Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  He had been called away in the middle of his explanation, called away by Captain Bitka, who insisted Ma personally supervise some routine repair. It was absurd but typical of the military, at least in her experience. Ma was a talented engineer, his insights bordering on brilliance. He was wasted in his current assignment, as anyone not in uniform could clearly see.

  She was relieved the Buran was seated to her right with an open chair between them. The Buran were shorter than most of the other intelligent species, averaging about one meter sixty, which meant Hue could have looked most of them in the eye had she chosen to. The difference in height became less pronounced when they were seated, as their legs were shorter in proportion to their torsos, at least compared to Humans and Varoki, the only other species currently aboard the ship. The Buran had remained arboreal much longer than had humans and Varoki, and they retained not only comparatively short legs but a swaying, rolling gait as well.

  Her reluctance to sit next to the Buran had nothing to do with stature or gait, however, nor did their skin bother her. Many found the ever-moist, lumpy, mottled brownish-green hide unsettling, but these variations in appearance from human norms were a source of interest to her, not repulsion. One of the Buran had lost a child, however, and Hue did not yet know enough about their social conventions to know how this Buran, who was the senior member of their delegation, felt about that or would react, or what reaction it expected in return. She did not want a faux pas to poison her research before it had begun.

  Humans, and the other species, knew comparatively little about the Buran. Although they had been members of the Cottohazz for more than a century longer than Humans, they had kept almost entirely to themselves for most of that time. Only in the last decade had they begun conducting cultural exchange missions and opening their world to visits from other than governmental officials.

  “Good evening, Dr. Däng,” she heard, and the Nigerian journalist Abisogun Boniface sat down next to her on her right. She nodded in reply and clucked her tongue softly in sympathy at the sight of his left forearm in a compression cast and sling. She and Boniface had met shortly after he boarded the ship at K’tok, along with the Marine contingent. He had asked for an interview when he learned she was on board and she had politely declined. She did not much enjoy interviews and she had reached the point in her life where she no longer felt obliged to do things she disliked. Boniface had not seemed disappointed and it occurred to her he had asked out of politeness rather than genuine interest. The realization had made her laugh.

  Boniface had boarded the ship with the Marines because he had been an embedded war correspondent with them on K’tok. Although she knew no details, she understood there had been desperate fighting there and Boniface had seemed distant and preoccupied at first. He now seemed more open, but also frightened. Well, they all were.

  The Varoki trade envoy e-Lisyss took the seat to her left without greeting her or acknowledging her presence. His omnipresent and oafish assistant sat to his left. Several other seats were taken by humans she recognized but did not know well enough to converse with. The only one who had made an impression was the tall, slender, heavily tattooed American musician, with shaved head and wearing a minimalist black suit over a white shirt and finished with an antique black string tie. The visual effect was somewhat spoiled now by a light blue US Navy-issue neck brace. That was Choice (her only name), supposedly a major American Afro-Jonque star, although Hue wondered how big a star she was to be touring this far from Earth. She also wondered how someone that white became an Afro-Jonque sensation, but she suspected she was being narrow-minded. Music, after all, was supposed to be borderless, but Choice was so white. Perhaps she was just very frightened.

  Hue had noticed there was always tension in Choice’s posture, even before she had been injured. She wondered if the musician’s quick, confident answers to questions, and her combative willingness to disagree and then overwhelm opposition, masked some sort of personal insecurity. Hue had never met any genuinely successful mass-audience artists before so she had no experience to draw on. Did success suggest a secure personality? Or did the desire to overcome or compensate for insecurity produce success? It was a question which had never occurred to her before, at least not with respect to celebrity artists, but now she wondered.

  As they waited for the captain, Hue looked around and wondered why these particular people had been brought here: two Varoki, one Buran (two if you counted its offspring), and six human civilians. Captain Bitka could have done a ship-wide address and taken questions by commlink. Why did he want to establish a personal connection with her and the others? These specific others.

  Once all the civilians were seated, Captain Bitka and Lieutenant Running-Deer entered and sat in the remaining two chairs, the captain directly across from her as promised. Poor Running-Deer had her swollen nose taped and sported two luminescent black eyes. The captain greeted Hue politely as he sat and she responded in kind.

  They had met only once before, four days earlier, when she had been invited to dine at the captain’s table, along with three other civilian guests and one of the ship’s enlisted mariners. She had looked forward to it as Bitka had a reputation as an intelligent officer. One person had used the words “tactical genius” to somewhat breathlessly describe him. Hue had seen no evidence of genius over dinner. The captain had made no contribution to the wide-ranging conversation, had not even shown any interest in it, repeatedly covering yawns with his napkin. At one point she was fairly certain he dozed off for several minutes. He looked intelligent, with that broad high forehead, and the appearance might account for the reputation, and she knew many people mistook taciturnity for brains. Or possibly the bar for intelligence was simply low in the United States Navy.

  Mikko Running-Deer sat to the captain’s right and for the second time Hue noticed how the normally cheerful and extroverted executive officer became a different person in Bitka’s presence—businesslike, unsmiling, unemotional. What sort of private interaction would produce such a pronounced change in public behavior? Perhaps the same sort that demanded the senior engineer supervise the trivial repair of some power gizmo or other. Maybe when some people in the Navy said “tactical genius” they meant an authoritarian martinet simply lucky enough to have survived the worst Human military disaster in a century.

  Was that who this new captain was? Well, she’d see soon enough.

  “Thank you all for coming,” Bitka said. He had a good strong voice, clear enough he didn’t have to shout to be heard, and apparently didn’t feel the need to. “We are recording this meeting and broadcasting it live throughout the ship. I want to bring you up to date as to what we know about what happened, our current situation, and what I intend to do. Please bear with me and let me complete that summary. Then I’ll be happy to answer your questions. I’ve asked you specific people here as representatives not only of the three species on board but also of a variety of disciplines and professions. I hope your questions address those the rest of our passengers are wondering about.”

  It fit that he would not want questions until he was done, fit with a desire to control everything, even the flow of this meeting.

  “It should be obvious that we experienced an unscheduled and unexpected interstellar jump. Because there was no warning, passengers and crew suffered a number of injuries, some serious, and one fatality: the child of Eeshaaku Manaam, Consulting Facilitator for the Buran New Era Artistic Conference. Parent and child were on their way to Eeee’ktaa, the Buran homeworld. I have spoken with the Honorable Eeshaaku Manaam and expressed my heartfelt regrets at the death of its child. Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan has asked to address the rest of you and the ship’s company at large. Councilor?”

  At least the captain knew the Buran custom of using the entire name in address, Hue thought. The Buran to her right, still holding its infant in its arms, rose. Most humans disliked their voices but Hue found them intriguing. They were deep and resonant, but also flat and emotionless, an
d seemed to have a faint echo, like something from a child’s ghost story.

  “Captain Samuel Bitka, let me say first that we appreciate your sympathy over the unfortunate death of the young Eeshaaku Manaam. The elder Eeshaaku Manaam asked me to express this to you again in person, and to thank the other passengers for their expressions of sympathy. But we would not want our fellow passengers to suffer undue distress on our account. We have a different view of death than we understand you to have, a view I cannot explain. That is all.”

  Then it sat again. For a moment no one spoke and several shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. If the Buran had meant to put everyone at ease, it had failed, but that was probably inevitable. Given their appearance and strangely menacing voices, Hue could not imagine what it might have said to make everyone feel comfortable and at ease.

  The captain rose again. “Thank you, Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan. Let me extend my regrets to all of you here for the pain and fear you have suffered as a result of this incident. We are doing, and will continue to do, everything we can to get you safely to your destination.”

  That was rather well done, Hue thought. He didn’t sound like someone trained in public relations, but he came off as sincere. He probably was sincerely sorry for the death and all the injuries, if for no other reason than he was going to have to do a lot of explaining when they got to the Buran homeworld. He also sounded calm and supremely confident. Most supremely confident men she knew were fools.

  “All of that said,” Bitka continued, “it’s also clear the jump did not take us to Eeee’ktaa, or any other star system. We lost power for over an hour following the jump but, as you can see from the lighting and the restoration of the ship’s full e-nexus data grid, our fusion reactor is back online. All of our most pressing immediate concerns have been addressed. What remains is to figure out what happened and get us to Eeee’ktaa.

  “My operations department has pinpointed our current location as thirty-seven-point three light-years from the K’tok system and seventy-eight light-years from Eeee’ktaa, which puts us almost but not quite outside the volume of Cottohazz-explored space. Most of that space is empty and most of the stars visited have no life-sustaining worlds. As a practical matter, we are a fair distance from civilization, but well within the range of a single long jump to our destination now that we have made repairs.

  “Okay, that’s where we are. How did we get here? A few minutes before we jumped, an object that did not match the profile of any known spacecraft operated by any of the six species or one hundred and seventy-two sovereign nation states of the Cottohazz emerged from jump space close to us. Within seconds of the object scanning us, our ship jumped without our ordering it. We had preset the coordinates for Eeee’ktaa, a jump of sixty-three light-years from K’tok, but obviously we aren’t there, nor did we jump toward it.

  “Whatever caused us to jump, it sucked every joule of energy out of the one available cell of our power ring, leaving our reactor in shutdown mode and with not enough available stored energy to restart it. It takes a lot of juice to get a fusion reaction going. Fortunately, we had suffered a malfunction in our power ring which prevented three of our four cells from discharging. That untapped power, once the repairs were completed, let us restart the reactor. Lieutenant Ma and his engineering department literally saved our lives over the course of the last four hours. The next time you see someone with the engineering department shoulder flash, you might want to thank him or her.”

  Bitka turned to Ma. “Well done, Lieutenant.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Koichi answered, and Hue saw him blush. Perhaps this Bitka was smarter than she had credited him. A classic technique of psychological dominance was alternating abuse with kindness, and if that was Bitka’s game, he was playing it very well.

  “You’re welcome, Mister Ma,” Bitka said and then turned back to the civilians around the table.

  “Those are the bare facts of what happened. We believe the object broadcast some sort of coded command that triggered the jump we made. We recorded a variety of energy signals shortly before the jump. Some of them were clearly sensor radiation but others appear to be encrypted code. Our supposition is that somehow the encrypted code activated our jump drive.

  “As almost all of you must know, the uBakai Star Navy used an encryption system to trigger the jump drives of some Coalition naval vessels in orbit around K’tok in the recent war, the so-called jump scrambler weapon. This signal we received differs in three important ways from the weapon used by the uBakai.

  “First, it caused a coherent jump. That is, all molecules of our ship and of us left the K’tok system and arrived here at the same time and in their original configuration. The uBakai jump scrambler weapon only moved a selected number of molecules, thus destroying the structural integrity of the ships and the personnel on board.”

  Hue had never heard a complete description of how that weapon had worked. She knew it had been powerful and deadly, but what Bitka described sounded truly ghastly. She remembered passing the ruined starships as they left K’tok orbit, remembered with a new appreciation of how horribly all those people had died.

  “Second, in our event we jumped several light-years, as far as our stored power would take us.

  “Third, the code we intercepted bore no resemblance to the code transmitted by the uBakai jump scrambler weapon. Whatever encryption this object used, we haven’t been able to crack it yet. We’ll keep trying but we don’t really have the expertise. It may end up taking some really good brains in military intelligence to unwrap this one.

  “So that’s where we stand. The good news is that we are still within a single jump’s range of Eeee’ktaa now that we have our entire power ring operational. It is my intention to completely charge our ring and then jump to Eeee’ktaa seven hours from now. So everyone should think about getting some rest and having a meal.

  “Now I’ll take your questions.”

  Hue leaned back and looked around the table. That was a good, direct outline of their situation and the captain did not give the impression he was holding anything back. She had no idea whether she could trust that impression, and her inclination was toward skepticism. The others seemed to have accepted the presentation on face value, though. She understood. They were frightened, and frightened people often follow the person who shows the least fear.

  The Buran envoy to her right lifted its hand, palm up, apparently asking to be recognized.

  “Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan?” Bitka said.

  “Captain Samuel Bitka, if it is allowed, and if your communication officer would not object, I may be of some assistance in analyzing the coded transmission.”

  “Are you a trained cryptologist?” Bitka asked.

  “A linguist, which is not exactly the same, but not entirely different, either.”

  “Stop!” Hue heard from her left and the Varoki envoy’s assistant held up a hand. All of them turned and saw a hurried conversation between the two Varoki. They spoke softly but Hue could pick out a few works in aGavoosh, the Varoki universal language of diplomacy and commerce. Then the Varoki envoy’s assistant turned to Captain Bitka.

  “The Trade Envoy insists that this transmission be held as a confidential item until responsible governmental authorities can examine it and determine its significance.”

  “Why?” Boniface, the Nigerian journalist to her right demanded. “Are you afraid a Varoki government other than the uBakai has been tampering with jump drive access codes? Do you want to make sure this all gets hushed up before there’s another scandal?”

  This time the Varoki envoy jumped to his feet and let loose an angry stream of aGavoosh, harsh, guttural, and rich with clicks in place of some consonants. It was a good language for shouting in, Hue thought, although she couldn’t really understand much beyond repetition of the words “outrage” and “insult.”

  “That’s enough,” Captain Bitka said, cutting him off. “Please resume your seat, Envoy e-Lisyss.” He turned to the Buran.
“Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan, given the fact that we are only hours from our jump to Eeee’ktaa, I think a wiser course is to keep the transmission in military hands until we can turn it over to higher authority. I thank you for your offer and under other circumstances I would gladly accept.”

  The Buran bowed its head in acceptance.

  “I have a question,” one of the men she did not know said. “We’ve obviously suffered some sort of a malfunction. Why take any chances? Why don’t we signal for help? Won’t they send a rescue expedition after us?”

  Hue heard a note of desperation in his voice, an emotion she was sure many on board shared, but several people around the table groaned.

  “What?” the man said.

  The musician named Choice answered, the disdain clear in her voice. “It’ll take thirty-seven years for the distress signal to get to K’tok.”

  “Ms. Choice is correct,” the captain said. “Radio waves travel at light speed and we’re thirty-seven light-years out from K’tok. Our supply lockers are pretty well stocked, but I don’t think they’ll last that long.”

  That brought a nervous chuckle from the others, although the captain’s face remained carefully blank. The routine questions began after that, most of them covering material Bitka had already gone over. It had been a good, complete presentation. It had failed to cover only one important point.

  When the questions ran their course, Bitka took one more glance around and then looked directly at Hue.

  “I believe you have a question, Dr. Däng.”

  Hue twitched slightly with surprise but kept her face under control. How did he know that?

  “When we make our jump in several hours,” she said, “are you certain it will take us to Eeee’ktaa?”

  He looked at her for a moment before answering. His expression remained carefully neutral and his hands stayed folded on the table, but she saw that where the fingers intertwined they were white with pressure. For the first time Hue felt her throat tighten with fear.