The Disinherited

by Steve White

  "Worse than you think . . . however bad that may be. When the last courier was sent here, we thought Raehan couldn't hold. Now we're certain of it."

  "So." She gazed somberly around her at the base, and the world, that had been her home for two years. For a moment, it was so quiet that the faint, hissing roar of the distant surf was audible. She then looked upward at the tiny point of yellow-white light. "Then we must all go to Landaen?"

  "Oh, not everyone. This base can remain in operation with a skeleton staff—I'll leave the choice of who remains up to you. But if our observers at Tareil ever come here with the news that the Korvaasha have discovered Tareil's fourth displacement point and the Lirauva Chain, it will be necessary to immediately obliterate every indication that we ever knew of it. We destroyed all the robot stations in the intervening systems on our way here." (So much still to learn in those systems! Aelanni looked as sad as Varien felt.) "And we've brought a fusion device which can be triggered with a minimum of fuss, and is powerful enough to wipe out every trace of this base.

  "But," he continued more cheerfully, "for now we'll keep the base operating. I'll need you at Landaen, of course, and certain others . . . notably Miralann."

  Aelanni smiled impishly. "For his professional expertise, Father? Or could it be that you also expect his hobby to be useful?" Varien smiled back. The brilliant linguist had made the initial breakthrough that had enabled them to crack the primary Landaeniv language sooner than anyone had expected. But they both knew that Miralann's hobby was the truly eccentric one of military history.

  "Well, possibly," Varien allowed. "But I can certainly appreciate his professional achievement. Throughout the voyage here, I've been force-feeding myself that awful language. Of course, sleep-teaching devices are no substitute for actual practice . . . ."

  And, Aelanni knew, they exacted a price. She looked again at Varien's haggard face. "Father! At your age . . . !"

  "There's no alternative," Varien said harshly. "I must be able to communicate with them. So must we all . . . although the rest of you can take it at a saner pace. And there is no time to be lost. As soon as your ships can be ready, we must depart for Landaen."

  Aelanni's gaze drifted upward to the bright yellow-white star again. She had been there, almost a year before. "Yes, Landaen," she said somberly. "It's seemed to dominate our destinies, hasn't it? I remember when you were almost ready to make it, and the entire Lirauva Chain, public knowledge. But then we found out about the Landeniv, and we all agreed that the secret would have to be kept a little longer. There was no predicting how people would react to the news that we had discovered the one, single thing that we had known we would never discover: another race of humans!"

  Silence descended again. Trust Aelanni to say it openly and unflinchingly, Varien thought. She was right, of course. The social consequences of blurting out upon the datanets the great contradiction their earliest probing of Landaen had revealed—the starkly impossible which was also starkly factual—were unpredictable. Varien and the group of brilliant people he had gathered around him might think of themselves as fearless iconoclasts; but they were, inescapably, Raehaniv. Uncontrollable, unmanageable change was, simply, bad. So it had been for centuries.

  Varien also looked up at the yellow-white star, and the skin at the nape of his neck prickled.

  "Well." He spoke a little more loudly than necessary, straightening his cloak. "Whatever my reasons—and I seem to recall hearing the term 'childish secretiveness' from you at the beginning—it is fortunate that I kept the knowledge to myself. For it is now the one advantage we have over the Korvaasha. We must make what use of it we can—for we, here, are now acting for our entire race. As quickly as possible, we must depart Lirauva . . . but no." He smiled, seeking to lighten the mood. "I must practice my Landaeniv, and broaden my vocabulary. What do the Landaeniv call Lirauva? They must have a name for this system—it's one of the brighter stars in their night skies."

  "Oh, yes. Let's see . . ." She frowned as she struggled with the impossibly strange syllables. "Alpha Centauri, I believe they call it."

  Varien nodded, and practiced the words as the two of them walked toward the waiting ground car.

  Chapter Two

  "Colonel, we've got something very odd on the scope."

  Lieutenant Colonel Eric DiFalco, United States Space Force, hesitated a moment—Lieutenant Farrell, the duty officer, could be overconscientious at best and excitable at worst—then sighed and thumbed the intercom switch.

  "I'm listening, Lieutenant." He wasn't sure he had gotten just the right warning note into his voice. The news from home wasn't exactly something he resented being torn away from. Even Farrell's latest attack of the jitters would be a welcome relief from a detailed analysis of just how the lunatics were going about taking over the asylum.

  "Well, sir, it appears to be a spacecraft of unknown origin. Its performance parameters don't check with anything we know about. And . . . it's on a course that should intersect ours in . . ."

  DiFalco came out of shock. Please, God, don't let Farrell be seeing a UFO! And don't let him have already logged it! He concentrated on making his voice soothing.

  "All right, Terry. You were correct to report this. I'll be right up. Keep tracking it." He turned off his digital reader—plenty of time later for a masochistic reading of the Social Justice party's latest gains in the off-year elections—and stood up. It took only two long-legged strides to exit his tiny cabin and step out into the passageway that ran around the outer circumference of USSFS Andrew Jackson's spin habitat. People stood aside for him—about as far as military punctilio was carried in a spacecraft under way—as he proceeded to the hatch. He reached up, grabbed the rail, and pulled himself up and over into the weightless central access shaft, compensating with practiced ease for the Coriolis force. With an occasional assist from the railings, he shot forward past the shuttle docks to the control room.

  The contrast between the dim chamber with its glowing instrument panels and the starry firmament beyond the wide-curving viewport seldom failed to affect him. But now he made a preoccupied beeline for the command acceleration couch. Motioning to Farrell to remain seated, he settled to the deck, magnetized soles clamping gently to its surface.

  "All right, Terry. What's the status?"

  "Unchanged, sir. It's on a ballistic course—a very flat hyperbola, almost a straight line. The computer has projected it backwards, and it seems to have come from a region of the asteroids where we've never had anything." He gestured at a screen showing the simulation of the unknown's orbit, and DiFalco sucked in his breath. That ship had come a long way . . . but then he glanced at its velocity figures, and realized that it could have covered the distance in a reasonable length of time after all. "And as for where they're going . . . well, Colonel, the only explanation that makes sense is that they want to intercept us." Farrell's voice was steady. At least he has the balls to lay his opinion on the line, DiFalco admitted to himself.

  "No possibility that it's Chinese, I suppose," he asked. It wasn't much of a hope, anyway; they had no reason to be in this particular segment of space outside the orbit of Mars.

  "Negative, sir. That was the first thing we checked. Nothing of theirs has been in a position to have gotten into that orbit, even if they had anything that could manage that many sustained gees." He glanced at the time. "By the way, Colonel, enough time has elapsed from our initial hail for us to have received a reply from that ship, if they'd sent one."

  DiFalco glared at the offending blip. A UFO. Just fucking beautiful.

  The term had originated in the second half of the twentieth century, when many people had looked skyward in search of a substitute for religion and persuaded themselves that they had seen alien spacecraft performing impossible feats in pursuit of no intelligible objective. It had died out in the early decades of the present century, as space flight had settled into routine and the we-are-alone arguments of Tipler and others had fossilized into dogma—the s
cientific establishment had come to reject the possibility of extraterrestrial intelligence with such unanimity that the concept hardly even appeared in science fiction any more.

  But over the last few years, curious reports had begun to appear. They never seemed to have any unambiguous instrument corroboration, and DiFalco had always been inclined to write them off as a product of the general lunacy of the times. (The California school system had recently required that astronomy texts give equal space and respect to the flat-Earth theory, for to do otherwise would be "elitist"; the Social Justice party was expected to write a similar requirement into its national platform.) Only . . . these reports had come, not from the Great American Majority of functionally illiterate drones, but from space crews, all of whom were very competent people—the only kind that anyone could afford to send into space, which was why the new civilization growing up outside Earth's atmosphere had less and less in common with the collapsing society at the bottom of the gravity well. And these UFOs, although decidedly high-performance, hadn't reversed direction without loss of velocity or otherwise violated physical laws.

  Still, such reports were not noted for furthering the careers of those who made them.

  Just had to take command of the last of the Washington class ships in Mars orbit for the evacuation to Phoenix Prime, didn't you? DiFalco gibed at himself. Couldn't make the trip in cryo hibernation, could you? Couldn't even travel awake on a ship commanded by one of your juniors and spend the trip dumping words of wisdom on the younger generations! (He was all of thirty-five.) Oh, no! Perish the thought!

  He reached a decision. "All right, Terry. Have Gomez do an EVA with her photo equipment. The UFO"—there, he had said it—"is within ten million klicks, and she might be able to get something we can analyze. And laser a message to RAMP HQ at Phoenix Prime, in Level Three code, for General Kurganov personally." Sergei had ridden the Boris Yeltsin out to the asteroid base earlier, hibernating like a gentleman and leaving DiFalco as acting military CO of the Russian-American Mars Project. But now he was awake and back in command, at least until DiFalco relieved him early next year when the top spot rotated back to an American. He needed to be told . . . and he would have the sense to sit on the information until they had learned more.

  "Give him," DiFalco continued, "all the data we now have on the UFO. And tell him that I intend to continue to try to communicate with it. If it attempts a rendezvous with us"—no need to even check the figures to confirm that it was strictly up to the UFO to do so; Andy J. was committed to this Hohmann transfer orbit and lacked the reaction mass for any funny business, at least if it wanted to be able to choose an attainable destination afterwards—"I will do whatever seems indicated." And, he knew, Sergei would back him to the hilt. He unclipped his perscomp from his belt and consulted it. "It will take a few minutes to get a reply. Ask Major Levinson to join me in my cabin as soon as he can get away from Engineering. And buzz me as soon as you get any response from the UFO, or from General Kurganov . . . or when Gomez has some usable imagery for us."

  "Aye aye, sir." (Funny, the way naval usages were surfacing in a service descended from the Air Force. The ex-squids in the Space Force had to be threatened with bodily harm lest they call the control room the "bridge.") Farrell looked up, and for an instant he seemed even younger than he was. When he spoke, his tone was almost beseeching. "Colonel, what is that thing?"

  "I think we're going to find out, Lieutenant. Like it or not."

  * * *

  DiFalco's cabin was too small for pacing, and he soon found himself turning the news update back on. It was a link with familiar things, with home . . . and he needed that, however much he hated what home was turning into. He was up to the latest synagogue burning in New York (the state's Social Justice governor hadn't quite winked at the cameras as he had condemned the act "despite centuries of terrible provocation") when Jeff Levinson arrived. He switched it off hurriedly.

  "Oh, that," Andy J.'s executive officer indicated the reader. He smiled wryly at DiFalco's palpable embarrassment, creasing his dark features—his mouth, like his nose, belonged on a larger face. "Why do you think there are so many of us in space? Out here, you can get away from some things. Not all, of course." He took out the plastic Ethnic Entitlements Card that every American citizen was required to carry at all times—white, with a large yellow Star of David, in Levinson's case. DiFalco's was brown; his mother was one-quarter Cherokee, which, despite all her Swedish, Scots and English genes, and the Italian, Irish and additional English ones on his father's side, made him a "Third World person" and helped account for his rank. (Levinson had risen as high as he probably ever would, especially if the quota structure was further stacked against him as seemed likely after the next general election.) DiFalco was old enough to recall when the cards had been introduced . . . strictly as a temporary measure, of course, to "enable the proper authorities to readily identify the victims of past discrimination until its effects have been compensated for." Ex-officials of the former South African government had been hired for their experience in administering a similar system; those who had commented on the irony had been prosecuted for the misdemeanor of "inappropriately directed laughter."

  "But," Levinson continued, "you didn't call me in to discuss the political situation. What's up, that couldn't wait 'til after Fraser and I were done with the fuel feed?"

  "Well," DiFalco drawled, "how about little green men? Terry seems to have spotted some, doing their damnedest to intercept us."

  "Oy vey!" Levinson sagged down onto DiFalco's bunk. "What does the kid think he's seen now?"

  "It's no bullshit, Jeff," DiFalco assured him, turning serious. He accessed the data on his perscomp and handed it to Levinson. The XO studied it with frowning concentration, then looked up.

  "Eric, just what the hell is going on here? Nobody has anything like this, and extraterrestrials . . ."

  " . . . don't exist," DiFalco finished for him. "Everybody knows that. I'll tell you what I told Terry: we'll find out the answer soon enough, so all we can do now is assess our own capabilities—which, I know, don't include either attempting or avoiding a rendezvous. Our weapons"—the missiles, the antimissile lasers, and the big spinal-mounted particle accelerator—"are in working order." Levinson nodded emphatically. "But I don't intend to use them except in self-defense. For now, we'll continue to try and communicate with them. We simply don't know what we're dealing with here . . . ."

  The intercom beeped, and DiFalco acknowledged. "Colonel, Gomez is ready for you," Farrell reported.

  "Good. Tell her the XO and I will be in the lab ASAP."

  * * *

  Afterwards, neither DiFalco nor Levinson was ever sure how long a period of utter silence they had spent staring at the blowup. No fine details could be made out, of course, even with deep-space photography using mid-twenty-first-century equipment. But two things were very clear about the spacecraft. The first was that it was a spacecraft, an inarguably artificial construct. And the second was that it was a product of no known design philosophy, nor even any known concept of a viable spacecraft; there was no room for doubt that it had originated elsewhere than Earth.

  Finally, Levinson looked up, his engagingly ugly face wearing a lost expression DiFalco had never seen there.

  "Colonel, what are we going to do?"

  "We are going to wait," DiFalco stated firmly.

  * * *

  The Unknown lay a few kilometers off, a clearly visible affront to DiFalco's sense of reality.

  It had matched vectors with Andy J. so smoothly that DiFalco was somehow sure that it wasn't showing off, merely executing a routine maneuver. It certainly had the thrust to do it . . . he had tried to calculate the power required for that kind of sustained maneuvering by a ship massing what that one must, and given up. And it produced all that thrust with no great display of flaming exhaust; its drive was evidently too efficient to waste much energy on such things.

  "Well," Levinson broke the silence in the con
trol room, "we know one thing about them."

  "You mean besides the fact that they're very goddamned advanced?" DiFalco, like the XO, spoke in a hushed voice, for no reason that stood up to logical analysis.

  Levinson nodded. "They don't need weight."

  DiFalco nodded in reply. He had already thought of it himself. That gleaming bluish-gray shape—rather like a cigar with the small end forward, with four elongated blisters spaced evenly around the hull near the stern, alternating with what was obviously tankage—was a seamless unity without any segment which could plausibly be a spin habitat like Andy J.'s. If its occupants had wanted to use angular acceleration to counterfeit gravity while in free fall, they would have to spin the entire ship, which was patently impractical. Humans were unsuited to prolonged periods of weightlessness. Drugs coupled with regular exercise now enabled them to live indefinitely in low-G environments like Luna, but some weight was still required to prevent fluid imbalances and atrophy of the bone tissues and muscles, and all interplanetary spacecraft designs reflected this. It was the final piece of evidence that the UFO's crew were not human. Were they even organic?

  One thing they definitely were: damned uncommunicative. He had stopped paying attention to Farrell's endlessly repeated hails and requests for acknowledgment up and down the frequencies—they had become a meaningless ritual of some forgotten religion.

  So, like everyone else in the control room, he jumped when the hush was shattered by a screech of static, dying down to a faint roar overlaid by a voice speaking in careful, faintly accented English.

  "Calling United States Space Force Ship Andrew Jackson. We urgently request that your commanding officer come aboard our ship for consultation on matters of the highest importance."

  In the stunned silence, DiFalco was the first to find his tongue.

  "This is Lieutenant Colonel Eric DiFalco, commanding," he rapped out, pleasantly surprised that his voice didn't crack. "Who am I addressing? Can we have a visual signal?"