Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  “The suit drew a response from the object,” Grellet said. “How can you know what will happen if you approach it in the pods?”

  “I can’t,” I said. “But we’ll stop before we get as deep as the suit did. It’s the best we can do, Doctor.” I turned my face to the other passenger-representatives, seeking their tacit approval. “Nothing’s without risk. You accepted risk when you consigned yourselves into the care of your reefersleep caskets. As it stands, we have a reasonable chance of repairing the ship before we get too close to the object. That’s not good enough for me. I swore an oath of duty when I took on this role. You are all precious to me. But also I have twenty thousand other passengers to consider.”

  “You mean nineteen thousand,” corrected Chajari diplomatically. “The Conjoiners don’t count any more—sleeping or otherwise.”

  “They’re still my passengers,” I told her.

  * * *

  No plan was ever as simple as it seemed in the first light of conception. The inspection pods had the range and fuel to reach the drifter, but under normal operation it would take much too long to get there. If there were something useful on the Conjoiner wreck I wanted time to examine it, time to bring it back, time to make use of it. I also did not want to have to depend on some hypothetical shuttle or tractor to get us back. That meant retaining some reserve fuel in the pods for a return trip to the Equinoctial. Privately, if my ship was going down then I wanted to be aboard when it happened.

  There was a solution, but it was hardly a comfortable one.

  Running the length of the Equinoctial was a magnetic freight launcher, designed for ship-to-ship cargo transfer. We had rarely used it on previous voyages and since we were travelling with only a low cargo manifest I had nearly forgotten it was there at all. Fortunately, the inspection pods were easily small enough to be attached to the launcher. By being boosted out of the ship on magnetic power, they could complete the crossing in a shorter time and save some fuel for the round-trip.

  There were two downsides. The first was that it would take time to prepare the pods for an extended mission. The second was that the launcher demanded a punishing initial acceleration. That was fine for bulk cargo, less good for people. Eventually we agreed on a risky compromise: fifty gees, sustained for four seconds, would give us a final boost of zero point two kilometres per second. Hardly any speed at all, but it was all we could safely endure if we were going to be any use at the other end of the crossing. We would be unconscious during the launch phase and much of the subsequent crossing, both to conserve resources and spare us the discomfort of the boost.

  Slowly the Equinoctial was rotated and stabilised, aiming itself like a gun at the Conjoiner wreck. Lacking engine power, we did this with gyroscopes and controlled pressure venting. Even this took a day. Thankfully the aim didn’t need to be perfect, since we could correct for any small errors during the crossing itself.

  Six days had now passed since my revival, halving our distance to the surface. It would take another three days to reach the Conjoiner ship, by which time we would have rather less than three days to make any use of its contents. Everything was now coming down to critical margins of hours, rather than days.

  I went to see Magadis before preparing myself for the departure.

  “I’m telling you my plans just in case you have something useful to contribute. We’ve found the drifter you were obviously so keen on locating. You’ve been going behind our backs all this time, despite all the assurances, all the wise platitudes. I hope you’ve learned a thing or two from the object, because you’re going to need all the help you can find.”

  “War was only ever a question of time, Captain Bernsdottir.”

  “You think you’ll win?”

  “I think we’ll prevail. But the outcome won’t be my concern.”

  “This is your last chance to make a difference. I’d take you with me if I thought I could trust you, if I thought you wouldn’t turn the systems of that wreck against me just for the spite. But if there’s something you can tell me, something that will help all our chances…”

  “Yes,” she answered, drawing in me a little glimmer of hope, instantly crushed. “There’s something. Kill yourselves now, while you have the means to do it painlessly. You’ll thank me for it later.”

  I stepped out of the cage, realising that Doctor Grellet had been observing this brief exchange from a safe distance, his hands folded before him, his expression one of lingering disapproval.

  “It was fruitless, I suppose?”

  “Were you expecting something more?”

  “I am not the moral compass of this ship, Captain Bernsdottir. If you think hurting this prisoner will serve your ends, that is your decision.”

  “I didn’t do that to her. She was bruised and bloodied when she got here.”

  He studied me carefully. “Then you never laid a hand on her, not even once?”

  I made to answer, intending to deny his accusation, then stopped before I disgraced myself with an obvious lie. Instead I met his eyes, demanding understanding rather than forgiveness. “It was a violent, organised insurrection, Doctor. They were trying to kill us all. They’d have succeeded, as well, if my officers and I hadn’t used extreme measures.”

  “In which case it was a good job you were equipped with the tools needed to suppress that insurrection.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  He nodded at the officer still aiming the excimer rifle at Magadis. It was a heavy, dual-gripped laser weapon—more suited to field combat than shipboard pacification. “I am not much of a historian, Captain. But I took the time to study a little of what happened on Mars. Nevil Clavain, Sandra Voi, Galiana, the Great Wall and the orbital blockade of the first nest…”

  I cut him off. “Is this relevant, Doctor Grellet?”

  “That would depend. My recollection from those history lessons is that the Coalition for Neural Purity discovered that it was very difficult to take Conjoiners prisoner. They could turn almost any weapon against its user. Keeping them alive long enough to be interrogated was even harder. They could kill themselves quite easily. And the one thing you learned never to do was point a sophisticated weapon at a Conjoiner prisoner.”

  * * *

  For the second time in nine days I surfaced to brutal, bruising consciousness through layers of confusion and discomfort. It was not the emergence from reefersleep this time, but a much shallower state of sedation. I was alone, pressed into acceleration padding, a harness webbed across my chest. I moved aching arms and released the catch. The cushioning against my spine eased. I was weightless, but still barely able to move. The inspection pod was only just large enough for a suited human form.

  I was alive, and that was something. It meant that I had survived the boost from the Equinoctial. I eyed the chronometer, confirming that I had been asleep for sixty-six hours, and then I checked the short-range tracker, gratified to find that Struma’s pod was flying close to mine. Although we had been launched in separate boosts, there had been time for the pods to zero-in on each other without eating into our fuel budgets too badly.

  “Struma?” I asked across the link.

  “I’m here, Captain. How do you feel?”

  “About as bad as you, I’m guessing. But we’re intact, and right now I’ll take all the good news I can get. I’m a realist, Struma: I don’t expect much to come of this. But I couldn’t sit back and do nothing, just hoping for the best.”

  “I understood the risks,” he replied. “And I agree with you. We had to take this chance.”

  Our pods had maintained a signals lock with the Equinoctial. They were pleased to hear from us. We spent a few minutes transmitting back and forth, confirming that we were healthy and that our pods had a homing fix on the drifter. The Conjoiner ship was extremely dark, extremely well-camouflaged, but it stood no chance of hiding itself against the perfect blackness of the surface.

  I hardly dared ask how the repair schedule had been progressing.
But the news was favourable. Struma’s plan to divert the resources had worked well, and all indications were that the ship would regain some control within thirteen hours. That was cutting it exceedingly fine: Equinoctial was now only three days’ drift from the surface, and only a day from the point where the suit’s readings had begun to deviate from normal spacetime. We had done what we could, though—given ourselves a couple of slim hopes where previously there had been none.

  Struma and I reviewed our pod systems one more time, then began to burn fuel, slowing down for our rendezvous with the drifter. We could see each other by then, spaced by a couple of kilometres but still easily distinguished from the background stars, pushing glowing tails of plasma thrust ahead of us.

  We passed the ten-thousand-kilometre mark without incident. I felt sore, groggy and dry-mouthed, but that was to be expected after the acceleration boost and the forced sleep of the cruise phase. In all other respects I felt normal, save for the perfectly sensible apprehension anyone would have felt in our position. The pod’s instruments were working properly, the sensors and readouts making sense.

  At nine thousand kilometres I started feeling the change.

  To begin with it was small things. I had to squint to make sense of the displays, as if I was seeing them underwater. I put it down to fatigue, initially. Then the comms link with the Equinoctial began to turn thready, broken up with static and drop-outs.

  “Struma…” I asked. “Are you getting this?”

  When his answer came back, he sounded as if he was just as far away as the ship. Yet I could see his pod with my own eyes, twinkling to port.

  “Whatever the suit picked up, it’s starting sooner.”

  “The surface hasn’t changed diameter.”

  “No, but whatever it’s doing to the space around it may have stepped up a notch.” There was no recrimination in his statement, but I understood the implicit connection. The suit had provoked a definite change, that ripple that passed through the Equinoctial. Perhaps it had signified a permanent alteration to the environment around the surface, like a fortification strengthening its defences after the first strike.

  “We go on, Struma. We knew things might get sticky—it’s just a bit earlier than we were counting on.”

  “I agree,” he answered, his voice coming through as if thinned-out and Doppler-stretched, as if we were signalling each other from halfway across the universe.

  At least the pods kept operating. We passed the eight-thousand-five-hundred mark, still slowing, still homing in on the Conjoiner ship. Although it was only a quarter of the size of the Equinoctial, it was also the only physical object between us and the surface, and our exhaust light washed over it enough to make it shimmer into visibility, a little flake of starship suspended over a sea of black.

  There would be war, I thought, when the news of this treachery reached our governments. Our peace with the Conjoiners had never been less than tense, but such infringements that had happened to date had been minor diplomatic scuffles compared to this. Not just the construction and operation of a secret expedition, in violation of the terms of mutual cooperation, but the subsequent treachery of Magadis’s attempted takeover, with such a cold disregard for the lives of the other nineteen thousand passengers. They had always thought themselves better than the rest of us, Conjoiners, and by certain measures they were probably correct in that assessment. Cleverer, faster, and certainly more willing to be ruthless. We had gained from our partnership, and perhaps they had found some narrow benefits in their association with us. But I saw now that it had never been more than a front, a cynical expediency. Behind our backs they had been plotting, trying to leverage an advantage from first contact with this alien presence.

  But the first war had pushed them nearly to extinction, I thought. And in the century since they had shared many of their technologies with us—allowing for a risky normalisation in our capabilities. Given that the partnership had worked for so long, why would they risk everything now, for such uncertain stakes?

  My thoughts flashed back to Doctor Grellet’s parting words about our prisoner. My knowledge of history was nowhere near as comprehensive as his own, but I had no reason to doubt his recollection of those events. It was surely true, what he said about Conjoiner prisoners. So why had Magadis tolerated that weapon being pointed at her, when she could have reached into its systems and made it blow her head off?

  Unless she wanted to stay alive?

  “Struma…” I began to say.

  But whatever words I had meant to say died unvoiced. I felt wrong. I had experienced weightlessness and gee-loads, but this was something completely new to me. Invisible claws were reaching through my skin, tugging at my insides—but in all directions.

  “It’s starting,” I said, tightening my harness again, for all the good it would do.

  The pod felt the alteration as well. The readouts began to indicate anomalous stresses, outside the framework of the pod’s extremely limited grasp of normal conditions. I could still see the Conjoiner ship, and beyond the surface’s black horizon the stars remained at a fixed orientation. But the pod thought it was starting to tumble. Thrusters began to pop, and that only made things worse.

  “Go to manual,” Struma said, his voice garbled one instant, inside my skull the next. “We’re close enough now.”

  Two hundred kilometres to the ship, then one hundred and fifty, then one hundred, slowing to only a couple of hundred metres per second now. The pod was still functioning, still maintaining life-support, but I’d had to disengage all of its high-level navigation and steering systems, trusting to my own ragged instincts. The signal lock from the Equinoctial was completely gone, and when I twisted round to peer through the rear dome, the stars seemed to swim behind thick, mottled glass. My guts churned, my bones ached as if they had been shot through with a million tiny fractures. A slow growing pressure sat behind my eyes. The only thing that kept me pushing on was knowing that the rest of the ship would be enduring worse than this, if we did not reverse the drift.

  Finally the Conjoiner ship seemed to float out of some distorting medium, becoming clearer, its lines sharper. Fifty kilometres, then ten. Our pods slowed to a crawl for the final approach.

  And we saw what we had not seen before.

  Distance, the altered space, and the limitations of our own sensors and eyes had played a terrible trick on us. The state of decay was far worse than we had thought from those long-range scans. The ship was a frail wreck, only its bare outline surviving. The hull, engines, connecting spars were present… but they had turned fibrous, gutted open, ripped or peeled apart in some places, reduced to lacy insubstantiality in others. The ship looked ready to break apart, ready to become dust, like some fragile fossil removed from its preserving matrix.

  For long minutes Struma and I could only stare, our pods hovering a few hundred metres beyond the carcass. All the earlier discomforts were still present, including the nausea. My thoughts were turning sluggish, like a hardening tar. But as I stared at the Conjoiner wreck, nothing of that mattered.

  “It’s been here too long,” I said.

  “We don’t know.”

  “Decades… longer, even. Look at it, Struma. That’s an old, old ship. Maybe it’s even older than the Europa Accords.”

  “Meaning what, Captain?”

  “If it was sent here before the agreement, no treaty violation ever happened.”

  “But Magadis…”

  “We don’t know what orders Magadis was obeying. If any.” I swallowed hard, forcing myself to state the bleak and obvious truth. “It’s useless to us, anyway. Too far gone for there to be anything we could use, even if I trusted myself to go inside. We’ve come all this way for nothing.”

  “There could still be technical data inside that ship. Readings, measurements of the object. We have to see.”

  “No,” I said. “Nothing would have survived. You can see that, can’t you? It’s a husk. Even Magadis wouldn’t be able to get anyth
ing out of that now.” My heart was starting to race. Besides the nausea, and the discomfort, there was now a quiet, rising terror. I knew I was in a place where simple, thinking organisms such as myself did not belong. “We failed, Struma. It was the right thing to attempt, but there’s no sense deluding ourselves. Now we have to pray that the ship can slow itself down without any outside help.”

  “Let’s not give up without taking a closer look, Captain. You said it yourself—we’ve come this far.”

  Without waiting for my assent he powered his pod for the wreck. The Conjoiner ship was much smaller than the Equinoctial, but still his pod diminished to a tiny bright point against its size. I cursed, knowing that he was right, and applied manual thrust control to steer after him. He was heading for a wide void in the side of the hull, the skin peeled back around it like a flower’s petals. He slowed with a pulse of thrust, then drifted inside.

  I made one last attempt to get a signal lock from the main ship, then followed Struma.

  Maybe he was right, I thought—thinking as hard and furiously as I could, so as to squeeze the fear out of my head. There might still be something inside, however unlikely it looked. A shuttle, protected from the worst of the damage. A spare engine, with its control interface miraculously intact.

  Once I was inside, though, I knew that such hopes were forlorn. The interior decay was just as bad, if not worse. The ship had rotted from within, held together by only the flimsiest traces of connective tissue. With my pod’s worklights beaming out at full power, I drifted through a dark, enchanted forest made of broken and buckled struts, severed floors and walls, shattered and mangled machinery.

  I was just starting to accept the absolute futility of our expedition when something else occurred to me. There was no sign of Struma’s pod. He had only been a few hundred metres ahead of me when he passed out of sight, and if nothing else I should have picked up the reflections from his worklights and thrusters, even if I had no direct view of his pod.