Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  She even recalled the moment of realization. She remembered when it all started.

  * * * *

  Thirty-two Years Earlier

  Rosealma had been naive and terrified, outside her element, in a school on Hector Prime, a school on the ground, in real gravity, in a place where she couldn't just float away.

  She had chosen the Mehkeydo Academy because it was the best planet-bound school in the sector. She had grown up on The Bounty, a multinational cargo vessel, that never stopped anywhere for longer than a few weeks. She had thought with the ignorance of youth that staying planet-bound would be interesting.

  Instead, it had been stifling. She felt heavy and awkward and stupid, when she was none of those things. Because of her spacer background, she was the thinnest girl in class, and one of the smartest too. She had scored 100 on her boards, something no cargo monkey had ever done, and that made her eligible for full scholarships from the best schools in the Enterran Empire.

  She had chosen Mehkeydo Academy, and for nearly two years, she believed she had chosen incorrectly.

  Until that moment in class.

  No one saw the change occur, because hardly anyone looked at her. Most people thought her odd—and from their standpoint, she was. Even the professor, Erasmus Dane, rarely looked at her.

  He was a strange one too, that Dane. A highly regarded professor of Ancient Technologies, Dane loved anything old and out of date. He carried an ancient wooden pointer stick in his hand, tapping the metal tip on any surface to prove his point. He wore tweed jackets and wool trousers and always smelled a bit fusty, as if his clothes were as old as his obsessions.

  And one of his obsessions was stealth tech. He called it the ultimate lost technology. In his introductory class, Technologies and the Ancient World, he explored the way that human beings—from the beginnings of known civilization on old Earth—gained and lost knowledge. His focus in that class was on a group known as the Romans, who built things like roads and aqueducts, and whose engineering abilities flummoxed succeeding cultures for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years.

  By the end of that semester, he'd spoken about a legend of amazing ships and how he saw the people who flew them as the Romans that the Enterran Empire couldn't quite emulate.

  His mention of the fleet was the first time Rosealma had heard of it. The ships were called Dignity Vessels and they sounded magical: they were big and black and swooped like birds. They housed five hundred to a thousand to ten thousand crew members. They had weapons that could destroy entire planets. And they could vanish in the middle of battle, only to reappear at the exact right moment, and destroy entire squadrons.

  Rosealma loved the Dignity Vessel stories. She particularly loved how heroic the leaders of the Dignity Vessels sounded. But most of all she loved the stories of the Dignity Vessel fleet—how it was a hundred or five hundred or a thousand strong and how it never went back to Old Earth where it came from. Instead, it traveled ever forward, on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, fighting for the underdog, saving peoples and cultures that couldn't save themselves.

  Dane claimed these stories had a basis in fact, and urged his students to find the truth. He had them dig through ancient records, through texts and translations, finding any mention of Dignity Vessels and their crew.

  Rosealma loved the assignment and spent most of her semester on it. She discovered that no ship had ten thousand crew members, and that the stories of the Dignity Vessels weren't always heroic.

  But she also discovered that the ability to appear and disappear in a battle wasn't magical at all. It was technology based, and once upon a time, the Enterran Empire had known how to do the same thing.

  The Enterran Empire called that ability stealth technology. And Rosealma moved from a study of the Dignity Vessels to a study of the history of stealth technology long before she took Dane's Lost Technologies Advanced Seminar.

  Unlike most of her classmates, Rosealma had grown up on ships. And she knew that such a technology would change everything. It would make life both easier and more difficult.

  She had been moving away from a degree in history toward a degree in science when she had her epiphany in Dane's class. One of her other history professors told her she had a scientist's mind—she didn't like the inaccuracies in the historical record; she wanted to find a way to ensure that the historical record was accurate. She wanted precision and certainty and rigor, things that the study of history could never ever have.

  In that fateful lecture, Dane paced, as he always did, three-quarters performer and one-quarter professor, using his ancient pointer stick like a weapon. Any student who even appeared to doze got the stick slammed against a desk, making the entire class jump to attention. He would lean on the stick to make a point, slap it against his hand as he contemplated an idea. He would use the stick as a superweapon against the tiny holographic Dignity Vessels he surrounded himself with, creating a ripple in the hologram as the stick sailed through it.

  On that particular morning, he'd created an entire battlefield. Ships of various types fighting over nothing, weapons firing into the pretend space around him. Dane stood in the middle of the chaos, an invisible giant to the ships.

  Rosealma watched the Dignity Vessels. They were hard to miss, with their birdlike shape and long wingspan. They tilted and moved like predators, larger than every other ship, although Rosealma doubted that was how it had been. Just because one culture had a big ship didn't mean others lacked big ships as well.

  But that wasn't the first mistake she'd noted in the professor's presentation.

  Dane spent the morning discussing stealth technology. The Dignity Vessels winked in and out of the battlefield like lights turning on and off. When they disappeared, weapons fire would go through the empty space as if the ships had never been there.

  Based on his research, Dane said he believed that stealth tech cloaked the vessel all at once, making it invisible—not just to the instruments on the various ships, which was the way that stealth tech worked on existing ships—but also to the naked eye. So anyone who looked through a porthole saw the blackness of space instead of the outline of a Dignity Vessel.

  Hands shot up, of course, as their owners wondered how the shot missed the vessel then. And Dane, who had probably given this lecture a hundred times in his career, had an answer before the question even got asked.

  “The vessels cloaked,” he said, “and then they maneuvered out of the way. They returned to the same position before decloaking, to throw off their enemies.”

  But Professor Dane had never served on a ship. Rosealma had checked his curriculum vitae before taking the class, and she had noted his lack of expertise in actual space travel. Dane had taken vacation trips off Hector Prime, but he had never lived on a vessel, trained on a vessel, flown a vessel, or spent more than a few days on one.

  He really had no idea how modern vessels worked, let alone how ancient ones did.

  And sometimes, Rosealma believed, it didn't matter how much someone understood an intellectual concept: that was no substitute for hands-on experience.

  Those thoughts flashed through her mind as she looked at the miniature simulation—and that was when she had her epiphany. The Dignity Vessel's stealth technology wasn't a traditional cloak. No captain would have his ship execute four maneuvers when he could execute two.

  In a battle, time was everything. The captain would cloak the vessel and move away from the spot where he cloaked, never to return. But he would never cloak the vessel, move out of the way, then return and uncloak. It simply wasn't logical. And if that was how the Dignity Vessels’ cloaks really operated, and if that was the prescribed maneuver, the ships would have been easy to defeat. All the enemy had to do was surround that spot in space and wait for the Vessel to return.

  But the Vessels didn't always return. Sometimes they did move away. Sometimes they returned to the same spot moments later, and sometimes they returned days later.

  Either the cl
oaks used power efficiently, allowing a Vessel to remain hidden for days at a time (and if that was the case, why didn't the Vessel simply leave the area?) or the stealth technology wasn't a cloak as anyone in the Enterran Empire understood it.

  Rosealma went back to her primary sources, found the references that had bothered her, and in the next class asked Dane about them. She cited them, then brought them up beside her holographically as she asked her question.

  “Professor,” she said, “eyewitnesses throughout the known history of the Dignity Vessels reported weapons fire hitting the area where the vessels had been seconds—sometimes nanoseconds—after the Vessel engaged its stealth drive. No ship can maneuver out of the way that quickly. Couldn't the stealth technology have worked in a different way?”

  “You're assuming that their technology is similar to ours,” he said. “They could maneuver faster than any other ship.”

  “Then why, when they were in trouble in battle, didn't they just maneuver out of the way without cloaking? If they could travel much faster than all of the other ships, wasting energy on a cloak makes no sense.”

  He gave her a patronizing smile. “I assure you the ships couldn't have operated any other way.”

  “But you're assuming the stealth tech is a cloak,” she said.

  “What else could it be?” he asked, pretending at patience, but clearly annoyed that she had questioned his intellectual prowess.

  “I don't know,” she said. “But—”

  “Of course you don't know,” he said. “None of us know. Stealth technology is lost.”

  “But you said our ships used it in the early days of the Empire.”

  His pretence at patience left. “Look at the histories, young lady, then talk to me. We didn't use the stealth technology. It malfunctioned and nearly destroyed our fleet. The Dignity Vessels were much stronger ships than ours, built by better engineers, run by gifted scientists. They could adjust for the various stresses of the cloak. We could not.”

  Then he turned away from her and moved to a different part of the lecture. And he never ever called on her in class again.

  But it didn't matter, because she knew he was wrong. He didn't understand several things about space-faring vessels. Not deep down. He had no idea how terrifying it got when a ship's energy reserves faded or the power system collapsed. He didn't seem to understand that the kind of maneuverability he described was impossible outside of FTL drives. The Empire had FTL drives, had had them for centuries, and never used them for the maneuvers that Professor Dane described.

  Once engaged, all FTL drives forced ships to travel great distances in a matter of minutes. Returning to the same spot in a battlefield was ridiculous, but even if it was militarily recommended, it would be difficult after engaging an FTL drive—particularly in the minute or two mentioned in account after account after account from people in different time periods, from different sectors, people who had never spoken to each other, and indeed, couldn't have spoken to each other because their cultures wouldn't connect in a meaningful way for another two thousand years.

  “It sounds like he has a different definition of magic than you do,” said Edward Quintana. Quintana—Quint to his friends—had decided mid-semester that Rosealma interested him. He sat next to her in class, walked her across the quad, and had been angling to spend more time with her.

  He was good-looking for someone planet-bound, with a heavy bone structure and muscle mass. He was both broader and taller than she was used to, and it took a while for her to become accustomed to his strong features. Planetside, he was considered handsome, his blue-black hair skimming his strong jawline, accenting rather than hiding his thick neck.

  On the Bounty, he would be considered too big to be beautiful, clumsy and lumbering, without the grace of those who spent at least half of their time in zero-G.

  “Definition of magic?” she asked, trying not to sound too defensive, although she felt that way.

  They had just left the Lost Technologies building, which was smack in the middle of campus. Hector Prime's sun, considered weak by some standards, was in the center of the sky, and a pale yellow light coated everything. Students sat outside, shoes and coats off, reclining on blankets or the specially made grass the university had planted to avoid Hector Prime's environmental regulations. The grass was blue, rather than green, which irritated more traditional students, but Rosealma liked it, particularly on days like this when the weak sun made the grass sparkle.

  “Yeah,” Quint said, taking her arm and leading her around a pile of shirts and pants. Half a dozen students were jumping naked in a nearby fountain, squealing as the cold water hit their skin.

  Rosealma didn't think it that warm, but she was used to the constant temperature on board the Bounty. Any change in temperature took her days to adjust to.

  “Join me for a beer and I'll explain,” he said.

  She smiled. He'd been asking her out for weeks—beers, lunches, dinners—and she'd been saying no.

  “Oh, what the hell,” she said, and followed him to the student union.

  It was a clear building designed to reflect the sun's rays, making the building look like it glowed from within. The interior was surprisingly dim, which made it less comfortable for Rosealma than she would have liked.

  Quint led her to the beer bar and before she could stop him, he bought her something dark and rich and smelling faintly of cherries. Then he led her through a tunnel she hadn't known existed into an open space inside the building. It felt like she was stepping inside a ray of sunshine, and it took her breath away.

  “What's this?” she asked.

  “One of the Academy's many secrets,” he said, pulling out a chair for her. She sat, then took her sweet-smelling beer. The scent told her it had been brewed on campus—the food services majors always experimented with new forms of old products. She took a tentative sip. The beer didn't taste as bad as she'd thought it would. In fact, it had a tang that she liked.

  Quint smiled at her, then raised his eyebrows just a little. “And that,” he said, “is another of the Academy's many secrets.”

  She laughed, then eased back in her chair. She didn't relax enough here. It was hard for her. On the Bounty, she used to go to the zero-G playground and float for relaxation. Here, the zero-G areas were either research intensive or by appointment only.

  “So, magic,” she said. “You're saying I believe in magic.”

  “Both of you do,” he said. “And you and Professor Dane are arguing about whose belief is right.”

  She frowned. She did not believe in magic. She believed there were things in the universe she did not understand, things that functioned in ways she couldn't explain, but that didn't mean those things were magic.

  Still, she didn't want to argue with Quint. Not yet, anyway.

  “Enlighten me,” she said.

  “Professor Dane believes that ships can move quicker in a microburst than they should be able to,” Quint said. “He thinks that the Dignity Vessels have a drive different than, maybe even faster than, an FTL, and combined with the cloak, that makes them magical. When you asked your question, you threatened to destroy his magical theory and it unnerved him.”

  “I thought I just nipped at his pride by questioning his expertise,” she said.

  “That too,” Quint said, cradling his mug. “But you also believe in magic.”

  She resisted the urge to cross her arms. “Really?”

  Quint nodded. “You believe that a ship could remain in place, become invisible to the naked eye, and not be affected by weaponry. That's magic.”

  She shook her head. “I didn't say that.”

  “Then how could those ships become invisible and not deflect a direct shot without the eyewitnesses all over the known universe being wrong?”

  “I can think of two ways off the top of my head,” she said. “In the first, the ship absorbs the shot and takes the energy from it, creating the illusion of the shot going through.”

 
; “Like it created the illusion of disappearing?” he asked.

  “Something like that,” she said. “Or it could go slightly out of phase.”

  “Out of phase?” he asked.

  “Move just a hair into another dimension.”

  He laughed. “As if that's possible.”

  “It's more likely than a ship maneuvering the way that the professor describes,” she said. “It's one of the theories of time travel, that people can move out of time for just a moment, and then come back. There've been experiments in a controlled environment that show such a thing is possible.”

  “And there've been experiments that postulate a drive faster than FTL,” he said. “It's all theory, which goes back to belief, which goes to magic.”

  “You are stubborn,” she said.

  “And so are you,” he said. “Why do you want to prove the professor wrong?”

  “Besides the fact that he's a pompous ass?” she asked.

  Quint's grin grew. “Besides that, yes.”

  “Because my maneuver—my magic, if you will—is simpler,” she said.

  Quint set his beer down. His smile remained, but changed just a little, as if what she said made him think.

  “Simpler?” he asked.

  She nodded, then leaned forward. “We're talking about a fleet of vessels so advanced that they've survived away from their home base for centuries. These vessels rebuild on the run, they move from place to place, they're like a living city that's constantly changing. I've lived like that, although not to the same extreme.”

  Quint leaned forward too. He was closer to her than she expected, which made her breath catch for just a moment. She could feel something between them, something electric.

  Something unseen, unmeasured, and untested. Yet she knew it was there—and more than that: she knew that he knew. Without asking. Without confirming. Without precision and rigor, she had certainty.

  “To live like that,” she said, surprised that her voice didn't betray her sudden emotion, “you have to be efficient. No movement can be wasted. Every command does double-duty. The ship has to perform at the top of its ability with every single thing it does. And Professor Dane's theory isn't efficient. It might be logical, but in practice, it would use more resources than it would save.”