The New Space Opera 2 (28 page)

For a long, long moment she was immobilized in nearly complete sensory deprivation. Siddiq realized that she could hear a faint pinging—something coming into thermal equilibrium as air returned in sufficient pressure to carry sound to her ears.

The bulkhead behind her dilated open and she stepped backward into a dimly lit passageway. She hadn't bothered with weapons for this trip. The Ekumen would not attempt to slay her here. And like most Befores, Siddiq was very hard to kill. Those of her brethren who weren't extremely high-survival had died out long ago.

Father Goulo waited there.

He'd always seemed to her on the verge of attack, for all of his vows of pacifism. The man was as muscular-thin as the Before Michaela Cannon, though he was a mainline human of the current generation.
Mayflies
, she thought, then cast the word aside. Short-lived or not, it didn't matter. This man was here now, with the next piece of her project.

She looked him over. Father Goulo kept his hair as close-cropped as any Marine, and favored small steel-framed spectacles with round lenses of ground glass, as if he dwelt on some unRecontacted world still reeling from the Mistake. An anachronism of a man, traveling alone on an anachronism of a ship.

“Yes,” he said in answer to the question she had not asked. He spoke Polish in that slow, thin voice of his, accent untraceable even to her very experienced ears. “
Sword and Arm
still carries a fully maintained thread needle drive.”

She had Polish, too, legacy of a childhood almost a millennium and a half gone in twenty-first-century Wroclaw. “How would you
know
?”

“
I
know.” Father Goulo removed his spectacles and polished them on the sleeve of his crimson robe. “That is sufficient.” He restored his glasses to his face and stared quietly at her. “How do
you
know our project will succeed?” The Ekumen priest reached out to touch her bare chest. “You have frost on your skin.”

“Virtually the entire universe is very, very cold, Father.”

Father Goulo rubbed his fingertips together, a tiny stream of bright
crystals flaking away. “Some might find it distressing that you wander hard vacuum without a pressure suit.”

“Some might suck on my icy ass,” she replied. This conversation was growing tiresome. “Now do you have the project ready?”

Goulo switched to Polito, though his curious accent followed him. “I have spent the last six years-subjective aboard this ship in the absence of human company precisely in order to ensure that the project is ready.” The father pursed his lips, which was as much expression as she had ever seen from him. “Only a man of my education and experience could have hoped to succeed without either one of us arriving at the madhouse.”

She followed his language change. “Either one of you…?”

“The project is awake.” One eyebrow twitched. “It has grown quite adept at playing go, these past years.”

Go. A children's game, checkers for the quicker-witted. “And it is ready?”

“For your purposes?” Father Goulo didn't actually shrug, but she got the impression of a shrug in some subtle change in the set of his shoulder. “I could not say, madam. You are the starship captain, the mighty Before. I am merely a programmer who serves the majesty of the divine through the poor vehicle of the Ekumen.”

“You have never been
merely
anything in your life, Father.” The man had a mind like a Before, for all that he couldn't be much older than fifty. Not with current-state medtech in the Imperium Humanum. “Now, I would like to meet the project.”

“Please, Captain, step this way.”

She followed Father Goulo through another irised hatch into a room that glowed a deep, low-lux crimson.

Something whispered within, a voice bidding them welcome in a voice of poetry and madness.

CONTEXT

Humanity had spread across three thousand light-years of the Orion Arm, spilling into the deeper, darker spaces outside the trail of stars that led coreward from old Earth. The Polity was unified, in its way; and unopposed.

Then the Mistake had happened. The Fermi paradox unraveled catastrophically. The underlying metastability of a vast quasi-democracy
including more than two thousand worlds, over a million habitats, and countless ship-clades was betrayed, which caused the deaths of trillions.

What had begun as an almost accidental expansion, then morphed into a bid for species immortality, very nearly became a yawning grave of stardust and radioactive debris.

The attackers vanished as mysteriously and swiftly as they had emerged. They left little evidence behind as to who they were, or what their purposes might be beyond the obvious goal of extinction of the Polity.

Still,
H. sap
is harder to kill than an infestation of cockroaches in an algae-based oxygen scrubber. The combination of stealthed attacks, wetware memebombs, and culture viruses that raged along the interstellar shipping lanes was enough to stop all visible technological activity for at least three generations, but it wasn't enough to drown out the raging sense of purpose that had driven our most distant ancestors down out of the trees onto the lost African savannah.

The human race would never go home to die.

C
ANNON, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

Kallus slipped Cannon's door routines and entered the reserve bridge. Which was well enough; the Before had opened a security hole for him to that purpose, but some part of her still felt nerved when someone penetrated her perimeter.

He was a handsome enough man, for a mainline human. Medium-height, thick-bodied, gray at his temples, but with a squared face and big hands and pale blue eyes that would have piqued interest from a statue. She'd never been much for men, even back when her body might have known what to do with one—women had always been her style, certain women specifically, and
there
was a memory to be pushed aside—but Kallus had a way about him which stirred old ghosts in her dormant hormonal systems.

“Before,” he said.

Kallus was always properly respectful to her, but with a quiet leer in his voice. Perhaps it was that tone that stirred memories. She had a body like corpse-leather, which didn't attract many, not even those who failed to be properly terrified of Befores.

“Help me with something.”

Kallus nodded, smiling.

“Sometimes I think too much like a Before. Especially when contemplating another Before.”

“None of you is exactly human, Michaela. Of course you think like a Before.”

“So think like a human,” she urged. “What in the Mistake is Captain Siddiq doing leading a mutiny against her own command? And why is she doing it down on the surface of Sidero while the fighting's going on here?”

“Siddiq?” Kallus seemed surprised, for perhaps the first time in the thirty years-objective she'd known him.

“The Before Raisa Siddiq,” Cannon said dryly. “I am certain you've made her acquaintance.”

“I was wondering where she was.” Kallus tugged his chin. “I'd figured her for dropping off the network mesh to be invisible in the fighting.”

“She's dropped off our entire orbit. Downside on Sidero, don't know where without a lot more survey assets than we bothered to bring with us on this little jaunt.”

“Captain made her movements nonreportable.”

“Precisely.” Cannon called up a projection map of Sidero's surface. “So where did she go, and why?”

Kallus stifled a laugh. “On a hollow iron world with fullerene snow? My best guess is temporal psychosis. Gets all you Befores in the end. Human mind isn't designed to live a thousand years and more.”

Cannon shook off a flash of anger. Now was not the moment. “
Never
jest about that.”

“I am not jesting, Michaela. There's a reason nobody's made more of you since the Mistake. Siddiq cracking up is the most sensible explanation, given what we know.”

She had to rein in her voice. “Kallus. Do not trifle with me. I am not concerned with what we
know
. I'm concerned with what we
don't
know. Raisa is not suffering from temporal psychosis.”

The name had slipped out; she hadn't meant to say it. Was
she
weakening?

Kallus, being the man he was, didn't miss the mistake. “Raisa? Five years-objective on this starship and I've never heard you call the Captain by her first name.”

Cannon's anger finally got the better of her, riding a mix of old betrayal
and a bitter cocktail of the years. “Kallus, if you ever use that name in my presence again, so help me, it will be the last word that ever passes your lips.”

He stared past her shoulder at a glowing image. She turned to see a painfully young Raisa, hair spread in sunlight, walking with a laughing woman who was far too familiar.

“No…” whispered the Before Michaela Cannon.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

The starship was distressed, or at least what passed for distress amid the fluid pairs of her shipmind. Unstable conditions going unaddressed created a cascading series of alarms with escalating priorities that were inherently disturbing.

The degree of disruption within her decks was approaching intolerable. Seven deaths had occurred so far. Eleven more crew were wounded with a high likelihood of imminent fatalities.

Plan Federo forbade her from dispatching aid. Likewise, she couldn't respond to the emergency conditions all over herself except by direct, literal request.

Meanwhile, Captain Siddiq's comprehensive unreportability was itself triggering a whole new series of failure conditions and alarms.
Polyphemus
was indeed distinctly uncomfortable.

She could not oppose Plan Federo. Cannon's logic barbs were set far too deep in the shipmind's undercode. But she could work around the perimeters of the restrictions laid upon her by the two warring women.

The Before Michaela Cannon had been deep in conversation when the starship decided to intervene.
Polyphemus
needed her people to be aligned. The mutiny had to stop.

She called up media clips—the oldest clips—to bring memory back to the mind of the ones who were cutting her away from her strength. One she shifted to Cannon, another she placed on store-and-forward for the Captain whenever Siddiq returned to reportability.

The starship wished, not for the first time, that she could bypass the compartmentalization infrastructures in her mentarium, to see into subsystems and sensor grids denied to her by process traps, operational requirements, or the sorts of overrides set into her by the Befores Michaela Cannon and Raisa Siddiq.

Polyphemus
found herself with a new sensation rising to overcome her sense of distress. After some time, she identified it as anger.

S
IDDIQ, ABOARD
S
WORD AND
A
RM

“I am ready,” whispered the project. Its voice hissed from the very air of the room—a neat, simple trick of molecular manipulation which only worked inside well-controlled spaces.

Siddiq stared down at the thing in the box.

The project lay quivering amid a gel-matrix in a medical carrier. No, that wasn't right, the Captain realized. The project
was
a gel-matrix in a medical carrier.

Biological computing. A twist of horror shuddered through her. Somehow she'd not realized it would come to this.

“You used the human genome to build this?” Siddiq asked.

“
I
did not,” replied Father Goulo. “But yes, it was used. How else were we to develop an architecture utterly independent of the quantum matrices that underlie shipminds?”

There is a quantum matrix inside my head
, Siddiq thought. She held the words very far back inside, as a cascade of data about coal beds opened into her mind. “Why did it matter?” she asked.