by Craig Allen
Cody studied the sensors while rubbing his chin. “There’s a whole column of zero gravity rising from the surface into space. The mouth is a little under two hundred million kilometers above the surface.”
“We could get to it without worrying about the star’s gravity.” Hayes highlighted the entire column on the HUD. “And it’s close. The top is only a few thousand kilometers away.”
“It’s like a corridor.” Cody grinned. “That has to be Antediluvian technology.”
“So there’s some ancient machine down there making that happen?” Bodin asked.
“Has to be.” Cody leaned back again. “Antediluvian technology was unfathomable. All of this was probably built before humans had discovered fire.”
“Which species?” Sonja asked. “Weren’t there about a dozen of them?”
“More than that,” Cody said. “But no one’s really sure which technology belongs to which species. All we know for certain is they were incredibly advanced, to the point their technology seems like magic to us.”
“Well, that thing looks pretty magical to me,” Bodin said.
“And I bet the toads are using whatever’s down there.” Hayes grabbed the controls. “Gunny, I’m going to take the stick if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all, sir.” Sonja released the controls. “What are you planning?”
“I want a closer look at that thing,” Hayes said. “Banshee Four Niner, with me.”
“On your eight, Sleepy,” Sinclair said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“What if the Kali ship sees us and attacks?” Cody asked.
Hayes shook his head. “They’re about two hundred million kilometers away. We’d have plenty of time to see an attack. And those missiles would have to travel up the corridor or get caught inside the gravity of the neutron star, which would end their trip quick.”
“They’ll still spot us, though,” Sonja said.
“True enough.” Hayes engaged the main drive. “But they probably already know we’re here. I hope they’re willing to talk.”
The hopper angled toward the top of the zero-g corridor. The tube painted on the HUD grew larger and larger. After a few minutes, Hayes reversed thrust to slow down.
“We’ll breach it in five seconds,” Hayes said. “And… breach.”
The highlighted section of the column disappeared along the edges of the HUD as the hopper entered the corridor. Cody didn’t feel any different even as Hayes continued reversing thrust until they stopped.
“Damn.” Hayes pointed at the gravimetric readout. “Nothing. Not even residual gravitational pull from nearby stars.”
“Reading that, too, Sleepy,” Sinclair said. “Never seen it so dead before.”
“Anybody worried?” Hayes asked.
Sonja chewed her lower lip. “Terrified, sir.”
“I want to go down there.” Cody had everyone’s attention. “The Antediluvian species were master engineers. Their artifacts are nearly indestructible, made from elements within some island of stability far above the known elements on the periodic table. Everything they’ve made has lasted for half a million years or more. That includes whatever technology is maintaining this stable zero-gravity field.”
“So if this tunnel ain’t fallen by now, it’s not going to?” Bodin groaned. “Shit, Eggman, we’re still taking a big risk just being here.”
“Maybe he’s right,” Sonja said. “Besides, the toads know about this place. They sent a signal here.”
“Maybe somebody got that signal, and they’re here now.” Bodin pointed downward. “They’re probably on that Kali vessel. If that thing’s working, it’ll kick our asses.”
“No gravimetric readings so far,” Francis said. “Gravimetrics are reading zero all the way down to the surface. Even that ship is dead.”
Hayes drummed his fingers on his armrest. “Gunny, Nailer, go active on sensors. I want to know if that ship is alive or dead.”
Sonja went to work on the sensors. On the hopper’s HUD, the sensors showed curved lines stretching outward, like waves on a pond, representing the active scans initiated by the hopper.
“No gravimetrics coming from the ship.” Sonja pulled up the results and placed them on the HUD. “No sensor sweeps from the ship, either. No tracking systems. Even running lights are down, but it’s hard to say at this distance. More importantly, there are no reactor plumes. No power readings.”
Cody double-checked the sensors to make sure the ship was indeed dead. “What if they shut off the reactors?”
“They have to breathe, which requires power.” Hayes took a deep breath as he steepled his fingers. “Let’s have a closer look.”
“You sure about that, boss?” Sinclair asked.
“We’ll be fine.” He held up a hand. “Look, if shit goes wrong, we can reach higher velocities faster than a cruiser like the Kali.”
After a moment of silence, Sinclair spoke. “So what’s the plan, Sleepy?”
Hayes drummed his fingers on his console. “Nailer, Cracker, wait here. Within this tunnel, we should be able to send a clear signal back to you without the neutron star’s interference. We’ll head down and investigate. I want to confirm that ship is dead. And if it is, we might as well learn as much as we can here so we can give Washington a full report. That’s what we’re here for.”
“Roger that.” Sinclair chuckled. “Sure you don’t want us to check out that battle cruiser with you?”
Hayes stared at the sensor readings, pursing his lips for a moment. “No point. If that boat’s active, and if she grases us before we can un-ass the area, head back to Washington.”
“You get all the fun, Sleepy.” Sinclair parked his hopper at, from what lidar indicated, a few kilometers away from the top of the zero-g tunnel, relative to the star. “Break a leg, Banshee Five One.”
“Wilco. Out.” Hayes shut off the comm.
Everyone sat quietly as Hayes adjusted the angle of the hopper so the nose pointed at the neutron star—a situation, Cody reasoned, every pilot was taught to avoid. The HUD highlighted the outer boundaries of the corridor as the hopper descended into what should’ve been oblivion. All the while, gravimetrics read zero.
Hayes opened the throttle, and the hopper started forth. Cody wasn’t sure of their velocity, but it had to be high. All around the corridor was the blue-and-violet star, but dead ahead, inside the invisible tube they were following, was only blackness. On the rear camera, the other Banshee became smaller and smaller then vanished altogether.
Sonja manipulated her holocontrols, and a marker appeared on the HUD, overlaying the Kali vessel floating in the zero-g corridor just over the neutron star’s surface. “Those are definitely the coordinates for the bridge sat’s signal.”
“Is there anyone there to hear it?” Cody asked.
“If there is,” Bodin said, “we better gird our loins.”
Chapter Ten
“There she is.”
Cody’s eyes fluttered open. Even at maximum thrust, getting to the target had still taken hours. Outside, space itself was twisted and warped, like the view through the bottom of a bottle. That meant they were close to the surface of the star. Cody was amazed he’d managed to get some sleep while that threat loomed outside.
Partially blocking the view of the star was the hulk of a cruiser identical to the old Kali design. Compared to the Washington, it wasn’t much, but in the hopper, they were a mouse next to a cat. Cody hoped the cat was dead. Beyond the ship was the haze of the neutron star, a haze created by the storm of irresistible gravity.
Bodin whistled. “Brings back some bad memories.”
Hayes zoomed in on different sections of the hull. “I don’t see a designation anywhere. Not even a ship name.”
“The toads never bothered with those things.” Cody forced himself to relax when he realized he was gripping the armrests of his seat. “Is it dead?”
“There’re no signs of power,” Sonja said. “I’d say she is.”
Cody rubbed his chin. “I wonder what happened to her. Any battle damage?”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Hayes said.
They passed the Kali ship, which was on their port side. Cody wasn’t an expert, but the ship seemed fine—no scars from grasers or melted hull plating from tactical torpedos.
As they slowly passed the Kali vessel, Cody got a much better view. The ship was definitely a Kali design, but something was off about it, something Cody couldn’t quite place for a moment.
Then he realized something. “Wait a second. Look at the engines.”
Hayes zoomed in. “There’re no grav plates. Nothing. Just a big empty space where they should be. Even the main reactor is gone. Wonder how she got there without power. Or without engines.”
“But this is the precise location where the bridge sat sent its signal,” Sonja said.
“Maybe there are parts of it that are still functional.” Cody eyed the ship carefully. “Someone may be using it as a relay station of some kind.”
“Which means somebody’s around,” Bodin said.
“Yeah, but there’s no sign of—oh, shit!” Hayes yanked the stick aside.
The hopper darted port just as a piece of debris floated within half a meter of the hopper. Cody flinched, amazed he could grip the seat with his buttocks so well.
Hayes whistled. “That was close.”
“That was a piece of the Kali’s hull,” Sonja said. “It’s twice as long as the hopper.”
“Big enough to end our trip.” Hayes leaned forward to gaze at the floating debris as they passed it. “It’s radiation shielding, maybe left over from when the engine core got yanked.”
“But why’d they yank the engine?” Cody asked.
“Good question.” Hayes waved a hand. “We’ll report it to the higher-ups and let them figure it out. We’ll keep going down into no-man’s-land.”
The hopper continued to descend, leaving the dead spaceship aft. Another ten minutes later, the fluctuating patterns of the star’s surface gave way to the black circle at the end of the corridor. Again, Cody gripped his seat as they approached. The circle’s diameter was just large enough for two hoppers side by side to fit through. Hayes reversed thrust until the hopper stopped.
“The hell is that?” Bodin asked.
“Let’s find out,” Hayes said. “Ping it, Gunny.”
“Aye, sir.” Sonja ran her hands over the controls, and the hopper’s sensors sent active lidar signals. She frowned. “Nothing’s bouncing back.”
“Camo?” Bodin asked.
“I would imagine camouflage would make whatever this is resemble the rest of the star instead of a black disk,” Cody said. “Can we send skeeters?”
Hayes let his breath out. “Might as well.”
After a second of operating the holocontrols, a light flickered. Then, a series of blue icons emerged on the hopper’s HUD, each one representing one of the tiny skeeters. They were slightly larger than the ones in their envirosuits. In addition, they had miniature grav engines for operations in space. The skeeters launched, gathered briefly in front of the hopper, then advanced.
“They’ll reach the dark area in five seconds,” Sonja said. “I think.”
Hayes snorted. “Think?”
“I’m trying to gauge the distance when we can’t read what’s down there, sir. I—” Sonja’s attention went to an indicator flashing on the HUD. “Holy shit.”
On the HUD, the skeeters had spread outward as they reached the black disk… then traveled beyond it. The tiny bots continued on their course deeper into the zero-gravity tunnel, well below the surface of the neutron star. They spread to edge of the corridor below the black disk, which was as wide as the disk itself.
Sonja’s mouth fell open. “How could that happen? Cody, could a neutron star have a hole in it?”
“I strongly doubt it,” Cody said. “The gravity is so massive it smooths out any abnormalities.”
“But there’s still a hole down there, Doc,” Hayes said. “How’d it get there?”
“Whoever built this zero-g corridor probably created this cavity as well,” Cody said.
“Somebody dug a hole in a neutron star? What the hell for?” Bodin watched as the Kali ship disappeared above their heads. “There ain’t nothing down there.”
Cody was puzzled, at least at first. “What is in the center of a neutron star?”
“Neutronium,” Hayes said. “I see where you’re going, Doc. But neutronium’s too unstable to be used as ex-mat inside of a Daedalus drive. It’ll fall apart outside the confines of a neutron star and turn into protons.”
“There’s a theory no one’s been able to prove,” Cody said. “It’s been suggested that underneath the first layers of some neutron stars is a material far denser.”
“What, degenerate quark matter?” Hayes asked. “Down there?”
“Possibly,” Cody said. “If the degenerate quark matter has mixed with quarks known as strange quarks, then it would be stable outside the massive gravity of a neutron star. That’s precisely what we use in our Daedalus drives, only we make ours in particle accelerators.”
Bodin’s mouth fell open. “This place is a mine? A mine for ex-mat?”
“Looks like it,” Cody said.
Sonja toyed with the sensors. “I’m still getting nothing on lidar, but…” The skeeter icons on the HUD flashed briefly. “They’ve hit bottom. A little over… Christ, two kilometers.”
Hayes whistled. “That’s a deep hole anywhere but on a star?”
“I bet most of that was getting through the neutronium layer.” Cody scratched his head. “That means a majority of the star is degenerate quark matter.”
“How much you figure?” Bodin asked.
“A teaspoon of the stuff weighs nearly a billion tons.” Cody pulled an image of the star from the hopper’s records from when they first arrived. “The star is about twenty-five kilometers in diameter. If the outer two klicks of the star is neutronium—”
“So a hell of a lot,” Bodin said. “Why would anybody need all that? I mean, shit, don’t we just use a small amount in the engines?”
“Washington has ten milligrams,” Hayes said. “That’s about the most anyone uses in a single ship. I can’t imagine what someone would do with tons of it.”
“Contact,” Sonja said. “At least, I think so.”
She magnified the center of the black disk. Deep in the shaft, a series of lights flickered.
“Is that from the skeeters?” Cody asked.
“No.” Sonja pointed at the lights. “There’s something else there. Something at the bottom of the hole.”
If Cody had been an archeologist, he would’ve jumped for joy. But his heart still pounded at the possibility. “I think we should have a closer look.”
“You want to go down there?” Bodin asked. “What happens if we touch the walls?”
“I assume there’s a barrier to prevent that.” Cody pointed at the blue icons on the HUD, which were returning to the hopper. “The skeeters weren’t damaged when they touched the tunnel’s edge. And the bottom, I assume.”
“You assume right.” Sonja pulled up an image of the conical tunnel, as mapped out by the skeeters. “The bottom is level and featureless, according to the skeeters.”
“Skeeters don’t weigh nothing,” Bodin said. “Hoppers weigh tons. We fuck up and get outside this zero-g thing, this neutron star will pull us apart, starting with our balls.”
“Maybe your balls,” Sonja said.
“I’m fucking serious, Gunny.” Bodin scowled. “We go through that wall, and we’re all dead so fast there won’t be enough time to make our heads spin.”
“Not a problem.” Hayes pulled up a schematic of the hopper and overlaid it on the hole. “We’ve got plenty of breathing room.”
“Oh, spoken like a pilot,” Bodin said. “Begging your pardon, sir. I’m sure you’re a good pilot and all, but I’m wondering if we should send in a team of special
ists.”
“We will,” Hayes said. “But we should check it out ourselves first.”
Bodin sat back down in his seat, shaking his head. Cody couldn’t stop grinning. To explore such a large Antediluvian artifact before anyone else was exciting.
“Let’s go easy, sir,” Sonja said. “Gravimetrics are still reading zero g. Hope that maintains.”
“I’m sure it will,” Cody said. “If it didn’t, the skeeters would’ve been crushed.”
“I’m going to hold you to that, Doc.” Hayes pushed the stick forward. “Pucker up. Here we go.”
The hopper passed through the black disk until the deep-blue surface of the star vanished and they were in pure blackness. Hayes activated exterior lights, which illuminated nothing, as if the walls themselves were sheer black. That unnerved Cody. Beyond the canopy could’ve been either kilometers of nothing or the densest hull-crushing material in the universe. Only the skeeters’ map of the tunnel’s walls gave Cody any sort of notion of what was outside, but the sight made his hands tremble.
Cody cleared his throat and hoped talking would calm himself. “The walls are absorbing the light. Probably absorbed the lidar, too. The massive density is probably creating a lensing effect like the rest of the star, causing the light to bend away instead of reflecting back at us.”
“Huh?” Bodin asked.
Cody explained, “In theory, a pure quark star would have an escape velocity of about ninety percent the speed of light or more. Something that dense bends space so much that it can cause light passing close to it to bend away in another direction. That could be why we’re not seeing light reflected back.”
“That or degenerate quark matter is just black,” Sonja said. “Never seen so much at once.”
“No one has.” Cody swallowed. His excitement was rapidly vanishing, and he hoped no one heard the fear in his voice.
As they approached the lights at the end of the tunnel, a flash lit up the interior of the hopper, its source undetermined. An instant later, the flash was gone.
Hayes applied high reverse thrust, stopping their descent. “What was that?”
Sonja pulled up a view toward the rear of the hopper. A thin, transparent violet light extended from the walls and all around them, like a permeable barrier. The hopper was two-thirds of the way through it.