Stellaris: People of the Stars

by Robert E. Hampson

  “As well you should, but you’ve earned the traitor’s name and we will always refer to you that way. If you don’t like it, then send me home and try to build your bridge without us.”

  Luther’s mouth clamped shut in a tight, white line. He glanced at Sofie, then turned and stalked away.

  Sofie’s already pale face took on a whole new pallor. “Well, that could have gone better. Let me show you to your room. We’ll start fresh tomorrow.”

  “No, I’d like to see this immersion field now.”

  She stared down at me for a full second, then shrugged and looked around. “Alright, but we’ve found a potential problem. Are you in the proper frame of mind to look at this information objectively?”

  “I can separate my work from my personal feelings.”

  She shrugged, then led me to a large room with white walls that sparkled with thousands of tiny glittering pinpricks and handed me a pair of goggles.

  “Don’t remove these while in the simulation or the lasers will blind you.”

  The goggles were a tight fit on my broad face, but covered my eyes well enough. Sofie flipped some switches near the door and the walls flickered faster and faster until vague, ghostly structures took shape in the room’s center.

  As the holograms solidified, I recognized the mag rail twin track system we’d built on Støvhage’s central plateau. It looked so real! Like flying over it in an aircraft. Then the bridge appeared on the horizon. Sigvaldi’s tail it had been called, with the computer-controlled stabilizers providing the barb, its upper reaches disappearing into the blue sky, like the real thing. The camera view shifted slightly to focus on and follow two carriages, one on each track, accelerating toward us.

  The bridge loomed larger in the background, getting ever closer, until it converged with the carriage at the docking terminus. I held my breath as the view zoomed in close enough for me to see the mechanical latch system engage, yanking the carriages off the track and up the bridge rails toward the moon passing above. But then something unexpected happened. The carriage closest to my perspective shifted suddenly, canting at a strange angle, almost faster than my eye could follow; it broke free and spun off in a ballistic arc. The second carriage then broke free and followed its predecessor in a spinning plunge to the ground below.

  “What the hell!” I whipped around to find Sofie, but she was invisible in the simulation. I almost removed my glasses, then remembered it could blind me. “Where are you?”

  The simulation halted and faded, revealing Sofie standing next to the control panel. “Can you—”

  I crossed the room, nearly losing my balance in the lower gravity, until I was right next to her. “What is this insanity? Why did your little cartoon show such a catastrophic failure?”

  “Because in the right circumstances—”

  My arms flailed and spittle sprayed; I didn’t seem to be able to control myself. “We’ve tested that design fifty times—”

  Sofie not only held her ground, but bent closer to my face and put her hands on my shoulders. “Judel! Listen to me. The numbers don’t lie. In a fully loaded condition, those locks will fail.”

  I wanted to yank away, scream in her face and leave, but there was a pleading in her eyes. She believed what she said. But those locks and that carriage design were our last bastion of respect. The entire bridge had been their idea, their design and built by them. We had built the mag rail track needed to accelerate the carriages to translation speed, but the engineering had been theirs. The carriages were our only real contribution and the locks were my design. They had wanted magnetic locks from the beginning, but we—no I—had insisted that mechanical locks would be more robust and reliable.

  She squeezed my shoulders and bent a little lower until her face was inches from my own. “Please trust me, Judel.”

  “But we tested them,” I muttered and took a deep shuddering breath. “To three times the load requirements.”

  She dropped her hands and straightened to her full height. “I know. But you tested for individual stresses, not all twelve factors at the same time, because there is no way to do that until the actual system is built. We also suspect the purity level of the carbon alloy in your electronic models is higher than you’re capable of manufacturing, so we set it at a more realistic level in our simulation.”

  “But we—”

  “And before you get defensive, we can’t produce that level of purity either. It would only be possible with nano-assemblers and you know we haven’t had any luck with that.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Show me.”

  We watched the simulation four more times, with color enhancement and data tags showing exactly what happened as the stress loads piled up until the latch mechanism failed. So many thoughts crowded my head. I had doubts, but I also didn’t believe that Sofie was frivolous and shallow enough to waste so much effort creating an elaborate ruse. Especially not just to get her way on magnetic locks or for a little one-upmanship. Once the lasers were shut off I removed my glasses and rubbed my eyes.

  “You must be exhausted,” Sofie said. “Are you ready to go to your room?”

  I nodded and let her lead me through the now dark and empty engineering center and down the wide corridor to the dormitory and my room. We both hesitated awkwardly in the open door, but when I asked her to come in, she smiled and gave me a little shove. “Get some rest.”

  And I did just that, still in my clothes, and the last thought in my tired mind was of Sofie’s hands on my shoulders, only this time, instead of yelling, she kissed me.

  * * *

  The next morning I awoke stiff and unsure of the time. I took a shower that required me to squeeze through a rubbery, sphincter-like membrane into a tight little closet. The water spray came from three sides and, due to the weak gravity, filled the space with a weird mist made of large droplets that clung to me and had to be squeegeed off. I put on fresh clothes and settled down to reexamine the latch design. Each time I looked at the numbers it felt like touching an open wound.

  So I left my room, curious as to how far I’d get before their security wonks collected me. I wandered aimlessly for more than an hour, but the only thing I noted that could be considered useful intelligence was that most of the plazas and corridors I found were almost empty. Of course other than my dealings with Sofie, I had no clue about the schedules these people kept, so I could be between shift changes or maybe it was a holiday. I couldn’t escape the feeling that the infrastructure had been designed for a much larger population.

  The expected hand on my shoulder finally came, but when I turned, it was a winded Sofie.

  “Good morning,” I said. “Rough night?”

  “Why are you out wandering around? Are you trying to get me in trouble? I’m supposed to be your escort.”

  “I’m a tourist. Was I supposed to stay in my room?” I said, feigning innocence.

  She sighed and shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m winging this too. Look, they expect us at the engineering center in an hour, but there are no actual design meetings scheduled until the afternoon. Do you feel up to a little field trip to the surface? Since you are a tourist and all, I thought you might like to see the bridge from the outside.”

  “Absolutely!”

  She led me back to the locker room where I’d left my suit the day before. We helped each other dress and cross-checked our equipment after topping off our gasses, then walked up a long, sloping corridor that ended in a cluster of airlocks. As we waited for the air to evacuate, we checked our communications links.

  “As soon as we’re outside, you need to clip your short tether to the guide line,” she said. “It’s about one tenth of Støvhage’s gravity. It’s harder to reach escape velocity than you might think, but if you get a good enough launch it will still take hours for you to come down.”

  She took my hand before the hatch opened and held onto me through the whole tethering process. It felt a little silly, like a child being mothered, but I also knew that sh
e’d been born in this gravity and had far more vacuum experience than I, so was grateful for the help.

  We walked perhaps half a kilometer, then stopped and turned back to look at the bridge.

  “I knew you’d want to see it from the outside, too,” Sofie said.

  The terminal building we had exited was huge, perhaps three stories high, covering several acres and that was only the end where the bridge was anchored. Aside from my brief peek through the capsule window, I had only seen the bridge from Støvhage’s surface, moving past at over a thousand kph, which gave it the impression of some vast, bizarre aircraft. From this perspective it was a tower rising impossibly high into the blackness, getting ever smaller until it vanished from view.

  The inflexible neck on my suit forced me to lean backward in order to look up, but upon seeing a slowly rotating Støvhage nearly filling the sky overhead I totally forgot about the bridge. Painfully white clouds covered much of the surface, but I could see green bands separating the blue of lakes and oceans from the yellow-brown of the still dead lands. The fragile proof of our generations-long struggle. It was beautiful, powerful, and compelling.

  I gasped and muttered an old litany from the days when—due in no small part to these traitors on Sigvaldi—humanity’s survival on the surface had been doubtful.

  Sofie had said nothing during this time and when I turned to see why I found her facing away from me, staring at what looked like a smooth, nearly cylindrical mountain. Various antenna and other equipment protruded from the top and I realized it was an enormous building, covered by a thick layer of regolith.

  I touched her shoulder. When she turned to face me, the lights inside her helmet glistened from tear tracks on her cheeks.

  “Sofie?”

  “We have to stop this, Judel.”

  “What?”

  She pointed to her helmet and then held up a gloved hand with two fingers, then three, then one.

  I changed the channel on my suit radio to 231.

  “I’m going to do something stupid,” she said. “Please trust me. This needs to be done.” She unhooked our tethers from the guideline, then clipped them together and motioned for me to follow.

  We left the marked path and struck out directly for the strange buried building. Sofie never said we needed to hurry, but I felt an urgency in her actions so I followed without comment. After about ten minutes and little talking, we arrived at a tube that disappeared into the “hillside” which Sofie entered without slowing. Small, dust-covered lights cast dim illumination on the corrugated interior which went about forty feet before ending at a very strange airlock.

  The hatch was flush with its surrounding wall, revealed only by a seam not much wider than a human hair. Sofie punched a code into a lighted touch panel beside it which was totally smooth and almost completely blended into the wall. This building had obviously been here for many years, yet this was some of the most advanced workmanship I’d ever seen. Their techniques and capabilities were even more advanced than we’d thought.

  The hatch sank slightly into the wall, then slid into a recess, allowing us to enter. My heart sank as I looked around the inside of the airlock. If they were able to employ such exquisite workmanship on something as utilitarian as an airlock then we were doomed. The weaponry at their disposal must be beyond our imaginations.

  We passed through a powerful air curtain and vacuum system, then entered into a locker room and helped each other out of our suits. They were almost clean and I wondered why they would use such a wonderful system in this building, but not the main terminal building.

  “You said we’re doing something stupid. Why? What is this building?”

  Sofie turned and smiled at me. “You haven’t figured it out yet, Judel? We’re inside the ship. This is the Amundsen.”

  I steadied myself against the wall as vertigo made the room spin. Impossible. It couldn’t be true. We’d been led to believe the ship had long ago been scavenged for its systems and materials. Yet it all suddenly made sense. The signage was Norwegian, but contained words I didn’t recognize. The workmanship. The technology.

  I saw Sofie in a new light. She knew I was a spy. She had to know. Yet she was showing me a secret greater than all others. “Why?”

  “Wait and maybe it will make better sense when I show you the rest.”

  As I followed her through the ship, I saw that it had indeed been at least partially dismantled. Cavernous, echoing chambers where whole decks had been removed, leaving only wiring and pipe stubs. Hatches had been removed and I could see into large open areas and stripped cabins. We went down ladder after ladder, going far deeper into the ship and making it obvious that only a small portion made up the buried part I could see from the surface.

  When we entered another echoing chamber that curved gently away in two directions—obviously part of the rotating habitat—I finally got a sense of scale. The ship had to be a kilometer in diameter and at least half of the floor space I could see was covered by sleeper units. As we threaded our way between them I noticed that some were lit up. They were all occupied…by babies.

  Sofie led me to the only free-standing structure amid the cemetery of electric coffins and opened the door. Two surprised men stood in a room filled with humming equipment. They immediately backed away to the far wall and started talking animatedly.

  “We don’t have much time, so please listen and try to believe everything I tell you. We know you’re a spy. I also know you are a good person and I think if you have enough information you’ll make the right decision.”

  Despite the earnest expression on her face, I couldn’t help but hear Lund’s warning. Remind yourself that their motivation is the same as ours. To do what is best for their own people.

  “Your government is building twelve large lift vehicles. We estimate each one could carry a hundred or more soldiers. I’ve seen the pictures, but couldn’t get copies to show you. You’ll just have to trust me that they exist.”

  A sinking feeling settled over me. If that was a lie, then it was one that rang true. It sounded too much like Lund and his people. They needed me and my intelligence report, yet they would never tell me why it was important.

  “It’s hard to be certain without people on the ground, but by the level of activity around the sites, we estimate they are at least a year from completion. That’s why we’re trying so hard to finish the bridge first. We’re hoping that our people will fare better if integration is slow and natural instead of sudden and by force.”

  My thoughts were still on Lund and his subterfuge, so her comment took a second to sink in. “Wait. Integration?”

  “Yes. It’s inevitable. That’s why I brought you here.”

  She led me to a large console, covered with data-filled display screens. “I’m not exactly sure what our ancestors originally named this machine, but we call it the DNA Adjustor. A combination of our limited population, cosmic radiation, and the very low gravity inflicts our children with an extremely high birth defect rate for natural births. So instead of normal gestation, we put the fertilized eggs into sleeper units, where the DNA Adjuster can monitor the genetic health of the babies and correct problems early.”

  Growing babies inside an artificial environment made my skin crawl, but the engineer in me was still fascinated. I leaned in for a closer look and marveled at the symbols and text scrolling across the screens. History told us that our ancestors from Earth directly manipulated genetics, just as they’d been able to manipulate matter on a molecular level, but here it was directly in front of me; one of those magic machines kept working for hundreds of years.

  “It sounds as if you have a working system. So why the limited population? And what is the limit?”

  She was slow to respond and seemed to be struggling with the question. Then I heard clattering from behind us and looked back toward the door we’d entered. A squad of armed soldiers poured through the hatch, spread out and moved toward us.

  “Our population is fixed at
nine thousand,” she said abruptly. “That is the most our resources and economy can support. Like everything on the Amundsen, this DNA Adjustor machine was triply redundant. But two of the three machines have failed in the last few years. When this last one fails—and it will eventually because we don’t understand the technology—then our already small population will start to collapse.”

  By that point we were surrounded and an earnest, yet nervous young woman approached wearing an officer’s uniform. “You’re in a restricted area. Please come with us.”

  “I still want to meet your dog,” Sofie said and kissed me on the cheek.

  * * *

  The rest of that night I was kept locked in my quarters. I worried about Sofie—feeling somehow responsible and powerless—so I did what I always do when I’m stressed. I worked. In the morning I sent a message to Sofie and Luther, telling them I had a possible solution to the carriage-lock problem and I hoped they would listen to me.

  Four armed guards arrived and escorted me to the engineering center. They even accompanied me into the large conference room, where they fixed me with menacing glares from their posts near the door.

  I put my presentation up on the wall screen, ready to discuss by the time Luther arrived flanked by two other engineers.

  “Where’s Sofie?” I tried to look as menacing as I could without bringing the guards down on me.

  “She…is being detained,” Luther said with the same level of disgust most reserved for discussions of bodily functions. “There will be an investigation as to why she violated security protocols. In the meantime, in order to have as minimal a schedule impact as possible, we need to get these design changes approved so that the failed mechanical latching system can be scrapped in favor of our original magnetic locking system.”

  “As Sofie demonstrated yesterday, the mechanical latch system does fail six percent of the time under maximum loading, which is an unacceptable risk. However, problems with the mag lock system still exist too and—”