Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  After Mr. Kanza bought out his contract, Carver resolved to become a model worker, cultivate patience, and wait for a chance to escape; now, wondering if that chance had finally come, if he could turn Mr. Kanza’s crude trick to his advantage, he stepped hard on his anger and held his tongue.

  Mr. Kanza said to Rider Jackson, “You see? Not a speck of gratitude.”

  Rider Jackson turned his tell-nothing expression on Carver; Carver stared back at him through his brother’s faked-up ghost.

  The young lieutenant said to Mr. Kanza, “You’re certain we can trust him?”

  “I’ve had him a year. He’s never given me any trouble, and he won’t give us any trouble now,” Mr. Kanza said, pointing a finger at Carver. “Can you guess why I went to all the trouble of buying out your brother’s contract?”

  Carver shrugged, as if it meant nothing to him.

  Mr. Kanza said, “You really should show me some gratitude. Not only have I already saved your brother’s life, but if everything works out, I’ll void his contract, and void yours too. You’ll both be free.”

  “Meanwhile, you’re holding him hostage, to make sure that I’ll do whatever it is you want me to do.”

  Mr. Kanza told Rider Jackson, “There it is. I have his brother as insurance, the tug will fly itself, and if he does get it into his head to try something stupid, I can intervene by wire. If worst comes to worst, I’ll be the one short a flight engineer and a good little ship; as far as you’re concerned, this is a risk-free proposition.”

  ‘As long as the Navy doesn’t find out about it,” Rider Jackson said.

  “We’ve been over that,” Mr. Kanza said.

  Carver saw that there was something tense and wary behind Mr. Kan-za’s smile, and realized that he had worked up some reckless plan to get himself out of the hole, that he needed Rider Jackson’s help to do it, and he needed Carver too.

  “We’ve talked it up and down,” Mr. Kanza told Rider Jackson. “There’s no good reason why the Navy should know anything about this until you buy out your service.”

  Rider Jackson studied him, then shrugged and said, “Okay.”

  Just like that. Two days later, Carver was aboard Mr. Kanza’s tug, cooled down in hypersleep while the small ship aimed itself at the brown dwarf, Ganesh Five B.

  Mr. Kanza made extensive use of a data mining AI to track down skilled prisoners of war who were being used as common laborers, and to look for business opportunities overlooked by his rivals. The data miner had linked a news item about an alien and an astrophysicist who had disappeared after hiring a small yacht just before the beginning of the war with an academic article by the astrophysicist, Liu Chen Smith, that described an anomalous neutrino flux emitted by a pinpoint source within a permanent storm in the smoky atmosphere of a brown dwarf, Ganesh Five B. It was possible, the data miner suggested, that the alien, a !Cha that called itself Useless Beauty, had bankrolled an expedition to find out if the neutrino source was some kind of Elder Culture artifact.

  Although most of the systems linked by wormhole networks were littered with the ruins of the cities, settlements, and orbital and free-floating habitats of Elder Culture species, these had been picked clean long ago by the dozens of species that preceded human colonization. Working examples of Elder Culture technology were fabulously rare and valuable. There was only a slim chance that the neutrino source was some kind of artifact, but if it was, and if Mr. Kanza could capture it, his financial difficulties would be over. He had one big problem: if the garrison that policed the Ganesh Five system found out about the neutrino source, the Navy would claim it for the state. That was where Rider Jackson, a criminal turned war hero, came in.

  Rider Jackson had been born and raised on a reef circling a red dwarf star, Stein 8641. When their sheep ranch failed, Rider Jackson’s father ran off on a trade ship and his mother committed suicide. At age sixteen, Rider Jackson, their only child, inherited the responsibility of honoring his family’s debts. Our Thing, Stein 8641’s parliament, ruled that he should be indentured to his father’s chief creditors, the Myer family, until he had paid off all that was owed. Five years later, the day after war was declared between the Alliance and the Collective, he stole one of the Myer family’s ships and lit out, abandoning the ship in the sprawling docks of New Babylon and turning up the next day at a Navy recruiting office in the planet’s dusty capital, where he was promptly arrested for carrying false ID, a crime against the state that earned him ten years indentured labor. Soon afterward, having suffered two devastating defeats in quick succession, the Collective’s armed forces rounded up everyone with freefall experience from the state’s pool of indentured workers. Rider Jackson’s sentence was commuted to ten years’ service in the Navy. He fought in three campaigns in two different systems, and then his drop ship was hit by an Alliance raider and broke apart. Rider Jackson took charge of a gig and rescued seventy-eight warm bodies, including the drop ship’s captain. His heroism won him his lieutenant’s pip, a chestful of medals, and public acclaim, but his criminal history prevented him rising any higher, and at the end of the war, the Navy stashed him in the Ganesh Five garrison, with no hope of promotion or transfer, and nothing to do but listen to the self-pitying monologues of his commander, make random checks on ships passing between the wormholes, and file endless status reports. He still had seven years to serve, and after that he would be returned to Stein 8641, and the Myer family.

  Mr. Kanza, knowing that Rider Jackson couldn’t afford to buy out the unserved portion of his contract with the Navy, much less pay what he still owed the Myer family, had made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: help chase the hot lead on what might be an Elder Culture artifact in return for fifty percent of any profit. Mr. Kanza brought to the deal the information he’d uncovered, a ship, and someone to fly it; Rider Jackson rejigged the garrison’s tracking station to cover up the flight of Mr. Kanza’s tug, and used its deep space array to survey the brown dwarf. He found two things. The first was a microwatt beacon from an escape pod in orbit around Ganesh Five B. The second was that there was no longer any anomalous neutrino flux within the brown dwarf. It looked like Dr. Smith and the !Cha had captured the neutrino source, but then had got into some kind of trouble that had forced them to abandon their ship.

  No wormhole throat orbited Ganesh Five B; the only way to reach it was through real space, a round trip of more than sixty days. Rider Jackson couldn’t take a leave of absence from his post and Mr. Kanza was unwilling to risk his life, and couldn’t afford to hire a specialized, fully autonomous rescue drone because he was more or less broke and had exhausted all his lines of credit. His lightly modified tug, with Carver White riding along as troubleshooter, would have to do the job.

  Carver learned all this while he helped Mr. Kanza prep the tug. He quickly realized that even if he brought back something that made Mr. Kanza and Rider Jackson the richest men alive, Mr. Kanza wouldn’t keep his promise about freeing him; if he was going to survive this, he would have to find some way of exploiting the fact that he knew Mr. Kanza’s story about holding Jarred hostage was a bluff. He also realized that he didn’t have much chance of taking control of the tug and lighting out for somewhere other than the brown dwarf. He would be shut down in hyper-sleep for most of the trip, and the tug was controlled by an unhackable triumvirate of AIs that, sealed deep in the tug’s keel, constantly checked each other’s status. Not only that, but Mr. Kanza demonstrated with a ten-second burst of agony that he had hidden a shock stick in the tug too, and could use it to stimulate Carver’s Judas bridge if it looked like he was going to cause trouble.

  Carver’s last thoughts before hypersleep closed him down were about whether he had done enough to make sure he could live through this; it was the first thing on his mind when he woke some thirty-one days later, in orbit around the brown dwarf.

  The tug had discovered a scattering of debris, including hull plates, chunks of a fusion motor, and a human corpse in a pressure suit—it was clear tha
t Dr. Smith hadn’t survived the destruction of her ship—and it had also located the escape pod, which was tumbling in an oblate orbit that skimmed close to the outer edge of the brown dwarf’s atmosphere before swinging away to more than twenty million kilometers at apogee. A blurry neutron density scan snatched by a throwaway probe revealed that the pod contained a !Cha’s life tank, but its AI had refused to respond to the tug’s attempts to shake hands with it, and there had been no response to an automated hailing message either: there was no way of knowing if the !Cha, Useless Beauty, was dead or alive.

  The tug played a brief voice-only message from Mr. Kanza, telling Carver that he was to suit up and go outside and retrieve Dr. Smith’s corpse.

  “She may be carrying something that will tell me what killed her. Also, her relatives may pay a finder’s fee for the return of her body.”

  The tug was already matching delta vee with the body. By the time Carver had sent an acknowledgment to the message (it would take five and a half hours to reach Mr. Kanza), eaten his first meal since waking, and suited up, the tug and Dr. Smith’s corpse were revolving around each other at a distance of just a few hundred meters.

  Carver rode across the gap on a collapsible broomstick. Ganesh Five B filled half the sky, a dim red disk marbled by black clouds spun into ragged bands by its swift rotation; Dr. Smith’s corpse was silhouetted against the baleful light of this failed star, tumbling head over heels, arms and legs akimbo. Her pressure suit was ruptured in several places, and covered by fine carbon particles blown into space by eruptions in the brown dwarf’s magnetosphere; a fog of dislodged soot gathered around Carver as he fixed a line between the dead woman’s utility belt and his broomstick.

  After he’d towed the body back to the tug and stowed it in the cargo hold, Carver discovered a long tangle of transparent thread thinner than a human hair wrapped around Dr. Smith’s right arm. He couldn’t cut off a sample with any of his suit’s tools; he had to unwind the entire tangle before he could bring it inside the tug and feed one end of it into the compact automated laboratory. He’d brought the computer from Dr. Smith’s suit inside too, but its little mind was dead and its memory had been irretrievably damaged by years of exposure to the brown dwarf’s magnetic and radiation fields.

  The lab determined that the thread was woven from fullerene nano-tubes doped with atoms of beryllium, magnesium, and iron, and spun into long helical domains, was a room-temperature superconductor with the tensile properties of construction diamond: useful properties, but hardly unique. Even so, the fact that its composition didn’t match any known fullerene superconductors was tantalizing, and although he told himself that it was most likely junk, debris in which Dr. Smith’s body had become entangled after the destruction of her ship, Carver carefully wound the thread around a screwdriver, and shoved the screwdriver into one of the pouches of his p-suit’s utility belt.

  He had been hoping that the astrophysicist had survived; that she had been sleeping inside the escape pod; that after he’d woken her, she would have agreed to help him. He knew now that everything depended on whether or not the !Cha was alive or dead, and reckoned things would go easier if it was dead. Because if it was still alive, he would have to try to make a deal with it, and that was a lot riskier than trying to make a go of it on his own. For one thing, it was possible that the !Cha had murdered Dr. Smith because it wanted to keep whatever it was they’d found to itself. For another, like every other alien species, the !Cha made it clear that human beings didn’t count for much. Ever since first contact, when the Jackaroo kicked off a global war on Earth and swindled the survivors out of rights to most of the solar system in exchange for a basic fusion drive and access to a wormhole network linking a couple of dozen lousy M-class red dwarf stars, aliens had been tricking, bamboozling, and manipulating the human race. In the long run, like other species before them, humans would either kill themselves off or stumble onto the trick of ascendency and go on to wherever it is the Elder Cultures have gone, but meanwhile they were at the mercy of species more powerful than them, pawns in games whose rules they didn’t know, and aims they didn’t understand.

  Carver had a little time to work out how to deal with the !Cha; before it retrieved the escape pod, the tug spawned dozens of probes and mapped the brown dwarf with everything from optical and microwave radar surveys to a quantum gravity scan. Ganesh Five B was a cool, small T-type, formed like any ordinary star by condensation within an interstellar gas cloud, but at just eight times the mass of Jupiter, too small to support ordinary hydrogen fusion. Gravitational contraction and a small amount of sluggish deuterium fusion in its core warmed its dusty atmosphere to a little under 1500 degrees centigrade. There were metal hydrides and methane down there, even traces of water. Sometimes, its bands of sooty clouds were lit by obscure chains of lightning thousands of kilometers long. Sometimes, when the tug passed directly above the top of a convection cell, those huge, slow elevators that brought up heat from the core, Carver caught a glimpse of the deep interior, a fugitive flash of brighter red flecked with orange and yellow.

  And at every tenth orbit, the tug passed over the permanent storm at the brown dwarf’s equator, the location of the anomalous neutrino flux that had drawn Dr. Smith and the !Cha to Ganesh Five B. The storm’s pale lens was more than fifteen thousand kilometers across; probes dropped into it discovered a complex architecture of fractal clusters crawling and racheting around each other like the gears of an insanely complicated mechanism bigger than the Earth. They also discovered that it was no longer emitting neutrinos, and it was breaking up along its edges—the tug’s AIs estimated that it would break up in less than ten years.

  While the tug swung around the brown dwarf’s dim fires, Carver thought about the !Cha and what he had to do when the tug returned to Sheffield, and he lost himself in memories of his dead brother. He and Jarred had been close, two Navy brats following their parents from base to base, system to system. Although Jarred had been two years younger than Carver, he’d also been brighter and bolder, a natural leader, graduating at the top of his class in the Navy academy. The war had already begun when he graduated; the day after his passing-out parade, he followed Carver into active duty.

  The last time Carver had seen Jarred, they’d spent three days together in the port city of Our Lady of the Flowers, Persopolis. It was the beginning of Jarred’s leave, the end of Carver’s. The night before Carver shipped out, they bar-hopped along the city’s famous Strand. The more Jarred drank, the more serious and thoughtful he became. He told Carver that whichever side won the war, both would have to work hard at the peace if humanity was to have any chance at surviving.

  “War only happens when peace breaks down. That’s why peace is harder work, but more worthwhile.”

  “We defeat the Collective, we impose terms,” Carver said. “Where’s the problem?”

  “If we won the war and imposed terms on the Collective, forced it to change, it would be an act of aggression,” Jarred said. “The Collective would respond in kind and there would be another war. Instead of forcing change, we have to establish some kind of common ground.”

  “We don’t have anything in common with those slavers.”

  “We have more in common with them than with the Jackaroo, or the Pale, or the !Cha. And if we don’t find some way of living together,” Jarred said, “we’ll grow so far apart that we’ll end up destroying each other.”

  He started to tell Carver about a loose network of people who were discussing how to broker a lasting peace, and Carver said that he didn’t want to hear about it, told Jarred he should be careful, what he and his friends were doing sounded a little like treason. Now, in the cramped lifesystem of the tug, endlessly falling around a failed star, six billion kilometers from the nearest human being, Carver thought about what his brother had said on their last night together. Carver had gone a little crazy when he’d heard about his brother’s death because it had been about as good and noble as an industrial accident. One mac
hine had destroyed another, and Jarred and the rest of the Croatian’s crew had been incidental casualties who’d had no chance to fight back or escape. It was a brutal irony that Jarred’s death could help Carver win his freedom.

  At last, the tug fired up its motor and slipped into a new orbit, creeping up behind the escape pod, swallowing its black pip whole, then firing up again, a long hard burn to achieve escape velocity from the brown dwarf’s gravity well. It pinned Carver to his couch for more than two hours. When it was over, following Mr. Kanza’s instructions to the letter, Carver suited up, went outside, and clambered through the access hatch of the cargo bay.

  The pod’s systems were in sleep mode; careful use of a handheld neutron density scanner confirmed that apart from a !Cha tank, it contained nothing out of the ordinary. If Dr. Smith and Useless Beauty had retrieved something from the brown dwarf, either it had been lost with their ship, or it was hidden inside the !Cha’s impervious casing.

  Carver didn’t attempt to contact the !Cha. He knew that his only chance of escape lay in a narrow window of opportunity during the final part of the return journey; until then, he wanted to keep his plans to himself. He fixed telltales inside the cargo bay in case the !Cha decided to try to break out, locked it up, climbed back inside the lifesystem, and sent a report to Mr. Kanza, and let the couch put him to sleep.

  Carver was supposed to remain in hypersleep until rendezvous with Mr. Kanza’s scow, but he’d managed to reprogram the couch while prepping the tug. It woke him twelve hours early, four million kilometers out from Sheffield.