96: The Bids

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I knew it was going to be an interesting apprentice meeting when I walked in to find all four captains present.

“Ooh,” Aevor said, coming in behind me. “Do you have the bids?”

“We have the bids,” Captain Green confirmed, dropping a large stack of paper files on the table.

There were four of us and five bids that were popular enough to consider, so we each picked one and traded it for another when we were finished with it. Some of them were more exciting than others. There was a standard bid, which was just a basic, reliable colony building strategy that had proven successful in similar asteroid belts. It didn’t have anything new or surprising in it, except for a hastily tacked-on proposal to investigate the weird inner asteroids. Apparently, it was normal for a bunch of ships to put in bids like this, and they usually ended up allying and collecting them together into one bid to pool their support, since the bids were so similar. The bid usually made it into the final consideration, but almost never won, unless there were major problems with all the other bids. Practically speaking, a standard bid usually was the best option – why not just build a colony in the ways that we already knew worked? – but people weren’t practical. After spending generations moving to a new star, most people didn’t want to just repeat what our ancestors had already done. In the case of an asteroid belt colony, this meant building a habitat from one of the simpler, more stable, more easily expandable designs (we’d tried a lot of space station designs over our long history) on the edge of the belt, and harvesting resources from the asteroids as needed to expand and develop.

There was another bid that proposed covering the asteroids in mirrors and solar panels to make a massive computer-combined-solar-array. The near-endless energy and speedy communication across the whole belt would mean that the whole thing could be colonised as one big society and put their efforts into spreading onto the planets in the system. Personally, I didn’t see the point in trying to grow too big too fast – if spreading out like that made sense, then the colonists would start to do it on their own after their numbers got too big for the initial colony. Trying to build something massive from the outset was risky. Populating a whole asteroid belt would need a population many, many times bigger than the entire fleet even if the population density was really low; there’s no way that we’d stay long enough to do that. They’d be on their own before even a fraction of the design was finished, and that was risky.

There was a bid to mostly avoid the asteroid belt, only setting up mining operations there to provide metals for colonising an ice planet further out. It looked like it would work. I mean, I assumed it would work; it wouldn’t have gotten this far if it didn’t. All of the proposals that we were going to look at were going to be good proposals. I myself didn’t know much about colonising ice planets; I’d learned about asteroid belts.

There was a bid focused on one of the larger asteroids, with the plan to hollow it out and live inside. Materials dug out could be used to build on the surface. We’d done that sometimes in the past if there was something inside the asteroid that was worth the trouble, but it was a very labour-intensive way to build a home. The bid had a lot of reports about how useful the materials thought to be inside the asteroid were, which was probably why the bid was popular enough to reach us. It was also the only bid that made no mention at all of the strange inner asteroids; they would be too far away to ever be a problem.

And there was the Hexacorallia bid. The proposal focused mostly on the plants, on using biology to mine and grow homes for us. Hexacorallia was talked about, of course, but whoever had written the report hadn’t bothered to include anything about their politics or much about the ship’s structure – why would they? – so it made it seem like the mining and planting work would be done by peripheral vessels for a larger space station that would be a docked ship, the Hexacorallia, which would stay behind. Which… I supposed was true, technically. We’d done that before; left ships behind to act as colonies, and just modified then to suit their new jobs before leaving. But I didn’t think that any of them had been like Hexacorallia.

“I like the standard bid,” Dimun said.

Mana rolled her eyes. “Of course you’d like the standard bid.”

“It’s safe! Straightforward!”

“It’s nothing new, and it’ll teach us nothing. We owe it to future generations to do something that we’ll learn from. I’m a fan of the solar network plan.”

“It’s too big,” Dimun said. “We’d never get more than a fraction of it done. Do you have any idea how big an asteroid belt is?”

“We only need to get a fraction of it done. We just need to be here to help them set up enough initial systems to be self-sufficient, then we move on. It’ll be a long time before the fleet’s far enough for communications to become a problem; we can be kept updated in transit. And I bet that however they develop will tell us some interesting things about advancing our own in-fleet communication protocols in transit.”

“In transit we won’t have solar power! The whole thing promises to be wildly unstable, anyway. Why take risks that we don’t need to take?”

“What’s the point of building a colony if we’re not going to experiment and learn?”

“I like the asteroid hollowing,” Aevor cut in, his expression deadpan. “It’s been done before, which Dimun will like, but there’ll be explosions for Mana to find interesting. Everyone loves explosions.”

It wasn’t a very good joke, or even a joke at all really, but the attempt bled the tension out of the room.

“None of the plans are risky,” I pointed out, “or they wouldn’t have made it this far. But in terms of learning and safety, the best bet is the mining vines.”

“The plants are the riskiest one!” Dimun protested. “I’m all for backing up the Arborea Celestia wherever we can, but that tech just isn’t ready for forming such a critical part of a new colony. At least the belt-wide network is based on reliable technology that we’ve been using for centuries. We have no idea how well the plants will even work long-term. They need more testing in transit – ”

“They can’t do their jobs in transit,” I said. “It has to be in an asteroid belt. Everything else is just more lab experiments, and we know they’re reliable enough in the lab.”

I half-expected Mana to agree with me, if she was so interested in using the colony to advance colonisation science. But I wasn’t all that surprised when she said, “You went to Hexacorallia, didn’t you? Your judgement is clouded. It’s great that you want to do something nice for your friends, but this colony is important.”

Oh. Wow. Okay. I could pick up ‘project: try to be friends’ again tomorrow. For the moment, I fixed her with a cold stare.

“I have been to Hexacorallia,” I said, “and that’s why I can tell you that Hexacorallia’s bid is the only option. If we choose anyone else, especially that ridiculous belt-wide array bid but honestly anyone else, this colony build will become more complicated than you, relying entirely in a handful of pages to make your decision, can imagine.”

Nobody seemed all that worried by this statements. Even the captains looked unimpressed.

“Have you ever sent any diplomats to Hexacorallia?” I asked them.

“It’s a tiny, very young ship in the middle of nowhere,” Captain Violet said. “It has nothing to do with us, usually.”

I took that as a ‘no’. “That bid report doesn’t tell you the whole picture. Ignore the plants. The plants don’t matter.”

“Um,” Huspi said, “the plants are pretty central to the proposal.”

“Of course they are,” I said. “they want to win the bid. Building it around the plants gets the Arborea and the Stalwart and a bunch of other minor ships on board and looks all flashy and interesting, but it’s no more relevant than all the tacked-on ‘also we’ll investigate those weird asteroid’ projects are. The fleet cares about the plants, but Hexacorallia doesn’t. I spoke about this bid, myself, to people on Hexacorallia and on the Stalwart, and confirmed it directly.”

“So you are friends with the bidders,” Mana said.

“I’ve met some of them. We haven’t spoken in years. The plants aren’t a threat, and they’re also not critical to the colony; whether they succeed or fail will affect how the colony ends up looking, but it will succeed either way. In fact, I suspect that a lot of Hexacorallia are probably hoping that they fail, because the plant thing is a sort of awkward fit with their preferred society. Hexacorallia’s goal isn’t to develop these living hulls. Their goal is simply to live in an asteroid belt.”

“We’ll send diplomats to confirm that,” Yamin said. “But I don’t see how that complicates not selecting them. If anything, being reluctant about the central thrust of your own bid proposal is a bad sign.”

“It’d be simpler to push for a different colony,” Dimun agreed.

“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t. Because Hexacorallia’s goal, for generations, has been to live in this asteroid belt. So if you pick somebody else… how will you stop them from doing that?”

“What do you mean?” Dimun asked. “If the vote’s against them, then they can help build the colony that the fleet decides on and make a better bid at the next colony. If their people want to live in an asteroid belt so much, then they can leave their ship and stay in the colony we do build.”

“And how, physically, will we make them do that?” I asked.

“The same way we do with any ship that endangers a colony or tries to interfere with its construction decisions,” they said, getting annoyed. “If diplomatic and trade sanctions don’t work, outright war is a last resort once we’re at a star. But no ship would be stupid enough to take on the whole fleet for something like that; it’d be so much easier to move into the new colony than to be destroyed. The captains – ”

“Why would the population listen to the captains?”

“Well, whoever’s in charge! Whatever command structure they have! At worst, their treegrave – ”

“Nobody on Hexacorallia is going to listen to the treegrave if they disagree with it. They only built one for the fleet status; they don’t care about it. They’re not planning on having one for the colony.”

This, for some reason, stunned all four of the captains. They stopped watching with the detached amusement of people watching kids fight over something silly, and started paying close attention.

“They’re going to kill their treegrave?” Mana gasped. Oh, that must be why the captains were shocked. I needed to explain.

“No, no! They’re not planning on killing anyone. But they’re going to stop adding brains to it once the fleet leaves and let it die off in its own time. The people currently in it knew this plan before joining and agreed to it. But the thing about Hexacorallia is that once we hit orbit, as soon as it’s in a situation where it can sustain itself, we have no leverage. Because Hexacorallia are highly individualist. They have a treegrave because it’s necessary; they have a government because they need to cooperate with each other. But if the fleet says “Okay, you can’t build your colony here,” and their leaders say “okay, you can’t build your colony here,” then not everyone will listen. Some people will, but not everyone. They’ll run off and build their own homes in the belt however they like.

“And they can do it. Because the main thing about Hexacorallia is that it’s modular. It looks like one ship, but it isn’t; it’s hundreds of little peripheral vessels all clinging to each other to make one ship. And they can change position and break apart however they like. Hexacorallia has a central structure and shared facilities, because it’s safest and most efficient to have those, but it doesn’t need them. It can turn from a ship into a fleet very quickly, and it can behave like a fleet, splitting into new, smaller communities as necessary without any single power structure that controls the whole thing except for law and charter. That’s their whole design, and that’s why they want to be in the belt, because they can’t easily be who they are on long transits between stars.

“Dimun mentioned war as a last resort. That wouldn’t work. Any ship in this fleet could be subdued by pulling guns on it – except for Hexacorallia at the belt. Like I said, it’s not one ship; it’s a whole bunch of little ones, mostly spheres six to sixty metres in diameter with tiny individual populations, ready to stock up and break apart at short notice. If Hexacorallia loses the bid, most of them will accept it, but some won’t; they’\ll take their little ships and build a network of like-minded people and make sure that they have what they need to survive together, and take off into the asteroid belt. Who are you going to declare war on, the main law-abiding ship that stayed behind and is helpless to stop them? Or are you going to hunt dozens if not hundreds of tiny metal balls through ana steroid belt? The first thing they’d likely do is get far away from where we’re building the colony. They’d probably spread out, depending on how much contact they need with each other for manufacturing and food trade and soforth.

“Have you seen HEXes move? They don’t usually use rockets. They have them, for emergencies, but they were designed to move within the asteroid field, and they do that by physically holding onto asteroids – other ships, right now, but they’ll do it with asteroids when we get there – and physically jumping from one to another through space. They can move with almost no propellant. When they’re within the belt and able to efficiently get solar energy, they’ll be able to move around essentially for free, not counting wear and tear on the machines. Can any of our ships, with their big guns and their threats of war, do that? How much time and propellant should we waste rocketing little ships through fields of metal balls looking for the metal balls that don’t belong there and are actively running away?”

“I don’t really see how that would be a problem,” Aevor said. “Planetary systems are enormous. It’s not like half of a runaway ship would pose any real problem to the colony, right? They’d probably want to set up as far away from us as possible, to avoid the possibility of conflict; there’d be no need for them to have physical contact with our colony for centuries unless both colonies wanted it.”

“Physical contact isn’t the problem,” Huspi said. “It’s a matter of diplomacy. Like Taya said, it doesn’t make thing physically difficult, just… complicated. The unity of the fleet relies on us all agreeing to stick to our agreements. If we get to a star and a ship decides to just make an unauthorised colony, essentially using the fleet as a free ride to a new star and giving nothing in return, and they succeed… that’s a really bad look. It creates complications for future colonies. If it works once and the fleet does nothing about it, what’s to stop it from happening again?” Ke looked to the captains. “Actually, has this happened before? I find it hard to believe that it’s taken this long.”

“It has,” Captain Violet said. “If you’ve ever run into records of colonies where the fleet decided to make more than one at a single star, it’s usually because somebody pushed and it was easier to pretend consensus than to start a war over it. When that happens, it’s already a sign of a failure to control the situation. In situations like this, backing the dangerous party before it becomes an issue is the right move, if we can anticipate the situation before the danger becomes widely known.”

“So we’re just gonna give in to their demands?” Mana asked. “Isn’t that worse, diplomatically?”

“They haven’t made any demands yet,” I said. “That’s why it’s a good idea to back them. If they had openly indicated that they’d do something like this, then backing them would look weak, but what we need to do is make sure that the option isn’t even on the table. This isn’t a ship trying to bully the fleet; it’s just that that ship isn’t going to be able to keep control of its population when the fleet disagrees with them, and some of them would head off on their own. Hexacorallia would be even more embarrassed than everyone else if that happened, they’re not trying to force anyone’s hand. We need to use our vote to make sure that the question never even comes up.”

“If your information is correct, that might be the move,” Captain Red said. “It’s not a huge deal, but it’s definitely a reason to back that bid, given that there’s no major practical reason to prefer one over the others. And it does have the Arborea’s backing.”

“We need to send diplomats to all the key ships involved in the bid to confirm this,” Captain Green said. Which made sense. The proposal looked fine on paper, and it would be ridiculous to hinge anything on my memories of a holiday I’d taken as a little kid.

“We should send diplomats to the key ships in all the bids,” Yamin said. “We should’ve done that in the first place. We got lazy. It’s completely possible that there might be dangers in the bids from ships that one of our apprentices didn’t happen to travel to, as well.”

“But we’ve dealt with this kind of thing before, right?” Mana asked.

“Oh, yes. Ships keep their own problems to themselves for generations, and then all mix together to make a colony; there is always a fair bit of… messiness. This sort of thing isn’t brand new.”

But despite his relaxed tone, all four of the captains still looked very, very worried.

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