Seeds of Gaia

by Rick Partlow

  But then Sully spun the shuttle end for end, and the cameras focused on the Gateway itself, the framework they’d been building for over two years, and somehow the station paled in comparison. Gateway Station was a construction shack, bulky and utilitarian and ugly, a standardized piece of equipment hauled from one task to another. The Gateway was a work of art.

  Pris didn’t know much about Earth religions, but she’d seen old video of something they called a Christmas tree. The Gateway looked as if an orb weaver spider or a silkworm had set about trying to spin a Christmas tree ornament out of pure gold. What it really resembled, she knew on a purely technical level, was the heart of a Teller-Fox warp unit writ so large it was barely recognizable.

  Superconductive fibers basked gold in the exhausted rays of the long-traveled sunlight, woven and braided and twisted into shapes so intricate they seemed to shed the eye. Embedded in the gilded spider-web were kernels of glittering diamond, flattened ovoid jewels nested in the curling cables, defying her attempts to pinpoint where and how they were attached.

  The Gateway might have been the handiwork of the gods were it not for the small, pressurized maintenance shacks squeezed into the empty spaces between strands, temporary airlocks jutting out from them in ugly, pragmatic contrast. Tiny maintenance sleds scooted from one shack to another on puffs of vaporized gas, pinpricks of light to give the gigantic structure scale. Here and there, construction pods floated in place above ragged bits of wire, their waldos trimming and bonding and splicing with the precision of brains linked wirelessly to the mechanical appendages.

  Dwarfing the shacks and the sleds and the pods was the Resolution star freighter, huge for a Transition Drive ship, a bulging, flattened cylinder so large it had to be equipped with a second Teller-Fox unit amidships in order to form a rift wide enough to fit it. Part of the cylinder was laid open, the cargo doors swung out on hinges to allow access to the antimatter storage pods. Even as she watched, the first of them was being slowly tugged out of the cargo bays through the concerted efforts of a half a dozen maintenance sleds, their tow cables spooled out and attached to the pod magnetically.

  It all seemed frighteningly close, as if she could reach out and touch the sparkling globe or the dull grey sheen of the freighter; it was an illusion, the work of the viewscreen’s automated magnification working together with the video signals from the Gate’s security drones. In reality, they were tens of thousands of kilometers away from the Gate and it was going to take a frustratingly long time to match velocities with it.

  Pris felt the shuttle’s main engines engage, just a light shove barely more forceful than the maneuvering thrusters, and she settled in for the ride.

  ***

  “What are the odds?” Sam muttered half under his breath, staring at the sensor display.

  “Sir?” Patel, the sensor tech on duty for the shift looked up from his station, eyebrows arching. He was a tall man who always seemed annoyingly alert and on-the-ball even after working eight straight hours in the Control Center.

  “What are the odds this ore barge,” Sam clarified, indicating the shipment from the Belt with his left forefinger, “would be arriving at just the same time as the antimatter delivery?”

  Patel shrugged with an expressive motion of hands, shoulders and face; it looked as if he were a stage actor, Sam thought, trying to project the movement out to an audience.

  “I’d say it’s close to one hundred percent, sir,” the Resolution tech guessed, “since the Belters send the barges out on a regular schedule and it’s been six days since the last one. It’s just a coincidence.”

  “Prapanca,” Sam took a step across the compartment, cleaner and more brightly lit now after two years of occupation, to stand behind the Communications officer. “Find me the overrides for the barge’s automated systems. I want to hit the braking thrusters, delay its arrival by a few hours.”

  “Yes, sir,” the woman acknowledged, scrolling through a haptic hologram, another piece of equipment the Resolution had retrofitted onto the ancient bucket of a station. Propanca chuckled as she brought up the remote access to the control systems of the barge. “The Belters aren’t going to like me screwing around with their barges. You’d think the things were made of solid iridium as precious as they are with them.”

  The barge floated across the holographic display, skeletal and bulky all at once, a series of hollow frames holding in place thin, disposable containers filled with processed, powdered nickel-iron, iridium, gold, and platinum for the Resolution fabricators to churn into parts for the Gateway. Massive fusion engines capped either end of the ship, without the need for either physical or energy shielding because the barge was uncrewed. At the moment, neither drive was active; the barge had fired a deceleration burn two days ago and was due a final one in another twenty hours to take it to a braking orbit near the construction site.

  “A six-g burn for two minutes ought to slow her down enough,” Sam told Propanca, leaning over the console beside the Comms station. “If we need to, we can give her a kick in the ass in a few hours, after our freighter is on her way back to the Transition Point.”

  “Gotcha,” she murmured, absorbed in her task of inputting the clearance codes they’d wheedled out of the Belters during the negotiations.

  Sam noticed her hands pausing, glanced down and saw a confused frown pass across her sharp, chiseled features.

  “What the hell?” she said, annoyance in her tone. Her fingers moved again, and Sam could tell she was re-inputting the code.

  “Problem?” he wondered.

  “The damn hunk of junk isn’t accepting the codes they gave us, sir,” Propanca snapped, and he knew the anger in her voice wasn’t aimed at him but the Belters, who they’d all come to view with a mixture of vexation and outright resentment. “I keep getting an error code! I bet the paranoid assholes gave us the wrong sequence.”

  “Keep trying,” he told her, “but if you can’t get it to give up control, I want you to use the Patrol decryption protocols.”

  She craned her head back toward him, eyebrows raised.

  “Those are strictly for emergency use, aren’t they, sir?”

  “I’ll take full responsibility, Lieutenant,” he assured her. He grinned crookedly. “What’s the worst they could do to me? Stick me on a construction shack for three years?”

  She barked a laugh and turned back to her station to start the process. He snuck a look at the track of Priscilla’s shuttle on the sensor display; she’d cleared docking and Sully had done his usual slow turn to get a look at the station before boosting towards the Gate assembly. They were running at about a half-g acceleration, only a few hundred kilometers out. He considered for a moment whether he should bother her with the problem, but decided against it. The barge was still an hour out and even if they couldn’t slow it down, its course would take it kilometers away from the freighter.

  “Sir!”

  The alarmed, antiphonal chorus came from the sensor tech, Patel, and a half-second later, Propanca, who still had the barge on her screen. Sam needed neither of them to tell him what was happening; his eyes were glued to the main viewer, where the star-bright flare of the barge’s rear fusion drive filled the display. The ungainly vessel seemed to shudder and vibrate with the sudden burst of acceleration and he was seeking out the readouts even as Patel was announcing them.

  “Ten gravities!” The man’s voice broke halfway through the second syllable and he came halfway out of his seat. “Gaia’s bloated ass, twenty gravities!” He looked over at Sam and his eyes were pools of white set against the tan of his skin. “Sir, it’s gonna rip itself apart!”

  “What the living fuck!” Propanca yelled, slamming a hand against the console. “The decryption protocols aren’t penetrating the system because it’s locked us out totally! This is no fucking accident!”

  “Calm down, Lieutenant,” he said, forcing himself not to yell, not to rage. It wouldn’t do any good. “Get Minister Gage on the line now, I don’
t care if he’s taking a shit or climbing a mountain, I want to be talking to him personally in two minutes.”

  He rounded on Patel, who seemed on the verge of panic.

  “I saw the maneuvering jets,” he told the man. “When the burn began, it fired the port bow maneuvering jets. What’s its current heading?”

  “Umm…” The technician dithered for a second, falling back into his chair. “It’s heading is…” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing visibly, then looked back at Sam with an expression of utter helplessness. “Sir, it’s going to collide with the Gateway in less than ten minutes.”

  Sam knew there were Consensus military vessels only minutes away, and he knew by the time he got the message through Gage to them, it would be far too late. He banged his fist down on the control for the station’s general alarm and leaned over the intercom pickup as it blared.

  “Attention all station personnel,” he barked, his voice clear and piercing. “Get to your emergency shelters immediately and secure for impact!”

  ***

  “Oh, this ain’t good.”

  Sully was seeing it in his helmet’s HUD, but for Priscilla, it was splashed across the viewscreen, big as life and twice as devastating. The image of the ore barge was projected from the station’s external cameras, but the thing was close enough they could have seen it with the naked eye, if they hadn’t been facing the wrong direction. And accelerating the wrong direction…

  “Hold on!” the pilot warned her and she felt the engines cut thrust.

  Pris! It was Sam, of course, piggybacking his neurolink over the station’s communications array. Pris, the barge is boosting right for the Gate assembly! You two have to get the hell out of there!

  Maneuvering thrusters slammed her against her restraints and she couldn’t even think to transmit until the force let up. The shuttle was swinging around, still coasting toward the glistening beauty of the Gate assembly, but turning its tail to face the thing.

  I see it, she told him. She wondered why she wasn’t screaming, raging, shouting out orders. Instead, an odd calm had descended over her, the inescapable realization there was not a damned thing she could do about it.

  Another burst of the steering jets, shoving her the opposite angle into the side of her acceleration couch, and then the main engines roared to life again and pushed her straight back into the liquid-filled cushions.

  Dr. Kovalev is trying to evacuate the construction assembly to the freighter, and Gage says his ships are launching on the barge, but…

  It’s going too fast, she said, not so much a question as a statement of fact. They won’t be able to stop it.

  The perspective on the shuttle’s screens had shifted, widening to keep the barge in the field of view, progressing from one of the remote camera feeds to another. It was so close, too damned close, and this time it was no illusion, no camera tricks. The image was blurry, and she wondered if the camera drone was too close, if the radiation from the drive was affecting it, whether it would kill her and Sully…until she realized it was the barge vibrating, shuddering under more acceleration than it had been built to handle. Bits of it, pieces of cargo containers, service hatch covers, microwave antennae, it was all peeling off and spinning away, still traveling forward but losing the acceleration of the fusion drives. Most of it was burned up in the flare of plasma from the main engine and she thought for a long time she would be next, but the drive abruptly cut off.

  Burned through all the fuel it had left, she thought…or maybe she transmitted it to Sam, she wasn’t sure.

  “Shit, ma’am,” Sully said, drawing the first word out into three syllables. “That thing’s gonna hit.”

  She couldn’t see his face beneath the helmet’s visor, but she could discern the expression from his tone. He was running through the possibilities, seeing what she already had; the shuttle had burned away its velocity and was slowly pushing forward now, but if he increased their acceleration, he wouldn’t have enough fuel left to decelerate before he impacted the station. And if he maneuvered past the station, they’d wind up drifting in open space.

  “Do it,” she told him. His head turned toward her and she figured he was wondering if the rumors he’d heard about Resolutionists were true and they could read your mind. “It’s better than the alternatives.”

  “You’re the boss, ma’am.”

  He slammed the throttle forward and pushed the steering yoke to the starboard with the enthusiasm of a young man convinced of his own immortality, and Priscilla’s breath left her in a pained whoosh of air as acceleration slammed her back and sideways simultaneously. The shuttle, like the barge, couldn’t carry enough fuel to keep that kind of boost up for long, but two minutes at six gravities felt like forever.

  Still, when the burn ended and her breath returned, along with zero gravity, she didn’t feel relieved. They’d moved, and they were still moving, but not fast enough and not nearly far enough yet. The station was sliding past their starboard side, its smooth, silver hull taking up the entire right side of the main display, and just maybe if they could maneuver it between them and the barge before…

  She hadn’t realized she’d been grinding her teeth until the barge struck, not the Gate assembly but rather the freighter, with three of the five antimatter containment pods still resting inside. No, she corrected herself, instantly recognizing the flare of light for what it was, the barge hadn’t struck the freighter; she had ignited whatever tiny bit of fuel she’d had left for her forward drive and sent a star-hot explosion of plasma into the hold.

  A physical blow might not have ruptured the pods, even the impact of the mass of the barge travelling at thousands of meters per second. The plasma burned through their thick casing just deep enough to take out the isotope batteries, and when the magnetic fields snapped off for lack of power, kilograms of antimatter touched the alloy walls of the pods. Just as the bulk of the station slipped between the shuttle and the Gate, the largest anthropogenic explosion in the history of humankind ripped reality apart.

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Go! Go, Goddamnit!”

  Sam pushed Patel and Propanca ahead of him, nearly throwing them both at the entrance to the emergency access tubes. The lifts were potential suicide at worst and hours trapped in claustrophobic isolation at best, and neither appealed to him. Using the access tubes this far out towards the rim was chancy as well, but one he was willing to take.

  The entrance to the tubes wasn’t so much a hatchway as a ladder, a concave set in the bulkhead, the rungs well-surfaced and well-worn on this ancient relic of a station. Centripetal force made outward towards the rim “down,” which meant they’d have to climb toward the hub, and the climb would be hardest starting out…and if you fell, you’d get slammed back down at increasing velocity as the perceived gravity increased.

  Sam chivvied the Control Center crew ahead of him, his impatience building like a pressure vessel under heat as he watched the two of them take far too long to get their career-rear-echelon asses up that damn ladder. He thought about calling Minister Gage again, but with the transmission delay between Earth and their orbit, this was all going to be over before he could get a reply. Then he thought about calling Pris again, but she and Sully would either make it or they wouldn’t, and there was nothing left unsaid between them.

  Telia, he called instead. What’s the status in the shelter?

  Mawae is there, and reports we have all but fifteen personnel inside the shelter, she told him, her voice converted to neural signals and then squirted into the audio centers of his brain and still managing to sound infuriatingly calm.

  What’s Danabri doing there? he demanded, feeling the once-checkered surface of the ladder rungs now perfectly smooth under his palms. Above him, Propanca’s ship-boot slipped off a rung and he winced at the idea of her falling and taking him back down to the bottom with her. I told you to take charge of the shelter until I got there.

  I am at the crew quarters, making sure everyone gets to s
afety, she declared, her tone stolid and unyielding. I will be in the shelter momentarily.

  Damn it, Telia…

  My transponder readout shows you are not in the shelter yet either, Captain.

  Yeah, point taken, he acknowledged to himself, not wanting to give her the satisfaction of knowing she’d got him with the barb.

  I’m on my way. Get into that shelter, Telia. Afterward, I’m going to need people I can count on still healthy and moving.

  Yes, sir. I am, as you say, on my way.

  He grunted with a feeling of accomplishment in getting the woman to take an order for once.

  “Faster you two!” he barked, wanting to push Propanca’s butt out of his way but realizing it would be a bad idea for several reasons.

  The tunnel was color-coded for each level and they’d passed out of blue, the furthest out, through green and now into yellow, and he thought he could feel the difference in the perceived gravity of the spin. They could have taken it all the way into red, the hub itself, but they didn’t need to go that far; the shelter was on Magenta, the last level out from the hub so as not to block the channels for freight from either polar docking facility.

  That’s what those Belter engineers say, anyway. None of them were even born when this thing was built so they probably have no idea.

  He linked back up with the external camera view, counting on the regular space of the rungs to keep his hands and feet going to the right place and surrendering his eyes for just a moment, something he hadn’t been willing to risk when he was running through the corridor. The barge’s drives were dark and she was coasting on the velocity she’d built up on the heavy burn, but it was going to be enough; the Gate assembly wasn’t going anywhere.

  His foot slipped when he noticed the barge’s course had changed, ever so slightly, while he hadn’t been watching, and he barely caught himself before he began to slide back down the chute. He cursed under his breath, but chanced another view through the link, confirming what he’d thought he read on the sensor display: the barge was going to impact the freighter. It hadn’t moved, mostly because it couldn’t, not with the cargo bays yawning open and three antimatter storage pods loose in their collars, ready to transport.