Cities in Flight Retelling: Earthman Come Home Part 7 - The Battle of Hern VI

Amalfi is turning a dead rock into a weapon. Hern VI is a planetoid, small and ugly, and his people are bolting spindizzy engines all over it. The work is brutal. Every driver has to be placed at exact compass points, locked to the center of gravity, balanced against every other machine. And there still aren’t enough to make the thing fully steerable. When this rock finally flies, it will be clumsy and wild. But it will fly.

The Thing in the Jungle

Meanwhile, O’Brian, the proxy pilot, is watching the March on Earth through a drone hidden inside the Okie pack. The mob of homeless cities is still streaming toward the mother planet. Some stragglers have peeled off to find work along the way, but the main body keeps pushing.

Then something new shows up.

A city joins the march. But it’s not like any city O’Brian has ever seen. It’s enormous. And it’s sealed up, smooth hull all around, like a proper spaceship instead of the usual platform with buildings on top. It calls itself “Lincoln-Nevada.”

Amalfi takes one look at the screen and his blood runs cold.

He doesn’t explain to anyone what it is. Not yet. He just tells O’Brian to keep the drone locked on it. Then he calls the City Fathers and says: finish Hern VI in four years instead of six. And give me a course from here to the Lesser Magellanic Cloud, crossing Earth’s orbit.

The City Fathers protest. That cloud is 280,000 light years away. Amalfi does not care about the destination. He only cares about the path.

He gives them a flat trajectory. The City Fathers calculate 958 direct collisions and over 411,000 near-misses along the route. “Use it,” Amalfi says.

The computers go silent. Amalfi knows they’ll never actually fly that suicidal course. Their first rule is: preserve the city. But the shock speeds up the work. Fourteen months later, Amalfi grabs the master space stick and says one word.

“Spin!”

Subway Stars

What follows is one of the wildest rides in science fiction.

Hern VI is the most massive object ever kicked past the speed of light inside the galaxy. At the velocity it reaches, stars flash by like girders next to a subway track. Amalfi stands on the balcony of City Hall, frozen, watching suns cannon at his head, swell to fill the sky with light, and then vanish into blackness behind him.

There should be a sound. A whoosh. There is nothing. Just the tingle of radiation on his face as each star blasts past.

The planet is hard to steer. It takes seconds for course corrections to bite. There’s a wobble in the flight from leftover axial rotation they couldn’t fix. Hern VI lurches through the galaxy, and inhabited systems along the way lose their minds. Frantic radio calls pour in: “Calling the free planet! You’re on collision course with us!” There is no time to answer. They’re out of range before a sentence can finish.

Amalfi ignores them all. He watches one thing: the silver sphere of “Lincoln-Nevada,” still riding in the Okie pack, pretending to be just another city.

Showdown at Saturn

The Okie jungle reaches Earth’s solar system. The King arranges his cities into a huge cone formation, eighteen million miles long, pointed at Earth. Small cities at the front, big ones behind, medium-sized heavy-duty cities forming the walls. Smart arrangement. Shows defensive power without advertising an intention to attack.

Earth Security tells them to stop. Current law forbids Okie cities from coming within ten light years of Earth. It also forbids gatherings of more than four cities. The King says they’re coming anyway. They want justice.

Earth’s President is furious. He wants action. He calls it a “festering sore on our heavens” and starts talking about declining interstellar morality and grass growing in the space lanes. The Admiral, MacMillan, follows orders.

Operation A.

Police battleships spring out of nowhere around the jungle. Four cities explode into boiling clouds of gas. Just like that. No warning shots. No negotiation. The cops are using Bethe blasters, hydrogen-helium weapons that vaporize everything.

The King screams: “Fight! They’re going to wipe us out! Fight!”

Buda-Pesht, the King’s own city, charges toward Earth, spitting fire. Other cities follow. Then more. Then a wave.

And here’s the thing. The cities are winning.

This makes no sense. Any police battleship can handle three cities without breaking a sweat. There were five battleships per city when this started. The cities shouldn’t stand a chance.

But police ships are exploding all over the sky. Something else is doing the killing. Something new and deadly is loose among the cops.

That enormous silver sphere, “Lincoln-Nevada,” wobbling and out of control, is wallowing toward Earth ahead of the maddened cities. And police ships are bursting everywhere around it.

The Three Millimeter Move

Amalfi is watching Earth through his helmet. A blue-green dot growing into a disc at impossible speed. He sees ice at the pole. His eyes sting and water. He can’t explain why.

Then a beep. He nearly misses it. The warning buzzer already sounded while he was hypnotized by the sight of the home planet. He has maybe two and a half seconds of manual control over Hern VI before the City Fathers take the stick back.

He guesses the moment.

He moves the space stick in a flat loop about three millimeters long.

The City Fathers snatch the stick away. Earth vanishes. The sun vanishes. Hern VI accelerates back to screaming velocity.

A garbled voice begins broadcasting on Dirac: “PEOPLE OF EARTH. US THE CITY OF SPACES CALLS UPON YOU… YOUR NATURAL MASTERS…” The voice speaks in broken, inside-out grammar. It’s trying to announce Vega’s victory.

Then the voice stops existing.

The whole of Hern VI lurches and rings like a bell. Amalfi is thrown to the floor. And he doesn’t care. That impact means his three-millimeter move was true. Somewhere on Hern VI’s leading face, there is now a white-hot crater with the remains of the oldest Okie legend melted into it.

The Vegan orbital fort. The real Lincoln-Nevada.

It had waited for centuries, maybe longer, disguised as myth, hiding in plain sight. A relic of Vega’s old military might, aimed at Earth. It had joined the March on Earth hoping to strike in the confusion while Earth hesitated to fire on its own citizen-cities. And it very nearly succeeded.

Amalfi destroyed it with a planetoid and a flick of his wrist.

An Infant Galaxy

The city separates from Hern VI and lets the planet continue on its path toward the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Earth will chase the planet, not the city. All evidence of the Vegan fort is sealed in a cooling crater on a rock heading out of the galaxy forever.

Amalfi gathers everyone. The whole city listens.

He explains the situation. The city’s equipment is old and failing. They have no money. The galactic economy has collapsed. The drug standard that replaced the germanium standard is useless for Okies because they need those drugs to stay alive. They can’t trade their own lifespan.

“The Okies are through,” he says.

He proposes heading to the Greater Magellanic Cloud. Not just to find one planet. To find their own galaxy. A small galaxy, yes, but one moving away from the main one. A place where they can settle, build spaceships, colonize. Start fresh. Stay beyond the reach of any future government.

Hazleton pushes back. Why go so far? Why not hide in a big star cluster inside the galaxy? Stay on hand if things improve?

Carrel answers before Amalfi can. “Not only our planet,” he says, his eyes lit up. “Our galaxy.” He grew up in the south where the Magellanic Clouds crossed the night sky like tornadoes of sparks. He understands what this means.

Amalfi adds the sharp edge. There are already colonies in the Greater Magellanic. And the cities that went there in the old days were the worst of the worst. Bindlestiffs. Criminal cities. Including, probably, the Interstellar Master Traders, whose name makes every sentient being in the galaxy burn for blood. The New Yorkers won’t be plowing fields. They’ll be fighting.

Hazleton’s hands start kneading. “The Mad Dogs,” he says. “If they’re out there, I’d like to meet them.”

The City Fathers, confused by all this policy debate, conclude an election is happening. “HAVE MESSRS. HAZLETON AND CARREL ANY FURTHER ADDITIONS TO THEIR PLATFORMS?” they announce across the entire city.

Everyone goes blank. Then Hazleton laughs. “No additions,” he says.

Ten seconds later, John Amalfi is the mayor-elect of an infant galaxy.

The age of the Okie cities is over. Whatever comes next will be something entirely new.

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