The Concord Accord

The Accord registers and watches the arrays; it does not limit them. Nobody proposed capping power by law: no society has ever capped its total energy use, and the pull of abundant energy would wear down any such law. The Accord binds the four blocs, the Belt Republic, which signed just after winning independence, and Freehold, the Raised bloc, and it absorbed the Sealing Treaty (see The Concord Accord, in Politics).

What it does.

• Seats its council, the Anchorage, at the Landing, with six seats: the Settlement, the Mandate, the Parishad, the Open Cities, the Belt Republic and Freehold.
• Through the Anchorage, registers and inspects arrays and their seeds, large emitters and relay stations.
• Splits the shutdown keys to every large emitter and every Vault between the owner and the Accord, so the Accord can cut any beam.
• Sets keep-out distances for emitters around inhabited places, forbids aiming any large emitter at Earth's surface (a rule the blocs had kept since the first beams; beams to Earth end at receivers in orbit), and tracks ships near habitats.
• Carries the Rock Clause. Any move of a body over 1,000 tonnes (at 20 km/s, about 50 kilotons on impact) must be filed with the Watch before it begins, no body may be steered onto an orbit that could strike a planet or moon without the Watch's clearance, and moves near habitats are filed and logged. The Watch is the Accord's planetary-defence body, crewed by all six signatories, with a sky survey no member can switch off alone and shared deflection tugs, which can move rocks but enforce nothing; it descends, in spirit and in its oath, from the Bennu Nudge of the 2120s. The clause answers the Ceres Letter.
• Punishes a signatory that refuses a Vault inspection: the others' compute caps rise, and its fabs lose the seals that let their chips pass between blocs. By 2497 every signatory but Freehold has at least one Vault, the Belt Republic included; Freehold officially has none, and the Anchorage inspects its compute and cores instead.

What it leaves out. The negotiators tried caps and dropped them. A capped array's factories can regrow it, hidden seeds cannot be found, and mirrors turned edge-on hide their capacity. Emitter caps fail for the reasons below, and emitters are also the outer system's power supply. So the Accord watches, and the peace rests on everyone being able to destroy everyone else.