Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  Angrily, Radmer snatches back the binoculars. “Try facing one up close, then. Try facing twenty of them, or a hundred, or a thousand. This may seem unreal to you, Bruno—an awakening from your own dreams into the nightmares of someone else—but that is a tiny piece, yes, of the army which has devastated this world. Don't make light of it in my hearing.”

  “But those are household robots!” the old man protests. “They should be mopping your floors, shining your shoes. Those aren't soldiers. They aren't even in good condition; what are those boxes sticking out of their heads?”

  “They have been fashioned into soldiers,” Radmer says. “They've been modified, multiplied beyond number. The last I heard, there were four million of them. They will kill anyone who opposes them, and quite efficiently, thank you. In Nubia, the Senatoria Plurum commanded a full surrender by all forces and citizens—no resistance of any kind—but discovered to their woe that if unopposed, the enemy will also dismantle any signs of authority or government or the rule of law.

  “What happens after that is anyone's guess; in the final reports from Nubia, these ‘household robots' were trampling cities into the dust, carrying away every scrap of metal they could find. To make more of themselves? To make something else? Some siege engine to lay waste to our final strongholds? You laugh, Sire, but my children are dead. A great many children are dead, and the fates of those behind enemy lines are unknown. The handful of reports we've received are, shall we say, not encouraging.”

  Hearing this, the payload visibly reconsiders his stance, his position in the world of Lune. Radmer feels a burst of sympathy for the man; in truth, very little has been explained to him, and Radmer's own voice may have lost some urgency through the ages, ground away to deadpan by the wars and peaces and startings-over. Perhaps he has understated the dangers.

  “I apologize for offending you,” the payload says officiously, echoing that thought, “but I could not have known these things, since you haven't told them to me. We've barely spoken. There was a time, Architect, when you addressed me with trust and respect.”

  “Aye, that hasn't changed,” Radmer says. “But we are not peacefully marooned on your little planette, and this world does not know me as a builder. Here I'm a sort of . . . pastured warhorse, I suppose you'd say. I'm separated from my army, and my job—my absurd mission—is to get you into that city. You are a commodity, Sire, an armament. You may or may not be able to help us, but for now my job is to deliver you safely.”

  Even farther away, past the city itself, he can see the enormous white tents and globes which line the seashore, although the ocean itself is beyond the horizon, invisible. That's the camp of Lune's largest remaining human army, the last hope of a world.

  Now the payload is angry. “Perhaps your mission would go more smoothly if I were aware of the pertinent details. You say this place is unreal to me. I'll admit, that's so. Could it be otherwise? I've never seen this world inhabited. I don't know its people, and something tells me I don't know you either. You have become something . . . quite different. But recall, please, that until twelve days ago I thought my time on history's stage was ended.”

  While de Towaji holds forth, Radmer turns and rummages through lockers in the hull of the sphere. “I've brought only the lightest of weapons,” he says, fishing out a pistol and a stubby little blitterstick. “And very little ammunition. Stay very close, Sire, and do exactly as I say. Your life depends on this, and the fate of this world depends on you. You understand? Is that clear enough?”

  “Very clear. Thank you.”

  “Good. I'm sorry to be so brusque, but things are about to get very hot around here. If there's time later, I promise we'll talk.” Radmer locates a metal hook about the size of a dinner fork or particularly large gate key. He finds a good-sized rock and plops his ass down on it. Then, with the hook, he begins tugging at the laces of his boots. “Watch what I do. You're going to repeat these actions. You will want your boots very tight.”

  “Er, I believe they're tight enough already.”

  “So you say. But if you survive the first contact you'll be running and jumping and dodging for your life, and the ground may be slick with mud or blood or lubricants. Believe me, I've seen men step right out of their boots, dying for want of a proper knot. There is no limit to how tightly you should lace them. You can tug on this lace puller until your toes turn purple, until you lose all feeling in your feet, and still, when the moment comes, you will find these boots sliding and flopping around you, barely attached.”

  And Radmer can see right away that the payload thinks he's crazy, thinks that years of strife have tipped his mind over some precipice. People in the grip of a panic will latch onto small details in exactly this way, it's true, but Radmer has not panicked in more years than he cares to think about.

  The view, now that he bothers to notice, really is gorgeous. From these heights, in this clear winter air, he can see not just Timoch but fully a third of the nation of Imbria—its lakes and forests and prairies, its smaller cities to the north and south, and to the west the jagged mountains of the Sawtooth Range, towering kilometers higher than even the Aden Plateau itself.

  But it is a nightmare come true: the enemy right here within Imbria's borders, within a day's march of the capital itself. He scans the beautiful scenery for other glints and sees a few, although they don't have that too-bright look of superreflective robot hulls. These are the ordinary glimmers of glass and metal, of water and perhaps even ice, down there in the daily hustle and bustle of the wintering city and its suburbs. But the fact remains: a tendril of the invasion has reached the heart of Imbria. Radmer will not get the payload into Timoch, not before the enemy soldiers can reach him. Alas.

  There will be no quiet today, no peace, no crackling fire at journey's end, unless the city itself begins to burn. Radmer does not fear death—not much, anyway—but the stench of futility hangs nearby, and this is a thing he has dreaded since the Barnard Exile. Since his first taste of responsibility, of oversight, of problems so insolvably large he hadn't even known he was failing at them.

  So Radmer pulls on that lace hook for all he's worth, taking firm command of the one variable he can control. And knowing it will never be enough.

  book one

  the pioneeriad

  chapter one

  unto a nameless world

  Radmer vividly remembered his last sight of the old moon, before King Bruno's terraforming operations had begun to squeeze it. . . .

  He was called Conrad Mursk in those days, and he was standing on the bridge of the QSS Newhope, falling past the Earth and moon on a sunward trajectory. They had started their fall at Mars, and would keep on falling until they were within a million kilometers of the sun. At that point, scorching even through their superreflectors, they would swing around and rise again.

  Their path was like the orbit of a comet: long and narrow and lonely, descending briefly to kiss Mother Sol and then racing back up into the dark again for another long orbit. Except that they'd be firing their fusion motors down there at the bottom, unfurling their sails, catching the light of the sun and the laser boost of a dozen pocket stars to hurl them into deepest space. Past Mars and Neptune, past even the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud where the true comets lived. To the stars themselves.

  The windows on the bridge weren't made of glass, weren't made of anything really. They were just video images on the wellstone walls. Holographic—though with nothing close by to look at, this was difficult to discern. The images could of course be tuned and magnified and filtered to the heart's content, but looking out the portside window at that moment, what Conrad saw was probably an unadulterated view: a blue-white Earth no larger than a grape, with a fist-sized moon lurking in the foreground.

  There was no man in it. With Luna tidally locked to its parent planet, Conrad was looking at the Farside, the side faced permanently away from Earth, where there were no familiar landmarks at all. Funny: he'd been living in space for most of the
past eight years, but he wasn't sure he'd ever seen Farside before. It looked flat and gray, mostly featureless, and the half that was lit by sun revealed no superreflective gleam of dome towns. The dark half of it, washed out by brightness, revealed no city lights, no sign of human presence at all.

  This strange, precivilized moon drifted down the window, from fore to aft, with quite visible speed, like a soap bubble blown from a plastic wand and settling to Earth. But a bubble was small and close, whereas Luna was a quarter-million kilometers away, and huge. The QSS Newhope was falling fast, at twenty-seven kps—almost thirty kilometers per second. As fast as a comet. They were still a hundred and fifty million kilometers from the sun, but perihelion—their closest encounter with the furnace of Sol—would occur in just thirty days.

  Practically speaking, there were human beings who had traveled faster than this. Several hundred of them, in fact. But Newhope was the largest object ever to break the ten kps barrier. Not the most massive, though, for it was capped fore and aft with shields of collapsium, a foam or crystal of tiny black holes, and the mass between these “ertial” shields kind of . . . dropped out of the universe or something. The ship and crew had mass, had inertia, but not enough. Not as much as the universe wanted them to. Such vessels could be flicked around effortlessly, with even the tiniest of forces generating enormous accelerations, barely felt by the crew inside.

  But not many ertially shielded craft had ever traveled this fast, either. Generally speaking, it wasn't considered safe—any more than a hail of bullets could be considered safe. Interplanetary vacuum or no, there was a lot of debris to run into out here.

  Conrad Mursk was sitting behind the captain and to her right, in the first mate's chair. Around them were the three other bridge officers: Astrogation and Helm; Sensors, Communications, and Information; and System Awareness. And as it happened, the captain was turning to look at Conrad at that very moment, her face framed beautifully against the window, a part of the planetary tableau. Conrad looked from her face to the moon to her face again, thinking that perhaps she had something to say, some fair words to mark the occasion. The little blue planet down there was her home, after all. But she eyed him instead without speaking, without acknowledging the view at all.

  “You okay, Cap'n?”

  His use of the title was partly in jest. Her name was Xiomara Li Weng, or Xmary to her friends, and she had no closer friend than Conrad Mursk. Technically speaking, this was a violation of all sorts of Naval protocols and traditions, but then again the two of them weren't really in any sort of navy, weren't even Merchant Spacers in a commercial fleet. Never had been, unless penny-ante space piracy counted as a branch of service these days. In fact, like everyone else on this ship, they were prisoners. Convicts, exiles, fakahe'i. This long adventure, this hundred-year voyage to Barnard's Star, was their punishment for years of antisocial behavior in general, and for the Children's Revolt in particular.

  “Would you take a walk with me?” the captain asked, ignoring his ribbing along with the stunning view.

  “Um, certainly,” Conrad answered. “Walk” was a euphemism indeed, since every deck on the ship was a circle exactly thirty meters wide. There wasn't a whole lot of walking you could do. But there was an observation lounge, and that was what Xmary meant.

  “Robert,” she said to the astrogation officer, “you have bridge.”

  “Aye, miss,” Robert said. He had long ago faxed his skin a bright shade of blue, with hair and eyes to match, and it had the effect of making everything he said and did seem sassy, though his tone was innocent enough.

  She paused. “You want to keep it all night? Ninety-three days on this tub and you've never had the bridge for more than half a shift. You'd be all right with that, I assume?”

  “Absolutely, miss. I've conned bigger tubs than this one, if you'll recall.”

  “I'm aware of your record,” she said, wearily displeased. Indeed, she'd been along for part of it, dodging navy ships in the wilderness of the outer solar system. “And will you please call me Xmary?”

  But Robert just smiled. They'd had this conversation before, and he seemed determined, for whatever reason, to stand on ceremony. Robert was a sort of pirate himself, having led a group of squatters onboard a Mass Industries neutronium barge for almost five years. Hell, he'd practically run the place—a vigilante handyman and amateur mass wrangler. He was also an avowed anarchist who'd railed for years—uselessly, Conrad thought—against the natural human tendency to form hierarchies and elect leaders. But for all of that, he still seemed to have an anomalous bit of Navy in him.

  “Carry on, Number Three,” Conrad said to him crisply, just to carry the theme a little farther.

  “Aye, sir. Carrying on, per your instruction.”

  Conrad narrowed his gaze with what he imagined to be a Naval sort of ire. “Are you getting smart with me, Astrogation?”

  “Doubtful, sir,” Robert replied bluely, “although if I feel any symptoms of smartness coming on I'll be sure to report them.”

  “Do that, yes,” Conrad said, then couldn't keep from laughing.

  For a variety of logistical, historical, and presumably sentimental reasons, the bridge was actually at the center of the ship's next-to-forwardmost deck, just five meters behind the ertial shielding. It was the only crew-accessible space on this particular deck. All around it, above and below and ringed around the sides, were storage tanks—the eight tons of water the ship's plumbing required as buffer and ballast. It also served as shielding, against radiation and particle impacts and God knew what else.

  Conrad hadn't designed the ship, and truthfully, he wasn't all that familiar with the reasoning behind its design. He was only twenty-five years old—still a juvenile by Queendom of Sol standards—and had never held a job of any sort until Newhope's passengers had elected him first mate of the expedition three months ago. He was still learning his way around. Xmary, for her part, had just turned twenty-seven and had even less sailing experience than Conrad did. Systems was a twenty-year-old boy, Zavery Biko, and Information was manned (womaned?) by Agnes Moloi, who was twenty-nine. Blue Robert M'chunu, the old man of Astrogation, was thirty.

  It wasn't by coincidence that Conrad knew all their ages. This was his area of specialty: the crew. If he knew nothing else about them—nothing else about anything—he knew their birthdays, their hobbies, their interests and skills. He wasn't sure what to do with the knowledge, but he did his best to keep it fresh in his mind. The launch ops crew were getting on each other's nerves even before the passengers were tucked away, feeling the first twinges of cabin fever even before the Diemos Catapult had drawn back its arms and slung them sunward. Conrad's own personal passion was for architecture, for the subtle interplay of shapes and materials, but he knew a little—a very little!—about holding a crew together through difficult circumstances. It was a responsibility he took as seriously as he'd ever taken anything. Which wasn't saying much, but there you had it.

  “Have a nice walk, right?” Robert called after them, in an innocent tone which managed, nevertheless, to convey a sense of lewdness.

  Leaving the bridge involved climbing ass-first down an inclined ladder—or sliding sideways down the handrail if you felt like it, which Conrad usually did. The lounge was three decks down, and took up nearly half the level all by itself—one of the few indulgences the ship's designers had permitted her crew and passengers. At the moment, the ship's complement was twenty live people: the launch ops crew. The other forty-eight hundred were in storage, as data patterns in Newhope's wellstone memory cores. And eighteen of those twenty were currently either sleeping, working, or messing around on the galley level. For the moment at least, he and Xmary had the lounge to themselves. Alas, the Earth and moon were no longer visible through the windows, though he supposed he could remedy that by pulling back on their magnification a little.

  Instead, he engaged a voice lock on the hatch, then turned and yanked down his captain's pants. This was his other m
ain joy and passion, and the only other responsibility he took at all seriously. Within the minute they were fuffing on the cool wellsteel plating of the deck, kissing and hugging and working out the kinks. That they should do this as soon as the opportunity arose was not terribly shocking; they'd been intimate partners for years. And since everyone in this thirtieth decade of the Queendom of Sol had the eternally, immorbidly youthful body of a twenty-year-old, it was considered right and proper to squeeze in a vigorous fuff or two in the course of every day. Well, the men considered it so at any rate, and the women did not protest it overmuch.

  When Conrad and Xmary were done, they lay tangled in each other's arms, resting. Still on the floor, not even bothering with the couches or trampolines because they were young in their minds as well as their bodies and liked the sense of immediacy that a nice, cold floor could provide.

  “Now that's what I call a walk,” Conrad said.

  “Hmm,” Xmary grunted noncommittally. She liked a good fuff as well as anyone, but that wasn't why she'd asked him down here.

  “You want to talk?” he asked, taking the hint.

  “Oh, now you want to.”

  “My head is clear,” he agreed. “My full attention can be brought to bear. You have some problem? Some little worry itching at the corners of your mind?”

  “The usual.” She sighed. “I hate my job. I hate it for me, anyway. Captain of a fuffing starship? What do I know about that? Robert is spacewise; it should be him. I should be in storage with the passengers.”

  Conrad shrugged. “People like a woman in charge; they've had a queen ruling over them for three hundred years now. Well, I guess the oldest person in storage has only had a queen for forty-five years, but even so, we're all products of society, aren't we? You think we want Blue Robert M'Chunu for our captain, who doesn't believe in leaders or followers? Who went five years without wearing clothes, just on general principle? I don't think so, dear. I really don't.”