Battle Cruiser (21 page)

-30-

Following Morris’ advice, I began searching for Zye. I was getting to know the ship by now, and what had once seemed like a maze of passages was mapped out in my mind.

When I finally found her, she was in the cargo hold. It was still freezing cold down there, and dark. She was standing among the racks of tubes, examining them with a careful tenderness. I supposed that to her, they were children.

Walking up to her, I tapped her on her broad back. That was a mistake. In spacesuits and near vacuum conditions, it was impossible to hear another person approaching.

Her reaction was swift and violent. She whirled, eyes blazing. Sparks flashed, as something struck my personal shield.

I’d had the foresight to turn it on after Morris’ warning. It was a good thing I had. The shield absorbed her wild slash, leaving only a bright tracery of afterimages on our retinas to show it had passed at all.

“Sorry,” I said, staggering back a step. “Didn’t mean to startle you.”

“Captain?” she asked as if dazed. Her sides were heaving, her shoulders hunched for battle.

I was impressed by her reflexes. In less than a second, she’d gone from calm introspection and private thoughts about the embryos and shifted into a killer rage. I filed this fact away for later consideration.

“Sorry,” I said again. She seemed to hear me this time. “I was wondering what you were doing down here.”

She stared at me for a moment. It was the sort of stare a snake might give to any animal that surprises it. Slowly, she calmed down with a visible effort.

“It would be best,” she said, gulping for air and closing her eyes, “that you don’t surprise a Beta.”

“I can see that. When we first discovered your ship, we found tubes like these floating in space around it. Did you know that?”

I had her full attention again. “No.”

“It’s true. Our best guess is that the original miners who discovered the vessel opened the hatch to this hold. The action depressurized the chamber violently. Some of these vials must have been unsecured as they were blasted out into space.”

“Such a crime,” she said, looking around the room slowly. “I’d calculated that there were missing embryos—but I’d hoped they’d been removed when my people abandoned the ship. They must not have had time.”

Studying her for a moment, I decided not to tell her about the smuggler I’d found with a few dozen samples in Earth’s orbit. That couldn’t possibly improve her mood.

“Why is this ship carrying so many embryos?” I asked her. “What’s the purpose?”

She looked at me in puzzlement. “I would have thought that was self-evident. This vessel was prepared for colonization, should a suitable planet be found.”

“Ah,” I said, understanding the situation immediately. “That makes sense. It is equipped with a star drive, after all. Are all your cruisers built with star drives?”

“No, not all. They are difficult to build. We only have a few. They open a way for the others. But this ship—we were traveling alone, prepared for whatever we met up with. At least, that’s what we thought.”

“Do you know what damaged your ship?”

“Enemy fire.”

I smiled. “Of course, yes, but
who
was responsible? You said the Betas have many enemies.”

“I’ve been looking into the data core. There’s little there in the way of recorded logs at the time of the battle. But what I did find has led me to believe it was the Stroj. They are a savage people. Aggressive beings who will attack anyone they meet, heedless of losses.”

Nodding, I took a mental note.

“Stroj,” I said thoughtfully. “Human splinter colonists like the Betas, I assume?”

“Human, yes. But like us? That’s insulting. I will ignore your statement and assume it was made out of gross ignorance.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I meant no offense.”

I couldn’t recall having heard of a colonist group called the Stroj, but that didn’t mean they didn’t exist.

There was so much we didn’t know about this new universe in which we’d found ourselves. An entire interstellar community lived around us, and we knew next to nothing about it.

Looking around the hold, I was struck with a new thought. “How many Betas are here—as frozen embryos?”

“I haven’t performed a count,” she said.

“Do you know how many there were originally?”

“Ten thousand Betas, and one hundred Alphas. Most of the Alphas would turn out to culls, of course, but a few of them would grow up to lead the rest.”

“Culls?” I asked. “You mean rogues and mutations?”

“Yes.”

“One would think that you might have come up with a more precise system than random chance to create superior Betas.”

She shrugged. “An Alpha makes such an attempt from time to time, if it is in their nature. So far, none have succeeded.”

“I think I’m beginning to understand,” I said. “In a way, your similarity is a weakness. You are what you are, you can’t innovate very well as that isn’t a strong point of your design.”

“Exactly. We’ve found that the randomness of evolutionary mutations isn’t completely dispensable. That’s why we have the Alphas. They create all our advances, make all major decisions. They’re few in number, but they’re critical.”

“How was the first Alpha created?”

“Our Mother, the original woman who created us all, was the last survivor of the colonists who settled on our planet. Our world is a harsh one, with fierce gravity, tidal shifts and deadly wildlife. When she realized the colony was going to die out, she worked to create a singular being that could thrive on that world.”

“I see…and the Alphas?”

“Mother
was
the first Alpha—can you not see that?”

“Of course. She made Betas as an improvement upon her own design. A people more cooperative than pure clones of herself.”

Zye nodded. “You do understand. I’m impressed.”

“But why spoil a perfect solution? Why did she make more of Alphas?”

“She lived long enough to realize the Betas would stagnate. On her deathbed, she ordered the variation to be implemented in every hundredth embryo. We’ve followed her command from that day to this, with excellent results.”

“You have much to be proud of,” I said. “Your people were designed to survive where mine perished.”

My words made her happy, as I thought they might.

“One last question, Zye,” I said. “Would you say you’re any more or less clever than your average Beta?”

“I’m definitely more cunning than they are. That’s how I managed to live for many years in their midst, unsuspected.”

“That’s what I thought.”

If I had to guess, I’d say Zye’s intelligence quotient was an approximate match to human normal. If she was considerably smarter than the average Beta, that helped explain their lack of imagination. Despite all their strengths, the Betas needed Alphas to act as their leaders.

I knew that if leaders were such a rarity among Earthlings, it wouldn’t work out well. A company of soldiers needed many more leaders—sergeants, lieutenants and the like—to operate effectively. One person leading a thousand? It would be chaos. But possibly, since Betas were all obedient clones that thought alike anyway, they could cooperate effectively.

Thinking as an officer, I believed it might be rather nice to not have to deal with a shipload of personalities. You could definitely get more done if your crew invariably did as they were told.

On the flipside, it sounded like it would be extremely dull. I shuddered to think what Beta dinnertime conversation sounded like.

We left the cargo hold together. Zye began asking me about my personal shielding. Apparently, Betas didn’t possess such technology.

“I wouldn’t expect Betas to have portable shields,” I said. “We only invented them on Earth about fifty years ago. That would be long after your colony was separated from us.”

“So many ideas,” Zye said, musing. “Your people are like chattering marsh-water. A lake being struck by a million drops of rain all at once. No voice ever matches any of the others. No shared thought. Chaotic.”

“You might like it,” I told her. “Our cities are very stimulating. There’s new entertainment every hour in Capital City. It never stops.”

“There’s no set quiet-time?” she asked, frowning.

“No. People do as they wish. If you’re hungry at midnight, you can get up, drive your air car to a restaurant and order whatever you want to eat. It’s called freedom, Zye. I recommend it highly.”

“What about males?” she asked me. “Are there many of your sex available?”

“Ah…yes, of course. About half the population is male. There are billions of us.”

“Billions…are there any large males?”

I shook my head sadly. “Among my kind, I’m considered larger than average. There are few that are as large as you are, Zye.”

“A pity, but I suppose one must take what one can get.”

The conversation had taken a somewhat unexpected turn. I’d always believed she was interested in men, but I found her straightforward approach to the topic alarming.

-31-

The engines were operable eight days later. By that time, I was no longer worried that
Altair’s
crewmen would assassinate me. There was no love lost between us, but they’d come to accept I was their new captain. I was a usurper, certainly, and not to be trusted. But I was also a Star Guard officer, and their years of conditioning and discipline allowed me to lead them.

There was a new, darker source of dread growing within me, however. A shadow lay over everything we were doing to help get the battle cruiser safely home to Star Guard.

It had to do with our attempted communications with Earth—we just weren’t getting through.

“Yamada, anything on the frequency range?” I asked as I walked the bridge back and forth—some might call it pacing. There was plenty of room for the activity between the various stations as everything was built and sized for Betas.

“No change, sir. Just silence.”

“Analysis?”

“We’re either being jammed or Earth has been destroyed.”

She chuckled at her joke, but I didn’t join her. “Jammed? Shouldn’t we be hearing static, then?”

“No sir, not necessarily. It’s an active, intelligent jamming. If I had to guess, I’d say some station is in-between our location and the dish we’re trying to talk to. When we transmit a signal, the interrupting device picks it up and adds in confusing data on its own, turning our message into a mess. It’s a technique rather like shining a powerful spotlight onto a dim light bulb to wash it out.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “And who, in your opinion, would possess that kind of technology?”

She shrugged. “It’s not all that sophisticated or rare. Could be the rock rats, or anyone else with a budget and the mind to do it.”

“Great,” I said, settling into my chair.

A week had gone by, and I’d not been able to communicate with Star Guard command or my parents—no one. For all I knew, none of them had any idea I was out here in dire need of assistance. They probably all still thought I’d gone rogue somewhere in the out-system and attacked my own comrades.

My skeleton bridge crew had gathered together when they’d heard the engines had been marked as “operable” by the robotic repair systems.

“These robots are amazing,” I told Zye when she walked in. “I suspect they’re better than anything we’ve got for this task back on Earth.”

“Hey now,” Rumbold protested. “Let’s not forget about the dozen broken backs that have been laboring double-shifts to get this bird flying again.”

“You’re right, Chief,” I said. “Much of the credit must go to my crew. But Zye, who built these robots? Did you ever tell me that?”

She glanced at me, then looked back at her boards. “They weren’t built by my people. We do not design such things—not even our best Alphas are able to.”

“I see. How did you get them, then?”

“We captured a few in battle. After discovering they were highly useful, we traded for more.”

“Hmm,” I said. “You defeated their owners in combat? Why not press on and enslave the makers?”

“Interstellar invasion is difficult. We didn’t have a thousand ships and millions of Betas to spare. Instead, our Alphas reasoned it would be easier to trade for what we wanted.”

“That’s a very rational viewpoint. Who created the robots, then?”

“The Stroj.”

I looked at her in alarm. “Your enemy?”

“We’ve since had a falling out.”

“I’ve been doing what I could to research these people Zye calls ‘the Stroj,’” Yamada said. “I believe they started out as a scientific expedition, but they were lost after the Cataclysm. They were the crew of the colony ship
Inquisitive
.”

“You’re correct,” Zye said. “They were stranded in an M-Class star system. They were forced to colonize a local world circling a cool, dim star.”

“Huh,” Rumbold said, “I think I do recall such a ship. They left just before the lanes shut down. They must have been an unhappy lot after they arrived and found the ER bridge had slammed closed behind them.”

Zye frowned at us. “What’s an ER bridge?” she asked.

“That’s the official term for the interstellar pathways you described,” Yamada explained. “It stands for Einstein-Rosen bridge. Some call these bridges wormholes, an entanglement of two spots in the continuum.”

“We must have forgotten the official term for them…” Zye said thoughtfully. “Or else Mother didn’t think it was worth remembering.”

“She probably had a lot of things to teach to her first thousand daughters,” I said.

“The concept of an ER-bridge was first described in 1935,” Rumbold said. “We learned that back in school. It seemed very important then…without the bridges, it would take a century to travel between the nearest of our colonies.”

“Zye,” I asked, “have the robots repaired the ship’s ER bridge drive, or only her local drive?”

“The bridge drive is not yet operational,” she replied. “We only have conventional engines with intra-system mobility. To engage the bridge drive, as you call it, would first require that we locate an open ER bridge.”

Rumbold and I looked at one another. Yamada, who had been working her console steadily while we talked, looked up to listen.

“Can this ship do that? Can it find a new bridge?” I asked. It was the question all of us wanted to ask.

“Yes,” Zye said.

We stared at her, then glanced excitedly at one another.

“Let me get this straight,” Rumbold said. “This ship, by itself, is capable of ferreting out new pathways to the stars?”

“Yes,” Zye said again, in the exact same tone.

“Is that function repaired?” I asked.

“It was never damaged.”

“Let me guess why you never said anything about it, then,” Yamada said, jumping in.

Zye looked at her flatly. “Because I was never asked.”

“That’s what I thought,” Yamada said. She shook her head in disbelief. She turned to me. “Imagine, William, what this might mean to Earth. We not only have a way to get to the stars again, we have a ship that’s capable of finding her own way to anywhere we want to go.”

“That isn’t true—not exactly,” Zye said. “In theory, you can go anywhere, but you have to find the correct path first. The trouble is that you can’t determine the end point of a thread—we call the pathways threads—without traversing it.”

“So, you’re flying blind?” I asked. “Every time?”

“When you explore a new path, yes. Once it is known and mapped, it’s much safer.”

Zye was describing a frightening prospect, and it dampened our enthusiasm. We would have to jump blindly, not knowing if we’d come out trapped in the gravitational grip of a black hole, or doomed in some other fashion.

“I see now why your people went out ready to colonize, but ended up having to abandon this ship. They jumped blindly, came out in a dangerous region, and were promptly ambushed. In order to escape, perhaps they jumped again.”

“Several times, I’d estimate,” Zye said.

“But that wouldn’t necessarily allow them to escape. You said this ship can open a path for others. The enemy must have pursued them.”

“It’s the only logical conclusion,” Yamada agreed. I could hear the rising excitement in her voice. “The Stroj chased the battle cruiser. Eventually, the officers aboard this ship must have realized that they couldn’t escape. So they abandoned her, and sent her off into space on a fresh course.”

“And that final leg led her here,” I said. “But there’s one thing that I don’t get. If these Stroj were following the ship, and they wanted to capture her, why didn’t they follow to this system and take the ship? After all, she’d been abandoned and badly damaged by that time.”

“There is only one plausible reason I can think of,” Zye said, “but it is unpleasant to contemplate.”

We looked at her curiously.

“They might have decided,” she said, “to go after the fleeing crew instead of the ship.”

That was a grim thought. What kind of enemy would rather lose the ship than let the crew escape? I was beginning to hope I never met up with the vile Stroj personally.

“So,” I said, “the ship came here on automatic pilot, abandoned. In that case, who knocked out her engines when she arrived?”

Zye had no answer for that one.

Rumbold shrugged in confusion and disinterest.

“The fact is they’re gone,” he said, “and the ship was left here, floating in the dark for years. No one was aboard except for Zye. It’s a wonder you didn’t go mad, girl.”

Zye looked at him dismissively. “Betas do not experience madness. It’s not in our design.”

I had my doubts about that, but I didn’t mention them. I had no doubt she was strong-minded, but there had been a certain degree of hunger in her eyes when she looked at me. She was human after all, and she had to be tremendously lonely for all that time, not knowing if she would grow old and die in an automated cell.

“I have an idea…” Yamada said. She’d been working on her console steadily while I mused about Zye and her fate. “I think I know how it could have happened. The engines weren’t excessively damaged at the end of the battle when the crew decided to abandon her.”

Zye looked at Yamada suddenly. “You’ve accessed the logs?”

“Yes, I’ve figured out how over the last week. You aren’t the only one with hacking skills aboard this vessel.”

“But you admit you withheld this critical information until now? A Beta would be punished for such an omission.”

Yamada’s face darkened. “Let’s get something straight, Zye,” she said. “I’m a Star Guard officer, and you’re a civilian from another star system. I answer only to the Captain. As far as I’m concerned—”

“Ensign,” I said, intervening, “perhaps it would be best if you just informed us of your findings.”

Yamada flicked her eyes back and forth between my face and Zye’s stony mask.

“All right,” she said, “I think the ship was programmed to jump as Zye says. It did so, after the crew abandoned her. She was damaged, but still flying due to inertial effects. Looking at the sequence of events, It appears the ship crossed a bridge between star systems on autopilot and ended up here. But while she flew, her engines died. They were already damaged, and the primary ignition chamber burned through during those final hours. It’s a wonder she didn’t blow up.”

Zye nodded thoughtfully. I could see in her eyes she was playing out the scene in her mind. “The Stroj decided to process the crew, rather than to capture the ship. The engines detected the catastrophic fault and shut down. The ship would have fired braking jets and gone into hibernation without further programming.”

“We may never know the exact details,” I said, “but the scenario you two have come up with makes good sense. When we return to Earth, I’m going to enter it into my report and credit you both with the investigation effort.”

This seemed to mollify them both. They went back to their duties, which consisted of systems checks. If we were going to try to fly this vessel again, we had to make sure she wouldn’t explode upon applying her first kilo-Newtons of thrust.

A few hours later, we felt brave enough and confident enough to ignite the primary engine chambers. First, we had to stoke the core, which took guts in and of itself.

Squinting, despite the fact I knew it wouldn’t protect my eyes, I ordered Rumbold to begin the process.

“Are you sure, sir?” he asked worriedly.

“Just do it, Rumbold. We’ll die quickly if the chambers rupture.”

“That’s quite a comfort, sir!”

He finally applied his thumb to his board, then made a spinning motion around it, touching his index finger to the correct control.

Zye had read the instructions to figure out how to perform that particular maneuver. I took it that it wasn’t general knowledge, and that some Alpha designer of the past had wisely made the touch-sequence an awkward gesture that couldn’t be performed accidentally. It wouldn’t do to have someone sit on the console and fire up the core by simply leaning on it.

An intense rumbling rolled through the ship. We felt it in our bones. It was like an earthquake—but it was more of a deep vibration than a rolling or jolting. If I hadn’t been clenching my teeth, they might have clacked together.

“Status?” I said loudly.

“We’re good here,” Yamada answered.

“No breach shown,” Zye said.

“The panel is all green,” Rumbold said, “but that might mean we’re dead anyway.”

I gave him a silent “thank-you” and gazed at my supervisory panels. Apparently, a ship’s captain didn’t deserve the most detailed information feed in Beta systems design. What I saw was a diagram of the ship with vital systems blinking and interacting.

Most of the systems were still green, with a few yellow and red exceptions. Not everything on the ship had been repaired yet, such as the medical facilities. We’d focused on weapons first, then the engines. Frills could wait until we saw the blue-white sphere of Earth under us.

“Yamada, tell the crew to buckle up. We’re going to do this. I was planning to just warm the engines for a test-firing, but it’s my belief letting them go cold again while they’re damaged is more of a risk. We’ll press on and make our way back to Earth, starting now.”