Hearthspace, p.9
Hearthspace, page 9
‘Not this one. Another. Earth 6. This one’s smaller. Different in detail. These are worlds, each one unique.’
Nusma grunted. ‘The protector would say that. The captain would only see the slave pit it could become.’
Nusma had long come to impress Ulla, much to her surprise at first. There was a certain empathy under his mandated, trained cruelty; enough, Ulla had learned, to motivate him to find ways to help the slaves scooped up by the ship. Or at least ease their suffering, a little, within the bounds of his orders and duties, at least. Not gratuitous.
‘Anyhow this is where your people put a government centre.’
‘Yeah. And that’s right under us now.’
Looking down, she saw a compact city under clustered domes, the smooth strips of a spaceport’s runways.
‘We’re in a synchronous orbit – orbiting at the same rate as the planet turns. So we are hovering over the government centre, the main city of Earth 4, and the local seat of the Hearthspace we—’
That was when Captain Erbas’s voice boomed out.
The announcement came out of every speaker on the ship, Ulla later found out.
‘… at the target, and the package has been delivered. Entering the planet’s atmosphere now. Thirty seconds. No harm will come to the ship. But, if you are near a port – a dumb port – close your eyes. Now! Close your eyes …’
Apparently on an impulse, Nusma grabbed Ulla’s collar, hauled her back from the screens, and pulled her head down against his shoulder.
She learned later that he had known what was coming. And that curiosity overcame him.
Ulla closed her eyes. But Nusma didn’t close his.
‘… Five. Four. Three …’
When it happened, the light seemed to fill the room. Even through her closed lids.
Nusma winced. ‘Ouch … Shit …’ He looked around. ‘I can’t see …’ Now he panicked. He screamed for a medic. ‘I can’t see!’
As he screamed, Ulla held him until the crew medics showed up.
As it turned out, Nusma had been the only casualty aboard the slaver when the Hierarchy’s antimatter bomb hit Earth 4.
10
It took a long time for the former 45 crew to figure out what had happened, and that mostly from leaks and slips from the crew of the Scholar.
The bombing, and the damage it inflicted, unfolded in stages.
The explosion itself had, briefly, released heat comparable to what was believed to be the temperature at the centre of the original Sun of mankind. The centre of the Sun, brought down to the middle of a densely inhabited city.
At the moment of detonation had come a pulse of electromagnetic radiation which knocked out all sophisticated systems for kilometres around, even when they were not physically destroyed.
After that came pulses of extreme heat, thermal radiation.
The first wave crossed a kilometre in a second. In the central zone, buildings and monuments, roadways, bridges, were shattered. Even three kilometres out, people were burned alive, the skin curling off them.
And beyond that, a blast of hundred-kilometres-per-hour superheated air spread across the landscape. More buildings smashed, more people were burned and crushed, even as far out as ten kilometres.
Then a plume of dust and debris was hurled upwards, much of it almost reaching the stratosphere of this world, Earth 4. The local climate would be projected to be disrupted for weeks, and the food chains for longer, inflicting more pain and death.
Ulla learned later that images of this strike had been captured by the Hierarchy vessel and then transmitted. Sent out on high-intensity laser beams to neighbouring worlds, broadcast from the orbiting Scholar.
And along with those images, a message made the point that the Hierarchy had expended just fifty grams of antimatter to achieve this destruction.
Ulla saw little of Commodore Mott in the hours and days that followed. And when she did glimpse Mott, the commodore was distracted, busy.
Furious.
‘Some way to start an interplanetary negotiation,’ she muttered to Ulla in a private moment.
Meanwhile, Ulla got a personal briefing from the protector. ‘We have suffered one casualty of our own, which affects you. Lieutenant Nusma, your formal liaison with the crew …’
‘Oh. His eyes.’
‘Blinded. So our doctor tells me. He was on duty during our low pass, the bomb drop—’
‘I was with him.’
‘He saw the detonation through a plain window. The light, his eyes … Adequate warnings should have been given, even though all our crew are trained in protocols for such incidents.’
Such incidents. They do this routinely, then. But, poor Nusma – far from the worst of the slaver crew.
‘So, will he stand down from his duties? Will I need a different liaison?’
‘Oh, no. The replacements should be working for him in a couple of days. Once a suitable donor is identified. Painful, perhaps, but functional …’
And Ulla suspected she knew what class of the ship’s passengers would become a donor and sacrifice their sight for the sake of Nusma.
But Pulet said no more.
11
No more than a day after leaving the orbit of Earth 4, and the monstrous strike made against its major city, Ulla – and presumably the rest of the crew – sensed that the slave-ship was preparing for a departure, indeed was already getting underway.
Meanwhile, though news of the assault on Earth 4 must have spread at lightspeed across the local, neighbouring worlds and ships, there was no immediate retaliation, neither from the target nor its nearest neighbours. Nor indeed any relief effort.
‘A passive culture,’ Pulet murmured.
Maybe. But Ulla thought that the suddenness of the attack, the fragmentary data that must have come out of the event in the initial aftermath, would have led to an instinct for caution, not immediate retaliation. Ulla suspected, in fact, that neighbouring worlds would first look to their own defences, and only cautiously approach the assaulted Earth 4 – for now.
For Ulla, the wait for some response was a time of tension.
Waiting for what might become a Hearthspace-wide war.
Stuck in an enemy warship.
A couple of days after the departure, Ulla was summoned to the office of Protector Pulet along with Captain Erbas, Commodore Mott – and Lieutenant Nusma.
A heavyweight meeting, then.
Nusma waved at Ulla when she walked in. Ulla was surprised by that, surprised to see Nusma there with what was apparently already capable vision, even though his upper face was encased in a kind of protective helmet.
He grinned, but hesitantly. ‘Ulla. My partner. Sort of.’
‘You can see me?’
‘Badly, so far. The surgeon says it will take a few days for my new eyes to settle in. In the meantime this helmet is helping me out, feeding data direct into my visual cortex—’
She was ashamed at the relief she felt, for him.
But even so, the idea of it shocked her deeply. She tried to think positively for Nusma. And she tried not to think too hard about the unidentified donor. But she was a slave, a mutilated slave herself. If her eyes had been the best match …
At such moments, with the memory of her own mutilation strong, she would often taste phantom flavours, presumably psychosomatically. She was learning to ignore it. Or she liked to believe so. Her loss was bad enough. But to have healthy eyes taken from your head—
The protector suddenly seemed to notice her. ‘Ah! Our pet commander is with us again. Your distraction at such moments – empathy is a weakness, Commander. Turn it into a strength! A motivator! Rejoice that you were not chosen, this time … Bah. So much for petty diversions.
‘In any case, Ulla, I have a small task for you.’ He stretched his arms wide, yawned, rested back in his chair, and adjusted the loose low-gravity restraint around his chest. ‘I think we’re done with the politicking for now—’
‘Politicking. That’s what you call an antimatter bomb dropped on a crowded city?’
Commodore Mott gave her a significant look.
Pulet snorted. ‘Rather a tasteless remark in the circumstances, Commander. But I’ll let it pass. Given your utility. You’re here so I can pick your brain, your local knowledge. I’m rather tiring of politics and conflict and the grubby affairs of humanity – for now. I think of myself as a scientist first, as you know. And after that little unpleasantness at Earth 4, I think I would like a scientific excursion, if you will.
‘I’m curious! Scientifically. About the realms we now explore.’
Ulla murmured, ‘Realms with people already in them.’
He waved that away. ‘You’ll remember our discussions on the suite of worlds within which you have been unfortunate enough to grow up. Planets of a classification quite different from those of my own origin.’
Ulla nodded, sullenly. ‘Ice moons, orbiting giant worlds of chill gas, ice… ’
Still Captain Erbas watched her. He said softly, ‘You’re pushing your luck, slave.’
Again Pulet snorted. ‘Oh, let her be, Captain. She’ll get what is coming to her in due course. They always do. Cocky senior slaves who forget what they are. For now, she’s useful, and harmless. Also entertaining. And more useful if she isn’t confined, or doesn’t have her tongue ripped out, or isn’t simply killed. Not yet …
‘Ice moons of ice worlds, though, well, you’re right about that, in your ignorant way. But here there are other types, are there not? A suite of rocky worlds, roughly classified by your own scientists according to the patchy data available we found in the files aboard your small spacecraft: Earths, smaller Earths, cold Mars types, hot Venus types – Venuses, some of which you turned into cloud gardens, didn’t you?’
‘More like farms,’ Erbas said. ‘That must be a remarkable sight.’
‘Yes, and Earths, overheated Earths … and underheated Earths … Now, I’m particularly intrigued by the Mars types, actually. Smaller, colder. There are hints in your literature that of these worlds, most unexplored, it may be the smaller worlds that are the most promising arenas for life – I mean for the inception and evolution of life itself. Native life, not our imported variety. Rather than the more standard Earth-types.’
Ulla said, ‘Yet you have seen nothing of these worlds, save the Earth you bombarded—’
Captain Erbas frowned. ‘More disrespectful cheek from this untamed slave?’
Ulla caught Nusma’s artificial gaze. The lieutenant subtly shook his head.
Protector Pulet held up his hand. ‘You are unwise to say such things to your owners. But the content of what you say has some validity. There are no Earth types among the outer worlds, and so we have no expertise in them. The nearest analogues we have are the frozen ice moons, roughly Earth-sized, which orbit some of our gas giants. Whereas you have seen none of the giants we saw in our sky as we grew up.’
‘Maybe what she says has some value,’ Captain Erbas said. ‘She’s still unwise to say it. Defiance in her words, her tone …’
Ulla felt as if she was caught between two colliding worlds herself. But maybe there was some good she could do here, with her tiny fraction of leverage. And she had an idea.
‘You own someone who is an expert on Earth-worlds. A student of planetology as a sideline—’
Erbas glared at her. ‘Still trying to control the situation? You can’t help yourself, can you, slave?’
Pulet said, ‘Let her speak, man. Tell us of this expert, then.’
‘Dr Quero Borge—’
Captain Erbas glared. ‘Your ship’s doctor from the 45? You will call him Quero, by the way. Slaves have no right to family or clan names. Or indeed professional titles. Slaves are the property of the Sabre Hierarchy. Slaves are—’
Pulet waved a hand. ‘Oh, but slaves have a duty to be useful to the Hierarchy, Captain. And in this case, the self-evident utility of this individual—’
‘I know this one,’ Erbas said. ‘Quero has the skills of a doctor, a medic. But those skills have already been diminished, I fear.’
Pulet frowned. ‘What do you mean, man?’
‘We had to take his hand. His right – he is left-handed.’
Erbas spoke as if embarrassed – not for any cruelty, Ulla knew, only for the possible misuse of a useful tool.
But news of the punishment shocked Ulla; she hadn’t heard of the inciting incident.
Pulet’s frown darkened further. ‘His hand. Though he’s a doctor?’
Erbas shook his head impatiently. ‘He had treated a slave, an ill slave, without sanction from myself.’
Nusma said reluctantly, ‘But – sirs, the “ill slave” was a woman giving birth to a child.’
‘Rules are rules—’
‘I can see that, sir, but such a person, with such skills and experience, would naturally react in such a way. It’s only human, it follows from his training reflexes—’
Captain Erbas shook his head. ‘Are you being infected yourself by the poison that emanates from these cocky slaves? You know very well there is a strong case to be made that slaves are not human, as defined, and deserve no human rights …’
Pulet grimaced. ‘There is another point. Such mutilations reduce the value of the asset significantly. Why, if a line spindle jams on this fine sailship of yours, do you kick it to pieces … ? Ah, well, the damage is done.’ He turned to Ulla. ‘But you are sincere about this fellow having skills concerning planetology, planetary biology?’
‘I know it was a study area for him before he joined the navy – and he joined up in the first place to achieve some field exploration experience. Then the Hierarchy came.
Pulet grunted, ‘A scholar then. A man after my own heart.’
‘There’s probably nobody better informed aboard, among the natives at least. I mean, umm, the cargo.’
The others shared glances.
Captain Erbas said, ‘You do realise we are relying on the advice of one slave,’ and he nodded at Ulla, ‘about the learning and capabilities of another. It’s not quite unique in my experience, but rare, damned rare. And surely her true motive here is to protect this acquaintance of hers, to make him more valuable than we perceive.’
Pulet said, ‘That’s an intelligent enough analysis. But there is a point here. This expedition itself is unique – we are very isolated, and our resources are finite. And we do have a mandate to explore. This seems an opportunity.’ He turned to Ulla. ‘How do you think your doctor colleague will react when he realises he’s to become part of an expedition exploring a new planet?’
Exploring a planet? She hadn’t been expecting that. She thought fast.
‘I think he would feel guilty about abandoning his patients. Or – he might be glad to be taken away from his patients for a while, patients who might cause him to lose his other hand – or worse …’
Pulet nodded. ‘Plausible enough. Honest enough. Then it’s agreed.’
Erbas glanced at a log – handwritten, Ulla saw. ‘We plundered the log of the captured 45, and in fact we’re already underway to a promising Mars candidate – a hundred and fifty AU or so away, thirty-five days at one gravity.’ He glanced around. ‘In the meantime, let’s try to keep most of our useful assets from getting out of control or self-harming again, please. All agreed? Then I’ll log this session closed.’
And, Ulla realised, Commodore Mott hadn’t said a word.
12
In the days that followed, Ulla found she could barely pass a hull port or a viewing screen without images of the new world, this Mars clone, looming out of the dark. Many of the Hierarchy senior crew at least seemed to be fascinated by the diversion. Far more interested than, for instance, in the Earth-clone world they had so recently visited, and violated.
She tried to talk to Nusma about this.
‘You’re all showing a lot of scientific curiosity about something as unpromising as that,’ she said, as they gazed out.
That being Pulet’s Mars clone, seen telescopically as a brownish sphere which had come looming out of the muddled light of the Hearthspace background. A pale brown surface with rippling canyons, wide, low mountains, and tremendous plains – one of which seemed to cover more than half the planet’s surface, with a barely a wrinkle or uneroded hillock to break up the view. Perhaps the bed of a giant, lost ocean. Or a field of cooled lava from some primordial eruption.
Ulla said, ‘I mean, look at it. It looks … old. Old and dead.’ She noticed he was squinting a little. Were his new eyes not quite right?
Nusma shrugged. ‘Old, maybe. Probably. A landscape as old as the Hearth itself, and we don’t know how old that is. Far older than humanity’s presence here, that’s for sure.’ Then he frowned, and glanced around, blindly.
Ulla knew enough by now of the Hierarchy and its ways to be aware that such conversations, potentially treacherous or rebellious, discussions of the politically charged issue of human origins, were not welcome. And here was a man, already blinded by his own superiors. And still following orders to shadow Ulla.
He hesitated. ‘I get carried away. Too interested. I’m not really supposed to talk to you about stuff like this.’
‘Me, the slave.’ Ulla felt oddly insulted to be reminded of her status in such a way, in such a conversation. An unreasonable feeling. For whole heartbeats she had been kidding herself that she was in a conversation of equals here. She was forever inferior to Nusma, because the society she had stumbled into said it was so …
Nusma was still talking, and Ulla wasn’t paying attention.
‘… evidence of humanity in the Hearthspace is sketchy, scattered, patchy where it exists at all. Maybe that’s not a surprise. The tradition is that humans came from a planet, or planets, that circled one star—’
‘The Sun. The Sun. We thought we knew that too—’
‘Somehow they came here. People. We don’t know how, for one thing. Surely not by lightsail ship, across gulfs where there is no starlight, or Hearthshine …’
Ulla shrugged. ‘Maybe they came using antimatter. You people use it. That stuff must be useful for more than blowing other stuff up.’
