Mokoena spoke raggedly. The baby sensed her unease and wailed. She rocked it. “Recycling is never perfect, you know. A ship is not a planet. She can’t hold a full ecology. She doesn’t have plate tectonics, or any broad margin of tolerance. Wastes accumulate, toxins, unusables. Adrift in mid-space, with no proper means of flushout and replenishment — if a crew did live through the shock, I wouldn’t give them more than twenty years.”
“What a ghastly, slow death.” Zeyd turned to Nansen. It blazed from him: “But Rico, you think you can save them!”
“If they are in fact alive, which we don’t know, I think perhaps we can,” the captain replied carefully. “And I think it’s worth trying.”
“Allah akbar!” Zeyd cried. “The old crew faring again —”
Mokoena laid a hand on his arm. “No,” she said, gentle and immovable. “I’m sorry, Selim, darling, but no.”
“She’s right,” Nansen agreed. “It’s more than your child, and other children we mean to have. It’s everything we’re building here. The whole future we’ve dreamed of, lived for. Your advice, example, and inspiration are absolutely essential. Your duty, all of you, is to stay.”
“But not yours?” Yu challenged.
“I’m the most dispensable. The League can carry on without me — if people see that it is carrying on, that the industrial and social foundations for a starfleet are being laid — if they can keep a hope alive that the work will be rewarded in their lifetimes.”
“What will you do for crew?” Zeyd growled.
Nansen smiled. “Oh, we have no dearth of adventurous young souls. They’ll fight to go. Fifteen years’ absence won’t seem terribly consequential to them, and anyhow, they’ll experience just a few days. But they’d better have a seasoned commander.”
Sundaram shook his head. “Fifteen years for us without you, dear friend. Or perhaps forever.”
“We’ve time to be together,” Nansen said. “Envoy can’t leave tomorrow. Her gamma makes her safe enough from a quantum accident. But there are other kinds. And the Kith did make technological advances while we were gone. She needs a dozen sorts of retrofits. And the crew will need training, and — I don’t suppose we can start for at least a year.”
Mokoena’s gaze rested dark upon him. “An added year for them in that ship. You’re cutting it close, Rico.”
“I have no choice. Nor, really, about going. But I want to consult and work with my former crew.”
“You realize, don’t you,” Dayan broke in, “I’m going also.”
“We’ll argue about that later,” Nansen said roughly.
“We will not.” Dayan rose to her feet. “There is no argument.” She came over to stand above him. “I’m experienced, too. How can you imagine I’d accept fifteen years without you, and being too old for children when you got back? Meshuggah!”
CHAPTER 50
For thousands of years among the stars, for hundreds of her own years, the ship had been great and proud. She was akin to Envoy in her general plan — seen across fifty kilometers, the unlikenesses were few, the most obvious a proportionately larger hull — but of more than twice the linear dimensions, ten times the burden. Even the wreckage of her had kept majesty; Nansen remembered Machu Picchu, Kerak des Chevaliers, the Lion Gate at Mycenae. It still belonged in the reaches she had sailed; he remembered the Gokstad ship, the Mary Rose, the Constitution, and thought that Fleetwing had found a better ending.
But maybe the ancient crews had found better deaths.
He reduced viewscreen magnification, retaining light enhancement, to survey the entirety again. Lesser wounds dwindled out of sight and he saw the forward wheel turning as before, slower than his because it was bigger but creating interior weight as of old. That meant the frictionless magnetic bearings around its hollow axle were there, which meant that the superconductors generating the fields were operative, which meant that a fusion power plant was, which meant that life within the rim might yet be possible.
The force boom, though, projecting from the hub to make and shape the radiation screen fields, was warped, a fourth of its two-kilometer length snapped off. The outer hull was rotating, oppositely to the wheel, something that should never have happened. That it had not long since grated ruinously against the inner hull was a tribute to the remnants of the bearing system — to the engineers who designed it and the honest workers who built it, dust these many centuries. The eight boats that had docked on the exterior, two sets of four spaced equally around the circumference, were gone. The magnetics that held them fast had failed, doubtless in the moment of catastrophe, and they drifted off with the debris.