Fleet of Worlds Read online

  Think like a Citizen, she told herself. Any avoidable risk should be avoided. Nessus had an expression about leaving no stone unturned. She got a sandwich and more juice, wondering all the while why that odd saying nagged at her.

  Three-tenths light speed. Stone. She nearly dropped her plate as the realization dawned. In the presence of quite modest technology, the Fleet’s very speed was its worst vulnerability. Strew some pebbles in its path, and the Fleet’s velocity transformed them into fearsome kinetic-energy weapons.

  Was such a scenario remotely likely? Sparks-to-video in ten years seemed rapid to her, but truthfully she could not say. She intended to find out. What about alien intentions? If the ice-world denizens could harm the Fleet, would they?

  From the Concordance’s perspective, the better question might be: Who could say they would not?

  Space was a dangerous place, as her ancestors had found to their misfortune. A chill came over her—and a wave of gratitude for everything the Citizens had done for her people. Training exercise or not, she would take this threat assessment seriously.

  Eric was quite mistaken. She was hardly relaxed.

  3

  Perhaps mathematics was not such an impractical career choice after all.

  The Colonists’ world was Nature Preserve Four, NP4 for short, and theirs solely through the great magnanimity of the Concordance. At that they held only the continent of Arcadia. With few exceptions, and Kirsten was not one of them, the Colonist population enthusiastically embraced their assigned role as ecological stewards. Much of their world was dedicated to biodiversity sanctuaries; the rest of NP4, including most of Arcadia, was intensively farmed. The Colonists produced huge quantities of food, for the vast population on Hearth and the few millions of themselves.

  Not everyone is meant to be a farmer or preservationist, and that, too, was part of the Citizens’ vision. People were needed to maintain the irrigation systems, manufacture the tractors and combines, process and transport the harvests, educate the children, run the power generators, maintain the records, house and clothe everyone . . . it took a great many skills to maximize production in a sustainable way. Sustainability was the key—Citizens planned for the long haul.

  For all the breadth of Arcadian society, though, it took real creativity to justify a career in mathematics. Kirsten found enough unresolved problems in weather forecasting and seismic prediction to make it work. Interstellar navigation was not an application she would ever have imagined for herself, but she could not fault herself for overlooking it. Things change.

  Until five years ago, none of a trillion Citizens anticipated that the galactic core had exploded.

  With that revelation, nature preservation took on a much broader meaning. The radiation blast from that long-ago supernovae chain reaction would sterilize this part of the galaxy in another twenty thousand or so years. It was impossible to imagine the Citizen flight reflex operating on a larger scale: the migration of Hearth and its five nature-preserve companion worlds to safer surroundings. In so doing, the Concordance was once again rescuing her people.

  Nessus did not admit to knowing the aliens who had reported the core explosion. Maybe there was even sense to his refusal to say much about his past travels. “All aliens are different,” he liked to say. “The less I share, the less I’ll warp your thinking about what we encounter on this flight.”

  Kirsten liked Nessus a lot, and not only for having selected her to train as a navigator. Few Citizens could do what he did. Yes, the Fleet of Worlds was running from danger, but without someone scouting ahead, who could know what dangers they might be speeding into?

  Sighing, she switched off her sleeper field and settled lightly to her cabin’s floor. The universe had a way of keeping her awake. She might as well get up and do something.

  Nessus was probably unique. Padding down the corridor to the treadmill in the relax room, she surprised herself by thinking: There may not be another Colonist who can do what I can—

  And I have the pictures to prove it.

  WITH FIVE EQUAL-SIZED, tapered, tubular limbs spaced equidistantly around a flat core, the aliens seemed equally adapted to swimming the world-spanning sea and crawling along sea-bottom muck. Prehensile spines covered their leathery skins. Their five writhing extremities made them gross parodies of Citizen and Colonist alike. From time to time, some of them would entwine, or crawl over one another, or manipulate unrecognizable objects for unknowable purposes. Most of the activity took place inside ice or stone structures. Nothing in the images offered Nessus any sense of scale.

  He was marking a flat projection when Kirsten entered the relax room, a towel over one shoulder. She was svelte and athletic, fair-skinned with high cheekbones and a delicate nose. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a short ponytail, with unruly bangs that somehow made her dark brown eyes that much more striking. From the way Omar and especially Eric looked at her, Nessus guessed she was a desirable mate by Colonist standards.

  She hopped onto the treadmill. “Are you learning much from the recovered video?”

  Nessus said, “Despite what I always say, a picture may not be worth a thousand words.”

  She laughed, and Nessus guessed her good humor had little to do with his turn of phrase. While Eric had been disparaging noisy, low-quality signals and a primitive broadcast format, she had mathematically deconstructed the modulation scheme. Crisp video had popped right up after she mathematically described how to filter out superimposed data flows. It appeared she had found an audio channel and annotations of some kind where their engineer had suspected only noise.

  Presumably the experts on Hearth would come to the same conclusion, which was something he himself would never have accomplished. The only numbers Nessus found truly interesting were polls. Success in the Colonist scouting program could give him the start he had so long wanted in politics. A mental image of his disapproving parents, near-catatonic with fright these past five years since the first news of the core explosion, almost made him laugh.

  None of these ruminations were suitable for the crew. “What do you think of our new acquaintances?”

  “They’re sure busy doing something, but I can’t begin to guess what.” Her arms pumped as the treadmill kicked up to a higher speed. “It should get easier when the translator software starts making sense of the audio channel.”

  Nessus put his heads to use tweaking the projector controls. He was stalling: His attention was not on the magnified area he slowly panned across, but on what not to say. Concordance technology must seem limitless to the Colonists. There was much to be said for keeping them in a state of awe.

  This manic phase would not last forever. Soon enough, Nessus thought, I’ll surrender to tucking my heads tightly between my forelegs. When that happens, I’ll be just a bit safer if these three understand what Explorer is, and is not, capable of.

  “We can’t translate the broadcasts. The way it usually works”—and the thought brought him very close to retreating into a tightly coiled ball—“is in a faces-to-face encounter. We say something, and it’s unintelligible. They say back something unintelligible. There is much pointing and miming. The translator has to build the context. At first, only scattered words make sense. In time, there will be phrases, even sentences, but with maddening gaps for unrecognized concepts. Full translation takes a while.”

  “That’s . . . logical,” she huffed. Her ponytail flipped from side to side as she now ran full-out. “So we need to land and meet them.”

  A mosaic filled his mind’s eye, populated by swarming hordes, grasping tentacles, and sharp-edged daggers of stone and ice. He had met aliens before but not like this: A first contact could go wrong in so many ways. Up here, in the ship, they were safe from anything such primitives could do. Faces to face was a very different situation. “It would be prudent to gather more information first.”

  Sweat dripped down her face and neck, to be wicked away and evaporated by the nanofibers in her tunic. She ran in silenc
e for a long time. “Here’s a thought. Most likely, some of the audio corresponds to the video information. Suppose—” and she fell silent again. “Okay, try this. We use scene-analysis software to model what’s going on, tagging with English text our hypotheses about each object and activity. Most images are ambiguous, so we start with probability-weighted decision trees. Then we correlate the tagged scenes with the concurrent audio information.

  “Sure, some of the seeming audio may be an independent voice channel. It might be music, if they have such a concept. The thing is, over time, the only statistically significant audio data will be speech that’s related to the concurrent video. Everything else will be washed out by the significance filters.”

  “You could do such an analysis?”

  Retrieving her towel, Kirsten blotted her face and neck without breaking stride. “Sure. Not easily, exactly. It will take some programming, and probably some experimentation with the weightings of alternative interpretive models. . . .”

  Her math ability constantly impressed Nessus, but her casually assumed prowess at programming made him tremble. No, be honest—this kind of programming scared him. It scared all Citizens. Nothing was more intrinsically related to intelligence than language. Programs that modeled intelligence could, it was feared, all too possibly become intelligent. Translators, in certain circumstances, were a necessary evil, but . . .

  I’m more like most Citizens than I realize, Nessus thought. Still, he was one of the very few to have visited civilizations that dared to undertake AI research. None had run amok yet. And her approach, if it worked, might eliminate the need for a landing.

  “That is an excellent idea,” he began to say in support.

  The rapt expression on Kirsten’s face made it clear no encouragement was required.

  “CUTE LITTLE FELLAS.” The curl of Eric’s upper lip revealed his words as sarcasm. “Still, it’s interesting to watch what the starfish are up to.” He had proposed the name, and was all the prouder of it because it amused Nessus.

  At times, Kirsten found Eric’s deference annoying. Have your own values, she wanted to shout. She kept her response to a noncommittal grunt and returned her attention to the video. Officially, her interest was in ways to improve the correlation and decoding models. Interpretation of the data was more Omar’s department. In truth, she was hooked. The more she learned about the aliens, the more fascinated she became.

  Holos surrounded the video, each offering another perspective of the main scene: partially translated conversations; interpretations of any alien artifacts in view; the location on the globe of the video source; a highly magnified view from synchronous orbit of the encampment and a few roving aliens, taken by one of Explorer’s recently deployed probes. Kirsten said, “They call themselves Gw’oth, Eric. It’s Gw’o if you’re talking about just one.”

  “Maybe that translates to starfish.”

  “Whatever it means, they’re adventurers, space travelers in their own way.” He was so enamored of Citizen culture—just look at the curls and intricacies of his hair!—that Kirsten doubted he would ever appreciate how incredible the Gw’oth were. She felt compelled to try. Maybe she could reach him on his terms.

  “Someone I know once suspected this trip was a test. If so, part of our grade will certainly depend on how well we figure out these guys. Think about it, Eric. They evolved in the ocean. Living underwater means no fire and no use of metal. Their first venture above the ice, into the vacuum above the ice, was a heroic undertaking.”

  If their scene interpretations and partial translations were correct, those first forays had involved the most primitive of gear. The early protective suits looked like no more than translucent bags trailing tubes back to underwater pumps that were little more than flexible bags manipulated by Gw’oth remaining beneath the ice. Bags, suits, and hoses all seemed to be made from the tough skins of deep-sea animals. She pulled some old imagery from Explorer’s archive. “Just look at this.”

  Nessus joined them in the relax room. He had a way, Kirsten had noticed, of appearing whenever a conversation became interesting. “Don’t mind me,” he said. “I just came for a bite to eat.”

  “So the starfish,” and Eric looked to Nessus for approval, “cut a hole in the ice with stone tools and climb up wearing leather bubbles—where someone is already on the ice to capture it all with a video camera? Was that chipped from stones, too? Kirsten, that makes no sense.”

  Citizens ate often, but they ate with one head and kept watch with the other. Nessus was observing them now while he ate. Trying not to think about him assessing them, Kirsten gestured at the video she had just pulled up. “I assume it’s a reenactment. Maybe that’s a Gw’o who likes the challenge. Maybe it’s a history show, or education, or entertainment.

  “You’re right, Eric, about one thing. They could not have had video cameras, or any type of electronics, until after they went above the ice. Their only prior experience with gases would have been from undersea volcanic eruptions, or vacuum boiling of the water in a fresh ice fracture. Look at them now: We’ve got video of them wearing their pressure suits inside their above-ice buildings so that they can contain an atmosphere. Why? They need fire! Fire for what they still see as new industrial processes.” She wished she could say more, but it was far beyond her knowledge to guess what alternate paths to technology had been involved.

  Nessus set down his bowl, the gruel within it still untouched. “Eric, what do you think? Is such a scenario plausible?”

  Eric struck an increasingly familiar pose that made Kirsten strangely uncomfortable: worshipful presentation to their mentor. “It’s possible, Nessus. A big ceiling lens in an airtight room could focus enough sunlight to gradually photo-dissociate water. That would give a hydrogen and oxygen atmosphere. Such a lens could be carved from ice or a crystal like quartz. They’d need something they could add to the oxy-hydrogen mix to make it less explosive. Biological processes like digestion or respiration probably produce other gases, like carbon dioxide, in small amounts. They might have found catalysts to produce or separate gases. Yes, it seems possible. But how could they figure this all out?”

  Nessus gave an involuntary shiver, the kind Kirsten associated with a mood swing to depression and withdrawal. “I certainly hope we convince ourselves they somehow did. The alternative is that an advanced, spacefaring species has visited this solar system without our knowing anything about it.”

  He did not need to remind them that this solar system lay near the Fleet’s planned path.

  FROM FIRE TO fission in two generations.

  From the depths of his tightly coiled body, Nessus took solace that it could have been worse. At least the analysts on Hearth thought the Gw’oth had developed their technology on their own. And at least their report had reached him through the still-secret comm link in his cabin. The Colonists had not seen him in panic.

  Those advising the expedition from the safety of Hearth had assigned a multitude of computer and math experts to enhance Kirsten’s models. How many experts? His inquiries never got an answer. It probably did not matter, and it even amused him to picture their unease. None of the experts had had her insight to augment the standard translator.

  Regardless, between his expert and the many at home, there was now an answer to Eric’s question: How could they figure this all out?

  With great force of will, Nessus unwrapped himself. Without a doubt, this mission had already established the value of Colonist scouts. It was hard to be happy about that when a threat to the Fleet was involved.

  The disturbing analysis from Hearth lay unannounced in the ship’s main receive buffer. With a coded message, he released it to the comm subsystem on the bridge. Omar, currently on the bridge, would “receive” it while Nessus innocently made his way to the galley.

  “All hands to the relax room,” Omar called out over the intercom. Omar read fast.

  KIRSTEN STUMBLED DOWN the corridor, groggy from being awakened suddenly. She found th
e rest of the crew in the relax room before her, discussion already begun. A laugh caught in her throat, because Eric’s usual construction of elaborate braids was a straggle matted on the left. How much time, she wondered, did he normally spend to maintain that coiffure?

  “. . . Scientists back at Hearth have decoded a portion of a big Gw’oth data archive. What we’ve seen by tapping their broadcasts is a small part of what’s available. The good news is, there’s no evidence of spacefaring visitors helping the Gw’oth.” Omar gestured to a complex holo graphic whose meaning was far from obvious.

  Yawning, Kirsten almost dropped the bulb of stim juice Eric lobbed her way. She needed the caffeine badly; it took her a moment to synchronize her thoughts with the conversation.

  It had turned out digital data streams were sometimes modulated over the analog transmissions between the bases above the ice. Reverse-engineering the protocol and cracking its associated simple authentication model had revealed to her a new surprise: a Gw’oth digital communications network and associated archives. Likely there was no way beneath the ice to develop electronics or other sophisticated technologies, but devices built above the ice could operate below. The wired network deployed below the ice seemed far larger than what they could directly see. Its addressing scheme implied planning for a very large network.

  How much, she wondered, that was hidden from sight will now be revealed?

  That, Kirsten realized, was what this no-notice gathering was about. The experts on Hearth had analyzed the archive. She felt a twinge of jealousy. She could apply only the computing power of this single ship. They had a world’s computers to sift and organize the data.

  “The timeline surprised the analysts,” Omar said. “The Gw’oth calendar is based on the solar orbit of the gas giant they circle. We can translate their dates precisely. They first ventured above the ice fifty-two of our years ago. Roughly two Gw’oth generations.”