by Bill DeSmedt
“We have the best possible assurance: the probes themselves. Our correct choices here in the present are the enabling conditions for their return to us from the future.” Sasha chuckled. “I thought you said you had read the materials.”
“Read? Yes. Understood? Perhaps. Believed? Sashenka, I confess I do not know what to believe.”
“Well, for instance, did you follow the part describing how we designed the insertion process? How we used the probes themselves to verify the plan for the system that would send them?”
“I think so.”
“Take, for example, your calibrator headset.” Once Sasha was in lecture mode, one could forget about getting a word in. “Its proper design is key to the entire program, since without it we could not aim the probes. How did we design it? Simple: we tried multiple promising alternatives. At the point where we had found the correct one, a probe returned, confirming the choice.”
Galina nodded doubtfully.
“All right, then,” Sasha went on. “The procedure is the same at every branch-point: we make a commitment to ourselves that ‘if such-and-such is the correct way to proceed, then I will send a probe back to, say, tomorrow confirming that fact.’ If the choice is not correct, the plan as a whole will fail, and no confirming probe will or can be sent back.
Only correct decisions create the necessary preconditions for a future with probes in it—that is, the necessary preconditions for confirming the decision itself.”
“So,” she said slowly, “the probe will not come until the plan is correct. Because, until the plan is correct, the future from which the probe comes does not exist.”
“Bravo! You have it exactly. Except, of course, that, as of today, that future is the future no longer—it is here and now!”
Galina’s head was spinning. Sasha’s “explanation” seemed no explanation at all, smacking more of black magic than of science. There had to be some fundamental flaw in the logic.
“But does this not mean that we would possess more information than we have expended effort to gather? And does this not, in turn, violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics, or perhaps even Conservation of Energy?”
“It only seems that way. Entropy, after all, is not a principle, merely a statistical phenomenon—a general tendency toward increasing disorder, and one, moreover, that admits of localized exceptions. As for Energy Conservation, it is well known that this may be violated on quantum scales: energy and time are as complementary as position and momentum. Think of what we undertake here as the intrusion into the macrocosm of a microcosmic uncertainty. Just as your headset itself is a marvelous example of a scaled-up quantum effect.”
“The headset, ah, yes! Is it not time to use it, to launch the first timeprobe?” Anything to stop thinking about this.
Sasha stopped talking so suddenly that for a moment she thought his end of the videoconference had crashed and left her staring at a freeze-frame.
He blinked. “The probe. Yes, of course, you are right. I will talk you through the first two or three insertions. Thereafter you must manage by yourself, as I will be en route to Antipode for the omega sequence.”
“Understood.” It felt as if a cold, indigestible lump had congealed in her stomach.
Sasha’s eyes shifted to one side for a moment, as though checking something on an out-of-frame display. “Very well then, if you are ready, let us begin.” He was typing as he spoke. “Enter the combination now appearing on your screen into the keypad of the lockbox.”
“Lockbox? Ah, yes!” She had been wondering about the buffed steel panel set into the surface of her control console. As she tapped in the last digit, that panel slid back to reveal a rack holding eighteen stubby metallic cylinders, each with a date stamped on its top.
“Select the earliest probe—the one dated 05/111/92—and have one of the techs load it into the launcher. Advise me when this has been done.”
At the press of a call-button, a tech came over and picked up the cylinder. He walked back to the launcher. She couldn’t help noticing how cautious he became where his path skirted the red line marking off the higher-gravity zones.
Galina watched as he laid the probe gently in the open launch-chamber and locked it down, then gave her a thumbs-up.
“Done,” she reported.
“Next, put on the calibrator and activate the MRI.”
She lifted the strange-looking headpiece off its stand. It was cool to the touch, of beige plastic molded into an outsized skullcap. Its padded interior fit snugly onto the back of her head, with only a braid of cabling hanging down behind. She reached up gingerly and depressed the button located at the front of the device, imagining she could feel the flux as the magnetic resonance imager began scanning her visual cortex.
“Done,” she said. Her heart had begun to pound. Frightened as she’d been on the night they’d captured Vurdalak, it was as nothing to this sudden dread in the face of the unknown, the unknowable. In a few moments more, the worldline calibrator would begin capturing what her eyes witnessed, as the Portal opened and revealed . . . what?
“We are almost there now, Galya,” Sasha said. “The launch computer will take over as soon as you have fired the Casimir capacitor.”
The Casimir capacitor was a small device made up of two concentric superconducting spheres nested excruciatingly close together. Like all capacitors, it was made to store energy, but that’s where the resemblance ended. The Casimir capacitor stored negative energy. To do so, it employed a quantum effect discovered in 1948 by the Dutch physicist H.B.G. Casimir. Galina wasn’t too clear on the details. Something about suppressing some of the electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations in the gap between the spheres. But the end-result was straightforward enough: inject a jolt of negative energy into a charged black hole already rotating at nearly the speed of light, and its event horizon would be annihilated.
What would happen then, no one, perhaps not even God himself, knew.
“Galya? Can you hear me? You must fire the capacitor now.”
Galina took a deep breath and spoke the command. From the apex of the containment sphere, an injector tube took aim and spat the capacitor directly downward, into the black hole. The reduction in mass was miniscule, but Vurdalak was already poised on the knife-edge of extremality. Its whirling horizon blurred, melted. Then it was gone.
To Galina’s right, the workstation beeped a brief alarm, then recovered and set to work modeling a wholly new, hopefully still stable field configuration.
The subliminal hum of the generators changed pitch. With its event horizon gone, Vurdalak had stopped emitting radiation. Now only an accretion disk was left to generate power, at an ever-diminishing rate.
A countdown was added to the overhead time display: fifteen minutes until the cryostats red-lined and Vurdalak fell. Galina must complete the launch before then, and still have time to inject a Casimir “rectifier” that would close the event horizon and restore full power again.
“Singularity exposed,” the launch-control computer said. “All readings nominal. Commencing worldline calibration.”
Sasha’s voice, sounding only marginally more human, spoke in her ear, “Now, Galya, you must concentrate.”
Her eyes widened in awe as, directly before her, a strange light began to spill from the gradually widening Portal.
38 | Welcome Back
AGAIN, THAT STINGING in his neck. Knox swallowed, tasting the sourness of stale vomit in the back of his throat. He pried open eyes still smarting from the tear-gas’s aftereffects and looked around. Same white-coated stranger, same hypodermic maybe. Everything else was different. He was lying on a bed, a familiar bed with a matte-gold coverlet. The clock on the wall read 4:45—he’d lost four and a half hours somewhere.
No, wait. That was a twenty-four hour display—4:45 meant quarter of five in the morning. And, sure enough, the rounded window in the far wall gave out on blackness just beginning to pale with false dawn.
The rounded window? Realization hi
t him an instant before he felt the residual pitch and roll beneath him. He was back on Rusalka!
But why? Why not just shoot him where he stood—where he lay, rather—like poor Mycroft?
Mycroft! It was all coming back. Didn’t want it to. Not right now. Thank God, Marianna was okay. Last he’d seen, anyway. No, don’t go there either. Think about something else.
The hand shaking his shoulder saved him the trouble. The medic, if that’s what he was, was saying something in Russian. “Gospodin Knox, please, we must hurry. Are you able to sit up?”
With the medic supporting him, Knox tried to rise, and was immediately rewarded with a vision of encroaching darkness and the onset of a splitting headache. His stomach, which had been clamoring for attention for some time, now seemed on the verge of open revolt.
He fell back on the bed, panting and shivering. “Go ’way.”
Through slitted eyes, Knox watched the medic hold a whispered consultation with someone standing at the door. Two blurry presences entered the room and approached the bed.
“Dzhon,” said a familiar voice, “it is good to see you still alive. I cannot tell you how good.”
“Wish I could say the same, Sasha.”
“Enough of this!” Yuri shouldered Sasha aside, glowered down at Knox. “Stand!”
Head reeling, Knox did his best to comply. After two abortive attempts, he was more or less upright, hanging onto the night table for dear life, gasping for breath, his heartbeat thundering in his ears. The medic helped matters no end by shining a blinding light in his eyes.
“Listen, Dzhon,” Sasha said, “we get you cleaned up now. But we must hurry.” He glanced at his wristtop. “We have not much time.”
Sasha’s voice seemed to be coming from the bottom of a rain barrel. That couldn’t be right, could it? Knox raised his head and squinted. Sure enough, Sasha’s face was framed in a swirling tunnel of fuzzy black nothingness, was receding even as he watched into a pinpoint of light, like the image on a monitor after the power’s been cut.
“Devil take it! Get up!” The Georgian-accented bellow brought the world back, in patches anyway. Knox tried again to bestir himself. Time to be up and about . . . though actually it was kind of restful just lying there with Yuri kicking him in the ribs.
The world snapped back into focus once again, along with his headache. Arms draped around the shoulders of his two boon companions Sasha and Yuri, Knox was being half frogmarched, half carried down the exterior companionway to lab deck. The fresh breeze wafting into the open stairwell was doing more to revive him than the antidote had. The golden light from the sliver of sun just peeking over the horizon was helping too. The start of yet another beautiful day aboard Rusalka.
Not that he’d be spending much of it outdoors. Their trail led into the interior, along the familiar passageway to Rusalka’s “public” lab.
Where there had been some changes made. The firewalls were gone, and with them the jellyfish camouflage that had kept the secret lab secret. The partitioned compartment had become a single open space centered on the banks of workstations monitoring Antipode. They’d needed the room: the facility was now cluttered with equipment and jammed full of people. And, over in a corner, there was one person in particular . . .
Looking somewhat the worse for wear: bruised, smudged, thoroughly disarrayed, wearing makeshift manacles of adhesive mesh, and sporting more of the sticky stuff—emblematic of the ferocity of her resistance—in the most unlikely places. And, despite it all, utterly beautiful in his eyes. Marianna stood flanked by a brace of security guards, one of whom was holding a gun on her while the other wielded a sponge and a small bottle of solvent in an effort to scour residual patches of webbing from her arms.
Knox’s escort hustled him past newly-installed workstations and around rat’s nests of exposed cabling. Given they were headed for Marianna, he did his best to help out. He was surprised to find that his legs, though still wobbly, would now support his weight. Even so, he felt in far worse shape than she looked; they must have revived her first for whatever reason.
That she was fully recovered from the knock-out shot there could be no doubt: Marianna was glaring fiercely around the room, ready to take on Grishin’s minions one at a time or all together, looking for something to kill. The intensity of her gaze softened several orders of candlepower when she saw Knox.
“Jon! Thank God! I got worried when they didn’t bring you down. It’s seemed like hours.”
He was close enough to touch her, if only Yuri weren’t keeping him on so short a leash.
“My friends here insisted I get properly attired first.” Knox was wearing shirt and slacks on loan from Sasha. “I see your handlers didn’t enforce the same dress-code.”
Marianna was in the same sleeveless blouse and black jeans she’d been wearing at Weathertop. The only new additions to her wardrobe were the strips of sticky-web fastened tightly around her wrists.
“Oh, they tried,” she told him. Then she turned to the guard doing the scrubbing. “Didn’t you, you—you svoloch’ ! Yob tvoyu mat’ !”
Hunh! CROM’s survival-Russian instructors must have a whole different take on core vocabulary. Strictly speaking, though, the act Marianna claimed to have performed on the guard’s mother wasn’t anatomically feasible. The guard got the message regardless. Abandoning his clean-up-Marianna campaign, he set sponge and solvent on a nearby table and sucker-punched her in the kidney.
Knox strained against Yuri’s grip. No luck. He could only watch as Marianna doubled over from the surprise blow. She gripped the edge of the table for support and came back swinging. If she was hampered at all by the fact that her wrists were glued together, you couldn’t tell it from the pounding she began giving her luckless assailant.
Knox’s view of the fracas was cut off abruptly. Yuri’s injured arm, cast and all, had wrapped itself around his neck in a grip so tight it forced his head back. He struggled to draw breath through his constricted windpipe, then froze as he felt the cool kiss of a gun muzzle against his temple.
“Stop. Now.” Yuri’s voice was conversational in tone. Marianna knew enough Russian to understand—or maybe not: what counted was that she looked in his direction. Then she stopped. With Yuri, actions spoke louder than words, especially since his next action might be to pull the trigger.
Once he was sure the dust had settled, Yuri released Knox to rub his bruised larynx and think dark thoughts.
His client, his woman, his lover, on so many levels he ought to be doing something to help her. Instead he was being used against her—a hostage to her good behavior. That must be all they thought he was good for. They hadn’t even bothered reviving him until they’d found out what a handful she was.
Hunched over, still wheezing, it hit him with the force of a revelation: he was tired of it. Sick and tired of being a pawn in somebody else’s game.
For most of his professional life, Jonathan Knox had worked at solving other people’s problems. In all that time, he’d never lost sight of the essential distinction between the client’s best interests and his own. On balance, that was a good thing. A modicum of distance, of professional detachment, was key to maintaining his objectivity, to offering the best advice he could no matter the consequences.
Where was that distance now? It had gotten lost somewhere, squeezed down and collapsed into nothingness by Mycroft’s death, by his . . . his relationship with Marianna, by the sheer, globally catastrophic price of failure. Detachment be damned.
Knox straightened up slowly. Even a pawn had the power to change his lot in life, his status in the game—if only he could go the distance, make it into the last row.
One way or another, Knox vowed, he was going to make it into the last row on the chessboard and promote himself—from incidental nuisance to Arkady Grishin’s worst nightmare.
39 | Descent
KNOX WORKED HIS way down the stairs. Carefully, so as not to trip and stumble into Yuri again and earn himself another fist to
the gut. It wasn’t all that easy to negotiate a spiral staircase wearing handcuffs, but GEI Security had insisted no outsider be admitted into the presence of the “Comrade Director,” save under restraint.
Nearly there now, just a few more steps. What had Marianna said was down here? A bathyscaphe? He stepped off the last riser onto the deck and looked up. And up.
The mother of all bathyscaphes!
Every time Knox thought he finally had a handle on how big Rusalka was, she’d throw him a curve like this. Floating in a moon pool, the bright yellow submersible took up less than a third of the vast hold, yet seen from the foot of the stair she loomed out of the floodlit darkness like a zeppelin. Cyrillic script emblazoned across the bow proclaimed her the good ship Navtilus. The Russians always had been big Jules Verne fans.
No time to see the sights. Yuri was already marching him up the gangplank toward Navtilus s airlock. Knox paused in the entrance to look around, seeing nothing that would’ve been out of place in the cabin of a corporate jet—outsized desk-cum-console with a fifty-inch flatscreen on the wall behind it, several rows of armchairs maglocked to the floor plates, a mini-galley off to one side. No door through to a cockpit, though; the ’scaphe was piloted via sonar displays, so the navigational station could be set far to the rear, reserving the view out the forward ports for the paying customers.
Knox’s survey of his new surroundings was forcibly interrupted as Yuri tired of waiting on the ramp and hustled him into the cabin.
Marianna entered behind them, still glaring defiance at her minders, still worrying away at her bonds. Why, Knox wondered, would Grishin leave her wearing the same sticky-mesh they’d been captured in at Weathertop? Why not steel shackles like his? Not that the webbing wasn’t up to the job. Pliant enough to permit some freedom of movement, the adhesive manacles were resisting her every effort to twist or tear loose.