In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

“Charge rings. Bring us to one-two-six-point-eight-seven-one by zero-zero-one-point-three,” Miguel repeated.

  “Come about to one-two-six-point-eight-seven-one by zero-zero-one-point-three, aye sir. Charging rings,” Broadchurch echoed back.

  A slight tremor ran through the deck plating as reaction control thrusters at the bow and stern lit off and gently aligned the grand ship with its destination, then counterburned to cancel their momentum.

  “On trajectory, mum,” Broadchurch said.

  “Sat has cleared the gooey zone. Sky is clear,” Mattu reported. “We’re green to blow the bubble.”

  “Thank you, Scopes. XO, at your pleasure.”

  Miguel nodded. “Helm, blow the bubble.”

  “Blowing the bubble, aye sir.” Broadchurch reached up a finger to their holographic display, touched a floating icon and, with very little fanfare, bent the known laws of physics to within a micrometer of their breaking point.

  Behind the Ansari’s forward hull, where all the perishable organisms resided much of the time, lay the engineering hull. Inside it were most of the ship’s mechanicals, long-term stores, drone launch tubes, and of course, negative matter condensers. Mounted to the outside of the engineering hull were three enormous rings stacked one after the other like hula hoops. These were the Alcubierre rings, the innovation that had made FTL travel possible. Like poles on a magnet, a ship needed two rings to create the stressed spacetime field bubble that allowed them to skirt Einstein’s speed limit. Like all warships in the CCDF larger than a corvette, the Ansari held one ring in reserve in case of malfunction or battle damage. In a civilian ship, this would be an unjustifiable extravagance in both tonnage and cost, but in the harsh math of military preparedness, two was one and one was none, so it only followed that three was two. The largest assault carriers went so far as to mount four rings for a fully redundant set.

  At the push of the virtual icon at the helmsperson station, banks of capacitors inside the engineering hull released a torrent of energy through three structural pylons into the stream of negative-matter plasma channels and radial gravity-well accelerators inside the rings themselves. Outside the rings in a rough sphere reaching out to five hundred kilometers and change, spacetime had a little fit as it tried to sort out exactly how it was supposed to be shaped. This was, in centuries-old naval parlance, the “gooey zone,” so named because the effect this warping of spacetime had on anything or anyone unfortunate enough to be trapped within it were not conducive to continued mechanical or biological functioning as they tended to end up the consistency of chunky peanut butter.

  However, inside the gooey zone, the Ansari pinched off a perfect little bubble of universe of its own. Several things happened then that maybe six living people actually understood. The Ansari stood perfectly, absolutely still inside its little bubble universe, while powerful gravitational eddies stretched spacetime at the bow, and compressed it at the stern. Twisting the very fabric of the universe in such a violent and unnatural way came at a price. Nearly an entire recon platform’s worth of antimatter fuel had to be annihilated just to charge the rings to create the bubble in the first place.

  Pulled from ahead and pushed from behind, the bubble universe took off like a scalded cat. At its center, the Ansari sat, perfectly serene and immobile. It was impossible for anything to travel through space faster than light, and would remain so until the death of the universe. But space didn’t actually care what it did inside itself. A simple-enough idea that had regardless taken centuries to take from bar napkin, to blueprints, to hardware.

  Trapped inside its bubble, the Ansari was completely cut off from the outside. The inside surface of the bubble reflected any light or other active energy emissions. If the ship had portals, a crewmember could wave and see a funhouse mirror image of themselves waving back. Anything inside the bubble was nigh-invulnerable to anything in the universe outside, except against sufficiently intense gravitational shearing, such as the forces found inside a star or black hole, which could collapse the bubble prematurely, then collapse everything inside it permanently.

  The downside was, as long as they remained inside it, the Ansari and her crew were completely blind. They couldn’t see out to know if they were on course or to see approaching dangers. They couldn’t make any midcourse corrections. They just had to trust in their astrogation and hope for the best until it was time to pop the bubble and see where they ended up.

  In the case of this jump, they didn’t have long to wait. The Ansari covered the twenty-six light-minutes of the journey in less than four seconds. The precision necessary to drop them exactly where they wanted to go was beyond human reflexes. A preset countdown that ran out to eleven decimal places reached zero, and the same sequence that created and sustained the bubble ran in reverse, collapsing it in an instant almost too short to measure. The ship reappeared in the “real” universe at a dead stop.

  A small bow shock of gamma rays burst out and continued on in the Ansari’s direction of travel at the speed of light, the remains of the handful of dust grains and stray high-energy particles that had gotten trapped on the outer surface of the bubble during the jump. Over such a “short” distance, the effect was minimal. But it compounded the longer one traveled in Alcubierre. After a few light-years, the burst of gamma rays was powerful enough to destroy ships or punch holes in atmospheres. You really had to be careful where you pointed an Alcubierre bubble when it popped.

  “Jump complete,” Broadchurch reported.

  Susan worked her suddenly sore jaw. Something about Alcubierre transitions always made it clench involuntarily. A succession of ship’s doctors had told her that was impossible and it was psychosomatic, but it stubbornly kept happening anyway. “Stand down alpha and gamma rings,” she said while working her mandible.

  “Stand down alpha and gamma rings,” Miguel echoed.

  “Standing down alpha and gamma rings.”

  “What’s our position?” Susan asked.

  “Coming in now, Captain. We are … nine hundred forty-seven kilometers sunward of grid marker six-two-seven-dash-three-eight at zero-point-one-nine-meters-per-second closing rate.”

  “Not bad, Charts,” Susan said with satisfaction. “You’re a few dozen klicks past the line. Do you think you can beat that on the next jump?”

  “I will certainly try, mum.”

  “Weapons, where are we?”

  “CiWS is hot and streaming data from the active array,” Warner answered crisply. “Decoys and countermeasures on standby. Missiles on standby. Ready to bring up the laser and railgun systems.”

  “I think a ship-killer missile half again as big as a combat drone might be a little overkill, Guns.”

  “Overkill is my job, mum.”

  Susan shook her head. Some things were universal among weapons officers. “Scopes, bang away with the active sensors. Damn our EM signature. If there’s something hiding out here, flush it out.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Also, launch four armed drone platforms and establish a perimeter of a half million klicks at bearings zero, ninety, one-eighty, and two-seventy relative to the eclectic. Don’t bother stealthing them, go full active sensors.”

  “Bait, mum?” Mattu asked.

  “Something like that.”

  “Yes’m. Armed drones at compass points flat to the eclectic. Should be ready to launch in t-minus ninety seconds.”

  “Good. XO, alert Flight Ops to get a shuttle and an EVA team ready. I want them in vacuum in fifteen minutes.”

  “Mission profile?”

  “Retrieval. Bring back the biggest piece of Thirteen they can find for inspection.”

  “We’re in an unsecured combat zone. Marines’ll probably ask for combat air patrol to run cover for their bird.”

  Susan considered this for a moment. “That’s fair. Scopes, launch another armed drone and hand it off to Flight Ops.”

  “Launch CAP drone for the recovery bird, yes’m,” Mattu answered.

  S
atisfied, Miguel moved away to get on a com line to the small craft bay.

  “Okay people, we’ve cut the hole in the ice and dropped our line in. Now it’s time to lean back and wait for a nibble.”

  “I thought we were the fish,” CL Nesbit said dryly.

  “Yeah.” Susan allowed him the point. “I guess I lost track of the metaphor.”

  TWO

  It was Tyson Abington’s favorite part of the day: when a hush came over the office tower as its occupants filed out from another day’s labors for a night of well-earned relaxation with their friends and loved ones.

  For Tyson, it was one of the few moments of calm during the day when he could reflect and appreciate everything he and long generations of his family had built. His two-meter frame stood up against the transparent aluminum observation window of his penthouse office, close enough he almost left a nose print on the cool metal.

  The transparent metal was ten centimeters thick, yet clear as a still pond. It was seamless, and required no structural bracing, being more than strong enough to carry unaided the weight of the dozen engineering floors and communications antennas above it. Both electrical power and data passed through it wirelessly. The optical clarity and lack of framing made the illusion that the ceiling was simply floating overhead incredibly convincing. It was easy to forget the “glass” was there at all. An expensive illusion to create, but on nights like this, Tyson knew the extravagance had been worth every nudollar.

  The space took up the entire two hundred and eighty-eighth floor of the Immortal Tower in the heart of downtown Methuselah, capital of the entire planet of Lazarus. The nomenclature sounded ominous, but its history was quite innocent, bordering on cheeky. At the dawn of the company, Tyson’s forbearer, the legendary Reginald Abington, had been a brilliant engineer and savvy businessman. He’d been the first to perfect and patent an industrial-scale method to condense negative matter using overlapping gravity wave interference. The resulting company was named Abington Gravitonic Engineering, or AGE for short. Over the generations, AGE became Ageless Corp., and once Ageless set up shop on its very own colony world, well, the names sort of picked themselves.

  For reasons of pride and exclusivity, the Immortal Tower was the tallest building in Methuselah. It would remain so in perpetuity, on account the Abington family owned all of the airspace above seven hundred and fifty meters inside the city limits, and anyone that wanted to build above that height had to pay a monthly licensing fee that increased logarithmically with each additional floor.

  Technically, Ageless owned the airspace, as all the transtellars were publicly traded companies by law. But the Abingtons had managed to maintain a controlling interest over the centuries through clever maneuvering and more than one “incentivized” marriage proposal. Ageless wasn’t the largest transtellar, or the wealthiest, but it was one of the oldest, and the most stable. It had provided for its customers, shareholders, and employees in equal measure for centuries. Tyson took immense pride in his family legacy, and felt the weight of his responsibilities as its newest steward every day.

  He inhaled deeply, the native air laced with the slight copper smell that somehow survived even the best HEPA filtration. Between the shield mountain ranges that protected Methuselah from the gale winds of the rest of the planet’s equatorial regions, the pulsing heart of the city spread out before him. It was electric with trains of transport pods, buzzing drones, and blinking pedestrian crossings. The lower commercial and residential districts mingled with green patches of parks, and blue rivers cut through the entertainment district both to provide recreation and cooler temperatures in the city’s hot summers. Thin, needlelike towers raced up to the seven-hundred-fifty-meter “ceiling,” many connected by a latticework of aerial walkways that let the people working inside save the trouble of going all the way down to street level and up again just to attend a meeting.

  Stretching down Shensing Boulevard directly in front of him, “Embassy Row” played host to the Lazarus headquarters of the other major transtellars, as well as two towers jointly owned by half a dozen of the smaller consortiums. It also had the only two legitimate embassies on the entire planet: the UN embassy representing the interests of the governments of Earth, and the Xre embassy, which had stood empty since the day it had been built more than seventy years earlier. Tyson considered them both equally egregious wastes of high-value real estate, even if he never voiced the thought publicly.

  Methuselah was a thriving company town of almost six million people and nearly as many AIs. A blooming city in the desert.

  His city.

  Tyson often fancied himself a gardener in concrete and steel, tending to a forest of commerce. Things grew tall on Lazarus. With only three-fifths of Earth’s gravity, everything from plants to people to buildings to rockets had an easier time reaching for the sky.

  Which made it all the more surprising when things came crashing back down again. An alert in a search algorithm he’d programmed into the office during the first hour of his occupancy flashed in the window. The trading day was over, but overnight trades were projecting a sudden drop in Ageless’s stock price of sixty-three nudollars, well outside the typical background variation.

  At that exact moment, a camera drone flying the colors and symbol of the Interstellar News Network dropped down from somewhere above his floor and hovered at eye level, recording his facial expression with its binocular cameras in gloriously unflattering UHD.

  “Sir, there’s a problem,” the voice of his personal assistant, Paris, said almost simultaneously.

  “Yes, there’s an INN drone violating the airspace outside my office, for starters.”

  “Of course, sir. Let me just…”

  A second later, a micro missile little bigger than a pen came screeching down from a Triple-A battery on the roof, struck the camera drone dead center, and blew it into four spinning pieces. Tyson watched them tumble toward the ground for a moment, then returned his attention to the matter at hand.

  “Thank you, Paris,” Tyson said, the warm feeling in his stomach instantly replaced with ice in his veins. “Bring yourself onscreen, please.”

  Paris’s false-depth image assembled itself from wire frame to full rendering in less than a second, her svelte body, tailored business suit, horn-rimmed glasses, and pinned-back hair hovering on the other side of the clear aluminum window like a particularly alluring ghost.

  “What’s happened?” he asked. “Why are we down sixty points an hour after the bell?”

  “Sixty-three,” she corrected. She was very precise. AIs always were. “A bulk freighter, the Preakness, just arrived from our colony in Teegarden’s Star. There’s been a bacterial outbreak among the colonists. So far, the strain has proven resistant to all available antibiotic treatments.”

  Teegarden’s Star hardly ranked as a proper colony. None of the little red dwarf’s four planets were candidates for terraforming, nor their moons. But the night side of the tidally locked innermost planet was a veritable gold mine of rare earths and precious metals. Body-for-body, the mining operation there was one of the more lucrative operations Ageless had going in human-controlled space, even if it was only a small percentage of the company’s total revenue stream.

  “How many employees are infected?”

  “Well, all of them, sir,” Paris said with uncharacteristic hesitation. “There have already been three fatalities.”

  “Fatalities?” Tyson barked uncomprehendingly. “From a bacteria?”

  “It appears to be quite virulent. And it’s proven difficult to isolate, due to an airborne vector.”

  “How many employees in situ?”

  “Three hundred and six, not including the three fatalities.”

  “Shit! How are we only hearing about this now?”

  “Shipments to and from Teegarden occur quarterly, sir. This was the first ship to come from there in two and a half months.”

  “Why wasn’t a skip courier sent immediately?” Tyson raged.

/>   “…”

  “Well?”

  “The board of directors decided a permanently attached skip boat was an ‘unnecessary extravagance’ for a stable, low-priority outpost, sir. You signed the recall yourself.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes, sir. Last year.”

  Tyson blushed. “Fine, rescind that order immediately. How did someone else hear this report from my ship before I did?”

  “Are we sure that happened?”

  “Your software has a better explanation for the sixty-three-point drop in our overnights?”

  “No, sir. I suppose not.”

  “Well then? Who read this first and how?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Abington,” Paris said. She only used “Mr. Abington” when he was pushing her too hard. Tyson tried to calm himself.

  “I’m sorry, Paris. It’s not your fault, of course. Just … dig into the network and see what you can find out. Bribe some of the other AIs if you have to. I’m releasing five hundred thousand to your discretionary account.”

  “Thank you, sir. I will do my best.”

  “I know.” He rubbed a temple. “Call up a dozen of our best infectologists and epidemiologists and get them on a fast courier boat back to Teegarden. Full hazard pay for the duration and a five-thousand-share bonus when they fix this thing. Get them all the gear they ask for. And make sure it’s all in the press release. We need to be proactive about this thing and make sure everyone sees us doing it.”

  “Of course, sir. That’s an excellent response. There’s just one item you’re overlooking.”

  “And that is?”

  “The bulk freighter, sir.”

  “Yes? What about it?”

  “It needs to be quarantined, both the cargo and the crew.”

  “But we’ll lose an entire quarter’s worth of revenue from the mines!”

  “And if we don’t, we risk losing Methuselah, maybe all of Lazarus. Well, you squishy meat puppets at the least.”

  “Was that a joke, Paris?”

  “I’ve been practicing. Was it good?”