InterstellarNet: New Order

by Edward M. Lerner

  “We are here.” The hatch unlatched, an unknowable infosphere command evidently accompanying Mashkith’s words. He swung open the door.

  Helmut stopped in his tracks.

  The hold was vast enough that its stone floor was unambiguously concave. A curved metal plate sealed a fifteen—by twenty-meter gap in what had to be hull material. Amorphous blobs like car-sized candle puddles ringed the patch. Bulkheads were rippled and scorched black. Stalactites of frozen lava hung from the ceiling. Helmut panned slowly across the wreckage. On close-up, he panned again, this time concentrating on the periphery of the repair. The rim of the curved metal plate was embedded in melted and refrozen rock.

  Corinne never lost focus. “What happened here?”

  The Foremost moved cautiously into the devastated space, slowing to stroke a formless glob as he passed it. Kneeling briefly, he rapped the patched floor, as though to reassure himself of its continued integrity. “An impossibility.

  “Interstellar space is empty. Everyone says so. To encounter something big enough to matter—the odds against such an occurrence are enormous. At one-third cee, though, encountering the merest pebble would be catastrophic. Of course we were prepared. We looked far ahead for anything in our path.”

  Helmut could not help but notice an interesting omission. There was no mention of anti-space-junk lasers to blast stray pebbles, although laser turrets were plain enough on Victorious. Not mentioned because they could do double-duty as weapons? And anything bigger than a bit of gravel would have destroyed Victorious. A gram of something at that speed had kinetic energy greater than a kiloton of explosives.

  “If the odds of encountering anything at all were remote, what then were the chances of overtaking such an object on a path exactly parallel to our course?” Mashkith’s head waggled twice, quickly, from side to side. Embarrassment? “We only saw it the instant before it grazed the hull. We had no time to react.”

  Corinne had perched on one of the shapeless lumps, bringing her face nearer to his. “But why didn’t you see it? Why are you embarrassed?”

  Helmut zoomed in on a tight close-up.

  “We’ve had months now to investigate. All sensors were operating at peak efficiency.” Mashkith looked away from the camera. “Until it was too late, the angle of approach was indistinguishable from zero. The lateral-clearance calculation involves the sine of the angle of approach—and the sine of zero is zero. More side-to-side waggling. “A key software subroutine failed without indication, from a divide-by-zero error no one had ever tested for.”

  This year’s most popular bar in Valhalla City was named Loki’s. Its decor favored exuberant animal “carvings” (of native concrete disguised as wood and ivory), berserker-sized axes and swords of local iron, and reproduction Norman tapestries. Its seats were split hogsheads, also cast-concrete faux wood, but mercifully topped with unauthentic cushions. The plastic steins looked like they had been carved from horn. Only the snacks deviated overtly from the theme. That was fine with Art. Pizza, egg rolls, and stuffed Marshroom caps beat herring on a twig any day.

  Giant 3-V sets that normally showed zero-gee polo today were tuned to Corinne Elman’s exclusive interview with the Foremost. In what was surely the most crowded establishment on Callisto, the scientists and engineers of the contact team barely filled a corner. The diplomats and politicians had chosen to observe from someplace upscale and far more expensive.

  Art had subscribed to the infostream, of course, and not because of Pashwah Two’s advice. He wanted the full transcript and full visuals on file. Just in case.

  “…as we wait for permission to enter, I can’t help but feel a sense of awe. You’ve all seen Victorious by infosphere and on 3-V. Those images do not begin to reproduce the experience of approaching and then landing on it. Up close, the place on which I stand seems less an artifact and more a small world.”

  Whether the reporter’s route exactly matched Art’s own recent, disappointing trip, the empty corridors were identically uninformative.

  Keizo was nodding. “Hmm.”

  “Hmm, what?”

  “I’m not sure yet. Let’s watch a bit more.” Keizo stood and grabbed an empty faux pottery pitcher. “This round is on me.”

  By the time Keizo returned with more beer, the visitors were nearing the site of the supposed accident. “The Foremost is walking slower than I remember. On purpose? A dramatic pause. Here it comes. I’m almost certain.”

  The hatch swung open. But for a few scattered, awestruck obscenities, the crowd fell silent. Art was scarcely aware that Keizo was watching the packed room more than the 3-V.

  It looked like a bomb had gone off in that hold.

  Why was Keizo grinning?

  “A key software subroutine failed without indication from a divide-by-zero error no one had ever tested for.”

  Keizo cackled. A moment later, the entire crowd burst out laughing. The next minute of the netcast was lost to the noise, although from appearances it looked like Corinne Elman repeatedly saying, “There, there.”

  “Okay, Keizo,” Art said. “How did you know he would say that?”

  The sociologist waved his half-emptied stein in a sweeping gesture that took in the bar crowd. “Look at them. First the K’vithians agree to an interview. On our visit”—all subsequent official gatherings had been aboard UP ships or on Callisto—“we saw empty corridors and a conference room. Didn’t you think it strange to see seemingly inept crew being outwitted by a water hose?” As people began shushing the laughers, Keizo switched to the infosphere. “I suspect that scene was staged for Ms. Elman’s vast audience.”

  “To make themselves look foolish?”

  “To make themselves look unthreatening.”

  Eva refilled her stein, forehead furrowed. “A starship, by definition, means incredible power.” Keizo was not cleared on Himalia, so there was no mention of the antimatter the Snakes were presumed to control—and maybe wanted more of.

  Ah. “Hence,” Art said, “the advantage to appear bumbling.”

  “And hence this extraordinary exhibit. Pashwah has observed us for a long time. She knows us well. She counsels Mashkith well.” Keizo glanced around the tavern. “After that display, half the people here will support most anything to help the K’vithians. The rest, at the least, consider them too bumbling to be dangerous.”

  “…lost seven valued crewmates, senior scientists. A tragedy.” Mashkith was still talking about the accident.

  “But you persevered. You survived. You prevailed.”

  “Wait for it,” whispered Keizo. “He’s shown tremendous vulnerability—hardly the behavior we’d expect of a K’vithian, especially a Foremost. There’s a reason he did so. He wants something.”

  “At what cost?” Mashkith shivered. As though observing with Keizo’s trained eye, the motion looked unnatural. Contrived. A human gesture learned for a human audience.

  Corinne Elman, still perched on a recongealed lump, leaned in close. “What do you mean?”

  “In this place we stored the fuel for our return flight. Had our luck been only a bit worse, we would all have died instantly. Instead, we had only a moment to act. All the fuel canisters were ejected into space before the catastrophe that could have been a million times worse.

  “Without antimatter from the UP, we are stranded.”

  The dream was weird, as dreams often are. There were marines in a Plexiglas castle, flying dragons, quests and relics, moats filled with magnets. Thud … thud … thud … pounded something against the raised drawbridge. A battering ram?

  Only Art was awake now, the dream fading, and the noises continued. His bedside clock said 3:17. Someone was thumping on his cabin door. Vaguely he knew it had been going on for some time. Stifling a yawn, Art opened the door.

  Chung stood in the hall, fist poised to pound some more. He had obviously been up all night. “You warned me, and I didn’t listen. Now the Foremost sandbags me in a pay-per-view interview. Find out what’s going on.
What they know. What they want. What they’ll trade.

  “Whatever you need—it’s yours.”

  Then Chung departed, as abruptly as he’d arrived. With him went all thoughts of sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bose-Einstein Condensate: the fifth phase of matter, after solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. Albert Einstein first theorized the Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC) phase in 1924, building upon pioneering work of Satyendra Nath Bose, but the existence of BECs went undemonstrated until 1995.

  A BEC consists of like atoms cooled to a few billionths of a degree Kelvin above absolute zero. Fallen into the lowest possible energy state, bosons (particles with zero or integral spin, such as pions, alpha particles, and individual atoms) effectively lose their individual identities, exhibiting coherence like photons—also bosons—in a laser beam. In quantum-dynamic terms, all particles in the BEC share a common wave function. BECs can be used to confine matter at extremely high densities.

  —Internetopedia

  The social pleasantries didn’t last long, even by Art’s minimalist standards.

  “Reviewing your infosphere, I would guess you use BECs,” said Rashk Keffah. She was a junior officer, an engineer, and stocky for a K’vithian. She was also the sole surviving expert aboard Victorious in the safe handling of antimatter.

  Pashwah Two, like her parent, consistently declined to explain Snake body language. Art’s and Eva’s translator, Joseph Conrad 213, was still learning on the job, but Joe had no such reservations. “Did you notice the two eye blinks? That was a sneer.”

  The fourth and final biologic at the table was Rashk Lothwer, who shot his crewmate a look. (No comment from Joe, so the glance meant what it did among humans: surprise and/or “Watch it.”) More than a crewmate, in fact. The entire ship’s complement of Victorious appeared to be in clan Arblen Ems. Arblen Ems Rashk Lothwer, Mashkith’s chief lieutenant, was of the extended Rashk family. Were he and Keffah cousins? Brother and sister? Unknown.

  They were alone in the officer’s wardroom of the UP cruiser Actium, the Snakes seated on tall stools fabricated for them from ship’s stores. Hidden fans raced to vent the strong, pungent odor of sulfur dioxide, traces of which had adhered to the visitors’ pressure suits.

  Art had called the meeting to discuss refueling of the starship. Could it be done, were the decision made to do so? Dramatic INN interview notwithstanding, that was not a given. Meanwhile, Carlos Montoya and his UPIA bosses were in the initial stages of a witch hunt over the security breach. “Nothing stays secret forever,” was not cutting it as an explanation.

  Eva refused to take the bait. It helped, Art supposed, that she could feign ignorance of the sneer. “That is correct. The high density of storage made possible by BECs is a big plus.”

  “Until it blows up.” After another warning glance from Lothwer, Keffah added, “Indefinite, precise control of the cooling and the magnetic containment is required.”

  Spinning charged particles, such as electrons, are tiny magnets. That made it possible, Art knew, to trap super-cooled atoms inside magnetic fields. It didn’t matter whether those atoms were matter or antimatter. What did matter were the exact characteristics of the field. Clumped too compactly, a BEC exploded: a so-called “bosenova.” Insufficiently confined, and a BEC dispersed—which, with antimatter, meant explosion at contact with normal matter.

  Complex as confinement was, safely holding antimatter was but one step in a long process. A few subatomic particles at a time, the antimatter was created by high-speed, normal-particle collisions. Those collision byproducts that were antiparticles had to be captured magnetically before they could encounter any normal matter. The antiparticles, protons and positrons, were mated, and the resulting antihydrogen super-cooled for storage as a BEC.

  But storage was merely prelude to use. The antimatter atoms had to be transferred from production line to shipping containers to fuel tanks, without ever touching normal matter. Onboard ship, the antimatter had to be metered out, with near-infinite precision, into the engines. And absent a space drive to exploit the enormous energies stored in antimatter, the only use for antimatter was really big bombs.

  All these were challenges the K’vithians had evidently overcome. “If not BECs, Keffah, how does Victorious store its antimatter?” Art asked.

  Blink blink. “Safely.”

  “As Keffah indicated earlier, we have surveyed your infosphere for relevant topics,” Lothwer said hurriedly. “Our technology applies scientific theory not in evidence there. The Foremost suggests it is premature to discuss specifics.”

  Art stood and stretched. It didn’t take being an ICU exec to break the code: trade secret.

  That even made sense. The UP antimatter program was highly classified, but its cost was surely huge. Himalia base was a whole small town, its population numbering hundreds of scientists, engineers, and technicians. Its sole support for decades had been the antimatter program. Then there was the steady succession of scoopships bringing fusion fuel for the antimatter factory. It looked like the Foremost planned to swap technology for antimatter.

  “And how, without specifics, do you expect us to provide refueling assistance?” Eva’s sniff of frustration was no doubt translated by Pashwah Two for the Snakes. The shrug-equivalent in response made her grind her teeth.

  Lothwer broke a long silence. “Keffah, could you adapt BEC techniques to our systems?”

  “Some sort of interface mechanism, you mean? Something to convert from the BEC form? Not easily, but yes. I don’t see the point. That would still expose … the technology.”

  “Not a problem,” Art said. System engineers think a lot about interfaces. “Take it in stages. The BEC-to-whatever conversion mechanism never leaves Victorious. All the UP engineers would require is a BEC canister that mates with your onboard converter. We fill the BEC container, you take it aboard Victorious and transfer the fuel. Give us back the empty canister, and we repeat the process.”

  “A moment please,” Lothwer said.

  The cruiser’s instruments reported sudden spikes in radio traffic, all encrypted. At very low power: Lothwer and Keffah infolinking. At slightly higher power: exchanges between them and the Snake aux ship floating alongside, at the end of a flexible docking tube. At higher power still: messages to and from Victorious. Consultations? Request for approval? Amid total silence, Art and Joe tried to read meaning into the scarcest hints of movement by their guests. Was that a twitch? A nervous tic? Or were they just shifting positions on the stools?

  Lothwer’s eyes unglazed. “Our engineers agree in principle, but BECs worry them. This is technology we had abandoned as too dangerous.”

  “It’s a technology we have used without incident for years,” Eva snapped. “We would never have scaled it up to mass production otherwise.”

  “And that expertise,” said Keffah, “is crucial. Before we dare bring a BEC container near Victorious, you must convince me it is safe.”

  The Vestal Non-Virgin came, as always, in a tall, naked, and anatomically improbable ceramic mug. All that went into it were cherry juice and eighty-proof ouzo. Mostly ouzo. It was a Belter favorite, in no way associated with sacramental solemnity.

  Helmut didn’t care.

  He sipped slowly, his thoughts not on the beverage, nor the hangover certain to follow. Kwasi’s libation of choice was the Non-Virgin, and today was Kwasi’s birthday. Would have been. The least he could do was drink to an old friend’s memory.

  After all, he’d gotten Kwasi Abodapki killed. Among others.

  Three Exxon-Boeing scoopships had berthed recently, and the spaceport dive was boisterous. Helmut’s glum aura kept the adjacent stools empty. “Cheers, old friend.”

  The Lucky Strike had rendezvoused without incident with the vaguely potato-shaped rock known only as 2009 Sigma r, measuring roughly forty meters on its major axis. There was no evidence, physical or infospherical, to suggest anyone but Willem Vanderkellen had ever set boot on it.

  He sipp
ed without tasting, his thoughts far away.

  The four of them—he and give-you-the-spare-oxy-tank-off-his-back Kwasi, wisecracking Bill and zero-gee polo fanatic Milos—had put in weeks of hard labor. Navigational markers planted. Exploratory shafts sunk. Ore samples collected for assay, for the UP Bureau of Asteroid Management to confirm what the four of them already knew: rich veins of platinum and palladium. Radio beacon planted and on standby, ready for remote activation as soon as the claim was registered. While he readied the Lucky Strike for departure, Kwasi and Milos even consulted over the preamble of a summary message pre-filing with the BAM.

  It was never sent.

  Helmut had had plenty of time to brood since that day, plenty of time to fret and analyze and theorize. The dust and vapors from their operations were surely detectable at a distance, surely capable of providing incontrovertible spectrographic evidence. If they had been followed, a stealthed ship lurking nearby could easily see this was a claim worth jumping.

  The Non-Virgin was still half full. He drained it in one long swallow.

  The claim had been worth killing for.

  Actium had excellent long-range optical and radar scanners, none of them suited to the remote detection of matter/antimatter annihilation events. It had been a tight squeeze into the forward equipment pod, flashlight in hand, to recheck the jury-rigged splicing-in of new sensors. Wriggling out unaided seemed impossible—and Art’s barely suppressed anxiety surged. He willed his voice to be low and calm. “All the connections look good. Very professional. Can someone grab my feet?”

  Massive hands seized Art’s ankles and yanked. He emerged from the access tunnel sneezing from dislodged dust and streaked with grease. “Thanks, Carlos. For the extraction and for expediting our little outing.”