Heretics

by S. Andrew Swann

  “A calibration error. That was my first thought too.”

  “But the distance? For the tach-pulse to get here before the particle decay, it would have to be—”

  “I know: there’s no way anyone could tach that much mass, but you check the mass sensors, I even detected gravitational lensing on some of the high-res imagery.”

  “That’s as much mass as the wormhole.”

  “It’s exactly as much mass.” Toni II reached across in front of Toni and tapped a few controls, and the center holo snapped to show the same view, but current.

  Toni stared at the display. It was hard to make out at first, but in a few moments she could see it hanging there, like a mirrored ball reflecting a starscape light-years removed from the one that surrounded it. Toni shook her head. “Another wormhole?”

  “You can waste time confirming what I’m telling you, but I spent an agonizing six hours pouring over every sensor this place has. We got there a mass-equivalent equal to W Sigma Draconis III. A spin in the opposite direction. It’s approaching us at nearly three-quarters c. Straight-line course directly at the center of mass of our own wormhole.”

  “What happens when they—”

  “Nothing good, and a release of a lot of energy.”

  Toni turned to the communication’s console and flagged an emergency message to her command. “This is Lieutenant Valentine stationed on orbital platform 15 W-Sigma-Drac-Three. We have an emergency. A large mass is approaching the wormhole at three-quarters light velocity. It is on a collision course with impact in approximately eleven hours, twenty-seven minutes. I am attaching a burst of telemetry data on the mass. Request immediate evacuation, please advise.”

  Toni slammed the send icon so hard that her finger left a slowly fading dent on the input display.

  Over her shoulder she heard her own voice whisper, “You want to know what they’re going to say?”

  Toni stared at the console. She had sent an encrypted laser tightbeam to the nearest command station. It was at least five light- minutes. She looked over her shoulder at her double.

  “You went though this before?”

  “By the numbers,” she whispered. “I got orders back to sit tight and monitor the situation; they didn’t think there was any danger.” She chuckled weakly. “That’s what they said, anyway. They told me my sensors were off, and it was either going to miss or pass through the wormhole.”

  “But you didn’t sit tight?”

  “No, because the one heading toward W-Sigma-Drac-One hits about an hour earlier.”

  Toni II stared at the screen above the control console, seeing the disaster replaying itself. Seeing her younger self send the same message to command that she had. She could sense her younger self clinging to the same protocols that had trapped her in this assignment in the first place. She knew that it would take something catastrophic to make her disobey what was going to be a direct order.

  Sit tight? Fucking morons.

  Toni the younger turned to her and asked, “There’s more?”

  “I don’t know for sure; I just saw W1 flash out an obscene amount of energy all across the EM spectrum.”

  “How obscene?”

  “Well if you took the mass equivalent of two wormholes striking each other at a relative velocity three-quarters c, converted that to energy—” She was cut off because her younger self pushed her out of the way. Software boxes opened showing graphs and grids and vectors.

  “The navigational cont—” Toni II started to say, but she got what her other self was doing instantaneously. It was the same thing she would had done if she’d known that W1 was going to explode.

  Make the somewhat valid assumption that W1 blowing up was due to the same sort of event that was headed toward W3. And, if another wormhole was entering the Sigma Draconis system, it made sense to assume some other commonalities: the wormhole headed for W3 duplicated its mass, so assume the hypothetical wormhole matched the mass of W1; assume either the same relative velocity or the same total energy between the known and unknown wormholes. Assume the same point of origin for both.

  Given the data on the wormhole approaching W3, they could plot a line back to infinity that would intersect its point of origin. By making all the other assumptions, the computers could plot a bounded surface slicing through the Sigma Draconis system that would have to contain the hypothetical wormhole—assuming those assumptions were correct.

  The most important being common point of origin. If what hit W1 came from somewhere else, the sky was just too damn big to find it quickly.

  Searching a two-dimensional virtual surface that only covered eight degrees of sky at this distance took less than three minutes.

  “Found it,” Toni the younger whispered.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” She called up a schematic of the system, with the two tracks highlighted. Two spears piercing the plane of the ecliptic at about forty degrees, stabbing two of the wormholes though the heart. At this scale, the tracks looked parallel, but Toni II’s younger self zoomed the display out, and out, and out . . .

  “What,” Toni II whispered, “that far?”

  The scale raced by, five light-years, ten, twenty, fifty . . .

  The scale stopped growing at one hundred and twenty-one light-years, long past the point a human eye could separate the tracks. However, the computer still could, helpfully highlighting the point of intersection with a glowing blue orb.

  “Xi Virginis,” Toni II read the legend. She stared at the track shooting from Xi Virginis to Sigma Draconis. It struck her that there were three wormholes in the Sigma Draconis system. “Do you think there’s—”

  “Yes,” her younger self told her. She was already plotting a track from Xi Virginis to W- Sigma-Drac-Two. This time the computers only had a one-dimensional region of space to search, and they found the third wormhole in less than twenty seconds.

  Three wormholes had their own lethal twins racing toward them.

  “W1 impact in ten hours twenty-six minutes. W3 impact in eleven fifteen. W2 in twelve nineteen. It’s a staggered attack.”

  “Att—” Toni II caught herself, because whatever this was, it was certainly not random. The younger Toni had already grabbed the communicator again and was broadcasting the message back to command; three wormholes, origin Xi Virginis, trajectories, impact times.

  When she was done, the console flashed that a return message had been received. “What?”

  “Your earlier transmission,” Toni II told her.

  “Oh, yeah.” She turned on the transmission, and Toni II watched as the same low level officer told her younger self the same thing he had told her. “Lieutenant Valentine, your report has been passed on to the Styx System Security Command. Your orders are to remain in place and monitor the situation. The 3SEC Liaison believes there is a low risk of the unidentified object striking the wormhole directly, and if contact takes place . . .”

  Her younger self yanked her away from the comm display. “What?”

  She kept dragging Toni II down the corridor. “Move it. We got to get you dressed and suited up before we get the hell out of here.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Cassandra

  “No bureaucracy responds efficiently in a crisis.”

  —The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom

  “Bureaucracy is a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”

  —HONORÉ DE BALZAC (1799-1850)

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Wormhole Σ Dra III-Sigma Draconis

  On the viewscreen, Toni watched her home for the last 256 days drift away. Overlaid on the display were three timers, marking the collision times for the trio of wormholes orbiting Sigma Draconis.

  Timer one was at eight hours twenty-one minutes. Timer two at nine hours ten minutes. Timer three at ten fourteen.

  Toni II sat in an auxiliary seat that folded out from the wall behind the pilot. It was a close fit, as the scout was not intended as a passenger vessel, even
though the life-support systems were rated for four people. She could hear her twin breathing, oddly synchronized but with a half-second delay, like a strange echo.

  She called up the status of the tach-drive, overlaying the image of the receding platform. Everything nominal.

  She looked over her shoulder at Toni II, and they both spoke simultaneously. “Are you okay with this?”

  She stared at herself as herself stared back. It was sinking in that the woman behind her was her, with all but a little more than a week of common experience. They were more than twins. Ten days ago Toni II was the exact same woman that Toni had been five days ago. Not just identical, but the same individual. And as if they were caught in some sort of spiritual echo chamber, she could read the same thoughts crossing Toni II’s face.

  “I just thought—” they both said, then trailed off.

  “Maybe . . .” Toni paused, but this time it was just her speaking. “Maybe we should take turns talking.”

  Toni II waited a few beats before saying, “Not a bad idea.”

  “We both might be facing an unpleasant reaction from 3SEC, violating a direct order.”

  “Where else can we go in this thing?”

  “There’s the—”

  “Don’t say the wormhole. I tried that, didn’t work too well.”

  “If we tach—”

  “—out a light-year then just tach back? We might miss the fireworks, but there are others in the line of fire.”

  Toni nodded.

  It might be risky to disobey orders and go directly to the 3SEC command platform orbiting Styx, but there was no way for her to bypass the chain of command from her post, and she needed to warn the other stations—or get someone else to.

  Even if Styx itself wouldn’t be directly affected by the explosions, there were thousands of people who would be killed by the blast.

  Then there was the tachyon radiation.

  Toni II had told her a bit of what happened—what would happen—after W1 was the first to blow. As they prepped themselves to abandon ship, Toni II described how all the tach-sensors on the platform went crazy, and how the scout’s tach-drive was already crippled when she decided to escape the coming impact on W3.

  Warning her command had to be their top priority. Too many lives were at stake, and by the time W1 blew, throwing its tach-pulse across the inner system, it would be too late for those in the path of the other two to get out of the way.

  What really worried her was if the explosions were going to be powerful enough to endanger people on the planet itself—

  “Styx has a decent magnetic field and a dense atmosphere,” Toni II told her. “I’m sure the surface will be safe.”

  It’s like I’m married.

  “Okay, 3SEC it is.”

  Date: 2526.6.5 (Standard) Styx Orbit—Sigma Draconis

  Toni II watched her younger self plot a course for the 3SEC command platform and forced herself to not reach over the pilot’s chair and start entering the course herself. It felt surreal watching the other’s hands move a fraction a second after she thought of it.

  After the computer confirmed the jump calculations, and after she had reset the overrides that warned her against taching too close to a planet and established traffic patterns, the younger Toni leaned back and whispered, “Here we go.”

  Like every tach-jump, this one was instantaneous from the perspective of those in transit. One moment the views-creens showed the burning orb of Sigma Draconis and an enhanced star field behind the navigational overlays. The next moment, half the universe became the slushy gray orb of Styx itself.

  The counters that timed the countdown to the wormhole collisions all jumped down five hundred seconds to account for the passage of time in the real universe while the ship was making its short tach-jump.

  Immediately, the comm screens lit up with half a dozen flavors of warning at them, flashing like a summer lighting storm on the slopes of the Gehenna range during an eruption. The warnings came from civilian, commercial and military traffic controllers, all squawking that the little scout shouldn’t be where it was.

  Points started flashing all over the viewscreen, pin-pointing transponders and radar contacts. The tach-drive itself started beeping warnings from being too close to the “wake” of other, more capable drives.

  Toni II watched as her other self flipped on the military channel and said, “This is Lieutenant Toni Valentine of the Stygian Security Forces, in Centauri scout craft solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero. I am requesting immediate emergency clearance to dock at 3SEC.”

  The radio came alive. “Solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero, you do not have authorization to approach the 3SEC orbital platform. You are ordered to decelerate into a parking orbit.”

  “I repeat, I’m requesting emergency clearance.”

  In the main viewscreen, a small shadow emerged from behind Styx’s horizon. It didn’t look like much from this distance, but Toni II knew what it was before the heads- up identified it with its own transponder tag.

  “What is the nature of your emergency?”

  “In eight hours and three minutes, the wormholes in this system are going to start exploding!”

  The radio didn’t respond immediately.

  Across from the communication console, the weapons’ station began lighting up with sensor locks from several different orbital defense platforms. Before Toni II said anything to her younger self, she saw her other self plotting in another jump into the tach-drive. Only a couple of AU out, not too far for the standard drives to get them somewhere back insystem, but far enough away to escape any immediate nastiness.

  Assuming they’d have enough warning before they were shot out of the sky. Too long, and they wouldn’t be able to outrun a laser.

  “They won’t shoot at us,” her younger self whispered, answering her unspoken thoughts. “I just want out of here if no one talks to us.”

  “Do you suddenly feel like an old married couple?” Toni II whispered back.

  The eyes widened in her younger self’s face. “I was just—” She turned back toward the consoles and nodded. “Yes.”

  Toni held her course, watching the 3SEC platform grow in the viewscreen. Her hand hovered over the commit button that would fire the scout’s dangerously hot tach-drive and fling them an AU further out from Sigma Draconis, away from Styx and the doomed wormholes—and an AU away from being able to do anything.

  She had told Toni II that they weren’t going to be shot at. She was in an official craft with the right transponder and the right countersigns. They’d know that she was who she said she was.

  But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t blow the scout craft to hell for being where it wasn’t supposed to be. And she knew that Toni II knew it just as well as she did.

  She didn’t like the silence. Seconds were stretching to minutes without a response.

  The platform kept growing in the viewscreen, a series of large disks strung along a common axis pointing down at the surface. They were just close enough to see the spaces between the disks, where the docking facilities were.

  The countdown timer for the first impact crossed eight hours.

  I give them five minutes, then I’m taching out of here . . . Her fingers shook slightly over the control panel, and a bead of sweat stung the corner of her right eye.

  “Solo-charlie-eight-seven-six-five-four-nine-zero, you are to match orbits and dock on level alpha, bay three-seven. Confirm.”

  Toni yanked her hand away from the tach controls and radioed back, “Level alpha, bay three-seven.”

  “You are to dock, power down completely, and await further instructions.”

  Many of the warning lights turned off, and a schematic grid flickered on the viewscreen, showing the approach path. She did some minor manual maneuvering, then synced her onboard computer with traffic control.

  From behind her, Toni II said, “You notice that the last guy was different?”

  “Yes. We
got booted up the command chain.”

  “And we’re both wondering if that’s good or bad.”

  “They’re not shooting at us.”

  “Yet.”

  The small scout craft followed traffic control’s lead as the mass of the 3SEC orbital station grew to dominate the viewscreen. If she remembered the layout of the place correctly, level alpha was deep into the secured area near the “top,” furthest away from Styx. As they maneuvered, she saw bay thirty-seven, lonely and isolated between the top two disks of the station. The docking bay itself was huge, dwarfing their craft. The gap between floor and ceiling was easily fifty meters.

  A spidery robotic arm trailing coils of fuel and power lines extended from the depths of the docking bay to meet them as the scout drifted between the layers of the station. The arm mated with the underside of the scout and there was a subtle, jarring wrench as the scout matched the slow rotation of the orbital platform. Toni felt herself sink a little deeper in her seat as the arm rotated the scout parallel to the station’s axis.

  The computer helpfully began powering down the ship’s systems, and she had to force herself not to start switching overrides on.

  She wasn’t normally this paranoid, and she wondered where it was coming from. Yes, she was in a bizarre situation, but that shouldn’t cause her to mistrust her own command. Even the guy parroting orders at her to sit tight, that was more than likely bureaucratic inertia than anything else. They didn’t know how to deal with the situation, which meant the uncertainty got kicked up the chain until it reached someone with the authority to make a decision.

  That was rarely a fast process.

  She might have disobeyed a direct order, but she was still a lieutenant in the Stygian Security Forces, and she still had a duty. She had been hoping to bypass the command chain, if only to get her opposite numbers at the other two wormholes to get the hell out of there in the seven hours and forty-eight minutes they had left.