Analog SFF, June 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Gently crumbling small clods of the soft, damp soil, she trembled with the fear she finally admitted to herself. How easy—how disastrous—it would have been for the Foremost to disbelieve her, or to randomly seek among the crew-kindred for confirming opinions. But her sense of K'vithian psychology had been correct. To her, “ka” was an obligation; to Mashkith it was a rank—and among his kind, rank was all-important.

  Tentacles aquiver, she tenderly separated a fireberry bush and a lifath sapling whose branches had become intertwined. To the leaves that broke loose to flutter to the ground she thought: sorry. They were pitted and turning brown.

  One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.

  The ka must act when consensus cannot be used, and acted she had. The millions of plants in this oasis had sustained the crew-kindred, had sustained what remained of her sanity, for this long journey. Now she sacrificed them, was making of them a statistic, for her own ends.

  Another horrifying human rationalization from her long-ago studies was often in her thoughts these days. In her mind, she changed it only slightly.

  She must destroy this ship in order to save it.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  Long, chipped, concrete bar; battered, wobbly metal stools; solar-sailing regatta on the 3-V; sticky floors; dim lighting and raucous drunks ... Helmut could have been in any of a dozen spacer dives in Valhalla City, any of hundreds around the solar system. It was the kind of place Kwasi had enjoyed, if a bit too packed. The Snakes were buying supplies by the shipload, and the crews of all those freighters were crowding watering holes like this one to and past capacity. Helmut had hinted to Corinne that he would welcome some company tonight. When he named the bar, she grimaced and declined.

  “Colbert? Is that you?"

  Helmut looked up from his beer. A big-boned man with a pointed chin, black unibrow, and graying ponytail was studying him. His name was Rothman. “You must have mistaken me for someone else. Sorry.” He turned back to his drink.

  “No, I don't think so.” Rothman's chuckle had not changed. “What's the matter? Too busy for old friends?"

  Even friend of a friend overstated the relationship, but their paths had crossed in a half-dozen spaceports: in cheap hotels, secondhand supply shops, crummy restaurants—and dives like this. Damn, he needed to be more careful. It was a wonder an encounter like this had not happened well before now. “Never, but as I say, we don't know each other."

  The era was long past when starting over meant taking a new name and moving to another town. Finding a corrupt surgeon to replace an implanted ID chip was the easy part. The hard part was subverting government databases and planting a credible past for the new ID. For an imposture to fool routine audits, the false data had to be propagated back into the archives—the further back the cover story went, the better the odds of going undiscovered. It took skills and connections Willem Vanderkellen never had. That was why, with black-market help and the pitiful proceeds of pawning Willem Vanderkellen's last few portable possessions, he had briefly become Dennis Colbert. But that alias correlated too closely with Vanderkellen's disappearance to allay suspicions. It took years of odd jobs to fund two more name changes before he felt—mostly—safe.

  Money was always tight; he had had only one bout of plastic surgery. Colbert's identity was retired, but Colbert's face remained in use. He had gotten complacent, and that carelessness might yet do him in.

  A few more denials and a double shot bought “in your friend's honor” got Rothman to wander off. As quickly as Helmut could finish his beer without seeming to rush, he did. He slipped from the bar when Rothman's attention turned to a poker game in a back booth.

  The adrenaline rush from the encounter washed away any buzz from his beer. Helmut needed to go somewhere as far as possible—socially and geographically—from the spaceport. That thought led him to Loki's. The place wasn't exactly empty, but there were unoccupied seats at the bar.

  It was a good thing Corinne paid him well. He lost himself for a while in an overpriced Vestal Non-Virgin, and munched absentmindedly on pretzels. The 3-V over the bar was showing news. He got enough of that when he was working.

  An attention-getting cough. “Excuse me. You interested in splitting a pizza?"

  The man two stools down may have been making a simple offer, or it may have been guy talk for: You look like crap and shouldn't be alone. Either way, Helmut appreciated the question. “Maybe. Toppings?"

  “You choose. I'm Art, by the way."

  The CTO of the Interstellar Commerce Union wasn't as high-profile as Ambassador Chung, but even if Helmut had not become Corinne's apprentice cameraman, he would have known Art Walsh from any of a dozen 3-V appearances. He decided they weren't working. “Helmut. Pepperoni and Marshrooms okay?"

  “Sure, Helmut."

  He waved to the barmaid. Human help—no wonder the prices here were so outrageous. “Large pepperoni and Marshroom pizza."

  “You have an opinion about that?” Art asked.

  That must refer to whatever Helmut was ignoring on the 3-V. He tuned in briefly. There was a news item about—what else?—the Snake visitors. Restocking a habitat-sized vessel was making a big dent in local supplies. Prices were creeping up. Some talking head, not Corinne, was doing person-in-the-tunnel interviews. Today's profound question: Are you for or against higher prices? “Here I thought supply and demand is a pretty well understood topic."

  Art laughed. They chatted, nothing deep, just a pleasant conversation, until the food came. Helmut mentioned being crew on an interplanetary vessel. Art admitted to being in the UP mission. Which led Art to, “What about supplying the K'vithians with antimatter? Do you have an opinion?"

  “It seems like a major decision, not least of all considering the price tag. How many bazillions must it have cost to produce that antimatter?” Doing our own man-in-the-tunnel interviews are we, Art? “I don't envy whoever makes it. I'm not sure yet that I trust our visitors."

  His new friend squinted a bit at the 3-V. “I know how you feel."

  Helmut redirected his attention to another slice to avoid commenting further. For a moment, in the throes of a curiosity attack, he imagined he felt like Corinne. To which part of his last comment had the UP exec just related?

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 14

  Cascading alarms greeted the attempted restart of the long-deactivated, original shipboard sensor network.

  One work team after another radioed its findings to Gwu, and the reports were uniformly negative. Even her ever-present K'vithian guards seemed appalled. They were right to be.

  The years of disuse had not been kind. Components had sagged or been jarred from their connectors. Airborne dust had insinuated itself everywhere, dimming optical sources, blinding photocells, and causing reactivated power supplies to overheat. Sulfur dioxide had dissolved into any trace of water condensation, the resulting sulfurous acid slowly eating away at photonic circuits and the cladding of optical fibers. Former storerooms had become cabins for low-ranking K'vithians, the displaced spare parts scattered or lost. Enough random, cosmic-ray-induced memory glitches had accumulated in distributed signal-processing computers to occasionally stymie error correcting codes. Long-latent software bugs manifested themselves in the presence of a never-anticipated, never-tested-for eruption of concurrent faults. All the while, the upsurge in work-team movements brought more contamination into the farming and hydroponics sections, which continued to sicken.

  Gwu crisscrossed the ship, lending support to crewmates frequently stymied and always disheartened. She offered advice and encouragement, and often pitched in to help.

  Amid so many problems and such a far-ranging repair effort, none noticed her occasional tampering to maintain the instability.

  * * * *

  The maintenance schedule eventually brought Gwu to one of the lifeboat bays. The lifeboat itself was gone, she knew not where or when or why, but its complement of suspended-animation tanks
remained, pushed into a corner. Mocking her.

  In a way, the fixation on safety so innate to her kind had doomed them. No mere lifeboat could possibly sustain a biosphere across years of interstellar flight, so the size of Harmony's crew had been set by the suspended-animation capacity of its lifeboats.

  “Ka! Repairs undone."

  Distantly, she recognized a flare of heat beneath her fur, the dilation of her blood vessels in an autonomic fear response. Her tentacles trembled. Her jaw clenched. But her fright was not of the guard.

  Gwu gave orders to the others in the work detail. She had expected this shift's duty to be hard, but not this hard. Pride was an uncommon failing among her kind, and a ka in particular must be free of this trait. She might not even have recognized this predisposition but for her studies of Earth and K'vith.

  Humans and Hunters had in common an adage about pride. It was perhaps the most important lesson she might have taken from her studies. The irony, of course, was that she had not. Perhaps such blindness was the nature of the failing.

  The shared saying was: Pride goes before a fall.

  She settled heavily onto the deck, bracing herself against a suspended-animation tank. A rush of memories overwhelmed her....

  * * * *

  Gwu led the technicians from lifeboat to lifeboat. Her routine at each stop was ever the same—and each time, it was more difficult.

  Walking slowly along the queue, she greeted everyone in turn as the techs prepped their equipment. When they signaled readiness, Gwu moved to the first gaping tank. At each position, she offered a few words of support to a friend. It was humbling how many had similar encouragement for her.

  Somehow she kept her voice firm and resolute, holding her qualms inside. The crew-kindred had determined themselves to be too few for the challenges before them. How, then, could their brief farewells take so long?

  More than anyone, Gwu had shaped and championed Harmony's mission. Had she become too proud to acknowledge an error? Over and over, Gwu told herself: no. The mistake was not the mission; it was the crew constraint. A larger, more robust, onboard community, a population not limited by the capacity of the lifeboats, might have—would have, she insisted to herself—responded differently.

  She had watched with dismay as the radio dialogue with the Unity, at first a comfort, became impractical with distance. The messages that continued to stream past Harmony transformed from a virtual lifeline into a gnawing reminder of comradeship lost. As she fretted, the tiny community hurtling through the interstellar void at one-third light-speed grew ever more anxious and uncertain.

  Timidly at first, but in swelling numbers, the comments came: Their isolation was becoming unbearable. More and more the suggestion was made that they consider turning back. That was unthinkable. Gwu counter-proposed that the lifeboats, having so nearly doomed the mission, should now be used to save it.

  Slowly, that line of reasoning became the consensus.

  In her hearts Gwu acknowledged the truth: Here, as in the polite debates on Haven, she had far more shaped the discourse than she had been influenced by it. As ka, she held official authority only in times of shipboard emergency, but always an aura of prescient wisdom clung to her. The crew-kindred deferred to her whenever her opinion was sufficiently explicit.

  So now, after what had the appearance of a consensus process but was instead a reflection of Gwu's will—and her pride?—the crew-kindred were retreating to the suspended-animation tanks in the lifeboats. Planned observations of the interstellar void had been delegated to the shipboard AI. The presumed advantages of a conscious and attentive crew would be foregone—but the mission would continue.

  News of their decision would eventually complete its light-speed crawl home. All would be deeply asleep by then, with responsibility for the ship throughout the coming years of coasting entrusted to the shipboard AI. T'bck Ra would rouse them when they approached the K'vithian system.

  At long last, Gwu, Swee, and the few still-awake techs reached the final lifeboat. She said her farewells to one more group of trusting friends as their tanks underwent final checkout. One by one, they lay down in their tanks, until none remained conscious but Gwu and Swee.

  They entwined wordlessly, reluctant to let go, until Swee, with a wry wriggle, slipped free. “I'll see you when we wake up."

  Gwu lowered herself into a suspended-animation tank, thinking: This will work. This will be the beginning of a new era for the Unity. The clear cover of the tank pivoted downward, sealing her in with a soft pffft. She called out to the empty ship, “T'bck Ra, take good care of our friends."

  Drifting off to sleep, she wondered if the AI had heard her.

  * * * *

  With a shudder, Gwu jerked her thoughts forward to the present. She had awakened from years of suspended animation into a lifeboat ringed by armed aliens. The crew-kindred had been slaves to the K'vithians ever since. It took her several deep, cleansing breaths to control the shaking of her tentacles.

  She had assigned herself to this repair team despite the rush of memories she knew any trip to a lifeboat bay would bring. There was work to do, dangerous work she dared not discuss with any of the crew-kindred lest they be overheard.

  The spate of alarms now erupting across Harmony far outnumbered her technical specialists. That dispersal was vital to her plans, for it kept her experts fully occupied without raising suspicions about where experts were not sent—such as here. The team she had brought to this lifeboat bay was untrained to diagnose the erratic data stream from a nearby sensor suite.

  Gwu spotted a logistician staring perplexedly through the open hatch of a balky primary communications node. “K'tel Da,” she called. “You look like you could use a rest. I'll finish checking that out."

  Repairing the node's overheating power supply was trivial. What took Gwu a little longer, and why she had kept her experts away, was her true goal: introducing a far more subtle problem. The cladding of fiber-optic cables was easily damaged. She scuffed and twisted several cables in the crowded junction box. The resulting light leaks, in and out of the cables, would cause unpredictable crosstalk between supposedly separate subnets. Impossible-to-reproduce errors were about to break out across the ship; the K'vithians, whose networks were wireless, would not soon imagine the cause.

  Gwu had long waited for an excuse to access a major comm node. It was only her bad luck that her first opportunity had been in a lifeboat bay.

  Now she must wait again, for this and other sabotage to blossom. Then it would be time to test her luck once again.

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 15

  “Score one for persistence.” Keizo eyeballed Art's pressure suit with newfound confidence and proficiency. He had had plenty of practice since arriving in Jovian space. Other mission members paired off around them in the familiar ritual. “All green. Check me now."

  “Persistence sounds nice, although some would say you're being too kind. Some would say pushiness.” But Art had been stubborn with a purpose, and his obstinacy was finally being rewarded. He had agitated enough times after enough meetings that the next working session be held aboard Victorious that the Snakes eventually agreed. Unending polite refusal would have seemed evasive. “You're in the green, too. Ready?"

  “Ready."

  The group cycled the courier ship's airlock and made their way to the main airlock of Victorious.

  Mashkith, Lothwer, and Keffah greeted them inside. “Greetings,” the Foremost said. “This way for the antimatter discussion.” Several humans, headed by Ambassador Chung, followed after Mashkith and Keffah. Lothwer guided a second group dedicated to commercial matters. Art's punishment for his assertiveness—being in Chung's good graces had been fun while it lasted—was to coordinate for the latter group. Keizo could contribute no special expertise to either topic, and elected to go with the negotiators.

  Art's neck swiveled and craned as his group made its way to the same small conference room as the first onboard meeting, visor
photomultipliers compensating for the dim lighting. Surely they would pass something of interest. “Will we get to see more of the ship today?"

  “Not today.” Lothwer gestured at a work crew guiding a crate-laden maglev cart down a cross aisle. “We are stowing new supplies everywhere. It's too dangerous for non-crew to wander around the ship."

  No one mentioned wandering. “We would welcome an escorted tour."

  “We should do our work first, then see what can be done,” Lothwer said.

  A maybe that would become a no at the end of the session. “Then we should get started."

  Their agenda was long but not terribly interesting. Some specialty items on the Snakes’ shopping list were in short supply; would the UP tap its reserves to facilitate their replenishment? So many ships were shuttling supplies to Victorious that inevitably some had been delayed by administrative SNAFUs of one kind or another; could the UP expedite their clearance? A few freighters were to carry chemicals with which insurers lacked experience; could the UP intervene to get those ships released? It was bureaucratic minutiae that made Art's head spin, and which he would, as soon as practical, delegate.

  None of the issues could be solved on the spot, so Art allocated a bit of his attention to his real interest here: learning something new about the starship. The resupply had, from the start, involved large quantities of chemicals for the starship/habitat biosphere. Questions about progress recharging the onboard environment invariably got generic or vague responses. With his suit's enviro-sensors, he could actually take some readings.

  “Are you okay?” came a colleague's query over Art's implant. Only then did he realize he had whistled in surprise. Snake purchases from the sulfur mines on Amalthea had caused a major price spike on the spot market. Why were the concentrations of sulfur compounds in the air reduced since his first visit? “A stray thought. Sorry."

  The commercial discussions dragged on, productive but hardly interesting. Suit sensors detected no big changes from the last visit except the sulfur-compound concentrations. He was glad finally to hear Chung in his earphones. “We've finished for today, Dr. Walsh. How soon will you be ready to go?"