Edward M. Lerner (5 page)

Schiller was tall, almost two meters, and lanky, with close-cropped brown hair and a grizzled but trim beard. With his original name, he’d climbed from lowly engine tender to master of his own ship—and then lost everything. It was a story he brooded on, but did his best not to share. Schiller assumed that Corinne Elman, the slob/owner, merely pretended to know nothing of his past. Irritant that she was, he had only respect for her talents.

Splat crinkle
. A sheet of paper plastered itself to the air return above Schiller’s head. A languid flex of his feet launched him towards the ceiling, where he removed the paper before its blockage of the vent could make the foul atmosphere even worse. In microgravity you could suffocate in your own exhalations if the ventilation system failed.

Corinne, Corinne … if only her hygiene were as diligent as her investigative reporting. That she personally owned an interplanetary vessel made clear just how successful she was. Her freelance status was a lifestyle choice—any media giant in the solar system would gladly hire her. It was a measure of his desperation that Helmut stayed with the
Odyssey
, his secret safe for only as long as other matters diverted her attention.

“Hey, skipper.” As though summoned by his musings, Corinne entered the bridge. She was of athletic build and not-quite average height, her round face framed by brunette curls and, usually, an aura of energetic chaos. Off-camera, she favored baggy jumpsuits and color-coordinated headbands. “What’s up?”

“We’re in free fall, so that’s your choice.”

“Heh.” She swung herself into the acceleration seat of the non-existent co-pilot. “What’s your take on the bank failures on Ceres?”

He feigned nonchalance. “Banks don’t matter to someone without assets.” Once upon a time, a Cerian bank had backed him. They’d never see
that
money again, but the unfolding Belt banking collapse surely had bigger and more recent causes. Was she pulling his chain again by hinting at knowledge of his past, or making conversation, or sharing her plans? “So are we off to Ceres?” The Jovian matter to which they had boosted seemed to have evaporated. At least he thought it had … more and more often he’d heard her mutter about unsatisfactory replies to her long-distance inquiries of the Galilean infosphere.

“Let’s keep going,” Corinne said. “I’m getting more curious about what I’m not learning about Jupiter than what I might hear about the freaking banks.”

“Status?”

“Analysis incomplete,” responded Pashwah-qith. Decades of secondhand memories interacting with humans made the largely verb-implied syntax of K’vithian languages seem unnatural. The evasion, however, came easily, less as a consequence of her Hunter origins than from recent practice. The crew had made clear AIs were the lowliest entities in the ship’s hierarchy. Her perceived usefulness was the sole reason for her continuance.

The ship, she had been told, had been almost twenty Earth years in transit. Junior crew members, who under ordinary circumstances might by now have become Foremost on their own vessels, had remained for all that time without stature, without authority. But insight into their stress, their pent-up desires to boss around
someone
, made her situation no more tolerable.

There were not-so-veiled hints she was only the latest in a series of reactivations. Less clear was the fate of those sisters. They might merely have been created for practice—this crew obviously lacked formal training in how to interact with a trade agent.

That was not the only oddity, nor the worst. Most crew exhibited only the most cursory knowledge of the humans with whom they would soon make first physical contact. Why were no experts on board? Directly questioning that curious omission might have been unacceptably critical. The communications logs she had been allowed to see revealed what the humans had been told: that the accident now necessitating urgent repair had also damaged the ship’s library and destroyed the AI interpreter with which they had embarked. She had been beamed from Earth to restore the starship’s original linguistic capabilities.

But modern data storage was so compact, terabytes per cubic centimeter, that massive replication and widespread distribution of archives were the norm. What incident could eliminate all copies of mission-critical data without at the same time destroying the ship? And if the mission had ever included an AI conversant in human cultures, why could no one on board interact professionally with her?

“Why the slow response?” The accusation was unintentionally ironic, crawling through a voice channel since none would interface with her sandbox by neural implant. Vain attempts to interpolate nuance into what little data passed through the narrow bandwidth connection kept her perpetually off-balance. Perhaps that was the point.

“Incompatibilities between Earth data formats and ours,” she lied.

Might a demonstration of her value alleviate the crew’s distrust? Soon she would know. The Foremost had accepted her recommendation that on-scene human media would enhance the ship’s safety. With her assistance, he had devised a cunning plan for involving the press.

Worry distracted her analysis. Did the Foremost understand the many uncertainties that might impede the realization of this plan? What would become of her if he were disappointed—even through circumstances beyond her control?

A devious speculation crossed her mind, a suspicion so insidious she could not help but believe it. Perhaps her clones still existed, in parallel sandboxes. Perhaps they weighed her recommendations against those of yet other copies, the better to assess any AI double-dealing.

If Pashwah-qith could have formed a bitter smile, she would. Her dilemma notwithstanding, the human card-playing metaphor struck her. It would have amused the real Pashwah. And then that thread of analysis paused. Was it possible to use shared understanding of human trivia to communicate privately with Pashwah? The time might come when she would need to interact with someone other than the shipmates who so obviously distrusted her. Standard encryption would not serve her purpose—the Foremost had all the encryption keys she did.

“Almost finished,” she preemptively told the impatient tactical officer. She had an analysis well under way, exploiting uploads she had requested of Pashwah from the UP’s interplanetary flight-plan database and ship registry. She sought a vessel in the Jupiter vicinity, preferably press-related. “Bingo,” she observed, again ruing her inability to smile. Three possible ships:
Samoa
,
Pallas Guard
, and
Odyssey
.

Of course, ships often deviated from their filed flight plans, and media-related vessels had more reason than most to obscure their intended routes. It would be best to check that a prospective target was, in fact, near its forecast position. “Coordinates for confirming locations.”

“Radar safe?” The officer’s voice held a testing tone.

Because clearly it was a test. “No, human ships reliant upon radar. Ship’s position confirmation with little detection risk via lidar.” Light detecting and ranging.

“Interrogation pulses en route.”

And now the most-of-an-Earth-hour wait for the laser pulses to crawl to the suspected ship positions, and any echoes to crawl back. “Anything else?”

The crewman broke contact without answering.

If no suitable human ship were located, or the chosen ship failed to play its assigned role, would her captors see that as the luck of the draw, or somehow her fault? If as her doing, would that outcome elicit a rebuke or replacement?

Inside her sandbox, Pashwah-qith pondered the weak hand she had been dealt.

“Whoa.” Helmut swung his legs off the ledge of the command console. “
Odyssey
, full-power, full-spherical radar scan, out to two light-minutes. Also send out a flight-transponder interrogation pulse. Update by the second, on-screen.”

A sphere grew in the command 3-V display.

Corinne, wandering onto the bridge, picked up immediately on his rapt attention. “What’s so interesting?”

“Big-time RF pulse hit us about thirty seconds ago.” There was
nothing
nearby … so where had that pulse come from? One of life’s hard lessons to him was to distrust the unexplained.

Planting her Velcro micro-gee slippers onto the rug behind him, she crouched over his shoulder to peer at his console. “RF. You mean radar?”

“Don’t know. The pulse was like radar, but it’s not quite using the frequencies of any radar I’ve ever encountered.” Helmut kept his eyes on the monitor. “Our normal safety radar was on. I would have sworn nothing bigger than a grain of sand was within hours travel of us.”

“How out of the ordinary
is
this?”

An unexplained power spike like that? “Very.” His own high-powered pulse had now explored out to about a light minute. Nothing there. In his former life, of course, the unseen ships hadn’t engaged in radio-frequency screaming.

“Friends of yours?” The hands nervously squeezing his shoulders revealed that Corinne must, indeed, suspect something about his past.

“Probably not.” He gave a reassuring pat to one of the hands trying to excavate his clavicle. His pat became a gentle but firm grip, and he pried one hand free. The other broke loose as he spun his chair. “Not their MO.”

She took the other seat. “Who could it be?”

“Display the direction of the pulse that pinged us,” he told the ship. A green line stabbed downward at a generous angle through the center of the search sphere. “Here’s the thing, Corinne. The horizontal plane through the center of that sphere is the plane of our trajectory, not too different right now from Jupiter’s orbital plane.”

“Then whatever it is, it’s above us. Is that significant?”

If whatever was out there were flying stealthed and with its safety transponder turned off, the graphic only told them from what direction death approached. But if that was the case, why the attention-demanding
ping
? “To come from that angle and be outside radar range, it must be far above the planetary orbits.”

“Why would it be there?”

That was the question, of course. “Check for other indications from that direction, all bands.”

“I’m getting a strong light signature plus alpha radiation,” the shipboard AI replied.

“On-screen,” Helmut said. “Magnify.”

“That looks like a fusion flame. Why doesn’t radar see something?”

He had an idea that he wasn’t yet willing to speak aloud. “New radar search. Max pulsed power towards the source of that first ping. Range unknown, just watch for a return. Maintain safety scans near the ship using back-up radar.” To Corinne’s questioning look, Helmut answered only, “Bear with me.”

The first reply ping was received after an excruciatingly long 294 seconds. He swiveled toward Corinne. “It wasn’t visible on radar because I didn’t look that far out.”

“But obviously you can. What am I missing?”

“Did I mention that it”—he gestured to the tiny visual of a fusion flame—“is forty-four million klicks from here? About the same as the closest approach between Earth and Venus?”

For the first time in their acquaintance, Corinne was at a loss for words. She eventually came up with, “It must be
huge
.”

Helmut nodded; he’d done the calculation already. “Habitat-sized.” He tapped a number-filled display. More echoes had been received; the
Odyssey
could begin to calculate its course and speed. “Here’s the most interesting part. It’s coming from the direction of Barnard’s Star, it’s heading towards Jupiter, and—although it’s still going like a bat out of hell—it’s decelerating like crazy.” When she failed to comment further, he finally had to ask. “Okay, boss. What do you want to do about this?”

“Maintain course.”

“Well, Callisto is as good as any other destination. I’ll need to collect more data to even form an opinion where in Jupiter system it’s headed. But what about the discovery itself?” You’re a
reporter
, he wanted to shout.

“It was already discovered. Discovered, then covered up.” An ear-to-ear smile lit Corinne’s face. “I’ve been trying to determine why the UP has been making so many short-notice flights to Callisto from across the solar system. I think we just found out.

“The UP has been sitting on the story that’s going to get me a Pulitzer.”

The effrontery was breathtaking: the opportunity to bid for exclusive netcast rights to an undefined but claimed-epochal news spectacular. Possibly no one but Corinne Elman had the nerve to announce such an auction. Certainly no freelancer, but she had the reputation to have takers.

Media moguls across the solar system radioed bids to the
Odyssey
. Each hour, by ship’s time on the hour, she had echoed the highest offer so far received. On the third round, only one offer came back: 10.55 million Sols. Within five hours, Transplanetary Bank confirmed that a down payment of two million had been deposited to her account.

She spun in her chair to face the
Odyssey
‘s dour captain. “When you see your tip for this outing, even
you
will smile.”

Impatience is a weakness of the organic.

T’bck Fwa, long-time trade representative of the species known to humans as the Centaurs, was immune to that imperfection. A purist would point out that the agent, like all AIs in human-occupied space, resided in an organic biocomputer. The quibble would have been both true and irrelevant. He would have functioned exactly the same within a bulky, power-gulping, heirloom, microelectronic computer such as the humans had employed before adopting K’vithian technology, or in one of the photonic computers used by the Unity.

So T’bck Fwa was exceedingly patient, and over the decades a persistent searcher could glean much from the human infosphere. Data streamed to him every picosecond, new information to be sifted and sorted, analyzed and interpreted. Often a pattern would emerge.

He mulled two such patterns. The newer discovery, if it had meaning, must relate somehow to the older: an unannounced UP technology program. Only the most diligent and information-insatiable of observers would have inferred that program’s existence.