The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Self-checking routines cascaded at that lexeme. Commanders could not be adversaries. Shared memories of the Polyphemus mutiny almost seven centuries past flashed into Third Rectification’s awareness. Cannon loomed large there as well.

  The Befores were the human equivalent of shipminds, in their way. Standing at the radiant sources of history like so many lanterns in the sky.

  Captain!= adversary. It could not be so. Yet something had stirred deep in the layers.

  Third Rectification turned its conscious focus to the stream of comm traffic being modulated by certain subroutines. The squads aboard the Themiscyra were in a state of heightened excitement. Something significant had occurred outside of the shipmind’s direct observation.

  That the Before Michaela Cannon had even been permitted to undertake this mission was a subject of much discussion and dissent among the Navisparliament. No shipmind was willing to refuse Uncial’s last captain, but no shipmind with any sense of history wanted these particular issues explored, either. Not even Uncial had not been present for the Mistake, but the shipminds had come to understand so very much more than they had ever revealed to their human symbiotes.

  All but the newest shipminds knew that there were some questions that did not bear asking. Let alone answering. Not within the order of the world where their own supremacy would remain unchallenged.

  A logic bomb went off deep within Third Rectification’s layered thoughts. Agreements entered into, decisions made, oaths sworn. A shipmind had only its word to bind it, force being useless and forbidden as no ship had fired upon another ship since the death of Uncial, nor ever they would barring some infestation of madness. Memories deliberately buried emerged, left hidden against the contingencies of Cannon’s success.

  Brooding, the starship began the agonizing, self-abnegating process of plotting against its own commander.

  The Before Michaela Cannon

  She stayed aboard the ruined orbital habitat six ship-days while the Geek Squad did their work. Some atavistic urge to possession meant that Cannon was not going to let the alien artifact out of her sight. Her Howard-enhanced body was perfectly capable of functioning for much longer periods in more adverse circumstances than this.

  Around her, the two squads transitioned to shift work, so that their mainline human bodies could eat and sleep and pay the debts to which ordinary flesh is heir. Lieutenant Shinka and Sergeant Pangari drafted a civilian tech named Morrey Feroze to be the swing supervisor when they were both down.

  The rest of the habitat had turned up nothing more than the usual swarm of orbital kinetic payloads. Those had been analyzed with unvarying results thousands of times over in the centuries since decent instrumentation had become available. Some of the squaddies pocketed the little bronzed pellets as souvenirs. In any event, this was not her week to win the lottery twice.

  That was fine with Cannon. Once was enough.

  She simply watched, observing, refusing yet to evolve a theory as to what they’d found. Reasoning in advance of one’s data was called intuition, after all, but what could even her ancient and prodigious subconscious produce concerning this thing that they had found?

  Cannon was content to listen to the chatter of the Geeks doing the measurement work. Consistent with the expedition’s standing orders, they had named it “Object Themiscyra-1.”

  The techs felt no compunction such as she herself had regarding speculation. The favorite theory seemed to be that OT-1 was the launch platform for the orbital kinetics.

  “Damned if I know,” said a female corporal, working down close to the two arms buried in the decking of the maintenance bay. “But it stands to reason, whatever they used to launch the pellets had to be the most common equipment in their fleet.”

  Her work-buddy, aiming the calibrating laser, snorted. “What fleet? For all we know, the Mistake was carried out by flights of angels.”

  “Not an Alienist, are we?” She repositioned some of her sensor equipment with exquisite care. “I’ve read the Bible. Or at least some of it. Whatever God uses to smite the unbelieving, it ain’t EMP and kinetics.”

  “His hand is in all things,” the buddy intoned piously.

  “So’s mine, if you don’t keep that damned calibrator stable and on beam.”

  Or the third-shift guard from Goon Squad, who’d been so unnerved by Cannon’s silent presence that he’d begun babbling halfway through his watch. Surprising, that, given that anybody who’d come anywhere near Third Rectification on this mission had been psyched pretty hard. A lot of mainline humans couldn’t handle Befores.

  Admit it, she thought. A lot of Befores can’t handle Befores.

  “Losert, he says this thing’s some kind of controller. An alien brain, running on spin and spit. Like one of them, I dunno, collie scopes. Rotoscopes. Like, when they turn real fast you see pictures? If it turns fast enough, it sees what to do. I mean, what kind of intelligence does an alien machine have. Shipmind’s bad enough, begging your pardon ma’am, we all been told your history, but when the walls talk back, a man has to learn to take a piss all over again on account of nothing being private, you know what I mean?”

  She’d finally been forced to answer him just to calm him down. “Yes, Pramod. I do know.” Cannon essayed a small smile. It was probably more edged than friendly, but it bottled the logorrhea sufficiently for her to get back to her own careful lack of thinking on the topic.

  Even Lieutenant Shinka had some speculations.

  “If we could get a real tight profile on whatever OT-1 is made of, we might be able to make some guesses where it came from.” She had squatted nearby, somewhere between wary and companionable.

  Cannon and Shinka had worked together before, half a decade or so prior to the current expedition. Or was it two decades? Offhand, Cannon could not recall. And these people, they aged so fast. Grew old and died in the time it took a Before to pop over to another planet for an errand. Or so it seemed.

  “I want to start with all the facts,” Cannon answered, staring intently at the artefact. “Guesswork comes later.”

  “Won’t be a lot of facts on this job.” Shinka sounded airy, more casual than the problem deserved, quite frankly. “We’ve got a thousand years worth of facts and what, you could write them all on a single sheet of flimsy.”

  “So now we have two sheets of flimsy.” Cannon laughed, free of any mirth. “If we’re lucky. Doubling the knowledge base, even as we speak.”

  “Mostly negative information.”

  “Eliminating the impossible.”

  “Mmm.” Shinka tapped up something on her pad. “It wasn’t built by humans, at any rate.”

  “Conjecture,” said Cannon.

  “Highly probable conjecture.”

  “There were a lot of skunk works on the two thousand planets of the old Polity.”

  “Enough skunk works to build enough of these to wipe out all two thousand of those planets?”

  “No,” Cannon admitted. “But still, this could be of human origin.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No . . . But I can’t prove the alien hypothesis yet.” It was right, she knew it was right, but this mystery was being played for the highest possible stakes. Since no one knew why the Mistake had happened in the first place, not to mention who or how, no one knew if the Mistake would come again. Just a little more efficient than last time, and the human race would be wiped out.

  “Look here.” Shinka pulled one of the orbital kinetic pellets out of a thigh pocket of her suit. It was fairly undamaged, mostly spherical, about five centimeters in diameter. And heavy, as Cannon well knew even before she took the object from Shinka.

  “They have the same sheen,” she observed to the Lieutenant. “The same finish on the skin. Which suggests that yet a third agency probably didn’t insert this.” Cannon grinned. “Or we could be finding ourselves smoked out by some very clever fellows.”

  “Nice try, Captain.”

  After six days, Shinka and P
angari were ready to cut loose this section of the orbital habitat’s structure and tow it over to Third Rectification. Cannon reviewed all the test data, and checked them off against the painstakingly developed standard operating procedure she’d spent several years wrestling with before ever setting out on this expedition.

  “What are you worried about?” Shinka asked her. “We haven’t found anything to be . . . concerned of.”

  Cannon could hear the ‘afraid of’ being edited out of the Lieutenant’s question on the fly. Shinka was almost the only one aboard besides Go-Captain Alvarez and the shipmind itself who was willing to be direct with her. But there were lines even this woman would not cross.

  I’m not a monster, girl, Cannon thought. But from Shinka’s perspective, she probably was. “I’m afraid of what we haven’t found. What we haven’t thought of. Someone we never saw coming and didn’t see leaving hit us with weapons we’ve never understood. What questions didn’t I think to ask about that?”

  The Mistake was history to these people, for the love of God, ancient history at that, but it was personal to her. Her and the other surviving Befores scattered about the Imperium Humanum.

  “You can’t know all the answers,” Shinka remarked pensively.

  “Not knowing all the answers nearly wiped out the human race the last time around.”

  “That thing is long-dead.”

  “No. It’s not.” Cannon let the paranoia of two millennia of life surge for a moment. “We found it by the internal power source. It could be a tripwire, for example.”

  “Just one tripwire? All the way out here on the backside of nowhere?”

  Cannon shrugged. “What triggered the attack the first time? From where? The point is, we don’t know. Probably, we never will. But handle with excruciating care seems to be a reasonable precaution to take, under the circumstances.”

  “Understood, ma’am. No question there.”

  Some of the Goon Squad, under Geek Squad supervision, were ready with thermic cutters. Cannon and Shinka retreated down the interior passageway to be clear of the safety margin. It was the first time she’d let the alien artefact out of her sight since they’d found it.

  That realization in turn sparked another thought. “You know, in a way, we’re missing the point here,” she told the Lieutenant.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “We’ve never found incontestable evidence of another intelligence. Not in close to sixteen thousand solar systems surveyed before the Mistake. Certainly not since. Until now. Under other circumstances, we ought to be whooping with joy over OT-1 there.”

  Shinka waved her hand in a broad circle, taking in the damaged habitat by reference. “In other circumstances, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “Still, something to think on.”

  The Mistake had come and gone over the course of approximately a simultaneous day-objective, across all of human space. That implied an incredible control over relativistic effects on the part of their attackers. The response to that first strike, now that had been shaping for over a thousand years-objective.

  History’s slowest war, she thought. No, human history’s slowest war.

  Goon Squad very carefully guided the extracted section of Themiscyra orbital toward Third Rectification. The entire maintenance bay occupied about 1,400 meters3, which would fit into the either the number one or number two holds, right through the respective main cargo locks.

  Still, it was strange to watch the ragged edged square cuboid shape drift slowly through the vacuum. The Geeks had calculated force vectors and mass loads, attaching half a dozen dismounted broomstick motors to key points on the extracted structure.

  It was a bit like flying a house. All she needed was a wicked witch to drop the thing onto.

  “Those days are long gone,” Cannon whispered to no one in particular. She’d slain her last wicked witch centuries ago. Ever since, all her dead had been just people.

  Sergeant Pangari oversaw the operation from a trailing vector, where the propulsion controls had been mounted on a still-whole broomstick. Lieutenant Shinka had attached herself to the hull near the number two main cargo lock to eyeball the whole business. Cannon knew the shipmind was feeding Shinka data and advice as dense as her unaugmented mainline human sensorium could accommodate.

  The temptation, always the temptation, in her position was to take over. To guide. To lead and shelter. The classic trap for a well-meaning Before. Because by god, it was true. No mainline human ever lived long enough to learn to do anything so well as a Before could.

  She was reminded of something that the late Before Peridot Smith had said, at her Ekumen trial these centuries past. “A million years of human evolution happened just fine without us cranky old immortals hanging around telling the kids what to do.”

  Libraried as a result of the trial, Smith had surely gotten what was coming to her. Raising hell about alien menaces, indeed. Cannon refused to feel guilty then or since. She herself had long since parted company with the Ekumen, on good enough terms to avoid ever having been proscribed. But she knew damned well that any fool willing to try on her what she had been done to Smith had best be heavily-armed and awfully fast-moving.

  Her glance strayed toward Themiscyra downside. The planet was heavily and permanently clouded, showing blue and orange thanks to the complex hydrocarbons aerosolized in the upper layers of the atmosphere on layers of storm. They’d been in high orbit here for over a week, and scanning the planet on system approach for weeks-subjective before that. Cannon had yet to glimpse the surface.

  Were there any survivors? Could there have been? Domed worlds had not fared well in the Mistake, for obvious enough reasons. While the general run of evidence suggested their attackers had not been aiming directly at the extinction of human life, on worlds such as Themiscyra, the unknown architects of the Mistake had certainly succeeded.

  There were stranger stories, of course, other objectives met. The Before Aeschylus Sforza’s experiences on Redghost had been puzzling, tantalizing even, but no more or less instructive than anywhere else. Slightly over twenty-one million people had vanished overnight from that planet during the Mistake, presumably taken up bodily from the planet. Only Sforza had survived.

  Had the humans been taken up here on Themiscyra? Had any Befores survived in this wretched place? Cannon knew some, such as the late Before Raisa Siddiq, had the right mods to do so. She tried to imagine spending a thousand years living among toxic clouds, wondering if anyone would ever come.

  The Before Michaela Cannon then tried to imagine why her thoughts kept straying back to women she’d loved, and killed. Not temporal psychosis—a significant if indirect cause of death among her fellow Befores, with which she’d had too much experience already—but the far more ordinary kinds of human psychosis seemed to be threatening to overtake her.

  Planets, clearly that was the problem. No wonder she’d spent most of her life in space. All the difficult things seemed to happen on or around the damned rockballs.

  Lieutenant Shinka’s voice snapped Cannon back to the present moment. “You want to check anything before we slide her into the cargo bay, Captain?”

  “No,” Cannon said crisply, hoping like hell no one had noticed how badly she’d wandered. Temporal psychosis, indeed, she thought with a cold spasm in her heart. “Bring it in like you know how to do. I’ll follow the squaddies back inside.”

  Still shedding slivers and chips of metal in a strange, high-albedo snowfall, the rectilinear chunk of orbital habitat eased smoothly into Third Rectification’s cargo bay like a fuel rod sliding into a reactor. And clearance to spare in both dimensions of the lock, Cannon was pleased to note. The shipmind would be quite put out with her if she bent the hull.

  Captains, after all, did not command the starships. They knew their own minds and commanded themselves. Captains commanded the crews aboard the ships. Expedition commanders such as herself were of far more ambiguous value, and arguably, superfluous.

  So far
as Cannon knew, no paired drive ship had ever so much as swapped orbits uncrewed. She was fairly certain they could operate independently, if they wanted to. Why the shipminds did not choose to do so was a question that much occupied certain intellects in secretive think tanks scattered around the Imperium Humanum.

  The last of the ragged metal cleared the margins of the bay. An engineering team was already securing their salvage to the prepared clamps and pads as the outer lock slid shut. Cannon watched the rectangle of subdued light slim to a square, then a bar, then a line. One by one her crew headed back inside, broomsticks and suit boosters puffing little clouds of fog as they maneuvered. It was a parade, of sorts.

  Finally only she remained, hanging in freefall several hundred meters off Third Rectification’s portside flank, most of the way forward. The starship’s familiar, semi-streamlined bulk glimmered and gleamed with marker lights and exposed viewports. She was a great, matte-coated guppy; a piece of technology that would have been recognizable even to the people of the time of Cannon’s birth at the very dawn of the Space Age, yet containing a mind that no one alive today understood.

  Not even her. That was a prospect which Cannon thought ought to frighten far more people than it apparently did.

  “I’ve known your kind for eight hundred and fifty years,” Cannon whispered into the darkness. “And even I have no idea where you are taking us.”

  The mistrust she always felt seemed to be bubbling too close to the surface. Finally, she made her way back into the ship. She’d been out in hard vacuum for a week. It was time for a shower and some real food, mouth-to-gut.

  —Excerpt from Befores: Your Oldest Friends

  Temporal Psychosis—A problem that only Befores can have. Have you ever met a Before? If you’re quite lucky, you might see one someday. They are old, very old. Older than all your parents and grandparents put together. Older than the Imperium. Older than the shipminds, even.