This is the second story about the birth of a new space-based civilization, after "Founder's Log". Both stories rely on orbital mechanics, the only thing that really matters in our universe.
The future will depend heavily on 'butterfly moments' such as these, where a tiny adjustment at the moment of maximum velocity change leads to two radically different futures.

Kurt Binder watched the smooth landscape fall away around him, the edge of a great sphere that contained his entire future.
There were few irregularities to distract the eye. Barren as a parking lot, the asteroid's hills had been leveled years ago to provide reaction mass.
His oval shadow lengthened as he approached the small world's night side. No enemies in sight.
The hard part was the waiting.
   Strapped inside his pod, Kurt checked the status boards. The fusion reactor, gravity detector and electromagnetic shield readouts held steady. Behind him a fan zoomed. The liquid CFCs he was breathing contained 2% oxygen by weight. His normal respiration had been suspended.
Kurt Binder, the face of the Terran Alliance under extreme pressure, was as focused as a machine. His duties left him just enough time to think about the present task. The big picture was irrelevant.
   "We know you're there," a voice said. "We've been expecting you."
   He approached a field of containers filled with processed ore, covered with a film of dust. The steel boxes were stacked inside an artificial valley.
   From the corner of his eye Kurt saw a blur speeding over the container field toward his own shadow. A bright flash, then a shower of liquid fragments.
   The enemy had hit the decoy balloon shaped like his pod. Kurt watched the strike from inside the disk of dust fragments that orbited Rockall like a semi-solid fog.
   Particles rained against his e-shield. From a distance, the disk cloud looked like Saturn's rings, reaching almost to the surface. The particle orbits decayed fast, but the rings were constantly replenished by the mass driver, which was only 60% efficient at full power. Turbulence propelled much of the dirt into unstable orbits, where the particles collided and merged.
The edges of the ring faded away as Rockall accelerated. Now the ring was also being disturbed by other forces.
   It was Kurt's turn to attack. He had the least frightful reputation among Terran agents because he left the fewest survivors. Enemies might remember his broken nose and the burn mark on the side of his face. His stubble covered many scars, not all from training.
In a superficial age, he had no use for plastic surgery.
   Kurt's laser scatterometer scanned the horizon with picosecond bursts. No strange reflections.
Too bad he had been forced to disable their thrusters.

   Below him was the prize. Kurt's pod orbited at walking speed forty meters above the mountain-sized world of Rockall. Its barely perceptible surface gravity was reduced an additional third by its four-hour rotation, and by its excavated interior. Anyone could jump off this world if they dared.
It resembled an ordinary Amor-Apollo carbonaceous-chondrite, but Rockall's faint magnetic field, locked in when it had cooled eons ago, identified it as something else. Just below the surface was a massive deposit of iron, aluminum, titanium, and more exotic elements like uranium. This easily-harvestable hundred-billion-ton nugget was a core remnant of the planet Hephaestus, destroyed in a great collision after the birth of the solar system. In 2022 it had been learned that all the inner planets were fragments from that cataclysm.
   Rockall was originally annexed by Ultexon enterprises to supply the Earth-Mars run. Later, the outpost crew had installed the mass driver, and began ejecting ground-up pieces of regolith. Slowly, Rockall's orbit began to spiral closer to the sun.
Its ultimate destination would be a high Earth orbit. There, its metals would be used to build space stations and luxury goods for the planet below, to the delight of Ultexon's shareholders.
   After barely a week on course, everything had gone to hell. Contact with the small crew was lost, and the mass driver had ramped up its output. All orders from Earth were ignored. It became obvious what must have happened.
Rockall had been converted into a fortress heading for the Free Zone between Earth and Mars, where it would provide the newborn democracy with a vast supply of strategic minerals.

Not if Kurt could help it.
   He'd warned his bosses this would happen, not from any sense of empathy. Space mining was a harsh life. Astronauts were treated like equipment, exploited and discarded with maximum efficiency.
They couldn't quit, since they couldn't return to Earth gravity. Years of zero-G lowered their bone-densities to where they couldn't stand up by themselves. Ultexon wasn't particularly interested in finding a cure. Who needed incentives when they had reliable mind control?
Kurt knew that nothing was 100% reliable, except perhaps the laws of physics.
   For the first time, space workers had an alternative. The Free Zone was a cluster of old space stations kept functioning by retired astronauts. A few dozen well-hidden Superbombs prevented the Alliance from blasting them to ashes.
With the abundant metals from Rockall, and their even more formidable know-how, the rebels could construct a fleet of new spaceships. The Free Zone would start colonizing the inner asteroid belt, hopping between tiny worlds like Polynesian settlers. In a few decades, they might become a rival of the mighty Terran Alliance.
   Kurt's job was to prevent that. Officially he worked for Imperial Insurance, which held the twelve-figure Rockall policy, but the Alliance was Kurt's real master.
   It was hard to hide in space. Fortunately the Alliance owned the only known stealth spacecraft. It wasn't fully invisible (that was one invention they wouldn't risk even here), but Kurt's craft was as perfectly black as nature allowed. Only star occultations could reveal its presence, and even those could be masked. Most of his waste heat was radiated by a low-energy thermocoupled laser. The drive was a neutral particle beam.
Normally Kurt would have slipped in silently, but upon discovering Rockall's newly installed thrusters, he'd had no choice but to blast them to bits.
   "We'll sooner kill ourselves!" the voice shouted. "We'll take you with us."
   Ahead was the target. Kurt emerged from the dust band and aimed his pod, spinning crazily in three dimensions.
The last thing he saw was a surreal landscape of canyons and valleys crowding the horizon, not erosion but mining. Much of the planetoid had become a sculpture of sandblasted shapes.

   With exquisite precision he vanished down a narrow shaft, the rock wall only centimeters from his hull. He never flinched inside his blue-lit aquarium, and barely felt the acceleration.
   The tunnel shaft had been blasted only minutes before by a ground penetrator. With enough practice and preparation, anything could seem normal. There was pleasure in seeing elaborate simulations become reality, if only because it ended his training.
   The asteroid was riddled with manmade tunnels and caves like a multi-layered labyrinth. The empty corridors were profoundly barren. Only a fraction of Rockall had been excavated, but it added up to a whole world of dark highways, slowly changing as old ones were filled in. Many tunnels were never traveled after their excavation.
   He felt smugly superior in the dark, though ambushes waited ahead.
The walls rumbled with occasional quakes. He figured he had a 1% chance of perishing in a tunnel contraction. Another rumble, and something behind him collapsed. Good, the dust would hide him.
   He couldn't see the ore excavator, but his radar imaged the back of the huge machine. Using his self-aiming laser, it took only seconds to cut the guide wires holding it in place. He entered the massive device through its conveyor outlet.
   The cavity was half-filled with crushed rocks. When he bumped against a titanium blade, the recoil caused another eruption of dust.
   He had no intention of waiting half an hour for the excavator to fall to the core, so he activated his thruster. The exhaust beam exited through the conveyer outlet, pushing his craft against the blade. Screeching sounds grew louder.
   Slowly the digging machine began to move. Boulders became unsettled, rolling in spooky silence between the grinders and out the back. A thud shook the excavator as it broke through a steel net.
   In his cocoon, he felt the impact of particle beams, and saw the reflected neon of a laser burning through metal. They couldn't penetrate the thick armor of the excavator. Kurt had several minutes of peace.
   With an impact that shook all of Rockall, the excavator hit the bottom of the shaft. Debris surged outward as Binder reversed course, and turned and escaped into a side tunnel.
   He was weightless at the center of the world. His beams disturbed years of darkness. Around him, Rockall was still shaking but slowly settling down. He couldn't use his main drive here, but his electro-shield snared the faint magnetic field lines permeating the core, smoothly pulling his pod down the corridors. Kurt never lost his sense of direction, rotating vectors like a gyroscope.
   He saw odd geological patterns in the polished walls, metallic crystals like starfish and flowers. The burnished corridor looked almost organic.

   "We see you," a voice said.
   He turned to see a red octopus crawling around a corner. From its alien head, twin shafts of light glared through the suspended dust motes, illuminating his pod. It approached too fast, too smoothly to be alive. The robot had the most practical shape for its underground environment.
   Kurt activated his thruster and raced down the curving tunnel. The walls passed at increasing speed, but the red monster had no trouble keeping up. Despite the counterpressure from Binder's exhaust beam, it grew in his rearview screen like a mask, tentacles lashing the walls like whips.
Kurt chose to get mad.
   The radar showed no obstacles ahead.
   Hopefully his passage had swept the corridor clean of dust. Kurt's life depended on it.
He fired an antimatter grain at the octopus robot, a sphere of anti-Neptunium barely visible to the naked eye.
   Apparently there had been some microscopic dust specks. For an instant a jagged lightning bolt marked the vaporized particle's trajectory. Then the octopus detonated with the force of an artillery shell.
   The tunnel became a bright kaleidoscope. If the pod had windows, he would have been blinded. Driven by the blast, it skidded against the wall. His trained reflexes steadied the pod as debris surged past, blown by a ghostly wind.

   Turning a final corner, Kurt found himself between two vast walls receding into darkness. His pod came to a halt, and he listened to the remaining vibrations.

   From within the rock came a musical thumping. The walls were designed to be pulled apart by tidal forces, preserving the asteroid's general shape.
Rockall's mass driver was on the other side, virtually impregnable. Bucket loads of crushed debris were being ejected from three different outlets.
Time for his next secret weapon. Behind three hundred meters of solid, iron-rich rock was their ceramic superconductor ring, the core of their small fusion plant, which provided cooling power for their much larger fission plant.
   His quantum neural interface aimed the pod's neutrino gun. Traveling at lightspeed, the neutrino beam effortlessly penetrated the rock.
   The unstable particles decayed in nanoseconds. They would heat the superconductor ring from within and tear it apart, releasing the stored momentum of the circling superfluid coolant. A fatal chain reaction would then disable their mass driver.
It was almost as clever as the enemy's original plan.

   When plotting their trajectory, Rockall's crew had discovered the perfect blackmail opportunity: at this moment, the asteroid was making a retrograde flyby over the nightside of Mars, staying just outside the calculated Roche limit, losing much of its orbital velocity in the process. The planet had been catching up with the asteroid at its orbital apogee for weeks.
The Alliance didn't dare interfere. The mass driver had to keep working at full power, or Rockall would smash into the red planet. A collision was unacceptable. It would black out and probably freeze out the newly forming atmosphere.
   The next phase was even more daring. As they rounded the horizon, the asteroid would find itself on a direct collision course with Earth. A similar maneuver had been considered as part of their official mission, but that shortcut had been judged too dangerous.
   Rockall's momentum made it hard to stop. Even blasted into fine dust, the fragments could do massive damage. Earth was in no real danger, but the Alliance didn't want to spend a fortune to deflect Rockall. They had been forced to negotiate.
   Immediately after the flyby, the crew would begin changing their trajectory again. Even at maximum thrust, the asteroid couldn't avoid plunging closer to the sun. But while it would come close, it didn't have to collide with Earth.
Only the crew could steer it to safety. Their plan was to follow a complex orbit toward the Free Zone, designed to intersect Earth increasingly distant in the future, until they finalized their escape. The impact point would shift from six months to two years away.
The near encounter with Mars would also weaken Rockall. It was developing trillions of cracks, becoming a tightly bound collection of rubble.
If the Alliance were to attack, the crew could easily blow up their small world, and the rubble would continue along its deadly path, greatly complicating matters.
Once inside the Free Zone, they would circularize their orbit in a few months. Only then could they relax.
   Destroying the superconductor ring would ruin their plans. They also needed it to detonate their Superbomb. Since Kurt had disabled the attitude thrusters, they would be completely helpless.
Their fission reactor would blow up and release all its energy at once. Boiling gas would blast from the three shafts, providing enough thrust to miss both Mars and Earth with a tolerable safety margin. Best to do it near the time of closest approach.
A collision with Deimos could have stopped Rockall altogether, but was impractical to arrange.

   Kurt's mission was almost over. Time for his final report, a solemn duty. He spoke in code, and the signal went through a chain of microscopic relays left in the tunnels.
   "This is Kurt Binder," he said. "Rest in peace."
   Then he heard a voice in his earphone, their medical officer. Let's see if this criminal could distract him while he waited.
   "Amuse me," he said, sensors in his vocal chords compensating for the breathing fluid.
   "Think about what you're doing," the medic said. "This is a turning point in history. The Free Zone desperately needs this asteroid. If you take it away, a billion people will never be born!"
   "Good," Binder responded as he collimated the neutrino beam. "They would consume Alliance resources."
   "Consider the implications," the medic went on. "All your systems, including that neutrino gun, are quantum-controlled by your brain. And your brain has been changed to make it more efficient."
   "That's why I won," Kurt said.
   The medic went on. "You believe nothing I say could change your mind, but only a few of your neurons would need to change. Maybe only one! It would take only a tiny amount of energy."
   "So what?" Binder asked. This traitor was too strange.
   "Nature will always outsmart us," the medical officer said. "The potential future can even influence the present. Right now, the choice between two future universes is being decided inside your brain. The quantum fate of reality depends on your thoughts, which have been fine-tuned to detect such processes. It's too much for one man to bear. Can't you feel the conflicting possibilities?"
   Kurt Binder had a strange insight. At the very center of the asteroid, he could feel the surrounding matter like a giant lens, with him at the focus. The crew knew the mass of the asteroid to the last kilo. They should be able to detect his gravitational distortion.
   He had forgotten about the proximity of Mars and the inefficient mass driver.
   Binder was no longer alone. A rising chorus inside him, a maelstrom of voices screaming to be born, filled his quantum interface like static feedback.
He tried to scream through the fluid. Panic was the rarest human emotion. Under the circumstances, it wasn't surprising that he forgot he wasn't wearing a spacesuit until after he'd left his pod.

   Seven spacesuited figures emerged from the darkness like floating statues. Carrying dozens of weapons, they studied their enemy from afar, all with the same expression.
   Identical fluid drops hovered in startling 3D. The neutrino beam had strayed off course the moment Binder had panicked, and it was now aimed harmlessly into the wall.
His pod was so black it was hard to detect among the shadows.
The flyby phase had ended two hours ago, and the new trajectory was in effect.
   "What happened?" the C-engineer asked. "He should have won. Radiation from the antimatter explosion?"
   "No," the medical officer said, looking as haggard as everyone. A wild tribe, they resembled pioneers now.
   "Gamma rays take longer to scramble brains," she said. "Alliance agents are borderline insane to begin with. He didn't mind dying in the meltdown, but it made him more willing to hear me out."
   The medic studied Kurt's corpse amid the still-liquid drops of oxygenated fluid. Tiny bubbles boiled on their surfaces.
   "The Alliance doesn't want its agents to show initiative," she said. "Their control implants generate irresistible compulsions and taboos. Much stronger than our control drugs. Everything I said about quantum ghosts was nonsense, of course. His weakness was that he believed in forces higher than himself. Classic submissive personality type, though he didn't know it."
   "Sounds like mind games to me," the engineer said. "But this is a crucial moment. We're lined up for Earth impact . . . Now!"
They would finalize their near-miss atmosphere-grazing trajectory in another hour. If the Alliance attacked, their course could be changed back in minutes.
   The medic glanced at her pale and emaciated crew, with lines around their eyes, needle scars and UV burns. Their plan was a superhuman chore, even with advanced motivator drugs. They had lost their normal expressions. The body resisted confinement, no matter how comfortable the spacesuit.
   She continued. "Very likely, he amplified some random fluctuations from his quantum interface, and imagined they were what frightened him most. He found our weaknesses, but forgot his own."
   "He gave birth to our history," the commander said. The future was wide open.
   Floating between the vast walls, the medic realized how tiny their error margin had been. Could the future actually influence the present?
For a moment she understood how Binder had felt.

---

The best hard SF novel ever written: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
Buy the book
Read the chapters


Arcalon Productions Comment Page