Here, their altitude was low enough to whiz around the entire diameter of Ignis Rubeli in less than a day. It was disturbing to be skimming so close to the broiling surface, the braided cords of plasma shifting in the volatile photospheric magnetics like an expanse of maturing wheat in howling crosswinds. The less rational side of her mind believed that they could not orbit at such close distance where the surface took up their span of view entirely, and that they should simply fall into the cauldron below.
“Commander, we are emerging from the plume. External communications should be restored momentarily.”
“Thank you Kinny. Chart all probes on the holographic display as they come online. Highlight any that have received anomalous readings.”
“Aye, Commander.”
Aru was still curled up in the relaxation pod, 7 hours down and snoozing like a baby. Mei had barely slept. She gave his pod a swift kick, then another until a slow groan emerged.
“Rise and shine Captain Hangover.”
“You aren't kidding.” He sat up, rubbing his temples. “System, coffee.”
“Aye, Captain.” A bridge mug arrived promptly through the wall intraship transport terminal and was delivered to him by servicebot. “Your command status has been restored Captain.”
“Position?” he asked no one in particular.
“We're in the prescribed target orbit, 22,000 kilometers altitude over the photosphere,” Mei answered. “Orbital ratio is 21 to 1. Our position is aligned 144 degrees retrograde relative to Calidon, and we are moving into full alignment with The White Stone.”
“And our corresponding probe in the satellite ring?”
“Just a moment Captain.” She stared anxiously into the display, tapping at it impatiently. “Kinny, hyper-relay network status?”
“Online... now. Synching.... Real-time communication link established.”
Boom! There it was, their farprobe: online, off course, and highlighted.
“Aft Nearprobes 8,9, and 11 are not responding... starboard 12 reporting heavy sensor damage,” reported System.
“Yeah, yeah, Kinny. First walk us through what's going on with Farprobe 34 in the satellite ring.”
“During the transmission blackout, Farprobe 34 detected an orbital object roughly 1,700 kilometers off the search marker. It followed contingency protocols to adjust course en route to it. It is still in approach and will rendezvous in the next 30 minutes. Shall I display the visual data?”
What a stupid question. “Yes, dammit.”
A full 3D rendering of what looked nearly identical to a child's toy jack appeared on holograph. It spun on a longer vertical axis with four metallic gray cylinders jutting out perpendicularly from its center.
“Stop the spin,” she said, and the image came to a halt.
“Logosian?” Asked Aru, again to no one in particular.
After a brief pause System decided it was being cued to answer.
“Almost certainly, Captain. This object's form corresponds to a retro satellite design speculated to have been in use during prior historical iterations. It is protected by an environmentally self-perpetuating force field. The position and signal readings seem to validate your theory that this is a link in a communication hyper-relay network.”
“How does a permanent satellite like this endure in this environment?”
“Unknown, Captain. This design minimizes surface area contact with the solar medium. To survive for any length of time in this environment it must be coated with some materia well beyond mnemtechian technological capacity to fabricate. A cursory spectroscopic scan identifies it as partially metallic, but we will need to wait until rendezvous to conduct a meaningful analysis.”
“What's going with its transmissions?”
“If I may speculate, Captain?”
“By all means.”
“Observation of transmission relay further validates your theory, Captain. The four perpendicular cylinders operate at a high rate of rotation, 18 revolutions per minute. They function as both transmitters and receivers depending on their alignment to the vector of orbit, in the aft position receiver, the fore position transmitter. That transmission is being relayed to the next satellite in the ring, and its markers precisely match the signal we observed yesterday in terms of composition, quantum-forwarding velocity, and amplitude.”
No surprise there. What struck Mei more than anything though was the diminutive size of the object. A transcoronal broadcast would require a massive transmitter.
“This object is only 23 meters in diameter. As we can see the axis is aligned perpendicular to the solar surface...” She started into her observation and was uncharacteristically interrupted by System.
“Yes, Commander, the outward tip of the axis is currently receiving a weak transmission, amplifying and quantum-forwarding it along the satellite ring. That signal source is likely beyond the corona and is angling its beam in conjunction with this satellite's movement.”
“The White Stone!” she declared. Wordlessly, System brought the now familiar orbital diagram of the Stones orbits and that of the satellite ring into perspective. The current incoming transcoronal beam was highlighted with the White Stone as its origin, indeed angling the communication beam ever so slightly to track this satellite's orbit.
“Speed it up, Kinny -the whole network.”
The holographic diagram burst into 100x speed. The White Stone’s beam tracked the aligned but much faster orbiting satellite until it moved out of range. The signal then reset itself, angling back along the ring to the next satellite coming into range, and so on.
“So where is the return signal to The White Stone?”
“There is none, Commander. It is a one-way transmission.”
That again brought up the vexing question of why data would be beamed into a star and not out of it. But that assumed that all the satellite stations on the ring were identical. Perhaps there was a larger transmitter somewhere in the chain, but Mei doubted that because it would have to be so massive as to be visually detectable from a great distance.
“And the inward end of the axial column, pointing toward the solar surface? What is its function?”
“Unknown,” answered System, “but as you can see, Commander, that bulbous tip is much larger than the outward tip. It's impossible to know what components lay beneath the shielding, but I would speculate that it is an inactive transmitter.”
Assuming all this was correct, an elegant and very hopeful picture formed. They could extrapolate every link in the satellite chain with complete accuracy. They knew it was receiving from, but not transmitting to, The White Stone. Probes were on route to the nearest satellite in perihelion with The Black Stone on the opposite of side of Rubeli, but it would take a several more hours to collect that data. Mei reasoned they would see the same thing there, an incoming transmission.
Just as The Stones in their far extra-coronal orbit angled communication beams at the nearest satellite to them in the ring, so too must the ring be transmitting to an object here in the lower orbit when they crossed paths. She glanced at Aru who glanced back with a look that told her their brains were already synched into the same parallel line of reasoning.
“This is just a matter of observing a satellite with its downward axis transmitter enabled and broadcasting...” she began.
“Then we track the angle of the signal to the intersect of this target orbit, which should put us in the vicinity of the receiving body,” he finished.
They had several probes rendezvousing with various satellite links on the chain. Some, however, would not at times be accessible through the wide-scale hyper-relay network they had laid. But even just sticking with one satellite, they should observe it align and transmit within the next forty-seven hours, the full circuit of the satellite ring orbit.
“We can do this even one better. Kinny, assume an object in an orbital period range of 8,000 kilometers above or below The Kinetic.”
“Yes, Commander.”
�
��Now find which orbit our satellite ring would be optimized to transmit to.”
A bright highlighted ring wrapped itself around the diagram of Ignis Rubeli, 2,330 kilometers above their current position.
“That's our absolute target orbit,” Aru confidently declared. “System, navigator: Take us back up there, and reassign all nearprobes to sweep that orbit.”
“Aye Captain,” responded Mei and System in unison. Mei's official position was, after all, the Navigator -not that titles usually held much meaning in a two member crew -or three if you counted Kinny.
System spoke. “Captain, I don't mean to divert attention from the search, but we’ve just come into the midst of a sudden thermal spike. The hullbots are reporting an issue with the physical shielding on the outer shield ring you should be made aware of immediately.”
“Whoa, wait... what's going on with the shield ring?” he asked.
The holograph put a profile view of the Kinetic on display along with her surrounding toroidal magnetospheric shield.
“Due to the lower surrounding voltages of the chromosphere, our environmentally powered magnetospheric force-shield is considerably weaker here. That has resulted in a marked increase in the density of highly charged plasma ions, particularly single protons, seeping into our shielded space and raising The Kinetic's thermals rapidly beyond safe levels.”
“We're getting too hot.” translated Mei. It stood to reason that would happen gallivanting around inside of a star. At least they still had plenty of heatsinks.
System continued. “Three of the outer physical layers are showing increases in molecular expansion, begetting what will be a slow but continuous and irreversible degradation of structural integrity.”
Mei translated once more. “We're, um... melting.” Then she laughed. She didn't know why she found that amusing, because it certainly wasn't. Maybe it was so alarming she had to imagine it that way in order to cope with it.
“System, how much longer can we continue to sustain the Kinetic in the chromosphere?” Aru asked nervously.
“It depends on how much damage you're willing tolerate, Captain. My recommendation would be that we exit this star immediately, as our hull integrity will be further compromised on our passage out of the corona. Based on current data and a best case scenario, the Kinetic could remain in this environment for another 14 hours before exiting, though in doing so we will sustain extreme damage to the hull, outer weapons systems and sensors in the interim. To be clear about this, Captain, that is the maximum amount of time we have before engines and basic life support become compromised.”
It was all so surreal. Mei still had her eyes on the holograph tracking Farprobe 34, which suddenly began blinking and then disappeared altogether offline.
System started to go on about the other near probes that should be online, but were lost in the surface eruption and others that had reported in but were otherwise teetering on the verge of breakdown. That only left them with 8 fully functional near probes for the sweep. Vast sums in military assets were being lost, but that was far from any of her immediate concerns.
“Where is Farprobe 34?!” Mei insisted.
“Lost,” System replied. A display overlayed Farprobe 34's forward camera stream, or the last moments of it. A tubular column of white light shot forth between the satellite and the probe, then darkness. “It appears Farprobe 34 was detected by the satellite and struck by a direct high intensity particle beam. We can safely assume it has been destroyed.”
That relay satellite hadn't appeared to be weaponized, but obviously it was. Shit!
Aru was still remotely viewing the hull regions where the markings had worn off and identity relief symbols were beginning to meld into each other like some unrecognizable alien language. He turned to her with that look... the look he always had when he was about to suggest something she absolutely would not like hearing. She knew what was to about come out of his mouth next, and she nipped it square in the bud.
“No! No fucking way Aru. Don't even say it! We've got 14 hours.”
After which, should they survive another ravaging transcoronal journey, the Kinetic would most likely be rendered an unsalvageable wreck.
“Mei...” Aru cautiously pleaded. “The Kinetic is melting!”
“So what? This ship was designed to melt.” She was really just throwing stuff at the wall here.
“No. Mei... no it... it wasn't. That doesn't even make sense.”
“Sure it does. Melting is better than cracking, isn't it?”
The persuasive effect of that argument fared no better than the previous one had. Aru just discounted it entirely.
“If that tiny satellite is armed with high-energy, unerringly accurate particle beam emitters, what kind of reception can we expect from the mystery sphere at the heart of all this? And how can even we hope to find it with only 8 nearprobes in the sweep and no transmission data from the satellite ring?”
Mei thought hard and fast. They still had three more farprobes en route to other satellites in the ring. She was not sure which were immediately contactable through the hyper-relay network yet. “System! At what distance was Farprobe 34 from the satellite when it was struck down?”
“1,894.3 kilometers, Commander.”
“And from what maximum tracking distance could another farprobe obtain an accurate vector reading on a downward transmission from one of those satellites?”
“3,655 kilometers, Commander.”
“Instruct all three of the Farprobes en route to satellites to maintain an observational distance of 3,500 kilometers from their targets. We need the time, the vector of the downward transmission, and a brief recording of it changing angles.”
And that was all they needed. That would pinpoint their sphere's location. All they had to get was that one reading, sail the Kinetic to the location it inferred, and investigate the sphere -all in a 14 hour window. Investigate? Hmmm... There’d be no time for that. This sphere was going to be coming with them.
The Riverway
New boots, new belt, a sleek bolas to replace that bulky crossbow, and a brand new water resistant canvas cloak, thick enough to endure all the chill a southern night could cast on him. Not wanting to cut his long overgrown hair, he bid the hairdresser to braid and bead it into a more manageable order. Passing children snickered to see a man at the salon, but Gahre took no offense to his manhood. A full mane on the crown warmed the head.
He had the straps replaced on his backsack, his knives professionally honed to a vorpal edge, a new silk rope, a variety of herbal teas and basic medicinal, a new firestarter, a lighter cookpot, bandages, and a sewing kit.
New leggings and a spare shirt. Brass telescope, new compass? Why not!
After running out of ways to spend Indulu's credit, he bid uncle farewell and hopped aboard an eastward bound merchant wagon along the King's Highway. They were honored to take him on having heard tell of his recent exploits. For two days he rode the wagon, breaking bread and telling tales. The merchant's daughter, a maiden nubile yet well developed in her womanhood, enticed him cruelly with her charms. The patriarch of the family did not dissuade this either, nor even keep watch of them in the night. But Gahre knew where that road led, and resisted temptation.
Two days along the King's Highway to the capital, Gahre hopped off just before crossing the first bridge north of “where the two rivers merge.” He collected his belongings, thanked the merchant, and gave the daughter a friendly wink. Then he, by way of his map and guidebook, bounded off down an overgrown trail that followed the river's southern flow.
It was lovely country where old-growth hardwoods shaded the lush river banks. There were several prized herbs he sought outlined in the field guide, which was packed neatly in waterproofed cloth in his pack. He had little need of it though, having memorized all the herbs attributes and likely habitats in that stinking cell. God, it felt good to be out of there. All his disillusionment shed off him as he ventured deeper in the wood. Ironic, he thought,
that he should be so anxious to profit from this expedition to forage these prized rhizomes, seeds, mosses, pods and mushrooms, when he had just turned down a fortune in gold offered at his feet. It didn't matter, he'd been proving a point, and it had been well worth it. No need to think about all that now anyway. He was free, doing what he loved. He planned to go five days into this entirely uninhabited and mostly unexplored territory. The book described an ancient oak “so enormous a thousand wagons could rest comfortably in its shade.” There was even a sketch of the impossibly large tree. The guide only gave a general location, but he would be passing through there in the days to come and surely keeping an eye out for it. If it were only half the size the journal claimed, he imagined it would be hard to miss.
There was danger in these lands, but the kind of danger he felt at ease with. Animal sign was everywhere showing that all that grazed, hunted, or scavenged dwelled here in abundance. He needed to take care to observe sign, recognize territory, and shelter himself wisely.
Gahre was a silent strider through the wood who left little trace of his passing. His new boots were of a longer shin-high moccasin style, and hurt a bit as new boots always did during the breaking-in period but otherwise served him well. He had a keen nose and keen ears and could just as often detect an animal presence before they detected him, depending as always on which way the wind blew.
On the evening of that first day, while scouting along the banks for a suitable site to make camp, he came into a population of large brown bears fishing in the river where twenty or so were congregated. They spotted one another at the same time, and a large male stood menacingly erect and roared at him.
“Sorry bear!” he shouted back. “I shall detour around your fishing grounds!”
The bear casually dropped out of his stance and went back about his bear business, as Gahre patiently hiked into the interior of the wood well around them, and circled back to the river in the final waning moments of dusk. He made a fire and speared a fish, which he skinned and then rubbed a salty herb mixture into the fillets. He lit a lantern and let the fillets slow cook on a flat stone burrowed in the coals of his campfire while he read more of the treatise and its detailed diagrams of the leafy and rooty prizes he sought after, til the coals died and he with a full belly swaddled himself in his wonderful new robe and slept that wakeful alert sleep of a man alone in the wilderness.
DUALITY: The World of Lies Page 8