Mach's Legacy

by D. W. Patterson

  “Admiral you are sacrificing everyone in those lead ships to get one shot at those ports. But knowing where that plasma is headed I would like to volunteer for one of the lead positions. Therefore I will ask only for volunteers from my crew as well,” said Captain Josephson.

  Soon two more captains had volunteered and their crews also to a man. They were ready. Leaving behind The Admiral in his ship. They had soon paired off with the lead ship of each pair diving at full speed toward the planet and the plasma port openings.

  Captain Josephson spoke to his pilot, “Pilot Becket I want your hands on the controls at all times. No Ems is that understood?”

  “Yes sir,” answered Pilot Becket.

  “Good take us in as fast as possible with as much evasive maneuvers as the ship can handle and still hold together, no use giving them an easy shot. Fire control I want that wormhole weapon available at all times. Take a shot at anything that looks like an infrastructure build.”

  Captain Josephson's ship One Centauri was following a typical dive bombing run that military men had executed for centuries. But in the hands of Lisa Becket the run was anything but typical. Considered the finest pilot in the fleet Lisa knew all the evasive maneuvers in the book and more, she knew those that only she knew how to perform.

  As the ship came screaming down in a silent arc to the target the wormhole weapons surrounding the port opened fire. All weapons coordinated their fire in such a way as to create a grid of plasma fire too small for a fusion ship to fly through. But Lisa flew her ship through it blasting away with the maneuvering rockets at such a pace that the reaction fuel was disappearing fast.

  The Captain held his peace knowing he was now superfluous and that everything rode on the shoulders of Pilot Becket. The gunner too held his fire knowing that by the time he locked on to the target the abrupt turning and pivoting motion of the ship would throw off the aim. He had flown simulated strafing runs with Becket before. That was why he was on manual control, the Ems simply couldn't anticipate Lisa's tactics.

  Once through the grid of plasma the gunner took his shots knocking out the wormhole weapons defending the port. The following ship would have a clear shot, which it took successfully destroying the port.

  The other lead ships didn't make it although the trailing ship of each pair was able to take out its assigned plasma port. The remaining four ships were retreating fast to the assembly point around the Admiral's ship. The planet seemed unusually quiet, but only for a moment.

  Before long new ports had opened fire with their plasma weapons. The barrage would keep up. Captain Josephson grimaced thinking of the loses they had suffered.

  Deep inside the planet Awannti had chosen to release his virus code when he knew that the Beleni were simulating target coordinates. By the time the code had worked its way into the targeting software the Beleni had gotten off several accurate shots. But after the code began its work the accuracy of the wormhole casts degraded rapidly.

  It wasn't long until the Beleni were aware of the problem. Belenus again flew into a rage.

  “What has happened with the simulations?”

  “Sir we don't believe its a problem with the simulations,” said Selenus.

  “Well what is it?”

  “Something is wrong with the targeting software.”

  “How?”

  “A viral code Belenus.”

  “Sabotage!” thundered Belenus. “I won't stand for it. I expect the saboteur to be found immediately.”

  “Meanwhile turn all the weapons on those Centauri ships. They're good at that distance aren't they?” he asked sarcastically.

  From above the planet seemed to explode in a ball of fire as all the weapons at the disposal of the Beleni discharged at once. The ships were caught off guard. They were hardly underway when the fury was upon them and passed without incident.

  “What happened?” asked Captain Josephson.

  “I don't know sir but we have company,” said the sensors operator.

  “What is it?”

  “Multiple ships sir off port.”

  “Show me.”

  The wallscreen filled with images of ships, similar to the fleet's fusion ships but heavily modified. The weapons on the planet fired again this time apparently aimed at the new intruders. As Captain Josephson watched the wallscreen the maelstrom of plasma slammed against and flowed around some kind of shield which the new ships fielded.

  Perhaps it's electromagnetic?

  “Sensors can you make out the source of that shield being used by those ships?”

  “No sir there is not indication from sensors.”

  It's not electromagnetic then.

  Just then the intruder ships seemed to fire something that looked a lot like the plasma globes that the Beleni had used. Except these could divide and move at speeds much greater than anything seen before.

  Visually it was like a persistence of vision effect. The appearance of a giant cocoon seemed to be forming around the planet below and the distant central star. It wasn't long until both were hidden from view and then the cocoon dissipated and the planet and it's sun were gone.

  A message came in from the intruders.

  Greetings Centaurians. I am Aggie Prime and I speak to you on behalf of all Aggies. We have disposed of the renegades from this universe. We believe they will be no more threat to you.

  As we leave now to explore the extra-dimensional we bestow this gift which Captain Josephson will find in his docking port. We hope that the gift will prevent your extinction in this universe. For the other death there is no known pathway in this world.

  We wish you well and goodbye.

  Chapter 27

  The “gift” from the Aggies had quickly made its way back to New Hope University where it was being examined. It turned out to be a glowing, golden sphere about two centimeters in diameter. Under magnification the surface of the sphere was almost smooth, but occasionally a ripple like pattern marred it.

  Analyzing the sphere with lasers to further probe the surface and a magnetic-based pulse reflectometer to penetrate the interior built up a tomographic map which showed the interior of the sphere to be made up of a huge cloud of particles, like a plasma, with an overall support structure. The particles weren't random though as they coalesced into many different shapes.

  Upon looking at the internal structure one of the researchers realized that they were looking at what the plasma globe researcher Emmy Gibbs had called a skyrmion. Was this just one of her globes in miniature form? A call went out for Emmy to join the team.

  The Centauri Two habitat was hard hit. New Berlin, the largest city in the habitat, had been almost completely destroyed by the plasma bomb and resultant fires. Emmy and her grandmother along with Dag and Sigmund had been working with rescue services since the disaster.

  “Grandmother I wish you would take some time off and go home to rest. The rescue services team has the upper hand, I'm sure they could spare you.”

  “I don't know what I would do at home Emmy except relive these last few weeks over and over in my mind. Better to be here, work until I'm tired, then I can at least sleep.”

  “Okay grandmother at least let's knock off an hour early today and relax some.”

  “Sounds good Emmy.”

  Emmy and her grandmother were searching through records trying to coordinate the bodies of the dead with names. Some had the ID chip beneath their skin while others had nothing and needed to be identified some other way. Some bodies were burned too bad to be identified unless they had the ID chip or some other means such as dental records. Then there were those who were listed as missing and would never be identified because the bodies had been burned to ashes by the high temperatures of the plasma. Over three thousand people died in New Berlin alone. In some ways the work of identification would never be done.

  While she waited for her Emmie to search through records Emmy looked up to see Dag and Sigmund walk into the room.

  “Hi Dag, Sigmund. So goo
d to see you two. I thought you were working with the rescuers in New Hope?”

  “Hi Miss,” said Dag. “We were but the rescue services in New Hope are such that we were no longer needed in that service. But Dr. Jackson contacted us for a new mission. To bring you this.”

  Emmy took the device from Dag. It was an Emmie. It started to play a prerecorded message from the team investigating the gift and the message from the Aggies. The messages finished and Emmy looked at Dag.

  “Extinction? But the Beleni are banished aren't they?”

  “Yes Miss but you see it is now believed that the Beleni have left behind traps for us. Because of this they thought it important that you be escorted. That's what Sigmund and I are here for.”

  “But Dag I'm so tired.”

  “Then we will wait until morning and you can get a good nights sleep,” he said cheerfully.

  Emmy nodded okay knowing that Dag didn't understand what she meant by the remark. Emmy, like her grandmother, had not had a good nights sleep since the bombing.

  “One more thing,” said Dag.

  “Yes?”

  “Sigmund has something to say.”

  Emmy turned from Dag to Sigmund.

  “Yes Sigmund?”

  “Miss the object they call the gift.”

  “Yes?”

  “I've seen them before on Earth. At least I've seen pictures of them.”

  “Them?”

  “Yes Miss. You see there are millions of them in a mine on Earth.”

  “Emmy! Emmy!” yelled Jack as Emmy and the two robots came up the escalator from the shuttle. He ran up and kissed and held her.

  “You look a bit tired my dear.”

  “It's nothing, I just haven't been getting as much sleep as I should.”

  “Oh no and now we have dragged you in to this mess. I'm sorry dear.”

  “It's okay Jack. I'm fine really, although I might take a nap now and then.”

  “And I'll watch over you,” he said kissing her again.

  On the ride from the shuttle port to the university, Emmy, who had grown tired of seeing all the destruction, fell asleep on Jack's shoulder as he watched.

  Alpha Indi was the last node of the old wormhole transit network that had not been blinkered by the Beleni, at least not yet.

  Joe Petersen was back at his job monitoring the ore mining equipment when he noticed the vibrations. They weren't intense but they were persistent. At first Joe thought some of the machinery on the asteroid must have developed a problem. So he started shutting down the machines one at a time to see if the vibrations would go away. With the last machine off he still felt the vibrations.

  What have I missed?

  He went through the schematic layout of the equipment on the screen mentally making note of its status. He couldn't find anything. He decided to power down everything.

  A few minutes later Joe was sitting in the dark and still there was the damn vibration. He looked out at the stars and noted they were shimmering as if his eyes were watery. He wiped his eyes with a sleeve and looked again, same thing. He turned to look at the central star, same thing.

  Joe asked his Emmie to link him to the habitat. The call went through but the connection was bad.

  “Asteroid six-nine-two calling New Eureka, over.”

  Joe would have to wait a few minutes between transmission and reception as this was old-fashioned electromagnetic communication restricted by the speed of light.

  “Go Ast . . . -nine-two, over.”

  “Transmission breaking up New Eureka. I'm reporting a strange vibration here, not related to machinery, over.”

  “Same here six-nine-two. Unknown or . . . over.”

  Then as Joe looked away from the direction of the central star the universe blinked and was gone. He pivoted in his seat trying to look for other stars. Nothing.

  No one answered his call again.

  He turned the lights to the mining station back on while he tried to understand what had happened and what to do next.

  “Alpha Indi Disappears” - The New Hope Sentinel, 5.28.2644.

  “The Nightmare is Not Over” - The Centauri Journal, 5.28.2644.

  “How the Government has Failed Us, Just as Well” - The Centauri Worker's Union, 5.28.2644.

  Jack and Emmy were having breakfast.

  “Have you seen the news honey? The Alpha Indi System has disappeared just like the others. People are alarmed all over again.”

  “What is the government going to do?”

  “They are going to send a ship to probe the area and see if this is another baby universe problem.”

  “A baby universe? I thought that the Aggies had taken care of that problem.”

  “Well they did say something about our extinction being related to the baby universe's, so obviously they knew that there was still some threat.”

  “Okay we go to see the globe today?”

  “Yeah it should be in your old lab by now.”

  The gift did look like a miniature skyrmion except that at its small size it looked a lot smoother than the larger ones.

  “Sigmund tells me there are millions of these on Earth and that they have all been read into a huge database which no one has been able to interpret.”

  “So maybe we start with getting their input on how to readout the information.”

  “It's been hundreds of years and the Earth has been through so many upheavals that I'm doubtful we will find that information.”

  “Well we'll start there. Let's leave it to Sigmund he may have contacts on Earth that can help us.”

  While Sigmund was checking with his contacts on Earth Emmy started trying to read the globe. She took the globe and its mount and remounted it in her lab where it could be exposed to the reading device they would develop. Emmy had in mind a shroud like device that would capture the globe's data in a high capacity holographic memory. She also had in mind getting Eric Jordan on the project.

  Eric agreed and his adviser also agreed to support the project and allow Eric to postpone his school work.

  But it would be up to Emmy to understand how the particles coalesced into different forms and how those forms could be read out. Then it would be up to all of them to decode those forms into information.

  Sigmund after a week of trying had failed to find anyone that could locate the original database. All he could find out was that the mine where the globes were originally discovered was still there and the globes were in the mine. The database had most certainly been lost when the Aggies had been banished from Earth and the Earth governments failed to maintain civil order. It was only with the return of the Ems that civil society began to function again.

  So they would have to start from scratch and time was scarce as the blinkering of Alpha Indi showed.

  Emmy began working twelve and fourteen hour days again. She was always tired but at the same time tireless. The others saw her efforts and they too put the time in also.

  After a week Dag and Sigmund had been to Earth and back. They had worked out an agreement that allowed them access to the globes there. They had also arranged all the logistics necessary to transport the team to Earth and to the mine when that day came.

  Eric and his team had begun building the shroud that Emmy had envisioned. He had the electronic design that would pick up the particle configuration and imprint it on the holographic datacube. He also was working on a translation program although he still needed Emmy's list of particle patterns.

  Emmy and Jack worked on identifying the many different particle configurations. Some of these came in the form of the five Platonic solids such as cube, tetrahedral, octohedral and so on. Others were more complex and seemed to be made up of pairs, triplets, quadruplets and a single quintuplet combination of the solids. Fifteen different combinations in all. To Emmy it seemed a small number for a whole alphabet.

  They turned over their results to Eric. Somehow these configurations would need to be mapped to the English alphabet.

&nb
sp; Chapter 28

  The magnetic lines of force of a skyrmion cross each other at many points as they build the cage holding the particle plasma. For the gift globe there were nine circulating field lines crossing each other at nine factorial locations or over three-hundred and sixty thousand unique locations.

  Emmy's idea was that for every sampling time they would read each of these locations and the particle configuration that was there. By the next sampling time they would read out another configuration. So after three sampling times over a million particle configurations would have been read. It was still to be determined where the first location was and how fast the sampling rate should be although Emmy estimated that the size of the skyrmion determined the sampling rate. The smaller the faster.

  Eric suggested they take a single sample and try to figure out the unknown parameters and sampling rate. All of them expected some ordered sequence to come out of the sample, not just a random ordering. In this way they would know they were on to something.

  The shroud operated on the spin magnetic moment of each particle to map it to the hologram as the spin moment was converted to laser light in the shroud.

  The experiment was run repeatedly and the results were remarkable. For one thing it didn't seem to matter what the sampling rate was the gift adapted to the reading device. Also the order was the same every time. Obviously the Aggies had engineered the gift to be immune to any imperfections in its readout.

  Then there were the results of the readout. The usual five Platonic solids came out as pictograms which were followed by an English letter. But there were far more unique pictograms. The Ems analyzed the results and found five-hundred sixty-eight unique pictograms. It was quickly seen that this was the result of all the various solids combined with one or more of the others.

  For instance combining a tetrahedral (four vertices, four faces) with a cube (eight vertices, six faces) gave a pictogram with twelve vertices and ten faces. It turned out that the extended set of pictograms also gave numbers and mathematical symbols. The Ems also recovered the message that the Aggies gave to the fleet when the gift was presented along with some arithmetical operations. This was meant to be a check on the translation.