Across the room was a coiling, surging waveform, positioned so you couldn’t see it when you first entered. It roiled against the wall, twisting and unspooling, smooth and natural as water. It was compelling in the way that leaning over the edge of cliff was compelling. Fascinating and terrifying when the only thing holding you back was the abstract understanding of what would happen if you took just one more step.
“Is that it?” Helen asked, unconsciously moving closer. She felt the hairs on the back of her arms lift, as if a cool breeze had wafted through. “Is that the signal Ted and I picked up?”
“Here, come take a seat.” Dougal avoided the question initially. “Until you get used to the room space, you’re likely to walk into a table.” Helen didn’t really need his confirmation, the whispers in her head recognized it; muttered uncomfortably in the back of her mind.
“Or maybe not . . . your waldo experience might translate over just fine,” Dougal continued, drawing Helen’s attention back.
“Sitting is good.” Staring at the twisting sine waves that had killed her NAV made Helen nauseous. She found the first available chair and dropped into it. It barely moved under her weight, like it was bolted down to keep the room consistent.
“Perfect.” Dougal bustled over and pulled the waveform closer with a pinch of his fingers. “I’ll give you the grand tour, starting with this guy.”
“And this guy is?”
“This is a visualization of the corrupted entanglement Feed. We pulled it from your mission to launch the payload. Isn’t it gorgeous? We just got the first alert ping letting us know the payload is still alive, by the way, so the mission is still on target.”
It was hard to take pride in such an expensive success. Helen took some solace in the fact that the payload surviving meant the project was still alive. Helen still had the chance to get back into the rotation.
“Okay, so check this out.” Dougal pulled up a second signal and showed it off next to the first. The difference was immediately clear: the new form crawled across the wall, jagged and polygonal. Every angle and twist screamed its artificiality.
“That’s the way the Feed looks on a normal day. Now, when we pulled your NAV out, we got a huge influx of incomprehensible data. Everything that came back down the line on that link was garbage, so Ivester was kind of shouting into the void. Ten minutes after you dropped out, everything returned to normal. We’ve been working off the recordings. This here,” he waved at the slick, oily waveform, “is our copy of that garbage. We’ve been trying different algorithms to see if we can get it to make sense, but so far we haven’t cracked it.”
“So why wasn’t Ivester affected when he linked in?” Helen asked.
Dougal held up a finger. “That may have been blind luck. We used the emergency feed, which piggybacks onto the OP signal rather than the NAV signal. Ivester wasn’t properly ‘entangled’ the way you OPs and NAVs are,” he corrected. “But something happened to Ted, that much is clear. And we have a full copy of your biofeedback showing that something happened to you as well. As far as I’m concerned, the sneaky little fucker is in that recording somewhere. We’re going to have some fun hunting it down.” Dougal turned that finger on the stabby-looking waveform, poking at it in virtual space for emphasis.
Helen felt a little more queasy, and somewhere in the back of her head, a familiar chattering whispered.
Dougal picked up on Helen’s discomfort. “Sorry, I’m not trying to be insensitive, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime problem. I know nothing we can do will fix what happened, but at least we can get you some answers, right?”
“It’s all right.” Helen forced a smile and turned her attention away from the corrupted Feed, away from the whispers that threatened to take up too much space in her head again. “So the primary NAV and OP Feeds are now clean?”
“That’s what it looks like.” Dougal cast the waveform back to its place against the wall. “Let’s take a look at the rest of our space. I’ve got new data coming in from Rachel this afternoon. We can revisit that slippery little construct then.”
“Can you give me the thousand-foot view of where the whole mission is right now? I’m only really familiar with my own little piece.” Helen fibbed just a little. OPs had broad discretion when it came to information on any given mission they were assigned to. Most operators only paid attention to their own checklists, but Helen preferred a longer view. Knowing the endgame made it easier find the right solution in a pinch, so she had spent the extra time to read through Dougal’s filed reports, the timelines and plan of attack. What she really wanted was to confirm that her impressions were correct.
Entanglement was blindingly simple, really. Two sets of quantum particles were entangled using the standard Kleinsberg-Yount method. One set of particles was kept in a magnetic chamber, and only accessed by the coffin computers. The matching set was packaged up with a thimbleful of eenies and sent through a teeny tiny wormhole to its final destination. Those particles could transmit data instantaneous-ish, across billions and billions of miles. Over time the eenies would collect the material they needed to build out a new waldo. You could have a freshly made remote-operated vehicle in the space of a few months.
Line Drive represented the farthest anyone had ever sent a waldo, bypassing every other human-inhabited station and planetoid by a billion miles or more.
Line Drive was the first attempt to make a change to this pattern. Instead of exploring by remote, the payload of Line Drive would lay the groundwork for a human-safe wormhole engine, more commonly called a jumpgate. The star’s energy would be tapped to build a gate large enough to bring through something more human-scale, perhaps eventually transport ship-scale. It would allow them to establish the first live human foothold in that area of deep space.
If we can keep the project on track.
Part two of Line Drive was already being prepped. Dougal pulled up the simulation and walked Helen through the progress so far. With the payload’s successful launch, it would be six months before the next phase of Line Drive. By then the payload should have achieved its final orbit and begun collecting material to build the jumpgate back home.
Helen was, or had been, on the short list of operators for Phase II. They had only six months to determine if Ted’s death was a tragic accident or a case of industrial sabotage. Helen still could not shake the thought that, if she’d picked up on the problems a little more quickly, Ted could have been saved.
“What else did you get back from the mission? I heard the images, the micrograms that came back, were corrupted?” Helen turned her attention back to the simulations, trying to focus on the problems ahead of her rather than the problems behind.
“It makes the best case for this being an accident of some kind, rather than industrial sabotage,” Dougal said. “Quantum Feeds are un-hackable, so it’s probably a hardware failure in the Golfball itself.”
“The Golfball was messed up when I got there.” Helen ignored the chattering that arose in her head, pushing it back out of the way.
“Eaten away, you said.” Dougal called up Helen’s post-mission report, tossed the image on the wall. “That’s some pretty specific imagery. We haven’t been able to find a failure state that leaves behind bite marks.”
Helen ignored the implication. Hofstaeder had latched on to that and kept circling back around to the idea, like she thought it was a symptom. Helen had begun to carefully adjust her wording so she wouldn’t get those concerned looks quite so often.
“Well, when the next round of data gets back, you’ll get a better descriptor than my fifth-grade art skills.” Helen guided the interaction back towards joking camaraderie.
“Yeah, I’m guessing you never took an art class.”
“Never passed an art class, but I got an E for effort,” Helen returned.
“Well, the shells you saw do raise a lot of questions. I should have you run t
hrough the images we have on file for our eenies and our competitors’, see if anything pops.”
“I was using a false-color microgram, if that helps. The colors ought to show where there were mistakes when the eenies were built.”
Dougal gave her a surprised look. “I see you’ve been reading the material already. Yes, under false color we should be able to see wear patterns, color shifts to indicate a bad build or weakness. Our eenies are silver to the naked eye. Color, actual physical color, costs molecules we’d rather save for something else.” Dougal reached up into the Inspace between them and tugged at one of Helen’s sketches, turning it into a rough 3D model. “Let’s have you run through the eenie designs first. James can knock out the ones that aren’t even a close match. That should narrow the list to something manageable.”
Helen pulled one of her sketches out of the Inspace, gave it a tug. Working in virtual was easier than working on the whiteboard, more like clay she could push around with her fingertips to match her memory.
“Okay, what happens if I find a match?”
“Just let me know and we can go from there.” Dougal opened a connection to James and delivered the instructions. The Far Reaches AI came back with a list of a couple hundred designs for her to examine.
“This might take a little while.” Helen eyeballed the list, watching the number tick upwards slowly as James added more obscure and harder-to-find designs to the list on the fly.
“Once we have the actual images, we can sic James on finalizing the matches. Once Rachel and Torbin get here, we can put together a better outline of what we need you to be working on.”
“I think this is going to keep me busy for a week.” Helen pulled the stack of images closer, peering at the differences in legs, in tails.
“Nah, James will keep updating his decision-making based on what you cast aside.” Dougal pointed out the changing numbers. “See, there’s another ten knocked off the ‘possibles.’ Take it back to your desk and we’ll see where it goes from here.”
Helen obediently headed to her pedestal, dragging the stack of eenies in her wake. She wasn’t sure if she hoped to find a match or not. A match would mean that Ted’s death was industrial sabotage without a doubt. No match meant they’d still have more questions than answers.
It’s like eating an elephant. I just have to keep taking bites at the problem until it’s all gone, she told herself. But saying it was one thing, believing it another.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“Congratulations!” Keller stuck his head into the Flight Ops cubicle where Helen had been hiding. His slicked-back black hair suggested he’d just arrived on-site, since the aircon hadn’t had time to dry it to its usual raven finish, and the reddish flush in his brown cheeks said he’d been in a hurry. The man spends way too much time on his hair, Helen reflected.
She was busy sorting through the influx of documents that came along with her short-term reassignment. No one was using her old workspace. She’d snuck back down to the basement to go through the rest of the eenie designs on the large, flat Insight desktop. As cool as the multi-faceted Inspace of the analysis lab was, there was too much noise for her to focus.
“It’s temporary, or at least it damn well better be,” Helen groused. She had spent most of the previous night in the lab, digging through materials on eenie design. The dispensary in her apartment’s kitchen had failed to produce any coffee and she had yet to make it to the commissary for breakfast. What should have been a perfectly shitty morning was only countered by the mood-balancers Hofstaeder had her taking.
“Please, please, tell me you’ve got good news for me.” Helen kicked the office’s only empty chair over to the head of operations and he dropped into it.
Like most of the closet-sized workspaces, it sported walls painted black from the top of the desks to the ceiling. A band of ferro-plastic ran around the bottom of the black, making it a place to stick bits of paper and personal memorabilia. Easy enough to see from chair height, but low enough so as to not interfere with serious work. Helen’s cluster of printed-out theater tickets and still images huddled together in the corner, out of easy reach. Add to this an Insight touchscreen table and a reclining lounger and you had a space that was more than sufficient for an OP’s paperwork.
Perhaps not the best space for an analyst. Helen was already on the edge of overwhelmed with the volume of information she was working through. Flight Ops school had been a hell of a lot of work, but she was beginning to think she’d taken the easy road. Shortly, a delivery of actual, physical documents would show up, each carefully printed onto non-biodegradable sheets and kept offline and out of Far Reaches’ computers. The idea was to make espionage as big of a pain in the ass as possible. She wasn’t entirely sure what genius thought that was a good idea or where she was going to put all the paperwork.
“Temporary or not, it will give you a sense of your next steps when you’ve finally aged out of Ops,” Keller pointed out. Helen wasn’t in the mood for the mentor act.
“I plan to retire and turn into one of those biddies with a dozen cats who pilots the slow cargo ships out past the asteroid belt,” she said with a touch of acid.
“You hate cats,” Keller said.
“I might meet the perfect cat.”
“You might just take the promotion with good grace, too. There’s no way I can let you back into a coffin without a new NAV.”
Ouch. That was the one point Helen had been trying not to think about. She didn’t feel right replacing Ted, but in order to get back out to the Golfball, she would have to. She silently gritted her teeth before asking the question.
“So who’s available?”
Keller held up a hand. “Not a chance. You know and I know how this works. Doc’s still got you juiced up, probably on a host of emo-blocking ‘don’t freak out in public’ drugs, all of which have to be flushed out before you can be re-evaluated. Give everything a few more weeks to process before we even start to think about partnering you up with someone new.”
He was right. Helen was in a much better mood than she should be, given the circumstances. Whatever chemical cocktail the doc had given her that morning was keeping reality, or maybe just the consequences of her actions, slightly out of reach. She was, admittedly, a little curious to see what would happen when the drugs wore off.
She was also a little terrified to feel what would happen when the drugs wore off.
There was a definitive hole in her soul that Ted had once occupied. She could feel it, like the strange concave divot left in your flesh after a hard object had pressed against it for a long time. Long enough for it to become a part of you in function, if not in actuality. It should still hurt. It should . . . something. Something should have come rushing in to try to fill that hole, but Hofstaeder’s clever mix of chemicals kept it perfectly formed in the center of her being.
“Keller,” Helen asked slowly, “why haven’t I been benched?”
“You have, or didn’t you notice your suspended OP access?” Keller replied dryly.
“No.” Helen turned the idea around in her mind, examined it in the light of her mentor’s influence. “No, but I’m not. Company policy says I’m supposed to be out, like off the Far Reaches campus, strictly enforced downtime. So why the exception?”
Keller tapped his fingertips together. Helen recognized the gesture. It meant he was about to tread lightly. He was “not-saying” something, something important, and she’d better listen.
“Line Drive is a significant project for us, you get that, right? The cone of secrecy right now is very small and losing people, losing OPs, is non-trivial. You are one of the most senior OPs we have; you’ve got experience we need out there, especially in light of what happened. I’m not sure another operator would have been able to get the payload launched,” he said quietly.
“Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to be on leave. Not even if
Doc didn’t have me on emo-blockers, but . . .” Helen paused. Normally Keller was her superior, normally he was cleared to hear every damn secret she might encounter . . . Except now he wasn’t. The previous day’s walk-through with Dougal had made that crystal clear. She’d been shifted to the analysis team, bumped up a grade. They were on the same level in the org chart now, but under different subheadings. She couldn’t talk to her mentor about what bothered her the most.
That was disquieting, but the idea fell, ever so gently, alongside the loss of her NAV on the other side of the chemical barrier between her head and heart.
Don’t forget, she reminded herself. You might not care right now, but those things matter. REALLY matter.
“I feel we’re missing something. I need to figure out what it is,” she finished lamely.
“It’ll all come out in the wash,” Keller replied, letting her off the hook. “While you’re still drugged up, though, I thought I’d get your opinion on the operator line-up going forward. Since your temporary promotion has stuck me with your workload, I figure you could at least share some opinions.”
Beauchamp’s going to be pissed when she hears about this. Helen allowed herself the petty joy for just a moment.
“I thought Beauchamp was supposed to be filling my spot?”
“Like I said, we are utilizing every available resource. As a card-carrying member of flight-team analysis, you are now officially one of those resources.”
“Fine. Hit me with it. But you keep my name on that rotation list. I’ll be back as soon as I can get Doc to clear me.” Helen cast her gaze upwards to the black-on-black office walls. Keller’s file appeared, projected from Insight, bright against the dark painted background.
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