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Same as when the war ended, the War to end all wars, well, ended at least for the next year or so, before the peace heated up. Everybody was going to live high and wide and business was just going to take off like the proverbial bat out of the hot place.
Well, it might take off for some, and it had, but Dutchman's guesses were dependably wrong, and what mattered to them out here was the politics that occasionally flared through Beta, this or that company deciding to private-enterprise the old guys out of business. They'd privatized mining. That was no big surprise.
But—Sandman finished the coffee fizz and cycled the container—they didn't privatize the buoys. Every time they tried, the big haulers threatened no-show at Pell, because they knew the rates would go sky-high. More, the privatizers also knew they'd come under work-and-safety rules, which meant they'd actually have to provide quality services to the tenders, and bring a tender-ship like BettyBup to standard—or replace her with a robot, which hadn't worked the last time they'd tried it, and which, to do the job a human could, cost way more than the privatizers wanted to id their job,id away more secure than, say, Unicorn, who was probably a kid, probably signed on with one of the private companies, probably going to lose her shirt and her job the next time a sector didn't pan out as rich with floating junk as the company hoped.
But the Unicorns of the great deep were replaceable. There were always more. They'd assign them out where the pickings were supposed to be rich and the kids, after doing the mapping, would get out of the job with just about enough to keep them fed and bunked until the next big shiny deal . . . the next time the companies found themselves a field of war junk. Just last year the companies had had a damn shooting war, for God's sake, over the back end of a wrecked warship. They'd had Allied and Paris Metals hiring on young fools who'd go in there armed and stupid, each with a district court order that had somehow, between Beta and Gamma sectors, ended up in the Supreme Court way back on Pell—but not before several young fools had shot each other. Then Hazards had ruled the whole thing was too hot to work. Another bubble burst. Another of Dutchman's hot stock tips gone to hell. And a raft of young idiots got themselves stranded at Beta willing to work cheap, no safety questions asked.
So the system rolled on.
T_REX: Gotta go now. Hot date.
FROGPRINCE: Yeah. In your dreams, T_Rex.
You made the long run out from Beta, you passed through several cyberworlds—well, transited. Blended through them. You traveled, and the cyberflow from various members of the net just got slower and slower in certain threads of the converse. He could key up the full list of participants and get some conversations that would play out over hours. He'd rather not. Murphy's law said the really vital, really interesting conversations were always on the edges, and they mutated faster than your input could reach them. It just made you crazy, wishing you could say something timely and knowing you'd be preempted by some dim-brain smartass a little closer. So you held cyberchats of the mind, imagining all the clever things you could have said to all the threads you could have maintained, and then you got to thinking how far out and lonely you really were. He'd rather not. Even if the local chat all swirled about silly Unicorn. Even if he didn't know most of them: space was bigger, out here. Like dots on an inflated balloon, the available number of people was just stretched thin, and the ones willing to do survey and mine out here weren't necessarily the sanest.
Like buoy-tenders, who played chess with ghost-threads out of the dark and read antique books.
Last of the coffee fizz. He keyed up the French lessons. Comment allez-vous, mademoiselle?
And listened and sketched, a Teach Yourself Art course, correspondence school, that wanted him to draw eggs and put faces on them: he multitasked. He filled his screen with eggs and turned them into people he knew, some he liked, some he didn't, while he muttered French. It was the way to stay sane and happy out here, while BettyBdanced her way along the prescribed—
Alarm blipped. Usually the racket was the buoy noting an arrival, but this being an ecliptic buoy, it didn't get action itself, just relayed from the network, time-bound, just part of the fabric of knowledge—a freighter arrived at zenith. Somebody left at nadir.
Arrival, it said. Arrival within its range and coming—
God, coming fast. He scrambled to bring systems up and listen to Number 17. Number 17, so far as a robot could be, was in a state of panic, sending out a warning. Collision, collision, collision.
There was an object out there. Something Number 17 had heard, as it waited to hear—but Number 17 didn't expecttrouble anymore. Peacetime ships didn't switch off their squeal. Long-range scan on the remote buoys didn't operate, wasn't switched on these days—power-saving measure, saving the corporations maintenance and upkeep. Whatever it picked up was close. Damned close.
Maintenance keys. Maintenance could test it. He keyed, a long, long way from it receiving: turn on, wake up longscan, Number 17, Number 17.
He relayed Number 17's warning on, system-wide, hear and relay, hear and relay. He sent into the cyberstream:
SANDMAN: Collision alert from Number 17. Heads up.
But it was a web of time-stretch. A long time for the nearest authority to hear his warning. Double that to answer.
Number 17 sent an image, at least part of one. Then stopped sending.
Wasn't talking now. Wasn't talking, wasn't talking.
Hours until Beta Station even noticed. Until Pell noticed. Until the whole buoy network accounted that Number 17 wasn't transmitting, and that that section of the system chart had frozen. Stopped.
The image was shadowy. Near-black on black.
"Damn." An Outsider didn't talk much, didn't use voice, just the key-taps that filled the digital edges of the vast communications web. And he keyed.
SANDMAN: Number 17 stopped transmitting. Nature of object. . . SANDMAN: . . . Unknown. Vectors from impact unknown. . .
SANDMAN: . . . Impact one hour fifteen minutes before my location. The informational wavefront, that was. The instant of space-time with 17's warning had rolled past him and headed past Frog-Prince and Unicorn and the rest, before it could possibly reach Beta. They lived in a spacetime of subsequent events that widened like ripples in a tank, until scatter randomized the information into a universal noise.
And BettyBwas hurtling toward Number 17, and suddenly wasn't going anywhere useful. She might get the order to go look-see, in which case braking wasn't a good idea. She might get the order to return, but he doubted it would come for hours. Decision-making took time in boardrooms. Decision-making had to happen hell and away faster out here, with what might be pieces loose.
He shifted colors on the image, near-black for green. Nearer black for blue. Black stayed black. Ball with an inward or outward dimple and a whole bunch of planar surfaces. He didn't like what he saw. He transmitted his raw effort as he built it. Cigar-shape. Gray scale down one side of the image, magnification in the top line. Scan showed a flock of tiny blips in the same location. Scan was foxed. Totally.
"God."
SANDMAN: Transmitting image. Big mother.
A keystroke switched modes. A button-click rotated the colorized image. Not a ball. Cigar-shape head-on. Cigar-shape with deflecting planes all over it.
SANDMAN: It's an inert. An old inert missile, inbound. It's blown Buoy 17. . . SANDMAN: . . . Trying to determineV. Don't know class or mass. Cylindrical. SANDMAN: . . . Buoy gone silent. May have lost ante