Infinite Stars

by Bryan Thomas Schmidt

  That was why Magadis was useless as a hostage. Only part of her was present to begin with, and that part—the body, the portion of her mind within it—would be deemed expendable. Some other part of Magadis was still back with the other Conjoiners.

  I approached her. She was thin, all angles and edges. Her limbs, what I could see of them beyond the shackles, were like folded blades, ready to flick out and wound. Her head was hairless, with a distinct cranial ridge. She was bruised and cut, one eye so badly swollen and slitted that I could not tell if it had been gouged out or still remained.

  But the other eye fixed me well enough.

  “Captain.” She formed the word carefully, but there was blood on her lips and when she opened them I saw she had lost several teeth and her tongue was badly swollen.

  “Magadis. I’m told that’s your name. My officers tell me you attempted to take over my ship. Is that true?”

  My question seemed to amuse and disappoint her in equal measure.

  “Why ask?”

  “I’d like to know before we all die.”

  Behind me, one of the officers had an excimer rifle pointed straight at Magadis’s head.

  “We distrusted your ability to conduct an efficient examination of the artefact,” she said.

  “Then you knew of it in advance.”

  “Of course.” She nodded demurely, despite the shackle around her throat. “But only the barest details. A stellar-size object, clearly artificial, clearly of alien origin. It demanded our interest. But the present arrangements limited our ability to conduct intelligence gathering under our preferred terms.”

  “We have an arrangement. Had, I should say. More than a century of peaceful cooperation. Why have you endangered everything?”

  “Because this changes everything.”

  “You don’t even know what it is.”

  “We have gathered and transmitted information back to our mother nests. They will analyse the findings accordingly, when the signals reach them. But let us not delude ourselves, Captain. This is an alien technology—a demonstration of physics beyond either of our present conceptual horizons. Whichever human faction understands even a fraction of this new science will leave the others in the dust of history. Our alliance with the Demarchists has served us well, as it has been of benefit to you. But all things must end.”

  “You’d risk war, just for a strategic advantage?”

  She squinted from her one good eye, looking puzzled. “What other sort of advantage is there?”

  “I could—should—kill you now, Magadis. And the rest of your Conjoiners. You’ve done enough to give me the right.”

  She lifted her head. “Then do so.”

  “No. Not until I’m certain you’ve exhausted your usefulness to me. In five and half days we hit the object. If you want my clemency, start thinking of ways we might stop that happening.”

  “I’ve considered the situation,” Magadis said. “There are no grounds for hope, Captain. You may as well execute me. But save a shot for yourself, won’t you? You may come to appreciate it.”

  * * *

  We spent the remainder of that first day confirming what we already knew. The ship was crippled, committed to its slow but deadly drift in the direction of the object.

  Being a passenger-carrying vessel, supposed to fly between two settled, civilised solar systems, the Equinoctial carried no shuttles or large extravehicular craft. There were no lifeboats or tugs, nothing that could nudge us onto a different course or reverse our drift. Even our freight inventory was low for this crossing. I know, because I studied the cargo manifest, looking for some magic solution to our problem: a crate full of rocket motors, or something similar.

  But the momentum of a million-tonne starship, even drifting at a mere fifty metres a second, is still immense. It would take more than a spare limpet motor or steering jet to make a difference to our fate.

  Exactly what our fate was, of course, remained something of an open question.

  Soon we would know.

  * * *

  An hour before the suit’s arrival at the surface I gathered Struma, Doctor Grellet, the other officers and passenger delegates in the bridge. Our improvised probe had continued transmitting information back to us for the entire duration of its day-long crossing. Throughout that time there had been little significant variation in the parameters, and no hint of a response from the object.

  It remained black, cold, and resolutely starless. Even as it fell within the last ten thousand kilometres, the suit was detecting no trace radiation beyond that faint microwave sizzle. It was pinging sensor pulses into the surface and picking up no hint of echo or backscatter. The gravitational field remained as flat as any other part of interstellar space, with no suggestion that the black sphere exerted any pull on its surroundings. It had to be made of something, but even if there had been only a moon’s mass distributed throughout that volume, let alone a planet or a star, the suit would have picked up the gradient.

  So it was a non-physical surface—an energy barrier or discontinuity. But even an energy field ought to have produced a measurable curvature, a measurable alteration in the suit’s motion.

  Something else, then. Something—as Magadis had implied—that lay entirely outside the framework of our physics. A kink or fracture in spacetime, artfully engineered. There might be little point in attempting to build a conceptual bridge between what we knew and what the object represented. Little point for baseline humans, at least. But I thought of what a loom of cross-linked, genius-level intelligences might make of it. The Conjoiners had already developed weapons and drive systems that were beyond our narrow models, even as they occasionally drip-fed us hints and glimpses of their “adjunct physics,” as if to reassure their allies that they were only a step or two behind.

  The suit was within eight thousand kilometres of the surface when its readings began to turn odd. It was small things to start with, almost possible to put down to individual sensor malfunctions. But as the readings turned stranger, and more numerous, the unlikelihood of these breakdowns happening all at once became too great to dismiss.

  Dry-mouthed, I stared at the numbers and graphs.

  “What?” asked Chajari, one of the female passengers.

  “We’ll need to look at these readings in more detail…” Struma began.

  “No,” I said, cutting him off. “What they’re telling us is clear enough as it is. The suit’s accelerometers are going haywire. It feels as if it’s being pulled in a hundred directions at once. Pulled and pushed, like a piece of putty being squashed and stretched in someone’s hand. And it’s getting worse…”

  I had been blunt, but there was no sense in sugaring things for the sake of the passengers. They had been woken to share in our decision-making processes, and for that reason alone they needed to know exactly how bad our predicament was.

  The suit was still transmitting information when it hit the seven-thousand-kilometre mark, as near as we could judge. It only lasted a few minutes after that, though. The accelerational stresses built and built, until whole blocks of sensors began to black out. Soon after that the suit reported a major loss of its own integrity, as if its extremities had been ripped or crushed by the rising forces. By then it was tumbling, sending back only intermittent chirps of scrambled data.

  Then it was gone.

  I allowed myself a moment of calm before proceeding.

  “Even when the suit was still sending to us,” I said, “it was being buffeted by forces far beyond the structural limits of the ship. We’d have broken up not long after the eight-thousand mark—and it would have been unpleasant quite a bit sooner than that.” I paused and swallowed. “It’s not a black hole. We know that. But there’s something very odd about the spacetime near the surface. And if we drift too close we’ll be shredded, just as the suit was.”

  It reached us then. The ship groaned, and we all felt a stomach-heaving twist pass through our bodies. The emergency tone sounded, and the red
warning lights began to flash.

  Had we been a ship at sea, it was as if we had been afloat on calm waters, until a single great wave rolled under us, followed by a series of diminishing after-ripples.

  The disturbance, whatever it had been, gradually abated.

  Doctor Grellet was the first to speak. “We still don’t know if the thing has a mind or not,” he said, in the high, piping voice that I was starting to hate. “But I think we can be reasonably sure of one thing, Captain Bernsdottir.”

  “Which would be?” I asked.

  “You’ve discovered how to provoke it.”

  * * *

  Just when I needed some good news, Struma brought it to me.

  “It’s marginal,” he said, apologising before he had even started. “But given our present circumstances…”

  “Go on.”

  He showed me a flowchart of various repair schedules, a complex knotted thing like a many-armed octopus, and next to it a graph of our location, compared to the sphere.

  “Here’s our present position, thirty-five thousand kilometres from the surface.”

  “The surface may not even be our worst problem now,” I pointed out.

  “Then we’ll assume we only have twenty-five thousand kilometres before things get difficult—a bit less than six days. But it may be enough. I’ve been running through the priority assignments in the repair schedule, and I think we can squeeze a solution out of this.”

  I tried not to cling to false hope. “You can?”

  “As I said, it’s marginal, but…”

  “Spare me the qualifications, Struma. Just tell me what we have or haven’t got.”

  “Normally the ship prioritises primary drive repairs over anything else. It makes sense. If you’re trying to slow down from lightspeed, and something goes wrong with the main engines at a high level of time-compression… well, you want that fixed above all else, unless you plan on over-shooting your target system by several light years, or worse.” He drew a significant pause. “But we’re not in that situation. We need auxiliary control now, enough to correct the drift. If it takes a year or ten to regain relativistic capability, we’ll still be alive. We can wait it out in reefersleep.”

  “Good…” I allowed.

  “If we override all default schedules, and force the repair processes to ignore the main engines—and anything we don’t need to stay alive for the next six days—then the simulations say we may have a chance of recovering auxiliary steering and attitude control before we hit the ten-thousand-kilometre mark. Neutralise the drift, and reverse it enough to get away from this monster. Then worry about getting back home. And even if we can’t get the main engines running again, we can eventually transmit a request for assistance, then just sit here.”

  “They’d have to answer us,” I said.

  “Of course.”

  “Have you… initiated this change in the schedule?”

  He nodded earnestly. “Yes. Given how slim the margins are, I felt it best to make the change immediately.”

  “It was the right thing to do, Struma. You’ve given us a chance. We’ll take it to the passenger-representatives. Maybe they’ll forgive me for what happened with the suit.”

  “You couldn’t have guessed, Captain. But this lifeline… it’s just a chance, that’s all. The repair schedules are estimates, not hard guarantees.”

  “I know,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “And I’ll take them for what they are.”

  * * *

  I went to interview Magadis again, deciding for the moment to withhold the news Struma had given me. The Conjoiner woman was still under armed guard, still bound to the chair. I took my seat in the electrostatic cage, facing her.

  “We’re going to die,” I said.

  “This is not news,” Magadis answered.

  “I mean, not in the way we expected. A clean collision with the surface—fast and painless. I’m not happy about that, but I’ll gladly take it over the alternative.”

  “Which is?”

  “Slow torture. I fired an instrument probe at the object—a suit stuffed full of sensors.”

  “Was that wise?”

  “Perhaps not. But it’s told me what we can expect. Spacetime around the sphere is… curdled, fractal, I don’t know what. Restructured. Responsive. It didn’t like the suit. Pulled it apart like a rag doll. It’ll do the same to the ship, and us inside it. Only we’re made of skin and bone, not hardware. It’ll be worse for us, and slower, because the suit was travelling quickly when it hit the altered spacetime. We’ll take our time, and it’ll build and build over hours.”

  “I could teach you a few things about pain management,” Magadis said. “You might find them useful.”

  I slapped her across the face, drawing blood from her already swollen lip.

  “You were prepared to meet this object. You knew of its prior existence. That means you must have had a strategy, a plan.”

  “I did, until our plan met your resistance.” She made a mangled smile, a wicked, teasing gleam in her one good eye. I made to slap her again, but some cooler part of me stilled my hand, knowing how pointless it was to inflict pain on a Conjoiner. Or to imagine that the prospect of pain, even drawn out over hours, would have any impact on her thinking.

  “Give me something, Magadis. You’re smart, even disconnected from the others. You tried to commandeer the ship. Your people designed and manufactured some of its key systems. You must be able to suggest something that can help our chances.”

  “We have gathered our intelligence,” she told me. “Nothing else matters now. I was always going to die. The means don’t concern me.”

  I nodded at that, letting her believe it was no more or less than I had expected.

  But I had more to say.

  “You put us here, Magadis—you and your people. Maybe the others will see things the same way you do—ready and willing to accept death. Do you think they will change their view if I start killing them now?”

  I waited for her answer, but Magadis just looked at me, nothing in her expression changing.

  Someone spoke my title and name. I turned from the prisoner to find Struma, waiting beyond the electrostatic cage.

  “I was in the middle of something.”

  “Before it failed, the suit picked up an echo. We’ve only just teased it out of the garbage it was sending back in the last few moments.”

  “An echo of what?” I asked.

  Struma drew breath. He started to answer, then looked at Magadis and changed his mind.

  * * *

  It was another ship. Shaped like our own—a tapering, conic hull, a sharp end and a blunter end, two engines on outriggers jutting from the widest point—but smaller, sleeker, darker. We could see that it was damaged to some degree, but it occurred to me that it could still be of use to us.

  The ship floated eight thousand kilometres from the surface of the object. Not orbiting, since there was nothing to hold it on a circular course, but just stopped, becalmed.

  Struma and I exchanged thoughts as we waited for the others to reconvene.

  “That’s a Conjoiner drive layout,” he said, sketching a finger across one of the blurred enhancements. “It means they made it, they sent it here—all without anyone’s knowledge, in flagrant violation of the Europe Accords. And it’s no coincidence that we just found it. The object’s the size of a star, and we’re only able to scan a tiny area of it from our present position. Unless there are floating wrecks dotted all around this thing, we must have been brought close to it deliberately.”

  “It explains how they knew of the object,” I mused. “An earlier expedition. Obviously it failed, but they must have managed to transmit some data back to one of their nests—enough to make them determined to get a closer look. I suppose the idea was to rendezvous and recover any survivors, or additional knowledge captured by that wreck.” My fingers tensed, ready to form a fist. “I should ask Magadis.”

  “I’d give up, if I were
you. She’s not going to give us anything useful.”

  “That’s because she’s resigned to death. I didn’t tell her about the revised repair schedule.”

  “That’s still our best hope of survival.”

  “Perhaps. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t explore all other possibilities, just in case the repair schedule doesn’t work. That ship’s too useful a prize for me to ignore. It’s an exploratory craft, obviously. Unlike us, it may have a shuttle, something we can use as a tug. Or we can use the ship itself to nudge the Equinoctial.”

  Struma scratched at his chin. “Nice in theory, but it’s floating well inside the point where the suit started picking up strange readings. And even if we considered it wise to go there, we don’t have a shuttle of our own to make the crossing.”

  “It’s not wise,” I admitted. “Not even sane. But we have the inspection pods, and one of them ought to be able to make the crossing. I’m ready to try, Struma. It’s better than sitting here thinking of ways to hurt Magadis, just to take my mind off the worse pain ahead for the rest of us.”

  He considered this, then gave a grave, dutiful nod. “Under the circumstances, I think you’re right. But I wouldn’t allow you to go out there on your own.”

  “A Captain’s prerogative…” I started.

  “Is to accept the assistance of her second-in-command.”

  * * *

  Although I was set on my plan, I still had to present it to the other officers and passenger-representatives. They sat and listened without question, as I explained the discovery of the other ship and my intention of scavenging it for our own ends.

  “You already know that we may be able to reverse the drift. I’m still optimistic about that, but at the same time I was always told to have a back-up plan. Even if that other ship doesn’t have anything aboard it that we can use, they may have gathered some data or analysis that can be of benefit to us.”

  Doctor Grellet let out a dry, hopeless laugh. “Whatever it was, it was certainly of benefit to them.”

  “A slender hope’s better than none at all,” I said, biting back on my irritation. “Besides, it won’t make your chances any worse. Even if Struma and I don’t make it back from the Conjoiner ship, my other officers are fully capable of navigating the ship, once we regain auxiliary control.”