The Year's Best Science Fiction: Fifteenth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  "I am aware of that." Her eyes were open, staring at him with a mixture of contempt and anger.

  "Sure, sure," he mumbled. "Holy Mother, you'd expect us to find some by now. "Careful," she datavised. "Remember this damn ship has internal sensors."

  "I know how to follow elementary security procedures," he datavised back.

  "Yes. But you're tired. That's when errors creep in."

  "I'm not that tired. Shit, I expected results by now; some progress."

  "We have had some very positive results, Antonio. The arrays have found three separate deposits of pitchblende."

  "Yeah, in hundred-kilogram lumps. We need more than that, a lot more."

  "You're missing the point. We've proved it exists here; that's a stupendous discovery. Finding it in quantity is just a matter of time."

  "This isn't some astrological experiment you're running for that university which threw you out. We're on an assignment for the cause. And we cannot go back empty-handed. Got that? Cannot."

  "Astrophysics."

  "What?"

  "You said astrological, that's fortune-telling."

  "Yeah? You want I should take a guess at how much future you're going to have if we don't find what we need out here?"

  "For Christ's sake, Antonio," she said out loud. "Go and get some sleep."

  "Maybe." He scratched the side of his head, unhappy with how limp and oily his hair had become. A vapour shower was something else he hadn't had for a while. "I'll get Jorge in here to help you monitor the results."

  "Great." Her eyes closed again.

  Antonio deactivated his flatchair's restraint straps. He hadn't seen much of Jorge on the flight. Nobody had. The man kept strictly to himself in his small cabin. The Crusade's council wanted him on board to ensure the crew's continuing cooperation once they realized there was no gold. It was Antonio who had suggested the arrangement; what bothered him was the orders Jorge had received concerning himself should things go wrong.

  "Hold it." Victoria raised her hand. "This is a really weird one."

  Antonio tapped his feet on a stikpad to steady himself. His neural nanonics accessed the analysis network again. Satellite eleven had located a particle with an impossible mass-density ratio; it also had its own magnetic field, a very complex one. "Holy Mother, what is that? Is there another ship here?"

  "No, it's too big for a ship. Some kind of station, I suppose. But what's it doing in the disc?"

  "Refining ore?" he said with a strong twist of irony.

  "I doubt it."

  "Okay. So forget it."

  "You are joking."

  "No. If it doesn't affect us, it doesn't concern us."

  "Jesus, Antonio; if I didn't know you were born rich I'd be frightened by how stupid you were."

  "Be careful, Victoria my dear. Very careful."

  "Listen, there's two options. One, it's some kind of commercial operation-, which must be illegal because nobody has filed for industrial development rights." She gave him a significant look.

  "You think they're mining pitchblende?" he datavised.

  "What else? We thought of the concept, why not one of the black syndicates as well? They just didn't come up with my magnetic array idea, so they're having to do it the hard way."

  "Secondly," she continued aloud, "it's some kind of covert military station; in which case they've tracked us from the moment we emerged. Either way, we're under observation. We have to know who they are before we proceed any further."

  "A station?" Marcus asked. "Here?"

  "It would appear so," Antonio said glumly.

  "And you want us to find out who they are?"

  "I think that would be prudent," Victoria said, "given what we're doing here."

  "All right," Marcus said. "Karl, lock a communication dish on them. Give them our CAB identification code, let's see if we can get a response."

  "Aye, sir," Karl said. He settled back on his acceleration couch.

  "While we're waiting," Katherine said. "I have a question for you, Antonio.

  She ignored the warning glare Marcus directed at her.

  Antonio's bogus smile blinked on. "If it is one I can answer, then I will do so gladly, dear lady."

  "Gold is expensive because of its rarity value, right?"

  "Of course."

  "So here we are, about to fill Lady Mac's cargo holds with 5,000 tonnes of the stuff. On top of that you've developed a method which means people can scoop up millions of tonnes any time they want. If we try and sell it to a dealer or a bank, how long do you think we're going to be billionaires for, a fortnight?"

  Antonio laughed. "Gold has never been that rare. Its value is completely artificial. The Edenists have the largest stockpile. We don't know exactly bow much they possess because the Jovian Bank will not declare the exact figure. But they dominate the commodity market, and sustain the price by controlling how much is released. We shall simply play the same game. Our gold will have to be sold discreetly, in small batches, in different star systems, and over the course of several years. And knowledge of the magnetic array system should be kept to ourselves."

  "Nice try, Katherine," Roman chuckled. "You'll just have to settle for an income of a hundred million a year."

  She showed him a stiff finger, backed by a shark's smile.

  "No response," Karl said. "Not even a transponder."

  "Keep trying," Marcus told him. "Okay, Antonio, what do you want to do about it?"

  "We have to know who they are," Victoria said. "As Antonio has just explained so eloquently, we can't have other people seeing what we're doing here."

  "It's what they're doing here that worries me," Marcus said; although, curiously, his intuition wasn't causing him any grief on the subject. "I see no alternative but a rendezvous," Antonio said.

  "We're in a retrograde orbit, 32 million kilometres away and receding. That's going to use up an awful lot of fuel."

  "Which I believe I have already paid for."

  "Okay, we rendezvous."

  "What if they don't want us there?" Schutz asked.

  "If we detect any combat wasp launch, then we jump outsystem immediately," Marcus said. "The disc's gravity field isn't strong enough to affect Lady Mac's patterning node symmetry. We can leave any time we want."

  For the last quarter of a million kilometres of the approach, Marcus put the ship on combat status. The nodes were fully charged, ready to jump. Thermo-dump panels were retracted. Sensors maintained a vigilant watch for approaching combat wasps.

  "They must know we're here," Wai said when they were 8,000 kilometres away. "Why don't they acknowledge us?"

  "Ask them," Marcus said sourly. Lady Mac was decelerating at a nominal one gee, which he was varying at random. It made their exact approach vector impossible to predict, which meant their course couldn't be seeded with proximity mines. The manoeuvre took a lot of concentration.

  "Still no electromagnetic emission in any spectrum," Karl reported. "They're certainly not scanning us with active sensors."

  "Sensors are picking up their thermal signature," Schutz said. "The structure is being maintained at 36 degrees Celsius."

  "That's on the warm side," Katherine observed. "Perhaps their environmental system is malfunctioning."

  "Shouldn't affect the transponder," Karl said.

  "Captain, I think you'd better access the radar return," Schutz said.

  Marcus boosted the fusion drives up to one and a half gees, and ordered the flight computer to datavise him the radar feed. The image which rose into his mind was of a fine scarlet mesh suspended in the darkness, its gentle ocean swell pattern outlining the surface of the station and the disc particle it was attached to. Except Marcus had never seen any station like this before. It was a gently curved wedge-shape structure, 400 metres long, 300 wide, and 150 metres at its blunt end. The accompanying disc particle was a flattened ellipsoid of stony iron rock, measuring eight kilometres along its axis. The tip had been sheared off, leaving a flat cliff hal
f a kilometer in diameter, to which the structure was clinging. That was the smallest of the particle's modifications. A crater four kilometres across, with perfectly smooth walls, had been cut into one side of the rock. An elaborate unicorn-horn tower rose 900 metres from its centre, ending in a clump of jagged spikes.

  "Oh Jesus," Marcus whispered. Elation mingled with fear, producing a deviant adrenaline high. He smiled thinly. "How about that?"

  "This was one option I didn't consider," Victoria said weakly.

  Antonio looked round the bridge, a frown cheapening his handsome face. The crew seemed dazed, while Victoria was grinning with delight. "Is it some kind of radio astronomy station?" he asked.

  "Yes," Marcus said. "But not one of ours. We don't build like that. It's xenoc."

  Lady Mac locked attitude a kilometer above the xenoc structure. It was a position which made the disc appear uncomfortably malevolent. The smallest particle beyond the fuselage must have massed over a million tonnes; and all of them were moving, a Slow, random three-dimensional cruise of lethal inertia. Amber sunlight stained those near the disc's surface a baleful ginger, while deeper in there were only phantom silhouettes drifting over total blackness, flowing in and out of visibility. No stars were evident through the dark, tightly packed nebula.

  "That's not a station," Roman declared. "It's a shipwreck."

  Now that Lady Mac's visual-spectrum sensors were providing them with excellent images of the xenoc structure, Marcus had to agree. The upper and lower surfaces of the wedge were some kind of silver-white material, a fuselage shell which was fraying away at the edges. Both of the side surfaces were dull brown, obviously interior bulkhead walls, with the black geometrical outline of decking printed across them. The whole structure was a cross-section torn out of a much larger craft. Marcus tried to fill in the missing bulk in his mind; it must have been vast, a streamlined delta fuselage like a hypersonic aircraft. Which didn't make sense for a starship. Rather, he corrected himself, for a starship built with current human technology. He wondered what it would be like to fly through interstellar space the way a plane flew through an atmosphere, swooping round stars at a hundred times the speed of light. Quite something.

  "This doesn't make a lot of sense," Katherine said. "If they were visiting the telescope dish when they had the accident, why did they bother to anchor themselves to the asteroid? Surely they'd just take refuge in the operations centre."

  "Only if there is one," Schutz said. "Most of our deep space science facilities are automated, and by the look of it their technology is considerably more advanced."

  "If they are so advanced, why would they build a radio telescope on this scale anyway?" Victoria asked. "It's very impractical. Humans have been using linked baseline arrays for centuries. Five small dishes orbiting a million kilometres apart would provide a reception which is orders of magnitude greater than this. And why build it here? Firstly, the particles are hazardous, certainly to something that size. You can see it's been pocked by small impacts, and that lior looks broken to me. Secondly, the disc itself blocks half of the universe from observation. No, if you're going to do major radio astronomy, you don't do it from a star system like this one."

  "Perhaps they were only here to build the dish," Wai said. "They intended it to be a remote research station in this part of the galaxy. Once they had it up and running, they'd boost it into a high-inclination orbit. They had their accident before the project was finished."

  "That still doesn't explain why they chose this system. Any other star would be better than this one."

  "I think Wai's right about them being long-range visitors," Marcus said. "If a xenoc race like that existed close to the Confederation we would have found them by now. Or they would have contacted us."

  "The Kant," Karl said quickly.

  "Possibly," Marcus conceded. The Kant were an enigmatic xenoc race, with a technology far in advance of anything the Confederation had mastered. However, they were reclusive, and cryptic to the point of obscurity. They also claimed to have abandoned starflight a long time ago. "If it is one of their ships, then it's very old."

  "And it's still functional," Roman said eagerly. "Hell, think of the technology inside. We'll wind up a lot richer than the gold could ever make us." He grinned over at Antonio, whose humour had blackened considerably.

  "So what were the Kant doing building a radio telescope here?" Victoria asked.

  "Who the hell cares?" Karl said. "I volunteer to go over, Captain."

  Marcus almost didn't hear him. He'd accessed the Lady Mac's sensor suite again, sweeping the focus over the tip of the dish's tower, then the sheer cliff which the wreckage was attached to. Intuition was making a lot of junctions in his head. "I don't think it is a radio telescope," he said. "I think it's a distress beacon."

  "It's four kilometres across!" Katherine said.

  "If they came from the other side of the galaxy, it would need to be. We can't even see the galactic core from here there's so much gas and dust in the way. You'd need something this big to punch a message through."

  "That's valid," Victoria said. "You believe they were signalling their homeworld for help?"

  "Yes. Assume their world is a long way off, three-four thousand light years away if not more. They were flying a research or survey mission in this area and they have an accident. Three quarters of their ship is lost, including the drive section. Their technology isn't good enough to build the survivors a working stardrive out of what's left, but they can enlarge an existing crater on the disc particle. So they do that; they build the dish and a transmitter powerful enough to give God an alarm call, point it at their homeworld, and scream for help. The ship can sustain them until the rescue team arrives. Even our own zero-tall technology is up to that."

  "Gets my vote," Wai said, she gave Marcus a wink. "No way," said Katherine. "If they were in trouble they'd use a supralight communicator to call for help. Look at that ship, we're centuries away from building anything like it."

  "Edenist voidhawks are pretty sophisticated," Marcus countered. "We just scale things differently. These xenocs might have a more advanced technology, but physics is still the same the universe over. Our understanding of quantum relativity is good enough to build faster than light starships, yet after 450 years of theoretical research we still haven't come up with a method of supralight communication. It doesn't exist."

  "If they didn't return on time, then surely their homeworld would send out a search and recovery craft," Schutz said.

  "They'd have to know the original ship's course exactly," Wai said. "And if a search ship did manage to locate them, why did they build the dish?"

  Marcus didn't say anything. He knew he was right. The others would accept his scenario eventually, they always did.

  "All right, let's stop arguing about what happened to them, and why they built the dish," Karl said. "When do we go over there, Captain?"

  "Have you forgotten the gold?" Antonio asked. "That is why we came to this disc system. We should resume our search for it. This piece of wreckage can wait."

  "Don't be crazy. This is worth a hundred times as much as any gold."

  "I fail to see how. An ancient, derelict, starship with a few heating circuits operational. Come along. I've been reasonable indulging you, but we must return to the original mission."

  Marcus regarded the man cautiously, a real bad feeling starting to develop. Anyone with the slightest knowledge of finance and the markets would know the value of salvaging a xenoc starship. And Antonio bad been born rich. "Victoria," he said, not shifting his gaze. "Is the data from the magnetic array satellites still coming through?"

  "Yes." She touched Antonio's arm. "The captain is right. We can continue to monitor the satellite results from here, and investigate the xenoc ship simultaneously."

  "Double your money time," Katherine said with apparent innocence.

  Antonio's face hardened. "Very well," he said curtly. "If that's your expert opinion, Victoria, my dear. Car
ry on by all means, Captain."

  In its inert state the Sll spacesuit was a broad sensor collar with a protruding respirator tube and a black football-sized globe of programmable silicon hanging from it. Marcus slipped the collar round his neck, bit on the tube nozzle, and datavised an activation code into the suit's control processor. The silicon ball began to change shape, flattening out against his chest, then flowing over his body like a tenacious oil slick. It enveloped his head completely, and the collar sensors replaced his eyes, datavising their vision directly into his neural nanonics. Three others were in the preparation compartment with him; Schutz, who didn't need a spacesuit to EVA, Antonio, and Jorge Leon. Marcus had managed to control his surprise when they'd volunteered. At the same time, with Wai flying the MSV he was glad they weren't going to be left behind in the ship.

  Once his body was sealed by the silicon, he climbed into an armoured exoskeleton with an integral cold-gas manoeuvring pack. The SII silicon would never puncture, but if he was struck by a rogue particle the armour would absorb the impact.

  When the airlock's outer hatch opened, the MSV was floating 15 metres away. Marcus datavised an order into his manoeuvring pack processor, and the gas jets behind his shoulder fired, pushing him towards the small egg-shaped vehicle. Wai extended two of the MSV's three waido arms in greeting. Each of them ended in a simple metal grid, with a pair of boot clamps on both sides.

  Once all four of her passengers were locked into place, Wai piloted the MSV in towards the disc. The rock particle had a slow, erratic tumble, taking 120 hours to complete its cycle. As she approached, the flattish surface with the dish was just turning into the sunlight. It was a strange kind of dawn, the rock's crumpled grey-brown crust speckled by the sharp black shadows of its own rolling prominences, while the dish was a lake of infinite black, broken only by the jagged spire of the horn rising from its centre. The xenoc ship was already exposed to the amber light, casting its bloated sundial shadow across the featureless glassy cliff. She could see the ripple of different ores and mineral strata frozen below the glazed surface, deluding her for a moment that she was flying towards a mountain of cut and polished onyx. Then again, if Victoria's theory was right, she could well be.