Not very impressive to look at, but the only purpose-built warship in his command. A UN Dart-class attack boat, a spindle shape, massive fusion-power unit, tiny life-support bubble, asymmetric fringe of weapons and sensors.
It had been a United Nations Space Navy ship, piggybacked into the Alpha Centauri system on the ramscoop battlecraft famamoto, only two months ago, dropped off with agents aboard. And the UN personnel had been persuaded to… entrust the CatsJdnner to him while they went on to their mission on Wunderland. The Yamamoto's raid had sown chaos among the kzinti; the near-miraculous assassination of the alien governor of Wunderland had done more. Markham's fleet had grown accordingly, but it was still risky to group so many together. Or so the damnably officious sentient computer had told him.
His scowl deepened. Consciousness-level computers were a dead-end technology, doomed to catatonic madness in six months or less from activation, or so the books all said. Perhaps this one was too, but it was distressingly arrogant in the meantime.
The feeling of wrongness grew, like wires pulling at the back of his skull. He felt an impulse to blink his eye (eye?) and knot his tendrils (tendrils?), and for an instant his body felt an itch along the bones, as if his muscles were trying to move in ways outside their design parameters.
Nonsense, he told himself, shrugging his shoulders in the tight-fitting grey coverall of the Free Wunderland armed forces. Markham flicked his eyes sideways at the other crewfolk; they looked uncomfortable too, and… what was his name? Patrick O'Connell, yes, the redhead… looked positively green. Stress, he decided.
'Catskinner,' he said aloud. 'Have you analyzed the discrepancy?' The computer had no name apart from the ship into which it had been built; he had asked, and it had suggested 'Hey, you.'
'There is a gravitational anomaly, Admiral Herrenmann Ulf Reichstein-Markham,' the machine on the other craft replied. It insisted on English and spoke with a Belter accent, flat and rather neutral, the intonation of a people who were too solitary and too crowded to afford much emotion. And a slight nasal overtone, So! Belter, not Serpent Swarm.
The Wunderlander's face stayed in its usual bony mask; the Will was master. Inwardly he gritted teeth, ashamed of letting a machine's mockery move him. It even knows what it does, he raged. Some rootless cosmopolite Farther deracinated degenerate programmed that into it.
'Here is the outline; approximately 100 to 220 meters below the surface.' A smooth regular spindle-shape tapering to both ends.
'Zat—' Markham's voice showed the heavy accent of his mother's people for a second; she had been a refugee from the noble families of Wunderland, dispossessed by the conquest. 'That's an artifact!'
'Correct to within 99.87 % probability, given the admittedly inadequate information,' the computer said. 'Not a human artifact, however.'
'Nor kzinti.'
'No. The design architecture is wrong.'
Markham nodded, feeling the pulse beating in his throat. His mouth was dry, as if papered in surgical tissue, and he licked the rough chapped surface of his lips. Natural law constrained design, but within it tools somehow reflected the… personalities of the designers. Kzinti ships tended to wedge and spike shapes, a combination of sinuosity and blunt masses. Human vessels were globes and volumes joined by scaffolding. This was neither.
'Assuming it is a spaceship,' he said. Glory burst in his mind, sweeter than maivin or sex. There were other intelligent species, and not all of them would be slaves of the kzinti. And there had been races before either…
'This seems logical. The structure… the structure is remarkable. It emits no radiation of any type and reflects none, within the spectra of my sensors.' Perfect stealthing! Markham thought.
'When we attempted a sampling with the drilling laser, it became perfectly reflective. To a high probability, the structure must somehow be a single molecule of very high strength. Considerably beyond human or kzinti capacities at present, although theoretically possible. The density of the overall mass implies either a control of gravitational forces beyond ours, or use of degenerate matter within the hull.'
The Wunderlander felt the hush at his back, broken only by a slight mooing sound that he abruptly stopped as he realized it was coming from his own throat. The sound of pure desire. Invulnerable armor! Invincible weapons, technological surprise!
'How are you arriving at its outline?'
'Gravitational sensors.' A pause; the ghost in Catskinner's machine imitated human speech patterns well. 'The shell of asteroidal material seems to have accreted naturally.'
'Hmmm.' A derelict, then. Impossible to say what might lie within. 'How long would this take?' A memory itched, something in Mutti's collection of anthropology disks… later.
'Very difficult to estimate with any degree of precision. Not more than three billion standard years, in this system. Not less than half that; assuming, of course, a stable orbit.'
Awe tugged briefly at Markham's mind, and he remembered a very old saying that the universe was not only stranger than humans imagined, but stranger than they could imagine. Before human speech, before fire, this thing had drifted here, falling forever. Flatlanders back on Earth could delude themselves that the universe was tailored to the specifications of H. Sapiens, but those whose ancestors had survived the dispersal into space had other reflexes bred into their genes. He considered, for moments while sweat trickled down his flanks. His was the decision, his the Will. The Overman must learn to seize the moment, he reminded himself. Excessive caution is for slaves.
'The Nietzsche will rendezvous with the… ah, object,' he said. His own ship had the best technical facilities of any in the fleet. 'Ungrapple the habitat and mining pods from the Molkte and Valdemar, and bring them down. Ve vill begin operations immediately.'
'Very wrong,' Dnivtopun continued.
The Ruling Mind was encased in rock. How could that have happened? A collision, probably; at high fractions of C, a stasis-protected object could embed itself, vaporizing the shielded off-switch. Which meant the ship could have drifted for a long time, centuries even. He felt a wash of relief; and worked his footclaws into the resilient surface of the deck. Suicide Time would be long over, the danger past. Relief was followed by fear; what if the tnuctipun had found out? What if they had made some machine to shelter them, something more powerful than the giant amplifier the thrint patriarchs had built on Homeworld?
Just then another sensor pinged; a heatspot on the exterior hull, not far from the stasis switch. Not very hot, only enough to vaporize iron, but it might be a guide beam for some weapon that would penetrate shipmetal. Dnivtopun's mouth gaped wide and the ripple of peristaltic motion started to reverse; he caught himself just in time, his thick hide crinkling with shame. I nearly beshat myself in public… well, only before a slave. It was still humiliating…
'Master, there are fusion-power sources nearby; the exterior sensors are detecting neutrino flux.' The thrint bounced in relief. Fusion power units. How quaint. Nothing the tnuctipun would be using. On the other hand, neither would thrintun; everyone within the Empire had used the standard disruption-converter for millenia. It must be an undiscovered sapient species. Dnivtopun's mouth opened again, this time in a grin of sheer greed. The first discoverer of an intelligent species, and an industrialized one at that… But how could they have survived Suicide Time?
There was no point in speculating without more information. Well, here's my chance to play Explorer again, he thought. Before the War, that had been the commonest dream of young thrint, to be a daring, dashing conquistador on the frontiers. Braving exotic dangers, winning incredible wealth… romantic foolishness for the most part, a disguise for discomfort and risk and failure. Explorers were failures to begin with, usually. What sane male would pursue so risky a career if there was any alternative? But he had had some of the training. First you reached out with the Power-
'Mutti,' Ulf Reichstein-Markham muttered. Why did I say that? he thought, looking around to see if anyone had noticed. He was standing a little apart, a hundred meters from the Nietzsche where she lay anchored by magnetic grapnels to the surface of the asteroid. The first of the habitats was already up, a smooth tan-colored dome; skeletal structures of alloy were rising elsewhere, prefabricated smelters and refiners. There was no point in delaying the original purpose of the mission, to refuel and take the raw materials that clandestine fabricators would turn into weaponry. Or sell for the kzinti occupation credits that the guerillas' laundering operations channeled into sub-rosa purchasing in the legitimate economy. But one large cluster of his personnel were directing digging machines straight down, toward the thing at the core of this rock; already a tube thicker than a man ran to a separator, jerking and twisting slightly as talc-fine ground rock was propelled by magnetic currents.
