And now the thrilling conclusion:
As you might imagine, I was bloody furious with Frank. I called him up by voicelink because email wasn't satisfying enough and gave him an almighty hair-dryer about his dubious friends and the clusterfuck I'd been dragged into on his account. He was frantically apologetic and swore up and down he hadn't had a clue what the guy was really up to... And the funny thing is, I think he was telling the truth.
Frank actually seemed to like me, insofar as he liked anyone outside the toxic little echo-chamber he'd sequestered himself in with his buddies; after all, I'd helped him get to Fenspace when nobody else had. Or maybe it was pure pragmatism on his part, recognising me as a valuable asset who shouldn't be expended lightly. Either way, he didn't strike me as having much acting ability, so I'm pretty sure he really was duped by that porn guy. (He's still in prison, by the way. The US Department of Justice can probably tell you where if you want his side of the story.) Still, we parted on the understanding that the next time he had a correspondent ask him to recommend a good charter pilot, he was to send them to someone else.
Anyway, feeling slightly better for having it out with Frank, I made best speed for the Moon Kingdom Memorial and radioed ahead to request the Sailors Armed Militia meet me at the landing pad.
There were rather a lot of them waiting for us, all ostentatiously armed and accompanied by a lady who introduced herself as Ms. Curtis and explained she'd been a social worker before going Up. That was more qualified help than I dared hope for, so I showed her through to the galley and messroom and busied myself making tea while she talked to the four girls.
Yeah, you can see where this is going, can't you? I genuinely did not catch on until they'd left, and I saw her pause in front of the cockpit window to put on her official tiara.
It was just after three o'clock in the afternoon and we had several other pickups to make that day, but my professionalism has its limits. I put Barbara in charge and went in search of a bar.
Mercifully, the next few months were relatively uneventful. Work was plentiful, with a second wave of colonisation happening in the Belt and on the moons of Jupiter and a number of new orbital stations springing up. I did a few removals for the first inhabitants of Island One around that time, and I have to say Mal Ford... or Fjord, or... Just how do you pronounce that? Anyway, I found his well-publicised and very unflattering remarks about the place thoroughly inaccurate: The reality considerably worse!
Which isn't to say it was all smooth sailing. Lots of would-be Belters started going out there and not coming back. Some of that was likely people coming to mischief through negligence or just bad luck, but stories were circulating of organised gangs pouncing on newly-settled rocks to loot supplies, or worse. Settlers started getting better armed and more jumpy, especially when the gangs started using distress calls as bait.
It was against that backdrop that I got another email from Frank, offering me quite a bit over my usual rate to collect himself, a couple of buddies and their gear from an asteroid a short distance from 1186 Turnera. It didn't have a catalogue number, as far as I could tell; presumably Frank's party had located it by chance and not bothered to report the discovery.
Now, that wasn't incriminating by itself; uncharted asteroids are only a navigation hazard if you're flying without radar at close to the Limit, and if you're dumb enough to do that you deserve to get yourself killed, so the only real reason to file the paperwork is the bragging rights. But the location gave me a very uneasy feeling. I only took the job out of a mixture of morbid curiosity and a faint hope that I could use whatever influence I had with Frank to keep him out of trouble.
I was honestly expecting him to have fallen in with the nuttier end of the Separatist fraternity; he had exactly the right combination of persecution complex, intellectual snobbery and questionable people skills to feel right at home with them. But the thing about most Separatists is, they might talk big about how space is the ultimate high ground and all that but they rarely go beyond "civil disobedience"... which generally means making a bloody nuisance of themselves, blatantly mishandling handwavium and generally giving Fen a bad name. (Being opposed to a licensing regime is one thing; I may disagree, but it's a defensible position. But we have rules about how to store and transport the stuff because Extremely Bad Things happen when it gets spilled all over people, okay?)
Frank was... Well, a lot more proactive.
The rock he'd set up shop on was pretty small, about three quarters of a mile in diameter. A couple of 'waved shipping containers clung to one side, and as we moved closer to look for a landing site, I realised with a growing sense of dread that there were half a dozen engines embedded in the rock's surface. Big engines, big enough to potentially push something that size up to a good four or five percent of c.
There was no good engineering reason to build yourself a ship that way. If you needed lots of interior volume then you could buy up and 'wave a container ship for a lot less than what it'd cost to hollow out a rock that size. And why the hell would you strap so many engines to it? Even with a constant-speed drive, it'd steer like a drunken three-legged cow at the best of times; at full speed it'd be a danger to itself and the entire solar system.
As the airlock cycled to admit our passengers I was still telling myself it couldn't be as bad as it looked. Maybe Frank had twigged that whoever designed the thing was a thundering dolt, or worse, and hired me because he wanted out?
Yeah. Wishful thinking.
"Tom, old buddy!" he boomed cheerfully. "Good to see you again. This is Earl and this is Brad. So, can we get going soonish? I set the final countdown on the engines and..."
"What the fuck are you doing out here, Frank?" I demanded.
"Eliminating a threat to Fenspace," he replied, bold as brass. "Look, I realise it's gonna make kind of a mess and all, but do you have a better idea?"
And he launched into a long-winded rant about 'mundanes' and their culture and how it was repressing original thinkers and disdainful of truly worthy pastimes and... Christ almighty, he even threw in something about how the marginalisation of geeks was responsible for his inability to get a woman to have sex with him. Basically, geek culture gets a bum deal so let's genocide everyone who's not a geek.
"It's drastic," he concluded, "but sometimes the world needs men who are hard enough to make the hard choice."
"Like cold-blooded murder?" I replied, surprising myself with how calm I sounded.
"Yep," he said chirpily, sounding pleased that we were on the same wavelength.
And I guess a hard man did make a hard choice that day, because I drew my sidearm and I shot him dead. One of his buddies had a pistol of his own and almost nailed me, but Barbara got him with the coachgun just as he was squeezing the trigger and the shot went high. The other went completely to pieces and begged us not to kill him, so we tied him up and left him in one of the passenger cabins while we disabled the countdown by the simple expedient of unplugging the computer. I was tempted to see if we could rig it to crash into the sun, but I didn't feel like tampering with it.
We managed to raise a Belter ship, and they got word to Juno City and then the Convention. A couple of Sailor Armed Militia ships were dispatched to go over the asteroid with a fine-tooth comb and question the surviving conspirator. A search of Frank's body turned up a remote that would have started the rock's engines instantly if he'd managed to grab it in time, which exonerated me of any potential murder charges.
I didn't tell them I'd been so damned angry at that point that I never even noticed he was reaching for something in his pocket, and they didn't ask.
I had to testify to a Convention sub-committee in Crystal Kyoto. I don't remember much of what was said -I was still pretty shaken at the time- but Haruhi's closing statement is still perfectly clear.
"I can tell you don't want thanks for killing Berquart. I can tell you don't want to be called a hero. But a lot of people owe you their lives, Tom. Never forget that."
There's been a lot of unkind things said about that girl, before and since, but she's alright in my book.
I don't know how much the Convention told the Outer Space Affairs bureau in New York directly, but a mostly accurate version did the rounds on the Interwave after some Belters sent the rock into the sun. They were kind enough to leave Barbara's and my names out of their statement. It would've been quite a nine day wonder in the media if the first evidence that the Sammies had a corruption problem hadn't been surfacing about the same time, and then there was SOS-Con and the war...
Basically, we had more immediate and pressing problems. But it was one of many events that forced us to acknowledge the existence of a darker side to Fenspace, and the need for an organised effort to bring it under control while we still could.
I still wonder why Frank called on me of all people to lift him off the rock before it launched. Was he looking for my approval, some sort of endorsement or validation of his actions? He must have known I disapproved of his grudge against anyone not Fen, so I can't imagine how he'd have expected that from me; whatever Frank might have been, he wasn't stupid. Unless some part of him wanted me to stop him? Perhaps he just didn't know anyone else with a ship who'd take his money.
We'll never know now.
If I regret anything at all, it's not staying in better touch with Frank; I couldn't have prevented him from falling into bad company, but I might have been a moderating influence or at least seen warning signs in time to stop him sooner. But damn it, he was a grown man of twenty-five when I dropped him off at New Yavin all those years ago. He should have been old enough to know better.
But I don't feel guilty about killing him. I took neither pride nor pleasure in it, and I still wish it could have been avoided, but it had to be done.
This place will be closing soon, and I should be getting home. One for the road?
Alright. Here's my card; do you mind emailing me a preview copy for a quick fact-check in the cold light of sobriety? Alright, thanks.
Oh, and here's a pull-quote for you: 'If you hear someone talking about Hard Men making Hard Decisions and they mean it, you have to stop them. At any cost.'
It's kind of a Fen joke. Long story.
G'night.
THE END
As you might imagine, I was bloody furious with Frank. I called him up by voicelink because email wasn't satisfying enough and gave him an almighty hair-dryer about his dubious friends and the clusterfuck I'd been dragged into on his account. He was frantically apologetic and swore up and down he hadn't had a clue what the guy was really up to... And the funny thing is, I think he was telling the truth.
Frank actually seemed to like me, insofar as he liked anyone outside the toxic little echo-chamber he'd sequestered himself in with his buddies; after all, I'd helped him get to Fenspace when nobody else had. Or maybe it was pure pragmatism on his part, recognising me as a valuable asset who shouldn't be expended lightly. Either way, he didn't strike me as having much acting ability, so I'm pretty sure he really was duped by that porn guy. (He's still in prison, by the way. The US Department of Justice can probably tell you where if you want his side of the story.) Still, we parted on the understanding that the next time he had a correspondent ask him to recommend a good charter pilot, he was to send them to someone else.
Anyway, feeling slightly better for having it out with Frank, I made best speed for the Moon Kingdom Memorial and radioed ahead to request the Sailors Armed Militia meet me at the landing pad.
There were rather a lot of them waiting for us, all ostentatiously armed and accompanied by a lady who introduced herself as Ms. Curtis and explained she'd been a social worker before going Up. That was more qualified help than I dared hope for, so I showed her through to the galley and messroom and busied myself making tea while she talked to the four girls.
Yeah, you can see where this is going, can't you? I genuinely did not catch on until they'd left, and I saw her pause in front of the cockpit window to put on her official tiara.
It was just after three o'clock in the afternoon and we had several other pickups to make that day, but my professionalism has its limits. I put Barbara in charge and went in search of a bar.
Mercifully, the next few months were relatively uneventful. Work was plentiful, with a second wave of colonisation happening in the Belt and on the moons of Jupiter and a number of new orbital stations springing up. I did a few removals for the first inhabitants of Island One around that time, and I have to say Mal Ford... or Fjord, or... Just how do you pronounce that? Anyway, I found his well-publicised and very unflattering remarks about the place thoroughly inaccurate: The reality considerably worse!
Which isn't to say it was all smooth sailing. Lots of would-be Belters started going out there and not coming back. Some of that was likely people coming to mischief through negligence or just bad luck, but stories were circulating of organised gangs pouncing on newly-settled rocks to loot supplies, or worse. Settlers started getting better armed and more jumpy, especially when the gangs started using distress calls as bait.
It was against that backdrop that I got another email from Frank, offering me quite a bit over my usual rate to collect himself, a couple of buddies and their gear from an asteroid a short distance from 1186 Turnera. It didn't have a catalogue number, as far as I could tell; presumably Frank's party had located it by chance and not bothered to report the discovery.
Now, that wasn't incriminating by itself; uncharted asteroids are only a navigation hazard if you're flying without radar at close to the Limit, and if you're dumb enough to do that you deserve to get yourself killed, so the only real reason to file the paperwork is the bragging rights. But the location gave me a very uneasy feeling. I only took the job out of a mixture of morbid curiosity and a faint hope that I could use whatever influence I had with Frank to keep him out of trouble.
I was honestly expecting him to have fallen in with the nuttier end of the Separatist fraternity; he had exactly the right combination of persecution complex, intellectual snobbery and questionable people skills to feel right at home with them. But the thing about most Separatists is, they might talk big about how space is the ultimate high ground and all that but they rarely go beyond "civil disobedience"... which generally means making a bloody nuisance of themselves, blatantly mishandling handwavium and generally giving Fen a bad name. (Being opposed to a licensing regime is one thing; I may disagree, but it's a defensible position. But we have rules about how to store and transport the stuff because Extremely Bad Things happen when it gets spilled all over people, okay?)
Frank was... Well, a lot more proactive.
The rock he'd set up shop on was pretty small, about three quarters of a mile in diameter. A couple of 'waved shipping containers clung to one side, and as we moved closer to look for a landing site, I realised with a growing sense of dread that there were half a dozen engines embedded in the rock's surface. Big engines, big enough to potentially push something that size up to a good four or five percent of c.
There was no good engineering reason to build yourself a ship that way. If you needed lots of interior volume then you could buy up and 'wave a container ship for a lot less than what it'd cost to hollow out a rock that size. And why the hell would you strap so many engines to it? Even with a constant-speed drive, it'd steer like a drunken three-legged cow at the best of times; at full speed it'd be a danger to itself and the entire solar system.
As the airlock cycled to admit our passengers I was still telling myself it couldn't be as bad as it looked. Maybe Frank had twigged that whoever designed the thing was a thundering dolt, or worse, and hired me because he wanted out?
Yeah. Wishful thinking.
"Tom, old buddy!" he boomed cheerfully. "Good to see you again. This is Earl and this is Brad. So, can we get going soonish? I set the final countdown on the engines and..."
"What the fuck are you doing out here, Frank?" I demanded.
"Eliminating a threat to Fenspace," he replied, bold as brass. "Look, I realise it's gonna make kind of a mess and all, but do you have a better idea?"
And he launched into a long-winded rant about 'mundanes' and their culture and how it was repressing original thinkers and disdainful of truly worthy pastimes and... Christ almighty, he even threw in something about how the marginalisation of geeks was responsible for his inability to get a woman to have sex with him. Basically, geek culture gets a bum deal so let's genocide everyone who's not a geek.
"It's drastic," he concluded, "but sometimes the world needs men who are hard enough to make the hard choice."
"Like cold-blooded murder?" I replied, surprising myself with how calm I sounded.
"Yep," he said chirpily, sounding pleased that we were on the same wavelength.
And I guess a hard man did make a hard choice that day, because I drew my sidearm and I shot him dead. One of his buddies had a pistol of his own and almost nailed me, but Barbara got him with the coachgun just as he was squeezing the trigger and the shot went high. The other went completely to pieces and begged us not to kill him, so we tied him up and left him in one of the passenger cabins while we disabled the countdown by the simple expedient of unplugging the computer. I was tempted to see if we could rig it to crash into the sun, but I didn't feel like tampering with it.
We managed to raise a Belter ship, and they got word to Juno City and then the Convention. A couple of Sailor Armed Militia ships were dispatched to go over the asteroid with a fine-tooth comb and question the surviving conspirator. A search of Frank's body turned up a remote that would have started the rock's engines instantly if he'd managed to grab it in time, which exonerated me of any potential murder charges.
I didn't tell them I'd been so damned angry at that point that I never even noticed he was reaching for something in his pocket, and they didn't ask.
I had to testify to a Convention sub-committee in Crystal Kyoto. I don't remember much of what was said -I was still pretty shaken at the time- but Haruhi's closing statement is still perfectly clear.
"I can tell you don't want thanks for killing Berquart. I can tell you don't want to be called a hero. But a lot of people owe you their lives, Tom. Never forget that."
There's been a lot of unkind things said about that girl, before and since, but she's alright in my book.
I don't know how much the Convention told the Outer Space Affairs bureau in New York directly, but a mostly accurate version did the rounds on the Interwave after some Belters sent the rock into the sun. They were kind enough to leave Barbara's and my names out of their statement. It would've been quite a nine day wonder in the media if the first evidence that the Sammies had a corruption problem hadn't been surfacing about the same time, and then there was SOS-Con and the war...
Basically, we had more immediate and pressing problems. But it was one of many events that forced us to acknowledge the existence of a darker side to Fenspace, and the need for an organised effort to bring it under control while we still could.
I still wonder why Frank called on me of all people to lift him off the rock before it launched. Was he looking for my approval, some sort of endorsement or validation of his actions? He must have known I disapproved of his grudge against anyone not Fen, so I can't imagine how he'd have expected that from me; whatever Frank might have been, he wasn't stupid. Unless some part of him wanted me to stop him? Perhaps he just didn't know anyone else with a ship who'd take his money.
We'll never know now.
If I regret anything at all, it's not staying in better touch with Frank; I couldn't have prevented him from falling into bad company, but I might have been a moderating influence or at least seen warning signs in time to stop him sooner. But damn it, he was a grown man of twenty-five when I dropped him off at New Yavin all those years ago. He should have been old enough to know better.
But I don't feel guilty about killing him. I took neither pride nor pleasure in it, and I still wish it could have been avoided, but it had to be done.
This place will be closing soon, and I should be getting home. One for the road?
Alright. Here's my card; do you mind emailing me a preview copy for a quick fact-check in the cold light of sobriety? Alright, thanks.
Oh, and here's a pull-quote for you: 'If you hear someone talking about Hard Men making Hard Decisions and they mean it, you have to stop them. At any cost.'
It's kind of a Fen joke. Long story.
G'night.
THE END