Ship Who Searched

by Mercedes Lackey

  Baen Books by Anne McCaffrey

  The Planet Pirate Series:

  Sassinak (with Elizabeth Moon)

  The Death of Sleep

  (with Jody Lynn Nye)

  Generation Warriors

  (with Elizabeth Moon)

  Also available in a one-volume book:

  The Planet Pirates

  The “Brainship” Series:

  The Ship Who Searched

  (with Mercedes Lackey)

  Partnership (with Margaret Ball)

  (available in one volume as

  Brain Ships)

  The City Who Fought

  (with S.M. Stirling)

  The Ship Who Won

  (with Jody Lynn Nye)

  The Ship Errant by Jody Lynn Nye

  The Ship Avenged by S.M. Stirling

  Baen Books by Mercedes Lackey

  BARDIC VOICES

  The Lark and the Wren

  The Robin and the Kestrel

  The Eagle and the Nightengales

  The Free Bards

  Four & Twenty Blackbirds

  Bardic Choices: A Cast of Corbies (with Josepha Sherman)

  The Fire Rose

  The Wizard of Karres

  (with Eric Flint & Dave Freer)

  Werehunter

  Fiddler Fair

  The Sword of Knowledge (with C.J. Cherryh, Leslie Fish & Nancy Asire)

  Bedlam’s Bard (with Ellen Guon)

  Beyond World’s End

  (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Spirits White as Lightning

  (with Rosemary Edghill)

  A Host of Furious Fancies

  (omnibus, with Rosemary Edghill)

  Mad Maudlin

  (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Music to my Sorrow

  (with Rosemary Edghill)

  Bedlam’s Edge

  (ed. with Rosemary Edghill)

  THE SERRATED EDGE

  Chrome Circle (with Larry Dixon)

  The Chrome Borne

  (with Larry Dixon)

  The Otherworld

  (with Larry Dixon & Mark Shepherd)

  HISTORICAL FANTASIES WITH ROBERTA GELLIS

  This Scepter’d Isle

  Ill Met by Moonlight

  By Slanderous Tongues

  And Less Than Kind

  HEIRS OF ALEXANDRIA SERIES

  by Mercedes Lackey, Eric Flint

  & Dave Freer

  The Shadow of the Lion

  This Rough Magic

  Much Fall of Blood

  Burdens of the Dead (forthcoming)

  THE SECRET WORLD

  CHRONICLE

  Invasion: Book One of the Secret World Chronicle (with Steve Libbey, Cody Martin & Dennis Lee)

  World Divided: Book Two of the Secret World Chronicle (with Cody Martin, Dennis Lee

  & Veronica Giguere)

  THE SHIP WHO SEARCHED

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

  in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents

  is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2003 by Bill Fawcett & Associates.

  The Ship Who Searched © 1992 by Bill Fawcett & Associates.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book

  or portions thereof in any form.

  A Baen Book

  Baen Publishing Enterprises

  P.O. Box 1403

  Riverdale, NY 10471

  www.baen.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4516-3873-8

  eISBN: 978-1-61824-989-0

  Cover art by Sam Kennedy

  First Baen printing, February 2013

  Distributed by Simon & Schuster

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  McCaffrey, Anne.

  The ship who searched / by Anne McCaffrey & Mercedes Lackey.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-4516-3873-8 (trade pb)

  1. Space ships--Fiction. 2. Women--Fiction. 3. Science fiction. I. Lackey, Mercedes. II. Title.

  PS3563.A255S47 2013

  813'.54--dc23

  2012043323

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  INTRODUCTION

  Mercedes Lackey

  It was 1969, I was in my second year of college, and I was a voracious science fiction reader. Now, until I went to college—Purdue University, if you haven’t ever been to my website, such as it is—that had been rather more difficult when I’d been in high school. And certainly more difficult that it is now! In those days of yore, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was no Amazon, no Barnes and Noble online. There were a few—a very few—Giant Bookstores, but they existed only in big cities. The nearest of those was Krochs and Brentanos in Chicago, and I only got to go there once a year, when the whole family made the pilgrimage to our optometrist, who had been treating our family since my parents got married. It was possible to mail-order books, but only from a few publishers—Ace, for instance. So my science fiction habit had to be satisfied with what I could get in the library, what I could find at the drugstore (not much), my yearly binge at Krochs, and science fiction magazines.

  Ah, but at Purdue I found a cramped, condensed version of Krochs—a store that had an entire bookcase of science fiction and fantasy books, most of them new (or at least, new to me) releases. It was there I found my first copy of The Ship Who Sang.

  It makes me chuckle when 20-something critics of this book whine about how terrible it was that Annie portrayed her heroine Helva as a shell-encased prisoner, pointing out all the wonders of technology that they themselves have at their fingertips, and positing that the shell-people should have been more like Robocop than Helva. Uh…no, kids. Try some history. The stories were written between 1961 and 1969. Your watch has more computing power than was used to put a man on the moon. I know. My father was one of the first commercial computer programmers. Computers used vacuum tubes and wires and were the size of city blocks. It wasn’t until 1964 that the first computer using transistors was developed, and it was so expensive that only national militaries and extremely large corporations could afford them, and they still filled entire buildings, because the memory media were so huge—tape decks bigger than a double bed set on end and stacked disk arrays the size of wedding cakes that required machines the size of a refrigerator to house them. Unlike Isaac Asimov, Annie was not a great technologist, nor a great futurist; when it came to the techy-bits, she couldn’t imagine anything like a cell phone you could hold in your hand, a GPS, or the sort of support system for someone inflicted with the kind of deadly birth-defects Helva had that could be housed in anything smaller than an entire spaceship.

  But Annie was unflinchingly honest about the kind of future that would “offer” that sort of monumentally expensive life support to the select few deformed infants whose brains were at least salvageable. Remember, according to the book itself, these children were not just “disabled,” and they couldn’t be expected to wheel themselves through life in a wheelchair. They were saddled with deadly deformities. They would require full life support for the entirety of their lives. Annie knew very well what that meant when a parent couldn’t pay for such life-support. She posited a future where only a corporation or a government that expected to get value for their money would take these infants in and turn them into shell-persons—and in the process, saddle them with so much debt they were virtual slaves. Dystopian? Oh my, yes, and Annie knew it. Don’t let the fact that Helva seems cheerful fool you; the crippling load of her debt is a thread that runs through the entire book. Try reading it wit
h the slant that The Ship Who Sang foresees a future where medicine is only available to those who pay and it becomes a very different book indeed.

  Anyway, I loved it (why is it that late teens and college kids are so enamored of dystopias?), and I loved Helva, and I never understood—since there was no Internet available where an author’s least thoughts are broadcast to the world—why Annie didn’t write more Ship books.

  Of course, eventually I found out; how the stories were her way of coping with her own father’s death, and how that was still too painful for her to consider doing anything more with Helva. But time passed, and with it came healing, and eventually Annie decided it was time to revisit her Brainships.

  But this time she wasn’t going to do it alone.

  Bill Fawcett put together the package; Annie with four junior authors, each of whom would create his or her own shellperson to feature in a new series. And I was flattered, flabbergasted, and incredibly honored when Bill asked me to be one of them. It was a little like being asked to sing a duet with Paul McCartney, so far as I was concerned.

  Now, I knew a good bit more about the techy stuff than Annie; I was more-or-less stuck with the whole shell-person concept, even though I knew very well that a future that far removed from our own would probably have gotten to the brain-in-a-box point that would allow anyone who chose that route (and had the money) to have themselves a whole cyborg body built. But when you play in someone else’s sandbox, you play by their rules. I did intend to amend some of those rules as the book went along, however, and Annie graciously—and enthusiastically—allowed me to do so.

  The first rule I amended was to have my protagonist start out as a normal little girl. According to canon, only those born with fatal deformities were allowed to be salvaged for the shell program. I didn’t see any reason why that rule needed to be stuck with, and when Annie saw my outline, she agreed. So Hypatia experiences normal life up to the point where she contracts an alien virus and becomes a quadriplegic.

  I did this on purpose. Helva never actually knows what human sensation is. Hypatia does, and she misses it, and craves it, and (subconsciously) that becomes a huge driving force for her through the rest of the book.

  And like Annie, I was very aware of the dystopian nature of a future that can cheerfully turn children on life support into chattel slaves. It’s another dark thread in the tapestry that becomes a driving force for Hypatia. Like Annie, I chose not to make it the core subject of the book—I’m with Robert Heinlein, I’m not the sort of writer who can “sell her birthright”—as a storyteller—“for a pot of message.” Instead, I chose to be true to Annie’s voice, and make the story of one protagonist triumphing over everything that is flung in her path as the core of the book. But it’s there, and it forms part of the backbone of Hypatia’s journey. Annie obviously approved of my approach, and we went on that journey together. And what a ride it was!

  CHAPTER ONE

  The ruby light on the com unit was blinking when Hypatia Cade emerged from beneath the tutor’s hood, with quadratic equations dancing before her seven-year-old eyes. Not the steady blink that meant a recorded message, nor the triple-beat that meant Mum or Dad had left her a note, but the double blink with a pause between each pair that meant there was someone Upstairs, waiting for her to open the channel.

  Someone Upstairs meant an unscheduled ship—Tia knew very well when all the scheduled visits were; they were on the family calendar and were the first things reported by the AI when they all had breakfast. That made it Important for her to answer, quickly, and not take the time to suit up and run to the dig for Mum or Dad. It must not have been an emergency, though, or the AI would have interrupted her lesson.

  She rubbed her eyes to rid them of the dancing variables, and pushed her stool over to the com-console so she could reach all the touch-pads when she stood on it. She would never have been able to reach things sitting in a chair, of course. With brisk efficiency that someone three times her age might have envied, she cleared the board, warmed up the relay, and opened the line.

  “Exploratory Team Cee-One-Two-One,” she enunciated carefully, for the microphone was old, and often lost anything not spoken clearly. “Exploratory Team Cee-One-Two-One, receiving. Come in, please. Over.”

  She counted out the four-second lag to orbit and back, nervously. One-hypotenuse, Two-hypotenuse, Three-hypotenuse, Four-hypotenuse. Who could it be? They didn’t get unscheduled ships very often, and it meant bad news as often as not. Planet pirates, plague, or slavers. Trouble with some of the colony-planets. Or worse—artifact thieves in the area. A tiny dig like this one was all too vulnerable to a hit-and-run raid. Of course, digs on the Salomon-Kildaire Entities rarely yielded anything a collector would lust after, but would thieves know that? Tia had her orders if raiders came and she was alone—to duck down the hidden escape tunnel that would blow the dome; to run to the dark little hidey away from the dig that was the first thing Mum and Dad put in once the dome was up. . . .

  “This is courier TM Three-Seventy. Tia, dearest, is that you? Don’t worry, love, we have a non-urgent message run and you’re on the way, so we brought you your packets early. Over.” The rich, contralto voice was a bit flattened by the poor speaker, but still welcome and familiar. Tia jumped up and down a bit on her stool in excitement.

  “Moira! Yes, yes, it’s me! But—” She frowned a little. The last time Moira had been here, her designation had been CM, not TM. “Moira, what happened to Charlie?” Her seven-year-old voice took on the half-scolding tones of someone much older. “Moira, did you scare away another brawn? Shame on you! Remember what they told you when you kicked Ari out your airlock! Uh—over.”

  Four seconds; an eternity. “I didn’t scare him away, darling,” Moira replied, though Tia thought she sounded just a little guilty. “He decided to get married, raise a brood of his own, and settle down as a dirtsider. Don’t worry, this will be the last one, I’m sure of it. Tomas and I get along famously. Over.”

  “That’s what you said about Charlie,” Tia reminded her darkly. “And about Ari, and Lilian, and Jules, and—”

  She was still reciting names when Moira interrupted her. “Turn on the landing beacon, Tia, please. We can talk when I’m not burning fuel in orbital adjustments.” Her voice turned a little bit sly. “Besides, I brought you a birthday present. That’s why I couldn’t miss stopping here. Over.”

  As if a birthday present was going to distract her from the litany of Moira’s failed attempts to settle on a brawn!

  Well—maybe just a little.

  She turned on the beacon, then feeling a little smug, activated the rest of the landing sequence, bringing up the pad lights and guidance monitors, then hooking in the AI and letting it know it needed to talk to Moira’s navigational system. She hadn’t known how to do all that, the last time Moira was here. Moira’d had to set down with no help at all.

  She leaned forward for the benefit of the mike. “All clear and ready to engage landing sequence, Moira. Uh—what did you bring me? Over.”

  “Oh, you bright little penny!” Moira exclaimed, her voice brimming with delight. “You’ve got the whole system up! You have been learning things since I was here last! Thank you, dear—and you’ll find out what I brought when I get down there. Over and out.”

  Oh well, she had tried. She jumped down from her stool, letting the AI that ran the house and external systems take over the job of bringing the brainship in. Or rather, giving the brainship the information she needed to bring herself in; Moira never handed over her helm to anyone if she had a choice in the matter. That was part of the problem she’d had with keeping brawns. She didn’t trust them at the helm, and let them know that. Ari, in particular, had been less than amused with her attitude and had actually tried to disable her helm controls to prove he could pilot as well as she.

  Now, the next decision: should she suit up and fetch Mum and Dad? It was no use trying to get them on the com; they probably had their suit-speakers off. Even th
ough they weren’t supposed to do that. And this wasn’t an emergency; they would be decidedly annoyed if she buzzed in on them, and they found out it was just an unscheduled social call from a courier ship, even if it was Moira. They might be more than annoyed if they were in the middle of something important, like documenting a find or running an age-assay, and she joggled their elbows.

  Moira didn’t say it was important. She wouldn’t have talked about errant brawns and birthday presents if what she carried was really, really earth-shaking.

  Tia glanced at the clock; it wasn’t more than a half hour until lunch break. If there was one thing that Pota Andropolous-Cade (Doctor of Science in Bio-Forensics, Doctor of Xenology, Doctor of Archeology), and her husband Braddon Maartens-Cade (Doctor of Science in Geology, Doctor of Physics in Cosmology, Associate Degree in Archeology, and licensed Astrogator) had in common—besides daughter Hypatia and their enduring, if absent-minded love for each other—it was punctuality. At precisely oh-seven-hundred every “morning,” no matter where they were, the Cades had breakfast together. At precisely twelve-hundred, they arrived at the dome for lunch together. The AI saw that Hypatia had a snack at sixteen-hundred. And at precisely nineteen-hundred, the Cades returned from the dig for dinner together.

  So in thirty minutes, precisely, Pota and Braddon would be here. Moira couldn’t possibly land in less than twenty minutes. The visitor—or visitors; there was no telling if there was someone on board besides the brawn, the yet-unmet Tomas—would not have long to wait.