AIs do not make jumps on their own. I twisted my head and looked at the time. We were back on ship time, which was Andiquar time. It was a quarter to four in the afternoon, but the middle of the night to me. And two hours before we were scheduled to transit.
“Belle,” I said, “what’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Chase.” She appeared at the foot of my bed. In her Belle-Marie work uniform.
“Belay the jump.”
“I don’t seem to have control over the displacement unit.” She meant the quantum engines, which were continuing to rev up. We hadn’t had time to take on enough of a charge to get to Rimway, but that wouldn’t prevent us from leaving the immediate area and going somewhere. It just limited the options.
“Try again, Belle. Belay the jump.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m unable to do so, Chase.”
I was out of the sack by then, charging into the passageway. I banged on Alex’s door and barged into his compartment. It took a moment to get him awake.
“Jump coming,” I said. “Heads up.”
“What?” He rolled over and tried to look at the time. “Why the short warning? Isn’t it too early?”
You could feel the pressure building in the bulkheads. “Get hold of something!” I told him. Then the lights dimmed. Quantum jumps are accompanied by a sense of sudden acceleration, only a few seconds long, but enough to do some serious damage if you’re caught unawares. I heard Alex yelp, while I was thrown back against a cabinet. I saw stars and felt the customary tingling that accompanies passage between distant points.
The lights came back up, full.
Alex had been tossed out of bed. He got to his feet with a surge of intemperate remarks and demanded to know what we were doing.
“I don’t know yet,” I told him. “You okay?”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said. “The bone’ll set in a few days.”
I scrambled onto the bridge. “What happened, Belle?”
“I’m not sure, Chase,” she said. “The clock seemed to be running fast.”
“And you weren’t aware of it?”
“I don’t monitor the timers, Chase. There’s never been a need to.”
Alex appeared at the hatch.
“Okay, Belle,” I said. “I want to know precisely what’s going on. And while you’re trying to figure it out, let’s open up and see where we are.”
Somewhere, thrusters fired. The ship moved. Began to rotate. I grabbed hold of the side of my chair. Alex was thrown off-balance, staggered across the bridge, and finally went down in a heap. “Belle,” I said, “what are you doing?”
There were more bursts. The prow was rising, and we were swinging toward starboard.
“Belle?”
“I don’t know,” the AI said. “This is really quite extraordinary.”
Alex got to the right-hand seat and belted in. He threw a desperate look at me.
“Belle,” I said, “open up. Let’s get a look at the neighborhood.”
Still nothing.
“Okay, how about the monitors then?” I was striving to keep my voice level. Don’t alarm the passengers. Never sound as if you’ve lost control of events. “Let’s see what the telescopes have.”
The screens remained blank.
“Belle. Give us the feed from the scopes.” I dropped into my chair and belted down.
“There’s a break in the alignment, Chase.” Her voice was flat. Detached. “I can’t get a picture.”
“Where?”
“Main relay.”
“Damn you, Belle,” I said, “what’s Walt Chambers’s real name?” Walt Chambers was a client we’d carried a couple of years earlier while he was researching ruins on Baklava. He’d been with a group of academics, and his name was Harbach Edward Chambers. But he didn’t like Harbach. He looked a lot like Walter Strong, the old horn player. He’d claimed the name Walt during adolescence, and it stuck. He’d traveled with us, and Belle knew him.
“Searching,” she said.
“Search, hell.” I opened the data flow panel. System status seemed normal. “Belle,” I said, “take yourself off-line.”
The main engines fired a short burst, then shut down. There followed a series of volleys from the attitude thrusters. Up, down, port, and back to center. We were aligning ourselves on a new course.
“I’m sorry, Chase. I don’t seem to be able to do that.”
“Hey,” said Alex, “what’s going on?”
“I’m working on it.” The port thrusters fired. “She’s changing our heading.”
“Why?”
“Damn it, Alex, how do I know?”
I was suddenly aware I was floating. My hair drifted up, and I was rising against the seat belts. The ship’s rotational motion stopped, and the main engines came back on. We began to accelerate. At maximum thrust.
“Gravity’s off,” Alex said. “You okay?”
“I’m fine.” I tried to take Belle off-line, but nothing happened.
“You’re giving us a hell of a ride, Chase.”
“It’s not me.” The engines shut down again and the gee forces went away. The ship became dead quiet, and a series of status lamps began to blink. “Son of a bitch,” I said. “I don’t believe it.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Belle’s dumping our fuel.”
“My God,” he said. “All of it?”
I tried again to wrestle control away from her. The fuel status lamp went to amber, then to red, then to bright scarlet.
I released my harness and got over to the maintenance panel.
“What are you going to do?” Alex demanded.
“For a start, we’re going to disable her.” I opened the panel.
“I’m sorry, Chase,” said Belle. “Nothing personal.”
Yeah. Right. It didn’t even sound like Belle anymore. And what chilled me most was that I detected a sense of genuine regret. I twisted the handle, punched her buttons, and her lights went out. “Good-bye,” I said.
“She gone?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to her?” Alex asked. “Are we okay?”
“It wasn’t Belle,” I said. “Hang on, I’m going to restore gravity.”
“Good,” said Alex. “If you could make it quick—”
“I’m working as fast as I can.” Artificial gravity is normally controlled by the AI. To reset it, I had to switch over to manual, and punch in more numbers. Our weight flowed back.
Alex sat quietly, looking stunned. “What’s our situation?” he asked, finally.
“Can’t be good. We’re adrift in a hot area.”
“Hot?”
“There’s a lot of radiation out there. Let’s get a look.” Despite Belle’s claims, the telescopes worked fine. They aren’t designed to be operated manually, though. I had to turn each on individually, then aim it. There were six of them, so it took a while. I routed the feed into the displays. One by one, the pictures came on.
The Belle-Marie was in the middle of a light show.
Two bright blue lights slashed across the monitors. It was a saber dance, and the sabers were long, twisted beams of light. “What the hell is it?” asked Alex.
It was the sort of effect an ancient lighthouse might have caused had the lamp been bouncing around inside and spinning wildly.
The lamp itself appeared to be a blue star.
Alex was watching me, reading my face. “So what is it?”
“Ramses.”
“The pulsar?”
“Yes. Has to be.” I was pressing my earphones, listening to it. I put it on the speaker, and the bridge filled with a sound like waves of ice and sleet rattling against the hull.
“Doesn’t sound good,” he said.
“We’re headed directly into the lights.”
“What happens when we get there?”
“We’ll fry. If we’re still alive at that point. Radiation’s already going up.”
He didn’t take that real
well. There was some profanity, which was rare for him. And then he told me in a cool level voice that we needed to do something.
I was in a state of near shock myself. “I don’t believe this,” I said. “Leave the damned ship under the supervision of nitwits, and this is what happens.” Someone had re-programmed or replaced Belle. Probably the latter.
His eyes were wide, and there was something accusing in that stare. How could you let this happen?
We were getting more warning lights. External radiation levels were increasing. I was checking time in flight, the range from Sacracour to Ramses, the status the quantum engines would have attained before transition. It was Ramses. No doubt. A collapsed star. Or maybe the burned-out remains of a supernova. I wasn’t really up on my celestial physics. In any case, I knew it was a beast we wanted to stay well away from.
The beams flicked past, moving so quickly they constituted a blur. I froze one of them. “It’s mostly a slug of gamma rays and photons.”
“Can we get clear?”
It was a cosmic meat slicer, and we were headed into it with no power and no way to change course. “We have no engines,” I said.
“How long?”
“Seven hours. Give or take.”
“What about the jump engines? Can’t we jump out of here?”
“They’re useless without the mains.” I switched on the hyperlight transmitter. “Arapol, this is the Belle-Marie. Code White. We are adrift near Ramses. Heavy radiation. Request immediate assistance. I say again: Code White.” I added our coordinates, set the message to repeat, and began transmitting.
Help wasn’t going to arrive in time. So I began working on the assumption we’d have to save ourselves. To that end, I pulled up everything we had on pulsars in general and Ramses in particular. I’d never really had any cause to concern myself with pulsars. The only bit of information I thought I needed was pretty basic: Stay away from them. “It has an extremely strong magnetic field,” I told Alex. “It says here that it bounces around a lot, the magnetic field, sometimes close to light speed. It interacts with the magnetic poles, and that’s what generates what you’re looking at.”
“The lights?”
“Yep. They’re cones.” We still had the frozen image on one of the screens. “There are two of them. Ramses is a neutron star. It spins pretty fast, and the cones rotate with it.”
“Must be damned fast. They’re a blur.”
“It rotates once in about three-quarters of a second.”
“You mean the star spins on its axis at that rate?”
“Yes.”
“How the hell’s that possible?”
“It’s small, Alex. Like the one that hit Delta Kay. It’s only a few kilometers across.”
“And it spins like a banshee.”
“You got it. This is a slow one. Some of them do several hundred revolutions per second.” The two shafts of blue light both originated on the neutron star. Their narrow ends pointed toward the pulsar.
I’ve discovered since then that, like any superdense star, a pulsar has trouble supporting its own weight. It keeps squeezing down until it achieves some sort of stability. And the more it squeezes, the faster it spins. The point is that as the pulsar gets smaller, its magnetic field becomes more compressed. Stronger. It becomes a dynamo.
“Sons of bitches,” said Alex. “I hope we can get our hands on the people who did this.”
“Consider yourself lucky the quantum drive isn’t too precise. Or they’d have shipped us right into the thing. As it is, at least we got some breathing space.”
We were 60 million klicks from the pulsar. The cones at that range were almost 6 million kilometers in diameter. And they were directly in front of us, dancing all over the sky.
Hull temperature was up, but within levels of tolerance. Internal power was okay. Attitude thrusters had fuel left. The AI was dead. We had some computer power available, off-line from the AI.
So how do you change the course of a starship when you can’t run the engines?
“Maybe,” suggested Alex, “we could start heaving furniture out the airlock.”
TWeNTY
We imagine that we have some control over events. But in fact we are all adrift in currents and eddies that sweep us about, carrying some downstream to sunlit banks, and others onto the rocks.
—Tulisofala, Mountain Passes
(Translated by Leisha Tanner)
By any reasonable definition of a star, Ramses was dead. Collapsed. Crushed by its own weight. Its nuclear fires were long since burned out. But its magnetic field had intensified. It was a trillion times stronger than Rimway’s. Or Earth’s. It was throwing out vast torrents of charged particles.
Most of the particles escaped along magnetic field lines. They came off the surface in opposite directions from the north and south magnetic poles. Which meant there were two streams, accounting for the two light cones. They were necessarily narrow at the source, but they got wider as they moved out into space. It was those streams, more or less anchored on a wildly rotating body, that produced the lighthouse effect. But Ramses was a lighthouse spinning so swiftly and so wildly that even the beams of light got confused.
“That’s why the cones are twisted at intervals,” I told Alex. “Ramses spins like a maniac, and the light cones are millions of kilometers long. But the particles can only travel at light speed, so they become spirals.” I’d been punching data into the processing unit and was starting to get results. “Okay,” I said, “we’re not in orbit. But we’re going to go right through the circus.”
The link dinged. Transmission from Arapol. It was a bit like awaiting sentence.
I activated it. A short dumpy man appeared up front. “Belle-Marie, this is Arapol. Emergency unit Toronto is on the way. Forward situation and location to us for relay to rescue vessel. Radio transmissions are negative your area. Too much interference from Ramses. ETA Toronto nine hours from time of transmission this message. Do not go near the pulsar. I say again, do not approach the pulsar.”
“Nine hours,” said Alex. “Call him back. Tell him that’s not good enough.”
“Alex,” I said, “they could get here during the next ten minutes, and they wouldn’t be able to find us in time.” With radio transmissions wiped out by the pulsar, it could take weeks.
I wasn’t feeling very well. “Me neither,” said Alex. “You don’t think any of that radiation’s getting in, do you?”
I’d been watching the numbers. Radiation levels outside were still rising, would continue to rise as long as we kept getting nearer the pulsar. But they weren’t yet close to being a problem. “No,” I said, “we’re fine.” But my head was starting to spin, and my stomach was sliding toward throw-up mode.
“Good.” He looked terrible. “Back in a minute.” He released himself from his harness and pulled himself out of the chair.
I watched him stagger toward the hatch. “Be careful.”
He left without answering.
The washroom door closed. A few minutes later, when he came back, he still looked pale. “I wonder,” he said, “if they did something to life support, too?”
I ran an environment check. “I don’t see anything,” I said.
“I’m glad to hear it. But something’s wrong.”
I saw nothing on the status boards. No evidence of a radiation leak. The ship was holding steady. What was making us sick?
“Alex,” I said, “I’m going to shut everything down for a minute.” He nodded, and I killed the power. The lights went off. And the fans. And gravity. Backup lamps blinked on. We drifted silently through the night.
And there it was. “Feel it?” I asked.
“Something,” he said.
It had a rhythm. Like a tide rolling in and out.
“Are we tumbling?”
“No. It’s more like a pulse. A heartbeat.”
I wished I knew more about pulsars. We’d done a segment on them at school, but I never expected to go anywhere ne
ar one. Nobody ever goes near one. My kabba cup was a small metal container with a straw. I removed the cup from its holder and released it.
In the zero-gee environment, it floated away, drifting toward the open hatchway. It disappeared out into the common room. I repeated the experiment with a metal clip. It also went out through the hatch.
“What are you doing?” asked Alex.
“Just a moment.” I tried a handkerchief. Held it out. Let it go. It went nowhere. Just floated there at arm’s length. So we had two metal objects that had gone aft, and a handkerchief that simply stayed adrift.
“Which tells us what?” asked Alex.
I brought the systems back up, turned the lights on, but left the gravity off. “The magnetics are screwed up.” I got grip shoes out for both of us so we could get around. Then I gave myself a crash course on pulsars.
After an hour or so, and several trips to the washroom to throw up, I thought I knew what was happening. The axis of the magnetic field was well off the spin axis of the pulsar. More than thirty degrees. The plane of our vector almost aligned with the spin axis. So the magnetic field, as far as we were concerned, was off center. Ramses was also oscillating, and it was strong. The magnetic forces were rocking the ship.
Alex made an animal sound. “I’m not following.”
“We’re getting eddy currents in the hull. They keep changing our orientation. We have too much movement in too many directions.”
“Well, whatever. Can we do anything about it?”
“No. But the good news is that it’s slowing us down.” The hull was warm. “It’s heating up,” I said.
“Praise be!” Alex looked delighted. “We get a break! Enough that the Toronto will be here before we go into the soup?”
“No. Unfortunately not. But it’s going to give us”—I tapped a key and studied the result—“another two hours.”
“I’m sorry, but I don’t see how that helps. It’s just two extra hours to be sick.” Then he brightened. “Wait a minute. How about the shuttle? It’s got a full tank. Why don’t we use it to clear out? Leave the ship?”
I’d already considered it and discarded the idea. “Its hull is too thin. If we go out in that, we’d be fried in about two minutes.”
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