and lower it, a series of gastight tubes were sewn around the exterior and connected to the main ship by much thinner tubes. Gas was pumped into the tubes to set the sail, pumped out while thin filaments were retracted to furl it. Heating elements within the tubes kept the gas from freezing and collapsing in the cold of deep space.
Other problems, microminiaturized electronics and an extremely lightweight spacecraft body, had been easier. Indeed, they had been almost natural outflows of ongoing, purely terrestrially oriented, research. It was a short step from nanotube body armor for soldiers to a nanotube spacecraft body, for example. The programming had been even easier if not precisely simpler.
Not to say that the ship was cheap. It had eaten up almost all of the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration's somewhat constrained budget for the better part of two decades. The less said about the scandals, the overruns, the bribes from various foreign subcontractors, however, the better.
The ship, if one could call a robot a ship, was named the Cristobal Colon. Many had held out for a different, generally more culturally sensitive and less eurocentric, name. These ranged from Saint Brendan and Leif Eriksson (obvious nonstarters) to Sinbad to Cheng Ho. Since the Americans were footing the bill, however, they got to choose. Moreover, they were, at the time, going through one of their periodic bouts of extreme nationalism. 'Cristobal Colon' seemed good to them and the rest of the world could lump it.
The robot, or ship, was just under two meters in diameter and approximately nine long. Various projections-a radio telescope here, an antenna there-were attached to the outside. The computer that controlled it was deep inside, or as deep inside as one can get with a cylinder two meters across. The sail dwarfed the robot ship, though the sail massed very little and the ship several tons.
The ship was very fast, as men reckoned such things. Boosted by lasers fixed to the moon and floating in space, by the time the ship reached the point it was at it was going a very appreciable fraction of c. Everything was operating normally, though there was a bit of trouble in the Number Thirty-three vent. There were nearly a hundred such, however, which allowed Mission Control or the robot to steer the thing a bit. Even with one such operating at suboptimal efficiency, there was no danger.
Imagine the consternation at Mission Control, then, when the robot and sail seemed to wink out of existence completely…
Chapter Two
I loved you
And so I took the tides of men into my hands
And wrote my will across the sky in stars…
Cochea,
Provincia del Valle de las Lunas, Republica de Balboa,
Terra Nova, 10/7/459 AC
Art, precious metals and the occasional young slave were not the only in-demand product of Earth. Music, too, was popular, in particular the wild and violent sounds of the twentieth century. Earth literature also had its place on the new world. Both had been brought by the original immigrants in the form of computer discs. Much had been lost, of course, but much had survived the days from when the old computers wore out. Indeed, developing new machines capable of reading the old discs had given Terra Nova a leg up in artificial intelligence, generally.
As with many immigrant tongues on Old Earth-American English, Quebecois French and South African Dutch, for example- many of the languages of Terra Nova retained many features that had been lost to their mother tongues. Indeed, a man or woman of the twentieth century would likely have found the English of the Federated States more comprehensible than that commonly used by the Anglic-speaking proles of Old Earth. In any case, this made much of the older music of Old Earth quite in tune with Terra Novan listeners.
Of course, Latin hadn't changed in millennia. It was LatinSatanic flavored Latin at that-which flowed from the speakers in the book-stuffed library:
O Fortuna
Velut Luna…
High on one wall of the library hung an ornate, embossed certificate, in Spanish, signifying a high decoration for valor from the Republic of San Vicente. The gilt name emblazoned on the award was Patricio Hennessey de Carrera. Posted beneath the certificate, framed with obvious pride, hung a letter of reprimand-in English-from a general officer of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia. It was addressed merely to 'CPT Patrick Hennessey.' Both certificates-dated fifteen years prior, long before Hennessey's promotion to his terminal rank- described the same series of events, though in rather different terms.
The library was large, with bookcases covering three of the substantial room's four walls. Against the fourth, under the certificate and the letter of reprimand, stood a desk and chair, each made in the main of dark-finished Lempiran mahogany, hand crafted and richly carved. A man approaching middle age, just beginning to go gray at the temples and with a face weathered beyond its years with the wear of sun and rain, sat at the desk, eyes fixed on a book.
The book was one of many. Reaching floor to ceiling, the volumepacked shelves of the library held the essence of a lifetime's interest and study, more than seven thousand volumes in all. Even over the broad, deep desk more bookshelf space was stacked and-like the other shelves-filled to overflowing. Still more reference material resided on computer micro-discs inside cases stuffed to the brim.
Despite appearances, there was an order and a theme to the volumes. The library was, in the main, about war. If there was a book on the plastic arts-and there were several-the owner had studied them because he knew that art had propaganda value in war. If there was a book on music-and there were dozens-that was because music, too, was both a weapon of war and a remarkably subtle yet powerful tool for training for war. If there were books on the Marxism that had made its reappearance under the Volgan tsar during the Great Global War-and there were some few-it was because the reader believed in knowing one's enemy.
There was even a copy of the Koran.
However, most of the library was more obviously military. The collection covered, as nearly and completely as possible on Terra Nova, every human age and culture as it pertained to armed conflict. An English translation of Vegetius rested next to another copy in the original Latin. Apparently not as confident in his Greek as in his Latin, the reader kept most of Xenophon in bilingual texts-Greek and English alternating pages. Plato, Rousseau, Machiavelli, Aristotle, Hitler, Lenin, Mao, Annan, Nussbaum, Harris, Steyn, Fallacci, Yen, Peng and Rostov… war was about philosophy and politics, too, and so the reader studied those as well.
Eyes fixing upon the Nussbaum work, a gift from his parents many years prior, the reader thought, Amazing that that line of thought should have succeeded in contaminating not one but two worlds. What utter nonsense!
A stranger, given time to realize the single-minded purposefulness of the library, might eventually have concluded that the reader considered war his art; perhaps all he cared about.
The stranger would have been wrong. War was not all the reader cared about, nor even what he cared most about. It had been a job and was still a hobby; it was not a life.
The reader, one Patrick Hennessey, late of the Army of the Federated States of Columbia, put down the book he had been studying and closed his eyes, deep in thought.
Decision Cycle Theory, the Observation-Orientation-DecisionAction loop, plainly was working against Nagumo at Midway on Old Earth. How and why is combat on the ground different? Friction? Scale and scope? The vulnerability of large single targets like aircraft and aircraft carriers compared with the endurance and ability to soak up punishment of ground forces composed of many small units and separate individuals? Nagumo's pure frigging bad luck?
Hennessey's aquiline face frowned in concentration. Pale blue eyes, normally slightly too large for the size of
