Universe Between Read online

  The captain called him to the bridge. From there, the two of them went into her day cabin. She brought up the image that had caused all the fuss. “Ok, Chuck, what is it?”

  She delighted in calling him Chuck. She was always Captain, or Captain Moresby, or ma’am, but never Virginia.

  “I’m an archaeologist, not a clairvoyant,” De Courcy said.

  “Guess.”

  “I’d say it looks like a mushroom anchor that’s dug itself way into the bottom.”

  “How do you know what a mushroom anchor looks like?”

  He told her about Minerva and about the mooring buoy he had set for her in Cortes Bay, garden spot of Victoria Sound, a mooring buoy held in place by a mushroom anchor.

  “I’m happy for you,” she said, with a dollop more sarcasm than was needed. “Seriously, though, it can’t be. A mushroom anchor? Out here in the middle of nowhere?”

  “I said it looks like a mushroom anchor. I didn’t say it is a mushroom anchor.”

  She gave him her Number One Skeptical Look. It was part grin, part disbelief, and part stoicism. “Okay, I’ll play along. If it is a mushroom anchor, then whose is it?”

  Whose? was right. So far, Barkley IV had yielded no sign of indigenous habitation, either currently or in the past. As far as any of the survey crew could tell, the planet was an absolute wilderness, apart from the half dozen colonial settlements that had started up: mining, refining, farming, manufacturing, more farming, and a resort complex complete with a marina. If nothing else, the planet was a sailor’s paradise, an almost perfect combination of warm weather, open oceans, sheltered cruising grounds, and quiet anchorages.

  De Courcy was almost sorry he hadn’t brought Minerva. They wouldn’t have let him, and she was better off in storage, but that didn’t mean he didn’t regret not having her. On the other hand, maybe he and his boat were better off letting some other poor, dumb schlub be the first to discover the hard way that the water was filled with single-celled organisms that loved to burrow into glass reinforced plastic like so many microscopic teredo worms. Not that there were any such organisms. As far as anyone knew.

  “Why don’t we find out what it is before we start worrying about who left it there.”

  Moresby glared at him.

  “The what will give us the who, anyway,” she said.

  As an archaeologist, let alone an exoarchaeologist, De Courcy knew what a hoot that was, but he let it go. “No doubt,” he said. He did not add, If you expand your determination of what far enough.

  There was a polite rap on the door.

  “Come,” Moresby said.

  The first officer poked his head into the room. “Colonial’s on the blower for you, ma’am.”

  “Thanks, Bohai.” To De Courcy, she added, “You’re with me.”

  What more could a guy ask for?

  The upshot of the exchange with Colonial was that based on an analysis of the image and other data provided, the boffins had determined that the object was not natural but was indeed an artifact.

  De Courcy could almost feel the cold, crisp campus mornings in the fall, taste the unparalleled cinnamon rolls in the faculty-only lounge, inhale the delicious, heady scent of the library. Yes, Dr. De Courcy. No, Dr. De Courcy. Will that be all for now, Dr. De Courcy?

  Therefore, the planetary governor, no less, was instructing Plumper to drop whatever she was doing at the moment and “to take whatever steps might prove to be necessary to determine the nature and origin of the artifact and to return with it to Colonial headquarters as soon as possible.”

  The publications, the books, the lecture tours, the polite jealousy of his colleagues. The money. The new roadster. The new sails for Minerva. The new autopilot. The new electronics. The new paint. The consulting fees. The exquisite vindication. With never a gloating word said. And never an I-told-you-so for him. It would be so much better that way. Served cold.

  Captain Moresby acknowledged her instructions with the required hint of dutiful groveling.

  Rather than breaking the link, the colonial bureaucrat asked, “Have you heard from Discovery in the past forty-eight hours?”

  Moresby’s face registered as much surprise as she dared. “I’ll check the comm logs, but I don’t believe we have, sir. Is anything wrong?”

  “She’s overdue with her daily reports. We thought you might have picked something up.”

  “Sorry, sir, but we haven’t. Is there anything we can do?”

  “Keep your ears on,” he said. “Relay any messages from her. Check your logs.”

  Moresby checked the logs. Nothing. Not a peep out of Discovery in the last two days. Moresby reported it.

  Meanwhile, Plumper returned to the area where her scanners had detected the artifact, and came to a complete stop, holding her position with bow and stern thrusters. She was outside the entrance of a long, narrow bay, sheltered behind a natural breakwater. According to the scanners the bottom inside was fine-grained sand. A horseshoe-shaped run of wooded hills bordered the bay. De Courcy thought that he had never seen such a beautiful natural anchorage.

  Remote scanners were deployed.

  They spluttered and gurgled into the bay and were soon sending back streams of data, plus images of the artifact.

  Moresby launched an aerial reconnaissance drone.

  To her, De Courcy said, “Does this mean you believe me?”

  “No, it means I’m doing my job,” she said. Relenting a fraction, she added, “Whatever it is, it sure as hell isn’t a Navy stockless.”

  An hour later, they had a working chart of the area. The bay was two kilometers long and a half-kilometer wide. It was between twenty and twenty-five meters deep right up to the shoreline, with a mud-and-sand bottom and little weed.

  It was too perfect, as though it had been dredged out of the island, scoured of excess weed and grass.

  The artifact lay far down in the mud in the exact center of the bay. On the floor of the bay, however, right above the anchor was a rounded hump about the size of a lifeboat. It was a trifle odd, the coincidence of it being right there, but in and of itself, it wasn’t the least bit unusual. Sand moved, formed hillocks, below the surface as well as on dry land.

  “Hazards, Bohai?” Moresby asked the first officer.

  “None that I can see,” Bohai said. “No rocks. No snags. We can go in if you want to.”

  Moresby commed Colonial.

  The colonial bureaucrat told her that it was her show.

  Then he said, “We’ve learned that Discovery sank.”

  De Courcy felt his stomach tighten. It was as though he were two people: one whose stomach was clenching and a second one who was taking in the show from a safe distance.

  Moresby’s face went blank. “Survivors?”

  “None.”

  Moresby’s face hardened. “What happen?”

  The ship filled up with water, De Courcy thought, but did not say so out loud.

  “We don’t know yet, but we do know that whatever it was, it was quick. We’ve sent Resolution to investigate.”

  Of course it had been quick; otherwise, Discovery would have sent a distress call and there would have been no mystery, no forty-eight-hour gap in her stream of daily reports.

  “Understood,” Moresby said.

  She went to the bridge and conned the ship into the bay.

  The turn around the end of the natural breakwater was tight, but the water was deep, no current to speak of, and Moresby made it look easy. Maneuvering at dead slow, she relied on the ship’s twin screws alone, making no use of either the ship’s bow or stern thrusters.

  It was as pretty a piece of ship handling as De Courcy had ever seen, and his estimation of his gallant captain went up by several notches.

  Once inside the bay, Moresby proceeded for a spot over the artifact.

  When Plumper was two hundred meters off, a mass of bubbles erupted from the surface of the water over the artifact. The bubbles grew into a froth, and a moment later, a lar
ge, blue-and-white sphere popped to the surface. A heavy ring stood upright on top of it. The circumference and the upper surface of the sphere were covered with symbols.

  Moresby and her bridge crew stared at it, silently, openmouthed.

  Moresby was the first to recover her wits. “All back,” she ordered.

  “All back,” came the reply. Then, “Engines answer all back.”

  “Very well.”

  Just as the ship came to a stop, Moresby said, “All stop.”

  “All stop.” Then, “Engines answer all stop.”

  “Very well.”

  De Courcy snatched up a pair of binoculars and stared at the blue-and-white sphere. “It’s a mooring buoy,” he said. “Has to be. Only thing it can be.”

  “Maybe,” Moresby said, settling and resettling her own pair of binoculars. “We don’t know what it is.”

  “I think we should pick it up,” De Courcy said.

  “As in tie up to it?” the first officer asked.

  “Exactly.”

  “It has writing on it, or something that looks a lot like writing,” Moresby said. “Can you read it, Chuck?”

  “No, of course I can’t,” De Courcy said.

  “Then, assuming that it is a buoy, we can’t tell whether it’s a mooring buoy or an aid to navigation. For all we know, it could be marking a hazard, or it could be a quarantine buoy, or restricted, or some other sort of buoy.”

  “Yeah,” De Courcy said. He had nothing else to say. She was right. They didn’t know what it was. For sure. On the other hand, that ring made it pretty clear. After all, the more Earthlike planets that were discovered, the more universal certain things proved to be. Skies on planets with oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres tended to be blue—of one shade or another—because sunshine diffused through oxygen-nitrogen atmospheres in pretty much the same way regardless of what the planet was called. And so it went.

  A mooring buoy was likely to look like a mooring buoy no matter where it was because that particular configuration was efficient and useful.

  “Look, Captain, you’re right. We can’t tell for absolute certain, but I still think we’d be wise to tie up to it.”

  “Nothing doing,” Moresby said, and began the maneuvers required to anchor the ship.

  The instant the hook was down, long before it dug into the bottom, the buoy turned from blue and white to green and black, and sent up an ear-splitting howling. Lights emerged from inside the sphere and flashed.

  “That’s done it,” De Courcy said.

  “Done what?” Moresby asked.

  “It. How should I know which it?”

  “You’re the exoarchaeologist.”

  “Yes, but I’m not an oracle.”

  “Captain,” the first officer called. He was standing farther out along the bridge wing. “We have a problem.”

  They rushed to look over the side.

  Around the ship the water was beginning to boil. It reminded De Courcy of holovideos he’d seen of a school of piranha devouring a tapir. Maybe it had been a tapir. It could have been a wild pig. No matter what it had been, it had ended up a skeleton in a matter of seconds.

  It was then that De Courcy heard the new sound. It wasn’t the sound of engines, or generators, or pumps, or ventilation fans. It was the sound of metal being ripped apart. The sound of tiny metal teeth cutting into the ship, devouring it.

  The reports began coming in.

  Flooding.

  Bulkheads giving way.

  Crewmen swarmed over and reduced to pulp, the pulp reduced to pink smears in the water.

  Equipment failures.

  Moresby ordered the anchor raised. The chain came up, but the anchor was missing. The last link looked as though it had been cut through with a dull hacksaw.

  She ordered the engines ahead full. The shafts raced, but the ship did not move. The propellers were gone.

  Plumper began to settle. She went down by the head first, then took on a slight starboard list.

  “Engine room’s flooding, ma’am,” the first officer reported.

  A look of defeat and unexpected horror filled Moresby’s face.

  The engines stopped. The pumps stopped. The generators stopped. The lights went out. The lights came back on, now running off the backup batteries. The ventilators stopped. The ship was utterly quiet. Except for the sound of those trillions upon trillions of gnawing, devouring teeth.

  The lights went out.

  The batteries were gone.

  Over and above the grinding of those teeth came the screams of the crew below decks. Rushing to get out. Finding their paths blocked by collapsing structures, by jammed doors. By darkness. By their own panic. By the multiplying red smears in the water rising around their ankles, around their knees, around their waists. Ripping them apart. Consuming them alive.

  “Abandon ship!” Moresby ordered, yelling the words. “Pass the word, abandon ship!”

  She ran from the bridge wing. “You’re with me, Doc,” she called over her shoulder.

  Doc. Better than Chuck. Much better.

  De Courcy followed at her heels.

  She raced into the comm shack. A terror-stricken operator sat at his machines, hysterically frozen.

  “We have to broadcast a mayday,” Moresby said, shoving him out of the way.

  “Using what for electricity?” De Courcy said.

  “The comms have their own power,” Moresby said. “Batteries.”

  The bulkheads were covered with an advancing, seething mass. De Courcy recognized them for what they were: nanobots. So it seemed that humanity wasn’t the only sentient race to invent the little darlings. As inevitable as fire and agriculture. Given the right conditions. Given enough time.

  They were slithering toward the helpless operator.

  The Colonial bureaucrat’s face appeared on one of the screens.

  “Virginia? Is that you?” he asked.

  “We’re under attack.”

  “I called to warn you. Whatever you do, don’t drop anchor anywhere near anything that looks like a mooring buoy.”

  “You’re a little late with the warning, Frank,” she said.

  For De Courcy, the pieces fell into place—click, click, clank. The idyllic planet. The utter lack of habitation. The disguised automatic buoy. Probably one of countless thousands scattered around. He’d been right. Dropping anchor had been a first-class no-no. There were coral reefs like that back home. They’d been free to tie up, but not to anchor.

  Discovery before them and now Plumper had stumbled into the equivalent of another culture’s wilderness area, one that that other culture valued very highly, more highly than most humans could possibly imagine.

  And now Plumper’s crew was paying the price.

  No doubt the retribution would spread.

  Moresby screamed and went down, covered in a writhing mass of nanobots.

  De Courcy felt the ship shift under him, felt her begin to roll onto her side and settle in the thirty-meter-deep water.

  He felt the shudder of her bow striking the bottom, felt the continued roll, felt the water sloshing around his legs. He tried to move, to flee the comm shack, but he couldn’t get his legs to move, his hands to drag him out. Like the operator, De Courcy’s terror had frozen him in place.

  His skin tingled. He dared not look for fear of what he would see. And then his skin burned, the pain intensified into a scream that filled his mind, the flooding compartment.

  The ship went onto her side, throwing him against a bulkhead, stunning him.

  Utter darkness.

  Utter pain.

  He was being eaten alive. Like the tapir. Or the wild pig.

  He would have preferred to drown, but he didn’t have that much time left.

  A sudden bubble of calm opened.

  He thought of the university, of the book deals, the lecture tours, the money, the new car, the new sails for Minerva.

  He was glad that he hadn’t brought her. She deserved better.

/>   Introduction to “Slow World”

  Steven Mohan, Jr is one of our favorite writers. Kris published his work in Fantasy Adrift and he led off the sixth issue. Many editors like Steve’s work. He’s written for a lot of Daw fantasy and science fiction anthologies, as well as magazines like Interzone and On Spec. His short work was shortlisted for the Pushcart Prize, among other honors.

  To mark Steve’s third appearance in Fiction River, he returns to ideas he explored in our Moonscapes volume. He writes, “One day…it occurred to me that in a spacefaring culture nothing would be more valuable than the ability to alter the speed of light. Gargantuan distances would be suddenly made passable—and a true interstellar civilization would be possible. I described how such a thing could be accomplished in ‘Hot Jupiters,’…[but] this story takes the conceit a bit further—and turns on an idea central to all economic theories. The law of unintended consequences.”

  Slow World

  Steven Mohan, Jr.

  When Zombie’s thugs finally came for him, Grant Holtzmann was in an honest-to-god dirtside bar drinking honest-to-god bootleg whiskey out of an honest-to-god glass.

  The bar was on the bad side of Hole, which was a neat trick since Hole was all bad side. It was dark and small and close, filled with people who had come to drink, not talk. There was no sound save for the clink of glasses against the warped, gray plank that served as the bar and the gasp of people taking their medicine.

  The place was a shack built from mismatched boards inexpertly nailed together. Its front wall was missing, leaving it open to the broiling summer day. It had a dirt floor. A bluebottle fly buzzed in, thought better of it, and buzzed out. The bar smelled like tobacco and sweat and earth and damp, rotting wood. It smelled like a world.

  Gravity was a constant ache in Grant’s bones, a rippling agony he savored just like he savored the whiskey’s smoky burn. He was on a world again.

  His world.

  Grant felt a long hand on his left shoulder and knew at once what this was.

  He turned and saw an orangutan in a charcoal, double-breasted pinstripe suit, a smart gray fedora perched jauntily on his head. The ape smiled, revealing a train wreck of crooked yellow teeth.