The Light Years

by R. W. W. Greene

  “I’ll pay you, of course. Enough to buy yourself out of your contract and set yourself up in style on any planet you want. Your mother, too. She won’t have to live in that shabby apartment with La Merde creeping up around her ears.”

  The glass on the desk beckoned. I’d not planned to give him the satisfaction of sharing a drink with him, but I suddenly needed one more than I’d ever needed anything in my life.

  “There are others on your team I could ask, but I prefer to work with family. Plus, Dr Sasaki, you have a certain credibility in the field that could help me sell it.” He heaved himself to his feet. “Again, you’d be wise to keep my sister out of this. If she starts watching you, I will be forced to turn to my other sources.”

  My head was swimming. The captain, my mother, a possible revolution on Gaul… “I’ll think about it.”

  Rakin had been about to reclaim his bottle, but my words caught him short, maybe even surprised him. He withdrew his hand. “I’ll just leave that with you.”

  ADEM

  Four months out of Gaul

  The Hajj hung motionless in space. When in motion, inertia was on the crew’s side. If the engines cut out, the ship would stay on course. Headed toward some human civilization, rescue might be possible. But being frozen there at zero velocity had Adem’s teeth on edge.

  Sometimes the engines built by the United Americas just stopped, without reason or warning, and never came on again. It had happened on other Trader ships. If it happened now, leaving the Hajj a fixed point in space until the Big Crunch… Adem shuddered. In all his years on board, unless it was docked, the Hajj had never been so still.

  But that’s what Hisako needed for her tests.

  “That is going to work,” she said.

  “I won’t argue.” Adem stuck his multi-tool back in his pocket and stepped away from the probe. Cameras, sensors, and a computer wrapped around some spare thrusters. It was ugly, ungainly, and unique. Adem’s first attempt at building something capable of powered flight. The little spacecraft’s job was not overly complicated: go forward twenty-nine klicks, take some pictures, and return. The fact that its course would take the probe through an artificially created wormhole changed little, at least in theory. “Let’s go up to the bridge and make sure.”

  Adem had built the probe in the forward airlock. Upon reaching the bridge, he launched it by removing the air, opening the outer door, and applying the forward thrusters by remote control. The probe floated free until he brought it to heel to the left of the bridge. “Hisako, look out the port window and wave.” The photo came up on the primary view screen, a portrait of starship and scientist. “I think we’re ready to go.”

  Hisako woke the newly installed console. Worm-drive control. “We’re fully charged,” she said. “I’m doing it.”

  With an invisible hand, the Hajj reached out to the space-time ahead of it and squeezed. Even after four months on the project, Adem didn’t understand all the physics behind it. The drive’s technology was related to the ship’s mass-grav system, and gravity-wave manipulation, dark-matter injections, magnetism, negative energy, and quantum entanglement all played a part. The important bit, he’d decided, was that it worked.

  “We’ve got a stable wormhole!” Hisako said. “Send the probe through!”

  Adem activated the program he’d coded for the probe. He could not see the wormhole, but sensors on the ship and probe said it was there. His tiny spacecraft – he should have named it! – sped away from the Hajj, diminished in the bow camera’s view, and disappeared.

  “It should only take a minute.” Adem kept an eye on the clock. “How’s the hole?”

  “Holding,” Hisako said.

  “I just decided to name the probe. The Midnight Special. Any objections?” Seeing none, he told the nearsmart to put it in the ship’s record.

  “How much longer?” the captain said. Her voice was tense, her face shiny. She sat forward in her chair like she might need to leap out at any moment.

  “It’s back.” The probe sped back into the camera’s range. “And it’s transmitting.” Adem sent the pictures to the view screen.

  “That looks like Nov Tero to me,” Lucy said. “Nice work!”

  Hisako’s shoulders relaxed. “I’m closing the wormhole.” The Hajj released its grip. “It’s closed. No sign of a tear.”

  “Get The Special back inside and pull it apart. I want to know how it held up.” The captain leaned back in her chair. “When can we try it again?”

  Adem and Hisako exchanged glances. “Give me a couple of days,” she said. “If the probe checks out, we can reuse it. If not, Adem can–”

  “If the probe’s damaged, I’m not risking the ship,” the captain said. “You have two days. Being parked like this makes me tense. I keep thinking someone is going to plow into us.”

  Collision with another ship was near impossible, even more so because of the course change Lucy had made when they left Gaul, but the very idea made Adem’s skin crawl.

  “Two days,” Hisako said. “Adem, can you handle the autopsy on the probe by yourself? I want to run a diagnostic on the drive.”

  Adem steered The Midnight Special back into the airlock. Maiden voyage complete, trial one successful.

  HISAKO

  Four and a half months out of Gaul

  Lucy wasn’t showing the proper amount of tension. Nobody was, so I opted to carry it all myself.

  “Hit the right place at the right speed, and we’ll go right through,” I said. “The hole will close up behind us and – Bam! – Nov Tero!”

  I couldn’t shut up. Lucy knew the procedure as well as I did, and “bam” was not a word I wanted to associate with our first space-time shortcut. Eight successful trials with The Midnight Special notwithstanding, there was a lot riding on the next ten minutes. I cleared my throat. “If you’re worried, we could let the nearsmart do it.”

  That’s how the UA military traveled through wormholes, but, no, not Lucy Sadiq.

  “No one flies the Hajj but me,” she said. “Time to let it go.”

  “How long?” Maneera asked. She had worked off her stress in advance by beating the crap out of all comers in the gym that morning. Dooley was still dealing with all the strains and sprains.

  “Nine minutes thirty,” I said.

  “Check the numbers again. Be sure.”

  I had lost track of how many times she’d said that since we told her we were ready to go. It made me wonder if she would have been happier if the drive had something wrong with it, or I’d been unable to install it on the Hajj. She’d be in the black from selling off Hadfield salvage anyway and someone else could take the giant leap into civilian faster-than-light travel.

  I ran my calculations through the nearsmart and checked them against an independent set I gave Odessa’s android pal, Reg. They matched again. “We’re ready to go.”

  “Five minutes,” Lucy said.

  The worm-drive triggered at two minutes, the field it projected extending ahead of the ship and collapsing space-time as we accelerated.

  “One minute.”

  The captain punched her intercom button. “Brace for impact. We’re going through.”

  “I see it. It’s big, bad, and beautiful,” Lucy said, “and we’ll be at the front door in twenty seconds.”

  I held my breath.

  The ship lurched, tossing me and anyone else standing to the deck. The lights went out. My head hit something, and I saw stars. Dimly, I heard the captain yelling. “Mass-grav is out. Micro-g protocols everyone. Adem, check your sister!”

  “She’s breathing. Pulse is good. But she’s out.”

  “Get us some light! I don’t care how you do it.”

  “The nearsmart is down,” that was someone else, “power and comms are out.”

  White light flared as Adem held up his multi-tool. He did something to the unlit end and pressed it to the ceiling where it stuck. “That will last about an hour. Let me see if I can do something more perma
nent.”

  “Is anyone hurt?” the captain addressed the room.

  There were groans as the bridge crew reported in. I tried to stand and ended up on the ceiling. Micro-g protocols. I found something to hang onto. My stomach hurt. I was in charge of the worm-drive project, and whatever had gone wrong was on me.

  “Where are we?”

  “Captain, everything’s down,” the astrogator said. “I can’t get a position.”

  “Look out the damned windows!”

  The astrogator, I couldn’t remember his name, flew below me to the port-side viewing window and consulted his reader.

  “Hisako, what happened?” Maneera’s attention was on me, and it burned.

  “No idea. Everything was going like fine until–”

  “Find out.”

  “The stars look right.” The astrogator finished his surveys. “We’re where we’re supposed to be.”

  The bridge lights stuttered on at about eighty percent. Adem sailed up and reclaimed his multi-tool. “Emergency power. I bypassed the nearsmart. Ventilation fans are coming on, too. That will give us about six hours to figure things out before it gets stuffy. I’ll take the crawlspace to engineering and get it sorted.”

  “Put on a suit and go up top first,” the captain overruled. “With communications down, we don’t even know if the engineering section is still there. If the timing was wrong, the wormhole could have pinched us in half.”

  “If everything looks okay up top, we might as well walk to engineering on the outside. Be quicker than coming back in and crawling through the spine.”

  “Approved. Just don’t do anything stupid. Hisako, go with him.”

  “I’ve never space-walked!”

  “Just do what Adem does. You’ll be fine.”

  Adem hung upside down from the ceiling and kissed the captain on the cheek. He nodded to me. “You good?”

  “I’m going to get us both killed.”

  “Nah. This is the easy part. Come on.” He grabbed my arm and towed me toward the emergency airlock.

  I followed the instructions the nearsmart had drummed into my brain. I’d never gotten round to the test, but getting into the suit wasn’t much harder than putting on a pair of coveralls. Adem swore. “Forgot that the nearsmart is out. The suits have radios in them. Make sure yours is on before you seal the helmet.”

  We tested the radios and squeezed into the emergency airlock.

  “What did we do wrong?” I said.

  “If we’d had a systems failure, we’d be dead already. Gutierrez says we’re in the right place.”

  Gutierrez. That was the navigator’s name. “Based on a look out the window!”

  “He knows what he’s doing. Provided we’re intact and can get everything restarted, I’d say we won. We just took the Hajj through a wormhole.”

  When the pressure equalized, we floated up the ladder to the outer door and emerged on top of the command module. My stomach swooped.

  “Keep your eyes on the hull if you have to,” Adam buzzed at me over the suit radio. “Safety-wise, it’s not a bad idea anyway.”

  I fought the vertigo to get a look at the stars. “There are so many of them.” I flushed. It was a stupid thing to say, but I had no other words.

  “Keep your breathing under control. Match the duration of your exhales to your inhales, and you’ll mitigate your adrenaline response. Wait here for a second.” He pulled a line from my belt and attached it to a ring mounted outside the airlock.

  I crouched like an insect on the ship’s hull, holding on for dear life against the eternal drop we were hanging over. I had an insane urge to unclip my tether and fly. I settled for lifting my arms above my head. There were tears on my cheeks, but I didn’t care. No one could see me through the faceplate of the helmet, and it was just so beautiful, so… regal. The radio crackled. “The engineering section is still there,” Adem said. “Come on. Stay on the blue stripe. Your boots are magnetized, but not all of the hull is ferrous.”

  I forced myself to look down. The blue stripe was about twice as wide as an uptown sidewalk. I put both boots on it carefully. “What about the tether?”

  “You’ll see another ring in about seven meters. There’s another tether on the other side of your belt. Clip it into the ring and hit the button. The one near the airlock will release and wind back into your belt. There are rings all down the stripe.”

  I lifted my right foot.

  “Keep one foot on the ship at all times. Shuffle if you need to.”

  The universe beckoned, but I kept my eyes on my feet as I followed the blue stripe to where Adem stood waiting for me. He pointed. “The path goes along the spine. It will take us about half an hour to get there in these things.”

  The suits were good for eight hours. I nodded.

  “If you’re nodding, I can’t see it. You actually have to speak to me.”

  “I’m ready.” I tried to keep the shaking out of my voice.

  “We got this.”

  I mimicked his slow steady gait, making sure my off foot was firmly planted before I took a step. My breathing tried to get away from me, but I chased it down and forced it under control.

  “What happens if we can’t get everything restarted?” I said.

  “We’re close enough for a rescue at this point. Maybe even a tow. Hopefully it won’t come to that.” He twisted around and pointed to a point of light. “That’s Nov Tero. If we can open another wormhole, we might make it back to Gaul eleven standard years after we left. Crazy to think about.”

  My mother would still be in her fifties. If there was a war going on, I could use Rakin’s money to get her off the planet, maybe to Freedom. I could easily get work at a university there if I showed up with the schematics for the worm-drive, not to mention the rest of the decrypted files from the Hadfield. Then I’d get rich by “re-inventing” all the missing tech. “How much do you think your mother would charge if I wanted out of our contract?”

  He was slow to answer. “Legally, she wouldn’t have to release you, but my guess is expenses plus time and pain in the ass. Less if you trained someone up on the worm-drive. How long do you think that would take?”

  The manuals had been written for soldiers not scientists. The crew needed to be able to service the thing and make it run, not build a new one from scratch. “I don’t know. I’ll talk to Mateo about it.”

  “Be a good idea to train him anyway. You could fall over dead any minute.”

  It almost sounded like he wished I would do just that.

  “I can teach him the basics in a few months.”

  “Do you think you know enough now to build another one?”

  “I can install one, sure. Tune it, make it work. But I wouldn’t know where to begin to make one. The processes, the parts, the materials… Odessa is having the same problem with her android. They made the brains out of a platinum-iridium alloy, and there’s not much of either out here.”

  “There was plenty on Earth. Now that we have a worm-drive, we could go back and see what’s left.” Adem held up his hand. “We’re here.”

  The blue stripe was interrupted by another hatch. Adem flipped open a panel and studied the small screen under it. “I can’t tell if the lock is working. Stand back a little.”

  I shuffled back a few feet, careful to stay on the stripe. Adem opened a smaller hatch and reached in to pump the emergency release handle. The door opened slowly.

  “You go through first. I’ll reseal the door.”

  I crawled down the ladder backward. There was no way to get my helmet lamp pointed in the right direction, so I had to feel along with my feet for each rung. Adem came behind me, pausing to pump the door closed.

  “Stop there.” Adem squeezed past me. “Hold onto the ladder. If we’re lucky, there’s going to be some wind.”

  He opened the door slowly to allow the pressure to equalize. We came through a hatch in the ceiling of Rakin’s office. Adem unsealed his helmet. “We’ll work faster witho
ut the suits, but remember where we put them.”

  A light flashed in my face, and I flinched. The light holder realized his mistake and directed his beam toward my feet. “Hisako?”

  It was Mateo.

  “And Adem,” I said.

  “Thank God,” Mateo said. “We weren’t sure the command section made it. What happened?”

  “We’ll figure that out later,” Adem said. “For now, we get the power back on.”

  “That’s easy enough. The nearsmart shut everything down to divert more power to mass-grav. If we restore power to the computer, it can do the rest.”

  “Anyone hurt down here?”

  “Bumps and bruises. Tobey got a pretty good sprain when he caught himself wrong against the deck. I splinted it.”

  “Let’s get the lights back on.”

  We restored power to the nearsmart, and the computer did the same for the rest of the ship. In an hour everything was running normally again.

  “So, what happened?” Even over the comm Maneera was terrifying.

  “The worm-drive draws a lot of power,” Adem said. “When we took the Hajj through, the nearsmart had to divert power to mass-grav to deal with our acceleration, and there wasn’t enough to go around. The nearsmart cut everything else to power the mass-grav. Probably saved our lives.”

  “Does that mean we can’t use the worm-drive again?”

  Adem looked at me.

  “The Hadfield had a military-grade power system. The Hajj is a civilian vessel, but if we reduce the power load before we go through, we should be okay,” I said. “We could put everything but mass-grav and the drive on backup power and zip through just as you please.”

  “Good news. By the way, we’re right on target. We shaved about nine months relative off the trip.”

  “That’s incredible.” Adem’s eyes were wide.

  “Run a full diagnostic. Make sure we didn’t break anything.”

  Adem returned to our workspace with his arms full of parts and tools about thirteen hours later. 01:37, to be exact. “You have carbon on your face,” he said.

  I rubbed my cheek. Adem dumped the tools at his workstation and pointed to his chin to show me the right spot.