The Space Opera Megapack: 20 Modern and Classic Science Fiction Tales

by John W. Campbell

  As a pilot must, he crossed the field to tend his ship. He barely paused during the walk-around, carefully detaching the fake pipe fittings and connections that had marred the beauty of the lines and hidden features best not noticed by prying eyes. The hardest thing was schooling himself to do a proper pilot’s walk-around after so many years of cursory play-acting.

  L’il Orbit was a Class A Jumpship, tidy and comfortable, with room for the pilot and co-pilot, if any, plus cargo, or a paying passenger. He dropped automatically into the co-pilot’s chair, slid the ship key into its slot in the dark board, and watched the screen glow to life.

  “Huh?” Blue letters formed Terran words against the white ground. “Who’s there?”

  He reached to the keyboard. “Get to work!”

  “Nothing to do,” the ship protested.

  “You’re just lazy,” the man replied.

  “Oh, am I?” L’il Orbit returned hotly. “I suppose you know all about lazy!”

  Despite having written and sealed this very script long years ago, the man grinned at the ship’s audacity.

  “Tell me your name,” he typed.

  “First, tell me yours.”

  “Professor Jen Sar Kiladi.”

  “Oho, the schoolteacher! You don’t happen to know the name of a reliable pilot, do you, professor?”

  For an instant, he sat frozen, hands poised over the keyboard. Then, slowly, letter by letter, he typed, “Daav yos’Phelium.”

  The ship seemed to sigh then; a fan or two came on, a relay clicked loudly.

  The screen cleared; the irreverent chatter replaced by an image of Tree-and-Dragon, which faded to a black screen, against which the Liaden letters stood stark.

  “Ride the Luck, Solcintra, Liad. Aelliana Caylon, pilot-owner. Daav yos’Phelium co-pilot, co-owner. There are messages in queue.”

  There were? Daav frowned. Er Thom? his heart whispered, and he caught his breath. Dozens of years since he had heard his brother’s voice! The hand he extended to the play button was not entirely steady.

  It wasn’t Er Thom, after all.

  It was Clonak ter’Meulen, his oldest friend, and most trusted, who’d been part of his team when he had been Scout Captain and in command such things. The date of receipt was recent, well within the Standard year, in fact within the Standard Month…

  “I’m sending this message to the quiet places and the bounce points, on the silent band,” Clonak said, his voice unwontedly serious. I’m betting it’s Aelliana’s ship you’re with, but I never could predict you with certainty…

  “Bad times, old friend. First, you must know that Er Thom and Anne are both gone. Nova’s Korval-pernard’i…” Daav thumbed the pause button, staring at the board in blank disbelief.

  Er Thom and Anne were gone? His brother, his second self, was dead? Anne—joyful, intelligent, gracious Anne—dead? It wasn’t possible. They were safe on Liad—where his own lifemate had been shot, killed in Solcintra Main Port, deliberately placing herself between the fragging pellet and himself… Daav squeezed his eyes shut, banishing the horrific vision of Aelliana dying, then reached out and cued the recording.

  “…Korval-pernard’i. The name of the problem is the Department the Interior; their purpose is to eat the Scouts. Among other things. One of those it swallowed is your heir, and I don’t hide from you that there was hope he’d give them indigestion. Which he seems to have done, actually, though not—but who can predict a Scout Commander? Short form is that he’s gone missing, and there’s been the very hell of a hue and cry—and another problem.

  “Shadia Ne’Zame may have discovered his location—but the Department’s on the usual bands—monitoring us. Listen to Scout Net, but for the gods’ sweet love don’t attempt to use it!

  “Shadia’s due in any time and I’ll send a follow-up when she gets here. You’d scarcely know the place, with all the changes since your training.

  “If you’ve got ears for any of us, Captain, now is when we need you to hear.” There was a pause, as if Clonak was for once at a loss for words, then:

  “Be well, old friend. If you’ve heard me at all…”

  It ended.

  Daav stared for a moment, then punched the button for the next message.

  There was no next message. Days had gone by and Clonak had not followed up.

  Daav shifted in his seat, thinking.

  Desperate and under the shadow of a pursuing enemy, Clonak had found him. And Clonak had not followed up. Suddenly, it was imperative that Daav be somewhere else.

  He flicked forward to the microphone.

  “This is L’il Orbit, ground. I think I’ve got the problem fixed now. I’m going to be checking out the whole system in a few minutes. If I get a go, I’ll need you to move me to a hot pad.”

  “Hot damn, L’il Orbit, way to go!” The counterman sounded startled, but genuinely pleased. “I’ll get Bugle over there with the tractor in just a couple!”

  “Thank you, ground,” Daav said gravely, already reaching for the keyboard.

  “Hello,” he typed.

  “Go,” said maincomp.

  “Complete run: Flight readiness.”

  “Working.”

  So many years. His brother and sister dead. His son in trouble. The son he wasn’t going to be concerned with after all. And somehow the Juntavas was mixed around it.

  Scout Commander. Daav sighed. Scouts were legendary for the trouble they found. The trouble that might attend a Scout Commander did not bear thinking upon.

  The ship beeped; lights long dark came green. He touched button after button, longingly. Lovingly.

  He could do it. He could.

  He had left all those battles behind.

  “Ground,” he said into the mike, the Terran words feeling absurdly wide in his throat, “this bird’s in a hurry to try her wings. Everything’s green!”

  “Gotcha. We’ll get you over to the hotpad in a few minutes. Bugle’s just got the tractor out of the shed.”

  Daav laughed then, and laughed again.

  It felt good, just the idea of being in space. Maybe he could talk to some of the pilots he’d been listening to for so long—He grimaced; his back had grabbed.

  Right. Easy does it.

  And then, recalling the circumstances, he reached to the keyboard once more.

  “Hello,” he typed. “Weapons check.”

  “I’m not a combat pilot, either, Shadia. I think we did as well as might expected!”

  The gesture in emphasis was all but lost in the dimness of the emergency lighting.

  “I swear to you, Clonak—they’ve murdered my ship and if they haven’t killed me I’m going to take them apart piece by piece, and if they have killed me I’ll haunt every last one of them to…”

  The muffled voice went suddenly away and the mustached man raised his hand to signal the separation. The woman shrugged and braced her legs harder against the ship’s interior, bringing her Momson Cloak back in contact with his as they sat side by side on the decking behind the control seats, using the leverage of their legs to hold them in place in the zero-g.

  “We bested them,” the man insisted. “We did, Shadia—since the fact that we’re somewhere argues that their ship isn’t anywhere.”

  There was a snort of sorts from within the transparent cloak. “I’m familiar with that equation—my instructor learned it from the Caylon herself! But what could they have been thinking to bring a destroyer against a ship likely to Jump? You don’t have to be a Caylon to know that’s…”

  Her gesture broke the contact again and the near vacuum of the ship’s interior refused to carry her words.

  Shadia leaned back more firmly against Clonak’s shoulder, the slight crinkle sounding from the cloak not quite hiding his sigh, nor the crinkling from his cloak.

  She glanced at him and saw him shaking his head, Terran-style.

  “Next shift, Shadia, recall us both to put on a headset. As delightful as these contraptions are, I’d like us
to be able to converse as if we weren’t halflings in the first throes of puppy-heart.”

  She laughed gently, then quite seriously asked, “So you think we’ll have a next shift, at least? No one on our trail?”

  He sighed, this time turning to look her full in the face.

  “Shadia, my love, I doubt not that all is confusion at Nev’Lorn. The bat is out of the bag, as they say, and I suspect the invaders have found themselves surprised and disadvantaged.”

  He nodded into the dimness, eyes now seeing the situation they’d left behind so suddenly when the Department of Interior attacked them.

  “The ship most likely to have followed was closing stupidly when last we saw it—closing into your fire as well as the sphere of the Jump effect of the hysteresis of our maneuvers. They would have been with us within moments, I think, if they had come through with us.”

  Clonak gestured as expansively as the Cloak allowed.

  “Now—what can I say? We’ve come out of Jump alive. If we’re gentle and lucky the ship may get us somewhere useful. Perhaps we’ll even be able to walk about unCloaked ere long; with hard work and sweat much is possible. You will remember to tell people that you’ve seen me sweat and do hard work when this is over, won’t you, Shadia? When our present situation is resolved—then we will consider the best Balance we might bring against these murderers.”

  He sighed visibly, used the hand-sign for “back to work,” with a quick undernote of “sweat, sweat, sweat.”

  She smiled and signaled “work, work, work” back at him.

  Clonak stretched then, unceremoniously lifting himself off the floor and away from Shadia. Steadying his feet against the ceiling of the vessel he brought his face near hers and touched left arm to left arm through the cloaks.

  “Shadia, I must give you one more rather difficult set of orders, I’m afraid. I know my orders haven’t done much good for you lately, but I pray you indulge me once more.”

  With his other hand he used the Scout hand-talk, signifying a life-or-death situation.

  She nodded toward his hand and he closed his eyes a moment.

  “If you find that, against chance, we are brought again into the orbit of the Department of the Interior, if they verge on capturing us—you must shoot me in the head.”

  He flicked an ankle, floated accurately to the floor again, belying the cultivated image of old fool, and he looked into her startled, wide eyes.

  “Just dead isn’t good enough, Shadia; they’ll have medics and ’docs. Do you understand? There must be no chance that they can question me. They cannot know what I know, and they cannot know who else might know it.”

  Clonak tugged gently on her elbow, and she uncurled to stand beside him, stretching herself and near matching his height.

  His hand-talk made the motion demanding assent; she responded in query, his in denial…and he leaned toward her until cloaks touched again.

  “I know, Shadia, neither of us were raised to be combat pilots. It is thrust upon us both as Scouts and as pilots. My melant’i is exceedingly clear in this. I can tell you only one thing right now—and little enough it is to Balance my order, I know.”

  Her hand signaled query again and his flicked the repeated ripple that normally would signify a humourous “all right, all right, already…”

  “What I know,” he said into his cloak and through the double crinkly life-skins to her ears, “is the name of the pilot they are afraid of. And having made this one pilot their enemy, they now must be the enemy of us all.”

  The math was easy enough, if not quite exact. There were a dozen Momson Cloaks per canister; each of the two installed canisters had eleven left. There were two replacement canisters, and a backup. The emergency kit built into each of the conning seats held a pair of individual Cloaks, as well. Out of an original eight eights to start there were now five dozen and two to go.

  Math is a relentless discipline: It took Shadia down the rest of the path almost automatically. Each Cloak was designed to last an average sized Terran just over 24 hours—Momson Cloaks were, after all, standard issue devices on cruise ships plying the crowded space of the Terran home system—but they were conservatively rated at 30 hours by the Scouts.

  Perhaps 40 standard days then, Shadia thought, if usage was equal and none of the units bad, if…

  She saw the flutter of a hand at the edge of her vision as Clonak signaled for attention; he leaned forward and they touched shoulders as he spoke:

  “Not as bad as all that, Shadia—we’ve got some ship stores too, and the spacesuits themselves, if need be, and there might be a way to…” She glanced at him sharply and he pointed toward her right hand.

  “I’m not a wizard, child. You were counting out loud.”

  Shadia rolled her eyes. It was true. She’d been waiting for the battery powered gyroscope in the auxiliary star-field scope to stabilize with half her mind and with the other half she’d been doing math on her hand.

  She bowed carefully amid a sea-noise of crinkling. “Thank you for your notice,” she said formally, while her free hand chuckled out the sign for “Why me?”

  His reply in finger-talk, also with the underlying ripple of a chuckle, was simply “Breath’s duty.” He pulled away, a rough-trimmed wire conduit clutched carefully through the transparent Momson Cloak, and floated toward the open overhead panel. Shadia likewise turned back to her task in progress.

  The ship’s tiny forward viewports were automatically sealed by Jump run-up; they were blind unless they could get power back to those motors or use the auxiliary scope to see straight away from the ship.

  And now the star-field scope was stable enough to run: Despite Clonak’s protestations, he’d managed to perform wizard’s work on the back-up electrical system and the device was ready to operate. It was not what one might hope to be using to determine one’s position after an interrupted Jump-run, but she’d used less in training.

  As she bent to the scope she sighed a breath—and then another. Breath’s Duty, indeed. Every child on Liad was made by stern Delm or fond grandfather to memorize the passage, which had come virtually unchanged through countless revisions of the Code. Unbidden, portions came to her now, recalled in the awkward rhythms of childish singsong.

  “Breath’s duty is to breathe for the clan as the clan allows, Breath’s duty is to breathe the body whole, Breath’s duty is to plan for the clan’s increase, Breath’s duty is to keep the Balance told, Breath’s duty is to…”

  Carefully, she adjusted the star-field scope. To be useful, she needed to recognize any of the several dozen common Guides—her usual choice was the brilliant blue-white Quarter main giganova—or find a star within disc-view. Disc-view, of course, was optimum. With the auxiliary scope even a basic scan could take a day.

  “Breath’s duty is to keep the Balance told,” she muttered, and noted the gyroscope’s base setting. There were a lot of degrees of space to cover, and time moved on.

  It was L’il Orbit and not Ride the Luck that docked at Delgado’s smallest general-flight orbiting docks; and Professor Jen Sar Kiladi it was who made a series of transfers to and from accounts long held in reserve. The shuttle trip to the larger commercial center, as well as the various library connections and downloads, were made by a student invented some years before by the professor; and the tools purchased at the local pawn establishment were paid for, in cash, by a man with a brash Aus-Terran accent and super-thin gloves.

  “I’m here to fix your nerligig,” the little man told the morning guy behind the bar.

  “Ist broke?” the bartender wondered. The device sat in its place, motionless—but it was always motionless at this time of the day, local ordinance requiring the Solemn Six Hours of Dawn to match that of the spiritual city Querna on the planet below.

  “Repair order!” said the man, vaguely Aus, waving a flimsy in the air and lugging his kit with him. “I’m good, I’m expensive, and I’m on my night differential.”

  He looked like one
of those semi-retired types: just the kind of guy who’d know how to keep an antique nerligig running.

  The bartender shrugged, waved the man and his tools toward the ailing equipment, and poured a legal drink into one glass and its twin into another then gave them both to the customer at the end of the bar.

  “Hey, asked for one drink—right?”

  “Solemn Six, bud! Can’t sell youse that much in one glass this time of the day…”

  The repairman shook his head, set up his tools, adroitly removed the wachmalog and the bornduggle from the nerligig, and waited patiently for the boss.

  The boss was a heavyset Terran, and he traveled today with three guards. He came in looking tired and his guards swept by, checking out the patrons, glancing at the bartender, reconnoitering the restrooms…

  It was the boss who saw the nerligig guy, professionally polishing one of the inner gimbag joints.

  “What’s going on here?” he demanded.

  The guy glanced at him out of serious dark eyes. “Time to do scheduled maintenance.”

  The boss grimaced, but gave the correct reply.

  “I don’t need nothing fancy today.”

  “Dollar’s greener when you do,” said the man, polishing away.

  “At’s awful old.”

  The repairman looked up, eyes steady—

  “I only come out at night, you know.”

  The boss looked at the bartender, sighed, and watched his guards stand importantly around the bar for a moment.

  “You cost me some help today,” he said finally, turning back to the nerligig guy.

  The man shrugged.

  “Good help is hard to find. Better you know before there’s a life in it.”

  The boss sighed again, and waved the repair guy toward his office.

  “C’mon back.”

  The office was sparely appointed; a working place and not a showplace. Daav took a supple leather chair for himself, nodding at its agreeability.

  The boss sat in his own chair, rubbed his face with his left hand and gestured at his visitor with his right.

  “What’s your pleasure?”