Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

He waves me off. “More than that. Some say the fleet’s a thousand strong, some say it’s a hundred strong. Some don’t give a number. But all the legends talk about the vessels being on a mission to save the worlds beyond the stars, and how the ships moved from port to port, with parts cobbled together so that they could move beyond their design structures.”

I’m awake again, just like he knew I would be. “There are a lot of these stories?”

“And they follow a trajectory—one that would work if you were, say, leading a fleet of ships out of your area of space.”

“We’re far away from the Old Earth area of space. We’re so far away, humans from that period couldn’t even imagine getting to where we are now.”

“So we say. But think how many years this would take, how much work it would take.”

“Dignity Vessels didn’t have FTL,” I say.

“Maybe not at first.” He’s fairly bouncing from his discovery. I’m feeling a little more hopeful as well. “But in that cobbling, what if someone gave them FTL.?”

“Gave them,” I muse. No one in the worlds I know gives anyone anything.

“Or sold it to them. Can you imagine? One legend calls them a fleet of ships for hire, out to save worlds they’ve never seen.”

“Sounds like a complete myth.”

“Yeah,” he says, “it’s only a legend. But I think sometimes these legends become a little more concrete.”

“Why?”

“We have an actual Dignity Vessel out there, that got here somehow.”

“Did you see evidence of cobbling?” I ask.

“How would I know?” he asks. “Have you checked the readouts? Do they give different dates for different parts of the ship?”

I hadn’t looked at the dating. I had no idea if it was different. But I don’t say that.

“Download the exact specs for a Dignity Vessel,” I say. “The materials, where everything should be, all of that.”

“Didn’t you do that before you came here?” he asks.

“Yes, but not in the detail of the ship’s composition. Most people rebuild ships exactly as they were before they got damaged, so the shape would remain the same. Only the components would differ. I meant to check our readouts against what I’d brought, but I haven’t yet. I’ve been diverted by the stealth tech thing, and now I’m going to get a little sleep. So you do it.”

He grins. “Aye, aye, captain.”

“Boss,” I mutter as I stagger down the corridor to my bed. “I can’t tell you how much I prefer Boss.”

I sleep, but not long. My brain’s too busy. I’m sure those specs are different which confirms nothing. It just means that someone repaired the vessel at one point or another. But what if the materials are the kind that weren’t available in the area of space around Earth when Dignity Vessels were built? That disproves Squishy’s worry about the tech of that thing.

I’m at my hardwired terminal when Squishy comes to my door. I’ve gone through five or six layers of security to get to some very old data, data that aren’t accessible from any other part of my ship’s networked computer system.

Squishy waits. I’m hoping she’ll leave, but of course she doesn’t. After a few minutes, she coughs.

I sigh audibly. “We talked last night.”

“I have one more thing to ask.”

She stepped inside, unbidden, and closed the door. My quarters felt claustrophobic with another person inside them. I’d always been alone here—always—even when I had a liaison with one of the crew. I’d go to his quarters, never bring him into my own.

The habits of privacy are long engrained, and the habits of secrecy even longer. It’s how I’ve protected my turf for so many years, and how I’ve managed to first-dive so many wrecks.

I dim the screen and turn to her. “Ask.”

Her eyes are haunted. She looks like she’s gotten even less sleep than I have.

“I’m going to try one last time,” she says. “Please blow the wreck up. Make it go away. Don’t let anyone else inside. Forget it was here.”

I fold my hands on my lap. Yesterday I hadn’t had an answer for that request. Today I do. I’d thought about it off and on all night, just like I’d thought about the differing stories I’d heard from her and from Jypé, and how, I realized fifteen minutes before my alarm, neither of them had to be true.

“Please,” she says.

“I’m not a scientist,” I say, which should warn her right off, but of course it doesn’t. Her gaze doesn’t change. Nothing about her posture changes. “I’ve been thinking about this. If this stealth tech is as powerful as you claim, then we might be making things even worse. What if the explosion triggers the tech? What if we blow a hole between dimensions? Or maybe destroy something else, something we can’t see?”

Her cheeks flush slightly.

“Or maybe the explosion’ll double-back on us. I recall something about Dignity Vessels being unfightable, that anything that hit them rebounded to the other ship. What if that’s part of the stealth tech?”

“It was a feature of the shields,” she says with a bit of sarcasm. “They were unknown in that era.”

“Still,” I say. “You understand stealth tech more than I do, but you don’t really understand it or you’d be able to replicate it, right?’

“I think there’s a flaw in that argument—”

“But you don’t really grasp it, right? So you don’t know if blowing up the wreck will create a situation here, something worse than anything we’ve seen.”

“I’m willing to risk it.” Her voice is flat. So are her eyes. It’s as if she’s a person I don’t know, a person I’ve never met before. And something in those eyes, something cold and terrified, tells me that if I met her this morning, I wouldn’t want to know her.

“I like risks,” I say. “I just don’t like that one. It seems to me that the odds are against us.”

“You and me, maybe,” she says. “But there’s a lot more to ‘us’ than just this little band of people. You let that wreck remain and you bring something dangerous back into our lives, our culture.”

“I could leave it for someone else,” I say. “But I really don’t want to.”

“You think I’m making this up. You think I’m worrying over nothing.” She sounds bitter.

“No,” I say. “But you already told me that the military is trying to recreate this thing, over and over again. You tell me that people die doing it. My research tells me these ships worked for hundreds of years, and I think, maybe your methodology was flawed. Maybe getting the real stealth tech into the hands of people who can do something with it will save lives.”

She stares at me, and I recognize the expression. It must have been the one I’d had when I looked at her just a few moments ago.

I’d always known that greed and morals and beliefs destroyed friendships. I also knew they influenced more dives than I cared to think about.

But I’d always tried to keep them out of my ship and out of my dives. That’s why I pick my crews so carefully; why I call the ship Nobody’s Business .

Somehow, I never expected Squishy to start the conflict.

Somehow, I never expected the conflict to be with me.

“No matter what I say, you’re going to dive that wreck, aren’t you?” she asks.

I nod.

Her sigh is as audible as mine was, and just as staged. She wants me to understand that her disapproval is deep, that she will hold me accountable if all the terrible things she imagines somehow come to pass.

We stare at each other in silence. It feels like we’re having some kind of argument, an argument without words. I’m loathe to break eye contact.

Finally, she’s the one who looks away.