CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Exodus
Individuals have free will. Societies do not.
Knowledge is more than equivalent to force.
Mallory woke up from a nightmare. The memory of it faded nearly instantaneously, leaving him with a vague impression of Junta loyalists and a burning church. He opened his eyes and saw a bulkhead curving over him. He felt the vibration of engines running somewhere.
“You awake now, Fitz?”
“Uh,” Mallory pushed himself up from the thin mattress he’d been sleeping on. He rose too fast and almost tumbled out of the bunk before he realized he was in low gravity. His stomach did slow rolls as he looked up and saw the small chrome pipes set in the ceiling.
There were three methods to get some form of “gravity” on a space vessel, none of which were gravity per se. The first, and the most natural feeling, was constant acceleration. Next best was rotating a large container and placing the floor on the outer surface.
Neither worked well when designing a ship to enter an atmosphere.
The last method was perhaps the most nausea-inducing. Contragrav drives had been around a while, relying on a repulsive force inherent in some exotic forms of matter. It wasn’t true antigravity, any more than a vectored thrust aircraft, but a kilogram of contramatter would repulse normal matter with a force several orders of magnitude greater than gravity. It had been used as lift for aircraft for centuries. Somewhere along the line, someone realized if they channeled dense plasma from a ship’s contragrav drive though manifolds in the ceiling, it could provide a nearly-even downward force through any part of the ship you wanted. And, since the main power requirement of the contragrav drive was creating the exotic matter in the first place, it was actually less expensive than constant acceleration and cost less design-wise than rotating large chunks of the ship.
But it didn’t
Wahid had been bending over him, a small hypo in one hand. Wahid stepped back as far as the small cabin would allow, and Mallory realized that his left bicep was stinging. He rubbed his arm and looked at Wahid. “What did you inject me with?”
Wahid looked a little sheepish. “A little stimulant. You’ve been out for a few hours.”
Mallory nodded. “Thanks for getting me out of there,” he looked around the tiny ship’s cabin.
“Yeah.” Wahid responded to Mallory’s curious looks. “Mosasa showed up finally, lucky us.”
“The fighter?”
“That was Parvi.”
“His own air force?”
“You haven’t been on Bakunin long, have you?”
Mallory shook his head.
Wahid laughed, “Well, welcome to Bakunin, where any mother’s son can grow up to run as large a tin-pot army as he can afford. And Mosasa can afford quite a bit.”
“He can afford more than us,” Mallory said.
“Yes, I can.”
Mallory turned to see Mosasa standing in the doorway to the cabin. He wore a gray jumpsuit, and the ship’s lighting seemed to give the scales on his tattooed dragon an unhealthy green shimmer. He looked at Mallory, then at Wahid. “I can afford to pay well. But I only pay for what is absolutely necessary.”
