Humanity's Hold, Sol, 4053.22.11 CE

23.7 megaseconds since the catastrophe

Gianetta had expected the council to convene within a day or two of her uncle Neal being laid to rest. In this, she was not merely disappointed, but somewhat bewildered. In fact, the council kept postponing scheduled sessions. She'd pressed her uncle Morris about it. He managed to look uncomfortable and even squirm a little as he said, "I know this must be frustrating, Gi. Honestly, I'm not happy about it either. I have things to report, and they're the kind of things we only talk about in person. Apparently, things are moving quickly in other quarters of the plan, and the councilors involved are too busy to meet."

Only long acquaintance let her see that he truly was frustrated by this, himself. With everything she had been given access to, however, she also knew it was true that there were a lot of moving pieces to the plan. She was impatient, but she supposed the delay just meant she'd get even more information out of the meeting that finally happened.

Finally, the date for the next session came around, and Baker had sent to the council group chat, "Today? Please?"

Gianetta had actually chuckled at that. It read like something she might send to her friends when she was missing them, and not like one of the leaders of humanity asking that the other leaders all meet together to do business.

Still, she'd been expecting him to be rebuffed. She was pleasantly surprised when Petra Amundsen, the councilor who had been most responsible for all the postponements, said, "Yes!"

The council chamber was an actual cave off a gallery, rather than a building on a cavern floor. Legend had it that the leaders of the original refugees who hid below from the Great Flare had met here, too. The monarchy that her uncle's revolution had overthrown had instead had a palace built down on the cavern floor, where later generations had created something that looked more like their ancestors' cities. The revolutionaries had found the "original" council cave and reclaimed it.

Gianetta had her doubts, but not strong enough to burst anybody's balloon about it. It did make good theatre, if nothing else. She was Carson enough to understand the value of the dramatic.

Aware that she would probably show herself to be overeager, Gianetta nevertheless timed things so that she arrived early. The guards assigned to the door knew who she was and let her in, and she found that she was not the first. Uncle Morris and Elaine Carpenter were both there ahead of her. She had heard their voices, but not their words, through the door.

They were not happy with one another.

They shut up as soon as the door opened, of course. Carpenter looked at her with a smile that was somehow a sneer, which fit what Gianetta knew about the woman. Long years of conversations with Uncle Neal and Uncle Morris had included the outlines, which Neal's files had added detail to more recently.

Carpenter and Gianetta's uncle had not been friends. Carpenter was in favor of a much more aggressive policy with the aliens. Her stance was both that True Humanity had the natural right to do whatever it wanted with alien lives, and also that it now had the power—in this case meaning energy—thanks to the solar stations of Phase One, to do almost anything they wanted. She was arrogant in ways Carson likened to the old aristocracy. She came by it honestly—her family had been aristocratic at one time. Elaine's father had been Uncle Neal's contemporary and became a rebel after a political setback, more than out of any great zeal for the cause.

Uncle Morris looked less than thrilled to see Gianetta arrived in the midst of the argument. Being a precocious child who found her elders' conversations far more interesting than those of other children, she was used to this particular look. It was the look of an adult who had been in the middle of saying something one didn't say in front of children.

His expression cleared up momentarily. Clearly, he was checking himself. His "niece" was no child, any longer, and had every right to be here, even early. The council had taken the decision to accept her online, a provision they had for routine business. She came here not as a provisional councilor, but as the real deal, wearing her ring openly.

She had been prepared for a mixed reception, but not for this.

Without reducing her sneer by so much as a millimeter, Carpenter rose to shake Gianetta's hand. "Councilor Carson. Welcome to the fray. I'm Elaine Carpenter." The sneer did not extend to Carpenter's voice, which seemed genuinely glad to see her. As the other woman spoke, Gianetta realized that only once side of her mouth—the sneering side—had moved. Then, at last, she remembered: Carpenter had suffered an injury in her youth that doctors had thought nothing more than Bell's Palsy. Only after she had not recovered a year later did they realize it was a more long-term paralysis, by which time it was also too late to do much.

Gianetta had allowed both Carson's warnings about this woman, and the obvious argument with Baker before she came in, to bias her feelings. Carpenter might turn out to be a snake after all, but the woman was not being deliberately rude.

So, Carson shook the proffered hand and said, "Councilor, glad to be here." Neither one of them had said "nice to meet you", and Gianetta was wise enough in the ways of subtext to know what that established. Carpenter might as well have said, "I know your uncle warned you about me," while Gianetta might as well have said, "He sure did! Was he wrong?"

Her Uncle Mor—no, that's wrong in this context, she thought to herself, and corrected her inner monologue: Councilor Baker also rose. "Gianetta, glad you're here. I should have guessed you'd be early." That was all the apology she was going to get, here, for his expression when she'd come in. It was enough, for now.

"Councilor Baker," she said, keeping it formal but smiling. "Eager to get to work."

"Well," he responded, "there'll be plenty of that, soon enough. But we should wait for the rest."

They trickled in soon enough, and they each greeted her in turn. She hadn't bothered to sit down, yet. She stood behind the chair with her name in front of it. There was no ceremonial reason; it just seemed silly to keep getting up and sitting down again when there were six other people to shake hands with. Paul Evans; Roger Thompson; Jane Plummer; Steven Risley; Petra Amundsen; and finally, Gene Burke. She had met most of them over the years through Carson or Baker, and she now knew more about them through Carson's files.

Evans and Amundsen leaned in Carpenter's direction but were less vocally aggressive. Thompson, Plummer, and Burke preferred to focus on the Hold itself and professed themselves uninterested in foreign adventures. The main advantage in their mind to Phase One was that the Hold never had to worry about energy again. Risley had sided mostly with Baker and Carson—that is, her uncle Neal. She supposed she was going to have to start thinking of herself as Councilor Carson, now. If she didn't take that seriously, she couldn't expect the others to do so.

Most of them were polite, even visibly and honestly glad to meet her. Risley seemed preoccupied and surly in a way that didn't seem directed at her, but he couldn't quite set aside in his greeting.

They finally all sat down, three to a side of the triangular table, and the meeting began. As it happened, Baker held the rotating chair and gaveled them in, calling them to order and formally welcoming her. If Carson had been expecting anything like the ancient Roberts and his Rules, she would have been disappointed. Maybe it was because of the long delay to get to this point; maybe this was normal; either way, he launched right into business.

"Councilor Carson, we recognize that some of what we're going to talk about, you may not have full background for. Feel free to ask for clarification, or to refer to your tablet—while we're in this room, it should show you details you can't get in your office or elsewhere in the Hold. The system is smart, and should show you what you need to know based on what we're talking about."

That was interesting. She had always suspected there was some AI in use at the highest levels, but most people in the Hold made do without it. Idly, she wondered if the Phase One power delivery system meant that restriction would get relaxed, energy no longer being an issue.

"As much as I'm itching to deliver a report I've received from an outsystem operative, I'm going to ask Councilor Amundsen to deliver her report on Phase Three, first."

Amundsen rose, though Baker hadn't. Carson couldn't quite tell if there was some protocol she'd missed or if Amundsen was just so full of excitement she couldn't stay seated.

Once she spoke, however, Carson stopped doubting. Definitely excitement. "To spare Councilor Carson the need to reference her tablet, and because honestly I've been dying to talk about it anyway: Phase Three has involved developing our own facility for faster-than-light travel. There were always two prongs to this research. One prong involves relearning the classic technology Earth originally invented, the Skip, and then adapting what the aliens have learned to create their Jump and Time Compression drives. This effort was completed ages ago, since the aliens are mostly quite open with their technology. The Time Compression drive, for example, is theoretically patented within the Tau Ceti Treaty Organization, but we are not signatories to that treaty, so we're not required to pay a royalty for the use of the equations." This was said with a wry grin and there were chuckles and snorts around the room.

"Anyway, we have a prototype TC ship that's run some shakedown runs and proven itself. It's not as fast as some of what we're told the aliens have managed, but it would get us places well enough. The real problem is that age-old limitation of all known FTL systems: the need to be outside the heliopause."

"The second prong of research picked up on equations that had long since been left on a shelf for lack of enough energy to implement them. Any one of the known FTL systems, and a couple of other ideas for utilizing hyperspace besides, could always have been invoked further downwell, but at such an enormous energy cost that no ship could carry the necessary generating capacity."

Amundsen was looking directly at Carson, and Carson knew enough to know this was a free-form discussion, not requiring permission of the chair. The chair could require a more orderly proceeding, but that had clearly not been invoked. She was being invited, or possibly challenged, to put the pieces together before Amundsen could get there, and she had, and said so. "Phase One gives us access to an awful lot of energy, doesn't it, Councilor?"

Amundsen's look was a little patronizing, conveying, "Oh, thank G-d the new Carson has a brain in her skull!" Carson decided to be offended later, in private. Out loud, Amundsen said, "Exactly so. We have ourselves a certifiable genius. Some of you may have met her. Rowan Moran. Our intel from the aliens suggests only one or two people match her when it comes to hyperphysics. I handed her the problem: assume you can allocate some of the power from the collector network for your own purposes. What could you do with it? Last week, she proved what, and she just repeated the experiment again, yesterday. Here's the vid."

What followed didn't look like all that much if you didn't know what it meant. A polygonal frame hanging in space. Then, space twisted and a different starscape replaced what they were seeing. Their perspective moved toward the structure, and then through it, and Carson realized they were seeing footage from a probe being sent through.

Once it was through, the different starscape was all around. The probe was clearly somewhere else. Sidebars showed telemetry declaring it had emerged in a system cataloged as LHS 1140. A glance at her tablet told Carson that there was a habitable world there, currently inhabited by an alien diaspora colony. That world was apparently mostly non-technical, so the experiment was unlikely to be detected.

That star system was also almost fifty light years away.

The probe spun on its axis and then puffed back for an unframed patch of stars that somehow looked wrong for the starscape, like a jigsaw puzzle piece out of place. Then it was through again, and facing a small orbital station, which Carson guessed—and her tablet confirmed—was where the experiment was being controlled.

It was also in orbit between Earth and Venus; as was the frame through which the probe had passed.

Glancing around the table, she saw that the import of this experiment was not lost on anyone, not even the localists. Risley went so far as to say, just loud enough to be heard, "It...worked! It actually worked!"

Amundsen was downright smug as she said, "It did. And more than once, as I said. Both times, the probe went through, confirmed its location, and successfully came back. Each time, when the aperture was opened, communications flowed through without meaningful lag. It passed from deep inside our gravity well to a location deep inside LHS 1140s and back again. The second time involved adjustments to the tunnel generation frame that required less power. It's still a very high number of petawatts, mind you, but, but it's about half what the first experiment required, and the results measure out almost identically."

Carpenter was smiling as broadly as her half-paralyzed face would allow. It was not a flattering look on her if Carson was being honest with herself, but she was still trying even in her own mind to be respectful of the woman's disability, and not assume malice. Regardless, this was clearly the result she wanted.

Baker was...squirming again. He was the only one who looked genuinely unhappy with the development. The localists looked impressed with the achievement, but as soon as their shock wore off, Carson knew they'd be wondering how this really helped the Hold. But Baker seemed almost horrified.

Carson didn't really know how to feel about it beyond awe that so longstanding a problem had been solved. Instead of looking for an emotion, she asked, "How far can one tunnel extend?" She realized she had unconsciously adopted terminology already for this technology, and wondered idly if it would stick.

"We haven't tested its limit yet," came the answer from Amundsen. "We chose this system, fifty light years out, for several reasons. For one thing, while we're mostly thinking of establishing our own outposts, having at least one habitable planet in easy reach would not be a bad thing. I believe Councilor Evans has a report on that later. Also, it serves as proof we have a means of travel that's significantly faster than anything else currently known. Even the TCTF's mothballed experiment, Zephyr, couldn't traverse fifty light years in less than about a week, and that's pushing itself harder than TCTF ships tend to as I understand it."

Baker, sitting next to her, twitched at the mention of Zephyr. She had a feeling Baker was not going to be able to be a proper chair and let everyone else go first before he made his report.

In fact, he interrupted almost immediately. "Zephyr is not so much mothballed any more."

On a hunch, Carson turned to Carpenter to see her reaction. She didn't bother hiding that she'd done so. Carpenter was not at all surprised by this news, which helped to clarify at least one thing she and Baker had been discussing at volume when Carson had come in.

Amundsen, however, was taken aback. "Excuse me, Morris? I assume this pertains to the news you have?"

"It certainly does." Carson knew Baker well enough to hear how controlled he was being. "But I don't want to preempt you if you have more to say. This breakthrough is important, and I don't want to downplay it."

That was just politeness. Carson knew it; Amundsen, she was pretty sure, knew it. Baker felt that his news set aside everything else anyone had to say.

Amundsen took a moment to consider, then said, "It is important, but the implications can be explored separately from the news, and that's about all the news I have. The deep details are on your tablets. Of course, they're still under seal for now." She sat down.

Meaning they could only be viewed in here, with at least six of the nine present. Carson hoped nobody was in a hurry to be somewhere else. She wanted to read those details.

There was a pause as people looked expectantly at Baker, wondering if he'd pass to let someone else report first or take the ball. He was himself looking down at the table, collecting his thoughts and deciding which way to go.

Finally, he looked up, decided and determined. "Well...much as I must naturally hate to bring negativity after such a strongly inspirational moment: we have had a returnee agent from the diaspora, specifically from the Tau Ceti Treaty Organization. Phase Two's plan for the TCTO, guided by Councilor Carpenter, was intended to disrupt them through their reliance on artificial personalities to run their starships and stations. Their confusion, combined with similar efforts in other polities, was meant to provide us a measure of security through obscurity. We already count on the fact that nobody looks downwell in this system. We resent it, but we count on it.

"Well, this is the first direct report we've gotten of how those efforts are going and—" He was trying to keep his voice mild. Professional. Neutral. It was not Baker as Chair. Carson had been on the receiving end of a set down from Baker before that went this way. The blandness was just another way of sharpening the spearhead.

"—we certainly have disrupted them. If by 'disrupt' one means 'killed millions'."

He paused.

Four of the councilors erupted a moment later in various expressions of horror.

Carson remained silent, too stunned to even swear. Baker, of course, was letting his point sink home and letting his silence work for him. Risley just sat stewing, and Carson was convinced Baker had "leaked" his news to his ally early, explaining his surliness earlier.

Carpenter and Evans were smiling.