Gypsy

Gypsy

By Carter Scholz (excerpt)

The launch of Earth’s first starship went unremarked. The crew gave no interviews. No camera broadcast the hard light pulsing from its tail. To the plain eye, it might have been a common airplane.

The media battened on multiple wars and catastrophes. The Arctic Ocean was open sea. Florida was underwater. Crises and opportunities intersected.

World population was something over ten billion. No one was really counting any more. A few billion were stateless refugees. A few billion more were indentured or imprisoned.

Oil reserves, declared as recently as 2010 to exceed a trillion barrels, proved to be an accounting gimmick, gone by 2020. More difficult and expensive sources – tar sands in Canada and Venezuela, natural-gas fracking – became primary, driving up atmospheric methane and the price of freshwater.

The countries formerly known as the Third World stripped and sold their resources with more ruthless abandon than their mentors had. With the proceeds they armed themselves.

The US was no longer the global hyperpower, but it went on behaving as if. Generations of outspending the rest of world combined had made this its habit and brand: arms merchant to expedient allies, former and future foes alike, starting or provoking conflicts more or less at need, its constant need being, as always, resources. Its waning might was built on a memory of those vast native resources it had long since expropriated and depleted, and a sense of entitlement to more. These overseas conflicts were problematic and carried wildly unintended consequences As the President of Venezuela put it just days before his assassinations, “It’s dangerous to go to war against your own asshole.”

Tango. Photo by Elena

The starship traveled out of our solar system at a steep angle to the eclipse plane. It would pass no planets. It was soon gone. Going South.

…

So: Shackleton Crater. It was a major comm link anyway, and its site at the south pole of the Moon assured low ambient noise and permanent line of sight to the ship. They had a Gypsy there – one or their tribe – to receive their data.

The datastream was broken up into packets, to better weather the long trip home. Whenever Shackleton received a packet, it responded with an acknowledgement, to confirm reception. When the ship received the ACK signal – at their present distance, that would be about two months after a packet was transmitted – the confirmed packet went back to the end of the queue, to be retransmitted later. Packets were time-stamped, so they could be reassembled into a consecutive datastream no matter in what order they were received.

But no ACK signals had been received for over a year. The buffer was full. That’s why she was awake.

They’d known the Shackleton link could be broken, even though it had a plausible cover story of looking for SETI transmissions from Alpha C. But other Gypsies on Earth should also be receiving. Someone should be acknowledging. A year of silence.

Going back through computer logs, she found there’d been an impact. Eight months ago something had hit the ship. Why hadn’t that wakened a steward?

It had been large enough to get through the forward electromagnetic shield. The shield deflected small particles which, over decades, would erode their hull. The damage had been instantaneous. Repair geckos responded in the first minutes. Since it took most of a day to rouse a steward, there would have been no point.

Maybe the impact hit the antenna array. She checked and adjusted alignment to the Sun. They were okay. She took a routine spectograph and measured the Doppler shift.

0.056 c.

No. Their velocity should be 0.067 c.

Twelve years. It added twelve years to their cruising time.

She studied the ship’s logs as that sank in. The fusion engine had burned its las over a year ago, then was jettisoned to spare mass.

Why hadn’t a steward awakened before her? The computer hadn’t logged any problems. Engine function read as normal; the sleds that held the fuel had been emptied one by one and discarded, all the fuel had been burned – all as planned. So, absent other problems, the lower velocity alone hadn’t triggered an alert. Stupid.

Think. They’d begun to lag only in the last months of burn. Some ignitions had failed or underperformed. It was probably antiproton decay in the triggers. Nothing could have corrected that. Good thinking, nice fail.

Twelve years.

In angered her. The impact and the low velocity directly threatened their survival, and no alarms went off. But loss of comms, that set off alarms that was important to Roger. Who was never meant to be on board. He’s turned his back on humanity, but he still wants them to hear all about it. And to hell with us.

When her fear receded, she was calmer. If Roger still believed in anything redeemable about humankind, it was the scientific impulse. Of course it was primary to him that this ship do science, and send data. This was her job.