Writers of the Future Volume 28: The Best New Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year

by L. Ron Hubbard

  “Could he have been trained?” Anderson said. “People can be taught, can’t they, to beat truth tests?”

  It had occurred to Jared, but was unlikely. “Only if he’s trained as an Operative. Even I would struggle to come through a test like that with a clean score.”

  “A test like that?” Sal said. She’d opened the transcript on Anderson’s screen and was skimming through it. “You didn’t press him too hard from what I can see here.”

  “No, but I was sitting opposite him in a quiet room with no other distractions. I had every deceit cue covered short of sticking a thermometer up his butt—if he was lying, I’d have known.”

  “Well, I don’t care what you think you know. You started all this, you are supposed to be able to find this stuff out.” She was finger-jabbing him as she spoke, leaning forward to punctuate each “you” with a prod in his face. “So why are you not able to do that?”

  “Sal, that will do,” Anderson said. She sat back heavily, still glowering at Jared. Then Anderson faced him, too. “So, what do we do now?”

  What they did was to block off all the avenues that had been used to hijack the Remote Observation satellites. Having focused initially on trying to find the culprit, now they concentrated on the nature of the breach, how the messages had been transmitted and how to stop them in the future. Whoever had done it had covered up well; nothing was left of whatever they’d sent, or the software that had passed those messages to the satellites. But within a day, the gaps in system security had been plugged. Whoever it was, they wouldn’t be doing it again.

  As for Jared himself, his placement had been a ruse from the start, and now even that cover was gone. However, he still had his Alliance Liaison credentials, still had the run of the station and still had a job to do. Anderson had put the hunt for the culprit in Benning’s hands, him and his security team, and with Jared still overseeing the operation, that was where he spent most of his time. Leads, however, were scarce; beyond the system trace that had pointed to Rory Temple in the first place, there was little to go on.

  “The commander’s thinking of bringing Temple in,” Benning said, three days after Rory had been implicated. He and Jared were in Benning’s office, reviewing the evidence to date. “He’s going to talk to him directly.”

  “What does he plan on doing?” Jared said. “Asking straight out if it was him? Or letting Sal loose on him?”

  Benning laughed. “I wouldn’t want to be in the room for that session.”

  Jared smiled back. Benning seemed a good guy to work with. Stocky, middle-aged and graying, but level-headed and quick-thinking with a practical approach to things. Unlike other more hotheaded members of the crew. “So just what is it with Sal? What do you think her problem is?”

  “She’s loyal to Anderson, that’s really all it is. Anything that poses a threat to the mission is a threat to him, and she can be pretty zealous in dealing with it. Overzealous, some might say.”

  Jared wondered if Anderson appreciated Sal’s overprotective approach or just tolerated it. “What do you think Anderson will do now?”

  “I don’t know. To be honest I think he’s hoping that now the breach is plugged, this problem will just go away, that once the Caronoi officially know we’re here, whatever went before won’t matter.”

  “I wouldn’t be so hopeful myself.”

  “Neither would I. I’m glad I’m not in his shoes, you know. He’s got ultimate responsibility for every decision on this mission—the choice of landing site, the procedure for breaking cover, the contingencies if contact goes badly. Then, as if that weren’t enough, first we find out we might have got their tech level wrong, and then this breach happens.”

  “What do you mean we got their tech level wrong?”

  Benning laughed. “You mean there’s something Alliance Liaison doesn’t know first? That makes a change. It’s the Caronoi space program. You know we thought we knew how they’d done it?”

  Jared nodded—it was yet another technological miracle the Caronoi had cooked up in between song sessions and leaf eating: their own space program, their own Voyagers and Cassinis spreading through the system, launched on glorified black powder rockets, processing with analog valves that predated even the transistor era, but nonetheless sending a steady stream of high-quality data on the plethora of giants and supergiants that made up the Caron system. They also had first-generation orbital telescopes, Hubbles and Webbs with what the technical assessments branch had concluded to be impressive capabilities for something so crude—the reason why Kaluza Station had to be concealed so carefully.

  “Go on,” Jared said, intrigued.

  “We’re picking up g-wave emissions in the outer system. They’re difficult to pin down. It’s not like a radio source that you can just focus a receiver onto, but some of them seem to be coming from the same direction as their outbound probes.”

  “So what do we think it is?” he said.

  “Maybe their theoretical understanding of gravity isn’t so theoretical after all.”

  “You mean they’ve had gravity drives all along? And used them on their probes?”

  “First-generation low-thrust devices for course correction? It’s been suggested.”

  It didn’t seem plausible to Jared. He had enough trouble equating the Caronois’ existing achievements to their everyday way of life—the way they pulled metal ore out of the ground, mixed propellants and fuel, invented and built electronic controllers, all so they could put a one-off spacecraft into operation, then go back to living a life that on Earth would have predated the agricultural revolution. But then again the Alliance didn’t initiate contact unless a race had reached a certain level, where space exploration had been demonstrated, physics was encountering the territory beyond relativity and the full-blown manipulation of gravity and unconstrained access to space were only a matter of time.

  “Are you seeing all this on the omni-g?”

  “Some,” Benning said. “Plus some A-vector ghosting on the high gain. It’s faint though.”

  “Can I see what it looks like?”

  “Sure, if it’ll mean anything to you.”

  “It will do,” Jared said. Benning had a better-than-average appreciation of the principles underpinning gravity control, but Jared used to work with this stuff every day.

  Benning brought up the relevant files, and Jared scrolled through to the graphs of what Kaluza’s g-wave detectors had found.

  “A-vector modulation at 850 kilohertz,” he read out loud, “localized stress tensor divergence in dimensions four and five—this isn’t Caronoi.”

  “Then what is it?”

  Jared thought back to his old job and the covert g-wave measurements that were taken whenever Alliance ships visited Earth or encountered human vessels, all so that Earth could see how far in advance the Alliance races really were. The endeavor was dangerous in diplomatic terms, but invaluable in other ways as Sprite, Sephoran, Tessalan and Garrison ships unwittingly yielded their secrets. Sometimes, however, when particularly auspicious or politically sensitive visits were in progress, something else would show up, too.

  “This is Alliance. It’s the Sprites, but not their regular cruisers. They have some kind of special unit, ships they keep at a distance, hovering in the outer system.”

  “So they’re hiding from us while we hide from the Caronoi? That’s just what we need with a breach on our hands, them watching over our shoulders.”

  Something made Jared wonder whether watching was all they were there to do.

  Three weeks passed with no more breaches, but no more sign of who had been responsible in the first place. Then, finally, contact day itself came.

  The transfer deck to the shuttle was barely big enough for the Contact Team, let alone anyone else, but any room with an outside view was considered fair game by those not on shift or those on nonessential duties who
wanted to see the departure for themselves.

  Anderson himself was part of the team. There had been debates about whether it was right for the commander to take part in the first landing, but the risk was considered small and it seemed fitting that he should go. The rest of the team was an assortment of biological, cultural and scientific researchers, chosen by a committee back on Earth to share the honor of first contact.

  There was a speech, by Anderson, relayed across the station video link, made up of his own words marking the event, and messages from heads of state back on Earth. Jared was watching from the rec room, angled back from the sunward side of the station as were most habitable sections, but with enough of a view to show the shuttle when it eventually departed.

  Then the display showed Anderson and the rest of the Contact Team climbing into the craft, wearing the same red jumpsuits that had become their uniform, him in his commander’s black. Then the shuttle undocked and silently moved away from the station until its grav drive was powered up, making it recede into the distance at what would have felt like fifteen Gs if the gravity on board hadn’t been compensated. Within seconds, it was lost to the naked eye, but the station’s long-range sensors kept track of it, relaying the tiny image through the station.

  The spectators dispersed soon after that, and Jared went too, back to his cabin. He checked his watch—in just four hours’ time the shuttle would arrive, then the first step in the carefully choreographed sequence of events would take place: a radio message on the same frequency the Caronoi used for long-distance messaging, with an explanation of who the humans were and why they were here, then a signal of their intent to land. Then there would be an opportunity to reply, and the opportunity to say no if the Caronoi so wished—eventual contact was inevitable, but anything to avoid looking like an invading army could only be a good thing. For the same reason, Kaluza Station would stay hidden, for a few days at least, along with all the other remote probes scattered through the system, though moving the whole operation into Caron-c orbit was always the eventual aim. Then, once the shuttle had made landfall, the first meeting would take place.

  That initial broadcast though—Rory Temple himself had written it, drawing on the cultural and linguistic knowledge that he understood better than anyone. In a way, he already was the spearhead of the contact effort, and the record would show it—so why would he risk so much to get his name in the history books illegally? It just didn’t make sense.

  Jared lay down on his bunk and closed his eyes, thinking through the problem. A question had kept coming back to him all through the hunt for the culprit, a question that no one had ever had time to dwell on when the evidence concerning the breach itself took priority—what had those messages contained? What had Rory or whoever it was said to them? Had the Caronoi really received messages from above and not reacted at all? Or was the evidence there, in the songs that used to filter from tribe to tribe, but nowadays flowed back and forth over the planet’s surface like a web of self-perpetuating knowledge?

  Jared got up and opened a terminal, linking up to the internal feed of recent news and discoveries. There was a group page belonging to the decoding team, a kind of repository of quick look reports on all Caronoi communications that the technical and cultural research teams could browse, and call up the full recordings if they wanted. He scanned through the reports for the last eight weeks, the approximate duration of the breach. Northern hemisphere songs were showing an increased proportion of fictional material, one report said, their own stories and legends playing a big role in a way that wasn’t true for other regions. Then there was a reference to one of the Continent A settlements, playing with new ideas for collecting water in dry seasons, encouraging the growth of plants that collected moisture under their leaves. Then there was a tribe on the west coast of continent B, the readout showed, who had started making rapid advances in the mathematical analysis of competitions and strategies for winning them.

  Jared stopped, wondering why that last part had stood out. He checked the date on the posting—just one week ago. Then he looked back in the archive of postings, searching for anything on the same or related subjects. There was nothing. He stopped, thinking back to his conversation with Rory Temple, running through everything he’d seen and heard, justifying to himself just why this might be significant.

  Then he called the number given for the decoding group and got through to one of their researchers.

  “Hi, I’ve just seen the summary for signal 2/DK/2462,” he said, once he’d identified himself. His heart was pounding with the realization trying to be born in his mind, and it was hard to keep his voice level. “That reference to their mathematics and analysis of competitive behavior—have you ever seen that come up in any other songs or communications?”

  “No, there’s no sign of it here,” the woman said when she’d checked her records.

  “Nothing before a week ago?”

  “No.”

  Jared thought back to that chat with Rory, three full weeks ago, concentrating not on Rory himself but on what he’d tried to hide on his screen, that window that had looked like “Game Theater,” but which the recording in Jared’s implants now showed to be something altogether different.

  “How about other ways of phrasing it, like ‘tactical strategies,’ or ‘competitive analysis,’ or—ah—‘Game Theory’?”

  She checked again. “Nothing,” she said.

  “What about other tribes or other regions?”

  “It’s spread to a few other tribes since then, but the signal you saw seems to be the origin. Beyond that, it’s as if it came out of nowhere.”

  Jared was out of the door and running to Benning’s office before he’d even had time to break off the call. Benning was sitting at his desk, halfway through reading the dailies that his staff had put out.

  “I know who it was,” Jared said. “It was Rory Temple all along.”

  “How do you know?”

  Jared told him everything, up to and including how Rory had information on his Caronoi analysis system three weeks ago that didn’t show up in Caronoi communications until two weeks later.

  “You think this is what he’s sending?” Benning said. “Why this? Why is he giving them math lessons?”

  “You want answers to that, I say we go and ask him. Where is he now?”

  Benning still didn’t seem convinced, but he called up Rory’s details to see the last access point he’d swiped through. The record showed him being on a maintenance deck toward the sunward side of the station. It was far from his usual place of work.

  “What in the hell is he doing there?” Benning said.

  They went to the area indicated in the records, up at the narrow end of the spindle-shaped station, not running but still moving with urgency. The area they ended up in was right under the array of antennas and dishes that were clustered on the sun-facing point of the station. There they slowed, moving quietly, knowing even before they located him that whatever Rory was doing, he wouldn’t want to be found.

  The deck was like a circular corridor matching the sixty-foot diameter of this narrowest part of the station, and they found Rory in an alcove on the outer side, kneeling down with his back to them. The alcove contained ducting and cables running floor to ceiling, presumably leading to one of the antenna arrays on the outer hull, and Rory had plugged a portable omni into one of the monitoring units and was uploading something to the transmitter.

  “Rory, whatever you’re doing, stop,” Jared said.

  He jumped half out of his skin, almost falling over in his haste to get up and turn around. His eyes darted between Jared and Benning, then he backed against the wall, deflated, as he realized he couldn’t get out.

  “You mustn’t stop it,” he said. “There’s too much at stake.”

  “What are you doing?” Benning said, heading over to the omni. He was about to unplug it when Rory ran ove
r, pushing him away, then stepped back with his hands up.

  “Sorry—you can’t do that. Please, you’ve got to listen.”

  Jared’s detectors, tuned for their usual role of spotting untruths, were now screaming one thing at him—Rory was sincere, and was doing what he was doing for a reason he believed in so strongly, he didn’t care what happened to him as long as he could continue. This wasn’t someone out to steal glory.

  “Benning, wait a minute,” Jared said. “Rory, tell me what’s going on here. I promise, I’m listening.”

  “It’s the Caronoi,” he said. “I’ve got to get a message to them.”

  “We know. You’ve already sent them several. But why? What have you been telling them?”

  “How not to get themselves exterminated, that’s what.”

  “What the hell do you mean?” Benning said.

  “It’s the Alliance and the judgment they pass on new races. My grandfather knew. Don’t you realize? He knew what almost happened to us and why. And guess what? Those poor bastards down on Caron-c are heading for the same fate.”

  “So you tipped them off?”

  “Yes, but not in the way you think. I tapped into their songs, the ones they share between continents, and added the elements of the knowledge they’ll need to survive.”

  “What—Game Theory?” Jared said.

  Rory blanched, his eyes widening. “How do you know about that?”

  “It’s started turning up in their songs. The intercepts are showing it.”

  “And now that they know we’re here, all preparations for contact have been wasted,” Benning said.

  “No, it’s not like that,” Rory said. “I hid the information in their songs. They don’t know it’s from outside. If they ever try to trace it back, then it will look like it came out of nowhere, but right now every tribe thinks it must be one of the other tribes that started it.”

  So that’s how he beat the lie test, Jared thought. He was telling the truth when he said actual contact was still to come. “But why Game Theory? How is that meant to save them?”