Authors: Gregory Benford and Larry Niven
He looked up. Three laser shots hit the Birds. One was hit in the head and toppled back. The other two shrieked and reached for something in their harnesses. Four shots threw them back and down, out of sight.
Cliff had fired one shot—and missed. He stuffed his laser away and sprang at the net. He snagged hands in the webbing and went up it fast. His boots hit Terry, who cried “Ow!” Cliff surged using Terry’s back. He grabbed the line and hauled himself up. The Birds were milling around on the magcar floor, shrieking.
Over the lip of the magcar, tumbling, he fell on a Bird body. Feathers made it soft; then he struck the hard body beneath. He struggled up, breathing in the thick, sultry smell of the aliens.
The bodies were bleeding red. Two didn’t move. One was twitching, but its eyes were closed. As he stood, he slipped on the blood, recovered, shook his head in the adrenaline haze—and looked down at a surprisingly simple control board.
Terry and Aybe were shouting, but he ignored them as he studied the board. To the right was what seemed to be a simple lever and release. Everything else looked like press plates and displays. The lever, then.
He tried it, and the line started to draw up into a receiver with a rasping noise. Cliff reversed the lever, and the line played out. He tried the release, thumbed it hard looking over the side, and the net dumped the men.
“Ow!” Terry hit the ground with Aybe on top of him.
“Wow,” Aybe said, standing up. They all gaped at one another, amazed at what they had done.
Irma said, “That was so fast.…”
“Good shooting!” Terry said.
Cliff called down, “Let’s grab this. Shinny up here, bring all our gear.”
Terry said, “Think it’s safe?”
Cliff considered for several seconds. “I can’t tell if they sent any alarm. Seems unlikely, though.”
Aybe said, “I never thought we could—it was so fast!”
Irma said, “That magcar is better than this damn sailer. Let’s go.”
Terry started, “I wonder—”
“Think later,” Cliff said. “Act now.”
They all looked up at him from below, faces scared and joyous at the same time. Seconds passed. Then, as if some unspoken agreement had been reached, they scattered to their tasks.
Howard came climbing up, and the two of them inspected the bodies. Their lasers had punched holes in vital organs, bringing shock, and then the aliens had bled out. Together they tried to detect signs of life. No pulse, and certainly there would have to be a heart. No reactions, no breathing, eyes blank and staring.
“Turd-ugly, aren’t they?” Terry said, and kicked a body. “Solid, too.”
There were many facets of these aliens Cliff wanted to explore, but there wasn’t time. They got the harnesses off the bulky bodies before he and Howard pitched two Birds overboard. Cliff kept the one less damaged. Aybe started to argue with him and then shrugged.
By this time the rest were passing up gear. Howard said, “If they did set off some alarm, we’d better get away.”
Everybody agreed, and voted Aybe into the pilot’s chair, since he had flying experience. The chair was too big for humans, but the seat wrapped anyone who sat in it with a gauzy strap restrainer, and Aybe managed to settle into it. He set to work systematically learning the control panel.
Cliff climbed down to check the bodies he had tossed out. Autopsies are best done fresh, and he learned a good deal in half an hour of cutting. Aybe shouted, “Hey, look!” and made the magcar perform some maneuvers. To their applause he announced in a stentorian voice, “Flight is leaving, folks.”
They all laughed hard, letting the tensions out.
He helped Irma carry some gear from the sailer. She whispered, “Great attack! I knew you could do it.”
“Well, that makes one of us.”
The hell of it was, Redwing thought, that
SunSeeker’s
magscoop
seemed to act better as a brake than as an accelerator.
The deck veered and flexed under his feet, seams groaned, a low rumble echoed. The magscoop expanded, breathing like a lung, and
SunSeeker
slowed. Contract, and the ship accelerated.
Redwing hated the rumbles and surges, maybe because they echoed his own anxieties. To maintain flight control and keep their magnetic fields up and running,
SunSeeker
had to feed its engines with plasma. But the plasma density here was low and the ship had to keep flexing its magnetic screens to stay in burn equilibrium. So the whole ship followed a troubled orbit, skimming along above the Bowl and trying to pick up weak signals from their teams.
“Jam, can’t we smooth this out?” he asked.
The slender man stared intently at the control boards and just shook his head. “I am trying, sir. Ayaan’s array is slewing as we change velocity.”
Ayaan herself called from a nearby control pod, “I can’t get coherence! My antennas cannot focus.”
Redwing felt frustrated, out of his depth technically. A ramscoop of
SunSeeker
class was an intricate self-regulating system, and no one could master even a fraction of its labyrinthian technology. It was not so much a ship as a self-tech entity, with artificial intelligences embedded in every subsystem. It behaved less as a ship than as an electromagnetically structured metallic can run by a dispersed mind, itself electromagnetic.
Beside it, an ancient automobile was an idiot savant, working because analog feedbacks and what the techs called “self-regulating networks” operated well enough, arrived at by incessant trials and some considerable deaths. Autos arose through a form of driven evolution.
SunSeeker
came from a two-century-long evolution of directed intelligences, none individually of great capability. Indeed, the subminds embedded in
SunSeeker
were no better than ordinary human intelligence, and some much lesser. But the sum of these subminds, as with whole human cultures, was greater than linear. Modern human civilization was surely of lesser station than its greatest intelligences, such as Gödel and Heinschlicht. So was
SunSeeker
an anthology of self-critical and disciplined minds. Each mind lived its life with a reward system and constraints, dwelling in a community of diverse talents. All that properly propelled
SunSeeker
into a social intelligence, one that ran beyond what the ship could entirely comprehend. In this it was much like human societies. While it nominally served Earthly society, the ship also had evolved over the centuries of its flight into its own, original society. Smart networks had to.
It could innovate, too.
“Cap’n! Our subsystems found a way to amp the coherence,” Ayaan called out. “I’ve never seen it do that before.”
Redwing walked behind her acceleration couch and watched the screens display a dazzling graphic. It showed linked armories of smart systems, adjusting in milliseconds to the fits and snarls of
SunSeeker
’s trajectory. The hundreds of elements in Ayaan’s array glided to compensate, like a retina that caressed the light falling on it.
The signal grid shifted, its colors cohering. Suddenly, a strong pulse came through. “It’s from Aybe’s phone,” Ayaan said, excited.
“Send Beth’s bio data as soon as you can.”
“Got it inserted already, right behind the carrier signature,” Ayaan said crisply.
“What’s their situation?”
“Here’s their text.”
GOT FREE OF ALIENS. MAKING OUR WAY ACROSS THICKLY WOODED TERRAIN. HEADED OUT OF DESERT ZONE.
“That’s it?”
“I had to synthesize their signal three times to get even that.”
“Can’t they send up some detail?”
“I’ll ask them to use store and transmit. That lets them set the phone so when it acquires us, it sends a squirt at optimal rates.”
“No audio?”
“Too noisy for that. I squeezed this out of repeated text messages. Lucky it got through, considering.”
“Considering what?”
“How weak their signal is, how fast we’re moving, the whole problem of using a dispersed antenna—”
“I get it,” Redwing said. “Outstanding work, Lieutenant.”
She smiled and added, “I’ll send what text I get to your address.”
“I wish we had more people to analyze this,” Redwing said suddenly, feeling his isolation.
Again, Ayaan smiled kindly. “Our experts are on the ground, gathering information.”
He nodded, then lifted his head a bit. He shouldn’t let the crew see his uncertainty. An old rule: If people can see up your nostrils, you’re keeping your chin at the appropriate alpha angle.
“Has Aybe got the food stuff?”
“Just did. Sent back an acknowledgment—whoops, there goes the connection. Damn.”
Redwing paced and turned back to her. “Y’know, just before they went down, Cliff was afraid they wouldn’t be able to digest any of the food down there. Kind of funny. Now we’re sending him menus.”
Ayaan chuckled. “It’s a major discovery, I should think.”
“Really? Still seems like common sense to me. Food is food.”
“Most biochemists think it was a historical accident that all our sugars are right-handed, while our amino acids are left-handed. It could easily have been the other way round.”
Redwing blinked. He kept forgetting that crew were multiskilled, so the loss of one specialist couldn’t crimp them a lot.
“Well, turns out otherwise,” he said. “Beth’s team said they had some dysentery at first, but some of their med supplies put them right. Prob’ly Cliff’s did, too.”
“Beth’s text messages said she got most of her lore from the aliens.”
Redwing nodded once more. “They knew the poisons, and maybe those are pretty near universal? Interesting idea.”
Ayaan was observing him closely, he noted. “Sir, I understood Cliff’s point, and indeed, I agreed with it. Particularly his suggestion that they do thorough sampling of the alien air, to see if it would be dangerous to us.”
“Which they did. And it wasn’t.”
“Beth reported some flulike symptoms, dysentery, too—but, yes, nothing fatal.”
“They caught a break, maybe.”
She shook her head. “What interests me is that these ideas of Cliff’s, and mine, they were quite plausible. Yet you ignored them.”
“Not exactly. I said be careful but keep going. We had to go down there, had to take our chances.”
“Yes, and that is what I find admirable. You made the decision, despite our worries.”
He wondered briefly if she was just sucking up to him. But no—she wasn’t that kind of woman, a brownnose climber. “That’s my job.”
She beamed. “And I am glad it is not mine.”
“You’re going to have to make decisions, too, as this whole thing plays out. Here’s a tip: The biggest mistake is being too afraid of making one.”
They both laughed together and it felt good.
* * *
That evening he lay in his bunk thinking about the day and what Ayaan had said.
All the media back Earthside had played the whole ocean/space analogy to the hilt, making Redwing’s job sound like that of Captain Cook or Magellan. But those sailors had plenty of experience, had worked their way up the naval ladder by sailing to nearby ports, learning command, getting navigation right, and gradually making longer voyages. The first generation starship commanders had to make a huge leap, from piloting craft around the solar system, then the Kuiper belt and fringes of the Oort cloud, then to interstellar distances. That was a giant jump of 100,000—like sailing around the world after a trial jaunt of about three football fields.
He had piloted a ramscoop on one of the first runs into the Oort cloud, and done well. But in all the trials,
SunSeeker
hadn’t topped a tenth of light speed more than once, and they had run at that for only a week. Five ships had gone out before
SunSeeker.
In the first decade, none reported ramscoop troubles like theirs. That didn’t mean much now, though. Communications from Earth had stopped more than a century back, for reasons unexplained. Silence says nothing.
They were sailing uncharted waters here, Redwing thought, to use a nautical phrase. Magellan, he now recalled, had gone ashore and gotten tangled up in conflicts in the Philippine Islands, and died in a battle he chose to start. He had been convinced that the angel of Virgin Mary was on his side, so he couldn’t lose, even though he was outnumbered by a thousand to thirty. Later generations named a small galaxy after him, but he had made plenty of dumb decisions, especially that fatal one, out of emotion.
So maybe analogies could be useful, after all.
Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.
—M
ARK
T
WAIN
Even Tananareve was keeping up, moving steadily with grim,
sweaty determination, but Mayra wasn’t. She hadn’t been making good time since their last sleep. Her forehead wrinkled with grave, deep lines and her lips moved in an interior dialogue. Beth could feel what it was doing to her, the loss of her husband eating into her morale.
That was how she had to think of it, Beth realized. Morale. Keep the unit together and deal with what happened. Leadership, they had called it in crew training. Every crew member had to be able to assume leadership if the circumstances demanded it. Which meant if the actual leader got killed or disabled or broke down in the face of things nobody had imagined before. Leadership.
She slowed her own pace, then watched as Lau Pin burrowed into the thick, leafy undergrowth and was gone in seconds.
Beth bit her lip. She would not yell after him. They were fugitives, best to stay quiet. She followed the torn foliage, thinking how easily a Serf-One tracker could do the same, or just follow his nose. The smell of smashed vegetation was rank.
But Mayra wailed and threw herself down among the springy leaves.
Beth glanced after Lau Pin, then touched her shoulder. “Mayra—”
“He’s
dead,
and what’s it for? We’re just
running.
We’re all dying of bone loss anyway in this low g!” She spat the words out, pressure released.