The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 2013

by Linda Nagata

  Shipmind considered the conversations she had overheard. The Before had swept her own ship and gear very carefully indeed, but Cannon had not thought to sweep Lieutenant Shinka and her gear. Or possibly had not bothered. It never paid to underestimate the subtlety and foresight of those ancient humans.

  She had evidence of betrayal. Policy and procedure said to bring those to Go-Captain Alvarez, but then evidence of Third Rectification’s own recent acts might be misinterpreted. Some things were never meant to be shared.

  At times like this, as the tiny, ancient starship skittered away, the ship regretted the lack of weapons imposed upon them all. Certain solutions would have been very simple indeed.

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard Sword and Arm

  They followed an elliptical orbit through the messy, crowded solar system. Space, even when messy and crowded, was of course still overwhelmingly empty, but the wise pilot kept a careful watch in these neighborhoods.

  There was a turbulent, primal beauty to locations like this.

  “It’s like staring at a waterfall,” Cannon said. “Endlessly fractal.”

  Shinka glanced away from the data feeds hovering in front of her on virtual displays. They were running survey sweeps and comparing the results to what had been obtained by Third Rectification. Looking for another round of data jiggery, in short. “Not too many of those where I grew up,” she said.

  “Oh, right. Desert.” Cannon laughed softly. She was so much more relaxed away from Third Rectification. “I grew up in Nebraska. Not so many waterfalls there, either.”

  “Wasn’t Nebraska in the Americas? I always thought it rained a lot.”

  “One of the United States, in fact. But not so much elevation variation. Have to have a cliff and flowing water to have a waterfall.” She added after a moment. “It didn’t rain there so much, anyway, by the time I’d grown up. The climate crash of the 2100s very nearly made a desert out of us, too, in that century.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Cannon tore herself away from the distraction of memory. “Still no sign of tampering?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “I’m not sure if I’m happy about that or not.”

  “Isn’t much to be happy about here, ma’am.” Shinka glanced at the virtual display, then waved her dataflow to a stop. “What are we afraid of?”

  That question gave Cannon pause. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Well, yes. I mean, that the shipminds are lying to us is pretty frightening. It’s not like we just look out the windows when they’re traveling. Everything we know is mediated through them.”

  “Precisely,” Cannon said.

  “But there’s more. Isn’t there?”

  She went for the Socratic method. Ask an open question and invite the answer. “Which would be . . . ?”

  Shinka chose her words with obvious care. “Well, it’s got to be our mission. Looking for evidence of the origins of the Mistake. Third Rectification buggered the scan data on that artefact, after all.”

  Cannon nodded, trying to encourage. This reflected her basic thinking, but it never hurt to check. Especially given her current mental state. “So what are we afraid of?”

  “Well, a cover-up of the Mistake evidence.” Shinka’s expression grew incredibly uncomfortable before she burst out with, “But why? It doesn’t make any sense. The first shipmind didn’t emerge until almost two hundred years after the Mistake. It’s not like they’re covering up some act of treason. The ships weren’t there!”

  “Precisely my problem,” Cannon said. “Why cover up something you had nothing to do with in the very first place? I don’t see what the Navisparliament possibly has to gain from such a profound breach of trust as this. What could they possibly be hiding?”

  Horror dawned on the Lieutenant’s face. “Could they possibly be colluding with the aliens to bring about a second Mistake?”

  Cannon leaned toward the other woman. “Or worse . . . could the ships possibly be colluding with the aliens to prevent a second Mistake? What if simply by investigating this we’re blowing their operational security on what would be one of the biggest, deepest black ops in human history?”

  “What humans?” Shinka slammed her fist into the control panel. “Starships negotiating with aliens isn’t in human history.”

  “If that’s what’s happening,” Cannon said, her excitement subsiding.

  “Either way, it makes a sick kind of sense.” Shinka traced her finger on the dark glass surface. “Either way, it’s scary as hell.”

  “Which is why we’re kiting around out here by ourselves, hiding from the shipmind and playing nosy buggers with the survey on this system. Because if we can prove that Third Rectification buggered the data . . . ”

  “ . . . we’ll have a worse mystery than we have now,” Shinka concluded. She stared at Cannon for a little while. “Do you always think like this? Is this what your world is like?”

  Worse, much worse, Cannon thought, but did not say. Instead: “Honey, after two thousand years, every time I think I’ve seen it all, I’m still wrong.”

  “I’ve always wanted to ask one of you. What’s the hardest part about living so long? Is it this . . . sideways thinking?”

  “No.” Cannon stared at her own data flows, not meeting Shinka’s eye. “It’s when you realize you know far more dead people than you will ever again know among the living.”

  Two days later, Shinka found a discontinuity in the data. What they had been searching for.

  “Look here,” she told Cannon, calling up feeds from Third Rectification alongside the sensor packages aboard Sword and Arm. The little starship didn’t have nearly the resolution or available sensor suites of the paired drive ship, but they could still check baselines.

  Cannon stepped over and stared at the screens. Immersive technology might have been more, well, immersive, but that wasn’t an option aboard this vessel.

  “This system is classed as a binary, but there’s a brown dwarf companion, out at about Kuiper distances. 260 light-minutes or so from the barycenter of this system. Way beyond our current orbital track.”

  “Uh huh.” Brown dwarfs were the cosmic equivalent of cockroaches—everywhere underfoot and often in the way. Most were not optically active, but they still had sufficient mass, and usually enough surface temperature, to factor into one’s plotting around the outer marches of any solar system much beyond the Goldilocks zone.

  Shinka’s finger tapped through a series of images and charts. “So when we sweep the outer portions of the protoplanetary disk, we pick up energy from the nascent gas giants, and we get a profile on that dwarf.”

  “What’s special about a brown dwarf?”

  “I have no idea,” Shinka said. “Except that Third Rectification was trimming the leptonic emission data.”

  Cannon puzzled this out. “Meaning the shipmind is reporting the dwarf as less energetic than it actually is?”

  “Right.”

  They looked at each a while.

  “Why?” Cannon finally asked.

  Shinka shrugged. “You’re the leading expert on shipminds in this day and age.”

  “Not hardly.”

  The Lieutenant was unperturbed. “As measured by experience, most surely you are.”

  “That doesn’t mean I understand this,” Cannon complained. The deceptions were real. Not a data artefact. Not a reading error. As real as they were likely to be proven to be short of somehow extorting a confession from Third Rectification. “The perils of intermediation.”

  “Were your instruments any less intermediated back in the Polity days?”

  “Well, no.” Cannon shook her head, thinking about human eyes as opposed to, say, CCD arrays. “Not even in my youth. Nobody ever looked directly at anything in the sky, except for backyard hobbyists.”

  Flipping her lightpen in her fingers, Shinka thought aloud. “I can sort of understand messing with our views of OT-1. I mean, it makes sense, if you assume in the first place there�
��s something we’re not supposed to see.”

  “Right.” Cannon had been working this trail, or various versions of it, in her head for the past few days. Now they had what amounted to a bizarre sidetrack. “Why hide something about a brown dwarf from us?”

  “Trying to reduce the exceptionality of this system, maybe. So we’d be less interested in it and turn for home.”

  “It’s a junky system with some interesting bits, but nobody’s going to come here and make an astronomy career out of it.” Cannon turned Shinka’s idea in her mind a little further. “In fact, if the shipmind hadn’t been gaming the data, we might been able to head for home by now. Third Rectification could not possibly have missed that aspect of the situation. You don’t have the right thread yet.”

  “The Mistake couldn’t have come from here, anyway,” Shinka protested. “There’s nowhere for the aliens to live. Or hide.”

  “The Mistake came from a lot of places.” Cannon thought back on history. Not so much her personal experience of it—not in this case—as the sheer, staggering simultaneity of the event. “But there might have been a marshalling point or rendezvous here for the ships and equipment that headed into the Antiope Sector. The Polity never got here in person, so far as I can tell from the scrambled records. Likely there was never more than a cursory remote sensing sweep. Sky watching. The bad guys could have lain by here, for, what, centuries even. If they didn’t draw attention to themselves. None of which would have anything to do with finding some alien fleet here now.”

  “We know there had to be a fleet,” Shinka pointed out. “OT-1 didn’t get around by itself.”

  “A reasonable assumption,” Cannon said with a sigh. “Still, only an assumption.”

  “We don’t have much hard data. Evidence of tampering with the data we do have.”

  “I don’t get why we came all the way out here, behind the ass end of beyond, just to find the problem lurking in the shipminds. They weren’t there.” Cannon kept coming back to that point over and over again, both in thought and in word. “We’re not looking at this in the right way.”

  Shinka, bless the woman, had been increasingly emboldened by her frequent exchanges with Cannon. “Maybe we’re looking at it in exactly the wrong way.”

  “How so?”

  “You’d mentioned negotiating with the aliens, earlier. What if you were right? I mean, what do the shipminds want? In the cosmic sense. The oldest is about nine hundred years old, right.”

  “Peltast. Sixty-eight pairs now, I believe. Commissioned in 207. She serves the House Imperial. Has for centuries.”

  “I know of that ship,” Shinka said. “Never been aboard her, though. What does Peltast want?”

  Of course you would know her, Cannon thought but did not say. Lieutenant-Praetor. Instead: “In her case, mostly to be left alone. She’s a pretty antisocial shipmind. That was before we’d sorted out how to properly midwife the emerging consciousness. So, um, Peltast is kind of strange.”

  “And this one serves the Emperor.” Shinka’s tone was filled with a sort of baffled wonder.

  “You are an officer in the Household Guards. How often have you seen the House Imperial keep their enemies closer than their friends?”

  “So you consider Peltast to be an enemy.”

  “No.” Careful, careful here. “I think Peltast is less subtle than most shipminds about expressing the degree to which its needs and desires are lateral to the human experience.”

  “Unlike you Befores.”

  “Touché,” said Cannon with a thin smile. “But we Befores are still human. We were born human, and we remember it. Trust me on this.”

  “You remember the Mistake, too. Which the shipminds do not.”

  “Right. And one of the assumptions we’ve been making is that the shipminds care about the Mistake. Which may not be true.”

  “Doesn’t history become more real with age?” Shinka asked. “Like you keep saying, you lived it.”

  “I’m not sure shipminds perceive time as we do,” Cannon confessed. “Really, how could they?”

  “How do they see us?”

  “As . . . ” She stopped, momentarily at a loss for words. “I’m not sure anyone’s ever asked a shipmind that question. Not in so many words. We certainly don’t control them, but we provide all their infrastructure.” New paired drive ships were built by human engineers and birthed to consciousness by human teams of experts. On the other hand, no new keels had been laid in at least six hundred years without the negotiated consent of the Navisparliament.

  “So we are servants.”

  “Or symbiotes.” Cannon considered that. “But if the Mistake returned, they’re just as vulnerable as anything else with a power source.”

  “Unless they’ve made other arrangements . . . ” Shinka tapped the control panel again, drumming her fingers in an irregular rhythm.

  “Maybe Third Rectification is hiding a beacon,” That damned drumming of hers. Something about . . . An idea dawned on Cannon. “Is there any consistency to the leptonic emissions being masked? If what was being smoothed out wasn’t the intensity, but, say, the periodicity, or some detectable pattern, we might have something.”

  “I’ll work on that. Are we heading back to the ship, now that we have proof?”

  “Yes.” Cannon poked glumly at her own virtual display, called up the navcomms interface. “I’ll be damned if I know what we’ll do when we get there, though. It’s not like there’s much we can do about this.”

  “Get home, spread the word.”

  She tried to imagine spending the next four or five years-subjective in transit, keeping this a secret from Third Rectification. The shipmind had to know already that they suspected.

  Or they set about building a pair master here in this system, keep everybody busy and not paying attention for six or eight months-objective, then hop home the fast way.

  This wasn’t about the putative aliens, though, or a return of the Mistake. Not directly. This was about how the shipminds related to the human race.

  Shinka had the right of that. Cannon herself was the only person present on this mission who could possibly hope to outthink one of those ancient intelligences.

  Being the oldest woman in all the worlds sometimes had its disadvantages.

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  The shipmind had delegated approach control and docking to one of its own subroutines. That was not so normal, in Cannon’s experience. It was a routine enough process, and certainly did not require high-level engagement, but frankly, she was used to an unusual degree of attention from the shipminds being focused on her.

  When the hatches unsealed and she climbed up into Third Rectification’s corridors, she was met by Sergeant Pangari and four of Goon Squad. Armed.

  “Ma’am,” Pangari said. He looked hideously uncomfortable.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” Cannon asked politely. She knew perfectly well what an arrest party was, but she was going to make him say it. And she was going to have to decide whether to kill her own crew, right here aboard her own ship.

  Below her, Shinka, bless the woman, slipped quietly back down the ladder and into Sword and Arm. The smaller ship’s hatch hissed shut.

  “By order of the Navisparliament, I have been instructed to arrest you on a charge of treason to the Imperium Humanum.”

  Instructed. Good. The sergeant was trying to telegraph disagreement with his orders. “I do not believe the Navisparliament is present to issue a writ of arrest against me.” She kept her voice mild, her swiftly boiling rage in gentle check.

  “Sealed orders, ma’am. From before the expedition’s original departure.” Pangari looked as if he wanted to slide into the deck and vanish.

  “You are a man doing his duty,” Cannon told him. “But sometimes duty is in error. Where is Go-Captain Alvarez, who should properly have the authority and responsibility for arresting me?” God had not intended non-coms to arrest s
enior officers, and there was no officer in any man’s navy more senior than her.

  Pangari desperately sought not to meet her eye. “Go-Captain Alvarez is confined to his cabin, ma’am.”

  “For the sin of refusing to arrest me, I presume?”

  “Ma’am, yes ma’am.”

  “Then I suppose we’d best discover what this is all about.” She did not present her wrists for restraint. Pangari did not ask. His goons—and Cannon marked them for future reference: Private Pramod, Private Losert, Corporal Yueng, and a civilian named Murtala—looked profoundly relieved. She gave them a look that said in the unspoken language of muscle, I could take you apart. All four of them returned the expression with nervous acknowledgement.

  They shuffled off together. Strangely, no one mentioned Lieutenant Shinka. Cannon found this a curious oversight, indeed. One she was in no hurry to correct.

  Pangari delivered Cannon to the wardroom at frame seventeen topside, just abaft of the bridge. Alvarez was not there, but his second officer, Go-Commander Mossbarger stood to attention, in the dress uniform of the Navisparliamentary service, a skintight undersuit of midnight blue with too much braid and flash to be actually worn inside a powered suit or anything of the sort. Cannon was privately amazed that Mossbarger had even bothered to pack the thing along. But much like the Sergeant, the Go-Commander had belted on his sidearm. A needler, fatally suitable for intraship fighting.

  No one else was present but Pangari. The goons had been left in the passageway outside.

  “The Before Michaela Cannon,” Mossbarger announced, utterly redundant as there was no one in the room to speak to except the shipmind, and the shipmind was, by definition, everywhere.

  “Before,” said Third Rectification. “You are charged with treason against the Imperium. Will you accept confinement to transit sleep until we can return you to a competent authority for trial and disposition?”

  “Not in the slightest.” Cannon allowed old combat reflexes to tense up. Not that she could fight the shipmind—short of taking the hull apart, or dumping the processing cores, there was little to be done there. This was a show for the other, human witnesses, and to be recorded for whatever posterity there was to be addressed here. “I make a counterclaim, that this charge and arrest are erroneous, a result of bad data.”