Forbidden Suns

by D. Nolan Clark

  Bury nodded and left without further remarks. Well, thank the devil for small mercies, Lanoe thought. He turned a chair around to face the control stand and Valk’s abandoned suit.

  “I’m starting to worry about you,” he said.

  “May I ask why?”

  The voice from the speakers sounded right. It sounded like Valk, like Tannis Valk. Like the simulation of Tannis Valk that Lanoe had met just before the battle of Niraya. But the Valk of back then had been less precise in his language. He’d been a lot more rough-and-tumble. A lot more human, Lanoe guessed.

  “You’re deteriorating,” Lanoe said. “Stop—before you say it, I’m sure your software is working at peak efficiency. That’s not what I’m talking about.”

  “My personality, you mean,” Valk said. “My … ability to relate to my fellow man. Hmm. That bears some consideration. I could try reoptimizing some subroutines, see if that helps. The last thing I want is for people to feel uncomfortable around me.”

  Lanoe looked down at his hands and smiled. They’d passed that junction a long time ago. “It didn’t occur to you that I might want to know that Ginger was in trouble. If I hadn’t come over to look at a computer model—”

  “One I really think you should see,” Valk told him.

  “In a minute. If I hadn’t come over for that, I wouldn’t have known what was going on until it was too late. Let’s put aside the human element here, that could have compromised the mission. What the hell were you thinking? You heard her screaming. You did nothing.”

  Valk paused before answering. Lanoe wondered if that was just to simulate some level of contrition. “I knew she wasn’t in immediate danger.”

  Lanoe shook his head in frustration. He was getting nowhere.

  He’d known for a while that Valk was falling apart. Paniet had warned him about it, but he’d been able to see it with his own eyes. And he still needed Valk, the AI was still crucial to his plans. This wasn’t good. He gestured at the empty suit lying at the controls. “What’s going on here?”

  “Manifesting a human shape was using up energy we could better use elsewhere,” Valk told him. “If it bothers you, seeing me like that—”

  “It does,” Lanoe said.

  “I never thought you were such a stickler for your troops keeping their uniforms in good order,” Valk said, and then he laughed. But the suit moved, straightening up. The black helmet flowed up out of the collar ring. The suit’s arms lifted and the gloves arrayed themselves over a virtual keyboard. “Better?”

  Something occurred to Lanoe. “Stand up,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “I want to see you stand up. Don’t worry about wasting energy. Paniet fixed the leak in our engine, so we have plenty of power. Just stand up for me. Maybe walk around a little.”

  “I’m not sure I want to,” Valk said.

  “It’s an order.”

  “Lanoe … it hurts.”

  “You told me once that everything hurt. All the time. Phantom body syndrome, right? That’s what you called it?”

  “Yes,” Valk replied. “I have that even now, but it’s like a dull ache. A soreness in muscles that should be there, but aren’t. If you make me stand up, it’ll turn into real pain. I don’t want to feel pain. What conscious being wants to feel pain?”

  “One,” Lanoe said, “that wants to obey the orders of his commanding officer.”

  It took a while. There were false starts, as Valk bent forward at the waist, then fell back against his padded seat. His legs moved, his boots shuffling against the deck plating. Making little progress. Eventually, though, he rose to stand. He took two steps forward, toward Lanoe.

  “Is it bad?” Lanoe asked.

  “Bad enough,” Valk said. He didn’t grunt in frustration, or gasp at fresh pains, but Lanoe could tell he was having trouble.

  “Do a lap of the wardroom,” Lanoe told him. “Then I’ll look at your damned computer model.”

  Valk took the suit for a spin, showing no sign of distress now. However much pain he might be experiencing, it didn’t slow him down.

  Lanoe watched him go with a dubious look. “You seem to be doing fine.”

  “Seem,” Valk said. “Seem. Seem. Seem. It’s a simulation. Everything I am is a simulation.”

  “You need to get it together, Valk.”

  The AI laughed. “Do I? I’m not supposed to exist, Lanoe. I’m supposed to be destroyed, deleted. Fragmented and then wiped. Even I think I’m an abomination. But you want me to ‘get it together.’ To stabilize.”

  It wasn’t the first time Valk had talked about being erased. He’d even given Lanoe a gift once, a software package in the form of a black pearl. A data bomb—if Lanoe so much as swiped his eyes across that black pearl, it would start a chain reaction that would expunge Valk entirely from any computer he inhabited. Lanoe had archived the black pearl, knowing that someday he might actually need it.

  But not today.

  “I still need you,” he said.

  “You do.” It wasn’t ego saying that. It was a simple statement of fact. Valk knew just how valuable he was.

  Lanoe sighed. “Come on, big guy. You need to …” Something occurred to him. “You need to show me that computer model you keep talking about.”

  The transformation was instant. Before, Valk had sounded depressed, even suicidal. Now, with no transition, he was all energy and purpose. The AI dropped back into his seat and called up a large display that showed the disk in all its swirling glory. Metadata flashed all around the image, numbers showing distances between objects, relative masses, a timeframe. “If you look here—”

  “Hold on,” Lanoe said. He couldn’t shift gears as quickly as Valk. He rose from his seat—exhaling sharply as he exercised old, stiff joints—and walked over to the control stand. “Tell me what I’m seeing. Keep it simple for me.”

  “Okay,” Valk said. “This is a simulation of all the mass in the disk, the gas and dust and the little shepherd moons. I plugged in all the variables we could think of, gravity, angular momentum, the effect of the stellar wind, and so on, and then I let it run for a couple of billion simulated years. That didn’t quite work. The disk fell apart almost immediately, all that hydrogen gas just pouring onto the surface of the star. The end result was just a bigger star, which made no sense.”

  “How long would it take for the disk to collapse?”

  “A few hundred years.”

  Lanoe nodded. “The Blue-Blue-White have whole cities down there. Nobody would put cities in a gas cloud that’s just going to go poof in that kind of timeframe.”

  “Right,” Valk said. “There’s some kind of force holding the disk back from falling into the star. Maybe a weather field, like we use in our airlocks, but on this kind of scale that seems unlikely. The power you would need to keep something like that going would be immense, much more than you could get even if you collected all the energy coming off of the star. No, there’s something else at work here. I have no idea what it might be, but I know it has to be there. I added a variable that pushes the gas away from the star and the model worked great, it ran for billions of years without significant loss of mass. Interesting enough, right?”

  “I suppose,” Lanoe said.

  “It is to me. But if that doesn’t get you interested, this definitely will. The next step was to run the model backward in time. Take it right back to zero. That’s when I found the real puzzle. There is no zero.”

  “I have no idea what you mean by that.”

  Valk sighed. It sounded like a real sigh, anyway. “I wanted to see how the disk formed in the first place. How all that gas could just accumulate without coalescing into a gas giant, or a brown dwarf, or even a star—a binary companion to the red dwarf. The answer is, it couldn’t. Or at least, the odds of such a thing happened are—ha—astronomical.”

  “There must be something wrong with your model, then. Or there’s something we don’t know yet about astrophysics, something that can allow th
is.”

  “Oh,” Valk said, “there are plenty of mysteries left in space. But this isn’t one of them. The answer isn’t that we don’t know how this sort of thing could form in nature. The answer is much simpler.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yes. It didn’t.”

  It took Lanoe a minute to realize what Valk was telling him. When he did, he made a fist and thumped Valk’s console. “Holy damn,” he said. “You’re saying—”

  “The disk is artificial. The Blue-Blue-White built it.”

  Lanoe closed his eyes. He felt like his brain was reeling, spinning out of control. “Get Candless over here. And Paniet, we definitely want Paniet’s opinion on this. Get them over here now.”

  In the brig, the two of them were moving. Ehta had unlocked Ginger’s suit and now the girl was in there, moving with the alien. They circled around each other, every motion exactly mirrored by the other. When Rain-on-Stones lifted one arm in a feeble gesture, Ginger matched it perfectly. When the chorister reared her head back in what looked like a silent shriek, Ginger’s head snapped back, too—and her mouth opened and she let out a chilling cry.

  Ehta knew she should stop watching. That she should get away from this—for her own mental health if nothing else. But she couldn’t. She just stood there in front of the open hatch of the cell, stood there barely even blinking.

  The alien’s movements were slow, still. The sedative hadn’t completely worn off. Her legs slipped on the padded floor, her feet unsuited to standing on such a smooth surface. Every time, Ginger slipped, too, almost falling.

  Ginger didn’t look at Ehta. She didn’t say a word in any language. The lucidity that had come and gone before, the ability to focus on the human beings around her, was gone. She was trapped now, trapped in this strange dance with the alien.

  Help me, she’d begged. Ehta, help me.

  But how? How was Ehta supposed to do anything for the girl? She was gone, lost in her communion with the chorister’s slowly waking mind.

  Lanoe won’t set me free.

  Free—free of her connection to the chorister? Ehta had suggested earlier that they wrap the girl’s head in metal foil, to block off the alien thoughts that were being beamed ceaselessly into her brain. Ginger hadn’t thought that would work, maybe, or perhaps she’d simply known that wouldn’t be enough.

  Set me free.

  The two of them dropped to the floor, Ginger down on her hands and knees. Rain-on-Stones on more legs and arms that Ehta could count. Together they pawed and scratched at the padded walls of the cell. The alien’s limbs moved with furious speed, as if she were trying to dig her way out of a grave.

  Ginger’s hands blurred as she desperately scrabbled to keep up. To match those anguished movements.

  Set me free.

  Suddenly, Ehta understood.

  What the girl wanted. Why she had turned to a marine for help. Regardless of the problem in front of them, marines only ever used one solution.

  Set me free, the girl had begged.

  The only way that would be permanent. The only way Ginger could survive, long-term.

  She wanted Ehta to kill the chorister.

  It was the only possible way.

  Candless stared at the display, her face pinched as her eyes followed its swirling course. Lanoe watched her carefully.

  “You are telling me,” she said, “that the disk is artificial.”

  “Yes,” Lanoe said.

  “You’re saying—you’re claiming that the Blue-Blue-White don’t just live here. That they actually built the place, too.”

  “Yes,” Lanoe said, again.

  “You can’t possibly be serious. It’s simply too big.”

  “It’s the only thing that fits all the data we’ve collected,” Valk insisted.

  “Then for the first time in history, mathematics has been proved wrong,” Candless said.

  Lanoe was pretty sure that coming from her that counted as a joke.

  “I had him run me through it a couple of times before I realized he was right,” Lanoe said. “Look here, at these shepherd moons. They’re there for a reason. You see how the outer edge of the disk has those tiny gaps in it? Those are where the moons sweep through, clearing out dust. Their gravity isn’t much, but it’s enough to pull the gas along with them. They keep the hydrogen from just flowing off into deep space.”

  “Ooh,” Paniet said. The neddy was crouched down next to the display, a look of utter excitement and happiness on his face.

  “The gas is thickest here, on the inner rim of the disk,” Lanoe pointed out. “Where it’s balanced against the stellar wind. It’s thinnest at the outer edge. That’s important, too. The disk is only about two million kilometers in radius—”

  “Only!” Candless said.

  Lanoe shrugged. “It orbits pretty close to the star, is what I’m saying. So it gets pretty hot—that inner rim is baking at about a thousand degrees. But because that’s the thickest part, it serves as a buffer, soaking up all that heat and radiation. The central section, where the cities are, is protected by that buffer. The average temperature here,” he said, pointing at the central part of the disk, where the cities were, “is about three hundred degrees.”

  “How temperate,” Candless said. “Balmy, even.”

  Lanoe ignored her. “The density changes, too. There’s a gradient from inner rim to outer rim. In the center, the zone of the cities, it’s about the same average density as Saturn, six hundred and eighty-seven kilograms per cubic meter.”

  “Ooh,” Paniet said, tilting his head to one side. “Less dense than water. Interesting.”

  Lanoe ignored him, too. “We don’t know much about the Blue-Blue-White, but we know they evolved in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet. Probably one a lot like Saturn, but hotter. That city zone is the perfect environment for our jellyfish. Given how unlikely it is that the disk just formed naturally, how much more unlikely would it be that it would form in exactly the right conditions for them?”

  “I imagine the odds would be quite low,” Candless admitted. “But you still need to answer one question. How exactly would they do such a thing? This is far beyond anything we—we meaning humans here—ever imagined. The scale alone …”

  “Ah,” Paniet said. Then he stood up quickly. “We do know that the Blue-Blue-White are planetary engineers. That’s why they built their drone fleets in the first place. To spread out through the galaxy and terraform—if you’ll forgive a slightly incorrect term—every gas giant they could get their hands on.”

  Candless still didn’t look convinced. She opened her wrist display and started tapping at virtual keys. “Two million kilometers major radius, one hundred thousand kilometers mean minor radius …” she said under her breath.

  Which Valk seemed to find amusing. He laughed, anyway.

  “May I inquire,” Candless said, “what precisely you think is so humorous?”

  “You’re doing math,” the AI said.

  Everyone, including Lanoe, turned to stare at him.

  “What? You could just ask me. You’re trying to compute the volume of the disk. It’s about three hundred and ninety-five quadrillion cubic kilometers—roughly two hundred and seventy-six times the volume of Jupiter.”

  “Quadrillion,” Candless said. “That’s a number you don’t run across very often.”

  Paniet nodded. “Multiply that by the density, Valk. How much does this thing mass?”

  Valk didn’t hesitate in responding. “Two hundred and seventy-one octillion kilograms.”

  “Oh, now we’re into the octillions,” Candless said, nodding her head sagely. “And that, of course, is where your theory is going to fall apart.”

  “How so?” Lanoe asked.

  Candless practically spluttered in disbelief, as if it should be perfectly obvious. “Where, pray tell, would our jellyfish friends even find so much mass? Admittedly, hydrogen is common enough in the universe. But that much of it in one place—”

  “
Actually,” Paniet said, “I can think of one obvious source.”

  “You can,” Candless said.

  “Yes, dear.” He pointed at the display. At the very center of it. At the red dwarf in the middle of the disk. “A star. A red dwarf would do, say, about a quarter of a solar mass in size—”

  “Less, actually,” Valk pointed out. “About thirteen percent of a solar mass.”

  “Right,” Paniet said. “See? Easy.”

  Lanoe frowned. “What are you suggesting?”

  Paniet shrugged. “More what I’m guessing. But it fits. I think that a very long time ago this star system was a binary. Two red dwarfs orbiting each other very close. The Blue-Blue-White evolved on a gas giant that circled them both, but they outgrew their original planet and needed more space to move about. So to make this—this disk thing—they dismantled one of the red dwarfs. Sort of smeared it out across its own orbit.”

  Candless had gone pale. Lanoe watched her carefully. She’d accepted it, he saw. She believed that the disk was artificial.

  She was still having trouble with what that meant, however.

  “You’re saying that these jellyfish don’t just tinker with planets in their spare time,” she said, in an uncharacteristically soft voice. “They build things out of stars, too.”

  Paniet nodded gleefully. “Isn’t it just wonderful?”

  Chapter Twelve

  In the tent hidden deep inside the carrier’s flight deck, Paniet ran one hand along the smooth side of the Screamer. It felt good, solid. A piece of work he could be proud of. He turned and looked at Hollander and gave him a smile. “Would you be a dear and give those locking nuts one more turn?”

  “Right,” the Hadean neddy said. He pushed his way under the connecting spar that held the thruster package onto the main body of the drone and made the adjustment. Other neddies polished the big lenses or checked the inflight electronics packages.