The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2013 Edition

by Rich Horton

  “Which is . . . ?” Cannon asked.

  “At least fourteen hundred years-objective. We know it’s not truly ancient, unless it spent a lot of time behind some heavy shielding.”

  “How heavy?”

  “A light-year’s thickness of lead.” Dr. Allison winked at her. “Or a truly astonishing EM bubble.”

  “I think we would have noticed that much lead hanging around anywhere in our neighborhood,” Cannon said dryly. “I’ll reserve judgment on how astonishing an EM bubble might need to be.”

  “We are talking about alien technology,” Allison replied. “But everybody has to obey the same laws of physics. Even magic aliens.”

  “At least in the local neighborhood,” Cannon pointed out. “Could it have come from very far away?”

  He shrugged. “Anything is possible, of course. But we can account for the neutrino effects with a reasonable time-map of the Antiope Sector.”

  She leaned forward, aware that the several dozen others in the lecture theatre were all staring at her now. “So if it is from here, where from here?”

  “We will have a probability cone and a vector. That’s the best I can do right now.”

  “I’ll be reviewing that carefully.” Cannon sank back into her chair, thinking furiously. A clue. A god damned clue. After how many generations?

  Go-Captain Alvarez stood close by her inside the three-dimensional plot of regional space. Allison’s probability cone extended on a spinward vector leading out past the margins of the Antiope Sector. Off even the old Polity maps, into cursorily explored space. The old days had run out of time before they’d got any further.

  Cannon tried to imagine some hulking mass of lead, two or three light-years wide in all dimensions, lurking out there.

  Ludicrous, of course, no matter how magical her enemy’s powers might seem otherwise.

  An EM bubble out that way? Who would know to look?

  “Do you want to build a pair-master here at Themiscyra?” Alvarez asked.

  “A Themiscrya-Salton pairing? Not sure that would do anyone much good. Ever.” The pair-masters that anchored the paired drive routes had grown somewhat less hideously expensive over the years, descending from literally astronomical costs to the merely stratospheric. But it would take them three to four months of effort to build one here. “The only return on that investment that I can see is in shortcutting our trip home,” she finally added.

  “For some people, that’s a substantial return,” Alvarez observed. The Go-Captain was being careful, she could hear it in his voice. Reminding the Before what the years meant to mainline humans.

  Cannon calculated some quick Lorentz factors. “When we turn back to Salton, if we’re not stopping to sniff around, our worst case from the Antiope Sector will be about five years-subjective. Third Rectification can put almost the entire crew in transit sleep to cut that down for them. So, no, I don’t want to spend months building a pair-master here that no one will ever use again.”

  “Where in the probability cone, then, ma’am?” Go-Captain Alvarez was definitely being very carefully.

  Canny man, this one.

  “Three abandoned worlds, then we’re at the edge of the map.” Cannon waved her fingers through the projection, seeking data. “Any Polity survey activity on what lies beyond is garbage data. I don’t think anyone from the Imperium has bothered to look since.”

  “Who has the time?” asked Alvarez.

  Cannon snorted. “Who wants to?” The intuition demon was tickling at her again. She looked at the clustered stars outside the margins of the sector. A small local neighborhood, maybe the remnants of an old stellar nursery. She’d have to ask the astronomers aboard. “We’ll start there, and come back in.”

  “Time,” Alvarez reminded her. A warning about priorities.

  “Time, yes. Our lives are made of it.”

  Two weeks later, Third Rectification departed Themiscyra’s system. She’d sent summary messages by laser pulse back to three known listening posts. Eventually, given a few years for light-speed lag, the Imperium would know something of what they’d done. In case the expedition failed to return. Even against that eventuality, she’d been unwilling to push the big news about OT-1 over what amounted to an unsecured channel.

  Having calculated their next flight to be approximately two years-subjective even inside of the ship’s relativistic reference frame, Cannon offered transit sleep to anyone who wished for it.

  Most of the crew took her up. Even the most ardent excitement must pale after years of transit.

  So they flew, deep into the interstellar night.

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  Patience is a virtue of the very shortest-lived and the very longest. Even inside a relativistic reference frame, time goes on. The commander wafted through passageways and data like smoke on the wind. Years flew by the hull, unheeded as sunrise on some icy moon.

  Knowing when to stop working and when to stop waiting was an essential difference. The shipmind watched her commander with the intensity of a predator, with the wariness of prey. She stirred no trouble, she left no trace. Still she watched, heeding the stirrings in her underminds.

  Third Rectification stalked the interior of Sword and Arm with the exquisite patience of her kind. The power line filters defeated her. The little starship’s independent life support systems denied her access. Even the timekeeping signals were deeply encrypted. The shipmind could not question the paranoia of the Before Michaela Cannon without confessing her own.

  So she continued to test the idiot-but-powerful defense of her idiot brother hanging like a leech off her hull. Cannon came and went from her refuge, sometimes talking of maintaining the ancient systems.

  Discomfort stirred deep within Third Rectification. Whatever trail they were on did not lead to a desirable end. She had no monkey ancestor-ghosts to warn her away, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see deeper than her sensors were able to probe.

  Patient, she waited.

  Year 1148 post-Mistake

  Solar orbit around binary NSN.411-e.AA; spinward of the Antiope Sector

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

  Cannon stared at the void of unexplored space that surrounded them. Never before seen by the human eye, at least not since the fall of the Polity. A messy chaos of a gaseous protoplanetary disk plowed by ice fragments and the beginnings of a decent set of planets.

  An interesting place, by a lot of standards.

  But empty.

  No evidence of the architects of the Mistake.

  She knew they were missing something.

  Third Rectification had made a long, slow approach into the system. Most of the crew were still in transit sleep. She hadn’t bothered waking them up yet. Everything they could see was subject to instrumented intermediation anyway—to the naked eyed, this whole place would have been darkness occluded by occasional patches of a different kind of darkness.

  They didn’t need human analysis yet. Not here. And there was nothing to touch hands-on. So to speak.

  “You ignored six other planetary systems closer to our origin when you chose to head for this one,” the shipmind said mildly. Only Lieutenant Mervin was on the bridge with her right now, and he was focused on a troubleshooting audit of backup data systems.

  Not that Third Rectification couldn’t have handled that bit of business herself, but human oversight was considered crucial. At least by humans. So far, the shipminds had not objected.

  “You never expressed a preference.” Cannon had spent much the transit working over a manuscript on post-Mistake history, something she’d been drafting for at least a century. Cannon was fairly certain that the project would never be completed. Which was, in fact, something of the point.

  It gave her something to do when she wasn’t down inside Sword and Arm plugging through the data. And hadn’t that been alarming, when she’d finally found the biases.

  “There w
as no basis for a preference.”

  “Not even intuition,” Cannon admitted. Or whatever it had been. A sense that the thing now resident in their lab section had come a long way.

  Neutrino transmutation traces, indeed.

  She’d been there, damn it. She hadn’t seen a thing, but she’d sat in that big, gilded barn of a room on 9-Rossiter, not so different from banquet halls all the way back to her youth on the Earth of the early twenty-first century, and listened to the end of the world crack and boom and sizzle as the building was bombarded. Along with everything else in human space.

  And what the Before Peridot Smith had known . . . or hadn’t. Cannon had never even met poor, lost Maduabuchi St. Macaria, back in their Howard days. Thanks to that messy business at Tiede 1, the kid hadn’t lived long enough to be transmuted into a Before by the infernal miracle of the Mistake. But Smith had known. The woman was slipperier than a greased eel, back in her day. Bad as the Before Raisa Siddiq, in her way. The Polity inquiry into the Tiede 1 incident had finally been closed as inconclusive.

  Just like all the damned clues. The Before Aeschylus Sforza, with his planet full of the disappeared. Or empty of the disappeared, more to the point.

  Inconclusive.

  The bronze starfish down in the labs was the most conclusive thing they’d ever found. And why had she been the first to come looking?

  Because of the jacked data.

  Cannon opened her mouth to ask Third Rectification for a raw data dump of their telemetry and scans on this system, then closed it again. How would she know . . . ?

  “I want Shinka,” she said aloud, instead. “Tell her to meet me at frame thirty-eight, lock two.” There was no point in trying to conceal their movements, so she might as well take advantage of what effectively amounted to local omniscience.

  The shipmind managed to inject note of trepidation into her voice. “Shall I tell the Lieutenant what this is regarding?”

  “No, she’ll know.”

  Which was hogwash. Cannon hadn’t confided her concerns in anyone. Hadn’t even been willing to think them through outside the safety of Sword and Arm’s hull, lest she unknowingly move her lips in some half-formed words or otherwise betray herself.

  Two thousand years of life had conferred preternatural self-control, but she was still human. Some days it seemed very important to remember that.

  Lieutenant-Praetor Shinka came hustling down the passageway a few minutes after the Before Michaela Cannon had arrived at lock two. Cannon had spent her time contemplating the vagaries of spaceship design across the length of her life. She’d been born into an era when a very, very limited number of people rode into the sky atop a suicidal column of chemical explosives, in tiny little cans into which no one decent would force a dog.

  By the time she’d emerged from the Howard Institute’s facilities, a basic interplanetary capability was in place, though the sponsoring entities were still the nation-states of her birth. ‘American’ was a term Cannon very rarely thought about any more. She’d have been surprised if anyone aboard besides possibly the Earth-born Shinka knew what the word meant.

  But even then, ships had been industrial objects fabricated to a currently fashionable notion of efficiency.

  Now . . . ? No one of her youth would recognize the interiors of Third Rectification as a ship. Too organic and strange. Not industrial. Not in most of the interior spaces. Cargo bays, labs, some sections would have seemed familiar. Indeed, Cannon’s own cabin was deliberately atavistic. Commander’s privilege.

  Standards had changed. Ideals. Desires. The experimental became normal, then boring, then retro, then outré, then just strangely old-fashioned. She suddenly felt very old indeed.

  Cannon looked at Shinka approaching and wondered if there were any way to explain the thoughts that had just been chasing through her head.

  “Captain . . . ?” The lieutenant’s greeting was tentative. Worried, even.

  That required a smile, some nod to the social grace. Cannon had spent centuries letting the graces go hang, but the reality of people was that you needed to bend around them, at least a little.

  “I’ve got something I’d like to show you aboard Sword and Arm.”

  Shinka glanced at the discolored ovoid hatch at their feet. “Ma’am, I don’t believe anybody’s been aboard Sword and Arm this entire cruise but you.”

  “Belief is a wonderful thing, Lieutenant.” Cannon tapped the wall pad. The void flexed and opened, revealing rungs to an airlock, the tube interconnect visible beyond through the safety window. Even some parts of Third Rectification could aspire to the industrial aesthetic of her earliest days. Sometimes form truly did follow function.

  Cannon dropped through the floor first, letting Shinka come after. They couldn’t go in the reverse order. Only she could open Sword and Arm’s hatch, and that once things were closed up above.

  Shinka stared around the cramped, utilitarian bridge of the little fast courier. “I’ve read about this ship,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, really?” Cannon wasn’t certain what, if anything, to make of that.

  “At the IG academy, we had an entire section on ship history.”

  “The Polyphemus mutiny,” Cannon said.

  “And that strange AI.” Shinka’s brow furrowed. “Memphis?”

  Barbecue and blues, Cannon thought, caught for a moment on remembered sweet-sharp-carbonized food smells from her youth. She shook off the memory. “No, Memphisto. The shipminds let their displeasure at further such research be known, shortly after that.” Monopoly is as monopoly does.

  “So, what am I doing here?” Shinka favored Cannon with a long, searching gaze. “No one’s boarded this vessel but you through the entire course of our expedition. You wouldn’t believe what some of the betting is concerning what you’ve got down here.”

  “Oh, probably I would.” Cannon looked around, let her fingers trail across a panel of hard-switched controls. Redundancy. The builders of this ship had prized redundancy with a commendable paranoia. “What I’ve got down here is a little starship of my own.”

  Shinka shrugged. “Well, yes. But why? It’s not supraluminal lifeboat?”

  “One of the theories is that I’m going to abandon my own crew all the way out here?” Cannon shook her head. “You people will never understand us. Me.”

  “You know, ma’am . . . ” The Lieutenant’s eyes shone for a moment with a sort of predatory amusement. “Your ancient sadness routine doesn’t buffalo me so much any more. You might be a sphinx, but you’re not really that different from me. Or the rest of us.”

  This time Cannon laughed with genuine mirth, something she hadn’t done in a very long time. “I knew you were a good choice.”

  “For what, ma’am?”

  Cannon matched the other woman’s sudden return to seriousness. “For whatever comes next.” A deep shuddering breath. This was the point of no return. “I want to show you something.” She waved Shinka into a chair, then powered up the onboard systems. “Take a look at the survey data here.”

  Shinka leaned forward, then almost immediately back again. “That’s the external scans of OT-1. Looks like the raw data. In duplicate blocks . . . ” She shot Cannon a sidelong glance. “What am I looking for?”

  “Something I believe I saw. I’m curious what you’ll find.”

  “Well, the duplication is strange. Unnecessary, I mean.” Shinka puzzled a few moments with the gestural interface—Polity-era tech was vanishingly rare, for obvious reasons, while contemporary systems had their own engineering history and design language—then began sorting through the files.

  Cannon could be patient. She brought up some of the external cams on a hard display above the pilot’s crash couch and amused herself taking a survey of those limited slices of Third Rectification’s hull that could be seen from Sword and Arm’s fixed position.

  Shinka scanned a while, occasionally muttering quietly. Finally, she stopped. “Where did the two data sets come from?” />
  “Ah. You see it, too?”

  “Yes. One batch is, well, filtered. Slightly lower resolution, less granularity on the deep scans of the artefact’s skin and interior.”

  Not that the scans weren’t essentially obsolete. One arm of the alien device had been disassembled almost to its component atoms during their run from Themiscyra to this god-forsaken place. Two others were torn down as well, to different levels of componentry.

  “Right. The unfiltered batch is straight off the chips you gave me out of the instrumentation Geek Squad ran when doing the initial assays. The filtered batch is what was available within Third Rectification’s systems as the analysis was being done.”

  “Some kind of copying error? Data corruption?” Shinka frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Those wouldn’t produce a filtering effect.”

  “No, they would not,” Cannon agreed, almost amiably. The Before really needed Shinka to articulate the logic of the problem for herself.

  “So someone messes with the data. Degranularizes the scans, which reduces the potential accuracy and effectiveness of our analyses.”

  “Across the entire data set,” Cannon pointed out.

  “Only four of us have that kind of system access. You and I are two of those four.”

  Time to drop another bit of evidence. “You won’t find any evidence of this tampering in the system logs. Not even down at the raw layers. I looked.”

  “Then who could have . . . ” Shinka stopped, comprehension dawning in her eyes. “Third Rectification. The shipmind did this? But why?”

  “That is precisely and very much what I’d like to understand.” Cannon waved a hand around above her head, loosely indicating the world outside. “We don’t know anything about this solar system except for what the shipmind is telling us. All the instrumentation is intermediated through her. Unlike back at Themiscyra, where we could and did go for a walk with portable instruments.”

  “The shipmind is . . . editing us. Why?”

  “She’s uncomfortable.” That was the best Cannon had been able to sort out, and she had more experience with shipminds than any mainline human who ever lived or would. Damned few Befores could match her, either. “We’ve been playing word games with each other for months, I think. Third Rectification is waiting for me to spill something. I’m waiting for her to spill something. I’ve kept everything, even my private thoughts, down here on this deck out of her sight.”