“It doesn’t seem like anybody here knows about the war,” I said.
“We hear things. Well, truth be told, we all heard things. The missionaries that flew us here told us about it, but it didn’t sound serious. It didn’t sound like more than a little uprising.”
“You never followed the war on the mediaLink?”
“And what would that be?” she asked.
“What would what be?” I asked feeling thoroughly confused.
“You said something about following the war on something or other.”
“The mediaLink,” I said. “That’s the news source.”
“I can’t say I have ever heard of it,” she said.
“It’s too late now,” I said. “It receives communications signals sent through the Broadcast Network. You do know about the Broadcast Network.”
“Yes,” she said, feigning that she was offended. “I know about the Broadcast Network.”
“When they destroyed the Network, they shut down communications as well as travel. Close as I can figure, it would take a laser signal 70,000 years to get from Earth to Delphi. Without the Broadcast Network, they might as well be sending smoke signals.”
“So it’s all true. The entire Republic is shut down,” Marianne said.
“Everyone is on their own,” I said. “It’s just that some planets are better off than others.”
“So why did you come here?” Marianne asked. “You have that self-broadcasting ship. You can go anywhere.”
“I asked Ray where he wanted to go, and he said he wanted to come here.”
“And you went where he asked. ‘Where you go, I will go …Where you lodge, I will lodge also …Your people shall be my people.’ You’re a modern version of Ruth, Mr. Harris.”
I didn’t know what that meant and I had never heard of Ruth, but Marianne’s smile charmed me. “Maybe we should look in on the meeting,” I said. “I don’t want to start tongues wagging.”
“Are you worried about my reputation?” Marianne asked. “Don’t worry about me. Those tongues are already wagging. That’s how life goes on a small planet.”
“How did it go?” I asked Freeman as we settled down to sleep in the Starliner. Archie could not find beds for us. He could not find sheets for us, but he did have pillows.
“They don’t want to leave,” Freeman said. He stripped off his chest armor and stepped out of his coveralls. Stripped down to his boxers, he stretched out as best he could. “They think they can talk their way out of this.”
“They want to reason it out with a fighter carrier?” I asked.
I had never seen Freeman stripped down. The massive muscles in his chest and arms looked powerful, but not defined. He did not look like a bodybuilder. He had the build of a blacksmith or a construction worker. “They think God delivered them here.”
Marianne had said as much when we were talking. Images of Marianne ran through my head. Was I infatuated, I asked myself, or just lonely? So many new emotions clouded my thinking since the fall of the government that I no longer trusted myself. I wanted to ask Freeman about his sister, but I was afraid of tipping him off to my thoughts.
We slept on reclining seats that only reclined to a forty-five-degree angle. The weight of our heads never left our necks.
“You landed on an engineered planet once, didn’t you?” Freeman asked.
“Ezer Kri,” I said. “That’s where we caught Kline. You were there, remember?”
“No, an unpopulated one,” Freeman said.
“Ronan Minor,” I said, remembering the mission.
“It wasn’t called something Kri?” The term kri denoted a planet with an engineered atmosphere.
“It was a shitty place.” I rolled over in my seat and hit the panel to turn out the lights. “What do you think is happening on Earth?”
Freeman thought about this. “Depends who comes out on top. If the Confederate Arms win, they’ll fly in armies. The outer arms always had good ground forces, they just couldn’t protect them.
“If the Mogats made out, it will be worse. The Mogats, they don’t care about colonizing. They don’t want to occupy Earth. All they want is to erase every vestige of the Unified Authority.
“It’s only been a few days …The Mogats and the Confederates may not be through killing each other yet,” I said.
“Harris, you think we could relocate these folks on Ronan Minor?”
“They wouldn’t like it,” I said. “It was a jungle and the only life on it is cockroaches and rats.”
Freeman understood what I meant immediately. Ships are not allowed to land on engineered planets until they are declared stable. When squatters trespass on these planets, vermin escape from their ships. On a planet like Ronan Minor, where the vegetation is profuse and there are no natural predators, rat and cockroach populations proliferate.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Talk about your flat-world society …Archie Freeman did not believe that there could still be a fighter carrier floating out somewhere around his planet. It took some arm-twisting, but Ray talked him and three of the elders into a trip to the broadcast discs. We would show them that the discs were dead, do a radar sweep to see if we could find any trace of the fighter carrier, and maybe look around. Ray Freeman did not come for the ride.
Archie and his brethren were novices at space travel. They had never been in a self-broadcsting ship, and the idea of it scared the hell out of them. The old man had to brace himself just to climb into the copilot’s seat of the Starliner. He did not complain or ask me to be careful. He looked around the cabin nervously and tried to sound comfortable.
“You know,” he said in a confidential tone that suggested this was a big confession, “I always wondered what it would be like to go up in one of these.” He laughed. Now that he was in true confession mode, he went on. “Self-broadcasters remind me of the early days of airplanes and daredevils flying through barns. Ho, ho, ho.” He laughed a beautiful baritone laugh.
The elders, men in their thirties if I had to guess, sat in the first row of the cabin. They strapped themselves in and did not speak. They seemed to share Archie’s outer fear of self-broadcasting ships not his inner enthusiasm.
“Do you understand how self-broadcasting works?” I asked Archie as we strapped ourselves into our seats. I, of course, only had the shallowest grasp, but a farmer/colonist like Archie would not care about the specifics. All he cared about would be the base fundamentals.
“It will be just like flying into a broadcast disc,” I said.
“The broadcast discs were destroyed,” Archie said.
“Not destroyed …just unplugged,” I said, for lack of finding a better way to explain myself.
“They don’t have power?” Archie clarified.
“Right. This ship can broadcast itself. There will be an electrical field around the ship right before we broadcast. It’s supposed to be there. There will be a bright flash, and when we come out, we’ll be near the broadcast discs.”
“What if we run into that carrier?” Archie asked as I powered up my console.
“We could,” I said, “but I’m betting that they went to the discs, found them dead, and have already turned back toward Little Man.”
“Delphi,” Archie said.
“Excuse me?” I asked.
“We call the planet Delphi. ”
“Right. Sorry.”
“What happens if we run into that carrier? I don’t see any guns on your ship.”
“I don’t have any.”
“Can you outrun a carrier?”
I hit the button to start charging the broadcast engine. “Not a chance. Those ships hit thirty million per hour. I might be able to do six million miles at best.”