The Torch of Honor

By Roger MacBride Allen

Scanned, proofed and formatted by BW-SciFi

Release Date: January, 8th, 2003

PRELUDE

April, 2115

The Finns knew the Guardians had won. It was over. The Guardians had taken the planet's surface, and now the surrender of the great satellite Vapaus would go into effect in a few hours. The Guardians themselves had caused a delay of the surrender by insisting it be negoti­ated strictly in English. The Finns, desperately playing for time, stalled for as long as possible, taking hours to search for the English-speaking officer they could have produced in moments.

The time was put to urgent use. The last, the only hope, thin though it might be, was the League. Word had to be sent.

Six of the last torpedoes were stripped of armament. Light-speed-squared generators and radio beacons were installed. Recordings that held the vital knowledge of the anti-ship missile system, and what little information the Finns had on the Guardians, were placed aboard.

Word had to get through.

The Guardians had not yet closed the ring around Vapaus. Three tiny one-man ships were launched from the Forward airlock complex, each with two torps strapped to jury-rigged harnesses amidships. The little ships launched at six gees, to fly straight through the Guardian fleet. The enemy's radar was too good to be fooled by any feinting maneuver; speed was the only protection.

It was not protection enough. The lead ship was de­stroyed in seconds by laser fire from a troop transport. The Finnish pilot's last act was to blow the fusion engines; the resultant explosion created a plasma that jammed every radar screen and radio within a thousand kilometers. That gave the two remaining ships their chance as they flashed into and beyond the gathering fleet.

They dove down to lower orbits, rushing to get the sheltering bulk of the planet between themselves and the enemy's radar before it could recover from the explo­sion the Finns' lead ship had died in.

They fell toward the planet, gathering speed for a gravity-assist maneuver. One hundred eighty degrees around the planet from the satellite Vapaus, they both changed course, maneuvering violently, one coming about to fly a forced orbit straight over the planet's North Pole, the second heading over the South Pole.

As soon as the ships had reached their new headings, they cut their engines for a moment, and each released a torp. Then the two ships and the two released torpedoes ignited their engines and flashed on into the sky, the torps holding course, the ships again changing their headings.

The southern ship was caught and destroyed by a Nova fighter scrambled from the planet's surface. The northern ship released its second torp and came about, one final time, to act as a decoy for the torps.

Soon, all too soon, another fusion explosion lit the sky, marking the point where a Guardian missile had found the last Finnish ship.

The Guardians tracked only the last torpedo launched, and they were able to destroy it.

Of the six torpedoes, two now survived, undetected. Engines still burning, they curved around the world in exactly opposite directions, one over the South Pole, one over the North, their courses bent by the planet's grav­ity until they came about to identical bearings.

The torps cut their engines precisely over the Poles, just as they reached escape velocity.

Each now rose on a straight-line course starting from a point directly over a pole and parallel to the equator, the paths of the torps also parallel to each other.

Engines stopped, they rushed through space, coasting, trusting to the cold and dark of the void to hide them.

Hours after launch, when they were hundreds of thou­sands of kilometers beyond the orbit of the moon Ku, celestial trackers on each torp examined the starfield. The maneuvering thrusters fired fussily and touched up the torps' headings. The two torps were now on precise headings for the Epsilon Eridani star system, where the English had their colony world, Britannica. The torpe­does were still far too close to New Finland's sun to go into light-speed-squared. For long weeks they coasted on into the darkness, while behind them, the Guardians worked their horrors on the Finns.

On one torp, the power system failed and the torp became another of the useless derelicts in the depths of space.

But the other torp, the last one, held on to life. And at the proper moment, the light-speed-squared generator absorbed nearly all the torp's carefully husbanded power and grabbed at the fabric of space around the torpedo.

The last torp leaped across the dark between the suns.

Soon after, with weak batteries, the radio beacon barely detectable, the torpedo drifted into the Epsilon Eridani system.

Just barely, the last torp made it.

PART ONE:

AN EMPTY GRAVE,

A HOLLOW WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

January, 2115

A cold, drizzly rain spattered the faceplate of my pres­sure suit as the chaplain droned through the funeral service, there at the edge of the empty grave.

The metal and rubber arm of my helmet's windshield wiper slithered back and forth across my field of vision, clearing the rain away. This was probably the only world humanity had bothered to settle where a pressure suit needed a wiper. We all had them, the wiper blades endlessly waving, side to side, like the mouthparts of giant locusts.

They were gone, dead, missing in the depths of space. Sixty of our classmates. Their ship simply vanished en route back from one final training cruise. There had been exactly one hundred of us when we had started out. Of course there had been other losses to our ranks— other accidents, candidates who had been dropped—but now there was this. There were only 34 of us left to stand on the miserable plain.

"Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher," intoned our chaplain. "We bring nothing into this world, and we take nothing out." The words might as well have been a recording. The chaplain's voice made me think of dried-out toast. He talked on in gravelly, portentous tones, plucking old morsels from half the books of scripture, a shopworn service to be dragged out for all funerals and sad occasions. "What is man, that thou are mindful of him?" he asked, his voice rising for a moment, and then sliding back down to a low grumble.

A light blinked on the telltale board inside my helmet, and I kicked my radio over to a private channel.

"Mac, this man is awful. Can't we make him be quiet, so we could at least stand here and think?" Joslyn asked. She and I had been married by the same chaplain three months ago. He had taken two minutes over our vows and 45 minutes on a rambling sermon that put half the congregation to sleep.

"Just keep your suit radio cut off," I suggested.

"But then I could still see his great jaw flapping. And now he's glaring at us. Best we listen. Oh, Mac, they deserve a better send-off." She slipped her gauntleted hand into mine and we switched back to the general circuit.

"Dear Lord, we commit to your care and keeping the immortal souls of these, the departed. We pray you to welcome and cherish the souls of Lieutenant Daniel Ackerman, Lieutenant Lucille Calder, Lieutenant Com­mander Joseph Danvers...."

Nice touch, I thought. He's got them memorized in alphabetical order.

The empty grave was a regulation hole, one meter wide, two meters long, two meters deep. I looked up into the sky through the gloomy overcast at the blue-and-white globe that hung there. It was there, on the planet Kennedy, that the tradition of the empty grave had arisen. There, during the Fast Plague, it had been rare to have a body to put in the ground. The corpses had been viciously infectious. The only sure way of steri­lizing the remains was to destroy them in the fusion flame of a grounded spacecraft. That was what hap­pened to my parents' bodies—I remember the patches of dim incandescence in the cleansing flame. There was a an empty grave there, on Kennedy, a meter by a meter by two meters; on top of it a granite cover slab that bore their names.

There have always been a lot of funerals without bod­ies at the edges of civilization, I suppose. There still were. A ship doesn't come back. Somebody pushes the wrong button and a ship explodes. People get eaten. There are lots of ways.

Finally, the cover slab with sixty names on it was carefully set down over the grey concrete shell that defined the grave. A few centimeters of dirty water were trapped in a puddle in the bottom.

We trooped back to the pressurized quarters and the wardroom. There was to be a reception there.

Joslyn and I hung back. We stood on the surface of the moon Columbia a while longer. When humanity came to this system, this, the planet Kennedy's only large moon, had had a wispy methane atmosphere and a lot of water ice locked up in polar icecaps. Now the engi­neers were hard at work in a dozen projects to remake it into a better place. Some day their work would be done and this world would live. Already, the air pressure was up to a third of what Earth's was. But it was still a dank, miserable bog of a world, cold and moody, the air poisonous. It rained too much.

Silently, I bid our comrades a last farewell, and we went inside.

Once in our quarters, it took us a while to get out of our pressure suits and into our dress uniforms, with the grim addition of an issue black armband.

I struggled into the midnight-black, high-collared, rather severe uniform of the Republic of Kennedy Navy. Joslyn, a native of the Planetary Commonwealth of Britannica, was thereby a loyal subject of the King-Emperor of Great Britain. Her uniform was a deep navy blue, with a lower collar, far fewer buttons, and a better cut. Both of us wore the insignia of the League of Plan­ets Survey Service, a starfield superimposed on a rectan­gular grid. Both of us were lieutenants, assigned to special training classes at the League of Planets Survey Service Training Center on Columbia.

Joslyn checked her appearance in the mirror. She said she was five foot seven and I was six four. I said she was 170 centimeters and I was 193. She was slender, well-muscled and strong. Her face was oval, her lips full, and she had a full set of dimples when she smiled. Her hair was a shade between brunette and blonde. She grew it long and braided it. It was long enough to hang to the small of her back. Now she had the braid coiled on top of her head. She pulled her tunic straight and checked her profile, giving me a smile and a wink in the mirror. She might be slender, but even in a dress uniform, she was definitely female. She satisfied herself as to her own appearance and turned to me. She patted my tunic smooth and brushed some lint from my sleeve.

"You'll do," she said, "but if they ever put padded shoulders in those uniforms, you'll never fit through the doorway." Suddenly, she threw her arms around my neck, pulled my head down, and gave me a most unmili­tary kiss. She looked me in the eye and sighed. "Mac, I do love you so."

I tickled her under the ear and smiled back. "Never mind that stuff. You sure I look okay?"

"Oh, you'll do. That is, if one likes Greek gods."

I looked in the mirror and shrugged. I've always felt I looked like a refugee from a comic book. Broad shoulders, plenty of muscles, I suppose, kind of a narrow waist. My face is long and lantern-jawed. I've got light blonde hair and the blue eyes to go with them. My smile is a little uneven, but it's friendly enough. My arms and legs are long, my hands and feet big. I take the largest size they issue in practically everything.

Growing up, I was the kid who tripped over his own two feet and tended to smack into walls. My body got bigger than my coordination could handle for a while there. Nowadays, Joslyn can escort me to the dance floor in perfect safety; I can even waltz. Nonetheless, in regulation formal dress I look about the size and shape of the angel of death.

We headed to the wardroom.

We, the survivors, should have been able to gather quietly together, drawn to each other by the bonds of comradery that linked us one to the other, and to the dead.

But the government representatives here had to be treated diplomatically. Some were from nations and planets that opposed the Survey, others from places that were footing the bill. Captain Driscoll had to invite them, and many had come.

Joslyn went off in search of drinks. I stood there and scanned the crowd for a friendly face. Pete Gesseti caught my eye and came over.

Pete works for the Republic of Kennedy State Depart­ment, and is one of those rare people who can actually make you believe that the bureaucracy knows what it is doing. He is intelligent, open, and calm. A friendly warn­ing from Pete has kept plenty of people out of trouble. Pete knew my father—and kept me out of trouble.

If not for Pete, I'd probably be just another of the orphan punks that cause Hyannisport police to travel in pairs.

Pete is of medium height, his brown hair retreating toward baldness, his face permanently calm.

He came over and shook my hand. "This isn't the right sort of occasion, but I haven't seen you since. Congratulations on your commission, Second Lieuten­ant Terrance MacKenzie Larson, sir."

"Thanks, Pete."

He raised his glass to me and took a sip. Joslyn re­turned and handed me my drink. "Two more congratu­lations. Or three. On your commission, Lieutenant Joslyn Marie Cooper Larson. On your marrying him. And on his marrying you. Cheers."

We clinked our glasses and smiled. Pete went on. "Sorry I missed the wedding. I understand the Rever­end Buxley was spellbinding. I couldn't get leave."

"We understand, Peter. It was pretty short notice," Joslyn said. "Once we decided to marry, we didn't see much point in waiting."

"The wedding aside, at least you didn't miss a trip to someplace worth going," I said.

"True, I guess. Though the League should have picked someplace a lot better than this to train you kids. And I have a sneaky idea that putting you in this hole was the deliberate policy of certain people who want the Survey to fail, if you're interested in a little paranoia."

"What?"

"Mac—tell me this: How does Columbia rate as a training base for a space-going operation?" Pete has a tendency to snap from one subject to another quickly. He takes some keeping up with.

"Well, okay—not so great."

"Make that terrible. You guys should be in free orbit. That way, if you want to train in your ships, you just hop out the hatch and go to it. Here, since your ships aren't designed to land on a surface, you lose a lot of time taking shuttle craft back and forth. Makes sched­ules impossible. Even having to fly through this atmo­sphere is worthless as training. It's a freak since the terraforming engineers started tinkering with it. It hasn't stopped raining here for years, which must be great for morale. The air would kill you, so you have to wear suits. The methane leaks in anyway, and stinks to high heaven. The whole atmosphere is in transition: All kinds of crud precipitates and ruins equipment. . . ."

"Okay, you've made your point. It's not such a great base. So who is it that got the base put here?"

"You kids are lucky this is my third drink or I'd still be a fairly discreet diplomat. People who wanted the Survey to fail. Those people had friends who arranged for some misguided members of the Kennedy Chamber of Commerce to lobby for you to be based here—if you follow that. They would like the Survey to fail because the British donated the ten long-range frigates you'll be flying, because your commander graduated from Annapolis, and because the reports are to be published in English. They think the Brits and the Yanks are plotting to lay claim to all the best real estate out there. Note Britannica, Kennedy, and Newer Jersey are the prime planets so far—Europa, for example, isn't all that habitable. There are some grounds for being suspicious. Anyone you met at this reception speaking French, or German, or Japanese, for example, would probably be just as happy if you had all been on the Venera when she went poof."

"You're not suggesting the Venera. ..." I began.

"Was nuked on purpose? No. But it has crossed my mind that your friends aren't dead."

"Pete—you're going too fast. We're at their funeral, or didn't you notice?"

"Hmmmm. Look, I'll finish the thought and then for­get I said anything. But the Venera fits a pattern. In the last ten years or so, there have been at least 30 cases in which something like this happens: a proven, reliable ship takes off, on a well-known route. A number of highly skilled people are on board. Some evidence—in the manifest, say—is sometimes found to suggest that someone bribed their way on board, or stowed away, or whatever. The ship vanishes. No wreckage, no explana­tion. The ship ends up listed Lost With All Hands, and they put the files away. I get a funny feeling sometimes that someone is. setting up shop on some backwater planet. Needs more skilled people than he's got, so he kidnaps the talent he needs. Now forget I ever said that, because I'd hate to fib and deny any such idea ever went through my head." He sipped his drink.

I stood there, too surprised by the idea to react. Joslyn wasn't going to let the subject drop, though. "Peter, if you believe that, why aren't you out organizing a search party?"

"Joslyn, please—okay, I know that look. I give up. I guess I've gone far enough that it doesn't matter. Listen. One: No way to prove it. Two: I could not face giving all but certainly false hope to thousands of people who are relatives and friends of people lost on unaccounted-for ships. Three: As the saying goes, it's a big galaxy. We've been in star travel for 100 years, and have yet to visit a tenth of the star systems within a hundred light years of Earth. Four: Sooner or later, we will stumble across them—next year, next millennia—if we keep looking for habitable planets. If something like the Survey gets off the ground and is out there doing the looking. I spend a lot of government time on the Survey. My superiors complain about it at times. So let's leave it alone and talk about the weather. Has it stopped raining yet?"

"Not for another fifty years or so," I said. "We get the message." We murmured something in the direction of a goodbye and circulated among the guests. I went through the motions, mostly on automatic.

My head was whirling with confusion. I had never paid much attention to politics. It had never occurred to me that someone would think ill of the Survey, let alone try and throw monkey wrenches at it. And past that, way past that, the wild thought that all those people might still be alive.... I understood why Pete wasn't wholesaling his theory. I had known him all my life, and it had taken a funeral that might have been mine and a few drinks too many for him to mention it to me. How could he ever bring himself to suggest it to strangers?

And then there were the rumblings that the Survey Service was to be stillborn. We had yet to send a single ship out on a survey mission. Ours, the first class of the Service, had been about a month from graduation when the Venera was lost. I had figured the loss would slow us down to a crawl, but could it really stop us? With all that to worry about, it was a lousy party, even for a funeral.

Some hours after, I was alone in the view room. An overhanging roof shielded the oversize view window from the worst of the rain so that it was possible to see something of the dismal surface of Columbia, and of her sullen sky. Now it was night, and Kennedy gleamed boldly down through the high cloud deck.

I looked up again at the sullen sky, and thought of the stars behind the dirty clouds.

So many stars. . . .

In the vicinity of Earth's sun, the star systems are about five light years apart, on the average. That works out to about 64,000 stars within a hundred light years of Earth. Our home solar system is a good sample of what you can expect to find in an average star system—nine or ten good-sized planets, 40 or 50 noticeable satellites, and a few trillion pieces of sky junk from the size of a rogue moon down to individual atoms and elementary particles.

There's plenty of variety that goes past the average to the incredible. If every human alive now, in 2115, were put to work as a scientist or an explorer, and passed their jobs along to every one of their descendants, it would still take a thousand years to get together a basic catalog of what we know is out there to learn within that 100 light years.

Consider the infinite variety of Earth—the geology, the hydrology, the atmosphere, the biology, the physical reality of our ancestral home. Multiply it by the number of worlds waiting to be found, and you'll begin to under­stand the problem.

Exploration is not something to do out of idle curiosity. Knowing what is out there is an urgent need, and get­ting more so every year.

Around the beginning of the third millennium, the experiments were performed that took faster-than-light travel from an impossibility to a laboratory trick to a way to haul freight. Humanity, barely staggering into the third thousand years alive, found that the stars had been dropped in its lap. The explorers went out.

Some of them came back. The settlers followed in their paths. More than once, settlers went out blazing their own trails. Very few of that number were ever heard from again.

Yet, by the year 2025, the United States Census Bureau estimated the off-Earth population as over 1 mil­lion for the first time. Ten years later, the figure was twice that, and the pace accelerating. By 2050, rapid emigration and high birth-rates had pushed the mini­mum estimate to 10 million. Even to this day, the Cen­sus people try to keep track of it. At the moment, the best guess is 85 million people. That is, 85 million, plus or minus 20 million!

The colonists went out, poorly organized, often toward nothing more definite than the hope that they might find a place to settle and live. Few managed that. One job of the Survey was to find these people, and to establish a reliable catalog of habitable planets, so the next genera­tion of colony ships might go out with a better chance of survival.

And we were to locate bounty, the incredible riches that literally hang in the sky. What new mineral, born in exotic heat and pressure, waited for uses to be found and a market established? Where were mountain-sized lumps of pure nickel-iron, orbiting in darkness, waiting for a factory ship to take possession? Where were the lovely green worlds waiting for people to come and live on them? What new plants, new animals, would be worth exporting?

Surely it must have been obvious to everyone there was a need to explore. Just as obviously, it was a job for the governments of humanity to take on. Obvious to everyone except the governments, that is. Governments are supposed to lead, but they have been following the people ever since our race entered space in a big way.

The first crunch came in the 2030s or so. By that time, there were a good half dozen colony planets—and a bad dozen. Nations and consortiums that certainly could not afford to do so established colonies anyway. True, the founding colonies had done great good for the nations that could afford the great capital expense. But a poor nation goes bankrupt long before its colony starts to pay any returns. The pattern was repeated many times. The nation, or the colony, or both, would collapse, and people would start to die. To the richness of space we brought war, riot, pestilence, and starvation. It hap­pened in a dozen different ways on a dozen different worlds.

The big nations, and the healthy colonies, many of them completely independent by this time, got tired of bailing out the failures after a while. The United States, the Asian and European powers, the strong colonies— Kennedy, Britannica, Europa, New Alberta, Newer Jersey, and the others—came to the conference table. By every means possible, they coerced the little and the weak to join them—The Estonian Republic, The People's Federal Protectorate of Chad, Uruguay, colonies like New Antarc­tica and High Albania, the O'Neill colonies, the self-contained (and self-righteous) free-flying colonies in orbit around Earth.

Some big countries were part of the problem: China had pulled off some truly remarkable failures in space by this time. Many of the smaller nations and colonies were among the most responsible members of the conference: Sweden; Singapore, and her "daughter," the O'Neill colony High Singapore; Portugal; Finland; and New Finland were strong backers of the enterprise.

The delegates bickered. They threatened each other. They indulged in back-room deals that are still causing scandals today. But they managed to come up with a treaty.

So, on January 1, 2038, at 0000 hours GMT and Zero hours Accumulated Stellar Time (AST), the League of Planets came into being and its founding document, the Treaty of Planets, came into effect.

By 0000 hours GMT on January 2, or 24 hours AST, the League was evacuating the hapless residents of New Antarctica and treating them for frostbite.

The delegates came up with a system that works. Its basic tenet sets the right of a human being to live over the right of an idiot to run a government as if it were a family business.

When the League came into being, ground rules were set up for the founding of colonies. Folks could still bug out and vanish if they wanted to, but fewer people did so by accident. Fewer people starved. When the Fast Plague came to Kennedy, the Interworld Health Organi­zations (which is one of the pieces of the League that actually predates it, somehow—like the International Court of Justice at The Hague) came in, and their aid saved us. There is no possible question on that point. That's why the Republic of Kennedy is very pro-League.

There are other good things. There are fewer tin­horn dictators taking over small colonies with still-weak governments. Trade is reliable, not for gamblers anymore.

I stood there and looked out at the gloomy night. It occurred to me that I must have been pretty naive to think that politics wasn't going to affect the Survey— not with a history like the League's.

I must have been there for nearly an hour, nursing a drink. An orderly came for me.

"Lieutenant Larson?"

"Mmmmm?"

"Excuse me, sir, but Captain Driscoll's compliments, and could you come to her office right away?"

I followed the young man along the well-known route to Driscoll's office.

The orderly led me into the office and vanished. Joslyn was there already...