The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  “Still,” Karl says, “I was military too—”

  Which explained a lot.

  “—and no one ever taught me about stealth tech. It’s the stuff of legends and kid’s tales.”

  “It was banned.” Squishy’s voice is soft, but has power. “It was banned five hundred years ago, and every few generations, we try to revive it or modify it or improve it. Doesn’t work.”

  “What doesn’t work?” Junior asks.

  The tension is rising. I can’t let it get too far out of control, but I want to hear what Squishy has to say.

  “The tech shadows the ships, makes them impossible to see, even with the naked eye,” Squishy says.

  “Bullshit,” Turtle says. “Stealth just masks instruments, makes it impossible to read the ships on equipment. That’s all.”

  Squishy turns, lets her arms drop. “You know all about this now? Did you spend three years studying stealth? Did you spend two years of post-doc trying to recreate it?”

  Turtle is staring at her like she’s never seen her before. “Of course not.”

  “You have?” Karl asks.

  Squishy nods. “Why do you think I find things? Why do you think I like finding things that are lost?”

  Junior shakes his head. I’m not following the connection either.

  “Why?” Jypé asks. Apparently he’s not following it as well.

  “Because,” Squishy says, “I’ve accidentally lost so many things.”

  “Things?” Karl’s voice is low. His face seems pale in the lounge’s dim lighting.

  “Ships, people, materiel. You name it, I lost it trying to make it invisible to sensors. Trying to recreate the tech you just found on that ship.”

  My breath catches. “How do you know it’s there?”

  “We’ve been looking at it from the beginning,” Squishy says. “That damn probe is stuck like half my experiments got stuck, between one dimension and another. There’s only one way in and no way out. And the last thing you want— the very last thing—is for one of us to get stuck like that.”

  “I don’t believe it.” Turtle says with such force that I know she and Squishy have been having this argument from the moment we first saw the wreck.

  “Believe it.” Squishy says that to me, not Turtle. “Believe it with all that you are. Get us out of here, and if you’re truly humane, blow that wreck up, so no one else can find it.”

  “Blow it up?” Junior whispers.

  The action is so opposite anything I know that I feel a surge of anger. We don’t blow up the past. We may search it, loot it, and try to understand it, but we don’t destroy it.

  “Get rid of it.” Squishy’s eyes are filled with tears. She’s looking at me, speaking only to me. “Boss, please. It’s the only sane thing to do.”

  Sane or not, I’m torn.

  If Squishy’s right, then I have a dual dilemma: the technology is lost, new research on it banned, even though the military keeps conducting research anyway trying, if I’m understanding Squishy right, to rediscover something we knew thousands of years before.

  Which makes this wreck so very valuable that I could more than retire with the money we’d get for selling it. I would—we would—be rich for the rest of our very long lives.

  Is the tech dangerous because the experiments to rediscover it are dangerous? Or is it dangerous because there’s something inherent about it that makes it unfeasible now and forever?

  Karl is right: to do this properly, we have to go back and research Dignity Vessels, stealth tech, and the last few thousand years.

  But Turtle’s also right: we’ll take a huge chance of losing the wreck if we do that. We’ll be like countless other divers who sit around bars throughout this sector and bemoan the treasures they lost because they didn’t guard them well enough.

  We can’t leave. We can’t even let Squishy leave. We have to stay until we make a decision.

  Until I make a decision.

  On my own.

  First, I look up Squishy’s records. Not her dive histories, not her arrest records, not her disease manifolds—the stuff any dive captain would examine—but her personal history, who she is, what she’s done, who she’s become.

  I haven’t done that on any of my crew before. I’ve always thought it an invasion of privacy. All we need to know, I’d say to other dive captains, is whether they can handle the equipment, whether they’ll steal from their team members, and if their health is good enough to handle the rigors.

  And I believed it until now, until I found myself digging through layers of personal history that are threaded into the databases filling the Business’s onboard computer.

  Fortunately for me and my nervous stomach, the more sensitive databases are linked only to me—no one else even knows they exist (although anyone with brains would guess that they do)—and even if someone finds the databases, no one can access them without my codes, my retinal scan, and, in many cases, a sample of my DNA.

  Still, I’m skittish as I work this—sound off, screen on dim. I’m in the cockpit, which is my domain, and I have the doors to the main cabin locked. I feel like everyone on the Business knows I’m betraying Squishy. And I feel like they all hate me for it.

  Squishy’s real name is Rosealma Quintinia. She was born forty years ago in a multinational cargo vessel called The Bounty. Her parents insisted she spend half her day in artificial gravity so she wouldn’t develop spacer’s limbs—truncated, fragile—and she didn’t. But she gained a grace that enabled her to go from zero-G to Earth Normal and back again without much transition at all, a skill few ever gain.

  Her family wanted her to cargo, maybe even pirate, but she rebelled. She had a scientific mind, and without asking anyone’s permission, took the boards— scoring a perfect 100, something no cargo monkey had ever done before.

  A hundred schools all over the known systems wanted her. They offered her room, board, and tuition, but only one offered her all expenses paid both coming and going from the school, covering the only cost that really mattered to a spacer’s kid—the cost of travel.

  She went, of course, and vanished into the system, only to emerge twelve years later—too thin, too poor, and too bitter to ever be considered a success. She signed on with a cargo vessel as a medic, and soon became one of its best and most fearless divers.

  She met Turtle in a bar, and they became lovers. Turtle showed her that private divers make more money, and brought her to me.

  And that was when our partnership began.

  I sigh, rub my eyes with my thumb and forefinger, and lean my head against the screen.

  Much as I regret it, it’s time for questions now.

  Of course, she’s waiting for me.

  She’s brought down the privacy wall in the room she initially shared with Turtle, making their rift permanent. Her bed is covered with folded clothes. Her personal trunk is open at the foot. She’s already packed her nightclothes and underwear inside.

  “You’re leaving?” I ask.

  “I can’t stay. I don’t believe in the mission. You’ve preached forever the importance of unity, and I believe you, Boss. I’m going to jeopardize everything.”

  “You’re acting like I’ve already made a decision about the future of this mission.”

  “Haven’t you?” She sits on the edge of the bed, hands folded primly in her lap, her back straight. Her bearing is military—something I’ve always seen, but never really noticed until now.

  “Tell me about stealth tech,” I say.

  She raises her chin slightly. “It’s classified.”

  “That’s fucking obvious.”

  She glances at me, clearly startled. “You tried to research it?”

  I nod. I tried to research it when I was researching Dignity Vessels. I tried again from the Business. I couldn’t find much, but I didn’t have to tell her that.

  That was fucking obvious too.

  “You’ve broken rules before,” I say. “You can break them again.”
/>
  She looks away, staring at that opaque privacy wall—so representative of what she’d become. The solid backbone of my crew suddenly doesn’t support any of us any more. She’s opaque and difficult, setting up a divider between herself and the rest of us.

  “I swore an oath.”

  “Well, let me help you break it,” I snap. “If I try to enter that barrier, what’ll happen to me?”

  “Don’t.” She whispers the word. “Just leave, Boss.”

  “Convince me.”

  “If I tell you, you gotta swear you’ll say nothing about this.”

  “I swear.” I’m not sure I believe me. My voice is shaky, my tone something that sounds strange to even me.

  But the oath—however weak it is—is what Squishy wants.

  Squishy takes a deep breath, but she doesn’t change her posture. In fact, she speaks directly to the wall, not turning toward me at all.

  “I became a medic after my time in Stealth,” she says. “I decided I had to save lives after taking so many of them. It was the only way to balance the score . . .”

  Experts believe stealth tech was deliberately lost. Too dangerous, too risky. The original stealth scientists all died under mysterious circumstances, all much too young and without recording any part of their most important discoveries.

  Through the ages, their names were even lost, only to be rediscovered by a major researcher, visiting Old Earth in the latter part of the past century.

  Squishy tells me all this in a flat voice. She sounds like she’s reciting a lecture from very long ago. Still, I listen, word for word, not asking any questions, afraid to break her train of thought.

  Afraid she’ll never return to any of it.

  Earth-owned Dignity Vessels had all been stripped centuries before, used as cargo ships, used as junk. An attempt to reassemble one about five hundred years ago failed because the Dignity Vessels’ main components and their guidance systems were never, ever found, either in junk or in blueprint form.

  A few documents, smuggled to the colonies on Earth’s Moon, suggested that stealth tech was based on interdimensional science—that the ships didn’t vanish off radar because of a “cloak” but because they traveled, briefly, into another world—a parallel universe that’s similar to our own.

  I recognized the theory—it’s the one on which time travel is based, even though we’ve never discovered time travel, at least not in any useful way, and researchers all over the universe discourage experimentation in it. They prefer the other theory of time travel, the one that says time is not linear, that we only perceive it as linear, and to actually time travel would be to alter the human brain.

  But what Squishy is telling me is that it’s possible to time travel, it’s possible to open small windows in other dimensions, and bend them to our will.

  Only, she says, those windows don’t bend as nicely as we like, and for every successful trip, there are two that don’t function as well.

  I ask for an explanation, but she shakes her head.

  “You can get stuck,” she says, “like that probe. Forever and ever.”

  “You think this is what the Dignity Vessels did?”

  She shakes her head. “I think their stealth tech is based on some form of this multi-dimensional travel, but not in any way we’ve been able to reproduce.”

  “And this ship we have here? Why are you so afraid of it?” I ask.

  “Because you’re right.” She finally looks at me. There are shadows under her eyes. Her face is skeletal, the lower lip trembling. “The ship shouldn’t be here. No Dignity Vessel ever left the sector of space around Earth. They weren’t designed to travel vast distances, let alone halfway across our known universe.”

  I nod. She’s not telling me something I don’t already know. “So?”

  “So,” she says. “Dozens and dozens of those ships never returned to port.”

  “Shot down, destroyed. They were battleships, after all.”

  “Shot down, destroyed, or lost,” she says. “I vote for lost. Or used for something, some mission now lost in time.”

  I shrug. “So?”

  “So you wondered why no one’s seen this before, why no one’s found it, why the ship itself has drifted so very far from home.”

  I nod.

  “Maybe it didn’t drift.”

  “You think it was purposely sent here?”

  She shakes her head. “What if it stealthed on a mission to the outer regions of Old Earth’s area of space?”

  My stomach clenches.

  “What if,” she says, “the crew tried to destealth—and ended up here?”

  “Five thousand years ago?”

  She shakes her head. “A few generations ago. Maybe more, maybe less. But not very long. And you were just the lucky one who found it.”

  I spend the entire night listening to her theories.

  I hear about the experiments, the forty-five deaths, the losses she suffered in a program that started the research from scratch.

  After she left R&D and went into medicine, she used her high security clearance to explore older files. She found pockets of research dating back nearly five centuries, the pertinent stuff gutted, all but the assumptions gone.

  Stealth tech. Lost, just like I assumed. And no one’d been able to recreate it.

  I listen and evaluate, and realize, somewhere in the dead of night, that I’m not a scientist.

  But I am a pragmatist, and I know, from my own research, that Dignity Vessels, with their stealth tech, existed for more than two hundred years. Certainly not something that would have happened had the stealth technology been as flawed as Squishy said.

  So many variables, so much for me to weigh.

  And beneath it all, a greed pulses, one that—until tonight—I thought I didn’t have.

  For the last five centuries, our military has researched stealth tech and failed.

  Failed.

  I might have all the answers only a short distance away, in a wreck no one else has noticed, a wreck that is—for the moment anyway—completely my own.

  I leave Squishy to sleep. I tell her to clear her bed, that she has to remain with the group, no matter what I decide.

  She nods as if she’s expecting that, and maybe she is. She grabs her nightclothes as I let myself out of the room, and into the much cooler, more dimly lit corridor.

  As I walk to my own quarters, Jypé finds me.

  “She tell you anything worthwhile?” His eyes are a little too bright. Is greed eating at him like it’s eating at me? I’m almost afraid to ask.

  “No,” I say. “She didn’t. The work she did doesn’t seem all that relevant to me.”

  I’m lying. I really do want to sleep on this. I make better decisions when I’m rested.

  “There isn’t much history on the Dignity Vessels—at least that’s specific,” he says. “And your database has nothing on this one, no serial number listing, nothing. I wish you’d let us link up with an outside system.”

  “You want someone else to know where we are and what we’re doing?” I ask.

  He grins. “It’d be easier.”

  “And dumber.”

  He nods. I take a step forward and he catches my arm.

  “I did check one other thing,” he says.

  I am tired. I want sleep more than I can say. “What?”

  “I learned long ago that if you can’t find something in history, you look in legends. There’s truths there. You just have to dig more for them.”

  I wait. The sparkle in his eyes grows.

  “There’s an old spacer’s story that has gotten repeated through various cultures for centuries as governments have come and gone. A spacer’s story about a fleet of Dignity Vessels.”

  “What?” I asked. “Of course there was a fleet of them. Hundreds, if the old records are right.”

  He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number.
But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”

  I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”

  “And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”

  “We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”

  “So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”

  “Dignity Vessels didn’t have FTL,” I say.

  “Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But in that cobbling, what if someone gave them FTL.?”

  “Gave them,” I muse. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.

  “Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”

  “Sounds like a complete myth.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”

  “Why?”

  “We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there, that got here somehow.”

  “Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.

  “How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”

  I hadn’t looked at the dating. I had no idea if it was different. But I don’t say that.

  “Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”

  “Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.

  “Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”