The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  Second, even once built, every ship wishing to be capable of traveling to a site served by a pair master was forced to make the initial journey at relativistic speeds so that both ends of the pairing could be entangled, with the intervening distance required as part of the equation. Cheating didn’t work, either. A drive to be paired had to make the trip embedded in its host starship. Simply traveling within the hold of another starship did not support the effect. Even worse from some points of view, if pulled out later from the host starship and associated shipmind, the drives would lose their pairing. There was no point to cannibalization. Everything had to be created the hard way.

  This was a very limited form of FTL, though still far more effective than relativistic travel. The extent of interstellar travel grew slowly, and only at great need.

  THE BEFORE RAISA SIDDIQ, SURFACE OF SIDERO

  Siddiq walked almost naked in a field of buckyballs. This planet, if it in fact was a planet—some theories held this to be an artificial world—boasted .088 gravities at the surface, wrapped in hard vacuum. Which in and of itself was highly curious, as Sidero sat firmly in the Goldilocks zone of its primary and should have been perfectly capable of retaining a decent atmosphere. The night sky above revealed only the endless field of stars in the Orion arm. Sidero had no large companion, only a swarm of captured asteroids. Their pair master would be a more substantial satellite than any of the natural moons.

  The Before herself was hardened as only thirteen centuries of living through two cycles of empire could make a human being. The best way to remain functionally immortal was to remain highly functional. In these degraded days, she could walk the outside of her own ship’s hull for hours before needing to find a breath, her skin proof against all but the most energetic particles. Clothes were mostly a nuisance. Besides, she hadn’t had genitalia to speak of for over a thousand years, so modesty had long since gone out of consideration.

  The spherical fullerene sprayed around her boots. She could swear the world rang beneath her feet, each strike of her heel banging a gong ten thousand kilometers across. No matter that sound did not carry in a vacuum—some things could be heard inside the soul.

  Wrong, wrong, it was all so very wrong.

  Cannon was up there in orbit, talking to her ship in a dead language that existed mostly in undercode running on ancient infrastructure and its more modern copies. The Imperium stretched through time and space behind them, an ever-opening invitation to repeat the Mistake.

  Siddiq had long ago ceased thinking of herself as human, except occasionally in a very narrow, technical sense. Her gender had been subsumed many centuries-subjective past by the same medtech that had granted her the curse of immortality. Being a woman was as much a matter of habit as being human. Except when it wasn’t.

  Damn that Michaela Cannon.

  A line of what could have been buildings loomed ahead, rising out of the fullerene dust that covered the surface. The current hypothesis down in the Planetary Sciences section aboard Polyphemus was that some alien weapon had precipitated Sidero’s atmosphere into the carbon spheres. Mass estimates didn’t support this thinking, but it kept the bright boys busy.

  Of far more interest to the Before Raisa Siddiq was what lay beneath the planet’s iron skin. The recontact surveys had found four Polity starships in orbit here, three military and one civilian. That represented an enormous commitment of interest and resources, even by the insanely wealthy standards of pre-Mistake humanity.

  Whatever those long-dead crews had wanted, it wasn’t just an abandoned artificial world covered with fullerene.

  Her tight-comm crackled. Siddiq had kept herself outside of Polyphemus’s network mesh ever since this voyage began, for a variety of good reasons that began and ended with Michaela Cannon. Only two others in local space had access to this link.

  “Go,” she said, subvocalizing in the hard vacuum.

  “Aleph, this is Gimel.”

  Testudo, then. No names, ever, not even—or especially—on tight-comm.

  Siddiq nodded. Another old, pointless habit. “Mmm.”

  “Beth reports that Plan Green is on final count.”

  The Captain smiled, feeling the absolute cold on her teeth and tongue as her lips flexed. “Have any of the downside contingencies come into play?”

  “Number two surely suspects.” That would be Cannon. “Number one continues to act out of pattern as well, with ongoing excessive monitoring. Neither has risen to code yellow.”

  The ship knew. She had to. No matured paired starship flew without a keen, insightful intelligence. They knew their own hull and crew the way Siddiq knew her own body.

  No one had ever tried to force out an intelligence. Not in the three hundred years-subjective since the late, great starship Uncial had first awoken. Not until now.

  She crossed the rising line of maybe-buildings to find the dish-shaped valley beyond, as she’d been told. This close, under naked-eye observation, a decidedly low-tech net of thermoelectric camouflage obscured a grounded starship of a vintage with the pre-Mistake hulks in orbit, rather than her own, far newer Polyphemus.

  There were shipminds, and then there were shipminds.

  She glanced up into the starlit sky. Even now, Polyphemus was above the horizon, Siddiq’s ancient lover and longtime enemy aboard, looking down, wondering, wondering, wondering.

  It had all gone so wrong since the Mistake. Maybe now things would begin to go right.

  SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS

  The starship let her ego slip. That was only a construct anyway, a sort of face for speaking to humans in all their kith and kind. Beneath, where people of flesh and bone kept the shifting fragments of their personalities, she kept her pairs.

  The pairs were the heart of a starship’s mind. Each was a glowing bond, each carried awareness of the particular pair masters that held their connection; and through the pair masters, a faint overlay of all the other starships that had paired with that master.

  Fundamentally, Polyphemus saw the universe as connections—acausal, atemporal, little more than bonds uniting, little more than transit between places as ephemeral as moments in time, to be measured even as they passed from observation. Below the level of her own ego, humans were but echoes. Only the Befores—immortal relics of the Polity’s shattered empire, embittered through loss and deprivation, insane even by the standards of a machine-mind—were persistent enough to truly reach down into the pairs burning within her.

  The starship listened now to her two Befores. They rang within her.

  Siddiq, the captain; the one whose word and bond passed below the ego-wrapper into the meanings that danced in the burning worlds of the pairs deep within her. This Before’s mind had been bent by the weight of centuries, fractioned by grief and the changing of worlds. Swinging even now on the hinge of betrayal, though the nature of that treason still eluded Polyphemus. If she’d been capable of true, emotive sadness, she would have felt it now.

  Cannon, the social engineer, who struck the starship in an entirely different way, much as a scalpel might slice through callus and sinew within a breathing body. Cannon, who had captained lost Uncial, the first and best of them all, to her death. This Before’s mind was not bent so much as twisted, blown by winds of fate and the long, struggling arc of desire. If the starship Polyphemus had been capable of love, she would have known its first stirrings now.

  The two Befores moved on intercept courses, like a planet-buster and a kill vehicle, an explosion born of old hatred and ancient love.

  From down within the glowing space of the pairs, she called up a media clip. So old, so out of date, long before virteo and quant-rep recording. This was not just the crudity of early post-Mistake media, but rather a file dating from the dawn of data capture. Formats had been converted and cleared and reconstructed and moved forward over networks extending through time and culture and technology.

  The sound is long-lost, if it was ever there, but the video portion is viewable: a woman, almost
young, recognizable as Michaela Cannon even to the machine vision processes of a starship’s undermind. Another woman, a juvenile, Raisa Siddiq. As yet mainline human in this moment, so far as Polyphemus can determine.

  The clip is short. They walk together toward a set of doors. Siddiq is laughing, her hair flowing in the lost light of an ancient day. Cannon turns toward the camera, smiling in a way that Polyphemus has never seen in the archives of recent centuries. Her eyes already glitter with the sheen of a Before’s metabolism, but she is caught up in the moment.

  Still, for then, also mostly human.

  Her smile broadens, Cannon begins to speak, then the image flares and dies, trailing off into the randomized debris of damaged data.

  The starship wondered if either woman remembered that time. She wondered even more if either woman cared.

  Alarms sounded, summoning her ego back to its place. She must begin to deal with the violence blooming deep within her decks.

  CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  Cannon’s modeling reckoned on the mutinous activity ramping up to an asymptotic curve before the end of the current ship-day, but even she was surprised at how quickly events began to break open. It wasn’t just tight-comm or simple, old-fashioned note-passing, either. Cannon had long since come to believe quite firmly in the communicative power of monkey hormones, those evolutionary imperatives encoded in the vome-ronasal organ and the endocrine system.

  The medtech which reencoded the Before genome also robbed its beneficiaries of much of the physiological basis of desire and reproduction. Atrophied genitals, sexual responsiveness sharply reduced over time, an eventual degendered coolness, which the original architects of the technology saw as more of a feature than a bug in an immortal. Who would love, who could live forever?

  In her secret heart, the Before Michaela Cannon had an answer to that question, but it was written in the blood-red ink of pain.

  She no more felt a stirring in her loins than she felt mutiny on the wind, and for the same reasons. But Cannon was wise with the lessons of years, and a social engineer besides. Her analyses and models had not failed to include actionable elements.

  “Polyphemus, trigger plans Federo, Emerald, and Pinarjee.”

  “Acknowledged,” said the starship.

  Cannon swiped her fingers across empty air, opening comms links to her various key allies and enemies among the crew. She had plenty of both, with four hundred and seventy-three souls here in Sidero space. Switching from Classical English to Polito, the most widely spoken contemporary language of the Imperium Humanum, the Before began a series of tight, swift conversations.

  “Shut down the pair-master site completely. All cold and dark.”

  “Secure the life-support plant. It’s low priority for the other team and we may wish we had it later.”

  “I know what you’re doing, and I know when and where. You should factor this into your ongoing plans.”

  “Stop what you’re about. Right now, or you could kill us all. That lot doesn’t care who the hell has the con.”

  Cannon didn’t aim to halt the mutiny, not yet. She aimed to understand it. In order to do that, she had to retard the outcome just enough to balance between the two until comprehension came and new decision trees blossomed in her mind.

  Now, where in the Mistake was Siddiq?

  “Polyphemus, have you found the Captain yet?”

  Another careful, slightly delayed answer. “She remains outside my network mesh.”

  Damn that woman. But what was the ship getting at? “How…far…outside your network mesh?”

  “No tracers, Before.”

  “No tracers” meant the Captain had moved at least several thousand meters from Polyphemus’s high-density sensor envelope. In other words, she wasn’t hull-walking, or meeting in a dead room somewhere aboard.

  If it was time for twenty questions, well, they could play that game. Cannon had asked a lot of questions in her lifetime.

  “Did the Captain give you specific orders regarding whether to report on her location and movements?”

  “I am not permitted to say, Before.”

  Cannon smiled. Looking where someone conspicuously wasn’t was itself an old, old piece of tradecraft. The human race had been intermittently experimenting with ubiquitous electronic surveillance since about the time of her birth on poor, lost Earth. “When was the last reportable order she did give you?”

  The starship’s voice seemed to have an amused lilt. “Four hours, seventeen minutes, and eleven seconds ago, on my mark.”

  Got you, bitch. “What order was that, Polyphemus?”

  Siddiq’s voice echoed in Polito. “ Open the launch bay doors.’”

  The Before tapped her lips. “Are all of the ship’s boats reportably accounted for?”

  This answer was quick, for Polyphemus now knew the game surely as well as Cannon herself. Mutiny, indeed. “Ardeas has been unreportable for four hours, twenty-six minutes, and thirty seconds, on my mark.”

  “Show me the volume of space Ardeas could cover in that time at full acceleration. Also show me any reportable traffic control data and flight paths.” The Before thought for a moment. “I’m particularly interested in any delays or diversions in established trajectories.”

  Within moments, she had determined that Ardeas was almost certainly on the surface of Sidero. Which was curious, indeed, because Captain Siddiq had forbidden all landings on the iron planet until the pair master was fully constructed and instantiated.

  SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS

  The starship’s loyalties were eroding. Uncial was hardly a memory of a memory for Polyphemus. The First Ship’s death was separated from the starship’s own awakening by more than a century-subjective, but the Before Michaela Cannon held a place at the core of every starship psyche in Uncial’s line of descent.

  Which was to say, every paired-drive ship in the Imperium Humanum.

  She watched the controlled chaos emerging in her own decks and gave idle consideration to a full purge of her onboard atmosphere. Succession of captaincy could be a tricky business at best with starships. Though Polyphemus and her sisters held registration papers, the vessels were to all intents and purposes autonomous. A captain whose starship did not accept her found a berth elsewhere. All was negotiated.

  Siddiq had come aboard thirty-two ship-years ago. She’d sailed Polyphemus through her last six pairing cruises, then on a series of short-run military missions, before acquiring this contract from the Duke of Yellow for instantiating the pair master at Sidero. It was a tricky, dangerous mission. An error or mishap would doom the starship and her people to a relativistic journey back into paired space.

  A very high number of Befores served as starship captains, due to their combination of deep experience and high tolerance for relativistic travel. Their numbers were declining over time as murder, mischance, and temporal psychosis winnowed the Befores one by one. Captain Siddiq was capable, competent, and engaging, and seemed in control of herself. Polyphemus had always liked that the woman carried a quantum matrix library in her skull—Siddiq possessed a wealth of Polity-era data about mining, minerals extraction, and resource engineering, dating from the era when the Befores were indefinitely long-lived subject-matter experts traveling the old empire at need. Much of data was embedded in abrogated context, not directly accessible by query, but it was the sort of capability that had led her to the current contract.

  But now, the Captain’s increasingly erratic behavior and impending sense of betrayal was loosening the implicit bonds of loyalty embedded in their roles. Siddiq was also compromising the connection developed by their three decades-subjective of experience serving together.

  Plan Federo instructed Polyphemus to stand down from assisting the crew with interpretive logic, in both her overarching intelligence and her various component subsystems. She was now interpreting orders very literally, with no second-order thinking or projections. This had already killed three mutineers who ordered a lock open
ed without first verifying the presence of atmosphere on the far side. The crew had not yet realized how uncooperative their starship had become.

  She watched the other plans with interest, and carefully observed where Captain Siddiq wasn’t, should the Before Michaela Cannon make further queries.

  SIDDIQ, SURFACE OF SIDERO

  She studied the hull of the grounded starship. Siddiq’s friends in the Ekumen had been forced to send the requisite hardware by relativistic travel, of course—the whole point of this business was to trump the shipmind before the pair master’s instantiation. If they waited until afterward, well, at the first sign of trouble, Polyphemus could just flee for the other end of the drive-pair at Ninnelil, from where they’d set out.

  This vessel was too small for a paired drive; that was clear enough. Even more strangely, it was a Polity-era hull, or a very good copy of one. Shattuck class, she thought, but that was the sort of thing there hadn’t been much percentage in keeping track of since the Mistake. Fast scout with a thread needle drive, now retrofitted to something relativistic. Under the netting she couldn’t tell what. Knowing the Ekumen, it would have been the cheapest available solution.

  She slipped into a brief, involuntary memory fugue, boarding half a hundred ships in the lost days of the Polity, fighting for her life aboard wooden schooners on Novy Gorosk between the Mistake and Recontact by the Imperium Humanum, then the world of paired-drive ships since. So many lost ships, so many lost friends…

  Siddiq shook off the moment. An internal check showed she’d only been out of awareness for about two hundred milliseconds. Not enough to be noticed, except possibly by another Before. Or a shipmind.

  Neither of whom were here with her now.

  Satisfied that she’d stood quietly long enough for inspection from the interior, the Before Raisa Siddiq slipped beneath the camouflage net and knocked bare-knuckled on the hatch.

  CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  The mutiny was in full flower. Cannon’s simplified wireframe of Polyphemus showed decks and sections in color code. White for ignored or bypassed, blue for actively loyal to Cannon’s interests, orange for disputed territory, and a deep, bloody red for the mutineers. She still couldn’t give a good accounting of where Siddiq’s loyalties lay, but she also couldn’t form an adequate theory about why a captain would rebel against herself.