:1:
Diplomatic efforts had failed, and we were officially at war with the Trefoil alien culture. War is never pleasant, however unavoidable it sometimes becomes. But one of the things that blurs the edge of war’s unpleasantness is victory. We enjoyed victory after victory, sweet as honey. Soon enough were closing in on the Trefoil homeworld.
Why did diplomacy fail? There were ways in which our view of the cosmos aligned with theirs. But then again there were ways in which the human assumptions about things and the Trefoil assumptions were so radically at odds that it was simply impossible for us to communicate at all, let alone reach a compromise. Like us, the Trefoil were a social species, and there were broad emotional parallels – their versions of love and aggression appear to have been more-or-less equivalent emotions to ours – as well as some surprising specifics: the concepts of Answegen Geschichtlichkeit and Geworfenheit all made perfect sense to the Trefoil, it seems. But other concepts, like mutual advantage, creativity, logic, meant nothing at all to them.
Their attacks on Human Space were very hard to predict, and therefore hard to defend against. For that reason, I suspect, they underestimated our ability to fight and win.
My name is Ferrante, and I was in command of the warship Centurion 771. This is what happened when our ship and a sister ship called Samurai 10 pressed our attack on a damaged Trefoil Supership designated ET 13-40. ET is shorthand for Enemy Target.
:2:
Centurion and Samurai came out of warp together and coordinated our initial firesweep on the ET. About one in five Trefoil ships can be captured – sometimes apparently important craft, flagships even, sometimes trivial little spacetugs. The rest will self-destruct rather than be taken. What criterion determines, for the Trefoil, which kind of ship is too valuable to fall into human hands … well, nobody has been able to work that out.
We were half a light year from β Cygni, the star’s red blob clearly visible on our screen without need of magnification. The Trefoil Supership had fallen out of warp, presumably on account of its internal damage: the crazy ziggurat of its hull was ruptured in a hundred places, and weird entrails (cables? tentacles?) trailed from every breach. Since every individual Trefoil ship is designed according to a different template we couldn’t be sure of the internal composition of this particular one. Most Trefoil craft possessed three command centres, and it looked likely that the baobab-shaped excrescence on the side of the craft was one of those. We concentrated fire, and scratched red-brown furrows over the hull, everting the inward spaces of its bridge. If that’s what it was.
We thought we had her, but then she twisted and fell out of existence, reappearing in orbit half a light year away. Must have had a last squirt of warp capacity in her engines. It was an easy matter to follow her and we repeated our attack mode. The huge craft was in orbit around a taupe and yellow gas giant, sinking into the upper atmosphere. For a moment I wondered if she would crash down into the world and so escape us by destroying herself. But she deployed a filigree web, and we realised she was scooping.
Well: we could stop that easily enough. Both ships manoeuvred, and targeted. The battle was seconds away from being won.
Then Samurai exploded: a stutter of blue-white light, a soundless crunching inward, twisting the main hull like a rag being wrung and then there was nothing of the starship except debris spiralling and hurtling.
:3:
At exactly that moment the link went down, and I was no longer mentally connected to the rest of the crew. I came out of telspace gasping, as if cold water had been thrown in my face.
The Centurion shuddered, and one of our cannons overheated and melted itself loose of its bearings. The bridge screens lit up with error messages. The warp went offline. One thruster fired and the other stalled, and we were spinning. The failure of warp meant that inertial controls sagged and gave way, and we were all crushed against the sides of our harnesses.
I’d been in telspace with my crew for so long, it took palpable effort to dredge their actual names from my memory. “Modi,” I yelled – my voice hoarse with unuse. “Cancel that thruster!”
She was already doing so, and stabilising the craft, but then the counter-thrust sputtered out. We were still spinning, although not at so crushing a velocity.
No telspace meant the manual operation of the ship. I looked at my hands, palms down, palms up, and tried to place them on the command screen. But there was something wrong with my hands. More than wrong, there was something monstrous about them. Something… blasphemous, almost. I looked at them again and I began to scream.
:4:
I’ve served with Modi for over a year, first on the Broadsword 27 and then the Centurion – my first command, although the consensual nature of the telspace makes the concept of command much less hierarchical than it might once have been. In the Big Wing Battle at Alpha Scorpii internal fires had scarred my face and torso, and burned away three of the fingers from Modi’s left hand, leaving her a puckered crabclaw thumb-and-index. She’d tried an artificial hand with four plasmetal fingers and an opposable plasmetal thumb, but the interface had never quite gelled for her and there was a lag between her willing something and her prosthetic acting. For that reason she tended not to wear it.
That fact saved everybody’s life.
:5:
There were four of us on the craft, and one other – me, let’s say. Captain. A standard crew. Han killed herself within the first five minutes of the… of whatever it was that happened to the ship (she pressed herself against the glowing-hot flank of the gun-compartment and died screaming). Shabti and Kellermann became catatonic, the former singing a nursery song over and over in a scratchy, high-pitched voice.
Modi got to me before I could self-harm in any way. She took hold of my head, and forced me to look into her eyes. Without my hands in plain view, I felt the terror ebbing away. But there was something – I couldn’t say way – profoundly awry with the universe as a whole. The Centurion shuddered and bucked, and error messages blinked and flashed on every screen on every surface. The main screen showed the Trefoil ship, pulling up now from its orbital gas sweep and drawing its scoop back into its main body. Soon enough it would turn and bear down upon us.
“Ferrante,” Modi yelled, right in my face. “Ferrante. They will be on us in minutes.”
“Minutes,” I gasped.
“We need to pull the ship together. Pull ourselves together. We still have nine cannon.”
“Nine cannon,” I repeated. “Yes.” There was something comforting in that thought. But, the sense of wrongness persisted. “Something is very wrong,” I told Modi.
“I feel it too,” she agreed. “But we have to get a grip.”
The word grip made me glance back down at my hands, and the terror welled up again. I began screaming for a second time.
Modi was a quick thinker. She pulled off her top and wrapped it around my hands. “Ferrante,” she said. “We have to act.”
I was gasping. I was finding it hard to breathe. The topography of the bridge seemed to twist and slip around me in weird ways. “Oh,” I said. “Oh – oh – oh.”
:6:
Cygni is a binary system: a fat red giant and a tiny, bright little blue star – beta is the bigger. There are some Jupiter-sized gas giants, and a whole lot of dwarf planets and fragments and meteorites. The proximity warning sounded and Modi dabbled at a screen to confirm the zapping of the offending rocklet. But then it sounded again, and again, and the chances that so many asteroids were on a collision course were so minute that it could only mean the system was fried. I tried to breathe, deep, and get a grip. Slowly I drew my right hand out from beneath the covering cloth. I didn’t like looking at it, but it didn’t offend basic reason in the way that staring at both my hands did. I tried contacting the rest of the crew, dispersed about the ship, but the system told me that Han was dead, and the other two unresponsive.
“Something,” I said. “The Trefoil did something.”
&nb
sp; “It’s a weapon,” said Modi. “I just don’t see what kind.”
“Whatever it is, it destroyed the Samurai and has caused –” I looked around at the flickering screens – “a whole mass of malfunctions and problems for us.” Some shred of soldiery reasserted itself in my mind. I was supposed to be in charge. “We’ll have to close with the ET and fire on her manually. I don’t know if we can trust the AI to target the cannon.”
“What do crews say when they’re not in the telspace? Aye aye, is it?”
“We’ve still got nine cannon,” I said. That fact should have reassured me, but instead it made me obscurely uneasy.
So we wrestled with the ship via the glitchy manual interface, and the thrusters fired. Warp came online again, and the inertial balancing flashed on, off, on, off. Then the warp went down. The whole ship began to shake violently. I felt sharp, stabbing pains in my fingers and toes. This was the moment Kellermann died. He owned an antique cigarette lighter, which in turn contained a small amount of butane. This exploded with enough force to kill him and breach the hull. The reason it exploded had to do with the arrangement of protons in the butane nucleus.
In retrospect I can say: thank heavens we weren’t carrying any neon.
“Pull back,” I said, and together Modi and I grappled with the interface to bring the Centurion out of attack mode. The more distance we put between ourselves and the ET, the calmer the craft became.
“I don’t know what it is,” Modi said. “I don’t see how they’re doing that – it’s like a magic spell, like some voodoo sphere of malignity around the ET.”
“We’ve still got nine cannons,” I reminded her. “We can still shoot at her. True we won’t be at an optimum distance to …”
“Why do you say still?” Modi asked.
“What?”
“You say we’ve still got nine cannon. You say that because we’re supposed to have more.”
“That’s right.”
“How many cannon are we fitted with? How many are we supposed to have?”
I could not say. I mean that strictly: the answer to that question couldn’t be said.
:7:
Modi scribbled a number on her pad with her forefinger. “What do you call that?”
I looked at the number. I recognised it, but its name slipped from my head. “Nine-and-four?” I offered.
“That’s not it, though, is it?”
“No,” I agreed, pained. “Six-and-seven? But that’s now how we say it, is it. I want to say three, but it’s clearly not three.”
She wrote another number. “And what about that?”
I looked at it. “It’s a four. But it’s more than a four, isn’t it. It’s a lot more than four, actually.”
“It’s four and something else. It’s the something else that’s … I don’t get it.”
“What is it? The number I mean?”
“It’s the designation of our ET,” Modi said. As soon as she said that I recognised it. Of course!
“Ferrante,” she asked. “What’s our ship called?”
“Centurion.” The name came from my mouth like a bark of gibberish. I knew what Modi was going to ask next, and it was: what does that word mean? And I knew that I wouldn’t be able to answer that question. Although it was in my head that I used to know. Once upon a time. It had something to do with war. But what did it have to do with war? It was a non-word. It was an impossible word.
:8:
“The ET is bringing about,” Modi sang. “It’s using its scoop harvest to boost itself towards us. Unless we can get warp working again, it will be on us in …” and she stopped, and looked puzzled. “I had a calculation of the time …”
Since this was the amount of time we had left alive, I was eager to find out what it the number was.
“Let’s say, in nine minutes,” she said. “Between nine and eleven minutes.”
The ship was starting to shudder again. Modi saying that, giving voice to that phrase between nine and eleven, brought the terror shaking back into my mind. I wish she hadn’t said that. Because there was nothing between nine and eleven, and at the same time there was something between nine and eleven and the fact of this thing being and not-being, its hideous elusiveness, like a monster in the shadows, was inexpressibly ghastly to me. I began weeping, tears washing down my face. And it wasn’t because of the pain in my hands and feet.
:9:
From this point on I was useless. Worse than useless. I was very specifically starting to lose my mind. Modi was more focussed. She managed to get the main AI – hiccoughing and prone to weird snags and cutaways though it was – to target the cannons. The Trefoil Supership swung down upon us and I began to sing a top-C and slap the top of my head with my hands and Modi fired and
:11:
As to why the Trefoil had not deployed their ‘device’ – this super-weapon – before… Well, there is no consensus. It might be that they only very recently developed it. Conceivably ET 13-40 was a research and development platform. Then again, perhaps the Trefoil have had their ‘device’ for a long time and simply haven’t deployed it for incomprehensible alien reasons of their own. The capture of a still-working model of the device, and its rapid adaptation and redeployment by Human Forces, brought the war very quickly to an end. Reprogrammed to blank out 3, the device completely shuts down Trefoil computers, designed as they are on a base-3 system of trits. It also causes individual Trefoilers to suffer severe internal physical damage and to degrade all triangular components. Neon, which has an atomic number between nine and eleven, is rare on a starship, but lithium – atomic number 3 – is much more common, and the presence of any at all caused instant destruction. It seems likely that the existence of some small quantity of neon on board the Samurai caused its immediate destruction. I’ve no idea why that ship would be carrying neon, but starships are large and complex things.
Of course, I recommended Modi for decoration, and stand by my recommendation. She didn’t exactly figure out what the device was doing to us but she had enough of an inkling, and was able to act. She grasped that it had something to do with the eradication of the quantity between nine and eleven.
“I’m guessing,” she told me afterwards, “that the Trefoil understood enough about us to know our default mathematics is base-10 and so they erroneously assumed that our computing would be decenary. The fact that we developed binary computing is what saved us. Our AI was certainly confused, but still functioning.”
“It’s still hard for me to understand,” I told her. “How can a device eliminate a number – from the universe, I mean? Surely that number just is a feature of the way things are?”
“Depends how you look at it,” she replied. “We warp spacetime to travel faster than light, so we have good practical knowledge that spacetime is deformable. Say that the deep structure of the universe is information – is maths, effectively. If we can alter that deep structure to make the distance between stars temporarily shorter, then it’s not hard to imagine the Trefoil finding a way to alter the deep structure in a different way. Temporarily to suppress ten from the fabric of things.”
I shuddered. Modi is still happy to use the word itself. For me just saying the word brought the tendrils of nightmare to the tender parts of my memory. Like many who experienced the Trefoil ‘device’ in those last, desperate (on their part) days of the war, I continue to refer, superstitiously, to between-nine-and-eleven.
“Amazing, really,” Modi mused, “that deploying the device didn’t entirely undo the fabric of reality within its sphere of influence. Surprisingly tough, reality. There’s genuine inertia and persistence to reality it turns out.”
“We don’t know how long it would last, though. I mean, if the Trefoil device were deployed for long stretches of time. Or over a wide area.”
But that’s the thing about Modi: she’s an optimist. “Oh, I think reality would adjust. Indeed, who’s to say it hasn’t happened before?”
“Before?”
Modi laughed. “Ancient alien races, fighting a war across the galaxy – who knows? What if one of them deployed something similar to the Trefoil device? Maybe many times? Maybe whole numbers were eradicated for ever. Maybe there once was a number between nine and ten, or between one and two – I don’t mean fractions or decimals. I mean a whole lost number. What if reality shook itself and then adjusted to the new, out-of-whack logic?”
“That’s crazy talk,” I grumbled.
“Maybe it is,” and she laughed. “Maybe.”
Ajdenia
Natalia Theodoridou
It’s cold and sunless in the tunnels. Bart is sweeping the walls vigorously, trying to warm himself up inside his stiff uniform. He scans every crack he comes across for contaminants, seals it, then moves on, sweeping and scanning, scanning and sweeping. The job is repetitive; he’s heard of people who’ve been driven mad by the repetition of it, lost their grip. But Bart doesn’t mind. If only it weren’t so cold. If only there were some sun in the tunnels. But of course there isn’t.
“Sun is precious, sun is rare,” he whispers behind his mouth cover. “Sun is for the worthy.” And for Ajdenia, he adds silently.
He tries to recall the warmth of sun on his skin. He almost succeeds.
And the worthiest of all get to live above, showered in sunlight.
He finishes the length of tunnel number 8 and enters the Ra intersection. All the intersections are named after long lost deities associated with the sun. The next one is called Helios. Then there’s Tonatiuh, Solar Logos, Surya. Bart knows them all, every name, every inch. He always works methodically. He’s good at what he does. He’s worth five minutes in the filter room, under the sun. Maybe next year he’ll be worth five and a half. Or six, even.
There’s another employee in tunnel number 9. Bart takes a moment to observe them. Their uniforms are identical. Their mouth masks, their goggles, their hoods. He wonders what that person looks like underneath. He wonders what they are worth. Do they also spend a few moments each day trying to remember the feeling of sun on their skin? Are they about to lose their mind?
Best of British Science Fiction 2016 Page 23