by B. V. Larson
I looked at her thoughtfully. She had me there, and she knew it. I didn’t have anyone else for the job. I didn’t have anyone I felt I could entrust with the keys to Star Force. At times I’d thought Crow was the man for that job—and that had turned out pretty badly.
I heaved a sigh and straightened my spine. “Helm, let’s lay in a course for the closer of the two suns. The white dwarf will do, won’t it Marvin?”
“According to my calculations, either star’s energy output is sufficient. If we choose the smaller of the two, we’ll have to build somewhat closer, however.”
I nodded. “You have the helm, Marvin. Take us to the star of your choice and park us in orbit. I want full radiation suits for the crew. Double-up on nanocloth suits and have the nanites chew up some lead before they add that second layer.”
There were a few groans at this announcement. Nanoclothing was so light and easy to wear you sort of got used to them after a while. They were a hard habit to break, like living in your pajamas all weekend long.
We planned to fly in with our most heavily protected face always aimed toward the stars like Spartans hiding behind upraised shields. I ordered the hull thickened up on the belly of the battleship as we glided closer to the blazing suns. Star Force people could take a lot of radiation, as the nanites repaired cells quickly, but our electronic subsystems were more fragile. To compensate, the ship’s systems moved constructive nanites around. They flowed in vein-like silvery relief over the hull, delivering more metal to the portions of the ship most affected.
Marvin chose the smaller star because its energy output was more stable. We reached the white dwarf two days later and established a safe orbit after fighting the gravitational forces. Then the real work began.
Marvin was given a fighter to tool around in because I’d told him he couldn’t have engines attached directly to his body. Unfortunately, his overseeing a large construction project in space pretty much required mobility.
I became angry less than a week into the project, when I realized Marvin had dismissed his fighter pilot. This meant that he was effectively zooming around independently.
“Marvin?” I shouted into a private channel. “Report immediately.”
“That’s not possible, Colonel. I’m engaged in a critical phase of the project. I’m assembling the core of a key system.”
I muted him and turned to Jasmine, who was watching the boards and knew better than I did what he was up to.
“Is he bullshitting me, Captain Sarin?”
“Yes and no. He’s not here in orbit around the white sun. He’s near Harvard, in fact, building a digester.”
Harvard was one of the three moons that sailed around a gas giant in this system’s habitable zone.
“He’s building a what?” I asked.
“He’s breaking down surface material of asteroids and smaller moons orbiting the gas giant. He’s quarried chunks of rock and is firing them toward the sun. Another system located here in orbit around the white sun catches the pieces and uses them in construction. Really, it’s quite elegant as an engineering solution.”
I frowned. It sounded big, expensive and complex.
“How big are these chunks of material?”
“They’re about two kilotons each, according to these documents.”
She displayed a mass of planning files on the command table. I’d been busy looking at reports of our military buildup back on Earth. I’d pretty much let Marvin do whatever he wanted. In retrospect, I realized that was rarely a good idea.
A blizzard of files opened with a rattling sound-effect on my side of the big screen. I tapped them closed irritably. I didn’t have time to read every blueprint and proposal.
“How is he managing to accelerate and decelerate chunks of mass that big?”
Jasmine looked at me in surprise. “Didn’t you know, sir? He’s brought along another of his prototype devices for this purpose.”
“What device?”
“A gravitational manipulator. A smaller version of the system Phobos uses for propulsion and weaponry.”
Of the tech we’d discovered and purloined, gravitational control systems were among the most amazing. The Blues were the experts at this, and they’d built a moon-sized ship that flew using a gravity-manipulating drive. We’d stolen the ship, made it our own, and called it Phobos.
I scratched my chin. “Well, it does sound like he’s got a good reason,” I had to admit. “Put him on screen.”
“He’s not in local space, Colonel.”
“I know that. But wherever he is, there’s a camera. Let’s see him.”
It took her a few minutes, but we soon had him on the big display. Marvin was zooming around in his fighter, making gut-wrenching turns and sliding stops.
“He’s buzzing around like a bee in a greenhouse,” I said, chuckling.
“He does seem to be happy, sir.”
“All right, Marvin,” I said, unmuting the blinking channel again. “You can keep your fighter and fly it yourself but no strapping any engines directly to your chassis!”
“I wouldn’t think of it, Colonel Riggs.”
Time passed. Every day I watched chunks of rock flowing into orbit near us. It was disconcerting seeing the flying stream of debris. It reminded me of being in the path of an automatic pitching machine only, in this case, the balls were the size of buildings, and they were flying at around a hundred thousand miles a minute.
Still, he managed to use gravitational systems to accelerate and decelerate each chunk. When they got to our orbital position, he began assembling them into a massive cylindrical structure.
I frowned as this monolithic thing that grew up outside my windows. With each day that passed, I couldn’t help but be awed and worried by it at the same time.
“Jasmine,” I said one fine morning as we sipped coffee and stared at the growing structure, “Tell me if I’m wrong, but that doesn’t look like anything a human would build in space, does it?”
She shook her head. We both went back to staring. Marvin was creating an alien structure. A sphere of black, swirling stone mixed with metal in an almost organic pattern.
What had I set into motion? I’d expected maybe a smaller version of a ring, but this thing…? What the hell did it do?
I demanded a face to face meeting with Marvin the next day. He complained bitterly, not wanting to pause in his work. I knew he’d been working around the clock without a break, and he was totally obsessed.
When I threatened to clip his wings and take away his fighter, he finally came to heel.
“Colonel Riggs,” he said as he walked onto the bridge, “What is so critically important it can’t be done virtually?”
I gave him a quick, visual inspection. His body looked remarkably like the version I’d originally approved of and allowed out into space. But I knew better.
“Jasmine,” I said, “play the vid.”
She tapped the screen and, on the holotank, an image of Marvin flickered into being. It showed him as he had been less than an hour ago, fully decked out with ten extra cameras and two clusters of tentacles that drifted in the vacuum of space.
“Looks like a couple of sea anemones somehow attached themselves to your chassis, Marvin,” I said. “Where are those clusters of appendages? Did you leave them in the fighter?”
“Those are not technically appendages, Colonel Riggs. My primary form is exactly as you see before you, approved and certified.”
I scoffed. “Come on, Marvin, we’ve got you on video.”
“Oh,” he said, as if noticing the video for the first time. “I see clearly the source of confusion on your part. That is not my body you’re seeing. Those are tools—work clothes, if you will. Just as a human needs tools to perform construction, I designed external components I could add to my structure temporarily to enhance my performance.”
I laughed. Jasmine scowled.
“I get it,” I said. “I told you there can’t be any altering of your form.
So, to circumvent that command, you built whatever you wanted as a ‘tool’ which would allow you to claim it wasn’t part of your actual body. Very clever, Marvin.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“How close are you to finishing this semi-organic-looking cylinder-thing?”
“It’s finished now.”
Jasmine and I stared at him for a second. “What?”
“The project is completed. We’re ready to proceed to the next step, but we haven’t yet accumulated sufficient mass.”
“Is that why more chunks keep coming into orbit here?”
“Precisely.”
“Why do you need so much mass?”
“How else do you propose to create compressed matter? You must have a source of uncompressed matter, then compress it. Stardust is extremely dense, collapsed material, and it requires a great deal of mass and energy to create it. I propose to perform the task artificially with gravity we’ve generated and controlled.”
Jasmine spoke up then. She had her own reasons for demanding he come to us and report in.
“Marvin,” she said, “I’ve done the calculations. All the smaller moons in the gas giant’s gravity-well do not make up enough mass to equal what you’ve already transported here into orbit. How is this possible?”
“First, let me praise your mathematical prowess, Captain Sarin. However, you are wrong in this instance.”
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“All the mass I’ve transported to orbit the white dwarf star, Loki, comes from the orbit of the gas giant.”
We both frowned at him. “But if the total mass of the asteroids is less than what you’ve sent…” I paused, and then I had a terrible thought. “Marvin, are you mining the primary moons?”
“Of course I am, Colonel Riggs. The conclusion is inescapable, isn’t it?”
“Those were habitable worlds, not just rocks in the sky!”
“The difference is negligible in this instance as they are no longer habitable worlds.”
“But Marvin,” said Jasmine in a sad, worried voice, “the Crustaceans dream of returning to their homes and rebuilding someday.”
“That is an unreasonable fantasy. Firstly, the radiation on the moons in question will not fade to a non-lethal level for thousands of years. Secondly, there will be large portions of the moons missing by that time as my project has removed them.”
We stopped asking questions then because we didn’t know quite what else to say. I considered ordering Marvin to stop chewing up the Crustacean moons, but I knew there wasn’t any other source of material we could easily access. The system didn’t have an asteroid belt, and the gas giant itself was too huge and not solid enough to mine into chunks.
I went to the big window and watched jagged lumps of matter fly by at blurring speeds. What would the Crustaceans say if they knew what we were doing out here?
I turned back to Marvin. “I want you to mine only one of the three moons. Pick the one that’s most suitable, and leave the other two alone.”
“That will delay my schedule, sir. Once the initial crust of the moon is stripped away, the magma underneath is far less suitable as it—”
“I don’t care. Do it my way or forget it.”
He craned his cameras and eyed me quietly for a time. I knew he was gauging my mood and looking for any sign of weakness.
I must have looked resolute because at last he said: “It will be done your way, Colonel Riggs.”
Then he left, and I felt more disturbed than ever by what we were doing out here.
-10-
A month passed. During that time, most of the surface of Harvard, one of the three extinct moons circling the gas giant, had been stripped away. The planetary mass, once roughly the size of Earth, had been reduced by approximately four percent. That might not sound like a lot, but I was pretty sure the Crustaceans were going to notice if they ever got out this way again.
“Marvin,” I said on my next daily call, “Give me a status report, please.”
“We’re ready to move to the next phase, Colonel Riggs.”
“Really? And what phase is that? Are we going to chew up a fresh world? Or maybe you’d like us to steer a couple of comets into orbit around this star.”
“That will be unnecessary and a waste of time. A comet, in particular, would be unhelpful. At this relative proximity to a stellar body, the heat and radiation would quickly vaporize the entire—”
“Yeah, yeah,” I interrupted. “I know. It was a sarcastic comment. What is the next phase?”
“Testing.”
I paused, and my face brightened. “Testing? That does sound positive. How do we do it?”
“The unit is ready to transmit—but I’m unsure as to the precise nature of the final results.”
“What do you mean, ‘unsure’? Are you ready or not?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes, I am.”
Jasmine tapped my arm. I turned on her in irritation. Wearing lead underpants for many long weeks had made us all touchy—except for Jasmine herself, that is. She was as cool, professional and unperturbed as usual. Even the heat of the “double blaze” period didn’t bother her much. Every nine days, our orbit led us into a position where we were between both of the stars: the big red one and the white dwarf. Hit from both sides with every ounce of radiation the two furnaces could put out, our cooling systems were always overloaded. We called these unpleasant hours the “double blaze”.
Right now, we were in the worst of it. The temperature had to be more than a hundred degrees in my suit, and the internal temperature of the ship was around a hundred and fifty. You had to put your food into a cooling chamber just to slide it into your helmet and eat it.
“What do you want, Captain?” I asked her.
“Ask him about the generators. Where are they?”
“That’s right. Marvin? We’ve been observing your engineering. We understand the incubator—that cylindrical thing; and we understand the compressed matter it’s been pumping out. Star-dust, you call it. But aren’t you going to need more generators? What’s going to power this communication device when you have it ready?”
“That is an insightful question, Colonel Riggs. Inspect any of the rings, and you’ll find they do not have power emissions. The trick is that the power was utilized in their creation. They are linked through entanglement properties across time and space. They are, in a sense, occupying the same location in a different dimension. Therefore, applying resonance to one causes the other to resonate.”
“Yeah, yeah, I know all that. But you said we’d send a transmission like a directional beacon. How can you do that without a power supply?”
“I have plenty of power. Distance isn’t a factor when the two devices are entangled.”
“Hmm,” I said, looking at Jasmine. She was listening in, and she shrugged at the explanation. “I sure hope you know what the hell you’re doing because we don’t.”
“Are you ready to proceed with the test?” Marvin asked.
I looked around my staff. They gave me “why not” type gestures.
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “But can’t it wait until we’re out of the double-blaze period? We’re hot and uncomfortable here.”
“Unfortunately, no. The gravitational forces required use solar energy, and the collectors are operating at their peak during this time period.”
“Right. Okay, let’s go.”
“Excellent! I’ll launch the probe immediately.”
We all stood around the command system, not quite sure if we were going to see anything interesting. We got quite a surprise.
A blue streak appeared, curving away in an arc from our location and stretching off into space.
“What the heck is that?” I demanded. “Jasmine, why are you putting that bright trailing graphic on—whatever that is?”
“I’m not, sir,” she said. “The image you see is real. At least—according to our sensors it is. It’s burning white-hot, about seven thousand
degrees Kelvin.”
“Seven thousand K? Isn’t that around the surface temperature of Sol?”
“It is a little hotter, actually.”
I muttered curses. “Where’s it going? Is it physical or is it an emission?”
“It’s a little of both, I think. The arc—sir, we’ve plotted a course. The anomaly is heading for the ring out of the Thor System.”
“Marvin!” I roared. “What’s happening?”
“Excuse me, Colonel Riggs. I’m having difficulties.”
“This isn’t a test,” I said. “You launched the probe, didn’t you?”
There was a pause, during which I watched the silver arc of brilliant light stretch a quarter of the way around the white dwarf star. It broke orbit and began to straighten out, heading toward the far reaches of the star system.
“I have good news and bad news,” Marvin said after a moment. “The system misfired. It is a prototype, after all.”
“What’s the good news?”
“Why, that is the good news,” he said as if surprised. “It works, and it is transmitting.”
“Well, shut it off, we’re not ready. The battle group isn’t poised for a response.”
“But sir, I’ll have to start over again.”
I frowned. “Start over? How long will it take to rebuild the probe?”
“Not just the probe, but the receiver will have to be reconstructed as well. We’ll have to move on to a second moon—there’s no choice there. I’m down to magma all over Harvard.”
I heaved a sigh. Internally, I knew he was probably manipulating me. Marvin was all about doing what he wanted and asking forgiveness later rather than for permission now. That way, no one ever got the chance to tell him “no”. The only option you ever had with Marvin was to decide if today was the day you shut him down permanently.
“Proceed with the test,” I said.
“A wise choice, Colonel Riggs.”
“Don’t rub it in, robot.”
“An unclear reference. Comment ignored.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, and muted the channel.
“Well,” I said, looking around at my stunned staff. “It is time to get our ships moving.”