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

by L. Ron Hubbard

  Rory paused, as if collecting his thoughts on a subject he never expected to have to explain. “The Alliance destroys races that it thinks might be a threat to it. It’s no coincidence that contact always occurs just when a race discovers g-wave tech and starts to control gravity. It’s the point of no return when a race can begin to spread to the stars and exert an influence over what it finds there. But there’s another discovery just beyond gravity control, something even more profound. The way my grandfather described it, it’s like a way of violating causality, a limited form of time travel where you can make effect happen before cause, and it brings massive power—enough to make you think you could defeat the whole Alliance. But you’d be wrong. That’s where Game Theory comes in—in single-play cooperate-or-betray games, defectors always win. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It’s been known for years. If you play time after time and keep score, it’s the strategy that determines the winner. But if you can loop back within the game, and time is no longer sequential, it’s always the instigator who loses. It’s like a fundamental principle, and the Alliance have a name for races who haven’t figured it out—they call them ‘naïves.’ And whenever a naïve race discovers what causality violation can buy them, they always end up using it, no matter how cooperative they might have seemed to begin with. They end up losing—non-sequential Game Theory ensures it—but they do untold damage in the process. That’s why the Alliance does this; that’s why contact is made and judgment is applied—any race liable to make trouble can’t just be contained or left to its own devices. It’s make or break.”

  Jared had more questions than he could count—how could the Alliance be so sure that all naïve races would cause trouble? Why not just tell each new race why it was pointless? And why not contain them rather than wipe them out altogether? But right now, a more immediate question had to be answered.

  “If the Caronoi are already lined up for this, why were we given the job of bringing them in? What’s our part in all this?”

  “To start with, one of our jobs was to find out whether they are naïves or not, even though we didn’t know we were doing it. Check the things the Alliance want us to report on, like the Caronois’ technical and mathematical development—Game Theory is in there, it’s just not obvious. But this is the thing—we’re being tested too. Our Alliance membership is hanging by a thread and always has been. The people who think we’re still being judged, they’re right. And this is the test we’ve been given, to see how we react when the race we’re reaching out to is themselves targeted for elimination.”

  So now they knew the criterion for destruction, Jared thought. There had been countless theories over the last sixty years as to why mankind was nearly eliminated, most of them immediately discounted. It wasn’t because humans were a militarized race, the favorite theory in the early years—for instance, Sephoran starships packed a firepower that would dwarf the whole world’s nuclear arsenal. It wasn’t because humanity had damaged their world’s ecology, or wiped out whole species—at least one Alliance race didn’t even inhabit their home world anymore thanks to the effects of their industrial advancement. Instead, it was this, some obscure bit of mathematics that could relegate a race to extinction just by its absence from their textbooks.

  Jared had felt frustration before at mankind’s lowly position among races that held power of life and death and had deigned to keep humanity ignorant too. Now this revelation made him angry.

  “Is that it? That’s why we nearly died?”

  Rory just nodded.

  “But if you knew this from your grandfather, why didn’t you say anything? We could have known what we were getting into from the start.”

  “At our stage of membership, just knowing the criteria for destruction is enough to ensure destruction. The Alliance want to see us demonstrate truthfully that we’re worthy of joining, not just see us showing them what they want to see. It’s the same for the Caronoi—I had to hide the knowledge in their songs, make it look like they worked it out themselves.”

  “The bastards. The bastard alien freaks, making us jump through hoops in games we’re not even allowed to know the rules to.” Jared worked for the same organization that employed the Speakers, those humans trusted with managing the direct contact with Earth’s sponsor race, the Sprites, so by all rights he should have been all in favor of Alliance membership. But he’d joined up on the rebound from his old job, and whereas there he’d been using Earth’s membership for Earth’s benefit, now he wasn’t really sure whose interests he was serving. And all through his time there he’d had a suspicion that there was something deeply wrong with the position humanity had been put in, the continued life-or-death judgment, just by making themselves known to other races.

  “That’s why the Alliance are here,” he said. “They’re here to put the extermination order into practice.”

  “They’re here?” Rory said.

  “Yes.” Jared told him about the g-wave intercepts, the now unmistakable signs of Sprite ships hanging back in the outer system.

  “That’s them,” Rory said. “My grandfather talked about special ships they use, some kind of elimination unit, with planet-busting weapons.”

  “But aren’t the Caronoi safe now? You’ve put the knowledge into their songs.”

  “Not enough though, I never got past the basics. I even had to teach them what conflict is, the idea is so alien to them. Then I lost contact.”

  “That was us,” Jared said. “We cut the feeds to the satellites. But are the Caronoi really going to be wiped out? How can a race turn bad if they have to have the very concept of conflict explained to them?”

  “I don’t know; all I have is what my grandfather was told—the Alliance think that races like that are the most dangerous of all.”

  “So what options do we have?”

  “Options?” Benning said. “We came here to arrest this guy; now you’re asking him about options?”

  It was true, Jared thought. But now that he knew the truth, he couldn’t do anything else. “Yes. We can’t just do nothing and let an innocent race be exterminated.”

  “We need to get this message to Anderson,” Benning said, still unsure about whether they were doing the right thing.

  “We may not have time,” Jared said. “The Contact Team shuttle is in radio silence, all the way in. Even their receivers are off. Rory, if we can arrange for you to use the station’s transmitters, can you get the rest of the information into the Caronoi songs in time?”

  “I don’t think so. I was trying just now, but it’s probably too late.”

  “Wait,” Benning said. “We’re overstepping the mark here. Even if the kind of intervention he was attempting is right, it’s not our remit to—”

  “But we do not have time!” Rory was shouting now, desperation showing through. “Once contact is made they’re done for! Their dealings with us and the rest of the Alliance will only escalate and there’ll be no way I can give them this knowledge and pretend it’s always been there. We have to act now!”

  “But what can we do?” Jared said.

  Rory hesitated; a possibility had clearly occurred to him, but he seemed reticent to share it. “I have a song fragment already scripted that gives the full knowledge in one go,” he said eventually. “But it’s too late to be subtle. Trying to slip it into their emissary transmissions is too slow—the stuff I send doesn’t always get picked up, and I have to resend each stage unless I’m sure it’s sunk in. It’s taken me months just to get this far. To guarantee success we’d have to go there and feed it into a song directly. I mean find a song ritual in progress and go to Caron-c in person, ahead of the official contact event.”

  Benning shook his head. “Absolutely out of the question,” he said. “If you think you’re going to upstage this whole effort on your own, then think again.”

  Jared knew the next move was in his hands. Though by
using his position in a way Alliance Liaison would never sanction, he would be throwing his career and possibly his freedom away. “As an agent of the Office of Alliance Liaison, I have the authority to requisition any equipment or personnel on this station,” he said. “Rory, you’re going to come with me, and we’re going to take a shuttle and go down to the planet.”

  “No way,” Benning said. “I can’t allow that.”

  Benning was a reasonable man, and Jared felt bad coercing him into acting illegally. But Jared had the will—and the authority—to act.

  “This is now OAL business—you know what that means.”

  Benning seemed torn between further protest, and giving in to Jared’s authority. “You’ll need access codes to the shuttle,” he said, bowing to the inevitable. “The commander would normally hold those. He’s deputized Sal in his absence.”

  For the first time since reaching his decision, Jared hesitated. “She’s going to be trouble,” he said. “Is there any way around it?”

  “You can’t get off this station without getting past her.”

  “Then that’s what we have to do.”

  A figure appeared in the doorway. “And just how do you plan on doing that?” It was Sal herself; on a station where anyone could be tracked through any access point, it should have been no wonder that Anderson’s designated troubleshooter would find them.

  “How much did you hear?” Jared said.

  “Enough to get a squad of guards up here and have you taken in. And him too,” she added, indicating Rory.

  “No, this is too important. If you heard what’s going to happen down there, then you have to help us.”

  She shook her head. “No way. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.” Then she reached to her belt, where her Taser was kept.

  Jared had received full Operative training when he joined OAL as a field agent. As a roving troubleshooter with the success or failure of Earth’s interplanetary relations in his hands, he had to be prepared for any situation. And even though he’d never had a real-life physical fight since he was ten years old, the Operative combat training and implant-boosted reflexes were there nonetheless, ready to come to the fore when needed.

  He found himself running at her before he even knew what he was doing. She went for the Taser, taking aim in slow motion compared to the speed Jared was moving, then fired early, too early for the darts to fly true. He dodged them, then turned his shoulder toward her and barged her to the side. He only intended to push her off balance and disarm her, but as she lost her footing, she stumbled against the doorway and hit the back of her head on the sheet steel floor.

  “Damn!” Benning said, running over to her. He checked her pulse, then lifted her eyelids to look at her eyes. “She’s alive.”

  “How are we going to get the codes now?” Rory said.

  “I saw a maintenance office on the way here, one level down,” Jared said. “We can drag her down there and use her palm print on one of the terminals.”

  “Are you serious?” Benning said, deathly pale.

  “Yes, and you’re going to help me.”

  Benning was in a cold sweat as he helped Jared move Sal’s unconscious body, but he did as he was told. Rory stepped in to help too, maneuvering her down a stairway and into the empty office. Then Jared activated the terminal, holding her right hand to the reader as he logged in under her name.

  “You know how these files are laid out,” he said to Benning. “You find the codes.”

  Benning complied, copying the crucial information to his own storage key. Then Jared pulled four chairs together and laid Sal out on them. She wasn’t bleeding or swelling, but showed no signs of moving either.

  “We’ll call the med bay once we’re in the shuttle. Come on, let’s do this.”

  Jared looked back as Kaluza Station receded behind them, its needle-like profile all but invisible when looking down its central axis. Behind it, the bulk of Caron-e sat, its vast ring system tilted out of the orbital plane, casting a hundred parabolic shadows over its surface. The shuttle pulled away from Kaluza to a distance of five kilometers, then its grav drives activated, giving it the same fifteen-G acceleration that had taken the Contact Team down to the inner system. It was the fastest they could get there, but as the Contact Team were destined to spend hours in high orbit before landing, they still had hopes of beating them to the planet’s surface. Once the acceleration was underway, Jared stepped away from the window and went over to where Rory was reprogramming the omni, translating the song fragments he’d formulated into as many dialects as possible so they could land wherever they needed and deliver the message without delay.

  Two hours later the midway point of the journey was reached and the shuttle began decelerating. Another two hours later, they were there.

  Caron-c was so like Earth, the way its blue, brown and green surface lay blanketed in white clouds, the way the light of its parent sun shone off its oceans like a blaze of white fire. Only the shapes of the land masses betrayed the truth: the two main continents running north to south, connecting the two hemispheres like elongated dumbbells with the three smaller continents sitting between them. And above the planet’s horizon hung its only moon, Carpathia, as cratered and airless as Earth’s moon but almost golden in color. They entered an orbit two hundred miles above the surface, with all radio sources and illumination deactivated. There was still a chance that they would be detected though—the Contact Team shuttle was orbiting nine hundred miles higher, and even though its radar was off, it still had sensors that might pick them up as it scanned for the Caronois’ replies to the welcome message. And the Caronoi themselves, watching the heavens just as keenly, might also spot a new arrival within hours of it orbiting their planet.

  Jared and Rory scanned the planet from above, tuning into the frequencies the Caronoi used to spread their songs across the globe. What they wanted was a song ritual in progress, preferably only just begun. It took twenty minutes before Rory announced that he’d found one.

  “That’s it,” he said. ‘‘Continent C, northern peninsula. Not ideal, but it’s the best we have.”

  “Why is it not ideal?” Benning said.

  “This area doesn’t breed intellectual heavyweights,” Rory said. “It’ll look weird to the Caronoi that this group made the breakthrough. But it’ll have to do.”

  They began their descent, shedding orbital velocity fast, preparing for aerodynamic flight as they dropped into the upper atmosphere. They’d lost too much speed to heat up appreciably—no old-style reentries now gravity itself had been harnessed—but the sound of the supersonic airflow rushing over the airframe whistled into the cabin like a distant gale. Then, as they got lower, they turned off to the side, toward the source of the emissions. The sky around them was pastel blue, cloud banks like strings of cotton balls dividing the air into layers of temperature and humidity, with a mottled landscape of green and brown below them. Any temperate zone on Earth could have looked like this.

  Then they went low, maneuvering around any known concentrations of population, descending until the treetops looked close enough to touch. The canopies were slightly too dark, too angular in shape to be earthly—for only at twenty meters altitude did the planet start to look like somewhere other than home. Then they encountered a series of undulating ridges with broad valleys between them. In one of them, they stopped as Benning brought them to a hover just above ground level, checking the map display.

  “This valley leads to the sea,” he said. “According to this they’re on the coast a few miles up.”

  He took them north, following the valley floor as the ridges to either side petered out, leaving them on a broad coastal plain. The land met the sea in a series of rocky ledges, and it was on one of these that the Caronoi had gathered. They could see the Caronoi, not just huddled together, but piled on top of one another in a heaped congregation twenty meters
long and three high, standing on each other’s shoulders and flanks like an irregular framework of limbs and torsos.

  Benning landed them a few hundred meters inland; then they quickly gathered up everything they’d need, including Rory’s omni and the audio files it contained. Then they opened the shuttle’s rear hatch and stepped out onto the surface of the planet.

  The smell was what Jared noticed first, smells of sea spray and salt and ozone, mixed with odors of cut grass and pine sap that seemed to mix in different ways as he turned his head. The air was cold, the light fading, and it felt like an autumn day’s twilight on a chilly seashore back where he’d grown up in Maine. He could hear the sea hitting the rocks, the wind blowing in off the water, but most of all he could hear the Caronoi themselves, that low droning sound pulsing and fluctuating, interspersed with chirps and whistles as whole volumes of information passed between them.

  “Come on,” Rory said, dashing around to the front of the shuttle, then onward to the Caronoi gathering. He ran over to them, then stopped just short of the closest ones. Jared ran after him and stopped alongside. The Caronoi were close enough to touch, every mark on their mottled white bodies visible, but locked into their song, trancing, they were completely unaware of their new visitors. It felt like sneaking up on someone in their sleep.

  “Amazing,” Rory said under his breath, then reached out and gently touched the closest one. First contact, in this case literally. “Right, let’s get this started.”

  “Have they reached the right bit of the song?” Jared said.

  “It doesn’t work that way, they don’t separate out the subjects like that. The songs are more like audio holograms—as long as we got here early enough we can pipe the information in and give them time to digest it.”

  He opened up the omni and selected the song files for this dialect. Then he set them playing, adding his contribution to the close harmony rendition of an entire race’s knowledge. A couple of the nearest Caronoi shifted their posture in response to the new sound, as if trying to locate it, make out what it said.