Fleet of Worlds by Larry Niven and Edward M. Lerner – A SCI FI Essential Book

EXILE

Earth date: 2650

CHAPTER 1

Alone in his cabin, behind a triply locked hatch, within a vessel constructed from the most impenetrable material ever made, light-years removed from any conceivable hazard, Nessus cowered.

"Nessus" was a label of convenience. His actual name, Citizen speech requiring two sets of vocal chords for proper articulation, was unpronounceable by his crewmates on the opposite side of the sturdy hatch. He had once overheard an irreverent Colonist remark that his true name sounded like an industrial accident set to music.

Curled into a ball, heads tucked safely inside, Nessus saw and heard nothing. He unclenched only enough to breathe. The herd pheromones continuously circulating in the ship's air would eventually calm him. Meanwhile, surely, his anxiety was appropriate.

How could he not panic? He represented a trillion of his kind. Only the merest fraction of the Concordance could bear to take leave of the home world. Yet here, by his own initiative, he was — because the alternative, for all of the trillion, was even more unthinkable.

The panic attack ebbed, and a head emerged for a peek. Sensors hidden throughout the ship reported that conditions remained normal. His three Colonist crew were unaware of or properly respectful to his mood. Two were within their respective cabins, one softly snoring; the last stood watch on the bridge.

Had he truly thought: normal? Normality existed only on Hearth, in the time-tested rhythms of life, amid the teeming multitudes of his kind.

He rolled once more into a tight, quivering orb. Without radical changes and much luck, everything normal was doomed.

* * * *

You never saw hyperspace; quite the opposite. The brain refused to acknowledge that a dimension so strange could exist. Objects all around a cabin window somehow came together, the mind denying the nothingness between. You covered the window, but a coat of paint or a scrap of fabric only taunted you that oblivion lurked behind. You had to get used to hyperspace, and some never did. Hyperspace had driven many people mad.

Kirsten Quinn-Kovacs, alone on the bridge, studiously ignored the covered view port. There was much else to do, and much more to occupy her thoughts. Everything was new and wondrous. Merely to be aboard was a tremendous honor.

At every moment, the strangeness of it all threatened to overwhelm her.

The bridge of Explorer was a chimera, a superposition of improbable parts. Chimera: The word itself was a fanciful novelty, describing a fantasy creature. Nessus had taught it to her, claiming to have learned it on an alien world far, far away.

What could be more improbable than that she was on her way to study an unexplored alien planet? Though there was little chance she would set foot on that new world, this trip was an amazing opportunity. Except as a passenger or on training flights, always within sight of the Fleet of Worlds, no Colonist had been on a space ship — until now.

She stretched and her crash couch stretched with her. Whoever had built it truly understood Colonist physiology. The flight and navigation controls within her reach were likewise comfortable and intuitive. The General Products company knew their stuff. It amazed her that Explorer was only a prototype.

The other seat on the bridge, a padded bench, was as clearly meant for Nessus. The console before Kirsten had its analogue near that empty couch. She could, in a crisis, interpret those other instruments; she could not possibly operate those controls. Her hands did not begin to approach the dexterity or strength of a Citizen's lips and jaws.

Although half the bridge's seating accommodated Colonist physiology, the room itself was clearly designed to Citizen standards. There was not a sharp corner to be seen. Consoles, shelves, instrumentation, the latching mechanism on the hatch — everything looked melted and recongealed. Citizens perceived an unnecessary hazard in every crisp edge and pointed corner.

The nothingness that was hyperspace whispered to Kirsten, daring her to acknowledge its presence. She fixed her eyes instead on her console. The heart of the instrumentation was a large transparent sphere: the mass pointer. Each blue line radiating from its center represented a nearby star. The direction of the thread showed the direction to the star; the length of the thread represented the star's gravitational influence: mass over distance squared. The longest thread by far pointed straight at her: their destination.

Logic said that a glance every shift or two was more than sufficient — even at hyperdrive speed, they took three days to cross a light-year — but logic seemed a flimsy thing indeed while the nothingness stalked her mind. She shuddered. Ships in hyperspace that too closely approached the singularity around a stellar mass, vanished. The mathematics was ambiguous. None knew where the disappeared had gone, or whether they even still existed.

Monitoring seemed like a process that could be easily automated — simply drop out of hyperspace when a line got too close — but it was not possible. The mass detector was inherently psionic; it required a conscious mind in the loop.

Even splitting the responsibility three ways, the stress was intense. They dropped into normal space every few days, if only for a moment to remind themselves that stars were more than hungry singularities reaching out to devour them.

"Does a thirty-day journey still seem like a simple thing?" The voice was a rich contralto that women envied and men found disturbingly alluring.

Kirsten looked up, the clatter of hooves on metal decking that should have alerted her to Nessus's approach only now making a conscious impression.

One head held high, the other low, he watched her from two directions at once. With the instinctive caution of Citizens, Nessus had paused half-inside, half-outside the hatchway, poised to dash in any direction.

Her whole life she had been beholden to Citizens. So it had been for generations. But while Kirsten knew about Citizens, and respected and revered them, she had met few of them. Her people, like sharp corners, were an avoidable risk.

Now, in the emptiness behind the void between the stars, Kirsten reawakened to how dissimilar Citizens and Colonists truly were.

Nessus stood on two forelegs set far apart and one complexly jointed hind leg. Two long and flexible necks emerged from between his muscular shoulders. Each flat, triangular head featured an ear, an eye, and a mouth whose tongue and knobbed lips also served as a hand. His leathery skin was a soft off-white, with few of the tan markings common among some Citizens. The unkempt brown mane between his necks covered and padded the bony hump that encased his brain.

He raised a neck. His heads swiveled toward each other, eye briefly peering into eye, in an ironic laugh. Her brave words at the start of the journey had not gone unnoticed. Despite her embarrassment, she was relieved that he had come out of his cabin. Relieved, but not surprised: The surprise would have been his continued absence as they neared their destination and its unknown perils.

Of course had Nessus not emerged in another shift or two to oversee the ship's arrival, she would have hit the panic button. The looped recording of a Citizen screaming in terror would bring him to the bridge, no matter what.

The room must have looked safe enough. Nessus entered and straddled his thickly padded bench, arching one neck forward to more closely examine the mass pointer. "We will arrive soon," he said. The simple statement ended with a hint of rising inflection that was surely no accident.

He had run the experimental training program for Colonist scouts. Surely questioning his prot�g�s was by now second nature to him. But what was the question? Whether preparations had been completed while he hid in his room? No, that topic would be reserved for the captain.

Twenty of the best and brightest had been winnowed from the Colonists' millions. Whatever their avocations or interests, until this time of crisis every Colonist contributed directly or indirectly to food production. The trillion Citizens on Hearth consumed vast amounts of food, and left scant open space on which to raise it. How she, Omar, and Eric performed on this mission would be taken as proof whether any child of farmers and conservationists could rise to the occasion.

Before departing the Fleet, the biggest risk the three of them had imagined was a lack of challenge. The unsuspecting aliens whose faint radio emissions had drawn Hearth's attention might prove too primitive. They might offer the crew no opportunity to show their talents.

How naïve those fears now seemed!

Risks motivated Citizens, risks and finding ways to avoid them. If Nessus were questioning her, most likely the unstated subject was risk. He wanted to know: Did she understand the dangers?

The only tasks in hyperspace were routine maintenance and monitoring the mass pointer. The one was tedious, and the other nerve-racking. In such a small crew, everyone took turns. They were about to emerge from hyperspace, though, and this time not only for a reassuring peek. When they did, the star that had been their target would instantly become the brightest object in their sky. In that instant, the crew's roles would cease to be interchangeable.

She would be a navigator once more, once more with stars to steer by.

"We'll assume orbit well outside the singularity," she answered, guessing at his implied question. "I can't imagine how they could detect, let alone waylay us — but if they do, we'll re-engage hyperdrive and be gone."

Two bobbing heads, alternating high and low, left Kirsten convinced she had guessed correctly. She smiled too, in her own Colonist way.

* * * *

Explorer burst from hyperspace at furious speed.

The courage that enabled Nessus to be here meant that he was, by definition, insane. Kirsten had never met a sane Citizen, because they never left Hearth. Her hands never left the flight controls, but her eyes kept darting involuntarily to the right where Nessus rested upon his crash couch. He could take control of the ship from her at any time. The knowledge was simultaneously reassuring and demeaning.

The Fleet's velocity at Explorer's departure was "only" 0.017 light speed. Setting out, that initial impetus had seemed a meaningless crawl in the context of the light-years they were about to cross. That same intrinsic velocity as they reentered normal space was an altogether different matter.

Under Nessus's watchful eyes, Kirsten shed excess speed using the ship's gravity drag. Three times she micro-jumped them back to hyperspace, looping them around their target for another braking pass. Explorer's fusion drive would have accomplished the task much faster — but a miles-long column of fusing hydrogen, hotter than the surfaces of stars, would have shouted the news of their arrival to anyone watching.

"Well done," Nessus finally said.

"Thanks." Her mentor's words seemed both sincere and tentative. As Kirsten steered Explorer into orbit around the distant spark named G567 X2, she initiated a deep-radar scan. It was both doctrine and enigma. Neutrinos passed right through normal matter, so what were they looking for? "It is good practice," was the only explanation their trainer had offered. "Nessus will know what to do if there is a return signal."

As busy as she was, Kirsten could not help but wonder what the aliens called this sun. Nessus would not care. Citizens exhibited curiosity only when their safety might be imperiled. At other times, they considered inquisitiveness to be at best a distraction.

Perhaps their curiosity made Colonists better explorers, and that was why they were here. Or perhaps Colonists were only expendable. Her parents and brothers thought the latter. And if no one were willing to scout ahead of the Fleet? Her family had no answer to that.

With a sigh of relief, Kirsten raised her hands from the controls. "We're in orbit," she announced over the ship's intercom. To Nessus, she added, "We're safely outside the singularity, as promised."

With one head high and the other low, he studied her. "Good. Our work here begins."

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