“Hello?” squawked the communicator.
“With whom am I speaking?”
The name at first meant nothing to Nike. Then the cocky attitude registered, and Nike remembered. This was the General Products employee Nessus had dubbed Baedeker.
“Deputy Minister, your staff resisted putting through my call. I insisted.” Baedeker’s throats rasped with emotion. “The situation is unacceptable.”
Why would this engineer think to contact him? “Start at the beginning.”
“It’s the three Colonists, aboard Explorer,” Baedeker said. “I can’t hear them.”
A ship lost? The staccato rhythms of three thousand hooves waxed and waned, making the hoarse voice on the communicator even more difficult to understand. “I don’t understand. How can a ship be lost? One of your hulls!”
“No, sir. The ship is fine. I can’t hear the crew. I can’t overhear the crew.”
For this he had been called from the grand ballet? “Continue.”
“We equipped Explorer with listening devices with which to monitor the unsupervised Colonists. Their conversation is multiplexed into the outgoing telemetry stream.”
Unsupervised Colonists. Nike chose to ignore the undertune of disapproval about the mission he had authorized. “What could interrupt the telemetry?”
“Nothing has. All data streams continue unabated. The Colonist recordings are fiction. Fiction!” Baedeker lapsed briefly into an unhappy hum. “They evidently altered the sensor feed into the telemetry subsystem.”
Nike waited out a torrent of words about sampling techniques and autocorrelation. The details hardly mattered. Explorer’s crew had substituted random repeats of recorded conversations and ambient noises—and Baedeker had noticed only now. First the altercation aboard the General Products factory, and now this. Twice the Colonists had bested the engineer. Nike kept his amusement to himself, giving the Colonists credit for maintaining their privacy.
Citizens rarely wanted privacy. Colonists often did. Nike wished he could see Explorer’s crew, observe their clothing and jewelry. That would tell him much about their mindsets, almost what he could glean by observing a Citizen’s mane. Of course a Colonist was a laborer. Laborers had little time for proper grooming of their manes. They took much less time over programmable clothing and nano-spun jewelry.
Thunderous ululations from the packed theater announced the end of the second dance movement. Nike asked, “What about the reports from Explorer?”
“They seem credible,” Baedeker said.
That was rather grudging. “Do you see any inconsistencies in the data? Odd results? Any reason at all to question their findings?”
“No. If anything they are ploddingly thorough in their studies.”
“Then let us accept their desire for privacy, and let them do their work for us.” Setting aside thoughts of humans and Colonists alike, Nike reimmersed himself in the beauty of the dance.
OMAR AND ERIC were rehearsing dialogue for a fresh voice recording, another faked bridge conversation. They were ad-libbing a little, trying to crack each other up, defying with their laughter the nothingness of hyperspace.
Kirsten stood unseen outside the relax-room door, listening, and asking herself one last time: Do I want to do this?
And realized that she very much did.
It scared Kirsten to remember how often she had spurned Eric’s advances. Would he now spurn her?
He had matured into someone confident, supportive, and self-deprecating—into someone she very much admired. Perhaps that growth meant he would no longer have interest in her. She had to make a grand gesture.
She had to risk rejection as publicly as she had rejected him.
Kirsten stepped into view. “Eric,” she called out. “May I have a word with you?”
Both men turned, and stared.
Eric followed her in silence into her cabin. The room was cramped, not much more than sleeper-field plates equipped with crash webbing. Eric managed to close the door without brushing against her. For a long time, he was at a loss for words. “About your outfit,” he finally managed.
Her jumpsuit shone a fiery red, trimmed with warm yellow accents, the colors more vibrant than any she had ever seen him wear. “I hope you like it.”
He looked like he wanted to ask: why? Instead he said, “You already know my medical problems. They’re genetic.”
Kirsten took his hands. “I have wisdom teeth.” When he looked puzzled, she explained. “Extra teeth. Too many for my jaw. If I hadn’t had surgery, they could have grown horizontally or pushed out other teeth. In many people, the crowding causes jaw pain and headaches.” The problem was easily corrected, and in fact the extracted teeth could be saved for transplants, but she wanted to make a point. No one was perfect.
His eyes narrowed appraisingly. She imagined he was weighing the risks to their hypothetical children, as society expected. All he said was, “That’s not so bad.”
“Anyway, now you know. And my grandfather ruptured an artery in his brain. He was hiking alone. Help didn’t come in time. He was only seventy-one. I thought I should tell you.”
Eric gave her hands a squeeze. “You’re beautiful and fun and brilliant. How could teeth possibly matter? Kirsten, could you consider me a proper mate?”
“Yes. Yes. You believed in me. You brought me back when I had given up.” Releasing his hands, Kirsten put her arms around his neck. He had been sweating.
He enfolded her waist. It felt right.
Like Citizens, Colonists seldom spoke about mating practices, but they did touch, and frequently. She could not help wondering: How much of this behavior is human? How much has been imprinted—inflicted—on us in hopes of more and fitter laborers?
She shook off the sudden cynicism. Now was not the time.
“Not being a total idiot,” Eric said, “I want to join our lives. Shall we?”
“I bind myself. We’ll still need genetic counseling,” which was mandatory before a union could be made official, “but—” Kirsten trailed off, at a loss for words.
“And I bind myself.” Eric broke into a grin as goofy as the one she knew she was wearing. “I have got to change the color of my clothes.” To the pastels of a mated man, he probably meant.
“No,” Kirsten answered. “You need to take them off.”
20
“You’re sure about this?” Omar called from the bridge.
“Yes!” Eric and Kirsten answered in unison. “For the last time,” Kirsten continued, as she sifted backpack contents. “Are you ready?”
“We’re holding position. Thrusters are working hard to do it.”
Kirsten peered out the relax-room’s view port. Even at full magnification, the institute’s mysterious GP #4 hull was invisible. NP5, around which it orbited, loomed largest of the six worlds of the Fleet.
Explorer, under power, raced along a distant arc concentric with that orbit. Only a chance visual sighting could reveal their presence. Explorer’s space-traffic-control transponder was silenced, and its stealthing mode was active.
In theory, everyone in the Fleet thought Explorer far away, still studying Oceanus. In practice, Omar relayed reports and fictitious telemetry through the hyperwave buoy they had left behind. The doubled distance made no difference to instantaneous communications, and Hearth received the incoming signal from the expected bearing.
Are we really clever, Kirsten wondered, or delusional?
“We are better prepared,” Eric said.
Could he read her mind? The unstated comparison was to the expedition she had planned, to the Human Studies Institute. Or, more accurately, had scarcely planned. She answered, “If the stepping-disc network is configured as we expect.”
“Even if Citizens weren’t systematic by nature, why wouldn’t there be a standard addressing scheme used aboard ships? Why waste the energy to invent one each time?”
If Eric were correct, the addressing scheme on that GP4 ship matched the stepping-disc n
etwork on Explorer. They would reappear unattended in a storeroom aboard the mystery ship. And if he were wrong? They could pop up anywhere. In a mess hall. Onto the bridge. She had never seen a Citizen’s toilet—
“Guys,” Omar prompted.
“We’re ready,” Eric said. Communicator in hand, he tried the first address in the presumed subnet range for storerooms. “Still here. Do you suppose there’ll be gravity?” He tried another. A third.
And vanished.
Kirsten gave him ten seconds to pop back, if he had found himself somewhere unfortunate, or with a witness, or otherwise to simply vacate the destination disc. “Omar, wish us luck.” She took her backpack and stepped—
INTO A CAVERNOUS storeroom, dancing briskly toward a wall.
Eric caught her, sparing her from a fall. “It happened to me, too,” he said. “Not the best velocities match.”
What was the magic number? Two hundred feet per second was what she recalled. They must have been just on the cusp. A bit more velocity difference and the paired discs would not have allowed the transfer. A bit less and the momentum compensation would have been perfect.
If Citizens never envisioned an intruder crossing a few miles of predator-free forest, they surely never imagined a hundred-thousand mile jump between ships matching courses and speeds. “Under the circumstances, the match seems plenty precise to me.”
They walked quickly through aisles until they found a terminal. Eric knelt to unload his backpack. He was still wearing pastels and a topaz ring that matched her own. “Look around while I do this. Keep an ear open. If we get caught, we’re courting and a little goofy.”
As though that would excuse a stolen starship and sneaking aboard one of the best-kept secrets in the Concordance. Kirsten smiled but said nothing.
The plan was simple. Crew communicators were portable; hence ships had wireless networks. So: In some deep recess of the storeroom, hide a network sniffer. It would catch and store the radio packets flying by. Also hide a vidphone with good lines of sight and hearing on the terminal.
On some future visit, they would retrieve the stored data. Keyed or verbal commands the gear captured during inventory draw-downs would provide an unencoded data sample with which to crack encryption on the shipboard network. Crew login sequences, if they could catch one, would be a bonus, although tongueprint biometrics was more likely.
Kirsten explored as Eric worked, snaking through aisle after aisle of tanks and bins. Finally past the raw-material repositories, she made her way between shelves piled high with everything from complex photonic components to large structural assemblies. Those must be either too complex or too large to synthesize quickly.
“Eric,” she whispered. Almost certainly their communicators would go unnoticed here, but why take even that small chance? In her mind’s eye, Nessus bobbed his heads, up/down, down/up, approving her caution. “Eric. How’s it going?”
“Sniffer is hidden,” he whispered back. “I’m working on a power hookup. It would be a shame if we couldn’t get back aboard before the batteries drained. How are we doing for time?”
Her wrist implant was in stopwatch mode. “Eight minutes left.” Eight minutes until Omar attempted another precise velocity match to enable their return. Thereafter, Omar would match courses again every five minutes, pacing the unseen ship.
She walked on. More bins and parts, components and supplies. Spare synthesizers. Emergency rations (grass and grains) in case the synthesizers all failed at once. Nothing instructive. The next glance at her wrist showed six minutes. “Eric?”
“I found accessible power lines for the sniffer and vidphone. I can use inductive taps. I’m snaking our power lines behind stacks of stuff.”
Clever. Kirsten wouldn’t have thought of that. An inductive coupler clipped over a power line, drawing off energy without ever interrupting the electrical flow. Very stealthy.
She reached a dead end. “Four minutes. I’m coming back.”
The anticlimactic smoothness made her want to scream. We haven’t learned anything, Kirsten thought, except that we can get aboard. In minutes they would return to Explorer.
“Done,” Eric called. “Come on back.”
There must be something here, some further clue in the long series of signs. To wait until they next managed to return, hoping to find decipherable data—it was intolerable.
Three minutes. Kirsten reversed course past emergency rations, chemicals, parts. . . .
She sped right passed Eric, rushing through the aisles she had not yet explored, looking for something very specific and low-tech.
The storeroom held emergency rations and large structural elements. Survival gear would not be accessible only by stepping disc. Big stuff would not fit through the only stepping disc they had seen, in the storeroom’s center. Logically, the storeroom had to have a physical door—and she still wasn’t sure until she saw it.
A big square door with an inset window.
“Eric,” she called. “Come here.”
“Time’s almost up,” he answered from aisles distant.
“Now, Eric.” She stared out the window, across a broad corridor, through a clear wall. A vast space, the central volume of the giant GP4 hull, gaped before her.
Suspended in its center, was, undeniably, an alien spaceship. A ramscoop.
Faded English letters on its scarred and ancient hull declared it the Long Pass.
REBIRTH
Earth date: 2650
21
Side by side, Kirsten and Eric stared at Long Pass. Their wrist implants beeped almost simultaneously. Eric panned a quick view of the ramscoop with his communicator. “Omar will be matching course in a minute.”
“Go ahead.” Beyond the door and to Kirsten’s left, a light flickered randomly. “I’ll be right behind you.”
Eric strode back into the maze of shelves. She took the cessation of footsteps to mean he had teleported back successfully. “In a few minutes, that is,” she clarified now that he couldn’t argue. One of them had to take back word of their find before anyone—she—took yet more risk.
She had seen old dates embedded within the serial numbers of some stockpiled parts. Dust covered the shelves themselves and most items on them. The flickering light outside the storeroom removed all doubt from her mind: This region of the ship had gone unvisited for a long time. Citizens would not leave a failing LED along the route to emergency supplies.
With a faint squeak, the door opened to Kirsten’s touch.
She peered into the hall and saw no one. Feeling like a very small fish in a very large fishbowl, Kirsten ran, clutching her communicator, along the curved corridor to the spidery catwalk which led to Long Pass. With luck, software would compensate for the shaking and bouncing to render a good picture. She crawled onto the catwalk . . . but yes, there was gravity. She could safely run across.
Heart pounding, Kirsten dashed through the derelict’s airlock, its hatches both open. Her wrist implant showed nearly four minutes until her next opportunity to return to Explorer. Thinking any ship must have something like a bridge, and that bridges belonged in the bow, she headed forward.
Crisp-edged corners, without trace of the melted look favored by Citizens. Beds and chairs glimpsed through open doors: Colonist normal. The latches on those hatches: equally ordinary, mounted at a height natural for Colonists. The ceiling glow that brightened when she stuck her head into a cabin was pleasant to her eyes. The holo cube she found lodged behind a small fold-down shelf showed men, women, and children.
In countless small ways, the vessel was undeniably Colonist. Or was the correct term human?
Kirsten kept shooting video as she sped through the ship, still seeking the bridge. Scarcely a minute until the next pick-up opportunity. She should return to the storeroom and its stepping disc.
She plunged ahead.
Another cabin, as familiar as anything on NP4. A larger room of uncertain purpose, on whose wall hung a mundane to-do list on curled, brittle
paper—the tasks handwritten in English. Holos everywhere. An apparent cargo hold, its deck half empty, its shelves picked nearly clean. Tiedowns and braces on all the shelves. Gravity or free fall, the ship would accommodate both.
Beep. “I’ll be back in five more minutes.” Kirsten was not sure to whom she made the promise.
At last: the bridge. Crash couches. Controls meant for hands like hers. More holos.
Kirsten froze. That empty cargo hold! Without a doubt, its contents had been removed to Hearth for study. Its cargo probably resided deep in the bowels of the Human Studies Institute.
Maybe this GP4 ship had landed on Hearth, and the cargo had been extracted there. Maybe the cargo had been moved to a docking bay for offloading into a smaller Citizen ship for a flight to Hearth. It didn’t matter which. The insight was that the cargo had been removed—and surely not over that narrow catwalk.
Kirsten raced back to the empty cargo hold. She found a stepping disc on the deck between two mostly empty shelves. Although she had expected to find it, the disc looked out of place. Grafted on. Her wrist showed a bit more than two minutes until Omar next matched course and speed. That gave her more than ample time in which to collect a souvenir.
She had noticed a decoration in one of the cabins, a handicraft of some unfamiliar kind. It hung on the same bulkhead as the hatch. No one could see the artwork’s presence—or absence—without entering the cabin.
The artwork crudely rendered an image of flowers and shells in thousands of tiny knots and stitches. The background was tightly woven material. Texture could be a hologram, so she brushed it with her fingertips. Knots and background alike felt like natural filaments of some kind. The colors were muted—faded?—and the wooden frame battered. She took the decoration and frame, unsure why they seemed important. One corner of the wooden frame bore matching holes on its front and back edges. She guessed at a small animal’s tooth marks.
Less than two minutes.