Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Morton gave Madoc a quick glance. ‘Tara only took her own stuff.’

  ‘You knew what was hers, did you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Did anybody else?’

  This time the glance Morton shot at his lawyer was a puzzled one. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘I read the transcripts of all your calls and messages to Broher associates,’ Paula said. ‘There was never any dispute over what was removed. So tell me this: in a home where two people have lived together for twelve years, where only those two people could possibly know which item was their own, how is it that the killer only removed her property?’

  Morton’s expression turned to one of stricken incomprehension. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.

  ‘No criminal gang would ever know what to take to set up the alibi,’ Paula said. ‘It would take someone intimate with the house and its contents. There were only two of you with the exact knowledge. One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn’t do it.’

  Morton slowly lowered his head into his hands, covering his grief and confusion. ‘Oh holy shit,’ he moaned. ‘I didn’t. Did I?’

  ‘Yes.’ Paula regarded him with the kind of sympathy normally extended to the bereaved. ‘You did.’

  *

  The jury took three hours to deliberate their verdict. Comment on the unisphere was that they took so long in order to enjoy a decent lunch at the taxpayer’s expense. When they filed back in to the courtroom and delivered their verdict nobody was surprised that it was unanimous. The electronically disguised voice from behind the curving silver glass announced, ‘Guilty.’

  The outbreak of chatter was swiftly silenced by the judge, who then told Morton to stand. There were, the judge said, very firm guidelines laid down for such appalling crimes: the minimum was usually twice the period of life loss.

  ‘Given that you committed this crime purely for your own advancement, I have to agree with the prosecution’s assessment that you are a cold immoral individual who sees other people’s lives as an inconvenience to your own ambition and has no qualm in eradicating such problems. Due to your evil, Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal have suffered the loss of decades without a body, I therefore have no hesitation in imposing a punishment of one hundred and twenty years of life suspension. Sentence to begin immediately.’ His gavel banged down loudly.

  Tara Jennifer Shaheef leaped to her feet and screeched: ‘You bastard!’ at her ex.

  On the other side of the public gallery a hysterical Mellanie screamed incoherently, struggling against the court officials holding her back from jumping the railings to be with her guilty lover. Some members of the public around her were cheering merrily at the commotion. Morton shook his head in bewilderment as he was led out of the dock, a study in tragicomic defeat. The reporters turned en masse to the prosecution table. Hoshe Finn and Ivor Chessel were clearly delighted, smiling wildly as they shook hands. Paula Myo seemed oblivious to the fuss all around her; she was picking up loose sheets of hard copy and slotting them neatly into her briefcase. Her hand-held array followed, and with the table surface clear, she walked out of the courtroom without looking around.

  14

  Wilson was now a hundred and twenty-nine days into the mission, and counting. In the same way everyone else on board the Second Chance was counting. Days, hours, minutes: every little unit was being ticked off with a combination of irritation and relief. Their problem, strangely enough, was just how well the starship had worked since they departed Oaktier. He supposed it was inevitable: enough money had been poured into the design, making sure every component had multiple redundancy along with at least a two hundred per cent tolerance rating. In his NASA days they’d called it goldplating. Everything on Ulysses had to work, and if some bizarre mishap did knock out a unit then three back-up systems jumped up to replace it. And that was when you could still see Earth through the viewing port; and communications with Houston took a few minutes at the most. It provided a tenuous feeling of connection to the rest of the human race which had always given him a degree of security. If something had gone badly wrong, he’d believed that NASA would ultimately do some-thing to salvage the situation. Today, though, the sense of isolation was stronger by orders of magnitude. Even he, with his previous experience, found their flight daunting. Should anything go wrong here in hyperspace, nobody was ever going to find them. It made him grateful for the way the starship had been constructed. This mission, he realized, had an altogether more mature feel to it than the Ulysses flight ever had.

  It was a civilized voyage. First of all there was the gravity. It might only be an eighth of a gee around the rim of the life-support wheel, but it made sure everything flowed in the right direction. His body was so much more comfortable with that. Then there was the food. Instead of neat efficient, rehydratable packets of precooked meals, the Second Chance canteen served dishes like pan-fried scallops with herb risotto; or loin of lamb with tarte tatin of vegetables drizzled with a thyme and tomato sauce; and the dessert selection was dangerously more-ish. For recreation there were a number of gyms (not even this ship boasted a swimming pool), which everyone dutifully attended. But most of the crew spent their spare time accessing TSI dramas. They had a huge library on board, with sexsoaps inevitably the most popular, though first-life first romances were equally fashionable, and there were numerous adaptations of classic fiction and biographies of historical characters. Wilson spent several days immersed in a sumptuous production of Mansfield Park. He’d read the novel in his first life, and was interested in the societal structure of the era which it conjured up (intriguing parallel with present-day Earth, he felt), though he was fairly sure there hadn’t been quite so many lesbian love scenes in the original book.

  Between fitness sessions, meals, TSIs, and ship’s duty, he spent most of his hours with Anna. Even after all this time, he still preferred a one-woman-at-a-time lifestyle. Exceptions being between serious relationships and marriages, and at the end of them when things were unravelling. But the kind of arrangements many of the Commonwealth’s wealthy, and not-so-wealthy, favoured had never really appealed; not like Nigel Sheldon with his thousand children and dozen-strong harem, or the Kandavu multi-families, or any other of the hundreds of variants on relationships At heart, he knew he was as old-fashioned as the era he’d come from.

  Anna, though, was good company; never demanding, happy to keep things comfortably casual. It was almost the same as before the launch, the difference this time being that everyone on board knew about them. That didn’t cause any resentment or whispering. Again, due to the nature of the voyage. They were all grown-ups. Although it had never been a firm policy, one you could find written down or in a program, Wilson had rejected all applications from first-lifers.

  He was convinced they didn’t have the temperament he wanted from his crew. The voyage so far had confirmed that in his own mind. There had been so little trouble, so few ‘personality clashes’, that he’d begun to regard the ship’s psychologist as superfluous. Even now, as he waited on the bridge for the hyperspace flight to end, there was no sign of any tension among those around him.

  ‘No significant mass within a hundred AUs,’ Oscar reported.

  ‘Thank you,’ Wilson said. He glanced round at the portals himself, seeing the gravitonic spectrum displays almost blank, like the eye of the storm. They’d obtained their last accurate navigational fix flying within three hundred AUs of a red dwarf, now ten light-years distant. That put them close to twenty-five light-years from Dyson Alpha, in clear interstellar space. ‘Okay, stand by to take us out of hyperspace. Anna, let’s have the main sensor suite on line please.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ She didn’t even grin at him. On the bridge, she took her duties very seriously indeed. Two seats away, OCtattoos on her hands and forearm began to shimmer like pulsing silver veins as her palms rested on the console i-spots, readying the equipment up at the bow of the
starship.

  ‘Astrophysics?’ Wilson asked.

  ‘Ready, sir,’ Tunde Sutton said. He was waiting at the rear of the bridge, along with two of the science officers, Bruno Seymore and Russell Sall. Their consoles all had double the number of portals and screens that the others had; capable of displaying a vast amount of data. In addition, all three men had upgraded retinal inserts, giving them a high-quality virtual vision field. If there was any anomaly out there in real space, they’d have it located and analysed almost instantaneously. They were also sharing the data with the astrophysics office, on the deck above, where the majority of specialists were waiting, including Dudley Bose.

  ‘Oscar, bring the force fields on line, please, and take tactical control.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  Part of Wilson’s virtual vision display showed him the power being routed into their force fields and atom lasers. Sensor data was also fed directly into the targetting control, with Oscar assuming executive authority for their missile arsenal. Wilson moved his virtual fingers to activate a general channel throughout the ship. ‘All right, ladies and gentlemen, let’s see what’s out there. Tu Lee, take us out of the wormhole. But keep the hyperdrive on line. We may need a fast exit.’

  Tu Lee grinned broadly. ‘Yes, sir.’

  The blue mist filling the two big high-rez portals at the front of the bridge began to darken. A ripple of black broke out from the centre, expanding rapidly. Clear pinpoints of light speckled the deep night outside the ship as the starfield appeared around them once more.

  ‘Tunde?’ Wilson demanded.

  ‘Nothing obvious, sir. Electromagnetic spectrum clean. Gravitonic empty. Standard particle density. Immediate quantum state stable. Zero radar return. Neutrino flux normal. Cosmic radiation high but not excessive.’

  ‘Sensors, show me Dyson Alpha,’ Wilson said.

  Anna centred the main telescope, feeding the image to the left-hand portal. Slim red brackets indicated the position of the shielded star. She bled in the infrared emission, and it appeared as a pale pink dot. Dyson Beta materialized slightly to one side. ‘Doesn’t look like there’s any change to either of the barriers,’ she said. ‘They were both still intact twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘Any activity in the surrounding area?’

  ‘Not that I can locate. Do you want a hysradar sweep?’

  ‘Not yet. Expand our baseline for the current sensors. I want a clearer picture of the area. Astrophysics, keep monitoring. Pilot, hold us stable here.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ Anna began to manipulate virtual icons. ‘Prep-ping for sensor module launches.’

  Wilson let out a quick breath of relief. His virtual finger was tapping icons almost unconsciously. On the console in front of him, one of the small screens flicked between camera images. Each one had a small portion of the starship super-structure, the forward sensor array, a slice of the life-support wheel, the plasma rockets. But no matter which camera he chose, there was never anything other than the ship and the very distant stars. Nothing. The emptiness was awesome. Frightening.

  When he was a boy, Wilson had enjoyed swimming. His parents had a small pool in their yard, and he’d used it every day. That didn’t stop him from continually nagging his parents to take them to the larger pool at the county sports centre. He’d been nine on the day of that visit, him and a whole group of friends; ferried out there by some harassed mother with a people carrier. With his skill and confidence he’d not been intimidated by the size or depth of the big pool, and was soon leading the others through the water. When he was in the deep end he dived to the bottom, sure he could touch the tiles. He made it easily enough, his strong strokes hauling him down away from the surface, popping his ears against the pressure twice on the way down before slapping his fingertips on the smooth blue tiles. Sound from the rest of the pool was curiously muted so far below, the thrashing feet above, dull, like the filtered blue light. Pressure squeezed him gently. So he started to swim up. And only then did he realize his mistake. He’d taken enough breath to get him down, but now his lungs were burning. Muscles twitched as the need to suck down fresh glorious air swelled desperately. He began to claw frantically at the water, which did nothing to increase his terribly slow speed. The need for air became overwhelming. And his chest began to expand, lungs working to pull in that sweet oxygen. Wilson felt the water sliding up his nostrils like some unstoppable burrowing creature. Right that second he knew if it got any further he would drown. It was enough to send his body into a frenzy, kicking and struggling. At the same time he found the discipline to stop his lungs from trying to inhale. Somehow he managed to break surface without the water spilling any further inside him. Only then did he suck down a huge breath of beautiful clean air, almost sobbing as the shock of what’d happened struck him. For a long time he’d clung to the side of the pool as big shivers ran up and down his body. Finally, he regained enough control to swim back out to his friends, not that he ever told them what had happened.

  Even during his air force combat flights he’d never felt so scared as that whimpering child striking out for the side of the pool. Nothing had ever come close to recreating that feeling. Until now. Now that same clammy sickness was gripping him just like it had his nine-year-old self as the reality sank in of how far away from anything they were. He started his ancient deep feedback breathing exercise routine, trying to calm his body before the shakes started.

  ‘Modules disengaging,’ Anna announced.

  ‘Right, thank you,’ Wilson replied a little too abruptly. His virtual hand stopped flicking through the camera sequence, and he concentrated hard on the images of the sensor modules. Something to do, something to shift his mind from the nothingness of outside. He felt his heart rate slow as he forced his breathing to a regular rhythm, though there was nothing he could do about the cold perspiration on his forehead. A text-only message popped up into his virtual vision, it was from Anna and read: Are you all right?

  Fine, he sent back. He didn’t look in her direction. Everyone else on the bridge seemed to be absorbed by their work, unaffected by what lay outside. He was the only one interstellar space was intimidating. That piqued him somewhat – enough to make him focus properly on his job.

  The screen on his console showed him the forward section of the Second Chance. Doors on eight cylindrical bays had opened up, spaced equidistantly just behind the bow’s large sensor cluster. Modules like big metallized insects sprouting golden antennae were drifting out, glittering in the lights around the rim of each bay. Ion thrusters flared blue on the base of each one, pushing them away from the starship.

  They travelled in an expanding circle, linked by laser and microwave, taking hours to reach their stand-off station. When they were fifty thousand kilometres out, their ion thrusters burned again, bringing them to a halt. As one, their dark protective segments peeled open, exposing delicate sensor instruments to the interstellar medium. Disks, blocks, booms and lenses uncoiled on the end of electromuscle tentacles and began scanning space around Dyson Alpha. The big arrays back on the Second Chance correlated the results, combining them into a single image with an extraordinarily high resolution in every spectrum.

  For everyone waiting eagerly on board, they were a big disappointment; virtually no extra information about the barrier was revealed. Its diameter was confirmed at twenty-nine point seven AUs. There was a moment of prayer-like silence on the bridge as that fact was absorbed. The surface was emitting in a very low infrared wavelength. Local particle density was slightly lower than average, indicating the solar wind emission was blocked. Nothing else could be detected. After five days of cautious observation for any sign of hostile events, or any other energy emission that might point to artificially generated activity, Wilson had to agree with his science team that there was no obvious danger at this distance. He ordered the sensor expansion modules back to the starship, and they flew fifteen light-years closer.

  When they emerged into real space again, they repeated the exa
mination. From five light-years, the images which the expanded baseline modules provided were even more exact. But nothing had changed. The interstellar particle winds blowing off nearby stars were detectable as they gusted round the barrier, creating giant swirls and eddies which sighed in the electromagnetic spectrum like faint whale song.

  Wilson moved them forward in one light-year increments. Each time, the eight modules would fly out and peer ahead. Each time they would provide a more detailed survey of the local radiation and particle environment. Of the barrier itself, they revealed nothing.

  ‘Take us to one light-month out,’ Wilson told Tu Lee.

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Tunde, that’ll take us within high-definition range of the hysradar.’ Wilson said. ‘Do we scan it?’

  The astrophysicist gave an expansive shrug from behind his bridge console. ‘It’ll tell us a lot about the nature of the barrier, but of course if there is an active force controlling it, then we’ll probably reveal ourselves. I can’t imagine they won’t be able to detect it.’

  Oscar looked at the forward portals which showed the blue walls of the wormhole closing over real space. ‘They have to know already. We’d be able to pick up the quantum signature of a wormhole from this distance.’

  ‘The builders must have realized that people would come and investigate at some point,’ Anna said. ‘You can’t do some-thing like this and expect it to go unnoticed.’

  ‘We’ll run passive scans first,’ Wilson said. ‘If there’s no response, we can use the hysradar.’

  Just under four hours later, the Second Chance emerged from hyperspace. Wilson didn’t have to order the expanded baseline modules out. The ship’s main telescope revealed the full expanse of the disk. In infrared it was like the baleful eye of some dreaming dragon.

  ‘Very low neutrino density out here, and virtually nothing coming from Dyson Alpha’s direction,’ Bruno Seymore said. ‘I’d say the barrier is impermeable to them. We should be picking up a whole deluge from the star at this distance.’