“So, not a black hole. But something dense enough to bend light.”
“I can’t tell you more; I’m guessing as it is.” She bit her lower lip in a way I had come to know very well. “Here,” she said. “In case you get a bruise.” She put something in my hand and fled the armoury.
It was her ritual of good fortune to give me a child’s adhesive bandage as I went out on the vane – her way of telling me to be careful. On this day, she pressed something larger into my hand. I still have it with me, you see?
A box of bandages.
* * *
You grow uneasy, my friend.
Perhaps you are anxious for this tea water to boil? I believe tea has to be prepared as the Chinese drink it, which is to say, scalding. I was taught this by an old smuggler up in the Blanco Grande.
Frances used to worry all this boiling water would do some grievous injury to my throat. She was not the appreciator of fine teas that you and I are. Her tastes ran to the simple and the sweet, I’m afraid.
Sometimes I wonder what brought us together. Perhaps I saw something a bit reckless in her, I don’t know. I laugh to think what Frances imagined she saw in me. A man of decency beneath the rage? A man of honesty beneath the lies, compassion beneath the avarice?
You will find this most amusing – because I could not bear to let her down, I would have been that man. I can hardly bring myself to admit it now. Had things turned out otherwise, Frances and I would be on a little plantation like this one. I would be sitting out on that veranda, a happy fool rocking children to sleep in my lap.
You spared me this embarrassing decline, you and your undertaking. I will not forget that, my friend. You have my word.
I placed Frances’ talisman into my forearm kit as we loaded our gear and false men onto a little cargo train that ran across the starboard vane.
We set out through the tiny valleys of production grade isotopes that clustered on every side of the ship’s hull. Our way into battle was lighted by tubes of flawless manufactured diamond, filled with target isotopes of cesium and cobalt in a liquid suspension. El Camino Azul, we called it – “the Blue Highway”.
The Blue Highway zigzagged past railheads and loading cranes, all untouched by the catastrophe just beyond our sight. The scene was oddly quiet. The rail line was intact here. The screams had stopped. Rosalie Nuñez suggested that things were not so bad. Might Contreras and his Hot Shots have found a place of refuge?
No one dared answer; to acknowledge such baseless hope invited bad luck. Yet her optimism hung in the air as we entered a small canyon filled with low-level actinides.
It was here that the landscape began to deform under the compulsion of your treasure.
A rack of headlights glared at us from the back of the canyon. Pablo Sanoro pointed. “A tractor!” he cried. “It’s the Hot Shots!” He gave Nuñez an encouraging nudge. “Maybe things really aren’t so bad.”
He called out to them and waved. The headlights did not move. We came around to the back of the strontium shelves; Mister Robinson switched on a spotlight.
All the hopeful chatter died away. Someone swore. Pablo Sanoro started to shush the blasphemer, till he realized it was Nuñez herself.
The headlights did indeed belong to a tractor. Perhaps it was the Hot Shots’ tractor. I could not say from looking. The machine had been squeezed into the open end of an abandoned sodium reservoir.
Press your thoughts, friend Beltran – twenty-five tons of steel and titanium tucked into a crevice the size of a baby’s coffin. Here was a missive from your beast, a foretaste of what awaited us.
A silence fell upon my crew as we rolled past the collapsed tractor. Then Pope and Robinson fell into wagering over the nature of a creature that could crush a twenty-five-ton tractor into a sodium conduit.
“Echnesium!” declared Pope. “It radiated mediating particles for the electroweak force. I’ve seen echnesium sweep a vane with riptides of magnetic force, drawing in everything in its wake – ferrous and non-ferrous metals alike. Molten steel, hundreds of degrees beyond the currie point of iron. Lead. Flesh, even.”
Mister Robinson looked at me to see if I was hearing this. “Echnesium has earned its place among the Seven Dreads, but how can echnesium isolate its fury so fine as to suck a tractor into a coolant pipe?”
“I’ve seen echnesium focus its rage finer than that,” Pope declared. She recounted the tale of a cerezadito she had known on the Ten of Swords. The lad favoured a steel moustache bangle. He wore it the day he walked into an echnesium fire, and gave not a thought to steel’s magnetic properties.
“I found him during the next shift,” Pope said, “with his face pressed to a ferro-ceramic bulkhead, and his ornament working its way out of his left ear.”
Nuñez gasped. Robinson waved his hand, unimpressed.
“Easy to push a little metal through a kid’s brain,” he said. “It’s something else to stuff a tractor into a coolant pipe.”
Pablo Sanoro appealed to all of us for decorum. He nodded toward Nuñez, who sat quiet and awe-struck at the back of the train.
Pope raised her chin at Mister Robinson. “If it’s not echnesium, then what?”
“A quantum vacuum state,” Robinson said. “Bound inside the heavy nuclei of some metallic plasma. Vacuum3, perhaps,” Robinson suggested. “Bound inside one of the more stable isotopes of pterachnium.”
Nuñez gave me an uneasy look. Perhaps she longed for reassurance. But I had my mind on Contreras and his Hot Shots, and where I feared they might be. One of the false men ended up explaining the concept of quantum vacuum states for her.
“What we call ‘vacuum’ in this universe is actually a morass of self-annihilating virtual particle pairs. They pop into existence, find each other, and pop out of existence in a suicidal frenzy. But more perfect states of vacuum are possible, and they adhere to their own laws and start-up values. Vacuum3, for instance, allows a small portion of these virtual particles to pop into existence unpaired with any anti-particle to annihilate. Left over, these begin to accumulate.”
Pope nudged at Robinson – where did you pick this one up?
“Do you know how much mass you’re talking about?” she asked. “Sixteen nanoseconds, the mass of these particles would sink an astronomical chunk of space into a singularity.”
The false man – we called him El Guapo, “the Handsome One”, straightened in a show of dignity. “Actually, many of these exotic states radiate the particles as fast they appear.” It knew she was laughing at it. It turned about, looking for allies. “Really, I would have thought someone in your profession would find this more relevant.”
Nuñez looked around at all of us. “What does that mean? We might be facing a black hole?”
“It’s probably a bit of plutonium, burning itself off,” I said.
“Vacuum4 more likely,” said Robinson, who did not stint on the truth in unpleasant matters. “What do you say, Mister Seguro? Vacuum4 radiates magnetic monopoles. That would explain the tractor in the coolant pipe.”
“You have monopoles between your ears,” Pope derided him.
“Monopoles catalyze proton decay. And that, in turn –”
“We’re getting carried away here,” I said. “We don’t know what’s at the back of the vane till we see it for ourselves.”
Pope nodded at me. “What about you? I recall a time you could have told us what we faced without a second thought.”
I looked into the eyes of Nuñez, round with terror. Even Sanoro looked abashed.
“Perhaps my powers are slipping,” I said. “We’ve got enough to think about right here.”
And we did. While we had argued over the precise nature of your treasure, the rail line had angled into a tunnel and brought us down to the region of the undervane.
No mechanic likes the undervane at a time like this. Ask a sailor on the ocean the last place he wants to be when his ship is rolling hard – few things play worse on the mind than being trapped below dec
ks in a foundering ship.
And yet, if Esteban Contreras lived, this is where heat and radiation would have pursued him, to the last place any sane person would go.
We entered a dim and smouldering realm. All mechanical illumination was gone. The vast twilight between us and the distant perimeter of the starboard vane was a grotto of cherry red stalactites, flaming gases, red rivers of steel, glowing like dogs’ eyes at dusk.
We called out for Contreras on our suit radios. Nothing came back but the hoarse roar of static. We waited, called out again. There was no response. We searched for some sign of the Hot Shots on every part of the spectrum. Nothing lay before us but a flood plain of magma, flowing down from the inferno at the back of the vane.
“We need a vantage point,” Mister Robinson said. I found a raised siding. Before the excursion, it had connected the hot vaults at the bottom of the undervane to a quadrant of target shelves on the deck. A giant airlock sealed the two worlds off from each other. But ferocious heat had warped the bulkhead till it was frozen in its track. The rail line leading up to it was washed over. A torrent of metal sludge and debris had formed a natural waterfall from the mouth of the tunnel, across the tracks, over the edge of the siding and into the dark.
Here, we listened for some sign of the Hot Shots.
In the tenuous atmosphere venting from a thousand coolant pipes the ship banged and ticked all around us. We heard no human sound. I slammed on the rail with a target shelf key. Big as a man’s leg, they are. Anyone alive down here would have felt a tremor pass through the deck.
Nothing came back to us but the groans of super-heated metal.
As we waited for some sign from Contreras, a breach opened in the sullen darkness to our left. Molten steel, the remains of one of the giant cracking stations on the surface, poured across the rail line just behind us.
The rear car was swamped before we realized what had happened. It carried all but one of Mister Robinson’s false men. The motor car, where we sat, was engulfed up to the gunwales. Heat exploded up through the floor.
We were hard against it, compañero. The train began to lurch backwards in a series of uneven jerks as the brakes gave way to the heat. Someone pleaded with me to call back to the ship for help.
“No one is coming after us,” I said. “That’s how ships lose two or three crews to a single disaster.”
“But we’ll die –”
“Shut up,” I said. I needed to think.
Whoever it was, they started to argue. Without preamble, Mister Robinson threw them over the side. Surprise – the whiner turned out to be the Handsome One. Programmed to human emotion not wisely but too well.
A silence descended on the crew. It lasted for a moment, but one moment was all I needed.
The whistle of escaping gas led my gaze to a small aperture to one side of the airlock. Stars glimmered beyond the hole.
It was far too tiny to squeeze through in a hotsuit, but it implied hope; perhaps the lock was not jammed so tight as it looked.
We had a vane mule locked against the front of the train. The mule was roughly the size and shape of an elevator car, with eight nimble legs per side. Folded against its roof was a telescoping lift, used for reaching the upper levels of the tallest target shelves. Pope and I rode it up to the head waters of the half-molten waterfall. Here, the gases whined and whistled as they squeezed through the tiny orifice.
Pope heated the area with her microwave torch. I wedged an extensible forge into the softened wound and applied pressure.
The metal resisted. I put my shoulder into it, and the hole tore wide open. Our lift kicked away to the right. Pope swore and hung on. I fell, hit the torrent right at its crest.
The surface was covered over with metal garbage. It was smooth and hard beneath. I had nothing to hold on to. Below me waited a golden-hot pool of metal. I clawed for a finger-hold, latched onto something firm. Debris skittered and kicked over me like a wave, but I clung to my handhold till I could lever myself up onto the track.
It was only as I caught my breath before the freshly opened tunnel that I realized what had lent me purchase.
A gloved hand rose out of the welt of metal, as if reaching for a lifeline.
My fellows were silent. I heard someone sob. I thought it was Nuñez, but she was directly behind me, wide-eyed with amazement.
Who was the mechanic enveloped in the metal tomb? I will never know. The crew gathered round to touch the hand, to hold it before moving on.
The train was useless, of course; the track ended here. We piled our gear into the mule’s insulated storage bay. We followed behind as it picked its slow path out of the undervane.
I found myself on the shore of a metallic sea. I confess to you, my friend, my emotions overcame me as I took in the new world your treasure had wrought. Where were the screen control towers that reared up around us like a garden of roses? Where were the centrifuge stations, three stories tall and squat as Sultans? Or the hectares of target shelves that rolled out to the edge of the vane? Or the intricate rail lines that tended them?
Before us lay a ghostly beach town of outbuildings, target shelves, and wrecked coolant pipe, all twisted and broken open to the sky. I could pick out individual structures with a moment’s concentration. Some of them still had paint on their walls.
Through the gaping doors and windows of a gutted isotope vault, I could see bits of stuff bobbing in the fused metal troughs and waves. Beyond that, the heat had been too intense to leave any trace of history. The topology smoothed into gently rising swells.
The very back of the vane disappeared in a furious glare. Your financial instrument converted everything it touched – ship’s decking and incoming nuclei alike – into a stream of X-rays that swept the sky before us.
We would have died but for the polarizing screens. Mutated as they were, the polarizing screens held focus on the burning shelf at the back of the vane. They scoured the bulk of the heat into space.
Far overhead, the corona of your beast burned at 10 million Kelvins. Observatories around the Orion Nebula thought us a new stellar X-ray source. Did you know?
We huddled in shadow of the vault, with our radiators fully unfurled, like butterflies cowering before a typhoon. I poked a hand-held camera through a sagging tear in the wall and sent pictures back to the nuclear chemistry committee.
Some on the committee thought we were saved. A shower of undifferentiated particles would poison the reactions going on before us. Your treasure would gutter out like a candle in a stream of piss.
The captain himself pointed to the star chart over his desk. The Hierophant ploughed through the deepest portion of the Scatterhead Nebula. Clouds of ionized tungsten stretched before us all the way to the Hercules Vent. They would gorge the monster till it erupted into some new state.
“We have to know what’s out there,” the captain said. “Some of us think we’ve created some sort of exotic vacuum state. We can’t tell; at least two of the polarizing screens are intersecting the deck, carrying tell-tale radiation away into space. We need a radio assay from beyond that curtain of plasma.”
“We are already too close to the inferno,” I said. “Any closer, some of us will die.”
Captain was a decent and humble man. He knew very well what he asked of us. He was silent for a moment, and I could almost hear his mind racing for some way out of this terrible command.
“We have to know what’s out there,” he repeated. “Or all of us will die.”
Lend your best attention, my friend; this is how men and women face desperate fate.
There was no drawing of lots, no heroic pronouncements, no brave jokes. Mister Robinson handed the sensor spike to his man Pablo Sanoro. I pointed at a spot overlooking the edge of the pit.
No one offered to take young Pablo’s spot. Death in this place is not so easily eluded that a courageous gesture will save one or doom another.
Perhaps the young one, Nuñez – perhaps she was shocked by this. Sanoro gav
e her a glance as he stepped out into the light. She raised her gloved hand to him but said nothing. There was no time for fond wishes of luck.
Sanoro shouldered his way forward to an outcropping of metal. He paused a moment to gauge his chances and then he staggered on till he disappeared into the light.
An interval of silence. The remote viewer in my hand blazed with sudden light. We gathered around as it showed us the face that leered from behind its veil of plasma. Nuñez called out to Sanoro to hurry back. Before he could answer, a perturbation among the screens raised a tsunami wave of light high over our heads. A dozen detectors crackled inside my helmet and then subsided. I heard something very faint and far away – a cry of agony?
We, all of us, called out for Sanoro. Rosalie Nuñez called his name. Even you, compañero, would weep to hear her voice. And I know you for the hard man you are. Sanoro never answered. Perhaps the radio interference was too dense. Perhaps he turned off his radio so we would not hear him as he died.
Even now, my thoughts turn to young Nuñez. We might have eased her broken heart, but time was hard upon us. On a dozen tiny screens leered the monster that took Sanoro’s life.
No, no – you must not turn aside now, my friend. This is the sight you paid to see. This is the source of all that had happened. The molten metal that poured through the undervane flowed from here. The circles of destruction that engulfed the starboard vane radiated from this point.
On collimated radar it was a chimera. It roiled and turned about itself like a snake on a hot spit. Infrared showed scabs of magnetic convection crusted over wounds that bled light. All very pretty, but none of it described the engine that drove this conflagration.
We had one last thing to try. Almost as an afterthought, Sanoro had left a gravitational wave interferometer at the brink of the inferno – bricks of purest rubidium, tautly held in a wire harness. It was telling us something even as we dialled it in, but gravitation is a hard thing to gauge on a ship like the Hierophant.
At first, the oscillating line was wildly erratic. As we filtered out the effects of the ship’s velocity, the inertial sink, the polarizing screens, the oscilloscope settled into a metronomic pattern, at once familiar and dreadful.
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