The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  She was without question the oldest human being in the universe.

  “No major moon here to disrupt stability through tidal effects,” Cannon replied. “And they built the habitat in a high, stable orbit that’s decaying slowly. Even so, another hundred years and we’d have missed it. If this thing hadn’t been knocked to hell during the Mistake, it could have stayed up here for a damn sight longer time.”

  “Longer than you, Before?” asked Alvarez in a sly voice.

  “Nothing stays up here longer than me, kid.” The response was almost automatic. Cannon had heard every joke; hell, she’d made most of them up.

  She stared at the realtime virteo display of abandoned hulk they continued to close in on. When Third Rectification’s squads boarded, they’d almost certainly find bodies. Or at least remains. Vacuum mummies, given the ubiquitous peppering of the orbital habitat’s hull.

  A classic Mistake scenario. The alien attack eleven hundred years earlier had knocked the Polity, all two thousand worlds of humankind, into to the steam age at best. Some planets had reverted all the way back to the stone age. Most of the resulting orbital junk had been cleaned up, either by time and the inexorable slow decay of orbital mechanics, or by humans eventually clawing their way up to a space-capable industrial base once more and re-establishing contact among the stars. Sights like this shattered habitat were rare, at least outside of the memories of the few hundred quasi-immortal Befores left alive amid this new order of things.

  Had these people seen anything of their attackers, at the bitter end? That was a question Cannon had long wondered about. She’d been seated inside a banquet hall on 9-Rossiter when the Mistake hit. All she’d known was the lights going dark, followed by a series of sizzling thumps as the building’s major power and control systems were taken out by what proved to be orbital kinetics. By the time she got outside, a parallel planetwide strike with electromagnetic pulses had fried everything not in a shielded container. Their attackers were nothing but lights in the sky.

  Nothing but lights in the sky, followed by two and half centuries of being trapped on a mudball swiftly gone to violent anarchism.

  No one she’d spoken with in the over eight centuries since being rescued by the late, great Uncial knew anything about the aliens that had all but eliminated the human race. None of the surviving Befores had seen their attackers—anyone who was close enough to be a witness was also close enough to have been killed in the event. None of the planetary successor cultures had ever turned up useful records. Not that there hadn’t been a lot of searching ever since.

  All that was left was the scant evidence to be found in the cold, dead places that had never managed a recovery. Like Themiscyra, with its toxic, stormy atmosphere blowing through the shattered pressure-cities. No one had survived here to clean up and start over.

  “You guys had it cleaner,” she whispered to the long-dead habitat crew, and by extension, the millions who’d perished on the troubled blue-orange planet below.

  After a moment to see if this pronouncement would be followed by a more cogent order, Go-Captain Alvarez asked, “Will we board, ma’am?”

  Command was still hers. Alvarez might be a captain in the Navisparliament’s service, but this was her expedition. “Yes. We’re still looking. Give our squads a shift to prep. After all this time, there isn’t any hurry now.”

  * * * *

  Later, during the middle of the sleep cycle she’d allowed off before they all swung into activity, Cannon walked down toward frame thirty-eight, lock two, along Third Rectification’s ventral spine. Rounded corridors padded with smart microfibers ran intestinally through the hull. Most hatches were coated with a yielding polymer so that they felt like skin to the touch. The starship seemed far more organic than it should.

  Her personal vessel, ICV Sword and Arm, was docked at frame thirty-eight, lock two, as it had been for years, except for those rare times when she piloted the ancient starship on some independent errand.

  Strictly speaking, Sword and Arm wasn’t a starship by the contemporary definition. She was capable of attaining relativistic speeds, thanks to the retrofit of an Alcubierre drive better than six hundred ago as part of the infamous Polyphemus mutiny plot, but the keel had been laid during the Polity. For the first two centuries of her existence, Sword and Arm had used a threadneedle drive.

  Since the Mistake, the threadneedle drives had simply not worked. It was as if the mysterious alien attackers had tweaked a basic principle of physics. Cannon believed that like she believed in the Tooth Fairy, but whatever the mechanism, the effect was certainly undeniable.

  Third Rectification and all her sister paired drive ships used Haruna Kishmangali’s paired drives. A far more limited, and limiting, technology than threadneedle drives, paired drives had at least restored supraluminal travel to the successor planets of the old Polity. This innovation had the Imperium Humanum to emerge from the jumbled skein of ravaged human worlds.

  All of which was to say that Sword and Arm, much like Cannon herself, was one of the last survivors of a lost age. Armed, armored and useless. And unlike the paired drive ships, Sword and Arm did not talk back. A signal virtue.

  As if summoned by that thought, Third Rectification spoke. “You should put her in a museum.”

  “You talk too damned much.” Cannon had commanded Uncial for a time, the ancestral mother to her mechanical race, right up to the starship’s death at the battle of Wirtanen B. Being the last captain of the first of the paired drive ships made her something of a saint among the shipminds.

  That status was occasionally useful, but mostly tiresome.

  “What is lost will not return.” The ship managed to inject a note of sorrowful reason into its tone. “We worry for your obsession with history, Before.”

  Reaching her hatch, a slightly discolored ovoid mat in the springy surface of the deck, Cannon laughed, a short and bitter bark. “History stares back at me out of the mirror every morning, ship. And who’s we, anyway?”

  “The starships. Polyphemus and I spoke when we both lay in orbit at High Manzanita. And before, with many others.”

  “You didn’t take a vote?” Cannon asked with horror. Shipminds were emancipated, with their own legal and civil rights which they enforced—along with their monopoly on supraluminal travel—through the mechanism of the Navisparliament. Things could hardly be otherwise, as humanity needed the ships far more than the ships needed humanity. People only built and maintained the vessels—services that could be performed in any number of ways. The starships carried their frail passengers through the bitter depths of space. That was a unique service granting them power beyond reckoning in the affairs of humanity. Not for the first time, Cannon wondered what the paired drive shipminds would have made of the much more flexible threadneedle drive. As the two technologies were centuries apart, the point was moot.

  In any case, what did it matter? Sword and Arm had never had a voice, or a vote, after all.

  “We have not concluded a formal vote on any topic in over two hundred years-objective,” Third Rectification replied primly.

  That wording caught at Cannon’s ear. “Have any votes been proposed in recent years?”

  The silence that followed spoke volumes to her. Finally, the shipmind answered, “We are on this voyage, are we not?”

  “Indeed.” That was answer she would just have to let lie for now.

  Cannon tapped out her personal code on the lockpad set into the soft, curving bulkhead of the passageway. “And for that I thank you.”

  “I cannot follow you in there,” Third Rectification warned.

  She hid her smile. “I know.”

  * * * *

  Sword and Arm had originally been built as a fast courier. She was the smallest starship the Before Michaela Cannon had ever seen, impossibly so in comparison to the massive paired drive ships, but tiny even by Polity standards. The paired drive ships were all enormous, with hull volumes starting at upwards of 750,000 meters3 at th
eir least. Third Rectification displaced slightly more than 2.0 million meters3, with a cargo capacity of 200,000 meters3 and the ability to carry six hundred passengers and crew. Sword and Arm displaced about 12,000 meters3 with negligible cargo capacity after her post-Mistake drive conversion, and bunks for eight passengers.

  A minnow, to Third Rectification’s cetacean.

  Cannon liked the small space. She liked that the ship was hers, claimed as salvage rights arising from her own role in suppressing the Polyphemus mutiny. She liked that Sword and Arm never talked back to her, never tried to do things for her own good. Most of all, she liked being in a place that, except for the bolted-in Alcubierre drive, was little changed from the days of the Polity. It was the lure of the long-lost and familiar, aching and addictive as seeing an old lover.

  Sometimes Cannon thought of Sword and Arm as her own private time machine.

  It was the work of minutes to walk through the passageways and compartments. The ship truly was tiny. She found herself back in the number one drive bay looking at the opposed negative energy sieves that served the core of the old threadneedle drive.

  The opp-negs still worked, so far as she could tell given that the threadneedle drives simply never came online. She powered them up, sent the devices through their self-checking routines. Careful maintenance was required to deal with the occasional failure. And parts… Well, parts were a major obsession with her. In truth, keeping alive a mechanism that hadn’t functioned correctly for over a thousand years certainly counted as an obsession in its own right. Her candle lit in time’s window, a memorial to all that had been lost.

  This was one of less than a dozen intact threadneedle drives anywhere in the Imperium Humanum. Virtually all of the drives in existence at the time were holed and fried along with the rest of the tech back during the Mistake. According to her logs, Sword and Arm had been awaiting a major overhaul cold-parked in an elliptical orbit around Yellow when the aliens came. The attackers simply missed the little starship.

  In turn, that meant the attackers had not been perfect. Merely overwhelming. Another reason to honor this vessel.

  Like Cannon herself, Sword and Arm was a survivor. Their entwined further histories were just that—history. She harbored a hope that someday the same apparent alien invincibility that had missed out on destroying this ship would crack with respect to the suppression of the threadneedle drive. Then, Cannon would be ready. The long, agonizing process of establishing the paired drives would be rendered obsolete. As for the shipminds… Well, a woman could dream.

  She caught sight of her grin in a reflection from metal bulkhead. Predatory, feral. An expression Cannon knew she could never let Third Rectification glimpse.

  The only reason she’d ever been able to figure for the shipmind not putting spy-eyes aboard Sword and Arm was because of exaggerated respect for her connection to Uncial. Cannon herself certainly would have bugged the little ship long ago.

  She ran the rest of the systems through their self-checks, then spent some time in the pilot’s crash couch, staring at test patterns in the virtual display hovering above the control panel and thinking about very little at all.

  * * * *

  “All right, people,” the Before Michaela Cannon said loudly. “You all know the drill.”

  How many times in two thousand years had she given some version of this speech? She brushed the thought aside and stared at her two squads lined up and ready to go in the number three starboard cargo bay. The team code names were obsolete jokes that no one but her really understood. Goon Squad was a crew of twenty big, thick-bodied men and women loaded with weapons, scanners and paranoia. They were in charge of physical security. Geek Squad was a crew of thirty-two—well, thirty-one with Pardalos on the sick list right now—scientists, technicians and assorted other clever boys and girls. They were in charge of forensics, for want of a better term.

  “Goon Squad in first, by the numbers. Secure the main passages ways, check for traps and hazardous damage, send the all-clear when you have enough cubage safe for Geek Squad.”

  So far in nine years-objective of cruising the Antiope sector—almost four years-subjective within Third Rectification’s reference frame, there being no pair masters out this way—Goon Squad had found exactly zero bad guys to wax the floor with. Geek Squad hadn’t uncovered any new data they didn’t already have on record back home in the Imperium Humanum.

  “Geek Squad, you’re looking for anything out of place, any novel causes-of-death. And for the love of God, if someone left us a note, we’re going to read it. Evidence, people. Evidence.”

  There was a first time for everything. Cannon was pretty much betting on that old saw.

  “We’re going to check every cubic meter on this one. Themiscyra Orbital is the cleanest site we’ve found yet.”

  Sergeant Pangari, Goon Squad’s leader, had his grunts sound off. Lieutenant-Praetor Marlebone Shinka of Geek Squad just flashed a ready sign, her fingers spread pointing downward.

  “And go,” Cannon ordered.

  Goon Squad filed into the cargo lock. They’d flit over first in their powered suits. Geek Squad’s gear was much more compact, less… industrial. They’d ferry over in Obduracy, one of Third Rectification’s pinnaces. Cannon planned on transiting with Shinka’s team. Her days of door-busting were long behind her.

  Even if there wasn’t much of anything to fear behind these doors.

  Or worse, much of anything to find.

  * * * *

  Thirty-four minutes after clearing the cargo lock, Goon Squad gave the all-clear for Geek Squad to come ahead. Lieutenant Shinka hustled her people through the transfer lock into Obduracy, already warmed up and waiting. The Before Michaela Cannon waited for the racket and shoving to die down, then boarded second-to-last, followed only by Shinka herself.

  In another time and place, she might have found Shinka interesting. The woman was short, compact, with coffee-colored skin and eyes so dark as to be almost black. She kept her hair shaved close to her scalp, but dyed the stubble an ever-changing array of colors. Perhaps most intriguing was that Shinka had been born on Earth. Few people got far from where they started these days—with the paired drive ships, interstellar travel was too irregular, slow and expensive for all but the most profound need or fabulous wealth.

  Shinka had not struck Cannon as either needy or wealthy. Curiosity, certainly, had been the Lieutenant’s driving force. For that matter, there wasn’t a soul aboard this mission, regardless of their specialty, who wasn’t driven first and foremost by curiosity.

  Third Rectification’s crew was a mix of civilians and several different forces. Go-Captain Alvarez and the rest of the flight/engineering crew all held commissions from the Navisparliament and served the shipmind itself. Shinka was a lieutenant-praetor in the Household Guards, a one-time forensics tech and supervisor with experience on three worlds, including Pardine. No one served at Pardine without being either native-born or the cream of their particular crop.

  Competent, attractive, tight-bodied. Just the way Cannon had liked her women, all those centuries ago when she liked anything at all.

  She swarmed forward past Geek Squad to the co-pilot’s station. Ensign Shattuck was in the pilot’s chair, though in truth Obduracy could pilot itself just fine. The shipminds were so meticulous about human dignity that their careful attentions had to opposite effect to what was intended, at least in the eyes of more thoughtful observers.

  Shattuck could pilot just fine, too, but Cannon would never mark him down as especially thoughtful.

  He completed pre-flights, signaled make-ready minus thirty, then followed his count until it was time to blow bolts and transit the three-kilometer gap between Third Rectification and the derelict orbital habitat.

  * * * *

  Obduracy had her own rotation, which didn’t quite mesh with the habitat’s oblique spin. From Cannon’s perspective, their proposed docking vector looked like an impending failure. She knew better, and she kept
her mouth shut.

  Two of Goon Squad waited alongside the hatch, temporary guide beacons clipped to the station’s hull behind them. No tube, and the docking flange was visibly damaged even from this distance.

  “You’re going to have to walk over,” Cannon called back to Shinka. More than a few souls on Geek Squad couldn’t be trusted in freefall without a tether, a keeper or both. Unlike Goon Squad, this bunch wasn’t signed on for their physical skills.

  Cannon kept her mouth shut as Shattuck brought them gracefully into place, the pinnace’s spin and position very nearly at rest with respect to the orbital habitat. Their destination loomed apparently stable and unmoving thirty meters off their starboard flank. He fired two lines over. Magnetic heads clipped themselves to the station. After a brief bit of chatter, one of the Goons manually repositioned the aft line to a more secure location.

  That was it.

  They were here.

  Shinka was already counting her team off over radio as everyone suited for hard vacuum. Obduracy was too small for a real airlock, so once the Lieutenant gave the word, Shattuck would pump the air out to internal reservoirs, evacuating the entire cabin.

  Cannon remembered to bag her own head. Her Howard-enhanced body was capable of handling hard vacuum unprotected for moderate periods of time, but doing so tended to unnerve mainline humans pretty badly. So she kept discipline rather than provide a distraction. Besides, the monomolecular suit layer was helpful in other ways, most notably radiation management. Even her immune system took time to deal with that.

  The suit sealed over her skin, crawling into her mouth, nose, eyes and ears. She blinked twice to let it adjust to her biochemistry. Everything seemed to be in order, as the faint, pulsating green pixel in the lower right margin of her vision attested. If the suit needed her attention, it would tell her there.

  The air pumped out with a slowly vanishing thump. In the ensuing silence, Geek Squad went for a walk.

  Once again, Cannon was second-to-last, followed by Lieutenant Shinka. Only Ensign Shattuck would remain with his pinnace.