Asimov's Science Fiction: October/November 2013 (26 page)

"Coop, you can't!" Dix said. "You can't!"

The transport reached the very edge of the range. Coop slammed both hands onto the controls. One palm hit the speed setting while the other sent every weapon the transport had at the landing deck of Starbase Kappa.

"Coop, nooooo!" Dix screamed.

The transport went from a cruising speed to its maximum in less than a second. Everyone got knocked back, even Coop. He had plugged in coordinates near the
Ivoire's
last position.

At that moment, the weapons fire hit the landing deck. It exploded. Starbase Kappa pinwheeled away, mostly intact, but bits scattered. Coop wasn't close enough to see, but he knew what it was: pieces of the starbase, pieces of Yash's case, pieces of the civilian and his two guards.

The wave from the
anacapa
wasn't visible, but it hit them all the same, loud and screeching and heart-pounding. Coop had been hit with a destroyed
anacapa
wave before and it felt awful. The scientists didn't know why, and until this moment, he hadn't cared.

He gripped the seat, his breath coming in big gasps.

He couldn't see the wave move outward from the explosion, but he knew it had, and he knew that the Empire ship wasn't out of range. It bobbled, then rolled, and then floated, as all of its systems died.

The Fleet's transport ships had been built to survive an outside
anacapa
explosion. No ship in Boss's universe had been built that way. The wave would continue outward and would probably hit all of the Empire ships guarding this part of space. It wouldn't take out any other ships, since the Empire ships were keeping interlopers out of here.

At this moment, the crews of the Empire ships were probably still alive. But they wouldn't be for long. The ships' systems were down, along with everything else, even the environmental suits. Gradually, the environment would leach out of all of the ships, and the crews would die.

He doubted any ship could save them. Functioning ships were too far away to arrive quickly enough.

Coop stared at the Enterran ship for a moment. Its commander had had the right idea; she had just been too late. He felt for her. She had been in the wrong place at the wrong moment. He had known that the second he saw her, and he had known he couldn't warn her.

He found a stable orbit near a moon not far from the site where the
Ivoire
would return. He kept the cloak on.

His crew said nothing. Even Dix had grown silent.

Coop ran a hand through his hair, and turned around.

Dix looked like he had died along with the
anacapa
drive. His eyes were sunken, his lips bleeding where he'd clearly bitten them.

"Do you know what you've done?" he asked, his voice hoarse.

"Yes," Coop said. He sounded firm and confident, and like the captain he had once been.

The cockpit crew stared at him with the same expression Dix had. Apparently they had all held onto a bit of hope. Maybe they had thought that the insane scheme that Dix had come up with would reverse the circumstances of their journey into the future, and send them back to the proper place in the past.

Even Coop had felt that hope, not as a real thing, but as a pressure.

He had destroyed the pressure.

But unlike the crew, he wasn't feeling sad. He was feeling alive, for the first time since he got here.

He hadn't resurrected Captain Jonathan Cooper of the Fleet. That man was gone.

But he had found a new man, Coop Cooper, who captained the
Ivoire.

He had done what he set out to do. He had destroyed the malfunctioning
anacapa.

No one would die in this area of space ever again because of his people.

And he had kept his promise to Boss. The Empire didn't know about the
Ivoire
or his working
anacapa
drive.

His first mission in this new place had been a success after all. Just not the kind of success he'd expected it to be.

Dix's lower lip was trembling. His eyes were filled with tears. He was shaking his head.

"We're never going to go home again, Coop. Never. The circumstances will never ever be right again."

They hadn't been right this time either. Coop had argued that and argued that. So had his engineers and scientists. But apparently no one had believed them.

"I know," Coop said. "This is our home now. This place. Our training taught us how to move forward. It's time we do that."

"I can't," Dix said.

"You will," Coop said.

They needed time to mourn their lost lives. But first, they had to accept that their past lives were lost. He had helped them with that this day. That was the greatest success of the mission, the fact that it had exploded the false hope along with the damaged
anacapa.

It had helped him. And now that he was back on firm footing, footing he understood, he would be able to help them too.

The
Ivoire
had been missing its leader. He was back now, and he would make the best choices he could.

The first thing he was going to do was return to the Nine Planets. Now the fight against the Empire was his as well as theirs. His actions against the Empire would be seen as an attack. He would take the blame for that, just like he would take the blame for destroying his crew's hope.

He had broad shoulders.

And it was time he finally used them.

MEMORIES OF EARTH

Neal Asher
| 3677 words

Since 2000, Macmillan has published seventeen of Neal Asher's books and their schedule is now two years behind him. Some of his novels have appeared in America from Tor. Night Shade Books released
The Departure
in February, but now it seems that Sky Horse Publishing will be bringing out the rest of his Owner trilogy—
Zero Point
and
Jupiter War,
respectively—in May and September. This trilogy is based on some short stories that appeared long ago in his collection
The Engineer,
and the Owner has turned up in short tales since then. While the books detail his inception, "Memories of Earth," is a story set in the Owner's future. For more information check out:
http://freespace.virgin.net/n.asher/
and
http://theskinner.blogspot.com/.

The memories were vague now, still nightmarish, and still after all this time he could not quite piece together the course of events. The Grazen mother had attacked just after they'd established the mining operation down on the surface of the world he had named Malden, just after the first proto-life drops in the ocean, and when they were building the first terra-forming bases. It must have been watching, for it chose its time well. He'd just started expansion of the Rhine drive vortex generator when the Grazen ovoid slammed into the
Vardelex.

The yig worms had quickly penetrated the ship's structure, and moments after Saul and his crew had been battling for survival both in the physical ship and the computer realm most of his mind occupied. They'd grabbed everything they could, including Earth's gene bank, and managed to escape—just four hundred of the nine hundred aboard. The hardware and bioware had been wrecked in his skull, but were just functional enough for him to send the detonation signal to a cache of thermo nukes inside his ship. False daylight had marked their landing on Malden as both the
Vardelex
and the Grazen ovoid were destroyed in an atomic conflagration in the night sky.

"It reminds me of Earth," said Tina Chandra, as she closed up her EA suit and walked up to stand beside him.

Saul snapped out of his reverie and glanced across at her, suddenly angry. Then he calmed himself on a slow wheezy breath, nodded obligingly, suppressing the urge to challenge that. How could the view through this panoramic window possibly remind her of Earth? She'd grown up in the Bangladesh sprawl where the only real available views were of further buildings and the seething manswarm, and no view she could have chosen from cams scattered across their old home would have showed her anything like this. Maybe polar ice or government-owned croplands would have been as uninhabited, but they were in no way comparable. But then her attitude was usual with many of the survivors, and especially the long-sleepers like Tina: whenever they talked of "Earth" they always talked of a halcyon ideal that had only ever existed when life for humans had not been ideal at all. They certainly weren't referring to the nightmare they had left behind.

Blinking weary eyes, Saul returned his attention to the scene before him. The sky looked like nougat, striated in pink and white and marbled with pale nutty clouds just above the horizon. The ocean was rose, foaming like fizzy wine on the green and scummy sands lying a kilometer from T-base Six. Between the window and that strand lay the flat rocks of the lava flow the base had been anchored to, and there a solitary planter, like a giant steel beetle made like a Doolittle push-me-pull-you, with heads and manipulators at both ends of its body, was at work. It was pausing at hollows between the slabs to spew part of its load of that scummy sand from the beach—this laced with further organics, minerals, and a selection of new genetically modified seeds for salt-resistant plants.

"I still wonder if we did the right thing," she said.

Saul stooped, his back aching, and picked up his EA suit helmet from the ledge below the window. "Was there any right and wrong in this?"

"It's like a proto-Earth," said Tina. "The algae blooms and micro-fauna we found when we arrived would have eventually led to larger life forms there, and then on land. By seeding both the oceans and the seas we put our own stamp on it—we probably destroyed something precious."

"Something precious in a few billion years maybe." Saul shrugged and turned to head toward the airlock. "And very much dependent on how you define precious. I consider our lives precious, and if we don't do this we die here."

It was all he had left really. He'd left most of his mind behind on his ship and now even his viral genetic fix was failing; he was growing old, dying. His legacy would be a terraformed world the long sleepers could walk out on and begin their lives anew. He felt he owed them that.

Tina followed him. "But what right do we have to interfere?"

Saul rounded on her. He had intended to remain calm, just run through the final check and not end up in another debate about the morality of what they were doing; not end up going round and round in their discussions of the meaning of it all. He was getting tired of the growing number of sleepers who advocated closing themselves up in cold coffins until human civilization reached this far out to release them into some future utopia—giving up, in other words.

"So tell me, Tina, when did you start believing in God?" he asked.

She was taken aback, her mouth opening and closing like those modified trout being bred for the inland lakes. "I don't believe in God—that's... primitive."

"Oh, I see." Saul gazed at her with pretend puzzlement. "So what's all this talk about our right to interfere? It strikes me that rights are something granted by someone higher up." He stabbed a finger toward the ceiling. "And the only higher ups I've thus far seen in this region of space are the Grazen, and the only right they would grant us is to die quickly rather than screaming in a yig-worm burrow."

Saul turned and stepped into the corridor leading to the rear airlock of Base Six, pausing for a second to peer into one of the cryogenics rooms at twenty cold coffins arrayed around the wall. Two hundred days ago he, Tina, and seventeen others had woken in a room just like this on the other side of the base, while one occupant had died sometime in the past—his coffin truly earning the term before they took him outside, found some soft ground inland and buried him, thus making a small addition to the terran biomass of Malden. Right there was a demonstration of how far he had fallen. He— who had once been able to clone replacement bodies for people and transfer minds between bodies like computer files—could not keep someone alive in a simple cold coffin.

Upon their arrival on the surface it had soon become evident that they had two choices: struggle to survive using hydroponics in the enclosed bases, or sleep in the cold coffins from their landing craft, while the terraforming of Malden progressed. He'd chosen the latter and still had enough power to force the decision. So they had rested in cold stasis for a century while the oceans began filling with terran life. Then the century after that, and again and again. Saul had woken many more times than the others, constantly tweaking the plan, ensuring everything kept on track. In Earth years he was a hundred and seventy now, while Tina here was just into her forties.

"Bring your case, we've got work to do," he said, dragging his gaze away from the cold coffins, and together they stepped into the airlock at the end of the corridor.

Upon waking this time Saul had issued his orders, and the few who had woken with him had set to work assembling and testing the first planter robots and re-jigging the robot factories and auto-maintenance bays, utilizing metals and other materials stockpiled over the best part of two thousand years of automated mining and manufacturing. And now the new system was nearly self-sustaining. Just a little more checking and he would be sure, then it would be time to head back to cold sleep, perhaps, for him, for the last time.

He stepped out of the airlock and gazed across a rocky plain to distant mountains and noted how the greenery was now predominant. Using the rich-in-organics sand and proto-soil from the coastlines, the robots had spread their planting inward over three hundred kilometers, and the blooms from two of the bases had already met up and melded. Within another hundred days the entire continental landmass would be rimmed with green. Also, with the genetically modified algae and seaweeds in the oceans rapidly heading toward critical mass, it seemed likely that, by the end of that time period, there would be enough oxygen content in the air to begin introducing small land-going fauna—though of a highly modified kind. They did not need to stay awake for that. He just needed this last check; this last glimpse into a computer world he had once mastered and now found killingly difficult.