The Consuming Fire (The Interdependency #2)(24)
Where it would have found itself, in any of these instances, was away. Away from Hub, away from Terhathum, away from humanity. Away from rescue. Away from life.
I’ll Always Remember You Like a Child was a ship designed to be capable of maintaining the lives and safety of its crew for five years before things would inevitably decline into chaos and madness. But like most commercial fivers, the Child was not in fact set up to sustain its crew for five years. In the Child’s case, it had been tasked with making short-haul cargo trips from Hub to Terhathum and back again, over and over, trips that took roughly two weeks each leg. There was no need to fit the ship for long-term crew survival. Until there was.
Captain Moria appealed to her crew for calm and got it, for two weeks. In another two weeks, Moria would be dead and the crew, which understood all too well what had happened to the Child, where it was (and wasn’t) and how little food and other resources it had on hand, would begin to fracture. In another month half the crew would be dead, including most of the officers. Six weeks after that and the crew would be down to thirty, in three noncooperating groups, and ship systems would begin to fail.
It would be another 277 days before the final surviving crew member, a cargo handler named Jayn Brisfelt, would record a lengthy testimonial of the last, extraordinarily depressing days of the Child and her crew, before he would then go to the security office, obtain a sidearm, retire to one of the crew lounges, put on one of his favorite comedies, and then shoot himself mid-laugh during his favorite part of the story.
The testimonial, recorded on a tablet, would be unseen and unheard by any other living thing. The tablet itself, whose internal battery would drain within two years, would lose the ability to function fifty years later even if it had been charged. The Child itself would be a cold, powerless husk within ten years. It would be never be found by humans or any other intelligent creatures, if there were any. It would drift between the stars for twenty million years before being gravitationally snagged by a passing red dwarf star, which it would orbit for another six million years in a comet-like path before falling into the star and vaporizing into its constituent atoms.
But this was all in the future.
At the moment, the collapse of the Flow stream between Hub and Terhathum was confirmed by a simple procedure: A research drone attempted to fly into the Flow shoal and was unable to. Where the Shoal had been, only moments before, was nothing but conventional space-time, and vacuum. Other ships sounded the area, on the idea that the Flow shoal might have moved, or was moving, a thing that had rarely been seen but which was theoretically possible. It was not moving. It was, simply, gone.
It would take weeks or months for the news of the collapse of the Terhathum stream to reach all the systems of the Interdependency (including Terhathum itself, now nearly one month away from Hub), but within the Hub system, the effect was immediate:
On the Hub Stocks and Commodities Exchange, stocks plunged and commodity futures collapsed and billions of marks’ worth of value vaporized almost instantly. A very few speculators, having shorted the market, momentarily found themselves almost ridiculously rich, until trading was halted entirely and gains and losses frozen.
Several mercantile houses filed claims to the House of Aiello, which held the monopoly on insurance, for losses incurred because of the (now almost certainly confirmed) collapse of the Flow stream from End to Hub. The claims were for lost ships, cargo and crew, and ran collectively into the billions of marks. The House of Aiello rejected nearly all of these claims, asserting, not entirely unreasonably, that the collapse of the Flow streams constituted an Act of God.
Shops and markets across the entire Hub system were swamped by panicked shoppers who came in first for essentials, and then for anything that was left. Overwhelmed store owners and managers tried to assure their customers that the collapse of a single Flow stream did not mean they were immediately doomed to starvation and despair. This did not go as well as they hoped.
Police and security forces across the system shifted to high alert and prepared for rioting. The good news was that the panicking seemed largely contained to the shopping experience. The bad news was that no one believed that would stay true for very long.
The Church of the Interdependency and other religions found their places of worship jammed, as the faithful, the newly faithful and the not-actually-at-all-faithful-but-this-is-some-weird-shit-and-I’m-hedging-my-bets came in and, depending on experience, prayed, meditated or wondered what it was exactly they were supposed to do now that they were there. Priests, ministers, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders were on one hand delighted to be useful in a moment of spiritual and existential crisis and on the other hand well aware that this was the theological equivalent of shoppers making a panic run at the market, with their new parishioners grabbing at anything and hoping it would get them through.
In Hubfall, the newly fervent who weren’t at a church found themselves at the gates of Brighton, the local imperial residence. Everyone in the Hub system was aware of Grayland’s visions for the future of the Interdependency, and her championing of Lord Marce Claremont, whose scientific findings had predicted the collapse of the End and Terhathum streams. Whether they believed her visions were sincere, a ploy to gull the credulous, or a sign of mental instability, they now had reason to believe she was onto something. And so they came to Brighton, some to revere, some to pray, and some because even if they didn’t want to go to a church, they wanted to be somewhere in this teleologically deeply unsettling moment.