The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  “Eliminating the impossible.”

  “Mmm.” Shinka tapped up something on her pad. “It wasn’t built by humans, at any rate.”

  “Conjecture,” said Cannon.

  “Highly probable conjecture.”

  “There were a lot of skunk works on the two thousand planets of the old Polity.”

  “Enough skunk works to build enough of these to wipe out all two thousand of those planets?”

  “No,” Cannon admitted. “But still, this could be of human origin.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No… But I can’t prove the alien hypothesis yet.” It was right, she knew it was right, but this mystery was being played for the highest possible stakes. Since no one knew why the Mistake had happened in the first place, not to mention who or how, no one knew if the Mistake would come again. Just a little more efficient than last time, and the human race would be wiped out.

  “Look here.” Shinka pulled one of the orbital kinetic pellets out of a thigh pocket of her suit. It was fairly undamaged, mostly spherical, about five centimeters in diameter. And heavy, as Cannon well knew even before she took the object from Shinka.

  “They have the same sheen,” she observed to the Lieutenant. “The same finish on the skin. Which suggests that yet a third agency probably didn’t insert this.” Cannon grinned. “Or we could be finding ourselves smoked out by some very clever fellows.”

  “Nice try, Captain.”

  After six days, Shinka and Pangari were ready to cut loose this section of the orbital habitat’s structure and tow it over to Third Rectification. Cannon reviewed all the test data, and checked them off against the painstakingly developed standard operating procedure she’d spent several years wrestling with before ever setting out on this expedition.

  “What are you worried about?” Shinka asked her. “We haven’t found anything to be… concerned of.”

  Cannon could hear the ‘afraid of’ being edited out of the Lieutenant’s question on the fly. Shinka was almost the only one aboard besides Go-Captain Alvarez and the shipmind itself who was willing to be direct with her. But there were lines even this woman would not cross.

  I’m not a monster, girl, Cannon thought. But from Shinka’s perspective, she probably was. “I’m afraid of what we haven’t found. What we haven’t thought of. Someone we never saw coming and didn’t see leaving hit us with weapons we’ve never understood. What questions didn’t I think to ask about that?”

  The Mistake was history to these people, for the love of God, ancient history at that, but it was personal to her. Her and the other surviving Befores scattered about the Imperium Humanum.

  “You can’t know all the answers,” Shinka remarked pensively.

  “Not knowing all the answers nearly wiped out the human race the last time around.”

  “That thing is long-dead.”

  “No. It’s not.” Cannon let the paranoia of two millennia of life surge for a moment. “We found it by the internal power source. It could be a tripwire, for example.”

  “Just one tripwire? All the way out here on the backside of nowhere?”

  Cannon shrugged. “What triggered the attack the first time? From where? The point is, we don’t know. Probably, we never will. But handle with excruciating care seems to be a reasonable precaution to take, under the circumstances.”

  “Understood, ma’am. No question there.”

  Some of the Goon Squad, under Geek Squad supervision, were ready with thermic cutters. Cannon and Shinka retreated down the interior passageway to be clear of the safety margin. It was the first time she’d let the alien artefact out of her sight since they’d found it.

  That realization in turn sparked another thought. “You know, in a way, we’re missing the point here,” she told the Lieutenant.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “We’ve never found incontestable evidence of another intelligence. Not in close to sixteen thousand solar systems surveyed before the Mistake. Certainly not since. Until now. Under other circumstances, we ought to be whooping with joy over OT-1 there.”

  Shinka waved her hand in a broad circle, taking in the damaged habitat by reference. “In other circumstances, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Still, something to think on.”

  The Mistake had come and gone over the course of approximately a simultaneous day-objective, across all of human space. That implied an incredible control over relativistic effects on the part of their attackers. The response to that first strike, now that had been shaping for over a thousand years-objective.

  History’s slowest war, she thought. No, human history’s slowest war.

  Goon Squad very carefully guided the extracted section of Themiscyra orbital toward Third Rectification. The entire maintenance bay occupied about 1,400 meters3, which would fit into the either the number one or number two holds, right through the respective main cargo locks.

  Still, it was strange to watch the ragged edged square cuboid shape drift slowly through the vacuum. The Geeks had calculated force vectors and mass loads, attaching half a dozen dismounted broomstick motors to key points on the extracted structure.

  It was a bit like flying a house. All she needed was a wicked witch to drop the thing onto.

  “Those days are long gone,” Cannon whispered to no one in particular. She’d slain her last wicked witch centuries ago. Ever since, all her dead had been just people.

  Sergeant Pangari oversaw the operation from a trailing vector, where the propulsion controls had been mounted on a still-whole broomstick. Lieutenant Shinka had attached herself to the hull near the number two main cargo lock to eyeball the whole business. Cannon knew the shipmind was feeding Shinka data and advice as dense as her unaugmented mainline human sensorium could accommodate.

  The temptation, always the temptation, in her position was to take over. To guide. To lead and shelter. The classic trap for a well-meaning Before. Because by god, it was true. No mainline human ever lived long enough to learn to do anything so well as a Before could.

  She was reminded of something that the late Before Peridot Smith had said, at her Ekumen trial these centuries past. “A million years of human evolution happened just fine without us cranky old immortals hanging around telling the kids what to do.”

  Libraried as a result of the trial, Smith had surely gotten what was coming to her. Raising hell about alien menaces, indeed. Cannon refused to feel guilty then or since. She herself had long since parted company with the Ekumen, on good enough terms to avoid ever having been proscribed. But she knew damned well that any fool willing to try on her what she had been done to Smith had best be heavily-armed and awfully fast-moving.

  Her glance strayed toward Themiscyra downside. The planet was heavily and permanently clouded, showing blue and orange thanks to the complex hydrocarbons aerosolized in the upper layers of the atmosphere on layers of storm. They’d been in high orbit here for over a week, and scanning the planet on system approach for weeks-subjective before that. Cannon had yet to glimpse the surface.

  Were there any survivors? Could there have been? Domed worlds had not fared well in the Mistake, for obvious enough reasons. While the general run of evidence suggested their attackers had not been aiming directly at the extinction of human life, on worlds such as Themiscyra, the unknown architects of the Mistake had certainly succeeded.

  There were stranger stories, of course, other objectives met. The Before Aeschylus Sforza’s experiences on Redghost had been puzzling, tantalizing even, but no more or less instructive than anywhere else. Slightly over twenty-one million people had vanished overnight from that planet during the Mistake, presumably taken up bodily from the planet. Only Sforza had survived.

  Had the humans been taken up here on Themiscyra? Had any Befores survived in this wretched place? Cannon knew some, such as the late Before Raisa Siddiq, had the right mods to do so. She tried to imagine spending a thousand years living among toxic clouds, wondering if anyone would ever come
.

  The Before Michaela Cannon then tried to imagine why her thoughts kept straying back to women she’d loved, and killed. Not temporal psychosis—a significant if indirect cause of death among her fellow Befores, with which she’d had too much experience already—but the far more ordinary kinds of human psychosis seemed to be threatening to overtake her.

  Planets, clearly that was the problem. No wonder she’d spent most of her life in space. All the difficult things seemed to happen on or around the damned rockballs.

  Lieutenant Shinka’s voice snapped Cannon back to the present moment. “You want to check anything before we slide her into the cargo bay, Captain?”

  “No,” Cannon said crisply, hoping like hell no one had noticed how badly she’d wandered. Temporal psychosis, indeed, she thought with a cold spasm in her heart. “Bring it in like you know how to do. I’ll follow the squaddies back inside.”

  Still shedding slivers and chips of metal in a strange, high-albedo snowfall, the rectilinear chunk of orbital habitat eased smoothly into Third Rectification’s cargo bay like a fuel rod sliding into a reactor. And clearance to spare in both dimensions of the lock, Cannon was pleased to note. The shipmind would be quite put out with her if she bent the hull.

  Captains, after all, did not command the starships. They knew their own minds and commanded themselves. Captains commanded the crews aboard the ships. Expedition commanders such as herself were of far more ambiguous value, and arguably, superfluous.

  So far as Cannon knew, no paired drive ship had ever so much as swapped orbits uncrewed. She was fairly certain they could operate independently, if they wanted to. Why the shipminds did not choose to do so was a question that much occupied certain intellects in secretive think tanks scattered around the Imperium Humanum.

  The last of the ragged metal cleared the margins of the bay. An engineering team was already securing their salvage to the prepared clamps and pads as the outer lock slid shut. Cannon watched the rectangle of subdued light slim to a square, then a bar, then a line. One by one her crew headed back inside, broomsticks and suit boosters puffing little clouds of fog as they maneuvered. It was a parade, of sorts.

  Finally only she remained, hanging in freefall several hundred meters off Third Rectification’s portside flank, most of the way forward. The starship’s familiar, semi-streamlined bulk glimmered and gleamed with marker lights and exposed viewports. She was a great, matte-coated guppy; a piece of technology that would have been recognizable even to the people of the time of Cannon’s birth at the very dawn of the Space Age, yet containing a mind that no one alive today understood.

  Not even her. That was a prospect which Cannon thought ought to frighten far more people than it apparently did.

  “I’ve known your kind for eight hundred and fifty years,” Cannon whispered into the darkness. “And even I have no idea where you are taking us.”

  The mistrust she always felt seemed to be bubbling too close to the surface. Finally, she made her way back into the ship. She’d been out in hard vacuum for a week. It was time for a shower and some real food, mouth-to-gut.

  —Excerpt from Befores: Your Oldest Friends

  Temporal Psychosis—A problem that only Befores can have. Have you ever met a Before? If you’re quite lucky, you might see one someday. They are old, very old. Older than all your parents and grandparents put together. Older than the Imperium. Older than the shipminds, even.

  Befores are people who were alive before the Mistake, whose bodies were changed by doctors in the old Polity so they could live a very, very long time. No Before has ever died of old age. Most of them perished during the Mistake. About half of those who survived the Mistake have died since then. The ones who still live have too many memories. Sometimes those memories become too much for them, and they forget where they are in time.

  Someday all the Befores will be gone. We will still have a few Libraries, which is what happens to some Befores when they die, but the last people who remember the Polity and the days before the Mistake will never walk among us again. If nothing else takes them from us, temporal psychosis will.

  Study questions:

  Can you get temporal psychosis?

  Could any mainline human have this problem?

  Will it be good for the Imperium when the last of the Befores dies?

  Would you want to become a Before, if you could? Why or why not?

  They were in orbit four weeks conducting a rigorously detailed analysis of the recovered artefact before Cannon would allow anyone to physically touch it. To assuage her conscience, she had Third Rectification perform a very tight continuous EM sweep of Themiscyra. Just in case some fellow Before had managed to survive down there.

  After the Mistake, Cannon had been desperate to get off 9-Rossiter, and that was with—eventually and after much guidance from her—access to electricity and plumbing and something like an industrial base. Trapped here for a thousand years? Temporal psychosis would have to take a back seat to claustrophobia and possibly good old-fashioned rage at the sheer abandonment. Sky Sforza had had it bad enough on Redghost, where a person could at least wander around out of doors breathing the air and drinking the water.

  Guilt rarely troubled the Before Michaela Cannon, but empathy was a stone bitch. And boy could she empathize with some poor bastard being trapped downside here since the other end of forever.

  Lieutenant Shinka continued to lead the analysis team. They measured everything about OT-1 that could be measured without making contact. Cannon sprawled on her bunk in the master’s cabin, staring at the force maps of the device’s nominal magnetic field. Current best-guess from the Geeks was that the field represented leakage from the power source. Which itself continued to look like a vastly undersized ion-coupler cell.

  Yet another reason for concluding that this was of alien rather than human origin. That technology simply didn’t miniaturize.

  A faint chime announced she had a visitor. Cannon glanced around the cabin—everything was stowed properly, the art on the walls was straight in its clips, she hadn’t left anything lying around loose. A modest space, especially for a high officer on a paired drive ship, but what did she need with more cubage?

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Lieutenant Shinka.” From the timbre of the voice, Cannon knew it was not the shipmind who responded. Just one of the keeper routines. Third Rectification could easily route its awareness anywhere, but tended not to bother. Rather like a human not paying attention to every sound, color and smell they experienced at any given moment.

  “Enter.”

  The hatch hissed open. Shinka wore her Household Guards uniform, Cannon noted. Not incorrect, but a bit out of place five years-subjective into a long cruise.

  Shinka saluted. Also out of place, as Cannon wore no uniform. Just an embroidered silk robe over a unitard, itself the innermost layer of a powered suit. Or battle armor.

  Cannon hadn’t meant to make a point with that choice of clothing. She actually found the damned things comfortable.

  “Nice work so far on the analysis, Lieutenant.”

  Shinka cracked a smile. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “You seem prepared for formality.”

  “Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” The Lieutenant met her gaze, eyes gleaming. “My team believes we’re ready to extract OT-1 from the decking it’s embedded in.”

  “Really?”

  “All testing protocols have been met.” Cannon knew that, of course, she saw every report as both raw data and summary. “Three separate working groups have been meeting to review all the parameters, looking for missed angles.” Cannon knew that as well. She’d sat in on some of those sessions. “Everything’s checked out clean. Ma’am, we’d like to cut this puppy loose and get hold of its tail.”

  “Vengeance, Lieutenant?”

  “I wouldn’t know, ma’am.” The unspoken words, I wasn’t there, hung between them. “More excitement, I’d say. The chance to actually touch something that came from th
e hands of someone not human. That’s historic.”

  Hands, or tentacles, or force fields. Who knew? Cannon could certainly understand the impulse. “And then you want to take it apart.”

  “Of course, ma’am. That’s what we signed up for.”

  A cruise of a decade-subjective or more was a huge bite out of a mainline human’s life and career, Cannon reminded herself. For her, it was just another way to pass the time. For many of the people aboard Third Rectification, this expedition would be the mainstay of their life’s work. She was aware of at least seven doctoral candidates aboard. Figure that many again undeclared but in the making.

  They hadn’t enlisted for the joy of spending a meaningful portion of their adult lives in her company. No, to a woman and man, Third Rectification’s crew was consumed by an almost-pathological curiosity.

  Only Cannon worried about vengeance. Of course, she worried more about what was going to come next.

  “Let’s go look at this fish we’ve caught, Lieutenant. You’re probably right. It’s time to take this one off the hook.”

  Shinka smiled politely at that.

  “Have you ever, ah, been fishing?” Cannon asked after a moment, as she pulled on her boots.

  “Seen a few virteos,” Shinka admitted. “I was raised in the desert.”

  “Earth, right? Which one?” Cannon asked. “I grew up in Nebraska. A long, long time ago. Lots of corn, not so much with the desert.”

  “Namib Desert, ma’am.”

  “Um…” Cannon dredged her brain for memories as old as childhood schooling. “Southern Africa?”

  “Yes.” Shinka’s smile was becoming decidedly lopsided.

  “We’re both a long way from home.” Cannon stood and followed the Lieutenant out.

  Freeing OT-1 from the salvaged decking was almost anticlimactic. No sparks, no flashes of light or strange EM emissions. Just a few minutes with a thermic cutter, followed by a few more minutes with a high-speed mechanical saw. Then Goon Squad shifted the sections away, opening the old maintenance bay like a flower and tearing down the bulkheads and decks in sections for later jettisoning.