The Heisenberg Corollary

by C H Duryea

  “Well, you really have a knack for making a girl feel special,” she said. “And—and work with me here—you still expect me to think that whoever’s in that ship wants us dead for—“ she threw her hands up flippantly, “oh, I don’t know—capricious or totally mysterious reasons?”

  “I only said I didn’t know who they were. I’m beginning to understand why they’re back there.”

  “Hundreds of people died on that platform!”

  “I’m aware of that, Vibeke!”

  “And now I’m stuck with you.”

  “And without you, we’ll all end up as dead as everyone else back there.”

  “Maybe that’s for the best,” she said. “Maybe we should just stop this boat and let them blow us all out of space.”

  “If all they wanted was our vapor in a jar,” Zeke said, “that would be one thing. But I think they want more than just that. I think they want the Frogger.”

  “If they did then why are they trying to vaporize us?”

  “Because the Frogger’s outer casing is extraordinarily tough. Tough enough to withstand the weapons they’re using. It’s the only explanation for their use of such old-fashioned artillery. They want to destroy us and grab the Frogger out of the wreckage.”

  “If your project was so top secret, how did they find out about its tough hide?”

  Zeke shrugged. “I’m not sure. The casing was manufactured by a XARPA subcontractor. The sub wasn’t supposed to know what it was for—but maybe it got leaked.”

  “A fine mess, Hezekiah Travers,” she said. “A fine mess.”

  “Listen,” Zeke said, “I’m not making any claims to selfless heroics here. I want to save my skin. And yours too as it happens. So, sue me. But I also can’t let my drive fall into the hands of anyone who would weaponize it. If we die out here, then more deaths—lots more—could follow.”

  “Said the guy who was selling his technology to the military.”

  “It was meant for exploration,” Zeke said. “Discovery. XARPA had resources that I needed.”

  “How noble of you.”

  “I said I’m not a hero. But if we let it fall into the wrong hands—”

  Vibeke slumped back into her seat and picked up the NeuralNav headset. “Save your speechifying,” she said. “You made your case. And for your info, I don’t want to die either. Better dial in your calibrations—we’re coming up on Mars.”

  “I’ll check on the installation first,” Zeke said, pulling himself out of his seat and toward the cockpit door. He stopped and looked back at her.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She didn’t look at him but kept working the fibers and cables of the interface. “Hurry up. We’ve got six minutes.”

  Zeke came off the flight deck into the main cabin. It was your standard medium haul cargo ship fare. A fairly cramped main room walled in with auxiliary consoles and equipment bays, and a small table near a cheap autoslop machine that he hoped he hadn’t just consigned himself to eating out of for the foreseeable future. Then there was the airlock that had deprived them of the Friendly Card’s intended pilot, and a narrow gangway leading to a privy, an outdated MediMech, and a couple, maybe three sack tubes. Aft of that would be the hold which would have the access to the engine bays and the ship’s more critical innards.

  It was here that he found his colleagues, all hard at work with the Frogger in the middle of them, bolted to one of the ship’s dorsal struts. Augie had an access panel open and was manipulating fiber optic cable behind the wall while Narissa calibrated the sensors on the device. Harbinger sat at the instrument console, madly tapping code into the main processor bank.

  “Almost ready to jump, boss,” Harbinger said. “Are our friends still on our tail?”

  Narissa punched a button on a screen panel. “They’re getting closer. Maybe they’re trying to get in for a better shot at us.”

  Zeke crossed over to the device, grabbed the fasteners, and shook them hard.

  “You’re sure it’s bolted tightly enough?” he asked.

  Augie poked his head out of the access panel. “The only way it’s coming off is if it takes the whole strut with it.”

  “Yeah,” Narissa said. “Here’s hoping this boat’s tough enough to weather the trip.”

  “Were you able to set any destination parameters?”

  “No time,” Harbinger admitted. “We’re gonna have to do this blind.”

  “A blind jump,” Zeke said, almost to himself, then to Narissa. “Well, it looks like we’re gonna get a chance to test your entanglement theory.”

  “I wasn’t expecting to be my own test subject,” she answered.

  “At least you’ll be in good company.”

  “Which will be fine if we don’t end up in a universe where protons think they’re electrons, or one that’s filled with tapioca pudding.”

  “Eccch,” Augie said.

  Zeke checked his chronometer. “Three minutes.”

  “Done in two,” Narissa said.

  “I’m heading back up,” Zeke said turning to the passage forward. “Strap in when you’re done.”

  “Hey, Zeke,” Augie said.

  Zeke turned. “What?”

  “You two make a right smart-lookin’ flight crew.”

  “Shut up.”

  Zeke made his way back to the cockpit. Vibeke was hooked in again, and her gaze was far off. The fiber optics were pulsating around her head, and there was a slight, almost wistful smile on her face.

  “Don’t let me interrupt,” he said, sliding back into his seat.

  Vibeke blinked, and her gaze found Zeke. “Oh. You.”

  “Expecting somebody else?”

  “None of your beeswax. Is your new favorite toy ready to go?”

  “As ready as it’s ever going to be. We good up here?”

  “I wouldn’t call us good.”

  “I mean are we ready?”

  “Yes—Mars in T minus forty-five.”

  The red planet was coming up fast in the viewport. A bright rusty dot, getting bigger by the second.

  “Inertial capacitors aligned,” Vibeke reported. “Set to kick in after fly-by.”

  “Orbital trajectory locked in.”

  “I always thought I wanted to see Mars,” she said. “Now, I can’t imagine wanting to be here less.”

  “Look on the bright side,” he said.

  She turned. “What’s that?”

  “You get to play with your new favorite toy.”

  “Go jump in the lake.”

  “Just as soon as we’re done here.”

  Zeke drove the Friendly Card crazily close to the Martian surface, making a bee-line for the coordinates Vibeke had set. Behind them, the horizon again occluded the pursuing ship. They didn’t fire this time.

  They repeated their maneuver, skimming across the planet’s gravity well, the inertial capacitors screaming in protest. An indicator light flashed red.

  “Capacitor’s overheating!” Vibeke shouted.

  “Compensating,” he responded.

  “Not too much—we need that energy!”

  Zeke worked the stick and skimmed the line between deadly inertial compression and exploding capacitors. It was easily the most difficult flying he had ever done.

  They passed over Mars’ nighttime side.

  “Prepare to turn,” Vibeke said.

  “Ready.”

  “NOW!” Vibeke ordered, and again the ship careened at a sharp angle that would have been impossible without the Martian gravity well. The capacitors wailed again—but they held—and the Friendly Card didn’t disintegrate. The planet snapped them in the new direction like a rubber band.

  “Hell, yes!” Vibeke exclaimed, exhilaration shuddering her whole frame.

  “Ready to discharge capacitors,” Narissa’s voice called over the intercom.

  “Discharge on my—” A detonation pounded the ship.

  “We’ve got company!”

  The enemy ship was waiting for the
m as they came back out to the day side, and it let loose with a new volley of firepower. The ship bucked and panels shorted as smoke and alarms filled the air.

  “Discharge now!” Zeke yelled into the comm.

  Suddenly Zeke and Vibeke were both thrown back in their seats as the inertial capacitors shifted from charge to discharge. The kinetic energy stored by the capacitor bank threw the Friendly Card beyond the attackers’ range. But they were still coming.

  It was time.

  Zeke checked their velocity. “Point eight c!” he shouted into the comm. “Activate the drive!”

  “Frogger coming online,” Narissa responded. “It should register on the navigation interface! Are you reading it, Dr. Helstrom?”

  Vibeke reacted like someone had shocked her. But then she smiled.

  “I’ll say,” she said.

  “Point eight five,” Zeke reported. “Get ready!”

  More explosions rocked the ship.

  “Point eight nine!” Zeke shouted.

  Zeke didn’t get a chance to announce their next increment. Suddenly everything went dark.

  And weirdly stretchy.

  Five

  Zeke came to having no idea how long he had been out. The first thing he recognized was a vast blackness outside the viewport. As his eyes focused, tiny pinpoints of starlight resolved themselves out in the infinitude. The stars floated down, like snow falling, and Zeke realized they were the ones who were drifting—back flipping slowly along their x-axis. As they drifted, a massive billowing nebula of green and blue gasses floated down and practically filled the glass.

  Where the hell were they?

  The air was smoky and orange in the emergency lighting, and one of the navigation panels was still sparking. He checked their life support status. The screen was cracked, but it showed that all bio-readings were in the green. The redundant systems were doing their jobs.

  He punched the comm button. “Everyone okay back there?” he croaked. “How ‘bout you, Vee?”

  Nothing.

  “Vee?” He turned and Vibeke was unconscious, her body contorted in the co-pilot’s seat, the fiber optics of the interface flashing with almost blinding rapidity. “Vibeke?”

  He thumbed the release on his seat harness and crossed over to her. She was alive; she was breathing. Much more than that it was hard for Zeke to tell. He prodded her gently on the shoulder.

  “Hey, you. Doctor Helstrom, do you read?”

  When she didn’t respond, he remembered the MediMech. He didn’t think it would be good for much, but it would at least be able to check her vitals. He unclipped her harness, then pulled the NeuralNav from her head.

  She suddenly gasped—a sharp, guttural intake of breath. Her eyes snapped open and they were rolled up into their sockets as her arms flailed about her, batting him defensively on the head and chest.

  “Hey, hey,” he said, grabbing her wrists. “It’s just me.”

  Vibeke’s arms stiffened, resisting his hold. Her lids fluttered, and her eyes righted themselves and fixed on Zeke. She didn’t speak.

  “You’re okay,” he said.

  Then she shook her wrists free and reached up and seized Zeke by the head. She grabbed him by the hair, launched herself up, and planted her mouth on his in a hungry and insistent kiss.

  It wasn’t the first time Zeke had ever been surprised by a kiss—but this one truly shocked him. Before he could even react, Vibeke had slid her arms around his neck and was pushing him back into the console. She pressed against him and held the kiss, invasive and adamant.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders and pushed her back, her mouth detaching from his with a sharp, wet sound.

  “What the hell’s gotten into you?” he said.

  She twisted against his grip and stared at him, and Zeke was suddenly unsure if she was even seeing him at all. Then, as if her power supply had been cut, she fell back into the seat.

  “Holy moly,” he said, just as Augie came through the accessway.

  “You guys okay?” he asked.

  Zeke gestured to Vibeke’s inert form. “Give me a hand. We gotta get her to the MediMech.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “She tranced out and kissed me.”

  “Kissed you?”

  “Yeah. Rather hard.”

  “You’re right,” Augie said after a moment’s consideration. “Better get her to the MediMech.”

  Zeke, Augie and Harbinger watched as Narissa wrangled the controls of the MediMech. The apparatus was an articulated table that extended from a nesting space inside the wall. It looked like cheap, aged plastic—because it, in fact, was cheap, aged plastic—and it had the smell of old transformers and sterilizer.

  “This boat could sure use a few upgrades,” Narissa grumbled as she pounded a button repeatedly to get it to engage. She whacked the unit on the side of the table, and the screen flicked to a new and apparently more satisfactory image.

  A hinged scanner/analyzer hovered over the exam table, and the unit reminded Zeke of one of those old photocopier machines.

  Vibeke lay on her back on the table, eyes closed, face flushed, and her breathing shallow and rapid.

  “It’s all we got for now,” Zeke said. “Is it working?”

  “Barely,” Narissa answered. “Nothing wrong with her vitals. Heart, respiratory, temperature are all on the high end, but they’re hardly out of normal range.”

  “Anything else you can pick up?”

  “Checking. Wait a nanosec. Unusual capillary dilations.” She punched a few more keys, peering at the MediMech’s screen. “Let’s see what neuroendocrinology looks—oh. Hello.”

  “What?”

  “Dopamine, epinephrine, oxytocin—these numbers are off the charts.” She squinted at the screen and chewed on her lip. She turned to the three men. “You guys mind giving us a few minutes?”

  The men left Narissa and the MediMech to their patient and went aft to the engine compartment. The Frogger remained mounted to the dorsal support strut, its sensors and indicators blinking tentatively as if in wait. Harbinger sat at the small engineering console that had become his makeshift workstation. Snatching up his percentile dice, he rolled them nervously in his fingers.

  “So,” Zeke said, checking the Frogger’s gauges. “Where the hell are we?”

  “Charles has been working on that,” Augie said.

  “The onboard computer’s pretty stupid,” Harbinger said. “They removed the AI’s higher functions for the NeuralNav test. They left the cognitive matrix—in effect, the ship’s nervous system—in place, but it’s a blank slate. I’m giving it a few tutorials on what indicators to look for.”

  “Has it found anything?”

  “Not much. But based on our movements and the ship’s structural specs I can say that our mass has not changed appreciably.”

  “Appreciably?”

  “Not enough to matter, beyond recalibrating for new conservation of energy constants.”

  “Enough to establish that we’re somewhere else?”

  Harbinger nodded. “We are definitely not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy.”

  “Now that reference I understand,” Zeke said.

  “And as an added bonus,” Augie said, “we appear to have ducked our tail.”

  “That’s a relief,” Zeke said. “I was beginning to think they would just shake us apart.”

  “And that,” Harbinger said, “brings us to our next fun problem.”

  “Which is?” Zeke asked.

  “This freighter’s taken a pounding. We’re lucky it’s still holding air. Life support is running on redundants, the inertial capacitors are fried after that maneuver which incidentally also drained most our fuel, wiring is shorted all over the ship, and everything running on fiberoptic is on battery power, including the MediMech, autoslop, the privy, the artificial gravity—and the air scrubbers.”

  “And the bad news?”

  “You want worse? How about this? With no fuel and no capacitors, we�
�re adrift. Our chances of engaging the Frogger now is—“

  “About ten to the eighty-sixth to one?” Augie offered.

  “More or less.”

  “So what are you saying,” Vibeke said, suddenly standing at the accessway from the hold, “is that now that we’re here, you can’t get us back home?”

  She came in with Narissa following.

  “Even if that were at present an option,” Harbinger explained, “it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

  “Care to explain?” she pressed.

  The dice in Harbinger’s fingers made small clicking sounds as he rolled them.

  “The Friendly Card’s navigation system isn’t exactly fine-tuned for interdimensional travel. Consequently, we can only give the Frogger two sets of reentry coordinates to our universe. One is inside the insertion module at—well, at what used to be—XARPA. The other is the point of our recent departure. Factoring in any time differential, it’s possible, perhaps likely, that we would reenter our space in one of two places. Inside the burning hulk of the platform—in which we would be trapped and would burn up as the wreckage hit the atmosphere, or just outside Mars’ orbit at more or less the same time we left, giving the USS Squarenose one more chance to turn us into ions.”

  “And at the power levels we’re using to punch this ship past the membrane,” Narissa added, “the time or location differentials could make matters even worse for us on the other end.”

  “Are you okay?” Zeke asked Vibeke. Then to Narissa, he added, “Is she okay?”

  “Nominally on the beam,” Narissa said.

  “What happened?” Zeke asked. “Do you remember what happened after the jump?”

  She looked hard at Zeke, her pale blue eyes like runoff from a glacier.

  “I remember,” she said curtly. “Please don’t remind me.”

  “What happened?”

  “Zeke,” Narissa said quietly. “Not now.”

  Zeke relented and let it go.

  “Why the limitations on our return coordinates?” Vibeke pressed.

  “Up until today,” Zeke explained, “the Frogger was strictly in R and D. Proof of concept didn’t require us to solve for both chronospatial variables. So, we used an accelerator loop to constrain its location and programmed it for a precise reentry time—since that was all we needed. We didn’t want to spend years waiting for it, or find it rusting in some tomb somewhere ‘cause it came back years before.”