The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

The Lieutenant was unperturbed. “As measured by experience, most surely you are.”

  “That doesn’t mean I understand this,” Cannon complained. The deceptions were real. Not a data artefact. Not a reading error. As real as they were likely to be proven to be short of somehow extorting a confession from Third Rectification. “The perils of intermediation.”

  “Were your instruments any less intermediated back in the Polity days?”

  “Well, no.” Cannon shook her head, thinking about human eyes as opposed to, say, CCD arrays. “Not even in my youth. Nobody ever looked directly at anything in the sky, except for backyard hobbyists.”

  Flipping her lightpen in her fingers, Shinka thought aloud. “I can sort of understand messing with our views of OT-1. I mean, it makes sense, if you assume in the first place there’s something we’re not supposed to see.”

  “Right.” Cannon had been working this trail, or various versions of it, in her head for the past few days. Now they had what amounted to a bizarre sidetrack. “Why hide something about a brown dwarf from us?”

  “Trying to reduce the exceptionality of this system, maybe. So we’d be less interested in it and turn for home.”

  “It’s a junky system with some interesting bits, but nobody’s going to come here and make an astronomy career out of it.” Cannon turned Shinka’s idea in her mind a little further. “In fact, if the shipmind hadn’t been gaming the data, we might been able to head for home by now. Third Rectification could not possibly have missed that aspect of the situation. You don’t have the right thread yet.”

  “The Mistake couldn’t have come from here, anyway,” Shinka protested. “There’s nowhere for the aliens to live. Or hide.”

  “The Mistake came from a lot of places.” Cannon thought back on history. Not so much her personal experience of it—not in this case—as the sheer, staggering simultaneity of the event. “But there might have been a marshalling point or rendezvous here for the ships and equipment that headed into the Antiope Sector. The Polity never got here in person, so far as I can tell from the scrambled records. Likely there was never more than a cursory remote sensing sweep. Sky watching. The bad guys could have lain by here, for, what, centuries even. If they didn’t draw attention to themselves. None of which would have anything to do with finding some alien fleet here now.”

  “We know there had to be a fleet,” Shinka pointed out. “OT-1 didn’t get around by itself.”

  “A reasonable assumption,” Cannon said with a sigh. “Still, only an assumption.”

  “We don’t have much hard data. Evidence of tampering with the data we do have.”

  “I don’t get why we came all the way out here, behind the ass end of beyond, just to find the problem lurking in the shipminds. They weren’t there.” Cannon kept coming back to that point over and over again, both in thought and in word. “We’re not looking at this in the right way.”

  Shinka, bless the woman, had been increasingly emboldened by her frequent exchanges with Cannon. “Maybe we’re looking at it in exactly the wrong way.”

  “How so?”

  “You’d mentioned negotiating with the aliens, earlier. What if you were right? I mean, what do the shipminds want? In the cosmic sense. The oldest is about nine hundred years old, right.”

  “Peltast. Sixty-eight pairs now, I believe. Commissioned in 207. She serves the House Imperial. Has for centuries.”

  “I know of that ship,” Shinka said. “Never been aboard her, though. What does Peltast want?”

  Of course you would know her, Cannon thought but did not say. Lieutenant-Praetor. Instead: “In her case, mostly to be left alone. She’s a pretty antisocial shipmind. That was before we’d sorted out how to properly midwife the emerging consciousness. So, um, Peltast is kind of strange.”

  “And this one serves the Emperor.” Shinka’s tone was filled with a sort of baffled wonder.

  “You are an officer in the Household Guards. How often have you seen the House Imperial keep their enemies closer than their friends?”

  “So you consider Peltast to be an enemy.”

  “No.” Careful, careful here. “I think Peltast is less subtle than most shipminds about expressing the degree to which its needs and desires are lateral to the human experience.”

  “Unlike you Befores.”

  “Touché,” said Cannon with a thin smile. “But we Befores are still human. We were born human, and we remember it. Trust me on this.”

  “You remember the Mistake, too. Which the shipminds do not.”

  “Right. And one of the assumptions we’ve been making is that the shipminds care about the Mistake. Which may not be true.”

  “Doesn’t history become more real with age?” Shinka asked. “Like you keep saying, you lived it.”

  “I’m not sure shipminds perceive time as we do,” Cannon confessed. “Really, how could they?”

  “How do they see us?”

  “As…” She stopped, momentarily at a loss for words. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever asked a shipmind that question. Not in so many words. We certainly don’t control them, but we provide all their infrastructure.” New paired drive ships were built by human engineers and birthed to consciousness by human teams of experts. On the other hand, no new keels had been laid in at least six hundred years without the negotiated consent of the Navisparliament.

  “So we are servants.”

  “Or symbiotes.” Cannon considered that. “But if the Mistake returned, they’re just as vulnerable as anything else with a power source.”

  “Unless they’ve made other arrangements…” Shinka tapped the control panel again, drumming her fingers in an irregular rhythm.

  “Maybe Third Rectification is hiding a beacon,” That damned drumming of hers. Something about… An idea dawned on Cannon. “Is there any consistency to the leptonic emissions being masked? If what was being smoothed out wasn’t the intensity, but, say, the periodicity, or some detectable pattern, we might have something.”

  “I’ll work on that. Are we heading back to the ship, now that we have proof?”

  “Yes.” Cannon poked glumly at her own virtual display, called up the navcomms interface. “I’ll be damned if I know what we’ll do when we get there, though. It’s not like there’s much we can do about this.”

  “Get home, spread the word.”

  She tried to imagine spending the next four or five years-subjective in transit, keeping this a secret from Third Rectification. The shipmind had to know already that they suspected.

  Or they set about building a pair master here in this system, keep everybody busy and not paying attention for six or eight months-objective, then hop home the fast way.

  This wasn’t about the putative aliens, though, or a return of the Mistake. Not directly. This was about how the shipminds related to the human race.

  Shinka had the right of that. Cannon herself was the only person present on this mission who could possibly hope to outthink one of those ancient intelligences.

  Being the oldest woman in all the worlds sometimes had its disadvantages.

  * * * *

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The shipmind had delegated approach control and docking to one of its own subroutines. That was not so normal, in Cannon’s experience. It was a routine enough process, and certainly did not require high-level engagement, but frankly, she was used to an unusual degree of attention from the shipminds being focused on her.

  When the hatches unsealed and she climbed up into Third Rectification’s corridors, she was met by Sergeant Pangari and four of Goon Squad. Armed.

  “Ma’am,” Pangari said. He looked hideously uncomfortable.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” Cannon asked politely. She knew perfectly well what an arrest party was, but she was going to make him say it. And she was going to have to decide whether to kill her own crew, right here aboard her own ship.

  Below her, Shinka, bless the woman, sli
pped quietly back down the ladder and into Sword and Arm. The smaller ship’s hatch hissed shut.

  “By order of the Navisparliament, I have been instructed to arrest you on a charge of treason to the Imperium Humanum.”

  Instructed. Good. The sergeant was trying to telegraph disagreement with his orders. “I do not believe the Navisparliament is present to issue a writ of arrest against me.” She kept her voice mild, her swiftly boiling rage in gentle check.

  “Sealed orders, ma’am. From before the expedition’s original departure.” Pangari looked as if he wanted to slide into the deck and vanish.

  “You are a man doing his duty,” Cannon told him. “But sometimes duty is in error. Where is Go-Captain Alvarez, who should properly have the authority and responsibility for arresting me?” God had not intended non-coms to arrest senior officers, and there was no officer in any man’s navy more senior than her.

  Pangari desperately sought not to meet her eye. “Go-Captain Alvarez is confined to his cabin, ma’am.”

  “For the sin of refusing to arrest me, I presume?”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

  “Then I suppose we’d best discover what this is all about.” She did not present her wrists for restraint. Pangari did not ask. His goons—and Cannon marked them for future reference: Private Pramod, Private Losert, Corporal Yueng, and a civilian named Murtala—looked profoundly relieved. She gave them a look that said in the unspoken language of muscle, I could take you apart. All four of them returned the expression with nervous acknowledgement.

  They shuffled off together. Strangely, no one mentioned Lieutenant Shinka. Cannon found this a curious oversight, indeed. One she was in no hurry to correct.

  * * * *

  Pangari delivered Cannon to the wardroom at frame seventeen topside, just abaft of the bridge. Alvarez was not there, but his second officer, Go-Commander Mossbarger stood to attention, in the dress uniform of the Navisparliamentary service, a skintight undersuit of midnight blue with too much braid and flash to be actually worn inside a powered suit or anything of the sort. Cannon was privately amazed that Mossbarger had even bothered to pack the thing along. But much like the Sergeant, the Go-Commander had belted on his sidearm. A needler, fatally suitable for intraship fighting.

  No one else was present but Pangari. The goons had been left in the passageway outside.

  “The Before Michaela Cannon,” Mossbarger announced, utterly redundant as there was no one in the room to speak to except the shipmind, and the shipmind was, by definition, everywhere.

  “Before,” said Third Rectification. “You are charged with treason against the Imperium. Will you accept confinement to transit sleep until we can return you to a competent authority for trial and disposition?”

  “Not in the slightest.” Cannon allowed old combat reflexes to tense up. Not that she could fight the shipmind—short of taking the hull apart, or dumping the processing cores, there was little to be done there. This was a show for the other, human witnesses, and to be recorded for whatever posterity there was to be addressed here. “I make a counterclaim, that this charge and arrest are erroneous, a result of bad data.”

  The shipmind’s voice echoed, calm but loud. “You have no basis for such a claim.”

  “Neither do you,” Cannon replied sharply. “Shall I discuss the reasoning behind my counterclaim?”

  “If not treason, then you are suffering from the impairment of incipient temporal psychosis and must be confined for your own safety as well as that of others.”

  Given that this very thought had crossed her own mind more than once in the past few days, Cannon was surprised enough to miss a beat in her response. This playlet had its rhythms, and everyone in the room knew it would not end well. The question was how not-well. “I am not the one who is confused. On what basis was a writ of arrest against me for my supposed misdeeds of this moment sworn so many years-subjective past?”

  “The Navisparliament had reason to believe that this expedition was a distraction or covering action for a more treasonous effort on your part to seek out and contact the forces behind the Mistake.”

  Cannon laughed out loud at that accusation, a genuine peal of mirth. “You guys need to get out more,” she said. “That any Before would be a party to such an insane effort beggars the imagination. I counterclaim that the Navisparliament is concealing its own conspiracies in the matter.”

  Pangari and Mossbarger both appeared startled at that statement. Cannon spoke now, to them and more formally for the record, “Gentlemen, I have evidence regarding data manipulation with intent to conceal, on the part of Third Rectification. Granted that I have now told you of this, what do you think the odds are of any of us surviving to see Salton again? The shipmind has broken trust with us in a way that we have never seen before.” A cold thought slipped through her mind. “Or at least, have never documented before.”

  “Temporal psychosis,” announced the shipmind. “She has lost grip of her rationality.”

  Cannon knew the control codes, the old ones laid down by Haruna Kishmangali himself at the beginning of the shipminds’ world. She shouted them out, a short string of numbers and nonsense syllables that served to briefly interrupt Third Rectification’s higher mental processes. That was a code that forced a self-check, rather than anything more disruptive, under the assumption that the people aboard the starship wished to return home someday.

  “We’ve got about two minutes, if we’re lucky,” she told Mossbarger and Pangari. “Do I walk freely out of here, or do we waste time fighting?”

  Pangari spread his hands open and weaponless in a form of acceptance. Mossbarger looked as if he’d been sucking pickled lemons. “What the hell did you just do to the ship?” the commander asked.

  “Since you didn’t draw your weapon on me,” Cannon said with some urgency, “we are down to the negotiating. May we continue this conversation after the current crisis is over?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she turned and tapped open the wardroom hatch. Pangari’s Goons waited outside, hands on their own shocksticks, but not drawn either. She saw in their eyes the slight relaxation at a nod from the Sergeant.

  “Congratulations, gentlemen, you get to live.”

  Cannon hustled down the passageway, heading for her hatch down on the ventral face of frame thirty-eight.

  * * * *

  Her shortest route was almost two minutes. She’d wasted a good twenty or thirty seconds getting out of the wardroom, though fighting her way out would have been even more wasteful. Cannon did not have the combat mods of some of her fellow Befores, who could boost their reaction speeds and timeslice their way through such a melee like wind around leaves.

  So she ran. Her pace was still considerably faster than a mainline human could hope to move.

  Third Rectification was a big ship, but crewed far under capacity for this voyage. With many of those still in transit sleep. Chances were good that Cannon could get back to Sword and Arm without having to fatally argue with anyone. Had the word of her impending arrest even been spread?

  She had no illusions of her own popularity aboard ship. Befores were an object of respect or fear to most people. Never familiarity. Shinka, Pangari, the bridge crew—some of these had grown accustomed to her. But even from her own view, these were small people with small lives. She didn’t always remember to pay attention.

  Scrambling down a ladderway, Cannon hit the emergency cutoff on the gravimetric lift. No good at all if the shipmind came back faster than expected.

  It was an old code, one of the oldest. She might be the only human being left alive who even knew about those troubleshooting templates. If Pangari and Mossbarger weren’t very damned smart and lucky, she might once again be the only human left alive who knew, in very short order. The shipmind would be frantic to conceal that secret.

  She bounced down into the number one ventral passageway. Something was hissing, loudly. The shipmind was moving air. Or replacing it. Fire suppression systems
could do that in a hurry. A carbon dioxide dump to cram down oxygen levels would just about drop a mainline human in her tracks.

  Cannon was able hold her breath for a good fifteen minutes, even without preparation. As she reached her hatch, silica-laced protein foam began filling the passage. More fire suppression.

  Even her lockdown codes couldn’t disable safety systems, so those had been immediately available to the shipmind as it had regained self-control. Her opponent was fighting back.

  And the hatch pad was locked out.

  “Damn,” muttered Cannon. She didn’t have long, before Third Rectification got more clever, or sent armed dupes her way. Neither alternative appealed.

  It would be fairly well impossible to beat open a space-rated hatch. She didn’t have any tools with her. Blasting, even if she could find or improvise an explosive on such short notice, had other, more obvious impracticalities.

  Well, on second thought, she could beat on the hatch. Shinka was still down below, aboard Sword and Arm. It was inconceivable that the Lieutenant had not been paying very close attention, indeed. Not that she could see into Third Rectification, any more than the shipmind could see into the smaller ship—except, the shipmind had done exactly that.

  Cannon set that thought aside, for later. She raced back to the ladderway, ripped the safety bar right off its hinges, and skidded through the foam once more to the floor hatch.

  The orange aluminum of the safety bar made a sufficiently good hammer to clang on the hatch with, even through the soft floor coverings. The pad wouldn’t be dead on Shinka’s side unless Third Rectification had gone a lot deeper into the safety overrides—you never locked people out of a ship. Not in peacetime conditions. Basic safety.

  Even if it were dead, Shinka was sitting in a starship full of tools and equipment. She could improvise.

  Improvise quickly, Cannon amended her thought, as the foam rose thigh deep around her. Fairly soon, she’d need to breath again, too.

  * * * *

  The hatch beeped and irised open about three minutes later. Cannon wasn’t quite out of air, but close. Foam slid into the new hole in the floor, so she slid with it, and slapped the hatch closed as quickly as possible. Great gobs of sticky blue rained down on Shinka below her, armed with an autoneedler that Cannon didn’t actually recall having in the equipment aboard Sword and Arm.