Assemblers of Infinity

by Kevin J. Anderson

  He flailed his arms, trying to keep his balance; he pushed the diagnostic unit away from him. Every second seemed to take an eternity. Jason twisted his body as he fell, trying to prevent his helmet from cracking against the hard ground. All the time he kept his arms moving. The loose light twirled beside him, making crazy patterns as it spun through the vacuum.

  He heard Erika's shouts, but couldn't make sense of them through his own yelling.

  Even through the bulky padding of the suit and the slow-motion fall in low gravity, Jason felt the breath go out of him as he struck bottom. He had landed on his backpack; the heating and oxygen unit had softened the fall. He struggled to breathe, and only after the first sharp pain had gone away was he able to gasp for air. Sounds came over his radio, but they were distant, someone calling....

  His heart continued to beat fast. He tried to take slow breaths, to keep from hyperventilating. He didn't hear any telltale sounds of air hissing in his ears. Checking his life-system parameters with the heads-up display, he saw that his suit pressure was stable.

  He heard a low moan. He struggled to an elbow. His backpack kept him from bending forward. Jason shoved hard with one hand and rolled to the front.

  Pushing up with both hands, he straightened. You sure weren't meant to fall down in a bulky spacesuit, he thought. "Erika?"

  "Yeah." Her voice sounded weak. "Right here."

  The light was off to the side, illuminating a distant wall. Jason stepped to the light, reaching out to ensure that he wouldn't hit anything.

  "You okay?"

  "Yeah. I didn't even move, and I still came tumbling after you!" Her voice took a second to come back. "What happened?"

  "Besides falling? I don't know." Jason bent to pick up the dropped light. He found Erika lying not far from where he had fallen. "How's your suit pressure?"

  She took a minute to reply. "Steady." She reached behind herself. "And the optical fiber's still attached. Think we're still transmitting out?"

  "We don't know if we ever were."

  He stepped carefully to her. Walls of alien material rose up around them, glowing with the edge-of-vision blue color. He couldn't see how far they had fallen, or what had become of the hole they had walked through.

  "Jase," Erika said. She had just finished struggling up from the ground. "Behind us. Is it my imagination, or is there a passageway back there?"

  At first Jason could see only more of the alien material, then he caught a glimpse of something darker. "You're right." He turned the light back toward her. "How could you see that?"

  "No blue glow. The light in your hand was blinding you."

  Jason pondered that. "Let me try something. Stay still." He switched off the light. The entire chamber plunged into darkness.

  It took a minute, but shortly Jason began to notice the faint outlines of several square entrances into the chamber. The squares were deep black, while the walls and floor around them glowed a bluish violet. He felt his eyes getting used to the darkness about as much as they ever would to the edge of the spectrum; to a different set of eyes, the chamber might be blazing with light.

  "This place looks like a train station. I can count seven, no eight tunnels coming in here."

  "Nine," corrected Erika. "Think about it -- nine arches outside, nine pathways, now nine tunnels." Jason stood by and watched as Erika measured all the entrances to the tunnels, the chamber they were in.

  "Sounds like they've got a thing for nines, or threes." Jason took another deep breath, felt his heartbeat slowing down. "Well, do we try to go back outside? Everybody must be worried about us. Or do we go on?"

  "Go on, of course." He had never heard Erika sound so determined. "We might not get another chance to come out here, if somebody blows it all up.

  All we've seen are tunnels so far. There's got to be something more."

  Jason swallowed again, knowing she was right. "Then let's find it." He switched the brilliant light back on, breaking the spell. "So which way?"

  "Your call," said Erika. "Pick a tunnel, any tunnel."

  He hesitated for a moment, then struck out for the first corridor. He lifted the heavy diagnostic pack, hoping it would be worth their while to lug the thing along. They walked in silence on a level floor.

  After many minutes of plodding, they stopped as Erika's light splashed on something large ahead of them. Jason could just discern the outline of a multifaceted building constructed of panels placed at odd angles. An architect's bad dream. The structure was a lighter color than the surrounding floor and walls; it appeared to be made from a different material. Some of the panels were adorned with an ordered array of circles parallel to each other, all pointing back down the tunnel.

  Erika said, "What do you think?"

  Jason wet his lips. The recirculated air in his suit seemed even drier than usual. "I don't know." He felt at a loss to communicate; this overwhelmed his sense of architectural insight. It looked as if an autistic child had tried to build something and had parts left over. Thin panels, wedges of material at every angle, a snapshot of a house of cards in mid-collapse. The structure didn't look as if it could support itself.

  Erika started toward the exotic building. She kept the light trained on the structure, lighting up the panels covered with aligned circles. As Jason approached, the building seemed to rotate. It was all in the perspective, like walking through a painting. No matter where they viewed the structure, the circles pointed straight down the tunnel.

  As if it were trying to tell them something.

  --------

  CHAPTER 39

  MOONBASE COLUMBUS

  Big Daddy Newellen shifted behind the virtual display panel in the moonbase control center. It took him a moment before he could piece together words enough to speak out loud. Damned harebrained theory -- but it all checked out. Everything.

  Bernard Chu and the other crewmembers stared at the images transmitted back from Jason and Erika's exploration of Daedalus. At times, bursts of static interrupted the foreshortened images piped through the fiberoptic cable Erika had laid down, but they missed little.

  An exterior view of the whole structure came from the hopper's cameras, sent by Cyndi Salito and Bryan Zed. At least those two were still in two-way touch, and antsy to do something. Three separate times, Salito had requested permission to go in after Jason and Erika, but Bernard Chu had flatly denied her.

  Zimmerman had not been able to disarm the nukes in the fail-safe ring.

  Personally, Newellen couldn't imagine McConnell setting off the warheads now, not with people over at Daedalus -- but Mission Control on Earth had fallen mysteriously silent, without even Fukumitsu's insistent questions. Chu had called it good riddance to distractions. But it made Newellen uneasy.

  This new idea of his made him uneasier still.

  "Hey Bernard, I've got to show you something."

  Startled, Chu turned from the command podium. "What?"

  Newellen gestured. "Come here. You're not going to believe me unless you see the calculations yourself."

  Chu sighed and moved over to Newellen's station, keeping his gaze toward the holotank showing 2-D images transmitted by Jason and Erika. "Is it good news or bad?"

  "Depends. Good, in the sense that I might have figured out a reason for a big part of that structure. Bad, in that it means all four of our people at Daedalus are in deep poop."

  Chu's pinched face focused on Newellen now. "Tell me."

  "Well, let's assume that that flowerlike main structure is some sort of wonky dish antenna. It has to have a purpose, and that seems likely. If it's to transmit e-m waves, then there has to be a way to get the electromagnetic energy to the antenna. Amateur electronics stuff."

  "Okay..." said Chu, "remember, I'm a biochemist."

  "Basically, I've run some antenna design calculations and I think the passageway Jason and Erika are walking in is a mode converter. Giant size."

  Newellen waited for some shocked reaction. Chu looked at him with a puzzle
d expression. "A what?"

  Newellen sighed. "Mode convertors take electromagnetic energy in one spatial form and convert it to another. It's usually more efficient to produce e-m waves in one mode, but to actually transmit the signals, they have to be converted to another mode, or pattern. I'm pretty sure from the measurements that those catacombs are mode converters."

  "But what for?"

  "It may be a way to phase-conjugate the waves, if they're coherent." He paused. "Our people might be walking through a giant radio amplifier. When you think about it, that one-way radio membrane makes sense: radio waves can only come out, not in. Since there are no incoming waves, it cuts down on losses in the cavity. It's a true diffraction-limited amplifier."

  Chu grew alert, still not understanding but concerned. "And if it's turned on? While they're still inside?"

  Ah, now the man was getting it! "Depending on the intensity, there's a good chance they might be cooked. The suits will protect them some -- but radiofrequency waves will still couple to the human body. It's not a very healthy place to stand."

  Chu drew in a breath. He glanced around the control center, as if hoping for an inspiration.

  Newellen kept stating his case. He felt suddenly hungry. "From what I can tell in the last batch of transmitted pictures, those circles on that gadget are some sort of solid-state devices, probably used for creating the E-M waves. It's a simple matter of phase-conjugating them -- and the measurements work out." He shrugged. "But this is all theory, of course."

  "Of course." Chu scowled, as if finally realizing that he wanted to pass this one off to Mission Control on Earth -- but they had cut him off without any explanation. "Anything else I should know?"

  Newellen worked his pudgy fingers along the controls, calling up another set of calculations. "Well, I was really puzzled by the energy source for this stuff. First, I thought, with the neutrino flux so high there might be some sort of fusion reactor inside. Neutrino detectors are quirky things, but they're not that bad. Erika's readings were a thousand times higher than they should have been for a fusion reactor, though. Outside the error bars by a mile."

  Chu stared down at the stream of numbers, but they obviously didn't mean anything to him. "And?"

  "The only energy source I know of that produces a neutrino flux that high is an antimatter-matter reactor."

  Someone in the control center whistled. "Isn't that impossible?" said Chu.

  "So are alien nanotech machines on the Moon," Newellen answered.

  Chu swallowed and regained his composure. "So that device they've found is probably a matter-antimatter reactor?"

  Newellen was suddenly struck by a thought. "And if each of those tunnels is supposed to act as a waveguide, then there must be eight more reactors just like this, one at the end of each tunnel. That signal's going to pack one hell of a punch when it goes."

  Bernard Chu fidgeted, as if forcing himself to swallow something he found extremely unpalatable. "So Dvorak and Trace are sitting in the middle of a giant alien microwave oven."

  "That's basically right." Newellen nodded. "And they don't even know it. Worse, since the nanocritters shut down and the complex is completed, that transmitter could go off at any time."

  --------

  CHAPTER 40

  WASHINGTON, D.C. -- LOCAL MISSION CONTROL

  Major General Simon Pritchard felt his hand grow slick with sweat on the textured handle of the service revolver. Everything came to a stop as tension thickened the air.

  In the Mission Control center, all attention flicked back and forth between himself, the transmitted images of Dvorak and Trace exploring the Daedalus catacombs, and Celeste in her barely controlled state of panic.

  Petite and coiled to spring, Celeste turned her back on Albert Fukumitsu and marched toward one of the Mission Control flatscreen terminals.

  The tech sitting there swivelled in his chair as if poised to run.

  "Punch up the command sequence for setting off the nuclear quarantine ring," she said. "I have the access codes. We've got no alternative but to detonate the warheads and end this once and for all."

  Pritchard felt his skin crawl. He had been stupid not to realize what she intended to do, and now he didn't know which course to take. How could he let her go through with this? He trusted Celeste implicitly. Or did he?

  Several of the techs leaped to their feet in outrage. "Wait a minute --

  " Fukumitsu cried. He sputtered before he finally found words. "On what basis do you make that decision? I've been here every second of the exploration and I've seen no evidence of a threat! Exactly the opposite -- the aliens could have killed all the people on Columbus during the infection if they wanted to.

  They could have retaliated when Chu sent his homemade bomb. But they've made no aggressive move. None.

  "Instead, look at what they've done -- " He gestured to the screen where Dvorak and Trace stood inspecting the glimmering matter-antimatter reactor. "We still don't have a clue what any of this is. How can you just push the button -- "

  She shouted at him. "Because I know! I always know. That's how I knew about the Grissom, how I knew something bad was going to happen on the Collins

  -- " Celeste caught herself before explaining any further. Pritchard furrowed his brow, trying to understand what she was implying.

  Celeste lowered her voice. "You are out of line, Mr. Fukumitsu. It is not part of your job to question my orders. You are relieved, as of now."

  Fukumitsu flinched as if he had been slapped in the face. But he refused to move. Celeste turned her anger instead to the tech by the console in front of her. "Punch up the command sequence, I said!" She pushed him aside and crouched over the panel, working with the interface to pull up a set of menus.

  Pritchard shifted the service revolver to his other hand, trying to keep himself motionless as the turmoil churned within him. What the hell was she doing? Now that more pieces were falling together, it made even less sense to him.

  He remembered the night of Bernard Chu's communication from the Collins, how Celeste had wakened from a deep sleep full of nightmares. Then he recalled the uncanny story of how she alone had managed to rescue the people on the Grissom by somehow knowing to get them into the only safe place on the entire station. She had once told him how interested she would be in hearing about his dreams -- had she been speaking literally?

  Pritchard experienced the sudden, sinking certainty that Celeste McConnell, the powerful Director of the United Space Agency, was making her major, often-questionable decisions on the basis of dreams.

  Pritchard recalled making love to her earlier that night. Celeste seemed so desperate, clinging and grabbing at him. She had been full of erotic energy, wrapping herself around him like raw electric wires. Now, she wanted to use half a dozen warheads to blow up Daedalus and all traces of the alien artifact.

  Perhaps she had been planning this all along. Because these were old-style warheads from a secure stockpile, they didn't retain all of the attendant checks and balances, bureaucratic stalling devices that would have made it impossible for anyone to set them off in a timely fashion if something disastrous did happen at the alien construction site.

  Since the quarantine ring was not to be triggered anywhere on Earth, and on the opposite side of the Moon from Columbus, they had managed to ramrod approvals through, to streamline an emergency detonation process. Pritchard himself had helped.

  The U.S. President had one set of access codes, and so did the director of the United Space Agency. Celeste did have the power to detonate them --

  legitimately. In an emergency only.

  But was this an emergency?

  Prickles of sweat appeared on his forehead. Pritchard had not comprehended the magnitude of what they were doing. He had been swept along with his newfound glory, press conferences, important decisions that affected the whole world, sudden prestige for his lifelong work in a military that had fallen on weaker times. Somehow this did not seem to be the proper culminat
ion of his life's work: to destroy mankind's first link with an advanced alien race ... because of a bad dream.

  On the screen, Dvorak and Trace moved deeper into the alien hall of wonders beneath the lunar surface. There were supposed to be no people present when the warheads went off, Pritchard thought. No risk to human life!

  But now two people had gone to explore, daring to do something no one else would do. And look at everything they had discovered....

  How could he let Celeste wipe that away because of a nightmare? A blot of mustard, a fragment of underdone potato, as Dickens would have said. And if she had only a vague feeling of impending disaster, how could Celeste know that she wouldn't cause the disaster herself? What if the nightmare were warning her of a completely unrelated threat? Even if her dreams were somehow truly prescient, how could he be sure Celeste was interpreting them correctly?

  Then Pritchard recalled seeing her sit up screaming in the middle of the night, sweat-drenched, with terror on her face. She did seem to know something. And she had been absolutely right about the Grissom....

  Hunched over the flatscreen, Celeste called up the warhead command sequence. The technician stood beside her, his face the color of wallpaper paste. No one was willing to challenge the director's orders, especially not with Major General Pritchard standing there with the guard's service revolver ready.

  "This is the only way. We'll be safe," Celeste kept whispering. "Trust me."

  Rigid and formal, the second guard pulled her gun out of its holster.

  "I'm afraid I cannot allow you to do that, Director McConnell," she said.

  "Please step away from the console. Immediately."

  Livid, Celeste whirled to glare at her. Her lips curled back. Pritchard thought for a moment she was going to hurl herself at the guard and try to wrestle the weapon away.

  On the screen in front of Celeste, a schematic of Daedalus crater showed red circles at the locations of the deployed warheads. A blinking string of letters on the screen requested the access code, holding on a thirty-second time to detonation.

  Pritchard pointed his own gun toward the guard, holding it steady. He did not let his own gaze waver. "Sergeant, please drop your weapon. Now."