The ancient woman sat back, biding her time.
“Did the streakship ever talk?” he asked.
“Yes.” She nodded and smiled wistfully, and then with a matter-of-fact shrug, she added, “As soon as the streakship got above us, it hit us with a narrow-beam broadcast. Yes.”
“What did it say?”
“Life survives inside the Great Ship,” she reported. “But our old leaders, the wise and powerful captains . . . they’re gone now. All of them. Either dead or in hiding somewhere.”
“Who is in charge?”
“Nobody.”
“What does that mean?”
“From what the streakship told us, passengers are fending for themselves.” The woman paused, studying his new face. Then she quietly mentioned, “However, there is one exceptionally obscure species that’s come into some prominence. In fact, at the end of the Polypond War, they took control of the Great Ship’s helm.” She offered a flickering wink, and then added, “And, oh . . . now that I mentioned that . . . guess who else has gone away . . . ?
“Somebody you know . . .
“Even before your body arrived home, he picked up his shell, and by the looks of it, scuttled away . . .”
10
Peregrine was perfectly healthy and profoundly poor. The raider who saved him had acquired most of his assets, while his debts to the hospital remained substantial, possibly eternal. He had no ship, and his crew was repaired and working with others. Several investors came forward, offering to pay for a new ship in return for a fat percentage of all future gains. But the only fair offer was a brief contract from his father, and for a variety of reasons, personal and otherwise, the young man decided to send it back unsigned and follow an entirely new course.
If you live cheaply and patiently, it takes astonishingly little money to keep you breathing and content.
For most of a century, Peregrine stalked the deep tunnels and access ports that laced the Ship’s central nozzle. Armed with maps left behind by his mother and sister, he hunted for routes they might have missed. He managed to find two or three every year, but each one was inevitably plugged with the high-grade hyperfiber. It was easy to see why no one kept up this kind of search for long. Yet Peregrine refused to quit, if only because the idea of failure gave his mouth such an awful taste.
New lovers drifted in and out of his life.
He occasionally saw the old lady engineer, meeting her for a meal and conversation. They hadn’t slept together in decades, but they remained friendly enough. Besides, she had a sharp mind and important connections, and sometimes, when she was in the mood, she gave him special knowledge.
“You knew a big hatch was coming,” Peregrine accused her. “That’s why you seduced me when you did. Somehow, you and your founder friends pieced together clues that the rest of us don’t ever get to see.”
“Yet that hatch, big as it was, was just a secondary phenomenon,” she explained. “Like blood from a fresh cut. I won’t tell exactly how we knew, but we did. And what was more important was that someone or something had emerged from one of the old ports. We had reason to believe that an armored vessel was pushing through the Polypond ocean, heading our way . . . presumably to get into a useful position before jumping free of the Ship.”
“And you suspected Hawking?”
“For thousands of years, I did. We did.” Fusillade nodded, and then said, “This isn’t official. But in the final seconds of the War, a few messages arrived from the interior. They were heavily coded military broadcasts, which is why they aren’t common knowledge. They describe the creatures that were taking over the battered Ship. The !eech, the broadcasts called them. And not wanting to alert the spy in our midst, we decided to keep those secrets to ourselves.”
“But he’s gone,” Peregrine countered. “Why not make a public announcement?”
“Because we don’t want to panic our children, of course.”
“Am I panicking?” he asked.
“In slow motion, you are. Yes.” The ancient engineer sat back in her chair, tapping at the heart nestled between her unequal breasts. “Spending your life searching for a way into the Ship, when we are as certain as we can be that there is no way inside . . . yes, I think that’s genuinely panicked behavior . . .”
“Hawking disappeared to someplace,” he replied. “That means there’s at least one route off this nozzle.”
“If he went back into the Great Ship, perhaps. But for all we know, he’s walking today on a living cloud off on some distant piece of the Polypond’s body.”
Peregrine had wasted decades walking empty hallways and dangling from soft glass ropes. He could have wasted a thousand centuries before finding the relevant clue. But he was a lucky individual, and he had the good fortune of becoming lost at the proper moment. After two wrong turns, he found himself standing beside a tiny chute exactly like ten thousand other chutes. Except, that is, for the marks left behind by a delicate limb that had been dipped in paint. No, in blood. A blackish alien blood with a distinctive flavor, and the writing was a familiar script, showing the simple word “HAWKING,” followed by a simple yet elegant arrow pointing straight down.
11
The chute ended with a vast airless room built for no discernible purpose. Its walls were half a kilometer tall, and the floor was a circular plain covering perhaps ten square kilometers of featureless hyperfiber—stuff as old as the Ship, far better than any grade that could be chiseled through today. The only obvious doorway led out into the dormant rocket nozzle. Peregrine set up a torch in the room’s center, and then he kneeled, searching that expanse with a powerful night scope. He should have missed the second doorway. If anyone else had ever visited this nameless place, they surely would have ignored what looked like a crevice, horizontal and brief. But someone was standing in front of the opening—a distinctive alien wearing a gossamer lifesuit, his long jointed legs locked into a comfortable position, the body motionless now and perhaps for a very long while.
Peregrine walked a few steps, then broke into a hard run.
On their private channel, Hawking said, “You look fit, my friend. And rather troubled too, I see.”
“What are you doing here?” Peregrine blurted.
“Waiting for you,” was the reply.
“Why?”
“Because you are my friend.”
“I don’t particularly believe that,” said Peregrine. “From what I’ve heard, the !eech are my enemies . . .”
“I have injured you how many times?”
“Never,” he thought, saying nothing.
“My friend,” said Hawking. “What precise treacheries am I guilty of ?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Silence.
Peregrine had invested years wondering what he would say, should this moment arrive. “Why live with us?” he asked. “Were you some kind of spy? Were you sent here to watch over us?”
There was a pause, then a cryptic comment. “You know, I saw you entering this place. I saw that quite easily.”
“I’ve been climbing toward you for several hours,” Peregrine complained. “Of course you saw me . . .”
Then he hesitated, rolling the alien’s confession around in his head.
With relentless patience, Hawking waited.
Peregrine slowed his gait, asking, “How long have you been watching my approach?”
“Since your birth,” the !eech confessed.
Peregrine stopped now.
After a few minutes of reflection, he said, “Those eyes of yours . . . they see into the future . . . ?”
Silence.
“Do they see everything that’s going to happen?”
“Do your eyes absorb everything there is to see?”
Peregrine shook his head. “A limited sight, is that it?”
One of the distant legs lifted high, signaling agreement.
“What else can you see, Hawking?”
“That I have never hurt you,” the al
ien repeated.
“My half sister . . . the one who died in the plasma blast . . . did you arrange that accident?”
“No.”
“But did you see the accident approaching?”
Silence.
“And why did you come up on the hull, Hawking? The only reason I can think of is to spy on us.”
“An obvious answer. And your imagination is richer than that, my friend.”
Hard as it was to believe, the apparent compliment forced Peregrine to smile. “Okay,” he muttered. “You wanted to spy on our future. We’re an independent society, free of the !eech, and maybe you’re scared of us.”
“That is an interesting assessment, but mistaken.”
“I don’t understand then.”
“In time, you will,” the !eech promised.
Then every one of its limbs was moving, carrying the creature backward into the narrow, almost invisible crevice. Peregrine began to run again, in a full sprint; but he was still half a kilometer from his goal when a warm gooey stew of fresh hyperfiber flowed into view, filling the crevice and pushing across the slick floor, glowing in the infrared as it swiftly cured.
12
The final doorway had been opened just enough for a small human wearing a minimal lifesuit to slip through, and, walking alone, he then stepped onto a frigid, utterly flat plain. During the War, portions of the Polypond had splashed into the giant nozzle, dying here or at least freezing into a useless hibernation. Peregrine strode out to where he found a modest telescope as well as a set of telltale marks. His friend once stood here, those powerful eyes of his linked to the light-hungry mirror. By measuring the marks in the ice, and with conservative estimates of the heat lost by Hawking’s lifesuit, Peregrine guessed that the creature had stood here for many years, pulling up his many feet when they had melted to uncomfortable depth, then dancing over to a fresh place before reclaiming his watchful pose.
Peregrine lay on his back now, slowly melting into the dead ice, and he fixed the same telescope to his eyes and purposefully stared at the sky.
The little city was barely visible—a sprinkling of tiny lights and heat signatures threatening to vanish against the vast bulk of the timeless and utterly useless nozzle. Millions of souls were up there, breeding and spreading out farther in a profoundly impoverished realm. Yet despite all of their successes, they seemed to have no impact on a scene that dwarfed all men and their eternal urges.
What wasn’t the nozzle was the galaxy.
Here was what the !eech had been watching. Hawking had lived for thousands of years in a place that offered him comfort and the occasional companionship. But once the streakship had left, carrying its important news to the universe beyond, the creature’s work had begun: sitting on this bitter wasteland, those great eyes had been fixed on three hundred billion suns. Peregrine studied the maelstrom of stars and worlds, dust and busy minds; and perhaps for the first time in his life, he appreciated that this was something greater than any silly Polypond. Here lay an ocean beyond any other, and someday, in one fashion or another, a great hatch would rise from it—furious bodies riding upon a trillion, trillion wings, reaching for this prize that has been lost.
This Great Ship.
WINNING PEACE
PAUL J. MCAULEY
Born in Oxford, England, in 1955, Paul J. McAuley now makes his home in London. A professional biologist for many years, he sold his first story in 1984, and has gone on to be a frequent contributor to Interzone, as well as to markets such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, SCI FICTION, Amazing, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Skylife, The Third Alternative, When the Music’s Over, and elsewhere.
McAuley is at the forefront of several of the most important subgenres in SF today, producing both “radical hard science fiction” and the revamped and retooled wide-screen Space Opera that has sometimes been called the New Space Opera, as well as dystopian sociological speculations about the very near future. He also writes fantasy and horror. His first novel, Four Hundred Billion Stars, won the Philip K. Dick Award, and his novel Fairyland won both the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the John W. Campbell Award in 1996. His other books include the novels Of the Fall, Eternal Light, and Pasquale’s Angel, Confluence—a major trilogy of ambitious scope and scale set ten million years in the future, comprised of the novels Child of the River, Ancient of Days, and Shrine of Stars—Life on Mars, The Secret of Life, and Whole Wide World. His short fiction has been collected in The King of the Hill and Other Stories and The Invisible Country, and he is the coeditor, with Kim Newman, of an original anthology, In Dreams. His most recent books include a new novel, White Devils, and a new collection, Little Machines. Coming up is a new novel, Players.
McAuley made his name as one of the best of the New Space Opera writers with novels such as Four Hundred Billion Stars and the Confluence trilogy, but in recent years he has created the Quiet War series as well, with stories such as “Second Skin,” “Sea Scene, With Monsters,” “The Assassination of Faustino Malarte,” and others, about the aftermath and the consequences of an interplanetary war that ravages the solar system. In the tense and suspenseful story that follows, he deals with the aftermath and the consequences of another space war, an interstellar one this time, and shows us that if you can’t manage to figure out a way to shake off the ghosts of the past, you may face a very limited future—such as: none at all.
One day, almost exactly a year after Carver White started working for Mr. E. Z. Kanza’s transport company, Mr. Kanza told him that they were going on a little trip—down the pipe to Ganesh Five. This was the company’s one and only interstellar route, an ass-and-trash run to an abandoned-in-place forward facility, bringing in supplies, hauling out pods packed with scrap and dismantled machinery, moving salvage workers to and fro. Carver believed that Mr. Kanza was thinking of promoting him from routine maintenance to shipboard work, and wanted to see if he had the right stuff. He was wrong.
The Ganesh Five system was a binary, an ordinary K1 star and a brown dwarf orbiting each other at a mean distance of six billion kilometers, roughly equivalent to the semimajor axis of Pluto’s orbit around the Sun. The K1 star, Ganesh Five A, had a minor asteroid belt in its life zone, the largest rocks planoformed thousands of years ago by Boxbuilders, and just one planet, a methane gas giant named Sheffield by the Brit who’d first mapped the system, with glorious water-ice rings, the usual assortment of small moons, and, this was why a forward facility had been established there during the war between the Alliance and the Collective, no less than four wormhole throats.
The system had been captured by the Collective early in the war, and because one of its wormholes was part of a chain that included the Collective’s New Babylon system, and another exited deep in Alliance territory, it had become an important staging and resupply area, with a big dock facility in orbit around Sheffield, and silos and tunnel networks buried in several of the moons. Now, two years after the defeat of the Alliance, the only people living there were employees of the salvage company that was stripping the docks and silos, and a small Navy garrison.
Carver White and Mr. Kanza flew there on the company’s biggest scow, hauling eight passengers, a small tug, and an assortment of cutting and demolition equipment. After they docked, Carver was left to kick his heels in the scow for six hours, until at last Mr. Kanza buzzed him and told him to get his ass over to the garrison. A marine escorted Carver to an office with a picture window overlooking the spine of the docks, which stretched away in raw sunlight toward Sheffield’s green crescent and the bright points of three moons strung in a line beyond the great arch of its rings. This fabulous view was the first thing Carver saw when he swam into the room; the second was Mr. Kanza and a Navy officer lounging in sling seats next to it.
The officer was Lieutenant Rider Jackson, adjutant to the garrison commander. In his mid-twenties, maybe a year older than Carver, he had a pale, thin face, bright blue eyes, and a calm expression that didn’t give anything away. He a
sked Carver about the ships he’d flown and the hours he’d logged serving in the Alliance Navy, questioned him closely about what had happened after Collective marines had boarded his crippled transport, the hand-to-hand fighting in the corridors and holds, how Carver had passed out from loss of blood during a last stand among the cold sleep coffins, how he’d woken up in a Collective hospital ship, a prisoner of war. The Alliance had requested terms of surrender sixty-two days later, having lost two battle fleets and more than fifty systems. By then, Carver had been patched up and sold as indentured labor to the pharm factories on New Babylon.
Rider Jackson said, “You didn’t tell the prize officer you were a flight engineer.”
“I gave him my name and rank and number. It was all he deserved to know.”
Carver was too proud to ask what this was all about, but he was pretty sure it had something to do with Mr. Kanza’s financial difficulties. Everyone who worked for Mr. Kanza knew he was in trouble. He’d borrowed to expand his little fleet, but he hadn’t found enough new business to service the loan, and his creditors were bearing down on him.
Rider Jackson said, “I guess you think you should have been sent home.”
“That’s what we did with our prisoners of war.”
“Because your side lost the war.”
“We’d have sent them back even if we’d won. The Alliance doesn’t treat people like property.”
Carver was beginning to like Rider Jackson. He seemed like the kind of man who preferred straight talk to evasion and exaggeration, who would stick to the truth even if it was uncomfortable or inconvenient. Which was probably why he’d been sent to this backwater, Carver thought; forthright officers have a tendency to damage their careers by talking back to their superiors.
Mr. Kanza said, “If my data miner hadn’t uncovered his service record and traced him, he’d still be working in the pharm factories.”
Rider Jackson ignored this, saying to Carver, “You have a brother. He served in the Alliance Navy too.”
The New Space Opera Page 9