by Rich Horton
“Forgive me, Raisa,” she muttered, then broke off their acceleration. A clear signal of surrender—nothing wrong with the shipmind’s telemetry, after all—though she’d hold her current course as long as possible, to buy time to think.
The normal space drives, inboard behind Sword and Arm’s shielding, had taken the same rattle her head had, but were not significantly damaged. Cannon turned to Shinka, speaking loudly and slowly. “I am plotting a rendezvous course back to Third Rectification.”
Shinka muttered something and stared at her displays. Then, “I don’t know if you need to, ma’am.”
“The Alcubierre drive is fried. We can’t reach relativistic velocities any more, nor decelerate.”
“Yeah.” The Lieutenant seemed shocky. Her voice was strange, too, though Cannon couldn’t tell how much of that was her own hearing trying to recover. “Ma’am . . . call up your own interface to the threadneedle drive.”
“What?” The Before was at a dead loss for a moment, a sensation she had not felt in half a thousand years. She always knew what to do next.
“The threadneedle drive,” Shinka said with a strained patience. “I don’t know what it’s supposed to be doing, but it came online when you unlocked the interfaces for me.”
“Threadneedle drives don’t come online,” Cannon muttered. “We’ve spent the last eleven hundred years trying to deal with that fact.”
“Everyone knows you’ve maintained yours.”
“Because I’m a stubborn old bitch.” Her hands jabbed through the interfaces, pulling up controls and schematics. Home, home, home, chanted a quiet, panicked voice inside her mind. You couldn’t fly a starship into the past. Only the future.
Cannon’s heart froze, then melted. The drive had come online, into hot stand-by mode. She’d not seen that since before the Mistake.
“But how . . . ?” Reality bore in on her in a flood every bit as overwhelming a cascade as any temporal psychosis fugue. “This is what the shipmind was afraid of. This is why the Navisparliament was jiggering the data.”
“Then why did they ever let us come out here?” Shinka asked.
“We weren’t supposed to find anything. We weren’t supposed to come this far. We’re outside the boundaries of the old Polity.” Cannon slammed her hand into the panel. “By god, it’s an area effect.” She whirled toward Shinka. “We’ve been arguing for the last millennium about how the laws of physics could have been tweaked to disable the threadneedle drives. This isn’t basic physics, this is fucking technology, and now we’re outside its range.”
“If the threadneedle drives could be restored . . . ” Shinka’s voice trailed off.
Cannon finished the thought. “ . . . then the shipmind’s absolute monopoly on supraluminal travel could be broken. This is the prize that the Navisparliament thought worth betraying all the accumulated trust of the centuries.”
“We have to get home,” breathed Shinka. “It’s the biggest news since the Mistake.”
“We have to get home and be very damned quiet on arrival,” said Cannon. “If they catch us first, we’ll be silenced. Hard.”
“They who?”
“Besides the Navisparliament? Unknown. And until we know that, we’re going to have to be damned careful.” She pulled up the threadneedle’s navigation mode. “And with the Alcubierre drive toasted, we’re going to have to do it in one jump, getting close enough to home to make it in on normal space drives. Praying the threadneedle process doesn’t fail mid-transition.”
Shinka asked the obvious, practical question. “Will it?”
“I don’t think so,” Cannon told her. “Once I’ve got this, we’re going to goose out of here. When we hit the gas, Third Rectification is going to know something’s up.”
“Shipmind’s been hailing the whole time.”
“We’re going to have to bust her drives.” Cannon closed her eyes a moment and begged Go-Captain Alvarez and all the others aboard for forgiveness. “And her comms. We have to be disappeared, no word leaking back, until we figure out what to do with this information.
Shinka was quiet a long moment. “Anything we bust up they can repair. Given sufficient time and motivation.”
“You have a lot of friends aboard,” Cannon said, her voice gentle. “A lot of loyalty. Could you fire on them?”
“Navisparliament is never going to allow another expedition, is it? Not once they find out what happen from Third Rectification’s point of view.”
“What do you think?” Cannon was not unkind, paying close attention even while she worked frantically to set a course to Salton using dormant skills and ancient technology.
“It’s not my friends and shipmates we have to stop. It’s the ship herself.”
“No one knows how to shut down a shipmind. Except by destroying the ship.” Not even with her override codes. Kishmangali had not been suicidal, after all. Merely very cautious. Cannon knew perfectly well that an enormous amount of very intelligent, focused thinking had gone into that question over the centuries.
“This . . . information . . . ” Shinka stopped, a sob caught in her throat. “This is about all other people, not just specific other people.”
It was the sob that caught Cannon’s attention. You didn’t cry for the living, only for the dead.
“I’ve got a fire control plan in place that starts with the drive and walks forward.” The Before was somber, even as she worked furiously. “We don’t have the power to destroy something that big, but we do have the firepower to permanently disable Third Rectification beyond local repair.” No one had ever been charged with murder in the death of a shipmind, but it was certainly possible within the Imperium’s legal framework. The deaths of a hundred and forty-two crew were far less ambiguous. She imagined herself pleading self-defense.
“It won’t kill them all right away,” Shinka said in a horrified voice. “Some will die slowly.”
“What’s this information worth?” Cannon demanded. “We finally got the threadneedle drive back. Enough to know there’s something to look for. A fix to be found. What is that worth?”
“To the human race?” The Lieutenant was shouting back now, tears streaming down her face. “Everything. To Pangari and all those others? Their lives.”
Cannon flipped over to the fire control screen, before Third Rectification delivered another ballistic package, or took a zap from her mining laser.
“I’ll do it,” Shinka whispered.
“I’m the commander of the expedition. I’ll do it.” Cannon smiled at her, feeling her lips stretched over her teeth like a tiger’s grin. “Besides, my dead are already legion. These ghosts will have to get in line to haunt me.”
She triggered the firing pattern. Sword and Arm’s power flickered, dimmed, then recovered. On the virtual display, Third Rectification silently erupted into expanding clouds of gas and debris.
“What if we’re wrong?” Shinka asked, a moment too late. “What if the threadneedle drive doesn’t get us home, doesn’t work?”
“Then we all died for nothing.” She sighed. “Really, that’s the human condition.”
Cannon lit up the initiation sequence on the threadneedle drive, heading for Salton. That was the closest inhabited planetary system with sufficient infrastructure for her hide within while working the delicate next phases of this problem.
She felt lighter, and she wondered why. Surely not the weight of over a hundred souls and a shipmind.
History. The weight of history was lifting from her shoulders, to be replaced by the lightness of the future.
The Before Michaela Cannon hit the launch button and hoped like hell Sword and Arm’s threadneedle drive would actually work.
Biographies
Linda Nagata is the author of multiple novels and short stories including The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel, and the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award. Though best known for science fiction, she writes fantasy too
, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Her newest science fiction novel is The Red: First Light, published under her own imprint, Mythic Island Press LLC. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui. Find her online at MythicIsland.com
Genevieve Valentine’s first novel, Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti, won the 2012 Crawford Award and was nominated for the Nebula. Her second novel, Glad Rags, a 1927 retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, is forthcoming from Atria in 2014. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Journal of Mythic Arts, Lightspeed, and others, and the anthologies Federations, The Living Dead 2, After, Teeth, and more. Her nonfiction and reviews have appeared at NPR.org, Strange Horizons, io9.com, Lightspeed, Weird Tales, Tor.com, and Fantasy, and she is a co-author of pop-culture book Geek Wisdom (Quirk Books). Her appetite for bad movies is insatiable, a tragedy she tracks on her blog.
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award winning author of Osama, of The Bookman Histories trilogy and many other works. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella, for Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God, and a BSFA Award for non-fiction. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa but currently resides in London.
Sofia Samatar is the author of the novel A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press, 2013). Her poetry, short fiction and reviews have appeared in a number of places, including Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Stone Telling, and Goblin Fruit. She is the nonfiction and poetry editor for Interfictions: A Journal of Interstitial Arts.
David Ira Cleary was born in Wyoming, raised in Colorado, and has spent his working life in the San Francisco Bay Area, mostly programming computers or writing about software. He did have a stint as the story-writer for an on-line game company. He’s been published in Asimov’s, Interzone, Full Spectrum, Universe, SF Age, and other magazines and anthologies. In 1998, his story “All Our Sins Forgotten” was filmed by the Sci-Fi Channel, with Henry Rollins playing the lead role. He currently live in Oakland with his actress wife, two dogs, and three cats.
Sandra McDonald is the author of several books and several dozen short stories, including the award-winning collection Diana Comet and Other Improbable Stories. Her work has appeared in Asimov’s, Lightspeed, Strange Horizons, and many other magazines and anthologies. As Sam Cameron, she writes the Fisher Key Adventures for young adults. She teaches college in Florida and has too much wildlife in her backyard. Visit her at sandramcdonald.com
Margaret Ronald is the author of the Hunt series (Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt) as well as a number of short stories. Originally from rural Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.
Meghan McCarron’s stories have recently appeared in Tor.com, Clarkesworld, and Strange Horizons. She is a fiction editor at Interfictions and an assistant editor for Unstuck. She lives with her girlfriend in Austin, TX.
Aliette de Bodard lives and works in a computer-infested living room in Paris, where she has a day job as a software engineer. In her spare time, she writes speculative fiction: her Aztec noir fantasy Obsidian and Blood is published by Angry Robot, and her short fiction has appeared in places like Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Interzone. She won the BSFA Award for Best Short Fiction with “The Shipmaker,” and has been a finalist for the Hugo and Nebula. Her SF novella “On a Red Station, Drifting,” was published December 2012 from Immersion Press.
Leonard Richardson has a taste for adventure. His first novel, Constellation Games, is published by Candlemark & Gleam.
Ursula K. Le Guin has received five Hugo Awards, six Nebula Awards, nineteen Locus Awards (more than any other author), the Gandalf Grand Master Award, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master Award, and the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. Her novel The Farthest Shore won the National Book Award for Children’s Books. Le Guin was named a Library of Congress Living Legend in the “Writers and Artists” category for her significant contributions to America’s cultural heritage and the PEN/Malamud Award for “excellence in a body of short fiction.” She is also the recipient of the Association for Library Service for Children’s May Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture Award and the Margaret Edwards Award. She was honored by The Washington Center for the Book for her distinguished body of work with the Maxine Cushing Gray Fellowship for Writers in 2006.
Robert Reed has published eleven novels. His twelfth, The Memory of Sky: A Novel of the Great Ship, will be published in spring 2014. Since winning the first annual L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 1986 and being a finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer in 1987, he has had over two hundred shorter works published in a variety of magazines and anthologies. Collections include The Dragons of Springplace, Chrysalis, The Cuckoo’s Boys, and the upcoming The Greatship. Reed’s stories have appeared in at least one of the annual year’s best anthologies in every year since 1992, and he has received nominations for the Nebula and the Hugo Awards, as well as numerous other literary awards. He won a Hugo Award for his novella “A Billion Eves.”
Naomi Kritzer’s short stories have appeared in a number of publications, and she has two e-book short story collections available, Comrade Grandmother and Other Stories, and Gift of the Winter King and Other Stories. Her novels (Fires of the Faithful, Turning the Storm, Freedom’s Gate, Freedom’s Apprentice, and Freedom’s Sisters) are available from Bantam. She lives in St. Paul with her husband and two daughters.
Christopher Rowe has published more than twenty short stories, and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story “Another Word For Map is Faith” made the long list in the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, by Small Beer Press. His Forgotten Realms novel, Sandstorm, was published in 2010 by Wizards of the Coast. He is currently pursuing an MFA in writing at the Bluegrass Writers Studio of Eastern Kentucky University and is hard at work on Sarah Across America, a new novel about maps, megafauna, and other obsessions. He lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife, novelist Gwenda Bond, and their pets.
Emily Gilman wanted to be a paleontologist until one day in third grade, when a recess spent in quiet self-reflection led her to realize she’d be happier writing instead. She attended the Alpha SF/F/H Workshop for Young Writers in 2003 and 2004 and received an honorable mention in the 2008 Dell Award, and her work has appeared in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. During her non-free time she works as a middle school librarian, which is, she assures you, pretty much the best job ever.
Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the multiple-Hugo-Award-winning author of over a dozen novels and nearly a hundred short stories. Her hobbies include rock climbing, running, cooking, archery, and other practical skills for the coming zombie apocalypse. She divides her time between Massachusetts, where her dog lives, and Wisconsin, the home of her partner, fantasist Scott Lynch.
Caroline M. Yoachim is a writer and photographer living in Seattle, Washington. She’s a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, and her fiction has appeared in Asimov’s, Fantasy Magazine, and Daily Science Fiction, among other places. Her novelette “Stone Wall Truth” was nominated for a Nebula Award last year and has since been reprinted in Chinese and Czech. For more about Caroline, check out her website at carolineyoachim.com.
K.M. Ferebee holds a degree from Sarah Lawrence College, and previously toted a violin around the world as part of the indie rock ensemble Beirut. She currently lives in Columbus, and studies creative writing and the cult of the Midwestern lifestyle at The Ohio State University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Fantasy Magazine, Strange Horizons, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Weird Tales, and Shimmer.
Robert Charles Wilson’s novels include Julian Comstock, the Hugo Award-winning Spin, and Burning Paradise (forthcoming). Born in California, he lives just outside of Toronto, Ontario.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton, Tiptree, Mythopoeic, Rhysling, Lambda, Locus and Hugo awards. She has been a finalist for the Nebula and World Fantasy Awards. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and an enormous cat.
Gord Sellar is a Canadian who has lived in South Korea since late 2001. A finalist for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2009, he attended Clarion West in 2006. His writing has appeared in many magazines, anthologies, and journals since 2007, and in 2012 his first screenplay—the first Korean adaptation of HP Lovecraft’s work, titled “The Music of Jo Hyeja”—was turned into an award-winning short film. You can learn more about him and his work at gordsellar.com.
Kate Bachus’ fiction includes stories such as “Miss Parker Down the Bung,” “Echo, Sonar,” and “Ferryman’s Reprieve” for Strange Horizons, as well as other works published in various magazines and “Best of” erotica anthologies. She lives in Massachusetts with her wife and two kids and plays too much ice hockey.
Joe Pitkin lives in Vancouver, Washington, where he teaches at Clark College. His fiction has appeared in Analog, Cosmos, The Future Fire, and elsewhere.
Maria Dahvana Headley is the Nebula-nominated author of the dark fantasy/alt-history novel Queen of Kings, as well as the internationally bestselling memoir The Year of Yes. Her short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Subterranean, and more, and will shortly be anthologized in the 2013 editions of Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Paula Guran’s The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, and Jurassic London’s The Lowest Heaven, a celestial bodies anthology, in which she is responsible for the story about Earth. Most recently, with Neil Gaiman, she co-edited the young-adult monster anthology Unnatural Creatures, to benefit 826DC. Find her on Twitter at @MARIADAHVANA, or on the web at mariadahvanaheadley.com