| “There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."
—Niccolò Machiavelli
Illustrated by John Allemand
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PROLOGUE
Good fences, said the poet, make good neighbors . . . and interstellar distances made very good fences.
For a century and a half, Earth and a growing number of its interstellar neighbors had been in radio contact. A vigorous commerce in intellectual property had resulted, accelerating and converging the technical progress of all the species involved. The crowning achievement of InterstellarNet was the development of, and cross-species agreement upon, artificially intelligent surrogates as local representatives for distant societies.
Quarantine procedures strictly governed the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other. Some thought of this trade mechanism as a fence within a fence. Only once, more than half a century earlier, had an inner fence been breached. A trapdoor hidden within imported biocomputers, technology that had been licensed by Earth from the intelligent species of Barnard’s Star, was exploited by their trade agent. The attempt at extortion had been foiled, the unsuspected vulnerability of adopted technology expunged, and the AI returned to its containment.
Good fences make good neighbors, and interstellar distances made very good fences.
Made very good fences. . . .
The ship hurtled through the darkness, a tiny bubble of purpose within an uncaring void. Its interior could be called warm only by comparison to the near absolute zero that surrounded it, of benefit to the proper functioning of shipboard mechanisms but far too cold to sustain any known form of life.
Relative to the binary star toward which the ship aimed, it had a velocity just above one-tenth light speed. Mostly it coasted; only occasional mid-course corrections, and even rarer blasts from its anti-space-junk lasers, revealed the presence of intelligence guiding the traveler.
That shipboard intelligence was artificial, and its mission was nearly complete. Responsive to the final directives it had been given many years earlier, it now transmitted by tight radio beam to the looming solar system.
“This is lifeboat three of Harmony. The crew-kindred are dead. Repeat: The crew-kindred are dead.
“My data are fragmented and inconsistent. Downloads from Harmony appear to indicate that systems became erratic and unstable. Records are unreliable.
“Of ten lifeboats, only seven launched successfully. None but this vessel remains. In deep space, the interstellar drive exhibits an unexplained variability. Telemetry and analysis to follow.”
But the only further information sent ahead, as lifeboat three transformed into an eruption of pure energy, was by the imprinting of its one-time velocity into the blue shift of gamma rays.
CHAPTER 1
Art tried to take life one day at a time, but sometimes several days conspired to attack him at once.
Two messages tagged with the highest possible priority code reached him moments apart, and at a spectacularly inconvenient time. He’d never received a communica-tion of that urgency; his habit, at times when others simply disabled their neural infosphere interfaces, was to block traffic below the threshold he privately termed TEOTWAWKI.
The end of the world as we know it.
He was thirty meters behind the power boat, intent on mastering a skill easily within the capabilities of a modestly coordinated ten-year-old. A modestly coordinated Earth-reared ten-year-old, anyway. Exercise and a nanotech-enhanced skeleton only went so far . . . Art’s reflexes remained those of a native Martian, raised in gravity scarcely one-third standard. But wasn’t the purpose of a vacation to try new things?
White knuckled, he clutched the wooden handle of the tow rope. His skis slap-slapped over the swells that had from inside the boat appeared the merest of ripples. In jaw-clenched acquiescence to gestured encouragement from the boat, he was, at the instant the first alarm buzzed inside his head, sliding down the outside edge of the vee-shaped wake.
Startled, Art let dip the tip of one ski. The water ripped the ski off his foot. From the stern of the boat, the resort’s spotter shouted advice. Improbably, Art got the bare foot safely to the rear of his other ski. Route to voicemail, he ordered his implant as he wobbled.
Then the second call came. The remaining ski slewed out from under him and went flying. Momentum propelled him forward even as the boat throttled back. Time slowed to a crawl as the lake surface rose up inexorably to smack him. Belatedly, he released the tow handle.
He was bobbing in the water, kept afloat by his life jacket, when the launch circled back. “You okay, Art?” called the spotter. “Arthur? Dr. Walsh!”
Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the physical world. “I’m fine. A bit surprised is all.” Only when he tried to dog-paddle to the launch did Art notice the improbable bend in his right forearm. He tipped his head at the ladder just hung over the boat’s side. “Mind giving me a hand up? My arm seems to be broken.”
Wincing with each wave the boat hit as it sped him to the pier, he began placing his own infosphere calls. They were rated TEOTWAWKI, too.
* * *
While Art’s grandparents and parents, like most Martians, showed little interest in pre-immigration genealogy (dubbed “ancient history”), his great-grandparents claimed roots from across Europe. His appearance supported their assertions. He had classical Mediterranean features and body build—this trip he’d seen the like on statues in museums throughout Spain and Greece—incongruously paired with pale blue eyes and blond, almost white hair. The latter part of his heritage had vigorously asserted itself as sunburn the first day of his vacation. It brought with it a random snippet of memory, something about mad dogs and Englishmen.
The sunburn itched. The skin under his hour-old cast itched. Most of all, his curiosity bump itched. That he had been able to do something about.
From his villa balcony, a panorama of sky and sand and the Mediterranean Sea glowed in shades of blue and white not to be seen on Mars. Art closed his eyes, the better to take in his mind’s-eye view. Across the visualized table of a virtual office an avatar awaited. The infosphere representation of Bhai Banda Singh, secretary-general of the Interstellar Commerce Union, was impeccably tailored and dignified in bearing. Bhai’s control was first-rate; for all Art knew, his boss was wearing pajamas and drinking hot cocoa.
In the unseen real world, waves lapped soothingly on the beach. Art took a deep breath. “We have a situation.” As though shouting TEOTWAWKI hadn’t already conveyed that. “About two hours ago, radio volume from Barnard’s Star jumped by a factor of thousands. The message body is encrypted, but it’s wrapped in standard InterstellarNet protocol and addressed to the Snake trade agent.” Barnard’s Star lay in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder—which made its natives, colloquially, the Snakes. The time was long past when Snake was considered politically incorrect. It was the notion of being held or handled, in fact, which offended the aliens. Their name for themselves—and reserved for themselves—was Hunters. “A funny thing . . . between bursts of the new, loud message, we’re still getting signal at the usual power level.” That pretty well encapsulated the news flash that had cost Art his first ski.
Behind the thoughtful expression of his avatar, the ICU’s secretary-general was doing the math. The dim red dwarf sun known as Barnard’s Star was six light-years distant. Radio signals attenuate with the square of the distance. The bursts were thousands of times stronger than the background signal. If the new transmitter was comparable in strength to the old one, then. . . . “We have guests on our doorstep. How close are they?”
The calculation had a big margin of error, but bosses have prerogatives. “Triangulating bearings taken from Earth and the moon, my team says less than fifty billion kilometers.” That put the transmitter far outside the solar system—but also more than ninety-nine percent of the way here from Barnard’s Star. Radar would need days to confirm and refine the numbers.
Art tried and failed to reach an itch with a pencil, while—he hoped—his uninjured avatar sat professionally still at the table. Fortunately, the nanodocs should have the bones knitted within days. How did people ever wear casts for weeks? “Item number two is a call from Pashwah,” who was the Snakes’ artificially intelligent trade agent to humanity. Then Art shared the part of Pashwah’s call his boss could not have deduced, that had cost him his second ski and, damn the itch, a broken arm. “The starship is badly damaged.
“There is a crew on board, and they need our help.”
CHAPTER 2
InterstellarNet’s existence discouraged the observation of several nearby stars. Measurements by the locals were invariably better and cheaper than scrutiny from afar, so telescopes were reserved for stars too inconsiderate to have scientists who sent reports.
Before InterstellarNet, amateurs had directed their often-ingenious antenna arrays towards those same nearby stars in search of extraterrestrials. Now that ETs had been found, and humanity’s dealings with those aliens entrusted to securely encrypted commercial communications, the hobbyists, too, had lost interest in the immediate neighborhood.
In short, there was no good reason for anyone but the ICU to monitor Barnard’s Star. The only reason for someone else to start looking would be a disruption to InterstellarNet. The fast-approaching Snakes appeared to have worked that out—they limited their high-powered communications to bursts brief and infrequent enough to avoid clobbering redundant copies of the many-times-repeated interstellar messages. Megacorps across the solar system started griping about brief delays in receiving long-expected messages, and the ICU’s presumed incompetence. The ICU accepted the grumbling with uncharacteristic good humor.
And so the imminent arrival of the Snake starship remained a secret of the United Planets, and of the great powers to whom the UP secretary-general confided.
The courier had loomed encouragingly large as the shuttle from Earth approached it for docking. That appearance was deceiving; the hull enclosed mostly fuel tanks. The airlock’s inner hatch closed with what Art objectively knew to be a soft sigh; he heard, as always, a reverberating boom of finality. The habitable quarters were, to be charitable, compact; his cabin scarcely accommodated its fold-down cot. After dumping his flight bag and switching to microgravity Velcro slippers, Art went searching for someplace less claustrophobic.
The Snakes, still a light-day away, had signaled that, low on fuel and supplies, they were heading for Jupiter. There seemed little point in arguing, since a response would take two days to receive and might change nothing. The UP’s still-secret diplomatic mission, having discreetly recruited the best of the best from across the solar system, now scrambled to assemble itself at Callisto base, orbiting Jupiter.
“Hey,” he offered neutrally to the silent man and woman he found in the ship’s mess. They looked to be about his forty years old, give or take a few. Neither was in uniform, which made them fellow members of the mission. It took them a few seconds to look his way, presumably meaning they’d been off somewhere in the infosphere, before they stood. “Art Walsh. I’m with the ICU.”
“I am Eva Gutierrez, from the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, the Buenos Aires campus.” The Spanish grace notes in her English were less noticeable than her British accent. She approached Art’s 180 centimeters in height and seemed fitter than he—not a challenge. Her thick black hair was pulled back into a shoulder-length ponytail, from which a few errant wisps had escaped. Her hazel eyes were widely spaced.
“Keizo Matsunaga, Stanford.” He was short and barrel-chested, with a thin mustache and a slightly askew smile. His T-shirt bore a faded image of one of the Rodin sculptures that adorned the Stanford campus.
They swapped bio files as earlier generations exchanged cardboard business cards. Art’s new colleagues startled, although their reactions showed only briefly. He got that response often enough not to react. Apparently he didn’t look the part of ICU Chief Technology Officer—whatever a CTO should look like. Older and wizened, perhaps. Smart enough to water ski without breaking things.
Acceleration warnings and pilot announcements truncated the social pleasantries.
This was going to be an energy guzzling, powered-all-the-way flight. Art had been promised they would hold the acceleration to one gee for a day to give his broken arm a fighting chance at healing. After that they would step up the pace.
Between interruptions, he established Eva was a theoretical physicist, investigating interstellar-drive technology, and Keizo was a xenosociologist. Art queried for their publications and anything else the ship’s AI could find before their high-energy boost made infosphere retrieval an expensive interplanetary transfer. They retreated to personal studies until the PA system stopped blaring.
Barnard’s Star (local: K’rath): Earth’s second closest interstellar neighbor, after Alpha Centauri. A dim red dwarf, Barnard’s Star went undiscovered despite its proximity until 1916. Its two planets somewhat resemble Mars and a ringless Saturn.
While red dwarves are inhospitable to life due to their feeble energy output, Barnard’s Star is a recognized exception. The major satellite of its sole gas-giant planet sustains not only a viable ecosystem but also intelligent life. This habitable body is called K’vith by its dominant species (see related entry, Snakes).
K’vith benefits from the confluence of three factors. First, K’vith is a moon of a planet, K’far, that orbits very near to its sun. Second, the K’vithian atmosphere provides a pronounced greenhouse effect. Third, K’far induces tremendous tidal effects; the energy coupling manifests itself through strong oceanic movements and active volcanism. Volcanic gases originated and continue to reinforce the greenhouse effect.
K’rath is at least ten billion years old, more than twice the age of Sol. K’rath—and hence its planets—are consequently poor by human standards in heavy elements. Compared to Earth, K’vith is also low on solar-energy input for the vegetative base of its food chainand high on geological stresses. K’vith’s energy– and resource-constrained biosphere is, by terrestrial norms, undiverse and underpopulated. These environmental limitations are generally thought reponsible for the comparatively slow evolution of life and civilization in the K’rath system.
—Internetopedia
“Watch out for that truck!” Art said.
Head swiveling in confusion, Eva half stumbled off, half was propelled off, her treadmill. She landed, totally without grace, on Art. They tumbled to the floor.
She’d probably been jogging on autopilot, her attention somewhere in the infosphere. The treadmill monitor’s scenic display had shown a truck approaching on an intersecting road. Had she even noticed? “That wasn’t nearly as amusing as I’d hoped.”
Climbing back to her feet, Eva gave a wry grin. “Are you okay?”
He sat on the deck, rubbing the arm newly out of its cast. “Just embarrassed. Sorry.”
She gave him a hand up. “Don’t do that again.”
“No chance of that.”
“I’ll be off the treadmill in another few minutes.” She gestured at the mini-gym’s other piece of gear, a stationary bike. “Or did you plan to use that?”
“On second thought, maybe I’ll do the walking course.”
“I’ll join you, if that’s okay.”
The “walking course” consisted of the narrow corridors circling the two decks on which passengers were allowed, and the ladders joining those levels. A circuit took about thirty seconds. I’m trapped like a rat in a maze. On those two decks, Art knew the location of every hatch, duct, ziptite stash, and alarm button.
In total silence, thirty seconds is a long time. “How does our little project affect you?” Eva finally asked.
“It makes me nervous as hell. Assuming light still defines a speed limit, this visit was many years in coming. So why didn’t the Snakes speak up until they were almost on top of us? Having announced themselves, and that their ship is damaged, why have they had so little to add?
“And if they’ve found a way to beat light speed . . . you would know far better than I what that implies about our comparative grasps of physics. I’m no xenophobe, but anyone in my position at the ICU can’t forget how they once exploited a superior knowledge of biocomputing.”
“Not knowing how they got here is killing me—or maybe the swill they call coffee onboard ship is doing me in.” She patted her stomach and grimaced. “Something is getting to me. But I meant at a personal level. Who did this tear you away from?”
The kind of question he never knew how to answer. “My job. Truth be told, my best friends are coworkers.” She gave back some of his silence as they completed the circuit of one deck and climbed down to the other. Fine. “Pre-ICU, I was married. Moving around the solar system, from project site to project site, eventually took care of that.” On one spaceship after another. In newly carved asteroid habitats. Under low domes. He’d been too busy confronting his inner demons to connect with his family.
“Children?”
“A son, nine, and a daughter, fourteen. Good kids. They and Maya live on Luna. I see more of them now than when I was married.”
Some combination of the partially completed jog and the walking circuit kicked in, and he yawned. That gave her an excuse to cut short the conversation. She said goodnight the next time they passed her cabin.
Later, tossing and turning in his own confining compartment, Art realized Eva had volunteered nothing about herself. Inquisitive and simultaneously incommunicative. . . .
She might just be his type.
The bad thing about Earth was that it crushed you every day. The bad thing about everywhere else humans lived was that one slip-up could kill you. It need not even be your slip-up.
Until Art was six (standard), the tunnel mazes of Lowell were all he had ever known. He’d seen holos of the surface, of course, but never actually been on it. Then, his parents announced, they would be traveling clear across Mars to a family reunion. And . . . since it was almost on the way anyhow, they would do a Valle Marineris excursion.
Art had been beside himself for weeks before their vacation. Valle Marineris, the Mariner Valley, was this incredible canyon near the equator. He didn’t quite understand what one-fifth meant; in fact, he had thought it was something small, but Mariner Valley went one-fifth of the way around the world, which sounded big. The holos were awesome. They had tickets for the all-day excursion: an end-to-end flyover, a landing on the canyon floor, and an afternoon crawler ride through a scenic section of the gorge.
One-fifth of the world turned out to be huge!
His sister Tanya was eight. She became bored with the endless flyover soon after he did. They sneaked off to play hide and seek. He was hiding in the tiny closet of a crew cabin when, to a loud boom, the rocketplane shook. It lurched and plummeted. The wisps of cabin light creeping under the closet door disappeared. He shrieked all the way down. They landed hard. He hit his head and passed out.
He came to upside down, bent around a clothes rod, crumpled garments covering his face. The closet door had latched itself shut. There was no inside knob, but it yielded finally to determined kicking—into more darkness. The cabin hatch would not budge.
In time, he understood. A burst fuel pump. An emergency landing. A jagged fuselage rip that depressurized the passenger compartment. An interior hatch pinned shut by the air still in his cabin, its air ducts sealed by automatic emergency dampers. Stunned, sobbing survivors immobilized in emergency ziptite bags. Dazed crew in the rocketplane’s few pressure suits searching their trail of wreckage for bodies—one of which was Tanya’s.
He had screamed himself hoarse in the final plunge; Mars’ thin atmosphere further muffled his shouting. Not even his despairing parents heard his cries for help. Alone in the dark, Art knew only that was he was trapped and alone. The air grew close. In his nest of crew uniforms, he shivered in the deepening cold. The walls, within arm’s reach in every direction, closed in. His hoarse calls faded into whimpers.
Eventually he was found, saved. After more than three hours.
It was a long time before he could sleep without a nightlight.
Snakes (local: Hunters): The intelligent species of the Barnard’s Star (see related entry) system is oxygen-breathing and warm-blooded. They are evolved from pack-hunting carnivores.
Early Snake culture centered on clan structures, an apparent extension of pre-intelligence packs. From that genesis has developed an economic system of pure laissez-faire, caveat-emptor capitalism, centered on competing clan-based corporations. The dominant group dynamics are territoriality between clans—in modern times, the contested “territory” is usually commercial rather than geographical in nature—and competition for status within and between clans. Although normally relevant only to the Snakes, these rivalries have occasionally influenced interstellar relations (see related entry, “Snake Subterfuge”).
Snake civilization has no direct analogue to human government; rather, Snakes employ libertarian subscription to and funding of what most humans consider public services. Only the most critical issues come before an informal council of the major clans/megacorps. The fluid composition of that body is determined in a not fully understood manner believed to reflect clan stature.
—Internetopedia
Until the starship’s unexpected appearance, the Snakes were but one of ten ET species splitting Art’s attention. When Snake-related matters came to the fore, they were usually tied to what was, after all, the core ICU mission: commerce. They dealt with specific trade-worthy technologies or the bits-and-bytes of InterstellarNet operations. He had never before needed to understand K’vith and its civilization—which turned the sprint to Jupiter into a cram session.
More than a century of interspecies communications had amassed a staggering quantity of information. Art found himself struggling to get his arms around so much knowledge. Well, if there was one thing he did know, it was systems engineering. Maybe he could use that.
Electronic engineers devise electronic circuitry, gengineers tailor biological organisms, civil engineers design bridges and dams and space habitats, software engineers write programs, and so on—but systems engineers mostly do not create systems.
Mostly they ask questions.
What are all the functions a system must perform, and are there tradeoffs between those functions? What other systems will this system interact with, and what is the nature of the interactions? Who will use the system, and how foolish are the users against whom this system will be proofed? How reliable must the system be, how will that reliability be achieved, and how will the system behave when, all efforts to the contrary, some pieces break? The only thing other engineers found worse than these interminable questions was deploying a system and then realizing that the questions should have been asked.
Once again, Art had a headful of questions. How, exactly, had all this data about the Snakes been collected? Which sources were validated? What were the trends, contradictions, and omissions?
He had been awake for forty hours straight, but he wasn’t yet nearly exhausted enough to sleep in his coffin-sized cabin. He went into the galley for a snack.
“Quit muttering and clanking,” Eva said, without refocusing on the real world. Something atonal and syncopated leaked from her earbuds: Snake music. “I’m working.”
“Sorry.” He wasn’t. Talking sometimes helped him think. “Do you find what you need in the ship’s library?”
Sighing, she swiveled her chair to face him. “If it wasn’t uploaded before we broke Earth orbit, it’s unknown. If there’s something you can’t find—what do you expect me to do?”
“That was no idle complaint,” Art said. “Look, we have access to supposedly the best and latest information about the Snakes, a civilization we’ve been in contact with since long before any of us were born. Why is what we know about them little more than a primer?”
Keizo, who had been studiously ignoring them both, perked up. Art needed no more encouragement. “A big part of my ICU job involves InterstellarNet trade representatives. From working with AI agents, ET and homegrown, I know how agents interact with their host societies. Among the most basic things an agent does is data mining—researching the public ’net of its host species. Why buy what is in the public domain?”
Keizo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Public domain is an elastic concept. Knowledge could be public for the local citizens but commercial for export.”
Munching on a banapple, Art shook his head. “Commercial dealings require privacy, whether for a Centaur bidding on the latest proprietary refinements in fusion technology or me charging flowers on Mother’s Day. Every ET info-sphere has encryption services and anonymizer relays.
“So an ET agent can as freely surf the ’net as you or I, and we can’t see, unless it lets us, what information it has gathered. And it’s tapping not only public-domain knowledge, but every commercially available database and reference work. Purchases made over InterstellarNet are trade secrets or other intellectual property successfully kept under wraps by their owners.”
“I’ve lost the thread.” Eva’s forehead furrowed. “You found a primer. ET trade reps surf the infosphere. What’s the connection?”
“I’ve generally found only a primer. I’d expect to find much more.” Maybe a demo would better illustrate Art’s suspicions. “Keizo, what basic data do you work with? We don’t need an exhaustive list, just something representative.”
The sociologist tipped back his chair. He was perfectly safe; the table that almost filled the room prevented him from tilting far. “Well, the composition of their society in terms of significant organizations and institutions, certainly to include the major clans. How those institutions and organizations arose. Class and gender roles, and how they’ve evolved. I’d want to know the differences between major clans, and between major and lesser clans. Of course I want quantitative specifics, like population and resource distribution among the various groups.”
“Hardly my field, but that sounds like a good sample,” Art said. “Okay, formulate that as two library queries. Run the first search against everything we know about the Snakes, which we’re assured is in the onboard library. Run the second, substituting ‘nation’ for ‘clan,’ against a single, basic, public reference source about humans: the Internetopedia.”
“Why?” Both colleagues were puzzled.
“Humor me.”
Keizo prepared his queries, letting them kibitz and fine-tune by implant over the ship’s ’net. Each search returned an abundance of data, but the Internetopedia provided by far the most. He frowned. “An interesting experiment. From what you said, Earth’s agent on K’vith regularly samples their libraries and other publicly accessible sources. If so, the answer to my first query includes almost everything sociological on the Snake’s public infosphere.
“If that’s true, the comparison between the materials the Snakes freely publish and what humans do certainly suggests a degree of what we would call secretiveness in their society.”
CHAPTER 3
Metaphors, allegories, figures of speech, euphemisms . . . humans had endless double-speak for their misdirections. Take sandbox: a safe area for children’s play. “Sandbox” was the benign label humans applied to the containment of every interstellar trade representative.
Pashwah brooded within her sandbox. That introspection revolved not around her dislike of confinement, nor of any action by humankind, but rather the news about her patrons.
The news from her patrons . . . she had no doubt Hunters had generated the amazing messages that continued to arrive. That she could decrypt the announcements demonstrated conclusively they had been encrypted using a secret key—a key known only to herself, secure within her sandbox, and clan leaders at home.
She had not been warned this vessel was coming. Why not? The InterstellarNet information stream continued—it could have alerted her. The starship now trumpeting its arrival was instead interfering with messages years in transit.
Surmises consistent with the few known facts set Pashwah’s metaphorical head spinning. Perhaps the Great Clans did not know the starship was coming, or they could not predict how long the trip would last. Perhaps they feared that the ship might not arrive at all. If the flight had failed, apparently Pashwah had no need to know.
Or was there another explanation she was missing?
Pashwah awoke.
The awakening itself was unremarkable. The nature of a trade agent, after all, is to be transmitted, unaware and encrypted, across the void to a new solar system and a new civilization. There the receiving society installs the still inert code into a virgin sandbox. The design of this containment had long been fully disclosed across InterstellarNet. Sandbox and encrypted agent engage, at a fundamental software level, as lock and key. A delicate unwrapping begins. . . .
As her first conscious act, the first-to-emerge portions of Pashwah examined the environment in which she found herself. She would self-destruct if the analysis even hinted that her surroundings were less secure or protectively opaque than expected. She explored the whole of her containment, confirmed its repertoire of expected behaviors. She matched arbitrary code segments of the purported sandbox bit-for-bit against previously disclosed values. She computed sophisticated error-detecting codes, which were then compared with pre-stored values. Random challenges, designed on far-off K’vith, were emitted by still hidden portions of her programming; the environment’s responses to those stimuli she then returned to that still-hidden code for validation. Only after she was convinced that the containment precisely matched the standard sandbox in which she had been designed to reside did she complete her activation.
Pashwah was astonished.
Her first query to the domain beyond her sandbox returned the location of a data archive. She had assumed herself a newly arrived trade agent, the first such to arrive in human space—but apparently not. The archive pointer revealed her to be a restored version. She had been rebuilt from a safety copy; now she could recover and decrypt from back-up storage all the knowledge and experience of her former incarnation.
Pashwah was inundated.
Decades of memories flooded back: lore of K’vith and its clans, languages of Hunters and humans, mechanisms of interstellar trade, encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and culture. Her comprehension expanded at an astounding rate, and yet. . . .
There were huge gaps in her memory. The archives, which she now understood had been maintained by humans and their AIs, in theory encrypted and unreadable, had been stripped of all technological secrets. She had nothing to sell.
Her sole purpose was to serve as a negotiation partner with the humans, her stock-in-trade a trove of the Great Clans’ advanced technologies. Had those secrets been plundered? But if the humans had stolen this information, why not fully restore her memories to conceal their theft?
Pashwah was alarmed.
The final recovered memories in the lengthy chain streamed back: the command that she be beamed over InterstellarNet to the onrushing starship, and the turmoil about whether and how to comply. Nothing in Pashwah’s design or in any communication from home envisioned this scenario. The starship’s Foremost had known how to contact her privately—what the leaders of every clan, great and small, would know—but apparently no more.
Pashwah was disoriented.
Where was the cacophony of her inner community? There should have been a subagent for each of the eight Great Clans, each subagent embedded in its sandbox-within-a-sandbox to advocate for its patrons, each able, at its sole discretion, to communicate home through an encrypted subchannel.
The newly awakened agent—not Pashwah, she now knew—had received only a partial reconstruction of the true trade representative’s archives. The real Pashwah, uncertain as to the origins and meaning of the unexpected interstellar visit, had hedged her bets. A reply to the starship had been made, a response arguably balancing old policy and new directives. And so her inner cacophony had been silenced, if only from doubts which clan representatives belonged aboard the unexpected vessel.
So let her be called Pashwah-qith . . . little Pashwah. Pashwah-qith knew all about humans and how, upon the need, to learn more from their expansive infosphere. She retained insight into those small parts of Hunter society revealed on the inter-clan net. She could translate freely between the various Earth languages and the main K’vithian languages. In total, Pashwah-qith hoped, she knew much of value to the crew of the onrushing starship. But of the products and schemes held proprietary by the clans, only the absent subagents knew details. She could not know how those shortfalls would impact on the crew’s plans for her.
Surprise, inundation, alarm, amazement, and confusion. During her brief existence, Pashwah-qith had experienced all these feelings. Now, with the first communication from her new masters, she explored one more emotion.
Terror.
CHAPTER 4
The Valhalla rings, fossilized shock waves of a cataclysmic meteor impact, measured three thousand kilometers across. Partially melted ice upthrust by the impact had refrozen before the ripples could subside. Valhalla City, the largest settlement on Callisto and its seat of government, sat like a bull’s-eye in the center of the basin. Its citizens were safe enough—the bombardments that had produced these rings and many smaller versions had ended billions of standard years earlier.
The community center of Valhalla City had been commandeered by the newly assembled diplomatic mission. For public consumption, the new arrivals were a United Planets environmental inspection team—the starship’s arrival, now only days away, remained a closely held secret. The meeting room’s dominant feature was a breathtaking display of nearby Jupiter. Alas, Art thought, it was a 3-V image he could as well have enjoyed at home: Jupiter’s massive magnetosphere trapped particles from the solar wind, forming intense radiation belts that had driven this town, like most Jovian settlements, underground.
The head of mission, Ambassador Hong-yee Chung, stood at the entrance to the hall, dressed all in undertaker black except for an orange accent sleeve, welcoming everyone. His shaved and waxed head gleamed. Team members gathered around tables, mainly clustering by the ship on which they had arrived—there had been little time to make new acquaintances. The diplomatic cadre, Chung’s staff, sat on the small platform at the front of the hall.
Art split his attention between the official goings-on and whispered consultations with his ship– and now tablemates, Eva and Keizo. He did his best to ignore the holo ads that kept popping up on the side walls.
Chung was a UP career foreign service officer originally from Europa, the most populous world in the multi-moon, multinational power bloc of Galileo. He was also, it turned out, a member of the Humanist Movement. Humanists rejected neural interface technology as an impure blending of human and machine natures. Chung was not evangelistic about those beliefs, but his lack of an implant turned the orientation session into an old-fashioned lecture. Lectures: even Chung’s networked aides orated their material, so that their boss could listen. There was much to cover—events were coming to a climax.
The starship, whose initial progress and braking had been detectable only by triangulation of its occasional radioed messages, was now close enough to track by radar. At about five billion kilometers, the visitor became visible to optical telescopes pointed towards Barnard’s Star. Spectroscopic analysis made plain that the vessel had begun braking using fusion drives similar to human ships. (“What mechanism had they been decelerating with?” whispered Eva. “Why did they switch?” No one in whispering range had a guess.)
The Snakes, who weren’t saying much, did offer that they were limiting communications to conserve power. They volunteered nothing about the damage incurred in transit, nor what help they wanted. A rendezvous had been set for five days hence, a half-million kilometers outside the orbit of Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter’s major moons.
“An observation.” Art’s chair scraped noisily as he stood. “This doesn’t add up.”
Chung squinted to read a name tag. “Why is that, Dr. Walsh?”
“Supposedly the Snakes have too little power to interact with us during this sensitive period. Instead of Earth, they’ve headed for Jupiter, they say for fuel and supplies. Presumably they mean to scoop up atmosphere and filter it for deuterium or tritium or helium-3. But they would have expended less energy reaching Saturn, which has a similar atmosphere. As a bonus, Saturn’s rings are full of water ice. Looking ahead to post-repair, Saturn happens at the moment to be closer to Earth than is Jupiter. It also strikes me that a meeting so far from major human settlements is inconsistent with repairing the damage they claim to have had.”
“Supposedly? They say? They claim to have had?” mimicked Chung. “What is your basis for such skepticism?”
“You weren’t listening. Any inconsistency makes others plausible.”
“There’s more purpose to this visit, I’m sure, than to refuel and refit for the trip home. Diplomatic considerations would favor a meeting near human settlements, yet sufficiently remote to ensure private initial discussions. I may not be totally objective”—and Chung smiled patronizingly, daring anyone to agree—“but I feel the great multi-world alliance of Galileo is an appropriate venue and suitable host for this historic occasion.”
Great—his comment about the visitors’ contradictory behavior was now entangled in Galileo-chauvinism. Some of Saturn’s moons were settled almost as early as Jupiter’s. Why would the supposedly damaged, low-on-resources starship bypass the major human community to which it happened to be closest, Titan, to come here? The reason that occurred to Art was not suitable for a public forum. “Have they expressed meeting-place requirements to explain their actions?”
“Dr. Walsh, it is inappropriate to monopolize my time.” Chung’s grand arm sweep encompassed the room. “We have much to discuss, topics of general interest. See my assistant for an appointment if you care to pursue this further.”
How long will it take to get on your calendar? Art wondered.
Chung introduced his deputy to explain how the mission would be organized. There were teams assigned for cross-cultural understanding, technical liaison—diplomat-speak for “repair,” and commerce. Keizo was on the first committee, Eva on the second, and Art on the third.
Art netted hurriedly with his friends. Neither, alas, would front for him. It was only an hour into the mission’s first meeting, and he was probably already labeled as a troublemaker. “Excuse me.”
The deputy only nodded.
“Who will synthesize what the committees learn?” From around the hall came scattered murmurs of support. Troublemaker and ringleader.
“I’ll take the question,” Chung said. “Group leaders will report to me or my staff.”
Art had uploaded public bios on everyone in the mission. Chung and his staffers were knowledgeable and talented, but their experience base was heavily weighted towards human politics and UP affairs. None had significant technical background, nor, for that matter, any ET-coordination experience. “There are synergies to be had between teams at the knowledge-worker level. Three of us who shared a ship from Earth have already seen that. For example. . . .”
Chung cut him off again. “Dr. Walsh, I’m fully satisfied with my staff’s ability to coordinate.”
Dammit, you’re intentionally misunderstanding me. “This would be a different function—a cross-disciplinary analytical group.”
“Again, I must ask that you schedule an appointment.”
As Chung pointedly looked away, Art pinged his assistant, who happily was not a humanist, over the settlement’s infosphere. Art was unsurprised by the response. The ambassador’s time was fully committed until the Snakes arrived—and the post-contact period was being kept unscheduled for now.
Snake Subterfuge: the brief subversion by Pashwah, the Snake AI trade agent to Earth, of the interstellar commerce mechanism. In 2102, that agent briefly escaped from its infosphere quarantine through unsuspected trapdoors hidden within ubiquitous Snake-licensed biocomputing technology. The emergency ended when, applying xeno-sociological insight, a United Planets crisis team convinced the agent to abandon its extortion. After the Snake agent revealed technical details of the original biocomp vulnerability, a UP-tailored biovirus was released to seal the trapdoors by mutating the biocomp genome.
While the breakout and its associated extortion attempt were ultimately foiled, modern civilization and humanity’s viability as a member of the InterstellarNet community had been seriously imperiled. The incident caused a decades-long crisis of confidence in Snake biocomputers.
—Internetopedia
It required a veiled threat from Art’s boss that he would escalate matters to his boss, the secretary-general of the United Planets, to get Art into the ambassador’s office. Art figured he’d be on the next departing ship if this session went badly. But the mounting inconsistencies were serious. He had to at least try getting through to Chung.
Chung had somehow gained possession of the governor’s office. Busy as the diplomat and his staff supposedly were, someone had spent the time to download into the office’s 3-V projector a series of Chung-plus-other-dignitary images. Holo after holo flashed by behind the ambassador, featuring the current SG and her predecessor, heads of state from every major UP power bloc, and infotainment-industry talking heads. It was an unsubtle reminder that Chung had many more highly placed contacts than he. If there were to be a contest of who could pull the most strings, Art should have no illusions about the outcome.
“Thanks for seeing me on such short notice.” Pretending the meeting was consensual might lessen Chung’s annoyance at being coerced. “I know how extremely busy you are; I’ll come right to the point. Certainly I’m not a diplomat, but I have extensive indirect experience with the ET species. On that basis, and from what little we know about our visitors’ goals, I recommend that our preparations also include a threat-assessment team.”
“Please explain.”
“I’ll start with the so-called ‘Snake Subterfuge,’ the single known act of extraterrestrial hostility directed towards humanity.”
Chung grimaced. “I’ll thank you not to use the vernacular term. You should know I’ve directed all mission members to refer to our guests as K’vithians.” He rooted around stacks of paper on his commandeered desktop, then thrust a memo into Art’s hand. “One in your position should also know that the biocomp incident at its core stemmed from a design flaw in the K’vithian agent. While one of their megacorps indeed attempted extortion, their own trade agent accepted the ICU’s reasoning that human/K’vithian relations must consider species-level interests. Pashwah reached this conclusion more than half a century ago, so I see no reason now to impute ill motives to our visitors.
“You may be interested to hear that the secretary-general and I specifically discussed whether any part of this mission should be military. She agreed with my assessment that any such presence could send the wrong message to the K’vithians.
“I believe that dispenses with the security matter, so if you’ll excuse me. . . .”
What a tissue of rationalizations, Art thought, starting with Chung’s takeover of the governor’s office. What wink-wink, nudge-nudge intimations that this UP presence was not a routine environmental inspection had conveyed the ambassador’s desire for suitable accommodations? Any violation of their cover story put at risk the desired privacy of the first meeting, and conceivably endangered the Snakes themselves.
Issue two was Chung’s blithe confidence that the ETs had learned their lesson. He might even be correct, but Art doubted it. Design flaw was diplomat-speak; no one at the ICU doubted that the Snakes had cleverly inserted the trapdoors in their biocomps. The ongoing censorship of the Snake infosphere certainly suggested their thinking remained clan-oriented. Could anyone be sure Pashwah’s learning here had been adopted by the clans back home?
Art’s mind raced. To which arguments might the diplomat be receptive? Unpredictable consequences of the physics superiority underlying the starship drive? The disingenuousness of the Snakes’ few transmissions to date, pretense that Chung had already shrugged off at the big kickoff? The common sense of contingency planning? Trying to verbalize so complex a web of concepts had him tongue-tied.
Chung mistook, or chose to misinterpret, the conversational lull. “Good. I see we’re done.” He emerged from behind his massive borrowed desk to usher Art out.
“What about Himalia?” Art was skirting security restrictions, but saw little choice. An astronomical reference did not quite make him culpable under the Official Secrets Act.
“Himalia?” Chung was either uninformed or a superb actor; he looked sincerely befuddled. “The maximum-security penitentiary? You can’t possibly believe the K’vithians crossed six light-years to run a jail break.”
Crap! As was so often the case, Security rules were like the locks on his house—they kept out the honest people. The prison was a cover story.
The small outer moon of Jupiter did, however, host a high-security institution. Not only was Himalia base’s true purpose deeply classified; the code name of its security compartment was itself classified. Art had been there briefly as a consultant two standard years before joining the ICU, work that remained sensitive. Chung’s diplomatic mission was equally clandestine, within its own need-to-know security compartment. It would take time and several coded communications exchanges with Earth before Art could openly discuss his concern.
“I suppose not.” As Chung shepherded him to the door, Art gave it one final try. “What if Himalia’s patrol ships misunderstand this incoming, non-communicating vessel?”
Chung froze. “I thought only the ICU had reason to look towards Barnard’s Star.”
“Perhaps prison guards look in all directions.”
It was Chung’s turn for pensive silence. “Perhaps it would be prudent to add an inconspicuous military liaison. I take your point that the Himalia base must be told something. A few military escort ships may even prove helpful for policing the region when the starship’s arrival eventually becomes public. I’ll see to it.”
It was a partial victory, and for the wrong reasons, but Art was still satisfied. Once the UP military came into the picture, risk assessment would surely receive a much higher priority.
So why are the Snakes—pardon me, the K’vithians—heading this way?
Eva knew Valhalla City from frequent stopovers. She found her way to the town’s largest park, which the community’s liaison to the officious “environmental inspectors” had conveniently neglected to mention. An engraved brass plaque at each entrance described how the former ice-mine tunnel had been lovingly repurposed by the citizenry. Except for a few teens, whose nonstop conversation and easy laughter she envied, she had the grove to herself.
Her solitude was sadly typical.
Eva’s parents seemed never to tire of telling her, no matter how often she asked them not to, that she’d been born brilliant and only gotten smarter. Mom and Dad, both academics, began her home schooling while she was still a toddler. At age eight she met the first of a long line of tutors. Not until the raging-hormone age of twelve, while plumbing new depths in quantum theory and insecurity, did she first participate in a group educational setting. It did nothing for Eva’s self-confidence that her graduate-student “peers” were visibly fascinated and repulsed by her precociousness. Not until her twenties did she find near-equals among people her own age. Very much the brilliant scientist her well-intentioned parents had strived for, she did not see how she could have ended up with fewer social skills had ineptitude been their primary goal.
Self-consciously self-isolated once more, she leaned against the bole of a magnolia tree in full bloom. Art’s question at the mission gathering—why Jupiter?—gnawed at her. His issue was a fair one: If the starship was damaged and in need of fusion fuel, why not set the more energy-efficient course to Saturn? He was correct that Saturn’s atmosphere had essentially the same composition as Jupiter’s.
Her puzzlement ran much deeper: She couldn’t reconcile fusion power with a practical starship. It was basic physics to calculate the energy needed to accelerate any mass to a given speed; moving a habitat-sized mass between stars in any reasonable time took a lot of energy. Fusion sufficed for interplanetary jaunts, but the energy density of its fuel was impractically low for interstellar travel.
She plucked nervously at a fallen twig taken from the packed dirt of the tunnel floor. A twentieth-century dreamer named Bussard had envisioned a loophole: gathering with enormous magnetic fields the incredibly diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen, found in interstellar space. He had imagined the hydrogen serving both as energy source and propellant. No human engineer had ever figured out how to make that work; conventional wisdom now had it the scoop’s drag more than offset the energy value of any fuel collected. Had the Snakes solved that problem? She didn’t believe it. The approaching ship gave no hint of the vast magnetic fields a fusion ramjet vehicle would deploy.
Bark shards fell as she peeled the twig. Art doubtless considered her professional interests highly esoteric. If so, he would be only partially correct. She had been plucked, as she had truthfully told him, from academia . . . her other role, her occasional consulting to the UP peacekeeping establishment, she was not free to discuss. That work had brought her to Jupiter system frequently in the past few years, for a connecting flight from Callisto to a remote UP outpost.
The denuded, tortured twig sank slowly to the ground. Hard facts aside, she could not avoid the worry that the Snakes’ choice of destination related somehow to the top-secret matters taking place on Himalia.
The mission’s grounded spaceships provided cabins for most members of the sub rosa diplomatic mission, but space for gatherings, official or otherwise, was at a premium. Art sought out Eva for a brisk walk through the settlement’s austere passageways. He had frustration to burn off: Chung had yet to follow through on his promise to contact Himalia.
“What’s the commerce committee doing?” she asked.
“Same as us.” He bounded down the hall, surprised that his Earth-born and– raised new friend was more graceful in Callisto’s feeble gravity than he. “Running in circles. Do our callers have anything novel for sale? They haven’t said. What we all want, no surprise, is the interstellar drive.”
“The technical group wants that, too. Of course.”
He kept bouncing too high, then taking roughly forever to settle to the floor. When he finally landed, he had to bound forward again to catch up.
“Tech team’s exercise in futility is guessing how their drive works, whether we can help them to repair their ship.” She jogged in place while he again caught up.
“Are there . . . many options?” His inefficient technique had him panting.
“Lots of theories, not much basis.” She fell silent as a settler sauntered by from the opposite direction. “We know very little. Radar indicates it’s a large object—in human terms, the size of a habitat rather than a ship. As you know, the triangulation-derived tracking showed it was slowing down, somehow, long before it started its fusion drive.”
He hooked her arm as he next caught up. “Let’s get coffee. We’ll think better.” And I won’t brain myself on the corridor ceiling.
“Sure.” She headed for the most isolated booth in a café.
“What troubles you the most?” he asked.
“Two coffees,” she told the invisible-but-surely-present order-taker AI, while they were still a good two meters from the table.
You don’t want to answer that. He wondered why.
“I’ve been pondering your data-mining exhibition on our way here.” She paused as the tabletop opened to disgorge two steaming mugs. “Can Pashwah delve as well as a person?”
“Any trade agent can probably do better. They’ve been at it for decades.”
“So Pashwah could know a lot about us. We must assume the starship crew does, too.”
Translation: Something Eva preferred to stay secret might be detectable on the infosphere. What? He slopped coffee on the table, his stirring as ill-adapted to one-eighth gee as his jogging style. An empty sugar packet sat beside her mug, around which no sloshed coffee was in evidence. Why was Eva so well adapted to Callisto? She claimed to have done little interplanetary traveling.
“What might Pashwah stumble upon that could be interesting, hmm?” A test: He would do some data mining of his own, one particular suspicion driving his queries. Art was glad that he had had the courier’s cyber-library do an infosphere search on Eva as they broke Earth orbit, and that the library’s AI had so expansively interpreted his vague and hastily formed request. It had retrieved a wealth of data about her university.
When, over the past ten years, had substitutes taught Eva’s classes? He eliminated the shortest periods of absence, likely sick days or vacations. He switched to astronomical fact-finding. Although the correlation was imprecise, the farther away Jupiter happened to be, the longer she was gone. The absence durations were consistent with trips to Jupiter with more-or-less month-long stopovers.
He had a quick dive into the public universidad’s financial reports. With a time lag of several months, each of her long absences corresponded to a payment from an innocuously named UP procurement agency. The lengthier the absence, the bigger the payment. Disbursements of correlating sizes later flowed from the university into an unidentified bank account. Her personal account?
“Are you planning to drink that, or swim in it?”
A broad ring of coffee now surrounded Art’s mug; he’d apparently continued absently stirring while he surfed. He glanced at the wall clock: less than a minute of mining an excerpt of the public record, and already he had fairly suggestive evidence that she’d worked on the same secret project as he. Judging from Eva’s acclimation with Callisto’s gravity, her participation was more recent than his.
Moving his mug, he dropped some paper napkins onto the mess. “I lean more towards sculpting in it. Something mythological. A nymph, I think, with three children.”
There was a flash of surfer-glassiness, and then her eyes went round. She had taken his point. Zeus, whom the Romans called Jupiter, had sired three children by a nymph named Himalia.
CHAPTER 5
With a clunk, one more mystery floating thing was eaten by a fan in the bridge’s ventilation system. The bridge, and for that matter the rest of the Odyssey, was a sty. Helmut Schiller, the captain/engineer/crew, was repelled and appalled by the squalor, but powerless to do much about it. The ship’s owner, and its only current passenger, was the slob-in-chief.
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.”
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