There you are! Let’s see … where were we … Ah!
One of the fallouts of finding Bomorov’s Honeycomb Comet was an astronomy boom. Not only were people more interested and willing to spend more money, some of the HX technology found on the Sol fragments made telescopes better.
The new telescopes discovered that propulsion technology was being used in a small region a couple of light-years from Altair. Further observation determined that several kinds of propulsion systems were being used in the Altair Mystery, as it was called then, not just one. Why would a bunch of spaceships be jetting around a limited volume of interstellar space? We all wanted one answer to be true: It’s an HX fragment, or a ship … only a new one!—not a millions-of-years-old crumb of a piece, like a Sol Fragment!
And even if that wasn’t the case, it was bound to be something at least as interesting.
Once we Sol and Alpha Centauri humans realized this, we wanted our piece of the action! Well … some of us did. Some of us were deadly opposed to exploring it. They made the old argument, “This stuff is deadly dangerous and if we mess around we’ll get badly burned!” It comes up every time we humans find a new piece of the HX puzzle.
That argument gets old, but it has to get answered each time, and that’s where politics grows thick. In the first wave three ships were sent, each representing a different section of the Solar System. Sounds nice, but the three were supposed to be a team, too. But instead of picking a team based on previous experience together, we picked a team based on individual popularity with constituents.
Jonas got selected on his name. He represented Earth, of all places! But then again, what other off-Earth name did Earthlings know so well? I’m not sure he’d ever set foot on the planet until he went to formally accept the appointment, but having a famous great-grandfather from there was apparently connection enough. Anyway, it was technically the Mercury ship, because the xenophobe parties on Earth were strong enough to keep Earth’s name off any ship targeting alien life, even though xenophile Earth interests were financing it. And Aniston Jonas was born on Mercury.
Pardon an old man for meandering around the facts.
It was Czernak more than anybody else who politicked Jonas in as Earth-Mercury ship captain. Then Jonas returned the favor by helping to get Czernak in as the Mars ship captain. But when the other Czernak boosters, some very powerful people, were done with their arm twisting, there were a lot of other powerful people who were unhappy with the choice. The next strongest candidate had been Fatima Ziade, and it didn’t help that Kwame Mandalay, another male, had gotten the Belt ship, the Zheng He—never mind that we Belters were still about 4 to 1 male. And never mind that Mandalay had just about single-handedly raised the funding for the Zheng He, part of it from the Titanians, whom we never quite classified as dirtsiders, nearly half of it from other sources outside the Belt,and the rest by convincing the Benevolent and Protective Order of Spacers (the nearest thing to a Belter government) to float 99-year bonds to pay for the rest.
So the anti-Czernak crowd voted with their pocketbooks, and the Burroughs was plagued with low community support, low funding, and a higher level of corruption than usual, so it was delayed a full year. Ironically, we were still learning so fast from Sol Fragment tech that the year’s delay from all that constituent negativity made the Mars ship higher performance than the other two! So it was able to catch up with the other two ships, which had launched on schedule, by flying just a bit better than their 0.1G.
I was in the ten-ship second wave that launched 9 years later, in 2251. We’d advanced a lot more, so those ships were both better and cheaper to build. They carried 150 crew each, compared to a hundred in each first-wave ship, and like them could accommodate twice as many, as a safety measure. More important, we could maintain 0.3G. The first-wave ships took about 28 years to get to the Altair Sphere, measured by planetary time, 23 ship time. Our ships took only 20 planetary and a mere dozen ship time. So when we arrived the first wave had been on station just under a year.
Of course we would have liked to study our destination as we approached it. But for most of the journey that was impossible. When you’re moving at relativistic speeds—near the speed of light—everything in front of you is an X-ray haze and everything behind you is microwave dark. To top it off, when we decelerated, the engine exhaust got in the way of forward viewing. But when we were a light-year out and down to about 0.5C, the picture cleared rapidly.
And what a picture it was! Ships were darting this way and that, “like fish around a coral reef”, as one Jamaican scientist on board our ship said. I was born a Belter, and I was never a swimmer, but of course I’d seen nature threedies and virties, and after he said it I could see a similarity.
Which would make us all guppies newly released from a fishbowl! That’s what Osmore had immediately realized. As soon as the fog cleared, he’d recognized the situation and began saying, “Go slow.” It was cool, logical advice, and at first it was accepted. The first wave hung well away from the action for many months while they just observed.
But Czernak couldn’t resist playing politics, using a tactic that had served him well on Earth, called FUD, for Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt—keep your opponents off-balance by raising surprise issues. He found a hothead lieutenant named Botev to use as a stalking horse against Osmore. But FUD had no place out there; you face big, real threats, and quick cooperation is a lot more important than who sits next to the Captain at mess most often.
Most of the crew saw this. Hell! even Botev saw it and he backed off! That left Czernak feeling deeply threatened. He wanted politics; without politics, he was naked.
Let’s leave it there for today, okay, Jerzy?