Fleet of Worlds Read online

  Our year. It was an arbitrary unit of measure, maintained for consistency with old Citizen records. The Citizens had long ago moved Hearth far from its sun, as that star prepared to swell into a red giant. “Year” had been arbitrary long before the Fleet began its latest journey.

  Looking around the room, Kirsten could see that everyone was struggling to absorb the news. Not that long ago, the only bit of technical history she wanted to better understand was the likely progression between broadcasting techniques. More sophisticated transmission was such a small part of what was implied by Omar’s timeline.

  Someone had to comment first, so she did. “Fifty-two years seems incredibly fast progress.” It had been done, so she had to believe it. How could they learn so much so quickly? They had to build the tools to build the tools to build the tools, through untold iterations. They had to produce an atmosphere in which to first create fire to first smelt ores with which to craft their first metal tools. She could just barely believe the full sequence was achievable starting with a detailed knowledge of the underlying sciences. Experts on Hearth said there were no outside parties imparting the knowledge. So how?

  The hideously complex graphic floating in the aisle suddenly made sense. It represented the many parallel and entwining technological projects the Gw’oth had undertaken. “They knew from the moment they cracked through the ice what they wanted to do and how to accomplish it.”

  “That is what’s now believed,” Eric said. “What I don’t get is how. How could they create the plan before they had the environment in which to do the experiments to develop the science to envision the plan?”

  Kirsten had no answer, but neither did anyone else. She pointed into the holo. “Is that a nuclear plant at the end of this sequence?” No one corrected her. “How could we fail to notice nuclear power plants?”

  “They’re beneath the ice, on the ocean floor,” Nessus said. “We had noticed the heat sources, of course. We assumed they were seabed volcanoes. Checking those locations with full instrumentation, deep-penetrating radar, and radiation sensors leaves no doubt what they truly are. From fire to fission in two generations.”

  Nessus’ body quivered, as though he resisted fleeing to his room or rolling himself up. “And there is one more detail we collectively overlooked. Radio signals don’t propagate past the horizon, unless by bouncing off of an ionosphere. The ice moon has no atmosphere, but we never stopped to ask ourselves how the starfish communicate between their distant bases.”

  “Long wires run under the ice?” Omar guessed.

  Nessus reached a head into the graphic. “No, low-orbiting communication satellites. So far they use only primitive chemical rockets, but it’s a start toward space travel.”

  Comm sats. No one could claim those were out of sight beneath the ice. At least, Kirsten thought, Eric had the decency to look embarrassed.

  4

  The walls were rough-hewn stone, the lighting an eerie bioluminescent green, and the occupants five-pointed sea creatures. Purplish-green fronds grew from cracks in the floor and walls, swaying in unseen currents and eddies. For all the strangeness, the setting suggested an office.

  “What are you working on?” Kirsten asked rhetorically. She was watching the Gw’oth through a camera conveniently placed by the aliens themselves. Were they recording an important meeting? Monitoring workers for purposes of security? She had no idea. The camera was video only. That was too bad, because their translator was getting better. It produced logical-seeming results from nearly half what it was given.

  Beep. Her viewpoint switched to a storeroom somewhere beneath the ice. Their scanning program probed Gw’oth network addresses at random, but as far as she could ascertain, a network address conveyed nothing about a camera’s physical location. Maybe it didn’t matter. No one was in the room, and the translated labels on the boxes identified only various foods.

  Beep. Beep. Beep. Two random attempts had gotten no response. Another room, this time with two writhing Gw’oth. Alien sex, she thought. She was still blushing when the vantage point shifted again.

  A knock rattled her cabin door. “How is it going?” Omar asked.

  “Fine.” It was a rote answer. Eric was investigating the primitive Gw’oth satellites—in plain sight, now that he knew to look—and scanning the surface for launch sites. Omar was assisting Nessus with analysis of the archive translations streaming to them from Hearth. By process of elimination, that left her to sample the array of Gw’oth cameras. She only wished her assignment had produced something useful. “I’ve tagged several scenes for ongoing monitoring. How goes your analysis?”

  “The little guys are making me feel really stupid. I’m just glad we have a big head start, and the Fleet will be past here soon.”

  The little guys: Omar’s favorite nickname reflected a small bit of progress. A medical database had provided typical Gw’oth body dimensions in their own units of measure. A physics database had shown the correspondence between their traditional unit of length and hydrogen wavelengths. An average Gw’o was no longer than her arm; its torso at its thickest was the length of her hand. “Keep me posted, Omar. I’ll let you know if anything interesting pops up here.”

  The next beep-beep drowned out Omar’s parting words. Receding footsteps suggested he had not expected an answer.

  Bigger surprises than the size of a Gw’o lay within the medical databases. Each of the five muscular tubes was nearly an independent creature in its own right. Gw’oth researchers believed a distant ancestor of theirs was some sort of primitive colony. Omar, the closest among the crew to a biologist, suspected they were correct. It would take genomic databases to prove or disprove the theory, and so far nothing of the sort had been found. Gw’oth science seemed not to have ventured far into genetics.

  The next scene showed a single Gw’o operating an apparatus she did not recognize. Whatever it was, the creature used four extremities to control it. The lack of an annotation said the translator could not identify the equipment either. “Pause scan.” She watched for a while without enlightenment. “Keep recording this channel. Queue a copy to Eric.” After staring a little longer without result, she added, “Resume scan.”

  Beep. An empty corridor. Beep. A writhing mass of Gw’oth: an orgy. She averted her eyes until a tone signaled a scene change. Beep beep. A vast spread of sea-bottom plant life, perhaps a farm. Beep . . .

  She stood and stretched. The little guys were keeping their secrets, she thought, followed by: Why do I care that they’re smaller than me? Several more uninteresting scenes beeped by before she decided. It’s a defense mechanism. Omar is not the only one they make feel slow-witted.

  “Pause.” Maybe her reaction did bear thinking about. It wasn’t just that the outpouring of Gw’oth creativity shocked Eric and Omar—and her. In truth, Colonists had little experience developing technology from scratch. Her people’s science and engineering was doled out by their patrons. Whatever she had learned before, she had always been aware it was merely a subset of Citizen knowledge. No, what was truly eye-opening was that the Gw’oth rate of learning astonished Nessus.

  It was not her first such rude awakening. . . .

  WHEN KIRSTEN WAS twelve, her parents took her and her brothers hiking in a forested conservation zone. Dad practically had to drag her there, stepping disc by stepping disc. Voluntarily leaving the grid seemed ridiculous. To intentionally walk into the wilderness was the most peculiar thing she had ever contemplated.

  Still whining petulantly, she popped into a small woodland clearing where Dad and Carl awaited her. She took a step forward, and her mother and her baby brother appeared on the disc she just vacated. Teleportation: That was how civilized beings traveled. A ten-digit code was emblazoned on a nearby sign; she committed the stepping-disc’s address to memory. It seemed impossible that there would be no more stepping discs in their path. She had vague hopes of finding one, evading her parents, and teleporting back along a chain of stepping discs to home and
friends and urban comforts.

  Five globes—four blue and white, one bejeweled—hung overhead in a straight line: the rest of the Fleet. She had never set foot on any of them; she did not expect she ever would. Still, any of those worlds, even Hearth itself, was less alien than the myriads of trees all around her. Each of those worlds had stepping-disc grids, too.

  She had known in the abstract that farms and ranches and seas lay outside the stepping-disc network. Never before had she felt it. Her parents worked in a tractor factory. The factory and their neighborhood were in the heart of the grid.

  A hundred paces into the woods they lost sight of the forest-ranger station and its end-of-the-line stepping disc. Chirps and rustles in the undergrowth made her shrink close to Dad despite her displeasure at being here. She knew both he and Mom carried some sort of Citizen-sanctioned stunning device in case an animal got too close.

  Dad led the way into the park, babbling about permutations and combinations of trees. She did not share his enthusiasm. She remembered a downhill section along a stream bed, and a packed-dirt path. Had it been trodden by animals? The thought made her cringe. Occasionally they climbed hills for their different-only-in-the-details views, between longer periods spent among the trees and undergrowth. Much of her time went to keeping track of little Philip.

  Dad’s commentary grew sparser and sparser. They came to a halt beside a pond she thought seemed familiar. He and Mom traded looks that said plainly: This is not what I expected. Mom checked her communicator, and shook her head. No reception.

  “We’re lost, aren’t we?” Kirsten was scared and angry and ready to slug Philip, just because he was there. “Why would you bring us here? No stepping discs, no communications”—and a sudden thought hit her—“and no food.”

  “It was supposed to be a fun outing, Kirsten,” Dad said. “I thought we were following a circuit that would lead us back to the entry disc, but obviously we missed a turn. This park seemed small enough that we couldn’t go very far astray, and safe enough, because it’s surrounded by farms.

  “So yes, we’re lost, but there’s no need to worry. The park staff will surely find us. They know we’re in here. Or our friends will call them when we’re late coming home.”

  The sky darkened with clouds, and the rain began. They huddled together for warmth under a rocky outcropping that kept off little of the rain. Philip hid his face in Mom’s side, and even Carl was quiet. As the last of the orbital suns set for the night, the temperature plummeted. Her teeth chattered.

  Were they animals, to die alone in the forest? It seemed insane.

  Three yellow blotches in the dense cloud marked the visible worlds of the Fleet, a bit of normality in an existence suddenly become surreal. Through the clouds, she could not tell one world from another.

  It was a useless skill, but she had deduced how to tell the time of day from the position of the worlds in the sky. It amused her, and provided a smart-aleck answer to Dad’s questioning the value of studying math.

  Wait! The line of the worlds had seemed different at the start of their trek. “Dad, you said the park is surrounded by farms.” Farms meant warmth and food, and workers who could show them the nearest stepping discs.

  “Yes. We could hike out of here if we could walk in a straight line.” His shrug was barely recognizable in profile in the nighttime gloom. “Following stepping discs isn’t the same, is it? I mean, a stepping disc or a sign for one is always in sight.”

  “That’s the thing.” She pointed skyward, suddenly excited. “We can walk in a straight line. It’s even easy.” She turned to face squarely the three glows overhead. “Just walk towards the Fleet.”

  They made their way slowly with only flashlights to guide the selection of a safe path. With Dad at her side, Kirsten led the way. Another world had set, leaving but two to guide them, when the edge of a cultivated field appeared through the trees. It was her first feat of navigation.

  That near-disastrous outing was at once the start of her love of nature and the loss of innocence. Thinking her parents wrong and stupid about everything somehow had not yet translated into a visceral realization that parents did not know everything. But no one can know everything, not even parents. It was all right if she knew something they did not.

  That wilderness adventure, her first act of navigation, was also the first step on the path that had brought Kirsten to the stars.

  SO EVEN CITIZENS don’t know everything, and Eric’s question hung over the mission like a dark cloud. How had the Gw’oth planned their no-wasted-efforts, no-missteps, technological eruption before they mastered the environment in which to do the experiments to develop the science to envision the plan? If the four of them could not answer that, how could they begin to predict whether the Gw’oth represented a risk to the onrushing Fleet?

  Running often helped Kirsten think, and the only place onboard to run was the treadmill. Her arms and legs pumped, and cityscape streamed past her in a wall projection, as she tried to reconcile the irreconcilable. She had a theory that only an applied mathematician could like. The Gw’oth could have simulated everything—science, engineering designs, and development projects—until they were ready to put their plans into effect. With sufficiently massive computing power, models and calculations could replace much messy experimentation. She had taken basic science classes on Arcadia. Simulation was a much more reliable guide to how the world worked than her typical lab technique.

  But the Gw’oth wouldn’t have computers until they developed above-the-ice industry. The riddle made her head hurt.

  Dinner time came and went; she kept loping on the treadmill. She needed a clear head more than a synthed meal.

  Not only would the Gw’oth need computers to do the simulations, but as far as their investigations had revealed, the aliens still did not have major computing capabilities. They had huge data archives, and specialized devices to facilitate sorting and searching and networking that data—but computers? The scouts had not found any computing centers to speak of.

  Her arms and legs burned and trembled; she ached from overexertion. Knowing she had overdone it, she slowed the treadmill to a cool-down gait.

  Even Citizens don’t know everything. How much less do I know?

  5

  The four scouts watched a cluster of stone structures climb skyward from a mountain peak that poked through the ice. In the fast-forwarded playback, Gw’oth workers in pressure suits became nearly invisible blurs. Completed rooms and outbuildings were sprayed inside and out; whatever water did not immediately boil away froze into gas-tight seals. More and more test bores gaped nearby, giving the site the overall appearance of a mining camp. From the apex of the mountain rose a metal structure, too early in its construction to be conclusively identified. A steerable dish antenna on a tower pointed skyward; analysis showed it was tracking low-orbiting comm sats as they flew past.

  This was a full hologram, the imagery taken by Explorer’s forward probes. Explorer itself shared an orbit with the ice moon. The gas giant they both circled blocked starship and moon from any direct view of each other. Chains of tiny stealthed buoys, each in a transparent and indestructible General Products #1 hull, relayed messages between Explorer and its observation satellites high above the ice moon. We’re surely safe here, Kirsten thought. How much are we impeding our own investigation by hiding here?

  They had gathered again in the relax room. Nessus gestured with one head at the holo. “Omar, what do we know about their building project?”

  “Know? Not much,” Omar said. “The project was well under way before we happened to notice it. It looks like the little guys are putting up a big antenna. I would guess they’re going for a high-gain antenna to use with synchronously orbiting comm sats.”

  “We could land and ask them,” Kirsten burst out. More and more, the Gw’oth impressed her. Observing them was fascinating, but she wanted to get to know them.

  Nessus swiveled a head toward her. “Ask them what?”
>
  Whatever, she wanted to shout. Her impatience and frustration surprised her. “What are they building? What is their approach to science? Can we trade information with them?”

  The core question—will you become a threat?—could not be asked directly. Eric wanted to know how and from where they launched the satellites; she wanted to know why she had found data archives but still no major computing centers. Inquiries about either topic risked revealing their own spying to the Gw’oth. It’s tricky, Kirsten thought. Our investigations might make us seem a threat to them.

  “No landings yet,” Nessus answered with a shudder. “We don’t announce our presence, either. The Gw’oth probably do not even know that other intelligent species exist. Why reveal that fact, and perhaps in the process make them more likely to notice the Fleet?”

  Eric was frowning at the fast-changing holo. “They might know sooner than we’d like, that they’re not alone, I mean. That could be a radio telescope they’re building.”

  “I’ll continue to watch it,” Omar promised. “We might also try an experiment to elicit more information.”

  Something about experiment sounded provocative to Kirsten. “What do you mean?”

  “Incapacitate one of their satellites to see how they respond. It was Eric’s suggestion, and rather good.”

  Kirsten struggled to find a suitable verb, finally settling on a word that described the behavior of predatory animals. “Attack them?”

  Eric nodded. “We would use a laser-equipped probe, waiting until its line of sight to the Gw’oth satellite misses all other satellites and the ice moon itself. They won’t see anything. There is no evidence they have lasers, so they won’t have a clue what happened. A lost satellite will put a hole in their communications network, so they are likely to replace it as soon as they can.”