The Fleet 01 Read online

  However, for the past two seasons, he had begun to shun the company of his coevals; he showed signs of impatience at the presence even of his closest relatives; he no longer responded to casual challenges in the manner of a youngling, by a rough-and-tumble fight more play than purpose, but either dismissed them with expressions of ‘Contempt or, if provoked past bearing, went for what might more than once have been a kill, had others not intervened.

  Accordingly, on a day appointed, they took him to a wilderness on the far side of the planet, where he must survive by his wits until they came again. If he were found alive, he would be accepted as an adult. They gave him a baldric from which hung two containers, one for solids and one for liquids, holding rations for about three days. Otherwise he must provide for himself. But there was little water here” and less prey. Besides, there were always hundreds like him undergoing the same trial by ordeal. It was the Khalian way. There was no penalty attached to taking another’s kill—or even another’s life, if that was imperative to save one’s own—though it was best to avoid doing either, for it would entail lasting enmity from every member of the victim’s clan, and certain clans were very powerful.

  All this passed through his mind as the flier that had brought him boomed away into the sunset. Nonetheless he felt wonderful. The bones of his predecessors who had failed the test were scattered around the spot where he had been dropped. Not even they could diminish his sheer joy at finding himself so alone. He had been told, but until now had not appreciated, how much the Change would make him crave the vastness of wild and open landscape, after the crowded conditions of the multifamily village where he had grown up.

  As darkness fell he stared skyward. The welkin was clear, sown with brilliant specks as sharp as claw-points. He ached to the inmost fibre of his being with longing that he should one day be allowed to roam the greatest wilderness of all, the void beyond the air. All his life it had been his ambition to join the star-rovers, to prey on lesser species, not for food but use, to bring home riches that would make his descendants respected, famous, maybe even the root-stem of a new clan ...

  He roused himself from dreaming. In order that his ambition should become reality, he must survive this test. But even as he selected a safe place to wait for dawn, his thoughts were with the rovers, with the ravagers.

  So too were those of Yuriko Petrovna, though for a very different reason.

  And, indeed, she was not as yet aware of the fact. She—the pronoun was correct, though she had never borne children nor did she have any intention of so doing—was among the not quite lowliest of the Fleet. Her title was grander than her actual status. She was officially a pilot, and had command of an FTL starship. In fact, she was scarcely more than a passenger, aboard a single-person scout of a class so numerous its members were not even granted names ... though privately she had accorded one to hers: the Nag. Her study of history had taught her that that had once meant a broken-down horse. It also, and still, meant someone given to continual complaints and reprimands. Her ship had been refitted so often it was hard to be sure whether anything except a few struts and girders were original, but some of those were past the century mark, while every time she attempted to give a command the computer disapproved of warning lights flashed and its vocal circuits filled the air with harsh objections. So the nickname was befitting on both counts.

  As part of her training she, and fifty others like her in similar ships, had been assigned to one of the Fleet’s routine tasks: searching—very probably in vain—for a missing merchant vessel, overdue on a trip back to Fleet-controlled space from one of the outlying colony planets.

  But to her, if not her colleagues or those who had ordered out the search party, this was a special case. The lost ship was called Chrysanthemum, named by her captain for the national flower of his mother’s homeland back on Earth.

  His mother ... and Yuriko’s also, though they had been born some twenty years apart.

  Did they realise, back at Fleet Command, how grave a burden they were laying on her mind when they included her in the search party? Well, what a stupid question! Yes, of course! All such data must be instantly available from their enormous memory banks. Therefore she was being put to a test, to see whether emotional commitment would disturb her judgment during a long period alone in space. In a sense that was flattering, for it meant they had their eyes on her with a view to further promotion. Only the coolest-headed, only those who proved most resilient in the face of stress, could make it to the highest echelons of Fleet Command.

  But my own brother ... !

  Sighing, she turned her attention back to immediate tasks.

  Of the fates that might have overtaken Chrysanthemum, the likeliest was an accident when dropping out of FTL drive. Not even the fastest computers could reconcile all the differences between ordinary space and that weird zone beyond the speed of light. Now and then, even in the volume where the Fleet held sway, something went wrong: the mass of a miniature black hole, left over from the beginning of time, might distort the readings that indicated where to bring the ship back into the normal universe, or a fragment of undetectable antimatter might turn out to be adrift at the arrival point, which reacted with the hull or some other part of the ship and saturated its circuitry with wild particles and sleeting radiation ...

  But of late there had been rumours of another kind of threat, and most often in just that zone Chrysanthemum had traded through. (She was growing used to thinking of the ship in past tense—and her brother.) It was suspected that some unknown predatory species might be on the move, attacking human ships and even the most distant human planetary settlements. So far there were only the rumours to go by, or hints and clues at best, but a few seemed solid enough for the computers that ceaselessly ran simulations of all events throughout the volume of known space to signal low-grade warnings: fifteen, eighteen, maybe twenty percent credibility. Recently, though, the incremental rate had slowed to zero.

  Four chances in five, therefore, that this was just another foolish bout of panic, triggered by a handful of accidents that happened to occur in the same region. When there were hundreds of them every year, most of them more nuisance than disaster, and primarily attributable to poor maintenance or radiation damage in computer circuits, what were the chances for even fifty ships, darting hither and yon through such immensity, of tracing the lost vessel, its distress beacon radiating at the dilatory speed of light? There had been no news of her courier projectiles! Every craft aspace carried a stock of miniature FTL message-bearers designed to home in automatically on the nearest Fleet command post, or the ship’s base. But if any of Chrysanthemum’s had shown up, the searchers had not been told.

  Thinking of CPs—

  Too late. The Nag’s harsh tones were assailing her ears, reminding her that it was past time for her to dispatch another of her own courier projectiles, the last but two, in order to report her status and position. She was strictly enjoined not to continue the search past the expenditure of the last but one, the last being reserved for ultimate emergencies. And indeed by now she was growing weary and resigned. She was looking forward to returning to Port—horrible though it might be objectively. At least she was assured of human company back there, amid the crackling of the energy weapons that defended its perimeter. One day they might even cure the stink that always leaked, molecule by molecule, through its protective screens …

  So …

  She authorised the ship to copy her accumulated data into the missile and send it on its way. Then she resumed her habitual but most likely futile review of the known facts about the region of space Chrysanthemum had plied. The computer was so much smarter than any human mind at solving the equations that governed its physical attributes, calculating the most probable course deviations imposed by gravitational anomalies or the movement of mass and energy due, for instance, to the outburst of a nova ... of which there had been one in the vicinity not long ago.
When the core of a sun exploded it had effects in the FTL universe as well as—

  She snapped herself back from despair to optimism. There was one thing humans were better at than any computer. That was using unverbalised knowledge to turn a guess into a deduction! In view of the difference of age between them, she had never been very close to her brother. But she did remember him, though he had been a distant figure during most of her childhood; she had had a kind of crush on him when she was in her teens and he was already a seasoned space-farer. Sometimes a look had come over his face as though he were gazing past the here-and-now into uncharted regions of’ the galaxy …

  That had been why he opted to work for a small, unprofitable space-line, trading as often as not beyond the boundaries of Fleet-controlled space. That had been why she had tried to emulate him, and wound up here—wherever here might be. So few stars had habitable planets; so few compared to the illimitable span of universe space and time!

  But it didn’t matter where she herself was, as of this instant. What counted was to figure out—and this was her last chance—a high-probability location for Chrysanthemum. She could not have flown a galactodesic course for home; there was too much interstellar clutter in the way, intruding mass into her tachyonic line. Back-tracking a ship whose path lay partly through the otherness of FTL had much in common with subatomic physics; the number of influences that could disguise the ultimate location was at the power limit of even the most advanced computers.

  Suppose, though, she had been her brother, which of the routes open to him would she have chosen, given that all the likeliest had now been eliminated? (There were only a few thousand others! She had grounds to hope!)

  Abruptly her patience ran dry. She stabbed a handful of co-ordinates into the board before her. The computer began to voice its inescapable objections. With an override command she aborted them, and retreated to her bunk.

  When she awoke, the viewscreen in her cabin showed wreckage drifting all around the Nag.

  Shouting for more information, she rushed back to the control room without even rubbing the sleep from her eyes. The answer, of course, was prompt. But there was a difference. For the first time she discerned a conciliatory—almost respectful—note in the Nag’s automatic voice.

  “At the last destination you specified, it became possible to detect a light-speed distress signal then arriving in the vicinity. This damaged ship appears to be its source.”

  “Identity?” she cried. “Chrysanthemum?”

  The cold of space invaded her very heart. “Prepare my suit!” she forced out.

  “First,” the Nag said firmly, “you will relieve yourself, then cleanse your body and eat.”

  “But—!”

  “There is no sign of survivors.”

  The machine, as ever, was right. Sighing, Yuriko added one more question before she quit the console.

  “Does what happened look like an accident?”

  “No,” said the Nag, after a pause to analyse the implications. “It looks more like the result of an attack.”

  But how? How?

  The mystery plagued Yuriko every second as she complied with her instructions, knowing in her head that they were justified, yet feeling in her guts that if she were only to see with her own eyes rather than through a screen, she could find and take revenge on whoever—whatever!—had callously carved her brother’s ship apart.

  How? It implied the enemy could track their prey in FTL drive! There couldn’t possibly be a way of setting an ambush otherwise!

  That, though, was for Fleet Command to prove or disprove, with the resources of the computers at Port. Her task was now to gather data, nothing more. She drove herself to fulfill it.

  And very soon grew sick of what she found. The independent merchant ship, unarmed, had been slashed open as by a laser scalpel. In the axial corridors floated corpses, desiccated in the vacuum. They did not include her brother’s. Gone. As was the cargo, and much of the ship’s machinery. Not destroyed. Removed.

  And there was no other clue as to the nature or identity of the attackers—save one.

  Sealed compartments, slammed shut automatically when the hull was breached, where she might have hoped to find survivors, had been efficiently forced open. And exactly as many spacesuits were unaccounted for as there should have been additional crew members: five, including her brother. It looked as though they had been taken—well—prisoner.

  Yuriko’s mood grew ever grimmer as she pondered the implications.

  When at last she decided she had learned everything she could, she began to think about the message she was obliged to send back with her last-but-one courier projectile. At random, not seriously expecting an answer, she said inside the helmet of her spacesuit, “Nag, did they have time to fire off a CP?”

  The response took her by surprise.

  “Chrysanthemum’s computer records are garbled by radiation, probably associated with the weapon used, but decipherable data indicate she carried three, of which two were launched.”

  “Two were ... you mean there’s one left? Or was it stolen by the raiders?”

  “It has been retrieved and brought aboard.”

  She would have clenched her fists so hard her nails dug into her palms, but the suit gloves were far too thick and stiff.

  “Is it functional?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then ...”

  An inspiration came to her. But she knew perfectly well what would happen were she to voice it aloud. She contented herself with saying, “That means the attackers may not have understood what CPs are for. I’m coming back.”

  Mouth dry, heart pounding, hoping the Nag would never guess what she had decided to attempt—transgressing the spirit of her orders, admittedly, but not the letter—she did so.

  The next stage was fully automatic. It involved dumping data into the last-but-one of her issue CPs and dispatching it, along with a verbal commentary concerning her own observations. As she was recording it, her voice trembled a little—not enough, she hoped, to register a disturbed condition on the medical monitors.

  The next stage, if not automatic, should have been reflexive. She should have instructed the Nag to head for Port, her mission being at an end. Instead, when the CP was safely on its way, she drew a deep breath.

  “Integrate possible interception courses for the ship that attacked Chrysanthemum and give me those which trace back to the stars in this volume most likely to possess habitable planets.”

  “Your orders are to—”

  “Return to base after the expenditure of the last-but-one CP on board! I quote! Are there, or are there not, two functional CPs inside this ship?”

  There could only be one answer. Thanks to a careless turn of phrase on the part of whoever had drafted the brief for the searchers ...

  Out here she was at the very fringe of human-explored space. But if the enemy were truly alien—from a gas-giant, say—why, after attacking a human ship, would they want to take living captives? The absence of precisely as many spacesuits as there were missing crew members might imply mere scientific curiosity ... or something else, something infinitely worse.

  In any case, if there were a race out here that treated humans as no better than laboratory specimens—!

  My brother among them!

  She shuddered, and went on waiting for the Nag to perform her duty.

  What passed inside her mind during the next hour was unclear even to herself, let alone the computers at Port that tried to reconstruct it afterward. The most baffling mystery of all was this: what made her overlook the possibility that Chrysanthemum’s CPs, even though they had indeed been launched, might have been destroyed before they had the, chance to achieve FTL? After all, had either of them reached its destination, it should in principle have arrived before the search party was organised.

  One ob
vious possibility was an overweening desire for glory, to be the one who identified the home world of the unknown enemy and led the warships of the Fleet to it. However, this did not match her previous record. She was young, with a promising career before her, and uncountable options open whether or not she decided to continue in the service—was she the sort of person to gamble everything on a thousand-to-one, maybe a million-to-one, chance? People like that weren’t recruited!

  No, it didn’t fit.

  Many of the simulations they ran at Port wound up in futile recurrent loops hinting at incestuous attachment, her brother acting as a mental father-substitute ... but all this was abstract and artificial, testifying rather to the ingenuity of the psychologists who had compiled the Fleet’s personality profile programs than to what had really transpired in Yuriko’s not unattractive head.

  Closest, perhaps, came one who said, “I think she simply wanted vengeance.”

  But he was shouted down by colleagues and Fleet officers who cried, “Against her brother’s killers whom she served so well? Or us, because she thought we’d failed in our duty to protect him and his ship?” (That, though, was when the war was fully under way.)

  And nobody—not at the time, nor for a long while after—hit on the explanation that could be summed up in one single word: Grief.

  The Nag complied, though as it were suspiciously. The extra CP tipped the balance. And, miraculously (or was it? Surely if one met a new race among the stars one would expect to do so close to their home world, where humans still were all things considered!) after allowance had been made for every factor—the course Chrysanthemum had been embarked on, the detours she had been obliged to make due to the recent nova, the impact of the onslaught she had suffered that had hurled her across a light-month of real space, the effect of all the stellar masses in the neighbourhood, the drag of interstellar gas—there was one, and only one, unexplored system within the scoutship’s range from which the enemy might reasonably be thought to hail, unless of course they dwelt between the stars: one, and only one, that hinted at an oxygen-high planet.