Then Beth shook her head. “Look, we’ve got Apollo and Daphne ready to go. The lesser toroids know our drive. Let them run us for a while—good training. Tell them it’s a temporary promotion.”
Redwing laughed and Cliff knew the captain would agree. Even though it meant a human would have to go. Or two.
* * *
Redwing already regretted giving the Diaphanous pair those names, long ago. It made them into people, somehow, when they weren’t—like cats. “You want to dive near, so those two can sling into the plasma cloud, right? What if we lose them?” Redwing’s tone tightened, and his mouth shrank like a sea anemone poked with a stick.
Beth got up and paced. “They’re volunteers. We have the six others, the ones Apollo and Daphne call the Lessers.”
“We’re at max deceleration now—it drops as the cube of our velocity, y’know. So we need to lose every klick per sec we can.”
With a flick of her wrist inboard, Beth called up their trajectory arc, a long yellow line on the wall screen. SunSeeker was a pulsing red dot at the edge of the Excelsius outer system. Its engines were reversed now, firing its fusion-lit plume against its descent. Its magscoop flared broader than ever, shown in the shimmering air as an orange fluted web. Just as with solar sails, magnetic sails can tack. If a magnetic sail orients at an angle relative to the solar wind, charged particles are deflected preferentially to one side and the magnetic sail is pushed laterally. “Apollo and Daphne are bored! And we’ve got just this one chance to look inside the grav wave emitter, while we skim past.”
Redwing felt alarm bells going off, but she had a point.
* * *
Their time burned away. They had to do some fast work on Explorer in the Logistics module. Daphne stabilized the low-burn modes in the reactor while Apollo got their streamlines out from the mag nozzle all neatly aligned.
Other work, too. In the Longsleep module, they finished bringing up another crew member, Zhai, who got right into handling the comm deck. Zhai was small, fast, sharp—and thrilled to be in on an adventure none of them had ever contemplated. She grinned as Viviane put her through the early parts, before turning the updating over to an Artilect.
Beth knew she needed time with Cliff before they flew Explorer. She had helped Cliff come up out of the dark cold of decades-long sleep and into her warming arms. She had massaged his sore self, rubbed skin with aroma-rich lotions, and soothed away the panic that raced across his face, coming up out of the troubled dreams that the cold kindled. His fear came in fluttering eyelids, vagrant jitters in his face. Then his eyes focused, squinted, and she saw him back with her again, a slow smile.
Ten hours before they launched, they worked off their tension together. This mission was certainly dangerous, but they both hungered to get out of the ship, to do. Best to be relaxed, then.
They finished their biozone work in the hydroponics swamp, rich in lichen and ripe greens. Then the buzzing insect ranch, ants and crawlers and space-bred protein bugs. Done, they went straight to the sundlaug they had reserved for two hours. Sundlaug was an Icelandic name for a hot-water public pool, which somehow became the term for spherical pools in zero-g developed across many solar system habitats.
They hurried to the zero-g center of SunSeeker. Long before, they had learned that the hydroponics and animal farms were not enough. There was no nature in a starship, however lean and elegant and deft it was, so the closest you could get was an orgasm.
SunSeeker’s spherical pool was ornate in its lightweight way. Beside the big bubble was a wall screen, so by accessing their external cameras, they could both keep a lazy sort of watch, floating within the outer surface-tension skin and seeing the universe pass in review. He plunged into the ten-meter diameter, exciting the fluorescent microbes whose sprinkles of amber glow tracked the contained currents. She arrowed past him. The shimmering warmth coiled around her in a way water under grav could not. She hung suspended and kissed Cliff’s foot as he passed, grinning madly. Kick, stroke, and she was back in air barely in time, gasping. The sphere shuddered and flexed with their swimming, spraying some droplets of its own across the view of distant Glory, a pale cool dot.
Hanging there in an ocean of night, waves lapping over them at the pool’s edge, they made love. Each time with him lately, since they came out of the cold, she felt a new depth, an unexpected flavoring. They converged, his head between her thighs, the zero-g making every angle easily realized amid the moist waves and salt musk. He was lean, muscles coiled as diamond-sharp stars drifted behind him. New heat rose between them as she fluttered her tongue. Their bodies said what their words could not. Energy rippled along their skins, somehow liberated by the weightless liquid grace of movement. She felt her own knotted confusions somehow focus in a convulsed thrust, a geometry they yearned for. Yes, here was their center.
* * *
Redwing looked at a shimmering screen display of the latest survey of the grav wave black hole orbits. Cliff said, “This is a slice of one zone, to get a better fix on their packed-in paths.”
Beth leaned forward, pointing. “Seems they’re stacked in three dimensions, so they can zoom down close to the central black hole at the same time. But not spherically. The orbits are in two planes perpendicular to each other. Maybe they don’t want to make this too complicated? Anyway—that’s what makes those bursty grav wave signals.”
Redwing thought but did not say, When in doubt, count something. “I don’t want you in that swarm.”
Beth laughed. “We won’t be. I want us released from SunSeeker so we skim the rim of the plasma cloud, get a look, is all.”
Redwing nodded. “Not hard to do. I’ve banked us so we pass just outward from the target. I’ll tilt the mag screen a tad, so the flitter goes off on an arc swinging through the edge of that cloud. You’ll get within maybe two hundred thousand klicks of the center, then cut across and rejoin SunSeeker without fuel use.”
As he spoke, the Artilects wrote the planned pathways with blue arcs in the air. “Stay well away from any of those masses.”
“We’ll fly between the two planes where the black holes are,” Cliff added.
Beth got up and paced. “This is the first time we’ve maneuvered it at high velocity. Hope the flitter is up to it.”
“It’s rated to be. But, yes, this wasn’t tried at velocities around a thousand klicks a second. Another point—maybe whoever runs this place doesn’t even know we’re here,” Cliff said. Redwing liked their balance; Cliff always smoothed away worries if he could. This time he couldn’t.
Redwing looked sternly at them. “Earthside wants the generator shut down. I got a command on that years back.”
Jagged laughter, which he joined. “Right!—somehow we flip the Off switch on a swarm of planetary masses the size of marbles. Earthside figures the Glorians use it for communication with other Type 2.5 civilizations in the galaxy—aliens who can build grav wave emitters like this. Nobody who uses mere electromagnetic means is in their class, right? Maybe they can listen in, like us—but we can’t talk.”
Beth said, “So—if you can’t use gravity waves for communication, you’re a barbarian?”
This, too, provoked sighs and smiles. Fair enough.
“Prepare for the mission. Send all check sheets to me for review.” Off they went.
FOUR
MICE AMONG ELEPHANTS
Redwing watched them flick off from SunSeeker. Out through the mag screen, dwindling to a dot. All in pursuit of what monster was strumming the strands of space-time.
Christopher Columbus, he recalled, mistook squids for mermaids, later calling it an “error in taste.” He watched the tiny fusion-lit speck dive into the unknown and thought of the recruitment advertisement Ernest Shackleton placed for his pioneering polar expedition. His favorite: he called it up on a screen.
MEN WANTED FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF S
UCCESS.
The same year Einstein devised the essentials of his general theory of relativity, 1914. Centuries past.
* * *
Cliff worked with Beth to get the jet smoothed out to glide tight and sure. The fusion drive settled down after being unused for centuries, under Apollo and Daphne’s deft maintenance. This was a mere toy, a simple proton-boron reversed-field reactor, but the Diaphanous tuned their exhaust to optimum in minutes. Now here came the black hole array. They held hands as the image before them swelled, a plasma wave cumulus like a roiling fog.
Some voices ahead,
came a translated signal from Daphne.
“Voices?” Cliff shrugged. “Meaning waves?”
Beth frowned. “They’ve never used that term before.”
Signals. Many. Intense. Cannot know.
“You mean coherent messages?”
True. Cannot understand.
“But … intelligent?”
Must.
Cliff watched as they penetrated deeper into the plasma cloud, their mag screens picking up ever-higher densities, like plowing into a soft snowbank. But at a thousand kilometers a second.
He glanced at Beth. “Magnetic intelligence—here?”
She grinned, liking the idea. “The Glorians have got to run this grav wave emitter somehow. It’s just maybe a million times bigger than what Apollo and Daphne do in our fusion funnel.”
Cliff thought as they watched squiggles scrawl across screens, all from something ahead in the cloud. Apollo and Daphne were sending the puzzle up to them, unable to make much of it themselves.
How to solve this?—while diving into an unknown pit?
Brute forces seemed bound to drive evolution toward beings with awareness of their surroundings. It took billions of years to construct such mind-views. Occasionally those models of the external world could become more complex. Some models worked better if they had a model of … well, models. Of themselves. So came the sense of self in advanced animals.
“So plasma life is common,” Cliff said. “It’s here. Trying to talk.”
Beth shot back, “Doesn’t matter. This is a flyby, not a thesis.”
“Yeah, but…” A Diaphanous species around another star? He peered at the plasma wave map.
The vast reaches before them had knots and puckerings, swirls and crevasses. Here the particles thickened; there they dispersed into gossamer nothingness. And moving amid this shifting structure were thicker clots still, incandescently rich. Beings? Their skins shone where magnetic constrictions pinched, combing their intricate internal streamings. Filaments waved like glistening hair and shimmered in the slow sway of energetic ions. All this from buzzing radiations, the lingua of plasma.
We hear their calls.
The flitter’s Artilect, limited but quick, made these into booming calls and muted, tinkling cadences. Conversations? A babble, really—blaring away in thumps and shouts and songs, made of winds and magnetic whorls.
Cliff wondered what it was like to live through the adroit weaving of electrical currents, magnetic strands, orchestras humans could never hear. Daphne sent more filigrees, trying to convey when ions and electrons in their eternal deft dance, made—long songs smoldering and hissing with soft energies.
Cliff leaned forward, letting the translator work on, “Daphne, are these, to you, a new species or genus of your phylum?”
Strange they are. But they sing well.
Beth cut the audio and turned to him. “Stop! We’re dealing with a smiling cobra, who could hiss and strike at any moment.”
Cliff drew himself back from his concentration, snapping out of a focus he felt. “I was trying to—”
“Forget that. We have to get what we can, direct the probes. Give me target times to launch.”
He blinked, shook his head, swept hands over the controls. “We have to infer the mass from the plasma wave density. Looks like—” He studied screens, heart pounding now. Their flyby was only an hour long and already nearly half done. “There—”
Beth sent five microsensors out in a single punch-burst. “Done. They can send back close-ups.”
Cliff watched the central screen, now swarming with plasma wave signatures—color-signified, spectral flows jibing and chiming, sprawls of vibrant tints and glares. “Getting dense.”
“The black holes are converging,” Beth said. “In both the planes. It’s for a big pulse.” She was wound tight, he could hear, voice high, alarmed. But there was no time for that now.
Voices call cannot know will listen tell when can—
A wrenching force swarmed through the bridge. The walls popped. Screeched. Cliff felt himself twisted. A support beam hit him, and all was black.
* * *
When she came to from the impact, her ears roared as though from an acoustic shock. She got herself untangled with gear as more bangs and pops filled the air. The ship was readjusting itself to its wrenching.
She checked on Cliff first. Her head buzzed and the small bridge was a wreck. Oily smoke, stink of scorched wiring. No hissing of escaping air, at least.
She found him behind his chair mount. Red stains everywhere. He must have gotten hit and released his belts, then passed out from loss of blood.
Beth had seen it all—death, disease, disorders, pain—and it takes a lot to shock a nurse and a seasoned field biologist.
But she was. Because it was Cliff and he was barely breathing.
* * *
Diagnosis was clear and the handheld autodoc agreed.
She cut his blood-soaked pants away from the already pale legs. The cloth flaps folded back like rags. She paused, taking her knife from the field kit, hands jittery. Here it was. The left leg was a mess of crushed bone and flesh oozing blood. The smell was like sharp copper spun from a lathe, a memory from her teenage years.
He was bleeding out fast, and seconds mattered. No time to clean hands, so she pulled two plastic bags from the autodoc kit and made them work as gloves.
Beth measured the distance and with a single long stroke—zip—cut the leg from knee to mid-thigh. The slit went deep and she pried it open to see down into the cut. There: the femoral artery. She poked in and found the pulse, rickety and feeble. Her fingers followed the artery, slick under her fingers. Warm, weak. She tugged on it, lost it, a thin wriggling snake—then managed to get it between two fingers and hoist it into view. Thin, pulsing. She squeezed the artery back, judging the length of the blood vessel, and knew she had to make this next step quick and sure. The knife sliced through the vessel and she caught the top of it, squeezed the blood back toward the heart, feeling the pulse strong now. It was hard getting the slippery thin line between two fingers while with her other hand she tied it off. Then with the other hand, pushing the flesh aside for clearance, she got the vessel looped. A gentle pull knotted it shut. She lifted her hands and watched blood flow against the knot. The pulse was visible as blood fought to get through. It strained against the knot. With one hand she pulled the knot tighter. The block held. The bleeding below stopped. The pulse was stronger now as the blood bulged the vessel wider, turning it dark against the pale knot.
It took a moment to fish out some plastic line and wrap it around the incision. Three tight wraps over and under the leg secured it. She sat back and panted, heart pounding. “Done.”
* * *
Cliff had time to watch Beth as they coasted now, running on bare power. She slipped a headset on him so he heard the Artilects rummaging through their analysis of what had happened. Complicated. He managed to tell her while they arrowed into the SunSeeker mag web.
“That two-plane orbit method lets them tune the direction of the emission some. As we came in, they boosted their power just as we passed within the max zone. The stretch-and-squeeze flexed us less than a percent.”
Beth snorted. “And popped most of our systems. How’d SunSeeker do?”
“Got a pulse but weaker—farther away, out of the beam.”
“How’s your leg?”<
br />
“Hurts plenty, but better than being dead. I love you, and not just for your med skills.”
A hearty, relieved laugh. “I know what you like. You can have plenty of it when we tuck this baby into its slot.”
Redwing was flexing the ship’s magnetic fields to brake them. Cliff could hear the inductive coils running at max in their forward dipole field. More heat, and they were already running hot, with inboard cooling failed. Their relative delta-v had to be dissipated and the berthing slot was coming up fast.
“Let’s go back inta da pool. I sure need some zero-g lovin’.” Cliff realized that her painkiller had freed his tongue. Best to shut up, let her focus, just as—
The flitter bucked and rattled. Redwing must be pulsing his fields to the max. The deck below him popped and pinged and burned his hand. The berth swelled like a mouth and they plunged in.
A rough, slamming stop. Clamps seized them with a clang.
“Home sweet home,” Beth said, and began sobbing.
* * *
Cliff Kammash dreamed.
There was a tremendous bowl with a hole in the bottom, and a small sun above the hole. The sun was spraying fire through the hole. Cliff was huge. As the Bowl moved past him, he ran spectral fingers along its contours. Whole civilizations rose and fell here along the rim, where the Bowl’s six-hundred-kilometers-per-second spin provided artificial gravity. Farther toward the hole in its bottom, the Bowl was all mirrors. The mirrors focused on the sun’s pole of rotation, boiling gases into the jet. Around the Bowl’s back were esoteric ices at temperatures in double digits. Some of the Bowl’s Builders’ children were here, descended from life-forms in Sol system’s comets. The Ice Minds reacted to his touch, and suddenly he was down, and human size.
Glorious--A Science Fiction Novel Page 4