Bottom line: a couple of gene-tweaked terrestrial super crops had run amok. The question was, why? The crops themselves? Maybe. It might also be a side effect of some gene-tweaked bacterial symbiote of the crop, or a program bug in some nanite pesticide, or a new, mutated crop disease. In the course of this interminable voyage, she had seen them all.
And just as likely, some mundane environmental parameter had drifted out of tolerance. Any minor glitch with irrigation or artificial sunlight or soil pH could weaken whatever K’vithian crop had been sowed here, opening the way for invasive species.
Boring.
Corinne shifted her stance just a bit. In zero gee, separated from the metal of the deck by twenty or so centimeters of compacted soil, the maneuver required skill and attention to detail, at least if she planned to avoid setting herself adrift or taking divots. She wiggled one boot, disengaging its curved cleats. When the boot lifted free she replanted it a little to her right, and then repeated the process with her other boot.
Someone who was an agronomist, speaking in a tiresome soprano singsong, stood nearby. Likely he was answering all Corinne’s as yet unvoiced questions. The gaggle of students here to observe (but instead fidgeting in the manner of human teens) might benefit from the details. She was content to let the words wash over her. One more biotech, or nanotech, or eco, or whatever mishap scarcely qualified as news.
She remained a journalist because, well, what else did she have to do?
At their journey’s start, that decision had shocked Glithwah.
“But why?” Glithwah had asked.
“When you kidnapped me, you promised”—with a sneer—
“ ‘quite the scoop.’ ”
“That was before,” Glithwah had objected. Before learning about the Xool. Before departing for Epsilon Indi. “You are a guest.”
“Whom you did not allow to leave or broadcast,” Corinne had completed.
“For good reasons. Be honest. You wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere else.”
Except home. Except with Denise. “Still leaving me to find a reason for getting up every morning.”
And if the main project to which Corinne had set herself—unmasking Xool agents among the Hunters—had gone nowhere, well, she had reported on such events as did occur. Even when that meant the umpteenth so very serious (but do not worry, it’s certain to be contained) outbreak of this or that. The last excitement, eight interminable years ago, had been a damaged robot gone berserk. She had to admit: the custom-programmed nanites that took it down had been more than a little cool.
A starship, it had turned out, was but a small town in extreme isolation. Throughout thirty years of the Hunter equivalents to PTA bake sales, Kiwanis breakfasts, and what amounted to municipal elections, the occasional enviro-glitch counted as big news.
“You’re recording this spiel, right?” Corinne netted to Hank.
When Corinne first toured this vessel, the primary shipboard artificial intelligence had called itself Henry Hudson. Days later—on a renamed vessel, under new, alien management—the AI had gone informal. Maybe it had done so to downplay its eponym’s fate: cast adrift, never to be seen again, by the mutinous crew of the original Discovery. When Snakes had seized their first starship, they lobotomized its Centaur-built shipboard AI.
Funny thing, Corinne thought. Those were Snakes. These are Hunters.
“I am recording,” Hank agreed.
“And the short, non-pedagogical version?”
“Balancing two biospheres is hard. Wry amusement that one of humanity’s talents turned out to be the hardiness of their gengineered crops. The latest remedial nanites incorporate enhanced environmental sensing. These new nanites will mutate symbiotic bacteria, helping or weakening each plant appropriately to each field.”
“How does that work?” Corinne asked.
“By sensing concentrations of biochemical markers in the soil. The new nanites adapt their behavior to favor the preponderant crop and selectively weaken any invasive species.”
Improved nanites had to beat flamethrowers, which had at one time been the response to this sort of outbreak. Still, how much cleverer was this fix than the last however many fixes? Once again she wondered: did today’s little ceremony rise to the level of news? Either way, this would have to do if nothing more interesting came along soon ….
With a flourish, still talking, the agronomist decanted his new batch of nanites. The act of decanting: that could be seen. The nanites said to be released: they, of course, could not.
The nanites’ actual release would be through the underground irrigation system, applied directly to the roots. The purported aerial release, however, was more visual. Also entirely symbolic, while the ship remained at zero gee. No one had wanted to postpone the crop treatment while the listen-back-home interlude ran late.
Begging the question: what was taking Joshua and Carl so long?
Corinne dutifully captured vid in her implant’s memory of the anticlimactic staged nanite release. She recorded the mask-wearing demonstrators circling the field in protest of the release. Just in case nothing more newsworthy turned up.
The staying power of Xool-sponsored fairy tales amused her.
“Corinne,” Hank netted.
“Yes?”
“The Foremost has called a staff meeting. At four, ship’s time. Your participation is requested.”
At four? That scarcely left time for decontamination, absent which she would not be permitted off this deck. “Give my apologies here, please, and confirm for me. Oh, and stay linked for the meeting.”
“Of course.”
In magnetic boots and a fresh outfit, Corinne made it to the Foremost’s ready room with only minutes to spare. She found the place packed. Carl, looking haggard, and Joshua/Tacitus were there, too. Carl had saved her a chair, and Corinne nodded her thanks.
“What’s this about?” she netted.
Carl shrugged.
When they had first come aboard, this ready room, apart from unpacked boxes, had been pristine. Over the decades everything had become worn. Faded. Tattered. A few years into the flight Glithwah had given up on replacing the wall displays. Sulfur dioxide in Hunters’ breath dissolved into any trace of water condensation, the sulfurous acid thus produced pitting and etching surfaces until displays became useless. Whatever imagery everyone needed to consult could be accessed in consensual space.
It was all just … old.
As was she—not to mention frail, fragile, and readily exhausted. As was Carl. Joshua, not so much, as Tacitus supervised endless exercise, neural and hormonal biofeedback loops, and swarms of nanomeds and nanosensors. That discipline, or the repeated gene tweaking, worked: Joshua, who was eighty-five, did not look a day over seventy-five. Nor, any longer, entirely human. He/they were skeletal and somehow freakishly intense.
A distracted expression showed that Joshua/Tacitus were away in the infosphere, or in netted conversation, or both. They managed to net-text her a terse, “Hi.”
The Foremost swept into the room. Cluth Timoq was tall for a Hunter, broad of chest, and erect of bearing. His gaze was intelligent and confident. His knowledge of affairs aboard his vessel was encyclopedic. He was, in a word, imposing.
Timoq’s stiff posture as he sat told Corinne this was no time to indulge the failings of age. Sweeping his gaze around the long oval table, he announced, “It is time to complete our journey. What remains to be done?”
That was not exactly what he said, of course. Few among the oldest Hunters remembered a human language, if ever they had learned one. Of those born on this ship, none learned anything but clan speak. Why would they? English was a language of their ancient, made-thorough-fools-of oppressors. And what would be the purpose? Even Joshua, no matter the joyless regimen on which Tacitus kept him, must eventually succumb to age. Uploaded, he would no more care about language choice than Tacitus.
And so, the three of them had mastered clan speak. If Corinne had never learned to think
like a Hunter—taking comfort that not even Carl claimed full success in doing that—she had become proficient enough to no longer notice the implied-verb syntax or stumble over their units of measurement. When, rarely these past few years, she encountered an unfamiliar word or expression, dictionaries in her implant handled it. As for expressing herself, well, she had been born one pair of vocal cords shy for clan speak. Every cabin and few meters of corridor had a public-address loudspeaker in its ceiling; when she had something to offer aloud, she netted the words to the closest speaker. It never suffered from her laryngeal deficiencies.
Among the least of his many mid-voyage gene tweaks, Joshua had grown extra vocal cords and now spoke fluent clan speak. The few tweaks Corinne had had done upped her tolerance of the ubiquitous sulfur compounds.
Little of which was reminiscence, exactly, because so little about the voyage merited nostalgia. Still, the wandering of her thoughts seemed a harmless enough indulgence. In responding to the Foremost’s leading question, most of his officers, one by one, going around the long table, merely murmured their readiness.
“On your command, Foremost,” Rashk Folhaut, the navigator, concluded the survey.
The Foremost turned to Joshua, “Can you secure the big antenna within the shift?”
“It will take two shifts. After we finish here, of course. But is that appropriate? Ir find the silence in our home systems anomalous.”
“No, worrisome,” Corinne murmured. If not anyone else, their failure so far to detect home’s radio chatter worried her.
“Poor reception does not equal an anomaly,” If Hrak Jomar, the chief science officer, had heard and translated her sotto voce correction, he ignored her. “We hear only natural background noise from other InterstellarNet systems, too.”
“And that doesn’t concern you?” Carl asked.
“Having only an inferior transceiver bothers me,” Jomar shot back. “Luckily, we have no need of interstellar communications.”
“Jomar, you will send technicians to assist,” Timoq directed, ending the discussion. “Joshua, you will have one shift.”
Looking around the room, reading Hunter faces, Corinne saw no evidence of doubt.
But Carl frowned. “Foremost.”
“Yes, Carl?”
“In my opinion, for now we should remain far from the star. As one more rock in the cometary belt, we can observe unobtrusively. There is much that we don’t yet know.”
“Such as?” Timoq asked.
Such as, Corinne thought, the perils to which I doubt you give credence. But she sat in this meeting only by custom and sufferance. Glithwah, before she stepped down, had established the precedent: on critical matters, the humans had unique perspectives worth hearing out. Timoq might disagree, and Corinne would bet anything that he did, but the clan still honored, even revered, the leader who had led them to freedom.
Or if she was of a mind to be honest with herself, that’s why she was tolerated. Carl, for many years at the top of the shipboard b’tok ladder, had through strategic genius earned his place in the clan councils. Joshua/Tacitus had earned their place by their brilliance at, well, most everything else. After thirty years together, not a few Hunters remained intimidated by the very notion of Augmentation.
Maybe Timoq will heed them.
Carl pressed on. “Such as the deployment of the Xool. Their capabilities. Their intentions.”
Several among Timoq’s staff studiously looked away. Of those who did not, many had disdain in their eyes.
And maybe not.
“Somewhere there were Xool,” Timoq conceded magnanimously. “From afar, their presence in this solar system was a plausible inference. From afar. From here we could not have failed to have detected an occupied world. We will proceed to colonize.”
“We need supplies,” Firh Koban interrupted.
Was the old pirate—not a figure of speech—changing the subject, Corinne wondered, or subtly backing Carl?
Glithwah’s cousin had been a pilot and a warrior, a veteran of the secret campaign to capture human ships and build a navy. She had led the troops who stormed this starship. Now Koban, no longer young, managed the starship’s logistics. She would have made a good tactical officer—if the clan still had one.
Glithwah, while she still led, had kept a tactical officer on her senior staff. She had held combat drills, encouraged b’tok tournaments, seen to it that young Hunters trained in the old ways. But even in Glithwah’s time, the chief science officer had become her critical aide. Yes, another Xool agent might be aboard or a Xool vessel might somehow intercept them in the vast emptiness of interstellar space. The certain dangers of this epic voyage were ecological.
As, just before this meeting, Corinne had seen yet again.
Three Hunters, given their diminutive stature, required no more food, water, or air than a single human—but on the day Koban’s troops seized Invincible, it became home to more than twenty thousand Hunters. Specialists had to deal with sulfur compounds degrading the terrestrial biosphere that kept everyone breathing. They had to rework fertilizers, lighting, and irrigation systems, deck by deck, to the needs of specific K’vithian crops. With the ecosphere straining even from the start, demographic specialists and economists micromanaged who could have children when and for what careers those children would train. Tactical officer became a ceremonial post, even as everyone curried favor with the chief science officer.
Five years out from Ariel, Timoq, then a young chief science officer, had succeeded as Foremost. Glithwah had devoted the remainder of her life to mentoring—when, in the face of Timoq’s disdain, she found disciples—in the art of b’tok. Ten years from Ariel, soon after Glithwah passed away, Timoq without ceremony suspended the position of tactical officer.
The ship-wide memorial netcast for Glithwah was among the hardest things Corinne had ever had to do. One made friends under the strangest circumstances ….
Once again, Corinne had found herself woolgathering. She let Hank catch her up.
“What supplies?” Timoq asked.
“Top off our water tanks. Distill deuterium. Distill oxygen. Gather metals and trace elements for life support.”
“Can we not obtain those supplies from inner-system worlds?” Timoq asked.
“Doubtless, Foremost,” Koban agreed, “but until we have resupplied, we are not optimally prepared.”
“We wouldn’t want to meet anyone until our resupply is complete,” Carl said.
“Ah, you are still with us.” Timoq licked his lips in a Hunter smile. “I thought perhaps you were busy at b’tok. And why would we expect to meet anyone?”
Joshua leaned forward. “For all the reasons that led us to Epsilon Indi.”
“Except there are no adversaries here.” Timoq stood. “There is no one at all.”
Joshua stood, too, towering over everyone, forehead furrowed, but it was Tacitus’ intonation that rang out. “Then how do we explain the third planet’s appearance?”
“Sit,” Timoq commanded. Joshua did. “Jomar?”
The science officer summoned an image into the meeting’s consensual space. Even at full magnification, the planet deep in the habitable zone manifested only as a brilliant white dot. “This appearance? A world locked in an ice age, just as astronomers surmised before we first set out. Inconvenient for us, but perhaps why the Xool, if they ever occupied this system, have left.”
“The planet reflects too much sunlight even for an all-ice surface,” Tacitus said.
Jomar sneered, “You would have us hide from shininess?”
“I,” Carl said, “would have us retain the element of surprise. Suppose Xool are in this solar system. To resupply out here, we would enter a distant orbit using the T’Fru drive. To go much deeper in the system means switching over to fusion drive and shouting out our presence.”
Lest the random tug of some random Kuiper Belt object destabilize the interstellar drive and blow them to atoms. Corinne was not the only person around the
table to shiver.
“To be clearer,” Timoq said, “we are done, unless someone has something new to offer. Something other than wild speculation.”
“This is new,” Hank offered through a ceiling speaker. “The third planet has gone behind its sun.”
“So?” Timoq asked.
“From this distance,” Hank said, “my sensors cannot dependably separate direct sunlight from the far dimmer light reflected by the close-in planets. While III passes behind the star, its reflected light does not reach us. Barring questions, I will omit the details, but from the slight drop in illumination I can infer much about III’s atmospheric composition.”
“And we will determine much more from closer,” Timoq said. “Dismissed, everyone.”
“No.”
Even Corinne felt the word’s intensity. As for the Hunters, as one they flinched.
Once, long ago, Robyn Tanaka Astor had done something similar to Corinne and Joshua, some kind of Augmented trick. She/they had given her/their voice a special timbre, subtle harmonics—something—that slipped past the conscious mind, that demanded attention. That grabbed a mere human by the figurative lapels and shook.
So Joshua/Tacitus had mastered enough Hunter psychology to shake them—and chosen this moment, of all moments, to reveal the power.
Claws slid to their full extension from Timoq’s hands. “Explain yourself.”
“My pardon, Foremost,” Tacitus said. “This matter is critical. The significance of the latest observation is that the third planet has no atmosphere.”
“Impossible,” Jomar snapped. “So near to the star, ice cover cannot persist without an atmosphere. Ice would melt. Melt water would boil off in the vacuum as vapor. Ultraviolet light would split the vapor. The planet is too small to hold onto free hydrogen, but it would retain the oxygen.”
“Making it all the more puzzling,” Tacitus said, “that this supposedly icebound planet lacks an atmosphere.”
Timoq turned toward his science officer.
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