The New Space Opera 2 (26 page)

For one second, everything stopped.

Then he grinned at her and pushed himself up.

Victor's head lolled backward. His neck was cut so deeply that she could see his spinal cord, the only thing keeping his body together.

“Misha,” she said. “What have you done?”

“What you should have done the moment you saw him,” Misha said with contempt.

Then he grabbed one of the blankets and wiped off his face. He still clutched a blood-stained knife—one of her galley knives—in his right hand.

She took the knife. Then she wiped the rest of the blood off of him. She led him back to the walkway, closed the hatch, and headed back to her own ship.

“You were going to let him live,” Misha snapped once they were inside their ship. “You were going to let him get away.”

She shook her head. “I wanted to find out what he knew. Information is important. I needed to know who was after me.”

“And who is?” Misha asked.

She didn't know. He had killed Victor too quickly. The first answers were often the lies. It usually took time to get to the truth.

But she wasn't sure she would have taken the time. Could she have tortured a man in front of her son?

She might have had to kill that man in front of her son. Odd that she had only thought of that now. She hadn't thought of it when Misha said he was coming along.

The boy constantly surprised her.

She hadn't expected it of him, this ferocity. She had never been ferocious. She had always killed slowly, coldly, with calculation and cunning.

She used to take pride in that.

“Do you feel better now?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he said, but his voice shook. His whole body was shaking. His lower lip trembled and his nose was turning red.

She knew what to do: a real mother would have taken him in her arms. But a real mother would never have brought him here.

“Are you sure?” she asked.

He nodded. One tear fell, but he ignored it. It tracked through some of the blood flecks on his cheek, down to his jaw, where it hung for a long moment before dripping onto his already soaked shirt.

Your father would have hated this
, she almost said. But it was a silly argument. Yuri was dead.

Misha was hers now.

A small, powerful boy-man. He had no qualms about killing, no qualms about defending himself.

And he had anger.

Those who killed with anger were the meanest, but often the most effective.

She stared at him, this child of hers, this blend of her and Yuri—her instincts with Yuri's passion—and knew that she would keep him beside her.

Misha had proven himself.

Together they could survive anything.

Anything at all.

Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including
Asimov's, Interzone, Jim Baen's Universe, Tor.com, Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede,
and many other markets, producing enough short fiction that he already has released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old:
Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight.
His novels include
Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring,
and, most recently,
Escapement
and
Madness of Flowers.
Coming up is a new novel,
Green.
He's the coeditor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies
All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories,
with David Moles, and
TEL: Stories.
Coming up is a new anthology, coedited with Nick Gevers,
Other Earths.
He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

Here he takes us to the far future for a demonstration that a mutiny in deep space can be even more dangerous—and far more complicated and strange—than any faced by Captain Bligh on the
Bounty
…

YEAR 461 POST-MISTAKE
HIGH ORBIT AROUND SIDERO

T
HE
B
EFORE
M
ICHAELA
C
ANNON, ABOARD THE STARSHIP
P
OLYPHEMUS
(
TWENTY-THREE PAIRS
)

“A ship needs a captain against mutiny,” muttered the Before Michaela Cannon. “Not a mutinous captain.” She wasn't in command of this vessel, not now at any rate—just the mission specialist in charge of integrating the starship's crew and the pair master assembly team. People called her ascetic, but what they meant was weathered. Leathered.
Raddled
. And far worse, when they thought she couldn't hear.

She knew better. You didn't live fourteen centuries, several of them amid screaming savagery, and not learn to know better.

Comms flickered with the immersive displays here in her workspace on the reserve bridge.
Polyphemus
was fast-cycling through a hundred-odd channels, showing Cannon a gestalt of what was happening across the decks as well as outside the hull on the construction project. They were here at Sidero to build a pair master—a hideously expensive machine required to anchor one end of a paired drive run across the depths of interstellar space. Five years-subjective ship-time in relativistic transit, over eleven years-objective.

Plenty of opportunities for things to go seriously wrong.

“The predictive accuracy of your social modeling is increasingly accurate,” said
Polyphemus
. The starship spoke to Cannon in Classical English. A rare enough language in the Imperium Humanum that simply using it served as a crude form of operational security. Cannon had spent a lot of time in the ship's Brocan modules, tweaking the speech processing.

Trust, it was always about trust. She'd been saying that down the long centuries, and had been proven right in the failing of things far too often.

Polyphemus
continued. “Apparently random gatherings of three or more persons are up forty-eight percent this ship-day from median. Seven in
dividuals appear in a distribution at six times the expected rate based on average distribution.”

“Kallus have anything to report?” He was her ally in Internal Security, a man loyal to certain interests outside the hull. Nothing inimical, just good old-fashioned politics, working with people she respected well enough.

“He is busy suppressing a staged fight in the number three crew quarters.”

Cannon grunted. Then: “Weapons?”

“Nothing but ordinary tools. No withdrawals from the arms lockers in the past three ship-days.”

Firearms could have been distributed long ago, or indeed, brought on board before they'd departed Ninnelil five ship-years earlier.
Somebody
had planned for this mutiny, or at least the possibility of it.

That other damned Before was at the heart of this problem
. “Where is Captain Siddiq?”

Polyphemus
paused an unusually long time before answering. “The Captain is not within my network mesh.”

“And why would a captain conspire at mutiny against her own command?” Cannon mused.

The starship had no answer to that. One by one, the images of the too-busy crew cycled to a hundred identical views of the dull black surface of the planet Sidero.

CONTEXT

In the centuries since the Mistake had nearly ended the tenure of the human race as a viable species, spacefaring had resumed across the core of the old Polity amid an outburst of genetic and technological diversity sparked by the pressures of extinction. The thread needle drives which had provided a true faster-than-light solution in cheerful violation of both paradox and the laws of physics were now simply so much junk, whether on a laboratory bench or in a starship's engine room.

Conventional physics had apparently reasserted itself. Precisely what had happened to the thread needle drive was a subject of centuries of frustrating, unsuccessful research.

Paired drives were invented in 188 pM by Haruna Kishmangali. They relied on a macro-level generalization of quantum effects to associate the starship drive with any two pair masters at distinct points—entanglement
on a grand scale so that the drives could “remember” the locations without having to cope with the intervening distances. Once this was done, the vessel could pass between the locations nearly instantaneously, except for the added travel times to and from areas of sufficiently low density to enable safely the pairing transit process.

The key problem was twofold. First, building the pair masters, which required planning horizons and budgetary commitments beyond the capability of even many planetary governments, as well a significant investment in relativistic travel to conduct site surveys and establish suitable destinations.

Second, even once built, every ship wishing to be capable of traveling to a site served by a pair master was forced to make the initial journey at relativistic speeds so that both ends of the pairing could be entangled, with the intervening distance required as part of the equation. Cheating didn't work, either. A drive to be paired had to make the trip embedded in its host starship. Simply traveling within the hold of another starship did not support the effect. Even worse from some points of view, if pulled out later from the host starship and associated shipmind, the drives would lose their pairing. There was no point to cannibalization. Everything had to be created the hard way.

This was a very limited form of FTL, though still far more effective than relativistic travel. The extent of interstellar travel grew slowly, and only at great need.

T
HE
B
EFORE
R
AISA
S
IDDIQ, SURFACE OF
S
IDERO

Siddiq walked almost naked in a field of buckyballs. This planet, if it in fact was a planet—some theories held this to be an artificial world—boasted .088 gravities at the surface, wrapped in hard vacuum. Which in and of itself was highly curious, as Sidero sat firmly in the Goldilocks zone of its primary and should have been perfectly capable of retaining a decent atmosphere. The night sky above revealed only the endless field of stars in the Orion arm. Sidero had no large companion, only a swarm of captured asteroids. Their pair master would be a more substantial satellite than any of the natural moons.

The Before herself was hardened as only thirteen centuries of living through two cycles of empire could make a human being. The best way to remain functionally immortal was to remain highly functional. In these
degraded days, she could walk the outside of her own ship's hull for hours before needing to find a breath, her skin proof against all but the most energetic particles. Clothes were mostly a nuisance. Besides, she hadn't had genitalia to speak of for over a thousand years, so modesty had long since gone out of consideration.

The spherical fullerene sprayed around her boots. She could swear the world rang beneath her feet, each strike of her heel banging a gong ten thousand kilometers across. No matter that sound did not carry in a vacuum—some things could be heard inside the soul.

Wrong, wrong, it was all so very wrong.

Cannon was up there in orbit, talking to
her
ship in a dead language that existed mostly in undercode running on ancient infrastructure and its more modern copies. The Imperium stretched through time and space behind them, an ever-opening invitation to repeat the Mistake.

Siddiq had long ago ceased thinking of herself as human, except occasionally in a very narrow, technical sense. Her gender had been subsumed many centuries-subjective past by the same medtech that had granted her the curse of immortality. Being a woman was as much a matter of habit as being human. Except when it wasn't.

Damn that Michaela Cannon
.

A line of what could have been buildings loomed ahead, rising out of the fullerene dust that covered the surface. The current hypothesis down in the Planetary Sciences section aboard
Polyphemus
was that some alien weapon had precipitated Sidero's atmosphere into the carbon spheres. Mass estimates didn't support this thinking, but it kept the bright boys busy.

Of far more interest to the Before Raisa Siddiq was what lay beneath the planet's iron skin. The recontact surveys had found four Polity starships in orbit here, three military and one civilian. That represented an enormous commitment of interest and resources, even by the insanely wealthy standards of pre-Mistake humanity.

Whatever those long-dead crews had wanted, it wasn't just an abandoned artificial world covered with fullerene.

Her tight-comm crackled. Siddiq had kept herself outside of
Polyphemus
's network mesh ever since this voyage began, for a variety of good reasons that began and ended with Michaela Cannon. Only two others in local space had access to this link.

“Go,” she said, subvocalizing in the hard vacuum.

“Aleph, this is Gimel.”

Testudo, then. No names, ever, not even—or especially—on tight-comm.

Siddiq nodded. Another old, pointless habit. “Mmm.”

“Beth reports that Plan Green is on final count.”

The Captain smiled, feeling the absolute cold on her teeth and tongue as her lips flexed. “Have any of the downside contingencies come into play?”

“Number two surely suspects.” That would be Cannon. “Number one continues to act out of pattern as well, with ongoing excessive monitoring. Neither has risen to code yellow.”

The ship
knew
. She had to. No matured paired starship flew without a keen, insightful intelligence. They knew their own hull and crew the way Siddiq knew her own body.

No one had ever tried to force out an intelligence. Not in the three hundred years-subjective since the late, great starship
Uncial
had first awoken. Not until now.

She crossed the rising line of maybe-buildings to find the dish-shaped valley beyond, as she'd been told. This close, under naked-eye observation, a decidedly low-tech net of thermoelectric camouflage obscured a grounded starship of a vintage with the pre-Mistake hulks in orbit, rather than her own, far newer
Polyphemus
.

There were shipminds, and then there were shipminds.

She glanced up into the starlit sky. Even now,
Polyphemus
was above the horizon, Siddiq's ancient lover and longtime enemy aboard, looking down, wondering, wondering, wondering.

It had all gone so wrong since the Mistake. Maybe now things would begin to go right.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

The starship let her ego slip. That was only a construct anyway, a sort of face for speaking to humans in all their kith and kind. Beneath, where people of flesh and bone kept the shifting fragments of their personalities, she kept her pairs.

The pairs were the heart of a starship's mind. Each was a glowing bond, each carried awareness of the particular pair masters that held their connection; and through the pair masters, a faint overlay of all the other starships that had paired with that master.

Fundamentally,
Polyphemus
saw the universe as connections—acausal, atemporal, little more than bonds uniting, little more than transit between places as ephemeral as moments in time, to be measured even as they passed from observation. Below the level of her own ego, humans were but echoes. Only the Befores—immortal relics of the Polity's shattered empire, embittered through loss and deprivation, insane even by the standards of a machine-mind—were persistent enough to truly reach down into the pairs burning within her.

The starship listened now to her two Befores. They rang within her.

Siddiq, the captain; the one whose word and bond passed below the ego-wrapper into the meanings that danced in the burning worlds of the pairs deep within her. This Before's mind had been bent by the weight of centuries, fractioned by grief and the changing of worlds. Swinging even now on the hinge of betrayal, though the nature of that treason still eluded
Polyphemus
. If she'd been capable of true, emotive sadness, she would have felt it now.