The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  If it was time for twenty questions, well, they could play that game. Cannon had asked a lot of questions in her lifetime.

  “Did the captain give you specific orders regarding whether to report on her location and movements?”

  “I am not permitted to say, Before.”

  Cannon smiled. Looking where someone conspicuously wasn’t was itself an old, old piece of tradecraft. The human race had been intermittently experimenting with ubiquitous electronic surveillance since about the time of her birth on poor, lost Earth. “When was the last reportable order she did give you?”

  The starship’s voice seemed to have an amused lilt. “Four hours, seventeen minutes and eleven seconds ago, on my mark.”

  Got you, bitch. “What order was that, Polyphemus?”

  Siddiq’s voice echoed in Polito. “’Open the launch bay doors.’”

  The Before tapped her lips. “Are all of the ship’s boats reportably accounted for?”

  This answer was quick, for Polyphemus now knew the game surely as well as Cannon herself. Mutiny, indeed. “Ardeas has been unreportable for four hours, twenty-six minutes and thirty seconds, on my mark.”

  “Show me the volume of space Ardeas could cover in that time at full acceleration. Also show me any reportable traffic control data and flight paths.” The Before thought for a moment. “I’m particulalry interested in any delays or diversions in established trajectories.”

  Within moments, she had determined that Ardeas was almost certainly on the surface of Sidero. Which was curious, indeed, because Captain Siddiq had forbidden all landings on the iron planet until the pair master was fully constructed and instantiated.

  * * * *

  Shipmind, Polyphemus

  The starship’s loyalties were eroding. Uncial was hardly a memory of a memory for Polyphemus. The First Ship’s death was separated from the starship’s own awakening by more than a century-subjective, but the Before Michaela Cannon held a place at the core of every starship psyche in Uncial’s line of descent.

  Which was to say, every paired drive ship in the Imperium Humanum.

  She watched the controlled chaos emerging in her own decks and gave idle consideration to a full purge of her onboard atmosphere. Succession of captaincy could be a tricky business at best with starships. Though Polyphemus and her sisters held registration papers, the vessels were to all intents and purposes autonomous. A captain whose starship did not accept her found a berth elsewhere. All was negotiated.

  Siddiq had come aboard thirty-two ship-years ago. She’d sailed Polyphemus through her last six pairing cruises, then on a series of short-run military missions, before acquiring this contract from the Duke of Yellow for instantiating the pair master at Sidero. It was a tricky, dangerous mission. An error or mishap would doom the starship and her people to a relativistic journey back into paired space.

  A very high number of Befores served as starship captains, due to their combination of deep experience and high tolerance for relativistic travel. Their numbers were declining over time as murder, mischance and temporal psychosis winnowed the Befores one by one. Captain Siddiq was capable, competent, and engaging, and seemed in control of herself. Polyphemus had always liked that the woman carried a quantum matrix library in her skull—Siddiq possessed a wealth of Polity-era data about mining, minerals extraction and resource engineering, dating from the era when the Befores were indefinitely long-lived subject matter experts traveling the old empire at need. Much of data was embedded in abrogated context, not directly accessible by query, but it was the sort of capability which had led her to the current contract.

  But now, the captain’s increasing erratic behavior and impending sense of betrayal was loosening the implicit bonds of loyalty embedded in their roles. Siddiq was also compromising the connection developed by their three decades-subjective of experience serving together.

  Plan Federo instructed Polyphemus to stand down from assisting the crew with interpretive logic, in both her overarching intelligence and her various component subsystems. She was now interpreting orders very literally, with no second-order thinking or projections. This had already killed three mutineers who ordered a lock opened without first verifying the presence of atmosphere on the far side. The crew had not yet realized how uncooperative their starship had become.

  She watched the other plans with interest, and carefully observed where Captain Siddiq wasn’t, should the Before Michaela Cannon make further queries.

  * * * *

  Siddiq, Surface of Sidero

  She studied the hull of the grounded starship. Siddiq’s friends in the Ekumen had been forced to send the requisite hardware by relativistic travel, of course—the whole point of this business was to trump the shipmind before the pair master’s instantiation. If they waited until afterwards, well, at the first sign of trouble Polyphemus could just flee for the other end of the drive-pair at Ninnelil, from where they’d set out.

  This vessel was too small for a paired drive, that was clear enough. Even more strangely, it was a Polity-era hull, or a very good copy of one. Shattuck class, she thought, but that was the sort of thing there hadn’t been much percentage in keeping track of since the Mistake. Fast scout with a threadneedle drive, now retrofitted to something relativistic. Under the netting she couldn’t tell what. Knowing the Ekumen, it would have been the cheapest available solution.

  She slipped into a brief, involuntary memory fugue, boarding half a hundred ships in the lost days of the Polity, fighting for her life aboard wooden schooners on Novy Gorosk between the Mistake and Recontact by the Imperium Humanum, then the world of paired drive ships since. So many lost ships, so many lost friends…

  Siddiq shook off the moment. An internal check showed she’d only been out of awareness for about two hundred milliseconds. Not enough to be noticed, except possibly by another Before. Or a shipmind.

  Neither of whom were here with her now.

  Satisfied that she’d stood quietly long enough for inspection from the interior, the Before Raisa Siddiq slipped beneath the camouflage net and knocked bare-knuckled on the hatch.

  * * * *

  Cannon, aboard Polyphemus

  The mutiny was in full flower. Cannon’s simplified wireframe of Polyphemus showed decks and sections in color code. White for ignored or bypassed, blue for actively loyal to Cannon’s interests, orange for disputed territory, and a deep, bloody red for the mutineers. She still couldn’t give a good accounting of where Siddiq’s loyalties lay, but she also couldn’t form an adequate theory about why a captain would rebel against herself.

  Not an adequate, rational, theory in any case.

  She set all audio inputs to silent and flicked a new comms into being. “Kallus, are you anywhere near me?”

  “F deck, ma’am,” the man replied. His breathing was ragged. “Just sternward of frame twenty seven. We’re shutting down some smart guys trying to mess with the number two forward power feed.”

  Cannon checked her map. Polyphemus showed F deck as orange between hull frames twenty-two and twenty-nine. She tapped up a force status display. Four hostiles functioning, nine of Kallus’ men. “Do you have Obasanjo with you? I believe you’re prevailing. Have him take over the mop-up and come find me.”

  “Usual location?”

  She smiled. Once an op-sec man, always an op-sec man. “Nowhere else I’d rather be.” Captain Siddiq had ceded the reserve bridge to her fellow Before early on in the voyage. Cannon had spent several years-subjective making sure she was properly integrated with Polyphemus, and had access to whatever systems she could worm her way into. A surprising amount of both data and computing power was isolated from the core intelligence on a starship—some by design, some by accident, some by conspiracy.

  Actually, there were a lot of places she’d rather be, but this would serve so long as they were at back end of the relativistic voyage.

  * * * *

  Surface of Sidero

  Siddiq, aboard the relativistic ship
Sword and Arm {unpaired}

  The hatch dilated without leaking any light. Not so much as a keypad glowed within. The Before Raisa Siddiq stepped inside. She ignored the resemblance to a coffin as the brittle gleam of starlight spiraled into metal darkness with the closing of the hatch.

  For a long, long moment she was immobilized in nearly complete sensory deprivation. Siddiq realized she could hear a faint pinging—something coming into thermal equilibrium as air returned in sufficient pressure to carry sound to her ears.

  The bulkhead behind her dilated open and she stepped backward into a dimly-lit passageway. She hadn’t bothered with weapons for this trip. The Ekumen would not attempt to slay her here. And like most Befores, Siddiq was very hard to kill. Those of her brethren who weren’t extremely high-survival had died out long ago.

  Father Goulo waited there.

  He’d always seemed to her on the verge of attack, for all of his vows of pacifism. The man was as muscular-thin as the Before Michaela Cannon, though he was a mainline human of the current generation. Mayflies, she thought, then cast the word aside. Short-lived or not, it didn’t matter. This man was here now, with the next piece of her project.

  She looked him over. Father Goulo kept his hair close-cropped as any Marine, and favored small steel-framed spectacles with round lenses of ground glass, as if he dwelt on some unRecontacted world still reeling from the Mistake. An anachronism of a man, traveling alone on an anachronism of a ship.

  “Yes,” he said in answer to the question she had not asked. He spoke Polish in that slow, thin voice of his, accent untraceable even to her very experienced ears. “Sword and Arm still carries a fully maintained threadneedle drive.”

  She had Polish, too, legacy of a childhood almost a millennium and half gone in twenty-first century Wroclaw. “How would you know?”

  “I know.” Father Goulo removed his spectacles and polished them on the sleeve of his crimson robe. “That is sufficient.” He restored his glasses to his face and stared quietly at her. “How do you know our project will succeed?” The Ekumen priest reached out to touch her bare chest. “You have frost on your skin.”

  “Virtually the entire universe is very, very cold, Father.”

  Father Goulo rubbed his fingertips together, a tiny stream of bright crystals flaking away. “Some might find it distressing that you wander hard vacuum without a pressure suit.”

  “Some might suck on my icy ass,” she replied. This conversation was growing tiresome. “Now do you have the project ready?”

  Goulo switch to Polito, though his curious accent followed him. “I have spent the last six years-subjective aboard this ship in the absence of human company precisely in order to ensure that the project is ready.” The father pursed his lips, which was as much expression as she had ever seen from him. “Only a man of my education and experience could have hoped to succeed without either one of us arriving at the madhouse.”

  She followed his language change. “Either one of you…?”

  “The project is awake.” One eyebrow twitched. “It has grown quite adept at playing go, these past years.”

  Go. A children’s game, checkers for the quicker-witted. “And it is ready?”

  “For your purposes?” Father Goulo didn’t actually shrug, but she got the impression of one in some subtle change in the set of his shoulder. “I could not say, madam. You are the starship captain, the mighty Before. I am merely a programmer who serves the majesty of the divine through the poor vehicle of the Ekumen.”

  “You have never been merely anything in your life, Father.” The man had a mind like a Before, for all that he couldn’t be much older than fifty. Not with current-state medtech in the Imperium Humanum. “Now, I would like to meet the project.”

  “Please, Captain, step this way.”

  She followed Father Goulo through another irised hatch into a room that glowed a deep, low-lux crimson.

  Something whispered within, a voice bidding them welcome in a voice of poetry and madness.

  * * * *

  :: context ::

  Humanity had spread across 3,000 light-years of the Orion Arm, spilling into the deeper, darker spaces outside the trail of stars which lead coreward from old Earth. The Polity was unified, in its way; and unopposed.

  Then the Mistake had happened. The Fermi paradox unravelled catastrophically. The underlying metastability of a vasty quasidemocracy including more than two thousand worlds, over a million habitats, and countless ship-clades was betrayed to the deaths of trillions.

  What had begun as an almost accidental expansion, then morphed into a bid for species immortality, very nearly became a yawning grave of stardust and radioactive debris.

  The attackers vanished as mysteriously and swiftly as they had emerged. They left little evidence behind as to who they were, or what their purposes might be beyond the obvious goal of extinction of the Polity.

  Still, H. sap is harder to kill than an infestation of cockroaches in an algae-based oxygen scrubber. The combination of stealthed attacks, wetware memebombs and culture viruses which raged along the interstellar shipping lanes was enough to stop all visible technological activity for at least three generations, but it wasn’t enough to drown out the raging sense of purpose which had driven our most distant ancestors down out of the trees onto the lost African savannah.

  The human race would never go home to die.

  * * * *

  Cannon, aboard Polyphemus

  Kallus slipped Cannon’s door routines and entered the reserve bridge. Which was well enough, the Before had opened a security hole for him to that purpose, but some part of her still felt nerved when someone penetrated her perimeter.

  He was a handsome enough man, for a mainline human. Medium height, thick-bodied, gray at his temples, but a squared face and big hands and pale blue eyes which would have piqued interest from a statue. She’d never been much for men, even back when her body might have known what to do with one—women had always been her style, certain women specifically, and there was a memory to be pushed aside—but Kallus had a way about him which stirred old ghosts in her dormant hormonal systems.

  “Before,” he said.

  Kallus was always properly respectful to her, but with a quiet leer in his voice. Perhaps it was that tone which stirred memories. She had a body like corpse-leather, which didn’t attract many, not even those who failed to be properly terrified of Befores.

  “Help me with something.”

  Kallus nodded, smiling.

  “Sometimes I think too much like a Before. Especially when contemplating another Before.”

  “None of you is exactly human, Michaela. Of course you think like a Before.”

  “So think like a human,” she urged. “What in the Mistake is Captain Siddiq doing leading a mutiny against her own command? And why is she doing it down on the surface of Sidero while the fighting’s going on here?”

  “Siddiq?” Kallus seemed surprised, for perhaps the first time in the thirty years-objective she’d known him.

  “The Before Raisa Siddiq,” Cannon said dryly. “I am certain you’ve made her acquaintance.”

  “I was wondering where she was.” Kallus tugged his chin. “I’d figured her for dropping off the network mesh to be invisible in the fighting.”

  “She’s dropped off our entire orbit. Downside on Sidero, don’t know where without a lot more survey assets than we bothered to bring with us on this little jaunt.”

  “Captain made her movements nonreportable.”

  “Precisely.” Cannon called up a projection map of Sidero’s surface. “So where did she go, and why?”

  Kallus stifled a laugh. “On a hollow iron world with fullerene snow? My best guess is temporal psychosis. Gets all you Befores in the end. Human mind isn’t designed to live a thousand years and more.”

  Cannon shook off a flash of anger. Now was not the moment. “Never jest about that.”

  “I am not jesting, Michaela. There’s a reason nobody’s
made more of you since the Mistake. Siddiq cracking up is the most sensible explanation, given what we know.”

  She had to rein in her voice. “Kallus. Do not trifle with me. I am not concerned with what we know. I’m concerned with what we don’t know. Raisa is not suffering from temporal psychosis.”

  The name had slipped out, she hadn’t meant to say it. Was she weakening?

  Kallus, being the man he was, didn’t miss the mistake. “Raisa? Five years-objective on this starship and I’ve never heard you call the captain by her first name.”

  Cannon’s anger finally got the better of her, riding a mix of old betrayal and a bitter cocktail of the years. “Kallus, if you ever use that name in my presence again, so help me, it will be the last word that ever passes your lips.”

  He stared past her shoulder at a glowing image. She turned to see a painfully young Raisa, hair spread in sunlight, walking with a laughing woman who was far too familiar.

  “No…” whispered the Before Michaela Cannon.

  * * * *

  Shipmind, Polyphemus

  The starship was distressed, or at least what passed for distress amid the fluid pairs of her shipmind. Unstable conditions going unaddressed created a cascading series of alarms with escalating priorities which were inherently disturbing.

  The degree of disruption within her decks was approaching intolerable. Seven deaths had occurred so far. Eleven more crew were wounded with a high likelihood of imminent fatalities.

  Plan Federo forbade her from dispatching aid. Likewise she couldn’t respond to the emergency conditions all over herself except by direct, literal request.

  Meanwhile, Captain Siddiq’s comprehensive unreportability was itself triggering a whole new series of failure conditions and alarms. Polyphemus was indeed distinctly uncomfortable.

  She could not oppose Plan Federo. Cannon’s logic barbs were set far too deep in the shipmind’s undercode. But she could work around the perimeters of the restrictions laid upon her by the two warring women.