by Wil McCarthy
“Object shows no response,” said First Mate Peng.
Time rolled by like the starscape outside the viewport, first seconds and then minutes reeling away. The object did not move, did not transmit on any of the frequencies the lander used, nor on any other frequencies in the EM spectrum. Miguel pored over his instruments, looking up only occasionally at the ellipsoid outside to confirm, visually, with his own two eyes, that it continued to ignore them.
“Object shows no response,” Peng repeated.
“Acknowledged,” said the disembodied Lin Chelsea.
Miguel fiddled with controls, adjusted instrument gains and filters, swapped out one set of pattern recognizers in favor of another. And still, the ellipsoid changed neither its attitude nor its orbit, broadcast no radiation, emitted no particles. In fact, it seemed to absorb particle radiation rather well, particularly the neutrinos screaming up out of the depths, fleeing the slow death of matter taking place down there. Centrokrist made a good neutrino catcher, didn't it? He seemed to recall that the Malhelans had discovered it that way.
Something attracted his attention. Neutrino gravimetry readings... Wait a minute! He made an adjustment, and another. Yes, the mass of the neutrinos that had passed through the ellipsoid was measurably smaller than the mass of the ones which hadn't. And the ones which passed through the ellipsoid's edges were less massive than the ones which passed through the center.
Oh, hold on just a minute!
“Hollow!” he said out loud. “The hull material steals energy from neutrinos passing through it, but the hollow space inside does not! Or not as much, anyway. Lordy, something very strange goes on inside that object. It seems almost as if spacetime curves differently inside of it than out. Which, I suppose, fits with the evidence of inertial shielding based on the fact that they didn't fly apart into fucking dots down at the event horizon.”
First Mate Peng turned all the way around and gave Miguel a hard look. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Miguel glared up at him for a moment. “Nothing. Thinking out loud. Can we, uh, move a little closer to the object?”
“I would prefer not to. What did you have in mind?”
“Well, if it won't talk to us, at least we can get a good look at it. Possibly even at the insides of it.”
“I see. Hmm.”
Lin Chelsea spoke up: “Mr. Peng, would you please move the lander to within 500 meters of the ellipsoid?”
“Yes, Ma'am,” Peng replied cheerfully.
Engines groaned for a moment. The ellipsoid drifted toward the top of the viewport and began, slowly, to grow. Soon it had expanded to fist size, and the top edge of the viewport bulkhead began to eclipse it. Then it grew to two fists, and then a small melon. Engines, this time on the lander's “top” side, fired once, paused, fired again. The ellipsoid, now comfortably melon-sized, drifted back toward the center of the view and stopped there, hanging motionless before them once more.
“Status of prime number signal?” Miguel asked, glancing over at Beth Lahler, who now looked very disheveled indeed.
“Up to 353,” she said. Her eyes darted back and forth between the science panel and the forward viewport, trying to drink everything in at once.
“Still no response from the object,” said Peng.
Miguel turned back to his neutrino gravitometer readings. Important data lay buried there, he sensed, and not very deeply. If he plotted the neutrino mass-deltas as a function of cartesian coordinates... Could he form a picture? Yes, certainly! He'd have to set up the mapping algorithm by hand, of course. Damn, where were the mindlets of thing-Barta when he needed them?”
~~~
“The object draws still closer, Elevated Creature.”
Frills expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting... Not angry, yet, but tense with the anticipation of it.
“It is not the Enemy.”
“It emits patterned radiative pulses. It has moved down into Fleet's own orbit, and approaches the Elevated Vessel. With what intent? With what intent?”
Muscles bunch, contract, quiver as they store up energy, and suddenly Elevated Creature is in motion. Even anticipating the attack, even knowing the precise moment at which it must occur, Lesser Being cannot avoid it. Mass slams into mass. Momentum becomes pain.
Out of the deeps at last! Out of the contracted spaces where to look lowside within the Vessel is to look into pits of red slowness, where shouted orders stretch to clicking groans that the incompetent cannot decipher! Where timespace slopes twist the body, forcing rate gradients and spacial distortions upon it, so that time torque may break the bones and rupture the organs of those who move incautiously, of those who move at all.
Talons on spiracles now, squeezing, sharpened points penetrating here and there. Weakness becomes death, if Elevated Creature decrees it!
“It is not the Enemy. Do not be distracted, vermin, by extraneous phenomena.”
Lesser Being does not flinch. “And if it proves a second Enemy? Or a new aspect of the first?”
Talons on spiracles, still. Squeezing, almost crushing.
“Then it will no longer be extraneous.”
Elevated Creature pauses momentarily, breathing, and then sinks talons in to the root, and beyond. Fluid emerges, coloring every surface. But lo, steadfast bravery spouts also from the wounds! A message to all, from death's deliverer and its recipient both: Lesser Being unravels calmly, never deigning to scream.
~~~
Peng shook his head. “No. Still no response from the object. Maybe we should pull back and approach a different one.”
“Hang on,” said Miguel. “I need more time.”
On his science holie, reconfigured to display two-dimensional images from the neutrino gravitometer, a fuzzy picture had finally begun to form. Each passing second added thousands of faint, tiny dots to the image, gray on gray but with striking cumulative effect as the exposure time wore on into minutes.
He saw there a hollow ellipsoid, its hull just over one meter thick, with fainter, less intelligible structures inside it. Mysterious shapes, neither formless nor Euclidean. Some smeared more than others, as if they moved slowly or vibrated in place.
He adjusted a gain control, upped the image contrast, plugged in a primitive clarifier module. The picture changed, sharpened. The inner structures vanished, then slowly began to reemerge. Miguel switched clarifiers, and everything changed again.
“Hurry up, will you?” Said Peng with obvious annoyance. “What's got so much of your attention?”
“Looking inside the shell,” Miguel replied shortly. “Just wait, I'll send you the image when I get it focused a little better.”
“Send it to me now.”
“Okay.” Miguel's tone was skeptical, distracted. The First Mate should just let him rivet his attention on the task at hand, let him finish it. Miguel hated to show unfinished work, hated the hasty, half-assed look of it and the resulting implication about his own abilities.
“Oh!” Peng said as the image sprang up on his holie.
But Miguel had not finished. Over the next few minutes, he processed a handful of clear images from his stored neutrino gravimetry data, and found that he could blink back through them on the screen, like a child's cartoon flip-book. And in the cartoon, gray on blurry gray, those humped, elaborate shapes... moved. Like living beings, they moved. Thick limbs and other projections emanating from bodies that seemed heavy and sinuous at the same time. They had parts that looked like beaks, parts that looked like claws. Parts that looked like nothing Miguel had ever seen.
“You can see them move!” Peng said. “You can actually see them move!”
“Wow,” echoed Lahler.
Miguel ignored them. As he watched, one of the creatures flew from one side of the ellipsoid's interior to the other, colliding with another humped shape in a tangle of limbs and... things. Then the cartoon, its five frames over and done with, went back to the beginning and repeated itself. The creature launched itself, a
nd collided solidly with one of its fellows. Back to the start again. The creature bunched up and launched itself, savagely, premeditatedly, at one of its fellows, colliding with talons outstretched. Inertially shielded, the centrokrist ellipsoid did not shudder with the impact.
The creature, preparing to jump, gathered itself—
“Mister Barta!”
Miguel looked up from the display. “Huh?”
“I asked you a question!” Peng shouted at him.
Question. “I, uh, didn't completely hear you. Could you please repeat it?”
“Can you clarify the lower left portion of the image? We're looking at actual alien beings, here, and I want a better look at that one that's moving!”
“This display maps a very subtle phenomenon, sir.” Miguel said.
“Does that mean you cannot enhance it?”
Miguel huffed. “Peng, I just thought up this imaging process right here on the cusp of the moment. I don't have any experience with this sort of thing. Do you? I'm certainly open to suggestions.”
“Think for a minute,” Peng said, turning, propping his elbow up on the back of his seat. He looked eerie in the strange light of the hypermass. “Just relax, don't answer right away. I know you're frightened and uncomfortable and you'd really like to get out of here. So would I! It feels like I'm drowning. But this time, this very special time, will not come again. So think for me.”
Nodding made Miguel dizzy. He closed his eyes, did a breathing exercise for a few seconds. Opened his eyes again. “I can fiddle with it, I guess. If I filter out the noisier—”
“Uh, Miguel,” Beth Lahler said beside him. “The second group of objects has—”
Miguel turned a withering stare on her. “A minute, please, Tech Aid.” He turned to his panel again. “If I filter—”
“Tech Chief Barta,” Beth persisted, raising her voice a little. “They just kicked their engines on. Accelerating at 385 gee's.”
Miguel froze, then turned back to Lahler. “The second group? How far away?”
Lahler fairly smirked, obviously pleased with her quick mastery of the equipment. “They'll cross this orbit in approximately ten minutes. Moving fast, though. Moving almost straight out of the hole.”
“Wonderful,” Peng said, jerking an elbow hard against his seat as if to punish it. “There they go, off to deep space, and here we sit, talking to the furniture.”
“Not furniture,” Miguel said. “Let me finish with the scan.”
Suddenly, the image before him went white and featureless. Damn!
“Damn it! Explanation?” he barked at Lahler.
“The object started spewing out neutrinos,” she said quickly, her eyes on the holie in front of her. “Wait a minute, all of them did. All the ones in this orbit, I mean, all fourteen of them.”
“Oh.” Miguel cooled a little. He'd thought at first that this “primitive” equipment had failed under the gravitational stresses, much as his knees and spine achingly threatened to. And it had occurred to him, too, that Lahler might have fumbled on her controls, somehow erasing his image buffer. But these things had not happened. Instead...
“Oh, Lord. Peng, I think the furniture has answered you after all.”
Lahler nodded vigorously, an enterprise that must have caused her extreme discomfort. “Yeah, I think so, too. Look at these modulations!”
“Not on my display right now,” Miguel reminded her.
She waved her hands. “It's... a digital signal of some sort. Very short pulses. This would eat a lot of bandwidth as a radio transmission. It... Wow, it wouldn't even fit in the radio spectrum, it'd overlap into infra-red. Encyclopedias worth of information, here. Libraries worth.”
“Record it!” Miguel shouted, not in anger but in gut-trembling fear. Here they'd found exactly what they came down here for: a conversation with alien beings! They mustn't lose any of it!
Miguel's screen went gray-on-gray again.
“The broadcast has ceased,” Lahler said. “But I—”
“Damn it! Is it over? Damn it to Hell!”
“No!” Lahler shouted back triumphantly. “I had the recorders on already. I've got it! I've got it all!”
“Oh my,” Peng said quietly. “Oh my. Can we decode it?”
Miguel gaped at his Tech Aid, his assistant who only minutes ago could not work the equipment. “Good... good job, Beth. That shows remarkable foresight.”
Lahler, grinning broadly, blushed. “Purely accidental. Thank my luck.”
“Can we decode it?” Peng repeated.
Miguel turned to him. “We're in the middle of a black hole, sir.”
“Yes. And can we decode the signal?”
Lahler's grin vanished. She looked blue-purple, suddenly, as a wash of color swept across her holie. “The objects have begun emitting a particle stream down toward the hypermass. Correction, toward the second group of objects.”
Miguel craned for a look at her screen. “What sort of particles?”
“I don't know. Um... antimatter of some sort... very massive.”
“Antimatter? That would be dangerous as a—”
Everything went yellow-white. Everything glowed.
Crying out, Miguel raised an arm to shield his eyes. But the light was dimming already. He lowered the arm, and saw the ellipsoid outside the viewport, radiating like an incandescent light fixture. No, not radiating, reflecting; the light came up from below.
“What happened?” shouted First Mate Peng.
Lahler blinked, held her hands out in front of her face, fingers wiggling. Then, apparently satisfied the light had not struck her blind, she looked down at her holie. She blinked again. And began to look alarmed.
“Beth?” Miguel said with more than a little concern.
She turned to look at Miguel, her eyes narrow, a vague almost-fear still clinging to her expression. “One of the emerging ellipsoids has vanished,” she said. “And a cloud of plasma has taken its place. The others have changed their thrust vectors, all in different directions. They scatter. They look... like startled birds. They look scared.”
“That does it,” said Peng. He grabbed his controls and hunched over against the gravity gradient. “I'm taking us out of here.”
Miguel's skin broke out in shivery goose-pimples. “This is a war,” he said wonderingly. “They weren't talking to us, they were talking to each other. About a war.”
The lander's engines whined to life. Thrust acceleration tugged, perpendicular to the gravity gradient. Outside the viewport ahead and above, the ellipsoid grew, and moved up and to the side. Soon, it vanished off the edge of the viewport.
“I'll bet they chased each other in close to the hypermass,” Miguel said hurriedly. “They must have been fighting a long time! A long time!”
“Ellipsoids are firing antiparticle beams again,” said Lahler. “The plasma cloud down below us is dispersing rapidly, but its velocity remains at zero point five six cee. Parts of it will hit us if we don't get out of here.”
Peng slammed his fist down on a button and shouted into his holie. “Introspectia!”
The holie's reply was little more than a burst of static.
“Introspectia!” Spittle flew from purple lips, hooked away in the gravity gradient.
Then, Lin Chelsea's voice came faintly through: “...read you, lander.”
“Good, come pick us up! Forget the safety crap, we've got to get out of here!”
“Uh, negative...” Chelsea's voice sounded agonized, even over the static. “We've got rapid variations in particle flux up here, hammering the conversion fields out of alignment. We have to withdraw to a safe distance. In fact, we are already doing so.”
Peng paused for a moment, then slammed his fist down on the panel again. “Damn it! We'll die down here!”
“I... My deepest apologies to all of you. But you've taken triple-dose radiation prophylactics, yes? Believe it or not, this makes you less vulnerable than Introspectia's engines.”
“Correct,
” Beth Lahler said, almost calmly. “We may survive the plasma wave, particularly if we get medical treatment after it passes. The lander, however... Well, we may end up stranded.”
“Not if I can help it,” Peng snarled, working the controls with stiff, angry movements.
“...ive... th...” said Lin Chelsea.
“Repeat!” Peng screamed at the holie panel.
“I said, please forgive me. I really don't have a choice in this.”
Peng inhaled, paused, let out a heavy sigh. “I realize that, Captain. Can you explain your plans in greater detail?”
“No plans, First Mate, I haven't thought that far ahead. Once we clear this gas halo, we'll light up the main engines and get the hell clear. If we can get a few light hours away we can shut down the whole conversion field and bring it up again on a higher setting.”
“That will take days,” Peng said.
“Yes. Again, let me offer my very deepest apologies.”
“Oh, save it. Get out while you can.”
“That— Oh, I've been informed we can fire the main engines in another minute. Goodbye, crewmates. I wish you luck.”
Peng did not reply.
“Plasma wave will hit us in just over a minute,” said Lahler.
Miguel squirmed in his seat, suddenly aware of the solid weight of harness buckles biting into his flesh. He had heard and understood the entire exchange, and had felt a kind of disconnected fear as he thought through its implications. But in truth, his eyes had been mainly on the science holie in front of him, his hands mainly on the instrument and automation controls.
“Mister Barta!” Peng shouted. “What attitude would best protect the lander from the plasma wave? Engines away? Engines toward?”
Miguel thought for a (where was thing-Barta at a time like this?) moment. “Uh, I don't know. I guess it doesn't really matter.”
“Why not?”
“Relativistic protons will pass right through us and keep going. Like little bullets, unstoppable, leaving little bullet holes.”