Erebus

by Ralph Kern

  With a mental command, I brought up the file I had ready. A flashing envelope of a HUDmail appeared in my view, and I sent it over to her. “Already got it here for you.”

  “You are the picture of efficiency,” Phillips said, nodding at me and accepting the transfer.

  “We’ve managed to squeeze Red Star for more information,” I said. “The briefing docket you had included a HUD download from Drayton, right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It turned out she was holding out on us. We’ve just received the rest. Want to watch it with us?”

  CHAPTER 34

  IO

  “So, what now?” Drayton asked Delaney. They were still seated in the forward operating cabin at Eston Mons. The buzz centered around the transit of the probe through the gate had receded into the murmur of scientists and technicians analyzing the readings they had picked up from the gate’s activation.

  “What do you mean?” Delaney said distractedly, poring over the sensor data that had come in as the probe had flashed away. “Oh, we need to compile the sensor readings from the transit and see what we can learn from this.”

  The probe that they sent through had a return module and servitor robot. Once it arrived at its destination, it would gather sensor data, and if possible, the servitor would activate the other end of the gateway and send the return module back through the gate. The problem was that, without knowing where the other end was—or if it still existed, for that matter—they would have no way of knowing when it would return. If the other end was five light-years away, it would take ten years for it to come home.

  “The readings spiked in some different ways from our gateways,” Delaney murmured. “The sub-atomic positioning arrays, for example, seem to have worked much faster than ours.”

  “Are we going to be looking at incremental developments or seed changes from this?”

  “Sonia,” Delaney said testily, finally stopping examining his readouts and looking at her, “we sent the probe through five minutes ago. At least let me look at the damn readings.”

  “Okay, okay,” Drayton said, holding her hands up in mock surrender. “I’ll go file the initial report to Ms. Hanley.”

  “You do that,” Delaney said, turning back to his readouts.

  ***

  “Drayton, come back to the ops, now.” Delaney looked nearly frantic on Drayton’s HUD. Without anything more, he cut the Link.

  Groaning, Drayton swung her legs off the uncomfortable bunk where she had been writing her log for the bosses back home. She pulled on her boots and started walking in the low gravity of Io down the umbilical tubes toward the ops cabin.

  “What’s up?” she asked Delaney, who was talking animatedly with his technicians.

  “Look,” he said, waving his hand vaguely at the plate window up front, the alien pagoda a hulking outline in the darkness beyond.

  Stepping forward, she looked down at it and started in shock. The return module was lying on the human-installed mesh decking just outside the gate entrance. It was surrounded by a swirling mist from the atmospheric differential of where it had come from and where it now was.

  “Talk to me,” Drayton said, turning to look at Delaney. “Is this a malfunction or what?”

  “No, not at all. It went through, gathered the first load of data, then returned.”

  “The other end of the gateway can’t be far away, then,” Drayton said.

  “Oh, I think it is,” Delaney said, standing from the console he was hunched over.

  “It has to be nearby if it returned so quickly. In system, hell, probably in the Jupiter system,” Drayton said. Delaney just ignored her and carried on reading his console. Finally, Drayton walked over and looked at the clip that was playing on the screen.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, shock evident in her voice.

  Delaney rubbed his chin. “As far as we can tell, yes. Sensor readings are all what we would expect in that…environment.”

  Drayton looked again as the playback looped. The probe arrived at the other end in a bright flash, a low golden light, not enough to see detail. The flood light on the front of the probe lanced out. From what they could see, the probe was in a cavernous chamber. As the camera played around, it revealed a vast metallic-colored dome. It looked ancient, abandoned, the only light coming from above. Behind the probe was another pagoda, similar to what lay in front of them, light still pulsing along its flanks.

  The probe’s camera panned upward to reveal a large rent in the dome, the source of the light.

  Beyond was a swirling spiral of red and gold glowing matter. The matter would only actually move over epochs, yet the eye played tricks and filled in the movement, making it seem like they were watching a spinning whirlpool with a black speck at the center.

  “A black hole?” Drayton leaned toward the image. “There isn’t one anywhere even close to Sol.”

  “None that we know about,” Delaney added. “Definitely none that are in the process of devouring a substantial amount of matter like this one is.”

  “So where the hell is it?” Drayton asked.

  Delaney gave a shrug. “Thousands of light-years away. At least.”

  “Oh shit,” Drayton said realizing the full implications.

  “That’s right,” Delaney grinned. “That gateway not only goes farther than any of ours, but it does it faster than light.”

  “Oh shit,” Drayton repeated.

  CHAPTER 35

  GAGARIN

  “This could change, well, everything.” Frampton practically hopped around the mess as he vibrated with excitement after watching the HUD upload from Hanley.

  Drayton had known what she was doing when she held back the little detail that they had discovered a faster-than-light gateway. She’d fed us just enough information to keep us off her back and ensure we kept her on Concorde rather than shipping her back to Earth…or worse, sending her with Cheng.

  Sihota was somewhat more somber than Frampton upon the recently released revelations. “It may well do. The balance of power everywhere would change overnight and not in a predictable way.

  “Agreed,” Vance cut in. “Interstellar commerce, as fledgling as it is, for example. Even the Alpha Centauri research stations are an eight-year round trip at the moment. For the systems that are actually worth trading with, it’s even longer.”

  “Yes, but…” Frampton started.

  “Don’t get excited. The technology might not even be replicable. Red Star hasn’t got a clue as to how it worked, just that it did.” Sihota tried, unsuccessfully, to bring him down a peg.

  “Look,” said Frampton, gesturing at something in his HUD. I hadn’t bothered to slave mine to his. He was far more interested in raw data than in the general overview that I wanted, and his sparkling displays of graphs and numbers just confused me. “The basic principle is the same; it’s just half the components don’t seem to be there. The hardware is advanced, probably more so than ours, but we will be able to replicate it. It’s just a question of when. This isn’t magic; we only have to find the missing chunk.”

  “Yes, an important chunk…the chunk that accounts for the FTL travel. Look, we are not scientists. It’s not our job to figure this thing out,” Vance responded testily. “We only need to find out why Frain has gone to great lengths to destroy something so valuable.”

  I was idly flicking through the contents summary of the data file. As I did so, it occurred to me that people weren’t asking the right questions…There was one big glaring gap.

  “Folks, this is all very interesting. Whoever built this thing is easily as advanced as we are,” I said. “So where the hell are they?”

  Everyone just looked at me blankly. They were so caught up on the hardware, they had forgotten that basic question.

  “They had a star-spanning society. The only thing that is left now is some damn pagoda on a moon that’s now in bits. Oh, and presumably some derelict station circling a black hole Lord-knows-how-
many light-years away.”

  “It might not be the only artifact,” Sihota replied after a moment’s thought. “Think about it. Frain took Erebus to a system that even backwater systems would call backwater. So why Sirius? There’s not much there.”

  Sihota began tapping away on an invisible console that would be in his HUD. The lights in the mess dimmed, and a hologram of Erebus’s final approach to the gate arrays appeared floating above the mess table. We watched again as Erebus raced toward the gateways, turned front to back, and then decelerated hard yet carefully to ensure its antimatter torch didn’t destroy any of the thirty or so gateways floating in the Lagrange point.

  “There, look. Frain could have easily entered Tau Ceti, in fact, more easily than Sirius.” We watched as the explorer ship slid into the shoal of gates, sweeping by several. “Delta Pavonis—another decent and easier target. Both have relatively high colonial populations for him to run to. There’s a couple more gates he passes, not as viable as bolt holes, but with a lot more in them than Sirius has. Instead, he’s gone to extra effort to enter that gate. Why?”

  I pulled up the Sirius system on my HUD. It had various corporate and university interests within. It was apparently a fascinating place for science, but the only world that was even remotely habitable was an ice-covered rock, which by all reports, though beautiful, was not exactly an easy place to live. The system had only around five thousand people in a couple of dozen ships, stations, and one small settlement on that ice world. In terms of total population, the system measured about the same as a village.

  “So you think these guys found something out there?” I asked.

  “Well, he must have some reason for going there,” Sihota said with a shrug. “He didn’t just skip into the first gate that he could have.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Captain Vasily interrupted, entering the mess, “my orders have finally been signed off. Her owners aren’t exactly pleased, but I’ve been told they have come to an understanding with the treaty nations. Gagarin is to pursue Erebus.

  About damn time.

  CHAPTER 36

  GAGARIN

  “Layton, you don’t have to do this,” Giselle said earnestly, her face appearing in my HUD.

  “Yeah, I do,” I said. “Look, I want to. I need to.”

  “But sixteen years—assuming you even survive the experience,” she pressed.

  Why the hell was I doing it? For Dev? Would he even have wanted me to go to these lengths? Was it to complete a job? I love my work but not enough to sacrifice sixteen years. I suspected it was as much about fulfilling that pervasive childhood fantasy of being a star traveler as anything else.

  ”Hell, Giselle, I’ve never managed my teenage fantasy of being a gigolo to a stream of rich, beautiful women.” I smiled as Giselle rolled her eyes theatrically. “I might as well do the other one of exploring the stars.”

  “Great,” Giselle muttered. “You’re finally showing your true self. A kid trapped in an adult’s body.”

  I grinned and shrugged before growing serious again. “My decision is already made. It’s not as if I have to break the bad news to my wife and kids. I don’t have any. It’s only a matter of time before you boot me back to the Met, Giselle. Then what? I’ll be back juggling annual leave requests and performance figures. I can’t tell you everything about this job, but it’s big. It matters.”

  “Every job matters. To someone,” Giselle said.

  “Maybe, but there are scales of importance. Don’t try to talk me out of this. I’m going.”

  “Very well,” she said resignedly.

  “You mind packing up my stuff? Claim what you want, let the guys in the office take whatever, and put the rest in storage.”

  “Layton, you have a settee, a bed, and a coffee maker. I don’t think it will be too onerous to take care of that for you,” Giselle smiled. Yeah, I was somewhat minimalist.

  “What I want to know is, who the hell is going to pay my salary?” I asked, changing the subject. Hey, these things matter.

  “Damned if I know,” Giselle shrugged. “I’m in talks to add you to the Interstellar List. But unless you want to hang around for the next three months while I sort it out…”

  “Well, that wouldn’t exactly be a hot pursuit, now, would it?” I said with a smile before turning serious. “I trust you to sort it. I have a request, too. I know Dev had a kid brother. He’s just started school. Assuming you manage to sort my salary, put…say…a quarter of it into a trust fund for him, between now and eighteen.”

  “Layton, you don’t have to do that.”

  “No, I don’t, but I want to.”

  “I’m sure Dev’s family would appreciate that,” Giselle said. If I didn’t know the cool woman so well, I would have thought she was about to get emotional on me with the way her voice cracked.

  “Anyway, one more thing,” I said, quickly moving on. “Pull everything you can about the research that’s going on in Sirius. You’re looking for anything anomalous.”

  “You’ve been hanging out with those geeks too much. Anomalous?” Giselle rolled the word around her mouth and then asked, “Just what am I looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Everyone who is in Sirius should pretty much have a reason for being there. Sure, there are a few families, but you’re looking for, well, I don’t know, clandestine research? Corporate machinations?”

  “You don’t know what you’re asking me to look for, do you?”

  “Not a damn clue,” I replied with a grin.

  ***

  “What do you mean you’re going away? You are away. It’s not as if you come home nearly often enough as it is.”

  “I know, Mother, and I’m sorry.” The ethereal holograms of my parents were sitting on a couch in the corner of the mess. I didn’t know how much I could, or should, tell my parents, but I wasn’t going to leave without at least saying something. I looked at the aged couple. They had done everything they could to ensure I had a good life, got a decent upbringing, and knew the difference between right and wrong. Now, the sense of duty they had instilled in me was what was taking me away from them.

  I was going, and I wouldn’t be home for a long, long time.

  “Son, you never bothered to tell us before when you’ve been posted. You telling us now worries me,” my dad said.

  I glanced across at Vance, who stood in the corner of the room. She looked thoughtful for a moment and then shrugged, seemingly to herself. A second later, a text appeared on my HUD. Tell them, just not everything.

  I nodded back at her, a silent thanks.

  “I’ve been offered a job. It’s consulting in another star system. I can’t tell you just where, but I’ll be gone for a few years.”

  My mother gave a gasp and looked at my father. “How many years?”

  “I can’t tell you exactly. Between fifteen and twenty.”

  “Fifteen to twenty years!”

  “Moira,” my dad said, clasping his arm around his wife, my mother. “I’m sure you’ve thought this through, and you are doing what’s right, but that is a long time, Son.”

  “It is. But it’s also something I have to do, Dad. Look, it won’t be forever. You’ll still be around by the time I get back, and I’ll have one hell of a VR image collection to show you.” I tried to smile but knew that I had failed to be convincing.

  “Are you coming home before you leave? I’ll put on a roast, get your aunt and uncle down.” My mother was on the verge of tears.

  “I’d love to, Mother, but I can’t. The ship is leaving soon. It’s not as if I can just catch the next flight. It’ll be years before I get another chance.”

  “Layton, this isn’t fair.”

  “Moira,” my dad admonished, “this must be hard enough for him, too.”

  “It is, Dad.” I could hear my voice cracking. My mother was so damn upset. No son liked to see that.

  “Just make sure you look after yourself. Please,” he said, wrapping his arm around my mother.


  “I will. Look, I’m sorry. I have to go. A few other people need to use the room to contact their families. I’m sorry I couldn’t give you more warning.”

  “I don’t suppose you can HUDmail us?” my mother asked.

  “No. By the time any message gets to Earth, I’ll be nearly home anyway.” I realized that was the wrong answer as soon as I said it. They didn’t care about that. They just wanted me to get in touch as soon as I was able. “But tell you what, if I can, I will, even if the message gets home only a few weeks before me.”

  “Okay. Just try.”

  “I love you guys.”

  “We love you, too, Son.”

  “Laters, Gaters.” I blew a kiss and cut the Link, watching their holograms disappear. My eyes felt prickly. I hadn’t cried in years. I blinked a few times and took a deep breath.

  I felt a firm hand grip my shoulder and looked up to see Vance, a look of understanding on her face. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I will be. It’s hard, you know?”

  “I know. I’ve got to tell my daughter the same thing.”

  I didn’t even know she had a daughter, and my look obviously said as much.

  “She’s just finished college and has just started her first job, something as far removed from Company business as I could steer her. She has a nice young man to look after her. She barely even gets in touch anymore. Sound familiar?”

  I smiled back. “Yeah, it does. What are you going to tell her?”

  “The same as you. She knows what I do for a living—not that she approves. She’s one of those bleeding-heart-liberal types. I’m going to tell her I have an attachment.”

  “Ha.” I gave an affectionate scoff. The mental image of a frustrated Vance dealing with what she probably perceived to be lefty nonsense over the dinner table struck me as amusing.