“Master?” The thrint rotated his neckless torso back towards the slave. “Master, what shall we do until you return?”
Dnivtopun felt a minor twinge of regret. Being alone so much with the slaves, he had conversed with them more than was customary. He hesitated for a moment, then decided a last small indulgence was in order.
BE HAPPY, he commanded, radiating as hard as possible to cover all the remaining staff grouped by the docking tube. It was difficult to blanket the station without an amplifier helmet, but the only one available was suspect. Too many planetary Proprietors had been brain-burned in the early stages of the War by tnuctipun-sabotaged equipment. Straining: BE VERY HAPPY.
They were making small cooing sounds as he dogged the hatch.
“Master—” The engineering slave sounded worried.
“Not now!” Dnivtopun said.
They were nearly in position to activate the Standing Wave and go faster than light; the Ruling Mind had built up the necessary .3 of lightspeed. It was an intricate job, piloting manually. He had disconnected the main computer; it was tnuctipun work, and he did not trust the innermost programs. The problem was that so much else was routed through it. Of course, the Zengaborni should be at the board; they were expensive but had an instinctive feel for piloting. Now, begin the phase transition…
“Master, the density sensor indicates a mass concentration on our vector!”
Dnivtopun was just turning toward the slave when the collision alarm began to wail, and then—
—discontinuity—
Chapter 9
“Right, give me a reading on the mass detector,” the prospector said; like many rockjacks, he talked to the machinery. It was better than talking to yourself, after all…
He was a short man for a Belter, with the slightly seedy run-down air that was common in the Alpha Centauri system these days. There was hunger in the eyes that skipped across the patched and mismatched screens of the Lucky Strike; the little torchship had not been doing well of late, and the kzin-nominated purchasing combines on the asteroid base of Tiamat had been squeezing harder and harder. The life bubble of his singleship smelled, a stale odor of metal and old socks; the conditioner was not getting out all of the ketones.
Collaborationist ratcat-loving bastards, he thought, and began the laborious manual setup for a preliminary analysis. In his mother’s time, there would have been automatic machinery to do that. And a decent life-support system, and medical care that would have made him merely middle-aged at seventy, not turning gray and beginning to creak at the joints.
Bleeping ratcats. The felinoid aliens who called themselves kzinti had arrived out of nowhere, erupting into the Alpha Centauri system with gravity-polarizer-driven ships and weapons the human colonists could never match, could not have matched even if they had a military tradition; and humans had not fought wars in three centuries. Wunderland had fallen in a scant month of combat, and the Serpent Swarm asteroid belt had followed after a spell of guerrilla warfare.
He shook his head and returned his attention to the screens; unless he made a strike this trip, he would have to sell the Lucky Strike, work as a sharecrop-prospector for one of the Tiamat consortia. The figures scrolled up.
“Sweet Finagle’s Ghost,” he whispered in awe. It was not a big rock, less than a thousand meters ’round. But the density…“It must be solid platinum!”
Fingers stabbed at the board; lasers vaporized a pit in the surface, and spectroscopes probed. A frown of puzzlement. The surface was just what you would expect in this part of the Swarm: carbonaceous compounds, silicates, traces of metal. A half-hour spent running the diagnostics made certain that the mass-detector was not malfunctioning either, which was crazy.
Temptation racked him suddenly, a feeling like a twisting in the sour pit of his belly. There was something very strange here; probably very valuable. Rich, he thought. I’m rich. He could go direct to the ratcat liaison on Tiamat. The kzin were careful not to become too dependent on the collabo authorities. They rewarded service well. Rich. Rich enough to…Buy a seat on the Minerals Commission. Retire to Wunderland. Get decent medical care before I age too much.
He licked sweat off his upper lip and hung floating before the screens. “And become exactly the sort of bastard I’ve hated all my life,” he whispered.
I’ve always been too stubborn for my own good, he thought with a strange sensation of relief as he began to key in the code for the tightbeam message. It wasn’t even a matter of choice, really; if he’d been that sort, he wouldn’t have hung on to the Lucky Strike this long. He would have signed on with the Concession; you ate better even if you could never work off the debts.
And Markham rewarded good service, too. The Free Wunderland Navy had its resources, and its punishments were just as final as the kzinti. More certain, because they understood human nature better…
—discontinuity—
—and the collision alarm cut off.
Dnivtopun blinked in bewilderment at the controls. All the exterior sensors were dark. The engineering slave was going wild, all three arms dancing over the boards as it skipped from position to position between controls never meant for single-handing. He worried that it was malfunctioning; this particular species required very close control because of their weird reproductive pattern, despite being instinctively good with machinery. It might have been damaged by overuse of the Power.
CALM, he ordered it mentally. Then verbally: “Report on what has happened.”
The slave immediately stopped, shrugged, and began punching up numbers from the distributor-nodes which were doing duty for the absent computer.
“Master, we underwent a collision. The stasis field switched on automatically when the proximity alarm was tripped; it has its own subroutine.” The thrint felt its mind try to become agitated once more and then subside under the Power, a sensation like a sneeze that never quite materialized. “All exterior sensors are inoperative, Master.”
Dnivtopun pulled a dopestick from the pouch at his belt and sucked on it. He was hungry, of course; a thrint was always hungry.
“Activate the drive,” he said after a moment. “Extend the replacement sensor pods.” A stasis field was utterly impenetrable, but anything extending through it was still vulnerable. The slave obeyed; then screamed in syncopation with the alarms as the machinery overrode the commands.
REMAIN CALM, the thrint commanded again, and wished for a moment that the Power worked for self-control. Nervously, he extended his pointed tongue and groomed his tendrils. Something was very strange here. He blinked his eyelid shut and thought for a moment, then spoke:
“Give me a reading on the mass sensor.”
That worked from inductor coils within the single molecule of the hull; very little besides antimatter could penetrate a shipmetal hull, but gravity could. The figures scrolled up, and Dnivtopun blinked his eye at them in bafflement.
“Again.” They repeated themselves, and the thrint felt a deep lurch below his keelbones. This felt wrong.
✩ ✩ ✩
“Something is wrong,” Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham muttered to himself, in the hybrid German-Danish-Bali-Dutch tongue spoken by the ruling class of Wunderland. It was Admiral Reichstein-Markham now, as far as that went in the rather irregular command structure of the Free Wunderland Space Navy, the space-based guerrillas who had fought the kzin for a generation.
“Something is very wrong.”
That feeling had been growing since the four ships under his command had matched vectors with this anomalous asteroid. He clasped his hands behind his back, rising slightly on the balls of his feet, listening to the disciplined murmur of voices among the crew of the Nietzsche. The jury-rigged bridge of the converted ore-carrier was more crowded than ever, after the success of his recent raids. Markham’s eyes went to the screen that showed the other units of his little fleet. More merchantmen, with singleship auxiliaries serving as fighters. Rather thoroughly armed now, and all equipped with k
zinti gravity-polarizer drives. And the cause of it all, the Catskinner. Not very impressive to look at, but the only purpose-built warship in his command: a UN Dart-class attack boat, with a spindle shape, massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, and asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors.
And those UN personnel had been persuaded to…entrust the Catskinner to him while they went on to their mission on Wunderland. The Yamamoto’s raid had sown chaos among the kzin; the near-miraculous assassination of the alien governor of Wunderland had done more. Markham’s fleet had grown accordingly, but it was still risky to group so many together. Or so the damnably officious sentient computer had told him. His scowl deepened. Consciousness-level computers were a dead-end technology, doomed to catatonic madness in six months or less from activation, or so the books all said. Perhaps this one was too, but it was distressingly arrogant in the meantime.
The feeling of wrongness grew, like wires pulling at the back of his skull. He felt an impulse to blink his eye (eye?) and knot his tendrils (tendrils?), and for an instant his body felt an itch along the bones, as if his muscles were trying to move in ways outside their design parameters.
Nonsense, he told himself, shrugging his shoulders in the tight-fitting gray coverall of the Free Wunderland armed forces. Markham flicked his eyes sideways at the other crewfolk; they looked uncomfortable too, and…what was his name? Patrick O’Connell, yes, the redhead…looked positively green. Stress, he decided.
“Catskinner,” he said aloud. “Have you analyzed the discrepancy?” The computer had no name apart from the ship into which it had been built; he had asked, and it had suggested “hey, you.”
“There is a gravitational anomaly, Admiral Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham,” the machine on the other craft replied. It insisted on English and spoke with a Belter accent, flat and rather neutral, the intonation of a people who were too solitary and too crowded to afford much emotion. And a slight nasal overtone, Sol-Belter, not Serpent Swarm.
The Wunderlander’s face stayed in its usual bony mask; the Will was master. Inwardly he gritted teeth, ashamed of letting a machine’s mockery move him. If it even knows what it does, he raged. Some rootless cosmopolite Earther deracinated degenerate programmed that into it.
“Here is the outline; approximately 100 to 220 meters below the surface.” A smooth regular spindle-shape tapering to both ends.
“Zat—” Markham’s voice showed the heavy accent of his mother’s people for a second; she had been a refugee from the noble families of Wunderland, dispossessed by the conquest. “That is an artifact!”
“Correct to within 99.87 percent, given the admittedly inadequate information,” the computer said.
“Not a human artifact, however.”
“Nor kzin.”
“No. The design architecture is wrong.”
Markham nodded, feeling the pulse beating in his throat. His mouth was dry, as if papered in surgical tissue, and he licked the rough chapped surface of his lips. Natural law constrained design, but within it tools somehow reflected the…personalities of the designers. Kzin ships tended to wedge and spike shapes, a combination of sinuosity and blunt masses. Human vessels were globes and volumes joined by scaffolding. This was neither.
“Assuming it is a spaceship,” he said. Glory burst in his mind, sweeter than maivin or sex. There were other intelligent species, and not all of them would be slaves of the kzin. And there had been races before either…
“This seems logical. The structure…the structure is remarkable. It emits no radiation of any type and reflects none, within the spectra of my sensors.”
Perfect stealthing! Markham thought.
“When we attempted a sampling with the drilling laser, it became perfectly reflective. To a high probability, the structure must somehow be a single molecule of very high strength. Considerably beyond human or kzin capacities at present, although theoretically possible. The density of the overall mass implies either a control of gravitational forces beyond ours, or use of degenerate matter within the hull.” The Wunderlander felt the hush at his back, broken only by a slight mooing sound that he abruptly stopped as he realized it was coming from his own throat. The sound of pure desire. Invulnerable armor! Invincible weapons, technological surprise!
“How are you arriving at its outline?”
“Gravitational sensors.” A pause; the ghost in Catskinner’s machine imitated human speech patterns well. “The shell of asteroidal material seems to have accreted naturally.”
“Hmmm.” A derelict, then. Impossible to say what might lie within. “How long would this take?” A memory itched, something in Mutti’s collection of anthropology disks…later.
“Very difficult to estimate with any degree of precision. Not more than three billion standard years, in this system. Not less than half that; assuming, of course, a stable orbit.”
Awe tugged briefly at Markham’s mind, and he remembered a very old saying that the universe was not only stranger than humans imagined, but stranger than they could imagine. Before human speech, before fire, before the first life on earth, this thing had drifted here, falling forever. Flatlanders back on Earth could delude themselves that the universe was tailored to the specifications of H. sapiens, but those whose ancestors had survived the dispersal into space had other reflexes bred into their genes. He considered, for moments while sweat trickled down his flanks. His was the decision, his the Will.
The Overman must learn to seize the moment, he reminded himself. Excessive caution is for slaves.
“The Nietzsche will rendezvous with the…ah, object,” he said. His own ship had the best technical facilities of any in the fleet. “Ungrapple the habitat and mining pods from the Moltke and Valdemar, and bring them down. Ve vill begin operations immediately.”
✩ ✩ ✩
“Very wrong,” Dnivtopun continued.
The Ruling Mind was encased in rock. How could that have happened? A collision, probably; at high fractions of c, a stasis-protected object could embed itself, vaporizing the shielded off-switch. Which meant the ship could have drifted for a long time, centuries even. He felt a wash of relief, and worked his footclaws into the resilient surface of the deck. Suicide Time would be long over, the danger past. Relief was followed by fear; what if the tnuctipun had found out? What if they had made some machine to shelter them, something more powerful than the giant amplifier the thrint patriarchs had built on homeworld?
Just then another sensor pinged; a heatspot on the exterior hull, not far from the stasis switch. Not very hot, only enough to vaporize iron, but it might be a guide-beam for some weapon that would penetrate shipmetal. Dnivtopun’s mouth gaped wide and the ripple of peristaltic motion started to reverse; he caught himself just in time, his thick hide crinkling with shame, I nearly beshat myself in public…well, only before a slave. It was still humiliating…
“Master, there are fusion-power sources nearby; the exterior sensors are detecting neutrino flux.”
The thrint bounced in relief. Fusion-power units. How quaint. Nothing the tnuctipun would be using. On the other hand, neither would thrint; everyone within the Empire had used the standard disruption-converter for millennia. It must be an undiscovered sapient species. Dnivtopun’s mouth opened again, this time in a grin of sheer greed. The first discoverer of an intelligent species, and an industrialized one at that…But how could they have survived Suicide Time? he thought.
There was no point in speculating without more information. Well, here’s my chance to play Explorer again, he thought. Before the War, that had been the commonest dream of young thrint, to be a daring, dashing conquistador on the frontiers. Braving exotic dangers, winning incredible wealth…romantic foolishness for the most part, a disguise for discomfort and risk and failure. Explorers were failures to begin with, usually. What sane male would pursue so risky a career if they had any alternative? But he had had some of the training. First you reached out with the Power—
“Mutti,” Ulf Reichste
in-Markham muttered. Why did I say that? he thought, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. He was standing a little apart, a hundred meters from the Nietzsche where she lay anchored by magnetic grapples to the surface of the asteroid. The first of the dome habitats was already up, a smooth taupe-colored dome; skeletal structures of alloy, prefabricated smelters and refiners, were rising elsewhere. There was no point in delaying the original purpose of the mission: to refuel and take the raw materials that clandestine fabricators would turn into weaponry, or sell for the kzinti occupation credits that the guerrillas’ laundering operations channeled into sub-rosa purchasing in the legitimate economy. But one large cluster of his personnel were directing digging machines straight down, toward the thing at the core of this rock; already a tube thicker than a man ran to a separator, jerking and twisting slightly as talc-fine ground rock was propelled by magnetic currents.
Markham rose slightly on his toes, watching the purposeful bustle. Communications chatter was at a minimum, all tight-beam laser; the guerrillas were largely Belters, and sloppily anarchistic though they might be in most respects, they knew how to handle machinery in low-G and vacuum.
Mutti. This time it rang mentally. He had an odd flash of déjà vu, as if he were a toddler again, in the office-apartment on Tiamat, speaking his first words. Almost he could see the crib, the bear that could crawl and talk, the dangling mobile of strange animals that lived away on his real home, the estate on Wunderland. An enormous shape bent over him, edged in a radiant aura of love.
“Helf me, Mutti,” he croaked, staggering and grabbing at his head; his gloved hands slid off the helmet, and he could hear screams and whimpers over the open channel. Strobing images flickered across his mind: himself at ages one, three, four, learning to talk, to walk…memories were flowing out of his head, faster than he could bear. He opened his mouth and screamed.