Level the ground. Then place a foundation over it. Then build the flight specs. Then add the infrastructure – the water and power and sewage. All of that infrastructure would leave if the city left. The city would be built on top of the infrastructure, and then parts of the city would layer on other parts.
The dirt – the dirt was the very bottom. The foundation should have stayed, though. Hedie had said that the foundation would remain. If the domed city had to take flight, it would have to land on another foundation somewhere else.
That was, she had told Petras, the only flaw in the flying domed city plan.
Petras finally made it to the top of the nearest mound. The ground was still made up of mixed materials – the white, dark, and brown dirt all scattered across the top, as if disturbed by a great wind.
There was a slight wind here, and a smell that he didn’t recognize. Not that living decay he had smelled when the scraggly forest was here, but a faintly rotten scent overlaid with a bit of burned metal, ozone – something snappy and crisp and metallic and smoke-filled.
He peered down, expected a crater. Instead, he saw a flattened portion of ground. Only on the ground were strange prints, things he did not understand.
“Don’t walk any farther.” Ahmed had caught up to him.
“Where was she found?” Petras asked.
Ahmed pointed at the nearest print at the top of the rise.
Despite Ahmed’s warning, Petras took a few steps forward, and looked.
Not a print, really. An indentation. In the shape of a human form, curled in a fetal position.
Petras crouched. The stench grew suddenly worse. The dark part of the dirt here wasn’t black dirt. It was stained – and he suddenly understood what it was stained with.
Blood.
His wife’s blood.
The city had left, and then she had landed here, every bone in her body crushed.
He frowned, trying to imagine it. Because that dome was airtight, several layers thick, and there were layers and layers of foundation and infrastructure and –
That unsettled feeling became worse. It was impossible. What he was seeing. Impossible.
“I’m sorry,” he said as he turned slightly. “I’m not clear on something. How did the bodies get here?”
Ahmed ran his fingers across his forehead, as if he were trying to smooth out the new wrinkles.
“We don’t know,” he said. “We really don’t know.”
vi
“ENGINEERS AND GOVERNMENTS are the same on only one point,” Hedie said, two days before the wedding. “They both prefer certainty to uncertainty. Uncertainty can drive them crazy.”
She hadn’t been looking at Petras as she said that. She had her back to him, her entire body hunched. She was looking at a wall-sized 2D image of the Nbrediss Island Chain, the ocean a bright cheery blue, the islands themselves strange brown shapes that resembled – from this distance – rocks strewn across a pond.
“It wasn’t your project,” he had said, his stomach twisted in knots. They stood in his kitchen. It was the middle of the night. He had awakened to find the bed empty, and then emerged to discover her here, looking at the Island Chain again, as if she could solve the mystery of the collapsed bridges.
“It was my project,” she said. “I’m just lucky.”
“Lucky.” He didn’t think of her as lucky. The loss of the bridges haunted her so much that he worried about what he was getting into, what kind of person he was marrying. “I don’t understand how you can consider yourself lucky because you were with this project.”
“That’s just it,” she said, still staring at the image. He realized as he looked that she studied the image without the bridges, never the image with the bridges. “I wasn’t in charge of this project. I’ll be able to work again. Everyone who signed off – they might never ever be able to build anything again.”
The bridges remained a mystery that Petras did not like. Every new revelation sent Hedie into a frenzy of examination.
The ocean was too deep to find the bits of the bridges. The bridge pieces never washed ashore. Divers didn’t find foundations to the bridges.
But the bodies of the workers – they had floated to the surface almost immediately.
And they hadn’t drowned.
That had been the first important clue. They hadn’t drowned. They had no water in their lungs, but their bones were shattered, as if they had fallen from a great height.
“Everyone thinks they fell off the bridges,” she had said slowly that night, as if Petras hadn’t spoken at all. “But they couldn’t have...”
“What do you mean?” he had asked.
She shut off the image then, and turned to him, enveloping him in her arms.
“We’re getting married in two days,” she said.
“I know,” he said, wondering what he was getting into.
“It’s time to focus on the future,” she said.
“I know,” he said.
“So let’s,” she had said, and kissed him. And he had forgotten about missing bridges and damaged bodies, thinking only of family and a life with her, instead of one without.
She had only spoken of those bridges one more time.
vii
PETRAS TOUCHED THE ground where his wife’s body had ended up. The dirt was caked, thicker because it was laced with blood.
“Did you ever hear of the Nbrediss Island Chain bridge disaster?” he asked.
“Every engineer has heard of it.” Ahmed sounded very far away, even though he was only a few meters from Petras. “Seventy-five bridges with the same flaw, collapsing due to the same storm – and not a severe one at that.”
“That’s one theory.” Petras rolled one little clump of dirt into a tiny ball. He couldn’t let go of it. Not yet.
“That’s the only logical theory,” Ahmed snapped.
“So you know the other one,” Petras said.
“That aliens stole the bridges? Teleported them elsewhere?” Ahmed’s tone had grown derisive. “Any culture that can teleport structures of that size can build bridges like those linking the Nbrediss Islands.”
“Unless the teleportation device was also stolen,” Petras said. Hedie had believed that, in the end. Because she had seen some security footage from a dock near one of the bridges.
The bridge had disappeared.
Then, fifteen minutes later, bodies rained from the sky, landing in the ocean as if dropped from a great height.
They were rejected, she had said. Because whoever stole the bridges didn’t want people. They wanted intact structures.
She had looked ashen after seeing the footage, and it had taken him days to get her to tell him why.
The people who had fallen – the workers – they had been sent back alive.
He swallowed against a dry throat, then looked up at the purplish sky. Where had they appeared, his wife and the 599 others? Just inside the atmosphere? At the top of the dome?
Those last five seconds –
Those people must have been in hell, she had said, imagining it. He had closed his eyes against the image, back then, not wanting to pollute his mind.
Now, though, now –
He thought of her falling. Five seconds was a very long time. Long enough to recognize where she was and what would happen. Long enough to reach toward the existing city of Akida, toward her family asleep in their comfortable apartment.
Long enough to feel – what? Love? Regret? Fear? All of those things?
“You don’t believe that, do you?” Ahmed asked.
Petras realized Ahmed had taken a long time to speak, and when he had, his tone was different. More curious than sarcastic.
“Hedie did,” Petras said.
He stared at the bloody ground for a long moment, realizing that the sensation of disquiet had left him. Had it come from outside? From her?
Then he shook his head, the lore and folktales warring with the logic. Probably not from her ghost. But from the me
mory of her, the things she would have wanted Ahmed – and those running the project – to know had she lived.
Had she not been at the project when someone had transported it elsewhere.
“Hedie?” Ahmed said. “What would she know about it?”
Then Petras realized that Ahmed hadn’t known. Hedie had been right. No one had known of her involvement in the first project. It hadn’t been part of her resume because she hadn’t been a major player.
Petras stood, and wiped his fingers on his pants.
“Look it up,” he said. “You’ll see.”
And if Ahmed were smart, he would see the similarities. Maybe Ahmed would tell the others.
Or maybe Petras would remind his mother of both disasters. The PPM could investigate them as a unit, and do what needed to be done.
Petras turned. He could see the lights of Akida from here. Where his children were. Where Hedie’s parents were. Where his mother was. The entire world, for him.
He would move forward in it, taking care of his small life.
It wasn’t up to him to solve this. To find those who stole gigantic pieces of technology with other kinds of technology.
He would leave that to governments and engineers, people who needed certainty.
He had his certainty.
Hedie was gone, and she had left a legacy different from the one she had expected to leave.
She had expected to leave giant monuments, a tribute to her engineering vision, examples of her prodigious and unbelievably creative mind.
Instead, she left two imaginative children and a man who loved her – a small impact, but an impact all the same.
Petras would honor her the way she had wanted him to honor her – by recognizing her death, and raising their children to be the best of both of them.
Little pieces of the future, that he would protect, the only way he knew how.
Nature, and Nature’s Laws lay hid in Night.
God said, Let Newton be! and All was Light.
It did not last: the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein be!” restored the status quo.
—J.C. Squire, “In continuation of Pope on Newton”
DEAD BLACK SPACE. Captain Redwing peered doubtfully at the big screen, filled with... nothing.
“No Oort cloud at all? But the Glory star is a G3, right? Should be a swarm of iceteroids swinging along, way out here.”
Beth Marble shrugged. “Nothing within a quarter of a light year that’s nearly as big as Sedna. Recall when we boomed past that ice rock, beyond Pluto? First one found, back centuries ago? Here, nothing even a tenth as big as Sedna or even a thousandth.”
Redwing pondered. Conventional astronomy held that a cloud of interstellar shrapnel and bric-a-brac orbited stars, the mass that didn’t collapse to make the star or its planets. In his early career he had piloted a ramscoop on one of the first runs into the solar Oort Cloud. They had ridden Sunseeker out into the Oort, tried the flaring, rumbling engines, found flaws that the previous fourteen ships had missed. Redwing had overseen running the Artilect AI systems then, found the errors in rivets and reason, made them better. In the first few generations of interstellar craft, every new ship was an experiment. Each learned from the last, the engineers and scientists did their burrowing best, and a better ship emerged from the slow, grinding, liberating work. Directed evolution on the fast track.
Redwing emerged from that. Then the first generation of starship commanders had to make a huge leap, from the fringes of the solar Oort cloud out into interstellar distances. This expedition to find the gravwave emitter was a giant jump, a factor of 100,000 – like sailing around the world after a trial jaunt around a sandbar three football fields wide.
This star had a spherical outer Oort cloud of suspiciously low density, an icesteroid every Astronomical Unit or so, but now the inner Oort disk was... gone. Into whatever was emitting gravwaves. But invisible?
“So what’s this empty field telling me?” Redwing gestured to Cliff Kammath to expand the view near them. Sunseeker was about a thousand AU out from the target star, Excelsius, and there was nothing luminous in the vast volume.
Cliff’s brow furrowed. “Not much. Running the range now.”
Redwing watched the ship’s Artilects offer up views across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Pixels jittered, shuffled, merged. Visible light was a mere one octave on a keyboard fifteen meters wide – humanity’s slice of reality. “Except – here’s the plasma wave view, and – bingo!”
A long ellipsoidal cloud bristled in shades of rude orange. “Color-coded for plasma wave density,” Cliff said. “Blotchy.”
“This odd little zone is the only mass of any consequence in the entire outer system?” Beth said skeptically, mouth skewed. “And it’s not self-luminous at all in anything but plasma emissions?”
Redwing said to the Artilect system in his spaced, patient voice, “Display all detected plasma emissions – all-frequency spectrum.”
Sunseeker’s system dutifully trolled through a series of plasma views, labeled by frequency ranges, and stopped when it hit a softly ivory blob. Beth said, “Looks like a melted ice cream bar, three thousand kilometers across.”
“That’s plasma emission in the high microwaves,” Cliff said, prowling up the energy scale in jumps. “Oblong – ah, look – in the low x-ray there are a bunch of hard spots.”
“Moving fast,” Beth said as the refreshed image showed the luminous dots jumping along in flashes. “Seventeen. Fast! They’re orbiting the brightest of them – which doesn’t seem to move much. Look, one is fast, on an ellipse. The other makes a much smaller arc. A big guy with a swarm of bees around it. As though – good grief, they’ve got to have huge masses.”
Sunseeker’s ever-present Artilect conglomerate mind added on the screen, One is much larger than an Earth mass... approximating orbital parameters... smaller, 0.73 Earth mass... largest 17.32 Earth mass.
Radius of these is smaller than the resolution of my systems.
“So they’re less than a few hundred meters across,” Cliff added.
All three looked at each other. “Black holes, then,” Redwing said. The Artilect added, So radius is centimeters. Cannot see.
“Pretty damn dangerous neighborhood,” Beth said. “If those fast dots are black holes and the masses are right – hell, they’re less than a centimeter across? We’re looking at the plasma around them.” Beth’s mouth twisted into her patented wry slant. “No wonder the Glorians keep it out here a thousand AUs from their world.”
Cliff chuckled. “Recall the banner at our send-off party? The Star-Craving Mad Farewell. Well, we’d sure as hell be crazy to get close to that.”
Redwing couldn’t let that go by. With only three of them resurrected so far, and only able to revive at most one a day, he needed coherence in their effort. “It’s part of my orders. We’re to study the grav wave emitter, and there it is. Not that the physicists had any idea of what was going on here – plus study the biosphere of Glory, first priority.”
Cliff didn’t like conflict, so Redwing watched him flip through some images, then – “I went to a broader view and found a good clue. Look –”
A composite image of the whole Excelsius system rippled in the air. Cliff pointed at the apex of a parabolic arc. “That’s the star’s bow shock. The Excelsius solar wind meets the interstellar plasma there.”
They all knew what this meant. Sunseeker was deliberately using the bow shock parabaloid to augment its magnetic braking. Plasma built up all along that pressure wall. The ship had been taking advantage of it for weeks as it approached the star, flying along its long curve.
“They’ve put their gravwave emitter at the highest plasma density in the outer system,” Beth said. “Why?”
“That’s for us to find out,” Redwing said.
Cliff said slowly, eyes veiled, “Those Earthside orders – you’ll follow them?”
He and Beth were married but they didn’t necessarily
agree on tech issues or policy, Redwing knew. He raised his eyebrows at Beth, hoping for support, but she said, “Earth is so far away – hell, decades at lightspeed – we can’t be guided by their mandates.”
Redwing had never subscribed to the communal view of crew governance. One starship bound for Tau Ceti had followed a shared governance system and broken down into fighting factions, dooming the mission.
He stood, a clear signal in a small room. “We can’t remotely understand this system without knowing about this grav wave emitter.” He used his stern gravel voice. “It’s sending messages! We can’t read ’em onboard, but I’ll bet there’s a way to pick them out. Maybe in that plasma cloud. They must need it, but why? I don’t want to approach the inner worlds without understanding how some aliens built this thing. And perhaps even why.”
“But we’re in the long fall to Glory,” Cliff said mildly. “The braking is fine. Any change of vector will be tricky – and that plasma plume is many Astronomical Units away.”
Redwing nodded. Decelerating a starship was tricky without heating the ship so much its systems malfunctioned or failed entirely. Sunseeker’s support structure was made of nuclear tensile strength materials, able to take the stresses of the ramjet scoop at the ship core. But even that could not overrule thermodynamics. Heat had to go somewhere. The big magnetic fields at Sunseeker’s braking bow drove shock waves into the hydrogen ahead, ionizing it to prickly energies, then scooping it up and mixing it with fusion catalysis, burning as hot as suns – to power the vast fields serving as an invisible parachute in the star’s solar wind.
Yet he had to respond to this latest oddity, too. There must be a lesson here: All plans die upon first contact with the alien. That’s what this strange expedition, crossing light years and centuries, could do: embrace ultimate strangeness. He had long since learned that what his imagination could not summon, reality delivered with a shrug.
The couple glanced at each other, silent, then back at Redwing. “My orders stand,” Redwing said, closing the subject with a square mouth and flat stare.
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