Capital Starship (Ixan Legacy Book 1)

by Scott Bartlett

But this quiet was punctuated by soft clicking and even the occasional grunt or curse. The dim interior, lit only by multicolored neon strips that ran along the walls and floors, consisted of several enclosed booths, where patrons sat staring into space—or rather, staring into the fantasy worlds displayed by their Oculenses. Video games, panoramic vids, other media best viewed in the privacy of one’s home…that was what people gathered here to immerse themselves in. This was the new “social,” and sometimes it even justified that word, in a sense. Sometimes, the gamers played in shared fantasy worlds.

  The enclosure of the booths was almost complete, with only a narrow opening for servers to bring drinks when they were ordered remotely. Otherwise, most patrons kept curtains drawn across those openings. The booths even had their own ceilings. They reminded Husher of clamshells, or maybe the wombs to which everyone likened cities like Cybele.

  This is how this generation was raised. During Husher’s childhood, which had more or less lined up with the end of the First Galactic War, children had still sometimes pretended household implements were guns and chased each other around the yard, playing Marines and Ixa. Or they pretended they were Wingers taking flight, or pretended their dolls were people, or whatever. For Husher, the point was that those games had required some creative input from the children playing them. The generation he glimpsed through the clamshells’ openings—they’d been spoon-fed everything, so that they hadn’t had to tax even their imaginations.

  Husher walked to the narrow window at the back of the room, placing his paycard on the sill. “I’ll have a pint of this week’s lager, please,” he said.

  The man on the other side of the window shot him a strange look—whether because he’d actually walked to the window to order or because he was the captain of the Vesta, Husher wasn’t sure.

  He took his beer into an unoccupied clamshell. While he waited for Ochrim, he ordered his Oculenses to go completely transparent so he could look at the shadows that were his only companions, in here. When Ochrim finally made his appearance, the Ixan was beerless.

  “Where’s your drink?” Husher asked him before taking a long pull from his own.

  “I don’t need one,” Ochrim said. “If they ask me to order something, I’ll get a soda.”

  “Well, I could have used a second one.” Husher downed the remainder of his pint.

  “Order one using your Oculenses.”

  Husher grimaced. “Just start up the simulation. Show me what you have.” Reaching beyond the clamshell’s curtain, Husher found the privacy shield, slamming it across and casting them in utter darkness for the second it took a neon strip to come on, offering them enough light to drink by. Not that that was necessary. Oculenses had a night vision feature.

  At any rate, when he accepted Ochrim’s invite, the simulation washed out everything he could see of the real world.

  Husher found himself inside a blank void. Ochrim stood beside him, and suspended in the nothingness was a contraption for which Husher had no name. Four-pronged protrusions jutted from the top of the machine, with blue, bead-like wires running down them. A double row of tight coils marched along the sides, projecting in opposite directions.

  For more complex simulations, like most video games, users needed a controller of some sort, but Ochrim was able to manipulate the strange object without one, using hand gestures.

  “Hopefully the software I talked the Tyros governor into getting for you can do more than simulate a white void and a prop from a poorly produced sci-fi vid,” Husher said.

  “Oh, yes,” Ochrim said. “The DeskChain program allows me to do what Baxa used to—to accurately simulate the universe, or at least its physics, along with a reasonably large region of space.”

  “It makes me twitchy when you talk about Baxa in that tone.”

  “Not to worry, Captain,” Ochrim said. “My estranged father really did simulate entire universes—thousands of them at once. I can only simulate a small fraction of one. Also, I lack the superintelligence to go with it.”

  “Don’t sell yourself short, Ochrim,” Husher said. He nodded at the contraption. “Walk me through how this thing works.”

  Husher had always assumed “creepy smile” was just the default configuration for Ixan mouths, but right now, Ochrim appeared to be frowning. He seemed just as apprehensive to go through the process of explaining advanced quantum physics as Husher was to try wrapping his head around it.

  “As is often the way with scientific experimentation, I ended up somewhere quite different from my intended destination.”

  “I’m fine with that, as long as the surprise destination has military applications.”

  “It…should. Though I’m not sure you’ll respond positively to everything that’s involved in the process I’ve worked out.”

  Husher sniffed. “What parts do you think I’ll object to?”

  “It’s probably simpler for me to start at the beginning. You recall the experiment during which I successfully contacted my counterpart in the universe next door, so to speak?”

  “I remember you seemed pretty convinced that you had, yeah.”

  When Ochrim turned toward him, his expression was one of clear exasperation, even on an alien face. “I explained to you why it’s incontrovertible that I—”

  Holding up a hand, Husher said, “Yeah, yeah. I accept that you did what you claim to have done. Not saying I remember how you did it, or that I even understood how at the time, but I accept it. Let’s move on.”

  “Very well,” Ochrim said, clearly still ruffled by Husher’s breadth of ignorance. “The first problem I faced—or, thought I faced, at any rate—was traveling to another reality without my double traveling to our reality at the same time. That could result in some awkward interactions, not to mention pointless, since the next universe over would be configured almost identically to ours.”

  “Hold on a second,” Husher said. “When you told me travel across the multiverse might be possible, the military application that came to mind right away was perfect stealth. Is that what you’ve been thinking?”

  “I’m not military.”

  “Come on, Ochrim. You might as well be, with what you’ve gotten tangled up in over the years.”

  The alien hesitated, then: “As much as I hesitate to highlight any military applications to you, given the consequences almost certain to be brought by the Interstellar Union…yes. That is the obvious application, as I see it.”

  “So that’s why you say it would be pointless for us to travel to the next universe over. We’d just end up swapping places with our doubles, and in a combat situation we’d be under fire from our doubles’ enemies, who are equal in power to our own.”

  “Exactly. The only difference between our universe and the next is whatever quantum measurement caused the two universes to diverge. That’s far from enough to change the outcome of an engagement.”

  “We’d be just as likely to die over there as we were in this universe.”

  “Yes.”

  “All right. I think I’m getting the hang of this.”

  Ochrim looked skeptical about that, but he pressed on with his explanation nonetheless. “After I identified that initial, rather obvious hurdle—” To Husher’s ears, Ochrim placed a definite emphasis on the word “obvious.” “—I set about trying to determine what would be required for us to ‘skip over’ multiple universes, until we reached one different enough to be useful to us. That was no easy task. Remember that in the first experiment, we merely communicated with the next universe by observing a single isolated ion. What I hoped to do now was figure out how to transport an incredibly complex quantum system—namely, a starship of some size—several universes over.”

  “Did you succeed?”

  “No. Not nearly. But in trying, I did discover something else. This is what brings me to what scientists sometimes call a ‘happy accident.’”

  Tired of prompting Ochrim to continue, Husher decided to just wait until the Ixan kept talking.


  Eventually, he did. “I began with the assumption that in order to transcend the layers of decoherence separating the universes, I would first need to figure out a way to generate and then leverage a decoherence-free space. It’s been common knowledge in the field for some time that decoherence can be prevented by firing a photon at an atom whose spin is aligned in the same direction as its path. I thought that maybe travel between the universes might have something to do with repeating that action along the entire path integral—that is, every possible trajectory at once—from within a decoherence-free space.”

  “Um…and did it?” That was Husher’s best attempt at pretending he was keeping up.

  “I don’t know. I never figured out a way to fire an atom in infinity different directions simultaneously. Nevertheless, I decided to have a shot at creating a decoherence-free space anyway, within the simulation at least. That didn’t happen either, but it made me think—what if such a space already exists in the universe, but simply isn’t detectable using regular means? Then I started to wonder how it might be accessed. The idea popped into my head that perhaps negative-mass environments, which we know very little about, might hold the key.”

  “Like the ones created inside warp bubbles?”

  “Exactly. But we’ve made use of negative mass before, in wormhole generators. And so, since there are no actual consequences inside a simulation, I decided to attempt something that would almost certainly be illegal under current galactic law.”

  “You opened a wormhole inside a warp bubble?”

  Ochrim tilted his head sideways. “No. I didn’t bother with warp bubbles. Instead, I generated a new type of wormhole, which encompassed the starship like a sphere.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “The simulation crashed. It couldn’t account for what I was attempting to do.”

  “So…”

  “Captain, if my theory concerning the physics involved is correct, then two things are true. The first is that, in addition to the many-worlds interpretation, membrane or ‘brane’ cosmology also holds true for our particular universe. Basically, the three-dimensional space we live in is just one of many ‘branes’ or ‘dimensions’ that make up our universe and are gravitationally interrelated. The second thing that’s true concerns our use of dark tech. In short, we employed it in completely the wrong way—to connect different parts of three-dimensional space to each other. That’s why the technology was found to have such long-term catastrophic effects; the gravitational load we were placing on our individual brane was too much for it to bear, and if we’d carried on, we would have destroyed it. But I believe that connecting branes is how wormholes are actually meant to be used. That way, the gravitational effects are distributed across branes in a way that is easily borne by the universal substructure.”

  “What benefits are there to connecting the branes?”

  “I’m not sure,” Ochrim admitted. “I’d have to try it to find out. On a much smaller scale, of course—I believe I could do the testing in my lab.”

  “Right. Let me see if I have this straight. You want me to authorize you to use illegal technology so that you can test the benefits of reaching a part of the universe that might not exist and if it does, might not exist in a form that’s of any actual use to us.”

  “Essentially, yes. But it’s not only authorization that I require—I’ll also need Ocharium with which to fabricate the necessary circuitry.”

  “I’m going to have to think about it.”

  Chapter 29

  Thumbs-Down

  It took Maeve Aldaine a few days to make good on her promise to make Husher’s life a living hell, but in the end, she delivered.

  A petition was making the rounds on the Vesta’s narrownet with her name at the top. It called Husher a human supremacist for refusing to sign on to the Positive Response Program, and it also demanded that he resign.

  Even though he was technically off-duty, Husher’s spare moments were typically spent in his office anyway, trying to stay on the speeding treadmill that was keeping his ship running. He hated to take time away from that to put out this fire, but Aldaine’s petition was already approaching three thousand signatures—six percent of Cybele’s population.

  Cybele was in many ways a university town, and so those numbers shouldn’t have surprised him as much as they did. But besides the threat the petition posed, the fact that so many had signed it also kind of stung. He’d always tried his best to be a good captain and a responsible steward of what the capital starship had become, as much as he objected to that transformation. But according to this petition, at least, he’d failed.

  Husher decided the best way to defend himself was to tell the truth about his feelings on this issue—to present his argument with as much logic and sincerity as he could muster. He slid a datapad closer for easy access, willed his Oculenses to bring up the official social aggregator for the Vesta’s crew, and he began typing.

  “I believe the hyper-focus on group identity,” he wrote, “while well-intentioned, is misguided. I believe it’s fragmenting our society even as it’s meant to bring us together. The Interstellar Union was built on the idea that the most important thing about a being isn’t the species or group they belong to, but the content of their character as well as what they have to contribute to our shared society. No one’s species should define them, but initiatives such as the Positive Response Program seek to do exactly that. Such initiatives are fundamentally divisive. Do we have problems associated with interspecies relations in our society? Yes. Deep-seated problems. But forcing group identity to the forefront of our discourse does nothing to address them. On the contrary, I firmly believe it makes them worse.”

  Satisfied with what he’d written, he pushed it out to the various social channels where the crew maintained a presence. Then he returned to using his Oculenses to work through an endless stack of performance reviews, making a note to confer a promotion wherever he thought one was warranted.

  A few hours later, he picked a social channel at random and signed on to check how his post was being received. His eyes widened.

  There were almost a hundred comments, almost all negative, and a number of thumbs-down reactions that far outweighed the number of thumbs-ups. Dozens of users had also rebroadcast the post, and Husher saw that very few of them had added positive commentary.

  When he checked Aldaine’s petition, he saw it had jumped to over five thousand signatures. Over ten percent of Cybele…

  He slumped back in his chair, but the Oculenses made sure his view of the narrownet turmoil followed his vision, and he continued to scroll through pages and pages of outrage.

  “By suggesting that nonhuman beings shouldn’t value their species identity,” said one post that was typical of most of them, “the captain is denying their experiences. Take Wingers. They were slaughtered by the thousands, probably millions, at human hands. Even now, they suffer from institutional biases against them that seem designed to make sure they never do as well as humans. The captain’s advice to ‘forget your species identity’ is a cynical attempt to get beings to stop fighting for their rights, and I find it absolutely disgusting. This captain is a white human supremacist.”

  Husher laughed at that, more from disbelief than from amusement. The narrownet activists, who seemed to outnumber the ones he’d encountered in the streets of Cybele by orders of magnitude, had expanded their demands since Husher had made his post. They were now demanding that he and his human crew join their fellow humans in Cybele by participating in a Nonattendance Day for humans, to show solidarity with their nonhuman brothers and sisters. On that day, humans would be asked not to go out in public.

  A chime rang in the office, indicating someone at the hatch, and Husher willed his Oculenses to go transparent. The narrownet tumult vanished from view, though it seemed to linger in the air around him like an oppressive fog.

  He opened the hatch to find Fesky on the other side. “Need a drink?” she asked.r />
  “Kaboh has the command?”

  “Yep.”

  “All right, then.”

  They went to the Providence Lounge, which was the crew’s lounge, named for the supercarrier that had led the fight against the Ixa during the Second Galactic War. Husher found the name a bit ironic, since he knew for a fact that Captain Keyes would never have permitted a place on his ship where crewmembers were officially sanctioned to drink alcohol. But with Cybele right next door, it was inevitable that the crew would go drinking while off-duty. Better to give them a place of their own, where they didn’t have to worry about civilian scrutiny—and where any trouble they caused was limited to the crew section.

  Crewmembers still went to Cybele bars for variety, of course, and no small amount of trouble had been caused over the years. He never saw too many service members in a place like the Secured Zone, though, despite the militarized name.

  When you entered the Providence Lounge, you saw the bar right away—a long counter that ran along the opposite wall. You could sit there and chat with your neighbors and the bartender, or you could join in at one of the tables, which tended to alternate between card games and lively conversation.

  “I’ll buy,” Fesky said.

  “Thanks,” Husher said, settling into a chair, his gaze drifting to a Poker game being played at a table nearby. “Time to ante up, everybody,” a marine private was saying. “You can’t win if you don’t have some skin in the game.”

  A couple minutes later, Fesky returned with a lager for him and a bottle for herself. Wingers had trouble drinking from glasses, and her beverage contained no alcohol, since the substance did nothing for Winger physiology.

  “It’s pretty rich they’re calling me a white human supremacist, now,” Husher said. “I don’t suppose it counts for anything that my greatest hero was Captain Keyes, a black man.”

  “Of course not,” Fesky said, taking a sip. “You’ve been deemed unrighteous, and by definition it’s impossible for you to ever do anything good.”