A Learning Experience

by Christopher Nuttall

  Perhaps Steve had the same thought. “Good luck, Kevin,” he said. “If you don’t come back we’ll all be very upset.”

  Kevin had to smile. Where Steve had set out to build a new society, Kevin might well have taken the starship and vanished out into interstellar space. There was a whole galaxy waiting for the human race, after all. But he wouldn't be tempted to take Captain Perry on a long voyage of exploration. They needed to collect information and return it to Earth. If they failed, unlocking the secrets of alien technology might take longer than Earth had.

  “We will,” he promised. “Or die trying.”

  He took a long breath. “Give my love to Mongo and the others,” he added. “Goodbye.”

  Steve raised his hand in salute. A moment later, his image vanished completely.

  “Prepare the drive,” Kevin ordered.

  “The drive is online and ready to go,” Jackson reported. “All systems appear to be in optimal working order.”

  Kevin wasn't surprised. The Horde’s concept of basic maintenance was terrifying – he had a feeling that they lost at least one or two ships a year – but at least they’d stockpiled a reasonable amount of spare parts. Guided by the interface, the human crew had carefully replaced everything that had been threatening to break and then sent the damaged components to Heinlein Colony. Some of them, he hoped, would be duplicable by human technology.

  “Good,” he said. He braced himself. “Engage!”

  He hadn't been sure what to expect when the FTL drive activated. Some races suffered badly, according to the databanks, and needed to be sedated or held in stasis for the entire trip. Others seemed to find it exciting or felt nothing. Kevin ... felt a flicker of unreality for a long moment, followed by a strange kind of queasiness. And then everything seemed to return to normal.

  But the display were black, showing the unblinking nothingness of FTL.

  “We are currently heading away from Earth at several times the speed of light,” Jackson said, in hushed tones. “No man has ever been this far from Earth.”

  “No human-crewed starship,” Kevin corrected. Aliens had taken quite a few samples from Earth over the years. God alone knew what had happened to their descendents. Some would have been turned into mind-burned cyborgs, but the others? Were there brothers of mankind out among the stars? “But we will not be the last.”

  He settled back into the command chair. “We will run drills for the first half of every day,” he added. “And then we will spend the rest of our time researching the galaxy.”

  The next two weeks fell into a pattern. They ran emergency drills every day, learning more and more about the sheer variety of threats in the galaxy, then researched the vast datafiles on the starship. Kevin was used to the interface by now, but even he found it hard to keep track of everything it had to show the human users. And then there were the little hints they found that might just suggest ways to duplicate alien technology. The official files might be long on elaborate superlatives and short on details, but there were plenty of hints elsewhere. But could they be turned into working technology?

  It was astonishing just how used they became to flying through space in an alien starship. Boredom started to sink in rapidly after the first week, followed by a form of claustrophobia as the researchers realised that they were truly cut off from Earth. They could no longer email their friends and research partners, nor could they go elsewhere if they wanted a break from their work. Jackson, who admitted that half the trainee submariners felt the same way too, organised an endless round of games and contests to keep everyone distracted. On a submarine, he pointed out, there were far fewer distractions.

  Kevin privately understood. Anything could be happening, back on Earth. The Horde could have attacked again, he knew, or terrorists could have successfully struck at Heinlein Colony or one of the recruiting centres on Earth. There were just too many people volunteering to go to the moon for them all to be screened, even with alien lie detection technology. All they could really do was make sure that no one who hadn't been properly screened got access to the starships or other pieces of alien technology. But his understanding didn't make it any easier to bear.

  He spent a surprising amount of time talking to the alien. Cn!lss, once he’d overcome his slight fear of the utterly inhuman alien, was a strange conversationalist. On one hand, he seemed quite willing to share everything he knew with his human captors. But on the other hand, there were large gaps in his knowledge that seemed utterly implausible. If Kevin hadn't studied the records on the Horde so carefully, he would have assumed the Hordesman was keeping something from him. But ignorance of the greater galaxy seemed to be part of their worldview.

  “The world we’re visiting will not twitch a claw at your presence,” Cn!lss assured him. “They are used to visitors who do not wish to share anything of themselves with strangers.”

  Kevin nodded. He’d given serious thought to wearing something that completely covered their forms, but it seemed pointless. The human race wasn't that different to several other galactic races, including some who looked almost identical as long as they didn't remove their clothes. They’d be likely to be mistaken for one of those races, Cn!lss assured him, provided they didn't undergo a medical examination. That would have revealed their humanity beyond a shadow of a doubt.

  “You have contacts,” he said, softly. “People we can talk to?”

  “Quite a few who do business with the Hordes,” Cn!lss said. “They will sell to anyone, provided the price is right.”

  “How very human,” Kevin muttered.

  He sighed. It looked very much as though they would have to hire a local to help them sell their wares, giving the local a chance to cheat them out of half of their profits. If, of course, there were any profits. He couldn't help worrying about what would happen if their produce turned out to be completely worthless. Or, for that matter, if they were simply cheated so badly they wound up with nothing. It seemed alarmingly possible.

  The thought still nagged at him as he walked into the research lab and met Carolyn. His half-hearted attempts to lure her into bed had failed, but she seemed friendly enough. Kevin had sighed and given up, more or less. Maybe she was just worried about bedding her ultimate superior on the starship.

  “I think we have a rough idea of just how the alien drive works,” she told him, as she took her eyes off the screen. “It actually folds space around it, allowing the starship to cross large volumes of space almost instantly. Or at least we think that’s what it does.”

  She picked up a sheet of paper and held it up in front of his nose. “Imagine you start here,” she said, pointing to one end of the paper. “You want to get to the other end, which is quite some distance away. If you have to walk normally, it will take you some time.”

  Carefully, she started to fold the sheet of paper up like a concertina. “By folding the space around the starship, the FTL drive ensures that the distance the starship has to travel is much shorter than it seems. But ... the more space is folded, it seems to create gravity waves that allow the ship to surf towards its destination and ...”

  She paused. “You’re not following this, are you?”

  Kevin shook his head. He was, he knew without false modesty, pretty smart. It was why he’d gone into Intelligence in the first place. But Carolyn was far smarter than him, even though she had very little practical experience. As a theorist, she was first-rate. And yet ... could she actually turn theory into technology that would make FTL a practical reality?

  “We know it can be done,” Carolyn said, when he asked. “The aliens can make it happen, after all. And we also know that chinks in space-time form naturally, allowing the aliens to expand through space without FTL drives. If we’d had one of those in our star system ...”

  “I know,” Kevin said. “We’d have been overwhelmed long ago.”

  He shivered. When he'd realised that there were over ten thousand intelligent races known to exist, he’d wondered why Earth hadn't en
countered them openly centuries ago. The answer had finally emerged from the databanks, only to give rise to more questions. Galactic society preferred to concentrate on the gravity points, even though there was a working form of FTL drive. It was odd to realise that such a towering civilisation looked so strange, when viewed on a standard chart, but it did make sense. Earth had been ignored simply because she was too far from the galactic mainstream.

  They don’t have infinite power, not yet, he thought. Without it, there are limits to how far they can expand without the gravity points.

  It was odd. The aliens had all the tools to create a post-scarcity society, yet they lacked the power sources necessary to make that final jump. If they managed to gain access to an infinite source of power – zero-point energy, perhaps – they would be able to transform themselves into Star Trek’s Federation or the Culture or something even more powerful. But they couldn't, not yet. Humanity still had a chance to catch up.

  Or do we? The thought was a bitter one. Humanity had fought wars that had claimed millions of lives. The Galactics had fought wars that had killed billions or trillions. They thought nothing of building starships large enough to carry an American aircraft carrier in their holds or of converting an entire star system into a warship production plant. Or they could use nanotechnology to enslave hundreds of millions of people ... no matter how he looked at it, humanity’s survival would depend, very much so, on keeping their heads down and not making any enemies. But they already had one merciless set of enemies in the Horde.

  Carolyn elbowed him. “Penny for your thoughts?”

  “Just thinking about how far we have to go,” Kevin said. The vast majority of humanity – at least in the West – had absorbed the reports from the moon ... and then gone onwards, living their lives as if Steve and his family had never existed. He rather envied their ability to stop thinking about what it all meant. “How long until you can produce a working FTL generator?”

  “Probably years,” Carolyn admitted. She rubbed her forehead as she sat down. “I can see the bare bones of an FTL drive, but actually making it work would be tricky as hell. If we could open up the drive on the ships ...”

  Kevin shook his head, firmly. The whole system was sealed, a sensible precaution where Hordesmen were concerned. Besides, it was fairly clear from the instruction manual that any attempt to open the drive section would almost certainly disable it permanently. They couldn't risk being stranded in interstellar space.

  “I understand,” Carolyn said. She yawned, suddenly. “But it will be years before we make any real progress.”

  “I know,” Kevin confessed.

  “Tell you one thing,” Carolyn said. “We may be halfway towards artificial gravity and thus antigravity. It will take some work to produce enough superconductors, but once we have them we might be able to produce our own antigravity systems.”

  Kevin smiled. The real problem with human spaceflight was lifting cargo out of Earth’s gravity field. Every piece of weight had to be accounted for, somehow. The giant rockets that had propelled Apollo 11 to the moon had been discarded as they expended their fuel and became deadweight. But if humanity could master antigravity technology ...

  “Good luck,” he said. “Make it happen and you’ll be famous right across the world.”

  “That’s tiny, now,” Carolyn said. “Do you think anyone is ever famous right across the galaxy?”

  “I doubt it,” Kevin said. “The galaxy is really staggeringly huge. And besides, not all of the aliens share the same tastes. Who knows – they might actually like listening to the Screaming Singer of the Week.”

  “Nah,” Carolyn said, after a moment’s thought. “They couldn't be that perverse.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Heinlein Colony, Luna

  “Here he comes,” Mongo said, as the shuttle swept down towards the lunar surface. “Are you ready?”

  Steve shrugged, unsure. Arranging the state visit had been tricky, to say the least. Every world leader who considered himself important – something they all seemed to have in common – had demanded to be the first to visit the moon. And it hadn't just been them, either. The Secretary General of the UN, the Pope and hundreds of other significant political figures had also demanded to be the first to visit. In the end, Steve had ruled that the American President would be the first, if the Secret Service let him come. They’d been horrified when they realised they wouldn't be given complete access to the colony, even though it was their duty to protect the President.

  But the President had come. Steve had to smile at the thought. He had thought – and still thought – that the President’s politics were appallingly bad for America, but he definitely had to admit the man had balls. But then, what sort of politician would pass up on a chance to make history?

  There was a faint flicker of energy around the shuttle as it passed through the force field and settled to the ground. The force field was keeping the atmosphere in, allowing Steve and the rest of the reception party to stand in the open without spacesuits. But part of him really didn't like being so badly exposed. One glitch with the shield generator and they’d be dead before they could hope to escape.

  The hatch opened, revealing the President and his youngest daughter. She’d wanted to be an astronaut, Steve recalled; she was staring around the lunar surface as if she’d never quite expected it to be real. The Secret Service had thrown another fit at the thought of letting the First Daughter – one of them, at least – go with the President. But they’d been overruled, again.

  Steve nodded to Mongo, who stepped forward. “Present ... ARMS!”

  The small group of soldiers, armed with modified alien weapons, snapped to attention. Steve hadn't wanted a big ceremony, but he’d agreed – reluctantly – that some form of ceremony was probably required. In the end, they’d made it as simple as possible.

  “Welcome to Heinlein Colony, Mr. President,” he said, as the President reached the end of the line. “And you, young lady.”

  The President’s daughter looked up at him, eagerly. “Are we going to see Apollo 11?”

  “We are,” Steve confirmed. Had he ever been so eager as a child? Probably. “But first we have to tour the colony.”

  He allowed Rochester to take the lead as they stepped through the airlock and into the rapidly-growing underground colony. It had been a month since they’d make their public debut and the response had been astonishing. The lunar population had more than quadrupled, while several new factories had been set up on the moon and more were on the way. Indeed, with another starship at their disposal, they’d even started pointing water asteroids towards Mars to start the terraforming process. The protests from environmentalists on Earth had simply been ignored.

  “This is an incredible place,” the President said, as they came to the end of the tour. “You must be very proud.”

  “We are, Mr. President,” Rochester said. “We’ve built quite a community here over the last two months.”

  They entered Baen’s Bar and sat down at a reserved table. The owner had operated a diner in Montana Steve had patronised, but he’d gratefully moved to the moon when Steve made the offer. It was growing harder and harder to run a small business in America these days, thanks to the bureaucrats. Steve knew there would be no shortage of recruits for the foreseeable future.

  “Beef, chicken and other kinds of meat are expensive up here, at the moment,” Steve explained as menus were passed round the table. “We’re still working on setting up farms for animals, so we’re having to bring it up from Earth. But, on the other hand, there are fewer overhead costs for small businessmen.”

  The President laughed. “Point taken,” he said. “And retaken. And taken once again.”

  Steve shrugged. “I’m afraid the food isn't as fancy as you might get in a state dinner,” he added. “But it is very good food.”

  “That will be something of a relief,” the President joked. “Do you know how difficult it can be to endure a ten-co
urse dinner?”

  The cook took their orders, then vanished behind the counter. Steve smiled to himself as the sound of frying burgers echoed over towards the table, then allowed his smile to become obvious as a young girl served the drinks. The President’s daughter had chosen a colossal milkshake, which had arrived in a weirdly-shaped glass that had been produced in zero-gravity. Unsurprisingly, the President had settled for coke.

  “You’ve done quite a bit over the last month, if the reports are accurate,” the President said, as they waited. “Are you planning to slow down?”

  “Not at all,” Steve said. “The first asteroid homesteading kits are being completed now, so we hope to set up the first asteroid mining stations within the next month. Despite the naysayers, we had an astonishing number of applicants volunteer to enter the training program, even though there are significant risks and a very real possibility of death millions of miles from home. And we’re placing orders for components that will be used to construct the first base on Titan ...”