Analog SFF, July-August 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  All sides of the captain's study were holos, and surprisingly mundane: darkly paneled walls; oils of seascapes, storms, and ships under sail; an illusory blaze in a virtual fireplace; bookshelves of cloth—and leather-bound classics. The chairs were real and genuine leather; there was no disguising the squeaks. Four seats were occupied: Art and the captain, Carlos, and Keizo.

  Art took a deep breath. “There's a big question I cannot get out of my mind. Why are the Snakes so determined to leave now? I'll be honest—I have a theory. If I'm right, it's pretty damn horrifying. I asked everyone together because we all approach problems differently. Nothing would please me more than being shown the error of my ways.

  “The stated reason is simple caution. They're shorthanded. Mashkith wants to leave before he suffers any further mishap. Captain, does that work for you?"

  O'Malley leaned back in his seat, hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. “The navy ferried the Snake crew to the lifeboat, and there were only four aboard. Losing any crew is tragic, but is it a big risk? We've never gotten straight answers about the size of the ship's complement, but look at Victorious. It's enormous. Deep radar scans show just what you'd expect: It's a warren of caves and tunnels and decks. The supplies they took aboard likewise imply a large population. We've seen up to a dozen aux ships flying around at the same time, maybe a hundred individuals playing tourist.

  “I agree with your suspicions, Ambassador. Four casualties do not justify the unseemly haste with which they are suddenly leaving us—especially since their return flight will take them ... what? Roughly twenty Earth-standard years?"

  “Just Art.” I'm no diplomat. “Anyone else? Keizo, you look unconvinced."

  “Our visitors were very disparaging of our technology. They emptied and returned our antimatter transfer canisters very quickly. They imply our technology caused the disaster on Himalia. Perhaps they fear another such incident, and a worse outcome the next time."

  “Crap,” Carlos snorted. “There's nothing left to endanger them. Our only antimatter program was on Himalia. No one at UPIA has figured out how the Snakes penetrated our security and found Himalia, but having done so, they must know we have no other program. Art, you're killing me here. What other reason is there?"

  Another deep breath. “Complicity in the disaster. They want to be gone before we think of that."

  Seconds went by without anyone calling him crazy. “Okay, let's explore this scenario for a bit. If Snakes were involved, when would the Himalia explosion have occurred? Not before Victorious was fully refueled, of course. That leaves only a small window. Not as the lifeboat first approached, nor as it landed, nor as it sat locked and waiting for passengers to arrive for the demo trip.” If I'm not imagining all this, Art thought, how convenient my skepticism was for the Foremost. It helped justify keeping the lifeboat off-limits and unexamined. “Had the factory blown up at any of those times, we would certainly have seen a connection.

  “What about later? Could an explosion be planned for after the lifeboat's safe return from the demo flight? No, because that timing might permit the lifeboat's new, human owners to discover and disable the trigger. If this line of reasoning has any merit to it, the best time to cause an ‘accident’ would be precisely when it did happen—as the lifeboat approached Himalia on the return leg of the demo flight."

  O'Malley's eyes glazed briefly. Ship's duties? Fact-checking about this conversation? “I agree, to a point. If the Snakes were involved, they'd want to get away before their guilt is suspected. And I agree the timing is suspiciously supportive of such involvement. But you haven't said why they would. As to how, a big-enough, near-enough EMP could have killed the containment. There's no evidence of one."

  “Valid points,” Art said. “Among the more interesting topics on the infosphere today is the ‘silver lining’ blog among cosmologists. Observatories across the solar system reported a brief gravity wave around the time of the incident. There is much uninformed speculation about truly huge quantities of antimatter on Himalia, enough for the explosion to have recreated for an instant the conditions that immediately followed the Big Bang. That conclusion is nonsense, but the gravity pulse—that is significant. Observatories also saw a gravity wave when the Snakes demoed the lifeboat out past Pluto.

  “Suppose the interstellar-drive mechanism manipulates gravitational forces.” Just don't ask me for details. This was getting into Eva's theoretical approach to interstellar travel: modifying the properties of space itself. For reasons she could never make Art understand, there was no theoretical requirement for Newton's gravitational constant to be, well, constant. Modifying G locally would have the effect of creating a local propulsive gradient. Rolling downhill between stars, she called it. There was a lump in his throat he could not deal with now.

  “Every indication is their drive can't be used deep in a gravity well. They've told us that, and we know they stopped decelerating with their deep-space drive once they got close to Sol system. Would a drive that did not rely on gravitational forces be sensitive to gravity?"

  “What are you suggesting?” As Art hesitated, Carlos said, “If you ask me, Ambassador Chung didn't know what a resource he had in you. He belittled what I consider a healthy skepticism. In my line of work, we embrace it. Paranoia is a positive trait when it keeps you alive."

  What was he saying? He had a hand-wavy, qualitative hypothesis. The people—first and foremost, Eva—best qualified to critique it were nowhere around. Maybe their absence was another point in favor of Art's hypothesis. “The gravity pulse is the key. I can't give you details, but I believe the interstellar drive harnesses the energy from matter/antimatter annihilation to manipulate gravity.” That didn't mean Big Bangs on demand. It had to involve some interaction that was both subtle and controllable. “But once you wrap your head around a gravity theory advanced beyond anything we humans know, you have to wonder if the Snakes have found the holy grail of physics: a theory that unifies gravity with all other fundamental forces. Because one of those fundamental forces is electromagnetism, and it takes strong, precisely modulated EM fields to contain antimatter in BECs.

  “Here's my theory,” Art continued. “The obstacle to using the drive inside a solar system is the complexity of controlling the EM side effects. Those side effects can be calculated and compensated for—but only under simple circumstances. In deep space, that is, with no large masses around. Now think about our neighborhood, and the pull of Sun, planets, and the dozens of moons of Jupiter. Switching on the drive in that dynamic environment would be suicidal.

  “Imagine for the moment that the Snakes wanted a catastrophe. They activated the drive where it can't be controlled. The ripple took out the antimatter containment on the lifeboat. Maybe the ripple was enough to directly kill containment a couple thousand klicks away on Himalia. If not, all it takes is for radiation and debris from the first blast to unsettle one BEC container left on Himalia."

  Keizo broke the moment of stunned silence. “I'm the least qualified person aboard to comment on the physics. It seems to me, however, that an overarching question remains unaddressed. Why? Why would the K'vithians do this?"

  “Allow me.” When had O'Malley's cheek tattoos turned to skulls? At his unvoiced thought, one wall of the cabin morphed from old English study to a close-up of Victorious sliding through a field of stars. “Professionally, I'm impressed.

  “First, they're fueled. Since we don't have the lifeboat as an interstellar-drive prototype, a cynic"—and he winked at Art—"might say they stole that fuel. Worth, I'm guessing, a few months’ GDP for the whole solar system?

  “I'm merely your chauffeur, but you'd be surprised how high my security clearance is. Before agreeing to allow my ship anywhere near an antimatter bomb test—and let's be honest, that's what Art's first little experiment was—I used that clearance. The Snakes talked a good ball game about their advanced antimatter technology. I saw no evidence they have such a thing. In fact, they were a bit slow on the uptake w
ith our technology.

  “I don't believe our buddies in that big old starship knew how to manufacture antimatter. They wanted our technology as much as a load of fuel. More: If all they wanted was a trip-worth's load of fuel, they could have stayed home and saved themselves forty years. The main point of this trip must have been to Enron us out of our technology. How am I doing, Art?"

  So well it was scary. “Dead on."

  Keizo looked ill. “But why all the killing?"

  “Because,” Art said softly, “maybe it's not enough to steal away—if we can follow. Maybe they thought we could reverse-engineer their interstellar-drive technology from observing it in operation. Or perhaps we're closer than we realize to having the capability on our own. Regardless, they hoped to discredit our antimatter technology so completely we'd be afraid ever to use it again. That's why we got the disaster Keffah superciliously warned us about.” And more sadly: “And that's why they slaughtered our experts. There's no one left to refute their lies, no one left to rebuild our capabilities."

  Hands shaking, Art got up to pour himself coffee from the captain's urn. “You're wondering how, if they lack the technology, they ever got here. That's something I can't answer."

  “Actually, that's a question that can wait.” O'Malley zoomed the holo until Victorious filled the cabin. “I'm asking myself something quite different.

  “What are we going to do about this?"

  * * * *

  CHAPTER 30

  Two refugee families were shoehorned into Odyssey. Together that meant four adults and five kids. There was room aboard for little more than the clothes on their backs; a cat and a parakeet, both vocal, in separate cages; a few tattered stuffed animals.

  They did not fill the void Corinne had left.

  The parents were glued to the news. In their circumstances Helmut would be too, but now he tuned it out as an unproductive distraction. Much of the shrapnel that had until recently been Himalia was moving fast. Even a small chunk at those speeds could be fatal, so he had all the ship's sensors set at max sensitivity. His eyes were stuck to the main holo tank, in which all sensor data and calculated course projections were integrated.

  Radar showed vessels swarming around Leda and Elara; Lysithea was presently under bombardment and too dangerous to approach. The space-traffic-control display added the transponder IDs of the evacuation ships. There was a bubble in the flow, with transponder-equipped ships giving a wide berth to Victorious on its contrary path, and to the UP vessel trailing it. The starship's fusion drive “burnt” hotter than most everything else in his false-colored IR view, hotter than the flotilla of would-be rescuers, hotter than the final returning Snake auxiliary vessels.

  Helmut did not much care for the Snakes. He had not trusted them since he and Corinne realized how that stentorian radar ping had been used to manipulate them. How like the aliens not to help after the disaster.

  He was not one easily to accept accident as an explanation, especially in matters of life and death. Corinne was dead; he wanted a reason. Conventional wisdom may have converged quickly on an industrial mishap as the cause of the Himalia disaster, but he wanted proof. How like the Snakes to belittle UP technology as the cause of the accident.

  The few facts and many speculations had yet to crystallize a vague dread Helmut could not yet articulate, leaving him to stare into the display, oblivious to his passengers. Radar echo plus transponder icon, with or without the IR flare of a fusion drive in use, equaled a ship. Radar echo without transponder icon equaled a meteor. And the lone IR source showing neither a transponder nor a radar presence?

  That combination generally meant someone up to no good.

  Art squirmed in one of two bridge chairs. Small ships triggered his claustrophobia, and Odyssey was tiny. He could not keep his eyes from straying to the ship's single airlock, the only exit in case of a problem.

  Helmut looked offended. “It's fine with me if we go next door."

  “Next door” meant Actium, still shadowing the slowly receding Victorious. Why, when Mashkith insisted an exit was so urgent, that departure remained leisurely was merely the latest Snake enigma. Whatever the reason, Odyssey had easily caught up.

  After the Himalia disaster, the UP navy had tightened security. That included a background check before any civilian ships were allowed to approach. Carlos summarized the investigator's findings as, “Your drinking buddy is underage.” The comment had been too obscure for Art. It turned out to mean there was no credible record of Helmut's existence until five years ago. Did that make Helmut a spy, a master criminal, or someone in the witness protection program? Art's questions got only shrugs in return.

  Whoever Helmut really was, he was a friend—one who had also lost someone in the Himalia blow-up. And ambassadors, even acting ones, have some prerogatives. “Be happy you were permitted to dock ... whoever you actually are. Now what's this about?"

  “Something important enough to drop out of the evacuation operations. Something important enough to risk personal exposure. Who I really am doesn't matter right now."

  “What does matter?” Art asked.

  “That I'm certain someone well-placed in the government has seen this.” At an unspoken command, Helmut's main display holo panned back. On the periphery of the display volume, hotter than anything on the screen but Victorious, the IR view now revealed a tiny fusion flame. There was nothing there on radar. The trajectory recorded for the unknown ship climbed at an angle steeply inclined to the ecliptic.

  Its course was toward Barnard's Star.

  * * * *

  A TEOTWAWKI alert got Carlos out of bed. If that hadn't worked, Art was prepared to have the marine guards assigned to him as ambassador break down the cabin door. Art's message contained a capture of the holo, the dot representing the stealthed ship set to blinking, and a bit of text: Confirm or refute this data.

  The response five minutes later was even terser: Bring your buddy aboard. Marines waiting on the Actium side of the docking collar escorted them to Capt. O'Malley's cabin. One of the previously “paneled” walls now showed something like the main display on Odyssey. Art did perfunctory introductions. Carlos made no comment on the name “Helmut"; he might have been netting volumes privately to O'Malley. It didn't matter. Art plunged ahead. “That course implies a Snake vessel. The fusion drive, hotter than humans use but like Victorious, says the same."

  “And if it is?” O'Malley asked.

  “Remember how the Snake lifeboat went straight from deep-space demo to Himalia?” Carlos and O'Malley surely remembered everything about the apparent weapon of Himalia's destruction. The probably Snake-caused catastrophe consumed them no less than it consumed Art, as they all awaited direction from the politicians and admirals on Earth. “I keep thinking of something Ambassador Chung said right before the lifeboat demo. Chung claimed the Foremost sent the lifeboat straight to Himalia lest I accuse the K'vithians of bait and switch.

  “What if they engaged in bait and switch?"

  O'Malley frowned in concentration. “You're suggesting the lifeboat that we tracked all the way to Himalia, the ship our VIPs boarded, isn't what blew up. That this stealthed ship is the one with our people?"

  “I am,” Art said.

  “On top of destroying and discrediting our antimatter program, they'd get our best scientists.” O'Malley stood to stare into the holo. “If they could pull it off, it would make sense. Hell, it would be brilliant. How could it be done?"

  Helmut cleared his throat. “You track the Snake vessels, right? After the circus when they arrived, their ships began flying with UPAA space-traffic-control transponders."

  “Right,” O'Malley agreed.

  “I don't suppose I could have access to the Jupiter region's UPAA data base.” Helmut shrugged at the cold look from Carlos. “In that case, I suggest someone there do a bit of data mining. The query: Find the ten closest approaches by a Snake vessel to the final course of that lost lifeboat. Timestamp them.” To inquiring looks he
answered only, “Bear with me."

  The regional data center on Ganymede took twenty minutes to respond, of which only a couple minutes could be attributed to round-trip light-speed delay. Time enough for O'Malley's steward to arrive with fresh coffee, and to drink it. Time enough to pace and fret.

  A soft chime announced arrival of the response. O'Malley cleared a third wall of his cabin for its display. Ten swooping red paths around and grazing Jupiter: scoopship runs. One yellow path likewise shooting by Jupiter, but going no nearer than ninety-thousand klicks to the cloud tops. On its way down, the yellow track zigged and zagged on a path everyone had believed represented lessons for the passengers on the flight controls. The yellow trajectory never came terribly near a red one.

  The graphic told Art nothing. “Helmut, is this what you expected?"

  “No.” Helmut softly drummed fingers on the tabletop. “I'm missing something."

  Was Helmut imagining things, or was Mashkith yet again a step ahead of them all? The latter would not surprise Art. He considered himself a decent amateur chess player. Maybe a month after he had made a gift of a chess set, the Foremost visited Callisto. Art had offered a friendly game; Mashkith had mated him in twenty-three moves. How many moves ahead had Mashkith plotted the visit of Victorious?

  Dammit, this was no time to lose confidence. It might not be too late to save Eva and the others! “Call the lifeboat with our people A. Helmut, you think the Snakes dropped off a stealthed lifeboat, call it B. That at some point the Snake crew took over A, stealthed it, and destealthed B. B returned to Himalia, remotely operated or on autopilot, to trigger the explosion on its final approach. The mystery ship you spotted is A, and our people remain on it."