Going Interstellar (collection)

Beside him, Ackley hur-Shaddock—barely thirty and unusually impatient for so successful an Intendant—scanned the diamond-strewn darkness aggressively. “Where is it? I don’t see—”

“There.” Harrod pointed at the irregular star.

“That? It’s the size of a cur-mite. Smaller.”

Harrod reflected upon the dismissive remark: perhaps the intemperate nature of House Shaddock’s Evolved was actively inculcated in their Intendants as well. “I, too, expected it to be larger. But do not be deceived; it is simply hard to see at this distance.”

“But we are already within a hundred kilometers.”

“So we are. But watch.”

The irregular star had already become angular: not a bright, radiant point, but a long, flat, reflective surface.

“We should be going inside the Ark, today,” griped Ackley.

“There are safety issues that—”

“It is a waste of time to conduct a purely external survey first.”

“Ackley, if we are going to work together—as our Houses have instructed us—you will need to accept that my judgment takes precedence. That I give the orders.”

“You do not wish input?”

“I do not wish constant complaining—particularly when you do not even try to learn the reasons for the decisions I make, and the orders I give.”

“One day soon—when Overlord Shaddock Raises me up, to add my seed to his House’s Lines—it shall be you who listens to me. And insolence will mean your death.”

“As will be natural and proper, at that time. But that time has yet to come. Here, we are both but Intendants, and I have the benefits of age and long expertise in matters pertaining to our responsibilities. Do I not?”

Ackley’s response bordered on a petulant sulk. “Yes. You do.”

The Ark was beginning to burgeon rapidly, the long white keel stretching away into the dark, its length cluttered by irregular protuberances and bulges: modules, cargo containers, electronics arrays. But looming closest were great oblongs and spheres, like an onrushing agglomeration of planetoids and moonlets on a collision course….

A gentle counter-boost began to tug at them. The terrifying speed of their approach became merely shocking, then alarming, then swift, and finally, leisurely. They floated toward the clutch of white metal moonlets that were the great ship’s inertial fusion ignition chambers and the smaller nodules that held fuel and other volatiles.

Ackley stared forward, past them. “Where is the Great Ring of the early settlement stories?”

Harrod shrugged, glancing at the distant bow of the Ark. “The habitation ring was destroyed.”

“Destroyed? By what?”

“By war. What else?” What else, indeed? Savage internecine strife was the only cultural constant that limped through the tattered chronicles of all five prior Exodates. It was the sole reason for the Rite of Exile: the Rite was a pressure valve, an alternative to self-inflicted annihilation. It also unfailingly propagated a new wave of expelled pariahs, who staggered to yet another system to begin the cycle again. Indeed, Harrod was tempted to wonder if the Houses, now descended from five-time losers, must therefore contain a genetic flaw that not only predisposed them to intemperate ruin, but also kept them from learning to change.

Ackley had been studying the immense craft. “And since the war—?”

“Since then, the Ark and its tug-tenders”—small, distant specks, following the same high orbital track, but to port and starboard respectively—“have been abandoned, secured for long-term storage.”

“But why? The ship’s technology—”

“The ship’s technology is why, except for a small, automated monitoring station, it has remained off-limits. The Houses could not agree on how to share its advanced machinery.”

“And they are still unable to do so, after three and a half centuries—of course.”

Harrod smiled. “Of course.” According to records of the prior Exodates, collaborative use of an Ark was rare. Agreement arose on the matter only when the ship was needed as a garbage scow, to haul the latest batch of undesirables to a still further refuse heap in the stars. And, being the product of that long string of genetic disposal missions, being repeatedly orphaned by gulfs of time and space and strife, the Houses had forgotten their own roots, their true home world. Which, Harrod conjectured, was probably the first and last place that humans had known stability, acceptance, unity with their fellows.

Ackley had his palmtop computer out. “So, what are we looking for?” He stared up at the six immense thrust bells, arranged in three pods of two engines each.

“Micrometeoroid damage to the bells and their housing—an easy task, compared to our internal surveys of them.”

“Where we will be assessing …?”

“Primarily, the condition of the laser ignition chambers. We must anticipate complete rebuilds of half the systems, and major maintenance upon all the rest.”

“Even though they’ve been stored in a bath of inert gases?”

Harrod glanced at the younger man. “Three hundred fifty years is a very long time.”

Ackley shrugged. “What else?”