by Nick Webb
A mist shot out of the vial, and, seconds later, a slumping body hit the floor.
She darted around the door jamb, stepped over the sleeping body, and shut the door.
He was heavier than she’d hoped, but she managed to lift him back up into his office chair. He’d be awake in less than five minutes, so she had to work fast.
The computer terminal was already open to a file that he’d been working on, and within a minute she managed to navigate to a set of historical station log files. She waved them over to her own handheld in her pocket, and when the computer terminal protested and claimed the files were sensitive, she held up a special encoded electronic dongle she’d kept from her time at IDF Intel. Basically a universal backdoor into any system that all IDF contractors were required to accommodate, and Shovik-Orion was most definitely an IDF contractor.
The files jumped over to her handheld, and she navigated to a series of other folders for good measure. Medical logs. Research logs—she didn’t recognize most of the file names, and suspected she was only getting a small fraction of them since the folders were all nested so deeply and there were thousands of them, but she’d sort it out later.
Her timer beeped. Five minutes was up. She navigated back to the file he had open—he’d be awake any moment, and, in theory, not remember the minute or so leading up to his blacking out. Or at least be super confused for quite a while. Long enough for her to get back to the ship.
Something on the screen caught her eye. The man’s messages were open on the side of the screen, and she saw the sender of the top one.
Speaker Curiel, of the Galactic People’s Congress, and now the Chairman of the Board of Shovik-Orion.
Time was up, but she couldn’t help herself. She tapped on the message, and it opened.
Under no circumstances are any company personnel to give any Juice to any representative of any government. Including and especially President Cooper of United Earth. Failure to comply will result in immediate termination, and full legal measures will be brought to bear on the guilty party.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Britannia Sector
Britannia debris cloud
ISS Independence
Ready Room
“I don’t know, Shelby, I mean they’re clearly singularities. Their patterns match those Russian ones all those years ago. But this pair here?” Captain Rayna Scott tapped on the third pair they’d discovered. “These are different. Totally different. Never seen anything like it.”
“How are they different?” asked Proctor.
“For starters, they’re not zero dimensional. These are two-dimensional.”
“Two? I thought singularities, by definition, are single points. Zero dimensions.”
“In reality? Sure. Only zero dimensional singularities have ever been observed in nature.”
“So these are not natural.”
“Well duh,” said Scott. Proctor chuckled. Only Rayna Scott would ever dream of saying well duh to the former fleet admiral of IDF. “As long as the singularity has at least one dimension that’s been squeezed down to nothing, then you’ve got a singularity. So you could have sheet singularities, line singularities, point singularities—”
“What about higher dimensions?” said Proctor.
Captain Scott paused to think. And think some more. After nearly a minute Proctor was about to change the subject—they were definitely getting distracted by shiny objects at this point—when the former chief engineer snapped her finger. “Yes!”
“What?”
“Higher dimensions. A four dimensional singularity? What in tarnation does that look like? Well, take a four dimensional space, and squish one of the dimensions down to nothing, and you end up with regular old space like ours, except for one thing.”
“What?”
“A bridge. Hell, that’s what makes the Russian singularities even possible. A fourth dimension squeezed down to nothing, forming the basis of the spatial bridge that binds the two singularities together across massive three-dimensional distances. But our matter can’t exist in a four dimensional space, so it traverses that bridge instantaneously.”
Proctor drummed her fingers on the ready room desk, then tipped her mug to see that it was empty. “Rayna, we’re wasting time. The Swarm ship is out there, on the loose, doing God-knows-what. It came back to this time, right now, for a reason. And we still have no idea what that reason is.”
“Well clearly it’s because of these new two-dimensional singularities,” said Scott, confidently.
“How can you be so sure?”
“It’s the only thing that’s really new now, isn’t it? What else is there?”
“But why would the Swarm want a two-dimensional singularity?”
Scott stroked her chin slowly, then scratched her nose, then poked a finger up halfway to get at another itch. “Before, when we fought them, they relied on the Penumbra black hole to get from their universe to ours. It seemed they depended on natural singularities to travel to other universes. Seems kinda random, if you ask yours truly. Why not make your own? Then you can go to any universe, at any time, easy peasy.”
“But how—”
Scott predicted her question. “Four-dimensional space, dearie.”
“But these are two-dimensional singularities.”
“Nope. Didn’t you follow me earlier? The fourth dimension. These have two dimensions squished down to nothing, leaving two undisturbed, which is why we see them as two-dimensional singularities. And those two squished singularities? Well now, that’s interesting. Kinda opens up a whole world of possibilities. A whole universe, if you will. Or a universe of universes.”
Proctor stood up and dialed another coffee into the beverage dispenser. “Heavy cream and heavy sugar, right?”
“What else would I get, dearie?”
She smiled and waited for the mug to slide forward. “Okay, so the Swarm want this new type of singularity. But why now? Haven’t they existed before? And if they exist right now, they’ll exist in the future, so why not travel to sometime in the future to grab one? Why now, in particular?”
The mug appeared and she held it out to Scott, who accepted it but set it down without drinking. “I would assume that maybe there’s a second new thing that has recently appeared, and that the convergence of those two new things, here, right now, is unique, and too tempting a target to pass up. But that’s for you politicians to figure out. I’ll just handle the how, thank you very much. You handle the why.”
Proctor held a hand up to her chest. “Politician? Rayna, I’m hurt.”
Scott cackled. “Dearie, you became a politician the moment you pinned those admiral’s bars on your chest.”
She was right, of course. When she was a captain, there was autonomy, action, interesting discoveries—hell, she actually got to do science once in awhile. Then she got promoted, and then promoted again, and soon her days were filled with cabinet meetings and lunches with senators and hobnobbing at wine socials with foreign dignitaries.
And politics.
“And yet here I am, a former admiral, gallivanting around on a starship. Saving the world, again. Leave the politics to the politicians, I say.”
“Fuck that, Shelby. You want to trust the politicians to do anything that will benefit anyone other than themselves?”
Her own mug of black coffee slid forward out of the dispenser. She left it there. “What are you saying, Rayna?”
“I’m saying, you were right. We can’t do this alone. Earth is taken. The fleet is gone. The Swarm is back. And look at us. Scattered and divided. The Dolmasi and Skiohra not even returning our calls. The Eru helping the Trits evacuate and escape and presumably hide until the Findiri and Swarm threats are gone. The Chinese giving us just enough help at Bern to escape, and now nothing. The Russian Confederation doing goddess-knows-what. The Caliphate picking their noses. The GPC picking its ass. The Valarisi swimming in a goddamned pool.”
Proctor finally took a sip. And ne
arly scalded her throat. “You’re saying I should forget the Swarm? Leave them lurking out there, waiting for just the right moment to strike?”
“Leave them? No. But gather an army that will defeat them once they choose their moment. Or, hell, gather the army and then go find where it’s hiding and beat the shit out of it, instead of tilting at it with a single ship.”
“Tilt?”
Scott blew a puff of air in exasperation. “Windmills, dearie! You rushing to face them alone is a lost cause.”
Goddammit. She was always right. Except when it came to coffee. But otherwise the woman had some wisdom, in spite of outward appearances. She glanced at Scott and chuckled when she saw the finger back up the nose. “Fine. I’ll get in touch with the senior members of the diplomatic corps who I know are in hiding. See if they can’t drum up some kind of meeting we can invite all the interested parties to.”
“That’s a start, dearie.” Scott sipped her mug, then blew on it for a few seconds. “A start. Yes, a big grand coalition of races. A galactic republic. A federation. An alliance. A loosely organized confederation of states. Whatever you want to call it. But who’s going to lead it? That’s the key.”
“That,” began Proctor, blowing on her own coffee, “is the question now, isn’t it.”
Ensign Sampono’s voice came over the comm. “Admiral, a ship just q-jumped in. Claims to be GPC, with Speaker Curiel on board.”
“Speak of the devil,” said Rayna, cackling again.
“Well, we’ll cross that leadership bridge when we come to it. First we’ve got to build the bridge.” She stood up. “You coming with me?”
“Oh, no, dearie, I’m a liability at these kinds of things. No, I think I’ll go throw myself at this new singularity problem we have. Far better use of our time.”
She escorted Captain Scott out of the ready room. “Agreed, Rayna. Now say a prayer for me. I’m about to go do some politicking.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
Il Nido Sector
One lightyear from Paradiso
ISS Tyler S. Volz
Physics Lab
“We can do it again. I know we can. This time we can q-jump in right to the spot we left since we can just invert the jump calculations exactly, and we can do it again without interference from the Findiri ship.” Shin-Wentworth could speak again, but only if he focused his mind on something, anything else.
That the anything else was so closely related to the deaths of his wife and kids, this time by his own hand, made it difficult to say the least. Like he was walking on a tightrope wire strung between two skyscrapers, and the tightrope was not a rope but a finely sharpened blade that he was traversing on bare feet.
“I’m not so sure about that,” said Wiggum, pointing to the wall. He hadn’t even bothered with a meta-board or even a whiteboard, but was instead drawing on the wall itself with a marker. “Look. Look at these equations. I didn’t see it earlier, but it’s obvious now. It may not have even mattered that we hit the Findiri ship at all. It probably wasn’t going to work all on its own.”
“What the hell are you talking about? We did the preliminary experiments. The watch came through fine.” He scrutinized the equations, but his brain was not in a particularly analytical state.
“It did. But that was different. We were not bringing your watch from the past. We were sending it far away, having it wait for a few hours, then come back. Your family? Different.”
At the mention of the word family, Shin-Wentworth winced.
“Yeah, I figured it out. You should have told me, Commander.”
He grabbed one of the nearby chairs and sat down, putting his head in his hands. “Perhaps. But I needed to be sure you’d be on board.”
“Look, of course I’m on board. If we can perfect this technology, we can stop the Findiri before they even struck any of our worlds. Hell, we can even go back and save the religious fundies on Zion’s Haven. So I’m with you—let’s do this thing.”
He wasn’t expecting that. Wiggum had always struck him as stuck in his own head, oblivious to the importance of current events, and definitely not in possession of the necessary gumption to not only disobey orders to get things done, but to get things done in such a risky way, manipulating the space-time continuum, as they were.
“Okay, go on. What’s different?”
“You’re trying to reach into the past, grab them, send them through not one, but two singularities. One to transport them to the outskirts of the Penumbra event horizon where they experience the time shift, enough to send them ahead several days when they almost instantaneously go through the second singularity, fast enough so they don’t experience any of the less-savory effects of hanging out in outer space without a suit.”
“It’s different, sure,” said Shin-Wentworth, “but we knew that, and accounted for it, didn’t we?”
“We tried, yes. But I’m telling you now that it’s just not going to work. The laws of the universe we are in will not permit it.”
Shin-Wentworth shook his head. “No. I refuse to believe it. We’ve come all this way, made so much progress. We’re not just stopping here.”
Wiggum paused, and turned back to Shin-Wentworth. “Have you even looked at the video that the holoprojector drone took?”
“No. I can’t. I just can’t.”
“Well I did.” Wiggum bit his lower lip, closed his eyes, and continued. “It wasn’t pretty, Harry. The Findiri matter, when the two bridges linked up, tore through them. It basically snapped into existence in the same physical location as the matter in their bodies, and all the different molecules basically had a Paulie Exclusion Principle slugfest. And . . . organic bodies don’t fare too well in those.”
Shin-Wentworth’s head fell back into his hands. “My God, Wiggum.” He waited a long while to continue. “What have I become? My goal is good. Tell me that. I need to hear it from another voice, that my goal is good, and not evil.”
“It is good,” said Wiggum. “I’ve found in life that there are certain things that the universe is amoral about, though prudes might protest it. And traveling through time to rescue your family from death, not to mention all of humanity, is most definitely a good goal.”
Shin-Wentworth took a deep breath. Not of relief, necessarily, but of small comfort. “And tell me that my methods are good. The means. Do the means justify the ends? Ever? Not even in this case?”
Wiggum cleared his throat, as if about to say something difficult. “You killed your family. Moments before they were about to be killed. But think. If you get this right, they will be not killed. They will be rescued. And you will turn from a killer, into . . . something else.”
“A hero?” His mind went to Granger. Hadn’t his means been justified in the end? Earning him the title The Hero of Earth?
“Determining your title is above my pay grade.”
Shin-Wentworth sat in silence awhile, waiting for Wiggum to add to that, but he never did. Finally, “Wait, you just said, if I get this right. Earlier you were saying this wasn’t going to work.”
“I did.”
Shin-Wentworth considered, trying to recall the entire conversation. “You also said, the laws of this universe won’t permit it. That’s . . . an interesting choice of words.”
“Astute observation.”
“And?” He finally looked up. “What am I missing? We’re in our universe. Seems pretty cut-and-dried to me.”
Wiggum turned back to the wall and started drawing. This time not equations, or even words, but lines. “You’re familiar with the many-worlds theory?”
“I am. I also know that most scientists think it’s an intellectual curiosity, and nothing more, since it’s all just a bunch of supposition and not testable.”
He nodded, and kept drawing. “Quick primer. Pop culture tells it different. They say some mumbo-jumbo about different universes existing in which I have cat ears or you have two dicks or UE Talent Showdown got canceled in its first season instead of its twenty-first.”
He pointed to a line. “But consider quantum mechanics. A particle can be either spin-up, or spin-down. Or maybe you’re measuring the location of a particle after it passes through the two-slit experiment. Whatever. You measure it. Before the measurement there was any number of possible outcomes to that measurement with varying levels of probability. But you measure it and lock down the actual value.”
“Right,” said Shin-Wentworth, “basic stuff.”
Wiggum laughed out loud. “Ha! But it’s not. And I tricked you. I said actual value. There is no actual value. What if you had measured this value?” He drew another line that branched off the original. “That’s just the value you happened to measure out of an unimaginable number of possible outcomes. Many-worlds says that there are universes where other outcomes to that measurement happen, since they are both valid.”
“Okay,” said Shin-Wentworth. “Semantics, but okay.”
“Not semantics. Think about the mathematical implications. The raw numbers. How many possible outcomes are there when you measure the location of a particle?”
“Infinite?”
“No, but pretty damn close. Ten to the, I don’t know, thousandth power? Now consider all the atoms in the universe. A finite number. Large, but a finite number. Like ten to the eighty. How old is the universe? Nearly fourteen billion years. But how old in the smallest time unit possible? Ten to the, I don’t know, sixty Planck seconds?”
“I’m not following.”
“Most won’t. But think about it. Every atom, at every Planck second since the very first Planck second, has a gargantuan number of possibilities for its position, energy, and so forth. Now multiply all those numbers together. And mind you there’s some extra math coming into play because of coupling between nearby atoms. What do you get?”
“A fucking big number.”
“A fucking big number,” said Wiggum.
“I still don’t see how this applies to us.”