by Robert Reed
Then with a delicious abruptness, the detectors were forgotten.
Two of Pamir’s engineers had gone off by themselves, wanting more than a little privacy. Like a thousand robots before, they followed an obscure fuel line, moving deeper into the ship, finally reaching a point where for no apparent reason, the hyperfiber wall looked younger. Fresher. Wrong.
Robots would have dismissed such data as unimpressive. Obviously, the fuel line had been patched. But that sort of work was common in the early days of the voyage, and much of it was accomplished without records being kept. And since there were no seams or signs of traffic—nothing here but a good strong wall—the robots had lingered for only a few microseconds, then continued their plunge.
But the lovers were intrigued.
They lingered for a full hour, making sensitive probes before returning to their cramped car for another round of clumsy sex. Then in the afterglow, one of them said, “Wait. I know what this is.”
“What’s what?” said his lover.
“It’s a hatch. A nice big hatch.”
The other man said, “And look, here’s my nice big penis!”
“No, listen to me,” said the first man. Then he was laughing, adding, “What is it, it’s a secret hatch. That’s why this hyperfiber looks wrong.”
“Okay. But we’d see the seams along the edge. Wouldn’t we?”
“Not if the hatch itself is small. And not if the seams are perfect.”
Which left his lover with another doubt. “How could the !eech manage that sort of trickery?”
It would be a difficult task, yes. But they made more tests, finally sniffing out a nanoscopic flaw that intersected with approximately another twelve billion other flaws that created a hatch just large enough for a small cap-car to pass through. Perhaps. Armed with their fresh data, they returned to Pamir. The mission leader met them on the aerogel barge drifting in the middle of the hydrogen sea, surrounded by darkness and a perpetual chill, and with matching darkness, he listened to the engineers, then nodded, and quietly told both men, “Thank you. On behalf of the Master and myself, thank you.”
The first engineer had to ask, “But what about the !eech?”
“What about them?”
“We didn’t realize they had the means to build that sort of doorway, much less fool us for this long.”
“Yet fooled we were,” Pamir replied.
He stared out at the smooth, untroubled face of the hydrogen ocean, his thoughts turning back to Washen. If they had ever left her. Nobody else in his long life had been a better friend. In his gut, Pamir knew that Washen was waiting for him. She needed him, or she was dead. Either way, it was imperative that he find her, and with that thought burning inside him, he dismissed the two men and contacted the Master; and three minutes later, the engineers’ mission was officially terminated, handshakes and fat bonuses given along with warnings that no one else needed to learn anything more about this strange cold business.
* * *
WHAT CAPTAINS COULD build, captains could comprehend; and if it came to that, what they could build they could also break.
Thirty Submasters and high-grade regulars, most with engineering experience, were briefed in full and assembled inside an abandoned pumping complex above the secret doorway. Special scuttlebugs and smart-dust probes examined the area, then undertook an equally exhaustive search of every similar fuel line. But there was only the one doorway, and every test confirmed that it was real, that it hadn’t been opened for at least several years, and to the limits of their technology, there were no watchdog sensors or any sort of booby trap lying in wait.
The Master decided on cautious research.
But six months later, with her captains still hiding inside that pumping complex, her patience dissolved into a frustrated boldness.
“Break open the hatch,” she roared.
Pamir was in the conference room, sitting behind a row of Submasters. Quietly, but not too quietly, he said, “Madam.” Then he sighed and added, “Maybe we’re narrowing your search a little too much.”
Faces turned.
But not the Master’s face. Her dark eyes remained buried in the holomaps and equipment lists and the expanse of her own hand, one great finger pointing to a minuscule, yet suddenly vital detail.
Without looking at him, she said, “Elaborate.”
Then she added, “Quickly, Captain Pamir.”
“Someone or something could have fallen out of the !eech habitat,” he remarked, looking at everyone but the Master. “We should keep searching the fuel tank. And I still have that neutrino array in place. It was detecting a possible source … coming from somewhere below us, if the early data are true…”
One of the Submasters gave a rumbling cough, then reminded his superior, “The fuel tank has been searched. Nearly exhaustively, madam. And Pamir is talking about a piss of neutrinos too thin to have any value—”
Knowing the hazards, Pamir interrupted. “We should watch the doorway, and wait,” he argued. He was looking at the faces that were open enough to look back at him. Then he added, “If our captains are behind that door, then we’ll be showing them what we know. And like any game, you don’t want to give up your turn too soon.”
The Master took a moment, allowing his words to evaporate into the tense silence. Then she said, “Thank you.”
Pamir’s opinion had been crisply dismissed.
Speaking to more trusted captains, she ordered, “Keep yourselves and your ship safe. But as soon as physically possible, I want you to force the hatch. Please.”
Twenty-four hours later, hair charges of antimatter were set against the hidden hinges, then detonated.
The hatch shifted a nanoscopic distance, then jammed firmly in place.
The sophisticated equivalent of a prybar was deployed, and it gave a yank, then another, and that shiny gray plug of pure hyperfiber slid out slowly, then faster, tumbling down the fuel line for twenty kilometers, reaching a closed valve and slamming into an aerogel bed that caught it like a great hand, saving it for later studies.
Scuttlebugs, then high-ranking captains, descended on the gaping hole, all dressed in armor and bristling with weapons, the machines devoid of expectations while the humans assured themselves that they were ready for anything.
Behind the secret doorway, waiting for them, was nothing.
Cold iron-rich rock was mixed with splinters of hyperfiber. Which wasn’t exactly nothing. But as spidery limbs and gloved hands touched the stratum, a sturdy disappointment struck, the captains asking themselves, Is the hatch a decoy? Is it just a half-clever way to keep our eyes and minds pointed in the wrong direction?
But no, analysis showed that this was the topmost portion of a vertical tunnel, and if the tunnel kept plunging straight down, it would merge with one of the crushed access tunnels—ancient, enigmatic, and utterly useless.
Eleven days after Washen’s mysterious reappearance, an antimatter charge had destroyed the tunnel. Seismic records showed a bump and creak that had gone unnoticed among the ship’s usual bumps and creaks. But the damage looked obsessively thorough. The surrounding rock was pulverized, and treacherous. Rebuilding just the first few kilometers of the tunnel would take time and vast resources.
“Do it,” the Master ordered.
But they didn’t need thirty captains for what three of them, plus a brigade of mining drones, could accomplish with the same ease.
Pamir asked permission to return to the fuel tank and continue his search.
“Refused,” the Master replied instantly, out of hand.
Then she told him, “You’ll remain with the digging team. And if you find a moment or two of free time, I can’t stop you from doing what you want.”
“Alone?” he asked.
And her golden face smiled as she told her most difficult captain, “I am sorry. My apologies. I thought that’s exactly how you like to do everything.”
Thirty-three
NEUTRINOS AND THE slow
ghosts remained, but only in the corner of the eye and the mind. The central duty in Pamir’s life was to carve a simple hole, following the shattered vein wherever it led, and with the years that seemingly straightforward task evolved into what might have been the deepest, most demanding excavation in human history.
Nothing remained of the original access tunnel. A series of sharp shaped explosions had obliterated the hyperfiber walls, and worse, they had pumped fantastic amounts of heat into the surrounding rock and iron. A column of red-hot magma led down into the ship’s depths. Reconstructing the tunnel wasn’t impossible, but it was nearly so. What was simpler was to extract the magma like stubborn cream through a wide straw, then slather the surrounding walls with better and better grades of hyperfiber, creating a vertical shaft more than a full kilometer wide.
Thirty years of digging, and three captains stood at a point as deep as the fuel tank’s deepest reaches.
In another fifty years, they were clawing their way through a wilderness of iron.
Pamir was always present. But the other captains changed faces and names every eight or ten years. Duty in the “big hole” was by no means an honor. After the first century of work and several catastrophic collapses, the Master and most of her staff had lost hope in the project. The camouflaged hatchway had been nothing but a clever distraction. The access tunnel had been destroyed by someone, yes. But throwing antimatter bomblets down a tiny hole would be easy enough. Among the tiny circle of AIs and captains who knew about the digging, none could believe there was anything worth finding down there.
Even Pamir found his imagination failing him.
In his dreams, when he saw himself digging fast with a handheld shovel, he couldn’t picture finding anything but another gout of hard black iron.
Yet the hole was Pamir’s duty, and it was a grand, consuming obsession. When he wasn’t choreographing the digging, he was badgering distant factories for improved grades of hyperfiber. When he wasn’t overseeing the pouring of a thick new stretch of wall, he was personally examining the finished stretches, from bottom to top, searching for any flaw, any inadequate seam, where the brutal pressures of the great ship threatened to buckle all of his wasted work.
Those rare moments when he climbed out of the hole and into the fuel tank felt like vacations. His aerogel island still floated on the placid hydrogen sea. Alone, he would repair the neutrino detectors and comb the last year or two of data, searching for traces of that soft signal, trying to decide if it truly came from below.
After decades of growing subtly stronger, the signal was weakening now.
There were years when it seemed to vanish altogether.
The Master and her loyal AIs, privy to the same data, came to the same rigorous solution. “It’s vanishing because it never was,” they claimed. “Anomalies have that wicked habit.”
Pamir asked permission to build new detectors, increasing his sensitivity, and he was curtly refused. When he mentioned that a second array floating inside an adjacent fuel tank would let him identify every ghost particle’s birthplace, he found agreement based upon solid technical reasoning.
“But there’s more to this issue,” the Master warned. “It’s a question of resources and general discomfort.”
“Discomfort?” he inquired.
“My discomfort,” she replied, her holoimage feigning a grimace. “Floating on the hydrogen like they do, your toys are hazards. We don’t dare pump out important amounts of fuel, since that might disturb them. And worse, what if they clog a line?”
Half a dozen easy solutions occurred to Pamir.
But before he offered any, the Master added, “That’s why I want your array disassembled. And soon, please. We’ve got a major burn coming in a little more than eighteen months—a burn and subsequent flybys—and I need my hydrogen. Free of aerogel and detectors, and all the rest of it.”
“In eighteen months,” Pamir echoed.
“No,” she said, her patience worn into the thinnest of veneers. “Sooner than that. If you need, take a leave of absence from your hole. Is that understood?”
He nodded, bristled in secret, and decided what to do.
With the help of mining drones, Pamir dismantled exactly half of the array, packing up the sensors, then on his authority, sent them up to Port Alpha. He followed the fancy crates, and in a cramped assembly point beneath the outer hull, he met an ancient Remora who owed him more than one good favor.
Orleans had a splendid and ugly new face. Wide amber eyes rode on the ends of white worms, pressed flush against the lifesuit’s faceplate, and something that might have been a mouth smiled. Or grimaced. Or it changed shape for no other reason than it could.
A sloppy voice asked, “Where?”
Pamir gave the coordinates, then with his own easy smile added, “This is only for us to know.”
Orleans stared through the diamond wall of a packing crate, regarding its contents with his mutated senses. Perhaps no one appreciated a good machine more than a Remora, married as they were to their own bulky suits. “You’re on a hunt for neutrinos,” he remarked. Then he added, “I don’t believe in neutrinos.”
“No?” said Pamir. “Why’s that?”
“They pass through me, but they don’t touch me.” The nearly molten face managed to nod. “I don’t believe in things that mysterious.”
Both men laughed, each for his own reason.
“Okay,” said Pamir, “but will you do this for me?”
“What about the Master below us?”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
Orleans was smiling. The expression was sudden and obvious, and with the wormy green eyes staring at the captain, his smiling voice said, “Good. I like keeping secrets from that old bitch.”
* * *
HALF OF THE original array was deployed out on the ship’s hull, thousands of kilometers higher and some ninety degrees removed from the remaining half, tucked into the vastness between a pair of towering rocket nozzles.
Calibrations and synchronization took time. Even when there was reasonable data, it proved stubbornly uncompelling. The universe was awash with neutrinos, and the ship’s hyperfiber hull and bracings distorted that mayhem into a pernicious fog. Removing every source of particles took time and a narrow genius. AIs did the tedious work. When they were finished, Pamir was left staring at a vague, possibly fictitious stream. Not coming from a point, no. It was a diffuse source aligned around the ship’s core: a soft white sheen of particles rising from a region even deeper than the deep hole.
Pamir found excuses to leave the detectors in place, reasoning that he could acquire more data over the next months and years. But the neutrino stream stubbornly continued to weaken, as if it were willingly and maliciously working to make him appear foolish.
The Master lost her last shreds of patience.
“I see that half of your toys are gone,” she mentioned. “To where, I haven’t been told. But the point is that we have potential hazards drifting inside a fuel tank. Still. Against my better judgment.”
“Yes, madam.”
“It’s a little more than thirty days to the burn, Pamir.” The Master’s projection approached him, glowering. “I want the freedom to use my hydrogen. And without even the remote prospect of getting your playthings caught in my throat.”
“Yes, madam. I’ll see to it immediately.”
She wheeled in a graceful circle, then said, “Pamir.”
“Yes, madam.”
She stared at him, admitting, “I think it’s time to quit digging. Or at least leave that work with the mining drones. They know the tricks as well as you do, don’t they?”
“Nearly, madam.”
“Visit me.” She sounded almost friendly, her golden face shining down at him. “My annual feast is in four days. Join me and the rest of your colleagues, and we’ll discuss your next assignment. Is that understood?”
“Always, madam.”
The smile acquired a useful menace, and as sh
e vanished, she warned, “The Remoras have better things to do than look after your toys. Darling.”
* * *
OVER THE NEXT three days, detectors were dragged alongside the barge and taken off-line, and drones began to stow them for shipment. The sonar array and deep-dredges waited their turn. Where everything would end up, Pamir didn’t know. Probably stored inside a warehouse, and he didn’t particularly care about their fate.
Whatever happened now, he was definitely done with this place.
Because it was an order, and because it might do some good, Pamir decided to attend the Master’s feast. Returning to his quarters, he let his sonic shower carve off several layers of old flesh, then he stepped into his garden, the clean new skin beneath maturing in the false sunlight. In his absence, his llano-vibra had gone wild; thousands of mouths sang badly, a chorus of wild, unlovely sounds accompanying him as he dressed in his most ornate uniform. He tied the mysterious silver clock to his mirrored sash. A mouthful of bacterial spores guaranteed that he could eat and drink anything, his belches and farts turned to perfumes. Then he boarded his personal cap-car, and once under way, Pamir realized that he wasn’t simply tired, he was exhausted, better than a century of hard, thankless work suddenly grabbing him by the throat.
He slumped, and slept.
He would have slept until he pulled up beside the Grand Hall, but an AI yanked him out of a perfectly delightful sex dream.
The dream faded, as well as his erection. On a secure channel, he opened a channel to the AI. A dry, unimpressed voice reported, “There has been, sir, a rather considerable surge in neutrino activity.”
“From where?”
“From below,” the AI replied. “With just one array, I cannot pinpoint a source—”
“Straight below?” Pamir interrupted.
“And in a region encompassing an eight-degree dispersion, yes.”