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Book one.

The pioneeriad

Chapter one.

Unto a nameless world

Radmer vividly remembered his last sight of the old moon, before King Bruno's terraforming operations had begun to squeeze it. . . .

He was called Conrad Mursk in those days, and he was standing on the bridge of the QSS Newhope, falling past the Earth and moon on a sunward trajectory. They had started their fall at Mars, and would keep on falling until they were within a million kilometers of the sun. At that point, scorching even through their superreflectors, they would swing around and rise again.

Their path was like the orbit of a comet: long and narrow and lonely, descending briefly to kiss Mother Sol and then racing back up into the dark again for another long orbit. Except that they'd be firing their fusion motors down there at the bottom, unfurling their sails, catching the light of the sun and the laser boost of a dozen pocket stars to hurl them into deepest space. Past Mars and Neptune, past even the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud where the true comets lived. To the stars themselves.

The windows on the bridge weren't made of glass, weren't made of anything really. They were just video images on the wellstone walls. Holographic—though with nothing close by to look at, this was difficult to discern. The images could of course be tuned and magnified and filtered to the heart's content, but looking out the portside window at that moment, what Conrad saw was probably an unadulterated view: a blue-white Earth no larger than a grape, with a fist-sized moon lurking in the foreground.

There was no man in it. With Luna tidally locked to its parent planet, Conrad was looking at the Farside, the side faced permanently away from Earth, where there were no familiar landmarks at all. Funny: he'd been living in space for most of the past eight years, but he wasn't sure he'd ever seen Farside before. It looked flat and gray, mostly featureless, and the half that was lit by sun revealed no superreflective gleam of dome towns. The dark half of it, washed out by brightness, revealed no city lights, no sign of human presence at all.

This strange, precivilized moon drifted down the window, from fore to aft, with quite visible speed, like a soap bubble blown from a plastic wand and settling to Earth. But a bubble was small and close, whereas Luna was a quarter-million kilometers away, and huge. The QSS Newhope was falling fast, at twenty-seven kps—almost thirty kilometers per second. As fast as a comet. They were still a hundred and fifty million kilometers from the sun, but perihelion—their closest encounter with the furnace of Sol—would occur in just thirty days.

Practically speaking, there were human beings who had traveled faster than this. Several hundred of them, in fact. But Newhope was the largest object ever to break the ten kps barrier. Not the most massive, though, for it was capped fore and aft with shields of collapsium, a foam or crystal of tiny black holes, and the mass between these “ertial” shields kind of . . . dropped out of the universe or something. The ship and crew had mass, had inertia, but not enough. Not as much as the universe wanted them to. Such vessels could be flicked around effortlessly, with even the tiniest of forces generating enormous accelerations, barely felt by the crew inside.

But not many ertially shielded craft had ever traveled this fast, either. Generally speaking, it wasn't considered safe—any more than a hail of bullets could be considered safe. Interplanetary vacuum or no, there was a lot of debris to run into out here.

Conrad Mursk was sitting behind the captain and to her right, in the first mate's chair. Around them were the three other bridge officers: Astrogation and Helm; Sensors, Communications, and Information; and System Awareness. And as it happened, the captain was turning to look at Conrad at that very moment, her face framed beautifully against the window, a part of the planetary tableau. Conrad looked from her face to the moon to her face again, thinking that perhaps she had something to say, some fair words to mark the occasion. The little blue planet down there was her home, after all. But she eyed him instead without speaking, without acknowledging the view at all.

“You okay, Cap'n?”

His use of the title was partly in jest. Her name was Xiomara Li Weng, or Xmary to her friends, and she had no closer friend than Conrad Mursk. Technically speaking, this was a violation of all sorts of Naval protocols and traditions, but then again the two of them weren't really in any sort of navy, weren't even Merchant Spacers in a commercial fleet. Never had been, unless penny-ante space piracy counted as a branch of service these days. In fact, like everyone else on this ship, they were prisoners. Convicts, exiles, fakahe'i. This long adventure, this hundred-year voyage to Barnard's Star, was their punishment for years of antisocial behavior in general, and for the Children's Revolt in particular.

“Would you take a walk with me?” the captain asked, ignoring his ribbing along with the stunning view.

“Um, certainly,” Conrad answered. “Walk” was a euphemism indeed, since every deck on the ship was a circle exactly thirty meters wide. There wasn't a whole lot of walking you could do. But there was an observation lounge, and that was what Xmary meant.

“Robert,” she said to the astrogation officer, “you have bridge.”

“Aye, miss,” Robert said. He had long ago faxed his skin a bright shade of blue, with hair and eyes to match, and it had the effect of making everything he said and did seem sassy, though his tone was innocent enough.

She paused. “You want to keep it all night? Ninety-three days on this tub and you've never had the bridge for more than half a shift. You'd be all right with that, I assume?”

“Absolutely, miss. I've conned bigger tubs than this one, if you'll recall.”

“I'm aware of your record,” she said, wearily displeased. Indeed, she'd been along for part of it, dodging navy ships in the wilderness of the outer solar system. “And will you please call me Xmary?”

But Robert just smiled. They'd had this conversation before, and he seemed determined, for whatever reason, to stand on ceremony. Robert was a sort of pirate himself, having led a group of squatters onboard a Mass Industries neutronium barge for almost five years. Hell, he'd practically run the place—a vigilante handyman and amateur mass wrangler. He was also an avowed anarchist who'd railed for years—uselessly, Conrad thought—against the natural human tendency to form hierarchies and elect leaders. But for all of that, he still seemed to have an anomalous bit of Navy in him.

“Carry on, Number Three,” Conrad said to him crisply, just to carry the theme a little farther.

“Aye, sir. Carrying on, per your instruction.”

Conrad narrowed his gaze with what he imagined to be a Naval sort of ire. “Are you getting smart with me, Astrogation?”

“Doubtful, sir,” Robert replied bluely, “although if I feel any symptoms of smartness coming on I'll be sure to report them.”

“Do that, yes,” Conrad said, then couldn't keep from laughing.

For a variety of logistical, historical, and presumably sentimental reasons, the bridge was actually at the center of the ship's next-to-forwardmost deck, just five meters behind the ertial shielding. It was the only crew-accessible space on this particular deck. All around it, above and below and ringed around the sides, were storage tanks—the eight tons of water the ship's plumbing required as buffer and ballast. It also served as shielding, against radiation and particle impacts and God knew what else.

Conrad hadn't designed the ship, and truthfully, he wasn't all that familiar with the reasoning behind its design. He was only twenty-five years old—still a juvenile by Queendom of Sol standards—and had never held a job of any sort until Newhope's passengers had elected him first mate of the expedition three months ago. He was still learning his way around. Xmary, for her part, had just turned twenty-seven and had even less sailing experience than Conrad did. Systems was a twenty-year-old boy, Zavery Biko, and Information was manned (womaned?) by Agnes Moloi, who was twenty-nine. Blue Robert M'chunu, the old man of Astrogation, was thirty.