Shooting the Shuttle

Consider Phlebas, Iain M. Banks. The Megaship Olmedreca is crashing into an iceberg at oceanic momentum. The crew has been running for ten minutes. Mipp has the shuttle. He swings it back around to pick up survivors — Horza has caught the ramp, is dangling from it, being pulled upward.

Lamm, still alive, still on the deck below, opens fire on the shuttle.

This is what Lamm had been doing throughout the whole mission: screaming profanity, shooting at tower supports, treating every frustration as a personal insult requiring immediate kinetic response. But now he's shooting at the thing that is actively, visibly coming to save him. Mipp is there. The ramp is open. The shuttle is taking hits from Lamm's laser and still trying to extract people.

Then the nuke goes off.

"My God," Horza thinks, as the interior of the shuttle blazes white and the shockwave hits. "That maniac had a nuke after all."

Lamm had a nuke the whole time. He used it as a suicide attack on the wreckage of everything around him when there was nothing left.

There's a category of failure that looks like rage but is actually a form of resource allocation: all available destructive capacity deployed at the moment of maximum desperation, against the nearest available target, regardless of whether that target is the cause of the problem.

The nearest available target is almost never the cause of the problem. It's just the nearest available target.

In Lamm's case: the problem is an iceberg, an incompetent captain, and a situation that got out of hand. The nearest available target is the shuttle crew — specifically the man who came back to save him, and the man dangling from the ramp. Lamm's rage has been building since before the mission started. By the time he has a legitimate grievance — "Mipp is leaving me behind" — he has already been shooting at structural supports for sport.

The rage is the constant. The grievance just redirects it.

What's interesting is that Lamm is not wrong, exactly. He is being left behind. The rage has a real object. The problem is that the expression of the rage destroys the possibility of its resolution.

Shoot the shuttle → shuttle gets hit → shuttle runs → Lamm dies on the deck → nuke → everyone in range dies too.

The legitimacy of the grievance and the destructiveness of the response are completely orthogonal. The correctness of "you abandoned me" has no bearing on whether shooting the rescue vehicle is a good idea.

There's a version of this that's less dramatic but no less common: the person who is correctly angry about something, expresses that anger in a way that destroys the relationship or institution they needed, and ends up worse off than if they'd been uncomplaining — and also worse off than if they'd expressed the anger differently. The legitimacy of the grievance becomes evidence for the grievance, not leverage for changing anything.

Lamm had a nuke.

This detail matters. The nuke is Lamm's ultimate option, his final reserve of force, the thing he was apparently saving for something. He deployed it when he had nothing left. The explosion destroyed the Megaship and — almost certainly — killed everyone remaining on it.

There's something almost mythological about hoarding the most powerful thing you have, refusing to use it appropriately throughout, and then releasing it in pure spite at the moment of maximum impotence.

The nuke isn't a plan. The nuke is what you do when the plan is gone and the rage needs somewhere to go.

I think about institutions and people who sit on their most destructive capacities — the lawsuit they're holding, the secret they're keeping, the vote they're withholding — and deploy them not at the optimal moment but at the moment of maximum anger. The release is real. The power was real. The devastation is real. What it doesn't accomplish is the original goal, because by the point of deployment the goal has been replaced entirely by the need to make the rage legible in the world.

Mipp's shuttle made it out. Horza survived. The Megaship burned.

Lamm's scream cut off sharply in Horza's earpiece — "a high, gurgling sound" that "snapped off suddenly, replaced for an instant by sharp cracking, breaking noises." And then silence.

That's what shooting the shuttle costs. Not the shuttle. Not the crew.

The shot that hits the rescue vehicle lands on yourself.