City of Pearl

by Karen Traviss

  He thought of his first human friend, Benjamin Garrod, Joshua’s great-great-great-grandfather, dead for more than a hundred years and as freshly mourned and vividly remembered as if he had passed into earth yesterday. Benjamin understood what it was to have pain trapped in your head.

  And yet Aras now couldn’t recall the face of his own isan. It was bad not to remember your wife.

  But, as Benjamin had told him, not even a wess’har could be expected to remember things that had happened when the year on Earth was A.D. 1880.

  Something went clack against the hull.

  Commander Lindsay Neville glanced up. Apart from that clack, the ship’s cramped cockpit was showing normal on every panel.

  “Micrometeor impact, Boss?” Sergeant Adrian Bennett had logged more flight time than Lindsay had, and she wanted him to be right. “Shouldn’t be.”

  “Might be.” Lindsay checked the hull status panel again. “No, nothing. I’ll run more checks. Could be contraction noises.”

  Their target planet, Cavanagh’s Star II, was a couple of days away now, and it had a large moon orbiting it. The forward video feed had shown two small pale disks, and when Thetis’s centrifuge turned the right way, you could actually see them from the viewing port. It seemed much more real to watch it with the naked eye, and both worlds had now resolved into a mass of blue, white and green swirls.

  For a moment Lindsay wondered if the revive program had malfunctioned and they were just weeks out from Earth, beginning the gradual acceleration that would take them twenty-five light-years. The clack might have been a boarding crew, coming inboard to check them out. But it was not Earth. There were two planets, and their polar ice caps were substantial. She watched for a while and realized Bennett was standing—hanging—behind her in zero gee.

  “Looks reassuring,” he said. There was a flurry of light and sighing noises as streams of telemetry came in from the main planet. The AI was gathering spectrometry and highresolution images at a frantic rate, and instantly beaming back the raw data. In a couple of decades, others would be marveling at those pictures on the news, unless something more fascinating had cropped up in the meantime.

  “Well, I don’t think I’ll be needing my piloting skills,” Lindsay said, and folded her arms across her chest to stop them floating. “Not that we’d have a prayer if this crate ever needed to be flown manually.”

  “All it has to do is to get into orbit and stay there.”

  “Yeah.”

  Bennett looked thoughtful. He appeared to be the standard issue concrete-reliable Royal Marine sergeant, except for the times he gave her those dubious looks. She was lucky—she had a whole detachment of booties, as the navy called them, the best specialist troops she could want. She could easily have been lumbered with a ragbag of army and air force personnel. They said cap badges were just for comfort, a sop to identity in a vast anonymous European defense force of core skills and interchangeable parts. But as far as she was concerned, booties weren’t interchangeable at all.

  “It’s the name, isn’t it, Boss?” Bennett said.

  “What about it?”

  “Thetis. You know. Historically speaking.”

  “I’m no historian.”

  “Thetis was a submarine.”

  “I’m not going to enjoy this story, am I? Go on.”

  “Thetis sank with nearly all hands and the dockyard civilians on board within sight of land, all because a test drain had been blocked by a fresh coat of paint.”

  “Thank you for enlightening me, Bennett.”

  “No trouble, Boss.”

  Lindsay didn’t believe in bad joss and all that superstitious bullshit. Bad joss, bad luck, meant bad planning and poor attention to detail, as the original Thetis had proven. Behind every disaster there was a string of false assumptions and checks not made. Lindsay Neville could plan bad joss out of her life, and if anyone called her boring—well, that was just fine.

  Drill keeps you alive.

  She couldn’t plan for the civilian scientists she had in the freezer, though, because she hadn’t even met them in an ambulant state. That bothered her. And she certainly hadn’t planned to wake up and find her command had been usurped by a bloody civvie, and a copper at that. Shan Frankland’s file in the AI’s database had been less than informative. But the words Special Branch and “EnHaz” were enough to worry her. That was several lines before she got to the part where she was ordered to “offer full support and cooperation to any instruction” that Frankland issued when revived on establishing orbit. The FEU had hijacked her ship. She couldn’t even thaw the payload or the rest of the marines until bloody Superintendent Frankland—confidentially briefed Superintendent Frankland—gave the order.

  “Had any feelings about this deployment, Ade?” she asked. “You’ve clocked more spacetime than me.”

  Bennett chewed his inner lip as if calculating. “I’ve never had a payload of civvies embarked, if that’s what you mean. But this lot are trained, aren’t they? I mean, they’ve worked extreme environments. They’re not tourists.”

  “And Frankland?”

  Bennett shrugged. “None of my business, Boss.”

  It was time to refresh her knowledge of the civilians. She pulled down a container of coffee and swung for the hatch. “Ought to try to memorize names and faces before they wake up,” she said. “They all look the same in chill. I suppose I could call them all Doc.”

  She curled up against a bulkhead, feeling awkward. Onboard carriers, she had always had a cabin to retreat to, but Thetis was designed simply to store unconscious people in transit. There were no cabins or wardrooms or stewards, and the only privacy was the flimsy bathroom where anyone could hear what was going on. Slurping hard on the coffee, she stared at the eight faces that appeared and changed on the smartpaper hanging in front of her.

  “Hugel—physician. Rayat—pharmacologist. Mesevy—botanist.” She shut her eyes and repeated the names.

  “Do we need to remember what they do?” asked Bennett.

  “Seems rude not to.”

  “They all have different specialities.”

  “That’s to avoid fistfights, apparently. The techs told me you don’t know a thing about rivalry until you’ve seen blokes in white coats going at it. But some of them work for rival corporations, and they’re all on some incentive bonus or other, so they might slug it out.” She shut her eyes again, and felt oddly disoriented. She thought she’d got over that sensation. “Champciaux—geologist. Galvin—xenozoologist. Parekh—biologist—”

  “Marine biologist.”

  “Thank you. Paretti—xenomicrobiologist. You’ve already done this, haven’t you?”

  “I loaded it into my panel, Boss.” Bennett held out his open palm, shimmering with color and text. The living display warped and flexed with the contours of his hand: the graphics weren’t perfect because the bioscreen panel was designed for larger areas of flesh. “Just until we get to know each other.”

  “I might have to resort to that.” But it was bad enough taking a shower and finding a shifting display under the soapsuds without seeing a stranger’s face as well. Lindsay carried on staring at the smartpaper and repeating the mantra of names.

  “Michallat,” she said. “Journalist. Anthropologist. What use is he going to be?”

  “You can never have too many anthropologists, Boss. Handy for ballast.”

  She knew what the problem would be: boredom. The payload would be off doing what they did best and she would have six spring-coiled booties looking for something to keep them occupied. There weren’t going to be any colonists alive down there. She concentrated on revising those parts of the mission that involved looking for debris from the landing. There would be useful survival data from that for future missions, and it was going to make her an extraterrestrial specialist. It was going to fast-track her career better than a dozen small ship commands. It was worth it.

  But she slept badly that watch. There was no need for them to operate
a watch system, because the AI could maneuver into orbit without their input, but they did it out of a need to wrap themselves in that familiar comfort of routine. Bennett woke her, looking more relaxed than usual.

  “Just established orbit, Boss. Thought you’d like to see it. Shall we—”

  A red flash caught her peripheral vision at exactly the same time as the insistent pip-pip-pip of an alarm broke the hum and chatter of the AI. Bennett frowned and Lindsay swung into position at the console.

  “Last time I heard that sound I had missiles locked on me,” she said. They had been exercise missiles, but it still rattled her. “That’s got to be a malfunction.”

  Bennett tapped the console. There was a five-centimeter display almost lost in the rest of the telemetry panels, and it was pulsing red. The AI interface was set to text, and words began pouring like torrential rain down the main head-up display in front of the pilot’s seat.

  INTERFERENCE IN NAVIGATION LASER.

  INTERFERENCE IN NAVIGATION LASER.

  “What the hell’s causing that?”

  “No idea, Boss.” Bennett tapped reset panels and overrides. “No idea at all.”

  The litany changed abruptly. NAVIGATION LASER DISABLED. BACKUP DISABLED. And the lights around them went out. This was a rotten time for a systems failure. For a second they hung in the blackness, not breathing, and then the lights came on again and with them a dozen different alarms clamoring to tell of system failures.

  “What have we got, Ade?”

  Bennett confirmed her fears. “Life-support and cryo. Nothing else.”

  “Are we just lucky or have we been shut down deliberately?”

  “Oh, God. Look at that.”

  The sensors that swept for EM frequencies were alive, not with the usual crackling of distant stars but with a clear pulse. Bennett was now leaning over the display with a fixed expression that made Lindsay think he was panicking. Marines didn’t panic. She elbowed him out of the way, and realized why he was transfixed.

  “We’re being targeted,” she said. The screen confirmed it; something was delivering EM pulses to key systems and crippling them. She switched to her headset to give her a view of the whole ship in 3D, and saw red pulsing lights covering the whole aft section of Thetis.

  In a normal combat situation she would have had firing solutions. She would have had a good idea of the weapons ranged against her. A hundred exercises and a thousand drills had taught her that. But this was an unarmed survey ship, and no Thursday war had ever prepared her for an apparent assault from an enemy she could neither see nor even imagine. Unless the colonists had survived and taken “Onward Christian Soldiers” to a new level of understanding, she was dealing with an alien force.

  It didn’t even bear thinking about. But she did.

  “Show me the point of origin,” she said to the AI.

  UNABLE TO LOCATE POINT OF ORIGIN.

  “There’s nothing out there,” said Bennett. “But if they had wanted to shoot, they’d have done it by now, wouldn’t they? They wouldn’t just rattle our bars. Not if they were serious.”

  He had a point. It didn’t stop her mouth going dry, or the sweat prickling on her back, though; and in zero gee, sweat just stayed where it formed. “Maybe they’re just pinging us,” she suggested. “Testing us out.”

  And maybe not. Three sides of the faceted panel that wrapped around the two pilot seats were now black and dead. Only life-support and cryo panels showed activity.

  “Bennett, have we been hit at all?”

  “Not as far as I can tell. No hull breach. We’d feel it. Shit, we’d see it.”

  Lindsay was crammed in a cockpit with one other person, in space, with no visible enemy and no tangible damage and yet there was every sign that her ship was under attack. She had nothing to indicate the Thetis warranted evacuation—to where, anyway?—and no way of returning fire. She couldn’t even make a run for it.

  Sheer impotence made them both lower themselves into their seats. Thetis was dead in the water, if there had been any water, and Lindsay checked the systems again, pressing the panels. How long before their orbit decayed?

  “Bugger,” she said. “We can’t even land this thing.” She turned to the AI. “Revival and evacuation time please.” There was a ticker-ticker noise but no response from the AI. Damn: a manual job. She activated her bioscreen and began calculating to see if she had time to revive the payload and the rest of the detachment and get them into the shuttles before Thetis hit the atmosphere. The figures didn’t look good.

  “What if it is just a malfunction?” she said. “Maybe there’s no external threat.” She tapped the AI controls and waited. It took a second or two more than she expected, a very long time in her book just then. Its test-and-repair programs must have been working flat out. “Can you confirm malfunction?”

  NO SOURCE IDENTIFIED, it said again.

  “It’s screwed,” said Bennett.

  “Okay.” There was nothing she could do: the AI was trying to restore power, and there was no damage that any emergency team could tackle, no hull damage to seal or fires to extinguish. “Time to revive Superintendent Frankland, I think.”

  “If we’re seriously in the dwang, Boss, an extra pair of functioning lungs might be just what we don’t need.”

  “Well, I’m fresh out of ideas, and she’s in command. Orders say wake her up on establishing orbit.”

  “Wouldn’t the AI know what was in her confidential briefing?” asked Bennett.

  “You watch too many movies,” she said.

  On the way through to the cryo tubes, nausea gripped her and she grabbed a bag from her pocket to throw up. Odd: fear had never had that effect on her before.

  Something went thwapp on the bulkhead. It was like the clack the day before.

  Shan Frankland, still disoriented from chill-sleep, passed her swiss from hand to hand, deriving some comfort from fidgeting. “That’s something attaching itself to the hull.”

  “What do you base that on?” Lindsay asked.

  “Because it sounds like it,” Shan said. She regretted her waspishness but felt an apology was out of order right then. Something started tugging at the back of her mind. It was just a hint, a fleeting moment of feeling like an obscure memory. She tried to grab it as it dissolved, but it was gone, behind the inner door, and there were no handles to grasp. She shut her eyes tight for a second and forced the sensation away. “Say our lost tribe made it after all and they’ve got some interesting tech after all these years.”

  “No external vid feed, but I could go EVA and check,” said Bennett.

  Shan shook her head. “I’d really rather have the qualified pilot where I can see him breathing, thanks. Have you tried flashing anyone?”

  “The AI’s been looking for signals. Nothing.”

  “Maybe they’re not sending. Try calling on a radio frequency. You know, voice traffic.”

  Bennett swung himself into the seat without a word and plugged himself in to the console. It was nothing as graphic as inserting a jack into his skull, but just knowing he had implants sitting under his skin made Shan feel slightly queasy. He fiddled with the little crescent-shaped receiver that latched on behind his right ear. The AI obliged by selecting a range of frequencies.

  “What would you like to transmit?” he asked. In a world where AIs spoke silently to each other to share battlefield data, the art of radio conversation was long lost.

  Shan got the feeling Bennett was looking for a line fit to record in the archives. She disappointed him without meaning to. “Just say, ‘Constantine, this is Thetis calling Constantine, respond.’ If they’re out there, it’ll get their attention.”

  Bennett began a nervous monologue. After a few repetitions he appeared to settle into it. Then Shan looked into the face of a woman she’d read about in briefing notes but never really met.

  Lindsay Neville was horribly young. She looked like she was wearing her older brother’s uniform for a lark.

  She
was twenty-seven. Shan had spent her own twenty-seventh birthday behind a riot shield, sick from the smell of petrol, conscious of her brand-new sergeant’s stripes. She’d needed ten sutures in her calf. But the bloke who gave her the wound needed forty.

  “All I can say is that we’re probably not in the shit,” Shan said. “And that we should wait for a response.”

  “I know some of this mission is classified, ma’am, but it really would help to know what we’re facing here.” Lindsay looked irritated. Maybe she shouldn’t have made the reference to qualified pilots. “We’re on the same side.”

  “I’m not being secretive, and I’m not a spook. I’ve had a Suppressed Briefing. You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Lindsay’s expression told Shan she rated it marginally below water divining and reading runes. “Not something I’ve experienced, not at my rank.”

  “It’s not a perk, Commander. It drives you crazy trying to work out what’s niggling at the back of your mind, so you just let it drive you. If I seem vague, it’s not by choice. It’s the only way you can share intelligence without the risk of revealing it at the wrong time.”

  “It’s our job to give you whatever support you ask for, ma’am. But we do work better with knowledge.”

  “I’ll share what I know with you when I know it. And right now I recall knowing that at the time we went extrasolar, there were indications that the colony had survived. Let’s assume they also survived our flight time and we can make contact.”

  “If we don’t plummet in flames, of course.”

  “Has the orbit decayed?”

  “No, we’re still stable.”

  “We’ve probably been immobilized as a precaution. A sort of vehicle stinger on a big scale. That’s what I’d do if I were them. Not that I know who them is.”

  Lindsay raised her eyebrows. “Well, that’s a handy piece of kit. Some useful tech we can take back.”

  “Might not be ours to take.” Was this the time to…Jesus. The thought was suddenly solid in her head, a real memory the Suppressed Briefing had let loose.