The New Space Opera 2

by Gardner Dozois

  The cargo containers here were stacked two high, each twenty-five feet square and fifty feet long, with a chain-glass sheet with an access door inset across one end. I climbed stairs leading up to a gantry giving access to the second level of containers to begin my work. Like all the others, the first container had the door set high up, because the floor level lay three meters up to accommodate a deep hollow with frictionless sides within the container. Turning on the internal light, I carefully peered inside, checking each corner, and around the boxes of perma-sealed food animals and the small handler I used to move their contents. Nothing in sight, but shindles had a tendency to stack themselves up in the side of the hollow to throw out their dying, which usually went to find a dark corner in which to expire. When they were in this condition, they were especially dangerous, often unable to distinguish any warm living body from their usual hosts, and anxious to deposit the eggs their kind produced at the end of their short lives. Making sure I had missed nothing, I took up a breather mask that was beside the door, put it on under my visor, then stepped inside, drawing my stun stick, and went over to the food boxes.

  First, I poked the stun stick between the boxes and down the gap between them and the wall, to be sure nothing was lurking out of sight. Sure then that I was safe, I opened one circular expanded-plasmel box, a meter across and half that deep, and gazed inside. The first thing that always struck me was the beauty of the shells of these food animals, then the familiarity. They just looked like big flat snails, like ammonites, colored in iridescent hues. Enclosed in a thin layer of impermeable plastic, these huge mollusks were in a state of suspended animation, started by themselves but chemically maintained. I picked up the control for the handler, and it lifted up on maglev and drifted over. Using the various toggle switches, I had it slide its fork tines under the box and lift it. I then pulled the ravel tag off the box and watched the expanded-plasmel begin to decay, drip to the floor, and evaporate. By the time I brought the handler to the edge of the hollow, the box was gone, with only the big mollusk in its impermeable coating remaining. Another ravel tag set that coating expanding into a wet jelly that fell away in clumps while I turned to gaze down into the hollow.

  A great tangle of hair-thin, almost transparent, worms squirmed and writhed below me. It offended my sense of aesthetics that so large and beautiful a mollusk was to be sacrificed to keep these horrible squirmy little things alive. However, what was left of my suicide impulse countered with this: the things were very dangerous to feed, and it seemed likely that if Earth Central Security discovered that we were keeping them aboard, we would end up facing reprogramming or even a death sentence. Certainly the Gnostic AI would be taken away for reprogramming, and Ormod would lose the ship. This was because the one small colony of the creatures that had been found were being regraded to Sentience Level 3, with lots of provisos about hivemind potential. They were intelligent, apparently, and speculation abounded that their ancestors had arrived at their current location in the Polity in some sort of spaceship.

  I ordered the handler to drop in the big snail, which was now starting to move. It landed just to one side of the main tangle of shindles and stuck out one big slimy white foot to right itself. It then immediately started heading away just as fast as it could, which wasn’t very fast at all. In a moment, the shindles sensed its presence, all of them orientating toward it—then they flowed onto and around it like syrup, engulfing it and then beginning to penetrate it.

  These shindles were very different from those in the colony that had been discovered. They were much smaller, thinner, and transparent rather than white. Also, being surprisingly long-lived, their aim now seemed not just to lay eggs but to feed on the mollusk from the inside. Usually it took them many years to kill their hosts, but there were a lot of them, and our supply of the big snails was limited. It would take about half an hour before the snail started to expire, then in two days’ time I would fish out the empty shell for disposal. Intelligent, indeed! I just saw squirmy parasites.

  I was stepping into the third cargo container when the Gnostic shuddered and I felt an odd twisting sensation in my gut. The ship had come out of underspace too early, and it wasn’t until an hour later, after feeding the rest of our collection of shindles and returning to the living quarters, that I found out why.

  “It seem Gnostic find ’nother wreckage,” said Parsival.

  She was slender, not particularly pretty, and perhaps the least screwed-up member of the crew. At a mere thirty, she was still far away from her two-century watershed. She came from an out-Polity world with no connection to the runcible network that was rarely visited by ships. She’d just taken the first opportunity that came along; that that opportunity was the Gnostic was perhaps unfortunate. She might have chosen badly, but she had promised to serve aboard for two years, and still had three months to go. Slowly, she’d begun to grasp standard Anglic.

  “Any idea what it is?” I inquired, as I sat down at the refectory table.

  “Captain looking,” she replied.

  Gnostic, like most ship AIs bearing the name of the ship it controlled, often took little detours to ogle some piece of spaceborne wreckage. I had always thought that the wreckage it sought must be left over from the big war that had ended just after I was born; the war between the Polity and the vicious, crablike Prador, the one the Gnostic was hurriedly built during and fought in. However, I was soon to learn my mistake—though Gnostic frequently found wreckage from that war, it certainly wasn’t what it sought.

  Pladdick, another crew member, slapped a plate down in front of me: bacon on toast. Being what passed for the engineering officer aboard this ship, he had disconnected the food synthesizer from AI control after it started providing us with raw eggs and a pile of some granular substance none of us had attempted to eat, but now it could only be programmed for one simple meal at a time. We were all eating bacon and toast this pseudo-morning. I studied the others at the table.

  Excluding Ormod, the crew of the Gnostic presently numbered four: Parsival; Pladdick; a squat heavy-worlder who seemed perpetually grumpy; Shanen, a standard-format human like me who talked too much (for my own health, I tried to avoid her) and who I deduced had reached that watershed stage of life I had reached thirty years back; and me, of course. All of us were present at the refectory table. Each of us, when not here or about our tasks, occupied one of the large number of enormous staterooms (previously bunkrooms for troops) always kept available in case anyone should want to pay to be a passenger. Ormod often complained about the lack of business from that source, and put it down to the ease and convenience of runcible travel between worlds. He never seemed to notice that other ships were quite often packed with passengers, and never questioned why such people might want to avoid this ship. However, this trip was unusual, since we actually did have a passenger. I glanced around as she entered.

  Professor Elvira Mace wore a utile envirosuit, had twinned augmentations, and very infrequently ventured out of the computer architecture she had created in them. I knew her to be an expert in some obscure branch of alien computer science, but beyond that, knew very little about her. She only communicated when she wanted something, which was not often.

  “Why have we left U-space?” she asked as she sat at the table.

  “The AI running this ship—if ‘running’ is really the correct term—seems to be looking for something,” babbled Shanen. “However, it’s probably only found another chunk of Prador dreadnought or a space station. The last time, Gnostic found a Prador itself, still in its armored spacesuit. It was in suspended animation, but our lovable AI roasted it with one of the forward particle cannons.” Shanen gazed around at the others at the table. “I didn’t even know this ship was still armed until then.”

  “I see,” said Mace, and turned her attention to the plate Pladdick placed before her.

  Shanen did tend to babble, but she wasn’t stupid, and very often got things right—but not this time.

  “A bit of a
Lild scout ship,” said Ormod, pointing at the big curved screen before him. Unlike the rest of the ship, the bridge was small-scale: just a few chairs at a horseshoe console, all facing a panoramic curved screen.

  With Shanen at my side—she had suggested we come up here and find out what was going on, and I’d agreed because I hadn’t seen anything suicidal about her impulse—I gazed at the object displayed on the screen, and all I saw was a simple curved tube of metal trailing various cables and pieces of charred infrastructure from each end.

  Lild? I thought. What the fuck is a Lild?

  “So what’s the big interest?” I asked.

  Surprisingly, the AI replied first, reciting the first two verses of “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” then the Captain continued with, “Like the Prador, they built ships in their own shape. The Prador did this out of pure arrogance, but with the Lild, it was arrogance based on their religion. Did not God model the galaxy on their form? We just made copies of that form with CTDs inside and left them to be picked up by the Lild, rescued. It was a dirty trick, but enough to discourage them.”

  A CTD being a contra-terrene device capable of destroying anything from a small house to a small world, I surmised that such a ploy would certainly discourage them, whoever “them” might be. Having been built too hurriedly during the Prador war, it must have been faults not ironed out then that sent the Gnostic AI off the far side of weird. Still believing that this was something to do with that same war, I assumed that the Lild must have been a Prador weapon of some kind.

  “I never realized you were aboard the Gnostic during the Prador war,” I said, testing.

  Ormod parted his mandibles and grinned, again in that oddly distracted way. “I wasn’t.” Then, still looking at some point above and to the right of my head, “Professor.”

  I turned to see that Elvira Mace had joined us.

  “The data are good,” said Mace. “You may proceed.”

  “So you got the location,” said Shanen abruptly.

  Still distracted, Ormod said, “You talk about?”

  “The Circoven Line war, as you well know.”

  Now the Captain actually focused on someone properly, and that focus was rather intense and just a little frightening. After a long, drawn-out pause, he said, quite precisely, “Most line wars are named after the Polity worlds involved, but in this case the rule was changed. Probably that was guilt—it should be.”

  Shanen grinned, a little crazily I thought, and replied, “ECS had no remit to protect Circoven. The people wanted nothing to do with the Polity.”

  Something went click in my mind, and I remembered the words “Circoven” and “choudapt” being used in conjunction. I was about to ask about this, but now the Captain rose out of his seat and drew a hand’s length of the Samurai sword he always carried.

  “Go away,” he said.

  “Why, Captain, are you threatening me?” Shanen asked, laughter in her voice. For me, the suicidal impulse must have been at a low ebb that day, for I caught hold of her arm and dragged her from the bridge. Once out of there, Shannen began to fight me, but the doors slid closed and I heard the locks engaging. After a moment, Shanen seemed to get control of herself.

  “Tell me about this Line war,” I said. “Tell us all about it—I think we need to know.”

  “Do you all know what a Line war is?” Shanen inquired.

  All either nodded or said that they did, except Parsival, so Shanen explained for our out-Polity recruit.

  “Two hundred years ago, we fought an alien race called the Prador. There’s still argument now about how that would have ended had not the old Prador king been usurped by a new leader who no longer wanted to continue fighting. Now that was definitely a full-scale, all-out war and fight for survival. Line wars are those border Polity conflicts in which the extinction of the Polity is unlikely, but which could become something worse, and which require a certain level of resource expenditure. I can’t really be any clearer than that without getting into statistics.”

  “You sound like a logician,” grumped Pladdick.

  Shanen shrugged. “I was one, once. You get to my age, there isn’t much you haven’t done.”

  “So, specifically, the Circoven Line war?” I inquired.

  “Mostly these things are started by out-Polity humans and sometimes AIs, but every now and again, something completely new comes on the scene.” She grimaced for a moment. “The Lild starship consisted of a series of concentric toroids five miles across. It arrived outside the Circoven system, Captain Ormod’s homeworld, about fifty years ago. It was one of those worlds that went the full GM route, even modifying living organisms, if you see what I mean.” Quite obviously, Parsival didn’t, but Shanen continued relentlessly. “Circoven was out-Polity, and despite constant pressure to join, obstinately refused. The Lild starship divided into six segments. One of them headed for Circoven, where it proceeded to bomb the high-biotech world back into the Stone Age, killing some forty million people, while the others headed into the Polity.”

  “How is it you know about this stuff and I don’t?” I asked.

  Shanen turned to me. “The Polity is a big place, Strager—a lot of stuff like this goes on that most people just don’t get to hear about. But what I’m telling you is all available on the nets.”

  “That didn’t really answer my question,” I insisted.

  “No, but I guess I know more about it because I crewed on Gnostic’s sister ship, the Gnosis.” She shrugged, perhaps embarrassed about the name. “I was aboard Gnosis when the crew departed Gnostic shortly after the Line war I’m talking about, when its AI turned very strange and abruptly decided to go independent. I guess it was that that lured me back to crew here.”

  Suicide impulse, thought I.

  At that moment, the ship shuddered in a way I’d never felt before, the table vibrating before us, and we could all hear the distant sounds of things falling, followed by a deep hollow boom.

  “Gnostic not good,” said Parsival, and whether she was talking about the ship itself or its AI I didn’t know.

  “Fuck is that?” asked Pladdick.

  “Structure shift,” said Shanen, and we all gazed at her bewildered.

  “I’ll get to that later.” Shanen waved a hand airily and continued with her story as if nothing important had happened. “The five segments that headed Polity-ward arrived at a world with a population of four billion, a defensive satellite grid, two ECS dreadnoughts on station, and fifty attack ships. Ignoring every warning that could possibly be given, they proceeded to try dropping asteroids on that world and seemed unable to fathom why none of the rocks were arriving on the surface. Meanwhile, ECS was able to penetrate their com security and discover a great deal about them, and what we found out wasn’t good.”

  “Well, if they were bombing without provocation, I’d say that was pretty obvious,” said Pladdick.

  “Oh, it went further than that,” said Shanen, “much further.”

  Just then, we all felt the strange sensation of the Gnostic dropping into U-space.

  “I guess we’re not going to the destination logged,” I said.

  “I guess not,” said Shanen, then she told us about the Lild.

  As Ormod had stated, they were the beloved of God, the Lild. They were nautiloids, and one could see how the discovery that the galaxy they lived in was exactly the shape of their own bodies might affect them. Arrogance and fanatical belief had become a racial trait. The galaxy belonged to them, having been fashioned for them by their God, so everything belonged to them, and they could do with it what they wanted, and what they wanted usually involved subjugation, destruction, and death. Religion, a vicious and hardy meme at best, usually collapsed as civilizations became spacefaring, for most such belief systems, initiated when the world was still flat and thunder was the bellowing of gods, usually could not survive the realities of the universe and the steady abrasion of science. But this thing about their shape matching the shape of the galaxy sustained th
e Lild’s vicious faith. When the Lild warship encountered humankind, the nautiloids realized that here was a race competing for the watery worlds they preferred, and knew that this was a test laid before them by their God. Humans did not seem to understand their position in the galaxy; that they must bow to The Plan. The Chosen, as they called themselves, decided in an instant that this irritation called the human race should be exterminated.

  The holy war lasted one solar month, for though one segment of the warship was successful against Circoven, the remainder did not do so well.

  The asteroids the five segments dropped were vaporized by energies that the nautiloid theocracy knew nothing of and therefore claimed did not exist. The bombardment continued, sort of. When Polity dreadnoughts like the Gnostic moved into position and obliterated two segment ships and numerous smaller vessels, denial of the facts became a little more difficult. The survivors ran, the area of conflict—or, rather, the Polity dreadnought hunting ground—spreading out over many star systems. The five segments and most of the smaller ships were destroyed, but the one at Circoven managed to enter U-space far enough from detection to escape.

  “Doubtless,” said Shanen, “after that segment’s return to the Lild homeworld, there were some theocratic problems to resolve.”

  “You not know?” asked Parsival.

  “We not know,” she shot back. “Throughout the surveillance of the Lild here, the location of their homeworld remained undiscovered. You see, they had some form of AI running their ships which, though required for space travel, was never allowed to know anything about where the ships were going or where they came from for longer than it took them to operate the U-space engines. Only the Lild astrogators were allowed to retain that information, and we never got hold of one of them.”