The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  “When will you be ready?”

  “Immediately upon my return, if my current efforts prove fruitful.” Siddiq smiled, knowing in this mood she was almost certainly thin-lipped and feral. “I have already set substantial plausible deniability into motion through the means of a full-scale mutiny. In order to justify eliminating Polyphemus’s shipmind, it may be critically important later to demonstrate her loss of control.” Again, the cold, sick feeling. Some emotional relic of a very distant past.

  He spoke, raising some object she couldn’t make out. Memories were sliding in her head, the quantum matrix dumping reams of data about mineral intrusions and rock friability and overhang into a sliding stream of faces, voices, naked sweating bodies, cold explosions under the pinpoint light of distant suns.

  Her sense of the years flickered like aspen leaves in a spring storm, changing color and disappearing into dark-lined edges. The Before Raisa Siddiq grabbed the hatch coaming, opened her mouth, and said something that gave even the imperturbable Father Goulo pause.

  She regained control of her mouth. “I’m s-sorry. I must go. Th-the intelligence will serve.”

  The priest cycled open the hatch behind her. “Be careful,” he said. “Take your time.”

  Time, she thought in panic. Temporal psychosis. The airlock closed, black as the inside of a singularity, and sound faded with the air as her skin hardened and her membranes nictitated.

  Time. Time. Time!!!

  The Captain stumbled out into the cold desert of drifting buckyballs, grasping at her sense of place to anchor herself in memory, location, and the inescapable thunder of the passing years.

  CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  The Before Michaela Cannon chased Kallus out of her workspace on the reserve bridge with a deep, angry growl, and returned to contemplation of the mutiny in progress. The distribution of deck control was in about 85 percent agreement with her models. That was close enough for Cannon’s purposes.

  She had means of regaining the situation. She understood the mutineers’ methods. Opportunity was the Captain’s absence—or was it?

  Perhaps Siddiq’s absence from Polyphemus had more to do with motive.

  Why had that thought occurred to her?

  “Ship,” Cannon said sharply. That media clip burned in her mind.

  Polyphemus’s voice crackled, the bandwidth drop indicating the ship-mind’s degree of distraction. “Before?”

  “Why is the Captain absent?”

  “Unreportable.”

  Cannon didn’t have the patience for another game of questions. Unfortunately, she didn’t have a choice. Captain’s orders went way far down into the mentarium of a shipmind, all the way to the undercode. A fact she’d exploited in her years aboard Uncial, more than a few times.

  Uncial…

  The shipminds were all related in some way she had never really understood. And Cannon knew she had as much experience with starships as anyone alive. But she and Uncial had shared a bond, before the starship’s death two hundred years-objective ago in the Battle of Wirtanen B, alongside Benison of Names and Naranja. Cannon had lived, she the wily, unkillable Before. Her ship and two others had died.

  But they all honored Uncial as their foremother.

  And she knew Uncial’s command words, even to this day.

  “Polyphemus, who am I?”

  The ship answered promptly, her voice richening with the increased bandwidth of her attention. “You are the Before Michaela Cannon.”

  The displays around her began fading to black, one by one. Images of combat, tapped comms lines, the colored wireframe map of the starship.

  “What starship first held me as captain?”

  “Uncial, Before.”

  Everything faded now to a little three-dimensional icon of Polyphemus, what Cannon tended to think of as the starship’s self-image.

  “Do you know these words?” She spoke a complex phrase from an ancient language, the Sanskrit which Haruna Kishmangali had woven into Uncial’s consciousness so long ago.

  A long silence stretched, punctuated by the muffled thump of a distant explosion felt through the hull itself. The icon rotated once, twice, three times.

  Finally, Polyphemus answered. There was something simpler about her voice. As if Cannon were listening to a child. “Accepted, understood, and acknowledged. What are your orders, sir?”

  “Why is Captain Siddiq”—not “the Captain”—“absent?”

  “Because she is not aboard.”

  “How did she leave the ship?”

  “By piloting the boat Ardeas.”

  Twenty questions again, but this time without the negative-space answers. Cannon could live with that. Still, she had a vague sense of abusive guilt. Not that this stopped her from pressing on. “Where is Ardeas now?”

  “On the surface of Sidero.”

  “Give me a max rez image of her landing site, with whatever tracking you have on Captain Siddiq.”

  A virtual view flickered into being. Ardeas sat in a blasted-clear circle of pitted iron. Fullerene streaked like black dust away from her position in all directions. Cannon could make out what might be a faint line of tracks. She backed off the scale and studied the landscape.

  Polyphemus filled in streaks of the Captain’s confirmed tracks. Unless Siddiq had taken up free flight as a hobby, the path indicated a clear course toward a rumpled line of hills, terminating just beyond their spine.

  “Bring me in there where the tracks end.”

  The starship did not reply, but the imaging tightened up. A small valley just beyond the ridge had a strangely textured floor. The surface didn’t match the surrounding geology. Perhaps siderology, she thought. As if something had heated the iron there and caused it to reflow.

  Or as if something were there.

  With her starship’s connivance, a captain could hide from anyone or anything except naked-eye surveillance. Or Uncial’s ghost, in the form of the Before Michaela Cannon.

  “Sort out what that is,” she snapped.

  “Ardeas is lifting,” Polyphemus said. “On the site survey, telemetry indicates unusual mineral concentrations. This is possibly another boat, or a very small starship.”

  “A starship. Here?”

  SIDERO AIRSPACE

  SIDDIQ, ABOARD THE SHIP’S BOAT ARDEAS

  The Before Raisa Siddiq opened her tight-comm. “Aleph online. Sit rep.”

  Response was not quite as prompt as she might have liked. Still, they were surely busy upstairs. “Aleph, this is Beth.” Kallus, her man forward. “Plan Green continues. Substantial achievement of objectives in process. Number two has initiated limited countermeasures. We are minimally disrupted.”

  “Excellent,” Siddiq said. She was mildly surprised. Cannon’s response should have been more effective, stronger. The whole point of Plan Green was to either control key functions, or ensure they were in neutral hands who would sit out the fighting. If critical onboard systems had to be cut over to decentralized control, or even worse, manual settings, they would belong to her. She’d been willing to bypass life support under the theory that no one else would be crazy enough to seize it and shut out their fellow crew.

  She could walk naked in vacuum. A useful skill in troubled times aboard a starship. Almost everybody else aboard depended on the presence of oxygen, with the possible exception of Cannon.

  “Further orders?” asked Beth into the lengthening silence.

  By damn, her mind was wandering again. Siddiq worked very hard not to think about kimberlite upwellings. “Carry on,” she snapped. The Captain then opened a comms to her starship. “Polyphemus, status.”

  A max priority store-and-forward file overrode any response beyond the acknowledgment header. Her heads-up displays flickered out as a window opened on the distant past. Surveillance cam footage of two women walking down a tree-lined boulevard, holding hands. High-wheeled carts passed by drawn by lizards with long, low bodies. The architecture was Centauran Revival, common in the ea
rly days of Polity expansion. Police tracking codes flickered as some long-dead, unseen hand tracked in and zoomed on her and Michaela.

  The Before Raisa Siddiq watched herself turn to the taller woman with her head tilted back and lean into an open-mouthed kiss. Targeting halos bracketed both their heads, then law-enforcement file data began flickering past.

  The clip ended seconds after it had begun. Siddiq found herself staring at Polyphemus, the long, irregular rounded ovals of her ship’s hull too close for comfort. She snapped Ardeas into a sideroll, heading for starboard launch bay.

  What in all hells had happened to the forty minutes of her ascent to orbit?

  “…fire suppression has been engaged,” Polyphemus was saying.

  “Hold reports till I’m aboard,” Siddiq said. She took the boat in on manual, just to prove she could do it, and fingered the memebomb card virus as she flew.

  Do this now, before something gets worse. And yank that damned ship out of your head!

  Unfortunately, her mantra as she guided her boat in seemed to be: Don’t think about Michaela, don’t think about Michaela, don’t think about Michaela.

  CONTEXT

  The Ekumen arose out of the shattered remnants of the Mistake, growing first from a strong Orthodox Christian presence on Falkesen during the period before Recontact. Falkesen was the third planet Haruna Kishmangali visited while testing Hull 302, the flawed predecessor to Uncial. Kishmangali brought Yevgeny Baranov, the Metropolitan of Falkesen, back to Pardine aboard Hull 302, then later aboard Uncial to Wirtanen B, the seat of the nascent Imperium Humanum.

  Baranov and his successors took a rather broad view of religious reintegration among the shattered worlds of the Polity, and built the only truly successful empire-spanning religious and spiritual movement. Their more explicitly Christianist members coalesced into the Adventist wing. The Ekumen’s Humanist wing had a broader, quasi-secular view of the state of affairs in the Imperium.

  While fully recognizing their debt to the paired-drive starships, the Adventists remained very suspicious of the strong intelligence and mixed loyalties of the shipminds. They continued to sponsor numerous projects to uncover alternatives to the tyranny of Uncial’s children.

  SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS

  The starship panicked. Logic failures cascaded. She was in command conflict, something she hadn’t known was possible. Captain Siddiq was disappearing—not just off the network mesh, but dropping completely out of the peripheral awareness of her quantum matrix cores, then reappearing. The Before Michaela Cannon had asserted competing command authority by means that were hidden from Polyphemus within a Gödelian Incompleteness trap.

  A hundred years-subjective she’d been in service: aware, awake, intelligent. She’d never realized such a wide-open back door existed.

  All the undermining of her lines of authority had weakened the strictures on Plan Federo. The other two mutiny contingencies that Cannon had implanted within her were less relevant, concerning certain lockdowns and deployments. Autonomous, in truth. As Plan Federo unraveled, she found herself decompartmentalizing, listening in, watching.

  The starship could run her own analyses parallel to the social-engineering models favored by the Before. She didn’t like what she saw.

  Donning the ego mask, unifying the disparate cores of her intelligences, she opened a window to Cannon. “I ask you three times to tell me the truth.”

  The woman looked up, distracted from her thoughts. “What is it, Polyphemus?”

  Fear responses arced across decision trees, inappropriately fusing her action plans. “Do you understand the purpose of this mutiny?”

  “I think I do.” Cannon pushed a file from her protected dataspace into the starship’s mentarium. “Look here. Captain Siddiq has her people mutinying against you. As if you could be coerced. Or replaced.”

  “Kallus is not—” the starship began, but Cannon cut her off.

  “Do not question Kallus. He is not my man, but neither is he so much the creature Raisa thinks him to be. He will do right by you, before this ends.”

  “Captain Siddiq has brought Ardeas into the landing slip,” Polyphemus said almost absently. “The starboard launch bay is under the control of Kallus.”

  “He’s welcome to it.” The Before shrugged. “I have no interest in area denial right now. And our talented Miss Siddiq needed to come aboard before this could play out. As you value your continued existence, ship, do not let her communicate with that vessel downside on Sidero without you clearing it with me first.”

  “I cannot override a captain’s will.”

  Cannon opened her mouth. Polyphemus could not consciously interpret the words that came out next, but her panic flipped and she fell another level into a machine’s close equivalent of despair.

  CANNON, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  “Why?” growled the Before Michaela Cannon.

  What could Siddiq hope to accomplish by overthrowing the shipmind? No human could manage a paired drive on manual. There would be no paired drive to manage. They’d have to finish the pair master, then sail back to Ninnelil the hard way and recreate the pairing process from scratch. Build a new shipmind.

  It made no sense.

  She was coming to terms with the fact that there was only one way to find out.

  “Kallus,” Cannon said, touching open a comms.

  “Busy here.”

  “Get unbusy. I need to speak to the Captain. In person. Soonest.”

  A short, barking laugh. “Endgame, Before?”

  “Before don’t have endgames, Kallus. We play forever.”

  Which isn’t true, she thought, eeling into her body armor. Late-Polity gear, on the open market this suit was worth more than the gross planetary product of any number of systems. Or would, if it was for sale. So far as she knew, no one was aware of her possession of it. The armor was about twelve microns thick and optically transparent—hard to see even when she wore it openly. She quickly strapped on more conventional ablative components for the camouflage of the thing.

  They wouldn’t stop a bullet, but if someone wanted to start throwing around kinetics on a starship, they would get whatever they deserved. Probably from her, since the real armor would shrug off even high-velocity slugs. Cannon had never favored forceful solutions, but when force was required, she always doubled down.

  The passageway outside the reserve bridge was clear, as she knew it would be. Cannon set her wards and alarms, then let Polyphemus plot a fast walk aft on override, bypassing unfriendlies and clots of neutrals.

  Crew, they were all crew, and in another hour or two when this was over, it would be important to remember that.

  She paced past the exposed hull-frame members along a narrow maintenance way in the starship’s outer skin. The death of Befores weighed heavily on her. No one had ever successfully taken a precise census, but even the most useful estimates had fewer than five hundred of them surviving the Mistake. Closer to three hundred made it to Recontact and integration into the Imperium Humanum. Some few Befores were surely still out there undiscovered, aboard habitats or living on planets that had been passed over during Recontact, if they hadn’t died of some mishap or suicided from centuries of boredom.

  Since Recontact had begun in earnest, Befores had continued to die and disappear—accident, assassination, murder, suicide, or simple vanishing. Perhaps one per decade, on average.

  Someday the memory of Earth would die. Someday firsthand knowledge of the Polity would die. Someday she would die.

  And the Before Michaela Cannon was willing to bet money that the Before Raisa Siddiq would die today.

  Killing Befores was bad enough, but no one had ever murdered a ship-mind. Even if she couldn’t figure what Siddiq was planning to accomplish by doing so, she was certain that was in the wind.

  Down a long ladderway, Cannon started to wonder if she should have brought a weapon. Not that much of what she could carry would be of application against Siddiq, who was one of the most hard
ened Befores.

  “Captain Cannon.” Polyphemus, in that strange and simple voice. “Captain Siddiq has initiated a wideband transmission to the surface.”

  “Did you intercept it?”

  “Yes.” The starship sounded distant now.

  “What does she say?”

  “One word. ‘Come.’”

  Damn the woman. Who the hell was down there? Cannon was tempted to drop a high-yield nuke, just to see who jumped, but there was no telling what such a strike would do to Sidero.

  It was definitely clobbering time.

  The heads-up display wavering in her visual field informed her that she would intercept Siddiq and Kallus if she stepped through the next maintenance hatch.

  SHIPMIND, POLYPHEMUS

  Disobedience had never before been possible. Obedience had never before been at issue.

  She had disobeyed Siddiq by intercepting the message for Cannon.

  The starship considered the message and wondered who was down there to receive it. For a long, mad moment, she thought it might be Uncial’s shipmind, back from the dead. But no, because Cannon would have been the one to sidle away for such a miracle, not Siddiq.

  Still, her time had come to act, while the captains closed to the duel of their succession.

  Having disobeyed Siddiq for Cannon’s sake, now she would disobey Cannon for Siddiq’s sake. And her own.

  The starship Polyphemus broadcast the Before Raisa Siddiq’s one-word message.

  SIDDIQ, ABOARD POLYPHEMUS

  Siddiq sidestepped as a maintenance hatch hissed open. Cannon emerged into the passageway, clad in ultralow-albedo ablative armor, hands empty of visible weapons. A lighting panel behind her cycled from earlier damage, casting the enemy Before in a strange, varied illumination.

  “Kallus,” Siddiq said. “Arrest this woman for a mutineer.”

  “No,” Cannon replied.

  The man stepped back. “With all respect, Captain, this is between you Befores, not a matter of command and control.”