As they approached the depot, still several hours away, Victor said, “You realize of course that in all likelihood the ships docked at this place are going to know less about what’s going on than we do. They won’t have had communication for the same reason we don’t. They’ll be pumping us for information, not the other way around.”
“Probably,” agreed Imala. “But our shuttle is hardly the fastest thing out here. Maybe there are ships at the depot that left Luna after us and arrived before us. In which case they might know something we don’t.”
The shuttle’s flight data said that Last Chance had ten docking stations with umbilicals, but when the depot came into view, Victor saw that there were at least four times that many ships clustered around it.
“It’s packed,” said Victor. “No way we’re getting on board.”
“Maybe we don’t have to,” said Imala. “Laserlines work over short distances. If we get close enough, maybe they can feed us news directly to the ship.”
When they were less than a hundred klicks away, Imala used the laserline to hail the station.
The head of a portly woman appeared in the holofield.
“I’d ask for a docking tube,” said Imala, “but it doesn’t look like you have one available.”
“We don’t. You’re welcome to patch in to our news feeds, though.”
“You’re getting broadcasts from Luna?”
“We’re getting text only,” said the woman. “The bandwidth doesn’t handle voice or video.”
“How are you getting even that?” said Imala. “We can’t get anything.”
“We’ve set up a string of ships between us and Luna,” said the woman, “with a ship every million klicks or so. Like a bucket brigade. They’re passing up information via laserline as it becomes available. It’s not a perfect system, mind you. The deterioration you usually get in ten million klicks happens in a hundred thousand now. So in a million klicks you can barely make out a very slow transmission. The ships have to repeat the message three times and make the best guess about some passages, but even so you’re going to get some deterioration and holes in the text. Shall I send you the codes for the uplink?”
“Yes. Please,” said Imala.
“There’s a fee,” said the woman.
“You’re charging me for the news?”
“Keeping relay ships out there isn’t cheap. News wouldn’t get through otherwise.”
“How much?” asked Imala.
The woman told them a ridiculous amount. Imala wanted to argue, but Victor said, “I’ll pay it.” His family had left him money for his education at a university. He could spare some of it here.
Five minutes later text from various news feeds appeared on their monitor. The reports were riddled with holes and sentence fragments, but Victor and Imala got the gist of each report.
Victor had hoped that a fleet had been assembled, but it quickly became evident that such wasn’t the case. STASA was calling for calm and pushing for diplomacy, seeking for ways to communicate with the hormigas when they arrived. The U.N. had conducted an emergency summit as Ukko Jukes had suggested, but all that political circus had accomplished was to appoint the Egyptian ambassador, Kenwe Zubeka, as the secretary of alien affairs, a new position with zero power or influence. Zubeka seemed not to notice how insignificant his position was and kept making asinine statements to the press.
When asked about the destroyed ships in the Belt, Zubeka had said, “We don’t know what kind of misunderstanding or provocation our alien visitors were responding to. As soon as we can talk to them, I’m sure we can have a peaceful conversation that will benefit both our species.”
“Are you kidding me?” said Victor. “A misunderstanding? He’s calling the murder of thousands of people a misunderstanding? When they killed the Italians, it wasn’t a misunderstanding. It was deliberate. They knew what they were doing.”
“It’s typical geopolitics, Vico. Few countries have any military presence in space. Most of the bigger powers have shuttles and cargo vessels that are space-ready and could be weaponized, but to form a fleet, to amass enough ships to stage an assault or form a blockade, we need a coalition. The U.S., Russia, China, India, France. These countries don’t work well together. The Chinese don’t trust the Russians, India doesn’t trust the Chinese, and the U.S. doesn’t trust anybody, except for maybe a few countries in Europe. And no country wants to act on their own. If they go alone they risk crippling their ships and weakening their arsenal. That would make them vulnerable to other powers.”
“So they’re going to do nothing? Why does everyone seem to believe that inaction is the best course of action?”