They spent the next two hours going through logistical details. As versatile as a Javelin was for troop delivery and air support, using it for an extended period in hard vacuum would push its operating envelope. The deep-space booster would provide the extra consumables and equipment necessary for closed-loop life support. But even with the additional resources, they still needed to cover specific responsibilities and procedures. Space tended to be unforgiving.
Wyatt finally looked at his watch. He had covered the key aspects of the mission and the energy level in the room was ebbing. Time to wrap up. “The next transit window is in six days. We have a lot to do between now and then. Any questions?”
The team remained silent.
“Then let’s get to work.”
***
Wyatt strolled through Cromwell’s A-ring until he arrived at the carrier’s nondenominational chapel. Poking his head through the hatch found the berth deserted except for Father Bradley, who was wiping down the tiny altar with a rag and a bottle of cleaning fluid.
“Father?”
Bradley unbent himself with obvious effort. “Wyatt. Good God, you’re back to duty.”
“Yes I am. With a few new parts,” he said, tapping his leg.
Bradley shuffled over with the gait of someone who had spent too much time in microgravity. At first Wyatt thought he meant to shake his hand, but the priest quickly put his arm around him and clasped him tightly. “So good to see you, Lieutenant, new parts and all. How’s your family?”
Wyatt stiffened.
Bradley took a step back and appraised him. “Didn’t approve?”
“It’s been ... difficult.”
“I’m sure it has.” Bradley shuffled over to one of the tiny benches and motioned for Wyatt to sit. “I don’t suppose you want to talk about it.”
“Not really. I did my part trying to explain coming back. I can’t make them understand it.”
The priest bobbed his head up and down, nodding. “RESIT is a calling, Wyatt. A lifetime in space, traveling distances that boggle the mind. It takes great discipline and sacrifice. Rare to have a spouse, children, grow roots. At least, while you’re in. That’s difficult for many to accept.” He tugged his vestments. “Believe me, I know about this.”
Wyatt chuckled. “I think you got hit twice, Father. RESIT and the priesthood.”
Bradley winked at him. “So what else is on your mind? Or did you come down here just to say hello?”
“No. Well—partially,” he corrected. Wyatt sat in silence for a moment. “I did want to come see you. But I was hoping to get your take on something.”
“Go ahead.”
“The major isn’t assigning us back to Vigorous. He gave us a recon patrol. My first mission back and I get a bunch of leftover table scraps.”
“And why do you think that?”
“I think he’s questioning whether I’m ready. Whether I have my head together.” He stared at the deck. “Half my squad got killed on my last mission, Father. Plus the flight crew.”
“Your other family,” Bradley offered.
“Exactly.”
“Do you mind me asking if you think you’re ready?”
Wyatt stared at the small altar at the front of the berth as a reminder of where he was. He could talk freely here. It was why he came.
“I thought I was, Father. I mean, something bad happens, you dust yourself off, right? I’ve never had a problem before. But for whatever reason, I’m struggling right now. It was my call to launch that raid. It was aggressive. I planned it. We had a chance to give the Oscars a bloody nose.” He shook his head. “I cost us six lives. For what? For a million kilos of liquid nitrogen?”
The old priest studied him.
“Wyatt. I’m glad you’re a person of faith. It makes what I’m about to say just a little easier.”
“What’s that?”
“Suck it up.”
Wyatt raised his eyebrows in surprise. “That doesn’t sound very priestly.”
“Maybe it’s not. The point is, things will work out. God forgives. You need to forgive yourself.”
Wyatt stared some more at the altar. Even though it was against regulations for nondenominational affiliation, Father Bradley had hung a small figurine of a crucified Jesus Christ on the front.
“You’re not convinced you’re worthy of forgiveness, Wyatt?”
“I don’t know.”
“Wyatt.” Bradley’s voice was heavy with disapproval. “Come with me.”
The priest led him past the red curtain behind the altar to a small porthole. “I want you to look out there and tell me what you see.”
Wyatt sniffed a laugh. “Major Beck already pulled this one on me, Father.”
“Indulge me. What do you see?”
“I see a strange place for a window.”
“Really? Almost every cathedral on Earth has stained glass windows that depict some manner of God’s creation. Usually that means something biblical, to show off the wonder of the divine.” He paused. “Isn’t this the same?”
The curtain behind them helped cut out the compartment lighting. This porthole faced away from Tiamat and into the darkness of space. Wyatt saw the luminescent haze of the Milky Way in a broad stripe that cut from top to bottom.
Bradley put his hand on Wyatt’s shoulder and spoke in a whisper. “Look at this great, vast universe of ours. Fourteen billion years old. We live eighty, ninety years if we’re lucky. What do we know? We human beings are tiny and insignificant, Wyatt. We’re ignorant and foolish. We place our faith in ancient texts we believe to be divinely inspired. And why? Because God is so beyond our understanding that he had to dumb it down for us.
“But if you look closely, you can see God’s fingerprints everywhere. Galaxies out of the emptiness. Light out of darkness. Energy from matter. There’s an elegance that displaces the entropy of the void.”
A field of a thousand stars drifted in a lazy, counterclockwise spiral. Wyatt’s reflection stared back at him from the glass.
“God is there, Wyatt. A God who loves and forgives. All you have to do is believe in him and accept him.”
“I do believe, Father.”
“Good!” Bradley exclaimed. He swatted Wyatt on the back. “Because the atheists think all this happens randomly. And if that’s the case, well, I’ll be taking that Mercedes that’s going to spontaneously assemble itself in my driveway any day now.”
Wyatt turned from the porthole and laughed. “Thanks, Father.”
The old priest clasped his arms. “You can honor the dead, Wyatt. But God didn’t create you from the chaos to have a pity party. Have faith in him. Have faith in Beck. Most of all, have faith in yourself.”
Wyatt rubbed his eyes with his fingertips.
“I want is just a chance to make it right.”
“God doesn’t provide what’s wanted. He provides what’s needed.”
6
Gibraltar Gate
Proxima Centauri
13 February 2272
The cramped interior of the Javelin already felt claustrophobic.
Cargo boxes secured to the deck conspired with overstuffed cargo nets to steal the precious space belonging to the troopers. Between his eight-person squad, two pilots, and crew chief, Wyatt wondered how long it would take for the short tempers to appear. He could see several of them taking advantage of the microgravity to tuck themselves into odd corners away from the others. They were a U-Boat crew of the future, sweating and stifling inside a tin can, patrolling a sea of never-ending black.
“Lieutenant, we’re lining up for our approach,” Chief Warrant Officer Teo Parata called from the flight deck.
Wyatt had never worked with Teo before, but the pilot spoke with an easy confidence that helped him relax. Wyatt unbuckled himself and floated through the cockpit hatch. The flight deck felt focused and businesslike, with the pilot and copilot’s chairs placed side by side in front of a panel full of discrete controls.
Teo was b
usy cycling through the telemetry displayed on the control panel’s holo monitor. In a testament to personalization, he had placed a tiny cactus on the top of the panel inside a zero-gee bulb full of water and dirt.
“You don’t use a neural stub?” Wyatt asked.
“No, they give me a headache. I like being able to see out of both eyes, not have one of them turned into a computer display.”
“Fair enough.”
“Plus, our friend here is doing all the flying,” Teo said, pointing through the cockpit glass at the William Tell. The freighter stretched alongside them a hundred meters in either direction, connected by a docking boom at the Javelin’s top hatch. Floodlights illuminated the vessel and burned away the night. In the distance, Wyatt saw two more freighters that gleamed like lonely silver specks.
“How long until we go through?”
“Thirty minutes. Really light on the schedule this time. We’re third out of four, assuming our ride here doesn’t get cold feet.”
“He won’t. Captain Holland might be pissed about dropping a cargo capsule to make room for us, but he’ll do his job.”
“Aye, sir.”
Wyatt ducked back out and updated Laramie on the timeline. A minute later he heard her shouting orders at the team. “T-minus thirty, people. I want everybody in pressure sleeves, with CORE helmets ready, so hit the head now. Comm check in five. Carlos, quit your moaning, you sound like a little girl.”
Card games and dozing gave way to gearing up and buckling in. Wyatt peeled off his utilities so that he could wriggle into his own pressure sleeve. The snug bodysuit would keep his insides from squeezing out if the cabin became exposed to vacuum. Once he had it on, a flip of an actuator switch constricted hundreds of shape-memory coils like a multithreaded tourniquet woven into the fabric. The compression bordered on discomfort. But as Wyatt loosened his arms in wide circles, he was thankful he didn’t need to don the hardsuits necessary for EVAs.
The interior light switched to red as a reminder that they were headed into an operational area. Wyatt pulled on his CORE helmet and took a moment to test the tactical HUD. Pressed against his eye socket, the neural stub hijacked his vision and mapped seven green chevrons lined up neatly behind his position.
“Laramie.”
“What is it, LT?”
“Why are you and Corpsman Watanabe sitting backward?”
“Because they don’t make ‘em like they used to, LT.”
Wyatt broke the seal and flipped up his rebreather. He saw Laramie and Isi using their combat knives to pry away some sort of obstruction that kept the seat from flipping down. He suddenly realized Laramie had been talking about the Javelin, not his new trooper.
“Gibraltar’s powering up,” Teo said. “Want to watch?”
Now that was something you didn’t get to see every day, Wyatt thought. He unbuckled himself and poked back onto the flight deck. Ahead of them, a distant white ring flashed station-keeping lights.
“That’s the gate?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Looks small.”
“It’s far away.” Teo turned to the copilot. “Dave, what is it, forty meters in diameter?”
“Sounds right.”
“See? Big. Though it’ll still be tight—that docking boom from the Tell has us sticking out like a broken finger. Might scratch the paint.”
“Like I said. Small.”
Teo threw him a distasteful glance. “No more windows for you.”
The quantum gate grew in size as they approached. One of the other freighters began to cross the threshold and glided silently through without so much as a shimmy. Wyatt laughed to himself at the anticlimactic nature of it all—no fire, no lightning, no cymbals crashing. A circus seal jumping through a hoop received more fanfare.
Then the freighter ahead of them turned to port, and it began to disappear past the edge of the ring.
The realization of what he’d just witnessed hit Wyatt. This wasn’t a circus hoop. This was a hole in space-time, a grommet through the fabric of the universe.
“Whoa, that’s really freaky.”
“I was thinking the same thing,” Teo said. “Holographic universe, exposed.”
“Holographic what?” a voice asked.
Wyatt turned and saw the crew chief peeking through the hatch. “This new to you?”
“Yes, sir.”
Wyatt frowned. How to explain months of astrodynamics training in as few words as possible? “You know what quantum entanglement is?”
“I’ve heard of it, sir.”
“You take a pair of quanta and separate them. What you find is that they still influence each other—whatever state one is in, the other is in an opposite state. This happens no matter how far apart they are. It can be light-years. Anything about that bother you, Chief?”
The crew chief shook his head.
“They shouldn’t be able to talk to each other that fast. General relativity says the speed limit of the universe is the speed of light. Yet these particles—entangled particles—can somehow influence each other instantaneously. ‘Spooky action at a distance’, according to Einstein.”
“Okay.”
“Turns out, those two particles aren’t really light-years apart. We think of the universe as three-dimensional. But even though we describe gravitational mechanics in three dimensions, quantum mechanics can be calculated with just two. Those 2-D models still map exactly over the other models. In other words, you have all the information you need to make the universe run with just a set of 2-D calculations. This is the same way a holo monitor works—the projection is really 2-D, but there’s extra encoding in there that makes it look 3-D to our eyes. With me?”
“Sounds really weird.” The crew chief showed an obvious struggle in keeping up.
“It is. I’m basically telling you that we live inside a hologram. Spatial distance is a derived property. So, if we want to travel light years from one star system to another, all we need to do is skip the ‘spatial’ part. That’s what a quantum gate does. It turns our particles inside out. We blink out of existence here and blink back at the other end.”
The chief glanced evasively at the deck, discomfort on his face.
“You know what the rub is, though?” Wyatt was having fun now. “The gates only come in pairs because they have to be entangled. You know how you get one of the gates to the far end of where you’re going, right?”
“How?”
“You haul it there the hard way. It took Project Longshot sixty years to reach Proxima.”
“Oh.” The chief frowned. “I’ll stick to fixing Javelins, then.”
“That’s right, brother!” Carlos shouted from the cargo bay. “We’re just gun monkeys and vacuum junkies! Leave all that other crap to someone else.”
Outside the Javelin, the next freighter began to pass through the quantum gate. Wyatt watched again as the spacecraft transitioned to the other side, still sitting in plain view despite existing nearly a fifth of a light-year away. It soon disappeared altogether as it moved past the edge of the ring.
“Our turn coming up,” Teo said.
The William Tell approached at a brisk clip, its navigation systems synched with those of Gibraltar Gate. Wyatt began to feel uncomfortable as the ring grew in size. He had traveled through quantum gates before. But Sean’s questions gnawed at him, striking a chord with the alien way of thinking one had to adopt to understand how the gates worked. Could everything he saw, touched, or tasted really be just some kind of veneer over the true nature of existence? The air he breathed. The jump seat against his back. All of them, an assembly of strange subatomic particles held together in even stranger energy fields. These glimpses into the mathematical substrate of space-time—were they really the fingerprints of God, as Father Bradley suggested?
“Ten. Nine. Eight ...”
The station lights on the ring housing blinked at them.
“Three. Two. One. Transitioning now.”
The bow of the Will
iam Tell crossed the threshold. Wyatt held his breath as the ring passed overhead. Then it was over.
“Congratulations, Lieutenant,” Teo said. “You’re now officially in Alpha Centauri A.”
“Remind me to get my passport stamped,” Wyatt said. “Give me a sitrep. What do you see?”
Teo studied the telemetry from the Javelin’s observation gear. “Three freighters so far, all ours. No return shipping. No station patrol craft.”
“Any radio contact from the gate crew?”
“Some scattered noise from Gibraltar, back in Proxima. Nothing from Thermopylae on this side. Everything’s dark.”
Wyatt scowled. Very strange.
“Fourth freighter’s through.”
“Put me through to Captain Holland,” Wyatt said.
Teo tapped his way through some controls until he had the bridge of the William Tell on the line. “Over to you.”
“Captain,” Wyatt began. “What do you make of our arrival?”
“This isn’t going according to protocol, Lieutenant.” Holland’s voice telegraphed his anxiety. “Thermopylae Control should contact us and assign a transition vector. We haven’t received anything. We’re sitting here making a big traffic jam right in front of the gate.”
Teo’s holo monitor showed a tactical display of the nearby vicinity, with multiple blue chevrons indicating the different positions of spacecraft. One of the freighters, Mozambique, was continuing to turn in a wide arc and had almost completed a circle.
“What is the William Tell doing?”
“I’m on a heading at forty by minus-ten, which takes us to Juliet orbit.”
“Okay. Stand by.” Wyatt switched to his command channel. “Laramie, get up here.”
“You got it, LT.”
Twenty seconds later, Laramie crowded into the flight deck hatch. Thermopylae Gate had receded to the size of a thumbnail in the holo monitor. Wyatt briefed her on the situation.
“What’s next, boss?” Laramie asked.
“There’s supposed to be a crew directing traffic from onboard that quantum gate, but they’re not doing it. I want to know what’s going on. Get the team ready for a boarding action. We’ll detach from William Tell and take the Javelin back to Thermopylae.”
Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1) Page 4