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Authors: Vernor Vinge

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On only one issue could Paša be considered soft: his son was just eighteen today, yet the boy had already consumed the resources and the pleasures of a thousand adolescences. Saša X, dressed in skintight red breeches and diamond-encrusted belt, stood next to his father’s throne. The brunette leaning against him had a figure that was incredibly smooth and full, yet the Prince’s hand slid along her body as negligently as if he were stroking a baluster.
The keepers prostrated themselves before the throne and were recognized by the Emperor. Biladze bit back a curse. The damn microphone wasn’t picking up their conversation! How would he know what Paša or his son wanted if he couldn’t hear what was going on? All he was getting were music and laughter—plus a couple of indecent conversations close by the mike. This was the type of bungle that made the position of Chief Yacht Pilot a short-lived one, no matter how careful a man was.
One of his crew fiddled with the screen controls, but nothing could really be done at this end. They would see and hear only what the Lord Chamberlain was kind enough to let them see and hear. Biladze leaned toward the screen and tried to pick out from the general party noises the conversation passing between Boblanson and the Prince.
The two keepers were still prostrate at Paša’s feet. They had not been given permission to rise. Boblanson remained standing, though his posture was cringing and timid. Servants insinuated themselves through the larger crowd to distribute drinks and candies to the Imperial party.
The Emperor and his son seemed totally unaware of this bustle of cringing figures about them. It was strange to see two men set so far above the common herd. And it all brought back a very old memory. It had been the summer of his last year at Tiflis, when he had found both Klaša and the freedom of the Navy. Many times during that summer, he and Klaša had flown into the Kavkaz to spend the afternoon alone in the alpine meadows. There they could speak their own minds, however timidly, without fear of being overheard. (Or so they thought. In later years, Biladze realized how terribly mistaken they had been. It was blind luck they were not discovered.) On those secret picnics, Klaša told him things that were never intended to go beyond her classes. The architecture students were taught the old forms and the meaning of the inscriptions to be found upon them. So Klaša was one of the few people in all the Empire with any knowledge of history and archaic languages, however indirect and fragmentary. It was dangerous knowledge, yet in many ways fascinating: In the days of the Republic, Klaša asserted, the word “Emperor” had meant something like “Primary Secretary,” that is, an elected official—just as on some isolated Navy posts, the men elect a secretary to handle unit funds. It was an amazing evolution—to go from elected equal to near godling. Biladze often wondered what other meanings and truths had been twisted by time and by the kind of men he was watching on the holoscreen.
“—Father. I think it could be exactly what my creature says.” The audio came loud and abrupt as the picture turned to center on the Prince and his father. Apparently Rostov had realized his mistake. The Chamberlain had almost as much to lose as Biladze if the Emperor’s wishes were not instantly gratified.
Biladze breathed a sigh of relief as he picked up the thread of the conversation. Saša’s high-pitched voice was animated: “Didn’t I tell you this would be a worthwhile outing, Father? Here we’ve already run across something entirely new, perhaps from beyond the Solar System. It will be the greatest find in my collection. Oh, Father, we must pick it up.” His voice rose fractionally.
Paša grimaced, and said something about Saša’s “worthless hobbies.” Then he gave in—as he almost always did—to the wishes of his son. “Oh very well, pick the damned thing up. I only hope it’s half as interesting as your creature here,” he waved a gem-filthy arm at Boblanson, “says it is.”
The non-Citizen shivered within his blue uniform, and his voice became a supplicating whine. “Oh, dear Great Majesty, this trembling animal promises you with all his heart that the artifact is perfectly fit to all the greatness of your Empire.”
Even before Boblanson got the tongue-twisting promise out of his mouth, Biladze had turned from the holo and was talking to his men. “Okay. Close with the object.” As one of the crew tapped the control board, Biladze turned to Kolja and continued, “We’ll pick it up with the third-bay waldoes. Once we get it inside, I want to check the thing over. I remember reading somewhere that the Ancients used reaction jets for attitude control and thrust—they never did catch on to inertial drive. There just might be some propellant left in the object’s tanks after all these years. I don’t want that thing blowing up in anybody’s face.”
“Right,” said Kolja, turning to his own board.
Biladze kept an ear on the talk coming from the main deck—just in case somebody up there changed his mind. But the conversation had retreated from the specifics of this discovery to a general discussion of the boy’s satellite collection. Boblanson’s blue figure was still standing before the throne, and every now and then the little man interjected something in support of Saša’s descriptions.
Vanja pushed himself off the wall to inspect the approach program his crewman had written. The yacht was equipped with the new drive and could easily attain objective accelerations of a thousand gravities. But their target was only a couple hundred kilometers away and a more delicate approach was in order: Biladze pressed the PROGRAM INITIATE, and the ship’s display showed that they were moving toward the artifact at a leisurely two gravities. It should take nearly two hundred seconds to arrive, but that was probably within Saša’s span of attention.
One hundred twenty seconds to contact. For the first time since he had called Boblanson into the control cabin ten minutes earlier, Biladze had a moment to ponder the object for himself. The cone was an artifact; it was much too regular to be anything else. Yet he doubted that it was of extraterrestrial origin, no matter what Boblanson thought. Its orbit had the same period and eccentricity as Earth’s, and right now it wasn’t much over seven million kilometers from Earth-Luna. Orbits like that just aren’t stable over long periods of time. Eventually such an object must be captured by Earth-Luna or be perturbed into an eccentric orbit. The cone couldn’t be much older than man’s exploration of space. Biladze wondered briefly how much could be learned by tracing the orbit back through some kind of dynamical analysis. Probably not much.
Right now the only difference between its orbit and Earth’s was the inclination: about three degrees. That might mean it had been launched
from Earth at barely more than escape velocity, along a departure asymptote pointing due north. Now what conceivable use could there be for such a trajectory?
Ninety seconds to contact. The image of the slowly tumbling cone was much sharper now. Besides the faint scoring along its hull, he could see that the dull white surface was glazed. It really did look as if it had passed through a planet’s atmosphere. He had seen such effects only once or twice before, since with any inertial drive it was a simple matter to decelerate before entering an atmosphere. But Biladze could imagine that the Ancients, having to depend on rockets for propulsion, might have used aerodynamic braking to save fuel. Perhaps this was a returning space probe that had entered Earth’s atmosphere at too shallow an angle and skipped back into space, lost forever to the Ancients’ primitive technology. But that still didn’t explain its narrow, pointed shape. A good aerodynamic brake would be a blunt body. This thing looked as if it had been designed expressly to minimize drag.
Sixty seconds to contact. He could see now that the black hole at its base was actually the pinched nozzle of a reaction jet—added proof that this was an Earth-launched probe from before the Final Conflict. Biladze glanced at the holoscreen above the printer. The Emperor and his son seemed really taken with what they were seeing on the screen set before the throne. Behind them stood Boblanson, his poor nearsighted eyes squinting at the screen. The man seemed even stranger than before. His jaws were clenched and a periodic tic cut across his face. Biladze looked back at the main screen; the little man knew more than he had revealed about that mysterious cone. If he had not been beneath their notice, the Safety Committee would have long since noticed this, too.
Thirty seconds. What was Boblanson’s secret? Biladze tried to connect the centuries-deep hatred he had seen in Boblanson with what they knew about the tumbling white cone: It had been launched around the time of the Final Conflict on a trajectory that might have pointed northwards. But the object hadn’t been intended as a space probe since it had evidently acquired most of its speed while still within Earth’s atmosphere. No sensible vehicle would move so fast within the atmosphere …
… unless it was a weapon.
The thought brought a sudden numbness to the pit of Biladze’s stomach. The Final Conflict had been fought with rocket bombs fired back and forth over the North Pole. One possible defense against such weapons would be high-acceleration antimissile missiles. If one such missed its target, it might very well escape Earth-Luna—to orbit the sun, forever armed, forever waiting.
Then why hadn’t his instruments detected a null bomb within it? The
question almost made him reject his whole theory, until he remembered that quite powerful explosions could be produced with nuclear fission and fusion. Only physicists knew such quaint facts, since null bombs were much easier to construct once you had the trick of them. But had the Ancients known that trick?
Biladze casually folded his arms, kept his position by hooking one foot through a wall strap. Somewhere inside himself a voice was screaming:
Abort the approach, abort the approach!
Yet if he were right and if the bomb in that cone were still operable, then the Emperor and the three highest tiers of the nobility would be wiped from the face of the universe.
It was an opportunity no man or group of men had had since the Final Conflict.
But it’s not worth dying for!
screamed the tiny, frightened voice.
Biladze looked into the holoscreen at the hedonistic drones whose only talent lay in managing the security apparatus that had suppressed men and men’s ideas for so long. With the Emperor and the top people in the Safety Committee gone, political power would fall to the technicians—ordinary Citizens from Tiflis, Luna City, Eastguard. Biladze had no illusions: ordinary people have their own share of villains. There would be strife, perhaps even civil war. But in the end, men would be free to go to the stars, from where no earthly tyranny could ever recall them.
Behind the Emperor and the nobles, Boblanson cringed no more. A look of triumph and hatred had come into his face, and Biladze remembered that he had said this would be a gift fit for the Empire.
And so your people will be revenged after all these centuries
, thought Biladze. As vengeance it was certainly appropriate, but that had nothing to do with why he, Vanja Biladze, floated motionless in the control cabin and made no effort to slow their approach on the tumbling cone. He was scared as hell. Mere vengeance was not worth this price. Perhaps the future would be.
They were within a couple thousand meters of the object now. It filled the screen, as if it whirled just beyond the yacht’s hull. Biladze’s instruments registered some mild radioactivity in the object’s direction.
Good-bye, Klaša.
SIX MILLION KILOMETERS FROM EARTH, A NEW STAR WAS BORN. IN AN ASTRONOMICAL sense, it was a very small star, but to itself and what lay nearby it was an expanding plasmatic hell of fission-fusion products, neutrons, and gamma rays.
Robert Heinlein once proposed five rules for success in selling fiction (“On the Writing of Speculative Fiction” in Lloyd Arthur Eshbach’s
Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science-Fiction Writing
, Advent Publishers, 1964). The rules are simple, but following them
all
is difficult. Heinlein’s fifth rule was essentially “keep your story on the market until it sells.” The history of “Bomb Scare” certainly illustrates this principle, but with a little twist. I wrote the story in 1963 and got rejections from everywhere. Even I knew that it was a weak story, and so I never sent it to my favorite editor, John W. Campbell, Jr.; John was a person I didn’t want to disappoint. By 1970, there was no choice. I either had to send it to
Analog
, or consider breaking Heinlein’s fifth rule … .
John Campbell bought the story straightaway. So besides the importance of following Heinlein’s rule, there may be another moral here: It doesn’t pay to second-guess editors!
P
rince Lal e’Dorvik dilated his mouth hole, and casually picked at pointy fangs. With great deliberation he inspected the sky: the Maelstrom glittered across fifty degrees, a spiral of silver mist. It’s brilliance was dimmed by the gibbous blue planet that hung near the zenith. That blue light flooded through the transparent hull section onto the formal gardens of the Imperial Dorvik flagwagon. The soft brown sand dunes of the gardens were transformed into rolling blue carpets. An occasional ornamental lizard scurried across the sands. Within his vision, Prince Lal could see no less than five shrub-cacti: the excess vegetation made the scene almost sickeningly lush. Except for the bluish tinge of the landscape, Lal could almost imagine that he was back at Home in his winter palace.
With feigned nonchalance he turned to look at his companion, Grand General Harl e’Kraft. Prince Lal was thought harsh, in a civilization where the execution of ten thousand soldiers was considered moralebuilding discipline. Now he moved obliquely toward the subject at hand—with his reputation, he could afford to speak softly. “Is it always night?”
“Yes, Puissance, we keep the wagon oriented with the sun beneath the gardens’ horizon. Of course, I could make a ‘sunrise.’ It would take less than fifteen minutes to turn the wagon …”
“Oh, don’t bother,” Lal responded smoothly. “I was just wondering
what the ‘super-sun’ looks like.” He glanced at the blue-green planet high in the sky. “Isn’t it theoretically impossible for a giant star to have a planetary system?”
The young general sniffed warily at the bait. “Well, yes. Stars this size never develop solar systems by condensation. This one was probably formed by the accidental capture of three planets from some other system. Such things must be very rare, but we’re bound to run across them eventually.”
“Ah yes, there shouldn’t be planets here, yet there are. And these planets are inhabited by an intelligent, technologically developed race. And we must have these ‘improbable’ planets as the industrial base for our expansion in this volume; yet we don’t have them.”
Lal paused, then struck with reptilian ferocity.
“Why not?”
For a moment Harl sat frozen by the other’s ophidian glare. With a visible effort he twitched his mouth hole open in a disarming smile. “Care for a milvak, Puissance?” He motioned to a shallow dish of hors d’oeuvres.
Lal had to admit that the general was a cool one. Though e’Kraft faced the Long Dying for his failure, he offered his superior candied meat rather than explanations. This was going to be interesting. He carefully speared one of the squirming milvaks with a wrist talon, and sank his fangs into the little mammal’s hairless skin. With a sucking sound, he drained the animal of its vital fluids.
Harl e’Kraft waited politely until Lal had finished, then handed him a pack of color photographs.
“The Mush-faces are every bit as developed as you say. Their two outer worlds could supply us for any further expansion we might desire in Volume 095. They—”
Prince Lal slithered into a more comfortable position on the resting rack, and glanced at the top photograph. Mush-faces: that was an appropriate name for them. The olive-skinned monster that looked out of the photo seemed bloated, diseased.
“ … Have not invented mass-energy converters, but they do use a very efficient form of hydrogen fusion for their spacecraft. Their biggest spacewagons mass more than thirty thousand tons.”
Not bad for hydrogen fusion drive
, thought Lal. He glanced at the next picture. It was a schematic of a Mush-face battlewagon. There was the typical cigar shape of a fusion-powered craft, the magnetic venturis taking up much of the rear volume of the wagon. Ten rocket bombs were housed forward, with more snuggling under the craft’s nose on outside racks.
“In one respect they are ahead of us technologically.” Harl paused,
then said slowly, “The Mush-faces can shield against our mass-energy converters.”
This remark would have been greeted by a look of stupefied amazement if Lal’s spies had not briefed him beforehand.
LAL’S THIRTY TIMES GREAT-GRANDFATHER, GHRISHNAK I, HAD CONQUERED three oases on Home by edge of sword. His twenty-one times great-grandfather, Elbrek IV, united all Home with gunpowder and steam-powered sandwagons. His twelve times great-grandfather launched the first rockets into orbit, and perfected the hydrogen bomb for use against a group of heretics in the South Polar Sands. But the sword, gunpowder, steam, even the hydrogen bomb, all these were as nothing before the mass-energy converter. It was a simple weapon in practice: place the converter at the proper distance from the target, turn it on, and any desired fraction of the target was changed directly into energy. If such a weapon could be shielded against, the Dorvik had lost one of their trump dice.
E’Kraft continued, “This effect is probably incidental. Since the Mush-faces don’t have converters, it seems unlikely that they could intentionally design a defense against them. In any case, the only way we can destroy their craft is to convert a substantial amount of mass to energy just
outside
their screens. In other words we are reduced to using rocket bombs.
“They have an anatomical advantage, too, Puissance. A Mush-face can survive more than five times the acceleration that a Dorvik can. This mobility combined with their thousand gravity rocket bombs makes their space force more than a nuisance.
“Puissance, we have done as much damage as we dare to their industrial centers. It has not broken their will. Until we gain absolute control of local space, there will be no conquest.” The general’s statement was blunt, almost defiant.
Lal could imagine the tiny enemy craft flashing through the Dorvik fighter screen and firing rocket bombs at the Dorvik battlewagons. From the general’s own account as well as Lal’s spies, it was obvious that e’Kraft had made the best of a terrible situation. Supreme tactical skill was necessary to survive an enemy with longer legs and better defenses than one’s own. He riffled through the rest of the photographs. They showed proposed modifications in the Dorvik reconnaissance skimmers, for use as self-propelled bombs. Lal’s race hadn’t used rocket bombs in three centuries, so now that they needed them, such weapons were unavailable.
When Lal finally spoke, his face and tone contained nothing complimentary.
“So these pus-filled creatures are too stubborn for you? Your view is just too narrow, General.” He pulled an ornamented slate from his waist pouch. “That sickeningly blue planet,” Lal waved at the brilliant object directly overhead, “has twenty percent of the population and only three percent of the industry in this solar system. Its destruction would hardly impair the system’s usefulness to us. This”—he gestured with the triangular slate—“is an order, signed by my father. It directs you to detonate this planet.”
E’Kraft’s tympanic membranes paled.
Prince Lal hissed gently. “You find this overly violent?”
“Y-yes.” The general was still blunt.
“Perhaps, but that is the point. You will convert one trillionth of one percent of the planet’s mass. The explosion will be so vast that it will gently scorch portions of the other two planets. The deed’s very essence is violence and brutality; it will show this race that further resistance would be worse than any surrender.” Lal recited several stanzas from the liturgy of Dominance, finishing with:
“Ours is all that is and we rule all those who be,
For we are the Dorvik, the sons of the Sands.
And to those who deny our rule we say:
Bow down—or
be not
.
“It is immaterial whether you believe this doggerel garbage. The point is, that by divine authority or not, our race must stay on top. The day we take second place in the universe will be the beginning of the end for the Dorvik. If through some weakness of spirit we fail to conquer this system, then we will be consigning ourselves to the museums of the future just as surely as if we were destroyed in battle.”
In a single fluid motion, Lal reached out from his resting rack and handed his subordinate the order. “Implement this at once. And be sure you don’t annihilate more than the mass fraction specified, else this whole solar system might be destroyed.”
“I’m quite acquain—” e’Kraft was prevented from digging himself a grave by the appearance of one of his aides. The man’s three-dimensional image flickered, then steadied.
“PUISSANCE, GENERAL.” THE AIDE BOWED TO LAL AND THEN TO E’KRAFT. “Thirteen seconds ago we detected a gravitic disturbance near the sun. Someone has entered the system.”
“So!” Lal fumed. When he got his talons into the insubordinate
wretch that dared enter the combat zone without prior announcement—
The aide continued excitedly, “Puissance, it doesn’t respond to our IFF. It’s not one of ours.”
Prince Lal turned sharply to Harl. “Could the Mush-faces be experimenting with interstellar drive?”
“Unlikely, Puissance. The largest mass they’ve ever assembled in free fall was less than one hundred thousand tons. The smallest drive unit we have masses more than a billion.”
That was the Dorvik’s other trump. Without mass-energy converters, it was essentially impossible to hoist a drive unit into orbit, where it could operate.
The aide turned to look at someone outside of pickup range, and his excitement changed to pale and groveling terror. “The intruder is exactly one kill-radius from … from the sun!”
To convert a star—Lal gasped. While he had been ordering the destruction of a single inhabited planet, someone—
something
—absolutely evil had fused a bomb to murder a galaxy.
IT
WAS,
WHERE AN INSTANT BEFORE NOTHING HAD BEEN.
At one kill-radius from the primary, harsh white sunlight reflected blindingly off the little ovoid, all but blotting out the intricate gamma-colored designs that covered its surface.
Two creatures sat within the apparition. Considering the variety possible in this universe, they looked much like the Dorvik. A closer examination by someone trained and clever might have revealed a trimness and efficiency in the intruders’ structure that was missing from the Dorvik—that is missing from any natural race. For the intruders’ race had supervised its own evolution for more than 100,000 years. The result might not be remarkable in appearance, but the brains housed in those bodies were far quicker, far more subtle than anything unaided natural selection could produce. And though their grosser emotions were perhaps intelligible, any conversation presented here verges on falsehood in its incompleteness.
One of the creatures—identifiable by the two bristly spikes that grew tangentially from its head—turned to the other and said, in effect, “I still want S Doradus.”
“Gyrd, this star is almost as big. And quite a bit easier to reach, too.” The creature paused, adjusted the controls somehow. “Figuring the jump back is going to take all my concentration, so you’ll have to cancel the relative velocity on the converter when we drop it.”
The first replied. “No one tells me what to do, Arn.”
An air of hostility just short of physical violence filled the tiny cabin. Then Gyrd submitted with a nod.
“That’s better.” Arn relaxed. “Just imagine all the maggots that will fry in the fire we’re going to set.”
LAL BROKE THE AWFUL SILENCE. “HOW FAR AWAY IS THIS OBJECT?”
“Twelve billion kilometers, Puissance. We won’t be able to detect it by electromagnetic means for another ten hours.”
“How long would it take to compute a jump to its location?”
The aide did some fast figuring. “If we use everything, including our tactical computers, about ten minutes.”
“Very well, put everything you have on the problem. We’ll jump one of our battlewagons.”
“Yes, Puissance—”
“But, Puissance, what about the Mush-faces? If we don’t use the tactical computers for minimal defense, they’ll tear our fleet apart.”
Lal scarcely hesitated. “We’ll have to take those losses. If we can’t stop that … thing … near the sun, we’ll all be dead anyway, and the Dorvik empire will be destroyed in less than ten centuries.” He noticed that the aide was still waiting nervously. Lal turned to the man’s image and shrilled,
“Move!”
The aide bowed spastically and the image vanished.

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