The Space Opera Megapack

by John W. Campbell

  Not that Third Rectification couldn’t have handled that bit of business herself, but human oversight was considered crucial. At least by humans. So far, the shipminds had not objected.

  “You never expressed a preference.” Cannon had spent much the transit working over a manuscript on post-Mistake history, something she’d been drafting for at least a century. Cannon was fairly certain that the project would never be completed. Which was, in fact, something of the point.

  It gave her something to do when she wasn’t down inside Sword and Arm plugging through the data. And hadn’t that been alarming, when she’d finally found the biases.

  “There was no basis for a preference.”

  “Not even intuition,” Cannon admitted. Or whatever it had been. A sense that the thing now resident in their lab section had come a long way.

  Neutrino transmutation traces, indeed.

  She’d been there, damn it. She hadn’t seen a thing, but she’d sat in that big, gilded barn of a room on 9-Rossiter, not so different from banquet halls all the way back to her youth on the Earth of the early twenty-first century, and listened to the end of the world crack and boom and sizzle as the building was bombarded. Along with everything else in human space.

  And what the Before Peridot Smith had known… or hadn’t. Cannon had never even met poor, lost Maduabuchi St. Macaria, back in their Howard days. Thanks to that messy business at Tiede 1, the kid hadn’t lived long enough to be transmuted into a Before by the infernal miracle of the Mistake. But Smith had known. The woman was slipperier than a greased eel, back in her day. Bad as the Before Raisa Siddiq, in her way. The Polity inquiry into the Tiede 1 incident had finally been closed as inconclusive.

  Just like all the damned clues. The Before Aeschylus Sforza, with his planet full of the disappeared. Or empty of the disappeared, more to the point.

  Inconclusive.

  The bronze starfish down in the labs was the most conclusive thing they’d ever found. And why had she been the first to come looking?

  Because of the jacked data.

  Cannon opened her mouth to ask Third Rectification for a raw data dump of their telemetry and scans on this system, then closed it again. How would she know…?

  “I want Shinka,” she said aloud, instead. “Tell her to meet me at frame thirty-eight, lock two.” There was no point in trying to conceal their movements, so she might as well take advantage of what effectively amounted to local omniscience.

  The shipmind managed to inject note of trepidation into her voice. “Shall I tell the Lieutenant what this is regarding?”

  “No, she’ll know.”

  Which was hogwash. Cannon hadn’t confided her concerns in anyone. Hadn’t even been willing to think them through outside the safety of Sword and Arm’s hull, lest she unknowingly move her lips in some half-formed words or otherwise betray herself.

  Two thousand years of life had conferred preternatural self-control, but she was still human. Some days it seemed very important to remember that.

  * * * *

  Lieutenant-Praetor Shinka came hustling down the passageway a few minutes after the Before Michaela Cannon had arrived at lock two. Cannon had spent her time contemplating the vagaries of spaceship design across the length of her life. She’d been born into an era when a very, very limited number of people rode into the sky atop a suicidal column of chemical explosives, in tiny little cans into which no one decent would force a dog.

  By the time she’d emerged from the Howard Institute’s facilities, a basic interplanetary capability was in place, though the sponsoring entities were still the nation-states of her birth. ‘American’ was a term Cannon very rarely thought about any more. She’d have been surprised if anyone aboard besides possibly the Earth-born Shinka knew what the word meant.

  But even then, ships had been industrial objects fabricated to a currently fashionable notion of efficiency.

  Now…? No one of her youth would recognize the interiors of Third Rectification as a ship. Too organic and strange. Not industrial. Not in most of the interior spaces. Cargo bays, labs, some sections would have seemed familiar. Indeed, Cannon’s own cabin was deliberately atavistic. Commander’s privilege.

  Standards had changed. Ideals. Desires. The experimental became normal, then boring, then retro, then outré, then just strangely old-fashioned. She suddenly felt very old indeed.

  Cannon looked at Shinka approaching and wondered if there were any way to explain the thoughts that had just been chasing through her head.

  “Captain…?” The lieutenant’s greeting was tentative. Worried, even.

  That required a smile, some nod to the social grace. Cannon had spent centuries letting the graces go hang, but the reality of people was that you needed to bend around them, at least a little.

  “I’ve got something I’d like to show you aboard Sword and Arm.”

  Shinka glanced at the discolored ovoid hatch at their feet. “Ma’am, I don’t believe anybody’s been aboard Sword and Arm this entire cruise but you.”

  “Belief is a wonderful thing, Lieutenant.” Cannon tapped the wall pad. The void flexed and opened, revealing rungs to an airlock, the tube interconnect visible beyond through the safety window. Even some parts of Third Rectification could aspire to the industrial aesthetic of her earliest days. Sometimes form truly did follow function.

  Cannon dropped through the floor first, letting Shinka come after. They couldn’t go in the reverse order. Only she could open Sword and Arm’s hatch, and that once things were closed up above.

  * * * *

  Shinka stared around the cramped, utilitarian bridge of the little fast courier. “I’ve read about this ship,” she said quietly.

  “Oh, really?” Cannon wasn’t certain what, if anything, to make of that.

  “At the IG academy, we had an entire section on ship history.”

  “The Polyphemus mutiny,” Cannon said.

  “And that strange AI.” Shinka’s brow furrowed. “Memphis?”

  Barbecue and blues, Cannon thought, caught for a moment on remembered sweet-sharp-carbonized food smells from her youth. She shook off the memory. “No, Memphisto. The shipminds let their displeasure at further such research be known, shortly after that.” Monopoly is as monopoly does.

  “So, what am I doing here?” Shinka favored Cannon with a long, searching gaze. “No one’s boarded this vessel but you through the entire course of our expedition. You wouldn’t believe what some of the betting is concerning what you’ve got down here.”

  “Oh, probably I would.” Cannon looked around, let her fingers trail across a panel of hard-switched controls. Redundancy. The builders of this ship had prized redundancy with a commendable paranoia. “What I’ve got down here is a little starship of my own.”

  Shinka shrugged. “Well, yes. But why? It’s not supraluminal lifeboat?”

  “One of the theories is that I’m going to abandon my own crew all the way out here?” Cannon shook her head. “You people will never understand us. Me.”

  “You know, ma’am…” The Lieutenant’s eyes shone for a moment with a sort of predatory amusement. “Your ancient sadness routine doesn’t buffalo me so much any more. You might be a sphinx, but you’re not really that different from me. Or the rest of us.”

  This time Cannon laughed with genuine mirth, something she hadn’t done in a very long time. “I knew you were a good choice.”

  “For what, ma’am?”

  Cannon matched the other woman’s sudden return to seriousness. “For whatever comes next.” A deep shuddering breath. This was the point of no return. “I want to show you something.” She waved Shinka into a chair, then powered up the onboard systems. “Take a look at the survey data here.”

  Shinka leaned forward, then almost immediately back again. “That’s the external scans of OT-1. Looks like the raw data. In duplicate blocks…” She shot Cannon a sidelong glance. “What am I looking for?”

  “Something I believe I saw. I’m curious
what you’ll find.”

  “Well, the duplication is strange. Unnecessary, I mean.” Shinka puzzled a few moments with the gestural interface—Polity-era tech was vanishingly rare, for obvious reasons, while contemporary systems had their own engineering history and design language—then began sorting through the files.

  Cannon could be patient. She brought up some of the external cams on a hard display above the pilot’s crash couch and amused herself taking a survey of those limited slices of Third Rectification’s hull that could be seen from Sword and Arm’s fixed position.

  Shinka scanned a while, occasionally muttering quietly. Finally, she stopped. “Where did the two data sets come from?”

  “Ah. You see it, too?”

  “Yes. One batch is, well, filtered. Slightly lower resolution, less granularity on the deep scans of the artefact’s skin and interior.”

  Not that the scans weren’t essentially obsolete. One arm of the alien device had been disassembled almost to its component atoms during their run from Themiscyra to this god-forsaken place. Two others were torn down as well, to different levels of componentry.

  “Right. The unfiltered batch is straight off the chips you gave me out of the instrumentation Geek Squad ran when doing the initial assays. The filtered batch is what was available within Third Rectification’s systems as the analysis was being done.”

  “Some kind of copying error? Data corruption?” Shinka frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Those wouldn’t produce a filtering effect.”

  “No, they would not,” Cannon agreed, almost amiably. The Before really needed Shinka to articulate the logic of the problem for herself.

  “So someone messes with the data. Degranularizes the scans, which reduces the potential accuracy and effectiveness of our analyses.”

  “Across the entire data set,” Cannon pointed out.

  “Only four of us have that kind of system access. You and I are two of those four.”

  Time to drop another bit of evidence. “You won’t find any evidence of this tampering in the system logs. Not even down at the raw layers. I looked.”

  “Then who could have…” Shinka stopped, comprehension dawning in her eyes. “Third Rectification. The shipmind did this? But why?”

  “That is precisely and very much what I’d like to understand.” Cannon waved a hand around above her head, loosely indicating the world outside. “We don’t know anything about this solar system except for what the shipmind is telling us. All the instrumentation is intermediated through her. Unlike back at Themiscyra, where we could and did go for a walk with portable instruments.”

  “The shipmind is… editing us. Why?”

  “She’s uncomfortable.” That was the best Cannon had been able to sort out, and she had more experience with shipminds than any mainline human who ever lived or would. Damned few Befores could match her, either. “We’ve been playing word games with each other for months, I think. Third Rectification is waiting for me to spill something. I’m waiting for her to spill something. I’ve kept everything, even my private thoughts, down here on this deck out of her sight.”

  Shinka poked at the virtual display in front of her. “Shipmind isn’t part of this data flow?”

  “Nothing is. My own private Idaho.”

  “You killed for this ship.” The Lieutenant suddenly looked bashful, as if she’d overstepped. “That’s what the histories say.”

  “Killed, yes.” The Before Raisa Siddiq. Father Goulo. Memphis, that poor, doomed AI. “But not for this ship. Sword and Arm was sort of a consolation prize.”

  “You inherited a starship for coming in second-best.” Shinka’s tone flat, somewhere between crogglement and sheer disbelief.

  Memories of old, lost love tugged at the edge of Cannon’s conscience. “You don’t know what I gave up. They never cover that in the history books.”

  “No one ever knows what they gave up, Captain. Not until after it’s gone.” She looked around the tiny bridge. “So what will you do?”

  “There’s not point in confronting Third Rectification. She’s our ride home, after all.”

  Shinka patted the control panel sloping away from her station. “This thing works, does it not?”

  “Yes, if I want to fly me and a handful of my closest friends home the slow way. No transit sleep on this tin can, either. We’re a over four years-subjective from Salton right now. Couldn’t get the other three hundred crew on here, though. Not even cubed and frozen.”

  That didn’t even get a laugh. Of course, it probably didn’t even merit a laugh.

  “So what do you do?”

  “Sword and Arm can do just fine in local space. She moves faster than Third Rectification.” All the paired drive ships were basically tubs when engaging in Newtonian movement. It went with the size. “I want to go for a cruise. See if there’s anything we might be missing on the monitors upstairs.”

  Tapping her chin, Shinka nodded. “This is a profoundly frightening problem.”

  “That’s why I wanted you to see it.” Cannon paused, considering her next words, then plunged on. “I spent some decades—quite a few of them—lost in temporal psychosis. Centuries past now. But during that time, my grasp of reality was distorted. Often with enough subtlety that I could not tell myself.”

  “So you needed another pair of eyes. Sympathetic to your cause.”

  “I don’t have a cause, Lieutenant. This is about the Mistake. Would we be ready if they came for us again?”

  “No… It’s a big string to pull, though.” Shinka studied her hands a moment, as if fingernails had just been invented. “I was raised in an Alienist family. We believed… a lot of things. Took schooling, and some years of simply living in the real world, for me to shake that down to nothing more than a bit of reflexive uneasiness.”

  Cannon knew this. She’d seen the deep files on every live body aboard Third Rectification. “Why did you volunteer for this mission, then?”

  “To see if any of it was true. To prove my mom wrong.”

  “What will she say when we come back?” Cannon asked gently.

  Now Shinka’s voice was flat. “I’ve been gone from home over a hundred years-objective. She won’t have much to say at all.”

  Of course she had been gone that long. Once again, Cannon’s elastic sense of time had interfered with her assumptions about the obvious.

  “I want to detach, do some fly-bys,” she said brusquely.

  “Now?”

  “It can wait, but I want to go soon. Shipmind will be suspicious of us being down here in my private little playpen for this long. We either need to go right away or wait a week or two for that to die down.”

  “What can the ship do to us?” Shinka tugged a lip, looking thoughtful.

  “You fancy finding out?” Cannon asked. “It’s a long walk home from here.”

  “I’m not as worried about that as I might be. I happen to have a friend with her very own starship.”

  “Smart woman. Let’s get back aboard and sort ourselves out. Eight, ten days we’ll be gone.”

  “What are you going to tell Third Rectification?”

  “The truth,” Cannon said, her resolve softening for a moment. “Just not all of it.”

  * * * *

  “I’ll need to onboard another 4,000 liters of compressed O2 and another 5,200 liters of deuterium.”

  The display sparkled as resource allocations were adjusted.

  “You surely do not require that level of consumables for a week-long excursion in local space,” the shipmind said.

  Cannon sighed, tapping her lightpen. “How long have I controlled Sword and Arm?”

  “Almost seven hundred years, Before.”

  “In that entire time, I have never failed to keep her maintenance or consumables above reserve cruise levels. Have I?”

  “Of course not.”

  Cannon knew perfectly well that the shipminds had been tracking her starship carefully down the centuries. She also knew that Third Re
ctification knew she knew. It was enough to give someone a headache, sometimes.

  The Navisparliament strongly disapproved of relativistic starships operating independently. The shipminds collectively did not have the formal authority to outlaw such projects. Even if they had, it would have been largely pointless. The various armed forces of the Imperium Humanum would resist such moves vigorously. War as such was unknown, but actions in force were not; albeit planned and plotted on relativistic time scales thanks to the Navisparliament’s ban on overt weapons. Drive flares, mass pushers, mining lasers and such like were just tools, after all. At least under the law.

  All that aside, the Assurance Society ships were out there in their long, cold orbits, coming home periodically like gifts from some ancient god.

  More to the point, given that the paired-drive FTL was available, the requirements and pressures of human society largely rejected relativistic starships. Despite the limitations of the paired drive. For most purposes, if a relativistic cruise was needed, to establish a pair-master, for example, or to pursue some critical inquiry as the case with their current journey, every paired-drive ship carried its own relativistic propulsion.

  The pairings couldn’t happen without the initial slowtime cruise.

  All of which was to say, Sword and Arm had bothered them for centuries. Completely independent of the starship’s own strange and bloody history, it represented a very small but potentially significant wildcard in the shipminds’ strategies for their future.

  Right now, on top of all her other fears about data contamination and the illicit tweaking of their search for evidence of the Mistake, the Before Michaela Cannon was very much in a mood to twit the Navisparliament through its only representative in local space, Third Rectification.

  Lots of birds to be slain with this particular stone, she thought with satisfaction.

  “Any further questions?” she asked the shipmind.

  After a long pause, doubtless purely for dramatic effect, the starship responded, “Why?”

  “To test some theories.” As an answer, it had the advantage of being both utterly true and essentially meaningless. In hopes of nudging the shipmind’s thoughts in another direction, she added: “You’ve been around human beings for centuries. You know perfectly well how profound our need for see-and-touch is.”