Acadie

by Dave Hutchinson

  I looked up from the tablet. “Do you think I was right?” I asked. “To recommend Option One?”

  “I don’t know. I do think I’d prefer not to be here when we find out whether you were right or not.”

  “No word from Earth?”

  “No word from anywhere. Which doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Quite.” Like any other small, embattled, and basically paranoid nation, we had spies in the enemy camp, mundanes recruited by Connie and others and then run back into the Settled Worlds to report on stuff. Some of them worked for the Bureau. In addition, we were always visiting, checking the news feeds, tasting the zeitgeist, looking for signs that would give us an early warning of the Bureau making some kind of move against us. None of those assets had been able to find any information at all about the probe, or about a larger probe project. That didn’t mean these things did not exist, but it would have been nice to have some independent confirmation of my fears. I was battling a dreadful sinking feeling that we were doing this for nothing, that the probe was a one-off, but I didn’t dare take the chance. We had to go.

  I unstrapped myself, manoeuvred around the bar, and filled a bulb with whiskey sour. “Want a drink?”

  “No, but knock yourself out. Oh, you already are. Jolly good.”

  “Don’t.”

  She put on a mock-innocent face. “Don’t what?”

  “Just don’t.” I went back to my stool and strapped myself down again and took a big drink. I looked out through the huge picture window of the bar; I could just see the top curve of Big Bird, its thick atmosphere swirling and roiling with storms. There was a scoop-tanker in close orbit of the little gas giant; methane was a handy raw material for the modest needs of the Colony. If we were serious about trying to leave no signs that we were here, I was going to have to remember to either have the tanker dropped into the sun or fitted with hyperdrive motors. My brain was so fried that I couldn’t decide which.

  Connie was reading something on her tablet. “And thirty people don’t want to go at all?”

  “Personally, I’m surprised it’s not more.”

  “What are you planning to do with them?”

  “I’ve had them sedated and put into suspension.” I saw the look on her face. “We can’t leave them behind, Connie. I’ll apologise to them when we get wherever we’re going.”

  “It’s going to have to be a pretty spectacular apology.”

  “And it’s kind of low on my list of priorities right now. Anything else?”

  She turned off her pad and shook her head. She folded her hands in her lap and looked at me. “I’m worried about you, Duke.”

  I took another drink. “Thank you.”

  “Really. You do need to delegate more; you’re taking too much of the weight.”

  “It’s the only way I can be sure stuff’s getting done, Connie.”

  “I know, but you’ve got to learn to trust your team. You’ll be no use to any of us if you get sick.”

  I looked at her. “Anything else important?”

  “When this is all over, you get a holiday. A long holiday.”

  “Yes,” I said, looking out of the window again. “Well, we’re all going on a long holiday really, aren’t we?”

  * * *

  In the end, it was all a bit of an anticlimax.

  After months of too little sleep and too much work and too much to think about, all of a sudden there was nothing left to do, and one morning I sat in the control couch of One Potato, Two Potato and watched the displays as the Writers’ ship popped out of the system. There was no fuss about hyperdrive, no flashing lights or sudden claps of thunder. One second the great asteroidal rock was there, the next it was gone. On its way to the Rendezvous Point.

  Like everyone else in the Settled Worlds, we communicated using qubit transceivers, lattices of entangled atoms which made it possible to speak in real-time over enormous distances. I started to get qubit transmissions from the rest of the Crisis Team, scattered across the system, as they reported that the rest of the fleet had begun leaving.

  It took about fifteen minutes. Then we were all alone. Thirteen souls in stealthed boats, drifting through the dark on minimum power, the last line of defence.

  The final job of tidying up was the dewline. Billions of tiny orbiting satellites englobing the system might be something of a giveaway for any inquisitive Bureau ships which came looking for the lost probe, as well as coming under the heading “tech we’d rather the Bureau didn’t have,” so we had instructed it to eat itself.

  It was basically just the same process that the satellites used to reproduce themselves. We had just reprogrammed it to consume itself and build an enormous boulder of refined minerals and metals, which we would fly to the Rendezvous Point, pick up instructions about where to go next, and fly on to the new Colony, where it would be broken down again into a new dewline.

  Trouble was, this was going to take a while, and someone needed to supervise the process and make sure the Bureau didn’t turn up unannounced in the middle of it all. So the Crisis Team were a stay-behind group, tasked with giving the Colony as much lead time as possible while finishing the little details of tidying up the system.

  When the last of the Colony’s vessels were safely away, I looked around the flight deck of One Potato. The ship was pretty roomy, by most standards, but I had a suspicion I was going to start feeling the walls closing in on me before it was our turn to leave.

  “Okay,” I said on the general channel. “Thank you, everyone, that seems to have gone smoothly. If there’s nothing else, head for your assigned positions, power down, and go to sleep. I’ll see you in eighty years, if everything works out.”

  There was a chorus of “Night, Duke” from the rest of the team—grudgingly in Ernie’s case—and then their telemetry showed them going into suspension, one by one, until there was only Connie and myself left.

  “I really didn’t think we’d make it,” she told me over a private channel.

  “We’re not out of the woods yet.”

  “You’re just a little fucking ray of sunshine, aren’t you?”

  “We’ve been lucky so far,” I said. “We still have to stay lucky for another eighty years. That’s a lot to ask.”

  “The Colony got away,” she pointed out. “They’re safe. You did your job, Duke.”

  “I’ve done my job when we turn up in the new system with the dewline.” I typed the strings of commands which began powering-down One Potato. “And we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I’m going to turn in, Connie. Let’s hope we’re not disturbed, eh?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Sleep well, Duke. You’ve earned it.”

  * * *

  Coming out of suspension affects different people in different ways. I used to know someone who said it made him feel as if he was waking up with flu and the worst hangover of his life, but I’ve spoken to others who said they came round with no ill-effects at all and felt as if they’d just had a very long, very refreshing sleep.

  I probably fell somewhere in between. When I opened my eyes, they were gummy and I felt groggy and gluey-mouthed, but I’d felt much worse. And besides, I had other things to worry about.

  The display on the lid of my suspension unit was blinking red and there were far too many status updates. The first thing I saw was the date and time, and that was enough to tell me that things had not gone well. I’d only been asleep just over ten years; the dewline had barely had time to start disassembling itself.

  The rest of the heads-up only confirmed the story. Four days ago, the dewline had detected the approach of a small object, right at the far edge of its range. Then it had lost the object. Then it had detected a small object suddenly appearing at two light-years’ distance. The small object had manoeuvred for a while, then disappeared again and another small object—by this time the dewline was assuming they were all the same thing—had popped out at a light-year’s distance. The object did some more manoeuvring until about two hou
rs ago, when it had suddenly popped out and popped back in deep downsystem, just outside Big Bird’s orbit. The ship gave me a menu of options. I sighed and chose the last one and watched the lid of the unit hiss open.

  * * *

  “If it’s stealthed, it isn’t stealthed very well,” Karl muttered.

  “I’m more worried about the fact that it’s here at all,” I said.

  “There is no such thing as coincidence,” said one of the Twins, Turold or Telifer, I couldn’t tell the difference and it didn’t matter anyway. “The Universe is basically deterministic.”

  “I’m inclined to agree, at least this time,” Connie put in.

  “It’s been more than eleven years since the probe arrived,” Karen noted. “That’s a long time for the Bureau to sit around dithering about what to do next.”

  “There could be any number of reasons for that,” Karl replied. He sounded like one of those people for whom emerging from suspension was a less than happy experience.

  I shook my head. “The Bureau’s database of surveyed systems is huge. The chances of us getting two random visitors like this is . . .” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, the dewline can’t get a clear read on it yet,” Shaker said. “About all we can tell is that it’s not very big. All that jumping about it did suggests it’s not an automated probe, but the dewline’s not reporting anything resembling another ship right out to the limits of its range, so it probably isn’t remotely piloted.”

  “They could be using a qubit link to telefactor it,” Reece said. “They could be piloting it from Earth.”

  “Not enough bandwidth,” Karl said.

  “A closer look might help,” Connie said.

  “I say we toast it right now and get the hell out of here,” said Ernie. “It’s already seen the dewline.”

  “Not necessarily,” Shaker said. “Not unless it was looking or it ran into one of the satellites.”

  “Duke?” asked Connie.

  “Technically, my term as President ended eight years ago,” I told her. “I’m not running things any more.”

  “For shame, Duke,” she said, a chuckle in her voice. “Suspension doesn’t count. You know that.”

  “Mm hm.” I muted the conference call and said, “One Potato.”

  “Yes, Duke?” said the ship’s AI.

  “Where’s the intruder now?”

  A schematic of the system popped up in one of the displays: the sun at the centre, little coloured balls and dotted lines to show the planets and their orbits, a faint ring of stardust to suggest the asteroid belt. One tiny little sapphire light glowed brightly to show where the bogey was. It was two-thirds of the way across the system from my present position.

  I said, “One Potato, is there some way we can get close enough to that thing for a good look, without alerting it to our presence?”

  “There’s no way to answer that, Duke,” said the ship. “I don’t know how good its sensor suite is.”

  Fair point. One Potato was so effectively stealthed that it had the radar signature of a watermelon, but there was no telling what the Bureau was packing these days, industrial espionage notwithstanding.

  I opened the call again. “Okay. I’m going in to have a closer look. I’ll pop in with Big Bird between me and it, power down, and let my orbit bring me into visual range. How does that sound?”

  The usual sounds of agreement and disagreement, over the link. Fortunately, as well as being instantaneous, qubit transmissions were impossible to intercept. Also fortunately, if I was still running the show I could ignore everyone else and just do what the hell I liked.

  I typed in a couple of strings of coordinates and was gone.

  * * *

  The bogey was a fat cylinder about ten metres long, with a dustbin-sized white drum at one end and a weird assembly like a crown of thorns ringing the other. It had no markings, no exterior features except a line of hyperdrive pods and a few sets of manoeuvring quads.

  “What’s wrong with this picture?” said Karl.

  “No meteor shield,” said Bo. “He hits something, he’s in a world of hurt.”

  “Could have ditched it,” Karen said.

  “And then what?” Bo asked. “Where’s he going to get another one?”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” Reece said.

  “That’s fucking small for a long-range ship,” one of the Twins said. “It’s got to have support somewhere.”

  “There’s nothing but us as far out as Newark,” said the other Twin.

  “Meaningless,” said Shaker. “That’s close enough for backup.”

  “Depends how good their motors are,” Karl said.

  “If they haven’t got our motors, it’s too far away for effective backup,” Reece said.

  “Duke?” said Connie.

  I was staring at the image on the display, illuminated by daylight reflected from the top of Big Bird’s atmosphere, an itchy feeling climbing the back of my neck.

  “Duke?” Connie said again.

  “I don’t know,” I told them. “I really don’t.”

  “Radio transmission,” said One Potato. “He’s talking.”

  I sighed. “Of course he is. Okay, let’s see it.”

  The image of the intruder in the display was crowded up into a little box by the image of a small, black-haired, olive-skinned man with a neat goatee. He was wearing a clean pair of blue coveralls and behind him I could see what looked like a cluttered flight deck.

  “. . . emergency,” he was saying. “If anyone receives this, please respond. This is Simeon Bivar of the independent survey vessel Gregor Samsa. My hyperdrive motors have malfunctioned and my primary insystem drive has suffered an instability. This is an emergency. If anyone receives this—”

  I muted the transmission. “Okay. His name’s Simeon and he’s in trouble. Any ideas?”

  “Kill him,” said Ernie. “Fuck it, Duke, have you never read The Iliad?”

  “Could be kosher,” I said.

  “Just by accident,” Ernie said. “Dropping into my system and having multiple malfs. Yeah, right.”

  “It maybe does explain his approach manoeuvres,” Karen offered. “Maybe.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Does he see us?” I was orbiting Big Bird, close enough for the planet’s pathetic magnetosphere to give me some shielding. Gregor Samsa was over half a million kilometres away, almost in Little Bird’s orbit.

  “Impossible to know,” said Karl. “We don’t know what he’s got.”

  “Well that’s no fucking help,” I said.

  “If he’s carrying all the cutting-edge equipment we know the mundanes have, no, he can’t see us,” one of the Twins said. “But we should assume they have tech we don’t know about, so we should assume he can see us.”

  “You people do my head in,” I muttered. “Why are we bothering?”

  “You could always ask him,” Connie suggested.

  “Sure,” said Karl. “Like he’s going to tell us he has a tactical advantage.”

  “We could just wait and see what he does,” Karen said. “We’re not in a hurry.”

  “If he’s seen the dewline, he’ll know the Writers were here,” said Ernie. “We can’t leave him alone, Duke.”

  “He wouldn’t even be here right now if he’d found the dewline,” Connie told her. “He’d have hightailed it. He’d be on his way to Nova California by now.”

  “I don’t know, Duke,” Karl said. “If he can see us, you’d think he’d run for it. But that’d give away a tactical advantage, like I said.”

  “It would make him a pretty cool customer, sitting there like that knowing there’s thirteen ships looking at him,” Karen pointed out, which I thought was the first useful piece of intelligence to come out of the whole conversation. Assumption: Simeon Bivar is a pretty cool customer.

  I said, “Actually, I think there’s a way I can make this work.”

  Silence.

  “You might have
a bit of fucking faith in me,” I muttered.

  * * *

  I waited until Big Bird was between me and Gregor Samsa, then I popped out of the system a couple of light-years, performed a sort of three-dimensional dogleg of manoeuvres, and popped back in from another direction to within a quarter of a million klicks of the intruder.

  “Is everyone listening in?” I asked.

  A chorus of affirmatives.

  “Okay,” I told One Potato. “Let’s talk to him.”

  Simeon’s message popped up in the display in front of me. I said, “This is William Jefferson Clinton, of the trading vessel One Potato, Two Potato. I heard your message. How can I help you?”

  The recording was replaced by live feed of Simeon Bivar, his face wearing a wide grin. “John Wayne Faraday,” he said admiringly. “I’ve watched your press release.”

  I cut him off. “Everyone shut down,” I said to the others. “I’m going to punch him. I’ll see you at RP Two.” And I told One Potato to transmit the Punch codes to the dewline.

  The lights went out. The screens went dead. The aircon fell silent. I sat there in total blackness for what seemed like forever but was only a few seconds, as the Punch propagated through the system at several times the speed of light.

  The lights came on. Then the consoles. Then I felt the breeze of the air circulation system on my face. I looked at the displays.

  “Right,” I said. “Where did he go?”

  * * *

  The ship drew me a conference space, a cosy panelled study with a roaring log fire in the fireplace and walls lined with bookshelves. It drew a semicircle of high-backed leather armchairs in front of the fire, each one with a little mahogany side-table with a brandy snifter on it. I walked over to the window, lifted back the heavy velvet curtains. It was raining outside, and it sounded as if it was blowing a gale. The Writers had loved virtual environments even before they left Earth, and they’d set the Kids to improving and improving them and coming up with direct neural inputs, until it was impossible to tell what was real and what wasn’t. It was ferociously detailed; all the books in here were different, and I could take down any one of them and read it.

  The other pilots logged in one by one. Karl made a beeline for the humidor, took a cigar, and lit it with a spill from the fire. I was interested to see, when Ernie arrived, that the ship drew her without mods. She looked pretty and fresh-faced and wide-eyed, and about sixteen.