Pandora's Star

by Peter F. Hamilton

  When the torment was over, he grabbed a towel and wiped the rivers of sweat from his face. From the ache in his leg muscles he knew he was going to be stiff for a week. ‘See you in the bar,’ he groaned, and slowly made his way to the sanctuary of the gentlemen’s locker room.

  Forty minutes later, with at least some of the pain eased by a hot massage shower, he walked into the bar. The Clinton Estate was barely two and a half centuries old, but from the darkened oak panelling and high-backed leather chairs the bar could have dated back to the late nineteenth century. Even the staff looked the part, dressed in their scarlet jackets and white gloves.

  Paula was already sitting in a big leather wing chair, in one of the bay windows which gave a sweeping view out over the Estate’s formal gardens. With her smart suit and perfectly brushed hair reaching just below her shoulders she had the kind of easy poise which women from the Grand Families spent decades trying to achieve.

  ‘Bourbon,’ Thompson told the waiter as he eased himself into the chair opposite her.

  A light smile touched Paula’s lips at the tone of the order, as if she’d scored another point.

  ‘So did Rafael give you a hard time over Venice Coast?’ he asked.

  ‘Let’s say I was made aware he was unhappy. People see it as another victory for Elvin and Johansson over me. They are quite blind to what it actually signifies.’

  ‘That we have a new player in town.’

  ‘Not new. But they have become visible for the first time.’

  ‘You still believe there’s a mole in the Executive office?’

  ‘Or a Grand Family, or an Intersolar Dynasty. You’re the ones with the permanent connections, after all.’

  ‘Rumour in the Senate Hall dining room is that you told Mel Rees it could be the Starflyer.’

  ‘It is a possibility.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s logical, but Paula, it’s not popular. Just so you know. There are some planetary parliaments who have elected people who support the Guardians, not many, and it was all proportional representation votes. But the fact that anyone like that can gather support is worrying.’

  ‘Oh, I know it’s not popular. It’s not something I’m actively pursuing.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound like you.’

  ‘I can’t do my job if I don’t have a job.’

  Thompson greeted the arrival of his bourbon with a relieved grin. ‘We all get backed into corners. I’m sorry. It must be especially hard for you.’

  ‘I said actively pursuing. As the old prison saying went: they’ve only got your body behind bars.’

  ‘I see. So what can I do to help?’

  ‘I need to know if there really is a secret security section which is only answerable to the Executive.’

  ‘No, there isn’t. And I should know, our family actually pre-dates the Commonwealth. I can check with my father to be absolutely certain.’

  ‘Please do. It is important.’

  It wasn’t what Thompson expected, nobody ever questioned him; but then that was what made Paula so refreshing. They had started their association all those years ago with a quick exchange of information. She was after one of the Zarin Prime Minister’s staff, while he was trying to steer a bill on infrastructure tax credits through the Senate, which Zarin was opposing. Ever since then they had swapped facts and gossip on politics and criminals. Thompson wasn’t sure if they were friends, but the relationship had certainly been rewarding for both of them. And he knew he could trust Paula implicitly, which was just about unique in the circles he moved through. ‘Okay. What if there is? Will you try and arrest the President? Poor old Doi only just got in, and that was on a miserable percentage.’

  ‘The fact that Columbia hasn’t blocked the Venice Coast investigation suggests that situation won’t arise. I’m just eliminating possibilities at this stage, that’s all.’

  ‘Then let me tell you that I don’t know of any Grand Family who’d do such a thing. We’ve no reason to. Far Away and the Guardian terrorists don’t have any impact on our activities and money.’

  ‘Which leaves us with Nigel Sheldon.’

  ‘Who you will never arrest.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Not that the order would have come from Sheldon himself, anyway. Some fifth-level family executive will be trying to earn themselves points.’

  ‘That wouldn’t surprise me. Although, we don’t have any solid evidence that Rigin was ever working for Adam Elvin in the first place.’

  ‘You don’t?’

  ‘No. What we were observing resembled one of his smuggling shipments, that’s all. Although there is one major difference: the nature of the equipment Rigin was collecting.’

  ‘I skimmed the report. It was all high-tech stuff?’

  ‘Yes. But no weapons. If it genuinely was Elvin’s shipment, that would suggest Johansson is moving into a new phase of activity. I’ve no idea what, but there’s a very simple way to prevent it.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘A full examination of every piece of cargo shipped to Far Away. I’ve been arguing this for years, decades, actually. Every time I get the same answer – it costs too much and delays play hell with transport scheduling, especially with Half Way’s wormhole cycle.’

  ‘What did Rafael say?’

  ‘That he would press for it. But there’s been no movement. I need someone with real clout to implement the policy. You.’

  ‘Rafael has real clout, believe me. Some of us are getting worried about how much.’

  ‘Then all I can say is he’s not using it to support my request.’

  ‘Probably pissed at you for Venice Coast. His shiny new Agency didn’t look good in the aftermath. Did you watch any of the news shows? The editorials weren’t friendly. Alessandra Baron even took a swipe at you personally.’

  ‘So I heard,’ Paula said dryly. ‘But that should not affect Columbia’s judgement on this issue. Would you lobby the President for me on this, Thompson?’

  ‘It will annoy the Halgarths. They’re the only Intersolar Dynasty who have any real involvement with Far Away. But if you assure me it’s necessary, then of course I’ll use what influence we have. Right now we’re in a lot of credit with Doi.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  20

  After departing Anshun, the Conway and her sister scoutships, the StAsaph and the Langharne, took a mere seventy-two days to reach Dyson Alpha. Commander Wilson Kime was thankful for the shortened flight time. For all her speed, the Conway was barely half the size of the Second Chance, with a corresponding shortage of crew facilities. The most obvious change was the lack of a life-support wheel. The new scout ship marque had a crew of twenty-five, whose quarters were integrated with the main fuselage. Although the Conway’s super-structure was still a basic cylinder, blunt at both ends, she was a lot more streamlined than her pioneering predecessor, measuring a good two hundred and fifty metres in length, and eighty in diameter. The reduction in both length and volume was mainly due to reducing the plasma rockets to three, along with all the associated cryogenic tankage. Also, given the mission profile, there was no requirement for the auxiliary craft, their hangars, and their support systems.

  Kime had known CST was designing second-generation starships before the Second Chance departed, but even he’d been surprised by the seven-month assembly time. More impressive was the way they’d stuck to the completion dead-line with all the chaos of facilities and personnel being transferred to the High Angel. He’d still not got over his anger at that particular act of stupidity. After three and a half centuries he’d assumed government had by now learned how to keep bureaucratic interference to a minimum on big projects. Of course he knew it was all down to horse trading between the Grand Families and the Intersolar Dynasties, after all he’d taken part in enough sessions and deals himself, but surely the Executive knew it had to protect a project as important as this one from petty manoeuvrings and pork barrel politics? Apparently not.

  It didn’t help hi
s temper when he found out the scale of the alliance Nigel Sheldon had formed with the Farndale board, with himself as the figurehead of cooperation. So after being perfectly outmanoeuvred by committee and bumped upstairs to Commander of the new Starflight Agency, there was nothing left for him except bitching to Oscar and Anna about losing crucial people at critical times because they were needed to establish a duplicate facility at High Angel. His own involvement with the new shipyards was limited to a few administrative visits and one formal reception with the redoubtable Chairwoman Gall. They’d never liked each other. The reception hadn’t changed that.

  As before, he’d devoted his time and talent to pushing the construction of the scoutships. The development of High Angel and running the Starflight Agency could wait until his return. Unlike the Commonwealth Executive he realized their absolute priority was to find out what was happening at Dyson Alpha since the barrier went down. At least his new prestigious position meant he could give himself command of the scoutship reconnaissance mission.

  So now he was enduring the physical and unfortunately biological discomforts of prolonged freefall once again. The scaling down of crew quarters had included the more luxurious fittings they’d enjoyed on the first flight. Conway’s compartments were a cluster of connected spheres wrapped round the fuselage axis, behind the sensor bay and above the power deck. Each sphere had padded walls and all the internal equipment had soft rounded plastic edges, alleviating the worst impact bruises. But just like his time back on Ulysses he spent hours a day on various pieces of ingenious gym equipment to prevent his heart and muscles from atrophying. Once a week he visited the doctor for his organ functions to be monitored, resulting in an assortment of biochemicals being administered to counter their decay. Then there were the meal times when he had to force himself to consume the designated mass of food when he wasn’t remotely hungry; and all day long his e-butler reminded him to sip his water bottle to counter the dehydration which his body could no longer feel. To cap it all, and the undisputed chief of everyone’s bitch list, were the visits to the disposal utility chamber. It wasn’t just politics which hadn’t made much progress over three hundred and fifty years. Taking a dump in space still involved a disturbing arrangement of straps and suction pumps. At least having a pee was relatively straightforward – that’s if you were a man. The women on board had all undergone a little cellular reprofiling procedure to make suction tube use more convenient and less prone to slippage. It was a supreme test of character to ignore that during sex.

  Half a light-year out from Dyson Alpha the Conway came to a halt, though she remained inside the wormhole. The StAsaph and the Langharne moved up beside her. CST had solved the communication problem for ships in hyperdrive by using modulated pulses of the hysradar function. Given the difficulty involved in producing a hyspulse within the worm-hole generator, the process was still somewhat crude. It certainly wasn’t a directional signal, they were broadcasting to anyone in range, and it couldn’t carry anything like the amount of datatraffic as a microwave beam. But voice traffic was relatively easy to achieve.

  Wilson drifted into the bridge compartment and secured himself in one of the acceleration couches. On either side of the couch, screens and hologram portals unfolded from their pedestals. He studied the displays and asked Anna to sweep round with the hysradar. ‘Keep it to a quarter light-year radius,’ he told her.

  ‘Aye, sir,’ she replied from her own couch. She was serving as his executive officer for the flight, and was very conscious of everyone knowing about their relationship. It made her a stickler for protocol and efficiency, constantly proving to the crew she’d won the position on merit alone. More than one had privately asked Wilson if he could make her ease off the tight-arse routine. From that point of view, he was rather looking forward to the flight ending himself. Freefall really wasn’t everything the spaceflight romantics claimed. More than one of his bruises had been obtained inside their cabin.

  The hysradar scan showed they were surrounded by clear space; there was no trace of anything under acceleration. His e-butler opened a channel to the other two scoutships, encrypting the transmission.

  ‘Oscar, what have you got?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing in sight,’ the captain of the StAsaph replied. ‘I guess they’ve stopped sending ships away from their own star. At least in this direction.’

  ‘Looks that way. Antonia, have you got anything?’

  ‘Not a damn thing,’ Antonia Clark said from the bridge of the Langharne. ‘It’s clean out here.’

  ‘All right, we’ll proceed as agreed. Antonia, tag along with us until we’re ten AUs from the old barrier location. Stay in hyperspace and gather as much information as you can. Any hostile activity directed at us or you, and you are to get straight back to the Commonwealth.’

  ‘Understood.’ During the mission planning sessions back on Anshun she had spent days arguing that her scout ship should be the one accompanying the Conway, but there was no trace of resentment in her voice now.

  ‘Tu Lee, take us in,’ Wilson ordered. ‘Anna, sensors on passive mode, please.’

  ‘Already switched over, sir.’

  Wilson tried not to roll his eyes.

  The scoutships closed on Dyson Alpha. Their mission profile was simple enough; Conway and StAsaph were to enter the inner system, scanning for any sign of wormhole activity. If they found one, they were to approach the source, drop out of hyperspace, and attempt to open communications. If there was no sign of the Dyson aliens experimenting with worm-holes, they would fly to Alpha Major and try to open communications there.

  They were still a quarter of a light-year out from the star when Anna said: ‘We’re registering quantum fluctuations consistent with wormhole activity.’

  ‘From this far out?’ Tunde Sutton queried.

  ‘Yes. Whatever they’ve built, it’s goddamn powerful.’

  *

  MorningLightMountain began working on the problem as soon as its new Bose memories had revealed the theory and practical application of wormholes. It took just a few hundred immotile units to determine and quantify the fundamental principles, assisted by the Bose memory’s basic knowledge of human physics and mathematics. The equations fitted easily enough into its own understanding of quantum physics, simply extending the knowledge in a fashion it wouldn’t necessarily have thought of for itself. After that, came the more challenging task of designing the hardware. Of that, the Bose memories had little information.

  After a month, during which over a thousand immotile units had combined to analyse the new problem, and several advanced industrial manufacturing areas had been switched to producing components for the project, the first crude worm-hole generator was up and running. MorningLightMountain used it to open a small communication linkage to its biggest settlement at the large gas-giant. There, MorningLightMountain23,957, which supervised the settlement, was connected directly back into the original immotile group in real time. Over the next few weeks, a series of small wormholes was opened to MorningLightMountain’s other settlements, joining more and more remote subsidiaries to the main group cluster of immotiles back on the homeworld, meshing them all together into a single gigantic grouping.

  At this point, all the spaceship production facilities MorningLightMountain possessed across the star system were switched to manufacturing components for larger wormhole generators. As more and more wormholes were opened, linking planets, moonlets, and distant asteroid settlements, so the spaceships became redundant. It dismantled them and incorporated their resources into the new transport system. New power stations were deployed around the sun, vast rotating structures protected by force fields, that siphoned up the energy and transferred it (via wormhole) to the second gas-giant where the greatest wormhole of all was being constructed, the one that would reach across interstellar space.

  It took the full mental capacity of twelve thousand immotile brains to govern the interstellar wormhole, there were so many components to supervise, so ma
ny intricate applications of energy to control within the machinery. MorningLightMountain amalgamated the immotile specifically to form the command group; they had no other function, and they didn’t take part in MorningLightMountain’s unified thought processes. Even then, with so much brain power devoted to the device’s operation, it had to use more electronic processors than it ever had before to maintain the ancillary equipment.

  The interstellar wormhole had been operating for three weeks when several supplementary orbiting quantum wave detectors picked up the distortion points of approaching starships. They were smaller than the previous human starship, the Second Chance, but they were flying from the direction of the Commonwealth. They were also a lot faster.

  >ships mission / explain<

  I don’t know for certain. I expect a further attempt to establish communication. They’ll certainly want to know what happened to me and Verbeke.

  >confrontation probability / extrapolate<

  They don’t want a fight. The ships will be heavily shielded, though. They saw several ship battles while they were here before. They’ll know what level of defence they need this time.

  >response / explain<

  Oh, well, with my great tactical expertise . . .

  >tactical knowledge / memory<

  There was none. The Bose memories were lying – no, not lying, being sarcastic.

  >sarcasm / explain<

  It’s a human personality trait. Culturally related, you either got it or you don’t. I often used it to swat uppity students. I don’t think it applies to your culture, you’re more likely to use a nuke.