The Blue Marble Gambit (3 page)

It
was also a novel way to get me aboard ship, since I was technically on leave
and had I known he was looking for me would have raced in the opposite
direction. We had long ago established
that I was better at running than he was at chasing.

"You
almost let me get killed," I cried. The kill team, after all, could have just done their job without making
sport of it.

"Hardly,"
harrumphed the Admiral.

"That
kill team was good!" I countered. “Three species!" Multiple aliens gave a kill team three times the resources. Different species had different sensory
organs, different tactics,
different
instincts. A multi-species team was one of the
hardest to beat. It was mere luck
that had enabled me to flush the whole slimy gang into deep space.

He
was shaking his great head paternally. “Well, you were the one who decided to socialize with your own
assassins."

"Point
two: I'm on leave!"

"Leave,"
he harrumphed. “Cancelled."

Cancelled. I let out a shriek.
The fabled leisure
world of Eros?
The zero G hot tubs?
The orbital feather baths?
Cancelled? "But why?"

"Playing
poker with aliens is against regs. You know that."

It
all
clicked,
with a grinding, ratcheting sound only I
could hear.

"You
set me up!" Given his own sly way, it was plain as day. He had engineered where I was released
on leave, which under his own Fist regs he grudgingly had to allow me, knowing
that I would head towards Eros. A
path that would take me temptingly
close
to the
Round-N-Round, site of the irresistible CasinoPlex. Naturally I would drop in. I hadn't thought him that devious, but I
was still learning. He had a few
decades on me. Just as years add
rings to trees, they add serpentine twists and turns to a mind as devious and
intricate as his.

He
was shaking his head. “It's not
what you're thinking, Court," he said. He had an uncanny knack for knowing what
one was thinking, and for answering unasked questions. I attributed it to our shared blood, but
in fact he could do it with most people. He simply understood how the human brain worked, and was a master of
reading expression. “If I was going
to go to all that trouble, I would have just changed the regs. Or broken them."

True
enough, I realized. There was no
higher authority than him.
But then why had he been here, if not for the sole purpose of
snaring me?

He
explained it before I could ask. “I
need you to save Earth."

"Oh
shut up." He always said something like that when assigning me dull,
bureaucratic tasks.

He
frowned, deeply and magnificently. “No, I really mean it this time."

And
he did.

CHAPTER 3
. TIMECRUNCH

The
Admiral's briefing room was a cavern so huge it seemed that a hole had been
carved in space and wrapped with ship. Uncle Admiral, or as I sometimes called him to his equal dismay, Admiral
Uncle, eased behind the huge twisted block of raw meteor that made up his desk,
exercising his facial muscles in calisthenics that finally settled into a
frown.

Just
as the
eskimos
have a hundred words for snow, Admiral
Fairchile had a custom glossary of facial expressions. Not just any expressions, but mutant scowls,
half-breed sneers, and unpleasant grins. Occasionally, just to keep things interesting, a black moue would mate
with a grinding snarl to sire a new species of twisted glower.

The
Admiral himself wasn't a particularly large man yet he seemed enormous. This was partly due to his deep-chested
build, but even more a result of his ability to, in a single nanosecond,
transform himself into
a shouting
, blathering,
sweating demon. Alternatively, with
a single icy mutter he might deliver a death sentence. He was worth close attention, blood
relative or no, for his mind was sharper than a monomolec blade and twistier
than a wormhole, while his sense of family loyalties took a distinct back seat
to the needs of the Blue Marble.

"Sit
down, diz Astor," the Admiral ordered.

I
sat.

"Now
pay attention, Court," the Admiral continued. I put on my attentive face, although I
was focused on something else. While moving to the briefing room I'd felt the characteristic bump-bump
of going TL, and knew that the trans-light drive had kicked in. More bumps. And then still more. The Admiral had one of the fastest ships
anywhere, a result of his control over almost unlimited resources. We had to be cracking along.
But where?

"Where
are we going?" I asked calmly.

The
Admiral ignored my question.
Nothing unusual
there.

"As
I indicated, we have a . .
. Problem
, Court." The way he
said problem, with a little pause and a grimace and a capital letter, called an
old and familiar unsettled feeling back from wherever it went when it wasn't in
the pit of my stomach. It eased in
somewhere below my duodenum, a spot as accustomed and comfy for it as an easy
chair.

"I'm
listening."

"Wrong
sense. Watch," Admiral
Fairchile said, turning his chair to face the
side wall
. I turned as well, and watched as the
misty translucence of a wall-holo in warm-up mode appeared. It cleared momentarily, and the view was
of an enormous black sheet, with one tiny bright hole in the center.

"Recognize
it?" asked the Admiral.

I
didn't offer the entirely accurate observation that it could be any one of
billions of black sheets perforated by a single tiny hole.

"Ah,
no, not yet."

"Keep
watching, then." He smoothed his regulation-purple Fleet tunic.

The
tiny bright spot began to grow, ever so slightly. And looking closer, I could see other
bright spots, very tiny, in the background. Stars.
And one star in
particular.
But which?

Well,
it was a Type 7 like Sol, yellow like Sol. As yet, I couldn't see any planets. I hunted in the background for constellations, but couldn't make any
out.

Then
another ingredient was added to the soup. Along the right side of the display, a third of the way down, a glowing
symbol appeared in lurid red. It
was an odd amalgam of dots and lines, like a combination of ancient Arabic and
Chinese hallucinated by a feverish speaker of neither. A similar but different symbol appeared
in the top right corner, and then two-thirds of the way down the side. After the next one took the lowermost
position, other symbols filled in the gaps until there were none. Then, they all disappeared, and another
procession followed, except that this time the symbols appeared to be
different, and they filled the various positions in a different order.

On
the screen, the camera ship - assuming there was a ship involved - veered away
from the central sun and turned toward a smaller, duller light.

A
planet.

A blue and white planet.

I
decided to venture out onto a limb. Way out. “Looks like Earth,
sir." I added the "sir" in case that was a stupid observation;
the Admiral's uncharacteristic silence had me on edge.

Uncle
agreed with a wry face. Next in the
queue, by my calculations, should be a sardonic grin. “Yes, Earth.
Mother of the human
race.
Because there are so
few inhabitable planets, Earth is still the only human world on which we can
live without artificial environments. Earth is our anchor; without her, our colonies would die. Earth is humanity's linchpin."

I
knew all this. Inhabited planets
were few and far between; humans had been latecomers to a Galactic land rush
that was eons old. Flush with the
success of reaching the stars, we suddenly found ourselves to be like
aborigines setting out in canoes to colonize Earth in the 21st century: most
everything was taken, and no one was the least bit impressed with us, except of
course ourselves. And so though we
had footholds throughout our own system and on a few distant burnt cinders of
planets, Earth remained humanity's past and future. There was no telling why the inscrutable
Admiral was sharing this with me - he may have spoken for a simple reason such
as setting the stage, or for a more complex reason, or even for no reason at
all; it could have been simple misdirection.

On
screen, the camera ship slid into Earth orbit. While most ships followed the
well-defined corridors along the ecliptic, this one forged a different path, a
high polar route. Up and over the
brilliant
ice-cap
- it looked rather big - and down
the gray-blue slate of the Atlantic Ocean, frosted by white swirls of
clouds. The view rolled over the
Atlantic, a dark gray-blue beneath white swirls of clouds. It reminded me of my carefree days
before I had been dragooned into The Fist; the origins of my own strange trip
were right there on the screen, tiny and blue. The sea.
Specifically, the
Atlantic of the sixteenth century.
Had it not been for Blackbeard and Bluebeard, Long John Silver and Sir
Francis Drake, my life would have followed a very different course, perhaps.

For
while growing up in the later years of the stultifying twenty-third century I
had made two observations. First,
Earth was a staggeringly dull place, a wonderland of the
carefully-controlled
and safety-sealed, all smothered under the gray monolith of GovCorp, which ran
everything and everyone. This
situation was a natural outgrowth of events that began in the early
twenty-first century, when MicroCola, the softdrinkware conglomerate, achieved
a corporate coup by acquiring the entire nation of Bolivia as a
wholly-owned
subsidiary. Just like that, llamas, remote Andean
villages, and rocks and stones and glaciers became corporate assets, tiny items
of fine print listed on musty ledgers, bits of data buried on accounting
spreadsheets.

Not
to be outdone, Hewlett-GMitsu picked up Chile on the cheap, in a fire sale
after a disastrous accident derailed the
newly-elected
government's plan to convert the entire economy to Chiclet production. Then, in a neat trick, MicroCola and
Hewlett-GMitsu merged, to form the ultra giant Microbitsu. Meanwhile, on a parallel course, the
unified North American Government, or NAG, continued its decades-old process of
fossilizing and congealing into a single shapeless mass of bureaucracy.

Years
passed, with NAG nibbling lazily at the last independent bureaus – the
New Key West Lady's Temperance Society was the last to succumb, as I recall -
while Microbitsu foraged on other corporations. Both corporations and governments share
a common urge to expand, and both ate and ate and ate. Pickings became slimmer and
slimmer. Bureaucratic bellies
growled, as it became plain that each had fully occupied their respective
universes. But each wished to grow! It was their mandate! Their reason for being! Yet further expansion could come only
from merging together the disparate Government and Corporate sectors. Many analysts warned that this was a
remarkably poor idea, for a remarkably long list of remarkably good
reasons. The disparate Government
and Corporate sectors thanked the many analysts for their many analyses. And then promptly merged.

Within
decades - these things take time - the world's once-fractious array of
Government and Corporate bureaus had fused into a single immobile monolithic
entity. GovCorp.

Within
the planet-spanning, institutional-beige walls of GovCorp - and here, perhaps
finally, is where my observation comes in - there was a place for
everyone. In fact, there was the
same place for everyone, since all the real work was automated. GovCorp was thousands of layers of
administration, millions of managers busily managing each other.
A universe of Chiefs
with not an Indian in sight.
Infinite heat and zero light.
Endless motion without
movement.
Tiny cogs rolled
out of the schools, slid into the huge machine, busily turned until they wore
out, and then were replaced. To me,
as a future, it was preferable to being chained to a rock and having a
re-generating liver ripped out every day by an eagle.
But not by much.

Which
was why my second observation came in so handy. This observation was simply that while
humanity was plodding along, convinced of our linear progress into the future,
history had snuck off, hidden behind a tree, back-tracked, perhaps given off a
misleading animal call, and neatly circled around to repeat itself.

For
the regular interplanetary
liners which
plied the
routes between the planets and the roid belt were in several critical ways
nearly identical to the sailing ships of old. The similarities occurred in deep space,
where the liners were: Isolated. Helpless. Wealth-stuffed. And even, at first, Unsuspecting.

As
I saw it, my first observation presented the problem
;
my second, the solution. For
history hadn't yet completely repeated itself
;
while
wealth-stuffed liners blundered from planet to planet to asteroid, so far no
one had thought to bring to the stars what is truly mankind's oldest
institution. No, not that. Crime.
In this case, piracy.

That
omission was, for me, opportunity. The hidebound, cautious culture of Earth, which grew most people neat as
corn stalks in their cruelly disciplined rows, had turned me into a weed. As I finished my schooling and neared
graduation my future was grim as the toxic wasteland of an ancient nuke dump. The sole fate available to the lumpen
masses - lifetime service in the globe-girdling, globe-strangling GovCorp -
awaited me with implacable calm, like a giant anteater patiently awaiting a
tasty tiny ant. To the anteater a
single ant is but a momentary flash of ant-juice, a flicker of ant-ness on the taste
buds, gone and forgotten in a moment. But to the ant, the transaction is far more sinister, the loss
immeasurably greater.

This
ant decided to dodge that slurping tongue and break a new trail, using the same
distance and isolation that brought so much fun and excitement to various
peg-legged, eye-patch wearing, parrot-toting adventurers centuries before. It wasn't for the money; my family was
well off. In fact, both my parents
were paragons of civic virtue, a factor that served only as fertilizer for the
seed sprouting within me, a seed
which
soon bore
fruit. Fruit emblazoned with a
skull and crossbones.

Piracy. Crime was almost unknown on Earth - the
people were sheep, docile and polite, helpless in the grip of the all-knowing,
all-seeing GovCorp. It would be
taking candy from babies.
Big, rich babies.
A life of danger, challenge, and adventure, like those of the pirates of
centuries before. Like my
predecessors, I ignored the bits about scurvy and death and walking the plank.

When
I was caught - through the rudest and most traitorous circumstances imaginable
- instead of being strung from the yardarm or forced to walk the plank I was
consigned to the Fist.

Where
I'd been ever since.

The
Admiral made a small grunting sound. It was an idiosyncrasy that meant he was extremely agitated. The reason was on screen.

The
camera ship continued its orbit. I
looked for the large orbital stations, or any of the automated nav beacons,
most of which project asteroid-sized holo-ads touting ChemSticks, inhalants, or
even, due to yet another wave of nostalgia, old-fashioned imbibants. None appeared, which was odd, because
from that position the black of space should have been littered with colorful
ads crafted by Earth's best and brightest. This was a uniquely human waste; while other cultures steered their
premier intellects into science or research or policy, on Earth, except for a
select few, these gifted individuals peddled mouthwash for competing divisions
of GovCorp.

I
dismissed Heaven and looked to Earth. If I kept that trend up, my next view would be of - never mind.