Harry Turtledove: Herbig-Haro

The Terran soldiers around the starship returned fire automatically opening up with small arms, rocket and grenade launchers, and recoilless shells from the armored fighting vehicle that had somehow squeezed into position close by.

When the video straightened, the starship was holed and all but two of the aliens down. The survivors gaped at their fallen comrades. Neither had made the slightest move to reload his musket. Reading nonhumans' body language was always tricky, but Chang knew stunned horror when he saw it.

"'The Road Not Taken,'" B'kila murmured. "Back then, on Terra, they knew FTL travel was impossible forever. It was a rude shock when they found that a couple of simple experiments could have given them the key to contragrav and the hyperdrive three, four, even five centuries earlier."

"How did they miss them?" Chant asked.

"No idea—in hindsight they're obvious enough. What's that race that flew bronze ships because they couldn't smelt iron? And every species we know that reached what the old Terrans would have called a seventeenth-century technological level did what was needed—except us.

"But trying to explain contragrav and the hyperdrive skews an unsophisticated, developing physics out of shape. With attention focused on them, too, work on other things, like electricity and atomics, never gets started. And those have much broader applications—the others are only really good for moving things from here to there in a hurry."

With a chuckle. Chang said, "We must have seemed like angry gods when we finally got the hyperdrive and burst off Terra. Radar, radio, computers, fission and fusion—no wonder we spent the next two hundred years conquering."

"No wonder at all," B'kila agreed soberly. "But the Confederacy grew too fast and got too big to administer, even with all the technology we had. And unity didn't last forever. None of our neighbors could hurt us, but we did a fine job on ourselves. Someone back then wrote that it was only sporting for humans to fight humans; no one else gave any competition."

"And so, the Collapse," Chang said.

"And here we are, on Loki and a few ether worlds, picking over the pieces, a scrap from here, fragment from there, and one day we'll have the puzzle together again—or maybe a new shape, better than the one before . . . if we get the time. But those four missing ships frighten me." That was a word Chang had never heard her use before. "I still don't see how they disappeared. There's no one out there."

"No one we know of," B'kila corrected. "But I keep thinking that a road traveled once might be traveled twice."

As he took her meaning, Chang felt the little hairs at the nape of his neck trying to stand up. She finished low and fierce. "Find out what happened. And come back ."

"Any other little favors you'd like?" Praise of Folly 's computer had demanded when Chang described the mission. "Shall I write the suicide note, too? I won't go. I tell you—I'd end up in the scrapper there just as much as you."

"Shall I shift into override mode?" Chang snapped, in no mood for backtalk,

"No, don't," the computer said with poor grace. "It always leaves me slow and stupid for a couple of days afterwards."

Surly was a better word, the scout pilot thought, but held his peace. The takeoff was as smooth as takeoffs under contragrav always were, the shift into hyperdrive as brutal as the others Praise of Folly had been making lately. Chang staggered into the head and threw up. When he came out, he asked plaintively; "Isn't there any way to smooth that out?"

"Of course," the computer said. "Get me the parts and—" Chang grunted. Loki's own yards turned out decent craft, but some techniques of precision manufacture had yet to be rediscovered. If one of the old Confederacy ships went wrong, repairs weren't likely to do much good.

Despite Praise of Folly 's tape library, travel under hyperdrive was dull. The computer played chess at a setting that let Chang win about half the time, until one day he escaped from a trap it thought he shouldn't have seen. Then it trounced him six times running, adding insult to injury by moving the instant he took his finger off a piece. After that it seemed satisfied, and went back to a level mere mortals could match.

From time to time other ships showed on the detector. Most of them never sensed Praise of Folly ; Confederacy instrumentation handily outranged nonhuman or post-Collapse gear. Once, though, two vessels made a chase of it. "Damned pirates," Chang growled, and outran them. He approached his planned emergence-point obliquely, not wanting any observers to track his course back to Loki. The jolt on leaving hyperdrive was not as bad as the one entering it—quite.

"Now what?" the computer said.

The viewscreen showed a totally unfamiliar configuration of stars. Even the Orion Nebula was not as Chang knew it, for he was seeing the side opposite the one it presented to human space. He shrugged.

"Make for the nearest main-sequence G or K," he said, and gagged as Praise of Folly returned to hyperdrive.

The first yellow-orange sun proved without habitable planets. So did the second and third. A lean region, Chang thought. He was on his way to the fourth when the detector picked up the alien squadron. Excitement and alarm coursed through him. From the brilliance of the blips on the screen, those were sizable ships. They were making good speed, too, far better than most of the nonhuman craft he knew. He held his course and waited to be noticed.

In short order he was; the strangers had sensitive detectors. Three vessels peeled off from the main group toward him. He took no evasive action; he was looking for contact. "Fool that I am," he said to no one in particular.

The lead ship's drive field touched his; they were both thrown back into normal space. Gulping, Chang wondered whether the aliens were subject to nausea.

The two ships emerged on divergent vectors several thousand kilometers apart. That would have been enough to make it impossible for most of the aliens the scout pilot knew to find him in the vastness of space, but the stranger swiftly altered course and came after him.

"I'm picking up radar." the computer reported.

"Wonderful." Chang said morosely. As usual, B'kila had been right. The other two ships must have slaved their engines to their detector screens, for they returned to normal space at the same instant as their comrade and Praise of Folly . Chang's radar soon found them. They closed rapidly.

"Radio traffic," the computer said. The whistles and growls that came out of the speaker sprang from no human throat.

"Let's give them something to think about." Chang recorded his name and the name of his ship.

"Squirt that out on their frequency."

There were several seconds of absolute silence, then a burst of alien noise that sounded much more excited than the previous signals. Chang wondered if the nonhumans had learned English or Low Mandarin From any of the earlier pilots. If so, they were not letting on. The incomprehensible babble continued.

Then alarms hooted and the computer was shouting, "Missile away!" A moment later it reported,

"Contragrav job, fairly good velocity, but, a clean miss—trajectory far ahead of us."

"Just the one launch?" the scout pilot asked tensely.

"So far." Praise of Folly was a confirmed pessimist.

"Might be a shot across our—" A new star bloomed in the forward screen, a supernova burst that went from white through yellow and orange to red and slowly guttered out.

"Fission explosion," the computer said matter-of-factly. "Thirty kilotonne range." Chang held his head in his hands. Not just electronics, then: the aliens had a grasp of nuclear physics, too. He could not imagine anything worse.