Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

a dome of stars,
with the ragged glow of the Galaxy hurled casually across its
equator. Set in that diffuse glow was the sun, the brightest star,
bright enough to cast shadows, but so remote it was a mere pinpoint.
Around the sun Rusel could make out a tiny puddle of light: the inner
system, the disc of worlds, moons, asteroids, dust and other debris
that had been the arena of all human history before the first
interplanetary voyages some three thousand years earlier, and still
the home of all but an invisible fraction of the human race. This was
a time of turmoil, and today, invisible in that pale glow, humans
were fighting and dying. And even now a punitive fleet was ploughing
out of that warm centre, heading for Port Sol.
    The whole situation was an unwelcome consequence of the liberation
of Earth from the alien Qax, just thirteen years earlier. The Interim
Coalition of Governance, the new, ideologically pure and viciously
determined central authority that had emerged from the chaos of a
newly freed Earth, was already burning its way out through the worlds
and moons of Sol system. When the Coalition ships came, the best you
could hope for was that your community would be broken up, your
equipment impounded, and that you would be hauled back to a prison
camp on Earth or its Moon for ’reconditioning’.
    But if a world was found to be harbouring anyone who had
collaborated with the hated Qax, the penalties against it were much
more extreme. The word Rusel had heard was ’resurfacing’.
    Now the Coalition had turned its attention to Port Sol. This ice
moon was governed by five ’pharaohs’, as they were called locally, an
elite group who had indeed collaborated with the Qax - though they
described it as ’mediating the effects of the Occupation for the
benefit of mankind’ - and they had received anti-ageing treatments as
a reward. So Port Sol was a ’nest of illegal immortals and
collaborators’, the Coalition said, and dispatched its troops to
’clean it out’. It seemed indifferent to the fact that, in addition
to the pharaohs, some fifty thousand people called Port Sol home.
    The pharaohs had a deep network of spies on Earth, and they had
had some warning of the coming of the Coalition. As the colonists had
only the lightest battery of antiquated weaponry - indeed the whole
ice moon, a refuge from the Occupation, was somewhat low-tech -
nobody expected to be able to resist. But there was a way out.
    Five huge Ships were hastily thrown together. On each Ship,
captained by a pharaoh, a couple of hundred people, selected for
their health and skill sets, would be taken away: a total of a
thousand, perhaps, out of a population of fifty thousand, saved from
the incoming disaster. There was no faster-than-light technology on
Port Sol; these would be generation starships. But perhaps that was
as well. Between the stars there would be room to hide.
    All these mighty historical forces had now focused down on Rusel’s
life, and they threatened to tear him away from his lover.
    Lora was waiting for him at the Forest of Ancestors. They met on
the surface, embracing stiffly through their skinsuits. Then they set
up a dome-tent and crawled through its collapsible airlock.
    In the Forest’s long shadows, Rusel and Lora made love: at first
urgently, and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. In the habs,
inertial generators kept the gravity at one-sixth standard, about the
same as Earth’s Moon. But there was no gravity control out here in
the Forest, and as they clung to each other they drifted in the
tent’s cool air, light as dreams.
    Rusel told Lora his news.
    Rusel was an able nanochemist, he was the right age for Ship crew,
and his health and pedigree were immaculate. But unlike his brother
he hadn’t been good enough to win the one-in-fifty lottery and make
the cut to get a place on the Ships. He was twenty-eight years old:
not a good age to die. But he had accepted his fate, so he believed -
for Lora, his lover, had no hope of a berth. At twenty she was a
student, a promising Virtual idealist but without the mature skills
to have a chance of competing for a berth on the Ships. So at least
he would be with her, when the sky fell in.
    He was honest with himself, and unsentimental; he had never been
sure if his noble serenity would have survived the appearance of the
Coalition ships in Port Sol’s dark sky. And now, it seemed, he was
never going to find out.
    Lora was slim, delicate. The population of this