The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge

by Vernor Vinge

  “The Providencians,” Balquirth said, almost to himself.

  Chente nodded. “At this resolution, it’s difficult to see individual ships, but you get the idea of their formation.”

  “What’s that red blip?” Bossman Pier pointed to the newest apparition.

  “That must be a transponder on one of the Providencian bombs. All the communications bombs transmit a uhf signal in response to microwave from the satellite. I suppose that originally the gimmick was used to find dud bombs that fell back to the surface without detonating.”

  “So they really thought they were going to wipe us out,” said Pier. “This is even better than I had hoped.”

  The scanning dot moved relentlessly across the screen, shifting down with each pass to reveal more and more of the Providencian fleet. Finally they could see the echelon structure of the enemy forces. For ten more scans, no new blips appeared. Then a single red blip showed up far south of the enemy fleet. Chente caught his breath.

  Balquirth looked across the table at him. “How far is that bomb from us?” he said quietly.

  Chente held up his hand, and watched the scanning dot continue across the screen. He remembered Martha’s remarks about the Providencians having special delivery systems. Then the scanning dot showed the leading elements of the Ontarian fleet—just six lines below the red dot. “Less than ten kilometers, Bossman.”

  Balquirth didn’t reply. He looked at the display’s key, then rattled off some instructions into a speaking tube. General quarters sounded. Seconds later Chente heard the Fearsome’s big deck guns fire.

  Finally Balquirth spoke to Chente. His voice was calm, almost as if their peril were someone else’s. “How do you suppose they detected our fleet?”

  “There are a number of ways. Martha said the Providencians were experimenting with a lot of gadgets of their own design. In fact they may not have detected us. That bomb is probably aboard a small, unmanned boat. They may just keep it thirty or forty kilometers ahead of their fleet. Then if it hears the sounds of propellers nearby it detonates.”

  “Ah, yes. Research and development—isn’t it wonderful.”

  THEY STOOD WAITING in silence. Ten kilometers away, a barrage of heavy artillery was arcing down on the cause of that innocuous red blip. Any second now they would discover just how cleverly the New Providencians had designed their delivery system.

  From outside the windowless charthouse came screams. No other sounds, just screams. Chente smelled fire, noticed the insulation around the closed hatch was beginning to smoke. He and Balquirth hit the deck, and Maclen was not far behind. The bomb’s searing flash had crossed the ten kilometers separating them at the speed of light, but they would have to wait almost seven seconds for the water-borne shock wave to arrive.

  Chente heard a monstrously loud ripping sound, felt the deck smash into his chest and head. He was not conscious when the airborne shock wave did its job, peeling back the charthouse bulkhead and part of the deck above them.

  Chente woke with rain in his face, and the muffled sound of exploding ammunition and burning fuel all around. Behind all these sounds, and nearly as insistent, was a steady roar—the last direct evidence of the nuclear explosion.

  The Earthman rolled over, cursing as he felt the stitches the Ontarian doctors had put in his side come apart. His head rang, his nose was bleeding, and his ears felt stuffed with cotton. But as he shook the rain out of his eyes he saw that the others in the charthouse had not fared so well. On the other side of the cabin, Maclen’s body was sprawled, headless. Nearer, Balquirth lay unmoving, a pool of blood spreading from his mouth.

  For a few moments Chente sat looking stupidly at the scene, wondering why he was alive. Then he began to think. His plans to destroy the Providencian bombs were ruined now that the Ontarian fleet had been destroyed. Or were they? Suddenly he realized that this turn of events might give him hope of completing his mission and still escaping both groups. Chente struggled to his feet, and noticed the deck was listing—or was it only his sense of balance gone awry again? He recovered the recon display and his pistol, then picked the communications bomb from its case. The bomb didn’t mass more than fifteen kilograms, but it was an awkward burden.

  Outside the charthouse the mutilated guards’ bodies lay amid twisted metal. The ship’s paint was scorched and curling even in the rain. The after part of the ship was swallowed by flame, and the few people he saw alive were too busy to notice him.

  Martha. The thought brought him up short, and he reconsidered the possibilities. Then he turned and started toward the bridge. He could see the gaping holes where the glass had been blown out of the bridge’s ports. Anybody standing by those ports would be dead now.

  Then he saw her, crawling along the gangway above. The deck listed a full ten degrees as he pulled himself up a ladderway to reach her. “Let’s get off this thing!” he shouted over the explosions and the fire. He caught her arm and helped her to her feet.

  “What—?” She shook her head. A trickle of blood ran from one ear down her neck. Her face was smeared with grime and blood.

  He could barely hear her voice, and realized the explosion must have deafened them all. He held onto her and shouted again into her good ear. For a moment she relaxed against him, then pulled back, and he saw her lips mouth; “Not with…traitor!”

  “But I was never going to use that bomb on your people. It was just a trick to get at the Ontarian bombs.” It was the biggest lie he’d told her yet, but he knew she wanted to believe it.

  He pointed toward the Fearsome’s stern, and shouted, “To the launch!” She nodded and they staggered across the tilting, twisted deck, toward the flames and the sound of explosions. Everyone they met was going in the opposite direction, and seemed in no mood to stop and talk.

  NOW THERE WAS ONLY one narrow path free of flames and the heat from either side was so intense it blistered their skin even as they ran through it. Then they were beyond the flames, on the relatively undamaged stern. Chente saw that the motor launch had been torn loose from its after mooring cable, and now its stern hung down, splashing crazily in the water. Several bodies lay unmoving on the scorched deck, but no one else was visible. They crawled down to where the bow of the launch stuck up over the railing. Chente had almost concluded they were alone on the stern, when Balquirth stepped from behind the wreckage next to the launch’s moorings.

  The Ontarian swayed drunkenly, one hand grasping the jagged and twisted metal for support. His other hand held a slug gun. The lower part of his face was covered with blood. Chente staggered toward him, and shouted, “Thought you were dead. We’re going ahead with your plan.”

  Through the blood, Pier almost seemed to smile. He gestured at Martha. “No…Quintero,” his voice came faintly over the sounds of rain and fire, “…think you’ve turned your coat…”

  He raised the pistol, but Chente was close to him now. The Earthman lunged, knocking the gun aside with his bomb, and drove his fist hard into Pier’s stomach. The other crumpled. Chente staggered back, clinging to the rail for support. It struck him that the fight must have looked like a contest between drunks.

  He turned to Martha, and waved at the launch. “We’ll have to jump for it, before that other cable breaks.”

  She nodded, her face pale with cold and fear. They were cut off from the rest of the ship by the spreading fire, and even as he spoke the Fearsome tilted another five or ten degrees. He climbed over the rail and jumped. The drop was only three meters, but his target was moving and he was holding the bomb. He hit hard on his bad side and rolled down the launch’s steeply sloping deck.

  Gasping for breath he dragged himself back up the deck and waved to Martha above him. She stood motionless, her fists tightly clenched about the railing. For a moment, Chente thought she would balk, but she slipped over the railing and jumped, her arms outstretched. He managed to break her fall and they both went sprawling. They crawled clumsily down the bobbing deck toward the craft’s cockpit. Martha s
truggled through the tiny hatch, and Chente pushed the bomb after her. Then he turned and fired at the remaining mooring cable.

  THE LAUNCH KNIFED INTO the water and for a moment submerged completely, but somehow Chente managed to keep from being washed away. The boat bobbed back to the surface, and he scrambled into the cockpit.

  From his talks with Balquirth, Quintero knew the boat had a steam-electric power plant—it was ordinarily used for espionage work. Looking over the control panel, Chente decided that this was the most advanced Ontarian mechanism he had encountered—just the kind of luck they needed. He depressed the largest switch on the board and felt a faint humming beneath his feet. He eased the throttle forward. As the launch pulled slowly away from the foundering Fearsome, he thought he heard the whine and snick of small arms fire caroming off the boat’s hull; apparently Balquirth was not easily put out of action. But now it was too late to stop their escape. The Fearsome was soon lost to sight amid the deep swells and pounding rain. The last Chente saw and heard of the Ontarian fleet was a pale orange glow through the storm, followed by a sound that might have been thunder. Then they were alone with the storm.

  The storm was bad enough in itself. The tiny cabin spun like a compass needle, and several times Chente was afraid the boat would capsize. Somehow Martha managed to tie down the equipment and dig a couple of life jackets out of a storage cubby.

  Chente fastened the recon screen to the control board, and inspected the radar display. On high resolution he could distinguish every vessel in the area. Even his motor launch showed—or at least the transponder on his communications bomb did. They would have no trouble navigating through this storm, if they didn’t sink. He briefly thanked heaven that the comm bombs were about as clean as anything that energetic can be: nearly all the destruction was radiated as soft X rays. At least they didn’t have to worry that the rain was drenching them in radioactive poisons.

  “Now what?” Martha shouted finally. She had wedged herself in the corner, trying to keep her balance.

  Chente hesitated. He had three choices. He could flee the scene immediately; he could use his bomb to destroy the Providencians and their remaining bomb—just as he and Balquirth had planned; or he could indulge in more treachery. The first option would leave the Providencians with a bomb, and an enormous advantage in the world. The second option would be difficult to execute; at this point Martha might be stronger than he was. He might have to kill her. Besides, if he exploded his bomb, he would have no way to make his report to Earth.

  That left treachery. “We’re going to try to get picked up by one of the ships in the Providencian fleet.”

  TWENTY MINUTES PASSED. At the top of the screen the launch’s blip moved closer and closer to the red dot that represented the last Providencian bomb. He kept the screen angled so that Martha didn’t have a clear view of it.

  They should be able to see the ship before much longer. He leaned his head close to Martha and said, “Do you know any signals that would keep them from shooting us out of hand?” He pointed at the electric arc lamp mounted in the windscreen.

  Her voice came back faintly over the wind. “I know some diplomatic codes. We update them every fifteen days—they just might respect them.”

  “We’ll have to chance it.” Chente helped her light the arc lamp. But there was nothing to see except storm. Chente guided the launch so that its image on the screen approached the other. As they swung over the top of a swell, they saw a long gray shadow not more than two hundred meters ahead. It appeared to be an auxiliary craft, probably a converted cargo ship.

  Chente reached across the panel and tapped new instructions into the display. Now the machine was reading the transponder’s position from its internal direction finders. Beside him at the control panel, Martha awkwardly closed and opened the signaler’s shutter. For nearly thirty seconds there was no reply. Chente held his breath. He expected that this particular ship would be manned by Special Weapons people, who might well be trigger-happy and extremely suspicious. On the other hand, depending on what they expected of the Ontarians, the weapons people might be cocksure and careless.

  Finally a light high on one of the ship’s masts blinked irregularly. “They acknowledge. They want us to move in closer.”

  Chente worked the electric boat closer and closer to the ship. Martha continued sending. They were about fifty meters out now, and they could make out the details of the other vessel. Quintero looked closely at his display, then scanned the ship’s foredeck. He noticed a shrouded boat lashed down near the bow. Its position agreed with the location of the blip on his display. This was better than he had hoped. That was the twin of the robot boat that had nearly destroyed the Ontarian fleet.

  He took one hand from the wheel, drew his pistol and fired a single low-power bolt. The thick windscreen shattered, throwing slivers of glass all around. He stepped the pistol’s power to full and aimed at the other vessel’s bow.

  “No!” Martha screamed as she rammed him against the bulkhead. She was tall and strong and she fought desperately. They careened wildly about the cabin for several seconds before Chente got a solid, close-fisted blow to her solar plexus. She collapsed without a sound, and the Earthman whirled back to face the deadlier enemy.

  The ship’s main guns were turned toward him, but he was below them now. He sprayed fire all along the vessel, concentrating on the smaller deck guns and the shrouded boat. Clouds of steam quickly obscured the glowing craters his pistol gouged in the ship’s hull, and then the fuel supply aboard the robot boat exploded in a ball of orange-red flame hot enough to melt the controls of the bomb within.

  There was the sparkle of automatic fire from up in the ship’s masts, and the cockpit seemed to shred around him. He fired upward blindly.

  Chente grabbed the wheel and turned about. The seconds passed but there was no more Providencian gunfire. The sounds of the burning ship quickly faded behind them and they were alone.

  THEY DROVE STEADILY WEST for three hours. The seas fell. Just as the sun set, the cloud cover in the far west moved aside so that the sun shone red and gold through the narrow band between horizon and cloud.

  His reconnaissance screen showed no sign of pursuit. More importantly, there was only one transponder blip glowing on Chente’s display—his own.

  The tiny launch was slowing, and finally Chente decided to try to fire its boiler. He eased the throttle back to null, and the boat sat bobbing almost gently in the sea the sun turned gold.

  “Martha?” No response. “I had to do it.”

  “Had to?” Her tone showed despair and unbelieving indignation. She looked briefly up at him through her rain-plastered hair. “How many Providencians did you kill today?”

  Chente didn’t answer. The rationalizations that men use for killing other men stuck in his throat, at least for the moment. Finally he said, “I told you, I told the Ontarians: Unless you work together you will all be wiped out. But it didn’t do any good just to say it. Now, Ontario and New Providence have a mutual enemy: me. I have the only nuclear weapon left, and I have means to deliver it. Soon I will control territory, too. Your nations will spend their energies to develop the technology to defeat me, and in the end you may be good enough to meet your real peril.”

  But Martha had resumed her study of the deck, and made no reply.

  Chente sighed, and began to pull back the deck plates that should cover the boiler.

  The sun set and the first stars of twilight shone through the gap between the clouds and the horizon. Nineteen light-years away, his likeness must still be awaiting his report. In a few weeks, Chente would make that report, using the Ontarian communications bomb. But the people of the New Canada would never know it, for that bomb was the lever he would use to take over some small Ontarian fiefdom. Already he must begin casting the net of schemes and the machinations that would stretch one hundred years into this miserable planet’s future. It was small consolation to hope that his likeness would live to see other worlds.
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  There are a lot of things I like about “Just Peace.” As a collaboration it went very smoothly. Bill and I had many small things in our idea boxes that found a nice home here: the Canadian background, the danger of colonizing a planet whose core was about to undergo a phase change.

  We were vague about Chente’s background on Earth. This was deliberate. I assumed Earth had already gone through the Technological Singularity. We see about as much of Earth as we could understand. One major aspect of Earth’s technology leaks into this story: the duplicative transport used to bring Chente to New Canada. Not much is made of it here, but I find the idea immensely intriguing. If we could make exact copies of someone (not just clones, but exact down to quantum limits) what would this do to our concept of ego? The idea has been in SF for many years (at least back to Algis Budrys’s Rogue Moon and Poul Anderson’s We Have Fed Our Sea). There is plenty of mileage left in the gimmick. It is just one of the issues that I see looming in our future. Our most basic beliefs—including the concept of self itself—are in for rough times.

  ORIGINAL SIN

  Alien contact stories have always been a favorite of mine. I grew up with John Campbell’s notion that the humans were short-lived, bright, and terribly aggressive compared to the wiser intellects of galactic civilization. Why not turn that around? Why not have a race even more short-lived, intelligent, and aggressive than humans? John’s older/wiser races often tried to keep the human “superrace” confined to Earth. What would we do if confronted by aggressive primitives with the potential to run circles around us?