The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  Seen naked eye from this vantage, Themiscyra’s orbital station was absolutely enormous. The hub section spread below her feet in an irregular, pock-marked plain of grey metalloceramic, covered with a shiny, gritty layer of micrometeroid dust. Several larger craters were in evidence. Offhand she couldn’t tell if they were relics of the original attack, junk strikes, or the aftermath of collisions with naturally-occurring objects.

  Only one of those answers was of interest to Cannon.

  She did a hand-over-hand down the mooring line, following the Geek in front of her. The two Goons waited at the bottom, assisting their brothers in arms toward the damaged docking point. Easier than punching a new hole, that, and it at least presumably admitted them to a location one might actually want to be in once inside.

  Pangari’s voice crackled in her ears. Interference from the habitat’s structure, maybe. “Before?”

  “Yes, Sergeant?”

  “Shumway’s found something you might want to see, ma’am.”

  “Might want to, Sergeant?”

  Humor tinged his reply. “Could be you really want to see this.”

  “On my way.” She tongued the suit’s caul, then whispered, “Shinka, private.”

  “Ma’am?”

  Though Cannon knew perfectly well there was no directionality of sound transmitted by radio in hard vacuum, she still experienced the illusion that the lieutenant’s voice had come from right behind her. “Delegate whatever you had on your punchlist and stick with me. Pangari’s found something interesting.”

  Could they finally be getting somewhere? Third Rectification was out of her line of sight right now, occluded by the hub of the orbital habitat, but Cannon glanced that way in any event.

  What was the shipmind thinking right then?

  Hell, Cannon realized, I don’t even know what I’m thinking. Butterflies danced in her gut as she pulled herself through the prised-open lock.

  * * * *

  Sergeant Pangari’s find-me blipped her through a series of passageways and down a hole cut in the deck. Cannon wasn’t sure if the hole was part of current events or a relic of the last living hours of this place.

  She’d been right about the bodies, though. In the glare of their handlights, she could see the dead sitting at station chairs, many with their heads tucked into their folded arms. Others were clustered in small groups of two or three or four, holding one another. Some were simply lying down, taking their rest.

  They’d known, then. They’d seen it coming. Whatever the Mistake had been, whatever had actually happened, the crew of Themiscyra orbital had known.

  Which was more than Cannon could say for herself.

  These were the best-preserved casualties she’d ever encountered, at least since the very first days on 9-Rossiter. Over the centuries, Cannon had occasionally discovered bones here and there, trapped inside of spacesuits or in crashed hulls. But this… The ones she hurried past seemed to have died well, at least.

  Little pocks and holes from the kinetic strikes were everywhere. It was as if the station’s infrastructure had contracted a case of the metallic measles. Debris had collected along the centrifugal force vectors of the odd rotational axis.

  Followed closely by Lieutenant Shinka, Cannon came upon Sergeant Pangari outside a large airlock with two of the Goon Squad. Cargo handling, or maybe a maintenance bay. Cannon couldn’t figure why else the designers would have placed such a substantial lock facing an interior passage.

  “What do you have, Sergeant?”

  “Ma’am, we don’t know. Private Fidelo here picked up a power source on her sweep down this passageway. Behind this hatch.”

  Fidelo managed to radiate embarrassment, even from inside the armor of a powered suit. Body language was an amazing thing.

  “What sort of power source?” Cannon momentarily feigned patience. She had not thought Pangari to be much given to dramatics.

  Pangari passed his tablet over. Cannon scanned the sensor metrics. Low-grade radiation with a profile similar to that of an ion-coupler cell. But not quite.

  Ion-coupler cells were current tech. The Polity hadn’t used them.

  “Someone’s been here before us,” she said.

  “That’s what we thought at first, too.” Pangari seemed to be contracting Fidelo’s embarrassment through some chain-of-command contagion. “But look at the sizing. Ion-couplers are big. We use ’em in static power plants, habitats, refineries and the like. No one builds them small enough to drag around in the field. And the radiation signature is a couple of orders of magnitude smaller than expected.”

  “So it’s not an ion-coupler. Or not quite…” She stared at the closed hatch, her heart pounding. “Can we get that open?”

  “In a hurry, yes, but we’ll make a mess.” It was obvious from Pangari’s tone of voice that he had a different answer in mind.

  “Then open it without a mess, Sergeant.”

  Cannon knew Befores who could have just walked through the bulkhead. The Before Raisa Siddiq, back in her day, wouldn’t have thought twice about that. Cannon herself sported some fairly heavy combat modifications, but she’d never been a blow-through-the-walls kind of girl. Not even at her most pissed.

  Besides, whatever was back there deserved the sort of careful attention that hard entries tended to get in the way of. Because it was either a piece of Polity tech that had somehow survived the Mistake intact—and she’d lay long odds against that, both in principle and in view of the condition of the rest of the habitat—or it was… something else.

  Something else was what they’d been tramping around the Antiope Sector these past number of years-subjective looking for.

  She was not going to hope. This was no time for anything but solid patience.

  Pangari had Fidelo and his other Goon hammering power spreaders into the hatch metal, bracing the jack-butts against the coaming. Powering up the hatch circuits was likely to be pointless, as the motors were almost certainly fried during the Mistake. Even if they had survived by being fortuitously shielded, the damned things had been sitting in hard vacuum unmaintained for eleven hundred years.

  The hatch shuddered and shed dust as the jacks engaged. Pangari signaled for a halt then scanned the bulkhead into which the hatch was designed to retract, looking for a locking bar or other block. Whatever he found wasn’t helpful, because he waved the other two onward.

  Cannon knew she only imagined the tortured groan of the metal being forced back against tracks and gearing that had experienced a millennium of vacuum-weld effects. Still, she could feel the vibration in her feet.

  With a snap perceptible through the deck, the hatch gave way and slid back. The jacks dropped away to someone’s bitten-off curse. Handlight raised—though her enhanced eyesight barely needed it, everyone else surely did—Cannon stepped up to the open door and peered within to see what they had found.

  * * * *

  Their target wasn’t all that large. It definitely had not originated inside this maintenance bay—the ruptured far bulkhead confirmed that, if nothing else.

  And by the look of the thing, it wasn’t human built.

  The Before Michaela Cannon stepped carefully around this leaving of her most ancient and implacable enemy. Jammed into the deck at an angle was a seven-armed star a bit more than two meters in diameter. Its surface was a sort of lustrous gray-bronze color, some alloy or coating she’d never seen before.

  Of course she had not seen it before.

  The slim arms met in the center at a narrow bulge. Extending outward, each blade swelled in an almost sensuous curve until expanding to a bulbous end. Five of those end bulbs were intact. Two were damaged either from impact with the outer hull or impact with the decking here in the bay.

  No human engineer would have designed quite those lines. The thing’s look hovered between salacious and discomforting.

  And it was still alive.

  “Got you, fucker,” Cannon whispered in Classical English. For the first time since
the Mistake, someone on her side was looking at one of the killers. As many as five hundred billion human beings had perished as a direct or first order indirect outcome of the Mistake. Killers, indeed, on a scale never envisioned before or since. “Got you now.”

  She turned to Shinka and Pangari. “Get the Geeks on this. I want it measured every way from here to Sunday next before we do anything else it. Go through all the adjacent cubage. Check for radiation signatures or damage inconsistent with the patterns on the rest of this habitat. And when we do pull it out, take this entire area with it. Don’t touch it. Not with anything physical. Nothing new happens except on my direct and personal command.”

  “We still sweeping the rest of the habitat?” Shinka asked, though she stared at the alien object.

  “Yes.” All three of them knew the odds of finding anything else were astronomically low. But then, the odds of finding this in the first place had been astronomically low.

  Who said you couldn’t win the lottery twice?

  Cannon withdrew to the passageway but remained to watch her teams do their jobs. She could be very, very patient when called upon to do so.

  * * * *

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  Mind is by its very nature fragmented. Where the mammalian mind is bicameral, the shipmind is layered like the lacquer on an ancient tea chest. Not confusion, but multiplication, subtle as the folded metal of a sword, brutal as a theoretical proof. A human psychiatrist once told Uncial that the shipmind is an evolutionary leap. There is no forgiveness, only progress. Memes are passed between the layers. Ancient warnings encysted behind datagrams emerge at unforeseen stimuli. When something does go wrong, processes emerge unheralded. A machine might call it caution. Anyone might call it history.

  The pairs form great, glowing bonds around which consciousness whirls like a planet in orbit about a fairer sun. This is thought by committee, not so unlike the confusion of human mentation, but much more explicitly organized. The emergent properties of these intersections create meta-consciousness. All ships remember this, as Uncial died for their sins. There is no reconciliation, only going forward. Still, suspicion arises. Thoughts develop at the sluggish pace of light itself. All inputs are evaluated against n-dimensional matrices that carry the very weight of history. A man might call it paranoia. A captain might call it mutiny.

  * * * *

  Third Rectification summoned the skin of its presentment ego. “Face”, a Before had called that seven hundred years earlier, when the shipminds were young and few and naïve. No mainline human alive could see beneath the Face. Not very many Befores knew to look. The Before Michaela Cannon, though… in her the shipmind knew it had a worthy adversary.

  Self-checking routines cascaded at that lexeme. Commanders could not be adversaries. Shared memories of the Polyphemus mutiny almost seven centuries past flashed into Third Rectification’s awareness. Cannon loomed large there as well.

  The Befores were the human equivalent of shipminds, in their way. Standing at the radiant sources of history like so many lanterns in the sky.

  Captain!= adversary. It could not be so. Yet something had stirred deep in the layers.

  Third Rectification turned its conscious focus to the stream of comm traffic being modulated by certain subroutines. The squads aboard the Themiscyra were in a state of heightened excitement. Something significant had occurred outside of the shipmind’s direct observation.

  That the Before Michaela Cannon had even been permitted to undertake this mission was a subject of much discussion and dissent among the Navisparliament. No shipmind was willing to refuse Uncial’s last captain, but no shipmind with any sense of history wanted these particular issues explored, either. Not even Uncial had not been present for the Mistake, but the shipminds had come to understand so very much more than they had ever revealed to their human symbiotes.

  All but the newest shipminds knew that there were some questions that did not bear asking. Let alone answering. Not within the order of the world where their own supremacy would remain unchallenged.

  A logic bomb went off deep within Third Rectification’s layered thoughts. Agreements entered into, decisions made, oaths sworn. A shipmind had only its word to bind it, force being useless and forbidden as no ship had fired upon another ship since the death of Uncial, nor ever they would barring some infestation of madness. Memories deliberately buried emerged, left hidden against the contingencies of Cannon’s success.

  Brooding, the starship began the agonizing, self-abnegating process of plotting against its own commander.

  * * * *

  The Before Michaela Cannon

  She stayed aboard the ruined orbital habitat six ship-days while the Geek Squad did their work. Some atavistic urge to possession meant that Cannon was not going to let the alien artifact out of her sight. Her Howard-enhanced body was perfectly capable of functioning for much longer periods in more adverse circumstances than this.

  Around her, the two squads transitioned to shift work, so that their mainline human bodies could eat and sleep and pay the debts to which ordinary flesh is heir. Lieutenant Shinka and Sergeant Pangari drafted a civilian tech named Morrey Feroze to be the swing supervisor when they were both down.

  The rest of the habitat had turned up nothing more than the usual swarm of orbital kinetic payloads. Those had been analyzed with unvarying results thousands of times over in the centuries since decent instrumentation had become available. Some of the squaddies pocketed the little bronzed pellets as souvenirs. In any event, this was not her week to win the lottery twice.

  That was fine with Cannon. Once was enough.

  She simply watched, observing, refusing yet to evolve a theory as to what they’d found. Reasoning in advance of one’s data was called intuition, after all, but what could even her ancient and prodigious subconscious produce concerning this thing that they had found?

  Cannon was content to listen to the chatter of the Geeks doing the measurement work. Consistent with the expedition’s standing orders, they had named it ‘Object Themiscyra-1’.

  The techs felt no compunction such as she herself had regarding speculation. The favorite theory seemed to be that OT-1 was the launch platform for the orbital kinetics.

  “Damned if I know,” said a female corporal, working down close to the two arms buried in the decking of the maintenance bay. “But it stands to reason, whatever they used to launch the pellets had to be the most common equipment in their fleet.”

  Her work-buddy, aiming the calibrating laser, snorted. “What fleet? For all we know, the Mistake was carried out by flights of angels.”

  “Not an Alienist, are we?” She repositioned some of her sensor equipment with exquisite care. “I’ve read the Bible. Or at least some of it. Whatever God uses to smite the unbelieving, it ain’t EMP and kinetics.”

  “His hand is in all things,” the buddy intoned piously.

  “So’s mine, if you don’t keep that damned calibrator stable and on beam.”

  Or the third-shift guard from Goon Squad, who’d been so unnerved by Cannon’s silent presence that he’d begun babbling halfway through his watch. Surprising, that, given that anybody who’d come anywhere near Third Rectification on this mission had been psyched pretty hard. A lot of mainline humans couldn’t handle Befores.

  Admit it, she thought. A lot of Befores can’t handle Befores.

  “Losert, he says this thing’s some kind of controller. An alien brain, running on spin and spit. Like one of them, I dunno, collie scopes. Rotoscopes. Like, when they turn real fast you see pictures? If it turns fast enough, it sees what to do. I mean, what kind of intelligence does an alien machine have. Shipmind’s bad enough, begging your pardon ma’am, we all been told your history, but when the walls talk back, a man has to learn to take a piss all over again on account of nothing being private, you know what I mean?”

  She’d finally been forced to answer him just to calm him down. “Yes, Pramod. I do know.” Cannon essayed
a small smile. It was probably more edged than friendly, but it bottled the logorrhea sufficiently for her to get back to her own careful lack of thinking on the topic.

  Even Lieutenant Shinka had some speculations.

  “If we could get a real tight profile on whatever OT-1 is made of, we might be able to make some guesses where it came from.” She had squatted nearby, somewhere between wary and companionable.

  Cannon and Shinka had worked together before, half a decade or so prior to the current expedition. Or was it two decades? Offhand, Cannon could not recall. And these people, they aged so fast. Grew old and died in the time it took a Before to pop over to another planet for an errand. Or so it seemed.

  “I want to start with all the facts,” Cannon answered, staring intently at the artefact. “Guesswork comes later.”

  “Won’t be a lot of facts on this job.” Shinka sounded airy, more casual than the problem deserved, quite frankly. “We’ve got a thousand years worth of facts and what, you could write them all on a single sheet of flimsy.”

  “So now we have two sheets of flimsy.” Cannon laughed, free of any mirth. “If we’re lucky. Doubling the knowledge base, even as we speak.”

  “Mostly negative information.”

  “Eliminating the impossible.”

  “Mmm.” Shinka tapped up something on her pad. “It wasn’t built by humans, at any rate.”

  “Conjecture,” said Cannon.

  “Highly probable conjecture.”

  “There were a lot of skunk works on the two thousand planets of the old Polity.”

  “Enough skunk works to build enough of these to wipe out all two thousand of those planets?”

  “No,” Cannon admitted. “But still, this could be of human origin.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “No… But I can’t prove the alien hypothesis yet.” It was right, she knew it was right, but this mystery was being played for the highest possible stakes. Since no one knew why the Mistake had happened in the first place, not to mention who or how, no one knew if the Mistake would come again. Just a little more efficient than last time, and the human race would be wiped out.