“Wouldn’t help me much if I did,” Ran said. “You’ve got control of all the weaponry anyway.”
At least he knew that much. “Your business is to stay alive,” she said. “So is mine. We have more important things to do than fight. If we run, we run. That’s life.”
He didn’t actively look sulky, but them was still an air of vague disappointment about him. He opened his month, then closed it again as if thinking better of something he had been about to say. “There anything I can bring you from stores?” he said. “Not that we’ll be out there that long anyway. Just something to while the time away.”
Maura had to chuckle. He had no idea how short this mission was going to be if he kept on in this vein. “I’m fine,” she said, “but thank you for asking.”
He went out and fetched another small carton with his spare uniforms in it, and a few other pieces of bric-a-brac. They genuinely were bric-a-brac; one of them was a small Staffordshire china dog, its paint well worn off it. “Where’d you find that?” she said, interested in spite of herself.
Ran laughed. “It was my mother’s. She had it from her father . . . it’s been passed down, oh, four or five generations now, I guess. The member of the family who’s going farthest away always gets it. It’s well traveled, this critter.”
It looked it. Its paint was faded, and it had a faintly cross-eyed expression, like someone who’s taken too many jumps too fast. “Amazing it hasn’t been broken,” Maura said.
“Most of us tend to keep it under our beds,” said Ran.
“What? You don’t put it out on a shelf and let it take its chances?”
Ran raised his eyebrows. “Crockery shouldn’t take chances,” he said. “People, though . . . that’s another story.” And he glanced at the column and walked away.
Maura swore softly to herself. Brawns! What was she going to have to do to this one to calm him down?
They left the next morning. Maura had been cautioned to put a lot of distance between herself and the Hawking before she jumped the first time. For my good, she had thought, or for theirs? It was well known what happened if a jump engine happened to malfunction . . . and the first time a brain used one, there had been accidents and miscalculations. . . . It was easy enough to understand. What happened when you suddenly had a new part of your brain installed that worked forty percent better and faster than the rest of it? There were sometimes mishmashes, problems with coordination. For a human being to move an arm or leg fifty percent faster might not make any difference, but when the motor control involved was running a matter-antimatter conversion engine, and the mix suddenly went south . . . well.
Ran was sitting in the chair in the control room, drumming his fingers on the arms of the chair, trying to control his excitement and nervousness, and doing very badly. “Have you had time to look over the navigation plan?” Maura said.
“I saw it three days ago. It’s fairly straightforward. A hop-skip-and-jump setup: hop to the system, skip any planets not populated or showing signs of interference. Survey what’s there, then move on to the next star.”
“It’s a fairly extensive list, wouldn’t you say?” she said. “Forty star systems, with an option for forty more?”
“Piece of cake,” he said. Somehow Maura had known he was going to say that.
“There’s some in the galley,” she murmured. “First jump. Five minutes, counting from—now. Do you have trouble with fast jumps?” she said.
He blinked. “I’ve only done it once. Didn’t bother me much. It felt—” He shrugged. “Like going up in an elevator, actually. That pit-of-the-stomach feeling.”
Maura had never been in an elevator, but she knew that pit-of-the-stomach feeling. The sudden, bizarre pressure all over the hull, where there couldn’t be any pressure; the sense of not discontinuity, but of wrongness. That was the strangest thing about it. It was more a pang of conscience than anything else; there was a sense that it was morally wrong to be jumping. As if the laws of the universe were for the first time speaking and telling you directly that they were being violated, and they didn’t like it. Maybe that was just a side effect of being in a shell—the tendency to perceive physics directly, instead of through the film of less-sensitive senses. “Well,” she said, “then you won’t mind this one. It’s only forty light-years or so.”
He gulped. Maura found it briefly satisfying . . . and then was ashamed of herself. There was no point in deriving enjoyment from the discomfort of her brawn, even if he was a total prat.
The engines built power. There was no sound of it. They were quite silent; no moving parts, not even any moving plasmas, remained in the engines. The antimatter mix was coming up to the correct richness. That was the secret of making these engines move smoothly, Maura had been told; not just dumping the masses together, but keeping the mix slow and low at first, then enriching it as you went along. George, of GB-33871, had told her that it was very similar to making a cream sauce. Add the active ingredient slowly, taste as you go along, heat gradually, not too fast so that it doesn’t curdle. Slow and easy. . . . It’ll be worth waiting for when it’s done. George was a little strange, being about four hundred years old now; he would make jokes about being near the end of his service life. But he had survived a lot, and strange or not, his advice was worth listening to . . . even if he couldn’t eat his own cooking.
Maura didn’t say anything further, but sat there and watched Ran sweat, and counted the minutes down. If only he knew that I hate this as much as he does. . . .
They jumped, and found the first star, a little KO with no name but a string of numbers and letters out of the catalog. There were three planets: two gas giants, and a third of Earth type.
Maura said nothing for a while, letting Ran get himself up and stalk around the cabin with the air of a man just released from prison. Trainees were only taken on the shorter jumps. Maura wondered if this one had finally gotten further into him than the pit of his stomach, after all. He looked haunted. “What news?” she said. She could easily have found out by using her own sensors, but you had to let a brawn do something.
He was leaning over the computer, looking at the readouts. “Infested,” he said.
“How much?” They had been using percentages to talk about how much of the planet was domed-under. The Ichtons did not waste much. The strip-mining of old Earth was positively environmentally kind compared to the way the Ichtons used the planets that became theirs. Anything that could be termed a natural resource, however rare or common, was used. Everything was taken; mined, drilled, dug up, scalped off, and the proceeds shipped off to those domes to make . . . heaven knew what. The materials for more domes, Maura thought. This planet would have showed, to the human naked eye, a handsome blue-green ball; nothing strange about it. Unless you looked down to its southern hemisphere, and saw the blot that was not the color of earth or sea; the blot that under higher magnification could be shown to glitter balefully, like a many-faceted eye. A thousand domes, ten thousand, a million, packed together and expanding. The eye glittered at them.
Maura breathed out. “What percent?” she said again.
Ran was still looking at the readout screen. “About ten,” he said. “There’s a lot more undermining going on than shows at the moment. They’re under all the seas contiguous to that continent, and spreading. Maybe they’re trying not to attract too much attention here.”
“Too late for that, then,” Maura said. “Anything noticeable in or near the other planets? Orbital facilities?”
“Nothing.”
“All right. Then we move on.”
Ran went back to the couch and strapped himself down again, with an unhappy look. “That last jump—” Maura said.
“It was all right,” said Ran, and finished his strapping. “Let’s go.”
“As you say,” Maura said, and took the next jump without even bothering to count it down—fifty light-years, this time.
And she did it again, and four more times after that, and bar
ely let him have long enough to stretch his legs in between. Each time they found the same infestation; sometimes lesser, sometimes greater. Ran was beginning to frown, and to look frazzled. After the twelfth, she said, “Are you sure you want to keep going?”
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”
For her own part, she was finding it very hard to be cool. She could see, as if it were with her own eyes, what he couldn’t; the detail on those domes. There was always a sort of no-man’s-land around the domed zones, protected by force-field from intrusion; a wide barrier, just dirt or rock. Very often, on the far side, there would be large or small groups of the indigenous species—just looking. Sometimes they were trying to attack—futilely, of course; sometimes doing nothing, just gazing in horror at the sudden inoperable cancer growing on their world. She wondered whether the numbers, the figures and statistics, called up anything in Ran’s mind—any image of something real. She was familiar enough with his train of thought, anyway. Even if relatively young as brainships went, Maura knew what to expect. “Honeymoon syndrome,” as it was somewhat derisively called in the corps, the actual opposite of a honeymoon—when two people who didn’t know each other were thrown together to do highly dangerous and professional work, in a relationship that one way or another wound up being more intimate than many marriages.
She kept offering him chances to stop, but he wouldn’t. Rolling up to the twentieth planet, she said to him, “Look. That’s enough for one week.”
“I want to keep at it,” he said.
“I’m sure you do. But I for one want some rest, and I am not going any farther. You can get out and walk if you like.”
“I just want to get this job done,” he said.
Maura looked at him. Sensors picked up the elevated heartbeat. The sound of his EEG rattled against another sensor like pebbles shaken in a can. Agitated. Mustn’t let him get into this state again. “Look,” she said, “I’m sure you want to keep going. But we have more work to do.”
He turned away from her, the color rising in his face. “It can’t all be done in a week,” she said, trying to be gentle.
“It can!” he said, wheeling on her. “It’s only the tools that are ineffective. Not the mission. Not the goal.” And he strode off toward his cabin.
She looked after him from another camera. I could lock his door, until we settle this. I could lock him out, as well as in. . . . But she let him go in and shut the door unhindered, and lie on his bed.
Maura didn’t bother waiting for him to come out. She had her own business to take care of on this mission. She idly pulled a copy of his records, and ran her optical scanners over it.
The picture was much the same as the man she saw now. A picture of the parents: one dark-haired, one fair. The fair hair came down through his mother’s side. One brother, also in the Fleet; lost, some time ago, at Balaclava. Several postmortem commendations—he apparently had been leader of a fighter squadron that had managed to take out several Ichton ships, before being destroyed. That was the pity of it; no speed or cunning mattered, when you were dealing with odds of fifty or a hundred to one. The Fleet might be more maneuverable than the Ichton ships, but there were always more of them, no matter how many of you went down fighting valiantly.
The lost brother . . . who knew what effect that would have on Ran? She thought of Loni. It had been a while since she had thought of her. They weren’t sisters, really, but they had come into the brain facility at the same time; they had worked together and trained together, and played the games shell kids play together—chasing each other around the center at high speed and putting the lives of many at slight risk. They had had a good time together. Then they had both been commissioned as brainships. Loni had gone on in Fleet service after her payoff, and was last seen near the Rift. Her last communications were untroubled. But there had been reports of Ichton fleets out that way. No news ever came back, no wreckage. Nothing but silence where Loni had been.
Maura considered this bit of her history in conjunction with Ran’s, and snorted to herself. Was some amateur shrink out there trying to do a good deed? The Med Psych people out at Hawking had been known to pull such stunts every now and then. Well, Maura was having none of it. There was nothing wrong with her.
Nothing that seeing Loni again wouldn’t cure. . . .
There was of course no chance of that. Maura laughed hollowly at herself, not caring whether Ran heard her or not, and went back to her hobby.
She had been dabbling in code holography for a long time. It was very enjoyable to encode holograms of places that didn’t really exist, or ones that did. That was a challenge, too—to engrave pictures of places she had seen pictures of, and compare them to the originals. Image processing without the image, that was all it was. A very basic sort of pastime for a brainship, but it pleased her.
She was doing an unabashed pastoral that had so far cost her several weeks labor; a not-very-subtle takeoff on some paintings she had seen dating back to Earth’s seventeenth century. Rolling hillsides, green fields, hedgerows, various stock animals wandering about; nattily dressed young men and young women in long dresses and carrying frilly parasols, standing under trees and admiring the view. But the view was clearly not on Earth—it was the upcurving interior surface of a Dyson sphere, with the “afternoon” sun hanging up in the midst of it all.
She was working on the clouds in that sky, some hours later, when Ran woke up with a start. For amusement’s sake, she put a copy of what she was working on up on the screen in the control room, so that he could see it. He didn’t come into the control room for a long time. He made his breakfast first, and took a long while over it, before finally wandering in. There he stood, and looked at the picture. “Nice,” he said.
Maura chuckled at him. “Thank you. How did you sleep?”
“Badly,” he said. “Can we get started?”
“In a little while. I’m still running some system checks.” This was not strictly true. There was one check she had left running all night—engine status—but she let it stop now.
“And how are the engines doing?”
He might be an annoyance, but he was an observant one. “Greenline optimum.”
“But you weren’t expecting them to be doing that.”
“Young man,” she said, “you will have the courtesy to ask me what I think, not tell me.” When he merely raised his eyebrows at her, Maura said, “No, I didn’t expect that. I expected—some slight hiccup, some change in the wave form. It’s not as if these are standard components . . . or, rather, not as if you’re hooking these components into a standardized system. There is one very idiosyncratic component.” He nodded. “These engines tend to react one way with one brainship, another way with another.”
“And you were expecting them to malfunction?”
“No, but to produce some idiosyncratic—” She sighed. “I don’t know what. Are you about ready?”
“I have been for a while,” he said.
They started out again. This time it was a longer series even than the last. They were almost halfway through the list by the time they were done, and nothing was working out the way Maura had planned. He was supposed to be weary and frazzled at this point; she was supposed to be cool and collected, and in control. But he got cooler as the days went by, and the planets—the ravaged shells—the percentages got higher and higher. She was getting frazzled. The sight of the species of many worlds, standing, staring across the no-man’s-land; the sight of ocean creatures scrambling out of water and dying in the air, unable to deal with the alien presence that was changing their seas, polluting the water or drinking it dry. Fourteen planets, all complexed—all infected, from ten to thirty percent, sometimes more. Icecaps being mined off for their water, atmospheres being pumped away, pressurized, shipped out in cans; planetary crusts being mined straight down through the discontinuity layers for the liquid metal inside them.
They paused long over one planet. So much of its core had be
en mined out that there was now no sign of the robust magnetic fields that should have been there. Its rotation had slowed. Half of it was baking, half freezing, and a slow nutation was dragging the frozen side around for its turn, ice giving way to fire.
“We’re all going to die,” Maura heard herself say.
Ran’s head snapped around. “What?”
“They’re all going to die.”
He looked at the viewscreen. This world was a watery one, better to look at than most; the damage wasn’t visible. But the sensors clearly showed, under those oceans, the terrible changes in the temperature of the ocean floor, where Ichton drilling through the crust was exposing magma to the sea bottom, and the seas were slowly coming to a boil. Only the changing color at two or three points of the world, from a dark blue to a lighter one, betrayed that anything was happening at all. It was a very gradual change—you almost might not notice it, unless you were far enough out in space and could see the spots. Ominous, like the spots on Jupiter.
“Die?” Ran said. “Yes. Eventually, so we will.”
Maura gulped and tried to turn her attention elsewhere, for the little time while Ran was completing his readings. There was really nowhere else to look. The dead black of space, or this dying blue. She peered around the ship here and there, glanced into his cabin . . . saw that the crockery dog was sitting on a shelf, on a pile of books. “Came out from under the bed, did he?” she said, trying desperately for levity.
“What?”
“The dog.”
“I suppose we all have to come out sometime,” Ran said.
They went on, through the weary day, and through another. On the morning of the fourth day in this series Maura could barely stand the sight of Ran; but he got up more energetic than ever, somberly eager to get about their work. They were almost through their list of star systems, anyway—there was that small consolation. No more than ten left to get through. . . . But Maura found herself dreading the next jump, even as Ran strapped himself in and waited for her to report herself ready.
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