Last Plane to Heaven: The Final Collection

by Jay Lake

Even so, Maduabuchi was impressed by the welcome distraction of Tiede 1. Everyone else was too busy cleaning their weapons and hacking the internal comms and cams to pay attention to their mission objective. Not him.

  Inclined Plane boasted an observation lounge. The hatch was coded “Observatory,” but everything of scientific significance actually happened within the instrumentation woven into the ship’s hull and the diaphanous energy fields stretching for kilometers beyond. The lounge was a folly of naval architecture, a translucent bubble fitted to the hull, consisting of roughly a third of a sphere of optically corrected artificial diamond grown to nanometer symmetry and smoothness in microgravity. Chances were good that in a catastrophe the rest of the ship would be shredded before the bubble would so much as be scratched.

  There had been long, heated arguments in the galley, with math and footnotes and thumb breaking, over that exact question.

  Maduabuchi liked to sit in the smartgel bodpods and let the ship perform a three-sixty massage while he watched the universe. The rest of the crew were like cats in a sack, too busy stalking the passageways and each other to care what might be outside the window. Here in the lounge one could see creation, witness the birth of stars, observe the death of planets, or listen to the quiet, empty cold of hard vacuum. The silence held a glorious music that echoed inside his head.

  Maduabuchi wasn’t a complete idiot—he’d rigged his own cabin with self-powered screamer circuits and an ultrahigh-voltage capacitor. That ought to slow down anyone with delusions of traps.

  Tiede 1 loomed outside. It seemed to shimmer as he watched, as if a starquake were propagating. The little star belied the ancient label of “brown dwarf.” Stepped down by filtering nano coating the diamond bubble, the surface glowed a dull reddish orange; a coal left too long in a campfire, or a jewel in the velvet setting of night. Only 300,000 kilometers in diameter, and about 5 percent of a solar mass, it fell in that class of objects ambiguously distributed between planets and stars.

  It could be anything, he thought. Anything.

  A speck of green tugged at Maduabuchi’s eye, straight from the heart of the star.

  Green? There were no green emitters in nature.

  “Amplification,” he whispered. The nano filters living on the outside of the diamond shell obligingly began to self-assemble a lens. He controlled the aiming and focus with eye movements, trying to find whatever it was he had seen. Another ship? Reflection from a piece of rock or debris?

  Excitement chilled Maduabuchi despite his best intentions to remain calm. What if this were evidence of the long-rumored but never-located alien civilizations that should have abounded in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way?

  He scanned for twenty minutes, quartering Tiede 1’s face as minutely as he could without direct access to the instrumentation and sensors carried by Inclined Plane. The ship’s AI was friendly and helpful, but outside its narrow and critical competencies in managing the threadneedle drive and localspace navigation, no more intelligent than your average dog, and so essentially useless for such work. He’d need to go to the Survey Suite to do more.

  Maduabuchi finally stopped staring at the star and called up a deck schematic. “Ship, plot all weapons discharges or unscheduled energy expenditures within the pressurized cubage.”

  The schematic winked twice, but nothing was highlighted. Maybe Captain Smith had finally gotten them all to stand down. None of Maduabuchi’s screamers had gone off, either, though everyone else had long since realized he didn’t play their games.

  Trusting that no one had hacked the entire tracking system, he cycled the lock and stepped into the passageway beyond. Glancing back at Tiede 1 as the lock irised shut, Maduabuchi saw another green flash.

  He fought back a surge of irritation. The star was not mocking him.

  * * *

  Peridot Smith was in the Survey Suite when Maduabuchi cycled the lock there. Radiation-tanned from some melanin-deficient base hue of skin; lean, with her hair follicles removed and her scalp tattooed in an intricate mandala using magnetically sensitive ink; the captain was an arresting sight at any time. At the moment, she was glaring at him, her eyes flashing a strange, flat silver indicating serious tech integrated into the tissues. “Mr. St. Macaria.” She gave him a terse nod. “How are the weapons systems?”

  Ironically, of all the bloody-minded engineers and analysts and navigators aboard, he was the weapons officer.

  “Capped and sealed per orders, ma’am,” he replied. “Test circuits warm and green.” Inclined Plane carried a modest mix of hardware, generalized for unknown threats rather than optimized for antipiracy or planetary blockade duty, for example. Missiles, field projectors, electron strippers, flechettes, even foggers and a sandcaster. Most of which he had no real idea about. They were icons in the control systems, each maintained by its own little armies of nanobots and workbots. All he had were status lights and strat-tac displays. Decisions were made by specialized subsystems.

  It was the rankest makework, but Maduabuchi didn’t mind. He’d volunteered for the Howard Institute program because of the most basic human motivation—tourism. Seeing what was over the next hill had trumped even sex as the driving force in human evolution. He was happy to be a walking, talking selection mechanism.

  Everything else, including this tour of duty, was just something to do while the years slid past.

  “What did you need, Mr. St. Macaria?”

  “I was going to take a closer look at Tiede 1, ma’am.”

  “That is what we’re here for.”

  He looked for humor in her dry voice, and did not find it. “Ma’am, yes ma’am. I … I just think I saw something.”

  “Oh, really?” Her eyes flashed, reminding Maduabuchi uncomfortably of blades.

  Embarrassed, he turned back to the passageway.

  “What did you see?” she asked from behind him. Now her voice was edged as well.

  “Nothing, ma’am. Nothing at all.”

  Back in the passageway, Maduabuchi fled toward his cabin. Several of the crew laughed from sickbay, their voices rising over the whine of the bone-knitter. Someone had gone down hard.

  Not him. Not even at the hands—or eyes—of Captain Smith.

  * * *

  An hour later, after checking the locations of the crew again with the ship’s AI, he ventured back to the Survey Suite. Chillicothe Xiang nodded to him in the passageway, almost friendly, as she headed aft for a half shift monitoring the power plants in Engineering.

  “Hey,” Maduabuchi said in return. She didn’t answer, didn’t even seem to notice he’d spoken. All these years, all the surgeries and nano injections and training, and somehow he was still the odd kid out on the playground.

  Being a Howard Immortal was supposed to be different. And it was, when he wasn’t around other Howard Immortals.

  The Survey Suite was empty, as advertised. Ultra-def screens wrapped the walls, along with a variety of control inputs, from classical keypads to haptics and gestural zones. Maduabuchi slipped into the observer’s seat and swept his hand to open the primary sensor routines.

  Captain Smith had left her last data run parked in the core sandbox.

  His fingers hovered over the purge, then pulled back. What had she been looking at that had made her so interested in what he’d seen? Those eyes flashed edged and dangerous in his memory. He almost asked the ship where she was, but a question like that would be reported, drawing more attention than it was worth.

  Maduabuchi closed his eyes for a moment, screwing up his courage, and opened the data run.

  It cascaded across the screens, as well as virtual presentations in the aerosolized atmosphere of the Survey Suite. Much more than he’d seen when he was in here before—plots, scales, arrays, imaging across the EM spectrum, color-coded tabs and fields and stacks and matrices. Even his Howard-enhanced senses had trouble keeping up with the flood. Captain Smith was far older and more experienced than Maduabuchi, over half a dozen centuries to his few decades,
and she had developed both the mental habits and the individualized mentarium to handle such inputs.

  On the other hand, he was a much newer model. Everyone upgraded, but the Howard Institute baseline tech evolved over generations just like everything else in human culture. Maduabuchi bent to his work, absorbing the overwhelming bandwidth of her scans of Tiede 1, and trying to sort out what it was that had been the true object of her attention.

  Something had to be hidden in plain sight here.

  * * *

  He worked an entire half shift without being disturbed, sifting petabytes of data, until the truth hit him. The color coding of one spectral analysis matrix was nearly identical to the green flash he thought he’d seen on the surface of Tiede 1.

  All the data was a distraction. Her real work had been hidden in the metadata, passing for nothing more than a sorting signifier.

  Once Maduabuchi realized that, he unpacked the labeling on the spectral analysis matrix, and opened up an entirely new data environment. Green, it was all about the green.

  “I was wondering how long that would take you,” said Captain Smith from the opening hatch.

  Maduabuchi jumped in his chair, opened his mouth to make some denial, then closed it again. Her eyes didn’t look razored this time, and her voice held a tense amusement.

  He fell back on that neglected standby, the truth. “Interesting color you have here, ma’am.”

  “I thought so.” Smith stepped inside, cycled the lock shut, then code-locked it with a series of beeps that meant her command override was engaged. “Ship,” she said absently, “sensory blackout on this area.”

  “Acknowledged, Captain,” said the ship’s puppy-friendly voice.

  “What do you think it means, Mr. St. Macaria?”

  “Stars don’t shine green. Not to the human eye. The blackbody radiation curve just doesn’t work that way.” He added, “Ma’am.”

  “Thank you for defining the problem.” Her voice was dust dry again.

  Maduabuchi winced. He’d given himself away, as simply as that. But clearly she already knew about the green flashes. “I don’t think that’s the problem, ma’am.”

  “Mmm?”

  “If it was, we’d all be lining up like good kids to have a look at the optically impossible brown dwarf.”

  “Fair enough. Then what is the problem, Mr. St. Macaria?”

  He drew a deep breath and chose his next words with care. Peridot Smith was old, old in a way he’d never be, even with her years behind him someday. “I don’t know what the problem is, ma’am, but if it’s a problem to you, it’s a command issue. Politics. And light doesn’t have politics.”

  Much to his surprise, she laughed. “You’d be amazed. But yes. Again, well done.”

  She hadn’t said that before, but he took the compliment. “What kind of command problem, ma’am?”

  Captain Smith sucked in a long, noisy breath and eyed him speculatively. A sharp gaze, to be certain. “Someone on this ship is on their own mission. We were jiggered into coming to Tiede 1 to provide cover, and I don’t know what for.”

  “Not me!” Maduabuchi blurted.

  “I know that.”

  The dismissal in her words stung for a moment, but on the while, he realized he’d rather not be a suspect in this particular witch hunt.

  His feelings must have shown in his face, because she smiled and added, “You haven’t been around long enough to get sucked into the Howard factions. And you have a rep for being indifferent to the seductive charms of power.”

  “Uh, yes.” Maduabuchi wasn’t certain what to say to that.

  “Why do you think you’re here?” She leaned close, her breath hot on his face. “I needed someone who would reliably not be conspiring against me.”

  “A useful idiot,” he said. “But there’s only seven of us. How many could be conspiring? And over a green light?”

  “It’s Tiede 1,” Captain Smith answered. “Someone is here gathering signals. I don’t know what for. Or who. Because it could be any of the rest of the crew. Or all of them.”

  “But this is politics, not mutiny. Right…?”

  “Right.” She brushed off the concern. “We’re not getting hijacked out here. And if someone tries, I am the meanest fighter on this ship by a wide margin. I can take any three of this crew apart.”

  “Any five of us, though?” he asked softly.

  “That’s another use for you.”

  “I don’t fight.”

  “No, but you’re a Howard. You’re hard enough to kill that you can take it at my back long enough to keep me alive.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Maduabuchi said, very uncertain now.

  “You’re welcome.” Her eyes strayed to the data arrays floating across the screens and in the virtual presentations. “The questions are who, what, and why.”

  “Have you compared the observational data to known stellar norms?” he asked.

  “Green flashes aren’t a known stellar norm.”

  “No, but we don’t know what the green flashes are normal for, either. If we compare Tiede 1 to other brown dwarfs, we might spot further anomalies. Then we triangulate.”

  “And that is why I brought you.” Captain Smith’s tone was very satisfied indeed. “I’ll leave you to your work.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” To his surprise, Maduabuchi realized he meant it.

  * * *

  He spent the next half shift combing through comparative astronomy. At this point, almost a thousand years into the human experience of interstellar travel, there was an embarrassing wealth of data. So much so that even petabyte q-bit storage matrices were overrun, as eventually the challenges of indexing and retrieval went metastatic. Still, one thing Howards were very good at was data processing. Nothing ever built could truly match the pattern-recognition and free associative skills of human (or post-human) wetware collectively known as “hunches.” Strong AIs could approximate that uniquely biological skill through a combination of brute force and deeply clever circuit design, but even then, the spark of inspiration did not flow so well.

  Maduabuchi slipped into his flow state to comb through more data in a few hours than a baseline human could absorb in a year. Brown dwarfs, superjovians, fusion cycles, failed stars, hydrogen, helium, lithium, surface temperatures, density, gravity gradients, emission spectrum lines, astrographic surveys, theories dating back to the dawn of observational astronomy, digital images in two and three dimensions as well as time-lensed.

  When he emerged, driven by the physiological mundanities of bladder and blood sugar, Maduabuchi knew something was wrong. He knew it. Captain Smith had been right about her mission, about there being something off in their voyage to Tiede 1.

  But she didn’t know what it was she was right about. He didn’t either.

  Still, the thought niggled somewhere deep in his mind. Not the green flash per se, though that, too. Something more about Tiede 1.

  Or less.

  “And what the hell did that mean?” he asked the swarming motes of data surrounding him on the virtual displays, now reduced to confetti as he left his informational fugue.

  Maduabuchi stumbled out of the Survey Suite to find the head, the galley, and Captain Peridot Smith, in that order.

  * * *

  The corridor was filled with smoke, though no alarms wailed. He almost ducked back into the Survey Suite, but instead dashed for one of the emergency stations found every ten meters or so and grabbed an oxygen mask. Then he hit the panic button.

  That produced a satisfying wail, along with lights strobing at four distinct frequencies. Something was wrong with the gravimetrics, too—the floor had felt syrupy, then too light, with each step. Where the hell was fire suppression?

  The bridge was next. He couldn’t imagine that they were under attack—Inclined Plane was the only ship in the Tiede 1 system so far as any of them knew. And short of some kind of pogrom against Howard Immortals, no one had any reason to attack their vessel.

 
; Mutiny, he thought, and wished he had an actual weapon. Though what he’d do with it was not clear. The irony that the lowest-scoring shooter in the history of the Howard training programs was now working as a weapons officer was not lost on him.

  He stumbled into the bridge to find Chillicothe Xiang there, laughing her ass off with Paimei Joyner, one of their two scouts—hard-assed Howards so heavily modded that they could at need tolerate hard vacuum on their bare skin, and routinely worked outside for hours with minimal life support and radiation shielding. The strobes were running in here, but the audible alarm was mercifully muted. Also, whatever was causing the smoke didn’t seem to have reached into here yet.

  Captain Smith stood at the far end of the bridge, her back to the diamond viewing wall that was normally occluded by a virtual display, though at the moment the actual, empty majesty of Tiede 1 local space was visible.

  Smith was snarling. “… don’t care what you thought you were doing, clean up my ship’s air! Now, damn it.”

  The two turned toward the hatch, nearly ran into Maduabuchi in his breathing mask, and renewed their laughter.

  “You look like a spaceman,” said Chillicothe.

  “Moral here,” added Paimei. One deep black hand reached out to grasp Maduabuchi’s shoulder so hard he winced. “Don’t try making a barbecue in the galley.”

  “We’ll be eating con-rats for a week,” snapped Captain Smith. “And everyone on this ship will know damned well it’s your fault we’re chewing our teeth loose.”

  The two walked out, Paimei shoving Maduabuchi into a bulkhead while Chillicothe leaned close. “Take off the mask,” she whispered. “You look stupid in it.”

  Moments later, Maduabuchi was alone with the captain, the mask dangling in his grasp.

  “What was it?” she asked in a quiet, gentle voice that carried more respect than he probably deserved.

  “I have … had something,” Maduabuchi said. “A sort of, well, hunch. But it’s slipped away in all that chaos.”

  Smith nodded, her face closed and hard. “Idiots built a fire in the galley, just to see if they could.”

  “Is that possible?”