Analog Science Fiction and Fact - 2014-07

by Penny Publications

  Again she was lucky: setting the tip of the punch on the round surface of the bar, it took the force without rolling. She released the grip of her right hand—just starting to feel real heat—and reached for the sledge in its stone cradle.

  The steel was already passing from bright to darker orange, losing heat by conduction through the anvil's surface. She lifted the sledge with her elbow locked in a right angle—two kilos at least, she thought—and brought it down on the punch as if the biggest brains on Treasure Island were getting set to send her back to Earth in handcuffs.

  The indentation was as good as she could have expected: not clean through, but deep enough to judge its position on the centerline of the rod.

  She raised the sledge again and struck the punch a second time—probably all she'd need.

  She set the sledge down and took the bar from the anvil with her right hand, sliding it back into the center of the fire.

  Working the bellows, she heard Lawson and Scott speaking quickly and too-quietly in English. Probably annotating their video, telling everybody what everything meant.

  It took only a few cycles of the forced air draught to bring the tip—now a bit wider and just slightly flatter—back to medium orange. She brought the bar back to the anvil face, turning the punched opening downward and setting the tip of the punch directly on the pimple of steel stretched through from the opposite surface.

  She'd reached her best opportunity to destroy the piece, by giving the punch any angle off the vertical.

  She reached down for the sledge, quickly swinging it high and bringing it down, ramming the tip through the glowing finger of steel. Sure enough, a dull red bead, maybe an eighth of an inch across, fell through the hole in the anvil and bounced onto the packed dirt of the floor. The orange rod had shaped itself around the cone of the punch, becoming a rod with a ring near the end, a ring maybe twice as wide as the rod's original diameter.

  She set the sledge in its stand and took hold of the bar, wiggling the punch free with her left hand. Another heat in the fire?

  No, she decided, and turned the rod over again, lining up the ring with the hole in the anvil. This time she slid the punch in, took up the sledge, and struck once and then a second time.

  She pulled the punch out again, laid it on the stump, and flipped the bar one last time—flat on the anvil face. She switched hands, holding the bar with her left and the sledge with her right for a single light tap, just to remove a slight bend she'd managed to create.

  She set the sledge in its stand and balanced the bar on the anvil, with a half-toe hole through a one-toe ring at the far end, dull red fading to grey.

  Scott was looking back and forth between the anvil and the Local smith.

  "But—but you changed the shape of the bar," the professor said in English, and it was a second before Bogdana realized he was whispering to her earbud on the short-range net.

  "That's why it's a joke sir," she replied in English. "Just different ways of thinking about a problem. That's—"

  That's your thing, isn't it? In whatever it is that you do? How different people think differently about things?

  She trailed off as the Local smith stepped forward. Around the perimeter of the smithy's nonexistent walls, villagers craned past one another for a better look.

  Scott said nothing as the smith lifted the bar, turning to inspect it with daylight in the background. He set it back down on the anvil.

  "That's how I would have done it," he declared to the professors, and turned to face Bogdana with his fists on his hips. He looked her up and down, and his lips tightened for an instant.

  "So you see, mill-wright, you've earned nothing extra from your master today," he said. "For doing what is not even possible."

  "Don't answer," repeated the duty off icer—as if that had helped the situation, the first time.

  "No sir," Bogdana replied. "Not today."

  "Your masters are much like our masters," the smith went on, still speaking directly to Bogdana. "The best apprentice I ever trained was my older daughter. She's striking for a caravan's farrier of our acquaintance, this past year. I'm in the hells, knowing what she's living through, even though there are worse tradesmen to start out with. But we all go to our work where the master will have us."

  He shrugged again, and turned his whole body to face the professors.

  "So now we see that your servant knows her work, at least. Her father in the hells can be proud of her."

  Outside, villagers laughed—but Professor Scott was ready to claw back the credit for everything.

  "We select them for their skill," he replied, as happily as he could manage. "Not their manners, unfortunately."

  Then he turned to Bogdana.

  "Kuznetsova," he said in the softest English he could probably manage to force. "Please go back to the vehicle."

  Krawchuk's voice broke in, before Bogdana could acknowledge.

  "Dana, do you think this Local guy could forge us a crescent, so I can get this goddamn wheel off? Forge it close to a inch, and then hot-fit it to the nut down here?"

  Lawson answered immediately.

  "You're aware of the policy, Krawchuk. The local population does not learn about the failure modes of Terran technology."

  Lawson paused, and smiled patronizingly.

  "In any event, surely the containment team's vessel has such a thing as a repair kit. "

  Yes, it surely does, Bogdana thought. For fixing suborbital spacecraft, not all-terrain bus wheels.

  But she'd let someone else explain that to the professors.

  * * *

  Hot and Cold

  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro | 4888 words

  Spacetime rippled. Then the warp bubble enclosing the ship collapsed, and all systems died.

  Davos Yalow counted three heartbeats in the dark before the Geroch's quantum computer reinitialized and power returned.

  "Looks like the FTL drive is off line," he said, forehead creasing. His gangly frame stooped over the computer terminal. "We still have navigation and life support."

  Davos's wife, Xie, shook her head. She swiveled in her chair and faced him squarely, her seawater-green eyes hardening.

  "I told you this was a bad idea," she said. "We should have gone back to base before coming out... to whatever this place is."

  Three days before, while studying a remote star formation cluster, they had picked up an unnaturally cold region of space nine lightyears away. The region—Davos called it the Deep Cold —was impossibly quiet: it seemed to lack even background radiation. And it contained a sphere of some sort that was giving off bizarre gravitational readings. Davos had insisted they take a look.

  "How about we solve the problem, instead of blaming me for everything?" he said.

  Xie crossed her arms. "Blame? I call it assuming responsibility for one's actions."

  Davos ignored the bait and studied his screen. Their once-flirtatious exchanges had soured of late, becoming resentful squabbles. Scouting the heavens had all but lost its excitement for Davos, the thrill of discovery dulled by repetition. Not for the first time, he wondered why he didn't simply pack it in—his fading career in exploration, his crumbling marriage, all of it. Right now he'd give anything to be alone.

  As though sensing the implications of Davos' continued silence, Xie said, "Fine. We'll talk about it later. What do you propose?"

  "The FTL drive is our first priority."

  Xie tapped in a series of quick commands on her terminal. "We're still not able to determine what's inside the sphere."

  Davos poured over the data from the aborted FTL jump. He reviewed what little they knew about the sphere, as well as the other mind-boggling construct they'd found in close proximity to it: a half-kilometer wide cylinder, composition unknown, that stretched for two hundred and fifty million kilometers and opened up on a black hole's event horizon.

  "Whatever's inside the sphere must be massive," Davos said. "Massive enough to have spoiled our drive's metric contracti
on." When you were trying to warp spacetime, massive objects, with their own intrinsic warps, tended to screw up the process.

  Xie's head tilted. "Hmmm. What if it's a second black hole?"

  Davos nodded slowly. "If there is a black hole inside the sphere, it must be roughly"—he ran through the equations in seconds—"fifteen orders of magnitude less massive than its cousin out there. That would be consistent with its effect on our drives, while explaining why we didn't pick it up from farther away."

  "We need to see into the damn sphere," Xie said.

  It was Davos's turn to swivel in his chair. His hazel eyes twinkled as he entered lecture mode. "Even if we could probe through the sphere's outer layers, the computer predicts that the inner layer is made up of something akin to oscillating dipoles, which are acting as a perfect mirror for whatever's inside. We'd need a prohibitive amount of energy to break through the fields and see inside. And if there's one thing we should be conserving out here, it's energy."

  "You don't say," Xie replied sarcastically.

  "Look, I'm sorry," Davos said, voice deepening by half an octave. His expression changed—still unfriendly, but more somber. "For the record, you're right. We should have gone back to base before giving in to our curiosity."

  "Your curiosity."

  He shrugged. "Whatever. Here's what we know. The mass inside the sphere is messing with our FTL drive. And we can't break free from the sphere's gravity with sub-FTL engines. For all intents and purposes, we're stuck in orbit."

  Xie said, "What about communications? We could send out a signal. Wait for a recovery probe to pick it up and redirect it back to civilization using its own FTL boost."

  "What makes you think our probes have made it out here?" Davos replied. "Sensors show nothing for light-years in any direction. No stars, no planets, no interstellar dust, no background radiation—and no probes."

  Xie berated him with her eyes. "I still think that—"

  "I appreciate that communications are your strong suit," Davos cut her off. "But we should conserve all energy until we're sure sending out a signal is our only option."

  Davos, fully expecting Xie to insist on her point, prepared his next rebuttal. He was therefore momentarily caught off guard when instead she simply said, "Very well. Let's begin by reducing life-support to essential levels and shutting down all non-critical systems."

  He paused skeptically. Then he said, "Agreed."

  After making the adjustments Davos used the quantum computer to parallel run what-if scenarios, a task that required few resources. Every model came back the same: even if they could somehow break free from the sphere's gravity without FTL, they'd run out of energy well before they made it back to "warm space."

  As Davos worked on the problem his muscles stiffened and he became mildly nauseous. He attributed it to the lower gravity, reduced temperature, and thinned atmosphere.

  "Need some rest," he said.

  Xie barely acknowledged his comment with a grunt, not bothering to look up as he moved toward the rear of the navigation chamber, one of the Geroch's two bio-friendly units.

  Minutes later Davos and a sleeping bag hovered inches off the ground. He realized that the sinking feeling in his stomach wasn't merely environmentally induced queasiness.

  They might really be done for this time.

  And his marriage, or what was left of it...

  Eventually he settled into a restless semi-sleep. His mind churned with depressing dream-thoughts, while his last meal threatened to rise back up through his gullet every time he changed positions. He mumbled a complaint, opened his eyes, and bounded back to the navigation area.

  Xie was as absorbed in her work as when he'd left her.

  He placed a conciliatory hand on her shoulder. She flinched, so he pulled away quickly.

  "Any new suggestions?" he asked with unintended sharpness.

  "No," she said. "Fortunately for us, my old suggestion paid off."

  He blinked.

  "I sent out a signal," she said, "and received a response."

  Whatever light-headedness he'd been feeling vanished at once. His body turned to lead. "I can't believe that—"

  "Oh, seriously," Xie snapped, "give it up! I told you what we needed to do and you weren't even willing to hear me out. We're here because you made a bad call and I went along with it. I wasn't about to make that mistake again."

  Davos shook his head and bit down his words. He cleared his throat and said, "Who the hell responded?"

  "A ship on the other side of the sphere. The dipole field must have been interfering with our sensors. The crew is all dead, but apparently the ship was outfitted with a Murray AI, which is somehow still operational."

  Davos frowned. "So the ship's been here since before Murray AIs were outlawed—some five hundred years."

  "Give or take a few decades," Xie confirmed. "Let's count our blessings that Gabriele—that's the AI's name—is working. Like us, she believes that there's a black hole inside the sphere."

  "Nice to see you two are already on a first-name basis," Davos muttered. "How has she managed to stay operational all this time?"

  "Her ship, the Lemaitre, is a lot bigger than ours. Original crew complement of one hundred, compared to us two. Emergency backup power has kept her going. Mostly. She's a little incoherent. My guess is that five centuries alone out here have caused partial degradation."

  "Fantastic. A Murray AI, intrinsically unstable, made even more unstable by hundreds of years of loneliness. Any other good news?"

  "She's got a plan."

  He scoffed. "A plan?"

  "It's simple, really," Xie said, words that, when uttered by his wife, invariably inspired wariness in Davos. "With a minor tweak to our orbital speed, we can get close to the Lemaitre and transfer to it. Once onboard, we fly away."

  "Hold on. You're saying the Lemaitre has enough power to FTL jump? So why's it still here?"

  "Murray AI—she needs a human interface to activate her FTL drive."

  "But if the Lemaitre's FTL drive is still ticking, why didn't its original crew fly away five centuries ago?" Davos' mind buzzed. "Something's not right here."

  "According to Gabriele's records, something or someone paid the sphere a visit shortly after the Lemaitre arrived, generating enough radiation to kill the whole crew before they could jump or make it to their emergency cryo units. Except, of course, for Gabriele."

  "I suppose you've already entered the velocity changes," Davos said.

  "It didn't seem like a good idea to dawdle," Xie replied.

  Davos' skin crawled. "What makes you think I'll go along with this? We can't trust Gabriele. I say we stay on the Geroch."

  "I don't really care whether you come or not," Xie said. "Remain here if you wish."

  "That's your final word on the subject?"

  "No, these are my final words on the subject: I'm tired." She yawned. "My turn to sleep."

  And with that, back turned to Davos, she briskly made her way to the opposite end of the room and helped herself to a sleeping bag.

  Davos stared out of the nearest viewport, gaze lost in the all-encompassing darkness.

  In time, he entered the ship's second bio-friendly chamber. There he set about preparing for the EVA that would be required when they were close enough to the Lemaitre.

  From the outside the Lemaitre looked uncannily new. Its surfaces reflected Davos' and Xie's spacesuit lights with a polish unblemished by half a millennium in orbit. As they secured a line and clambered across to a port in the Lemaitre's hull, Davos found himself glancing up at Xie through his visor, wondering what the AI was whispering in her ear. He had brusquely rejected Gabriele's offer to provide remote assistance during their EVA, an offer that Xie had happily accepted. Now Davos reached the port and found it sealed by an embedded magnetic lock. A chilling sweat broke out on his back.

  A minute later Xie joined him and punched in the access code. "Gabriele gave it to me," she said, voice scratchy through the helme
t com.

  Once inside, they resealed the port hatch and scanned the atmosphere—meager, but survivable. Davos floated in place.

  "It's taking Gabriele some time to restore an optimal oxygen/nitrogen mix," Xie pointed out. "Several conversion pumps aren't working. Also, grav locks are down."

  "It had a whole day to prepare for our arrival," Davos grumbled, eliciting a scowl from Xie.

  "She did jettison the crew's bodies," Xie said, "if that's any comfort."

  Xie removed her helmet, paused a moment to allow her lungs to adjust, and began zero-g swimming down a passageway. Davos copied her, with appreciably less elegance.

  When they reached the navigation area, Xie pointed at a flashing screen. "The data corruption I was telling you about." Then she noticed the collar of a beige bodysuit showing underneath Davos' EVA suit. "Are you cold or something?"

  "Very."

  Her eyes lingered on the bodysuit's olive color. "Hmmm. Aren't all our bodysuits black?"

  "I dyed this one while you slept."

  "What?"

  In hushed tones Davos said, "Since when do you care how I dress?" Then he raised his voice. "Can you hear us, Gabriele?"

  "I can," a steely female voice replied, the sound seeming to simultaneously project out of every panel and alcove.

  Davos shivered. "Nice to meet you."

  "I wish your sentiment was genuine," Gabriele said impassively, "but thank you for at least simulating cordiality."

  "I really am glad—"

  "Drs. Davos and Xie Yalow, let us skip the pleasantries," Gabriele interrupted. "I require access to the human body to be able to initiate the Lemaitre's FTL drive. And you need a way out of this sphere's gravitational well. We don't have to like one another, but we do need to work together—at least for a while. Here are the instructions that will enable you to interface with my system."

  A succession of diagrams and notes scrolled on the nearest screen.

  "Let's not waste time then," Xie said.

  About ten minutes later they were strapped in the interface seats—a little too snugly for Davos' taste. Transceivers attached to their temples, their arms lay on touch-sensitive rests.