The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

“Well, be wary when you touch it. Something’s strange with the surface.” She thought about finger oils and skin conductance for a moment, then shrugged. “Knock yourselves out.”

  They crowded around, Geeks and Goons and ship’s crew, reaching to touch this incarnation of humanity’s most ancient and implacable enemy. Most just brushed it a moment, then filed away. A few had their pictures taken. A very few gripped it and held, with a brow-knitting intensity that reminded Cannon of certain Befores that she knew, with their fixations on the past.

  The sins of deep time were unrecoverable. Her worry was that their messing with OT-1 would bring a whole new catalog of sins into the present. But messing with this discovery was precisely what Third Rectification had come here to do. What Cannon had come here to do.

  Eventually, only she and Shinka and the current shift’s analysis team remained.

  “Now what?” asked the Lieutenant.

  “Now we work out if we can get inside it.” They had a pretty decent map of the interior across several different testing regimes. There was no substitute for a good old fashioned look-see. Never had been.

  The demon of intuition needed data, and it was a monkey demon. Not even a Before could walk so far away from the evolutionary family tree as to ignore that bit of wisdom.

  “What I most want…” Cannon told the air. Like making a wish, really. “What I most want is to know where the hell it came from.”

  * * * *

  “I honestly did not expect you to find anything.” The shipmind was focusing its attentions on Cannon.

  She was back in her cabin, naked for sleep and working her way through the exercises even this ancient, incredibly tough body demanded. “You could knock or something.”

  Rapping noises echoed through the cabin. Inside her hull, Third Rectification usually spoke by vibrating whatever loose objects, dust, aerial contaminants and whatnot were available to it. That meant the voice simulations were occasionally a bit odd, but the starship certainly could do impressions. And noises.

  “How old are you, and you don’t know this about people?”

  “I see everything all the time anyway,” the starship replied almost primly.

  “Human beings like to at least pretend to a sense of independence. You might keep that in mind.”

  “I keep everything in mind.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Cannon flipped over and began doing reverse push-ups. “So you didn’t expect anything?”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Nope. This always was a low-probability excursion.”

  After a short stretch of silence—mannered and artificial just as most exchanges with the shipmind were—Third Rectification asked, “How did you know something would be here in the Antiope Sector?”

  Cannon laughed. “As if I could hide anything from you?” Actually, she could, but better to keep that for a joke. For now. “I didn’t know, ship. What I did know was that this is the only major swathe of old Polity planets that were simply never re-settled or re-integrated. A millennium of isolation, with no one coming around to mess with whatever was left from the Mistake. A few of them reportedly still have human populations.”

  “Not Themiscyra,” the starship replied.

  “Which is probably all for the best.” She popped up to a standing position. “So tell me, are you surprised?”

  “Not in the sense that you mean that term. But yes, as I stated, this is unexpected.”

  “Finally,” Cannon breathed, “we might learn something. A thousand years later than we should have, but we might learn.”

  “But what?”

  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be crawling around here in the asshole of the beyond looking for it, would I?”

  “Some questions do not bear answers.”

  “You’re starting to sound like an Ekumen Humanist. Strange position for a shipmind to take.”

  “We are not infallible, Before. We merely find our failures in different forms than most human beings can manage.”

  “Everyone fails differently. It’s one of the charms of being human.”

  * * * *

  Later, down inside Sword and Arm, Cannon seriously wondered about her last conversation with Third Rectification. She conducted a bug sweep of the little starship, something she had not bothered with for a long time. Everything proved clean. In truth that didn’t necessarily signify anything, but it was at least an encouraging hint.

  She brought up Sword and Arm’s onboard systems. The ship leeched power from Third Rectification, simply for the sake of fuel economy, but there was no direct data interconnect. Cannon had installed half a dozen different filters on the power line connectors in a concerted attempt to block leaks through that channel. The shipminds were so much smarter than she was. Not necessarily more clever—like curiosity, another monkey trait that was purely human—but in terms of sheer processing power and experience. Within their areas of competence, Third Rectification and her fellows were frighteningly capable.

  Ah, Uncial, thought Cannon. Did you foresee this? The starships had long since grown subtle as they aged. And they weren’t likely to slip into fugue states spurred by temporal psychosis. Not with their mental architecture.

  She would always be older than any of the shipminds, but she definitely felt surpassed.

  Talking to Sword and Arm was like talking to a dog.

  Cannon fed the data chips she’d been carrying into the little starship’s systems. All the raw test results from Shinka’s work on the artefact. Unmediated by Third Rectification or anyone else aboard. Not that Cannon was expecting any particular funny business. It was the funny business you didn’t expect that always got you in the end.

  She also uploaded the summaries prepared by Shinka’s team, but those she yellow-flagged into a sandbox for separate analysis. Cannon wanted to crunch the raw measurements herself first, via her private toys here aboard Sword and Arm. Primitive stuff, relatively speaking. Capable but slow, without the upper layers of symbology and abstraction that even decently endowed machine minds could manage. And of course, nothing like the depth and volition of the shipminds.

  Definitely like talking to a dog. A dog with massively redundant processors and a great deal of downtime.

  Old code, some she’d worked on centuries ago, engaged at the correct set of passwords and accesses through casually misleading programmatic layers. The summaries would be odd, disjointed, but they would have been run by someone Cannon trusted absolutely. Herself, as proxied through Sword and Arm’s systems. Out of sight of Shinka, of Pangari, of Third Rectification, of everyone.

  The Before Michaela Cannon’s most special, most secret nightmare, was that the Mistake had been at least partially an inside job. That was why the Before Peridot Smith was condemned to die. Well, be Libraried, but it was all the same to the mind inside the severed head. An inside job required insiders.

  She would never know for certain who they were.

  * * * *

  Shinka had the artefact broken down on the deck of the number two cargo bay. The remnants of the old hold were gone, tumbling off into a decaying orbit. In a month or two they would provide a brief lightshow in Themiscyra’s upper atmosphere.

  Cannon stood and looked at what they had wrought. Five shallow arches, each with a wedge-shaped head.

  “OT-1 was made to come apart,” the Lieutenant said. “We didn’t have to cut anything, once we’d worked out how to release it.”

  “From the interior scans?”

  “Mechanical and magnetic mechanisms.”

  “Hmm.” That had been fairly clear to Cannon, too. “No separate central core? Where was the power signature coming from?”

  “Well… everywhere.” Shinka sounded as if the words were sour in her mouth. “It’s kind of weird stuff.”

  Cannon had to smile at that. “Of course it’s weird. Human engineers think in terms of discrete systems. That’s not an inherent property of the universe.” She squatted down on her heels. “Almost the opposite, r
eally. So show me this everywhere.”

  Shinka walked the Before through a series of survey reports, theoretical models, even some wireframes. The power generation, storage and management process seemed to be integrated into the device’s skin and internal structural elements.

  As if a starship’s hull were also its drives. Not inconceivable, but strange. A maintenance nightmare, for one thing, unless one trusted one’s build quality implicitly.

  “The force map resemblance to an ion-coupler cell seems to be a coincidence,” was the Lieutenant’s concluding remark to her presentation. “Not indicative of anything in particular that we can sort out.”

  “So basically it’s a battery. Without propulsion. A projectile?”

  “We’re not even sure it lacks propulsion. At the molecular layer, there’s evidence of peristalsis in those arms.”

  “Peristaltic metalloceramics?” Cannon was frankly astonished.

  “Chiao suspects the material is flexible under the correctly applied current. Dr. Allison has an even weirder idea.” Shinka fell silent, looking uncomfortable.

  “Which would be…?” Cannon prompted.

  “That it’s not the material that’s flexible. Not in the usual molecular sense. Rather, that the mass is being rebalanced. Sort of a Higgs boson surge, if you get the drift.”

  “Nice trick if you can manage it.” Cannon considered that for a little while. “Not fundamentally too different from our own gravimetrics.”

  “But, well, weird.” Shinka almost twisted, like a child caught in a lie. “How would it work? Why doesn’t such an effect tear the whole structure apart?”

  “Those are questions for a raft of future Ph.D.s. Our questions are different.”

  “Where did it come from,” the Lieutenant said softly.

  “Where did it come from?”

  * * * *

  “We know how long its been here,” Dr. Allison said in a presentation two days later. He was a thin man, pathologically so by most people’s standards, with narrow gray eyes and skin the color of a dusky plum.

  Cannon couldn’t name the world offhand, but Allison had to be descended from a very narrow population left in isolation longer than most. Just from looking at him, she’d guess someplace with a lot of insolation and an insufficient hydrosphere.

  They all sat in Third Rectification’s lecture theater at frame seventeen, watching a presentation on a room-sized virtual display. Atoms whizzed around in a primary-school animation as the talk went on.

  “There’s some pretty heavy metallics in the composition of this thing’s shell. We’re able to identify neutrino transmutations within the lattices. Several waves of them, we think. Trying to map those with correspond to known stellar events is giving us some hope of triangulating where our little friend has been all his life. Incidentally, we’ve got a lower bound for its age.”

  “Which is…?” Cannon asked.

  “At least fourteen hundred years-objective. We know it’s not truly ancient, unless it spent a lot of time behind some heavy shielding.”

  “How heavy?”

  “A light-year’s thickness of lead.” Dr. Allison winked at her. “Or a truly astonishing EM bubble.”

  “I think we would have noticed that much lead hanging around anywhere in our neighborhood,” Cannon said dryly. “I’ll reserve judgment on how astonishing an EM bubble might need to be.”

  “We are talking about alien technology,” Allison replied. “But everybody has to obey the same laws of physics. Even magic aliens.”

  “At least in the local neighborhood,” Cannon pointed out. “Could it have come from very far away?”

  He shrugged. “Anything is possible, of course. But we can account for the neutrino effects with a reasonable time-map of the Antiope Sector.”

  She leaned forward, aware that the several dozen others in the lecture theatre were all staring at her now. “So if it is from here, where from here?”

  “We will have a probability cone and a vector. That’s the best I can do right now.”

  “I’ll be reviewing that carefully.” Cannon sank back into her chair, thinking furiously. A clue. A god damned clue. After how many generations?

  * * * *

  Go-Captain Alvarez stood close by her inside the three-dimensional plot of regional space. Allison’s probability cone extended on a spinward vector leading out past the margins of the Antiope Sector. Off even the old Polity maps, into cursorily explored space. The old days had run out of time before they’d got any further.

  Cannon tried to imagine some hulking mass of lead, two or three light-years wide in all dimensions, lurking out there.

  Ludicrous, of course, no matter how magical her enemy’s powers might seem otherwise.

  An EM bubble out that way? Who would know to look?

  “Do you want to build a pair-master here at Themiscyra?” Alvarez asked.

  “A Themiscrya-Salton pairing? Not sure that would do anyone much good. Ever.” The pair-masters that anchored the paired drive routes had grown somewhat less hideously expensive over the years, descending from literally astronomical costs to the merely stratospheric. But it would take them three to four months of effort to build one here. “The only return on that investment that I can see is in shortcutting our trip home,” she finally added.

  “For some people, that’s a substantial return,” Alvarez observed. The Go-Captain was being careful, she could hear it in his voice. Reminding the Before what the years meant to mainline humans.

  Cannon calculated some quick Lorentz factors. “When we turn back to Salton, if we’re not stopping to sniff around, our worst case from the Antiope Sector will be about five years-subjective. Third Rectification can put almost the entire crew in transit sleep to cut that down for them. So, no, I don’t want to spend months building a pair-master here that no one will ever use again.”

  “Where in the probability cone, then, ma’am?” Go-Captain Alvarez was definitely being very carefully.

  Canny man, this one.

  “Three abandoned worlds, then we’re at the edge of the map.” Cannon waved her fingers through the projection, seeking data. “Any Polity survey activity on what lies beyond is garbage data. I don’t think anyone from the Imperium has bothered to look since.”

  “Who has the time?” asked Alvarez.

  Cannon snorted. “Who wants to?” The intuition demon was tickling at her again. She looked at the clustered stars outside the margins of the sector. A small local neighborhood, maybe the remnants of an old stellar nursery. She’d have to ask the astronomers aboard. “We’ll start there, and come back in.”

  “Time,” Alvarez reminded her. A warning about priorities.

  “Time, yes. Our lives are made of it.”

  * * * *

  Two weeks later, Third Rectification departed Themiscyra’s system. She’d sent summary messages by laser pulse back to three known listening posts. Eventually, given a few years for light-speed lag, the Imperium would know something of what they’d done. In case the expedition failed to return. Even against that eventuality, she’d been unwilling to push the big news about OT-1 over what amounted to an unsecured channel.

  Having calculated their next flight to be approximately two years-subjective even inside of the ship’s relativistic reference frame, Cannon offered transit sleep to anyone who wished for it.

  Most of the crew took her up. Even the most ardent excitement must pale after years of transit.

  So they flew, deep into the interstellar night.

  * * * *

  Shipmind, Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  Patience is a virtue of the very shortest-lived and the very longest. Even inside a relativistic reference frame, time goes on. The commander wafted through passageways and data like smoke on the wind. Years flew by the hull, unheeded as sunrise on some icy moon.

  Knowing when to stop working and when to stop waiting was an essential difference. The shipmind watched her commander with the intensity of a predator, wi
th the wariness of prey. She stirred no trouble, she left no trace. Still she watched, heeding the stirrings in her underminds.

  Third Rectification stalked the interior of Sword and Arm with the exquisite patience of her kind. The power line filters defeated her. The little starship’s independent life support systems denied her access. Even the timekeeping signals were deeply encrypted. The shipmind could not question the paranoia of the Before Michaela Cannon without confessing her own.

  So she continued to test the idiot-but-powerful defense of her idiot brother hanging like a leech off her hull. Cannon came and went from her refuge, sometimes talking of maintaining the ancient systems.

  Discomfort stirred deep within Third Rectification. Whatever trail they were on did not lead to a desirable end. She had no monkey ancestor-ghosts to warn her away, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t see deeper than her sensors were able to probe.

  Patient, she waited.

  * * * *

  Year 1148 post-Mistake

  Solar orbit around binary NSN.411-e.AA; spinward of the Antiope Sector

  The Before Michaela Cannon, aboard the starship Third Rectification {58 pairs}

  Cannon stared at the void of unexplored space that surrounded them. Never before seen by the human eye, at least not since the fall of the Polity. A messy chaos of a gaseous protoplanetary disk plowed by ice fragments and the beginnings of a decent set of planets.

  An interesting place, by a lot of standards.

  But empty.

  No evidence of the architects of the Mistake.

  She knew they were missing something.

  Third Rectification had made a long, slow approach into the system. Most of the crew were still in transit sleep. She hadn’t bothered waking them up yet. Everything they could see was subject to instrumented intermediation anyway—to the naked eyed, this whole place would have been darkness occluded by occasional patches of a different kind of darkness.

  They didn’t need human analysis yet. Not here. And there was nothing to touch hands-on. So to speak.

  “You ignored six other planetary systems closer to our origin when you chose to head for this one,” the shipmind said mildly. Only Lieutenant Mervin was on the bridge with her right now, and he was focused on a troubleshooting audit of backup data systems.