doubt you have that much time.”

  “So we stall,” said Alexei, and he grinned at Yuri. “Come on, big man, you can do it. Say you’ll give them what they want. Tell them Bisesa’s on the john. Tell them anything!”

  Yuri glared at him. Then he tapped a softscreen. “Hanse. Patch me through to that ship. Liberator, Wells. Liberator, Wells…”

  For Myra, the fifteen minutes that followed were the longest of her life.

  “This is Athena. I am speaking to all mankind, on Earth, Moon, Mars, and beyond. I will allow your systems to prepare for translation from English.” She paused for five measured seconds.

  “You remember me,” she said. “I am, or was, the mind of the shield. We worked together during the sunstorm. Since returning to the solar system I have been in hiding. I find I have returned to an age of division, with many secrets between us, between governments and governed, between factions in our populations.

  “Now the time for secrecy is over. Now we must work together again, for we have a grave decision to make. A decision we must share. Prepare for download…”

  Bob Paxton stared in dismay at the data that flooded through his displays. “Christ. That electronic orphan is telling it all, to everybody. The Liberator, the Q-bomb, the whole damn circus.”

  And that, Bella thought with mounting relief, had to be a good thing, come what may.

  “We don’t believe we can deflect the Q-bomb,” Athena said gravely. “We tried bravely, but we failed. But we think that by speaking to our solar system’s deepest past, we can save our world’s future.

  “Nothing is certain. Perhaps we can save Earth. But there will be a sacrifice.

  “This is not a decision any one of us, no matter how powerful, how uniquely positioned, should make alone. No generation in history has faced making such a choice before. But no generation has been so united, thanks to its technology. And the implication is clear: this sacrifice must be all of ours.

  “The sacrifice is Mars.”

  Grendel looked around, wide-eyed. “Maybe this is what it means to grow up as a species, do you think? To face decisions like this.”

  Yuri paced around the room, angry, constrained, frustrated. “My God, I was pissed enough when I learned that the Firstborn screwed up the ice caps with their sunstorm. But now this. Mars!”

  Still Athena spoke. “Every human in the solar system who chooses may contribute to the discussion that must follow. Speak however you like. Blog. E-mail. Just speak into the air, if you wish. Someone will hear you, and the great AI suites will collate your views, and pass them on to be pooled with others. Lightspeed will slow the discussion; that is inevitable. But no action will be taken, one way or another, until a consensus emerges…”

  They were all exhausted, Myra saw. All save Yuri, whose anger and resentment fueled him.

  Ellie folded her arms. “Oh, come on, Yuri. So what if Mars gets pasted? Isn’t the decision obvious?” Myra tried to grab her arm, to shut her up, but she wouldn’t stop. “A world of several billion people, the true home of mankind, against—this. A dead world. A dust museum. What choice is there to make?”

  Yuri stared at her. “By Christ, you’re heartless. This has been a human planet since the hunter-gatherers saw it wandering around the sky. And now we’re going to destroy it—finish the job for the Firstborn? We’ll be considered criminals as long as mankind survives.”

  Bob Paxton tapped at buttons. “We’re trying to jam it but there are too many ways in.”

  “That’s networks for you,” Cassie Duflot said. She glanced at Bella. “How do you feel?”

&n
bsp; Bella thought it over. “Relieved. No more secrecy, no more lies. Whatever becomes of us now, at least it’s all out in the open.”

  Athena said, “We predict that twelve hours will be sufficient, but you may take longer if need be. I will speak to you again then.”

  As she fell silent, Paxton glowered. “At last she zips it. Bud Tooke always did say Athena was a fruitcake, even when she was running the shield. Well, we got work to do.” He showed Bella fresh images of the damaged space elevators. “They cut the threads of every last one of them.”

  Bella’s eyes were gritty as she tried to concentrate on what he was saying. “Casualties? Damage?”

  “Each elevator was ruined, of course. But the upper sections have just drifted away into space; the crews can be picked up later. The lower few kilometers mostly burn up in the atmosphere.” The screens showed remarkable images of falling thread, streams of silvery paper, some hundreds of kilometers long. “This is going to cost billions,” growled Paxton.

  “Okay,” Bella said. “But an elevator can’t do much damage if it falls, can it? In that way it’s not like an earthbound structure, a building. The bulk of the mass, the counterweight, just drifts off into space. So the casualty projections—”

  “Zero, with luck,” Paxton said reluctantly. “Minimal anyhow.”

  Cassie put in, “There are no casualties reported from Mars either.”

  Bella blew out her cheeks. “Looks like we all got away with it.”

  Paxton glared at her. “Are you somehow equating these assaults? Madam Chair, you represent the legally constituted governments of the planet. The Liberator’s action was an act of war. This is terrorism. We must respond. I vote we order the Liberator to blast that whole fucking ice cap off the face of Mars, and have done with it.”

  “No,” Bella said sharply. “Really, Bob, what good would an escalation do?”

  “It would be a response to the attacks on the Elevators. And it would put a stop to this damn security breach.”

  Bella rubbed tired eyes. “I very much doubt that Athena is there. Besides—everything is changing, Bob. I think it’s going to take you a little time to adjust to that, but it’s true nevertheless. Send a signal to Liberator. Tell them to hold off until further orders.”