by Robert Reed
The Master decided on cautious research.
But six months later, with her captains still hiding inside that pumping complex, her patience dissolved into a frustrated boldness.
“Break open the hatch,” she roared.
Pamir was in the conference room, sitting behind a row of Submasters. Quietly, but not too quietly, he said, “Madam.” Then he sighed and added, “Maybe we’re narrowing your search a little too much.”
Faces turned.
But not the Master’s face. Her dark eyes remained buried in the holomaps and equipment lists and the expanse of her own hand, one great finger pointing to a minuscule, yet suddenly vital detail.
Without looking at him, she said, “Elaborate.”
Then she added, “Quickly, Captain Pamir.”
“Someone or something could have fallen out of the leech habitat,” he remarked, looking at everyone but the Master. “We should keep searching the fuel tank. And I still have that neutrino array in place. It was detecting a possible source… coming from somewhere below us, if the early data are true…”
One of the Submasters gave a rumbling cough, then reminded his superior, “The fuel tank has been searched. Nearly exhaustively, madam. And Pamir is talking about a piss of neutrinos too thin to have any value—”
Knowing the hazards, Pamir interrupted. “We should watch the doorway, and wait,” he argued. He was looking at the faces that were open enough to look back at him. Then he added, “If our captains are behind that door, then we’ll be showing them what we know. And like any game, you don’t want to give up your turn too soon.”
The Master took a moment, allowing his words to evaporate into the tense silence. Then she said, “Thank you.”
Pamir’s opinion had been crisply dismissed.
Speaking to more trusted captains, she ordered, “Keep yourselves and your ship safe. But as soon as physically possible, I want you to force the hatch. Please.”
Twenty-four hours later, hair charges of antimatter were set against the hidden hinges, then detonated.
The hatch shifted a nanoscopic distance, then jammed firmly in place.
The sophisticated equivalent of a prybar was deployed, and it gave a yank, then another, and that shiny gray plug of pure hyperfiber slid out slowly, then faster, tumbling down the fuel line for twenty kilometers, reaching a closed valve and slamming into an aerogel bed that caught it like a great hand, saving it for later studies.
Scuttlebugs, then high-ranking captains, descended on the gaping hole, all dressed in armor and bristling with weapons, the machines devoid of expectations while the humans assured themselves that they were ready for anything.
Behind the secret doorway, waiting for them, was nothing.
Cold iron-rich rock was mixed with splinters of hyperfiber. Which wasn’t exactly nothing. But as spidery limbs and gloved hands touched the stratum, a sturdy disappointment struck, the captains asking themselves, Is the hatch a decoy? Is it just a half-clever way to keep our eyes and minds pointed in the wrong direction?
But no, analysis showed that this was the topmost portion of a vertical tunnel, and if the tunnel kept plunging straight down, it would merge with one of the crushed access tunnels—ancient, enigmatic, and utterly useless.
Eleven days after Washen’s mysterious reappearance, an antimatter charge had destroyed the tunnel. Seismic records showed a bump and creak that had gone unnoticed among the ship’s usual bumps and creaks. But the damage looked obsessively thorough. The surrounding rock was pulverized, and treacherous. Rebuilding just the first few kilometers of the tunnel would take time and vast resources. “Do it,” the Master ordered.
But they didn’t need thirty captains for what three of them, plus a brigade of mining drones, could accomplish with the same ease.
Pamir asked permission to return to the fuel tank and continue his search.
“Refused,” the Master replied instantly, out of hand.
Then she told him, “You’ll remain with the digging team. And if you find a moment or two of free time, I can’t stop you from doing what you want.”
“Alone?” he asked.
And her golden face smiled as she told her most difficult captain, “I am sorry. My apologies. I thought that’s exactly how you like to do everything.”
Thirty-three
Neutrinos and the slow ghosts remained, but only in the corner of the eye and the mind. The central duty in Pamir’s life was to carve a simple hole, following the shattered vein wherever it led, and with the years that seemingly straightforward task evolved into what might have been the deepest, most demanding excavation in human history.
Nothing remained of the original access tunnel. A series of sharp shaped explosions had obliterated the hyperfiber walls, and worse, they had pumped fantastic amounts of heat into the surrounding rock and iron. A column of red-hot magma led down into the ship’s depths. Reconstructing the tunnel wasn’t impossible, but it was nearly so. What was simpler was to extract the magma like stubborn cream through a wide straw, then slather the surrounding walls with better and better grades of hyperfiber, creating a vertical shaft more than a full kilometer wide.
Thirty years of digging, and three captains stood at a point as deep as the fuel tank’s deepest reaches.
In another fifty years, they were clawing their way through a wilderness of iron.
Pamir was always present. But the other captains changed faces and names every eight or ten years. Duty in the “big hole” was by no means an honor. After the first century of work and several catastrophic collapses, the Master and most of her staff had lost hope in the project. The camouflaged hatchway had been nothing but a clever distraction. The access tunnel had been destroyed by someone, yes. But throwing antimatter bomblets down a tiny hole would be easy enough. Among the tiny circle of AIs and captains who knew about the digging, none could believe there was anything worth finding down there.
Even Pamir found his imagination failing him.
In his dreams, when he saw himself digging fast with a handheld shovel, he couldn’t picture finding anything but another gout of hard black iron.
Yet the hole was Pamir’s duty, and it was a grand, consuming obsession. When he wasn’t choreographing the digging, he was badgering distant factories for improved grades of hyperfiber. When he wasn’t overseeing the pouring of a thick new stretch of wall, he was personally examining the finished stretches, from bottom to top. searching for any flaw, any inadequate seam, where the brutal pressures of the great ship threatened to buckle all of his wasted work.
Those rare moments when he climbed out of the hole and into the fuel tank felt like vacations. His aerogel island still floated on the placid hydrogen sea. Alone, he would repair the neutrino detectors and comb the last year or two of data, searching for traces of that soft signal, trying to decide if it truly came from below.
After decades of growing subtly stronger, the signal was weakening now.
There were years when it seemed to vanish altogether.
The Master and her loyal AIs, privy to the same data, came to the same rigorous solution. “It’s vanishing because it never was,” they claimed. “Anomalies have that wicked habit.”
Pamir asked permission to build new detectors, increasing his sensitivity, and he was curtly refused. When he mentioned that a second array floating inside an adjacent fuel tank would let him identify every ghost particle’s birthplace, he found agreement based upon solid technical reasoning.
“But there’s more to this issue,” the Master warned. “It’s a question of resources and general discomfort.”
“Discomfort?” he inquired.
“My discomfort,” she replied, her holo-image feigning a grimace. “Floating on the hydrogen like they do, your toys are hazards. We don’t dare pump out important amounts of fuel, since that might disturb them. And worse, what if they clog a line?”
Half a dozen easy solutions occurred to Pamir.
But before he offered any, the Mast
er added, “That’s why I want your array disassembled. And soon, please. We’ve got a major burn coming in a little more than eighteen months—a burn and subsequent flybys—and I need my hydrogen. Free of aerogel and detectors, and all the rest of it.”
“In eighteen months,” Pamir echoed.
“No,” she said, her patience worn into the thinnest of veneers. “Sooner than that. If you need, take a leave of absence from your hole. Is that understood?”
He nodded, bristled in secret, and decided what to do.
With the help of mining drones, Pamir dismantled exactly half of the array, packing up the sensors, then on his authority, sent them up to Port Alpha. He followed the fancy crates, and in a cramped assembly point beneath the outer hull, he met an ancient Remora who owed him more than one good favor.
Orleans had a splendid and ugly new face. Wide amber eyes rode on the ends of white worms, pressed flush against the lifesuit’s faceplate, and something that might have been a mouth smiled. Or grimaced. Or it changed shape for no other reason than it could.
A sloppy voice asked, “Where?”
Pamir gave the coordinates, then with his own easy smile added, “This is only for us to know”
Orleans stared through the diamond wall of a packing crate, regarding its contents with his mutated senses. Perhaps no one appreciated a good machine more than a Remora, married as they were to their own bulky suits. “You’re on a hunt for neutrinos,” he remarked. Then he added, “I don’t believe in neutrinos.”
“No?” said Pamir. “Why’s that?”
“They pass through me, but they don’t touch me.” The nearly molten face managed to nod. “I don’t believe in things that mysterious.”
Both men laughed, each for his own reason.
“Okay,” said Pamir, “but will you do this for me?”
“What about the Master below us?”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
Orleans was smiling. The expression was sudden and obvious, and with the wormy green eyes staring at the captain, his smiling voice said, “Good. I like keeping secrets from that old bitch.”
Half of the original array was deployed out on the ship’s hull, thousands of kilometers higher and some ninety degrees removed from the remaining half, tucked into the vastness between a pair of towering rocket nozzles.
Calibrations and synchronization took time. Even when there was reasonable data, it proved stubbornly uncom-pelling. The universe was awash with neutrinos, and the ship’s hyperfiber hull and bracings distorted that mayhem into a pernicious fog. Removing every source of particles took time and a narrow genius. AIs did the tedious work. When they were finished, Pamir was left staring at a vague, possibly fictitious stream. Not corning from a point, no. It was a diffuse source aligned around the ship’s core: a soft white sheen of particles rising from a region even deeper than the deep hole.
Pamir found excuses to leave the detectors in place, reasoning that he could acquire more data over the next months and years. But the neutrino stream stubbornly continued to weaken, as if it were willingly and maliciously working to make him appear foolish.
The Master lost her last shreds of patience.
“I see that half of your toys are gone,” she mentioned. “To where, I haven’t been told. But the point is that we have potential hazards drifting inside a fuel tank. Still. Against my better judgment.”
“Yes, madam.”
“It’s a little more than thirty days to the burn, Pamir.” The Master’s projection approached him, glowering. “I want the freedom to use my hydrogen. And without even the remote prospect of getting your playthings caught in my throat.”
“Yes, madam. I’ll see to it immediately.”
She wheeled in a graceful circle, then said, “Pamir.”
“Yes, madam.”
She stared at him, admitting, “I think it’s time to quit digging. Or at least leave that work with the mining drones. They know the tricks as well as you do, don’t they?”
“Nearly, madam.”
“Visit me.” She sounded almost friendly, her golden face shining down at him. “My annual feast is in four days. Join me and the rest of your colleagues, and we’ll discuss your next assignment. Is that understood?”
“Always, madam.”
The smile acquired a useful menace, and as she vanished, she warned, “The Remoras have better things to do than look after your toys. Darling.”
Over the next three days, detectors were dragged alongside the barge and taken off-line, and drones began to stow them for shipment. The sonar array and deep-dredges waited their turn. Where everything would end up, Pamir didn’t know. Probably stored inside a warehouse, and he didn’t particularly care about their fate.
Whatever happened now, he was definitely done with this place.
Because it was an order, and because it might do some good, Pamir decided to attend the Master’s feast. Returning to his quarters, he let his sonic shower carve off several layers of old flesh, then he stepped into his garden, the clean new skin beneath maturing in the false sunlight. In his absence, his llano-vibra had gone wild; thousands of mouths sang badly, a chorus of wild, unlovely sounds accompanying him as he dressed in his most ornate uniform. He tied the mysterious silver clock to his mirrored sash. A mouthful of bacterial spores guaranteed that he could eat and drink anything, his belches and farts turned to perfumes. Then he boarded his personal cap-car, and once under way, Pamir realized that he wasn’t simply tired, he was exhausted, better than a century of hard, thankless work suddenly grabbing him by the throat. He slumped, and slept.
He would have slept until he pulled up beside the Grand Hall, but an AI yanked him out of a perfectly delightful sex dream.
The dream faded, as well as his erection. On a secure channel, he opened a channel to the AI. A dry, unimpressed voice reported, “There has been, sir, a rather considerable surge in neutrino activity.”
“From where?”
“From below,” the AI replied. “With just one array, I cannot pinpoint a source—”
“Straight below?” Pamir interrupted.
“And in a region encompassing an eight-degree dispersion, yes.”
“How big of an increase?”
“I’m witnessing activity levels approximately two hundred and eighteen thousand percent greater than our previous max—”
“Show me,” Pamir grunted.
The neutrino universe engulfed him. Suns were points of light burning in a endless gray haze. The nearest sun was a red giant orbiting a massive black hole, its fiery core and the black hole’s weak accretion disk both bright. But the brightest lights belonged to the ship, tens of thousands of fusion reactors producing the ship’s essential power, the power gridwork looking to his wide eyes like a beautiful and delicate orb composed of many tiny, brightly lit pearls.
Beneath the orb was a region of blackness.
In the neutrino universe, stone and iron were theories, were ghosts, and ordinary matter could rarely be seen, or felt, or believed in.
But beneath the blackness, enshrouding the ship’s core, was a second orb. What Pamir didn’t notice at first glance became obvious, then unmistakable. Eight degrees of the sky was covered with a neutrino-bright object. Staring hard, he heard himself asking,’Could it be an engine firing? An early burn, maybe?”
That would at least explain the neutrinos.
With no small measure of disdain, the AI said, “Sir, no engine is at work, and even if there was, no reaction vessel is properly aligned. Sir.”
Pamir blinked, asking, “Is it getting brighter?”
“Since we began this conversation… it has brightened nine hundred and eleven percent, with no signs of a plateau, sir…”
Softly, to himself, Pamir said, “Shit.”
To the AI, he demanded, “Explanations.”
“I have none, sir.”
But it was a tech-AI, not a theory-spawner. Pamir squinted at the mysterious projection, noting that unlike the shi
p’s bright pearls of light, this object had a diffuse glow, almost milky, and sourceless, and in its own fashion, lovely.
Then he noticed a brighter splotch.
Ninety degrees removed, which placed it… shit, directly beneath his own deep, deep hole… five hundred kilometers deeper, and what, if anything, did that mean…?
Pamir excused the tech-AI, then contacted his crew.
The AI foremachine answered. “Where are the captains?” Pamir asked. “One is sitting with the tenth-grades. The other with the fifteenths. Sir.”
At the Master’s feast, he realized.
“What do you see?” he blurted. Then, narrowing the topic, he asked, “How’s the work progressing?”
“I see everything, and all is nominal. Sir.”
“Do you sense any odd activity?”
“None.”
“Just the same,” he responded, “put yourself and the crew on alert. Understood?”
“I don’t understand, but I will do it, sir. Is that all?”
“For now”
Pamir cleared the channel, then fought to contact the Master. But her staff were doing their reliable best to protect her on this busy day. A rubber-faced AI glared at him. “The traditional festivities have begun,” it snapped, glass eyes filled with disdain. “Only in the most severe emergencies—”
“I realize—”
“-will I allow you to interrupt the Great Master.”
“Just deliver a message to her security nexuses. Will you do that?”
“Always.”
Pamir squirted the latest data to the Master’s station, then added a quick cautionary note. “I don’t have any idea what’s happening, madam. But something is. And until someone understands it, we’d better try to be careful!”
The AI absorbed the data, the words. Then it volunteered, “If you feel this strongly, perhaps you should deliver the message in person—”
He blanked the channel, gave his cap-car a new destination, and once that destination was registered, he overrode it, effectively masking his plans.Then he sat back, feeling a momentary sense of doubt. The feast would be a waste; he wouldn’t be able to reach the Master’s ears, or mind, for hours. But instead of flying down into the hole and seeing things for himself, which was his first duty, Pamir was returning to the giant fuel tank and his aerogel raft, reasoning that if he could get half a dozen of the detectors on-line, and if he could recalibrate them in the next half-day…