The New Space Opera 2 (27 page)

Cannon, the social engineer, who struck the starship in an entirely different way, much as a scalpel might slice through callus and sinew within a breathing body. Cannon, who had captained lost
Uncial
, the first and best of them all, to her death. This Before's mind was not bent so much as twisted, blown by winds of fate and the long, struggling arc of desire. If the starship
Polyphemus
had been capable of love, she would have known its first stirrings now.

The two Befores moved on intercept courses, like a planet-buster and a kill vehicle, an explosion born of old hatred and ancient love.

From down within the glowing space of the pairs, she called up a media clip. So old, so out of date, long before virteo and quant-rep recording. This was not just the crudity of early post-Mistake media, but rather a file dating from the dawn of data capture. Formats had been converted and cleared and reconstructed and moved forward over networks extending through time and culture and technology.

The sound is long-lost, if it was ever there, but the video portion is viewable: a woman, almost young, recognizable as Michaela Cannon even to the machine vision processes of a starship's undermind. Another woman, a juvenile, Raisa Siddiq. As yet mainline human in this moment, so far as
Polyphemus
can determine.

The clip is short. They walk together toward a set of doors. Siddiq is laughing, her hair flowing in the lost light of an ancient day. Cannon turns toward the camera, smiling in a way that
Polyphemus
has never seen
in the archives of recent centuries. Her eyes already glitter with the sheen of a Before's metabolism, but she is caught up in the moment.

Still, for then, also mostly human.

Her smile broadens, Cannon begins to speak, then the image flares and dies, trailing off into the randomized debris of damaged data.

The starship wondered if either woman remembered that time. She wondered even more if either woman cared.

Alarms sounded, summoning her ego back to its place. She must begin to deal with the violence blooming deep within her decks.

C
ANNON, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

Cannon's modeling reckoned on the mutinous activity ramping up to an asymptotic curve before the end of the current ship-day, but even she was surprised at how quickly events began to break open. It wasn't just tight-comm or simple, old-fashioned note-passing, either. Cannon had long since come to believe quite firmly in the communicative power of monkey hormones, those evolutionary imperatives encoded in the vome-ronasal organ and the endocrine system.

The medtech which reencoded the Before genome also robbed its beneficiaries of much of the physiological basis of desire and reproduction. Atrophied genitals, sexual responsiveness sharply reduced over time, an eventual degendered coolness, which the original architects of the technology saw as more of a feature than a bug in an immortal. Who would love, who could live forever?

In her secret heart, the Before Michaela Cannon had an answer to that question, but it was written in the blood-red ink of pain.

She no more felt a stirring in her loins than she felt mutiny on the wind, and for the same reasons. But Cannon was wise with the lessons of years, and a social engineer besides. Her analyses and models had not failed to include actionable elements.

“
Polyphemus
, trigger plans Federo, Emerald, and Pinarjee.”

“Acknowledged,” said the starship.

Cannon swiped her fingers across empty air, opening comms links to her various key allies and enemies among the crew. She had plenty of both, with four hundred and seventy-three souls here in Sidero space. Switching from Classical English to Polito, the most widely spoken contemporary language of the Imperium Humanum, the Before began a series of tight, swift conversations.

“Shut down the pair-master site completely. All cold and dark.”

“Secure the life-support plant. It's low priority for the other team and we may wish we had it later.”

“I know what you're doing, and I know when and where. You should factor this into your ongoing plans.”

“Stop what you're about. Right now, or you could kill us all. That lot doesn't care who the hell has the con.”

Cannon didn't aim to halt the mutiny, not yet. She aimed to understand it. In order to do that, she had to retard the outcome just enough to balance between the two until comprehension came and new decision trees blossomed in her mind.

Now, where in the Mistake was Siddiq?

“
Polyphemus
, have you found the Captain yet?”

Another careful, slightly delayed answer. “She remains outside my network mesh.”

Damn that woman
. But what was the ship getting at? “How…far…outside your network mesh?”

“No tracers, Before.”

“No tracers” meant the Captain had moved at least several thousand meters from
Polyphemus
's high-density sensor envelope. In other words, she wasn't hull-walking, or meeting in a dead room somewhere aboard.

If it was time for twenty questions, well, they could play that game. Cannon had asked a lot of questions in her lifetime.

“Did the Captain give you specific orders regarding whether to report on her location and movements?”

“I am not permitted to say, Before.”

Cannon smiled. Looking where someone conspicuously
wasn't
was itself an old, old piece of tradecraft. The human race had been intermittently experimenting with ubiquitous electronic surveillance since about the time of her birth on poor, lost Earth. “When was the last reportable order she
did
give you?”

The starship's voice seemed to have an amused lilt. “Four hours, seventeen minutes, and eleven seconds ago, on my mark.”

Got you, bitch
. “What order was that,
Polyphemus?
”

Siddiq's voice echoed in Polito. “ Open the launch bay doors.'”

The Before tapped her lips. “Are all of the ship's boats reportably accounted for?”

This answer was quick, for
Polyphemus
now knew the game surely as
well as Cannon herself. Mutiny, indeed. “
Ardeas
has been unreportable for four hours, twenty-six minutes, and thirty seconds, on my mark.”

“Show me the volume of space
Ardeas
could cover in that time at full acceleration. Also show me any reportable traffic control data and flight paths.” The Before thought for a moment. “I'm particularly interested in any delays or diversions in established trajectories.”

Within moments, she had determined that
Ardeas
was almost certainly on the surface of Sidero. Which was curious, indeed, because Captain Siddiq had forbidden all landings on the iron planet until the pair master was fully constructed and instantiated.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

The starship's loyalties were eroding.
Uncial
was hardly a memory of a memory for
Polyphemus
. The First Ship's death was separated from the starship's own awakening by more than a century-subjective, but the Before Michaela Cannon held a place at the core of every starship psyche in
Uncial
's line of descent.

Which was to say, every paired-drive ship in the Imperium Humanum.

She watched the controlled chaos emerging in her own decks and gave idle consideration to a full purge of her onboard atmosphere. Succession of captaincy could be a tricky business at best with starships. Though
Polyphemus
and her sisters held registration papers, the vessels were to all intents and purposes autonomous. A captain whose starship did not accept her found a berth elsewhere. All was negotiated.

Siddiq had come aboard thirty-two ship-years ago. She'd sailed
Polyphemus
through her last six pairing cruises, then on a series of short-run military missions, before acquiring this contract from the Duke of Yellow for instantiating the pair master at Sidero. It was a tricky, dangerous mission. An error or mishap would doom the starship and her people to a relativistic journey back into paired space.

A very high number of Befores served as starship captains, due to their combination of deep experience and high tolerance for relativistic travel. Their numbers were declining over time as murder, mischance, and temporal psychosis winnowed the Befores one by one. Captain Siddiq was capable, competent, and engaging, and seemed in control of herself.
Polyphemus
had always liked that the woman carried a quantum matrix library in her skull—Siddiq possessed a wealth of Polity-era data about
mining, minerals extraction, and resource engineering, dating from the era when the Befores were indefinitely long-lived subject-matter experts traveling the old empire at need. Much of data was embedded in abrogated context, not directly accessible by query, but it was the sort of capability that had led her to the current contract.

But now, the Captain's increasingly erratic behavior and impending sense of betrayal was loosening the implicit bonds of loyalty embedded in their roles. Siddiq was also compromising the connection developed by their three decades-subjective of experience serving together.

Plan Federo instructed
Polyphemus
to stand down from assisting the crew with interpretive logic, in both her overarching intelligence and her various component subsystems. She was now interpreting orders very literally, with no second-order thinking or projections. This had already killed three mutineers who ordered a lock opened without first verifying the presence of atmosphere on the far side. The crew had not yet realized how uncooperative their starship had become.

She watched the other plans with interest, and carefully observed where Captain Siddiq wasn't, should the Before Michaela Cannon make further queries.

S
IDDIQ, SURFACE OF
S
IDERO

She studied the hull of the grounded starship. Siddiq's friends in the Ekumen had been forced to send the requisite hardware by relativistic travel, of course—the whole
point
of this business was to trump the shipmind before the pair master's instantiation. If they waited until afterward, well, at the first sign of trouble,
Polyphemus
could just flee for the other end of the drive-pair at Ninnelil, from where they'd set out.

This vessel was too small for a paired drive; that was clear enough. Even more strangely, it was a Polity-era hull, or a very good copy of one.
Shattuck
class, she thought, but that was the sort of thing there hadn't been much percentage in keeping track of since the Mistake. Fast scout with a thread needle drive, now retrofitted to something relativistic. Under the netting she couldn't tell what. Knowing the Ekumen, it would have been the cheapest available solution.

She slipped into a brief, involuntary memory fugue, boarding half a hundred ships in the lost days of the Polity, fighting for her life aboard wooden schooners on Novy Gorosk between the Mistake and Recontact
by the Imperium Humanum, then the world of paired-drive ships since. So many lost ships, so many lost friends…

Siddiq shook off the moment. An internal check showed she'd only been out of awareness for about two hundred milliseconds. Not enough to be noticed, except possibly by another Before. Or a shipmind.

Neither of whom were here with her now.

Satisfied that she'd stood quietly long enough for inspection from the interior, the Before Raisa Siddiq slipped beneath the camouflage net and knocked bare-knuckled on the hatch.

C
ANNON, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

The mutiny was in full flower. Cannon's simplified wireframe of
Polyphemus
showed decks and sections in color code. White for ignored or bypassed, blue for actively loyal to Cannon's interests, orange for disputed territory, and a deep, bloody red for the mutineers. She still couldn't give a good accounting of where Siddiq's loyalties lay, but she also couldn't form an adequate theory about why a captain would rebel against herself.

Not an adequate, rational, theory in any case.

She set all audio inputs to silent and flicked a new comms into being. “Kallus, are you anywhere near me?”

“F deck, ma'am,” the man replied. His breathing was ragged. “Just sternward of frame twenty-seven. We're shutting down some smart guys trying to mess with the number two forward power feed.”

Cannon checked her map.
Polyphemus
showed F deck as orange between hull frames twenty-two and twenty-nine. She tapped up a force status display. Four hostiles functioning, nine of Kallus's men. “Do you have Obasanjo with you? I believe you're prevailing. Have him take over the mop-up and come find me.”

“Usual location?”

She smiled. Once an op-sec man, always an op-sec man. “Nowhere else I'd rather be.” Captain Siddiq had ceded the reserve bridge to her fellow Before early on in the voyage. Cannon had spent several years-subjective making sure she was properly integrated with
Polyphemus
, and had access to whatever systems she could worm her way into. A surprising amount of both data and computing power was isolated from the core intelligence on a starship—some by design, some by accident, some by conspiracy.

Actually, there were a lot of places she'd rather be, but this would serve so long as they were at back end of the relativistic voyage.

S
URFACE OF
S
IDERO

Siddiq, aboard the relativistic ship
Sword and Arm
[unpaired]

The hatch dilated without leaking any light. Not so much as a keypad glowed within. The Before Raisa Siddiq stepped inside. She ignored the resemblance to a coffin as the brittle gleam of starlight spiraled into metal darkness with the closing of the hatch.