Slow Bullets Read online

  But we knew nothing about our larger predicament. The ship’s electronic nervous system was only partially functional. It was blind to areas of itself, and blind to a great deal of the outside universe.

  And yet, it had managed to limp into orbit around a world. The orbit was high and stable—far enough above the atmosphere that it could be maintained almost indefinitely, with only tiny automatic thrust adjustments needed every few decades or so.

  Could we have been here that long?

  Prad thought he might have a way of determining where and when we were, independently of the NavNet. In his early investigations he had tried varying the search frequency in case—for some reason—the NavNet transmission protocol had been altered. He had been excited when the ship began picking up a regular radio signal, similar to the positioning pulse from a NavNet beacon.

  But the signal was natural in origin. Prad quickly realised that it was coming from a radio pulsar, the dense, rapidly spinning magnetic remnant of an exploded star.

  But that gave Prad a better idea. There were thousands of radio pulsars in the galaxy and they were all rotating at different speeds. The strengths of those pulsars would depend on how far away they were. By triangulating off these natural signals it should be possible to work out where Caprice had ended up. It would not give us as good a fix as the NavNet but it would be sufficient to determine which solar system we were in.

  Prad said to me that he could do better than just a positional estimate. Since all the pulsars were slowly winding down, it should also be possible to estimate how many months or years had passed.

  I told Prad that I should be extremely interested in the answer.

  ______________

  The representatives were called Yesli, Spry and Crowl. I met them in a lounge near the control station. They were all among the older people in their respective wheels, if not the very oldest.

  I knew none of these people before the wakening, so I had no sense of whether I could really trust them. Equally, I had no choice not to proceed as if they were completely sincere. These were the figureheads that the wheels had selected, and that was an end to it.

  Yesli was the only woman among the three, and she was the civilian representative of the third wheel, the one that contained the noncombatants and those who had no place in the other two wheels. She was older than me, from a different world—a different solar system, in fact—and she had a measured, cautious way of speaking.

  I thought I liked Yesli, at least to begin with. She could be very persuasive, but it was as if she knew the power of her own words too well. She did not need to say much to have the attention of those around her, and this was a gift she used wisely.

  Yesli had lost most of her family during the war and had reasons to dislike both sides. By the same token she had no strong reason to favour one side over the other.

  “You know who I am now,” Yesli said, when she finished telling us who she was. “What about you, Scur? We’ve been elected, the three of us. As far as I can tell, you just decided to put yourself in charge.”

  “It’s a fair point,” said Spry, who was a tall, shaven-headed man with very prominent cheekbones. He had muscular forearms which he liked to fold across his chest. “We’ve been selected by a sort of democracy, if you can call it that. I never asked to be placed in a position of authority.”

  “But you didn’t turn it down, either,” Crowl said, with a half smile. He was a small, unimposing man who looked no one’s idea of a soldier, much less a natural leader. But there was a cleverness in his eyes, a confidence in his manner, that had evidently won people over. Of all us he was the most relaxed in this low-gravity section of the ship. “Neither did I,” he went on. “As far as I can tell, Scur did the only thing open to her. If she hadn’t, we’d be drowning in our own blood by now.”

  “Scur’s another soldier,” Yesli said. “It doesn’t surprise me that you’d defend her. Frankly, I don’t see why soldiers should have any say on this ship at all.”

  “Civilians are in the minority,” I pointed out.

  “And this is not a military situation. This is not a state of war. We’re at peace. There was a ceasefire.”

  “Fine,” Crowl shrugged. “Then we’re all civilians now.”

  “Except for the war criminals,” Yesli said. “The . . . what did they call them, these people?”

  “Dregs,” I said, smiling nicely.

  “I’m one of those dregs,” Spry said, surprising all of us with his frankness. “I’m perfectly happy to admit it. During the war I served under a superior officer who committed numerous acts against the laws of war. She executed soldiers without due regard for military process. She murdered civilians. So I killed her, and a number of the men and women protecting her. That makes me a military criminal, by the laws of my own side. A traitor and a murderer.”

  “Do you regret what you did?” I asked.

  “Only that I didn’t act sooner, and that I didn’t take down a few more of the fuckers while I was at it. I regret that I allowed some of them a relatively painless death.”

  I decided that I liked Spry’s honest absence of contrition. I should have found it much harder to trust him if he had produced a show of remorse.

  “So it’s not all black and white,” I said. “There will be good and bad in all of us.”

  “And you?” Yesli asked. “What are your particular misdeeds, Scur?”

  “You tell me. I’m a conscripted soldier who obeyed orders, did her job, and just happened to end up on this ship for no reason that I can understand.”

  Yesli nodded carefully. “Then you committed no criminal acts? Nothing against the laws of war?”

  “I think I just told you that.”

  “Yesli has a point,” Spry said, conciliatorily. “It would be good to know your intentions, Scur. It’s not that we don’t necessarily trust you, but you can’t deny that you did seize power by threatening an innocent member of the crew.”

  “Who was running from a mob about to tear him limb from limb,” I replied.

  Spry nodded. “All the same.”

  “I used the gun to make my point. But Prad understands that it wasn’t personal. You’re right to ask, though—all of you. What do I want? The truth is, I have no intention of running this ship. You can sort that out between yourselves, just as soon as Prad comes up with a positional fix and an idea of how long we’ve been out here. I just want to see that we have a chance of getting home, whatever long that might take.” I paused. “And I have some unfinished business I’d like to attend to.”

  “Business?” Yesli asked sceptically.

  “There’s a man on this ship I’d like to meet. I saw him on one of the screens, before I forced everyone to go back to the wheels. After that, with everyone moving around, it was hard to trace his movements. I think he knew that, and used the confusion to his advantage. But he can only be in one of the three wheels, and he’s wearing the same silver outfit as the rest of us, rather than the black of crew. I know him as Orvin, although that might not be the name he’s using now. But he won’t be hard to locate. He’s a very big man, with very white hair, and he has a face that makes him look like a baby.”

  “Who is he?” Spry asked.

  “A true war criminal, unlike yourself. He and I have some history. We were on the same planet together, when the ceasefire came down. He did something bad to me, and now I’d like to put things straight.”

  “You mean,” Crowl said, “that you’d like your revenge.”

  I looked at him, gave every impression that I was thinking things over before answering.

  “Yes.”

  I don’t think it was the thing any of them were expecting.

  “I thought the time for lynch mobs was over,” Yesli said.

  “They are,” I said, nodding. “There won’t be a mob involved. Just me and Orvin and maybe something sharp. Once I have him, once I’ve settled our particular debt, the ship is yours. Run it as a trinity. Run it as a dictatorsh
ip. Organise yourselves however the fuck you like. I don’t care. I just want Orvin, and some time alone with him.”

  Spry had his muscular arms still folded. “How do you propose to proceed?”

  “Seal off the wheels for the time being. The three of you return and organise search parties with whoever you feel you can trust. Then start going through your people, one by one. Anyone you think looks the part, anyone you even have the slightest doubt over, you isolate them until I can check them out for myself. I won’t need to be there. Prad can help me use the cameras.”

  “Will Orvin know that you’re looking for him?” Yesli asked.

  “I made a mistake, announcing myself as Scur. He knows my name, and I imagine he remembers leaving me for dead.”

  “It’s an unusual name,” Spry admitted.

  “I don’t like this,” Yesli said.

  “I don’t either. But I like the idea of Orvin being among us even less.”

  I turned around sharply, aware of Prad making his way toward us along the corridor from the control station. I knew instantly that something was wrong, just from the look on his face.

  I started to ask him what was amiss.

  Prad halted. He looked terribly ill. I think if he had had anything in his guts just then, he would have vomited.

  It was not illness, though. I had seen people in the war look this way, when they had witnessed something that no decent person should ever have to see. It was usually the realisation that we are just fragile bags of meat and bone and blood, held together by almost nothing. With Prad it was a different sort of realisation, but no less discomforting.

  “Prad,” I said.

  “I can’t . . .” he started to say.

  “Prad, talk to me.”

  But all Prad could say was that he was sorry, over and over again.

  ______________

  Yesli, Spry and Crowl followed Prad and me back to the control station. It seemed to me that Prad was still on the verge of hysteria. “There’s been a mistake,” I said, trying to calm him down. “Whatever you think you’ve discovered, it can’t be as terrible as it seems. You’re like the rest of us—not at your best.”

  I was doing what I had done in the war—trying to shake someone out of the paralysis of shock and fear, so that they could move and react and continue the business of not dying.

  “You don’t understand, Scur. There’s been no mistake.”

  “Talk to us. Tell us what you’ve found.”

  “It won’t make any difference, knowing.”

  “Tell us!” I snarled.

  By turns he found some measure of composure. It took a while. Prad was not a soldier, and shock was not something he could just put behind himself for the sake of survival.

  But it helped that he had to explain a technical matter to the rest of us. It was like a prayer to him, this recitation of scientific facts and complications. The words gave him an anchor of calmness, however precarious it might have been.

  He told us about the pulsars, as he had already told me. He told us how the ship’s systems could use the pulsars as a positioning reference, even if there was a problem with the NavNet.

  “It should have been simple,” he said, still shaking, still pale, but at least able to get a sentence out now. “There are bright pulsars and faint ones. We’d only have needed to lock onto a few bright ones to get a good enough fix—the Sphinx, the Monkey, a handful of others. But it still didn’t work! The signals we were detecting were too far from the expected frequencies for the automatic correlators to work. That was my fault—I hadn’t allowed for a wide enough temporal search window!”

  “Meaning what?” Spry asked.

  “All pulsars gradually slow down, as they lose rotational energy. That’s a known, a given. The pulse rate slowly decreases . . . but even after years and years, the frequency’s only meant to change by tiny fractions of a millisecond.” Prad swallowed hard. “Barely any change at all over a human lifetime. Yes, there are complicating factors—glitches which make pulsars spin faster or slower, very suddenly. That’s why we need a few for our sample, to iron out those effects. I allowed for all that. But still—the correlators couldn’t get a lock. I was searching out across decades of time. I told them to look a whole century ahead, just in case.”

  “A century?” Yesli asked, as if she might have misheard. “You think we might have been out here that long?”

  “It’s worse,” I said. “Isn’t it, Prad?”

  Prad gave a dry, humourless laugh. “Oh, yes. It’s quite a bit worse. Shall we say—by at least five hundred years?”

  “No,” Crowl said, in flat rejection of this possibility. “That’s simply not possible. The ship’s intact, apart from some power blackouts. We skipped, that’s all, and something went a little wrong with one of the skips. But we haven’t been out here for five hundred years.”

  “You’re right,” Prad said, with an ominous smile. “Five hundred years is the lower end of my time estimate. This is the least worse case. You can be sure we’ve been lost quite a bit longer than that.”

  “Give me the worst case,” I said.

  “I cannot put a hard number on that—too many independent variables, too much uncertainty due to the glitches. It could be anything up to a thousand years, maybe a little more. Five thousand, if we have been very, very unlucky. There are some other things I can look at, if you really feel that your lives would be improved by knowing. Expansion patterns of visible supernova remnants. The proper motions of stars, now that we know which system we’re in.”

  “And do we?” Yesli asked.

  “I think so,” Prad said. “In fact, it’s exactly where we were meant to be. I’d say we were late arriving, but for all we know we’ve been in orbit here for centuries—just waiting for the ship to wake itself up.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You do, Scur—you just don’t want to understand. This is Tottori, the heavily settled and industrialised world where we were supposed to be sent on for additional processing.”

  I remembered our earlier conversation. “You said you didn’t recognise this place.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Well, then . . .” I started to say.

  “There’s been an ice age,” Prad said. “That’s why it looks different. The icecaps are much larger, and the coastlines and surface features totally altered. Some of the seas have frozen, some have retreated. I don’t know why this has happened.”

  “Ice ages happen,” Spry said.

  “The planet’s tilt can’t account for it. The sun is a little fainter than it should be, but not enough for this. I thought I must be wrong. Do you know why else I doubted myself?” He was staring at us now as if facing his accusers.

  “It’s all right, Prad,” I said.

  “There are no stations here. No orbital structures, habitats . . . no other ships. No cities, no spaceports, no roads or towns on the surface. This should be one of the most populous planets in human space . . . and instead it’s just a shivering dead iceball.”

  After a lengthy silence Spry said: “Is it possible you’ve made a mistake?”

  “It’s possible,” Prad answered, and we all allowed ourselves a foolish glimmer of hope, at least for the few seconds until Prad crushed it. “It’s possible that my methods are faulty, yes. But when the data said that this was Tottori, do you think I just stopped, accepting it without question?”

  “Go on,” I said, with a horrible sense of inevitability.

  “I checked the planet below against the ones in the files. The other planets in the system, their orbits and sizes are all as they should be. There’s a problem with the files, but . . .” Prad trailed off, collected himself. “I managed to recover enough information for the comparison. It’s true that the coastlines look different now. Everything looks different. But there are still enough points of similarity to rule out any doubt. Believe me, I would much rather that planet was not Tottori. But it is.”

  __
____________

  The Trinity—Yesli, Spry and Crowl—agreed to return to their respective wheels. They were going to have to do some delicate work in preparing the ground for the bad news we would all have to share sooner or later. They could not expect everyone to absorb the truth in a calm and reasonable manner.

  For the most part, since the wakening, it had been soldiers against soldiers. Those old differences would not be buried by this latest development—far from it—but I could easily imagine the soldiers turning en masse against Prad and the other crew. After all, they were the ones responsible for the ship, and it was the ship that had dragged us across time.

  Even if the fault lay with the ship, we needed it to survive. There would also be no point in hanging the crew, even if it helped the soldiers deflect some of their energies. What they needed—what all of us needed—was another focus.

  Fortunately I had just the man in mind.

  From their individual wheels, Yesli, Spry and Crowl selected a dozen or so subordinates who could be trusted to organise the search for Orvin. They were trusted with weapons, broken out of the same store where Prad had acquired his gun. When there were not enough energy pistols to go around, they were given axes and heavy-duty wrenches from the tools store. They were also given slates—Prad had already located several dozen without searching particularly hard—and they were shown how to use the slates as communication devices, so that we could coordinate the search effort.

  They were also, almost as an afterthought, informed that we appeared to be overdue at our destination by quite a long time.

  Exactly how long?

  Years, decades?

  “More than a century,” was the official line. It was not exactly the truth, but not exactly a lie either. No mention of the possibility of thousands of years.

  Was it arrogant of us to think we could bear the truth, when the others could not? I do not think so. I had seen Prad nearly vomit from the shock of his discovery, and I was only just bearing it myself. And even then, I had reached no kind of emotional reckoning with the facts. I kept telling myself that not only would I not be returning home, but that there could not possibly be any home that I would ever recognise. My mother, my father, gone for thousands of years—every part of their lives lost, for all I knew, under another ice age, on another world.