REDWING LOOKED AT a shimmering screen display of the latest survey of the grav wave black hole orbits. Cliff said, “This is a slice of one zone, to get a better fix on their packed-in paths.”
Beth leaned forward, pointing. “Seems they’re stacked in three dimensions, so they can zoom down close to the central black hole at the same time. But not spherically. The orbits are in two planes perpendicular to each other. Maybe they don’t want to make this too complicated? Anyway – that’s what makes those bursty grav wave signals.”
Redwing thought but did not say, When in doubt, count something. “I don’t want you in that swarm.”
Beth laughed. “We won’t be. I want us released from Sunseeker so we skim the rim of the plasma cloud, get a look, is all.”
Redwing nodded. “Not hard to do. I’ve banked us so we pass just outward from the target. I’ll tilt the mag screen a tad, so the flitter goes off on an arc swinging through the edge of that cloud. You’ll get within maybe two hundred thousand klicks of the center, then cut across and rejoin Sunseeker without fuel use.”
As he spoke the Artilects wrote the planned pathways with blue arcs in the air. “Stay well away from any of those masses.”
“We’ll fly between the two planes where the black holes are,” Cliff added.
Beth got up and paced. “This is the first time we’ve maneuvered it at high velocity. Hope the flitter is up to it.”
“It’s rated to be. But yes, wasn’t tried at velocities around a thousand klicks a second. Another point – maybe whoever runs this place doesn’t even know we’re here,” Cliff said. Redwing liked their balance; Cliff always smoothed away worries if he could. This time he couldn’t.
Redwing looked sternly at them. “Earthside wants the generator shut down. I got a command on that years back.”
Jagged laughter, which he joined. “Right! Somehow we flip the OFF switch on a swarm of planetary masses the size of marbles. Earthside figures the Glorians use it for communication with other Type 2.5 civilizations in the galaxy – aliens who can build grav wave emitters like this. Nobody who uses mere electromagnetic means is in their class, right? Maybe they can listen in, like us – but we can’t talk.”
“So Earthside has gone crazy,” Cliff said.
“Hard to define, crazy. See, Earthside doesn’t like what they’re saying – warnings about us! The Glorians know we’re spreading out like a bad virus.”
Beth said, “So... if you can’t use gravity waves for communication, you’re a barbarian?”
This, too, provoked sighs and smiles. Fair enough.
“Prepare for the mission. Send all check sheets to me for review.” Off they went.
HE WATCHED THEM flick off from Sunseeker. Out through the mag screen, dwindling to a dot. All in pursuit of whatever monster was strumming the strands of space-time.
Christopher Columbus, he recalled, mistook squids for mermaids, later calling it an “error in taste.” He watched the tiny fusion-lit speck dive into the unknown and thought of the recruitment advertisement Ernest Shackleton placed for his pioneering polar expedition. His favorite: he called it up on a screen.
Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.
The same year Einstein devised the essentials of his General Theory of Relativity, 1914. Centuries past. And a fair definition of their mission, too.
CLIFF WORKED WITH Beth to get the jet smoothed out to glide tight and sure. The fusion drive settled down after being unused for centuries, under Apollo and Daphne’s deft maintenance. This was a mere toy, a simple proton-boron reversed-field reactor, but the Diaphanous tuned their exhaust to optimum in minutes. Now here came the Grav, as they thought of it. They held hands as the image before them swelled, a plasma-wave cumulus like a roiling fog.
Some voices ahead, came a translated signal from Daphne.
“Voices?” Cliff shrugged. “Meaning waves?”
Beth frowned. “They’ve never used that term before.”
Signals. Many. Intense. Cannot know.
“You mean coherent messages?”
True. Cannot understand.
“But... intelligent?”
Must.
Cliff watched as they penetrated deeper into the plasma cloud, their mag screens picking up ever-higher densities, like plowing into a soft snow bank. But at a thousand kilometers a second.
He glanced at Beth. “Magnetic intelligence – here?”
She grinned, liking the idea. “The Glorians have got to run this grav wave emitter somehow. It’s just maybe a million times bigger than what Apollo and Daphne do in our fusion funnel.”
Cliff thought as they watched squiggles scrawl across screens, all from something ahead in the cloud. Apollo and Daphne were sending the puzzle up to them, unable to make much of it themselves.
How to solve this? – while diving into an unknown pit?
Brute forces seemed bound to drive evolution toward beings with awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Occasionally those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of... well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals.
“So plasma life is common,” Cliff said. “It’s here. Trying to talk.”
Beth shot back, “Doesn’t matter. This is a flyby, not a thesis.”
“Yeah, but...” A Diaphanous species around another star? He peered at the plasma-wave map.
The vast reaches before them had knots and puckerings, swirls and crevasses. Here the particles thicken, there they disperse into gossamer nothingness. And moving amid this shifting structure are thicker clots still, incandescently rich. Beings? Their skins shone where magnetic constrictions pinched, combing their intricate internal streamings. Filaments waved like glistening hair and shimmered in the slow sway of energetic ions. All this from buzzing radiations, the lingua of plasma.
We hear their calls.
The flitter’s Artilect, limited but quick, made these into booming calls and muted, tinkling cadences. Conversations? A babble, really – blaring away in thumps and shouts and songs, made of winds and magnetic whorls.
Cliff wondered what it was like to live through the adroit weaving of electrical currents, magnetic strands: orchestras humans could never hear. Daphne sent more filigrees, trying to convey when ions and electrons in their eternal deft dance, made – long songs smoldering and hissing with soft energies. Hell, we don’t even know what it feels like to be a bat. Good luck with plasma minds that came out of fusion energies. We came from chemical slurries in lukewarm seas. Yet we expect – no, we yearn – to reach out toward minds from alien oceans. Even ionized seas...
Cliff leaned forward, letting the translator work on, “Daphne, are these, to you, a new species or genus of your phylum?”
Strange they are. But they sing well. And are of kinds like us.
Beth cut the audio and turned to him. “Stop! We’re dealing with a smiling cobra, who could hiss and strike at any moment.”
Cliff drew himself back from his concentration, snapping out of a focus he felt. “I was trying to...”
“Forget that. We have to get what we can, direct the probes. Give me target times to launch.”
He blinked, shook his head, swept hands over the controls. “We have to infer the mass from the plasma wave density. Looks like –” He studied screens, heart pounding now. Their close-in flyby was only an hour long and already nearly half done. “There –”
Beth sent five micro-sensors out in a single punch-burst. “Done. They can send back closeups.”
Cliff watched the central screen, now swarming with plasma wave signatures – color-signified, spectral flows jibing and chiming, sprawls of vibrant tints and glares. “Getting dense.”
“The black holes are converging,” Beth said. “In both the planes. It’s for a big p
ulse.” She was wound tight, he could hear, voice high, alarmed. But there was no time for that now.
Voices call cannot know will listen tell when can –
A wrenching force rolled through the bridge. The walls popped. Screeched. Cliff felt himself twisted. A support beam hit him and all was black.
WHEN SHE CAME to from the impact she looked for Cliff first. Her head buzzed and the small bridge was a wreck. Oily smoke, stink of scorched wiring. No hissing of escaping air, at least.
She found him behind his chair mount. Red stains everywhere. He must have gotten hit and released his belts, then passed out from loss of blood.
Beth had seen it all – death, disease, disorders, pain – and it takes a lot to shock a nurse and a seasoned field biologist. And she was both. Cliff was barely breathing. Face white, eyes closed.
She found the inadequate field kit. It had already primed itself and its label spat out its advice. Diagnosis was clear and the hand-held autodoc agreed.
He groaned, twisted, breath fast and urgent. She cut his blood-soaked pants away from his already pale legs. The cloth flaps folded back like rags. She paused, taking her knife from the field kit, hands jittery. Here it was. The left leg was a mess of crushed bone and flesh oozing blood. The smell was like sharp copper spun from a lathe, a memory from her teenage years.
He was bleeding out fast and seconds mattered. No time to clean hands so she pulled two plastic bags from the autodoc kit and made them work as gloves.
Beth measured the distance and with a single long stroke – zip – cut the leg from knee to mid-thigh. The slit went deep and she pried it open to see down into the cut. There: the artery. She poked in and found the pulse, rickety and feeble. Her fingers followed the femoral artery, slick under her fingers. Warm, weak. She tugged on it, lost it, a thin wriggling blood-snake – then managed to get it between two fingers and hoist it into view. Thin, pulsing. She squeezed the artery back, judging the length of the blood vessel, and knew she had to make this next step quick. The knife sliced through the vessel and she caught the top of it, squeezed the blood back toward the heart, feeling the pulse strong now. It was hard getting the slippery thin line between two fingers while with her other hand she tied it off. Then with the other hand, pushing the flesh aside for clearance, she got the vessel looped. A gentle pull knotted it shut. She lifted her hands and watched blood flow against the knot. The pulse was visible as blood fought to get through. It strained against the knot. With one hand she pulled the knot tighter. The block held. The bleeding below stopped. The pulse was stronger now as the blood bulged the vessel wider, turning it dark against the pale knot.
It took a moment to fish out some plastic line and wrap it around the incision. Three tight wraps over and under the leg secured it. She sat back and panted, heart pounding. “Done.”
CLIFF HAD TIME to watch Beth as they coasted now, running hard on battery power. She slipped a headset on him so he heard the Artilects rummaging through their analysis of what had happened. Complicated. He managed to tell her while they arrowed into the Sunseeker mag web.
“Look, I should’ve seen it. That two-plane orbit method lets them tune the direction of the emission some. As we came in, they boosted their power just as we passed within the max zone. The stretch-and-squeeze flexed us less than a percent.”
Beth snorted. “And popped most of our systems. How’d Sunseeker do?”
“Got a pulse but weaker – further away, sure, and out of the grav antenna beam.”
“How’s your leg?”
“Hurts goddamn plenty but better than being dead.” A sigh. “I... I love you, and not just for your med skills.”
A hearty, relieved laugh. “I know what you like. You can have plenty of it when we tuck this baby into its slot.”
Redwing was flexing the ship’s magnetic fields to brake them. Cliff could hear the inductive coils running at max in their forward dipole field. More heat, and they were already running hot, with inboard cooling failed. Their relative delta-v had to be dissipated and the berthing slot was coming up fast.
“Let’s get back inta da pool. I sure need some zero-g lovin’, yeah...” His voice trailed off and Cliff realized that her painkiller had freed his tongue. Best to shut up, let her focus, just as –
The flitter bucked and rattled. Redwing was pulsing his fields to the max. The deck below him popped and pinged and burned his hand.
The berth swelled like a fish mouth and they plunged in. A rough, slamming stop. Clamps seized them with a clang.
“Home sweet home,” Beth said, and began sobbing.
REDWING LOOKED AT both of them for a long moment. He had already delivered his compliments and was reluctant to begin with business. He would never tell them that he had damn near shat himself when the gravwave burst wrenched them. He could see the effect in the Longview ’scope: a sudden flexing of the craft, despite its high tensile strength, carbon fiber core. It was a miracle that their hull breaks were small enough for the self-sealing webs to fix. That didn’t save the fusion core, but Cliff and the ’bots could get that back up in a month or two.
Their horrendous return trajectory, with no maneuver room, had worn him down. He hated being unable to do anything except wait like a catcher in a baseball game, ready for the incoming fastball, with lives hanging on it.
He breathed deeply and nodded to Zhai, who was still a bit rocky from her warm-up. “I hope you don’t get used to this level of drama.”
Quiet chuckles; good. “Zhai, report on the Artilects.”
She gave them an eye-rolling smile. “They’re embarrassed. They think they should’ve understood that two-planes method of grouping the black hole orbits around their primary. It exploits an antenna effect. They tracked Beth and Cliff and had their orbiting holes timed so they’d send a powerful burst just as they passed in front of the antenna’s max.”
“An act of war,” Redwing said dryly.
“We knew they didn’t like us,” Cliff said.
Beth snorted and took some time to drink some coffee. Her point made, she smiled. “Maybe it was just a warning?”
“We’ve come dozens of light years,” Cliff said. “Lost people, risked lives. We’re going to explore this damn system, whatever it takes.”
Redwing nodded. He had estimated that Cliff, wounded, would speak for a hard line position and save him the trouble. Good.
Zhai added, “That five-second burst of grav radiation used the holes’ spins, orbital speeds, and masses to tune the waves’ frequency and amplitude. A well thought through assassination attempt. Aya aye, Cap’n – be warned.”
Redwing waved the discussion away. “Another discovery, this time by the Diaphanous. Daphne reports that there’s a species – she calls them that – of Diaphanous around the black holes. Seemed to be warning us off.”
Blinks, open mouths. “And they’re willing to talk further.”
Beth said distantly, “Of course. They’re perched out here at the most dense part of the star’s bow shock. Feeding on it. That’s where they get the energy to manage black holes that weigh in with planetary masses. Gad, what a system.”
“Yeah,” Cliff said wryly, “and who built it? Just to send a message we mere electromagnetic newcomers can’t pick up.”
Nods all around.
REDWING RECALLED THAT when he was young – several centuries ago, he realized with a start – battles were close up and physical. Reassuring, analog, stuff you could feel. Downright earthy. Breeches slammed shut, a hard jerk on a lanyard sent an artillery round arcing into a blue sky, delivering pain at the other end of a parabola.
Here, wrinkles in space-time were weapons. And what else?
He peered out at the dwindling bow shock region as they braked steadily along its lengthy paraboloid. Vastness, hard to grasp with a lowly primate mind.
He allowed himself a drink, the faux-wine the autochef made, reminding him of jug zinfandel he had in a college that was probably dust now. He did not need it badly but it
was just right this evening and the first swallow was like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
Only one drink, though. He had to be a Captain, always. Awash in strangeness.
They were like mice dancing among elephants out here. Immense beings were calling the tune.
The perspective was huge beyond experience, true. He preferred to think of it as Wagner, without the music.
THERE WERE BETTER workers aboard the Great Ship. Virtuous entities with proven resumes reaching back across the aeons. But the timetable was inflexible, the circumstances brutal. Seventeen hours, six minutes, and two breaths. The job had to be completed within that impossible span, beginning now. Now. The client was among the weakest citizens of the galaxy, reasonably healthy one moment, and in the next, passing out of life. What wasn’t a home and wasn’t a shell had to be rebuilt from scratch. If the client perished, nobody was paid. But the respectable guilds would take too much time. The Avenue of Tools. That’s who the experienced contractor approached when trying to dodge the bureaucracies. Speaking through private channels, he could offer extraordinary pay for brutal, brief work. “But only for those who get here first, and I mean immediately.”
Then, one final enticement.
“And no background checks,” the contractor promised.
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