A Sword Into Darkness

by Mays, Thomas A.

  “Well, next time just route a request like everyone else. Damn, it’s good to see you awake – even if you do look like hell.”

  Nathan thought that was a bit hypocritical. It was not often that Lee showed his age, but today he seemed far older than his actual mid 60’s. “I’ll bet, Gordon, but I’ve at least got a reason. Have you looked in a mirror lately? Is there something wrong?”

  Lee let go of Nathan’s hand and stood, pride making him suddenly closed and distant, though he was only inches away. “I’m fine, so don’t you join the nagging crowd of my doctors. It’s like they worry the smallest little emotional roller coaster will send me into palpitations. I've got pills. It’s nothing you need to worry about. It’s nothing at all.”

  Lydia frowned. "So you say, Gordon."

  Nathan tried to make light of it. “As long as you don’t keel over on me, I won’t nag. My skin is very sensitive right now and your dead weight might make me un-comfy.”

  Gordon’s eyes narrowed. “Your compassion and concern are noted.”

  At that point, Kris reentered, ahead of a wave of nurses and doctors. She and Gordon stood off to the side with Lydia as Nathan was poked, prodded, queried, and quizzed. Soon enough, his IV bag was changed, a fresh round of pain killers and antibiotics administered, and his guests were cautioned not to keep him up for too long.

  Kris saw the last of the medical staff out and then closed the door, leaving the four of them alone. Gordon had grown far fresher during Nathan’s examination, so his medication was apparently effective. The man’s health and his own discomfort no longer his primary concerns, Nathan could hold back his questions no longer. “So what the hell happened at the shipyard? Who was that guy? Have we questioned him, found out who he was working for?”

  Gordon’s slight smile dropped. “Before I tell you, I want you to keep in mind that as soon as you’re better, I’m going to beat you unconscious again. You blew up an entire laser emplacement and burned a hole through three buildings. You’re supremely lucky no one was killed, including yourself! What were you thinking?”

  Kris appeared to have no concern over Nathan’s chosen method of stopping the thief, her approval obvious from her expression. “Yeah, good shootin’, Tex, but talk about overkill. You gave us a new north exit, and made our unexpected guest footloose and fancy-free. What were you planning on doing if the laser didn’t work? Nuke him with a ship-to-ship missile?”

  Nathan grimaced. “I really hoped I’d misremembered that. Did I really burn his foot off?”

  She shrugged. “Let’s just say Hopalong’s going to be stepping very carefully around you from now on.”

  “Enough of that,” Gordon interjected. “This was a serious security breach. We’re hoping that we were lucky and this was the first such incident, but just because you caught him last night doesn’t mean he hasn’t been stealing from us on every previous night.”

  “How did he even get in?”

  “Well, you may not have even noticed, but he bears a striking resemblance to Bill Blake, our night security chief – rather, our former night security chief who had a bad habit of drinking himself into a stupor when he was supposedly on watch. Last night, your thief made sure Bill was drugged enough that he wouldn’t wake until morning, dropped a virus in the telecom server so no one could call in or out, and made the rounds himself. We don’t know who this man is yet, or who he worked for, or even whether he’s a spy or just an industrial agent."

  Lydia spoke up. "He's been taken into DOD custody. So far, Under-Secretary Sykes has clamped down on even my access to info. We don't know anything about the thief yet, but when we find out, you'll be among the first to know."

  “One thing is for certain, though," Gordon said, "and that's that not everyone believes our pots are cracked. Someone out there, besides our late-arriving government sponsors, believes in what we are doing and they want that tech for themselves. This is the first attempt we’ve stumbled across, but it might not be the first attempt and it certainly won’t be the last. Between the launch of the Promise and your somewhat open use of an offensive laser, we are building up some actual stories to go along with our crazy theories. People are going to continue to try to get access.”

  Nathan winced. “Let me guess: tighter security?”

  Gordon nodded. “At the very least. More encryption, more electronic and manned security, more government oversight, whatever it takes.”

  “That means slower work and more frustration, and that’s not even counting the time lost due to the laser ‘malfunction’. Can we afford that?”

  “It’s a little late to be asking that question, Nathan! It will take whatever time it takes, time we have less and less of every day. Soon, we should get our first close-up pictures from the probe. What we’ve received thus far hasn’t been much better than what we’ve already gotten from the SSBA, but I guarantee the new data will impact our timeline. The closer we get, the more we define the threat, if there is one, the more pressure we’re going to start getting from above. We either adapt to it and continue to show progress, or we risk them ‘nationalizing’ us and removing us from the process entirely. Understand?”

  Nathan wished he was not lying down. He wanted to reassure Gordon, and he could not do that very well from such a position of weakness. “Yes, sir. We’ll tighten things up and we’ll get back on schedule. We’ll get our ship operational before the probe makes contact. I guarantee it.”

  Lee’s stern expression softened a bit. He gripped Nathan on the shoulder, one of the few places he was not really burned. “I know you will. Rest now, work later.”

  With that, he nodded to Kristene and then turned and left. Lydia came up and gave him a gentle, motherly kiss on his flash-burned brow, then followed Gordon out, closing the door behind them. Kris watched him leave and then sat next to the bed, carefully holding Nathan’s hand. She looked down at him, a smile rising on her cheeks. They were alone.

  She was about to say something, to do something. Nathan could see it, and now with all the new pressures being put onto their construction, his reasons for putting things between them on hold made even more sense—damnable, terrible, hatefully cold sense, but sense just the same.

  He hated it, hated himself, but he still rushed to speak before she could say anything. “Kris, about last night . . . .”

  She smiled. “I was just about to mention that. I know it might seem a bit sudden, but when you look at it another way, it’s been a long time coming.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  Her smile faltered. “Well, something obviously happened. I seem to remember us kissing in your office.”

  “Nothing happened. We’re coworkers and friends, and we both work closely together. Sometimes that … closeness is easy to misinterpret. And with everything going on last night, we got confused.”

  Her mouth was now set in a firm line. “I wasn’t confused.”

  “Kris, we can’t afford to mix work with … whatever else. I just don’t have time for a relationship right now.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you just break it off with your latest? Or was it the other way around?”

  “I’m sorry. I mean that we don’t have time for a relationship, not a relationship like that.”

  She fumed now. “I’m perfectly capable of keeping my job and my personal life separate.”

  “Good. Then this won’t be awkward when I get back to work.” Nathan closed his mouth and stared back into her glaring eyes, refusing to look away first.

  She broke contact, stalked to her purse, and went straight to the door. “You can be such an ignorant ass, Nathaniel Kelley. I know what you want and what you can and can’t afford to do better than you do. Hopefully, you can get a fucking clue before I’m done with you and this project.” She slammed the door behind her as she left.

  Nathan was alone. He laid his head back carefully, his skin no longer painful, but still noticing the stretching and tingling of his epidermis. He closed his eyes
and tried not to think. He tried to banish all thoughts of the new pressures the project was under, the thief he had injured, the way Gordon had looked, and Kris, Kris, Kris.

  His will failed. All his thoughts wrapped around those central ideas and spun faster and faster, sucked down a dark drain. An hour later, still awake, he felt numb with self-loathing, and he wished for anything else to dwell upon, even the nightmare-memory of the Rivero’s death.

  9: “CATHEDRALS IN AIR”

  The Promise fulfilled its name with unemotional efficiency. From the moment of its launch, the probe continually modified and refined the approach, attempting to arrange a meeting with an unknown alien presence traveling toward Earth at nearly one fifth the speed of light. To a person, this might be a daunting task, dogged by doubt, uncertainty, and trepidation. To the expert systems of the probe, it was merely a matter of numbers.

  The Deltans, at the time of launch, were 1.69 light-years away, traveling at 0.18 c toward Earth, and decelerating at a hundredth of a standard Earth gravity, or approximately 0.01 c per year. The Promise, presumably far smaller and less refined than the approaching alien, was nonetheless capable of greater accelerations.

  The probe set out from Earth at a third of a gravity of acceleration, more than thirty times the rate of the Deltans. Angled down out of the ecliptic, that rough plane in which the planets revolved around the sun, and to one side of the blue spark which defined the approaching alien, Promise’s course allowed it to direct its drive corona away from Earth and all the inquisitive amateur astronomers who might ask too many hard questions about the secretive probe. It also allowed the probe to make an oblique approach upon the alien—covert, ostensibly non-threatening, and as stealthy as one could get while radiating at a high temperature.

  Promise stacked up a list of accomplishments, all unacknowledged. Only hours from its launch, it surpassed Voyager 1 as the fastest man-made object, despite never going through the complicated rigmarole of planetary gravity assists. The probe’s enhanced photonic drive allowed it to brute-force itself past the record, to speeds which boggled the imagination. It rocketed across the orbits of each of the outer planets in turn, skirted by the wide expanse of the Kuiper belt and punched through the heliopause, where the pervasive solar wind was ground to a halt by the all-encompassing gasses of the interstellar medium. More than a hundred times the distance of Earth from the Sun, Promise entered true interstellar space, surpassing all previous probes.

  But Gordon, Nathan, and Kris’s modest creation paid little attention. Its journey had only just begun.

  The drive kept up a continuous massless thrust, using unimaginable photon pressure to muscle the probe to nearly relativistic velocities. At the speeds it traveled, a single grain of dust impacting the probe would be disastrous, so it protected itself by, once more, brute force methods. A laser continuously scanned the space immediately preceding the probe, lighting up and ionizing any particle massive enough to do Promise harm. The burning, ionized particle was then pushed out of the way by the strong electromagnetic field set up in the bow like a battering ram. Even with this defense, though, the probe could do nothing to stop the resulting radiation and cosmic rays that inundated it. For that, Promise relied upon thick layers of shielding and redundant, self-repairing electronics.

  For twenty months, Promise kept up its uninterrupted course. Then, when it had built up a staggering velocity of nearly half the speed of light, the drive shut down, more than 10,000 astronomical units from Earth, halfway to the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. It turned, centering the Deltans in its sensors, and re-evaluated its approach. It made some minor adjustments, turned to point its drive at a nearly right angle to the target, and lit off again.

  By starting out its journey driving at an angle to the Deltans, the probe had built up a significant velocity away from both the aliens and the Solar System. Now, after turnaround, it had to negate both that lateral velocity and the relativistic approach speed it had built up. The practical upshot was that the drive corona was now pointed away from the Deltans versus directly at them, allowing the probe to close relatively unannounced. It was wasteful in terms of energy expended, but the chosen route was as much of a defensive measure as the sandwiches of shield material blanketing the probe.

  The days continued to add up. Promise reached the Oort Cloud, that diffuse spherical grouping of icy rocks from which Halley’s comet was born, and burned its way through the Cloud’s nearly 30,000 AU expanse. Two and a half years after its launch, the probe exited the last structure of the Solar System, over three quarters of a light-year from home. Months later, the probe flew past the arbitrary but significant milestone of one light-year from its origin, but it paid no attention.

  At 1.08 light-years distant, the probe was nearly at rest to the Solar System and still accelerating. Promise’s motion reversed and it began to close then, building up speed in the approaching direction in order to match speeds with the Deltans. The Deltans themselves were no longer just a blur of blue light, but began to take on definition to the diminutive sensor package mounted on the probe.

  The processors aboard the Promise woke up, commencing the endgame of its journey. At 1.05 light-years from Earth, at a speed of 0.14 c, the probe turned again and reduced its drive to only a fraction of its earlier intensity, matching the nearby Deltans. The shielded side panels of the probe came free and the Promise blossomed, extending sensors, auxiliary probes, and twin communication dishes—one pointed at the objective, and the larger one pointed back toward Earth.

  Promise scanned and photographed the mysterious alien presence, so long unknown and now revealed. The probe launched smaller measuring devices in order to increase the scope of its investigation and retransmitted the reams of data it produced back to Earth, though the information would take just over a year to be received. The Deltans endured this scrutiny without reacting, seemingly inert.

  Then Promise said hello.

  February 18, 2045; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California

  Gordon sprawled lazily in his chair, leaning as far back as the soft leather seat would go, his feet propped up on the desk in his home office. The door stood closed, with Melinda Graciola, his personal assistant, holding all distractions at bay from her place just outside the office. Gordon was free to lay back and just think, something which he rarely had time to do these days despite the dividends such uninterrupted concentration usually paid.

  In each hand, Gordon held a glossy print, slowly bringing them together again and again, not really noticing the soft crashing noise he made every time the pictures touched. In his right hand, he held a picture of all they had worked to achieve—the ship, lying on its side in its floating hangar. It was a nameless, gunmetal gray monstrosity, a plated hexagonal pyramid covered in hatches, domes, sensors, and cables as workers crawled over it with last-minute labors, readying it for its rapidly approaching launch date. Nathan would be there now, overseeing the final outfitting, worrying over it like a mother hen. But that was good. It was his job to worry over such things.

  Gordon Lee had other things to worry about.

  In his left hand, he held the mystery—the clearest, most recent processed photo of the Deltans from the SSBA. For all of the array’s vaunted resolution and capability, though, this picture was little improvement over the one Lydia and Sykes had shown him years before. The glare from the Deltans’ photon drive simply blocked out all but the grossest of detail, and what was left behind looked like no ship Gordon could imagine. It was a false-color image of the central drive corona in brilliant blue-white, surrounded by four reddish shadows on the periphery of the drive’s circle.

  The spacing of the shadows always seemed to suggest something to Gordon, but he had never put his finger on it. The three largest shadows formed the vertices of an equilateral triangle around the drive, with the smaller shadow nestled on the perimeter halfway between two of the vertices. And, as subsequent exposures showed, the four shadows rotated about the drive, always keeping their re
lative positions to one another, but rotating rigidly around nonetheless.

  He softly crashed the pictures into one another again and then arched an eyebrow as a thought occurred to him. “Lagrange?” he asked to the empty room.

  Before he could pursue that line of thought any further, there was a rapid knock upon the door and Melinda opened it without prompting. She had been a knockout when he hired her thirty years ago, primarily as eye-candy for jaded bureaucrats he tried to sell to, but she had proven to be capable beyond just her looks, a true asset to the company. In the intervening decades, she had traded gorgeous and voluptuous for glamorous and regal. Gordon was usually pleased to see her, but not when she interrupted him on the verge of something so big. “Damn it, Melinda—”

  “Gordon, Castelworth’s duty monitor is on the line. She says she has an encrypted stream for your authorization.”

  Gordon scowled. Castelworth was his Australian telemetry station, tracking and monitoring all the constellations of satellites Windward Tech maintained for both government and corporate clients. Why the hell would they need him to personally decrypt a transmission? “Can you ask—”

  “Sir, it’s the Promise.”

  Gordon shut his open mouth and nodded. He carefully laid his two photos down on his desk, one atop the other. He squared them precisely and then moved them off to the side, and tried to appear calm. Calm was not a good descriptor, though. Now, without anything to occupy his hands, his fingers drummed a rapid, complicated rhythm on the desk, a counterpoint to the numerous disparate trains of thought that tried to traverse his mind at the same time.

  He looked up at Melinda and cleared his throat. Softly, he said. “Oh. Well, could you do me a favor and get in touch with Nathan for me. He should be here when we decrypt it. And Lydia Russ. Yeah, Lydia will never let me forget it if I leave her out. And Kris Muñoz and the Contact Evaluation Team, and the Physics Group, and the Astronomy Group, and, oh, and the Promise team, and—”