The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  The deep-space escape pods had enough food, water, and power to drift for four to five weeks. They also had full communications capacity, even though they couldn’t fly on their own.

  She ran her hands over the equipment manifest and nodded as her suspicion was confirmed.

  One of the deep-space pods was gone.

  Now she knew exactly how the op went: Victor had to follow very precise instructions. He probably had his own navigation device, implanted either in his eye or in the palm of his hand.

  When the coordinates flashed, letting him know that the ship was about to move into that government-less region between sectors, he took the rifle into the dining room, probably with the help of a staff member who did not survive long enough to realize the extent of his betrayal. Then, at a precise set of coordinates, Victor started firing.

  He was on a time line. He had to complete his work before he reached another set of coordinates, because that was where he would abandon ship.

  Then he would wait in the deep-space escape pod for retrieval. He would activate a beacon of his own. He would make sure that the call was weak, so that only ships passing close by would even notice the signal at all.

  If his services were still valuable, he would be rescued. If they weren’t, he would die there, alone, waiting, hoping that someone would find him in time.

  She did know her government, however.

  They would make him sweat.

  They would wait until the last possible moment before finding him.

  They would let him think he was going to die, then use his profound gratitude at his continued survival to ensure his loyalty for a few years to come.

  She had been in that situation so many times that the gratitude had faded. On the last three rescues, she’d been surprised. On the very last, she’d almost been disappointed.

  Not that she wanted to die.

  But she had been disappointed that the cycle was about to start again.

  She almost didn’t tell him. Misha had disappeared into his room off the living area in the suite she had moved them to, going through what remained of his and his father’s possessions as if they were a valuable treasure.

  The boy needed to mourn, and then he needed to move on. He needed to accept that his life would be forever different.

  She figured she would give him time to do that. Then when he finally thought of the killer, she would offer to take Misha to the site where the escape pod should have been.

  Enough time would have passed that Victor would be either dead inside that pod or long-rescued.

  But within the hour, Misha came out of his room.

  “Well?” he asked. “Can we find him?”

  And she found herself telling him the truth.

  She planned to buy a ship anyway, something small and utilitarian. The ship she bought was larger than the one she’d planned on, more comfortable, but still relatively compact, with only a commons area, a small galley, and two small cabins. This ship had defenses, however, and she was beginning to think she needed them.

  The ship was used, abandoned on the base when someone murdered its owner in one of the NetherRealm bars. She made sure everything worked, then she packed her gear and Misha’s.

  They left the following morning, without saying good-bye to anyone.

  Within five hours, she found the escape pod exactly where she expected it to be. She had calibrated the ship’s comm system to pick up the signal that Victor was sending.

  The fact that he hadn’t gone to a more common rescue beacon told her he was still alive, and still waiting.

  He hadn’t given up yet.

  But she didn’t tell Misha that. What she did tell Misha was the possibility that Victor was dead. She explained her reasoning, told Misha how ops worked without telling him that the “bitch” Victor had spoken of was her.

  Although she suspected that Misha had worked that out for himself.

  She used her ship’s grappler to capture the escape pod, knowing that she was notifying Victor of her presence. Then she attached a small enclosed walkway to the ship. The walkway was built into her airlock system; she could lock out any undesirable. Since the airlock was so well reinforced (she thanked whatever god she could think of for the paranoia of the previous owner), she didn’t have to worry about anyone blasting his way in.

  Then she holstered her favorite weapon, a highly accurate laser pistol, on her hip, added a second pistol—tiny and not as effective at long range—to her ankle, and slid a knife up her sleeve.

  Finally she turned to Misha, who had watched her preparations without saying a word.

  “If I don’t come back, you head back to the starbase. I have the automatic pilot programmed to take you there. All you have to do is engage it, and you can do that with voice commands.” She squared her shoulders. “I wouldn’t worry about that though. I suspect he’s dead.”

  She didn’t think Victor was dead, but she figured that was the best way to keep Misha from coming with her.

  He followed her to the airlock. When she went inside, he slipped in with her.

  She slammed her hand on the door controls, but he reset them.

  “I’m coming with you.” He would have sounded adult, but his voice broke halfway through, soaring into the soprano range before settling into a low alto.

  “No,” she said. “You don’t need to see this.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I do.”

  Something in his face made her pause. Pain—or was it loss? grief? or an anger so deep that she didn’t quite understand it?—steadied his features and let her know what he would look like as a full-grown man.

  He had power in that gaze. She hadn’t expected it.

  Nor had she expected his determination. If she sent him back, she knew he would wait until she was inside the pod, then he would come after her.

  She didn’t need the interruption. If he was going to come along, he was going to come on her terms.

  “All right,” she said. “You stay behind me. If I tell you to do something, you do it.”

  He took a deep breath. She got the impression that he hadn’t expected her acquiescence.

  “Okay,” he said.

  She stepped into the makeshift airlock on the other side of the walkway. She didn’t like this part. If Victor suspected an enemy outside his escape pod’s hatch, he would attack.

  She pulled her pistol, made sure Misha was behind her as he promised, and then she opened the hatch.

  A waft of hot, stale air covered her. It stank of sweat and unwashed human flesh. Her eyes watered, but she said nothing.

  “Jeez,” Misha muttered.

  She waved a hand to keep him quiet, then stepped inside.

  The pod had been built to hold ten. It had two areas. Neither were real rooms, but they allowed larger groups a bit of privacy.

  No one was in the front area.

  Her breath caught. Maybe he had died, after all.

  The main area had some controls, open containers of food, and a few blankets crumpled against one wall. She kicked the blankets, then stepped deeper into the pod.

  He came at her from the side, fast and hard.

  She stepped back and hit his belly with her elbow, knocking him sideways. The breath left his body with an audible “oof.”

  He fell against a pile of food packages. His face was covered with dirt.

  Someone hadn’t packed enough water into this pod, or he would have cleaned himself before now.

  She held the pistol over him.

  “This bitch wants to know if the message you sent came from our mutual friends in Intelligence or if you’re working for someone else.”

  Victor’s eyes narrowed. “What makes you think the message was for you?”

  “Me.” Misha stepped forward. She bit back annoyance. She wanted him to stay behind. “You used me as a message.”

  She hadn’t told Misha that. He had figured it out on his own.

  “You angered a lot of people by leaving that bio
weapons facility intact,” Victor said.

  “I presume it’s gone now,” she said.

  “It would have been if you hadn’t warned them. There’s a protracted war going on at Lysvista, and the good guys might just lose.”

  She didn’t believe in good or bad guys. She didn’t believe in much of anything anymore.

  If she ever had.

  “Are you the only contract on me?”

  He smiled. “If I told, that would take all the fun out of it.”

  “Fun?” Misha’s voice broke again. “You called killing my dad fun?”

  Victor turned that smile on Misha. “Why do it if it’s not fun?”

  Misha screamed and launched himself at Victor. Victor put up his arms—elementary defensive posture—but he’d been trapped in here for too long. He was weak.

  Misha grabbed his throat and shoved him backward, tumbling with him over the food piles. The food fell on top of them, obscuring her view.

  “Misha!” she said.

  Victor’s legs were visible, kicking, pushing, struggling. Misha’s were near his, but not moving.

  She was breathing shallowly, almost light-headed. Her heart was pounding. It took her a second to realize what was happening.

  She was frightened.

  Not for herself, but for Misha.

  She grabbed the food packages with one hand, shoving them away. Some slid out of her fingers, and she realized they were slick. She looked at her hand.

  Blood.

  She dug quicker, then stopped when she reached Misha. His face and neck were covered in blood.

  For one second, everything stopped.

  Then he grinned at her and pushed himself up.

  Victor’s head lolled backward. His neck was cut so deeply that she could see his spinal cord, the only thing keeping his body together.

  “Misha,” she said. “What have you done?”

  “What you should have done the moment you saw him,” Misha said with contempt.

  Then he grabbed one of the blankets and wiped off his face. He still clutched a blood-stained knife—one of her galley knives—in his right hand.

  She took the knife. Then she wiped the rest of the blood off of him. She led him back to the walkway, closed the hatch, and headed back to her own ship.

  “You were going to let him live,” Misha snapped once they were inside their ship. “You were going to let him get away.”

  She shook her head. “I wanted to find out what he knew. Information is important. I needed to know who was after me.”

  “And who is?” Misha asked.

  She didn’t know. He had killed Victor too quickly. The first answers were often the lies. It usually took time to get to the truth.

  But she wasn’t sure she would have taken the time. Could she have tortured a man in front of her son?

  She might have had to kill that man in front of her son. Odd that she had only thought of that now. She hadn’t thought of it when Misha said he was coming along.

  The boy constantly surprised her.

  She hadn’t expected it of him, this ferocity. She had never been ferocious. She had always killed slowly, coldly, with calculation and cunning.

  She used to take pride in that.

  “Do you feel better now?” she asked him.

  “Yes,” he said, but his voice shook. His whole body was shaking. His lower lip trembled and his nose was turning red.

  She knew what to do: a real mother would have taken him in her arms. But a real mother would never have brought him here.

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  He nodded. One tear fell, but he ignored it. It tracked through some of the blood flecks on his cheek, down to his jaw, where it hung for a long moment before dripping onto his already soaked shirt.

  Your father would have hated this, she almost said. But it was a silly argument. Yuri was dead.

  Misha was hers now.

  A small, powerful boy-man. He had no qualms about killing, no qualms about defending himself.

  And he had anger.

  Those who killed with anger were the meanest, but often the most effective.

  She stared at him, this child of hers, this blend of her and Yuri—her instincts with Yuri’s passion—and knew that she would keep him beside her.

  Misha had proven himself.

  Together they could survive anything.

  Anything at all.

  JAY LAKE

  TO RAISE A MUTINY BETWIXT YOURSELVES

  Highly prolific new writer Jay Lake seems to have appeared nearly everywhere with short work in the last few years, including Asimov’s, Interzone, Jim Baen’s Universe, Tor.com, Clarksworld, Strange Horizons, Aeon, Postscripts, Electric Velocipede, and many other markets, producing enough short fiction that he already has released four collections, even though his career is only a few years old: Greetings from Lake Wu, Green Grow the Rushes-Oh, American Sorrows, and Dogs in the Moonlight. His novels include Rocket Science, Trial of Flowers, Mainspring, and, most recently, Escapement and Madness of Flowers. Coming up is a new novel, Green. He’s the coeditor, with Deborah Layne, of the prestigious Polyphony anthology series, now in six volumes, and has also edited the anthologies All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories, with David Moles, and TEL: Stories. Coming up is a new anthology, coedited with Nick Gevers, Other Earths. He won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2004. Lake lives in Portland, Oregon.

  Here he takes us to the far future for a demonstration that a mutiny in deep space can be even more dangerous—and far more complicated and strange—than any faced by Captain Bligh on the Bounty…

  YEAR 461 POST-MISTAKE

  HIGH ORBIT AROUND SIDERO

  THE BEFORE MICHAELA CANNON, ABOARD THE STARSHIP POLYPHEMUS (TWENTY-THREE PAIRS)

  “A ship needs a captain against mutiny,” muttered the Before Michaela Cannon. “Not a mutinous captain.” She wasn’t in command of this vessel, not now at any rate—just the mission specialist in charge of integrating the starship’s crew and the pair master assembly team. People called her ascetic, but what they meant was weathered. Leathered. Raddled. And far worse, when they thought she couldn’t hear.

  She knew better. You didn’t live fourteen centuries, several of them amid screaming savagery, and not learn to know better.

  Comms flickered with the immersive displays here in her workspace on the reserve bridge. Polyphemus was fast-cycling through a hundred-odd channels, showing Cannon a gestalt of what was happening across the decks as well as outside the hull on the construction project. They were here at Sidero to build a pair master—a hideously expensive machine required to anchor one end of a paired drive run across the depths of interstellar space. Five years-subjective ship-time in relativistic transit, over eleven years-objective.

  Plenty of opportunities for things to go seriously wrong.

  “The predictive accuracy of your social modeling is increasingly accurate,” said Polyphemus. The starship spoke to Cannon in Classical English. A rare enough language in the Imperium Humanum that simply using it served as a crude form of operational security. Cannon had spent a lot of time in the ship’s Brocan modules, tweaking the speech processing.

  Trust, it was always about trust. She’d been saying that down the long centuries, and had been proven right in the failing of things far too often.

  Polyphemus continued. “Apparently random gatherings of three or more persons are up forty-eight percent this ship-day from median. Seven individuals appear in a distribution at six times the expected rate based on average distribution.”

  “Kallus have anything to report?” He was her ally in Internal Security, a man loyal to certain interests outside the hull. Nothing inimical, just good old-fashioned politics, working with people she respected well enough.

  “He is busy suppressing a staged fight in the number three crew quarters.”

  Cannon grunted. Then: “Weapons?”

  “Nothing but ordinary tools. No withdrawals from the arms lockers in the
past three ship-days.”

  Firearms could have been distributed long ago, or indeed, brought on board before they’d departed Ninnelil five ship-years earlier. Somebody had planned for this mutiny, or at least the possibility of it.

  That other damned Before was at the heart of this problem. “Where is Captain Siddiq?”

  Polyphemus paused an unusually long time before answering. “The Captain is not within my network mesh.”

  “And why would a captain conspire at mutiny against her own command?” Cannon mused.

  The starship had no answer to that. One by one, the images of the too-busy crew cycled to a hundred identical views of the dull black surface of the planet Sidero.

  CONTEXT

  In the centuries since the Mistake had nearly ended the tenure of the human race as a viable species, spacefaring had resumed across the core of the old Polity amid an outburst of genetic and technological diversity sparked by the pressures of extinction. The thread needle drives which had provided a true faster-than-light solution in cheerful violation of both paradox and the laws of physics were now simply so much junk, whether on a laboratory bench or in a starship’s engine room.

  Conventional physics had apparently reasserted itself. Precisely what had happened to the thread needle drive was a subject of centuries of frustrating, unsuccessful research.

  Paired drives were invented in 188 pM by Haruna Kishmangali. They relied on a macro-level generalization of quantum effects to associate the starship drive with any two pair masters at distinct points—entanglement on a grand scale so that the drives could “remember” the locations without having to cope with the intervening distances. Once this was done, the vessel could pass between the locations nearly instantaneously, except for the added travel times to and from areas of sufficiently low density to enable safely the pairing transit process.

  The key problem was twofold. First, building the pair masters, which required planning horizons and budgetary commitments beyond the capability of even many planetary governments, as well a significant investment in relativistic travel to conduct site surveys and establish suitable destinations.