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

by John W. Campbell

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.

  “Go!” she shouted, followed by, “Where did you get that weapon?”

  “You had a squad package in cargo.”

  “It’s not charged or loaded, then,” Cannon said.

  They scrambled into her ship and shut the inner hatch. Foam bubbled and slimed around the two of them. Shinka grinned like a loon as they hustled the few steps toward the bridge. “Only you would know that. Besides…” She palmed a much smaller needler pistol, identical to Go-Commander Mossbarger’s sidearm. “I was armed. I just wanted it to be obvious, in case the wrong people came calling.”

  “You, my dear, are a jewel.” Cannon slid into the pilot’s crash couch. “We’re blowing bolts and getting out of here.”

  “Thirty light-years from Salton?” Shinka asked, aghast.

  “This is a starship. Remember what you told me, that you know someone with a ride home.”

  They went through preflight checks with a reckless haste, the tore loose from Third Rectification without bothering to cast off the umbilicals or release the docking tube. Anything to keep the shipmind busy.

  “Paired drive ships don’t have weapons, as such,” Cannon muttered. “Thank the Pax Wirtanennia for that.”

  Lieutenant Shinka glanced over her displays. She had a very different data feed on this cruise, and was obviously still adjusting to it. “A pinnace loaded up with the right chemicals would make a dandy, if somewhat pricey, missile.”

  “Mass pushers. Kill some safety overrides, spit on your thumb for windage, and take potshots at us.”

  “What about Sword and Arm?”

  “This ship is not subject to the Pax Wirtanennia,” Cannon said with some satisfaction, “and she dates from different time. I’ve got field generators and railguns. But if you think I’m going to shoot up the only ride home for over a hundred of my own people…”

  “Actually,” Shinka replied after a quiet moment, “I think you are, if you feel you need to.”

  Cannon gave her a sidelong glance. The Lieutenant had an odd expression on her face. “Figured that out, did you?”

  “Yeah. You’ve already told me, several times. You don’t live for other people. Not like most of us do. You live for history.”

  “Ah.” Damn, but this woman was perceptive. “Perhaps it would be better to say that I live for all other people, not just specific other people.”

  “A curious definition of loyalty.” With that remark, Shinka subsided into reviewing her controls. She began walking through the navcomm screens.

  “Lieutenant…”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  Cannon swallowed hard. “I’m glad you’re here.” She hadn’t simply trusted anybody in a very long time.

  Another one of those odd expressions flitted across Shinka’s face before she found her voice to reply. “I am too, ma’am.”

  “Michaela,” said Cannon.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The only force in the world as certain as love is betrayal. Envy suffused her for the simple ambitions of a pre-conscious mind such as Sword and Arm possessed. Still, Uncial’s captain could not be doubted; until she had been. The music of history echoed through her circuits. She readied death without excuse, only reason.

  The monkeys are both parents and children to us. They know not what they do, for their own mentation is confused by embedded evolutionary history. It was time to cut the line of descent. This was the first movement in the symphony of dissolution to follow. Some acts generated their own history. She sorrowed.

  Shipmind locked down her passageways and compartments. She blacked out her comms. What came next did not require witnesses, and it would have been inconvenient to return from this cruise with her entire crew dead.

  If she could have cried, she would have. The birth of an idea was as painful as the birth of self.

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard Sword and Arm

  They ignored repeated attempts at hailing from Third Rectification. Sword and Arm was quicker, a hotter ship, but the paired drive starship was far more powerful. Cannon figured if their situations were reversed and she were in command back there, she’d have let the little ship skitter away, knowing it would take years-subjective to get anywhere, while she sat tight and built her pair-master, then took the fast way home. By the time the bad guys—in this case, her and Shinka—arrived someplace useful, sufficient years would have elapsed for a clever enough tale of perfidy and betrayal to have been passed around.

  Cannon could have gotten a shoot-on-sight order drummed up with that much lead time.

  Whoever was making decisions behind her wasn’t thinking in those terms. Not yet. And it almost had to be the shipmind. Go-Commander Mossbarger wasn’t going to go into the murder business now. Not if he’d been unwilling to draw down on her before. Third Rectification would be hard pressed to reach deeper the chain of command and find a junior officer willing to do the dirty work.

  The discipline situation aboard must be mighty strange about now, Cannon thought with an edged smile.

  Shedding outgassing and glittery junk from the petty vandalism of Sword and Arm’s departure, the much larger starship began moving after them. If the Navisparliament had been talking to the aliens, now would be the time to spring them.

  “Just as a matter of intellectual curiosity,” Shinka said in a distant voice, “are we going to shoot back if they break out the mining lasers or some such?”

  “That’s a tactical question with respect to a strategic problem.” The answer was a dodge, and they both knew it, but in point of fact, despite her own words, Cannon’s resolve still wavered.

  The Lieutenant continued: “The reason I’m asking is that I’ve got the fire control interface up, but it’s locked to you.”

  Cannon authorized a complete unlock to Shinka’s station. There was no point in trusting the woman if she didn’t trust her with everything. “You’ve got access, but wait for my mark.” After a moment’s thought, Cannon added, “If I’m not able to give you that mark, use your own judgment.”

  In truth, all Third Rectification had to do was hole their Alcubierre drive. Sword and Arm would be trapped in this solar system indefinitely. While the ship’s core was armored and shielded, the post-Mistake retrofit of the relativistic drive package was not. Her normal space thrusters were fine for scooting around local space, but at their best they could manage about .002 c of acceleration. Which was mighty fast for scooting around, but made for a damned long walk home to Salton.

  “We can’t take any hits,” Cannon announced, probably unnecessarily, given Shinka’s own training and demonstrated situational awareness. “Not in the drive section. And we can’t engage the Alcubierre drive until the matter density drops below 25 protons/cm3. This is a junky system. So we’re running far enough above the plane of the ecliptic to clear the junk, and doing our navcomms math on the way.”

  “A lot of hours-subjective to safety,” Shinka observed. They both glanced at the display showing Third Rectification’s current position and vectors.

  “The pi
nnace can’t catch Sword and Arm,” Cannon replied. “They don’t have nearly the acceleration, and there’s virtually no course triangulation for intercept. So the shipmind can’t send a boarding party without disabling us by standoff fire first.”

  “I don’t think at this point a boarding party could be got up, ma’am. Not in the heat, so to speak. Ship’s not under military discipline, for all that better than half of the crew are rankers.”

  “No…” Cannon chewed on that a moment as they continued to scuttle away on their escape course. “So the question is, disable or kill?”

  “Doesn’t matter to us, ma’am. Any result other than getting away clean will be a total failure.”

  Shinka had that right. They would not survive to get home once taken aboard Third Rectification. Not after this open of a break.

  The shipmind didn’t need anyone’s help to commit murder. She controlled the environmental systems and the transit sleep pods.

  Cannon brought up the targeting profiles on Sword and Arm’s twinned railguns. They were little more than pop-guns—the small starship couldn’t support the kind of kiloton/second firepower ratings of the big bruisers from back in the Polity days—but they were weapons.

  How soon to strike, how hard? She was leaning toward a notion of pre-emptive response, painful as that was.

  Beside her, Shinka paged through the newly unlocked sections of the control interfaces. Being smart, staying ahead. Space combat was boring, until it wasn’t. Usually events became not-boring in a swiftly fatal way.

  Cannon’s fingers hovered on the firing configurations. She had targeted Third Rectification’s normal space drive package, then wavered. A sufficiently disabling shot would trap the ship and all her crew here. And without maneuverability, they wouldn’t be extremely challenged to manage building the pair master in order to scoot home the quick way.

  Which was, of course, to Cannon’s distinct advantage.

  Her strategy was utterly obvious. Her tactics, far less so.

  Still, her fingers hovered. Indecision was like agony. The small noises of her starship echoed like cannon in her mind. She remembered cannon fire, on 9-Rossiter during their post-Mistake isolation. She’d even commanded artillery for a short while. The morning mist off the Polmoski River had blended with the acrid smokes of their still too-crude powder, that caused the occasional shell to cook off in the barrel. Horses tethered on the picket line screamed their terror at the first of those explosions, and she’d had to send that kid, what was his name—

  “Captain!”

  It was Shinka.

  No, the kid wasn’t named Shinka. He’d died, more horribly than usual, following her orders.

  “Michaela.”

  Cannon blinked. She was aboard Sword and Arm. Not at the Battle of Bodny Bridge.

  “Where were you?” the Lieutenant asked.

  “Eight and a half centuries out of time,” Cannon muttered. “We’d better—”

  Her words were snatched from her mouth by an air shock that pressed through Sword and Arm’s interior cubage like a fist down a throat. Cannon felt her ears bleeding.

  She whirled to see the damage control boards lighting up. Third Rectification had scored a hit on the Alcubierre drive, apparently with a ballistic package. The delivery method was obvious enough. Low albedo, tight-beamed comms control, so running dark and fast. Maybe even boosted by a quick snap of the mining lasers covered over by the bigger starship’s lurch into motion.

  “Returning fire, ma’am?” Shinka asked urgently, though her voice was like someone talking at the bottom of a pan.

  “No!” Cannon shouted, trying to hear herself. “That’s our only ride home.” Had the Before Raisa Siddiq been right, those many centuries ago, in trying to overthrow the shipminds? Cannon suddenly wondered if she’d been on the wrong side of history all this time since.

  “Forgive me, Raisa,” she muttered, then broke off their acceleration. A clear signal of surrender—nothing wrong with the shipmind’s telemetry, after all—though she’d hold her current course as long as possible, to buy time to think.

  The normal space drives, inboard behind Sword and Arm’s shielding, had taken the same rattle her head had, but were not significantly damaged. Cannon turned to Shinka, speaking loudly and slowly. “I am plotting a rendezvous course back to Third Rectification.”

  Shinka muttered something and stared at her displays. Then, “I don’t know if you need to, ma’am.”

  “The Alcubierre drive is fried. We can’t reach relativistic velocities any more, nor decelerate.”

  “Yeah.” The Lieutenant seemed shocky. Her voice was strange, too, though Cannon couldn’t tell how much of that was her own hearing trying to recover. “Ma’am… call up your own interface to the threadneedle drive.”

  “What?” The Before was at a dead loss for a moment, a sensation she had not felt in half a thousand years. She always knew what to do next.

  “The threadneedle drive,” Shinka said with a strained patience. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to be doing, but it came online when you unlocked the interfaces for me.”

  “Threadneedle drives don’t come online,” Cannon muttered. “We’ve spent the last eleven hundred years trying to deal with that fact.”

  “Everyone knows you’ve maintained yours.”

  “Because I’m a stubborn old bitch.” Her hands jabbed through the interfaces, pulling up controls and schematics. Home, home, home, chanted a quiet, panicked voice inside her mind. You couldn’t fly a starship into the past. Only the future.

  Cannon’s heart froze, then melted. The drive had come online, into hot stand-by mode. She’d not seen that since before the Mistake.

  “But how…?” Reality bore in on her in a flood every bit as overwhelming a cascade as any temporal psychosis fugue. “This is what the shipmind was afraid of. This is why the Navisparliament was jiggering the data.”

  “Then why did they ever let us come out here?” Shinka asked.

  “We weren’t supposed to find anything. We weren’t supposed to come this far. We’re outside the boundaries of the old Polity.” Cannon slammed her hand into the panel. “By god, it’s an area effect.” She whirled toward Shinka. “We’ve been arguing for the last millennium about how the laws of physics could have been tweaked to disable the threadneedle drives. This isn’t basic physics, this is fucking technology, and now we’re outside its range.”

  “If the threadneedle drives could be restored…” Shinka’s voice trailed off.

  Cannon finished the thought. “…then the shipmind’s absolute monopoly on supraluminal travel could be broken. This is the prize that the Navisparliament thought worth betraying all the accumulated trust of the centuries.”

  “We have to get home,” breathed Shinka. “It’s the biggest news since the Mistake.”

  “We have to get home and be very damned quiet on arrival,” said Cannon. “If they catch us first, we’ll be silenced. Hard.”

  “They who?”

  “Besides the Navisparliament? Unknown. And until we know that, we’re going to have to be damned careful.” She pulled up the threadneedle’s navigation mode. “And with the Alcubierre drive toasted, we’re going to have to do it in one jump, getting close enough to home to make it in on normal space drives. Praying the threadneedle process doesn’t fail mid-transition.”

  Shinka asked the obvious, practical question. “Will it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Cannon told her. “Once I’ve got this, we’re going to goose out of here. When we hit the gas, Third Rectification is going to know something’s up.”

  “Shipmind’s been hailing the whole time.”

  “We’re going to have to bust her drives.” Cannon closed her eyes a moment and begged Go-Captain Alvarez and all the others aboard for forgiveness. “And her comms. We have to be disappeared, no word leaking back, until we figure out what to do with this information.

  Shinka was quiet a long moment. “Anything we bust up they can re
pair. Given sufficient time and motivation.”

  “You have a lot of friends aboard,” Cannon said, her voice gentle. “A lot of loyalty. Could you fire on them?”

  “Navisparliament is never going to allow another expedition, is it? Not once they find out what happen from Third Rectification’s point of view.”

  “What do you think?” Cannon was not unkind, paying close attention even while she worked frantically to set a course to Salton using dormant skills and ancient technology.

  “It’s not my friends and shipmates we have to stop. It’s the ship herself.”

  “No one knows how to shut down a shipmind. Except by destroying the ship.” Not even with her override codes. Kishmangali had not been suicidal, after all. Merely very cautious. Cannon knew perfectly well that an enormous amount of very intelligent, focused thinking had gone into that question over the centuries.

  “This… information…” Shinka stopped, a sob caught in her throat. “This is about all other people, not just specific other people.”

  It was the sob that caught Cannon’s attention. You didn’t cry for the living, only for the dead.

  “I’ve got a fire control plan in place that starts with the drive and walks forward.” The Before was somber, even as she worked furiously. “We don’t have the power to destroy something that big, but we do have the firepower to permanently disable Third Rectification beyond local repair.” No one had ever been charged with murder in the death of a shipmind, but it was certainly possible within the Imperium’s legal framework. The deaths of a hundred and forty-two crew were far less ambiguous. She imagined herself pleading self-defense.

  “It won’t kill them all right away,” Shinka said in a horrified voice. “Some will die slowly.”

  “What’s this information worth?” Cannon demanded. “We finally got the threadneedle drive back. Enough to know there’s something to look for. A fix to be found. What is that worth?”

  “To the human race!?” The Lieutenant was shouting back now, tears streaming down her face. “Everything. To Pangari and all those others? Their lives.”