Fleet of Worlds Read online

  He needed to distract her.

  “The strange thing, Kirsten, is that the Fleet flees an abundance of worlds just like that.” He extended a neck at NP5, huge beneath the bridge view port. “Every once-habitable world in the galactic core has been wiped clean. More and more will be sterilized as the radiation front passes. Millions of worlds, Kirsten, ripe for eco-forming.”

  Swiveling his heads, Nessus looked himself in the eyes. “If only those worlds were safe to approach before all that wonderful but reactive oxygen recombines.”

  With a shiver for effect, he dropped the ironic pose. “Enough gloom. Let us return to Long Pass for coffee and carrot juice.”

  As she vanished, stepping ahead of him, he permitted himself a much needed stirring of his mane before following.

  NIBBLING DELICATELY, NIKE sampled the grass-and-fruit medley offered to him. The simplicity of the snack emphasized the naturalness and freshness—the expense—of its ingredients: another transparent offer. “Excellent,” Nike said. With delicacy was exactly how he had to manage this meeting. “Thank you for agreeing to see me, Eos.”

  Eos gestured expansively. At the luxurious dwelling his venality had gotten him? At politics and life? At the presumed deal about to be made? “Of course. Always glad to see you. Have you considered what we discussed on your previous visit?”

  “I have.” Nike bowed a neck with feigned unease. “Will the Hindmost definitely propose a unity government?”

  “Very soon,” Eos said. “The time is right. The migration proceeds smoothly.”

  Smoothly? Wild humans still sought them. By disregarding that truth, Eos had betrayed his position. Had forfeited the right to continue as leader of the Experimentalists.

  Nike decided: My conscience is clean. “A point worth making when you and the Hindmost announce your association.”

  “Indeed.” Eos paused from refilling his trencher with more grain-and-fruit medley. “Is that important to you, Nike?”

  “As leader of Clandestine Directorate, I am expected to watch objectively for problems. . . .” Another contrived bending of the neck.

  “I see,” Eos said. In the head not encumbered with a snack, lips wriggled with amusement. “It is more appropriate for you to agree that our circumstances are safe, especially to a suggestion I offer, than to volunteer that same assessment.”

  Nike lowered his heads submissively.

  “I see your point.” Setting down his trencher, Eos whistled a wry, double-throated arpeggio. “Then we have an understanding.”

  “We do.” Nike straightened. He felt no shame for his lie.

  Once Eos made his ill-advised declaration, and the Colonist crisis followed almost immediately, the whole Concordance would reach an understanding:

  The current leader of the Experimentalists was unfit.

  34

  Snoring softly, Eric turned lazily on his long axis, releasing Kirsten. Finally. She collapsed the sleeper field, easing them to the deck. She stood aside and reactivated the field before he stirred. He snorted in his sleep and she smiled.

  Resenting her insomnia—or his easy sleep—accomplished nothing. Kirsten headed to the relax room for a sleeping pill from the autodoc. En route, she changed her mind. She stepped directly from Explorer to Long Pass, the former docked alongside Preserver’s outer hull, the latter locked within.

  After a detour for coffee, Kirsten went to the ramscoop’s bridge. She found Sven already there.

  “Oh, hello,” he said. He continued shuffling papers.

  “I’m sorry to see you can’t sleep either.”

  “Coffee. We’re all addicted.”

  She took the other seat on the bridge. “I hoped to chat for a bit with Jeeves. Will that bother you?”

  “Nah.” Sven spread the papers across a console ledge. “If it does, I’ll move. I’m only here for a change of scenery. I can as usefully be stumped in my cabin or the dayroom.”

  “Thanks. I’ll talk quietly.” She swiveled toward the console, giving Sven the semblance of privacy. “Jeeves, this is Kirsten.”

  A cartoon of a round head with a moustache, smiled widely. “Good morning.” It was, just barely, by ship’s time.

  “What can you tell me about Earth?” she asked.

  “Very little. It’s where humans come from. Long Pass was built in and launched from high Earth orbit.”

  “And you don’t know where Earth is.” Kirsten sighed. She already knew his answer.

  “That data has been corrupted,” Jeeves said regretfully.

  She slouched in her chair, still not tired, but weary. Discovery of the ancestral ship was supposed to provide answers. Kept busy restoring the ship, Eric and Omar did not share her frustration. She did not share their intuition that mastering their forebears’ technology would prove useful. Somehow.

  Concentrate, she chided herself. “Could we, Colonists, live on Earth?” She had transferred basic knowledge to him, files about Hearth and the Fleet, about NP4 and Arcadia, hoping something would correlate with an otherwise useless scrap of his memory.

  “Presumably,” the AI said. “You can live in this ship.”

  “We may never know,” Sven said, rearranging and crinkling papers. “The Concordance wants no one to know its location. Earth’s authorities might have felt the same. Perhaps the data was only in the navigator’s head. Perhaps they had a plan to erase it if they encountered others.”

  However logical the speculation, Kirsten could not bear to accept it. So much had gone into getting here. In the end, would they be left with only Citizen fables of their past? The possibility broke her heart.

  She leaned back and stretched, stiff joints cracking. Sven had again rearranged his stack of papers. Task lists. Sketches. Snippets of inventory, some items checked or lined through. “Jeeves has terabytes of data. Why spend so much time dealing with these few bits?”

  Sven shrugged. “The crew also had those terabytes. They found this worth recording by hand. It’s worth a fraction of my time to wonder why.”

  “But doodles? At that, mostly doodles of flowers.” Kirsten was reminded vaguely of the needlework she had taken her first time aboard. “Sure, we found them all over. After years in this cramped, sterile environment, I’d yearn for a bit of nature too.”

  “Even the flower drawings are interesting,” Sven said. “You recognize them, of course.”

  Kirsten sipped the dregs of her coffee, now scarcely tepid. “A few. Buttercups and daisies. Irises, I think. That means the ship carried the seeds.”

  “Tyra, my wife, is quite the gardener. I recognize all these flowers, except maybe one.” Sven tapped several sheets. “It looks like a fuchsia, except that every fuchsia I’ve ever seen has four petals. These all have five petals.”

  “Odd,” she mused. “Maybe they brought seeds for those, too, but the breed didn’t take.”

  Sven stifled a yawn. “Jeeves?”

  “My inventory never included such a seed.” The AI paused. “At least I do not think so.”

  In the corner of Kirsten’s eye, Sven yawned again. She said, “Don’t let me keep you up.”

  “Fair enough.” He gathered up his papers. “So you see why I look to these few papers. The fuchsia discrepancy may mean nothing. Or it may show us that not only navigational data has problems.” Big yawn. “But more likely nothing.” He shambled off the bridge, presumably bound for his cabin.

  Not even Sven’s yawning had any effect on her. “Jeeves, remember the block of corrupted memory we last talked about?” The region somehow neither accessible nor inaccessible, of whose content and purpose Jeeves denied all knowledge. “Show details.”

  A graphic materialized: a fast-scrolling hexadecimal dump. The data sped past, telling her nothing. At so low a level of detail, how could it? “Pause. Is this program code or data?”

  “A little of each,” Jeeves said. “It’s mostly meaningless.”

  Neither program nor data? “Is this unassigned storage? Something released by a progra
m and not put back into use?”

  “Unlikely,” Jeeves said. “It’s not queued for reassignment. Nor has it been initialized for reallocation.”

  Kirsten drained the last of her coffee. She had studied Citizen computers, not human computers, but surely they shared some common underlying principles. No one worked with such minutiae as memory allocation—such bit shuffling had long ago been optimized and standardized—but obviously data structures underpinned everything. “Jeeves, does this mysterious block belong to any data structure?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Not a useful one. It’s tagged not to be reused, as though it had a physical fault. If so, the fault is transient, because it passes all my diagnostics.”

  Back and forth the conversation went, without progress. Her mood darkened under the futility of it all. Jeeves did not know what he did not know.

  What she did not know was simple: how to give up. “You said there is some data in this region. Does it use any data structure with which you are familiar?”

  Jeeves shook its animated head: no.

  Hmm. “You also said there is program code. That must correspond to a meaningful structure, or else you could not distinguish it from data. Correct?”

  It nodded, the tips of its mustache bobbing slightly.

  Kirsten jumped as the ventilation fan kicked on. She had ground to a halt. Maybe she might yet get some sleep this shift.

  But first—“Jeeves, I’m thinking we should try to execute the suspected code segments. Can you recognize and intercept anything unsafe they might do, before they do it?”

  “Clarify unsafe.”

  She thought. “Changes to program or data. Operation of shipboard systems.” Attempting to fire the fusion drive while inside the enclosed space of Preserver would kill them quick.

  “Then, yes, I can.”

  Kirsten rubbed her eyes. After disallowing all that, how would she know if those mysterious programs did anything at all? “Corrections. One, permit memory modification within only the anomalous region we’re discussing. Two, on this console,” and she pointed, “allow display and speech.”

  “Done,” Jeeves said. “Shall I begin running the suspected code segments?”

  “Go ahead.”

  The corrupted memory region held eight possibly executable code segments. Four, given the opportunity to run, did nothing. Three tried to transmit garbled commands over the main shipboard network; Jeeves blocked their attempts and terminated them.

  The final segment opened up a primitive hologram at Kirsten’s console: a narrow rectangle with a blinking square at one end. It might be nothing.

  Or, she thought, it might be a login dialogue.

  * * *

  NOT LONG AGO, to bond with Nike had seemed the unlikeliest of occurrences. Somehow, though, that had happened. So perhaps the news broadcast from Hearth should not have surprised Nessus.

  Instead, Nessus found himself struck tuneless.

  The Hindmost himself had invited Eos to join the government. Eos himself had agreed, citing the new era of security well established by years of uneventful Fleet voyaging. The sanguine announcement mentioned neither questing ARMs nor rebellious Colonists.

  Nike refused Nessus’ calls, pleading pressing duties.

  Behind his locked cabin door, heads below the delusional safety of his belly, Nessus marveled. There were forms of insanity far worse than scouting interstellar space.

  PRESERVER STORED HUGE volumes of deuterium and tritium. Like Explorer, but on a much grander scale, its tanks were refilled through stepping discs and molecular filters. Operated in transmit mode, those same discs refilled the fuel tanks of fusion reactors across the ship. Thus were all of Preserver’s auxiliary vessels refueled, and its robots, and even its trash disposals.

  Once Eric completed retrofitting a few stepping discs, Preserver would also replenish Long Pass’s tanks.

  While Eric attended to refueling, Omar and Sven consulted with Jeeves about old inventory records, Nessus sulked in his cabin, and the Citizen technicians ignored them all to debate the latest political news from Hearth . . . Kirsten fretted.

  After finding that single semi-functional code fragment, she had been too excited to sleep. No, be honest: too depressed. Say that she had found a hidden application. How could she possibly log in? Her exhaustion went beyond coffee’s powers; she switched to stim pills.

  Arms folded on the dayroom table, head down on her arms, Kirsten visualized the display invoked by that mysterious code. The blinking square was likely a cursor. Presumably the long rectangle was a data-entry field. If so, the field accommodated six characters. Random typing had proven the field did not expand to permit more.

  So, twenty-six letters and ten digits. She would be an optimist, and assume the password contained no punctuation marks. Six character positions. That made thirty-six to the sixth possibilities. Two billion, more or less.

  Guessing would not solve this problem and whoever had set this puzzle was doubtless wily enough to have defended against a brute-force attack.

  Guessing would not solve this problem.

  When the stim pills finally kicked in, Kirsten noticed she was hungry. She tried another experiment from Long Pass’s synthesizer: pepperoni pizza.

  Sven had covered one dayroom wall with old flower doodles. She couldn’t tell most flowers apart, except for their differing numbers of petals. Why had someone spent so much time drawing these things?

  The synthesizer disgorged her pizza. It smelled wonderful. The first bite seared the roof of her mouth.

  Flowers everywhere. Flowers on that handicraft from her first time aboard. If those flowers meant something, why were the fuchsias drawn wrong?

  More cautiously, she took a second bite. Pizza tasted wonderful. An Earth recipe, she decided.

  And Earth flowers? Was a message hidden in the flowers? Kirsten stared at the wall of drawings, desperate to see a pattern. Messy sketches. Many varieties. Petals and leaves. Something about the petals. The number of petals?

  On one sheet, flowers with three, five, and twenty-one leaves. On another sheet: three, eight, and five. The next: eight, three, and five. Something teased her memory.

  Across all the drawings, the flowers exhibited only a few distinct numbers of petals. She sorted the list: three, five, eight, thirteen, and twenty-one.

  She saw a pattern, but no meaning. Three and five are eight. Five and eight are thirteen. Eight and thirteen are twenty one.

  She finished the pizza and went to the bridge. A Jeeves animation was deep in discussion with Sven and Omar. There was no room for her inside. “Jeeves,” she called from the corridor. The AI could multitask. “Three, five, eight, thirteen . . . what comes next?”

  “Twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five. They’re all in the Fibonacci series, Kirsten. Starting with zero-one-one-two, every number in the series is the sum of the two that precede it.”

  Omar looked up, impatient at the interruption. “Kirsten, can you play number games later?”

  So the series had a name. Did it have a purpose? “Jeeves, what is the meaning of that series?”

  “The Fibonacci series occurs frequently in nature. In botany, for example, Fibonacci patterns appear in the spiraling of petals, leaves, and pine cones, the clustering of seeds, and the growth points at which plants branch and rebranch. In zoology, the Fibonacci numbers appear in the dimensions of successive compartments in the shell of the nautilus. The so-called golden rectangle . . .”

  “Kirsten,” Sven grumbled. “I’ve found my way to a listing of species once carried on this ship, including marine species new to me. Can your fun with numbers wait?”

  She ignored Sven, too. “Jeeves, you said the pattern occurs in nature. Did you mean all nature, or earthly nature?”

  “Earthly nature,” Jeeves said.

  So: She had found a code fragment, with what might be a dialogue box. A secret program hidden in the earthly computer, possibly accessed by a secret password. A secret earthly password? r />
  Might the flowers everywhere carry a message? Something that only humans might notice? Fibonacci numbers. Flowers with three, five, eight, thirteen, and twenty-one petals.

  She was stumped.

  Kirsten sat on the corridor deck, back against a wall, staring into the bridge. 3-5-8-13-21. Seven digits. The suspected password field allowed six.

  “Sven!” He looked up at her yell. “You said fuchsias have four petals, not five?”

  He nodded and went back to his work.

  Discard the five as disinformation. 3-8-13-21. Six digits meant 720 permutations. She could do that. She climbed back to her feet.

  Light-years and generations and centuries . . .

  Would the Colonists’ secret past finally be revealed through a brute-force search? For all Kirsten’s excitement, the aesthetics of that possibility offended her. Logic had brought them here. Logic should complete their quest.

  What else did they know?

  Flowers and Fibonacci numbers. Badly rendered flowers. She recognized only some of the flowers, but even she knew real irises grew much taller than real daisies.

  Kirsten searched her pocket computer for an image of the ancient needlework. Of the many flower representations, only that one was in color, obviously labored over the longest. Short irises and tall daisies. Might tallest representation denote the most significant digit? “Jeeves, run the last program fragment we found, with the same isolation measures. Into that text box, enter 8 3 21 13.”

  A trumpet fanfare rang out. A human hologram appeared, seemingly in a cabin of this ship. No, Kirsten thought, it is this ship. The needlework she had taken still hung on the wall behind the apparition. Sven’s mouth fell open. Omar froze.

  The man in the holo had dark eyes, hair, and complexion, and a face of indeterminate age creased with worry lines. His jumpsuit, of a curious plaid pattern, did not disguise a pudgy body build. His eyes were worldly wise and weary, and yet they conveyed a hint of humor. Kirsten could not help but think: I would like to have known this man.