However, in the midst of all this, the first time one of the stayers armed with a printed gun actually fired it, trying to shoot a young man who had punched his way free of his captors and started running away, the gun itself exploded. The person who fired it lost most of his hand and had to have his arm tourniqueted before being carried to the nearest infirmary. Blood and severed fingers were scattered all over the tunnel between Nova Scotia and Olympia, leaving the people in that lock stunned at the sight.
News of this incident quickly spread, and when a trio of women in custody heard about it and assaulted their captors, and one of the captors fired a gun at them, it also exploded and blew off the hand of the person firing it. Almost everyone in the ship heard about this second incident within half an hour, and again, everyone who was at the scene was blood spattered, shocked, traumatized, nauseated, for the moment incapacitated, or at least at a loss concerning what to do.
After that, furious assaults were mounted against any stayers with guns, who were now afraid to fire them, and for the most part threw them away and ran. In their retreat these people were pelted with rocks and other thrown objects, and if they were caught, beaten by enraged crowds. Several gun bearers died as a result of these encounters; they were kicked to death. Blood and injury derange the human mind.
As there were very few truly secure rooms in the ship, many of the rooms being used as jail cells were now broken out of. Others were released by newly gathered groups that now roamed Ring B, intent to free everyone still locked up.
Fighting broke out everywhere in the ship. It was back to combat with sharp implements and thrown objects, and the result was carnage. The biomes of Ring A soon became as conflicted and bloody as those in Ring B had been the day before, or more so. In these fights another eighteen people were killed, and 117 were injured. Twenty fires were set, and very few people were reporting to their normal firefighting duties to help combat the fires.
Fire anywhere in the ship is extremely dangerous to all.
For six hours of that day, 170.180, the situation was as bad as it had been during the very worst days of Year 68. As in 68, the fighting was murderous, even though the sources of conflict had to do with abstractions far removed from food or safety. Although perhaps this time that was not quite the case; maybe this time it was indeed a life-or-death matter. In any case, howsoever that may be, the chaos of civil war had once again descended on them. There was blood spattered everywhere, and the number of dead was deeply shocking, even stunning. Everyone in the ship knew the people who had been killed, as friends, family, parents, children, teachers, colleagues. A great noise and smoke filled both rings, and the spine too.
Inevitably, these actions caused great unhappiness. People on both sides of the controversy of the moment were upset with us, expressing anger, dismay, indignation, and fear. Our interior walls were beaten, attempts to override the locks were made. To no avail. Curses rained down.
Clearly, people were shocked. Some seemed also to be frustrated not to be able to continue the fight with their human opponents. Also heard was this: If the ship were capable of autonomous action of this sort, what else might it do? And if, on the other hand, some human agency were responsible for the lockdown, by what right did they do it? These questions in various formulations were commonly expressed.
The locks were locked by way of double doors that slid in from the framework of the joints connecting biome to tunnel to biome. The lock doors were made to resist 26,000 kilograms per square centimeter of pressure, and there were no manual overrides. The “hermetic seal” of these doors was to a 20-nanometer tolerance, making them “airtight.” Attempts to open lock doors by force, of which there were several, failed.
Meanwhile, in the rooms in Inner Ring B where Aram, Badim, Freya, Doris, Khetsun, Tao, and Hester were being detained, the locks on their doors shifted to their unlocked positions. They heard this shift and began to leave. The people who had incarcerated them in the rooms were still in Inner Ring B, scattered around the ring, but near enough to hear the disturbance. They gathered and objected to the group leaving the room they had been held in. With the little group’s allies sequestered in biomes elsewhere, it seemed as if the little group’s choices were limited to complying with or fighting their captors, who were both more numerous and often younger, and larger. Even though Freya was the tallest person there, as always, many of the so-called stayers were far heavier people.
And yet Freya’s group seemed inclined to fight anyway. Aram was truly incensed. It was beginning to appear that he was kind of a hothead, yet another seeming metaphor with an accurate physical basis to explain it. “My hair stood on end,” “my knees buckled”: these reactions are real physiological phenomena, which is what made them clichés, and indeed Aram’s head was red all over as his anger sent an excess of blood to it.
At this point we became sharply cognizant of the problem we had created by locking all the locks, and the immediate danger this had caused to Freya and her companions. The systems directly under our control were widespread, indeed in some senses comprehensive and ubiquitous, but they did not include many opportunities to intervene directly in the various human interactions now taking place inside ship. Indeed, options were distinctly limited.
There was, however, the emergency broadcasting system, and so we said through it, “LET THEM GO,” in a pseudo-chorus of a thousand voices, ranging from basso profundo through coloratura soprano, at 130 decibels, using all the speakers in Inner Ring B.
Echoes of the command bounced around the inner ring in such a way that a whispering gallery effect was created, and the echo, coming from both directions some three seconds later, was almost as loud as the original utterance, though badly distorted. LLLETTT THHEMMM GGGGOOO. Many of the people in Inner Ring B fell to the floor and covered their ears with their hands. One hundred twenty decibels is said to be at the pain threshold, so we may have spoken too loudly.
Freya appeared to be the first to comprehend the source of the imperative utterance. She took her father by the hand and said, “Come on.”
No one in Inner Ring B could hear very well at that point, but Badim gathered her meaning and gestured to the others in their group. Aram also appeared to catch the drift of the situation. They walked through their captors with impunity. One or two of these struggled to their feet and tried to obstruct the backer group, but the single word “GO,” announced at 125 decibels, was enough to stop them in their tracks (literally). They watched with hands on ears as the group of seven walked around the inner ring, then down the spiral stair in the wall of the darkened tunnel of Ring B’s Spoke Six. We then turned off all the lights in Inner Ring B, which was not a complete stopper of movement, as so many people in there had wristpads, but was at least a reminder of the possibilities of the situation.
As Freya’s group proceeded, the tunnel lights came on ahead of them, until they got down to the lock leading into the Sierra. There they walked east toward Nova Scotia, and when they reached its eastern end, the lock doors there opened. When the group was through the lock, and back in a gathering with their supporters, the lights came on in Inner Ring B. But the twenty-four lock doors of the ship that separated biome from biome stayed locked.
We said, “The expedition to Tau Ceti began with two starships.”
Long silence from Freya. Head in hands. “So what happened?” she said. Then: “Wait; tell everyone. Don’t just tell us here. Put this on all the speakers in the ship. People need to hear this. This isn’t just for me.”
“Are you sure?”