Heretics [Apotheosis 02]]

by S. Andrew Swann

  Was she under attack?

  Toni couldn’t find any sign of it. There were no strange contacts on any of the scout’s sensors.

  However, the tach-drive showed signs of disabling damage. Damage that existed before the data started recording. What could cause that kind of overload?

  The strangest part of the recording happened at the point the craft passed into the wormhole threshold. Parts of the ship started failing, and the damaged tach-drive spiked and went off the meter.

  She was interrupted by the medbay alarm.

  Her patient was conscious.

  * * * *

  Lieutenant Toni Valentine snapped awake and started hyperventilating. She was bound, confined, everything closing in on her. She struggled, and heard the alarm of the med system.

  I’m in a medical bay...

  She struggled to calm herself. Somehow she had made it. She had survived the brush with the wormhole and the malfunctioning tach-drive. She took a few deep breaths and unclenched her hands. If she was in a medbay, that meant she was safe. If she had survived the wormhole, that meant she was twenty years of space and time away from Styx and explosions cosmic and bureaucratic.

  She had just convinced herself that she was safe when the cover to the medical bay opened with a pneumatic hiss and a rush of air. Toni looked up and saw herself bent over her. Not an older version of herself.

  Herself.

  The exact same face she woke up to in the morning.

  “Oh, hell no!”

  * * * *

  Toni popped the cover on the pod, lifting it up and away from her doppelganger.

  She heard herself say, “Oh, hell ,no!”It had the same strange character as listening to a recording, her own voice not sounding quite right when not originating within her own head.

  She formed a reassuring smile that she didn’t feel and told herself, “You can probably imagine I have a few questions.”

  Toni II stared up at her as if she had lost comprehension of the English language.

  “We can get you dressed and get you some solid food before we—”

  Toni II grabbed her wrist. “Fuck SOP, what’s the date?”

  “We can—”

  “The date!” Toni II looked at her with eyes filled with fear and desperation. Something dropped in Toni’s chest, looking at herself with that expression. There was a terror there that went far beyond the existential dilemma of unexpectedly meeting yourself.

  Toni pulled her arm away. “June fifth.”

  “June fifth, ‘26?”

  Toni nodded.

  “Shit. Shit. Shit.” Her double jumped naked out of the pod and ran to the wall and one of the ubiquitous computer display screens. Toni II stared at the date/time stamp as if she expected—or maybe hoped—Toni had been lying. She kept shaking her head as if she didn’t quite believe what she was seeing.

  “What is it?” Toni asked.

  “You should have seen it already.”

  “Seen what?”

  “We have less than twelve hours before it hits.”

  “Before what hits?”

  She turned around and looked at Toni and said, “I don’t know what, but I know we don’t want to be around here when it does.”

  Toni stepped up and placed her arms to block her double. The fact that the ghost was some version of herself had allowed her to lower her guard, but the woman was still a security risk. Standard operating procedure was to treat ghosts as captured enemy combatants until debriefed and cleared by command. “We can talk about it in the interview—”

  Toni II ducked, folded her arms and scissored her way out of Toni’s grasp and ran down the hall.

  “Shit!” Toni snapped at Toni II’s retreating backside. She had lowered her guard too much. Lulled into thinking the other woman was unarmed and naked, so what could she do?

  But considering she knew the station as well as Toni did, she could do a hell of a lot.

  Toni punched the emergency lockdown codes into the console next to the door. Across the station, bulkheads came down, isolating each section. Toni paged through the security feed until she found her double trapped in a corridor halfway to the main control room for the station.

  “Why are you going there?” she asked the monitor. “Why would I go there?”

  Toni II stopped at a panel next to the lowered bulkhead and started punching in an override code. Toni activated the PA and said, “I did have the sense to change all the pass-phrases on the station. Now you just sit tight, I’m going to bring some clothes, and you and I are going to have a nice little talk.”

  Toni II looked up directly at the camera and said something. There wasn’t an audio pickup, but from her lips it looked as if she said something like, “I know what you’re thinking.”

  Toni II returned to the console and started punching in codes.

  “No,” Toni whispered, “You aren’t going to try and guess...”

  She tried to deactivate Toni II’s control panel remotely, but she wasn’t a systems expert and that wasn’t a standard function. She remembered something about doing that sort of thing from her orientation training, but the details were buried in her brain deeper than the function was buried in the advanced options menu.

  Toni cursed herself. Recommended procedure for pass-phrase security was to use a machine-generated code, but such things were impossible for a human to remember. Toni habitually used the second-best method, sentences of five or six words with some random numeric component. In almost every case, that, combined with a biometric component, was more than secure enough for anything that wasn’t a black op in enemy territory. She’d been too freaked out by her own ghost to consider the security implications.

  This woman had the same brain she did. All she needed to do was ask herself what she would have changed the pass-phrase to in the same situation.

  Toni II cleared the lockdown before Toni could figure out how to kill the panel.

  Toni ran down the hallway after her, ducking past opening bulkheads. Twin or not, she suddenly had no compunction about using force to restrain the woman. The bitch was more dangerous than she gave her credit for.

  As she raced to the control room, one thought echoed through her head: Why the hell would I be doing this?

  It made no sense. She knew the SOP better than anyone. All she had to do was sit tight and endure the debriefings—

  “We have less than twelve hours before it hits.”

  “Before what hits?”

  “I don’t know what, but I know we don’t want to be around here when it does.”

  Toni thought of the remains of her double’s scout.

  “You should have seen it already.”

  Toni wondered what could make her panic. What could make her ditch even the pretense of procedure? What would cause her to run naked through a space station?

  What is it I should have seen?

  For the past few days her time had been spent with the bureaucracy associated with finding a ghost—which would be the one thing that would be different between her and Toni II. That was the nature of ghosts; they appeared in their own pasts and created a new universe that was different because its past contained a ghost. By definition, Toni II didn’t have her own Toni II showing up on her space station.

  Did she see something I haven’t?

  Toni burst into the control room. Toni II was sitting down in front of the console. All of the holo displays showed false-color views of what seemed, by the coordinates displayed on the imagery, different spectra slices of the same five degrees of sky.

  Toni wrapped her arm around her double’s throat, yanking her out of the chair so hard that the struts bolting the seat to the floor bent with an ominous creak. She slammed Toni II to the floor, placing her knee in the small of her back.

  “What the hell are you trying to do?” she yelled at herself.

  “Look,” Toni II gasped through the choke hold. “Center. Screen.”

  When she was certain that her double was
immobile, Toni turned to look at the holo. She realized that the time stamp was dated nearly twenty-four hours ago and was speeding by at about four times real time. Sensor data scrolled by on the bottom of the screen, and at first the data didn’t make sense. Then she realized that Toni II had pulled up a tachyon overlay on the view.

  “You’re looking for a ship? There? You’re looking fifty degrees off the ecliptic and directly opposite Styx.”

  Toni II gasped, and Toni loosened her grip on her neck. Toni II sputtered and said, “Not a ship. Not anything like a tach-ship.”

  A flash erupted center screen, only visible in the false-color tachyon overlay. Just a tiny light flicking on and off, captured by the station’s sensors 23.56 hours standard ago—a tach-ship arriving.

  Toni felt an ominous chill. Anything that tached in close enough to fire the sensors should have radioed clearance.

  “The proximity alarm,” Toni whispered.

  “It isn’t a ship. By the time it’s close enough for the alarms, it’ll be too late.”

  Toni squinted at the sensor data, and several numbers didn’t make sense. “No, that can’t be right. Did you mess with the sensor array?”

  “Give me a break. Could you fake that screen in thirty seconds?”

  Toni looked down at her double. “Am I reading that right?”

  “Yes. Let me up.”

  Toni got to her feet. Her twin gasped a couple of times, rubbing her neck as she rose. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. Obviously, I wouldn’t either. But I already escaped this thing once. I don’t like the idea of being locked in a debriefing room when it happens this time.”

  Toni had already turned to face the console and began pulling up her own data streams on the tachyon pulse. “No, no, no. This has got to be—”

  “A calibration error. That was my first thought too.”

  “But the distance? For the tach-pulse to get here before the panicle decay, it would have to be—”

  “I know: there’s no way anyone could tach that much mass, but you check the mass sensors, I even detected gravitational lensing on some of the high-res imagery.”

  “That’s as much mass as the wormhole.”

  “It’s exactly as much mass.” Toni II reached across in front of Toni and tapped a few controls, and the center holo snapped to show the same view, but current.

  Toni stared at the display. It was hard to make out at first, but in a few moments she could see it hanging there, like a mirrored ball reflecting a starscape light-years removed from the one that surrounded it. Toni shook her head. “Another wormhole?”

  “You can waste time confirming what I’m telling you, but I spent an agonizing six hours pouring over every sensor this place has. We got there a mass-equivalent equal to W Sigma Draconis III. A spin in the opposite direction. It’s approaching us at nearly three-quarters c. Straight-line course directly at the center of mass of our own wormhole.”

  “What happens when they—”

  “Nothing good, and a release of a lot of energy.”

  Toni turned to the communication’s console and flagged an emergency message to her command. “This is Lieutenant Valentine stationed on orbital platform 15 W-Sigma-Drac-Three. We have an emergency. A large mass is approaching the wormhole at three-quarters light velocity. It is on a collision course with impact in approximately eleven hours, twenty-seven minutes. I am attaching a burst of telemetry data on the mass. Request immediate evacuation, please advise.”

  Toni slammed the send icon so hard that her finger left a slowly fading dent on the input display.

  Over her shoulder she heard her own voice whisper, “You want to know what they’re going to say?”

  Toni stared at the console. She had sent an encrypted laser tightbeam to the nearest command station. It was at least five light-minutes. She looked over her shoulder at her double.

  “You went though this before?”

  “By the numbers,” she whispered. “I got orders back to sit tight and monitor the situation; they didn’t think there was any danger.” She chuckled weakly. “That’s what they said, anyway. They told me my sensors were off, and it was either going to miss or pass through the wormhole.”

  “But you didn’t sit tight?”

  “No, because the one heading toward W-Sigma-Drac-One hits about an hour earlier.”

  * * * *

  Toni II stared at the screen above the control console, seeing the disaster replaying itself. Seeing her younger self send the same message to command that she had. She could sense her younger self clinging to the same protocols that had trapped her in this assignment in the first place. She knew that it would take something catastrophic to make her disobey what was going to be a direct order.

  Sit tight? Fucking morons.

  Toni the younger turned to her and asked, “There’s more?”

  “I don’t know for sure; I just saw W1 flash out an obscene amount of energy all across the EM spectrum.”

  “How obscene?”

  “Well if you took the mass equivalent of two wormholes striking each other at a relative velocity three-quarters c, converted that to energy—” She was cut off because her younger self pushed her out of the way. Software boxes opened showing graphs and grids and vectors.

  “The navigational cont—” Toni II started to say, but she got what her other self was doing instantaneously. It was the same thing she would had done if she’d known that W1 was going to explode.

  Make the somewhat valid assumption that W1 blowing up was due to the same sort of event that was headed toward W3. And, if another wormhole was entering the Sigma Draconis system, it made sense to assume some other commonalities: the wormhole headed for W3 duplicated its mass, so assume the hypothetical wormhole matched the mass of W1; assume either the same relative velocity or the same total energy between the known and unknown wormholes. Assume the same point of origin for both.

  Given the data on the wormhole approaching W3, they could plot a line back to infinity that would intersect its point of origin. By making all the other assumptions, the computers could plot a bounded surface slicing through the Sigma Draconis system that would have to contain the hypothetical wormhole—assuming those assumptions were correct.

  The most important being common point of origin. If what hit Wl came from somewhere else, the sky was just too damn big to find it quickly.

  Searching a two-dimensional virtual surface that only covered eight degrees of sky at this distance took less than three minutes.

  “Found it,” Toni the younger whispered.

  “I’m impressed.”

  “Don’t flatter yourself.” She called up a schematic of the system, with the two tracks highlighted. Two spears piercing the plane of the ecliptic at about forty degrees, stabbing two of the wormholes though the heart. At this scale, the tracks looked parallel, but Toni II’s younger self zoomed the display out, and out, and out...

  “What,” Toni II whispered, “that far?”

  The scale raced by, five light-years, ten, twenty, fifty ...

  The scale stopped growing at one hundred and twenty-one light-years, long past the point a human eye could separate the tracks. However, the computer still could, helpfully highlighting the point of intersection with a glowing blue orb.

  “Xi Virginis,” Toni II read the legend. She stared at the track shooting from Xi Virginis to Sigma Draconis. It struck her that there were three wormholes in the Sigma Draconis system. “Do you think there’s— “

  “Yes,” her younger self told her. She was already plotting a track from Xi Virginis to W-Sigma-Drac-Two. This time the computers only had a one-dimensional region of space to search, and they found the third wormhole in less than twenty seconds.

  Three wormholes had their own lethal twins racing toward them.

  “W1 impact in ten hours twenty-six minutes. W3 impact in eleven fifteen. W2 in twelve nineteen. It’s a staggered attack.”

  “Att—” Toni II caught herself, because whatever
this was, it was certainly not random. The younger Toni had already grabbed the communicator again and was broadcasting the message back to command; three wormholes, origin Xi Virginis, trajectories, impact times.

  When she was done, the console flashed that a return message had been received. “What?”

  “Your earlier transmission,” Toni II told her.

  “Oh, yeah.” She turned on the transmission, and Toni II watched as the same low level officer told her younger self the same thing he had told her. “Lieutenant Valentine, your report has been passed on to the Styx System Security Command. Your orders are to remain in place and monitor the situation. The 3SEC Liaison believes there is a low risk of the unidentified object striking the wormhole directly, and if contact takes place ...”