120: DELIVERY

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Tinera snickers. “Sixty five lightyears and you can’t outrun those books, huh, Aspen?” Her snickers turn to giggles and then hysterical, cackling sobs as she gasps for breath, grabbing the back of Tal’s chair for support. “Fucking hell!”

“Tiny?” Denish asks.

She takes a few deep breaths, fighting against her own body, before saying weakly, “I just figured it out. It all makes sense. Everything makes perfect fucking sense.” She tries to rub the tears from her eyes, with little success. “That supervisor down there. Hard to be sure, but did they sound kind of… Antarctic… to you?”

“You’re saying they’re not reinforcements, but competitors?” I ask. “There was a space race and Antarctica did beat us because of our engine trouble, you think?”

“This won’t cause problems with our landing, will it?” Captain Klees asks.

“Oh, no, no, they’ll be happy for that, I’m sure,” Tinera says, waving a hand dismissively. “There’s no race. There was never a race. The outcome was decided the moment the Courageous launched. And probably all the other javelins too, although unless everyone had engine trouble we’re presumably the last to find out. Did you hear the way Cattail phrased that, about expecting us earlier, and giving us up for dead when we didn’t show up? They planned to be here first, that was always the plan. The ship that brought them here could very well have started construction after the javelins launched, which is why we never heard about any race. They didn’t have to launch first, just accelerate faster.”

“You cannot safely accelerate a ship this size any faster than – ”

“A ship this size, you’re probably right. After all, we’re full of life samples and raw materials and sleeping colonists and all that, it’s a complicated machine, it’s got to have a billion backups and a massive cargo and all that. We accelerate at, what, somewhere around a tenth of g, probably? The lunar carriers and asteroid ships do 1 to 1.5g when they’re not dragging cargo. They could launch years after us and still beat us, even if we hadn’t run into trouble, depending on how much they’re willing to weigh down with fuel.”

“You cannot set up a colony with something anything near the mass of a lunar carrier.”

“Not a permanently independent one, no. But what if you had a colony ship coming in a decade or two behind you?” She grins. “How did Korea claim Mars? How did the Conglomerate claim Luna?”

Ah.

The laws state that whichever government sets up a stable colony first on an astral body has jurisdiction over that astral body. We’re far too far away from Earth for it to matter, but technically, if that’s an Antarctic settlement down there, then Antarctica owns Hylara.

“There was no race, see? Antarctica decided to secretly colonise everything reachable in this corner of the galaxy, and leak information to spies to make everyone else pay to supply said colonies via the Javelin program. They didn’t need to build colony ships, they just needed to outrace ours. What would the javelins do about it, once we all got to our destinations, tired and worn down and craving a planet under our feet? Start a stupid war over it? Set up a second colony somewhere else and put both at unnecessary risk instead of working together? Of course not.

“This is why the Javelin Program wasn’t all that picky over colonists, blindly accepting anyone who met the medical requirements and bulking up the population with prisoners when they couldn’t fill the javelins. This is why throwing away presumably valuable colonist lives in that stupid AI project wasn’t considered a big deal, and why it was worth it to run the AI experiment in the first place even though there’s no real way for anyone on Earth to take advantage of it. We’re here for emergency labour, emergency population if necessary, but mostly, we’re here as an excuse to launch the ships, because the people building them thought they were founding a colony. If we die before we can be colonists, that’s not a big deal; what matters is that the embryos in storage and all our other supplies make it down. We’re not colonists, we’re couriers.”

Denish frowns. “They need these supplies, yes? So why sabotage – ?”

“Oh, yes; why sabotage the ship? Why the engines and the carbon monoxide and the radio signal to the ship when we got close? Why send some probe ahead of us to Hylara to decide if we live or die? I don’t think they did. I think that what sent that signal is the Antarctic lander, or their base, or… whatever, something of theirs. You want to know the condition for our survival, ‘Nish? I’d go double or nothing on my prison sentence that the condition of our survival was the presence of that base. We get to live and land if Antarctica owns Hylara. If that ship experienced some complication, if they don’t have Hylara… then no one gets it.”

I shake my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. Empires are based on trade networks. If you can’t have a trade route, there’s no point in trying to establish an empire. A multinational push to spread out to other stars like the Javelin Program, that has PR, that has the dreams of the populace, that has political value invested in that dream. But a secret colonisation project, at this scale? Makes no sense whatsoever. This isn’t someone cheekily grabbing mineral-rich asteroids before their neighbour can get them. At this distance, exchange is impossible – the colony cannot receive orders from Antarctica, has no reason to listen if they could, and Antarctica has no reason to send any. They can’t be resupplied, they can’t send supplies back. So… what? The colony flies the flag of Antarctica on their main dome? Is that worth all this to Antarctica? I just don’t see how it’s possible.”

“You said that about a space race also,” Denish points out. “And yet, another colony is there.”

“Yeah,” I sigh. “They sure are.”

“I’m sure they’ll be delighted to explain the whole thing to us in exacting detail,” Captain Klees mutters around his wired jaw, “but frankly, I don’t care. Aspen is right about one thing – at this kind of distance, the difference between an independent settlement and a colony of Antarctica is semantic. But what Tinera suggests, and what we’ve seen on everything planned for this ship so far, is a flagrant disregard for the lives of our colonists. That’s what I’m worried about. When we immigrate into their colony… what’s that going to look like? What can we expect for the people in our care? Priority one is figuring that out before it’s time to land.”

“Priority one is probably returning Supervisor Cattail’s message,” Tal points out. “They would’ve trained their telescopes and stuff on us when they got the message. They probably know about how far away we are by now, and how long to wait for a reply.”

“Shit. Yes. Alright, they’re going to have a lot of questions about why we’re late and what we still have aboard; we can save a lot of back and forth long-distance if we don’t wait for the questions. Everyone get Aspen the obvious data on supplies, ship condition, all that. But keep in mind that we don’t know these people or their precise interest in us; we don’t need to tell them absolutely everything up front. Especially the more… complicated and uncomfortable parts.”

“So we shouldn’t lead with the part about mutinying against our previous captain who is now conveniently dead?”

“Yeah, Tal. We probably shouldn’t lead with that part.”

The response message takes less than ten minutes to put together. Most of what we want to say, someone on the ship is actively monitoring, or has prepared to report to Captain Kae Jin, so it’s not like we have to dig around the computer systems very much. Most of our time is spent deciding what we want to tell the colony, and how to phrase it.

“Supervisor Cattail,” I begin. (Cattail didn’t give us the name or rank of the superior they went to fetch, so addressing Cattail is my only real option.) “I hope your colony is doing well. The Courageous experienced engine trouble quite early in her journey which double the travel time on our clock; we’re not sure how long we’ve been travelling by your clock. I regret to report that Captain Reimann and his entire crew have been lost. Several members of Captain Kae Jinn’s crew are alive, including Kae Jin herself, but as yet still in chronostasis. All colonists in chronostasis have suffered a severe drop in revival viability, so we have no hard guarantees on how many astronauts will survive revival. We are currently operating with a reduced crew of emergency revivals from the colonist population.

“We have lost two chronostasis rings and one laboratory ring. Our ship’s artificial intelligence has also critically failed beyond recovery and systems are being handled manually and with independent scripts. Apart from the loss of the chronostatic colonists and consumables used on our extended journey, our cargo is largely intact. We are approximately two months from orbit and will be coming in entirely on manual, lacking AI assistance; our engineers have judged systems sufficient to do this without any serious cause for concern. Initial drop pods are in working order and ready to drop colonists and cargo as needed; pods for further drops are still undergoing inspection.

“Needless to say, we are greatly interested in your colony. What is your population and living situation like? Are you currently sustainable? What supplies would you say you need most critically, and what planetary location would make the best drop zone? Please let us know as much as you can.

“Courageous out.”

I step back from the microphone. Tal sends the message.

“Nice work,” Denish says, clapping me on the back and forcing me to step forward again. “You sounded like we know what we are doing up here and were not taken completely by surprise by Hylara already having a colony.”

“Except you forgot to answer Cattail’s question about whether you’re the Aspen Greaves,” Tinera pouts. I scowl at her.

“Great job, everyone,” Captain Klees says. “We’ll see what they have to say about that in a few hours. Tal, the alarm’s still set up to alert us to incoming messages, right?”

“Yep.”

“Great. I’m taking a painkiller and a nap. I’ll see you all when it goes off.” He heads for the airlock.

I reach up and touch the fragile new skin on my face. After all this, a painkiller and a nap doesn’t sound like a half bad idea.

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