Singularity Point

by Brian Smith

  “Sign up with Muse Monthly, yet?” Kusaka snorted derisively. “They’ll ‘make you rich’!”

  Ashburn laughed. “I hear ya—let the buyer beware, eh? Anyway, there are at least two big startups fixing to start up, and Barsoom Traders alone has been contracted for a half dozen runs, split between Titan and Hyperion.”

  “Hyperion?” Kusaka asked. “What’s going on there?”

  Ashburn shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. I caught a look at the payload manifest before I left Dejah Thoris—Captain Xiang caught that first Hyperion run. Looks like someone’s planning to build an entire construction dock out there based on the payload: a drop-and-go fusion reactor, a couple of industrial-scale 3D printers, large-scale excavation bots, and a small army of synths and other robotic helpers. They aren’t doing it half-assed.”

  “Well, I guess for Hyperion that makes a little more sense,” Kusaka replied. “Maybe not a construction dock, but a repair facility, maybe? I can definitely see a market for one out there. So, is your ship going to be running back and forth between here and Saturn for a while?”

  “Thuvia will be making two of the Titan runs, but not back to back. For the best profit margin, you have to work the triangle, right?” Ashburn added rhetorically. He opened a chart of the solar system with a sweep of his hands and flicked it over to Kusaka’s oculars. “Check it out. Right now, Vesta lines up almost perfectly with Mars and Saturn, but we won’t be stopping there, because we have a full contract-load for Titan. Jupiter’s ‘Greek’ Trojans, the asteroid cluster in Jupiter’s L4 point, will be the next stop. They’ve got tons of minerals and water there, but they always need thruster fuel for those little rockminers. So, I’ll tank in a load of liquid methane from Titan, trade it for precious metals, then swing back around to Earth with maybe a stop at Ell-4 in between. A nice retrograde tour of the solar system. The big money is always in luxury goods and passengers from Earth back to Mars, where we’ll load up the next Titan run and do something similar all over again. My purser tells me this isn’t the most profitable circuit we’ll ever do, but the contract with this new startup sort of limits our options for the outbound leg to Saturn, since they bought almost the whole hold.”

  “Ichiban!” Kusaka grinned. “One of these days I’d like to ship with you—just for the fun of it!”

  Ashburn laughed. “I’d make you the chief engineer today, buddy. It’d be a criminal waste of your talents, though. One of these days we’ll cop some sort of short out-and-back for some reason or other and you can ride along for fun—a little sabbatical. Or even a longer run, whenever you want—just let me know. You won’t have to pay anything—you’ll ship as my guest. Captain’s privilege.”

  “Arigato, Mike-san.”

  Banth One casually slid around the mottled, potato-shaped Phobos, with Ashburn occasionally squeezing the gyrogrips for small attitude adjustments to keep her oriented the way he wanted. Eventually Thuvia hove into view—she’d already been towed out of her dock and precessed so that her torch bell was pointed away from Phobos and the shipyard, which was good etiquette and always a sensible precaution—a fusion torch couldn’t accidentally melt or irradiate what it wasn’t pointed at.

  Thuvia was several hundred meters long, her stern dominated by the parabolic nozzle of her torch and the propellant-mass tanks surrounding her engineering plant. Forward of that were her primary electronic and communications modules, followed by the crew compartment, a permanent passenger module, and then the main hold, in that order. Like Dejah Thoris, her four auxiliary craft were externally berthed, hard-docked to the massive cargo-hold airlocks. Forward of all that, toward the bow, were the secondary electronics and communications modules, providing redundancy and backup in case an engineering casualty damaged or destroyed the primary array located aft. This section also hosted the dual cold-fusion auxiliary power units, or APUs, either of which could power the entire vessel’s electrical and life-support systems if the primary and backup laser-fusion reactors somehow failed. The bow of the ship was a dual-function aerobrake-and-radiation shield, giving her the overall appearance of a gigantic fat arrow hanging in space.

  It was all function over form, but the aesthetics wasn’t that bad either. Even though Mindy's Cure had eliminated cancer concerns and radiation exposure was treatable, the ship was still designed to minimize the latter to her human occupants, placing them almost amidships between the large mass tanks at one end and the cargo section and bow shield at the other. Both crew and passenger compartments had special, heavily shielded shelters where Thuvia’s human charges could take cover against events like solar flares.

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” Ashburn breathed, his throat feeling a little tight.

  “Hai, that she is. And she’s yours!” Kusaka added gleefully.

  Ashburn wordlessly held up a palm in reply, and Kusaka slapped him a high-five.

  They spent the next few minutes maneuvering for rendezvous and docking, with Kusaka watching every move with rapt interest. When Ashburn precessed them end for end for the final braking burn, they lost sight of Thuvia out of the cockpit viewport. Ashburn glanced over at this friend, who was grinning with almost childlike enthusiasm. Kusaka couldn't pilot a ship to save his life, but he sure loved to play the role of first officer.

  "Shiguro-san, sound the acceleration alarm, if you please."

  "Yokai, captain-san!" Kusaka replied. He slapped the alarm with gusto and the klaxon rang jarringly in the passenger compartment. “Attention, passengers. Stand by for free fall and docking maneuvers," Kusaka stated, parroting the announcement he’d heard any number of times. There was a sudden, bright flare of light at about their one o’clock high, causing Kusaka to flinch in alarm until he realized he was seeing the torch of a distant vessel throttling up to break orbit. Pretty as it was, you couldn’t look directly at a fusion plume without polarized snoopers or you’d risk blinding yourself permanently. Far beyond the orbit of Phobos, out in the Martian L2 point, the gargantuan cigar shape of Halsey Station was visible to the naked eye. A U.S. Navy torchship was maneuvering for rendezvous; Kusaka’s AR overlay tagged her as USS Reuben James.

  Ashburn checked their attitude and spent the final forty-five seconds fine-tuning his calculations through the holographic heads-up display in his AR data stream. As always, he had timed the deceleration burn down to the last erg. The autopilot fired the jets on schedule, putting them back under one Martian gravity for just a few seconds. As a matter of standard procedure, Ashburn hovered his hand over the manual throttle cutoff, on the off chance that the computer didn't cut the burn on schedule. He watched the timer roll down to zero and slapped the manual cutoff as a backup as the computer cut the burn right on the mark.

  Thuvia’s duty officer cleared them in to hard-dock with no delay.

  Ashburn watched his holographic display as the spaceplane sidled up next to her berth with near-zero relative velocity, and he instinctively fired a few sequential squirts from Banth One’s RCS jets to bring the ship in for hard-dock. Ironically, after all the ballistic skull-sweat it took to get the spaceplane from Nuevo Rio to this point, it was easier for a good pilot to just “wing it” at the very end and complete the docking maneuver by eye. With someone as experienced as Ashburn at the controls, it looked and felt like a computer-controlled stop anyhow.

  Four mechanical clamps locked into Banth One’s hull and firmly mated her main cargo lock with one of the four coincident airlocks in the ship’s hold. A muted clang echoed through the shuttle, and the appropriate docking lights on the console went from red to green. Ashburn locked down the board, and he and Kusaka released their restraints and floated back to board Thuvia. They activated their magboots once they were in the hold, reattaching themselves firmly to the deck.

  Campbell and Forester were both aboard. They were in good spirits and boisterously reminiscing about their youth when Thuvia’s new captain and his guest arrived. Ashburn was delighted to spot another old friend as well: Colin Harper, formerly
of His Majesty’s Royal Marines.

  The tough Australian ex-commando was about six feet tall but seemed taller and thinner than Ashburn remembered him. This was due in large part to the loss of muscle mass Harper had suffered over the years he’d spent living in Martian gravity. His hair had gone steel gray over the years, and the black eye patch he wore on the left side gave him a piratical aura. He wore an olive-green spacing jumpsuit with the sleeves velcroed off at his elbows, showing off well-muscled forearms. A pair of tattoos from his prior service decorated both, and a large-caliber pistol in the tactical holster on his thigh seemed more like an integral part of him than a mere sidearm.

  Knowing Harper as he did, Ashburn suspected there were a sharp fighting knife and some sort of holdout firearm squirreled away elsewhere about his person as well. Harper’s name was embossed in black lettering over his left chest pocket, while on the right was the tag of Aberdeen Astronautics Security Division, who weren’t contractors but the in-house division directly responsible for security at Aberdeen’s Mars-side headquarters and various shipyard facilities on Phobos. Harper also wore a dark patch on his shoulder which showed two small, eight-pointed gold stars near a third, smaller, four-pointed red star. Anyone would recognize the insignia as a depiction of Proxima and Alpha Centauri; the tabs at top and bottom of the patch were respectively labeled “GATEWAY” and “Project Daedalus”.

  “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” Harper exclaimed on seeing Ashburn. He quickly took in Mike’s fourth stripe. “No bloody way!”

  “Yeah, bloody way—and we’ll talk about yo momma later,” Ashburn grinned. To the surprise of everyone else the two men stepped in and shared a brief, zero-g bear hug made possible only through the tech of magboots. “How the hell have you been, old man?” Ashburn asked, and gestured at Harper’s eye patch. “I thought you were going to get that regenerated!”

  “Tried. The bugger didn’t take,” Harper shrugged, suddenly seeming to remember they were standing next to two Crandall Foundation trustees. He fired a sheepish grin at Campbell. “Sorry, sir. Dakota and I go way back. I haven’t seen him in a while,” he added.

  “We met during the Ell-4 incident,” Ashburn clarified when the others looked confused.

  Forester’s eyebrows went up. “Well, I’ll be damned! I already knew about Dakota here, Mr. Harper, but you were there, too?”

  “Aye, that he was,” Campbell answered. “That’s where you lost the eye, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It was Major Harper back then, and he led the hostage-rescue team,” Ashburn supplied.

  “That’s a story I’d like to hear sometime,” Campbell remarked, implying that now was not that time.

  Introductions followed for those who didn’t already know one another—in this case Kusaka and Harper. Forester couldn’t resist taking a little dig at Kusaka, asking if Federov had his “sky pies” in the oven yet. Kusaka let the jibe go gracefully, and Ashburn bit back a scowl; he liked Forester and the man was doing him quite an honor today, but he’d never liked the way these captains of industry took their occasional, mildly bullying verbal shots at their employees and subordinates, knowing they couldn’t return fire.

  “Well, mate, we’ll have to catch up another time,” Harper told Ashburn. “We’re tying up loose ends on a security breach in the new Gateway facility—that’s what we’re calling the new dock—the one for Daedalus.”

  “If we ever get around to building her,” Forester quipped, with a pointed look at Campbell.

  “She’ll be built, never fear,” Campell replied.

  “What kind of security breach?” Ashburn asked.

  Harper shrugged noncommittally. “Doesn’t matter now—it’s over,” he replied firmly, obviously refusing to air any of his company’s dirty laundry out-of-house. “When do you ship out, Dakota?”

  “’Little over a week,” Ashburn replied.

  “If you have a few days Mars-side, comm me—we can catch up.”

  “Yeah, I’ll do it! It’s good to see you, old man.”

  “Likewise, mate. I’ll meet you aboard the boat, boss,” Harper added to Campbell, before stumping off down the corridor in his magboots.

  Campbell looked around, the engineer in him fully appreciating the finished product his company had built. “Well, Ty, the delivery inspection and data work are all done. I just wanted to see her off and say congratulations to you and the captain in person,” he said amiably, turning to Ashburn. “Ty says your first run is going to be out to Titan.”

  Ashburn nodded. “It is. I figured you’d know all about it. Most of the hold was bought by a new startup, but there’s some stuff for Janus Station, too—all the leftover payload from this run, in fact.”

  Campbell looked taken aback. “What?”

  Ashburn paused, suddenly aware that he’d just let something slip he wasn’t supposed to. He didn’t really know how much Forester knew about Campbell’s connection to Janus Industries, and Kusaka knew nothing. Ashburn recovered quickly. “Sorry,” he said. “There’s this little station on Titan, owned by an independent called Janus Industries—don’t know if you’ve heard of them or not. Anyhow, part of the payload is theirs. We drop it at Chusuk Station and they pick it up there.”

  “Ah, I see,” Campbell replied.

  Just then, a worker in an Aberdeen jumpsuit floated by them expertly, not making use of his magboots. The worker pulled off a smartly executed piece of zero-g acrobatics to get around the men and launch himself downrange toward the airlock, where a hopper was waiting to shuttle off the last of the Aberdeen delivery crew.

  “Damn showoff synth,” Campbell grumbled after the worker had gone by.

  “Wait,” Kusaka protested. “That wasn’t a synth.”

  “Hell if it wasn’t!” Forester boomed. “You should see some of the bots ol’ Bill here has at his beck and call. Look—” he added. “Here comes another. Hey, you! Hold up for a tick!”

  Another worker in Aberdeen company togs stopped with apparently little effort, then engaged her magboots to hold herself in place. “Yes, sir?” she asked pleasantly. Ashburn shot a quick glance at Kusaka, who was obviously thinking the same thing he was—there was no way this woman was a synth!

  “What’s your designation, darlin’?” Forester asked.

  “My name is Ella,” she answered. “Shift two. We’re getting ready to depart, sir. Is there something you need? I’ve got to get to my boat.”

  “See?” Kusaka said, implying he was right, that Ella was human.

  Forester’s Texas-sized laugh boomed through the corridor. “Ella, are you human or synthetic?”

  “Synthetic,” she replied.

  For a moment, Ashburn and Kusaka thought she was putting them on. Then she reached up and flipped open the tip of her left middle finger, exposing a hard data port. She smiled at them. “It can be hard for humans to tell the difference, I’m told.”

  Ashburn was used to being able to reach out and touch a synth for whatever reason he wanted. When he reached up to touch Ella, she firmly intercepted his hand, stopping him with the most human of reactions. “Please don’t touch me. You aren’t an Aberdeen technician, and in any event you don’t have authorization,” she stated. “I work for Aberdeen Astronautics. I’m not a sex model.”

  “Sorry,” he said automatically. It was maybe the first time in his life he’d apologized to a robot. “I just wanted to check out your skin.”

  “Please don’t touch me without authorization,” she repeated, sounding slightly less pleasant.

  “On your way,” Forester directed, winking at his companions and aiming a slap at the synth’s buttocks as she started moving again. She reached back and slapped his hand away—hard enough to hurt. She shot him a dark scowl, along with a pointed warning glance as she went about her business. Forester rubbed at his hand somewhat absently. “See that? ’Bout as human as they come, without any flesh and blood in there,” he commented. “See that look she gave me? She looked like she
wanted to pop me one!”

  “That’s . . . pretty incredible,” Ashburn said slowly, watching her go.

  “It hit you!” Kusaka added indignantly, his disbelief mixing with grave concern. That was something synths were not programmed to do—ever. At least not legally.

  “Defensive programming. More a block than anything else—hard enough to sting a little, but not enough to do any real damage,” Forester replied. “Half of Aberdeen’s workforce is made up of those things now. The human half has never seen anything like them and probably thinks they all ought to double as sex models at breaktime. Something had to be done to curb that, or nobody’d ever get any work done!” he guffawed.

  Campbell looked distracted. “They got your shiny new torchship built ahead of schedule, didn’t they?” he observed before turning back to Ashburn. “They’ll get Daedalus done quick-smart, too, when the time comes,” he added pointedly. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, eh, lad?”

  “I suppose,” Ashburn replied, trying not to sound dubious. He didn’t let it show, but the realism of the synth and the casual, probably illegal way it was programmed to autonomously defy and/or strike a human being was something he found profoundly disturbing.

  “I’ve got a few of them running around company HQ in Kasei,” Forester confided. “They’re about as good as human employees—better in some ways, truth be told. I can get you a few for Thuvia if you want, Dakota. Some of the other captains have expressed an interest.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Ashburn replied guardedly. What he was thinking was, No way in hell.

  “Where did those synths come from? Who makes them?” Kusaka asked.

  Campbell shrugged, his poker face working as well on Kusaka and Ashburn as it had on Shu years back when she’d asked why the foundation was interested in Alpha Centauri. “Some new independent outfit here on Mars. Omni Systems, I think they’re called. I expect these models will be the standard in another few years. They’re damned realistic, aren’t they?”