Ship of Destiny

by Frank Chadwick

  “Can I?” he said after the communication lag, and then he laughed. “I already told Admiral Goldjune he needs to come up with a good microbiologist, and fast. I hate to say it but that’s probably going to do you more good than a particle-smasher like me looking at this. You’ve seen the visuals on the drive core yourself, right?”

  “Yes,” she answered, “I’ve been watching the vid feed from the start. I don’t know what I expected the jump core to look like, but this isn’t it. Just layer after layer of very thin metallic plates, which look to be either gold or gold-plated, and some sort of glutinous lubricating medium. Aside from interface systems connecting it to the jump actuators in the control suite, that seems to be all there is.”

  During the communication lag she wondered how many years it had been since Wu had even visited China. He didn’t sound Chinese. Any scientist would be fluent in English, of course, but he spoke it almost without an accent.

  “Yeah,” Wu said after the delay. “Seems is right. Whoever built that thing thinks a lot differently than we do. We look and see the machine as all those wafer-thin plates, with some sort of goo on them. Here’s a good one for you: the goo is the machine. It’s a colony of some sort of microbial lifeform, which apparently lives on waste heat or whatever electromagnetic energy is available. It was dormant when we started looking but as soon as we gave it some light it started waking up and once it got some electricity, hot damn! Those single-cell microbes live between the circuit boards and serve as selective biosuperconductors, opening and closing circuits between the panels.

  “Those low-power tests I ran? A pre-jump sequence? As soon as the sequence was initiated, there was a spike in colony activity and the organisms formed new circuitry patterns of bewildering complexity—bewildering at least to me. I had to go back to some knot theory math I hadn’t worked with for about a decade to make heads or tails out of all those three-dimensional circuitry flow patterns. Man, I really hate knot theory: crossings, braids, links, ambient isotopy, fourth-dimensional deknotting . . . damn, give me a break!”

  He put the unlit cigar in his mouth and chewed thoughtfully on it.

  “String theory?” Moe asked.

  Wu shook his head after the lag. “Knot theory, not string theory.”

  “Knotted string theory?”

  Wu laughed after the next lag. “This could turn into a pretty good comedy routine, if you’re into dumb physics jokes. And who isn’t, right? Knot theory, just plain old knot theory. No strings involved.”

  “I sympathize with your frustration, Dr. Wu,” Cassandra said, “but I am not sure I understand the significance of all that.”

  “Right,” he said after the communication lag. “A knot is a mathematically described line segment which at some point doubles back across itself. The complexity of a knot is described, among other ways, by the number of times the line segment crosses itself. A very simple knot you would tie in a piece of string has three crossings: the first one when you fold it back across itself, the second when you double it back under, the third one when you push it through the loop. Got it?”

  “I think so, yes.”

  “Well, in this three-dimensional circuitry flow pattern our e-nexus core identified knots with approximately five times ten to the seventh crossings.”

  “Wait,” Heidegger said. “They constructed a coherent mathematical knot with over fifty million crossings?”

  “Not a knot,” Wu answered. “Several tens of thousands of knots, as near as I can tell. Even with that hotshot naval computing suite, it’s a lot for one guy to handle. I’d like your admiral to find me a professional number cruncher as backup as well. But here’s the kicker: it changes and forms a new set of circuits over one thousand times a second.”

  They sat silently trying to make sense of that, Wu again chewing on his cigar and smiling slightly. He apparently enjoyed watching the confusion on their faces, a confusion he had already worked through. Cassandra could not imagine what all those different unique patterns might be. And then she could.

  “It’s calculating, isn’t it?” she said.

  “That’s where I’d put my money,” Wu answered with a grin.

  “Well,” Moe Rice said, “it’s got a lot of molecules to move during a jump, and it’s pretty good at keeping them in the right place, judging from experience. Doesn’t sound like too many calculations when you look at it that way.”

  “No,” Dr. Wu agreed. “In fact, it is still inadequate to that task if it actually calculates separately for every molecule it moves in a jump. I bet it has some sort of pattern-recognition shortcut which manages to reduce the number of required calculations to a manageable level and mass apply them to an entire set of molecules.”

  Cassandra thought about that: over a thousand calculations a second, each involving tens of thousands of circuit knots, each with around fifty-million crossings. How many data points was that? Even assuming just one bit per crossing, it came out to . . . more than she could calculate in her head. And that was after the problem was reduced to a manageable level.

  “The thing that’s got me stumped,” Wu went on, “is how it moves those molecules. I spent my early life chasing the dream that there was some way around the Varoki lock on theoretical physics. The Cottohazz intellectual property laws give them ownership of anything discovered based on knowledge they already own, but I guess every young buck physicist like me thinks there’s a way to wiggle past that, to find a research path that is so generic the big Varoki trading houses can’t claim ownership. But there isn’t, and the big reason is they won’t let us know how this damn drive works. Trade secret, they say. But if we don’t know what principle they’ve discovered to make this thing work, we don’t know where to look for something they haven’t discovered already. You see?”

  “Is that why you left physics to become a purser on a starship?” Cassandra said.

  “Sure. If I couldn’t figure out how the damned things worked, at least I could ride them. See the stars, you know? And you know what it got me? It got me right here, the first non-Varoki physicist in history to look inside a jump core and live to tell the story.

  “Physicists have been dying to get a look inside a jump core as long as I’ve been alive—longer, even—just so we could see what the thing does. Now here I am, like I won the biggest physics lottery in history, I’m looking right at the goddamned thing while it’s working, and I got nothing! Makes me want to come up there and give that son of a bitch a good hard kick.”

  He scowled and put the unlit cigar back in his mouth.

  “So why do you need a microbiologist?” Rice asked.

  Good question, Cassandra thought. Trust Rice to see past all the clutter.

  “Well, I looked at the initial tests on the biological material the one sampler bot collected. We’d like to understand how that killer solvent works, right? The bot got some of the aerosol solvent and also scooped some material from the main colony organism. The chemical bath stripped out a couple thousand distinct proteins, which isn’t all that many. The problem is they aren’t identifiable as anything we’ve seen before.”

  “Obviously, they are not from our tree of life,” Heidegger said. “The Varoki invented the jump drive. They must be proteins from their home world.”

  “Nope,” Wu answered, “not even close. And not from any other ecosystem in the Cottohazz, either. You run all the amino acid code chains through the universal protein database and you get about two thousand ‘no match found’ results.

  “Now what do you make of that?”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Four months earlier, aboard USS Cam Ranh Bay

  7 April 2134 (thirteen days after arrival at Destination,

  second day in orbit around Destie-Four,

  fifty-eight days after Incident Seventeen)

  As executive officer, Mikko did not have a spot in the normal watch rotation, but she filled in as necessary when one of the senior officers had a pressing job to attend to. The Red Watch wa
s Homer Alexander’s, but he was working with his missile-room crew, making sure they were up to speed on the modified Mark Five intercept missiles, and so she sat in as OOD—Officer of the Deck. She didn’t mind. She liked sitting watch now and then. It gave her time to think.

  Right now, she was being forced to rethink her notions concerning heroism. If there were any heroes who survived the uBakai War, Sam Bitka’s name had to be on the list, but he wasn’t what she had imagined, or fantasized. Part of that was due to the secrets he had shared over bourbon after Chief Duransky’s hearing, but other differences were subtler.

  For instance, whenever anyone asked him to share lessons from the war he did so, but never in a way that suggested he had done anything remarkable. Mikko at first put that down to modesty, the sort of self-effacement she expected from “real heroes.” Most of the other senior officers did as well. But over the last few weeks, as she and the captain worked together, she no longer believed that. He was trying to prepare them for what was coming, prepare them to face whatever lay ahead, and to face it alone, without him to rely on.

  She had begun to think the captain had a premonition of his own death. She wondered if part of him did not secretly wish for it. When she came upon him alone, lost in thought, unaware that anyone was watching him, sometimes he seemed so terribly sad.

  In that, he reminded her of J. C. Merderet, commander of the embarked Marine contingent—another hero who insisted all she had done was her job, and all she demanded of her Marines was that they do their jobs.

  Mikko was beginning to understand, or at least believe, that heroism often simply meant doing your job when the world conspired to make doing so impossibly frightening, dangerous, and difficult. That was what she thought the captain was trying to prepare them for, and the implied horror of that approaching test had driven every bit of romantic infatuation from Mikko. She thought she was coming to love Sam Bitka, but not as a man, as a fellow human being.

  “Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan is talking to the New People again,” Bohannon said as she strapped into the Comm One chair beside her. “Or still, I guess. Ever since we cracked the Destie language . . . Christ, it never seems to get tired. Sometimes it just walks over to a couch, lies down with its creepy little kid, and sort of turns off, you know? Like switching off the light. A couple hours later it wakes up and starts again. The Desties must run shifts of talkers with it. I needed a break.”

  “Hey,” the sensor tech in the Tac One seat to Mikko’s right said. “I’m getting a surge in radio traffic from ground control on Destie-Four, but it’s not to us.”

  Mikko touched her command workstation to bring up the passive sensors. There was a lot more comm traffic.

  “Did this just start?”

  “Yes, Ma’am. I’m showing acknowledgments from their orbital platforms now. Hey, see that spike? I think that’s an outgoing tight beam to another in-system station.”

  Mikko saw the energy output from the surface and orbital platforms hold steady, then go up again as more stations came online.

  “Wow!” the sensor tech said. “That’s a jump departure signature. Somebody just launched either a starship or a jump courier.”

  They hadn’t seen a ship enter or leave the Destination system since they arrived.

  “You’re sure that’s a jump drive signature?” Mikko said. “Exactly like we use in the Cottohazz?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the sensor tech answered, and then he realized the unlikeliness of two civilizations coming to exactly the same technical and engineering solution to star travel simply by coincidence. “Holy shit!”

  Sam sat at the desk in his stateroom and watched the small hologram of Cassandra—the only one he had of her, an image of her shoulders and head, a five-second recording of her that showed her expression change from laughter to an inviting smile and then freeze for five more seconds before restarting. He liked this recording. It captured something essential about her personality that was at the root of his attraction to her, although he couldn’t put into words what that was. He found himself studying it whenever he sensed something else, something about his situation or environment that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That unsettled sensation was exactly how he felt about the New People, the beings they used to call Desties before they could speak with them directly.

  Four days ago, Bohannon and Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan had begun decoding nouns, based on exchanged pictures and labels in English, and Destie verbs followed, and then a cascade of vocabulary, still growing. Communication with real content had begun yesterday, questions and answers, but nothing like what Sam had expected.

  As near as they could tell, the Desties, or New People, were courteous and helpful but not particularly curious about Cam Ranh Bay or its passengers and crew. It wasn’t that they already knew anything about them—it was more as if a bunch of unknown aliens showing up in a strange starship was not that unusual an event.

  Sam made sure Bohannon’s team did not mention their problem with the jump drive. There was plenty of time to deal with that once they had a better understanding of the situation here. At the moment Sam couldn’t say that any of it made much sense to him.

  Suddenly the general quarters gong began sounding and simultaneously his commlink vibrated: Running-Deer on the emergency command channel.

  “What’s happening, XO?”

  Captain, you need to get up here pronto. I think all hell’s breaking loose.

  * * *

  Mikko had filled the captain in by commlink while he was still on his way to the bridge. Once he took over she headed aft to her battle station in the auxiliary bridge, and all the while she kept wondering what the Buran had said to prompt this reaction.

  After two tense hours, the captain called a meeting of the department heads and civilian advisors. Mikko saw nothing but worried faces when she entered the conference room and imagined they saw the same from her. She also noted that Major Merderet had joined them.

  “You all know we have a new situation,” the captain began. “I’ll start by saying Lieutenant Bohannon and I are convinced this . . . problem is in no way the fault of Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan. The councilor was following my instructions to gather as much information as possible.”

  Captain Bitka was cut off by a torrent of angry aGavoosh from the Varoki trade envoy e-Lisyss. It went on for twenty or thirty seconds before ending with a loud and final-sounding click. His assistant, visibly coloring from anger or embarrassment, his large ears folded defensively back against his head, provided a translation.

  “The Honorable e-Lisyss objects to what was clearly a diplomatic exchange disguised as linguistic research. He disavows any responsibility for the damage done. He wishes his official protest recorded in the ship’s log. He demands to be placed in charge of all future negotiations.”

  “Noted,” Captain Bitka said and then turned to the Buran linguist. “Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan, can you explain to the others what you told me?”

  The Buran looked around the table with its blank black eyes and then spoke in its deep, flat voice. “At Captain Samuel Bitka’s direction I took care not to mention our forced passage here. I said we had been summoned by a messenger missile, but did not say our star drive had been reprogrammed. I also made no mention of the recent war, or of organized violence of any kind in the Cottohazz.

  “When the subject of our interstellar drive was broached they wished to know from whom we had obtained it. They did not seem to even consider that we might have developed it ourselves. And in fact we—that is to say Buran—did not. The Varoki did, which I told them. They were unfamiliar with the word Varoki, of course, and seemed to assume it was equivalent to a word in their language translated roughly as Guardian, or perhaps Overseer, or even Master. Were the Varoki our Guardians, they asked.

  “I replied they were not, that all of our six species lived together as equals. When we shared pictorial images of Varoki with them, they became agitated and several more protracted exchanges establishe
d we had no Guardians, in the sense they understand the term, and were in fact innocent of the concept. This revelation led to them severing communication. Lieutenant Bohannon tells me the large volume of communication across the system immediately ensued.”

  It was hard to read emotions on the Buran—hard to tell if they even had emotions comparable to humans—but Mikko sensed something like anxiety, a concern the Buran had somehow contributed to the problem, or a fear the others here would think so.

  “Thank you Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan,” Captain Bitka said. “Now I’ll add that twenty minutes ago we received an open communication giving us an orbital correction and orders to send a delegation down to the planet surface to meet with their Guardian, a being known as The Eye of P’Daan. I don’t know whether that’s a name or a title. Envoy e-Lisyss, it looks like you’re going to get your wish. You will be the representative of the Cottohazz Executive Council with the landing party, and also of the Varoki species. Councilor Abanna Zhaquaan, I would like you to ask if one of your colleagues would volunteer to accompany the landing party as a representative of the Buran. I will not order a civilian to do so. Not you, by the way. I want you and Lieutenant Bohannon up here monitoring and recording everything said down there.”

  “I understand, Captain Samuel Bitka. I am certain several of our party will relish being the first of our species to meet the New People face to face. I will select one of them,” the Buran linguist said.

  “I’m going, too,” Boniface, the Nigerian journalist said.

  Mikko looked at him, his face shining in the overhead light, and she saw an excitement in his eyes she couldn’t remember seeing before.

  “I said I wouldn’t order any civilians to accompany us,” the captain said. “I’m considering ordering you not to. What function would you serve?”