He was briefly ill. In the first couple of weeks, everybody caught colds from everybody else. But the viruses quickly ran their course through the Ship’s small population, and Rusel felt obscurely reassured that he would likely never catch another cold in his life.
A few days after launch Diluc came to find him. Rusel was up to his elbows in slurry, trying to find a fault in a nanofood bank’s waste vent. Working non-stop, Rusel had seen little of his brother. He was surprised by how cheerful Diluc appeared, and how energetically he threw himself into his own work on the air cycling systems. He spoke brightly of his ‘babies’, fans and pumps, humidifiers and dehumidifiers, filters and scrubbers and oxygenators.
In their reaction to the sudden severance of the launch, the crew seemed to be dividing into two rough camps, Rusel thought. There were those like Diluc who were behaving as if the outside universe didn’t exist; they were bright, brash, too loud, their laughter forced. The other camp, to which Rusel felt he belonged, retreated the other way, into an inner darkness, full of complicated shadows.
But today Diluc’s mood seemed complex. ‘Brother, have you been counting the days?’
‘Since launch? No.’ He hadn’t wanted to think about it.
‘It’s day seven. There’s a place to watch. One of the observation lounges. Captain Andres says it’s not compulsory, but if…’
It took Rusel a moment to think that through. Day seven: the day the Coalition convoy was due to reach Port Sol. Rusel flinched from the thought. But one of his worst moments of that chaotic launch day was when he had run down that desperate father and driven on, without even having the courage to watch what he was doing. Perhaps this would atone. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said.
Ship Three, like its four siblings, was a fat torus. To reach the observation lounge the brothers had to ride elevators up through several decks to a point in the Ship’s flattened prow, close to the rim. The lounge, crammed with Virtual generation gear, was already configured for the spin-up phase to come, and most of its furniture was plastered to the walls, which would become the floor. It was big enough for maybe fifty people, and it was nearly full; Rusel and Diluc had to crowd in. Pharaoh Andres – now Captain Andres, Rusel reminded himself – was here, sitting in a deep, heavy-looking chair, front and centre before an immense, shining Virtual.
A ball of ice spun grandly before their eyes. It was Port Sol, of course; Rusel immediately recognised its icy geography of ancient craters, overlaid by a human patterning of quarries and mines, habitats and townships, landing ports. In the inhabited buildings lights shone, defiantly bright in outer-system gloom. It was a sculpture in white and silver, and it showed no sign of the chaotic panic that must be churning in its corridors.
The sight took Rusel’s breath away. Somewhere down there was Lora; it was an almost unbearable thought, and he wished with all his heart he had stayed with her.
The Coalition convoy closed in.
Its ships materialised from the edge of the three-dimensional image, as if sliding in from another reality. The fleet was dominated by five, six, seven Spline warships. Confiscated from the expelled Qax, they were living ships each a kilometre or more wide, their hulls studded with weapons and sensors and crudely scrawled with the green tetrahedron that was the sigil of liberated humanity.
Rusel’s stomach filled with dread. ‘It’s a heavy force,’ he said.
‘They’ve come for the pharaohs,’ Diluc said grimly. ‘The Coalition is showing its power. Images like this are no doubt being beamed throughout the system.’
Then it began. The first touch of the energy beams, cherry-red, was almost gentle, and Port Sol ice exploded into cascades of glittering shards that drifted back to the surface, or escaped into space. Then more beams ploughed up the ice, and structures began to implode, melting, or to fly apart. A spreading cloud of crystals began to swathe Port Sol in a temporary, pearly atmosphere. It was silent, almost beautiful, too large-scale to make out individual deaths, a choreography of energy and destruction.
‘We’ll get through this,’ Diluc muttered. ‘We’ll get through this.’
Rusel felt numbed, no grief, only shame at his own emotional inadequacy. This was the destruction of his home, of a world, and it was beyond his imagination. Worse, Port Sol, which had survived the alien occupation of the solar system, was being devastated by humans. How could such things happen? He tried to focus on one person, on Lora, to imagine what she must be doing if she was still alive: perhaps fleeing through collapsing tunnels, or crowding into deep shelters. But, in the ticking calm of this lounge, with its fresh smell of new equipment, he couldn’t even picture that.
As the assault continued, numbers flickered across the status display, an almost blasphemous tallying of the estimated dead.
Even after the trauma of Port Sol, work had to continue on booting up the vital systems that would keep them all alive.
Rusel’s own job, as the senior nanochemist on the Ship, was to set up the nanofood banks that would play a crucial part in recycling waste into food and other consumables like clothing. The work was demanding from the start. The banks were based on an alien technology, nano-devices purloined from the occupying Qax; only partially understood, they were temperamental and difficult.
It didn’t help that of the two assistants he had been promised a share of – most people were generalists in this small, skill-starved new community – only one had made it onto the Ship. It turned out that in the final scramble about ten per cent of the crew had been left behind; conversely, about ten per cent of those who actually were aboard shouldn’t have been here at all. A few shame-faced ‘passengers’ were yellow-uniformed Enforcers who in the last moments had abandoned their posts and fled to the sanctuary of the Ship’s interior.
The work had to get done anyhow. And it was urgent; until the nanofood was available the Ship’s temporary rations were steadily depleting. The pressure on Rusel was intense. But Rusel was glad of the work, so hard mentally and physically in the high gravity he had no time to think, and when he hit his couch at night he slept easily.
On the fifteenth day Rusel achieved a small personal triumph as the first slab of edible food rolled out of his nano-banks. Captain Andres had a policy of celebrating small achievements, and she was here as Rusel ceremoniously swallowed the first mouthful of his food, and she took the second. There was much clapping and back-slapping. Diluc grinned in his usual huge way. But Rusel, numbed inside, didn’t feel much like celebrating. People understood; half the crew, it was estimated, were still in some kind of shock. He got away from the crush as quickly as he could.
On the twenty-first day the Ship was to encounter Jupiter.
Captain Andres called the crew together in the acceleration-couch amphitheatre, all two hundred of them, and she set up a Virtual display in the air above them. Few of the crew had travelled away from Port Sol before; they craned to see. The sun was just a pinpoint, though much brighter than seen from Port Sol, and Jupiter was a flattened ball of cloud, racked with storm systems like bruises – the result, it was said, of an ancient battle.
The most intriguing sight of all was four sparks of light that slid across the background of stars. They were the other Ships, numbers One, Two, Four and Five; the little fleet would come together at Jupiter for the first time since leaving Port Sol, and the last.
Andres walked though the crowd on their couches, declaiming loudly enough for all to hear, her authority easy and unforced. ‘We pharaohs have been discussing destinations,’ she said. ‘Obviously the targets had to be chosen before we reached Jupiter; we needed to plan for our angles of emergence from Jupiter’s gravity well. The Coalition is vindictive and determined, and it has faster-than-light ships. It will soon overtake us – but space is big, and five silent-running generation starships will be hard to spot. Even so it’s obviously best to separate, to give them five targets to chase, not just one.