168: PROPOSAL

We tell Max that we have something important to talk about and there will be a big decision for the colony to make, and a setmeet is arranged for that very night. I know they’re expecting some sort of retaliatory demand for either the kill switch thing or for the forced medical treatment and I don’t bother to disabuse them of the notion. It’s less messy to just leave the full explanation until the setmeet and spend our time preparing for that.

There’s a speech to write, and there are customs and protocols to learn. As upset as I am at the distasteful parts of Hylaran culture we’ve had to grapple with so recently, that’s no reason to start throwing our weight around and not show them the basic respect of considering the local customs and government structure. A setmeet involves one member of every set; 57 people currently, plus our representative. Much as we’d all like to be there, we decide against insisting on breaking the rules; I’ll represent the Courageous set, since it’s my plan.

I will bring a recorder so the others can listen to the whole meeting later, of course. Practicality is important too.

I learn the rules and protocols from Max, dress in a clean tunic with my nicest belt, and head for the central meeting area that night. I recognise a couple of faces among the fifty seven sitting cross-legged on the floor. Max never joined a new set after losing their old one, and thus represents their set of one. Celti, too, is unsurprising; being a member of the Leadership means he is also, of course, the representative of his set, the cattail set. There’s a handful of other faces I recognise on sight, having seen them around the colony, but don’t know particularly well. Everyone eyes me with a nervous apprehension.

There’s an agenda, I know. People register their grievances and proposals in advance and are called from a list. This is a last minute emergency meeting so I’m not surprised to find that the agenda is pretty short. I’m also not surprised to see that my issue is the very first one on it. I imagine that anyone else going first would not get the setmeet’s full attention.

I’m a little worried that they won’t get to go at all. I suspect that my proposal will probably take over the entire meeting. But hey, it was a short notice meeting anyway. I’m sure the other issues can wait for the next one. My proposal might even render them irrelevant.

The person running the meeting, whose name I don’t catch, calls me up to the front. “First show and tell is Aspen.” I get to my feet and walk over under the apprehensive gazes of the other set representatives, and they sit down, ceding the meeting to me for the next few minutes. I gather my thoughts and try to remember the speech we’d written.

“There have been some tricky currents since my set have landed here,” I begin. “Tension, miscommunication, even outright violence. We understand that you’re trapped between two powers, between Antarctica and the Courageous, and that trusting us might come with the promise of freedom from Hylara only to welcome what might be a more dangerous enemy into your community. And I want to thank you for your trust in us.

“As for the matter of the sabotage codes that we learned about today.” (The Hylarans look worried; some of them physically scoot back on the floor.) “My set wants to express our deep gratitude to you for the trust you showed us. As we understand it, you were given these codes soon after we contact you, yes? And ordered to kill us in space. It wouldn’t have worked, but our computer would have picked up if you’d used the codes, so we know you didn’t. You risked angering the people who you depended on for survival, the people who had hurt you before; you risked the possibility that we might come and destroy your community to take your Vault for ourselves. You took these huge risks for our sake, for the sake of thousands of refugees you’d never met. We recognise that that took great courage, and thank you for it.

“Now that that little weapon, and its uselessness, are out in the open, I suspect that a lot of tensions will die down. The radio no longer poses a threat, and I see that you’ve begun terraformation and started establishing biotanks. Most of the decisions worth fighting over have already been made. But there are still a lot of problems. Just this morning, we had some very serious cultural disconnect issues that could, between larger groups, have erupted into serious violence.

“I do see the logic behind the people who almost attempted to take down our ship today, and who chose mercy instead at the last moment. The ship above brings a great threat, and also great freedom. I can see why it would be tempting to have us drop down all the things you can use to protect yourselves from Antarctica, and then take action to protect yourself from us. You’re light years away from the rest of humanity and have nothing but each other to rely on out here. And I want to make a request of all of you, which is this: my set don’t want to know who was involved in this plan. Don’t tell us, don’t tell the ship. If you have some internal disciplinary system that you want to use against the rogue faction who planned to destroy our ship, that’s your affair, but don’t involve us. We’re going full amnesty on this; anything else is just going to cause more problems. Distractions that we don’t need right now, because we have work to do, and I’d rather focus on how we can all become allies rather than fighting over past injury.

“I will say this: your concerns are very valid. I can’t guarantee that the thousands of people up there have pure intentions. I can’t guarantee that dropping a bunch of Earth people with unknown priorities onto your stable community won’t destroy it, either accidentally or on purpose. No matter what we supply you with, the people we bring are a threat, and it’s a threat we can do our best to mitigate but can’t erase. Some of our people down here, with their different skills and experience with the various things we’re supplying you with, can only be beneficial for your community, but when the numbers get too high – and we have a lot of colonists who need to come down – then that benefit becomes a serious threat.

“So. What if we didn’t send them down?

“I’ve been looking at your technology over the past several days. Your power generation, cooling abilities, and metal refining are beyond anything we with our more-than-century-old tech could imagine. It’s far from certain, but there’s a possibility that we can not only make the Courageous properly spaceworthy again, but set it up with machinery that will allow it to remain spaceworthy by harvesting metals and ice from asteroids for as long as it needs to. Resources are abundant in space if you can overcome the time and distance between them, and the lack of heavy gravity makes moving between resources a relatively simple matter. It’s not safe, given those distances; it might not work. But it might be possible.

“So here is our proposal. We know that there are seven colonies with Vaults. We know that the javelins were set up to kill everyone aboard if they did not detect the presence of a living colony, to ensure that Antarctica would own the colony. Therefore, we have the locations of quite a few viable exoplanets that very likely do not have settlements on them. What our crew wants to do is give you the germlines you need from our ship – we have plenty of all of them in storage, we can give you some and take some with us – drop down whatever number of colonists we all agree upon as useful and able to integrate into life on Hylara without being a serious danger, and then simply resume our colonisation mission with a different target planet.

“I’m not going to lie: it’s a lot more complicated than I made it sound. It’s going to involve getting a new AI for the Courageous. It’s going to involve technology that may or may not exist yet, for all I know. It’s going to involve getting materials back up to the Courageous, when you don’t have orbital launch capabilities. It might be impossible. But it might be doable.

“So my question is. Should we all try?”

Dead silence greets my speech. It’s obvious that this was about the complete opposite of what everyone was expecting me to say. After almost a full minute, someone ventures, “You… don’t want to stay here?”

“Unless you have some way to modify the force and direction of your Hypati launcher so that it can throw a group of humans back up to the Courageous without turning them into a fine paste, I suspect that me and my set are stuck here,” I shrug. “But if given the option, to be honest? I’m even odds on either option right now. And some of my setmates would rather be anywhere but here, after recent events. None of us came here with the expectation of landing on a populated planet. We don’t want to take your colony from you. Our only stipulation for going ahead with trying this is, given that you’ll definitely want at least some of our colonists to join your community if only for their experience with organics, every crew member currently serving aboard the Courageous or down here on the planet gets to decide if they want to be one of those colonists or not.”

“And the ones who don’t…”

“Will almost certainly spend the rest of their lives on the spaceship, yes. Many of my colleagues have served on that ship for twenty years; it’s home to them, more familiar than any planet. If we can get the ship mobile and self-sustaining, enough will choose to stay to complete its mission.”

More confusion greets this. Apparently, the idea that we’d want to do anything other than pour a couple of thousand colonists into their colony and take it over is something they’re having trouble getting their heads around. Which is, honestly, fair; what I’m proposing is a massive risk to everyone who stays aboard the ship, awake or asleep, and living in a confined tube in space for the rest of one’s life is a huge ask even in something more stable than the Courageous. I’m surprised my own crew was so keen, too.

But the confusion doesn’t last long. There’s an undercurrent of chatter, low, excited, and against protocol. Somebody speaks up to say, “We need to bring this to our sets before we decide anything,” a proposal that’s unanimously agreed upon, and the setmeet ends early. Which is pretty much what I expected.

I hadn’t been sure about the crew, but I expect the Hylarans to agree to the plan pretty readily, and after a day or so where we get approached randomly a lot by people with clarifying questions, they do. The whole mood of the colony changes overnight. A lot of the Hylarans are more relaxed, most of the major threats and complications to their settlement now having a single solution, and while we may or may not be able to pull it off, it’s something to work towards. I’m a little more hesitant, still grappling with the sheer magnitude of what I’ve set in motion. It took forty hellish years to drag the half-broken Courageous to a safe haven, and here I am – here we are – preparing to send it away to do it all over again. With just a couple of meetings. Just like that.

If we can pull it off.