by Wil McCarthy
“Manmade object go bang,” Wallich muttered, snorting to himself. Then, more loudly: “So what the hell was it doing down here? How did it penetrate the Mycosystem so deeply without blooming a long time ago?”
“T-balance?” Tosca Lehne offered.
I cleared my throat. “Sir, could it be from Mars? Could there be humans living here, as well?”
“Not enough atmosphere,” Wallich said, dismissing the suggestion. “Somebody sent that thing down here, and unless there's some huge coincidence operating, or unless there are thousands of them and they go off all the time, I'd say its transmissions were somehow in response to our arrival. Definitely.”
“Someone's been tracking us right along,” Davenroy called out from the false engine room.
Wallich nodded. “Right. We're possibly not the only ones seeding the Mycosystem with detectors. But who the hell is detecting us, and why? This is a pretty sophisticated operation.”
No one had an answer for him.
“Okay,” he said, leaning back in his seat, retightening the straps. “Okay. We're in motion, here, and it's safe to assume the pinger was, too. Let's track the bloom's position optically, maybe compare it to angular positions on the radar pings themselves. Throw in frequency shifts, assuming they're due to Doppler, throw in the signal arrival times, and let's see if we can't trace back a course for this thing. Where did it come from? Where was it going?”
“No guarantee of equal spacing on the transmissions,” Lehne pointed out.
“Okay, fair enough. We'll leave that as an unknown. We have got several additional solid echoes, though, and I want trajectories on those as well.” He touched Lehne and Baucum each on the shoulder. “Can you two handle the problem while the rest of us work the trim burn?”
“Yes,” Lehne said.
Baucum nodded her agreement. “If we run all the unknowns through a million-trial randomization, we should be able to narrow in on a family of solutions. From there it should be mostly common sense. I figure, what, about half an hour?”
Lehne shrugged, noncommital but apparently more or less in agreement.
“Okay,” Wallich said, “do it.”
I felt a stab of envy then, because bioanalysis and countermeasures were certainly not superfluous tasks at this point. Far from it. Wallich had pulled them off normal duty simply because they were competent to solve this new problem, as indeed the whole crew probably was. Scientists and technicians and spacers all, all except for me. But I thought of Tug Jinacio, with his easy manner and his concrete, literal way of speaking, and doubted that he'd have known much about mathematics or technobiology or space navigation, either. Unless we somehow had blooms to fight, his job would have been really superfluous, all day, every day. I found the idea oddly cheering.
So the rest of us continued running calculations for the upcoming burn, and when it finally arrived it might almost have been just another smooth step in the preparations. Only the weight and vibration made it real. It lasted forty-five minutes, and when it was done we were still working the numbers for another five or ten minutes, gauging the effectiveness of what we'd done. Whee. Eventually, though, Baucum presented the results of the radar analysis.
“Slave your zee-specs to mine, please,” she said, whipping into a graphical presentation that cast colored lines all over the forward Mars display. She pointed to an arc. “This is the most likely path for our friend, Mr. Radar Beacon. White denotes its existence as a solid object, while the pink is its continuation along the same trajectory as a class one free-floating bloom. Note that there's another white line crossing here, possibly indicating the device's point of origin.”
The display flashed, lines vanishing and being replaced one by one. “Lehne's hypothesis is that this object here, with a radar cross-section comparable to that of a large instrument probe, is responsible for launching these other three objects, whose profiles are a good deal smaller. Possibly, these are additional radar beacons. And here, here, and here, we see other probelike signatures, with some fainter echoes that may indicate they've launched some beacons as well. It's very speculative, and I'm not sure I agree, but I haven't got a counterhypothesis I'm any happier with.”
“It's quite a welcoming party,” Rapisardi observed.
Wallich grunted. “It's very strange. Strasheim, contact the Gladholders and see if you can't find some information about this, right? They may be running some sort of experiment down here, though you'd think they'd have warned us, given that they knew where we were going.”
“The Gladholds aren't a single society,” I reminded him.
“Yeah, well, whatever. Call them anyway. I'm going off shift in a few minutes, and so is Davenroy. Eight-four sleep cycle until further notice. Rapisardi, we drop first payload in eleven hours. I want all diagnostics run at least twice before that happens, and I want you to wake me if you find any anomalies. It's a critical phase, not a time to find a weasel in our shorts.”
“We have access to the payload software from here,” Rapisardi said with an edge of annoyance. “Running the full diagnostic sequence twice is a terrific waste of my time. If anything is wrong, I simply need a minute to fix it and another minute to test the fix in simulation. And I hasten to assure you, nothing is wrong.”
Wallich darkened. “Yeah, well, this isn't a good time to go mucking with the guts of the mission, either. Just bear with me, all right?”
“Certainly,” came the reply, and if the word was not delivered with complete sincerity, well, Wallich didn't seem overly bothered.
~~~
Dibrin: please translate and forward to appropriate net channels. Hallo Gladholds. Pasteur encountering radar beacons etc in high Martian orbit. Experiment in progress? Possible hazards? Please advise ASAP. Thank you!
~~~
Eight-four rotation meant that each of us would work an eight-hour shift, then retire for four hours of sleep, circumstances permitting, then work another eight hours again. As it happened, this put me on the bridge for a long, uneventful stretch while ahead the planet swelled and behind, Rapisardi puttered with the detector packages. Meanwhile, Baucum was in bioanalyst heaven, making endless measurements of the sunlight and radar echoes that had passed through or bounced off of anything remotely mycoric in origin. She was paying me less than no attention, so I convinced Lehne to play a few games of chess, which he won handily despite the need to monitor his instruments.
And then Wallich and Davenroy returned, and Rapisardi agreed to skip his sleep shift, and Baucum tried to skip hers as well but was denied permission.
“We'll need you fully alert for the first deployment,” Wallich told her.
“Yes? I should think you'd need Rapisardi fully alert as well.”
He laughed and pointed at the hatchway. “To bed, young lady. Stop making sense at me.”
And so she went, and the next stretch gave me even less to do, even when another of the radar beacons went off a few times and then dissolved into vaporous bloom. Lehne handled the observations Baucum otherwise would have, and resource allocation simply wasn't an issue. I spent the time composing reports and collages I didn't have the budget to send.
Ahead, the planet was getting really large now. We'd cut magnification on the shared window from 500X to a hundred, and finally to fifty, but each time the image seemed determined to fill the screen again just as soon as possible. We were racing toward Mars at, what, something like three hundred kilometers per second? At that speed, the trip from Ganymede to Callisto would take less than four hours even at opposition, with the vast bulk of Jupiter sitting directly between them. Now that was fast!
Finally it came time for me to sleep, and Lehne, but by then of course we were only two hours away from deployment, so we were allocated ninety minutes and an insincere apology. I spent the time floating weightless in the darkness of my cabin, with the zee-spec charging on its rack and the air vent turned up for maximum white noise. I'm rarely one to refuse a rest, but I'd only been awake for half a day, and ca
tnap sleep eluded me, and in the end I drifted back to the bridge grouchy and dry-eyed, wishing I'd simply stayed there all along.
Lehne was already in his seat as I settled into mine and strapped myself down. And a lucky thing that was, too, that timely application of restraint webbing, because it was at almost exactly that moment that we were attacked for the first time.
EIGHTEEN:
Opposition
“Object two is venting, Captain,” Lehne said. “Fine mist, possibly vapor.”
“Spectral analysis?”
“Working,” said Baucum. “Organic, sir. Complex.”
Wallich exhaled sharply, through his teeth. “Right in our path, isn't it? Lovely. Davenroy, give me main engines and full ACS, please. Hang on, people, I'm taking us evasive.”
Here and there steering motors groaned to life, pulsing jets of iron plasma into the vacuum around us. Louis Pasteur shuddered, Wallich pitching and yawing her onto a new course and then demanding main engine thrust, completely ruining the finesse of our last burn.
“Not good enough,” Lehne called out. “Cloud dispersal puts us right through the edge of it in twenty seconds.”
Wallich slapped his armrest. “Damn. Baucum, what is this crap?”
“I don't know,” she replied in a singsong of tension and aggravation. “It's organic, possibly aminoid haptens. Too light to be mycoric, if that helps, but other than that it could be almost anything.”
“Find out in a sec,” Lehne said. “Entering vapor cloud. Now.”
Warning chimes rang. Lights on control panels flashed.
Baucum let out a tense sigh. “Substance identified, sir: it's complementin.”
A ripple of alarm ran through the bridge crew.
My dictionary was sitting open, waiting for just such an emergency. I looked the word up: com-pl
“Going to clog up the camoflage,” Lehne warned.
Baucum grunted. “Already! I'm reading some replication events on the forward hull. It seems to be very slow and tentative for the moment, but it's not what we want to see.”
“Damn right,” Wallich agreed. “Lehne, hydrofluoric sweat, please. Minimum setting. I'm laying us sideways and queuing up a thermal roll.”
This, at least, I understood. Our mission plan would bring us closer to the sun than any human had been in decades (any non-mycoric human, a part of my mind insisted), and at such proximities the thermal expansion imposed by sunlight was enough to pose a structural danger. Or a danger to the t-balance, or something. Anyway, the “thermal roll” program was designed to hold our long axis perpendicular to the sun, and to spin Louis Pasteur around once per minute to ensure even heating all the way around. People used to cook this way, I know, spinning animal carcasses over a pit of hot coals. Same principle, except in this case it was the stain of complementin, rather than heat, that we were spreading out evenly. To keep any one spot from becoming too heavily contaminated? Something like that, surely.
The forward window gave up its view of Mars, looked out over empty space instead, quiet starscape oozing around in a slow circle. The Gladholder fear doll had been kicking around the bridge for days, and now the rolling motion must have jostled it loose from some hidden resting place. “Help,” it said in a muffled, despairing voice. And then it fell silent again.
“HF sweat breaking down complementin,” Lehne reported. “Not advisable, though. Either way, we start attracting attention pretty quick, here. Never forget, we're crawling with bad bugs.”
Wallich grimaced. “Flash me a schematic of the vapor cloud.” Pause. “Hmm. Hmm. We're not getting out of this without throwing our trajectory completely off the deployment corridor.”
Well. That sounded a little too pat to be accidental, to me. “Somebody's warning us off,” I said.
“Warning, Hell,” Wallich replied, “that shot was well aimed, and we're going to hit the thing that fired it in about six minutes, if the mykies don't get us first. I'd say we're under attack.”
Everyone froze. Attack. That was the word we'd all been avoiding, the word we'd been trying not to have to apply. Because why would anyone attack us? What possible harm did we represent, to anyone or anything? Even the Mycosystem itself had little to fear from us, just a few passive markers left behind on the ice floes when our temporary invasion ran out. But I was getting used to things not making sense, getting used to the idea that inscrutable enemies had been dogging us right along and would continue to do so. There were people on Venus, after all, and looking for sense in the face of that seemed worse than hopeless. So okay, we were under attack. By Gladholders? By Templers? By someone or something else?
“We have to break off,” Baucum stated. “Really, I mean, that spray is exiting at more than twice our velocity relative to the object. Meaning, they can keep hitting us with it even after we pass them. And meanwhile, the spray's density is increasing as we approach. The situation is untenable.”
“Untenable? If we miss this pass, we'll have to turn around and come back. That's untenable, Baucum.”
“Excuse me, sir,” said Rapisardi, his voice cutting through and surprising everyone. The faux engine room behind the bridge's aft bulkhead had been removed during my break, and while voice contact was of course maintained, he and Davenroy had been going about their jobs with very quiet efficiency. Easy to forget they were even there.
“Yes?” Wallich demanded.
“Sir, I've been single-stepping through the payload software all day, per your instructions, and I've noticed a funny sort of loophole. If you're willing to sacrifice tube one to the effort, I believe we can clear the path ahead of us.”
“Explain.”
“Sir, it must be done right away or not at all.”
“Why did you wait so long to inform me?”
“I just thought of it! For God's sake, Wallich, that object is hostile. Shall I fire on it or not?”
“Fire on it? Tube one, you mean? Preserving two for the northern cap?”
“Correct. May I modify the software?”
Wallich paused, the muscles of his face twitching, as if unsure what expression to form. Then: “Affirmative.”
“Aye, sir. Software modified. Opening tube one. End thermal roll and maneuver to firing position.”
“Positive vee?” Wallich asked.
“Yes, positive vee!” Rapisardi shot back. “They're right in front of us, for God's sake! What do you think?”
“Calm down, calm down. Coming around to positive vee. Coming around. Coming around. That's got it. Fire when ready, Mr. Rapisardi.”
“Aye, sir. Firing tube one.”
There was a soft, metallic clank, and then a popping sound. The ship vibrated slightly. On the forward window, a score of white, fist-sized, roughly spherical objects tumbled out ahead of us, looking as if they were rolling down a steep hill toward Infected Mars. In moments they were lost from view.
“Recommend five seconds' thrust along minus-vee, Captain. Slow us down a bit; we don't want to be too close.”
“Affirmative, five seconds along minus-vee. Forward thrusters engaged. Hum de dum. Forward thrusters disengaged. You want to tell me what this is all about, now?”
Ahead, the view went blindingly white for a moment, and by the time the light had faded and my eyes had recovered from the shock, a diffuse mycostructure had filled the path ahead of us, swelling rapidly. Actually swelling, I mean, changing shape, shooting out foggy lobes and tendrils, and racing toward us as well. Or us toward it, if you prefer. I didn't even have time to scream before we were
through it.
“Blank that window,” Wallich ordered.
I complied, saw the others doing likewise. Maybe it was better not to see right now. But what had that explosion been all about? Rapisardi had specifically assured me, assured the crew, assured the whole Immunity that the detector packages nestled in tubes one through thirteen were not bombs. Had he lied?
“Did we just kill someone?” I asked.
“Doubtful,” Baucum replied. “The object wasn't that big.”
“So what did we do?”
“Spill it, Sudhir,” Wallich echoed.
The biophysicist's voice came back careful, almost embarassed. “It's never been a secret that nuclear energy presents... certain dangers. We think of ladderdown as a 'clean' technology, which in a radiation sense it certainly is.”
“But?”
“But. The quantum spatial distortion is normally induced and focused within a shielded reactor, where its effects can be controlled to within a few Planck radii. How else to tunnel out only the desired nucleons, yes? But if we invert the distortion function along the B axis, essentially turning it inside out in three-dimensional space, the same ladderdown tunneling can be induced stochastically in a much larger spherical shell, centered about the inductor. Shielding irrelevant, because it's inside the affected region, you see? Considered too hazardous for use in bloom cauterization, the phenomenon has no industrial applications. Look it up under Things Not to Try.”
Most of that went right over my head, but the gist seemed clear enough: he was talking about releasing energy, lots of it, in an uncontrolled manner. He was talking about a bomb.
“So easy?” Baucum accused. “You just thought of that?”
