The Collapsium

by Wil McCarthy

  Still, the view above them was naught but stars, the sun invisible below their feet, the planets hidden by distance and geometry. Even civilization was large, consisting mostly of empty space. Even an inertialess grappleship needed some time to cross through. To reach the orbit of Venus took them another twelve minutes, by which time they’d shed 95% of their velocity and were rapidly shedding the rest. Mercury was deep in the sun’s gravitational sink, farther from Venus than Earth was. They’d need thirty-six minutes more to reach it. From there, though, it should only be a few more minutes to reach the platform where Tamra and her entourage supposedly awaited rescue. Assuming their course was proper …

  Once again, Bruno shook Muddy awake.

  Once again, Muddy responded groggily and tried to go back to sleep.

  “Oh, no, no,” Bruno said this time. “I don’t know what you took, or how much, but I’ll wager it wasn’t what I’d picked for you. So okay, you’ve had a little break from yourself, but you get up and fly this ship now, Declarant-Philander; you’ve yet to teach me how to do it myself. Go on, take something to wake up if you like, but we need you at the controls.”

  “Hmmpf,” Muddy replied, opening bloodshot eyes to peer at him. “Where are we?”

  “Just sunward of Venus. We’ve just about half an hour to go, and you’ll need to start scanning for Tamra’s platform.”

  “Hmmpf,” Muddy said again, though in a livelier, more interested way. “That far, are we? Yes, I s-s-suppose I should be getting up, despite all the misery that entails. I can take a pill, you say?”

  “Muddy, so long as you’re awake and alert you can take any damned thing you please. We’ll sort your problems out later, right?”

  “All right, yes.”

  He struggled out of his couch, fell squarely atop a mewling Hugo, and made his way to the fax machine, which insisted on giving him a chilled electrolyte solution before dispensing any medication. From the look on Muddy’s face, it tasted none too wonderful.

  “All right?” Bruno asked, when Muddy finally settled back down into his couch.

  “Please, if you would, wait for the drugs to take effect.” Muddy’s voice was thick and slow.

  “I’ll do no such thing. Begin scanning, please.”

  “Well, aye, Your Lordship.”

  “You’ve learned sarcasm in your years away.”

  “And you’ve learned to be a prick. Beginning scan, sir. The ship is perfectly capable of doing this by itself, you know. Navigation and helm control, too. The instrument panel is just for fun, as I’m sure you’ve probably guessed. Well, it does make a few things easier—whoa. Scan complete; I’ve found a platform. Would you like a telescopic image?”

  “Please.”

  A holographic window appeared in the brick wall beside Bruno’s head. On it, he could clearly see a thin disc of opaque but gloriously shiny white. Di-clad neutronium, yes, spinning slowly in the sunlight. And, pinned to the bottom of the disc as if glued there, the somewhat larger shape of a police cruiser, whose battered hull had apparently reverted to native iron, its wellstone sheathing dead or inactivated.

  “Is the dome intact?” Bruno asked rhetorically. The clear dome that held in the platform’s air was pointed away from them at the moment, pointed straight down at the full fires of the sun.

  “Looks like someone did get to them,” Deliah observed. “It must have been a hell of a trip.”

  “And an unfortunate one,” Bruno said. “It doesn’t look as though that cruiser set down there peacefully. Look at that hull: the bending, the stress ripples. Do you see any lights on it?”

  “I’m compensating for sunlight,” Muddy volunteered. “We’re looking almost straight down. There may be lights that are simply drowned out. But I’m doubtful—that iron looks partly melted to me.”

  “Indeed,” Bruno said. “Any signs of air leakage?”

  Muddy checked. “No, sir. No signs of air at all, not even traces in the immediate vicinity.”

  “They might have spacesuits on,” Deliah said.

  “There’d still be traces,” Muddy sniffed. “That hull’s been devoid of life for at least a day. Probably longer. The air blew out and crystallized, and the s-s-solar wind has carried away the evidence.”

  “Well, then,” Bruno said. “Rest in peace, brave men and women of the Royal Constabulary. Here’s yet another tragedy to lay at the feet of Marlon Sykes.”

  Deliah pointed. “Here comes the dome. It looks intact!”

  The platform’s slow rotation was turning the shipwreck back down to face the punishing sunlight, and turning the dome—the only place that might yet harbor survivors—toward the cold blackness of space. Bruno’s heart sank. Intact or no, the dome’s contents would undergo brutal thermal cycles, heating up probably to several hundred degrees at peak, and then bleeding it all away again, bottoming out probably well below freezing. Living tissue did, of course, have its compensating mechanisms, its exothermic metabolism and its evaporative cooling, its circulatory system to refresh chilled or overheated tissues with milder fluids from the body’s interior. Ironically, human beings stood up to such punishment better than many inanimate objects, better even than the clothing and shoes that should nominally be protecting them. Indeed, the Queen and her people had allegedly survived at least six revolutions of the platform before Deliah had lost contact with them. But two weeks? It seemed impossible that even the hardiest of humans could survive that.

  Could the neutronium’s enormous mass serve as a heat sink? No, of course not—it had been basking out here in full sunlight for years! Its temperature would have equalized long ago, probably to something uncomfortably warm. Well, at least diamond was a good thermal conductor—it would pull heat from the sunward face, and radiate it away on the opposite side, in the cold shadows. That might help, though just how much …

  As the platform continued to turn, its habitable side swung slowly into view, and Bruno could see—to his incalculable relief—that beneath the diamond dome were a handful of loose, soft-looking silver cones, like little tents made of reflective fabric.

  “What’s inside those?” he demanded, pointing at them on the display. “Is anyone alive?”

  “I’m not able to tell,” Muddy answered gruffly, with no real sign of relief or concern in his voice. This was one of his symptoms—apathy regarding anyone but himself and Bruno, who still was himself in some very meaningful ways. But apathy even about Her Majesty?

  Bruno waved impatient hands. “They’re what, sheets of impervium cloth?”

  “Bunkerlite, I think, or some near equivalent. Super-reflectors, anyway.”

  “They must have gotten their fax machine working,” Deliah said, and at least the relief was evident in her voice.

  “So they could be alive,” Bruno dared to say. “Sabadell-Andorra, please attempt to establish radio contact. Muddy, are we on course to arrive there?”

  “Nearly,” Muddy said. “We’ll need a minor adjustment. I’m moving the grapple anchor to Venus …”

  “Not the inhabited areas, surely?”

  “Uh, checking. No. Not the inhabited areas.”

  “Still illegal,” Deliah noted.

  The ship bucked around them; if they hadn’t been strapped to their couches, the companions would all have tumbled like tenpins.

  “Now we are on course,” Muddy said. “Arrival in twenty minutes. There’s a problem, though—our course intercepts a loose fragment of Ring Collapsiter. What happens if that contacts the ertial shield?”

  “Oh, I’m not certain,” Bruno admitted. “And I doubt very much that we want to find out. But we do have to pass this way. For my comfort, let’s miss this thing by at least a kilometer.”

  “Aye, Lordship.” Muddy said. Then, “Unfortunately, we appear to be headed directly for it. We’ll miss by meters, if at all.”

  “Heavens! Is there anything to hook to for a plane change? North or south, it doesn’t matter; we just need to get some small distance between ourselves and the
plane of the Ring Collapsiter.”

  “Oh, sir. No. We’ve spent the last sixteen hours pulling ourselves ever more precisely into that plane, and no, there isn’t anything near at hand we can grapple to, to pull us out of it again.”

  “The poles of Venus, perhaps?”

  Muddy burst into tears. “Alas, no! We have to strike our targets with a nearly perpendicular beam. Venus itself is out of our plane, but not enough out of it. We could attach to its equator, and given enough time … Pointless. We haven’t enough time.”

  “Blast. Can we stop?”

  “Not quickly enough, sir.” Muddy wiped at his tears—a futile gesture, since the flow of fresh ones hadn’t abated. “Remember, we’re at full deceleration already. Oblivion, what a miserable ass I am. What a perfect servant of Declarant Sykes. I’ve killed you at last, sir, within reach of your goal.”

  “Oh, nonsense. Everyone makes mistakes. You’ve my distracted brain to do your thinking with, and that’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on Sykes himself. Time to impact?”

  “Um, seventeen minutes.”

  “Enough time to think of something. How about your emergency propulsion system? The compressed oxygen apparatus?”

  Muddy brightened. “I’d all but forgotten about that. Yes! What a thought, that something of my design should prove useful.” He hammered a series of calculations into the interfaces before him. “There is enough time, yes. It’s very low thrust, in comparison with our present velocity, but if we activate it immediately, we’ll miss the collapsium by half a kilometer. Is that enough?”

  Bruno tried to think of some way to confirm it, and finally—to his deep chagrin—was forced to shrug. “I don’t know, Muddy. I guess it’ll have to be.”

  chapter twenty

  in which old demons are faced

  Bruno sweated some as the wayward fragment approached. He pulled up images of it on a gravitational anomaly scanner; a thin loop of collapsium a thousand kilometers long. It should have appeared arrow-straight, just the tiniest slice of a huge circle stretching clear around the sun, but the piece had begun to pull in on itself, to twist, to curl. It seemed to be part of a ring much smaller than the collapsiter itself, one that might fit around the equator of Earth’s moon, or even a medium-sized asteroid. It was kinked in places, too, its structural rigidity slowly failing. In another few weeks it would probably curl enough to double back on itself, with probably calamitous results. Did it have a few weeks? He checked its trajectory and found it was indeed in a rather sedate solar orbit, with perihelion nearly a million kilometers above the chromopause. An orbit that might continue indefinitely, in the absence of disturbing influences.

  There were influences, though; the nearby construction platform, for one. And his sensors picked up all sorts of other, indistinct mass concentrations at the edges of his detection range. No doubt there were a thousand other fragments just like this one, caroming about in the limited space inside Mercury’s orbit. Eventually, this fragment would run afoul of one of those others, and its orbit would ratchet upward or downward. Eventually, one of them would surely fall straight in. There could be no doubt of that.

  The backup thrusters hummed; hundreds of tiny, temporary channels through the wellstone outer hull, accelerating heavy oxygen ions, one by one, to relativistic speeds. This, too, was probably illegal: an exhaust much deadlier than the typical fusion helium, and deadlier at a much greater range, too. They could probably cook a human from a light-second away.

  “Thirty s-s-seconds to closest approach,” Muddy warned.

  “Hmm. Here we go, then.”

  “It’s been an honor working with you, sir.”

  “Likewise,” Deliah chipped in.

  “Oh, nonsense. I couldn’t have done any of this alone. We all have the greatest respect for each other, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Twenty seconds.”

  He became acutely aware of his breathing. He wondered if it was loud, if it maybe should be a little slower and quieter.

  “Ten seconds. Five. Four, three, two …”

  And then, suddenly, there it was in the window above them—a long, slender piece glowing brightly with the familiar Cerenkov blue. The ertial shield hadn’t twitched in the slightest, hadn’t reacted at all. The collapsium itself seemed similarly unaffected, not falling in on itself in their wake or anything. They continued past, seeing more and more of it, the fragment growing longer and dimmer and loopier in the window view. Then the last of it trailed by, and they were in clear space again.

  “Backup thrusters off,” Muddy said. The humming stopped.

  Deliah let a long breath out. “That wasn’t so bad.”

  “No,” Bruno agreed. Not bad at all. Some day, he’d have to work out the theory of it all, the precise interactions between collapsium and hypercollapsite. The weak link was surely the collapsium, it being so much less dense, so much more subject to gravity and inertia and the various other interactions of the zero-point field. His fear had been the crushing of its lattice, and its resulting reversion to a chain of heavy, disconnected, uncontrollable hypermasses capable of all sorts of harm. But perhaps the two could live together in harmony after all. At half a kilometer’s distance, anyway!

  “Platform contact in two minutes,” Muddy said. He seemed to enjoy counting down event times—a task at once useful and easy and safe.

  “Good,” Bruno acknowledged. “Can we have the telescope image back?”

  Wordlessly, Muddy reached for his interface. The window reappeared, now showing a much larger, more detailed version of what they’d seen before. The dome was there, and the mirrored tents beneath it. Now there were other things visible as well: light-energy conversion panels with cables running across the diamond deck until they slipped under the edges of superreflective cloth. Discs of various color arranged in neat rows outside the tents, as if occupied in some sort of experiment. And one image that was both horrifying and uplifting: the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Horrifying because, well, it was the blackened, burned skeleton of a human being. Uplifting because there was only one. Had the survivors dragged a fallen comrade outside, to burn rather than rot? It lent credence to the idea that there were survivors down there.

  “My God,” Deliah said.

  That initial view had been oblique, almost edge-on, so it was difficult to make out any telling details as the platform turned away, turned its other, blank side to face them.

  Now the shipwreck as well betrayed new details; he could clearly make out the lines of an airlock in its iron skin, and a seam where two plates had warped apart. There was a neat, circular hole through the side, too, down low where it was nearly hidden by shadow. As the platform revolved—and grew, for they were approaching it rapidly—he could see a matching hole down low on the ship’s other side.

  He experienced an instant chilling of the blood. He’d seen holes like that before, in the ruins of Sykes Manor. Holes created by a weapon, a nasen beam. That ship hadn’t crashed onto the platform, hadn’t limped its way here and quietly expired; it had been murdered in the very act of rescue!

  “This is a trap,” he said, as coolly and evenly as possible. “Someone is watching the platform, waiting to pick off any ship that approaches.”

  “My God!” Deliah squawked, with much greater conviction.

  “I knew it!” Muddy wailed, suddenly tearful again. “I knew I’d get us killed! Declarant-Philander, there’s nothing we can do! No place else to grapple to, not in the time allotted!”

  “To the collapsium fragment above us?” Bruno suggested quickly.

  “No!” Deliah said. “It’s muon-contaminated—it’ll come apart in seconds.”

  “We will rendezvous with the platform,” Muddy insisted. “Nothing can prevent that now, no matter what we grapple to. Inertia can only be bent so far.”

  Bruno pounded a fist into his palm. “Blast it, a nasen beam isn’t easy to aim! How’s our oxygen supply?”

  “Fine, sir,” Muddy wearily replied.


  “Good. Set your thrusters on a program of random firing. Stay on trajectory, but let our arrival time float, plus or minus a few seconds. That may confuse the targeting mechanisms. They don’t have to miss us by much, so long as they miss us!”

  Soon, an annoyingly staccato hum commenced in the outer hull. As before, no sense of motion resulted from it.

  “Where is this nasen beam?” Deliah wanted to know.

  Bruno shrugged. “I couldn’t say. On a ship, probably, and not too near, or we’d’ve detected it already. It could be quite distant, in which case it likely wouldn’t fire until we’d matched courses with the platform. A known position—you see?—regardless of light-lag delays. If we complete our rescue quickly, the beam’s … controller may not realize we’re gone until after it’s fired.”

  “Thirty seconds to contact,” Muddy whined. “I’m scared, Bruno. I don’t want to do this!”

  “Turn us!” Bruno shot back, with sudden inspiration. “Make sure our hatch is facing the dome! And try to hit as close to the dome’s base as possible, without endangering the neutronium cladding. It’s all right to hit a little harder, just be sure we stick when we hit, so we can start melting through immediately. This is for your safety, Muddy; as you say, we will hit.”

  “Ten seconds. Oh, God, can’t we just let them die?”

  The impact was sudden and severe; Bruno was thrown against his restraints and slammed back into his couch again. Muddy shrieked, and even Deliah cried out in distress.

  Bruno’s own fear was a brusque, impatient business. He was frustrated, more than a little bit angry at being forced to such extremity, and there was a substantial part of his mind that dreamily refused to believe any of this was happening at all. His thoughts, such as they were, were focused on Tamra. In those hurried moments as he threw off his harness and leaped for the door, his own safety concerned him mainly to the extent that it was linked with hers—he couldn’t very well save her if he got himself killed. So he moved very quickly until he was poised to open the door, then froze in place.