The Final Frontier

by Neil Clarke

  He stumbled onto the bridge to find Chillicothe Xiang there, laughing her ass off with Paimei Joyner, one of their two scouts—hard-assed Howards so heavily modded that they could at need tolerate hard vacuum on their bare skin, and routinely worked outside for hours with minimal life support and radiation shielding. The strobes were running in here, but the audible alarm was mercifully muted. Also, whatever was causing the smoke didn’t seem to have reached into here yet.

  Captain Smith stood at the far end of the bridge, her back to the diamond viewing wall that was normally occluded by a virtual display, though at the moment the actual, empty majesty of Tiede 1 localspace was visible.

  Smith was snarling. “ . . . don’t care what you thought you were doing; clean up my ship’s air! Now, damn it.”

  The two turned toward the hatch, nearly ran into Maduabuchi in his breathing mask, and renewed their laughter.

  “You look like a spaceman,” said Chillicothe.

  “Moral here,” added Paimei. One deep black hand reached out to grasp Maduabuchi’s shoulder so hard he winced. “Don’t try making a barbecue in the galley.”

  “We’ll be eating con-rats for a week,” snapped Captain Smith. “And everyone on this ship will know damned well it’s your fault we’re chewing our teeth loose.”

  The two walked out, Paimei shoving Maduabuchi into a bulkhead while Chillicothe leaned close. “Take off the mask,” she whispered. “You look stupid in it.”

  Moments later, Maduabuchi was alone with the captain, the mask dangling in his grasp.

  “What was it?” she asked in a quiet, gentle voice that carried more respect than he probably deserved.

  “I have . . . had something,” Maduabuchi said. “A sort of, well, hunch. But it’s slipped away in all that chaos.”

  Smith nodded, her face closed and hard. “Idiots built a fire in the galley, just to see if they could.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “If you have sufficient engineering talent, yes,” the captain admitted grudgingly. “And are very bored.”

  “Or want to create a distraction,” Maduabuchi said, unthinking.

  “Damn it,” Smith shouted. She stepped to her command console. “What did we miss out there?”

  “No,” he said, his hunches suddenly back in play. This was like a flow hangover. “Whatever’s out there was out there all along. The green flash. Whatever it is.” And didn’t that niggle at his thoughts like a cockroach in an airscrubber. “What we missed was in here.”

  “And when,” the captain asked, her voice very slow now, viscous with thought, “did you and I become we as separate from the rest of this crew?”

  When you first picked me, ma’am, Maduabuchi thought but did not say. “I don’t know. But I was in the Survey Suite, and you were on the bridge. The rest of this crew was somewhere else.”

  “You can’t look at everything, damn it,” she muttered. “Some things should just be trusted to match their skin.”

  Her words pushed Maduabuchi back into his flow state, where the hunch reared up and slammed him in the forebrain with a broad, hairy paw.

  “I know what’s wrong,” he said, shocked at the enormity of the realization.

  “What?”

  Maduabuchi shook his head. It couldn’t possibly be true. The ship’s orientation was currently such that the bridge faced away from Tiede 1, but he stared at the screen anyway. Somewhere outside that diamond sheeting—rather smaller than the lounge, but still substantial—was a work of engineering on a scale no human had ever contemplated.

  No human was the key word.

  “The brown dwarf out there . . .” He shook with the thought, trying to force the words out. “It’s artificial. Camouflage. S-something else is hidden beneath that surface. Something big and huge and . . . I don’t know what. And s-someone on our ship has been communicating with it.”

  Who could possibly manage such a thing?

  Captain Peridot Smith gave him a long, slow stare. Her razored eyes cut into him as if he were a specimen on a lab table. Slowly, she pursed her lips. Her head shook just slightly. “I’m going to have to ask you to stand down, Mr. St. Macaria. You’re clearly unfit for duty.”

  What! Maduabuchi opened his mouth to protest, to argue, to push back against her decision, but closed it again in the face of that stare. Of course she knew. She’d known all along. She was testing . . . whom? Him? The rest of the crew?

  He realized it didn’t matter. His line of investigation was cut off. Maduabuchi knew when he was beaten. He turned to leave the bridge, then stopped at the hatch. The breathing mask still dangled in his hand.

  “If you didn’t want me to find that out, ma’am,” he asked, “then why did you set me to looking for it?”

  But she’d already turned away from him without answering, and was making a study of her command data.

  Chillicothe Xiang found him in the observation lounge an hour later. Uncharacteristically, Maduabuchi had retreated into alcohol. Metabolic poisons were not so effective on Howard Immortals, but if he hit something high enough proof, he could follow youthful memories of the buzz.

  “That’s Patrice’s forty-year-old scotch you’re drinking,” she observed, standing over the smartgel bodpod that wrapped him like a warm, sticky uterus.

  “Huh.” Patrice Tonwe, their engineering chief, was a hard son of a bitch. One of the leaders in that perpetual game of shake-and-break the rest of the crew spent their time on. Extremely political as well, even by Howard standards. Not someone to get on the wrong side of.

  Shrugging off the thought and its implications, Maduabuchi looked at the little beaker he’d poured the stuff into. “Smelled strongest to me.”

  Chillicothe laughed. “You are hopeless, Mad. Like the galaxy’s oldest adolescent.”

  Once again he felt stung. “I’m one hundred forty-three years-subjective old. Born over two hundred years-objective ago.”

  “So?” She nodded at his drink. “Look at that. And I’ll bet you never even changed genders once before you went Howard. The boy who never grew up.”

  He settled further back and took a gulp from his beaker. His throat burned and itched, but Maduabuchi would be damned if he’d give her the satisfaction of choking. “What do you want?”

  She knelt close. “I kind of like you, okay? Don’t get excited, you’re just an all right kid. That’s all I’m saying. And because I like you, I’m telling you, don’t ask.”

  Maduabuchi was going to make her say it. “Don’t ask what?”

  “Just don’t ask questions.” Chillicothe mimed a pistol with the fingers of her left hand. “Some answers are permanent fatal errors.”

  He couldn’t help noting her right hand was on the butt of a real pistol. Fléchette-throwing riot gun, capable of shredding skin, muscle and bone to pink fog without damaging hull integrity.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “Where I grew up, green light means go.”

  Chillicothe shook him, a disgusted sneer chasing across her lips. “It’s your life, kid. Do what you like.”

  With that, she stalked out of the observation lounge.

  Maduabuchi wondered why she’d cared enough to bother trying to warn him off. Maybe Chillicothe had told the simple truth for once. Maybe she liked him. No way for him to know.

  Instead of trying to work that out, he stared at Tiede 1’s churning orange surface. “Who are you? What are you doing in there? What does it take to fake being an entire star?”

  The silent light brought no answers, and neither did Patrice’s scotch. Still, he continued to ask the questions for a while.

  Eventually he woke up, stiff” in the smartgel. The stuff had enclosed all of Maduabuchi except for his face, and it took several minutes of effort to extract himself. When he looked up at the sky, the stars had shifted.

  They’d broken Tiede 1 orbit!

  He scrambled for the hatch, but to his surprise, his hand on the touchpad did not cause the door to open. A moment’s stabbing and squ
inting showed that the lock had been frozen on command override.

  Captain Smith had trapped him in here.

  “Not for long,” he muttered. There was a maintenance hatch at the aft end of the lounge, leading to the dorsal weapons turret. The power and materials chase in the spine of the hull was partially pressurized, well within his minimally Howard-enhanced environmental tolerances.

  And as weapons officer, he had the command overrides to those systems. If Captain Smith hadn’t already locked him out.

  To keep himself going, Maduabuchi gobbled some prote-nuts from the little service bar at the back of the lounge. Then, before he lost his nerve, he shifted wall hangings that obscured the maintenance hatch and hit that pad. The interlock system demanded his command code, which he provided with a swift haptic pass, then the wall section retracted with a faint squeak that spoke of neglected maintenance.

  The passage beyond was ridiculously low-clearance. He nearly had to hold his breath to climb to the spinal chase. And cold, damned cold. Maduabuchi figured he could spend ten, fifteen minutes tops up there before he began experiencing serious physiological and psychological reactions.

  Where to go?

  The chase terminated aft above Engineering, with access to the firing points there, as well as egress to the Engineering bay. Forward it met a vertical chase just before the bridge section, with an exterior hatch, access to the forward firing points, and a connection to the ventral chase.

  No point in going outside. Not much point in going to Engineering, where like as not he’d meet Patrice or Paimei and wind up being sorry about it.

  He couldn’t get onto the bridge directly, but he’d get close and try to find out.

  The chase wasn’t really intended for crew transit, but it had to be large enough to admit a human being for inspection and repairs, when the automated systems couldn’t handle something. It was a shitty, difficult crawl, but Inclined Plane was only about two hundred meters stem to stern anyway. He passed over several intermediate access hatches—no point in getting out—then simply climbed down and out in the passageway when he reached the bridge. Taking control of the exterior weapons systems from within the walls of the ship wasn’t going to do him any good. The interior systems concentrated on disaster suppression and anti-hijacking, and were not under his control anyway.

  No one was visible when Maduabuchi slipped out from the walls. He wished he had a pistol, or even a good, long-handled wrench, but he couldn’t take down any of the rest of these Howards even if he tried. He settled for hitting the bridge touchpad and walking in when the hatch irised open.

  Patrice sat in the captain’s chair. Chillicothe manned the navigation boards. They both glanced up at him, surprised.

  “What are you doing here?” Chillicothe demanded.

  “Not being locked in the lounge,” he answered, acutely conscious of his utter lack of any plan of action. “Where’s Captain Smith?”

  “In her cabin,” said Patrice without looking up. His voice was a growl, coming from a heavyworld body like a sack of bricks. “Where she’ll be staying.”

  “Wh-why?”

  “What did I tell you about questions?” Chillicothe asked softly.

  Something cold rested against the hollow spot of skin just behind Maduabuchi’s right ear. Paimei’s voice whispered close. “Should have listened to the woman. Curiosity killed the cat, you know.”

  They will never expect it, he thought, and threw an elbow back, spinning to land a punch on Paimei. He never made the hit. Instead he found himself on the deck, her boot against the side of his head.

  At least the pistol wasn’t in his ear any more.

  Maduabuchi laughed at that thought. Such a pathetic rationalization. He opened his eyes to see Chillicothe leaning over.

  “What do you think is happening here?” she asked.

  He had to spit the words out. “You’ve taken over the sh-ship. L-locked Captain Smith in her cabin. L-locked me up to k-keep me out of the way.”

  Chillicothe laughed, her voice harsh and bitter. Patrice growled some warning that Maduabuchi couldn’t hear, not with Paimei’s boot pressing down on his ear.

  “She tried to open a comms channel to something very dangerous. She’s been relieved of her command. That’s not mutiny; that’s self-defense.”

  “And compliance to regulation,” said Paimei, shifting her foot a little so Maduabuchi would be sure to hear her.

  “Something’s inside that star.”

  Chillicothe’s eyes stirred. “You still haven’t learned about questions, have you?”

  “I w-want to talk to the captain.”

  She glanced back toward Patrice, now out of Maduabuchi’s very limited line of sight. Whatever look was exchanged resulted in Chillicothe shaking her head. “No. That’s not wise. You’d have been fine inside the lounge. A day or two, we could have let you out. We’re less than eighty hours-subjective from making threadneedle transit back to Saorsen Station; then this won’t matter any more.”

  He just couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “Why won’t it matter?”

  “Because no one will ever know. Even what’s in the data will be lost in the flood of information.”

  I could talk, Maduabuchi thought. I could tell. But then I’d just be another crazy ranting about the aliens that no one has ever found across several thousand explored solar systems in hundreds of light-years of the Orion Arm. The crazies that had been ranting all through human history about the Fermi Paradox. He could imagine the conversation. “No, really. There are aliens. Living in the heart of a brown dwarf. They flashed a green light at me.”

  Brown dwarfs were everywhere. Did that mean that aliens were everywhere, hiding inside the hearts of their guttering little stars?

  He was starting to sound crazy, even to himself. But even now, Maduabuchi couldn’t keep his mouth shut. “You know the answer to the greatest question in human history. ‘Where is everybody else?’ And you’re not talking about it. What did the aliens tell you?”

  “That’s it,” said Paimei. Her fingers closed on his shoulder. “You’re out the airlock, buddy.”

  “No,” said Chillicothe. “Leave him alone.”

  Another rumble from Patrice, of agreement. Maduabuchi, in sudden, sweaty fear for his life, couldn’t tell whom the man was agreeing with.

  The fléchette pistol was back against his ear. “Why?”

  “Because we like him. Because he’s one of ours.” Her voice grew very soft. “Because I said so.”

  Reluctantly, Paimei let him go. Maduabuchi got to his feet, shaking. He wanted to know, damn it, his curiosity burning with a fire he couldn’t ever recall feeling in his nearly two centuries of life.

  “Go back to your cabin.” Chillicothe’s voice was tired. “Or the lounge. Just stay out of everyone’s way.”

  “Especially mine,” Paimei growled. She shoved him out the bridge hatch, which cycled to cut him off.

  Like that, he was alone. So little a threat that they left him unescorted within the ship. Maduabuchi considered his options. The sane one was to go sit quietly with some books until this was all over. The most appealing was to go find Captain Smith, but she’d be under guard behind a hatch locked by command override.

  But if he shut up, if he left now, if he never knew . . . Inclined Plane wouldn’t be back this way, even if he happened to be crewing her again. No one else had reason to come to Tiede 1, and he didn’t have resources to mount his own expedition. Might not for many centuries to come. When they departed this system, they’d leave the mystery behind. And it was too damned important.

  Maduabuchi realized he couldn’t live with that. To be this close to the answer to Fermi’s question. To know that the people around him, possibly everyone around him, knew the truth and had kept him in the dark.

  The crew wanted to play hard games? Then hard games they’d get.

  He stalked back through the passageway to the number two lateral. Both of Inclined Plane’s boats were docked there, one
on each side. A workstation was at each hatch, intended for use when managing docking or cargo transfers or other such logistical efforts where the best eyes might be down here, off the bridge.

  Maduabuchi tapped himself into the weapons systems with his own still-active overrides. Patrice and Chillicothe and the rest were counting on the safety of silence to ensure there were no untoward questions when they got home. He could nix that.

  He locked down every weapons system for 300 seconds, then set them all to emergency purge. Every chamber, every rack, every capacitor would be fully discharged and emptied. It was a procedure for emergency dockings, so you didn’t come in hot and hard with a payload that could blow holes in the rescuers trying to catch you.

  Let Inclined Plane return to port with every weapons system blown, and there’d be an investigation. He cycled the hatch, slipped into the portside launch. Let Inclined Plane come into port with a boat and a crewman missing, and there’d be even more of an investigation. Those two events together would make faking a convincing log report pretty tough. Especially without Captain Smith’s help.

  He couldn’t think about it any more. Maduabuchi strapped himself in, initiated the hot-start preflight sequence, and muted ship comms. He’d be gone before Paimei and her cohorts could force the blast-rated docking hatch. His weapons systems override would keep them from simply blasting him out of space, then concocting a story at their leisure.

  And the launch had plenty of engine capacity to get him back to close orbit around Tiede 1.

  Blowing the clamps on a hot-start drop, Maduabuchi goosed the launch on a minimum-time transit back toward the glowering brown dwarf. Captain Smith wouldn’t leave him here to die. She’d be back before he ran out of water and air.

  Besides, someone was home down there, damn it, and he was going to go knocking.

  Behind him, munitions began cooking off into the vacuum. Radiations across the EM spectrum coruscated against the launch’s forward viewports, while instrumentation screeched alerts he didn’t need to hear. It didn’t matter now. Screw Chillicothe’s warning about not asking questions. “Permanent fatal errors,” his ass.