InterstellarNet: New Order

by Edward M. Lerner

  The instruments were well separated: One orbited Earth, the second orbited Mars, and the third was staked to the surface of an asteroid. Each had recorded a transient gamma-ray anomaly at similar frequencies. If they had all observed the same event, triangulation gave it a position near Jupiter. Each observatory carried an atomic clock with its readout measurements time stamped. Adjusting the time stamps on the anomalous readings for the respective travel times from the triangulated location gave T’bck Fwa a highly precise match.

  It was one event—an unannounced hydrogen/antihydrogen annihilation incident near Jupiter.

  At the end of a long chain of inferences, he came to a final one. No refueling agreement had been announced, but the humans and K’vithians were already, and with great secrecy, experimenting with an interface between their respective antimatter-containment technologies.

  How long did he have before the stolen starship and its presumed captive crew were whisked away?

  The farms were ailing, exuding the faint but unmistakable scents of illhealth. Traces of erosion had appeared where sickly root systems surrendered topsoil to the irrigation flows. Hives buzzed manically and creeper burrows writhed in civil war, their tiny denizens confused by out-of-balance biochemical markers. Only the newly recharged hydroponics tanks showed signs of recovery.

  Each spotted and sere leaf, each fallen bug tore at K’Choi Gwu’s hearts. As though reading her mind, Swee entwined a tentacle with one of hers. Gwu took that to mean: You did what was necessary. Whatever that might have been.

  She gave a quick squeeze of thanks. Had anyone ever borne the burden of ka for so long?

  They worked slowly through a bluefruit arbor, their pruning and gathering of rotting fruit mainly for show. Her real objective was a remote tertiary processing node that metered out irrigation water in this secluded region of the orchard. As Swee stumbled ostentatiously over an exposed root, tentacles flailing for the benefit of any undiscovered surveillance cameras, she flipped open the cover over a maintenance jack. In an eye blink, she swapped the tiny memory chip for an empty one. The new chip went into a music player in her utility pouch; the cover flopped closed.

  Her husband muttered as he brushed leaf fragments, twigs, and dirt from his fur. “A shower will feel even better than usual.”

  “Try watching where you walk.”

  “I should have thought of that.”

  At the end of the next row, Gwu ignored his interrogatory glance. It did not matter how curious she was about the data surreptitiously collected by T’bck Ra. The more valuable the information, the more vital it was that she not jeopardize the source.

  They followed routine until the shift ran its course. They showered, as always. They joined colleagues in the common dining room. After eating, Swee brought a friend back to their small apartment, where—finally—Gwu retreated from their loud conversation by donning earphones.

  There had been other secret data transfers with the reawakened T’bck Ra. She knew far more than just a few shifts ago: about the pervasiveness of K’vithian alterations and networks throughout the ship; about inventories, reservoirs, and stockrooms now mostly refilled to capacity; about the human ships all around. She better understood the sensor grid with which their captors watched them, its scope implicit in the vast array of radio sources her reawakened ally had detected but been unable to compromise. From unguarded comments near a corridor sensor the K’vithians had failed to disable, she even knew Mashkith expected soon to finalize an antimatter-refueling arrangement.

  So Gwu had ample reason to be confident another report from T’bck Ra could not further discourage her.

  Once again, she was disastrously wrong.

  External communications was among the ship subsystems most intrusively altered; it was completely subservient to an overlay of K’vithian computers. T’bck Ra could detect a steady stream of messages to and from Harmony, but that traffic was encrypted. Was that communications with its own support vessels? The humans? The K’vithian trade agent?

  The soft muttering of Gwu’s earplugs must have been indistinct to the K’vithian bugs, whose long-suspected presence in her cabin was now confirmed. She fought to suppress her trembling. She dare not gamble that watchers were unable to interpret her body language.

  T’bck Ra had surreptitiously reestablished connectivity of a sort with the main external antenna! By interfacing directly with the real-time processor that modulated and demodulated the carrier wave, the AI had tapped into comm. A small part of the incoming data stream was unencrypted: interplanetary news beamcasts. Stories and events swirled in overwhelming variety and complexity, but one seized Gwu’s attention.

  “Snake Starship Lost in Space!”

  The reports were chaotic and sensationalistic. It did not help that T’bck Ra had tuned in well after the story started to unfold, that his translation capabilities for human languages were understandably limited, and that it had sampled and synopsized to reduce its account to manageable size.

  By her fourth review, a mental image took shape. A years-ago anomaly recorded by human gamma-ray observatories had been reexamined in view of a recent small antimatter explosion near Jupiter—the nearby blast which, authorities had eventually admitted, was an initial exchange-of-antimatter experiment with the K’vithians.

  “…The gamma-ray evidence shows a matter/antimatter explosion occurred ten Earth years ago roughly two-thirds of the way along the line between Barnard’s Star and Alpha Centauri. Allowing for the geometry, the observed blue-shifting of the radiation indicates the exploding material was traveling towards the Centaurs at approximately one-tenth light speed. We conclude that a starship from K’vith was en route to Alpha Centauri.”

  It was a plausible conclusion for someone who believed a K’vithian starship had come to Sol system. Evidently the United Planets public believed just that.

  Her own theory was quite different.

  Those who had seized Harmony lacked the technology for interstellar drives and antimatter. They had plunged into the interstellar darkness anyway, with human assistance their only hope of refueling for a return trip. That hope was nearly fulfilled.

  The ship lost on approach to the Double Suns was logically the lifeboat she had discovered missing from Harmony‘s bay. Its destruction, Gwu feared, was no accident.

  The crew-kindred’s final communication about its decision must have been perceived as an act of madness. Harmony itself had disappeared, hijacked before contact could be made with the Unity’s trade agent on K’vith.

  And yet … the lifeboat was somehow too near the Double Suns and too slow.

  The subtlety of Mashkith’s inspired treachery finally struck Gwu. For fear of hidden cameras, she did not dare key the computations into one of the standalone calculators allowed her by the K’vithians, nor even write down the problem. She was reduced to doing calendar conversions and equations of motion in her head.

  Harmony and its lifeboats had been fueled to accelerate almost to one-third light speed, coast most of the way between stars, then decelerate. Like every major Unity decision, that mission profile reflected compromise: fast enough to complete a round trip within a crew lifetime; slow enough to experiment with only minimal relativistic effects; brief enough in its reliance on the interstellar drive to have been validated by the flight to the Red Companion. In the Earth-standard years of the intercepted recording, the trip to—or from—the K’vithian system involved roughly a year of acceleration, eighteen years of coasting, and a year of deceleration.

  To make the math work, she had to assume the decoy lifeboat carried extra antimatter from another lifeboat, or from the ship’s limited reserves. The decoy had accelerated well past half light speed, then coasted only part way home before decelerating. Those observing on Chel Kra would conclude Harmony had been abandoned in deep space, its lifeboats creeping home at a small fraction of their planned speed.

  The self-destructing lifeboat, “proof” of shortcomings in the interstellar drive, wou
ld be the third great failure. It would be the final vindication, if vindication were still needed, of those deeming interstellar travel too costly and dangerous.

  Gwu’s descent into depression was so complete it blurred the boundary between wakefulness and nightmare. The remembered balls of orange and yellow flame were exaggerated: They had to be from a dream.

  “You were talking in your sleep,” Swee said. Meaning: I woke you before you might have said something compromising.

  A spot of her fur remained warm from his touch. She could never have borne this burden without him. That which she dare not mutter in her sleep she had not yet been able to discuss with him. “Sorry to disturb you.” Sorry I cannot be honest with you.

  She got a glass of water. The image of the Double Suns had faded, to be replaced by the random thought: Three strikes and you’re out. The context of the saying had vanished in the long years since she had studied the humans, but the meaning was self-evident.

  Or not so random. She had lapsed into troubled slumber brooding about T’bck Ra’s latest distressing news. The third strike.

  She had not noticed Swee slip out of the cabin, yet there he was returning with a mug of hot h’roth. “Thank you.” For the soothing drink. For keeping me going.

  He settled next to her. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Another time.” She shivered. And another place. To her surprise, she knew just where that would be.

  Life’s summer was more than a trauma for plants, more than a convenient alibi for eco-sabotage. Life’s summer was the harbinger of the doom the Unity risked at each inward plunge of the orange sun. The geological record revealed several sudden and major shifts in Chel Kra’s axial tilt; the fossil record showed massive die-offs on each such occasion.

  Primary’s miserly planetary system offered no good alternatives. Besides Chel Kra, there were but two very hot worlds within Chel Kra’s orbit, and, outermost, a small gas world with a few rocky moons. Secondary had only three planets, and for a similar reason. Each sun on its looping orbit about the other had long ago ejected into the interstellar darkness any planets that had formed farther out. Primary’s influence on the remaining planets of its smaller, dimmer companion made life on them even more precarious.

  Would the Unity survive the massive death and destruction a major change in axial tilt would cause? Probably—but could the survivors continue to maintain a presence in space? A second axial shift before the Unity regained its strength and capabilities might be fatal.

  The mission to the K’vithians had always been a means, not an end. It was to have been a larger-scale demonstration of feasibility than the jaunt to the Red Companion. K’choi Gwu ka had hoped it would lead to colonizing missions to stellar neighbors not much farther away. A colony at such a distance must be self-sufficient from the start—self-sustaining no matter what calamity might happen at home. Her species, for the first time in its history, would be safe. That had been her ultimate goal for this mission.

  Instead, the mission’s failure would sunder the delicate consensus that had sent Harmony, would tip the societal balance yet more towards conservatism and retrenchment. It would discredit interstellar travel for a very long time. For too long?

  The Unity came first. She would protect it at all costs.

  The work team waded through thick and fetid waste, the clotting filth rising over their second highest tentacle joints. Imagination recreated without difficulty the stench of the excrement and rotting leaves that lapped against sealed protective clothing. Strings of overhead lamps receded from the twisted and burst hatch of the reservoir, a coating of muck turning the bright yellow glow of the ceiling LEDs a dim green-brown.

  Gwu plodded into the gloom, one tentacle held high clutching a sonar scanner. She carefully examined her self-assigned segment of the recycling tank.

  Soon enough, a shout came from across the tank. “Here is something,” called T’Brk Cha. After two interstellar crossings, no one on board was young, but Cha was among the youngest. Moving slowly to avoid slipping, the other seven members of the work crew slogged through the viscous mess to Cha’s side. “Look at this.” He sounded as surprised as she had hoped.

  The youngster had found a burst pump awash in the muck, as Gwu had known he would. Her latest memory-chip message to T’bck Ra had asked the AI to overload and overheat something in an effluent reservoir, something that would cause a methane explosion.

  She was determined to have the benefit of the crew-kindred’s wisdom. This small representative group was as close as she could get—but she had to speak with them privately.

  There was no evidence of K’vithian bugs inside the tanks, in which all ship’s waste was slowly and organically recycled into fertilizer for the farms. As Gwu had expected, the K’vithian guards had halted far from the rupture in the farm floor—a good ten tentacle lengths distant, where the spatters of waste matter remained sparse. The work team was alone and unsupervised but for their suit radios. Gwu gestured with a dripping tentacle: suit microphones off. Touch helmets.

  “K’tel Da and T’Brk Cha,” she whispered. “You are to repair the pump—slowly. On my signal, reactivate your microphones. Speak to each other for the benefit of the guards outside. Complain about connections stuck shut by this muck. Curse about dropping slippery parts into the slime, and groping to find them. Talk to the rest of us, calling us by name, when you can grunt in response. Grumble how difficult it is to read part numbers because everything is corroded. When the guards bring replacement parts—and someone will, to get briefly away from the stench—manage to drop them into the tank. That clumsiness will be believable, since your sleeves are coated with this slime.

  “Stall to give the rest of us time to consult—and let me know immediately if the guards sound suspicious.” She waved them away from the cluster. They began chattering in her earphones, the volume lowered but still on lest a guard call her.

  She guessed they had a few minutes.

  “My friends, we have a serious matter to consider. Your wisdom must represent the entire crew-kindred.” And we must discuss this matter with uncharacteristic speed.

  “What is the issue, ka?” K’tra Ko, a mid-level supply officer, spoke first. Others murmured in agreement.

  For long years she had yearned for this moment. Now all her private thoughts and doubts, all her inferences and suspicions and fears vied for immediate release. This is not about me, nor is there time to explain everything. She must hope she had retained their confidence. “The Unity believes us lost, our mission a failure. The K’vithians have taken our interstellar-drive technology. With human help, they are about to master antimatter.”

  “What about … who … how … but would not…. “Except for human involvement, she had revealed nothing they might not have already surmised. Their sudden volubility came more from the opportunity to speak freely than from news. Only Swee did not speak, his silence an affirmation of support.

  “Softly!” In a lower voice, she continued. “We dare not be overheard. There is more. Please allow me to finish.”

  That a lifeboat was gone from its bay had become common knowledge. That it had been tampered with to simulate erratic drive behavior was not.

  A subtle exchange of glances established T’chk Dwu, a biosphere engineer, as the team’s spokesperson. “How can you know these things, ka?”

  There were nuances of doubt in the furtive looks and the whispered question. For much of the journey to Sol system Gwu would have welcomed release from her duties. From the failures of her leadership. That was then; she must not fail now to persuade. “The K’vithians do not know it, but T’bck Ra is reactivated.” Another eruption of intense whispering took longer to suppress. How long before their guards became impatient? “I am sorry there is insufficient time to explain fully. We cannot expect soon to have another unmonitored gathering.”

  As succinctly as she could, Gwu made her case. Her fear that three apparent failures—the crew-kindred’s retreat into su
spended automation, the disappearance of the Harmony, and most recently the rigged lifeboat disaster—would cause the Unity to abandon interstellar travel. Her dread of the Unity remaining forever at risk of an axial flip, trapped by its misunderstanding of the disastrous mission. How terse and emphatic—how much like the Foremost—I have become.

  Her turned-down earphones buzzed with the guards’ growing impatience. T’Brk Cha improvised that the pump must have failed long before it overheated to spark the explosion. They still needed to clear long-clogged pipes. Gwu hoped the translator would not recognize the panic in the youngster’s voice. “We must finish,” she told the huddled team.

  “Ka, what do you suggest?” T’chk Dwu asked. Anxiety had displaced the recent hint of skepticism in his voice.

  “I believe the Unity must be informed the technology works. A crew-kindred can safely cross interstellar distances.” Even though it had taken K’vithian hijackers to keep us awake as their technicians. She squeezed Swee’s tentacle. “Whatever the consequences to us. What are your thoughts?”

  The latest stunned silence gave way to new murmurs: of confusion, shock, even sympathy for her burdens. None questioned that the reawakened T’bck Ra would get only one chance to send their desperate message. None would risk that opportunity to communicate on contacting the humans, with whom their captors were evidently allied. None doubted the K’vithians would exact harsh retribution.

  And none put personal wellbeing before the safety of the Unity. The whispered consultation converged quickly to agreement with her proposition. Never had she been more proud of the crew-kindred and of her kind.

  But were they too late?