Backflow Boxed Set

by F P Adriani

  “So then…what?”

  “Well, the more people that are on here, the more people I have to worry about if something goes wrong.”

  “Yeah…it got hairy with that other ship.” Geena’s brown eyes locked right onto mine. “I heard about the stone.”

  I rolled my eyes to the ceiling. “Who hasn’t by now?”

  “Yeah, but someone said before that it’s linked with Rintu, and I know some things about that planet.”

  My gaze snapped right to hers. “Like what?”

  “I had this friend who was obsessed with the place—he went looking for it and disappeared, like plenty of people do in the galaxy—they quickly tire of where they are, and then they’re soon off to somewhere new where the pastures seem greener. But, I always thought Rintu must be where he disappeared to. The rumor is that they’re secretive there and the planet’s shielded, by both a gravity cloud and their technology. Some say their technology made the cloud. They don’t just let people come in there, you know.”

  I didn’t respond right away, and Geena kept talking. “You want to go there, don’t you?”

  Slowly wiping my mouth on a cloth napkin, I nodded at her and finally spoke: “How did you know?”

  She leaned back in her booth seat, her head tilting to the side, her long blonde curls shifting. “When you’ve been feeding someone for years, you learn their patterns of behavior.”

  My fingers played with my blue fork, pushing around the last bit of my salad. “I told Gary I intend to go there. He said that going is right thing to do, but maybe sometimes you shouldn’t do the right thing—like it’s not your problem, and it might hurt you more than it’ll help others.”

  “Can you safely get rid of the stone another way?” Geena asked me.

  “And that is the crux of the problem,” I said, pointing my fork in her direction.

  *

  A little later, on my way out of the dining room, I ran into Shirley.

  She had been walking into the room, but I immediately pressed a hand to one of her bare forearms and asked her, “How are you doing?” She was wearing a long-sleeved blue shirt, but her sleeves were sloppily rolled up to her elbows, and her face looked as flushed as mine felt.

  “Oh!” she said now. “Thanks for asking, Captain Lydia. I’m all right—I got some sleep. Now I’m just—I’m just still trying to process everything.”

  “Yeah, a lot of us are going through that now.”

  “I just want to remain helpful, if I can….”

  “Actually, I meant to ask you about that museum opportunity: do you think the station’ll be pissed that I seduced you away from there, and then they’ll bump me out of the job?”

  Surprise lit up her blue eyes before she shook her head rapidly, her dark hair bouncing with her motions. “Oh—no. I doubt it. Yours really was the lowest bid on the job, and the station cares far more about money than it does about me or anyone else. I bet they’ve got me replaced already—there are waiting lists for positions there. But, really, I wouldn’t worry about that museum job. …On the other hand, if you lose it because of me, that would certainly stink!”

  “But, Shirley, I only got it because of you. I should have thanked you more for that. Really: you definitely win some and lose some out here. I think you’ll see that, the more you’re with us. It got off to a rocky start—really rocky. But, I hope it gets better for you. If you need anything specific, don’t hesitate to ask anyone.”

  “Thank you, Captain Lydia!” she said fast, and I really liked how she always tried to take a middle path between the formal and the informal.

  I smiled at her; then I continued down the hall.

  *

  My engineering crew calculated that it would take over two days for us to reach the layer where Rintu supposedly was. I spent those two days resting more, and dealing with whatever issues came up with both my crew and my ship—minor things, fortunately; at the same time, everything suddenly seemed more than minor when you were headed for a place you’d never been to, containing people no one really knew, where you had to drop off a stone-mechanism that could be used to gain an incredible amount of both political power and fire power.

  As far as my ship’s computer records could tell, Rintu hadn’t actually been reached by anybody in many years, ever since the gravity cloud in that layer had expanded and surrounded the area around Rintu. It was also the only planet in that layer, and it circled a star very similar to Earth’s star.

  As the Demeter got closer to the Rintu area, my anxiety intensified; so, apparently, did the anxiety of my crew. Though they kept working, things were more silent than normal around the ship, and even the dining room became a ghost town.

  On the second evening, Gary and I were sitting together in the dining room having coffee when his eyes roamed over the empty tables and he said, “Where is everyone? Even Geena’s not here.”

  I frowned down at my coffee mug. “I think they’re all afraid of running into me, that I’ll notice what they’re thinking on their faces.”

  Gary flashed me curious eyes now.

  I exhaled hard. “They think we shouldn’t be going to the planet. They agree with you.”

  He didn’t respond; he took another sip of his coffee, his narrowing brown eyes considering me over the steam coming from his white mug.

  “Gary, I really don’t think I have a choice here.”

  “I know,” he said, lowering his mug to the table.

  “I can’t just toss the stone into space; that might be how it got to me in the first place. The previous owners—they were independent haulers, but they were explorers too. And they had a deal with the GES.”

  The Galactic Exploration Service would sometimes hire people to do jobs the Service didn’t think were significant enough for their science members to do, and, apparently, this hiring had happened with the Demeter’s previous owners. That crew must have located the stone and placed it in that table, and then, somehow, they forgot about it. However, prior to that, the stone had wound up somewhere to be found by a human….

  “Gary, I keep thinking about what you said—about the aliens or whoever—if they created the stones and wells, why aren’t they still using them? Are they an ‘obsolete’ technology to them now, and if they are obsolete, I wouldn’t want to meet the species that created it. They must be massively powerful.”

  “It seems likely that the aliens don’t exist anymore,” Gary said. “Or maybe they moved so far ahead of even that technology, they advanced so far intellectually that they just abandoned the old technology to pursue something else. Like they effectively became immortal, and they lost the ability to see the wells could lead to dangers for mortals.”

  For a long moment, I stared down into my mug and thought about Gary’s explanation. But the stressful events from the past few days finally began flashing through my thoughts. “I really am concerned and I want to get rid of the damn stone, but I’m also not suicidal.” I raised my eyes to Gary’s. “If you think we can’t make it through the cloud, we’ll turn around.” My eyes were asking him for something, some confirmation…but I didn’t get any. There was a twitching, unsure look around his brown eyes, but I couldn’t tell if that was toward what we were about to do with Rintu, or if he was unsure about how to make me feel better.

  When he still didn’t respond, I decided to be more explicit. “Do you think we can make it through the gravity cloud or not?”

  He sighed hard, lowered his head and passed a hand across his forehead. “I just don’t know. The other gravity cloud, the one in The Mearden Solar System—that’s been extensively explored. But it’s not the same as this one: with the Mearden one, we’ve isolated clear patterns of motion; with the cloud we’re headed to, we’ve got minimal data on it from an internal reference frame. As far as I could find in the computer’s records, only two ships have ever gone inside the Rintu cloud, but only briefly because it was so dangerous in there. Probes people have occasionally sent in stopped sending data back n
ot longer after they went in, and then the probes never came back out. And there’s nothing like this cloud anywhere else humans have been. We’ll have to see if we can get a better read on what the conditions are once we get closer to there.”

  Before I’d spoken with Gary, I too had made a detailed study of the computer’s data on the gravity clouds, so I knew that, as far as humans had been able to tell, Rintu’s gravity cloud was like a maze of random gravitational interactions that didn’t follow any consistent physics.

  Humans had recently learned that how gravity functioned in the universe wasn’t an either/or situation; gravitational effects could result from more than one cause. There were both particles that led to a gravitational effect, gravitons; and there was spacetime-bending by masses, which bending might or might not be independent of graviton interactions. How gravity worked and which mechanism was more important depended on the particular physical situation in question.

  However, the Rintu gravity cloud apparently wasn’t organized in the same way normal spacetime seemed to be organized, and particle interactions inside the cloud weren’t reliable: in the cloud, mass didn’t necessarily curve spacetime toward it; spacetime could also curve more readily from larger masses toward lesser masses, or even toward no masses.

  I was no hotshot expert pilot, but even I could tell there would probably be no easy way to steer a ship in a gravity cloud like that, and by simply going in there, a person would be risking her life: if there were large masses around, she might crash right into them even as she moved away from them….

  Gary was talking again. “I’ve been thinking: in the cloud, we’ll have the shields on maximum of course, and now that we know the cannons are working, if something’s coming at us, we could fire at it to break it up as a last resort. But, we probably shouldn’t even try to steer. We should enter the cloud and see where it takes us. If there’s any truth to it being a technology that the monks made, maybe we should go into the cloud with our heads bowed, letting that area of the galaxy take the lead.”

  I slowly nodded at him then, and we remained there in the dining room till late, tossing around even more ideas.

  I went to sleep that night with him beside me physically and on my mind mentally. On my ship I had the combined intellects of both science and engineering people I really respected; if we were all scientifically determined to reach Rintu, maybe that would be enough to get us there.

  The problem was: sometimes things seem so easy before you actually have to do them; pitfalls aren’t as visible then. Just the thought of falling into any traps now really scared me….

  And that was why when the moment arrived, when we were finally near the gravity cloud, traveling right outside what seemed to be the boundary of the apparent forces at work inside, I lost a lot of my prior nerve: I told both Gary and Shirley that I didn’t think we should go very far into the cloud.

  My right hand was on the soft top of my captain’s chair; my left was stretched out, palm up. I was standing facing Gary at his science station; Shirley stood to the right of him as she got to know a smaller science panel.

  And now I said to both of them, “Chen did some more digging on the computer, and the point where the probes disappeared in the past seems to have a clear location and is a relatively short distance inside the cloud’s edge. I think we should keep to the outside of that inner boundary.”

  Out of the corner of my right eye, I saw Chen turn toward me from in his chair. Today he was wearing a shirt that was almost the same deep-red as the chair, which seemed fitting to me for some reason.

  “Captain,” Chen said now, through a heavy frown, “what if we’re getting this backwards? Maybe when the probes people sent didn’t make it back from the cloud, it was because someone took them—or was able to take them once they passed that inner boundary. Maybe going to beyond that is precisely where we need to go to reach Rintu.”

  “It’s a possibility,” Gary said, looking at me with sharp brown eyes.

  I nodded fast at Chen. “That’s a good point—and maybe that’s the key: not going to Rintu, but being taken there. If we’re wanted, I mean. I’ve prepared a message to the planet—I wrote it out, so I can speak it exactly the way I planned. I’ll send it as soon as we enter the cloud….”

  “I wonder, though,” Shirley said, her voice slow and thoughtful as she stared up at the ceiling. “Maybe any signals we send would somehow get distorted into gibberish because of the physics inside, if it’s indeed as odd and chaotic farther in as people claim. It’s hard to say: it could be something internal to that space is making it seem like it works differently than it actually does—maybe there’s extreme distortion from numerous points of gravitational ‘lensing’ effects, like a fun-house hall of many mirrors with clear lenses in place of the mirrors.”

  Her head turned my way briefly; then she went back to looking down at her panel. I frowned a little at the top of her dark-haired head. “So,” I said, “do you think we shouldn’t go in at all and should just send another probe—do all of you think so? I could attach my message to the probe. Shit, I could stick the stone in the probe, just like I did with the photon flare for Claudius.” I stopped talking abruptly. I really didn’t want—or mean—to bring up that incident: my crew and I were even farther from help here than we had been when Claudius assaulted us. Even though I was quite confident my cannons were working properly now, running into Claudius again would still be worse than bad. I certainly couldn’t afford anymore damaging incidents to that aft nozzle; I knew my crew had expertly repaired the crack there, but, I’d had problems with that nozzle before. And by now, considering that materials are never quite the same once there’s been a loss of physical integrity somewhere, that aft nozzle could probably use a complete replacement….

  No one on my bridge had responded to my question about the probe, but it probably wasn’t that they were ignoring me; Gary and Chen had been coordinating an adjustment to the engines with Steve. And Shirley seemed to have gotten lost in the tech-world of her panel; I’d never seen her face so straight and her mouth so flat. This must have been her professional science-face, and I was glad she was finally showing it in a clear way on here: it made me feel better about what we were all about to do.

  I walked around to the front of my chair and glanced down at the numbers on my silver panel, then pushed an intercom button to broadcast ship-wide. “I’ve finally decided to go into the gravity cloud for sure. We should reach one of the ‘edges’ in about 20 minutes. All crew should be awake and alert and ready to adapt to possibly chaotic conditions. I’m sorry for this burden on all of you.” I closed the line.

  My panel indicated that the Demeter’s cameras were finally getting clearer views of the cloud. I enlarged the images on the bridge’s front viewscreen, and my first thought about the cloud was that the blurry exterior was similar in appearance to many nebulae. However, the gravity cloud had a more defined shape; while the boundary it made with the space around it was bumpy with perturbations, the cloud’s overall shape was essentially ellipsoidal.

  The cloud was big, its long axis seemingly equivalent to about 2 AUs, and almost the whole area was full of random swirls and jets of amorphous particles of various colors. It looked like a permanent party of kinetic energy was going on in space here, but I knew that was probably far from the truth.

  “This is definitely one of the most exciting images I’ve ever seen in space,” I said.

  There were murmurs of assent around the bridge—

  “Lydia,” came Steve’s abrupt voice over the intercom speaker, “I’ve just noticed an intermittent unusual decrease in the mass-flow rate in the zenite configuration. I’ll need to take the engine offline to check that it’s not a permanent decrease because a structural problem has developed.”

  “What?” I said, my pulse hammering through my body. “If we’ve got no zenite for backward movement, we’re hobbled—and right when we’re going into a gravity cloud!”

  “I know,” Steve s
aid. “But, if necessary, we can reverse some of the beam-engine flow and divert that exhaust and some from the reactor up to the forward nozzle through the longitudinal belly nozzle.”

  “But, Steve, if I remember correctly, we had to do that once years ago—and we couldn’t get as high a thrust….”

  “That’s correct,” Gary cut in. “There’s a loss of efficiency in that direction, which translates into a lower maximum thrust.”

  “I don’t fucking believe this,” I said. “Is the universe telling me I shouldn’t go into the cloud after all? Every time I finally decide one way, I’m yanked back! First the universe conspires to force me here; now that I’m here, it seems to be preventing my going in.” I was sitting in my chair now, and I glanced over my right shoulder at Gary. “Do you think having no forward zenite exhaust might not matter? What about your plan to avoid steering and navigating—did you discuss it with Chen and Steve?”

  Gary’s nod now was quick and sharp, and encompassed Chen too. “Obviously,” Gary said, “if we see something coming at our nose, instinct will make us want to move out of the way in the opposite direction, no matter what our plan. But, getting out of the way of anything will definitely be harder to do now without the zenite engine; navigating will probably take longer.”

  Sitting forward now, I pressed my elbows on my front panel and my hands to my forehead, rubbing there quite hard, as if the motion would give me an idea for a way out…it didn’t. I felt stuck.

  I grabbed my chair’s strap and pulled it across me and locked it; then I made a fast ship-wide announcement that everyone should do the same strapping in.

  “We’re going in no matter what,” I said at the end of my announcement. Then I linked my intercom with engineering only. “Take the zenite engine offline, Steve, but there’s no time to work on it now. I need you and Karen at full awareness of what’s happening outside the ship.”

  “You got it, Captain,” Steve said.

  We remained on course for the cloud; over the intercom, Gary, Karen, Steve and Chen discussed where they thought the best spot to enter the cloud was.