Hellburner, p.1
HELLBURNER, page 1
HELLBURNER
Caroline J. Cherryh
alliance-union 02
INTRODUCTION
The Alliance/Union Universe
When one plots, one achieves connections. Connections are the source of ideas. And when one is dealing with a real space and real stars, as I do, in my own way of working, the simple fact that stories happen within this area, say, a century or so apart, suggests that there might exist a connection, and therefore other ideas spring up, and find locations and more connections.
In such a way, both Alliance and Union were born.
I realized fairly early on that I was finding such connections, and considering the path set by other makers of universes (such as Messrs Anderson and Dickson, among others) I thought that it might be a great and good thing to write down dates and to begin to make systematic records. So I spun off a computer listing from about 2,000 to about 5,000 A.D., figuring this might give me plenty of room, decided on a few foundational (and, I believe, likely) discoveries in the sciences, and began working out how long it would take for social and political changes to result.
For I do not believe in a monolithic state. Humans have throughout history been fractious and argumentative creatures to govern, and the development of a strong merchant class has inevitably led to outlying settlements. Outlying settlements, even with good communications, differ in daily experience from the central government, and therefore differ politically. So, I reason, human beings will have their differences.
Alliance develops out of the merchant trade. The merchanters, the faster-than-light freighters, are huge ships, some of the largest being veritable spacefaring villages run by a hierachy of captains, one for each shift, and are matrilinear (but not matriarchal) due to the lifestyle. Each ship is an ethnic entity unto itself, and may have a ship-speak different than the common language. At a point within the future history, the merchanters have formed an alliance which becomes a government centred first at Pell and then at Haven.
Union begins when Earth attempts to curtail emigration and to control free movement in her colonies. Union, founded by dissident scientists and engineers, artificially augments its population to build an industrial base faster than Earth believes possible.
The third power is Earth itself. Ancient, complex, and (by Alliance and Union standards of behaviour) unstable in policy, Earth is both loved for the ideal it represents and detested for its continual political ferment. Earth frequently fails to deal with problems created by its own supranational corporations, which have, any visitor soon discovers, a great deal of political influence. Corporate feuds and maneuverings are very important to Earth—but such deals, compromises, and trade-offs unfortunately do not comprehend or care to comprehend the foreignness it is attempting to rule.
Nearly all my science fiction books exist within this future history, and I have been even-handed: some are written from the Alliance side of things, some from Union’s, and a few from the viewpoint of outsiders. They were not written in any particular order, and there is no need to read them in order—as in real life, one drops into history at one's moment of birth and has to read up on what has happened. So any point of entry will do, and any order of understanding will do. The universe will still unfold itself as it should.
Heavy Time is, to date, the earliest. Hellburner comes directly after it. Alliance does not yet exist, but Union does, and the rumours of it are frightening to the merchanter captains, who have come to Earth as the motherworld and legitimate authority.
C. J. Cherryh, 1992
Chapter 1
Stockholm is a city of islands and gardens, a stunningly eclectic architectural mix, from the Rigsdagshus to the 23rd century Carlberg Museum, from the restored Riddarholm Kyrka to the Academy gardens…
Founded in the mid-thirteenth century, the city of Stockholm holds abundant evidence of a thousand years of Baltic sea-faring tradition, plus a lively nightlife centred in modern Gustavsholm—
Ben indexed through the motile pictures and the text, the statistics about rainfall and mean average temperature which the Guide cautioned a visitor did not in any sense mean a constant temperature. Useless statistic— unless one contemplated Antarctica, where a mean temperature of -57°C and an average hours of sunlight only slightly better than Sol Station core meant Ben Pollard had no interest in McMurdo Base. Ben Pollard had seen a good deal of cold and dark and rock in his life. Old rock. This thirteenth century business amazed him. The whole damn human race dated itself in eighteenths of Jupiter’s passes about the sun, to the astonishingly recent number of about 10k such fractions, if you took the oldest cities. astex R2 out in the Belt had been a skuz old place and a friend of his had sworn it had seen better days just in his lifetime, but when Ben Pollard thought old, he thought in millions. The rock he’d handled out there was old. Humankind was a real junior on those terms.
He sipped real orange juice, imported up from the blue, cloud-swirled globe you could see at any hour on channel 55, along with the weather reports anywhere in the motherwell.
Weather— was a novelty. Real weather. You got weather in a station core when they were blowing cold rock down the chute. You got condensation in your spacecraft and you swore like hell and wiped and dried and tried to find the source of it. But in the motherwell condensation fell out of the sky in frozen balls or slow flakes or liquid drops depending on the low level atmospheric temperatures, and k-wide clouds threw out electrical discharges that made it a very bad notion to stand (the Guide said) at the highest point on the landscape.
Daunting thought.
The Guide said 70 per cent of the Earth was water.
The Guide said water in the oceans was 10k meters deep in places, and because it wasn’t frozen, Luna's gravity pulled it up in a hump of a wave that rolled around the globe and washed at every shore it met, enough to grind up rock into beaches.
All that unfrozen water. Gaseous nitrogen and liquid water that made all that sparkle when the sun hit the wrinkles on it that the Guide said were waves.
He planned to stand on a beach and get a good close look at that unfrozen water. On a clear day, when there were no lightnings. You could do it from the station. You could be there while you were here, but vr was a cheat, you could be a whole lot of places that weren’t real. He wanted to stand at the edge of the ocean and watch the real sun disappear behind the real world, at which point he figured he would really believe he was standing on a negative curvature.
The Guide said some spacers got dizzy, with the horizon going the wrong direction. There were prescriptions for vertigo. There were preparatory programs. But hell, he’d monkeyed around the core at R2, and stared straight at the rotation interface. That had to be worse.
The clock on the screen said: 08:43 June 14, 2324. And there was plenty of time this morning for coffee. Dress maybe by 0930h. Exams were done, the last score was going up today, but, hell, that was Interactive Reality Sampling and he had that one in his pocket, no question, no sweat. Probably set the curve: him or Meeker, one or the other: just let the udc get that score, and Stockholm was in his pocket for sure, motherwell assignment in the safest, softest spot in the service except Orlando. Stockholm was where Ben Pollard was headed, yeah! soon as the interviewers could get up to station.
Hell and away from the Belt, he was. Here you didn’t jam two guys into a fifteen by six, hell, no, Sol Station and Admin? You got a whole effin’ fifteen by six .9 g apartment by yourself, with a terminal that could be vid or vr whenever you opted. If you qualified into the Programming track in the udc Technical Institute, you got an Allotment that afforded you 2c/d Personals per effin’ seven-day week, which meant oj that was real, coffee that was real, red meat that was real, if you had the stomach for it, which Ben personally didn’t—you lived like an effin’ Company exec and had a clearer conscience. And if you could get that on world posting, your tech/2 graduation rating equalled a full udc lieu-tenancy in the motherwell, with an Army first lieutenant’s pay to start, full grade technical/1 promotion guaranteed in a year, and access with a capital A to all the services that pay could buy. You knew there was a war out in the Beyond, but it wasn’t going to get to Earth, that was what they were building that Fleet out there to stop—and even if it did, nobody was going to hit the motherwell, humans just didn’t do that. You were safe down there. You’d be safe no matter what.
He’d got his graduation. With Honors, he was certain of it; he’d sweated his Security verifications, but they’d come through months ago, and nobody had come up with an objection; he’d sailed through the Administrative Service exams four weeks ago, and the only complication in his way now was the formal interview, as soon as the personnel reps from the various agencies could get seats on a shuttle up here—funding time and some legislative hearing in Admin had had the shuttle up-slots jammed with senators and brass and aides for the last three days; but that was thinning out, thank God. The agency interviewers might turn up by the end of the week, after which time—
After which he could book himself a seat for Earth on whatever assignment shook out—maybe even take his pick: Weiter had dropped him a conspiratorial word that he had three different computer divisions fighting over him, including strategic supply modeling and intelligence, and the prestigious ai lab in Geneva (which was for his personal ambitions a little too scientific and academic—give him something with a direct line to politics, God, yes. There was money in that, and a protected paycheck).
Money. A nice apartment down where you navigated a perceptually planar surface at a 300kph crawl, when he was used t o thinking in kps and nanosecond intersects. Life on Earth went so much slower and death came so much later for a man who had money, brains, and position.
He’d had a partner back in the Belt, Morrie Bird, who had used to talk to him about Colorado, and cities and sunsets and Shakespeare. Bird had set a lot of personal store by Shakespeare. Bird had thought Shakespeare was important to understand. So when it had turned out of all things that he was going to the inner system, he had made it a certain point to see this Shakespeare guy—translated tapes, of course. V-vids, where you could wander around and watch the body language. And Bird had been a hundred per cent right: Shakespeare really helped you figure Earthers. Blue-skyers. People who had never felt null-g, never seen the stars all the way to forever—different people, with numbers hard to figure; people who thought they had a natural right to orange juice and gravity, people who (the Guide maintained) felt the moon tides in their blood.
Getting the right numbers in a new situation absolutely mattered. On Earth air was free and ship routes and energy were what the old Earthers had fought bloody wars over. Sincerely skewed values—but you had to think about that two-dee surface constantly, and it was limited that way. Finite. Finite resources. Shakespeare helped you see that—helped you see how certain old Earthers in control of those resources had thought they could run your life, the same as Company execs. And how these king-types always talked about God and their rights, like the preachers on R2’s helldeck, who snagged you with tracts and talked to you about free-shares in their particular afterlife and argued whether the aliens at Pell had souls. Only these old kings had been the preachers and the law and the bank.
Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school learning nothing but Company numbers —to figuring Shakespeare and human history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide said so.
Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.
Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the Zoological Garden in Haga Park…
A planet that wasn’t a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food that wasn’t synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the co2 on sunlight and dark; and habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept, non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took for granted, and ate, if it didn’t look too much like people.
He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back at, when he’d never expected to see any real thing more exotic than miners on R&R and bugs under a lab scope.
Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.
He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much blue-sky attitude he still couldn’t get the straight of. Baroque, was the word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings, that didn’t have a damn thing to do with useful—
The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.
God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1 to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about the motion. It said:
TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard
CTS/SS/udc 28 BAT 2
0852JUN14/24 SN P-235-9876/MLR
Report to fso-hq, 0930h/ref/Simons
Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?
What in bloody hell?
MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn’t gotten the message. No way to query the co. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn’t have the answer, and he’d effin’ better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted with a udc lad, hadn’t he?
It wasn’t an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn’t need a udc programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply modeling. Did they?
Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the udc eidat with the Fleet’s Staatentek system through the ec security screen, that was what. The Fleet’s Staatentek tried to phone the udc’s eidat 4005 to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind the ec’s security cloak, spat up a udc Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—
But you couldn’t ignore it. You didn’t want to face the interviews with an interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!
No second cup of coffee. He drank the half he had left while his fingers tapped up the station map and asked it where in hell fso-hq was on the trans system from his apartment in ti 12 for a 0930h appointment.
9:15 2 green to 14, blue to 5-99: pass required for entry.
Hell and gone from ti, and it was already 9 o’clock. Ten effin’ minutes to shave, dress and find his copy of his rating, which clearly said udc Priority Technical/2, before the Fleet grabbed him and stuck him at Mars Base doing data entry in Supply.
He burned the beard off, pulled on his dress blues: never wear fatigues to an interservice glitch-up. He had to talk to officers, no question, before this one was straightened out, maybe all the way up the effin’ coc in the udc and the Fleet. It could be a long day.
Envelope from udc Technical at Geneva in the briefcase, where it belonged. He put it in his breast pocket.
Never a friggin’ situation without a last friggin’ minute complication. God, he didn’t know why things like this happened to him. His interview appointment could come through at any hour, he didn’t want Meeker to grab the first slot—first effin’ thing he was going to do if they gave him Geneva was put the shove on that damned ec software.
He checked his watch. 0908. Five minutes to walk to the trans. Orders in his pocket. Yes. And out the door.
Trans was packed. A whole wide-eyed batch of shiny new C-ls with their entry tags and their hand-baggage occupied all the seats, and Ben clung with an elbow about a pole and punched buttons on the hand reader, running down the applicable rules on interservice transfer apps.
Wasn’t any reason to sweat it. Couldn’t be. Weiter’d shoved him through three levels in a year… He was Weiter’s fair-haired baby, best Weiter had ever had in the department. Him and Meeker, neck and neck all the way. No way Weiter wouldn’t go up the chain for him.
Green 14. He made the transfer and lost the C-ls—thank God. He got a seat, sat down and read.
Right of appeal. Ref: Administrative Appeal,Sec.14… through chain of command in service of origin.
In service of origin. Which meant the United Defense Command, which wasn’t, never mind Fleet Captain Conrad Mazian’s performance at the UN, going to let the Fleet get its hands on whatever it wanted.
Blue line now. Institution blue. The walls outside the spex in the doors grew skuzzier and skuzzier and the air that sucked in when the doors opened was cold and smelled of oil.
Descent into hell, Ben thought. Like R2 all over again. He sat in his dress uniform and watched the scenery, dark tunnel and grim flashes of gray-blue panels and white station numbers as the trans shot past stops without a call punched. Thump of the section seals. He could almost smell helldeck, all but hear the clash of metal and the hard raucous beat of the music echoing down the deck. He smelled the peculiar taint of cold machinery and kept having this most damnable feeling of—
—belonging in the dark side, living on the cheap, getting by, scamming the Company cops and knowing he could always slip through the system, knowing far more about the Company computers and access numbers than the Company thought he’d learned. Him and Bird.—And Sal Aboujib.
