Iterations by Robert J. Sawyer
They were wrong.
I didn’t want to use our tachyon-pulse cannon; it depleted the hyperdrive and I wanted to keep that in full reserve for later. “Shove some photons down their throats,” I said.
Nguyen nodded, and our lasers—thoughtfully animated in the holo display so we could see them—lanced out toward first one and then the other Altairian cruiser.
They responded in kind. Our force screens shimmered with auroral colors as they deflected the onslaught.
We jousted back and forth for several seconds, then my ship rocked again. Another stealth torpedo had made its way past our sensors.
“That one did some damage,” said Champlain. “Emergency bulkheads are in place on decks seven and eight. Casualty reports are coming in.”
The Altairians weren’t the only ones with a few tricks at their disposal. “Vent our reserve air tanks,” I said. “It’ll form a fog around us, and—”
“And we’ll see the disturbance created by an incoming torpedo,” said Nguyen. “Brilliant.”
“That’s why they pay me the colossal credits,” I said. “Meanwhile, aim for the struts joining the parts of their ships together; let’s see if we can perform some amputations.”
More animated laserfire crisscrossed the holobubble. Ours was colored blue; the aliens’, an appropriately sickly green.
“We’ve got the casualty reports from that last torpedo hit,” said Champlain. “Eleven dead; twenty-two injured.”
I couldn’t take the time to ask who had died—but I’d be damned if any more of my crew were going to be lost during this battle.
The computer had numbered the two remaining Nidichars with big sans-serif digits. “Concentrate all our fire on number two,” I said. The crisscrossing lasers, shooting from the eleven beam emitters deployed around the rim of our hull, all converged on the same spot on the same ship, severing one of the three connecting struts. As soon as it was cut, the beams converged on another strut, slicing through it, as well. One of the cylindrical modules fell away from the rest of the ship. Given the plasma streamers trailing from the stumps of the connecting struts, it must have been an engine pod. “Continue the surgery,” I said to Nguyen. The beams settled on a third strut.
I took a moment to glance back at the Rhamphorhynchus and Quetzalcoatlus. The Altairian singleships were swarming around the Rhamphorhynchus (colored blue in the display). Peter Chin’s lasers were sweeping through the swarm, and every few seconds I saw a singleship explode. But he was still overwhelmed.
Heidi, aboard the Quetzalcoatlus, was trying to draw the swarm’s fire, but with little success. And if she fired into the cloud of ships, either her beams or debris from her kills might strike the Rhamphorhynchus.
I swung to look at the hologram of Peter’s head. “Do you need help?” I asked.
“No, I’m okay. We’ll just—”
The fireball must have roared through his bridge from stern to bow; the holocamera stayed online long enough to show me the wall of flame behind Pete, then the flesh burning off his skull, and then—
And then nothing; just an ovoid of static where Peter Chin’s head had been. After a few seconds, even that disappeared.
I turned to the holo of Heidi, and I recognized her expression: it was the same one I myself was now forcing onto my face. She knew, as I did, that the eyes of her bridge crew were on her. She couldn’t show revulsion. She especially couldn’t show fear—not while we were still in battle. Instead, she was displaying steel-eyed determination. “Let’s get them,” she said quietly.
I nodded, and—
And then my ship reeled again. We’d all been too distracted by what had happened to the Rhamphorhynchus to notice the wake moving through the cloud of expelled gas around our ship. Another stealth torpedo had exploded against our hull.
“Casualty reports coming in—” began Champlain.
“Belay that,” I said. The young man looked startled, but there was nothing I could do about the dead and injured now. “What’s the status of our cargo?”
Champlain recovered his wits; he understood the priorities, too. “Green lights across the board,” he said.
I nodded, and the computer issued an affirming ding so that those crew members who were no longer looking at me would know I’d acknowledged the report. “Leave the Nidichars; let’s get rid of those singleships before they take out the Quetzalcoatlus.”
The starfield wheeled around us as the Pteranodon changed direction.
“Fire at will,” I said.
Our lasers lanced forward, taking out dozens of the singleships. The Quetzalcoatlus was eliminating its share of them, too. The two remaining Nidichars were now barreling towards us. Kalsi used the ACS thrusters to spin us like a top, lasers shooting off in all directions.
Suddenly, a black circle appeared in front of my eyes again: there had been an explosion on the Quetzalcoatlus. A stealth torpedo had connected directly with one of the Q’s three engine spheres, and, as I saw once the censor disengaged, the explosion had utterly destroyed the sphere and taken a big, ragged chunk out of the lens-shaped main hull.
We’d cut the singleship swarm in half by now, according to the status displays. Heidi powered up her tachyon-pulse cannon again; it was risky, with her down to just two engines, but we needed to level the playing field. The discharge from her TCP destroyed one of the two remaining Nidichars: there was now only one big Altairian ship to deal with, and forty-seven single-occupant craft.
I left Heidi to finish mopping up the singleships; we were going to take out the final Nidichar. I really didn’t want to use our TCP—the energy drain was too great. But we couldn’t risk being hit by another stealth torpedo; we’d left our cloud of expelled atmosphere far behind when we’d gone after the swarm, and—
And the Pteranodon rocked again. A structural member dropped from the ceiling, appearing as if by magic as it passed through the holobubble; it crashed to the deck next to my chair.
“Evasive maneuvers!” I shouted.
“Not possible, Captain,” said Kalsi. “That came from the planet’s surface; its rotation must have finally given a ground-based disruptor bank a line-of-sight at us.”
“Cargo status?”
“Still green, according to the board,” said Champlain.
“Send someone down there,” I said. “I want an eyeball inspection.”
Heidi had already moved the Quetzalcoatlus so that the remaining singleships were between her and the planet; the ground-based cannon couldn’t get her without going through its own people.
The remaining Nidichar fired at us again, but—
Way to go, Nguyen!
A good, clean blast severed the habitat module from the two engines—a lucky guess about which was which had paid off. The habitat went pinwheeling away into the night, atmosphere puffing out of the connecting struts.
We swung around again, carving into the remaining singleships. Heidi was doing the same; there were only fifteen of them left.
“Incom—” shouted Kalsi, but he didn’t get the whole word out before the disruptor beam from the planet’s surface shook us again. An empty gray square appeared in the holobubble to my right; the cameras along the starboard side of the ship had been destroyed.
“We won’t survive another blast from the planet’s surface,” Champlain said.
“It must take them a while to recharge that cannon, or they’d have blown both of us out of the sky by now,” Heidi’s hologram said. “It’s probably a meteor deflector, never intended for battle.”
While we talked, Nguyen took out four more singleships, and the Quetzalcoatlus blasted another five into oblivion.
“If it weren’t for that ground-based cannon…” I said.
Heidi nodded once, decisively. “We all know what we came here to do—and that’s more important than any of us.” The holographic head swiveled; she was talking to her own bridge crew now. “Mr. Rabinovitch, take us down.”
If there was a protest, I never heard
Heidi turned back to me. “This is for Peter Chin,” she said. And then, perhaps more for her own ears than my own, “And for Craig.”
The Quetzalcoatlus dived toward Altair III, its sublight thrusters going full blast. Its force screens had no trouble getting it through the atmosphere, and apparently the ground-based cannon wasn’t yet recharged: her ship crashed right into the facility housing it on the southern continent. We could see the shockwave moving across the planet’s surface, a ridge of compressed air expanding outward from where the Quetzalcoatlus had hit.
Nguyen made short work of the remaining singleships, their explosions a series of pinpoint novas against the night.
And Altair III spun below us, defenseless.
Humanity had just barely survived five hundred years living with the nuclear bomb. It had been used eleven times on Earth and Mars, and over one hundred million had died—but the human race had gone on.
But our special cargo, the Annihilator, was more—much more. It was a planet killer, a destroyer of whole worlds. We’d said when Garo Alexanian invented the technology that we’d never, ever use it.
But, of course, we were going to. We were going to use it right now.
It could have gone either way. Humans certainly weren’t more clever than Altairians; the technology we’d recovered from wrecked ships proved that. But sometimes you get a lucky break.
Our scientists were always working to develop new weapons; there was no reason to think that Altairian scientists weren’t doing the same thing. Atomic nuclei are held together by the strong nuclear force; without it, the positively charged protons would repel each other, preventing atoms from forming. The Annihilator translates the strong nuclear force into electromagnetism for a fraction of a second, causing atoms to instantly fling apart.
It was a brilliant invention from a species that really wasn’t all that good at inventing. With the countless isolated communities that had existed in Earth’s past, you’d expect the same fundamental inventions to have been made repeatedly—but they weren’t. Things we now consider intuitively obvious were invented only once: the water wheel, gears, the magnetic compass, the windmill, the printing press, the camera obscura, and the alphabet itself arose only a single time in all of human history; it was only trade that brought them to the rest of humanity. Even that seemingly most obvious of inventions, the wheel, was created just twice: first, near the Black Sea, nearly six thousand years ago, then again, much later, in Mexico. Out of the hundred billion human beings who have existed since the dawn of time, precisely two came up with the idea of the wheel. All the rest of us simply copied it from them.
So it was probably a fluke that Alexanian conceived of the Annihilator. If it hadn’t occurred to him, it might never have occurred to anyone else in the Trisystems; certainly, it wouldn’t have occurred to anybody any time soon. Five hundred years ago, they used to say that string theory was twenty-first-century science accidentally discovered in the twentieth century; the Annihilator was perhaps thirtieth-century science that we’d been lucky enough to stumble upon in the twenty-fifth.
And that luck could have just as easily befallen an Altairian physicist instead of a human one. In which case, it would be Earth and Tau Ceti IV and Epsilon Indi II that would have been about to feel its effects, instead of Altair III.
We released the Annihilator—a great cylindrical contraption, more than three hundred meters long—from our cargo bay; the Quetzalcoatlus and the Rhamphorhynchus had had Annihilators, too, each costing over a trillion credits. Only one was left.
But one was all it would take.
Of course, we’d have to engage our hyperdrive as soon as the annihilation field connected with Altair III. The explosion would be unbelievably powerful, releasing more joules than anyone could even count—but none of it would be superluminal. We would be able to outrun it, and, by the time the expanding shell reached Earth, sixteen years from now, planetary shielding would be in place.
The kill would go to the Pteranodon; the name history would remember would be mine.
They teach you to hate the enemy—they teach you that from childhood.
But when the enemy is gone, you finally have time to reflect.
And I did a lot of that. We all did.
About three-quarters of Altair III was utterly destroyed by the annihilation field, and the rest of it, a misshapen chunk with its glowing iron core exposed, broke up rapidly.
The war was over.
But we were not at peace.
The sphere was an unusual sort of war memorial. It wasn’t in Washington or Hiroshima or Dachau or Bogatá, sites of Earth’s great monuments to the horrors of armed conflict. It wasn’t at Elysium on Mars, or New Vancouver on Epsilon Indi II, or Pax City on Tau Ceti IV. Indeed it had no permanent home, and, once it faded from view, a short time from now, no human would ever see it again.
A waste of money? Not at all. We had to do something—people understood that. We had to commemorate, somehow, the race that we’d obliterated and the planet we’d destroyed, the fragment left of it turning into rubble, a spreading arc now, a full asteroid belt later, girdling Altair.
The memorial had been designed by Anwar Kanawatty, one of the greatest artists in the Trisystems: a sphere five meters across, made of transparent diamond. Representations of the continents and islands of the planet that had been Altair III (a world farther out from that star now had that designation) were laser-etched into the diamond surface, making it frostily opaque in those places. But at the gaps between—representing the four large oceans of that planet, and the thousands of lakes—the diamond was absolutely clear, and the rest of the sculpture was visible within. Floating in the center of the sphere were perfect renderings of three proud Altairian faces, one for each gender, a reminder of the race that had existed once but did no more.
Moments ago, the sphere had been launched into space, propelled for the start of its journey by invisible force beams. It was heading in the general direction of the Andromeda galaxy, never to be seen again. Kanawatty’s plans had already been destroyed; not even a photograph or holoscan of the sphere was retained. Humans would never again look upon the memorial, but still, for billions of years, far out in space, it would exist.
No markings were put on it to indicate where it had come from, and, for the only time in his life, Kanawatty had not signed one of his works; if by some chance it was ever recovered, nothing could possibly connect it with humanity. But, of course, it probably would never be found by humans or anyone else. Rather, it would drift silently through the darkness, remembering for those who had to forget.
The flashback was necessary, they said. It was part of the process required to isolate the memories that were to be overwritten.
Memory revision will let us put the Annihilator genie back in the bottle. And, unlike so many soldiers of the past, unlike all those who had slaughtered in the name of king and country before me, I will never again have a flashback.
What if we need the Annihilator again?
What if we find ourselves in conflict with another race, as we had with the people of Altair? Isn’t it a mistake to wipe out knowledge of such a powerful weapon?
I look at the war memorial one last time, as it drifts farther and farther out into space, a crystal ball against the velvet firmament. It’s funny, of course: there’s no air in space, and so it should appear rock-steady in my field of view. But it’s blurring.
I blink my eyes.
And I have my answer.
The answer is no. It is not a mistake.
Uphill Climb
Author’s Introduction
When I was fourteen, I discovered the work of SF writer Larry Niven, and began to read him voraciously. I was always particularly fond of his aliens, the most memorable of which are the puppeteers and the kzinti. Almost at once, I started putting together notes for my own alien race, the Quintaglios—descendants
The first print appearance of the Quintaglios, though, was in this little tale, which appeared in Amazing Stories in 1987 (and was my first sale to a major SF magazine).
Uphill Climb
“Service!” Livingstone Kivley lobbed his last tennis ball across the sagging net. At the sidelines, in the shade of the old brownstone office building, stood young Obno. She was thin for a Quintaglio, no more than 400 kilos, a dwarf tyrannosaur with nervous, darting eyes of polished obsidian. Kivley’s opponent was a blue boxlike robot. The little machine swatted the ball with a nylon racquet. Kivley swung, missed, swore. Obno spoke to the robot, using the sub-language her people reserved for talking to beasts and gods. It rolled on rubber treads to the net, lifted it, slipped under, and dutifully collected the balls.
Kivley turned his face up at Obno in what he hoped the alien would read as mock despair. “Oh, the humiliation! I’ve been playing tennis for sixty years and your overgrown milk crate whips the pants off me.” The blue box rolled up to Kivley and deposited three fuzzy spheres at his besneakered feet. Kivley saw the hurt look in the Quintaglio’s eyes. “I’m kidding, Obno. You’ve done a fine job.”
Obno didn’t look much happier. “The robot is capable of many other complex tasks.” She walked over to Kivley, lazy summer sun glinting off the scale vestiges embedded in her leathery hide. “It can work in manufacturing, run errands, look after infants, be a courier.”