Nucleation

by Kimberly Unger

  “I’m on it.” Helen called up her list of protocol items, shifting things around as the mole trundled its way forward. The ground-penetrating sensors had been mapped to Helen’s visual input. Whenever she sent out a pulse, she got a 360-degree image of the surrounding wall densities. The effect was akin to the way a dolphin could “see” underwater, just much more robust. When the waldo exited the tunnel into the cavern carved to house the jumpgate, Helen was immediately, intimately, aware of the sheer size of it. Way too big.

  “Hunh,” was all the comment she made aloud. Within the mole’s computer system, she brought up the original plans, checking the differences against the final result. Helen let out a long, low whistle.

  “Got something?” Keller’s voice again. He would be tracking her presumed location on Recovr’s shiny new mission console, relying on James to predict her location based on the limited data coming back.

  “I just hit the staging cavern about a hundred feet too early. According to the plans, it’s supposed to be a heck of a lot smaller. Hold on a second and I’ll send the information back.” She interrupted the emergency line to transmit the updated maps.

  Here in the airless void of the cavern, Helen adapted: flipper-like legs moving in sequence, using their own kinetic energy to help her steer. The asteroid was too small to have its own gravity. Instead, the air jets along her sides, normally used to clear mining debris, propelled her forward.

  “Okay, Helen, we’re back. That cavern is a whopper.”

  “According to the mole, the instructions were changed sometime after the original cavern was created.”

  “Do you have a record of who issued the change?”

  “Not in the mole’s database, but that should all be available once I hook us up.” Helen put out a series of sensor pings in order to pinpoint the NAV computers. She found them huddled in a cluster against the far wall. Just a stone’s throw away, the micro-jumpgate had been constructed and now stood dormant. Through the basketball-sized maw of the gate, the glitter of stars in empty space lay in wait.

  “Helen, I’ve got something interesting for you.” Ivester’s voice now. Helen would have rolled her eyes if the waldo had any. The engineer’s repeated interruptions were bad for the mission flow. Really going to have to lay down some ground rules.

  “Can it wait? If I miss and hit the gate, I’m going right out into the black.” Helen kept her focus on the box that housed the operations hub. If the cube-shaped structure had been any more plain, it would have been invisible and Helen had to hit it head-on. The mole didn’t have any “hands” to grab on with, so if she missed, it meant she could go bouncing right out through the gate and into space. She lined up her nose with the cube and fired her air jets in sequence, splaying out the mole’s paddle-like legs. The mole shot gracelessly across the cavern, the slow axial spin making absolutely no difference to its trajectory, but it made Helen feel like she had a little more control.

  “Consider this your incentive,” Ivester said. “The last Operator to ride that waldo was Catherine Beauchamp, back when she was working for BrightWinds.”

  Helen hit the smooth metal cube face-first and collapsed the mole’s body in around it, scrabbling with all her legs until enough of them had locked on to bring her to a stop.

  “We are way ahead of you on that one. Didn’t Keller loop you in? I think this has gone way beyond coincidence.” Cat’s direct attack on Helen had come while she’d been out at the asteroid the first time. Finding out that there was a lot more to the operation than the reports had logged was barely a surprise.

  Helen snuffled along the outer skin of the cube, looking for the access panel. The sensitive wires along the mole’s snout found a hard edge, followed it along until it turned a corner, then worked their way across until they found a series of holes just big enough around for the feelers to fit into. A quick thrust and a turn of her head and Helen had access to the computers inside the cube. She felt the shudder as the access door came loose and banged along her side before spinning off into the void. Hope I don’t need to go get that back.

  “Helen.” Dougal’s voice now. What, are they just passing the receiver back and forth between them? “Remember, we are completely blind on this end. If you’re not saying anything, we have no idea what’s going on.”

  Having all the voices right in her ear made it easy to forget that she was all alone. On a proper trip with a fully functioning NAV, there was more than enough information to go around. The NAV controlled everything: Insight, the computers, and the passive data collection apparatus that could program the eenies to do just about anything needed. The only data going back and forth now was the quantum Feed that allowed Helen’s body to run the mole.

  “Roger that.” She pushed herself back into the familiar patterns, into the routine of working with a NAV and a full control team, even though she had no such thing. “I’ve landed on the local y-positive axis of the hub and removed the cover to the access hatch.”

  The technical jargon was harder to reel off, but meant there’d be fewer “your right or my right” questions down the line. With cardinal directions being relative, any given object had to have each facing clearly labeled and named. If you didn’t have that, then you used your local xyz axes to indicate where you were in relation to that specific object, rather than the space around you. She hoped Keller hadn’t been out of the coffins too long to remember the rules.

  “I’m attempting to link the waldo computer directly to the NAV computer. Give me a moment, it’s like trying to push spaghetti through a keyhole . . .” Helen focused her attention on one of the mole’s prehensile whiskers, worming it into the computer, searching for an access point by touch. She found the edge of the access slot, worked her way to the middle, and finally made the connection.

  “Here we go.” The computers came online instantly, recognizing the mole and accepting the salvage protocol. Again, not a damn thing wrong with them. Something really weird is going on here.

  “Dougal, there’s a lot of information here. I’m going to cut comms and send it all straight to you. We can leave the mole connected without me.”

  “Before you sign off, can you double-check the NAV computer? If it’s still working, I’d be a hell of a lot more comfortable if we could get a second person out there with you.” It was Ivester who answered; they’d passed the mic again. “Keller’s got a friend over at Beyond Blue who might be able to get us access to their half of the set.”

  “One sec.” Helen dug through the files, looking for the NAV communications logs. They were corrupted, un-openable on her end, but she packaged them up to send back down the line anyway. James could try to make heads or tails of them. From there it became a scavenger hunt, trying to find pieces of software that directly communicated with the NAV particles. Helen came up empty every time. She was working blind, on the outside of a box with only a single connection inside. Out of frustration, she “hit” it with her sensors, a wordless, angry pulse meant to release a little tension.

  The image that came back stopped her cold. The entire inside of the cube was riddled with holes. Perfectly excised sections of the computer had been taken out while still leaving much of the function intact.

  In case anyone came back to salvage the operation? The thought came unbidden, accompanied by a familiar chill. Helen snapped images and sent them down the line without hesitation, interrupting communications as she did so. NAV particles are gone, a couple of the memory units are gone—some of the internal housing? Everything was eenie-built, so everything could be broken up and repurposed.

  So why just the NAV particles? Where the hell did they go?

  A little more digging into NAV computer’s memory gave her insight. The gate. THIS is what had been sent out through the gate. Not mined materials or the resources the moles were supposed to be harvesting from the asteroid. Whoever, or whatever, had sabotaged this BrightWinds mission ha
d sent the NAV entanglement particles through the gate to a new destination.

  “HELEN, WHAT THE HELL?” Keller’s voice again. “Do not just cut out like that, warn us next time.”

  “Did you see those pics?” Helen spoke in a rush. She needed to explain, somehow impart everything she’d just realized to Keller as quickly as possible.

  Deep breaths. How would Ted . . . Screw that. How do I handle this . . .

  “Not yet, Ivester’s getting them. . . .” There was a long pause. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah. The NAV particles are gone.” Helen interjected into the surprised silence, “They must have been sent out through the gate, that’s why I can’t get a connection through to them.” Helen continued digging, sorting files and information into packets for transfer back. “I can’t tell where. A bunch of these files are corrupted, probably starting when their connection to the NAV got cut off.”

  “So someone stole the NAV particles?” She couldn’t tell if that tone in Keller’s voice was shock or disbelief.

  “Well, they’re gone, or at least the portion of the NAV computer that dealt with those particles is gone. Which means that whoever has your end of those entangled particles might know something we don’t.”

  Another long pause. Helen hated those long pauses. Each one meant conversations she wasn’t a part of, decisions made without her input.

  “Okay, we need to you to transfer everything, and I mean everything, back to us. Don’t trigger the recycling sequence, just in case we need to get back out there again, and I want full mapping of every single inch of that NAV computer.” Ivester’s voice came down the line now.

  Helen had to stay entangled as long as the data transfer was piggybacking on the emergency communications channel. Mapping the cube would give her something to focus on in the meantime so she wasn’t just spinning her wheels.

  “I’m going to do some digging into what Beauchamp was up to last time she was out here,” she said. “The waldo’s got have its own version of events and I want to understand just what that was.”

  “All right. Don’t hesitate to break into the download if anything we need to know pops.” Keller again, sounding worried.

  “I’ll disentangle as soon as we can close the connection. Operator out.” Helen cut the connection before Keller’s worry could infect her too. She started the download, making sure the NAV logs went first. It was eerily, blissfully silent, the only sounds the clicks and pings of her own Insight and the faintly singsong responses from the mole.

  Okay, Cat. Let’s see exactly what happened to you out here. Helen instructed the mole to start its mapping of the computer cube and turned her attention to the waldo’s memory.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  “You might be on to something here.” Dougal was hanging out on the couch in the back of the Recovr space. The eenies had finished painting the walls and had seethed up into the naked framework of the ceiling. Helen could see them from the right angle, as if the beams and cross braces were dusted with silver glitter. Despite the new information they’d found, he was still doggedly pursuing the idea that the Scale were a form of industrial sabotage, rather than a new form of life. Dougal had filled the Insight space with panels upon panels of information detailing out just how the “corrupted eenies” had made the jump. What he couldn’t come up with was: Why?

  “These are two entirely different kinds of data. We can’t be one hundred percent sure based on this. The mole out on Myrian23A5 is using a whole different set of sensors than the spider out on the Golfball,” Dougal patiently explained. Again.

  Helen let out her breath in an aggravated huff. “So the problem is we’re comparing apples to oranges?”

  She’d just closed out an hour in the coffin, holding open the connection to Myrian23A5. The logs from the mole and the remnants of the NAV computer gave them a clearer picture to work with, but nothing definitive. After BrightWinds abandoned the site, it was clear the jumpgate had been used to send the Scale to meet up with the Golfball. So the invasion or sabotage or whatever you wanted to call it had a helping hand. So the second question on the table was: Whose?

  Keller had left to meet up with his contact over at Beyond Blue. Now that they knew for certain that the NAV particles had been stripped and sent through the jumpgate to the Golfball, Keller thought he could get them access to the matched pair here in Launch City. With that kind of access, they might be able to get a handle on how the Scale were operating and who was directing them.

  “It’s more like comparing one apple by touch to a second apple by sight. Both sets of data support each other, but without collecting the same kind of data in both locations, the results are always going to have room for questions,” Dougal said, reasonably enough.

  Helen held her tongue. They were in Dougal’s wheelhouse now; this was the whole reason they’d brought him onto Recovr in the first place. Proving that the Scale were more than just badly programmed eenies was key. That meant collecting data, getting evidence, and doing all this the right way. Dougal’s way. No matter how frustrating it might be at times.

  “So we’ve got to get back out to the Golfball proper.” Ivester joined them, taking up position at the other end of the couch.

  “Only if you want your arguments to be bulletproof,” Dougal pointed out. “I can make a sketchy case based on this, but I could make an unimpeachable case if we could compare like to like.”

  “Then like to like it has to be. If we’re looking at a new life form, then we’ve got to make it as clean and clear as possible.” Ivester fell into line.

  Helen rolled a shoulder. The feedback sensors on the refurbished coffin were out of alignment. She’d returned to a case of minor muscle strain, like what you’d get from sleeping in an armchair. Time in the coffin was still shorter than she’d like—they needed Doc to finish approving the drug delivery system. Helen would be limited to runs of an hour or two, so a quick run to make sure the entanglement with the Golfball still worked should be simple enough.

  “Can we get what we need within a five-minute timeframe?” Dougal asked the next reasonable question.

  “That timeframe only matters if we try to work with an entangled NAV. An entangled NAV only matters if we need to interact with the eenies that are repairing the Golfball.” Ivester ticked the logic off on his fingertips. “The waldo by itself is still completely safe. Helen can run the waldo, and Keller can talk her through anything that needs outside support through the emergency comm link.”

  “Hold that thought.” Helen’s personal tablet pinged for attention.

  The message was a video Feed from Keller, his face oddly lit by streetlights and colored LED strings.

  “Hey, Keller, downtown tonight?” Helen opened with the observation, spoken out loud for Dougal and Ivester’s benefit. “I thought date night was on Tuesdays.”

  “Not quite.” Keller’s tone was uncharacteristically clipped, tight. Something had him really pissed off. It took a lot to piss Keller off.

  “What kind of problem?” Helen switched to her inside voice, ignoring Ivester’s curious stare.

  “Beyond Blue is about to announce they’re sending a salvage team out after the Golfball.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Oh, it gets better.”

  “You mean the bad kind of better, don’t you?” Helen opened up the conversation, holding the tablet so everyone could listen in.

  “Beauchamp is leading that mission.”

  “So?” Helen wasn’t following. Beauchamp jumping ship was annoying, but not out of line. As far as Helen was concerned, having Ted’s angry ex out of the mix was the best thing to happen for weeks. Undoubtedly Beyond Blue had offered her a better position—lead on something like a salvage run to steal the Golfball certainly qualified.

  “There’s a good chance she took a bunch of the Line Drive data with her when she left.”

&
nbsp; Helen shot a look at Ivester, who nodded and replied quietly, “There’s a bit more to her departure than we looped you in on.”

  “How the hell did she manage that?” Helen demanded of Ivester, but Keller interjected.

  “You have a hell of a lot more privacy when you live off the Far Reaches campus.” Keller shrugged, the gesture making the handheld camera jiggle. “She must have been working on this in her off-hours, bringing them up to speed before she left us.”

  “So you think she was actively working against us?”

  “We have to treat it as such. I’m headed back in, already called for damage control. We’re going to have to speed up our timetable.”

  “Need anything from us?” Ivester asked.

  “We have to presume she’s giving them whatever she knows, both about Line Drive itself and our whole Recovr side-project.”

  “Beyond Blue can’t get there for at least a year, even if they dump all their resources into a new wormhole,” Dougal chimed in.

  Keller scowled and whipped his head around as if listening for something, the lights throwing multicolored streaks in his hair. All Helen could pick up were the hums of electric cars and ambient chatter. He turned his attention back to them. “I’ve checked the records. Beyond Blue launched several deep space missions around the same time as the Line Drive went off. Most of those have already been resolved, but there’s a few that look suspicious.” The handheld camera joggled, showing bits of the background as he increased his pace. Helen got the impression he was troubled, keeping an eye out for something.

  “A few?”

  “One of those projects was launched from Myrian23A5, and it looks an awful lot like it was aimed to intercept our Golfball. I have to cross-check the numbers before I’m sure, but I think that’s our little mystery launch with the NAV particles. I’ll bring you up to speed once I get back to the building.”