THE ARCHAENAUT
There’s time travel, and then there’s time travel. While some may jump in a telephone booth and be whisked off to God-knows-when, there are those who take the long way round. There are no telephone booths in Ruocchio’s Sun Eater universe, leaving those seeking to ply the oceans of time with only the more . . . conventional option.
“It should have been torn apart,” said Lieutenant Phanu from the navigator’s seat. “Sensor grid clocked it running thirty-nine percent c when it hit the edge of the system. There shouldn’t be anything left after an impact at that speed.”
“It could have been a glancing blow,” said Captain Misra, pulling herself forward so that she hung in freefall behind Phanu’s chair.
“Some glancing blow, ma’am!” Phanu replied, unable to keep the incredulity from his voice. He thumbed a couple controls, threw switches in sequence, relayed a comment to the helmsman at his side.
“Do we have a visual yet?” the captain asked.
Phanu shook his head. “Too far out. Won’t see anything for half an hour, I wager. Assuming we can catch it at all.”
From her place back and to port, the comms officer chimed in, “Do you think it’s a ship, Captain?”
“Command thinks it is,” Misra replied, peering intently out the alumglass canopy, as if expecting the answer to be written out there somewhere in the ink-dark of space. If it was so written, it was written in ink itself, and was thus invisible.
The object had first registered on the edge of the Aglovale system three days prior, when it struck an asteroid in deep orbit. The collision had cost the interloper nearly all its tremendous speed, and had set it on a new trajectory—not skirting the heliopause—but tumbling down the gravity well in-system toward Aglovale’s twin suns. It had taken the better part of the first day for news to reach command on the home planet, and just as long for orders to bounce to Fort Caspian, where Misra and the crew of the ISV Defiant had their berth orbiting Lot, the system’s farthest, coldest little world.
“It could as easily be an asteroid,” said Edevane, the science chief.
“At forty percent c?” Phanu said. “Pretty damned unlikely.”
“More likely than a ship,” Edevane replied. “There’s no distress beacon. No heat signature.”
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Phanu said. “Might be busted up pretty bad. Riding momentum.”
“Let’s not leap to conclusions, Michael,” Edevane said. “We don’t know anything yet.”
“I’m not leaping anywhere, Doctor,” the navigator said. “Just thinking ahead.”
Edevane grunted, prompting the captain to clear her throat. “Lysander, Michael, enough.”
“Aye, ma’am,” they both said in unison.
Captain Cassia Misra shut her eyes. It was bad enough dealing with the two men’s posturing back on the station with nothing to do. Far worse to deal with it in the heat of the moment. Edevane and Phanu were both good officers, but prickly and too similar to ever truly cooperate. They needed different ships, but Aglovale’s System Defense had too few, and so far from the home planet, there simply wasn’t much opportunity for reassignment.
Patrolling their borders with infinity had not been quite as romantic as she’d imagined when she enlisted in the Baron’s fleet. Not once in her seven years as captain of the Defiant had the system been attacked by outworld barbarians, and but for once in the six years prior—when an exonaut cruiser had sailed into the system in hope of finding fuel and a place to sell their wares—had anything happened outside the routine. The exonauts had been given fuel, but denied the right to make planetfall by the Baron’s fleet. They’d too much of the stink of machines about them, or so old Captain Blinn had said. Misra had missed the exonaut affair. She’d been stationed on the ground then, chained to a flight control console in the old capital, but Blinn told her the exonaut captain had been eight feet tall and wore an exoskeleton to protect himself from Aglovale’s crushing gravity. It had been a part of him, or so old Blinn said.
Misra shuddered.
For just about three thousand years, the Sollan Empire had been expanding, growing out from the ashes of ruined Earth, carried farther and farther on faster and faster ships. It seemed like every other year they were launching new peregrinations, new seed ships and new families for new worlds. Aglovale was a minor demesne, a system of little consequence on the borders of Imperial space. There were times Misra thought about changing her commission, signing on with the Emperor’s own, leaving her home system for a post that really mattered . . .
But that was all a dream, and she knew it. Aglovale was home, had been home all her life.
And there was a mission, at any rate.
“We should be in position now,” Phanu said, leaning back in his seat. Glancing over his shoulder, he said, “You may wish to strap in, Captain. If we need to move suddenly . . .”
She didn’t need for him to finish the thought, but found her place in the command seat behind and to center. They’d set an intercept course to catch the object as it fell in-system, and all they had to do was wait. Assuming Phanu had done his calculations properly, they lay directly in the path of . . . whatever it was. Their mission was simple: identify it. If it was only an asteroid, as Edevane speculated, they would vaporize it rather than let it pass and pose a threat to the inner system. If it was anything else, well . . .
Safely strapped in her chair, Misra said, “Are we ready to launch probe buoys?”
“Aye, ma’am,” said the helmsman to Phanu’s right. “On your mark.”
“Fire.”
The Defiant juddered slightly, and two points like flares shot past the bow of the ship, glittering the dark ahead. They diverged, forming a triangle with the Defiant at the vertex, each shooting off smaller flares as they went, each flare a smaller sensor buoy, forming a net in space between them and the target. “I want eyes on as soon as possible!” she said. “Let’s get a look at this thing.”
“We’ve got it!” Phanu’s voice cracked the tense silence.
“Put it on monitor,” Misra said.
The holograph display in the bridge’s center glowed to life, and a series of confused, reddish images displayed themselves. Each was not perfectly three-dimensional, but a kind of bas-relief snapshot where the probes’ long-range scanners took snapshots of the thing as it tumbled toward them. It was hard to get a precise look. The radar scans betrayed contours, could guess at size and scope, but the material and color of the object was still a mystery.
“It’s not that big,” said the comms officer.
“It’s bigger than we are,” Edevane interjected. “Two-point-one kilometers.”
That was nearly three times the length of the Defiant. Misra frowned. “Can you composite the images? I want a sense of what we’re looking at, Lysander.”
“Already on it,” the science officer replied. Each radar ping had captured a different profile of the thing falling into their system, a different snapshot, like photographs taken of a sculpture from all sides. Edevane bent over his terminal, fingers tapping as he attempted to align one image with the next.
On the holograph before the captain, the image of the thing took form.
“That isn’t an asteroid,” Phanu said, peering round his seat to look at it on the monitor tube.
“So it would seem,” Edevane said in answer.
The vessel had the look of some metal mushroom, or of the hilt of a gladiator’s sword. A huge, round shield plate stood at one end, badly chipped along one edge, a perfect circle no more. In its shadow, stretching from the center like a stem, lay the main axis and chassis of the ship itself, a broad ring rotated not far behind the shield plate, and behind that a great mast protruded up and down from the core shaft, and from each extremity a tangle of confused geometry fluttered. At the far end, opposite the shield, the stem swelled until it was twice its original size. There must be clustered the drive core and the mighty engines that had carried her across the stars.
In hushed tones, the comms officer voiced the thought Misra knew she at least had been having. “I’ve never seen a ship like that.”
Misra had seen ships with shield plates once or twice; the older bulk-freighters that plied the spaceways sometimes used them to guard their delicate hulls against micrometeor impacts and so on. Modern ships relied on hypercarbons, like the Adamant patented and produced by Hopper Industries, to create hulls impervious to that kind of damage. But she’d never seen one attached to so narrow a chassis before, and those masts, the confused tangles on the holograph . . . were they solar sails?
“Could be exos,” Phanu said. “They use spinships, don’t they? See the ring?”
“They’re not under thrust,” the helmsman said.
“Try hailing,” Misra ordered the comms officer. “All frequencies. Go.”
“Unidentified ship, this is the Defiant. You are entering Sollan Imperial space. This system is under the protection of Baron Constantine Martel. Identify yourself.” Nothing. “Unidentified ship, this is the Defiant. Identify yourself.”
The comms officer looked round at Misra, who made a gesture for quiet.
“They’re dead in the water, ma’am,” said the helmsman. “We’re picking up what might be an emergency reactor. Life support may be intact, but they’re not under thrust. Primary systems are all down. They were coasting on their way in-system. They’re dead as dead, I’m sure.”
Less sure herself, Misra ordered the comms officer to patch her through. Taking an instant to catch her breath, the captain keyed her microphone. “Unidentified ship, this is Captain Cassia Misra of the ISV Defiant. We are in position to render assistance should you require. Please reply.”
Silence. Total and absolute.
“Michael,” Misra addressed Lieutenant Phanu, “how long until they’re on us?”
“Nine minutes, twenty seconds,” he said, checking his readout. “They’re closing fast.”
Misra swore under her breath. “Scramble the lighters. I want grapnels on that ship. We need to stabilize their orbit and figure out where in Earth’s black face they came from.”
It took hours to rein the wild vessel in. The Defiant launched its full complement of lighter craft, and the smaller ships—using magnetic grapnels—caught and tethered the strange ship. Working in tandem, the flight crews—two men to a lighter—used their attitudinal jets to stabilize the broken vessel’s wild tumble. Firing retros, they bled much of what remained of the ship’s velocity and slid her smoothly into orbit around Aglovale’s twin suns. Misra watched those suns through the canopy that fronted the Defiant’s bridge. So far away they were that they almost seemed lost among the other stars, the bright white one with its duller, red companion, like mismatched eyes.
Tearing her eyes away, Misra studied the images on the comm console to her left, where a bank of monitors showed visions the lighter craft had taken of the derelict. Its hull glowed white as snow, as the streaks of cloud that mottled Aglovale’s green surface, with here and there the shadow of a scratch or pockmark from some long-ago collision. Misra floated free of her seat and pulled herself over the console, black hair floating off her left shoulder in its braid.
“Are we sure it’s one of ours?” she asked.
“Human, do you mean?” asked Lieutenant Edevane. “It looks the part.”
“But are there any markings? Words?”
“Not that we’ve seen,” the comms officer replied.
Phanu interjected as was his custom. “If they’ve been out in the black long enough, radiation’s probably done in the paint job.”
Edevane grumbled something. Misra caught the word obviously, but said nothing.
“If it’s exos, it could be . . .” The comms officer’s voice trailed off in horror. “Machines.”
Misra and a couple of the others made warding gestures. Phanu cursed. The exonauts and other outworld barbarians did not cleave to the Imperium’s laws forbidding the use and manufacture of artificial intelligence. For so many, the specter of the Foundation War and the Mericanii Totality still loomed large, and though it was written in the Chant of Earth that the first Emperor had smashed the machines forever, there were many who believed it was only a matter of time before hubris and human sin brought the horrors of the homeworld screaming back to blacken the stars. The exonauts flirted with such horrors, it was said, and if what Blinn had told her of the refugees who’d come to Aglovale was true, Misra was ready to believe even the darkest rumors.
“From the dominion of steel, O Mother, deliver us,” she prayed, and traced a circle on her forehead. She was far from the most pious observer of the faith, but was it not said that even the most ardent skeptic cries out to Mother Earth and Emperor in the face of the unknown? She exhaled sharply through her nose. “If it is exos, we needn’t fear. You know the protocol. If anyone’s alive, detain them. Question them. Turn them back. If not, we strip the ship and launch it into one of the suns.”
Her words—or the sharp reminder of protocol they carried—seemed to comfort the bridge crew. Misra studied the images another minute then in silence. The ship looked human enough. The silver foil of the solar sails, crumpled and twisted where they hung torn from their masts, had the look of many a satellite or orbital yacht she’d seen plying the spaceways above the skies of Aglovale, but surely mankind could not be the only creatures to have developed such things in the galaxy. There were other peoples, other races—primitive by comparison, to be sure, less developed than man. But they needn’t all be so. As a girl, Misra had watched holos about the tree-dwelling Niawangu who—six-limbed—dwelt amid the bottomless jungles of Marakand, never touching the ground. They were savages, little better than the forefathers of man who had carved rude symbols into the mouths of caves, but surely not all that dwelt among the stars were so backwards.
What if it’s . . . aliens?
The thought had chewed at the corners of her mind since the call came in, since they’d been dispatched from Fort Caspian. It wasn’t likely, that much she knew, but it was possible that she, Cassia Alexandra Misra, daughter of a civil servant, granddaughter of an urban farmer, would be the first human being in history to make contact with another race capable of sailing the dark between the stars.
“We need to prepare a boarding party,” she said. “Edevane, I want you with me, and twenty of the men.”
“You’re going yourself?” The science officer turned in his seat, bright eyes widening. “Captain, this is very irregular! Protocol dictates—”
Misra made a slashing gesture with one hand. “Don’t cite the regs to me, Lysander. I’m going.” She did her best to float imposingly in the center of the bridge, eyes narrow. No one else challenged her, and after a brief pause, she said, “Mister Phanu, you have the bridge.”
The captain had a brief glimpse of her armored frame in the window of the hatch before it opened. Her armor, like that of her men, had been purchased from the Imperial Legions and repainted in the Baron’s red and gold. Their faces all lay hid behind close-fitting plates of black glass, their necks protected by Romanesque neck-flanges. The suits themselves were bulky, but fit well, heavy though the ceramic plating was over the environment suit with its thick layer of sintered armorgel. They looked larger than any human ought to be, like squat statues of red-painted marble with fields of onyx for faces.
Chessmen.
The door opened on vastness and silence, and for a beat all Misra could hear was the rasp of her own breathing. She hated space—strange as that was for the captain of a starship to admit—and focused on the deck of the white ship beneath her feet to ground her universe. She could not see the Defiant when she looked up, though she knew it was there, black against that greater blackness. They’d ridden a shuttle across to the other ship, parked it on the main column of the vessel not far from where the masts rose and fell from that central spine. Still looking up through the tatters of the silver sails in search of her own ship, Cassia knew a moment of vertigo, fearing to fall into that bottomless night. She shook herself. The electromagnets in her boots were working fine. She would not fall.
“Find a hatch!” she ordered via the common band, stepping down from the ramp to the gently curving surface of the craft. The main shaft could not have been more than two hundred feet in diameter, and its surface curved away to either side. The base of the mast lay dead ahead, canted at a slight angle where they had not landed directly in line. Her men swarmed out after her, moving in pairs. They hurried right and left, following the curve of the hull, moving in the strange, hotfooted way men must wearing the iron boots that kept them clamped to the hull, high-stepping and awkward.
“See anything, Captain?” Phanu’s voice sounded in her ear.
“Nothing yet,” she answered. “Don’t you have eyes on?”
“We do. Just asking.”
Keeping a hand on her sidearm, Captain Misra stomped forward along the curving hull. The surface was far from smooth. Conduits ran bracketed to the hull, coated in places with ice, and raised panels rose as much as a foot, giving the place the appearance of some horribly paved road. And there were hooks and hard points where workers might tether a line, or bits of more delicate machinery hid under grates. It was an ugly, rough vessel, and ahead, beyond the masts, Misra saw the fat end of the engine cluster rising like white hills. Looking back and over the squat, beetle shape of their shuttle, she could see the ring section still spinning, and the gray shadow of the shield plate a thousand feet high.
“Found it, ma’am!” came the call. “Far side. Base of the mast!”
Misra acknowledged receipt and pointed for the four men of her guard to head right and counterclockwise around the shaft of the ruined vessel. The door was lozenge-shaped and built at an angle into the structure where the solar sail mast rose from a turret two thirds of the length of the spine from the forward plate. A manual lever stood vertical on the right side of the sealed portal, clamped in place and covered in peeled flecks of paint that once might have been yellow and black, but were so sun-bleached and faded they recalled old bones.
Seeing it, Lieutenant Edevane said, “Human or no, they’re right-handed.”
“I’m sorry?” Misra asked as Lysander brushed past her to the door. Behind him, the captain signaled her men to take up positions at either side of the airlock.
Edevane didn’t answer, but fiddled with the clamps that secured the lever in place.
“Do we need a breaching charge?” Misra asked.
“No no!” came Edevane’s reply. He’d freed the clamps already and gripped the lever. “Black planet!” he cursed. “Thing’s corroded. You, man!” He pointed to the soldier at his right, and gesturing to the lever, said, “You push. I pull. Savvy?”
The other man tapped his helmet twice to signal he understood and joined Lysander in torquing the handle. It ground an inch, and Misra swore she could feel the faint squeal of metal on metal through her boots as they did so. Edevane swore again, but an instant later the corrosion gave way, and the lever slammed down.
It took three men pulling to get the airlock hatch open, but open it they did. The bulkhead was nearly a hand’s span thick and slightly curved, and the glass in the window was just as thick. True glass, then, not the aluminum ceramic that passed for glass in most starships. That wasn’t all; there were markings stenciled on the inside of the hatch, letters Misra didn’t recognize. Judging by the red arrows, they were instructions for operating the manual release on the inside, but they were in no alphabet Misra had ever learned to read.
Edevane frowned at it. “Human after all,” he said.
“Can you read it?” Misra asked.
The lieutenant peered up at her. “It’s English. Old-style English. You see it on exo ships.”
“Exos?” Misra repeated the word, unable to stop the welter of disappointment bubbling from her depths. She had dared to hope—if only for a passing moment—that it was inhumans. Too much to hope for, she guessed. She shook her head to clear it. No sense getting lost in childish dreams when there was work to do. It may not have been aliens, but it was the exonauts, and that was dangerous enough. There was no telling what might lay in wait behind that inner door.
Edevane nodded, let two of the armed men file in. “Some of their clans still speak the old tongue. Never picked up the standard. Too isolated.”
Misra accepted this explanation with a tight nod and the double tap that signified she’d heard him. “Can we get the inner door open?”
“It is open, Captain!” called one of the others. “Internal environment’s well compromised!”
Captain Misra shouldered her way past Lieutenant Edevane and into the airlock, triggering her suit’s low-beams as she went. Their light illuminated padded white walls and silver panels with glass buttons and dead readouts, controls—she guessed—for the defunct airlock. A ladder exited through a hole in the floor, descending the mast turret toward the central column of the vessel itself. One of her men had already reached it, and—diving through it headfirst—pulled himself down. It was a strange, disorienting experience, even after all her years aboard the Defiant, a stark reminder that they were far from the warm embrace of Aglovale’s gravity well.
A moment later, sconce lights embedded in the wall of the antechamber flickered to life, reacting, perhaps, to the opening of the outer door or the movement of men within the room. Following her over the threshold, Lysander Edevane said, “Something’s still working, at least. Emergency power?”
“We’ll have to find out,” Misra said. “We need to find the bridge. See if we can’t access their computers.”
“There may be survivors,” Edevane said, prodding one of the dead displays in the hopes of coaxing some life out of it.
“With the main cabin compromised?” Misra asked.
“Could be on ice, or—if they’re exonauts—who knows?” His voiced darkened. “They might be playing dead.”
Misra took his point well enough. They’d both heard enough horror stories about bodies being pulled in from the black of space, only to be reanimated by machines impregnating the sacred flesh to wreak havoc upon the men who’d salvaged the apparently dead sailor. Misra keyed all comms, spoke to her team. “Stay alert. Keep an eye out for any bodies, or any signs of a fugue pod. Don’t take any chances. Assume any dead you find are hostile.”
“Ma’am?” came the confusion over the line.
“Just play it safe, Ginherroc.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The captain turned to her science officer, trying to see his face through the tinted black visor. “Forward, then,” she said, and followed her men to the ladder, imitating the awkward diving motion that uncoupled her feet from the deck so that she climbed up the down ladder and into the central shaft. More lights had flickered on ahead of her, following those of her men who’d taken the lead. Here and there one refused to light, or sputtered and died. How long had it been adrift, riding its momentum across the stars at a respectable fraction of the speed of light? How many years or decades had flowed by that hull and leeched the color from it? And whence had it come? From what dark station between the stars and far from the light of the Empire had it been launched? And to what purpose?
Misra hauled herself forward, following her men along the core shaft, which she guessed ran the entire length of the vessel from forward plate to engine cluster, though bulkheads were shut to fore and aft. Misra propelled herself after her men, Edevane close behind. More lights pulsed on as her people glided by, using rungs bracketed on all sides of the tubular shaft to press forward or slow themselves as their momentum became too great. Concave doors matching the curvature of the tunnel stood open or closed at intervals along the hall and at ninety-degree angles to one another. At one of these she halted, peered inside with her suit lamps.
It was a storage room, and within small crates floated behind the netting that held them in their niche, and the contents of one opened locker drifted like detritus in the bottom of a long-neglected well. Ration packs in silver foil, spoiled long ago, shimmered in the light of her torch beam, and what looked like a pair of brass dice on a thin chain.
Human, after all.
The next open door seemed a kind of primitive lavatory. She recognized the waste elimination systems for what they were at once—some things never changed—but the shower stalls, if such they could be called, were not the sonic booths she was used to, but simple alcoves equipped with sanitary-napkin dispensers and privacy screens. She’d seen such things in history lessons at the academy, and tried to imagine the animal stink of the place when it had had air, nose wrinkling.
“They didn’t design this place with boots in mind, did they?” groused one of the men.
He was right. Though ladder rungs ran along the sides of the shaft, there was no sense of decks at all. The chambers opening on four sides had all been built such that their floors were all aligned with the engine cluster beneath them, so that the ship might impart some imitation of gravity while under thrust. It was primitive, but ingenious in its way, that the crew might inhabit the spire while under the thrust, and the spin section ahead while not.
Ships like the Defiant took into account magnetized boots such as those they all wore, and so patterned their design more after the fashion of oceangoing vessels, with decks perpendicular to the axis of thrust. The warp drives used for faster-than-light travel imparted no inertia at all, and so ships like the Defiant spent most of their flight time not under what any ancient physicist would have recognized as thrust.
“Help me with this!” The words of the soldier ahead shook Misra from her reflection on the strangeness of the vessel, and looking forward she saw four men attempting to slide back the double doors of the bulkhead. The inner door had partly failed, had been open a couple inches. Wide enough to let any air there had been out, but not wide enough to admit any one of them.
The men groaned over the common band as they braced themselves against opposing walls—no easy task in freefall. But the door ground open, and when it had traveled a few inches, some long-dormant system kicked in and rolled the portal back.
“What’s all this?” Edevane asked, casting his suit lamp over the room beyond. The walls were honeycombed with little round apertures—each perhaps five centimeters wide. The section continued for perhaps five meters before giving way to a ring of controls that girdled the entire passage. He drifted to one wall, seized handles between banks of the silver-capped apertures. Misra imagined she could hear the man squinting as he tapped one of the circles, wiped a thin caul of frost from the end. “Cold storage,” he mused aloud, and leaned in to read some label on the end cap. Reacting to his touch, the little disc slid outward, outgassing as it went, revealing a narrow cylinder three times longer than it was wide, with glass sides revealing the blue fluid within.
“Lysander, leave it!” Misra ordered.
But the science chief leaned further in, focusing his suit light on the glass sides to better peer within. “Earth and Emperor!” he exclaimed.
“What is it?” Misra asked, unable to help herself.
“A child!” he said, holding up thumb and forefinger about two centimeters apart. “An embryo! About this big!”
Misra felt her heat tighten in her chest. “Human?”
“Well, I’m no biologist, but I’d say so,” Edevane said, and tapped the tube again. It slid neatly back into place. He pushed back from the walls, caught hold of a rung near what passed for the ceiling, given Misra’s vantage point. “There could be . . . ten thousand of them here! Maybe more. It’s hard to say!” He turned to look down at his captain where she clung to the wall opposite. “Cassia, I think this is a colony seed ship.”
“Never heard of the exos trying to launch a colony before,” she said.
“Aglovale’s pretty far out,” said one of the men. “Maybe they thought it was uninhabited.”
“You think?” asked the man called Ginherroc.
“Anything’s possible,” the first man said.
“What about the crew?” asked another.
“Maybe they had to evacuate?” Ginherroc said.
“Keep moving,” Misra said. “We haven’t found the bridge yet. It’s good that these systems are still working. We’ll find our answers ahead.” But she was unable to shake the sense that something was very wrong about all this. The ship had no warp drive, of that she was certain. They would have seen the engines on their approach. She had never heard of a colony seed ship without warp drive.
How long were they in coming here?
“Captain, Lieutenant Edevane. Door’s open!” said one of the soldiers. He’d gone on ahead to the round door at the extreme end of the core shaft, and found it functional.
Misra and Edevane broke off their conversation, and both kicked off the walls to reach the door. The room beyond the door revolved slowly, a great wheel turning floor to wall to ceiling in a steady clockwise motion. They had reached the ring section, Misra realized, and the two doors that faced each other across the vestibule turned with the great spokes that connected that ring to the central spire. A third door lay dead ahead, in the center of the far wall, but it was locked. One of the soldiers was prodding a control panel as she entered, but nothing changed.
“We may need to cut our way in,” he said.
“Hold that thought,” Edevane interjected. “There might be atmo on the far side still.” He turned back through the door whence they had come, then back to Misra. “Could be an airlock.”
Misra chewed her lip. “We won’t all fit in here.”
“We can leave the lads to search downship. Might be something in engineering anyhow.”
The captain nodded. If Edevane was right, it was better not to force the door, and if he was wrong, well, they’d be separated long.
As the lieutenant floated to the door to shout his orders, Misra radioed the ship. “Mr. Phanu, can you run a scan of the forward sections? There’s power coming from somewhere. I’d like to know where that is.”
“On it,” the gruff lieutenant replied. “Any idea whose ship it is?”
Misra hesitated only a moment. “Lysander thinks it’s exos. All the signs are in Old English.”
“English?” Phanu’s scowl crackled over the comm. “Talking pre-war English? Could be Mericanii.”
“That’s enough, Michael,” Misra snapped. “The Mericanii are three thousand years gone.”
“I’m just kidding, Captain.” She could hear the laughter in the navigator’s voice. “Watch out for robots!”
“I said that’s enough!” the captain snapped, but smiled beneath her visor. “Anything on scan?”
“Still going.”
Edevane had returned by then and cycled the rear door, sealing the two officers and five men in the low-lit vestibule. “Try the door!” he said, pointing to the man nearest the panel. Misra pressed herself nearer the rotating wall, grabbed a handle to pull herself away from the others clustered near the center. Her lower body thudded against the wall as she turned, was lifted above her compatriots to better see the door as Edevane’s fellow tapped again at the controls.
Again. Nothing.
“Is it dead?” she asked.
“I don’t know!”
“This is interesting,” came Phanu’s voice on the comms. “On a lark I spectrographed the light coming from the windows on the forward section. There’s air in there. Good air, but cold.”
Edevane spoke up. “Explains the door.”
“Can we cycle this room?” Misra asked. “Use it like an airlock?
“I don’t see any controls like that,” said the man at the door.
“Michael?” Misra asked. “Any ideas?”
As if in answer, a green light filled the vestibule, and a moment later the door just above where Misra clung to the rotating perimeter of the room opened, and a cold, white light flickered to life. A dry rasp of air—thin as the last breath of a dying man—rushed from the tunnel into the vestibule, making Misra think of the tombs of the desert kings of old her father had talked about when she was just a girl. The men all moved with well-oiled reflexes, drawing reactionless phase disruptors and taking aim. But there was no intruder, only an empty stretch of corridor of ladder descending to the ring section above.
Below?
“Was that you, Damien?” Edevane asked the fellow on the controls.
Damien shrugged. “Might have been?”
“Captain, let me go first!” called one of the others, but Misra had already hauled herself through the opening, her own disruptor in her hands. They were right behind her, pulling themselves over the lip and into the spoke that descended toward the ring. The captain caught hold of the ladder built into one side and pushed herself down. The ring section below was not spinning enough to create the full effects of simulated gravity; it had slowed over who knew how many years, but still she felt a phantom weight as she descended, and when her feet were on the lip above the lower door she did not float away, light though she was.
The lower door opened to admit her, and a rush of frigid air filled the shaft above, blowing her armor’s gold-fringed tunic up like the skirt of some silly little girl. Edevane and the others were just above her, so she leaped down through the aperture to the deck of the ring below. She landed catfooted, gun raised, in the center of what looked for all the world just like one of the rec rooms back on Fort Caspian. Low couches—black against the white walls a floor—carved out their square sitting areas around low tables, all built into the floor. But the walls were bare of any decoration, and a thin layer of frost lay on almost everything.
Edevane swung off the bottom of the ladder at her side—not one to leap as she had done—and the others came clambering down. “Living quarters?” he asked, looking round.
“Looks like.”
“Still no sign of the crew. Fugue, do you reckon?”
Misra shook her head. “I didn’t see any creches, did you?”
“Maybe down by the engines?”
A distant sound broke the sepulchral quiet of the place, and all seven of them jumped, pointing disruptors. What looked like a screwdriver rolled into sight from around a counter up ahead, and hurrying toward it, Misra saw a metal toolbox smashed open on the ground. She could see where it had rested on the counter—a clear spot stood dark against the glimmering frost. She stooped to pick it up. It was a screwdriver, a common screwdriver. She held it up for Edevane and the others to see.
Then a huge, white shape burst from over the counter and hurled itself at her. Edevane shouted. Too late! Whatever it was, it tackled Misra to the ground, knocked the disruptor from fingers suddenly nerveless. Cassia Misra reacted fast as she could, cuffed her assailant in what she guessed was the side of its head.
“Don’t shoot!” Edevane shouted. “You’ll hit the captain!”
Man-shaped it was and huge, hulking and padded beneath layers of what felt like rubber and Kevlar. A hand seized Misra by the jaw, forcing her head back. Her gun could not have gone far. She felt for it, hand slapping at the deck beneath her. Where were the others?
There!
The creature’s huge hand closed on hers and the gun in it, and before she could retaliate, before she could react—it was gone. Rolled off her and onto one knee.
“Stɑp!” it shouted, pointing the gun at her, at them. “ðæts fɑr ɪnʌf!” His words were strange, not wholly unfamiliar, but wrong. Misra slid backward where she lay, shamed to have been caught off guard so easily. Seeing her movement, her assailant snapped the weapon toward her. “hu ɑɹ ju? aɪdɛntəfaɪ jɔɹsɛɫvz!”
Guns glared at each other across the space between the demon in white and Misra’s men.
She didn’t understand.
“dɪd ju ətæk maɪ ʃɪp?”
Now that she had gained the space to breathe, Misra understood what it was that had attacked her. It was a man, or nearly one, clad in a heavy environment suit of heavy white cloth over layers of padded material. The helmet was not close-fitting at all, but a white dome with a bronzed visor that hid his face—for he he certainly was. The voice was deeply masculine, but human as anything in the cosmos.
“hu ɑɹ ju?” he roared once more, and pointing the disruptor at the ground he fired. The energy bolt flashed white in the dimness. “ɹɛbəɫz? ɪz ðæt ɪt?”
“Put the gun down!” Misra said, returning to her knees.
The man thrust the gun back in her face. His hand wavered. “ju doʊnt əndɝstænd mi . . .” His words trailed away to nothing. No one moved for a long moment.
“Who are you?” Misra asked, taking advantage of the man’s faltering to stand. He turned to look at her, perhaps recognizing the feminine in her voice. How long had it been since he’d heard a woman’s voice? Or any man’s? Misra tapped her chest. “Misra,” she said. “Misra.”
“Misra?” the man echoed the word in his curious accent. Then with one bulky gauntlet he lifted his bronze visor with the air of a knight long afield.
The captain gasped, and sensed the same thrill of horror run through the others.
It was a man, indeed, but a man like and yet unlike any she had ever seen. He wore his blond hair in a short burr flat on top and nearly absent on the sides. His face was broad and clean-shaven, strong-jawed and pale of skin, and Misra could tell that even were his padded suit removed he would be a big man, broad-shouldered and strong. But it was his eyes that drew hers, and drew those of all the others in the room.
They were solid silver, like twin pools of mercury in his otherwise unremarkable but handsome face. Like mirrors, they reflected all they saw, and seemed to glow with an inner light. And what was more, the left side of his head from his temple to behind his ear shone just as silver and gleamed with faint, blue light.
“Mother Earth!” swore one of the men. “He’s exonaut, all right.”
The stranger cocked his head, as confused by the strange wrongness of their words as they were by his, as though he could almost understand them. Lowering his stolen weapon, he said, “ɝθ?” And again, “Earth?”
“Earth?” Edevane asked.
“juɹ fɹəm ɝθ?” His jaw went slack, and it was only slowly that he lifted a hand to his own chest, jostling the air and water hoses fastened to the pack there. “hwiɫɝ. Aɪm kəˈmændɝ æɫən hwiɫɝ.”
“Wheeler?” Edevane echoed the man’s word. “Your name is Wheeler?”
The man nodded. Misra’s gun still wavered in his hands, half raised.
“Edevane?” Misra asked.
“He’s speaking English, ma’am. Old English.”
“You understand him?”
“Not well,” said the lieutenant. “Never thought I’d have to speak it.” He lowered his own gun and advanced a step, his empty hands raised. Pointing at his black-visored face, he said, “Aɪm idveɪn, ɫutɛnənt ɫaɪsændɝ idveɪn.”
“Lieutenant?”
Wheeler took a step back, raising his guns. “ɫutɛnənt fɔɹ hu? Hu du ju wɝk fɔɹ?”
Edevane glanced sidelong at his captain. “He wants to know who we work for, Captain.”
“Tell him, Lysander!”
“We’re soldiers of the Sollan Empire,” Edevane said, words muddy as he stumbled through the exonaut’s unfamiliar tongue. “This system is ours. Who are you?”
“jɔɹz?” Wheeler said, shining eyes narrowing. “Yours? This system’s uninhabited. No one’s been out here. What’s the Sollan Empire?”
“What does he mean ‘what’s the Sollan Empire’?” Misra echoed when Edevane had repeated the strange sailor’s words. The Sollan Empire ruled over thousands of star systems—more than ten thousand, or so it was said! The Empire ruled over the ruins of Earth itself, safeguarded the homeworld in trust against the day the radiation faded and mankind was free to return and plant her hills anew. How could anyone—even one of the exonauts—not know of the Empire? “It doesn’t make sense.”
Edevane turned to the man called Wheeler, and again speaking the fellow’s arcane tongue, he said, “Who are you, exactly? What is this ship? What is your purpose here?”
“maɪ pɝpəs?” Wheeler echoed. “My purpose? We’re a colony mission! Or we were.”
He continued on in that vein for a long moment, and when he was done, Edevane translated, saying: “He says their life support failed in transit.”
“What happened to the rest of the crew?” Misra asked.
Edevane repeated the question in halting, broken English.
“Dead,” the exonaut replied. That word, at least, had not changed as Old English and the Galactic Standard drifted further and further apart. Misra felt a twinge of sympathy for the lone sailor then. She could not imagine how long he had been alone, surviving off what ambient air remained in the vast ship, off the rebreather and the oxygen tanks left in storage.
Wheeler kept speaking then, continued for a long moment. Edevane hesitated for just a moment when he was done, asked a question in the exo’s aged tongue. “He says there were twelve of them.”
“Only twelve?” Misra was unable to keep the shock from her voice. There were three hundred on the Defiant, and it was less than half the volume. “What happened to them?”
Edevane asked.
“əpɫoʊdɪd,” Wheeler said.
The lieutenant didn’t answer at once, so Misra asked, “What did he say?”
Edevane shook his head. “‘Uploaded’?” he said, repeating the exonaut’s word sound-for-sound.
The captain shook her head as well. The word was English, and what it might mean she couldn’t begin to guess. “We need to radio Fort Caspian,” she said, “get up with command. Tell them it’s another exo incursion.” She studied Wheeler’s face, the mirrored eyes and implant on his temple. The mingling of flesh and machine was strictly forbidden. That was why the exonauts existed in the first place. They had chosen to flee, chosen exile rather than rejoin the human family after the war, after the Advent and annihilation of Earth and her machines.
The last exonaut ship had simply needed fuel and had been sent on its way, but Wheeler’s ship was in no state to sail, and so he would have no choice but to submit to Imperial rule. His eyes would have to be removed, and the thing in his head with them. If new eyes could not be found or grown for him, he would live blind but human as a guest of the Baron’s. It was the law.
Something of the interloper’s earlier behavior clicked in Misra then, and she turned her gaze back to Edevane. “Lysander, ask him where he came from.”
The lieutenant did as he was ordered, repeating her words in the stumbling, archaic way.
Wheeler’s silver eyes blinked, and he frowned at them as if this was the most foolish question in all the galaxy.
“hwɛɹ dɪd wi kəm fɹəm?” he asked, repeating Edevane’s question. Misra’s gun wavered in his confused hand. “aɪ . . . ɝθ. Wiɹ fɹəm ɝθ.”
Lysander Edevane might have been transmuted to stone. He stood there, utterly still, a suit of armor on display in some museum.
“What is it?” Misra asked, marking the unease that rippled through the other men to see their lieutenant’s reaction. But she already knew, could sense the answer in the way Wheeler had reacted to one of the soldier’s oaths.
Earth.
“He’s from Earth,” Edevane said.
“What?” one of the others interjected.
“Impossible!” Misra replied. “Earth was destroyed three thousand years ago!”
Picking up on the fear and anger in the voice of Misra and her men, Wheeler took a step back, raised his gun. “hwət ɑɹ ðeɪ seɪɪŋ?” His voice had sharpened, and clearly Misra heard the fear in it.
Edevane didn’t answer him. “It’s not impossible,” he said, turning to face her. “This ship is old. Pre-warp. If she could push light speed. Get right up against c . . .”
Misra could only stare at her lieutenant. He was talking about relativity. Special relativity. That hadn’t been relevant to space travel—not really—since Mann and Ibson created the warp drive. Modern ships like her Defiant were not even capable of achieving near-light speeds, relying instead on fusion engines for short, hard burns and ion drives and even solar sails to boost momentum over long distances. Warp drives sidestepped the issues of relativity, kept sailors from slipping away thousands of years into the future.
From traveling through time.
“Three thousand years . . .” Misra’s voice was shaking. “That would mean . . . that would make him . . .”
Edevane was well ahead of her. “Mericanii. This is a Mericanii ship!” His hand snapped back up, disruptor pointed at Wheeler’s chest. The other men stiffened, retrained their weapons on the target.
It wasn’t possible. Couldn’t be possible. Beneath her helmet, Cassia Misra’s mouth hung open. The Mericanii were gone. William the Great had stamped them out, tore up their iron colonies by the roots and hounded them back to the green hills of Earth where they and their machines had made their final stand. She looked at Wheeler. He was no exonaut, but an archaenaut, an ancient sailor borne by the winds of light from some half-remembered history. Her mouth worked, but no sound came out. Never in all her wildest dreams had she thought such a thing might be possible, might happen to her.
History did not come to life, did not sail out of the dark between the stars and menace her sleeping world. History was for books, for holographs and children. Not for the light of day.
But history had come to Aglovale, and to her.
“hwəts ɡoʊɪn ɑn?” Wheeler asked, pointing his stolen gun now at Edevane.
How many billions had the Mericanii and their machine masters killed, and on how many worlds? How many people had died in the name of their progress, their giant leap forward? The machines would not tolerate any man or woman to live free of their network. All were to be incorporated, that the machines might set them free. Of suffering, of pain, of the iniquities of ordinary life. Of rank and difference itself. Such equity demanded the machines to enforce it, and enforce it they had. Every blade of grass that stood tall was cut down, and every crawling weed was straightened, and all who would not kneel were destroyed less they threaten to Totality.
There were worlds besides Earth where still no life grew, and it was said that when the war was done, only the smallest portion of mankind yet stood free.
“They’re dead!” Misra objected, looking at Wheeler. “The Mericanii are dead.”
“Looks like this one was a long time coming here,” Edevane said. “What should we do? You know the Protocols. If there’s a machine on board . . .”
Misra knew the rules as well as any officer. Three thousand years later, and every man and woman on every ship from every world in the Imperium was still made to memorize the Avalon Protocols.
“This ship has to be destroyed.” She looked to Wheeler. And every man on it.
“hwəts ɡoʊɪn ɑn?” Wheeler asked again, clearly not guessing his danger. And how could he? He had come from a different world. A different universe. A universe forever changed by the actions of the power he had served—if he had served them.
“Ask him!” Misra said. “Name. Rank. Serial number. Ask him, Lysander!”
Lysander did as he was ordered.
The man called Wheeler did not lower his gun. “aɪ toʊɫd ju!” he said, still perhaps not understanding. “aɪ æm kəmændɝ æɫən hwiɫɝ, ju ɛs ɛs æməzɑn, əv ðə pipəɫz junaɪtɪd steɪts əv əmɛɹəkə.”
Captain Misra did not need Edevane to translate the archaenaut’s words. Strange though his accent was, his last words needed no translation.
A Merican.