The Ethos Effect, page 53
“On the last time out, I tried to get into the Setioni system. It’s one of the outlying Keltyr systems. The Republic has a small flotilla there. Two battle cruisers, frigates, and corvettes.”
“You’re thinking of building a battle cruiser?” Nynca arched her eyebrows.
“I thought about an IIS version—until I checked the costs. I settled on a more powerful version of the Joyau—when we can afford it.” Van laughed. “If I wanted to get everywhere I’d like to go, I’d need a dreadnought.” He paused. “Did Trystin think about it?”
“That was why he built the Elsin. IIS needed ships powerful enough to take on the Rev corvettes and frigates, but anything larger was cost-prohibitive. Also, it would have been far too obvious.” She studied Van. “What about the Keltyr system?”
“It’s not just that. I can’t confirm it, but it’s almost a certainty that the Republic wiped out my fathers and my brother and his family. Then, you saw the analysis Laren did. The RSF effectively massacred the Keltyr fleet...”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I guess ... I’m not sure I see any real difference between the Revenants and the Republic.” Van shook his head. “Oh, there are lots of differences. The Republic doesn’t have Temples and a state faith, and it doesn’t indoctrinate all its citizens into one belief system. But they both seem devoted to amassing temporal power and marginalizing anyone who is opposed or gets in the way. Neither wants people who are different with any degree of freedom or power. With each year, it gets worse. Just like the Revs, the RSF is using clones as disposable tools. Just like the Revs, they’re wiping out groups that don’t agree. The total is over five million already—”
“Five million?”
“That’s just on Sulyn. It doesn’t count the Keltyr fleet and whatever’s happening on the former Keltyr planets.” Van cleared his throat. “Just like the Revs, they’re using economic and social tools to expand and consolidate power. And just like the Revs, they’ve decided to change the rules of society whenever necessary to accomplish that, by taking away the rights of those who would oppose them. Did you know that they’ve started holding secret military trials, and that they’ve executed mediacasters and advocates who criticize the government?”
“I didn’t know that, but there have been scores of governments in history, if not more, that have done the same thing.”
“I know. But this is where I grew up. These are the people I defended. For me, that makes it different.” Van took a sip of the already-cool café. “Trystin had the knowledge that at least the evil ones were the enemy.”
“Not completely,” Nynca replied. “I was told that once he was followed and almost arrested in Cambria because he looked like a Rev. That was one reason he was never more than a commander in the Service.”
“That just makes matters more complex.” Van shook his head. “How can you stop evil when no one wants to pay the price?”
“People have never wanted to pay that price. They only rally to stop it when it doesn’t cost too much, or when their own survival is threatened. Why do you think Gramps used his device on the Jerush system? No one else wanted to act, and they wouldn’t have, not until the Arm had been turned into four major powers, with all the independent systems gone.”
“Do you think what he did will work?” asked Van.
“What do you think?” countered Nynca.
“Mostly ... it did. It will take years for everything to settle out, but the Revs can’t use unified economic power to push into smaller systems. That means, unless someone turns into the Revenant model, the smaller systems will become stronger, and there will be more of them. The Argentis are fairly live-and-let-live, and so is the Coalition...” Van paused. “Was that why he did it?”
For the first time, Nynca looked puzzled.
“He was afraid that the Coalition would have to go to war, and then all the freedoms, all the tolerance, all the economic openness would vanish...” Van waited.
Nynca’s laugh was sad—and wry. “I didn’t think of it that way, but that was the way he thought. That’s why I said you’re more like him than any of us are.” After a moment, she said, “Van ... let things settle out. The Arm needs IIS, and IIS needs you. If you try something like Gramps did...”
“I promise you I won’t translate the Joyau into a sun, or do anything like that,” Van said. “I’d like to think that I’d accomplished something positive, and I’d like to have time to do it. And there are ... things I really want to do.”
“Is that a promise?”
“It is.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“That’s why I’m out here. I’ve been talking to Mason and trying to figure out what else we can do with the ships. I also needed some time to think. But whatever I do, I want to be around for a good long time, and I want my life to reflect something positive.” All that was absolutely true. Van just had to figure out how he could do what he had to do and still do what he wanted to.
“I’d like to believe you,” Nynca said.
“But Trystin said the same thing.” Van paused. “Or did he?”
She frowned, then was silent for a time. “No. He really didn’t. Not this last time.”
“You see?”
“With you, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Van shrugged. “I’ll have to spend years proving it, then.”
“See that you do.”
Van laughed helplessly.
Chapter 96
After Nynca’s talk with Van, she had not stayed at Aerolis, and Van had finished his preparations on sevenday, including restocking on torps. Early on eightday, he eased into the command couch and went through the checklist.
He looked at the blank board before him. Do you want to go through with this? The next question was harder. If you don’t, will you spend years like Trystin, crisscrossing the Arm and trying to clean up cancerous outbreaks of tyranny and repression everywhere? Will you end up old and feeble, and unable to do anything, regretting losing the chance that you had?
He cleared his throat and linked. A-prime, Joyau ready to depower and delock.
Van dropped the ship grav to nil and waited.
Joyau, cleared to depower and delock.
Depowered. Delocking this time. With the gentlest touch of the steering jets, Van eased the Joyau clear of the locking tower. Outbound on minimum power.
Till the next time, returned Jynko.
Till then.
Once clear of the asteroid complex. Van turned the Joyau on an out-system course.
From what he had learned earlier, and updated while he’d been both in Cambria and at Aerolis, the “new” Republic government was being sworn in the next morning in New Oisin, and would be addressing the legislative and legal “reforms” proposed by Prime Minister Eamon. As Van had surmised, the RSF slate of candidates had won overwhelmingly, and the news permitted out of Tara trumpeted the results as a victory for “the people” and “a new era” for the Republic. Van had snorted at that.
Hours later, once he was clear of Perdya system, Van put the Joyau into jump immediately. The first jump from Perdya system brought him to an uninhabited system in the nebulous area bordered by Coalition, Argenti, and former Revenant systems.
There Van rechecked his equipment—and his calculations— then walked around the ship and stretched before settling back into the command couch.
The second jump brought the Joyau out into normspace close to the Taran system ecliptic, and well beyond the cometary belt—which was not at all where Van wanted to be.
He scanned the EDIs and the farscreens, but he was so far out that only a handful of RSF ships—those out beyond the gas giant Yeats—were showing.
Van calculated, then decided on a short jump—as short as he could make it—which would place the Joyau at an equal distance from Solis—Tara’s sun—but at right angles and directly “below” it.
He initiated jump.
What was black turned white, and white turned black, and every color was its opposite, and yet itself. Time stretched endlessly, and yet the jump was over instantly.
Van winced as the Joyau dropped back into normspace. For whatever reason, shorter jumps seemed to leave him more disoriented than longer ones. He’d heard the same thing from other pilots over the years, but the technical types had always dismissed what the pilots felt. Van supposed that had been true back in the dark ages, when the only piloting had been atmospheric.
He immediately began deceleration, since the lower the velocity of the Joyau—and the escape pod—the more accurate he could make the pod’s in-system jump. Then he studied the screens and EDIs, but nothing had changed, except that the jump had left the Joyau both in better position and farther away from the RSF ships patrolling the system.
Van scanned the in-system fleet—three dreadnoughts, six battle cruisers, eight frigates, and twelve corvettes—enough for an invasion force of a smaller system, and a clear sign that the Republic was at least slightly worried about either the Argentis or the Coalition. Next, he checked the system comparator, and nodded. It was twoday, as it should have been, and that meant that the Parliament would be in session, working on Prime Minister Eamon’s agenda.
It took more than an hour of deceleration for him to bring the Joyau’s relative velocity down within the limits he had earlier calculated, but finally he was satisfied. Less difficult was the last-minute wrestling with himself.
The questions and counterquestions echoed and reechoed through his thoughts.
If you don’t do anything, who will? But do you really think that destroying New Oisin will change matters? How can you possibly justify such an action? After all that the Republic has done in the past year, and the way it’s treated the Keltyr systems, how can you not stop them from becoming another Revenant empire? Besides you, who will do anything? Didn’t the Argentis and the Coalition surrender the Keltyr worlds to barbarism rather than take a stand and risk any of their ships and personnel? But does one set of barbaric actions justify another such act? Aren’t you taking too much on yourself?
Van shook his head.
Except that... no one else was doing anything, and if millions had already died on Sulyn, how could there not be millions more dead in the years ahead? There wasn’t any good answer. That much was clear. What was also clear to Van was that no one else was going to do anything, not anytime soon. The protectorate and the abandonment of the Keltyr systems to the Republic confirmed that.
Finally, he pushed away the questions and checked the farscreens and EDIs one last time. None of the RSF ships had made any course changes.
Van finally left the command couch and walked aft to the lockers next to the cargo hold. There, he donned the space armor and made his way into the cargo space. After sealing the helmet, he closed the lock doors. Then he loosened the quick-releases on the escape pod. If he had used the quick release bolts in their emergency mode, the pod could have come out tumbling, and that would have made the final adjustments and settings close to impossible.
When the pod was loose, he attached his own tether to one of the cargo restraint loops near the outer lock door. Then he attached the second and third tethers to the pod and then to a restraint loop on each side of the cargo lock. Only when he was satisfied that the tethers were secured did he send the command to the shipnet to reduce internal grav to nil.
Then he depressurized the hold, and opened the lock doors.
As he had hoped, the rush of air broke loose the pod from the deck, at least enough that Van could lever it out of the lock doors. He used as little force as possible, not wanting to put too much strain on the tethers or the restraint loops.
The pod reached the end of the tethers, stretching them slightly, but the one-way nature of the tethers stopped the rebound, and the pod came to rest ten meters outside the cargo lock door.
Before proceeding, Van linked with the shipnet once more, calling up the EDIs and farscreens. A single corvette had begun to accelerate outward toward the Joyau, but Van’s quick calculations showed that the corvette would not even near torp range for nearly three hours. He ran another calculation, and found himself frowning inside the shipsuit. If the corvette wanted to risk a high-dust-density jump, it was likely that the RSF ship could make a short jump in an hour. The jump accuracy for that short a jump was problematical, which was why Van hadn’t tried another jump to get closer in-system, but he couldn’t assume that the corvette would jump wide.
That meant, in the worst case, he had less than forty-five minutes to set up the pod for an in-system translation jump— with enough accuracy to avoid the solar core, a process analogous to threading a needle with a hundred-meter pole. With a deep breath that momentarily fogged the helmet view, Van began making his way, hand over hand, out along the tether that led to the escape pod.
Once there, most carefully, he undipped himself from his own tether, clipping the tether to the ring on the pod. The lock into the pod would barely accommodate the armor, and one locking would almost exhaust the pod’s extra-atmospheric capability. But then, no one would be needing that after Van adjusted the controls and settings.
Once inside the pod, stripped of all couches and habitability save basic atmospherics in order to accommodate the welter of equipment that Van had to move around, Van opened the helmet and removed the gauntlets. Then he eased into position, half-floating before the control panel—and the even larger panel above it that controlled the flux generator.
The link to the Joyau was faint but clear. Van ran a check, then took the positional information from the Joyau. Using the pod screens and comparing them to the relayed information, Van pulsed the steering jets until he had the pod oriented on Solis. Next came the course line settings, and then modifications to the jump generator. Then he had to set up the remote operation. Sweat pooled inside the armor, especially on his back, giving him the sense that he was wearing an icy jacket.
After another twenty minutes, he was ready to leave. Slowly, and carefully, he eased away from the controls, making his way back toward the minuscule lock. He sealed the helmet and donned the gauntlets once more, then slipped into the pod lock, careful to seal the inner door.
Atmosphere puffed out around him as he emerged from the pod. He had to be careful to clip the return tether to his armor first and then unclip the other two tethers from the pod without exerting force on it so that it floated free of the Joyau, but in the orientation most favorable for the programmed course.
Then Van pulled himself back to the Joyau, where he reeled in the other two tethers and closed the cargo lock. He repressurized the hold and waited until the heat indicators reached amber before he took off the helmet. The air still froze his nostrils as he took a breath.
Even before he was out of the armor, he linked into the shipnet. There were three corvettes coming at him from out-system, with less than ten minutes before they were within torp range. Van had no idea where they had come from, unless they had translated from the far side of the system, but that was an academic question. He just left the armor on the floor of the passageway and dashed to the cockpit and strapped in.
Then he ran the checklist for the pod and began the sequence—a sequence that would take three minutes.
Eight minutes before intruders are within torp range, the shipnet informed Van.
That left Van with less than five minutes. He couldn’t move the Joyau far from the pod, not without risking disturbing it and disrupting all his work—and the chances for success.
Are you sure you want to do this? Van pushed away that thought, recalling the devastation the Republic had created on Sulyn and the massacre of the Keltyr ships that had not been allowed to surrender—ships that had never even tried to attack the Republic.
One minute before the pod was go.
Van began to bring up full power on the Joyau’s fusactors. At the same time, he set up the precalculated jump coordinates. They’d be off some, but he wasn’t going to have time to refine them, not the way matters were going.
The pod vanished, and Van instantly poured full acceleration through the drives, a force that pressed him into the command couch, because he’d sacrificed the power for ship gravity to the drives and shields.
The monitors showed the three corvettes converging on the Joyau, and Van could see that he was moving all too slowly. The three corvettes had fired their torps simultaneously.
Van checked the EDIs, focused on Solis itself, looking to see whether the device had worked. But the screens went blank under the flare of energy that sheeted over the Joyau as the RSF torps began impacting Van’s shields. The secondary generator flared amber for a long moment, before slowly dropping back into the green.
Another wave of torps was on the way, but in the momentary clearing, Van could see the massive EDI surge from Solis, and he gave the command. Jump!
At that moment, energy from the second salvo of Republic torps flared against the shields, and Van could feel the secondary generator fail even as normspace vanished. The very jumpspace around the Joyau buckled, and the ship seemed to bend in half, then collapse inward, squeezing Van into a point.
Black turned a searing red, a blood-and pain-filled red that was somehow also white, even as white turned to an icy-deep-space-freezing black, and the pain from both ran through every nerve in Van’s body, an endless nerve-electric torture.
The Joyau dropped into normspace with a sickening lurch.
Van could barely breathe, and he could feel the entire ship-net burning through his nerves. Every sensor pulsed along his arms. Miniature knives twisted themselves deep into his skull. Every energy source shown on the EDIs pulsed pain. Through the pain, he could sense that the ship was mostly structurally sound. At least, he thought it was. Where was he?
Slowly, he tried to remember. Minutes later—or was it hours?—he recalled the jump system coordinates—the uninhabited system on the return to Perdya. Except... he had the feeling that he shouldn’t be heading to Perdya.
