by B. V. Larson
“I told you that at the time.”
“Perhaps I was very young then. In your universe, that is.”
“How old are you, Marvin? Just give me a ballpark answer.”
Marvin’s cameras looked at each other for a moment, and then back to me. “Subjectively, I have experienced more than six thousand years.”
Flabbergasted, I shook my head. “My Marvin is only a few decades old.”
“No wonder he’s an idiot.”
“You don’t know the half of it.”
Abruptly my HUD fuzzed and then cleared again. “All quantum ansible channels are inherently unstable,” Marvin said. “This one seems to be degrading. If you have any more questions, you’d better ask them quickly.”
I didn’t waste time asking about this device we were using to converse. Obviously, some version of Marvin had made it or modified it for his use. “In my universe, someone is trying to damage the maze with a fusion warhead from the inside. What will that do?”
Marvin grew very still. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps everything. The maze is a vast piece of interdimensional machinery. Like any mechanism, parts of it are delicate and parts are robust. If the fragile parts are damaged, everything connected to it could collapse.”
“Everything? What do you mean by everything? I know of a couple of weird ships and one golden planet made of solid stardust.”
“Your last assertion is incorrect. The golden planet is not solid nor is it an actual planet. Structurally, it’s a hollow sphere. Functionally, it’s a major routing node. If it were solid stardust, its gravity would be overwhelming. To answer your initial query, by ‘everything’ I mean the entire transportation infrastructure of the Ancients—nodes, ships, rings and other ancillary parts.”
The pit of my stomach suddenly felt as if I’d swallowed a block of ice. “So the nuke might stop the rings from working?”
“If properly placed, yes.”
The picture fuzzed again, for longer this time. When it came back, I spoke with more urgency. “Marvin, I need to locate the people with the atomic bomb. They have standard Earth tech, suits, radios, grenades—plus the warhead, and they’re somewhere in this maze. How do I find them? It’s too big to just keep searching at random, and we’ll eventually run out of energy.”
“Your Marvin could do it.”
“He’s busy right now, and he’s not inside the maze.”
“Your quantum ansible can—” Marvin said, and then he dropped from my screen.
“Dammit, suit, try to get him back.” After a full minute of trying, my suit reported no success. Now I wish I’d paid more attention to my advanced physics classes.”
“Come on, boss. Let’s go,” Kwon said impatiently.
“Go where?” I said.
“Follow the trail.” He pointed to the disturbed dust and debris.
“All right. Lead on. I can think while moving.” With a last look at the squatting ansible, I followed Kwon as he eagerly started striding through the maze.
Moving with my body on autopilot, I thought about the old, otherworldly Marvin’s last words to me. The quantum ansible, the RQTEA installed in my suit, must be the key. But it was advanced technology, obviously something our Marvin—hell, maybe multiple Marvins—had salvaged from inside the maze. It might be made by aliens or perhaps by the Ancients themselves. What did I know about such things?
At least I knew it was based on quantum theory, which had to do with the nature of the universe—or universes, I supposed—at the subatomic level. What did Sokolov and Valiant’s personnel have that was unusual at the quantum level?
Radioactives. The fissionables in the warhead would be constantly decaying. No technology ever discovered could stop that process. Even though modern nukes relied on fusion of hydrogen isotopes for most of their blast power, weapons-grade uranium or plutonium was still the best material to start the process. They would have a quantum signature, I was sure.
“Suit,” I began as I walked through room after room trusting Kwon to watch for danger. “Tune the quantum radios we have to their most sensitive settings and link them together.”
“Adjustment completed.”
“Using them and our movements as you would ordinary radios, perform spatial triangulation to locate all the quantum signals you can that match radioactive decay.” My crude, inexpert theory was that the fissionables might give off quantum radio static of some sort just like they gave off gamma and neutron emissions.
“Processing data.”
That gave me another idea. “Suit, also tune our standard sensors to the gamma EM bands and cross-reference with the ansibles. Find signal sources that radiate in both spectra.” Just like a lamp gave off both light and heat, I hoped to use two methods to filter out what I was looking for.
“Processing data,” my suit repeated.
I was glad modern suits were about as smart as Nano ships these days. Not geniuses like Marvin, but capable AIs that could do more than just follow simple orders.
Stumbling, I clunked into Kwon’s broad back. He’d stopped moving forward without warning.
“What is it?” I asked, stepping around him to look through the doorway where he’d stopped.
“I don’t like the look of this,” Kwon said. He pointed down a long, narrow room like a hallway. It had two openings, one at each end. Our portal was open and empty, but the other was closed by some dead black material. “That’s the first closed door we’ve seen so far.” He looked around at the narrow walls and high ceiling. “It could be a trap.”
I pointed at the floor. “The trail’s still here. In fact, that looks like a human boot print in the dust. We’re going the right direction for sure.”
“Or that could be old. Time is funny here, right?”
“But it’s still our best bet. I think they came this way.”
Kwon scanned the room again and hefted his laser. “I still don’t like it. What if something closes the door behind us?”
“Suit,” I said, squinting ahead, “give me ten times optical zoom.” The other end of the room leaped forward in my view and I looked closely at the material of the door that blocked our way. “Twenty times zoom.” Now the edge or jamb of the portal loomed large in my view, as if I held a magnifying glass to it. I could see a grain to it, slight variations in the stardust that gave me a sense of scale. Yet, the black material of the door itself seemed utterly dark.
“Suit, give me a max power spotlight wherever I look.”
A blaze of light sprang into being from my external lamp, focused on my point of observation. The dark door still showed nothing, absolutely nothing, while the golden stardust framing it blazed with reflected light.
That suggested the door might be made of some exotic, light-absorbing material…but there was one other explanation. I backed up and retrieved a hunk of glass about the size of a pool ball from off the floor. “Get out of the doorway, Kwon. I want to try something.”
When he did, I moved to the side so only my arm was exposed and I chucked the hunk of debris underhanded at the black portal. The piece of glass seemed to curve in midair, falling off to the side. “Give me some more chunks of stuff,” I ordered.
Kwon handed me pieces of junk until on the sixth shot I was able to predict the curve and get a piece of metal to hit the black door. Instead of bouncing off, it disappeared entirely but nothing else happened.
“That tells us two things, Kwon,” I announced. “One, the room doesn’t seem to be trapped. Two, that’s not a door. It’s a transport portal.”
“A what?”
“Like a ring. Like a window.”
“Huh.” Kwon stepped into the room and looked around. Then he walked over, picked up the chunk of glass I’d first thrown, and tossed it at the black door. It also disappeared. “Yup. Guess that’s where we’re going.”
Without further words, he leaped through, and I followed.
-20-
We found ourselves falling. We’d disabled our repellers because
of the unpredictable effects within the maze we’d been warned about—just like what happened on the now-departed Square—but our thrusters kicked on as our suit brains sought to stabilize and slow us.
Fortunately, we didn’t fall far, just thirty or forty feet. Unfortunately, we landed in the biggest heap of inorganic junk I’d ever seen outside of a big-city landfill. We floundered and sank, the weight of our armor working against us as we flailed to try to gain some purchase. Within seconds we were buried in metal and plastic trash. The more I moved the more I sank until I finally touched the deck with one boot.
“Kwon, you okay?” I asked over the short-range com-link.
“Sure, boss. Can’t see a damned thing.”
“Have you reached the deck yet?”
“Yup. But it’s like being buried. I can hardly move, and my energy use meter thing is shooting up into the red.”
I used my HUD to aim myself in the direction of his signal and pushed through the pile until I found him. “Kwon, you walk, I’ll stay right behind and push on your suit. Maybe together we’ll get somewhere.”
“Hope there’s no monsters in here,” Kwon said.
I chuckled. “What would they eat?”
“What do the beetles eat?” Kwon retorted as he pushed slowly through the pile. I shoved on his back to help.
“Visitors, I guess,” I said. “But apparently not piles of non-biotic trash, so they can’t be the cleanup crew. They must have colonized the maze and now live here. A hive intelligence, maybe—or just smart animals, like ants and bees.”
“Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“You’re starting to talk about beetles like they’re smart. Next thing, you’ll try to talk to them.”
I smiled and kept shoving. “Well, maybe that’s possible.”
“You tried talking with the Lithos. That didn’t work. Your dad did the same thing with the Macros, and it just got us into trouble.”
“Talking with the Macros saved Earth at least once. Dad suckered them.”
“I guess. I liked blowing them up better.”
“The supreme art of war is to win without fighting.”
Kwon grunted as he slammed a particularly stubborn piece of broken machinery aside. “What kind of hippie told you that?”
“Nobody important. Just an old Chinese guy called Sun Tsu.”
“Huh. I actually heard of him. He was supposed to be a great general.”
“He was.”
“How can you be a great general and not want to fight?”
“Because he loved winning more than fighting.”
Kwon chewed on that one for a while. “Sounds pretty boring, but I guess it would work.”
“You think of war as a sport and not an ugly necessity, Kwon. Win or lose, you love to play the game.”
“Winning is better.”
“Winning is the only thing that matters in the end,” I agreed. “Everything else is just technique. If I can win without fighting, I’m all about that.”
“I’m glad I’m not a commander.”
“Just be who you are, Kwon.”
“I think I’m a bulldozer today.”
About a minute later, the sea of salvage parted and we stumbled out into the open. Lots of junk still barred our way, but it wasn’t more than one or two layers deep and easy enough to push aside.
I turned to look above us using my spotlight and saw the square hole we must have fallen through. It was about forty feet above the garbage heap and maybe a hundred from the floor.
“Well, we’re not getting back out that way,” I said. “If the others really came this way, we need to pick up their trail.”
Kwon pointed at the nearest wall. “How about that thing?”
An opening loomed large, but at least it didn’t look pitch-black like a ring-door.
We clomped over to it. “There’s a path pushed through the junk,” I said.
“Yeah. Maybe beetles plowed through here.”
I walked slowly into the path through the junk. The path formed a crude, open-topped corridor as the walls of debris got higher.
“Look,” I said. “A repeater beacon.”
A standard Star Force radio repeater had been magnetically attached to a broken machine of unknown origin.
“Suit, is this beacon operating?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Should we try broadcasting through it?” Kwon asked.
“Same problem as before. The people with Sokolov think we’re dead. They’ll never believe anything we say. No, we have to find them and talk to them in person.”
“Can it tell us where they are?”
“Suit,” I said, “access the beacon’s logs and tell us what you can.”
After a moment, the suit responded. “This beacon was placed here forty-six hours ago by Gunnery Sergeant Taksin. He departed in the direction indicated.” An icon flashed on my HUD pointing toward the big doorway.
“What’s the standard battery life on a beacon?” I asked.
“Thirty days in active mode.”
“What’s its current battery charge?”
“More than ninety-nine percent full,” said the suit.
“Is that possible?”
“It is more than possible. It is self-evident.”
I rolled my eyes. More AI sometimes meant even your own battlesuit was a smart-mouth.
“How?” I demanded. “Its power should have depleted more than one percent.”
The suit brain thought for a minute about this open-ended question. “Beacon batteries may be recharged from any standard Star Force power source.”
I shook my head within my helmet. The suit wasn’t smart enough to help me figure out why it had been operating for more than two days but still had almost all of its charge. This seemed the opposite of our armor, which had been operating for only about an hour but had drained our generators of a third of their fuel.
“Well, at least we have a source of power for a booster,” Kwon said. Without asking, he’d already tapped into it with a worming wire of bright smart-metal. He didn’t get much out of it, less than one percent capacity. The suit required a lot more power than a simple beacon.
“This maze is screwing with our energy reserves and maybe the flow of time as well,” I said. “At the current rate of energy expenditure, we’re going to be at zero in two hours. Then we can get out of the armor and run our skinsuits on batteries for a few more hours, maybe. After that, we’re hosed.”
“Then what are we waiting for?” He turned toward the big doorway.
“Right.” I followed him, talking as we walked. “Our people entered the maze two days ago. How did they keep from running out of fuel and energy?”
“Maybe Sokolov knew where to get more. He said he lived here for years.”
“Good point.”
“How come we’re not very hungry?” Kwon asked suddenly.
I thought about that question. It was true, I wasn’t hungry. Not even after a few hours of adventuring in this maze.
“It seems like our suits are running through fuel faster than our bodies,” I said. “Maybe the effects of this place aren’t limited to time progression. Maybe something is sucking electrical power from our suits causing the generators to constantly recharge the batteries. Yet, it seemed to have the opposite effect on the beacon. That doesn’t make sense to me, and yet…”
Something tickled my mind, as if I had tenuous hold of a piece of the answer.
“Suit, display any detected radio and quantum sources,” I said.
My HUD showed the strong green beacon behind us and a cluster of at least a couple dozen faint yellow ones in the direction we were traveling.
I slapped Kwon on the arm and moving stopped. “Wait. Suit, filter for Star Force signatures. Identify.”
“Processing.” After several minutes, the icons turned green one by one.
“Suit, why did it take so long to identify those signals?”
“The signals are dis
torted. Advanced algorithms were necessary to provide pattern matching approaching full confidence.”
“Suit, how high is your confidence level set?”
“Standard level, ninety-nine percent.”
“Suit, lower your confidence set-point to ninety-five percent.” This would allow pattern matching much more quickly in a cluttered, uncertain radio environment, although it increased the risk of misidentification by several percent. I’d take the chance.
“So those are our people, boss?” Kwon asked. He was looking at his own HUD trying to puzzle it out.
“Yeah,” I said. “I think so. They’re somewhere ahead.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?”
I held up my hand. “I’m not sure…I feel like I’ve forgotten something important. Suit, initiate vertical resting mode with automatic hazard reaction.”
“Mode set.”
This allowed me to relax and ignore my own surroundings as the suit kept me upright and the brainbox watched for danger ready to react on its own. I closed my eyes while Kwon paced back and forth, clearly impatient.
“Kwon, you have to stop that. I’m trying to think.”
Kwon mumbled something vulgar and moved into a back-to-back guard position. There he put his own suit into resting mode in order to avoid the inevitable little servo movements as the armor sensed his restless muscles.
After ten minutes of near-meditation, I had it. My heart pounded suddenly with the hope I’d figured out part of the puzzle.
“Suit, display current fuel and battery power. Alongside it, display fuel and battery power at the moment I set resting mode.”
The fusion cell showed no use of fuel, but oddly, battery power levels had increased significantly. I crowed. “That’s it! Look, Kwon!” I sent him an echo of my HUD display. “We’re recharging when we stand still!”
“That’s impossible,” Kwon said.
“Whatever you say, big man—but it’s happening anyway. That’s why the beacon had a full charge. It’s not moving!”
“So moving sucks power, but stopping gives it back?”
“Yes! But not fuel. It would be really weird if our fuel tanks somehow refilled. Our batteries recharging—that’s easy to do even with our own technology. Hell, we broadcast power for short distances on Valiant where needed. We recharge a lot of things through contact induction so we don’t need hard plugs. For some reason, that’s what’s happening. The maze must trickle-charge anything that isn’t moving.”