Lost in Transmission

by Wil McCarthy

  “Look at the shape of the spot,” Xmary suggested. “The beam is circular, right? But I'll bet you're seeing an oval smear across our bow, and from that you can compute the incidence angle. And from the changes in the spot size you can get the divergence angle, and therefore the range. Trace the beam right back to its source.”

  This surprised Conrad. It was an ingenious idea, and certainly nothing his childhood Xmary, the Denver party girl, would have come up with. He loved her as much now as he had back then—or so it seemed, at any rate—but he supposed people did change, slowly, like wax dolls in the warmth of a closed hand. Decade by decade the differences were imperceptible, but across the span of centuries that fiery girl had changed almost beyond recognition. Was the escape from childhood a special case? Would there be changes this large in her future as well?

  “Conrad!”

  “Tracing,” he acknowledged. Then: “Okay, the error bars are half the size of the data, but . . . we're coming in clockwise around the sun, and it looks like they're orbiting counter. I guess they'd have to, to be able to catch us this early. If these estimates are valid, we're closing with them at twelve hundred kps, with closest approach occurring about fourteen minutes from now.”

  “Shit,” she said. “They're already damaging us from the outer limits of their weapons range. Things can only get worse.”

  “Surrender now,” Bascal's recording suggested, breaking off from his song for a moment. “It's not too late. I'll be merciful, truly.”

  “Dry up,” Xmary told the image. Then, to the holie window where Feck could be seen fussing with his reactor feeds, “Feck, I need you to go live with the engines a minute early, but not at full thrust. Go to seventy-five percent, and then institute a random walk program.”

  “Dispersing our downrange?” Feck asked.

  “Precisely.”

  A kilometer beneath them, the engines began to groan.

  “I don't understand,” Conrad said, feeling suddenly ignorant and out of place. He was an experienced naval officer, yes, but these two had worked together for almost two hundred years, facing heaven knew what sort of surprises and freak accidents along the way. They had a whole vocabulary about it, a rapport that went far beyond the merely romantic. This was hardly a time to be jealous, but just the same his heart cringed self-consciously. Here was a rival he could never match.

  “Me either!” Eustace chimed in. “Can you explain?”

  “We can't vary our course,” Xmary said, her tone bordering on impatience. “Not much, not enough. We can juke to the side, as in a collision-avoidance maneuver, but then we'll have to juke back again or our net velocity will be in the wrong direction. Very slightly, but over six light-years those slight errors become very costly in terms of distance, in terms of fuel. But what we can do is vary our acceleration along the direction of travel. This changes our arrival time without also changing our destination, and it makes our velocity and position harder to predict. It's a stealthing trick for vehicles like this one, which are inherently unstealthy. Comes in handy sometimes when the miners decide to get cute.”

  “I can hear every word,” Bascal's image told her. “You are compromised, Captain. Why fight when your opponent knows your every move?”

  Grinding her fists, Xmary turned her eyes on the thing. “First of all, the real Bascal Edward is forty-five light-seconds away, with Barnard in between us. You can't communicate with him—not in real time. And if you're relaying this conversation directly to Fist, which I imagine you are, even they have to wait three seconds to get it, and then three more for their beam to get back here to us, by which time we can be kilometers off from where they think we are. Try hitting that.”

  “The spot is gone,” Conrad reported as, at the ertially shielded edges of perception, the ship whined and jerked around him. “They've lost track of us.”

  “For now,” warned Bascal. “They will find you again, and make you the martyrs you're so determined to become.”

  “I see something!” Eustace said, from the Information seat beside Conrad. “On the radar, it's a blip. It's a cloud.”

  “Confirmed,” Conrad said, checking his own radar display, which by default was much smaller than Information's. He enlarged it. “They've released a swarm of projectiles in our path.”

  “Size and number?” Xmary demanded.

  “A few thousand pinheads. It's nothing the nav lasers can't handle,” Feck said, peering into some display of his own. “But why aren't they stealthed? I think these are decoys, Captain. We shoot at these, vaporizing a path, but the real danger is somewhere in front or behind. Pebbles of antimatter, I'll bet, suspended in a jacket of superabsorber. With propulsion modules, so they can stay out of our path, then juke into us at the last moment.”

  Xmary thought that one over. “Okay. Okay, something like that, surely. What do we do about it?”

  “Good question,” Feck said.

  On Conrad's board, the damage alarms lit up again, more insistently this time. This time the broken threads were on the capward edge of the sail, which was still filling out to its full expanse. The spot was smaller—only fifty meters across now—and it wandered fitfully around a square kilometer of sail, but did not leave it.

  “The spalling laser is back,” he reported. “They're having trouble keeping it focused, but it's definitely a threat to the sail. Not so much the hull.”

  Xmary sighed. “The sail is a one-way mirror, right? Clear on the forward face and superreflective on the aft? Go superreflective on the fore as well.”

  “That'll reduce our photon thrust,” Conrad warned.

  “Until we pass out of Barnard, yes,” she agreed. “Once the star is behind us, it won't matter.”

  “This is where the sail does us the most good,” he pressed. “You're cutting into our net impulse, prolonging the journey.”

  “Understood,” she snapped. “But let's get there alive, shall we? Feck, I want you to start a juking program as well. Full lateral thrust at a ten-percent duty cycle. And yes, that's going to waste fuel, making the journey longer still. Do it anyway.”

  “Aye, ma'am.”

  She fretted for several seconds, while Bascal's image launched back into its “Fuck You Song.” Finally, over the racket, she said, “We can't stay on the defensive like this. We've got to shake them up. Conrad, what kind of beam can you throw their way?”

  Conrad spread his hands. “I can generate a laser, ma'am, but they're stealthed, and probably juking as well. And they're a much smaller target than we are. All I can do is aim at my best guess.”

  “Without ertial shielding they're limited by fuel,” Xmary said, “and they haven't got nearly the thrust that we do. If they're juking, it's minor. And we have the whole sail to use as a beam generator. Wasting power, yes, but a laser beam ten kilometers wide ought to be rather difficult to avoid. Feck, are you up for that?”

  “No, sorry. Ma'am, if we're willing to sacrifice half our thrust, I can deliver you two gigawatts. Unfortunately, spread out over a hundred square kilometers of sail, that's about the power of a desk lamp. They're already fighting off Barnard's heat at sixteen megawatts per square meter, so we want to be at least as big a problem as that. Meaning the beam needs to be, uh, less than eleven meters across.”

  “I can't hit them with that,” Conrad warned. “Not bloody likely. I can't see them. They're two seconds lagged, now, but I can't even see where they were then. They're invisible.”

  “Shit,” Xmary said, throwing up her hands. And then a tentative expression broke out across her frowning face. “Wait a minute. Feck, they're absorbing all this heat from Barnard, right? And they're dumping it in the opposite direction. Every watt, or they'd be slowly cooking in there.”

  “We're doing the same,” Feck said. “Blackbody emissions on the shadowed upward face. The radiator flux is called huela puho, a blaze beam.”

  “Yeah, but we're not invisible and they are. Unless they're immediately upsystem from us, we should see a hot spot. Mayb
e they're hiding the emissions in a narrow frequency, longwave radio or something, but one way or another, all that energy has to go somewhere.”

  “I've been scanning for a hot spot,” Conrad complained. “I can't find one, in any frequency. My guess is, they're focusing it in a blaze beam directed away from us.”

  “Yes,” she said, lighting up in angry triumph. “And that's how we get them! We just need to redirect all this heat from the sun. The beam of our own waste heat, eh? We reflect it right onto them, as bright as the sun itself. Two suns at once! We don't need to be precise about it, just wave it in their general direction. They can't do the same to us—they don't have enough collection area. But with all this energy hitting both sides of our sail, we can overwhelm their cooling systems. They're probably running at full capacity already.”

  “They probably are,” Feck agreed.

  And with growing enthusiasm Conrad added, “Even impervium breaks down at thirty megawatts per square meter, ma'am. A fraction of a fraction of that energy slips in between the pseudoatoms, and the heat kicks the electrons right out of their quantum wells. The whole thing reverts to silicon fibers and then vaporizes. It's why you never hear about probes to the center of the sun. Nothing could survive that trip, because there's nowhere to dump the heat.”

  “Hooray!” Eustace called out. “We'll get those bastards!”

  “Not so fast,” Conrad warned. “We don't want to overwhelm our own systems while we're at it. We'll blow ourselves up if we do. Also, we really do need the push this light is giving us, or we'll be sailing in the dark for a thousand years. Let me check some numbers on this.”

  “Do it quickly,” Xmary said, leaning over toward his station. “If I read your displays correctly, the sails won't be holding together much longer.”

  This objection was entirely valid. Indeed, despite the side-to-side juking—which really was throwing the ship around in a way the ertial shields couldn't mask—Fist's spalling laser was doing a better and better job of focusing on a smaller and smaller area. In another minute or two, the thread damage would reach critical levels, and the wellstone sheeting, far thinner than a human hair, would start to unravel and lose its charge. And without the exotic electron bundles that held it together—the pseudoatoms which resembled natural atoms in the same way that starships resembled sparrows—the material would quickly disintegrate under the heat and pressure of Barnard's light.

  However, this was not a calculation Conrad had ever performed before, or even imagined he might someday need. How much energy could you put through a properly programmed wellstone matrix, and for how long?

  “Hurry, please,” she pressed.

  Bascal, meanwhile, sang, “Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and then / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you again. / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you my friend, / For fucking with me you'll be fucked till the end!” It was an old song, maybe older than the Queendom itself, and this was just the chorus. The stanzas went on and on and on. And on.

  Even with hypercomputers at his disposal, Conrad had never been all that brilliant with numbers. He was still less so on the noisy bridge of a heaving starship under full thrust, and under attack by unseen enemies. Still, eventually he got an answer, padded it for safety, and fed it down to Feck for confirmation. “Ma'am, we can illuminate the target for a hundred millisecond window out of every second. That's a safe number that will keep us alive, but if our aim is good, it should pop their cork in less than a minute.”

  “All right,” she said. “Do it. Ten-percent duty cycle.”

  And although Conrad was a damned talented programmer, easily better than King Bascal himself, this was another challenge which took more than a moment to address. More than two moments. More than six. By the time he was finished, by the time the ship was rocking and stuttering under the intermittent thrust of its newly weaponized sails, the sails themselves had begun to sprout man-sized holes. Damn that spalling laser! On the plus side, though, the invisible antimatter bombs Feck had predicted were flashing into oblivion in the distance, succumbing one by one to the scorching beam of concentrated sunlight.

  “It's like burning ants with a magnifier,” Conrad said. But apparently no one else onboard had ever done that, or understood what he meant.

  “Three minutes to closest approach,” Feck warned, gripping the sides of his navigation console. “Give or take ten seconds. Conrad, can you increase the power?”

  “Not without killing us, no.”

  “They appear to be killing us,” Xmary said. “A fine attempt, at any rate. Conrad, boost your duty cycle, please. Can you do fifteen percent?”

  “No!” he shouted back. “If I do thirteen percent those sails are going to explode!”

  “Do twelve,” she instructed. “Now, please.”

  “Aye, ma'am,” he said reluctantly. “Pulse width increased to one hundred twenty milliseconds.”

  A few seconds later, they were rewarded with a really big flash of light, easily twenty times brighter than the popcorn explosions of the antimatter mines.

  “And there they go,” Xmary said matter-of-factly.

  “Canceling program,” Conrad added, hurriedly tuning the system back to its normal propulsive mode.

  “Canceling evasion,” said Feck.

  The heaving of the bridge subsided, and even Bascal's ghost fell silent, his holographic face falling into an expression of surprise and defeat as the “Fuck You Song” trailed away.

  “Goddamn, that was close,” Conrad said to no one in particular. Then, more reflectively, “We just killed Ho and Steve. Our childhood buddies.”

  “They were backed up,” Xmary assured him.

  “Maybe,” Conrad agreed. “But what about their crew? Twenty people, was it?”

  “All volunteers. Probably all mean bastards. We're saving twenty-five thousand here, Conrad.”

  There was a great deal more to be said on the subject, but the sails, overtaxed by their ordeal or perhaps struck by some inert but invisible projectile, chose that moment to tear along three separate axes, folding outward and forward like tissue paper in a strong wind. The broken thread monitor shot right off the scale, its alarms blaring madly, and with the full fierce pressure of Barnard's light upon it and its structural integrity gone, the remaining wellstone fabric was ionizing, its captive electrons blasting away into space, into the plasma storms of Barnard's chromosphere.

  Not going to make it, Conrad had time to think, though not to say out loud. It's reverting; it can't possibly withstand this heat. And he was right: once ripped and parted, the sail took less than a second to rend itself into dark gray tatters which burned away into vapor and were gone.

  Feck and Xmary exchanged a look, and then shared it with Conrad.

  “The sail!” Eustace exclaimed.

  The sail, yes. Responsible for more than three quarters of the starship's total impulse. Was gone.

  “What does it mean?” she asked, although from her tone it was apparent that even she knew the answer. The journey ahead, already longer and more arduous than anything human beings had previously attempted, had just . . . quadrupled.

  Bascal's image began to laugh.

  chapter twenty-five

  the bridge of years

  “Life is nasty, brutish, and long,” Bascal's image was telling them. “For your sins, you'll spend ten lifetimes aboard this ship. And consider this: if we're truly immorbid—and there's been nothing so far to disprove it—then most assuredly you people will come face-to-face with myself sooner or later, and this betrayal will be called fully to account. I will find you, one way or another. Or do you intend to return to Barnard? A thousand years hence, perhaps, with a bellyful of fax machines?”

  “I hadn't thought that far ahead,” Conrad moped. “This is plan B-and-a-half. Nothing we've prepared for. And we have quite a while to think about it, eh?”

  They were all in Newhope's observation lounge, sprawling wearily on the couches, having abandoned the bridge and engine room—
unwisely, perhaps—to automated systems and luck. The main danger was juking to avoid obstacles, but this was as safe a place as any to weather that particular storm. Anyway, with such a low departure speed, well out of Barnard's ecliptic plane where the planets and asteroids spun, there was not so much debris to be dodged, and what little serious hazard there was could generally be detected with several minutes' advance warning. This was the advantage of traveling slowly: the jukes were neither violent nor closely spaced.

  “How did we come to this?” Feck wondered aloud. “As a society? Was there a single mistake, a failure point we should have known about?”

  “No,” the king's image told him. “Definitely not. If there had been, would the Queendom's analysts have approved the exile? We had everything we needed: the tools and materials and talent. There've been some isolated fuckups along the way, but that's to be expected. Any robust plan allows for those, and our plans were robust. Our failure—if such it is—has been in the dynamics. Numerous actions, individually correct but summing to something . . . unanticipated.”

  “Like the ecology,” Conrad said.

  “As complex as that,” the image agreed. “As slippery. As damnably perverse, yes: almost gravitating toward failure. Toward some optimized state unrelated to our hopes and dreams and back-breaking labors. We're simply dragged along, like ants on a tablecloth.

  “Still, it's the pointlessness of your response that astounds me most of all. Grand theft and treason are the least of it; you're facing seven hundred years of, shall we say, significant inconvenience. And for what? To save one percent of one percent of the children who will die on Sorrow? That's not even a dent in the overall suffering. Statistically speaking, that's no effect at all, except to worsen the morale of those who remain behind.”