by Robert Reed
“If they can manage that,” Aasleen said.
Krill grimaced and looked at their captain.
Hazz understood the situation clearly. But he thought it best to let Aasleen explain.
“Your subordinate,” she began, staring at the diplomat’s smoke-colored eyes. “You’re your diplomat just took our best shuttle. It is exactly the same as these other three, except it has a secondary hull that can be reconfigured. I designed that hull, under direct orders from you, madam. We were planning for contingencies, and you suggested that we have at least one shuttle that could look rather like a Scypha ship. ‘Just in case,’ you said. Madam. ‘In case our hosts aren’t as friendly or forthcoming as they should be. It would help if we could move among them, unseen.’”
The blood drained from the young face. Then a sorry old voice dribbled out. “Now I really don’t want to tell the Scypha.”
“Are there choices?” Aasleen asked.
“None,” Hazz said. Then with a crisp voice, he instructed the ranking diplomat, “Confess everything we know, and everything we can reasonably guess. No secrets here. Do you understand me? But make certain our man wears the majority of the blame.”
* * *
For twenty-three hours, Aasleen went about her business, overseeing repairs and managing one delicious fifteen-minute nap. She also listened to every rumor and examined the official updates for anything that might prove enlightening, and several times, she caught glimpses of the resident Scyphas. For nearly a year now, an alien delegation had been living onboard the Olympus Peregrine. They were high-ranking members of a government council that seemed to wield considerable power. For reasons of civility or simple functionality, they had grown bodies not unlike the human form—bipeds with single heads and single mouths, a pair of hemispherical eyes made from calcite crystals. They usually kept to their own little portion of the ship, which made it unnerving to see them drifting through the dock, one by one, glassy eyes staring at the broken shuttles and the AIs that were repairing them, and in particular, studying the chief engineer who was trying to do her job while ignoring all the damned rumors and briefings and official declarations that kept finding their way to her.
In the end, it was determined that Rococo hadn’t damaged the AI managers. But that didn’t particularly matter. With a full day’s jump on ships that were no faster than his, he had already won every likely race.
Other answers were needed. Aasleen was working on contingencies when Hazz called her to his quarters. By then the rumors were running in the same direction, but she ignored them. Aasleen entered the captain’s meeting room with three different plans ready to offer. Even when she saw the entire Scypha delegation drifting around the central table, she refused to accept the obvious explanation. Through a nexus, she fed her captain the latest update of the repairs. Then she told him and Krill, “I think we can see through his camouflage. And if we find him, we’ll use our own com-laser to cripple his shuttle, neat and easy.”
Hazz thanked her on a private nexus. But the latest stories proved generally correct. Speaking for humanity and the aliens, Krill said, “Everyone is outraged by what your brother has done,” she told Aasleen. “We are outraged and appalled. Stealing the shuttle is a minor evil. The Scypha believe, and now we concur, that Rococo has been in secret contact with one or more of the nonScypha lineages. For what purpose, we do not yet know. But he has acted against every order that I have given and every code that our captain has set down as law. And since he is ours—a body that belongs to our great lineage—we must send one of our own into the hunt. Because, as our hosts make plain, that is what justice demands.”
Aasleen glanced at the bright-eyed aliens, then at Hazz.
Her captain spoke. “I’ve considered every crew member for this assignment. We’ve had a few volunteers drift forward, which has been gratifying, but there isn’t much doubt about who is the best qualified. Is there, Aasleen?”
Shaking her head, she admitted, “No, there probably isn’t.”
Then she mentioned the most obvious difficulty. “But that leaves the problem of finding a suitable ship for me, since we don’t seem to have any craft that can actually catch him.”
A new voice emerged, a little too loud, utterly precise. “A fully-loaded deuterium freighter is soon to pass. Within a thousand kilometers of this place, it will pass.” The speaker was a smallish biped with a yellowish-green skin. Regardless of their body form, the Scypha retained a photosynthetic surface. It was a tradition and a consequence of their complex genetics: Under the proper circumstances, any one of these creatures could collapse into a trillion cells, and from those anonymous pieces, an entire jungle of plant-like organisms would spring forth.
“The freighter is changing its nature now,” the Scypha promised. “The ion-drive is being replaced by three fusion engines, and its body is creating a small but comfortable cabin for its guest. For you.”
“Am I the pilot?” she asked.
“No,” Hazz replied, fully expecting that question.
Then the human diplomat pointed a stiff finger at Aasleen. “You’ll go where you need to go, particularly if your brother manages to reach places where our good hosts cannot intrude.”
Chaos was the implication.
“But about my brother,” Aasleen began. Then she hesitated, wondering if she should risk offering her thoughts.
“A creature of your blood,” said the ranking Scypha.
“Except I don’t know my blood particularly well,” Aasleen said. And just to be certain that everyone understood, she quickly explained the histories of their unshared lives.
“But he is of your immediate line,” the creature insisted. Then the alien mouth attempted a smile, and it said to her and to every human, “You know him exceptionally well, or you know nothing at all.”
* * *
Aasleen made herself ready for the mission, packing a few belongings in a field kit while studying grim orders in detail. As soon as she was ready, she would ride one of the newly repaired shuttles out to an empty point in space where it would rendezvous with the promised freighter/hunter ship. The last word was that Rococo had vanished completely. But now the Scypha were actively searching for him, using tricks that Aasleen had surrendered willingly, and there was no way that he could remain hidden much longer.
Only an idiot would believe he could escape this sort of attention.
But Rococo was not an idiot, which led her mind to travel in new, equally painful courses.
Obviously, the charmer had more tricks waiting.
“And I’ll have to be ready for them,” she muttered to herself, leaving her quarters with her kit in tow.
A single Scypha was drifting in the wide hallway outside her door. It was wearing a loose-fitting gown and gecko shoes and the same yellow-green flesh that all of them cherished. But it was definitely not the delegate that had spoken at the meeting. Its voice was identical, but the body had more height and many more ribs, and the arms had extra joints for no sensible reason.
That familiar voice said, “Listen to me.”
Aasleen touched the floor with her own shoes, killing her momentum.
“About us, what you know is not enough.”
She couldn’t agree more. “I’m a tool-bearing tool. Most my friends are machines. Even human beings are usually too complicated for me.”
But that wasn’t apparently the creature’s point. Its face was twisted around a squarish skull and the lidless calcite eyes absorbed every photon, giving it the nearly perfect vision that the Earth surrendered when the trilobites went extinct. After a long, thoughtful silence, it asked Aasleen, “Which is more problematic, the shape of the body or the shape of the mind?”
She hesitated.
“If I look like no one else, how can one trillion minds think the same ways as any single mind does?”
And then that very peculiar creature turned its back on her, and on gecko toes, practically ran away.
5
The engines were firing again, this time killing some portion of their terrific momentum. Aasleen was strapped into her crash chair, a thousand invisible hands pressing down. On her orders, the bioglass walls had been left as transparent as gin, and when she wasn’t studying the Scypha and their long history, she gazed out at the graceless, doomed ship. Its fuel tanks were black cylinders mostly drained of their precious deuterium, and strung between them was a maze of pipes and pumps constructed from diamond and other soft materials. Three reaction chambers were woven from a low-grade hyperfiber, each chamber barely restraining the tiny sun burning inside. The newly constructed heat shield was vast and insubstantial—a stubborn cloud of carbon soot braced with nanowhiskers. Staring beyond the engines, Aasleen searched for Chaos, but the world was still hiding beyond the plasma plumes. Only between the black fuel tanks could she make out the blackness of empty space. Periodically the Scypha sun would peek in at her, filling the cabin with a blinding light, and sometimes she would see its sister star and the lone silver speck beside it—the giant jovian world maintaining a loyal distance. And the Ice Ring was always visible somewhere, appearing as smoky bands of glowing greenish haze. Millions of tiny worlds were moving, rich with life, linked to each other by com-lasers and trade lanes, by leaked air and lost water, by culture and eternal genetics. For tens of thousands of years, the Scypha had ruled a gigantic realm. Yet they never built any kind of starship or sent even one asteroid drifting off into the interstellar wilderness. And there was absolutely no evidence that they ever, even on the tiniest scale, attempted to colonize the jovian’s empty moons.
At least two ships were on a rendezvous course with Aasleen. One of the human shuttles had been given permission to slowly approach Chaos, while a swift Scypha drone was charging straight toward her, nothing onboard but Rococo’s left-behind satchel.
If she had the satchel in her hands now, she could crack its seals and study its contents, and more important, that conundrum would give her the excuse to do something other than other people’s nonsense and conjecture.
But there were no excuses. With one nexus, Aasleen reached deep into her data vault, picking random studies and learned papers, teaching herself a little more about the Scyphas and their home world. Yet experts were far from perfect. Even the exobiologists agreed on little but their own ignorance. And despite weeks of reading and contemplation, Aasleen was still barely a novice who could follow maybe half of any text, asking little questions when they occurred to her—clumsy questions answered easily by the vault’s AI, or countered with a simple, “That is not known,” response.
She was misreading an account about Scypha politics when Hazz appeared to her mind’s eye.
“It’s almost certain now,” the message began. “The ship that grabbed up Rococo has been traced back to the Iron Ring. That’s where it first appeared. It was pretending to be a drone bringing up a load of refined metals. It didn’t change its shape or programming until he had crash-landed on the asteroid. A few hours ago that new ship touched down on Chaos. On the eastern shore of the central ocean, we’re sure. Our telescopes saw it smack into the atmosphere, and our hosts are reporting the same observation.” He paused for a moment. “But I don’t need to remind you that our esteemed colleague might not have been onboard.”
Inside a hyperfiber lifesuit, the human body could drop almost anywhere and recover. Its descent would look like a meteorite, and since thousands of little impacts occurred every minute, there was no way to be certain about Rococo’s destination.
“But at least you can pick up a trail there,” Hazz continued. “Follow him as best you can. Our hosts have assured us that all of the local lineages will be helpful. Or at least, they will not get in your way.”
She sighed, barely relieved.
“And maybe there’s some more luck coming,” Hazz said. “As it happens, the dominant local lineage is an ally to the Scypha. At least as much of an ally as you’re going to find…”
The man’s face said more than any words. Hazz looked worried, suspicious and only grudgingly hopeful. It was an expression that an alien probably couldn’t read—even if the encryptions and other seals were broken.
“The Dun,” he said.
A thousand entries in her data vault began to glow with a soft pink light.
“They’re closely related to the Scypha lineage. At least that’s what our biologists claim.”
Hazz paused once again, pretending to gather his thoughts. But he knew exactly what he wanted to say. Quietly, with genuine warmth, he told Aasleen, “I am sorry. If I could have found a better candidate, you would have stayed here with me. This isn’t your profession, and these are awful circumstances, and I won’t remind you again about the time factors involved.”
Successful or otherwise, their mission had to end in just a few weeks. Otherwise it would be difficult for their starship, even with healthy engines and full tanks of metallic hydrogen, to catch up to the Great Ship.
Hazz shook his head angrily. “It does seem obvious. For whatever reason, Rococo is trying to ruin everything.”
Aasleen nodded.
Hazz pushed a hand through his kinky hair. “This isn’t your normal work, but this isn’t a job for diplomats. Or biologists. Or anyone else who happens to be under my command.”
In reflex, Aasleen reached along her nexus, taking another quick inventory of the traveling kit lying beneath her crash chair.
“None of this is fair,” said Hazz. “But Rococo has entered a place where he isn’t allowed, and you’re the best hope we have to solve this ugly conundrum.”
The kit was filled with exactly the types of devices that a talented engineer would want in reach, including a powerful plasma torch that could chisel through hyperfiber, or if necessary, boil the brains of one lucky man.
“Good hunting,” the captain said to his assassin.
Then he vanished, and Aasleen purged the message while leaving the Dun files highlighted. And again, she began skimming random texts, reading those parts that seemed most important, asking questions when they occurred to her, and swallowing every urge to scream or sob, or worse of all, just give up the fight and fall back to sleep.
6
The experts that hatched this mission had been of one mind: Olympus Peregrine—the retrofitted asteroid that helped carry the first humans to the Great Ship—would astonish their primitive hosts. The Scypha often rebuilt bolides, some even larger than the Peregrine. But their work was primitive by every standard, including mass-drivers and crude fusion engines that could barely nudge the little worlds into new orbits. The aliens didn’t possess high-grade hyperfiber, nor did they know any of the big cheats necessary to build a functional star-drive. Even as an elderly machine, the Peregrine possessed its burnished beauty, and it didn’t hurt that the enduring symbol of everything good and noble about human achievement was built inside a common piece of stone.
But Aasleen didn’t share the optimism. With a rather different estimate of her aging starship, she knew that good fortune was at least as important as good engineering when the Peregrine made its famous journey out to the Great Ship. Yes, the tiny voyage to the Scypha consumed only sixty years, but for the chief engineer, this mission felt like one intense, unbroken day jammed with work and major crises, plus three genuine disasters involving the ship’s increasingly problematic engines.
To reach the goal, the Peregrine needed to race ahead of the Great Ship while dropping through the plane of the Milky Way. Making this possible meant pushing hard enough so they could afford to slow down again, lingering in one location for three lazy years. And assuming that humans and the Scypha achieved some workable understanding, then the Peregrine wouldn’t just have to make the return voyage, but it would also have to bring home a few thousand adults—enough bodies and grown minds to build a functional colony somewhere onboard the Great Ship.
But return voyages weren’t guaranteed. While still inbound, Aasleen met with Hazz and his immediate staff, showing them proj
ections and models, hard numbers and soft gloomy numbers. Then as a final touch, she set a worn valve-fiber in front of her captain. It had been poured from what was once the finest hyperfiber made by humans, but that was thousands of years ago. The telltale darkening was obvious, revealing fractures deep inside the normally invincible material. Pointblank, she explained that only two of their main engines were reliable. What’s more, the trustworthy two were divided among the five present engines. “In other words, I’m going to cannibalize all five just to make a good pair, which leaves me needing to build three new engines just to give us a ninety percent chance of returning home.”
Hazz’s face grew soft and sorry. “What exactly are you proposing?”
She explained. The challenge wasn’t a surprise, and her solutions shouldn’t have been either. But it took Hazz half an hour to study the concepts, and several more hours to embrace what she wanted to do with their museum-worthy machine. A complete renovation of the starship was called for. Hyperfiber factories and fresh reactors would have to be built wherever there was room, and work had to be accomplished on the proverbial fly, using the inadequate tools on hand. Boast all they wanted about human genius, but the grim, inglorious truth was that their species was close to drowning.
Aasleen rarely saw her brother during those next months and years. But it seemed as if every twenty-four hours, she would talk to a person or two who mentioned Rococo. The diplomat/exobiologist often gave briefings to the crew, and he ate frequently with Hazz; and most likely, the affable fellow would pass someone in a hallway, and just to be pleasant, he would strike up a brief but undeniably memorable conversation.
Unlike his sister, Rococo was an intensely social organism, and better than most, he had the gift. Bring up his name, and faces would smile. Ask why, and the most retiring engineer or simplest AI-worker would replay a conversation word for word, catching some joy that nobody else could see. Of course nothing important was ever said. Aasleen noted that Rococo could speak buoyantly about the shallowest subjects. He was amusing at times but never more than that. And he told a good story, but not a great one. Yet her brother had some kind of chokehold on the hundreds of people they were traveling with—people she knew by name and face, some counted among her friends. But none of those people were so thrilled by her attentions that they would run to her brother, stopping him in the middle of his important work, distracting him by saying, “Oh, I saw your sister today. What a fun, good person Aasleen is!”