Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  Urzueth evidently noticed the defense-analyst’s same fixation upon the images. “Are you seeking something in particular, Mr. Riordan?”

  “In fact, I am.” Riordan leaned back with a frown. “But you do not seem to be willing to show it.”

  “If you make a request with which I may comply, I will be happy to do so.”

  “I’ve been watching our ships being destroyed. That is somewhat informative, but not as conclusive as watching your ships mount their attacks.”

  Urzueth paused, possibly conferring with his superiors, before replying: “How would that be conclusive?”

  “Because if saboteurs had access to our ships, then the destruction I’m watching may not be the result of the weapons your craft carry. It could be the result of charges secreted aboard our hulls. In particular, the rapid destruction of so many of our larger craft—many by catastrophic fusion containment failure—is particularly hard to understand. How is that being accomplished?”

  “X-ray laser.”

  “I have not seen any such weapons discharging.”

  “That is because our technology is different from yours.”

  “Evidently. And that is the technology I must explain to my superiors, if they are to believe our fight is futile.”

  “Very well.” Urzueth gestured to one of his assistants.

  The image abruptly changed from the jagged, blackened ribs of a gutted Russlavic destroyer to a smoothly attenuated delta: an Arat Kur shift-cruiser, viewed from off its starboard beam. The image—evidently relayed from another of the Arat Kurs’ ubiquitous microsensors—moved forward along the ship’s gray flank until it reached the bow. For a moment, Trevor suspected that their captors had pulled up the wrong sequence. This ship’s prow had a hole akin to one where a spinal railgun’s muzzle emerged, not the dome-like cap that typically concealed a laser’s redirectional mirrors. But the raised rim around the weapon aperture glowed slightly at the same moment that the sensor results—streaming on the left side of the screen—jumped wildly. Warning guidons from the Arat Kur microsensor indicated thermal spikes at both the cruiser’s nose and the shallow hillock at her stern.

  Riordan nodded slightly. “This will help us make your case,” he murmured in Urzueth’s direction.

  “Indeed? Why so?”

  “Because this shows how you won your decisive victory against us. And how you would do it again.”

  Urzueth’s mandibles clicked once. “I comprehend. Our spinal mounted X-ray lasers: you do not have their equivalent.”

  “We do not. Our nuke-pumped X-ray laser missiles are much less effective.”

  A similar scene depicted another shift-cruiser firing its X-ray laser: again, the watching microsensor painted thermal indicators at the ship’s prow and the stern. “These weapons allow you to strike with much greater power from much greater distance. Clearly, this was the decisive factor in the engagement.”

  Urzueth seemed reluctant to agree. “That is an overly hasty conclusion, Mr. Riordan. Our advantages were many. In every comparable class or type of ship, ours had superior acceleration and endurance. Also, the enhanced autonomy of our drones allows them to operate more effectively and at greater remove from our control sloops, affording us a much greater direct response envelope.”

  Riordan nodded agreeably. “Yes, this is consistent with what I saw. But these latter advantages can only be conceived in broad terms. Your spinal-mounted X-ray laser”—he pointed at the third, analogous scene now unfolding within the holo-round—“provides immediate, visual evidence of your superiority. I suspect it could prove the decisive element in convincing Earth’s leaders that capitulation is their only reasonable option.”

  “Would it be helpful to see more?”

  Unless Trevor was much mistaken, the corner of Riordan’s mouth twitched—the way it often did when he was laboring to suppress a smile. “The more evidence, the better, Expediter.”

  * * *

  Instead of being shown back to their separate cells, Trevor and Caine were deposited in what was essentially a suite, but outfitted in a style that recalled a budget hotel trying to appear opulent. Before Urzueth could leave, Corcoran turned a slow circle, hands raised in a gesture that took in the entirety of the nouveau gauche furnishings. “Is this a prison cell?”

  “No, Mr. Corcoran. Insofar as you have agreed to be our liaisons to the governments of Earth when we arrive there, these are ambassadorial quarters, suitable for your species. We hope they are to your liking.”

  Trevor struggled to find an adequate answer: it was a whole lot better than the cell he’d been in, but was so oddly laid out and appointed that he couldn’t come up with an honest statement which might not also offend his and Caine’s captor-hosts. They’d evidently put in a great deal of greatly flawed effort into making these quarters comfortable for them, but still—“We appreciate your consideration,” he stammered at Urzueth’s withdrawing carapace.

  When the hatchway had contracted and sealed behind the exosapient and his entourage, Corcoran turned to Riordan, who was trying to get comfortable on a couch that looked like it had been rescued from a clearance sale of off-beat office furniture. “So, you found the destruction of our fleet riveting viewing?”

  “I did,” Caine said brightly. As he did, he shook his head from side to side. Twice.

  “No?” Hmm, so you found what you were looking for in that final footage. But no way to talk about what it was, or what it means, here in our opulent and presumably bugged quarters. Trevor sat in a chair that appeared completely correct for human use but was an ergonomic nightmare. “Guess there’s nothing to do except for wait for dinner, then?”

  “Which will probably be every bit as wonderful as the furniture and amenities,” Riordan opined with an irony so bright that it was unlikely to be detected by the Arat Kur.

  His prediction—including that of a gustatorily disastrous dinner—proved to be prophetic.

  * * *

  NOVEMBER 17–29, 2119

  BEYOND THE HELIOPAUSE, BARNARD’S STAR

  Trevor and Caine discovered a means for confidential communications after the third day in their new but consistently irksome quarters. Although the Arat Kur did not keep them under constant surveillance—as their towering and ferocious Hkh’Rkh allies repeatedly urged—the humans were also rarely alone. The Arat Kur proved to be naturally congenial critters, and so did not presume that the humans wished to keep their own company most of the time. This meant there were always one or more distressingly attentive, yet politely distant, Arat Kur underfoot.

  Trevor remembered the one time he had felt a similar sensation: during a family vacation in France when very young, his father had taken them to a private dinner at a 17th-century palace. The four of them—Dad, Mom, Elena, and himself—were the only guests in that immense, high-ceilinged dining room. Also, apparently in keeping with the period decor, there were no less than eight servers of different station and function arrayed around the periphery of the room like so many wax figures. Then there were the various chefs who emerged from the kitchen, the sommelier, and some guy who was less than the owner but more than the maitre d’hotel. All for four people. Trevor couldn’t remember what his family talked about, or what they ate, or even the name of the damned palace: all he could remember was thinking, Why are all these waiters here? Are they all even waiters? And what exactly do they do—other than, well, wait? And for what?

  Being a guest of the Arat Kur was a little like that, Trevor discovered. And so, while he and Caine were neither separated nor intruded upon, they also lacked the privacy for secure communications. It took a day or two to figure out a solution, which ironically presented itself through a strongly shared human and Arat Kur trait: attention to hygiene. Specifically, toilet hygiene.

  Evidently, the Arat Kur were extremely fastidious about anything having to do with the excretion of wastes and had attitudes similar to humans about expecting privacy while doing so. Although the Arat Kur seemed only indifferently pr
epared to provide for human eating and sleeping requirements, they had obviously made a considerable study of human excretory habits. Caine and Trevor were somewhat dumbfounded to discover they had been furnished with a very reasonable approximation of a human toilet and an equally reasonable equivalent of toilet paper. The accompanying sink was large enough to bathe a toddler in and the amount of soap provided could have lasted them for many years.

  After two days, however, it became evident that the Arat Kur were mildly distressed by the humans’ toilet etiquette, but were too polite to say why—or perhaps the translation device wasn’t furnished with the right terms (which was pretty understandable). Trevor found the whole situation mildly amusing; Caine, on the other hand, considered it a phenomenon of intense interest and started a fairly hilarious (unintentionally so, but still hilarious) set of experiments to discover what, specifically, about the human toilet habits so distressed the Arat Kur. Everything became a variable to be tested—often with rather ridiculous results. But ultimately, he hit upon the factor that changed the Arat Kur’s reactions: the duration between flushing and exiting the bathroom. The longer the interval, the more—well, relieved—the Arat Kur appeared to be.

  Caine urged Trevor to extend his time in the fresher as well, and they both began testing other changes in their routine: more or less washing; more or less soap used; more or less grooming. A clear trend emerged: the more fastitidious the humans were in their post-excretory habits, the more relaxed the Arat Kur became. What was for a human a thorough handwashing was, for an Arat Kur, the equivalent of a quick spit on each palm and a vigrous rub on either pant leg. Their captor-hosts seemed to approve of no less than five minutes of detailed scrubbing, nail-checking, and repeated hot-water rinsings. Which—because of their warders immediately changed attitudes as soon as they emerged from the other side of the apartment’s closed bathroom door—all but proved that the Arat Kur had taken the fairly obvious precaution of putting visual (and probably audio) bugs in the privy. But still, it provided Trevor and Caine with an idea…

  By day four, the two of them began to express the need to use the single toilet facility in quick sequence, occasionally overlapping, the second entering while the first was still washing his hands. And there, with the tap running and soap foaming and toilet flushing, they found short intervals of time in which they could hold an unmonitorable whispered conversation: maybe a dozen words worth. They tested their presumption of privacy by feigning a joint decision to commit suicide that night at dinner—and discovered no enhanced security precautions. If anything, the only reaction of their captors was a faintly greater measure of approval and appreciation for the humans’ increased attention to hygiene.

  Trevor and Caine maintained the new routine, but did not immediately exchange further information, reasoning that if there wasn’t even the faintest hint that these intervals were being used to facilitate secret communications, even the most suspicious Arat Kur would eventually come to accept this as a normative behavior. And that seemed to be, in fact, what occurred.

  They waited until a full week after Urzueth Ragh had displayed the wholesale destruction of the Commonwealth and Russlavic fleets at Barnard’s Star before they started their brief exchanges. Ultimately, it took five days of intermittently overlapping visits to the restroom to compile even a brief conversation.

  It was Trevor who started it, noisily working up enough lather to wash a small dog. “So I’m guessing that up until the footage of their shift-cruisers wiping out our ships, I saw pretty much what you did. Every analogous system on their hulls is both smaller and more powerful than the ones on ours.”

  Riordan nodded. “Yeah. But the X-ray laser was the game-changer, no matter what Urzueth said.”

  It was five hours later before Trevor got the opportunity to express his doubt. “Urzueth was trying to mislead us. No way that was an X-ray laser. Can’t be. Damn ship would have vaporized itself.”

  “Yes, if it was nuke-pumped. But this one wasn’t.”

  “Then how do they get all those X-rays at that energy level?”

  “They’re using their drive.”

  “You mean, antimatter? Still won’t selectively give you—”

  “No: it’s not tapping an antimatter reaction. Not directly. They’re powering it with their shift-generator, their analog of the Wasserman drive.”

  “Wait: are you saying that they’re using a baby borderline black hole as a… a capacitor?”

  Riordan answered the next day. “Not merely a capacitor: you can’t store X-rays, and you can’t generate them selectively.”

  “Then how—?”

  “They’ve found a way to keep the drive’s incipient event horizon stable for more than a microsecond. That gives them both the power levels and the X-rays.”

  “Well, X-rays and pretty much everything else that would be spat out by a field-effect constantly trying to become a cosmic catastrophe.”

  “Yeah—unless they’ve found a way to bleed off the X-rays selectively, directionally.”

  Trevor was able to follow up on Riordan’s startling hypothesis a few hours later. “If they can do that, they’ve got a much better grasp of high-energy physics than we do.”

  “They’d have to in order to maintain an IEH for even a few seconds. And judging from the thermal spike back near their engine decks every time they fired that X-ray laser, that’s exactly what they’re doing: juicing their field effect generator.”

  Trevor frowned, then smiled. “That must be awfully expensive. In terms of antimatter, that is.”

  Riordan’s only response was an answering smile as they finished washing for dinner.

  * * *

  DECEMBER 2, 2119

  INBOUND TO EARTH, THE SOLAR SYSTEM

  Several days later, their part of the Arat Kur fleet shifted into Earth’s backyard, somewhat above the ecliptic and off the shoulder of Jupiter. Dazhee Kut, who had managed to visit them briefly the day before, sent a message as they arrived, explaining that he hoped to speak with them soon again and to put their mission in context. However, for reasons they never learned, that second confab never materialized. Trevor and Caine shared the same suspicion regarding what had prevented him: Darzhee Kut might have appeared a tad too sympatico with his human co-survivors for his superiors’ comfort.

  So it was Urzueth Ragh who arrived to explain where they were, that the human home fleet had now been defeated also, and that, very soon now, one of them would be sent home. The other would remain as a more permanent diplomatic liaison, at least until the current difficulties had passed. This was deemed essential since Trevor and Caine’s fellow humans had still not acceded to the invaders’ surrender demands; consequently, further unpleasantness was sure to follow.

  “Just how much more unpleasant do you expect things to get?” Trevor asked in a tone of voice that made the Arat Kur administrator flinch slightly and his security staff inch closer.

  “It is difficult to tell,” Urzueth admitted. “The remaining ships of your home defense fleet appear to be regrouping for another pass at us. There are signs that Earth itself is preparing for resistance. It will be quite futile, I’m afraid. The outcome is not in question, once we hold the high ground.”

  Trevor felt sweat break out at various parts of his body. “You mean you’d actually use an asteroid to—?”

  Urzueth Ragh started; his mandibles clacked in alarm. “Mr. Corcoran! We would never countenance such a barbarous act. It is not our intent to exterminate, or even conquer, your species: simply to compel you to agree to constraints that will ensure our own safety.”

  Riordan’s smile was mirthless, his eyes narrow. “I wonder if that fine moral posture, of eschewing genocide, is just a bit easier to maintain since you fear the possibility of retaliation by the Custodians. Unfortunately, you are already in the process of perpetrating the worst violation of the Accords: attacking another species’ homeworld.”

  Trevor glared at the Arat Kur. “Yeah, but since they’re alrea
dy here, maybe they figure they might as well swing for the fences: if you’re going to break the law, you might as well go all the way. After all, someone tried to play ‘drop the rock’ on us about 35 years ago. Maybe that was you—and maybe this is just your up-close-and-personal return to make sure the job gets done this time.”

  Urzueth made a noise that sounded like choked wheezing. “Gentlemen! The Wholenest does not annihilate entire species, let alone biospheres. If you seek further reassurance, I will endeavor to provide it. Or, if it is your intent to insult us with such questions, you have succeeded.”

  Trevor was too mannerly to spit, but thought about it. “You’re insulted? That’s pretty funny, actually—given your treachery since Convocation.”

  Urzueth’s mandibles froze, his wheezing diminished. He was either paralyzed by rage or shame. Trevor didn’t know enough Arat Kur body language to tell, and frankly, didn’t care.

  “However,” Riordan followed, “we are somewhat reassured at your response, Urzueth.”

  “And why do you believe my response is genuine, Mr. Riordan?”

  “Because—well, you’re not a very good actor.”

  Urzueth’s respiration did not just grow more regular; it stopped. “Is that an insult or levity?”

  “Well,” Riordan confessed, “probably a bit of both.”

  Urzueth resumed breathing, and shut off his translator as he clacked and chittered at his escort. “Very well,” he continued, “I presume that we may now continue our conversation in a productive fashion.”

  Yeah, don’t bet on it. But Trevor remained silent and folded his arms.

  Caine nodded slowly, carefully. “You mentioned that you intend to send one of us planetside and keep the other with your fleet.”

  “That is correct.”

  “And you are giving us the choice of who shall fulfill which role?”

  “That, too, is correct. Although there was considerable resistance to that suggestion.”

  I’ll bet, Trevor thought.

  “And who was kind enough to propose that?” Riordan asked.