Fleet of Worlds, Page 2

  She was shivering! Sitting up, he put an arm around her. “Then why are you worried?”

  She snuggled against him. “Because aliens must surely be alien. Can we presume to predict their social development?”

  “Can we presume to decide for mankind not to try contacting them? We’re almost a light-year apart. We’re moving at thirty percent cee. The ice world is moving at ten percent cee, and accelerating. Contacting them by comm laser already requires extrapolation and faith. Deferring to Earth could mean losing the opportunity.” He kissed the top of her head.

  “We’re not making this decision only for ourselves,” she said softly.

  He said, “There’s a reason our computers, like every starship’s computers, carry the UN’s standard First Contact protocol. Sending us off with the protocol means the UN recognized we might have to—”

  “I mean our children.” She shifted into a sitting position, careful not to dislodge his arm. “Diego, they may be only frozen specks, two among thousands, but the decision we’ve made affects them.”

  The children they were permitted only by leaving Sol system behind. “I think companionship in the universe will be a wondrous gift for them.”

  For a long while, the omnipresent hum of fans was the only sound. Then she said, “I might be worried about nothing. There may be no answer to our signal. Some unknown natural phenomenon could explain that planet’s movements.” She squeezed his hand. “The first extraterrestrial intelligence or a brand-new cosmic force. Either way, you’ve made one heck of a discovery.”

  If its acceleration were constant, the ice world had taken about a century to reach its current velocity. In that time, it would have crossed a bit over five light-years. A red-dwarf star lay more-or-less in its backtracked direction, at about that distance. One of its worlds, a gas giant alongside which Jupiter would seem puny, had a separation in its satellite system, a gap at odds with the accepted theory of planetary formation. “It could be a natural phenomenon,” Diego agreed.

  But he didn’t believe that.

  THE NORMAL COURSE of shipboard events was that there were none. One could get very bored, even at full cruising speed, between encounters with significantly sized dust motes. Every excuse for a celebration was quickly embraced.

  Four birthdays and New Year’s Day (despite Diego’s railing at the pointlessness of commemorating a random spot on the orbit of an increasingly remote planet) left long stretches of mind-dulling routine.

  The liquid in Diego’s glass was undeniably of that morning’s vintage. “Jeeves, did you taste this stuff?”

  “Harmless,” the Jeeves program said. “Mostly harmless.”

  “Good enough,” and Diego raised his glass. Fine wine would significantly overtax the synthesizer’s capabilities. Today the four of them celebrated something real. Ice World, months ago promoted to proper-noun status, should now have received the first-contact greeting lased more than a year earlier. Should . . . for such a simple word, it conveyed a satisfying and very newfound conclusiveness. They had signaled to where they projected the distant, speeding planet would be—if it continued without interruption on its steady course and acceleration.

  It had.

  A miniature Ice World, unanimous choice for the party’s décor, glittered above the dayroom table. Months of continuous observation had yielded details far beyond the crude holo he had first shown his shipmates.

  His shipmates. With a start, and to Jaime’s knowing smile, he returned his attention to the party. “To new friends!” Glasses clinked, contents sloshing a little, and were enthusiastically emptied.

  Sayeed shrugged. In the steadfastness of the Ice World’s hurtling trajectory, which three of them saw as evidence of intelligent intervention, he saw a mindless, if unknown, natural force. On one point all agreed: At least one of them was spectacularly wrong. Long after the discovery of pulsars, astronomers still remembered the hasty misattribution of the celestial rhythms to aliens. None of them planned to be forever remembered for announcing imagined aliens—or for failing to recognize real ones.

  “In another year-plus. Two if they ponder and muse for a while about how to respond.” Barbara poured another round of the vin très ordinaire. “I wonder what, still assuming someone is there, they will have to say.”

  Any alcohol is potable by the third serving. The day was special; they imbibed enough of today’s wine to render it superb. Eventually, they had Jeeves draw virtual straws. Jaime lost. She was taking a very strong stim when the rest of them headed to bed.

  THE VOICE OF Jeeves brought Diego instantly awake. “All hands to the bridge!”

  He burst through the cabin door shouting, “What happened?”

  Barbara beat him onto the bridge, but only because her cabin was closer. He and Sayeed were left to loiter anxiously in the corridor. The bridge couldn’t accommodate them all.

  “Radar pulse hit us.” Jaime’s chair spun as she relinquished it to the captain. “There’s nothing on our sensors.”

  “Jeeves, alarms off.” The warbling screech mercifully faded. Barbara settled into her seat and triggered a ping. Above a monitoring console, a spherical volume grew and grew: the representation of the space probed by that pulse. “Nothing,” she finally concluded. She downed the stim pills Jaime offered. “That’s as it should be. We must have a flaky sensor.”

  Diego nodded jerkily. They couldn’t have reached us.

  A new alarm blared. Parallel rows of floor lights blinked, painfully bright, their sudden manic cycling drawing Diego’s attention down the curved corridor. Emergency hatches slammed; the siren and the whooshing stopped. “Hull breach in storage bay D,” Barbara said. “Check that out, Sayeed.”

  Diego’s head pounded. He dry-swallowed the pills Jaime now offered him. The alarms resumed, joined by the windstorm of a second breach aft. Something was poking holes in their ship. What, if nothing were nearby, had breached the hull? They were moving at thirty percent of light speed. What could possibly overtake the ship from behind? Light speed! They couldn’t have reached us!

  “Jaime! Trade places.”

  They squeezed past each other and he dropped into the lone chair beside the captain. Radar, lidar, maser—the instruments reported nothing, regardless of the frequency they sent.

  Oh.

  “Barbara, let’s just look. No active sensors, just Mark I eyeballs.” She spared him a sideways glance—light-years from the nearest sun, what could he expect to see, and how? But she did as he proposed.

  The exterior cameras spun with the hull. Computers compensated for the gravity-simulating rotation, projecting a stationary star field onto the bridge. The stars behind were reddened and dimmed; the stars ahead flared, visibly shifted toward blue. And to one side: a large, circular patch of pitch-blackness. Whatever blocked the starlight was huge, or close, or both. Its immobile appearance meant it was orbiting them, matching the ship’s rotation.

  “What the tanj is that?” Barbara focused their radar and lidar on the apparition. “Still no return signals. The echoes are being nulled somehow.”

  “They’re—” Jaime bit it off, but Diego could finish it for her. They’re poking holes in our ship! Enemy aliens. She thought they were under attack.

  “Sayeed, report.” Diego’s words echoed from speakers across the ship. There was no answer.

  Another alarm. More wind rushing from the bridge. More emergency bulkheads slammed shut. “I’m on it.” Jaime’s voice quavered as she dashed off.

  There was precious little privacy in the Long Pass; by mutual agreement, the corridor cameras had been powered down early in the mission. Muttering under his breath, Diego hunted for the command sequences to awaken them. The first reactivations came a tantalizing few moments late. Was that shadow disappearing around a corner Sayeed’s? Jaime’s?

  One more ear-piercing alarm and again sudden wind tugged at his clothes. This alarm, too, faded as Barbara reset it. What was that scurrying sound?

  “Pressure continues
to drop throughout the ship. I’m closing all interior hatches,” announced the main bridge computer.

  “Thank you, Jeeves. Give us the corridor cameras.”

  At last they were all on. Diego cursed as one revealed Sayeed, crumpled and motionless, face down on the deck.

  Black, many-limbed figures scuttled past the camera at a nearby corridor intersection, moving too fast for Diego to integrate what he was seeing into a meaningful picture. Aliens, or robots, or alien robots. . . .

  Barbara had seen it, too. “We’ve been boarded.”

  The bridge hatch burst inward before he could respond. There was a brief glimpse of serpentine limbs, an impression of something pointing at him, and a nearly subsonic vibration.

  Then there was only darkness.

  Contents

  Exile Earth date: 2650

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Quest Earth date: 2650

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Rebirth Earth date: 2650

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Odyssey Earth date: 2652

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  EXILE

  Earth date: 2650

  1

  Alone in his cabin, behind a triply locked hatch, within a vessel constructed from the most impenetrable material ever made, light-years removed from any conceivable hazard, Nessus cowered.

  “Nessus” was a label of convenience. His actual name, Citizen speech requiring two throats for proper articulation, was unpronounceable by his crewmates on the opposite side of the sturdy hatch. He had once overheard an irreverent Colonist remark that his true name sounded like an industrial accident set to music.

  Curled into a ball, heads tucked safely inside, Nessus saw and heard nothing. He unclenched only enough to breathe. The herd pheromones continuously circulating in the ship’s air would eventually calm him. Meanwhile, surely, his anxiety was appropriate.

  How could he not panic? He represented a trillion of his kind. Only the merest fraction of the Concordance could bear to take leave of the home world. Yet here, by his own initiative, he was—because the alternative, for all of the trillion, was even more unthinkable.

  The panic attack ebbed, and a head emerged for a peek. Sensors hidden throughout the ship reported that conditions remained normal. His three Colonist crew were unaware of or properly respectful to his mood. Two were within their respective cabins, one softly snoring; the last stood watch on the bridge.

  Had he truly thought: normal? Normality existed only on Hearth, in the time-tested rhythms of life, amid the teeming multitudes of his kind.

  He rolled once more into a tight, quivering orb. Without radical changes and much luck, everything normal was doomed.

  * * *

  YOU NEVER SAW hyperspace; quite the opposite. The brain refused to acknowledge that a dimension so strange could exist. Objects all around a cabin window somehow came together, the mind denying the nothingness between. You covered the window, but a coat of paint or a scrap of fabric only taunted you that oblivion lurked behind. You had to get used to hyperspace, and some never did. Hyperspace had driven many people mad.

  Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs, alone on the bridge, studiously ignored the covered view port. There was much else to do, and much more to occupy her thoughts. Everything was new and wondrous. Merely to be aboard was a tremendous honor.

  At every moment, the strangeness of it all threatened to overwhelm her.

  The bridge of Explorer was a chimera, a superposition of improbable parts. Chimera: The word itself was a fanciful novelty, describing a fantasy creature. Nessus had taught it to her, claiming to have learned it on an alien world far, far away.

  What could be more improbable than that she was on her way to study an unexplored alien planet? Though there was little chance she would set foot on that new world, this trip was an amazing opportunity. Except as a passenger or on training flights, always within sight of the Fleet of Worlds, no Colonist had been on a space ship—until now.

  She stretched and her crash couch stretched with her. Whoever had built it truly understood Colonist physiology. The flight and navigation controls within her reach were likewise comfortable and intuitive. The General Products company knew their stuff. It amazed her that Explorer was only a prototype.

  The other seat on the bridge, a padded bench, was as clearly meant for Nessus. The console before Kirsten had its analog near that empty couch. She could, in a crisis, interpret those other instruments; she could barely operate those controls. Her hands did not begin to approach the dexterity or strength of a Citizen’s lips and jaws.

  Although half the bridge’s seating accommodated Colonist physiology, the room itself was clearly designed to Citizen standards. There was not a sharp corner to be seen. Consoles, shelves, instrumentation, the latching mechanism on the hatch—everything looked melted and recongealed. Citizens perceived an unnecessary hazard in every crisp edge and pointed corner.

  The nothingness that was hyperspace whispered to Kirsten, daring her to acknowledge its presence. She fixed her eyes instead on her console. The heart of the instrumentation was a large transparent sphere: the mass pointer. Each blue line radiating from its center represented a nearby star. The direction of the thread showed the direction to the star; the length of the thread represented the star’s gravitational influence: mass over distance squared. The longest thread by far pointed straight at her: their destination.

  Logic said that a glance every shift or two was more than sufficient—even at hyperdrive speed, they took three days to cross a light-year—but logic seemed a flimsy thing indeed while the nothingness stalked her mind. She shuddered. Ships in hyperspace that too closely approached the singularity around a stellar mass, vanished. The mathematics was ambiguous. None knew where the disappeared had gone, or whether they even still existed.

  Monitoring seemed like a process that could be easily automated—simply drop out of hyperspace when a line got too close—but it was not possible. The mass detector was inherently psionic; it required a conscious mind in the loop.

  Even splitting the responsibility three ways, the stress was intense. They dropped into normal space every few days, if only for a moment to remind themselves that stars were more than hungry singularities reaching out to devour them.

  “Does a thirty-day journey still seem like a simple thing?” The voice was a rich contralto that women envied and men found disturbingly alluring.

  Kirsten looked up, the clatter of hooves on metal decking that should have alerted her to Nessus’ approach only now making a conscious impression.

  One head held high, the other low, he watched her from two directions at once. With the instinctive caution of Citizens, Nessus had paused half-inside, half-outside the hatchway, poised to dash in any direction.

  Her whole life she had been beholden to Citizens. So it had been for generations. But while Kirsten knew about Citizens, and respected and revered them, she had met few of them. Her people, like sharp corners, were an avoidable risk.

  Now, in the emptiness b
ehind the void between the stars, Kirsten reawakened to how dissimilar Citizens and Colonists truly were.

  Nessus stood on two forelegs set far apart and one complexly jointed hind leg. Two long and flexible necks emerged from between his muscular shoulders. Each flat, triangular head featured an ear, an eye, and a mouth whose tongue and knobbed lips also served as a hand. His leathery skin was a soft off-white, with few of the tan markings common among some Citizens. The unkempt brown mane between his necks covered and padded the bony hump that encased his brain.

  He raised a neck. His heads swiveled toward each other, eye briefly peering into eye, in an ironic laugh. Her brave words at the start of the journey had not gone unnoticed. Despite her embarrassment, she was relieved that he had come out of his cabin. Relieved, but not surprised: The surprise would have been his continued absence as they neared their destination and its unknown perils.

  Of course had Nessus not emerged in another shift or two to oversee the ship’s arrival, she would have hit the panic button. The looped recording of a Citizen screaming in terror would bring him to the bridge, no matter what.