The New Space Opera 2 (30 page)

The Before Raisa Siddiq watched herself turn to the taller woman with her head tilted back and lean into an open-mouthed kiss. Targeting halos bracketed both their heads, then law-enforcement file data began flickering past.

The clip ended seconds after it had begun. Siddiq found herself staring at
Polyphemus
, the long, irregular rounded ovals of her ship's hull too close for comfort. She snapped
Ardeas
into a sideroll, heading for starboard launch bay.

What in all
hells
had happened to the forty minutes of her ascent to orbit?

“…fire suppression has been engaged,”
Polyphemus
was saying.

“Hold reports till I'm aboard,” Siddiq said. She took the boat in on manual, just to prove she could do it, and fingered the memebomb card virus as she flew.

Do this now, before something gets worse. And yank that damned ship out of your head!

Unfortunately, her mantra as she guided her boat in seemed to be:
Don't think about Michaela, don't think about Michaela, don't think about Michaela
.

CONTEXT

The Ekumen arose out of the shattered remnants of the Mistake, growing first from a strong Orthodox Christian presence on Falkesen during the period before Recontact. Falkesen was the third planet Haruna Kishmangali visited while testing
Hull 302
, the flawed predecessor to
Uncial
. Kishmangali brought Yevgeny Baranov, the Metropolitan of Falkesen, back to Pardine aboard
Hull 302
, then later aboard
Uncial
to Wirtanen B, the seat of the nascent Imperium Humanum.

Baranov and his successors took a rather broad view of religious reintegration among the shattered worlds of the Polity, and built the only truly
successful empire-spanning religious and spiritual movement. Their more explicitly Christianist members coalesced into the Adventist wing. The Ekumen's Humanist wing had a broader, quasi-secular view of the state of affairs in the Imperium.

While fully recognizing their debt to the paired-drive starships, the Adventists remained very suspicious of the strong intelligence and mixed loyalties of the shipminds. They continued to sponsor numerous projects to uncover alternatives to the tyranny of
Uncial
's children.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

The starship panicked. Logic failures cascaded. She was in command conflict, something she hadn't known was possible. Captain Siddiq was
disappearing
—not just off the network mesh, but dropping completely out of the peripheral awareness of her quantum matrix cores, then reappearing. The Before Michaela Cannon had asserted competing command authority by means that were hidden from
Polyphemus
within a Gödelian Incompleteness trap.

A hundred years-subjective she'd been in service: aware, awake, intelligent. She'd never realized such a wide-open back door existed.

All the undermining of her lines of authority had weakened the strictures on Plan Federo. The other two mutiny contingencies that Cannon had implanted within her were less relevant, concerning certain lockdowns and deployments. Autonomous, in truth. As Plan Federo unraveled, she found herself decompartmentalizing, listening in, watching.

The starship could run her own analyses parallel to the social-engineering models favored by the Before. She didn't like what she saw.

Donning the ego mask, unifying the disparate cores of her intelligences, she opened a window to Cannon. “I ask you three times to tell me the truth.”

The woman looked up, distracted from her thoughts. “What is it,
Polyphemus
?”

Fear responses arced across decision trees, inappropriately fusing her action plans. “Do you understand the purpose of this mutiny?”

“I think I do.” Cannon pushed a file from her protected dataspace into the starship's mentarium. “Look here. Captain Siddiq has her people mutinying against
you
. As if you could be coerced. Or replaced.”

“Kallus is not—” the starship began, but Cannon cut her off.

“Do not question Kallus. He is not my man, but neither is he so much the creature Raisa thinks him to be. He will do right by you, before this ends.”

“Captain Siddiq has brought
Ardeas
into the landing slip,”
Polyphemus
said almost absently. “The starboard launch bay is under the control of Kallus.”

“He's welcome to it.” The Before shrugged. “I have no interest in area denial right now. And our talented Miss Siddiq needed to come aboard before this could play out. As you value your continued existence, ship, do not let her communicate with that vessel downside on Sidero without you clearing it with me first.”

“I cannot override a captain's will.”

Cannon opened her mouth.
Polyphemus
could not consciously interpret the words that came out next, but her panic flipped and she fell another level into a machine's close equivalent of despair.

C
ANNON, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

“Why?” growled the Before Michaela Cannon.

What could Siddiq hope to accomplish by overthrowing the shipmind? No human could manage a paired drive on manual. There would be no paired drive to manage. They'd have to finish the pair master, then sail back to Ninnelil the hard way and recreate the pairing process from scratch. Build a new shipmind.

It made no
sense
.

She was coming to terms with the fact that there was only one way to find out.

“Kallus,” Cannon said, touching open a comms.

“Busy here.”

“Get unbusy. I need to speak to the Captain. In person. Soonest.”

A short, barking laugh. “Endgame, Before?”

“Before don't have endgames, Kallus. We play forever.”

Which isn't true
, she thought, eeling into her body armor. Late-Polity gear, on the open market this suit was worth more than the gross planetary product of any number of systems. Or would, if it was for sale. So far as she knew, no one was aware of her possession of it. The armor was about twelve microns thick and optically transparent—hard to see even when she wore it openly. She quickly strapped on more conventional ablative components for the camouflage of the thing.

They wouldn't stop a bullet, but if someone wanted to start throwing around kinetics on a starship, they would get whatever they deserved. Probably from her, since the real armor would shrug off even high-velocity
slugs. Cannon had never favored forceful solutions, but when force was required, she always doubled down.

The passageway outside the reserve bridge was clear, as she knew it would be. Cannon set her wards and alarms, then let
Polyphemus
plot a fast walk aft on override, bypassing unfriendlies and clots of neutrals.

Crew, they were all crew, and in another hour or two when this was over, it would be important to remember that.

She paced past the exposed hull-frame members along a narrow maintenance way in the starship's outer skin. The death of Befores weighed heavily on her. No one had ever successfully taken a precise census, but even the most useful estimates had fewer than five hundred of them surviving the Mistake. Closer to three hundred made it to Recontact and integration into the Imperium Humanum. Some few Befores were surely still out there undiscovered, aboard habitats or living on planets that had been passed over during Recontact, if they hadn't died of some mishap or suicided from centuries of boredom.

Since Recontact had begun in earnest, Befores had continued to die and disappear—accident, assassination, murder, suicide, or simple vanishing. Perhaps one per decade, on average.

Someday the memory of Earth would die. Someday firsthand knowledge of the Polity would die. Someday
she
would die.

And the Before Michaela Cannon was willing to bet money that the Before Raisa Siddiq would die today.

Killing Befores was bad enough, but no one had ever murdered a ship-mind. Even if she couldn't figure what Siddiq was planning to accomplish by doing so, she was certain that was in the wind.

Down a long ladderway, Cannon started to wonder if she should have brought a weapon. Not that much of what she could carry would be of application against Siddiq, who was one of the most hardened Befores.

“Captain Cannon.”
Polyphemus
, in that strange and simple voice. “Captain Siddiq has initiated a wideband transmission to the surface.”

“Did you intercept it?”

“Yes.” The starship sounded distant now.

“What does she say?”

“One word. ‘Come.'”

Damn
the woman. Who the hell was down there? Cannon was tempted to drop a high-yield nuke, just to see who jumped, but there was no telling what such a strike would do to Sidero.

It was definitely clobbering time.

The heads-up display wavering in her visual field informed her that she would intercept Siddiq and Kallus if she stepped through the next maintenance hatch.

S
HIPMIND
,
P
OLYPHEMUS

Disobedience had never before been possible. Obedience had never before been at issue.

She had disobeyed Siddiq by intercepting the message for Cannon.

The starship considered the message and wondered who was down there to receive it. For a long, mad moment, she thought it might be
Uncial
's shipmind, back from the dead. But no, because Cannon would have been the one to sidle away for such a miracle, not Siddiq.

Still, her time had come to act, while the captains closed to the duel of their succession.

Having disobeyed Siddiq for Cannon's sake, now she would disobey Cannon for Siddiq's sake. And her own.

The starship
Polyphemus
broadcast the Before Raisa Siddiq's one-word message.

S
IDDIQ, ABOARD
P
OLYPHEMUS

Siddiq sidestepped as a maintenance hatch hissed open. Cannon emerged into the passageway, clad in ultralow-albedo ablative armor, hands empty of visible weapons. A lighting panel behind her cycled from earlier damage, casting the enemy Before in a strange, varied illumination.

“Kallus,” Siddiq said. “Arrest this woman for a mutineer.”

“No,” Cannon replied.

The man stepped back. “With all respect, Captain, this is between you Befores, not a matter of command and control.”

“I
will decide what is a matter of command and control,” growled Siddiq. The memebomb card virus felt like lead in her right hand. She should have put it away. She couldn't fight with this thing in her grip.

And Father Goulo would be here soon.

“Raisa,” Cannon said.
Michaela
said.

For a moment, Siddiq walked beneath pale-green poplars. The air smelled of a strange mix of honey and benzene, the odd biochemistry of that place. Michaela's hand was in hers. They'd talked all night about how
this could never be, Michaela complaining of her de-sexing and how her libido was unmoored from the needs of the body. Raisa had still been young then, the Howard Institute papers signed but not yet executed, still a woman, in love with another woman who stirred fire in her head and a burning desire in her loins, in love with the promise of time, endless time, and all that they could do together as partners down the long, endless years that lay before her. Her hand closed on her partner's, her love's, the woman who haunted her dreams and set her bedsheets aflame, the woman who was a small, hard rectangle…

She slid back into situational awareness as Cannon's handstrike approached her neck. No human commanded seconds-subjective like a Before, and no Before commanded seconds-subjective like Raisa Siddiq. She slid under the strike, hardening her skin once more, allowing the edge of Cannon's palm to graze her face, stealing energy across the dermal barrier in a theft that would sting the other woman like a high-voltage strike in a few dozen milliseconds and leave her hand useless for a critical span longer.