The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  “You’ve got enough power for that?”

  “Emergency batteries are good, so far.” She glanced around the darkened control room, and realized that Severin wasn’t in any position to be able to command the ship, and wouldn’t be for a while.

  “We can stop the countdown at any point,” she said.

  “Hold at one minute, then.”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  Severin looked at her. “How many were in engine control with you?”

  A hard sadness settled onto her face. “Minimum engine crew on this watch, my lord. Two.”

  That gave Severin at least seven people he knew of who had been in hardened areas of the ship when the radiation hit.

  Seven, out of a crew of thirty-four.

  Mojtahed hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “May I speak with you privately, my lord?”

  “Yes.” Severin turned to Chamcha and Bhagwati, who were still hovering by the access panel. “Bring the breakers,” he said.

  The two crewmen made their way out. Severin turned to Mojtahed.

  “Yes?” he said.

  Mojtahed pushed off from the door and brought herself to a stop a short distance from Severin. She glanced at Lord Go, and her face hardened. She turned to Severin and spoke almost angrily.

  “Have you considered that we may have just been attacked?”

  “No,” Severin said, though he was unsurprised by the question. His thoughts hadn’t yet stretched to that possibility, but they would have reached it in time.

  “Gamma rays and fast neutrons,” Mojtahed said. “That’s what we’d get with a missile burst.”

  “We saw no signs of a missile incoming,” Severin said. “No missile flares, nothing on radar. And there’s no sign of a fireball.”

  “A missile could have been accelerated to relativistic velocities outside the system, then shot through a wormhole at us.”

  Severin thought about this. “But why?” Surveyor wasn’t a military ship, or particularly valuable, and it was engaged in crossing a system from one wormhole to another, outside any trade routes. As the target for the opening salvo of a war, Surveyor hardly rated.

  “Why,” Mojtahed repeated, “and who.”

  Severin’s mind raced. “If it’s an attack, the first thing we need to do is get a message to Chee Station and to the wormhole relay station for passage outside. We’ve got to do that before we light the engine, before we maneuver, before anything. Because if an enemy detects a sign of life, they may finish us off.”

  Mojtahed took in a breath, held it for a moment between clenched teeth, then let it out in a big, angry sigh. “If they’re attacking the likes of us, I don’t hold much hope for Chee Station or the wormhole relay station.”

  The silence had reached into its third second when Nkomo stuck her head through the door.

  “Doctor’s dead, my lord. I looked for her assistant and – ” Nkomo hesitated. “He’s no better off than the captain.”

  “Thank you,” Severin said, but Nkomo wasn’t done.

  “Lieutenant Wellstone’s dead in the corridor just outside, my lord,” she said as she came into the control room. “And I checked in Lieutenant Montcrief’s cabin, and he’s in his rack. He’s alive, but I can’t wake him.”

  “Thank you,” Severin said again. He turned to Mojtahed. “Get back to engine control and lock yourself in, just in case we’re hit again. I’ll concentrate on getting communications geared up before anything else.”

  “Very good, my lord.” Mojtahed began to push off, then paused. “Could it have been Titan?” she asked. “If Titan blew, we’d get a hell of a lot of radiation.”

  Mojtahed’s theory would have explained everything so conveniently that Severin hated to dispose of it.

  “Not unless Titan was nearby,” he said, “and it wasn’t. Titan isn’t even in the system yet.”

  Mojtahed apparently regretted the loss of her hypothesis as much as Severin. “Too bad, my lord.” she said, and then another idea occurred to her. “Could it be something in nature? We’re close to the core of this galaxy. Could something have blown up in the galactic center and the radiation just reached us?”

  “I don’t know,” Severin said. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know.”

  Mojtahed pushed off the acceleration cage lightly, with her fingers. Even so that was enough to cause the cage to roll, and Lord Go, tethered to it, woke with a gasp.

  “Hurts!” he cried, and Severin’s nerves gave a leap. He pulled himself closer to his captain.

  “Medicine’s on its way, my lord.”

  “Hurts!”

  Afraid to disturb Lord Go again, Severin let go of the cage and touched the deck with one shoe. He pushed toward a wall, pushed off again, and snagged the doorsill.

  “We’re going to the pharmacy,” Severin told Nkomo. “Then we’re going to start looking after the crew.”

  On Nkomo’s face was a look that combined anxiety and relief. “Yes, my lord,” she said.

  Severin looked at the body of Lieutenant Wellstone. “Let’s get her in her cabin,” he said, and he and Nkomo carried the body a short distance down the corridor. They put Wellstone in her rack, then raised the netting at the sides to keep her from floating away.

  On their way to the pharmacy they encountered Bhagwati and Chamcha returning with boxes of replacement electric parts. Severin told them to try to get the comm station working first, then led aft through a bulkhead. The pharmacy was in a shielded area of the ship: If the pharmacist had only been at her duty station instead of asleep in her rack, she would have survived.

  Two crew had come to the pharmacy in their agony, but had been unable to open the locked door. One was unconscious now, and the other curled in a ball, whimpering. Severin used his lieutenant’s key to open the pharmacy door and then the medicine locker. He pulled out a med injector, then began looking through the neatly labeled white plastic boxes slotted into the heavy metal frames that guarded the contents against heavy accelerations. He found Phenyldorphin-Zed, pulled out one of the boxes, and handed it to Nkomo. He took another box, opened it, slotted a vial into the injector, and stuffed the rest of the vials into one of the leg pockets of his coveralls.

  Severin switched the med injector on. A tone sounded. Colors flickered on the display. A tiny bubble of air rose in the clear vial, and the injector flashed an analysis of the contents and a range of recommended doses.

  The software in the injectors was as idiot-proof as the Exploration Service could manage. He dialed a dose.

  He floated toward the nearest of the two crew, the one that whimpered with each breath, and he anchored his feet against the frame of the pharmacy door, pulled the woman toward him, and gently tipped her chin back with his fingers. He placed the med injector against her neck, waited for the display to signal that he’d placed the injector correctly, and fired a dose straight into her carotid.

  The woman’s eyelids fell. The whimpering stopped, and her breathing grew regular. Severin floated to the unconscious recruit and treated him likewise. Then he offered the injector to Nkomo.

  “You go to the female recruits’ quarters and then take care of the petty officers. I’ll look after the male recruits, the warrant officers, the lieutenant, and the captain.”

  Nkomo looked at the med injector without touching it, her dark eyes wide. “What about doses? What about –?”

  “The highest recommended dose,” Severin said. “I’ve already set it on the injector.”

  Nkomo didn’t move. “Isn’t that dangerous, my lord? Because these people are so sick, I mean.”

  Severin felt a sudden blaze of hatred for Nkomo. Nkomo was going to make him voice a thought that he hated himself for thinking, let alone for speaking out loud. The anger showed in his voice, and it made Nkomo start and stare at him.

  “Nkomo,” he said, “does it look to you as if the quality of life for these people is going to improve anytime soon?”

  Nkomo was cautious. “Ah – no, my lord.”<
br />
  “They’re dying,” Severin said. “We can’t do anything about it except try to make them more comfortable. If you give someone an accidental overdose, then as far as I’m concerned that’s fine. It just means that she won’t have to spend days dying in agony. But use whatever dose you want, I don’t give a damn.”

  He held out the injector again. Nkomo hesitated, then took it with fingers that trembled.

  “Yes, my lord,” she said, and left very fast.

  Severin floated in the corridor shaking with rage and badly wanting to hit something, but he knew that if he punched the wall in this weightless state he’d just start ricocheting around the corridor. It wasn’t Jaye Nkomo’s fault that she was eighteen and had been in the service for less than a year. It wasn’t her fault that an officer had given her an order, an order fraught with all the weight of authority and the regulations and the awesome power of the Praxis, that told her to give massive doses of narcotics to the dying women she’d until less than an hour ago been laughing with and serving with and sleeping alongside, and that if she killed any of them by accident that was all right. Nothing in Jaye Nkomo’s training had ever prepared her for this.

  Nothing in Severin’s training had prepared him for giving such an order, either, and the knowledge made him furious. He went back to the pharmacy, found another med injector, loaded it, and went to the male crew quarters.

  The smell of it was unforgettable. It wasn’t quite the smell of burning and wasn’t quite the smell of roasting. It was the smell of ten men dying, and it came with moans and cries. The ones who weren’t crying were listless with the apathy that was a symptom of a heavy dose of radiation. Severin went from one rack to the next and administered the doses of endorphin-analog, and by the time he’d finished his anger had passed. He only had the energy left for emotions that might be useful. The emotions that would track down the enemy, whoever they were, and somehow – somehow, given that he was in a crippled, unarmed ship with only seven crew – somehow destroy them.

  He went to the warrant officers’ cabins, then to that of Lord Barry Montcrief, and then he returned to the control room.

  In the control room the emergency lights were on. More than half the displays were glowing softly. Bhagwati sat at the comm board with the lid of the board raised. She was replacing fuses. Chamcha was bent over the sensor board, a puzzled expression on his face. Both were trying to ignore Lord Go, who was curled into a fetal ball and crying.

  Severin floated to the captain and placed the injector against his neck and touched the trigger. Lord Go gave a long, ragged sigh, and his clenched body relaxed.

  Severin went to the command cage, took the picture of the captain’s family, the children and wife and parents and stuffed Torminel, and he returned to the captain and put the picture in Lord Go’s hand where he would see it if he ever woke.

  “Report, please,” Severin said.

  “Replaced breakers in Main Busses One and Two,” Bhagwati said, “but the engine isn’t lit, so we can’t get power from anything but the emergency batteries. Battery power should be enough to send a message, though, so I’m trying to get the comm station up.”

  “I’m looking at the spectra from just before we got fried,” Chamcha said. He turned to Severin, his wiry hair floating around his moon face. “There was nothing, and then wham! – x-rays.”

  “X-rays?” Severin said. A missile wouldn’t produce x-rays. He kicked off and floated gently toward the sensor station.

  “They came in pulses.” Chamcha’s voice was puzzled. “Eight pulses in the first three-quarters of a second, and then the fuses blew and it stopped recording.” He looked at Severin anxiously. “Could someone have hit us with an x-ray laser?”

  “Pulses,” Severin repeated, and his heart sank.

  This wasn’t an enemy he could fight with a crippled ship and seven crew. Nor was it an enemy he could hope to vanquish were he a senior fleet commander, with a dozen squadrons of warships under his command.

  This was an enemy that could wipe out entire civilizations without even noticing them.

  “Chamcha,” he said, “what exists in nature that sends out twelve massive bursts of x-rays in one second?”

  Chamcha’s eyes narrowed as he searched his memory. Then the eyes widened, and the color drained from his face.

  “Oh, shit,” he said.

  After replacing a fuse in the navigation station, Severin located the enemy within half an hour. One of the seven, or possibly eight, stars in the large system of which Chee’s star was an element had been catalogued, over eight hundred years ago, as a brown dwarf, a large gaseous body that wasn’t quite large enough to have properly ignited as a star.

  That categorization was now demonstrably incorrect, and so was the estimate of the number of stars in the system as a whole. There were not seven, or possibly eight, but rather eight, or possibly nine.

  The alleged brown dwarf wasn’t a brown dwarf, but a degenerate star. It had once been much larger, and had a companion star that was larger still, forming between them a binary pair that rotated about each other as they moved in even more complex orbits around the other six, or possibly seven, stars of the greater Chee system.

  The companion star, nearing the end of its life, had exploded as a supernova, hurling vast clouds of its outer shell into space. Much of this material had been absorbed by its neighbor, making it larger, still. The companion, dying, collapsed into a neutron star, and began a deadly dance with gravity, spiraling closer to its neighbor with every orbit. Eventually the neutron star had fallen close enough to begin stripping the outer layers of hydrogen gas off its attendant, drawing the infalling matter into a disk. As the material drew closer, the enormous magnetic fields of the neutron star drew the material inward, compressing and heating it, eventually transforming the infalling matter into powerful beams of x-rays that shot from the magnetic poles.

  The neutron star spiraled in, closer and closer, until its orbit was nearly within its companion’s outer envelope. The period of its orbit was less than three hours. It had so consumed its companion star that the companion was now indistinguishable from a brown dwarf, especially if the star was being observed from far away, hundreds of years ago, by surveyors who were far more interested in habitable planets.

  “Right,” Severin said. “Now the question is, what else is the pulsar going to hit?”

  He and Chamcha sat side by side in the sensor cage. Severin called other displays onto his own, piloting and astrography displays, and an estimate of the angle of the x-ray beam when Surveyor had been hit, which would provide a figure for the tilt of the pulsar’s magnetic pole and a judgment of what other objects the beam might intersect.

  The computer simulation of the multisun system, with the pulsar now added, ran briefly, then stopped. A tone sounded.

  Chee.

  “Well, of course,” Severin said. He was surprised by his lack of surprise.

  Chee and the eight, or possibly nine, suns of its system weren’t all in the same plane. The pulsar’s course was to galactic north of Chee, and the beam fired from its southern magnetic pole would intersect the planet for all of three seconds, long enough to kill any unshielded animal life form either in orbit or on the planet’s surface.

  Severin compiled the information into as terse a message as he could. “Send to Chee Station Command,” he said, “with copies to Lord Inspector Martinez and Astronomer Shon-dan at the Imperial Observatory.”

  “Very good, my lord,” said Nkomo. She had returned to the control room without speaking a word, and had taken her place at the comm board. She looked down at the board. “Comm laser three powering up and – we’ve lost it, my lord.”

  Severin turned to stare at her. “Lost it? Lost what?”

  Nkomo looked uncertain. “Lost the laser, my lord. It’s . . . malfunctioned somehow.”

  “Use another laser.”

  The second laser also failed. Severin thought that perhaps the x-ray flux had turned the metal on
the ship brittle as glass, and that the metallic semiconductors used to generate the lasers were blowing apart under the strain of excitation.

  When a third laser died, Severin decided that his theory was confirmed.

  “Try a VHF antenna,” Severin said. “Use the emergency channel.”

  They were going to get their message to Chee, Severin thought, one way or another, if he had to build an antenna himself.

  When Martinez returned to his lodgings at the Mayor’s Palace, the Lady Mayor herself bustled toward him as he got out of the car.

  “I wondered where you had been today, my lord,” she said. She looked in surprise at his muddy boots and informal clothing. “There are a stack of invitations that have come in for you.”

  “Rigger Ahmet was showing me the sights,” Martinez said. He turned to Ahmet and winked. “Right, Ahmet?”

  Ahmet grinned broadly. “Absolutely, my lord.”

  The Lady Mayor hesitated. Martinez smiled at her, and then his sleeve comm chimed.

  “Pardon me, my lady.” He answered.

  The chameleon weave on his sleeve shimmered to an image of Lord Ehl. The feathery dark hairs on the sides of his head were standing oddly, as if he’d just suffered an electric shock.

  “My lord,” Ehl said. “We’ve just received a transmission from Surveyor, and – well – I’d be obliged if you could get back to the station as fast as you can.”

  As the coleopter began its descent into Port Vipsania, Martinez looked at Shon-dan in the crystal-clear image of his sleeve display and said, “Do you mean to tell me that despite your entire crew of overpaid astronomers at Chee Station, you failed to detect two beams of deadly energy each over a light-year long?”

  Shon-dan gazed at Martinez with wide golden eyes. “My lord,” she said, “we’re cosmologists. We haven’t looked at anything within a hundred light-years of this place.”

  Martinez looked balefully at the image of Shon-dan, and then realized he was grinding his teeth. He unclenched and spoke.

  “Tell me what’s going to happen, and how long we’ve got.”