by Tony Daniel
Kiland stared into the reflection of deck lights in his troth ring for a half a second.
To the sub-captain: “Add me to the listen list, get a medic online, take any information you can about the physical plant situation. Try to patch through to the line I was on with the principal investigator last shift, open to the command chairs only.”
“Sir,” was the response, and then he listened.
“And this is?”
The image came from RosaRing’s medics; he shared it back across space and waited.
Verita winced when she saw it, her indrawn breath loud between them.
“There is this as well, and this, all isolated within the last hours. Tell me about them!”
Captain to subordinate, the last demand. Verita nodded and began.
“The last image is a fairly common nanopump; it is available for use on restricted crops on many worlds. It biodegrades over time; that one is close to the end of utility. I use them in my work.
“The second image appears to be a blood platelet from an oxygen breather. I’m assuming it is human, and it is malformed—perhaps it has been paired with a nanopump and become separated.
“The first image is an anomaly. We see two of these cell structures, intertwined, one with a cell nucleus being—let us say examined or read—and one with a variant cell in, let us say, production. It uses an alternate chirality to induce evolutionary opportunity.”
He said nothing for a moment, shared a list of symptoms . . .
“And this . . .”
“Is not surprising.”
“This is native to Trikandle, and it is infecting humans through some strange happenstance?”
Verita glanced at the screen, which made it look to Kiland that she’d been avoiding looking at him.
“No, it is not natural to the world. It is not natural anywhere. We brought it. I introduced it. It is of the Sherikas.”
She looked at him as if he were in the room with her.
“It ought not to have been able to do this, I swear.”
“The entire mission is in grave danger, sub-captain; nothing medical personnel on board the station have tried have been more than palliative; the filtration approach has failed entirely. We must act quickly and responsibly . . .”
Captain Kiland piloted the captain’s gig alone; he’d done so as a young officer and had had the ceremonial honor of piloting Admiral Smit’s farewell flight from the Implacable. Going over the log books he’d long ago discovered that he had more hours on board than any other and now . . . and now he was the best able to bring the tiny vessel to the scene of the crisis.
They’d jury-rigged infection monitors once it was apparent that the kitchens had been infested, or the air filters or . . . and so maybe it was true that the only person on board the RosaRing free of the mutagenic was the principal investigator. He carried two of the touch-free monitors and eight of the Implacable’s biohazard suits, while he wore a standard spacesuit he could shed in an outer lock. The gig could use the smaller connects and emergency ports, and he had a target, a hatch well away from the crew quarters where the sick were lying where they fell, or hiding in the darkness as systems went offline.
The sub-captain was overseeing refitting a wing of half-empty crew quarters into an isolation ward, though by now there was word of deaths among the ill, and odd behaviors among the living. They’d gotten some hope, though, from a few stalwarts who switched to back-up air supplies early . . .
It was a largely silent voyage. Several hours for the gig, a considered lifetime for Kiland. They’d mapped out as best they could the ports where the stains were, and clearly the hub ends were both affected. The tender’s failed launch made that port inaccessible as well.
His targets were the several ports in the area of the labs, ports largely unused since the station was first provisioned by massive temporary dry docks long before the mission to Trikandle. The station was visible to naked eye against space, strobes pointing to the parts he didn’t want to visit—he was avoiding the central hubs in favor of the outer ring, the lower quarter of the outer ring once he’d got oriented. The thing was huge—of course it was, that’s why it had taken the Implacable to move it!
“Kiland? They gave me this as a direct channel.”
He froze. There was too much to say now, and most of it said or shared before. He needed to concentrate. And . . .
“Verita. Yes, I am here. Approaching. Be calm. I’m cruising along the hull, watching section numbers go by. Yours will be soon, Verita.”
The contact was voice alone, so he watched the structure go by as he corrected for spin. He doubted that he wobbled, and he waited, glad that she could not see his face.
“Kiland, we have always been honest, so I will be honest. I am not well. It is not mere tension—you know that I know tension. I—I fell and bloodied my nose, Kiland, and it stopped instantly. But, I have tools. I am good at my work.
“My blood shows changes, too, Kiland. Please, fly on by, Kiland. Fly on by!”
She was away from the microphone some moments but he heard and said: “It is too late for me to fly by, Verita. We are committed. I must see and report for myself.
“Tell me your exact location. I will find the port closest to you. I will . . .”
He was under the bulk of the thing, with white and blue and white and blue and white and blue blurring before his eyes to white. . . . Then blue. He matched velocity until the surface below him barely crawled and then, numbers and letters.
“Forty-four AGAAGF/FE,” he said out loud as the gig answered his touch sweetly, approaching hatches auxiliary collars could link to. A hatch outlined, as if sketched over from within, by a collar of red and green crystals around the more prosaic ceramics meant to guard the ship close, even in the no-space that was Jump. His cameras surely transmitted that to the Implacable, surely the sub-captain saw the signs . . .
“Yes,” Verita said, “that will be several doors down. I can go there, Kiland.”
“There is a wobble,” he said, which was true of the ring’s motion and not his own.
“The next hatch will provide a better attachment angle. I will check that.”
The little vessel let the ring slide on by, and in a moment he heard a sound that might have been a cry or a cough and . . .
“Kiland, I am not well. It will take me some minutes to get to the next airlock.”
“No matter, the time,” he said, “Implacable awaits my order.”
“Yes, but I should move while I can, you see . . .”
“I have seen what I need to see, Verita. I shall return to the port where you are now. We shall be together very soon.”
The gig bumped very slightly against the stain edging the port. “Implacable, I am docking. We have blue, blue, blue. Without doubt, we have blue, blue, blue.”
“Kiland, tell me where to move?”
“Stay there, Verita. I will come to you. I am solving this.”
“Beam Banks One and Two, go live as leads. The captain has declared a lethal threat situation. We have identified and targeted a threat.
“Prepare to fire on my command, on radar’s current target T02. This is not a drill, you will now go to full combat power. Your target should be oversaturated at all wavelengths until plasma. Repeat, until plasma. Await my command.”
“Beam Banks Three and Four. Your targets are any rapidly vectoring objects showing planetary escape velocity. Your targets should be oversaturated at all wavelengths until plasma. Repeat, until plasma. Await my command.”
“Beam Banks Five through Twenty, your planetary grids are pretargeted and programmed. You will fire until plasma. Repeat, you will fire until plasma. Await my command.”
A decisive moment, the image from the gig, showing an empty pilot’s seat and board. The forward cams show a fringe of strange color around the docking collar, growing.
“All fire,” says the man. “All fire, all fire.”
Somewhere, a singer is sobbing quietly at
her terminal. The ship trembles. And trembles again, the ship’s rotation bringing all the beam projectors to bear, one after another, a rotational broadside searing the ether.
There is silence, and then, loud in the silence of tense breathlessness there is the news of solving:
“Zap.”
SF convention favorites Sharon Lee & Steve Miller have been writing SF and fantasy together since the 1980s, with dozens of stories and several dozen novels to their joint credit. Steve was Founding Curator of Science Fiction at the University of Maryland’s SF Research Collection while Sharon is the only person to consecutively hold office as the Executive Director, Vice President, and President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Their newest Liaden Universe® novel, The Gathering Edge, is their twenty-sixth collaborative novel. Their awards include the Skylark, the Prism, and the Hal Clement Award.
ICEBREAKER
Dave Bara
How do you react when you’re the small fry sub in the vast ocean of Europa and you’re faced with the boomer of your nightmares: a Chinese battlecruiser determined to jump the claim that will make your fortune? Captain Dizzy Ramos knows what she’s going to do: redeem her honor as a warrior after a lifetime of bad luck. Damn the Chinese. Damn the crew. Damn the heavens above. For she knows full well that to turn around as much bad juju as her career has acquired might very well require the ultimate sacrifice.
The icebreaker USNS Morant spun through near-Jupiter space, firing her retro-rockets and slowing her spin rate as she fell inward through Europa’s light .134 Earth-gravity well. Europa’s molecule-thin oxygen atmosphere created a microburn of scars on Morant’s skin. Unsightly, but nothing that would cause her captain the slightest concern.
The chemical rockets fired again, slowing her descent to less than five kilometers per second as her accompanying rotation also slowed. The large nuclear engine, nicknamed Berta by the crew, took over then, firing up at the base of the cylindrical spacecraft. Berta glowed red-orange in the dim light of the icy moon, slowing the Morant’s vertical drop even more. Her speed now halved, and then halved again, she slammed into the ice, cracking the surface of the Galilean moon for a good kilometer around the impact crater she formed. Automatically, metal impact shielding peeled back from the spacecraft, revealing a crisscrossing scaffold of framework holding Berta in her place.
Slowly Berta descended to the glaciated surface. She contacted the ice sheet and set off steam plumes venting away from her touch. Then she began rotating, spinning ever faster as she cut through Europa’s ice, seeking the relative warmth of her inner ocean.
Captain Dizzy Ramos of the Morant watched all this on her allscope, a combination of high-definition camera, periscope (for ocean use), and telemetry monitor. She turned from side to side as she’d been trained to do. Captain Ramos did everything by the book, and that was a big reason why her crew hated her.
“Ice is two point two kilometers thick, well within the range the prospectors gave. Should take Berta thirty-nine minutes to burn through. Plan for release into the ocean at forty-five minutes from my mark,” said Ramos. She waited a few seconds, then said, “Mark!”
“Acknowledged,” said the first mate, Aleks Kolorov, in his thick Serbian accent. “Forty-five minutes to ocean birth.” That’s what he always called it, equating the Morant’s insertion into the well-traveled Europan oceans to a baby’s birth from her mother’s womb. Dizzy Ramos hated that analogy, almost as much as she hated Kolorov. She rolled the allscope back up into its holding position to clear more room on the tiny bridge, then turned to Kolorov.
“Have the navigation charts loaded into the scope by the time we drop,” she said, trying hard to ignore the smell of him. Shipboard protocol called for two showers a week. Kolorov rarely took advantage of both his turns, and it disgusted Ramos.
“Aye, Captain,” said Kolorov. “As soon we’ve docked with Berta again I’ll let you know when we’re ready to get underway.”
“I want to be up here when we do the docking with Berta, not after,” snapped Ramos. “I’m captain of this ship, Mister Kolorov.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Kolorov. Ramos strode off the bridge with as much authority as her five foot three inch frame would allow. As she passed Kolorov’s station, he flipped her off behind her back. Once she was gone down the stairs, Kolorov turned to Ivan Massif, the navigator, a tall dark-haired lad from Ukraine.
“She stinks,” said Kolorov, crinkling his nose.
Massif laughed.
Berta was done with her drilling work two minutes early. Despite Ramos’s orders, Kolorov started the re-docking procedure, using the metal framework to slide the Morant down through the external scaffolding and into Europa’s salty ocean. Then he called down to Ramos.
She was seething when she came back to the bridge, quickly using the allscope to watch the reconnection of the Morant with Berta, her main engine drive. Once attached again and fired up, Ramos ordered the Morant to get underway.
“Mister Kolorov,” she said to her first mate as the Morant started moving, “was there something unclear about my instructions?”
“No, ma’am,” said Kolorov. “But there are certain things not worth bothering the captain about.”
“In your opinion. If this were a military ship—”
“Ah, yes, ma’am, but it is not. The Morant is a merchant ship, so orders have more of a feel of guidelines to them, no?” he said.
“I’m going to bring you up on charges when we get back to Ceres,” she said.
“You already tried that twice, without success. Perhaps it’s time you just gave it up and left the running of the ship to me. I’ve served on the Morant for a dozen years. You’ve been captain for less than two. You should leave running the ship to those of us who know her and concentrate on achieving mission objectives for the company instead,” he said.
That infuriated her. In the military every order was followed, down to the letter. If Captain Ramos was being honest with herself though, she’d acknowledge that after twenty years in military service, adjusting to being a merchant had been a difficult transition.
“I’m writing you up, Kolorov. I may not be able to discipline you but I can sure as fuck fine your ass off my ship. Two thousand this time. Next time twenty-five hundred, and so on, until you’re gone from here, so get used to that,” Ramos said. Kolorov shrugged her off.
“That won’t even dent my bonuses for exploiting this find. Do what you want, Captain. I doubt the company will complain when we come in early and under budget.” And with that he turned back to his board.
Ramos went to her comm and called down to engineering. “Kish, what’s the situation with our pipeline?” she said.
Daniel Kish, one of seven crewmen aboard, responded quickly. “Pipeline extrusion is ready to go, Captain. We have more than a hundred clicks worth of folded pipe in storage ready to unfurl. Shouldn’t be any problem getting to the target area.”
“Good,” she said. “Carry on.”
The target area was a recent find of a large natural-gas field by company surveyors that could be pumped out, cooled to -62º C, liquefied, then transported via the Morant’s flexible piping to massive tankers that would haul it back to Earth. There was enough just in this single find to fill one eighth of the Earth’s needs for most of a decade. And with a population of thirty-three billion, Earth had a lot of needs. There were the colonies too, about a million on Luna, two hundred thousand on Mars, and about fifty thousand on Ceres, but those were small potatoes and mostly taken care of by the smaller companies. Earth Resources Tech was one of the big ones, the biggest, unless you counted the state-run agencies in China and Russia. Dizzy could have signed with any of them after the Fourth War, but she chose ERT, and despite her crew of assholes, she still believed she’d made the right choice.
After setting up the pipeline extrusion equipment, Ramos ordered the Morant to be on her way.
“Mister Massif, set course for the Cambridge Shelf, as fast as Ber
ta can get us there.”
“Yes, Captain,” said Massif, and laid in the course to the navigation screen so everyone could observe it. Six hours running full out.
An hour later and everything was running smoothly when the trio heard footsteps on the open metal staircase leading up to the bridge. To Kolorov and Massif’s pleasant surprise it was Mischa Carr, the main nuclear tech that monitored Berta’s functions and radiation levels aboard Morant. She was the only other female aboard and the only one either man would consider sleeping with. Massif had had that pleasure more than once, but so far Kolorov had been locked out of her bedroom, to his frustration.
She came up to Ramos. “Captain, I have something to report,” she said.
“Go ahead,” said Ramos.
“I’ve been tracking Berta’s radiation levels since we started her up, and I’ve been picking up some anomalies in the readings,” said Carr. Her obtuseness made Ramos impatient.
“Just spit it out, technician. What anomalies? I haven’t got all day.”
“Well, ma’am, I detected what I thought was leakage. But when I ran the diagnostics again I determined that the residual radiation was not coming from Berta. It’s coming from outside the ship, and it gets stronger as we approach the gas field.”
“How far away is it?”
“I’d say about sixty clicks, ma’am.”
“Any idea what it is?”
“No ma’am. But I can say with certainty it wasn’t here when the survey team came through.”
“That was two months ago,” said Ramos. Then she turned to Kolorov.
“Radiation protocol, first mate. That’s an order.”
“She just said it’s sixty clicks out. You want us in those sweat suits the whole run in?” protested Kolorov.
“Those are my orders, first mate,” she said. Or I’ll shoot you where you stand, she thought. Then she left the bridge for the quiet of her cabin and away from the stench of Kolorov, which was sure to get worse.