days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the
long war changed… stations knit closer together.
Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest
Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen,
gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt’s, and reached for other stars and the
merchanters who served them. There were rumors… of vast population increases
going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of
the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark
nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization,
this Union, as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using
installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the
course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population
density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a
focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced
dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company.
And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation,
the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the
building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and
America and all their deadly kindred.
So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it
changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own
reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the
hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness.
Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense
territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years.
And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict.
Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back
our ships and let the bastards starve.
It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth
seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of
fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The
same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company
which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines
as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate
chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within
Earth’s own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory
missions in any direction at all, which were not.
No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were
geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics.
Earth banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It
weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth’s natural resources by the
stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly
became good politics. The Company Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it
was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and as it could.
At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty,
cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Mazian’s Fleet, they called
it, in the tradition of the Beyond, where ships were so few at first that
enemies knew each other by name and reputation… a recognition less common now,
but some names were known. Conrad Mazian of Europe was a name Union knew to its
regret; and Tom Edger of Australia was another; and Mika Kreshov of Atlantic,
and Signy Mallory of Norway; and all the rest of the Company captains, down to
those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and the Company, with less and
less love of either. None of this generation was Earthborn; they received few
replacements, none from Earth, none from the stations in their territory either,
for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchanters
were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling.