Fleet of Worlds Read online

Trust Kirsten to notice phonetic similarities between English and German. Coincidence, he had told her. What was one more deception?

  Had she dutifully deep-scanned Explorer’s most recent destination, wondering what there was to be learned that way?

  If she only knew.

  Eons ago there had been a war of galactic extermination, of which naught remained but scattered artifacts preserved for eternity within stasis fields. Most objects recovered from stasis storage defied understanding. All embodied technologies of terrifying potency. The prevailing opinion was that these were weapons caches.

  The one course of action more frightening than to locate and open a stasis box was to leave it for another race to find.

  The stasis field was opaque to neutrino pulses. Only degenerate matter, like the collapsed central mass of a star, shared that property. A stasis field could not be missed—so it was foolish to look for a stasis box in such a heavily traveled region as Sol system.

  As his singing swelled to a crescendo, enjoying his manic glee while it lasted, Nessus could not help wondering how Omar, Eric, and Kirsten were coming on their mission.

  A WATER WORLD sparkled through Explorer’s view ports. Other than the peaks of a few volcanic cones, only an immense, equatorial landmass interrupted the otherwise planet-spanning ocean. The continent’s coastal regions were bright with greenery, its high central plains brown and sere. Nike, in his only active participation, had responded to an early report by naming the planet Oceanus.

  Life teemed in the seas and jungles below. If she let herself, Kirsten could stare for hours every shift. Despite countless differences, Oceanus reminded her of NP4. She missed home.

  “It does look nice down there.” Eric sat on the relax-room deck amid a scattering of parts, things to be configured into yet another remote-sensing satellite. He had regained his normal color since the nearly disastrous expedition to the Human Studies Institute, but not yet his stamina. “In a bugs-at-the-top-of-the-food-chain sort of way.”

  “Nothing here to match the Gw’oth,” she said.

  “Not even close.” As a tiny component went flying from his grasp, he muttered about fingers being too stubby and inflexible.

  Rather than her smaller fingers, all she offered him was a question. “Why bother with more sensors? Nothing below can possibly be a threat to the Fleet.”

  “You really are down,” Eric said.

  He’d been like that with her, solicitous, since the autodoc let him out. His taste in colors had become subdued, too. She said, “It was a fool’s errand. I was the fool. The best that can be said for our outing is I didn’t get you killed—not quite—and we weren’t caught.” She trembled. She had no idea what punishment might have been meted out. Somehow, the uncertainty only made it worse.

  “Kirsten, I insisted on going. I kept my medical condition secret. It’s not your fault.” A cough ruined his protest.

  “I don’t understand why the autodoc can’t fix that.” At least, if he healed completely, she would have only the failure of their quest to depress her.

  “The ’doc can only treat my symptoms. It can’t keep my body from producing the proteins that predispose me to asthma attacks. Only time stops that process.” He sipped something from a drink bulb. “And no, the ’doc can’t switch off some magic gene. There’s some complex dependency involved: environmental, or multigene, or environmental and multigene.” Cough. “That’s me. I’m special.”

  Eric went back to his tinkering and she to planetgazing. She had a great deal of thinking to do. Either activity served to spend the time until his health would accommodate a return to the Fleet without raising unwelcome questions.

  UNSAVORY.

  It was the adjective Nessus associated with underworld figures. It could hardly be otherwise. To be unsavory, or worse, was surely a precondition for acting against the common good of one’s species. Unsavory, fairly or not, was how he labeled the man and woman in the holo before him.

  No matter that they had come at his summons: his minions.

  The wild humans spoke from a light-second away. If they were surprised to encounter a hyperwave radio relay rather than a ship at the designated coordinates, they did not comment. General Products produced a near-impregnable hull, but a sufficiently serious impact would still turn him to jelly. A sufficiently powerful laser would vaporize the hull coating and then destroy anything within, the hull itself being transparent to visible light. There could be antimatter. . . .

  This line of thought would soon have him cowering against his own belly, which he could have done without traveling so many light-years. It did nothing to protect the Fleet or to impress Nike. Better to concentrate on his goals than on improbable hazards. “What results?”

  “Fertility Board records are not easy to come by,” Miguel Sullivan began. He was swarthy and round-faced, with close-set eyes, a smooth scalp, and a scruffy mustache. An Earther scrubbed of body paint for space. “That was no small matter with which you tasked us.”

  It was no small retainer that had already been electronically transferred, from funds hopefully untraceable to General Products, with the promise of another payment upon success. “Your report,” Nessus prompted again.

  “Can I send you a file?” Ashley Klein’s most prominent feature was a Belter Mohawk dyed shocking neon blue. Her pale blue eyes seemed almost colorless by comparison. She towered over her colleague. The question was evidently rhetorical, because data appeared in an input buffer before Nessus answered. She said, “There have been billions of births on Earth in the past century. The overwhelming majority are what you would expect: one or two children approved for obviously healthy parents, and all Fertility Board rules clearly followed.”

  Nessus surveyed the file as she spoke. Those billions of births had been plotted against several different parameters. Every chart showed a nice bell curve—which meant every graph had outliers. “Clearly some couples had a third, or even a fourth child. A few applications were approved far quicker than the typical review period. There have been pregnancy complications, and a scattering of congenital disorders, despite all the screening.”

  “It’s what I’d expect,” Ashley said. “There’s no more variability here than you’d predict with so many cases to be evaluated. Less, to be honest.”

  Nessus placed little weight in the self-professed honesty of criminals. Even his own. Even when, with only the evidence of their eyes and his virtualized transmission to guide them, he must appear a human she. “And you cross-matched those exceptions with family income?”

  “Of course, since you asked.” Ashley shrugged and referred him to another graphic in the file. “It’s the same lack of pattern.”

  A pattern would have been nice; a few data points would suffice. Nessus sorted a list of the outliers against family income. While proving nothing, it yielded more than a million cases of plausible connivance. He transmitted back his version of the data. “Here. Now look for associations with anyone working for the Fertility Board, or to their relatives and friends.”

  Miguel smiled humorlessly. “Then we put the squeeze on them?”

  Unsavory and picaresque. The turn of phrase was new to Nessus, but its meaning was obvious. “No. For now, let the data trickle out. Reporters. Rumors. ’Net gossip. Be creative.”

  Ashley rubbed her chin. “Where’s the profit in that? It’ll only cause chaos.”

  “For you it will cause money.” They had the good sense to be silent when Nessus paused for any further objection. “Good. Here is another credit authorization code.”

  “We’ll head back into the solar system then,” Miguel said.

  Was there a nuance of complaint at Nessus’ insistence on a remote rendezvous? He did not care. Closer to the sun would make detection that much more likely. Closer to the sun, he would be within the singularity, unable to flick away from danger by hyperdrive.

  Thought of departure, however premature, reminded Nessus of another transaction. “There is something I would l
ike you to acquire for me. A collection, actually.” He transmitted the details.

  The humans twitched in surprise. “You’re serious?” Miguel asked. “That will cost you serious money. A few million, I’ll say five, just to determine feasibility. Much more if it can be done.”

  “Approved.” Fifty million would hardly touch the General Products accounts here in Sol system, and Nessus could hardly come all this way without bringing Nike home a souvenir.

  OMAR LOPED ON the treadmill, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. Only the wet hair suggested that he had been exercising for long. Sweat evaporating almost instantly through his nano-cloth jumpsuit kept the rest of him cool. He said, “I would defy even Nessus to find a threat down there.”

  Down there: the watery planet they had now orbited for twenty-two shifts. Close observation of Oceanus by remote-controlled sensors had revealed hive creatures, like especially retarded bees, and forests of sedentary sea-bottom creatures sieving the currents for the local algae-equivalent. Geometric structures in the ocean had provided the only suggestion of artificiality, an intimation that proved to be false. Except in progress reports to Hearth, the three of them never doubted these assemblages were naturally occurring reefs. Still, experience with the Gw’oth justified checking out the undersea features with methodical indirection. To stall while Eric mended.

  Which, to Kirsten’s relief, he had. She pinned Eric’s feet as he did sit-ups. “Do you think we’ll ever know where Nessus was sent?”

  “Doubt it,” Eric grunted. “Forty-nine. Fifty.” He flopped back onto his mat, breathing heavily but with none of the wheezing that had been so scary. “I’m ready to go back.”

  “To Arcadia?” Omar stepped off the treadmill. Sensing the disappearance of its load, the machine came to a stop.

  “To the institute.”

  “What?” Kirsten asked. She had championed that first excursion, arrogantly certain they would root out long-hidden secrets. That she would find a way into the computers, because that was what she did. “Why?”

  Eric wiggled his feet. “Let me up.” She did, and he stood. “There had to be meaning there. I keep looking.”

  “You keep looking,” Omar said. “Present tense. How, exactly?”

  “Where did I put it?” Eric looked around until he spotted his communicator, tossed into a corner when he began exercising. He tapped at its touch screen. “Here.”

  A holo swallowed his hand. “Enlarge.”

  Kirsten stepped back to take it in. “That’s . . . the institute’s main floor.” She peered between the virtual railings at the remembered area below. In miniature, Citizens walked about, mimed conversation, guarded stepping discs, and labored at their workstations. Shadowy images floated above, phantoms of holograms past. The sequence ran less than a minute before looping back to the beginning.

  “I took this video while you crept across the gallery floor to that terminal,” Eric said.

  “And you never said anything,” she said. “It shows us nothing.” Eric shrugged. “The problem is, I can’t help but believe that it should, or that it would have, if I had taken more.”

  “Can we enhance this?” Omar asked.

  “I wish we could,” Eric answered. “Now if we had a bigger computer we could safely put this on—but that’s not going to happen until we’re home.”

  “A bigger computer? We have all we could need.” Kirsten leaned over, squinting. The indistinct images tantalized her. “With the superuser privileges I cloned from Nessus, I can delete all traces afterward.”

  Omar broke a long silence. “Let’s do it.”

  A THOUSAND-PLUS ENVELOPES materialized at the appointed time inside as many unlisted transfer booths. The originating coordinates recorded by the receiving booths were nulled and untraceable. The compulsory authentication checks had been similarly bypassed. The identifications implicit in supposedly mandatory real-time payments were blanked out, should any of the recipients dare to inquire of the network provider. Lest the manner of message delivery be insufficiently instructive, each envelope bore in animation the snarling, ever watchful, three-headed guardian of Hades: Cerberus.

  It was enough, Nessus thought, to instill dread in the recipients even before they saw what waited within.

  Subverting the humans’ primitive teleportation system was easy, since the underlying technology had been licensed from General Products in the first place. The device Nessus had provided his minions for the task would have self-destructed after use. The time might arise when he wanted to trust the transfer-booth system’s integrity—in the sense of knowing that its vulnerability remained intact and unsuspected.

  The envelope contents were as carefully selected as the recipients. Off-world bank statements with embarrassingly large balances. Dates and places of trysts. Intimations of various cooked books, stock manipulations, tax evasions, rigged bids, undisclosed product defects, and sordid collusions. Enumerations of criminal investigations stymied or inexplicably gone dormant, of pardons granted and sentences commuted. Gambling debts, drug habits, spousal abuses, embezzlements, youthful indiscretions . . .

  It required an appreciation of human society far deeper than Nessus’ to grasp exactly why most of the hinted-at disclosures were problematical. That lack of understanding scarcely mattered, because his minions understood. All Nessus had required of Miguel and Ashley was invisible influence.

  He sought comfort from the beginnings of progress. Riots against Fertility Board corruption had begun. Those who would provide him with influence had been put on notice. Soon enough, the recipients of those Cerberus-emblazoned envelopes would be told the price of keeping their secrets. For most, the price of forbearance would be advocacy for Fertility Board “reform.” For a few, the price would be much higher. Nessus would see into the ARM itself.

  For all this preliminary success, Nessus trembled. The pungency of synthetic herd pheromone could not disguise the knowledge that he was alone, the only one of his kind for light-years. It could not hasten the manipulation of the wild humans. It could not purge his fear of failure. It could not heal his aberrance, or make him more attractive to the one he loved.

  Not directly, anyway.

  The deliberate unfolding of the plan had one advantage. The gift Nessus wished to obtain for Nike was obtainable.

  Its acquisition would also take time.

  THE VIDEO WAS low resolution, blurry, and shot from an oblique angle. Kirsten could do nothing about the angle, but everything else was amenable to computed corrections. She enhanced edges, interpolated new scan rows to sharpen the overall picture, compensated for the worst reflections, and adjusted for Eric’s tremulous camera hand.

  That was better.

  Scattered letters that remained ambiguous to Kirsten were nonetheless identifiable by character-recognition software. Whatever had blurred and smeared the letters had likewise distorted the rest of the image. She dug into the character-recognition algorithms, and pulled apart the pattern-analysis and pattern-matching logic. One routine at a time, she experimented.

  Eric, whom she had doubted, had persevered. She had despaired, and it shamed her. Not even the deflection of the Fleet’s course away from the Gw’oth had cheered her.

  Never again.

  Step by step the image improved.

  Omar ambled onto the bridge. “Welcome back.”

  She realized she had worked through the sleep shift. Her hands never left the keyboard. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, Kirsten, that you were whistling.”

  That made her stop, if only for a moment. “I guess I was. I could kill that Eric, if he hadn’t almost done it to himself already. This is good data.”

  “Only in your hands. And only when you were ready.”

  Omar was right, of course.

  Her fingers kept working. There was always one more tweak to try. “Wish me luck.” The still image hanging before her shimmered, then settled into crisper focus: the globe of NP5. This latest addition to the F
leet was always wreathed in cloud, still early in its transformation into a haven for Hearthian life. Beside the cloudy sphere hung an icon and a string of numerals.

  “Luck.” Omar settled on the arm of the crash couch beside her. “That looks clearer. See anything useful?”

  Finally, Kirsten lifted her hands from the keyboard. She turned to look Omar squarely in the eye. “My guess is ‘useful’ seriously understates it.

  “There’s a General Products #4 hull circling NP5. For some reason we can’t yet imagine, that ship matters to the Human Studies Institute. And this,” and she poked her hand into the cleaned-up holo, to the string of numerals, “is the key to the stepping disc network aboard that ship.”

  19

  With sinuous perfection, a thousand lithe figures twirled and leapt. Hooves kicked: unerringly straight and high, impossibly precise, preternaturally synchronized in each stroke against the rock-hard stage. Voices rang out, ineffably poignant in cadence and counterpoint, melody and mode. Lines formed, split, and reformed. Formations melded and reemerged.

  A thousand exemplars of perfection became one. A distraction, from questing humans and political ambition alike, that Nike sorely needed. As he watched, a much-needed calm washed over him. His heads swayed sensually, drawn to the rhythms of the dance.

  “Excellency,” someone whispered.

  Nike’s heads whipped around. Who would dare at such a time? The troupe had dedicated this performance to his honor.

  “Excellency,” repeated the aide. His heads drooped with chagrin and embarrassment. “There is an utmost-urgency call for you.”

  Whispering apologies to friends and colleagues he had invited to the performance, Nike pressed through the throng filling the private viewing room into a corridor empty but for some of his security detachment. The closed door muted the singing, but had no effect on the pounding of three thousand hooves. The vibration of the building continued unabated as the performance continued despite his absence.

  He accepted a communicator from the cringing aide. “That’s all right. It was your responsibility to tell me.”