“What’s her name?”
“Gypsy Blossom.”
Sunglow faced the bot and belatedly returned the muzzle-scratching greeting. “Where did the Remakers go, Gypsy Blossom? When will they return? Can you tell us anything at all?”
The bot raised her furless arms in a helpless gesture.
“She was only a seed when they left,” said Dotson.
“They never talked to me,” said the bot. “They did not leave me any plaques. All their messages were for you, and I think you have them all.”
Chapter Seven
“I thought things were cramped at 83, but …”
The laughter that issued from the grille in the panel before him was soft and warm, already missed. Tamiko’s face occupied the small screen, and he almost felt that he could smell her hair. “Not here, Mark. The Ajax is larger, and the General rates. I have a room all my own.”
“I’ve got walls anyway. But I have to share.”
There was the briefest of hesitations—was she wondering whether she should be jealous?—before Tamiko said, “I hope she’s nice.”
“He. The Baron. Not my type at all, though he took the upper bunk.” The cubicle they occupied had only the single pair of sleeping shelves. Those for the lower ranks held six, three to a wall, with much less headroom.
“Not your what? Type? That g … broken up. We must have … st our synch for a second there.” Her own words were suddenly choppy, as if they had been recorded by a voice-activated tape. Some were almost entirely lost.
“It’ll get worse.”
“I know.”
“We should be able to talk for a few days first.”
“Gotta g … being pa-ached.”
Marcus Aurelius Hrecker touched the key that broke the connection and leaned back in his seat. He sighed.
“Your girlfriend?” Eric Silber’s bitter voice made him close his eyes. Why did they have to share the same shift?
“Think you’ll get any favors, sucking up that way? How’s she taste, anyway?”
He refused to look at the other man. “Better than you would.”
“Shaddap,” said Meyer Smith. “You’re just working up to a fight. Save it for First-Stop.”
Silber settled back and stared once more at the controls and indicators he was supposed to mind. Hrecker did the same and wished that there was more to do than simply wait and watch for some malfunction or anomaly. But he and the others, including Eric, had done their work well. The ship, the whole fleet, was working flawlessly.
If only communication between the ships were not a problem. In two days, maybe three, he and Tamiko would no longer be able to speak to each other. Then the boredom would set in.
The problem had its roots in the laws of physics, not some failure of design. The ships’ Q-drives provided thrust and vector and a sense of weight. They would be essential for maneuvering once the fleet reached Tau Ceti. But they were useless for bridging the light-years between Tau Ceti and Sol. That needed the tunnel drives, which skipped through space, leaping a few more meters every 1.4 nanoseconds. The intervals between leaps were so short that the net effect was faster-than-light travel, even though between leaps, when the ship existed in real space-time, speed was distinctly slower than light.
It was those intervals between leaps that made communication possible. Unfortunately, they grew shorter and more frequent as “net” speed increased. Slight differences in drive frequency and in timing spread the fleet out and dictated that not all the ships occupied the same space-time simultaneously. Ship could talk to ship only as long as they were close enough together, as long as the intervals were long enough, as long as the ships’ computers could keep their quantum leaps synchronized. The trick was getting a signal’s wave-front to coincide in space and time with the ship for which it was meant.
The first signals to become useless would be real-time conversations such as he and Tamiko had just concluded. Highly redundant, repetitive coding would remain able to get messages through for a few days more. After that, total silence would fall. Each ship would be a single tiny, enclosed, self-sufficient world until it slowed on the approach to Tau Ceti. Then the signals would return.
“I’m catching a little drift in the shifter, Hrecker.”
“Yessir.” His fingers danced across the board before him, diagnosing, adjusting, trimming.
* * * *
Ten days later, Hrecker was in the Saladin’s mess after his drive-room shift. Across the narrow corridor that arched rimward of the storerooms, Bela B’Genda and the Baron shared one of the small tables that folded with its pair of seats from the wall. Hrecker shared another with Meyer Smith. Eric Silber had just arrived with the tray of food he had picked up at the end of the corridor. He took the next table past B’Genda and the Baron and sat so he could face Hrecker.
The Baron could not see the glare that passed his back. “I’ve been poking around,” he said.
“And you’ve found a planet-buster after all,” said Bela.
“You know there’s no such thing.” But he was grinning. The robot on his shirtfront twitched.
“No, I don’t. Besides, why not? It’s just a big warhead.”
“Real big,” said Silber. He was still glaring at Hrecker.
“What else?” asked their chief.
“Plenty of other stuff. Particle beams, of course.”
“I worked on those,” said Hrecker. They were an adaptation of the Q drive.
“We’ve got nukes,” added the Baron. “For the missiles. One size fits all. And big enough. If we can’t blow First-Stop up, we can sterilize it.”
“Freeze it,” said Bela. “We can’t possibly be carrying enough of those warheads to sterilize a planet. But it takes a lot less for a nuclear winter.”
“Whatever,” said the Baron. “We’ve got what it takes.”
“Do you?” asked Silber. “No more com, Marky,” he added. “No more chitchat with the girlfriend.”
“Another month,” said Hrecker. “That’s all.”
“No more sucking up.” Silber’s voice was taunting. “Can’t keep her busy. She’ll find someone else.”
“Cut it out,” said Smith.
“He’s always been that way,” said Hrecker. “But now …”
“I’m worse?”
“Too far from home,” said Bela. “Your own girl back in port.”
“Huh!” the Baron snorted. “If he has one. If one would have him.”
Silber’s face reddened. He set both hands on the edge of his table and began to push himself to his feet.
“No com,” said Bela. “No more sight of shore. As crazy as a sailor lost at sea.”
“Crazy, is it?” The man’s glare was rapidly turning dangerous. He was on his feet, crouched as if he were about to spring, shoulders raised, knuckles white. For a moment, the smells of sweat and something more, an animal pungency, rose above the scents of food.
Then silence struck the mess and she added, “As crazy as them.” She straightened in her seat, half turned, and hooked a thumb toward a sudden clash of plastic china and metal cutlery.
Hrecker kept one eye on the other man, but he too looked where she was pointing, past Silber, further down the corridor.
Several men and women were hurriedly abandoning their tables as two figures struggled to their feet amid a litter of trays and dishes. They roared. One swung a fist. The other slammed a knee into a crotch. One roar turned into a screech, but neither man went down. They grappled and lurched against the table they had been using. It sagged on its hinges.
“It won’t last,” said Meyer Smith, and he had hardly finished speaking when two burly Security guards rushed past. Two more appeared in the distance, beyond the combatants.
Silber sat down once m
ore.
The fight stopped. The combatants stared at the approaching guards as if at inevitable doom, and they did not resist when they were led away.
A swarm of tiny robots appeared as if from nowhere to clean up spilled food and repair the table.
The bystanders resumed their seats but kept their heads down. The mess was silent.
“We won’t see them again,” murmured Bela B’Genda.
Hrecker thought Silber looked as puzzled as he felt himself, and when Meyer Smith looked from one of them to the other and said, “You haven’t heard,” he shook his head.
“Signed on too late,” said Bela.
“Policy,” said Smith. “For mutineers, rebels, deserters, dissidents. There’s no room for a brig on this ship, and there’s no way to ship troublemakers home. So … Out the airlock. Or use them for reaction mass.”
“I don’t think there’ll be much more trouble,” said the Baron.
“It didn’t look like they were asking who started it,” said Hrecker.
Bela looked at Silber. He was still bristling with anger and defiance. “Then we should get out of here.” When Hrecker ignored her raised eyebrow and inviting glance, she grabbed the Baron by the hand. “Let’s go.”
“They’ll be busy for a while,” said Smith to Hrecker. “You come with me.”
“Not for …”
“I’d rather play chess.”
Behind them, Silber was left alone, clenching his fists. He did not look like he would surrender meekly if Security came for him.
* * * *
When Hrecker reported for work the next morning, Silber was not in the drive room. “I moved him,” said Meyer Smith. “C shift, 11 to 7.”
“Just as well,” said Bela B’Genda from her station.
“He’s got a bright green hard-on for you,” said the Baron. “Any idea … ?”
Hrecker shook his head and took his seat. He powered up his console, checked the probability shifters, and made two fine adjustments.
“Security didn’t object when I changed his shift,” said Smith.
“So maybe he’s not a plant,” said Bela.
“That’s only a rumor,” said Hrecker. A rumor with the strength to follow a man from Mars to Belt Center 83 to the Saladin. To First-Stop.
“It wouldn’t surprise me to learn it was truth,” said the Baron.
“More like,” said Bela. “He’s just too standoffish. He can’t let anybody get close, so nobody trusts him. Hence the rumor.”
“How’s the vacuum flux, Doctor Freud?”
“Jes’ fine, boss. You think maybe he volunteered? Went for the game as long as he had the name?”
“Who knows?” Smith touched keys and the screen above his console lit up with a flowchart. “The captain says we should try to synchronize with the other ships.”
“I know one way to do it,” said Bela. “Though it wouldn’t be real bright.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“And every ship would have to be precisely the same in timing.”
“Stay tightly packed?” asked the Baron.
“In line. Spaced just so to tunnel into the next ship’s wavefront.”
“And if the timing’s off?”
“Bugger all.”
The Baron laughed.
Two hours later, after all their efforts to adjust the timing of the tunnel drive had failed to raise a single response from any other member of the fleet, Meyer Smith said, “There’s another way. Stop tunneling once a day.”
“And if the ships are light hours apart?” asked Bela.
“They’d resynchronize every day, right?” asked Hrecker.
“That would still slow us down a bit, eh?” said the Baron.
“You might as well tell the captain he’ll have to wait till we reach Tau Ceti.”
“Another month.”
* * * *
… “Three weeks.”
* * * *
… “Eighteen days.”
* * * *
… “Two weeks.”
* * * *
“What I wouldn’t give for a game of poker!”
“Bridge for me.”
“Billiards.”
“Scrabble.”
But the only games were chess and checkers and go, games with no element of chance the probability shifters could influence however slightly. There was a library of old veedos, video games, and books stored in electronic form. There was sex and bickering and speculation on what they would find when they finally reached their destination.
Some wondered what they would do to what they found. The expedition’s commander—General Lyapunov—would decide that, as was only right, but …
“What do you think, Mark?” asked Bela B’Genda. “You’re in bed with his aide. What does she tell you?”
“One of his aides. And I haven’t seen her for weeks.”
“Still …”
“She didn’t talk about him much.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said the Baron. “We know what he’ll do.”
“Let us in on it, O Wise One,” said Meyer Smith.
“He’s an Engineer, isn’t he? And if he was a liberal, he wouldn’t be a general. We’re carrying guns and troops. If the place is crawling with gengineered monsters, we’ll wipe them out.” He held his arms as if sighting down the barrel of a rifle. “Boom! If there are any Gypsies there, we’ll wipe them out too.”
“You’re looking forward to it,” said Hrecker.
“Sure. It’s gonna be fun. Aren’t you?”
Hrecker nodded. He did not dare do anything else.
* * * *
Some studied the Explorer’s records and discovered anew that First-Stop’s population was remarkably small, its cities and roads and mines and fields notably few, its industry and technology astonishingly advanced. “It’s not much of a space program,” they said. “But it is one. Look at those satellites. Camera platforms for watching the weather. Communications relays. No space stations, but still … How can they support the effort? They can’t possibly have the economic surplus Earth needed to do as much. There isn’t the population, the industrial base, the …”
And if the Gypsies had made them hardly more than a century before? Then they hadn’t had the time. There must still be Gypsies there, helping, building, waiting for the cleansing hands of the Engineers.
Were there no signs of Gypsies except that enigmatic tower? Then the locals had to have been there much, much longer than a century. But if that was so, why hadn’t they left more scars upon the planet? Ancient ruined cities. Chinese walls. Denuded and eroded landscapes. Played-out mines.
There were no such things? Then the alien civilization had to be young, too young to have accomplished as much as it clearly had. Perhaps the Gypsies had made the coons. Yet how could even the infamous Gypsies have stimulated so much progress in so little time?
Just a century? That was how long it had been since the last Gypsy had returned to Earth’s vicinity, found the Engineers ascendant over all the system, and fled. More like a century and a half since the Gypsies had fled Earth itself.
But even if they had created the coons the very moment they had arrived at First-Stop, there had not been time enough for all the progress the Explorer’s records showed.
Were there more aliens than they could see? Did they live underground? Were there vast unseen warrens, buried slums and ruins and mushroom farms? As many billions as Earth had had to have to mount its first abortive space programs? Then, if that was so, there was the possibility of defeat.
“No,” said the Baron loudly when the possibility was raised at a table three down the mess from his own. “They thought of everything before they shipped us o
ff. Don’t you believe that? We’re armed to the teeth, and I think we must have a planet-buster warhead with us. It’s probably on the Ajax.”
There was a moment of silence. The others had dismissed the idea of a bomb that could destroy a world when he raised it before. Now they felt obliged to entertain the possibility more seriously. Eventually someone at that other table softly cheered. “Then we’ll get the gyppers sure.”
* * * *
Tau Ceti swelled from star to sun in the viewports, its light unshifted because the fleet’s instantaneous velocity was always much less than that of light, even if the “net” was something else again. Weapons systems were checked and readied, and people grew wire-tense as the time for action neared.
Hrecker was busy at his station, balancing the demands on the probability shifters as the Saladin’s tunnel drive turned off. The Q-drive would continue to provide thrust and a sense of weight until orbit was achieved half a million kilometers from the planet, well beyond the limits of the coons’ ability to detect them. At home, they would be heading for a translunar orbit, but First-Stop had no moon.
Radio traffic was forbidden for fear the coons would not only detect their presence but also overhear their plans. Yet there were also narrow, line-of-sight laser beams, and it was no surprise when a diode said his com was live with an intership call. A speaker crackled, and … “Mark?”
“Tamiko!” He could not resist glancing toward where Eric Silber had sat the last time he had talked to her.
“I’ve only got a moment,” she said. “But I couldn’t wait.”
“I’d have called soon enough,” he said. His eyes and hands were still darting over his board. “Right now—”
“You’re busy. I know. And we’ll see each other soon. But I wanted to hear your voice, see your face. And did you … ?”
An officious voice interrupted her: “Security override. You have ten seconds to clear this channel.”
“Acknowledged,” said Hrecker.
“Command conference,” said Tamiko with the confidence of one who knew General Lyapunov’s schedule. “Did you see? They’re already building a space sta …”
Thomas A. Easton’s GMO Future MEGAPACK® Page 131
