InterstellarNet: New Order Page 10

  She had brushed her fur carefully and straightened her utility belt. With a soft cloth she polished a smudge from her decorative buckle. Her escorts would not notice, nor, most likely, would Mashkith, but she would know she was at her best. “I am ready. Bring me to the Foremost.”

  Logic made clear that humans in their billions teemed nearby. During that long ago, painstaking evaluation of possible destinations, she had pored over uploaded human and K’vithian records. Her knowledge was sadly out of date, but one remark of a pre-United Planets madman had never released its grip on her thoughts.

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

  This Joseph Stalin was long dead, but had humanity changed? If the United Planets were to have antimatter and interstellar travel, would the Unity become the next statistic?

  She must not allow that to happen.

  Jupiter loomed on the holo wall of the Foremost’s cabin. Small black disks, the shadows of several moons, crept across the cloud tops like a celestial timepiece. To what final resolution did it count?

  My leadership has brought us this far. It will overcome this problem, too.

  This wall display usually summarized ship’s status. Mashkith could restore that information with a thought. Why favor the prisoners’ ka, their Foremost, with his own understanding of the data? A timid knock rattled his door. “Enter.”

  K’Choi Gwu ka glided into the room, her fluid, many-limbed gait still a wonder after all these years. She towered over the Hunter crew who escorted her. “Thank you for seeing me.” Her voice was muffled by the mask that protected her from the sulfur compounds ubiquitous to the Hunter part of the ship.

  She did not react to the holo. Surely the Great Red Spot unambiguously identified the gas giant as Jupiter. She might have learned from careless crew where they were, or deduced it on her own. She might have thought the image was a recording or simulation, presented as disinformation. Or she might simply have enough self-control to give nothing away.

  Did she, too, tire of thinking always several steps ahead? Of the attempt to interpret every circumstance from every possible point of view? Mashkith felt a moment of unaccustomed kinship with her. To be Foremost is to be always on duty, ever lonely.

  “Chair.” It was an order, not a courtesy. He remained standing. To the guards, he added, “To your duties.” The hatch slid shut behind them. “Your request for a meeting, ka. Explanation.”

  From pouches of her utility belt, Gwu removed several small plants sealed in clear bags. Damp-seeming dirt clung to their roots. Water beads sparkled on the leaves. Most of the leaves were green, although speckled with ragged, brown-edged holes. The remainder were mostly brown and sere. “The biosphere is going dormant. If this continues, we will die.”

  One of the shadows now crossing Jupiter was cast by the human world of Callisto, where even now new provisions were being staged. “Resupply imminent. Not an issue.”

  “Respectfully, Foremost, it is a big issue.” Ripples traveled from tips to base of her tentacles and reflected.

  Laughter? She dared to mock him?

  “Nervous laughter,” offered the AI translator by implant. “Fear.”

  “Explanation,” Mashkith repeated.

  “Simply, there have been too many shocks to the biosphere. It’s triggering a quiescent state. Nature’s safety shutdown.” She shivered, and this gesture had no hint of humor to it. “Life’s summer.”

  Seasons were an astronomical phenomenon. At Mashkith’s puzzled, silent inquiry, a many-times real time, not-to-scale graphic of the Unity’s home system replaced the panorama of Jupiter. Planets spun and swooped about their suns. The third world of four orbiting the yellow sun blinked slowly, denoting the ancestral home its occupants called Chel Kra: Haven. More slowly, the suns, one yellow and one orange, traced elongated ellipses about their center of mass.

  Ah. Before the herds developed medical technology, few would have lived to see the orange companion star brighten more than once: life’s summer. But however scenic the occurrence, its climactic effect was surely trivial. At its nearest approach, the orange interloper was about as distant from Primary as this system’s ringed giant from its sun.

  “A brief, perhaps one percent increase in heating. Insignificant.” An internal query yielded a final fact: The binaries were, in real time, nearly at their most distant positions. Assume the biosphere of Victorious somehow mimicked, and was sensitive to, Haven’s seasons. Would not the shipboard ecology be synched with the planetary ecology from which it sprang?

  “Foremosts never fools.” That wasn’t universally true, of course. Mashkith’s own grandfather, he whose brilliance-become-folly had ultimately sent Arblen Ems in hasty flight to the cometary rim, was an all-too-personal exception. The memory made him lonely and angry at the same time.

  Too much was ongoing in his current dealings with the humans to lose focus. Any ruse the ka might be attempting he could attend to later. The only important matter with the prisoners was that the repairs proceeded. “Guards.”

  Then the herbivore did surprise him.

  “Foremost, respectfully, you do not understand.” Again the nervous laugh. “Your world has K’far.”

  “Guards, at standby. Clarification?”

  And then Mashkith did understand. K’far and K’vith were tightly spin-coupled, more so even than Earth and its oversized moon. That coupling, by conservation of angular momentum, stabilized the axial inclinations of both worlds against perturbation.

  The peril of life’s summer did not arise from a temporary blip in insolation. Without a large satellite of its own to anchor it, Haven was prone to dramatic shifts in axial tilt. Haven was virtually untilted, virtually without seasons—now. It had been thus for the entire brief period of civilized occupancy. But how often had the gravitational tug of the inrushing companion star caused severe and swift shifts in the axial tilt of Haven? Surely often enough for protective dormancy to be a survival characteristic.

  As would be the ability to quickly migrate long distances across the planet to anywhere still able to produce food. Mashkith imagined a starving herbivore herd retreating in disciplined order across a forest suddenly become snowy wasteland or searing desert, beset on all sides by packs of desperate carnivores. Was this why the ka’s ancestors had come down from the trees? Sudden necessity?

  The Unity’s caution and social cohesion finally made sense to him. So did their ability to stick with a program of research and a plan of action long enough to master even antimatter and interstellar travel. Their home was that dangerous.

  But what was the relevance? “Relationship to ship’s biosphere?”

  “Foremost, despite our best efforts, sulfur compounds continue to infiltrate the farming and hydroponics sections of the ship. Living in such proximity, it is unavoidable. More and more plants are reacting to the frequent stresses as though to the perils of a life’s summer.” Nervous laugh. “They cannot do astronomy.”

  When that which would become Victorious had emerged from the interstellar darkness, Arblen Ems had been teetering on the brink of extinction. The clan’s scattered outposts had begun consolidating to a final few, had been driven to scavenging from abandoned stations—and raiding bases of other clans, where that could be safely and anonymously done—for parts and equipment whose resupply from the inner system was embargoed by the Great Clans.

  The clan’s remaining ships now masqueraded as auxiliary vessels of the starship. A few Hunter aeroponics facilities had been installed into Victorious. The familiar plants provided a touch of home for the crew. More recently, an aeroponics facility had been used for show, for the humans. Those meager Hunter resources could not begin to sustain life across Victorious, even if the K’vithian biota did not exude sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide in quantities toxic to the prisoners whose knowledge of ship’s systems remained so valuable.

  The herd’s biosphere would need fixing, but, like everything else, for now that was secondary to the antimatter n
egotiations. “Your guidance, ka?” The response she gave him was tentative, but perhaps that was to be expected. She proposed experimentation with lighting, temperature, humidity, and trace-chemical levels. Nothing she suggested could hurt, and perhaps they would learn something useful.

  Faster than the guards could return to escort the ka to her quarters, Mashkith had delegated by implant to his tactical officer. Rashk Lothwer could oversee the prisoners’ reactivation of selected processing levels of the shipboard instrumentation to monitor those experiments.

  Gwu was old and tired and insane, and she knew it. To her list of attributes, she now added one that was not a complaint. She was relieved.

  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-anticipa
ted, 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.