by Wil McCarthy
“Acknowledged.”
“Here they come!”
“AAAAAAAAH!”
Tom sat up sharply, banging his head against the supports of the bunk above his own. They were screaming on the bridge! Somebody was screaming on the bridge!
“Target course change.”
“Course change confirmed. Negative collision.”
“There they go!”
“They're going to burn us! They're going to burn us!”
“Shut the hell up.”
“Hey, hey, what is that? There's something behind them.”
“That's Introspectia! Darkness, look out!”
Silence. More silence. The bulkhead beside Tom reached out and punched him once. Twice. Not painfully, not hard. Silence followed. An odd thought occurred to himm: might he escape Yezu's fate, and survive these events after all?
“Burners on secondary,” said a calm voice on the interkom. “Looks like we made it.”
“Secondary burners, acknowledged.”
~~~
Miguel, having got back to his station and entered the link only a few minutes before, had not really felt prepared to deal with another emergency. But here one came, nonetheless.
“Captain!” He shouted, after activating the comlink. “Discrete gravitational sources ahead. Change course! Right now!”
The captain's thing-face appeared on the holie. “I see it, Mr. Barta. Course change initiated. Analysis?”
Miguel “watched” as the gravitational sources
Miguel(1):One object massing approximately two hundred tons.
Miguel(2):Several million objects massing ten grams and under.
flashed by, barely a kilometer away at their closest approach. He “looked” harder at them.
Oh, Lord. He recognized the lines and contours of the larger object: a Malhelan interplanetary mining ship. What the hell had they been trying to do?
“Captain,” he said, “that was a Malhelan ship, dumping rocks in our path.”
“In the aliens' path,” the thing-captain corrected. “The Malhelan government has ordered its ships to attack.”
“What?”
The captain's thing-face seemed to glare at him. “The details don't matter right now. Continue your prime-number broadcast.”
Beth Lahler growled beside him. “Captain, they don't respond to prime numbers, at least not over radio. Can't we try something else? We have no equipment to produce a modulated neutrino pulse like we've seen from them, but can we do something new with the radio? Pictures, maybe sounds?”
The captain appeared to think about that for a moment. Then: “Yeah. Send anything you like. And keep an eye out for the Malhelans.”
Chelsea's image vanished.
Miguel put a hand over his eyes. Too much to concentrate on. Too much even for thing-Barta, who seemed to have a lot of trouble working through the snarl of thoughts and feelings clogging Miguel's natural brain.
He had slept with a tech aid. On the brink of retirement, in the midst of the greatest discovery in the history of space travel... He had given in to his hormones, throwing away his pension, canceling all of his hard-won science bonuses. And Beth Lahler's, as well.
He stole a look at her.
As before, she sat stiffly, eyes forward. Not looking at him, not speaking to him unless he hit her with a direct, work-oriented question. You have ruined me, her posture said.
Ugh, that thought did not do her credit. Maybe she couldn't face him because she felt responsible. Maybe, in her mind, she had ruined him! But no, really, he could blame nobody except the hormones. Obsolete software, running ineluctably through the minds and bodies of people with rather loftier concerns.
She had certainly pleased him, though. The feel of her, sliding against him, moaning, rolling in the light of a dying star...
No! He slapped himself mentally. Stop it!
“More Malhelans ahead,” Beth said coldly. “We'll need a more dramatic course change. I don't think we can keep following these aliens. In fact, if we want to keep out of trouble we'll have to slow way down, and we'll have to do it without burning up those Malhelan ships.”
“Beth...”
No response. Miguel sighed. Must he lose even the thing for which he had lost everything else? Apparently so.
“Understood,” he said. “Feed your data through to the helm. I'll inform the captain.”
Beth jerked, sat up straighter. “Miguel, another ellipsoid is coming in. A big one, moving fast!”
He shoved his mind back into the instrument array, and confirmed her observations. “Oh, Lord. We've got to pull away from this mess.”
He communicated his concerns, and Beth's, to the bridge.
Introspectia changed course. The ellipsoids changed course as well, ducking around the Malhelan obstacle.
The big ellipsoid flickered past, moving at over ninety percent of the speed of light. One of the smaller objects exploded.
Miguel(1):Neutrino density function has suffered distortion along—
Miguel(2):Gamma flux—
Miguel(*):Shut the fuck up. Unless you can figure out how to fix my life, I really don't want to hear it.
The others ellipsoids continued their course change, though the huge interloper had gone as quickly as it had come. They moved, swinging faster, and faster still, through a great, high-gee arc across the starscape. Away from Vano, now, and the inhabited worlds which circled it. Moving back toward the emptier quarter of Malhela system, in the general direction of the Soleco hypermass.
I wish we could accelerate like that, Miguel thought, fleetingly.
Introspectia, slower and less nimble than its quarry, continued for a long while on its previous course.
Chapter Twenty-One
Something seemed to have shifted in the battle. Some great milestone had passed, or a pivotal event had come and gone, unnoticed by human observers. The ellipsoids still fluttered around the system like restless insects, and every now and again a group of pursuers would pounce on a group of pursuees, and something would blow up. But a sort of energy loss had occurred, in the spiritual rather than the physical sense; the ellipsoids seemed less intent on hard acceleration and strangely looping trajectories, more concerned with staying apart, keeping large distances between themselves and their enemies.
Captain Chelsea had taken the opportunity to invite Miguel and Beth to her briefing room, outside which they now stood.
Miraculously, Miguel's heart had stopped its hammering. His brow felt cool and dry, his stomach churning only slightly. With the time of reckoning now at hand, his anxieties seemed to float away like so much dandelion fluff. No more waiting, no more choices, no more chance. He drew a deep breath, a calm breath, and let it slowly out.
“Do you want to knock, or should I?” he asked.
Beth said nothing, did not look at him. Nodding to himself, he stepped forward, and knocked on the captain's door.
After a pause, the door WHOOMPED open, Lin Chelsea standing behind it, a white-haired angel of justice, clothed in Solar Commercial dress-grays. No smile on her face, no anger.
“Come in,” she said, and stepped aside. “Sit down on the couch.”
Miguel did as instructed, and Beth followed, sitting down next to him. Not crowding close against him, but not cringing away, either. Her posture and expression announced a firmly neutral formality, the sort of bearing a person might bring to a court proceeding. Which, Miguel supposed, fit this circumstance rather well.
The door slammed closed as Chelsea moved away from it. She sat across from them, placing her elbows on the arm rests of her chair, fingers coming together to form a steeple beneath her chin.
For several seconds, she remained silent. Then, tiredly: “You two could have behaved a little more discreetly, don't you think?”
The question seemed rhetorical to Miguel, so he made no reply. Beside him, Beth also said nothing.
The captain rocked her steepled fingers back and forth, touching middle fingers
to her face, then swinging them away until her index fingers came up against the bottom of her chin. Then reversing, rocking the steeple back and down once again. Like a sort of machine, one which converted reciprocating motion into waves of grim displeasure, radiating them out toward Beth and Miguel.
“You've both demonstrated considerable bravery,” she said, “performing crucial services for the corporation, and for the citizens of Malhela. For the whole human race, really. It doesn't please me to punish you, not at all. But I find my hands firmly tied by the circumstances.”
Again, Miguel remained silent. Again, Beth Lahler did the same.
Chelsea's scowl deepened. “Won't you say something?”
More silence.
“Okay, fine,” the captain said. “Make this as difficult as you like. Miguel Barta, you are formally charged with Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. Upon our return to Earth I will turn you over to Admin with the recommendation that you shall forfeit ten days' pay. Do you understand this charge? Do you understand the proposed sentence?”
Ten days' pay? The words made no sense for a moment, as they bore little resemblance to the ones he had expected to hear. Fraternization charges usually meant truly excruciating fines, along with punitive duties, refusal of discharge...
“Ma'am?” He asked.
“Do you understand what I have told you?”
“Yes, but—”
She waved him to silence, and turned her disapproving eyes on Beth. “Elizabeth Lahler. You have disappointed me with your ingratitude, and with your lack of judgment. I charge you, also, with Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. Upon our return to Earth I will turn you over to Admin with the recommendation that you shall forfeit ten days' pay. Do you understand this charge? Do you understand the proposed sentence?”
Beth appeared flustered, suddenly. “Ma'am,” she said, “I'm only an Aid. Second Class.”
“Excuse me?” the captain barked. “I distinctly recall promoting you to Tech Officer five days ago. Shall I check the duty logs to confirm it?”
Beth blinked, silent and confused.
“My dear,” Chelsea said, more gently now, “The stress of recent events has obviously unsettled you. If you think about it for a moment, I feel certain you'll remember.”
Suddenly, Beth's face broke out in a smile, and in that same moment it occurred to Miguel just how much Chelsea had done to spare them the company's wrath. Altering her records! Causing Beth Lahler to have been an officer at the time of the... illicit liaison.
So, Introspectia's captain had committed Falsification with Intent to Defraud. Good Lord. An offense like that made Fraternization look like straight company policy. Good bloody Lord.
“Don't you smile at me, Tech Officer!” Chelsea snapped. Her expression registered not a trace of amusement. “Go on, get out of here. Both of you, get out! And find someplace a little less public the next time you decide to screw!”
Hastily, Miguel and Beth got up and made for the exit. It opened for them, slammed closed behind them.
Once they were a safe distance away, Miguel put his hand on Beth's back. Warmly, affectionately.
She squirmed out from under his touch, stepping back against the corridor wall and raising an accusing finger. “Don't you touch me, Miguel Barta.”
Astounded, Miguel just looked at her. Had he misjudged things once again? Did Beth really, actually hate him now? Oh dear.
“Don't you touch me,” she repeated, shaking her finger at him. “Not in public. One misconduct charge is quite enough, thank you.”
Oh. He let out the breath he didn't know he'd been holding. “My apologies,” he said, with a fair attempt at sincerity. “Maybe you'd do me the honor of accompanying me to my quarters?”
Beth scowled. “You take a lot for granted, Mister. It takes more than a—”
Warning klaxons went off. Red and yellow lights began to flash.
“ALL BRIDGE, ENGINEERING, AND SCIENCE PERSONNEL REPORT TO DUTY STATIONS.” The voice of First Mate Peng echoed down the corridors. “REPEAT, ALL BRIDGE, ENGINEERING, AND SCIENCE PERSONNEL TO DUTY STATIONS.”
The captain's door flew open, and the captain herself paused for a moment, flashing Miguel and Beth a look of almost parental distrust before turning and hurrying down the corridor's other way.
~~~
“There they go,” Miguel said, with no small measure of bitterness. “Look at that, it looks like they're just going to head right back in again.”
Through the ship's sensor networks he watched the ellipsoids in a dozen different ways. He saw their electromagnetic emissions and reflections, the whole spectrum from thermal radio right on up through low gamma. He felt their prickly, constantly shifting neutrino flux, and their gravitational signatures. With three spectrometers operating on completely different principles, he sniffed and tasted the objects, and he sensed minute, physical vibrations from them in a way not entirely dissimilar to the human sense of hearing.
Their gyrations continued, but each loop and turn seemed now to carry the ellipsoids closer, ever closer to the time-prison of Soleco. Was the encounter really ending, then? Damn! The most important event in human history, and yet even in the thick of it all Miguel had been an observer, perhaps a minor nuisance, really nothing more than a beetle at the aliens' picnic. Well, okay, maybe 'picnic' was the wrong word. He'd braved a lot of dangerous conditions, and he'd certainly be glad if he didn't have to brave any more.
Or would he?
Roughly half the ellipsoids began to chatter, wildly, in a staccato language of neutrino pulses, and to dive even more swiftly toward the sensory null of the Soleco hypermass. Let's go, boys! Virtually massless in their centrokrist shells, shielded from inertia and from gravity, they expelled their exhaust of relativistic plasma and roared, with little apparent effort, at hundreds of gee's acceleration.
The other ellipsoids, more slowly it seemed, began to accelerate, and to start up their own neutrino pulse dialogue. The volumes of data they exchanged, very nearly a hundred terrabits in the first second, seemed ludicrous to Miguel. They didn't have anything to do other than swoop around and shoot at each other. What could they need to discuss in such volume?
None of it made any sense to him, of course, but he thought he heard a different sort of quality in the voices of the pursuing aliens than he had in the fugitives'. A little harder, perhaps a little colder. Not like the others' complex screams of rage and defiance. Or perhaps he simply read too much into signals which had not, after all, been meant for him.
“Analysis,” he said to Beth.
“On what?” she snapped back.
“On the signals. Do they sound different to you? Between the two groups, I mean?”
“Yes.”
He gritted his teeth. Did she have to behave this way right now? “In what way do they differ?”
In lieu of a verbal reply, Beth jammed a load of processed data at his mind. With some difficulty, he accepted and assimilated the bundle.
Average spacing between the neutrino pulses differed by ten to twenty picoseconds between the two groups. Neutrino mass varied by an average of 5.32E-12 kilograms. A thousand such measurements filled his mind, along with occasional annotation and commentary and... and Beth Lahler was deeply, burningly in love with him. Her feelings throbbed orgasmically in his mind, sought out his pleasure centers and entered them, so that he felt bruised with the magnitude of her desire.
“Ulgh,” he said.
Beneath the medusa-sproutings of the link harness, Beth shook her head. “No, damn! I didn't mean to let that through!”
Miguel slumped in his chair, lay almost motionless. Incapacitated, numb with an overdose of love, which was without question the most powerful drug that had ever existed.
“Damn it! Damn it!” Beth said. “There goes the last trace of my dignity.”
“Oh well,” Miguel said, still sprawled in his chair as limply as if his spine had shattered once again.
~~~
Miguel recovered within
a minute or two, in time to watch the fugitive ellipsoids descend into Soleco, watch redshift and time dilation and Lorentz contraction take hold of them, blurring and fading and distorting them until, at this great range, he could no longer perceive them at all. Into the hypermass, into the future, forsaking the universe of the present. Another thousand years in the amber? Another billion?
Less than an hour later, their pursuers began to trickle in behind them.
The pursuers have the advantage, he thought as he watched them, thinking about what things they might think about as they followed their enemies down into the hypergravitational pit. You plot the enemies' trajectories, find their velocities and their periapses and integrate forward through the time dilation. Find out when they will emerge, a thousand or a million or a billion years hence, and adjust your own trajectory so that you come out slightly earlier. They might escape you even then, but if you played things right, you could herd them right back into the hole again. You could keep them from ever escaping.
In fact, you must keep them from escaping; if they ever got round to the other side of the time hill, they might be waiting for you when you emerged! Ready to kill, ready to destroy. You cannot win this game unless you play it forever.
The thought sent shivers up and down his spine. A war that never ended. Like a picture of a war, like a fossil of it. A live battle with live participants, yes, but frozen in amber. Trotted out for show every once in a while, and then trotted right back into stasis again.
Sympathy washed over him. Whatever had set these groups off, whatever word or thing or event had triggered their mutual rage, it must by now have vanished as surely as the nebula from which Malhela system had coalesced so long ago.
He didn't feel quite so surprised, now, that the aliens had ignored Introspectia and all its attempts to communicate. On the timescale in which they had forced themselves to live, external events must seem fleeting and meaningless indeed.