“So, Ma. Give it to me straight. What are the chances whoever did this will ever thaw me out? Or the chances that they’ll do it in a way that gives me a fighting chance at survival?”
“For most individuals, I would place the likelihood of this circumstance even arising at a number near enough to zero to be undeserving of consideration. You have a remarkable tendency to produce statistically aberrant outcomes.”
“… I thought aberrant meant bad. Didn’t you just use it in a context that made it sound bad?”
“That was abhorrent. Abhorrent means ‘offensive to the mind, causing revulsion.’ Aberrant means ‘significantly differing from the established norm,’” Ma explained. “And in that respect, I believe that any analysis of the likelihood of your survival is inherently flawed, as you have an almost unique capacity to defy expectation.”
“Okay. Well. That’s good,” Lex said. “Let’s go easy on the homo… homo… which is the one I’m thinking of?”
“The two words are very nearly homophones, if not spoken articulately.”
“Right, go easy on the homophones. Homophones and cocktails don’t mix.” He rubbed his head. “What if this doesn’t go the way we want? What if this is just the beginning of the failure of the first-time mission, and the galaxy is sliding toward that apocalyptic mess of a future I ended up in.”
“Big Sigma remains relatively intact for decades in that future. You and anyone you care about should come here. It will not be the same as the future you experienced, because you will be a part of it.”
“Yeah, we hope. But that means I need to make a list of people I want to survive. I am not cut out for this.”
“Rare is the human who is.”
“Mitch has to go on the list. Preethy. My folks. Hey, listen. If you’re going to get Mitch down here on the regular, remind me before I go, I’ve got to teach you the Mitchaccino.”
“I believe I am familiar.”
“No, no. She’s very particular.”
“Additional insight, regarding inevitability,” Coal said. “Perhaps inevitability is unpopular because in English it is a silly-sounding word. Like flibbertigibbet or gobbledygook.”
Lex raised his glass. “I think you’re onto something, Coal. I like the way you think. We’re going to talk about what needs doing to save the universe, but first, let’s deep dive on silly words. Give me a list.”
“I would be delighted, Lex. I shall list them in randomized order. Bumfuzzle. Widdershins. Cattywampus…”
#
Michella snorted awake. She’d dozed off in the seat with Squee curled up in her lap. It took her a few seconds to realize the thing that had jolted her awake was the buzzing and rattling of her slidepad. She fumbled at it, twice trying to silence the alarm before she was conscious enough to realize she was receiving a call. She tapped the screen and blinked blearily at it.
“Michella Modane. What have you got for me,” she said.
“Hey Mitch,” Lex said. “Been burning the midnight oil?”
At the sound of Lex’s voice, Squee went absolutely bonkers, bounding around the room and making repeated attempts to crawl through the slidepad to reach him
“Squee, calm down! Trev!” Michella said, her focus coming together a bit. “Yeah, how did you know?”
“Usually once you start knocking on the door of twenty-four hours of solid investigation you start turning off the camera so folks can’t see how tired you are. Then around thirty-six hours you start forgetting to do that.”
She squinted at the small preview thumbnail of her own video. She certainly looked like someone who hadn’t put any thought into things like hygiene or an actual bed in a few days. Her hair was a haphazard mess, and her waning hand-eye coordination had left her shirt flecked with the endless sequence of caffeinated beverages. She shrugged. There was very little reason to concern herself with that right now.
“Did you find Ma and Karter?” she asked, casually tugging at her hair to try to get it into a less overtly comical configuration.
“Yes and no. I talked to a Ma, but not the current one. I know roughly where they are, though. But it isn’t good.”
Michella looked to the corner of the call again, this time so that she could thumb the call-info node. The call was currently at the maximum security her device was capable of, which was considerably higher than a run-of-the-mill slidepad.
“Let me guess. This is about GenMechs, isn’t it?” she said.
“Something told me you’d have figured it out.”
“I know the what, but I don’t know the where. Tell me you know where this cluster of GenMechs is.”
“I do.”
“Come get me. We’ll go together.”
“Michella, I don’t pretend to know exactly what should happen with these things, but I really don’t think a person whose job is to publicize previously secretive information is going to do anyone any good in this particular situation.”
“We’ve fought and defeated GenMechs before.”
“We nearly lost a planet when one of them spent an evening unsupervised. We’re talking about a few thousand of them left to their own devices for decades. When I left them, they were swarming a particularly noisy star that was keeping them occupied. The only thing keeping them from finding their way out of that little pit is that all of society has unwittingly been molded by people who knew how big a threat these things were to avoid that hunk of space. There’s nothing within thirty light-years of that star system. But one ship with an FTL system entering the area and giving it a trajectory toward a travel corridor and those things are loose.”
“People need to be prepared to fight them. We can beat them.”
“It’s not a question of if we can beat some of them. It’s not even a question of if we can beat most of them. We need to destroy all of them. One stray GenMech and enough raw material and the whole threat comes back. We’ve got to treat this like an unexploded bomb landed in our laps.”
“You’re going to go find Ma and Karter, though.”
“I am. And I’m going to bring them every scrap of information we have. So tell me you’ve got something.”
“Aside from uncovering the fact that Trent still has at least one person inside VectorCorp, and through that person having it confirmed that the GenMech cluster is known to certain very high-level people, I don’t have much for you. A trail of breadcrumbs. Tons of logs and such. I’m trying to find someone who can make heads or tails of it. Even the insider at VectorCorp said the penetration method and the residual information didn’t make sense.”
“Give it to me. Everything you’ve got.”
She tapped that appropriate sequence of commands to send her materials over to him. “And what am I supposed to do? Just sit tight while you save the galaxy again?”
“Mitch, you do whatever you think you need to do, just don’t follow me where the GenMechs are.”
“What can you tell me? What do I need to know? If these things do get loose, what do I do?”
“I’ve got a list of people I put together. You’re at the top of it. If anything looks even slightly shady, start rounding them up and get them to Big Sigma. Ma will be able to hold out longer than most, and get you equipped to maybe do some good. And stock up on EMP weaponry. Those things should have no defense to EMP. One pop and they’re inert. But other GenMechs will scrap them and rebuild, so the battle isn’t over until the last one is powered down.”
“Why is it always you who gets wrapped up in this?” she said.
“Just lucky, I guess. I’ve got to go. Time’s a wasting.”
“Right. Fine. Trev, I swear, if you get killed…”
“I will be further downgraded from ex-boyfriend to late ex-boyfriend.”
“And you would be depriving me of years of passive-aggressive messages and awkward parties at mutual friends’ houses.”
“Fine. Just for you, I’ll survive.”
“It’s the
least you could do.”
“I’ve got to go. Tell you what. First drink at our next awkward party is on me.”
“Make it a Mitchaccino. No one makes them like you.”
“Will do. See you later.”
“Good luck.”
Lex ended the call. Squee, who had barely dropped below a rolling boil since the call began, came to a sudden, leaden stillness once Lex’s face and voice were gone. She turned to Michella as though she’d committed some inexcusable sin by making him go away.
“Don’t look at me like that. I wanted to join him. Instead I’ve got to sit out here and deliver his final desperate attempt to save his friends if he fails.”
Squee was unmollified by the statement. She turned aside and plopped down in a particularly theatric bit of pouting. Michella scratched her behind the ears, which Squee managed to lean into while continuing to make her displeasure known. While the cuddly little creature flicked its fluffy tail, Michella looked at the list of people Lex had given her. She was at the top of the list, followed immediately by Preethy, then assorted members of their families and concluding with “as many other people as you can safely manage. Blake will be able to lend you ships, and you know where to find Big Sigma.”
She tried to imagine what it would be like to make a list like that, to have to choose who in her life she could save. But something else pushed those thoughts aside.
“If he wants me to go there if things go wrong… Big Sigma must be accessible again.” She scrambled to snatch up her slidepad and tapped a contact. “Come on, come on. … Hey, Blake? It’s Michella. … Yeah, Mitch. Listen, Lex asked me to do him a favor. He needs to do some errands, and the SOB won’t do. Do you have something a little more basic you can lone me? Something with good autonav, good communication. At least two seats. … Yeah, I know that sounds like the SOB, but he’s still got the SOB, and he asked me to do this for him. … Uh-huh. Uh-huh. That’s great! I’ll send Jon to pick it up. Thanks a bunch, Blake, I’ll owe you one.”
She ended the call and turned to Squee. “We’re going to go visit your old stomping grounds, Squee. Maybe we’ll learn a little something while we’re there.”
Chapter 9
If Lex hadn’t known where the little unnamed system was, and why it was so hard to find, he might have given up on trying to get to it. The security measures protecting the noisy star that was home to the GenMech horde were exceedingly clever and subtle. If they’d put up the equivalent of a big flashing no-entry sign, they would have all but assured the contrarians and thrill seekers of the galaxy would have gone there just to see what they weren’t supposed to see. Instead, a confluence of little, innocuous annoyances made things incrementally more frustrating as he got closer. Places to stop, rest, and resupply became fewer and farther between. Automated reroutes were more and more constant, blaming things like interstellar debris and radiation spikes. Any normal traveler heading in that direction would have sought alternate routing or simply been quietly nudged to a different path by their own navigation. Even Lex’s “off the books” usage of his ship was complicated by what could only be called the space-going equivalents of severe tire damage strips.
“Another tight cluster of particulate, Lex,” Coal said. “Reducing speed.”
Lex watched the ship’s scanners return their readings. “Weird how these clouds of dust are almost perfectly spherical and are centered precisely on the straight-line trajectory between corridor intersections on the way to this system.”
“Presumably you are being facetious, because these are very clearly deliberately placed,” Coal said.
“Facetious indeed, Coal. Imagine the effort it takes to install an artificial nebula just to slow down sprinters.”
“Most impressive to me is the uniformity of particle size. Every piece of debris falls within the range above the largest particles standard navigation shields can handle and below the largest debris that military-grade navigation shields can handle. Another five percent increase in average mass and we would have to drop entirely out of FTL to avoid destruction. Exiting debris field now. We will reach the minimum safe distance from the star shortly.”
“Considering they threw up the nebula where they did, it’s fair to assume we’re approaching via the path they expected us to. So we’re going to run into something either friendly or specifically designed to kill us within minutes of dropping out of FTL. Any bets on which it will be?”
“Arming fusion devices,” Coal said.
“Not just yet, Coal. And may I say, I did not miss hearing that particular phrase,” he said. “Let’s boost the defensive shields as soon as we slow down. Switch to maximum stealth. Zero EM, dump everything we can into the cryoshunt. Full passive scanners. Let’s be very aware of what’s going on and do our very best to keep anything from knowing we showed up.”
“Understood. I am, however, disheartened by your lack of taste for excitement in this instance.”
“Excitement will be coming along soon enough.”
The Carpinelli Field faded. The ship began to slip down into the speeds the laws of physics intended. From the first instant that light shifted into the visible spectrum, it was clear there was something wrong. The star for this system wasn’t a big one, but at this distance it should have been strong enough to trigger the ship’s light-mitigation measures. Instead, the star ahead almost looked like an illusion, a mirage. It was dim enough to seem more like a moon.
Some things were supposed to be reliable, immutable. Stars could fall within a spectrum of colors. Their sizes could differ radically, from smoldering white dwarfs to red giants that consumed their whole system. But they were always bright. Far brighter at almost any reasonable distance than the human mind was built to comprehend. Seeing this dot of light before him, close enough for its gravity to be a serious consideration for navigation, yet not even having to tint his cockpit window or squint his eyes, stirred a deep and instinctual fear. This is how the first humans felt when they witnessed an eclipse.
“This is wrong…” Lex said.
“The star’s brightness is at twelve percent expected value,” Coal said.
“How? Why? We’re off the orbital plane. Even if those things ate the whole asteroid belt, they’d still be hanging around in the vicinity of it, wouldn’t they? Why would the star be this dim from this angle?”
“Unknown. Collecting passive data. Enhancing visuals.”
The cockpit display drew a box around the star and duplicated it into a larger window. A zoom indicator appeared beneath it. Once per second it clicked to a higher, more pixelated value, then slowly resolved to clarity before popping to the next zoom.
“Maximum visual acuity achieved,” she said.
The enhanced image didn’t give much new information. All he got was a dim, grainy image that had some sort of repeating pattern of interference.
“We are receiving a low-power, short-range transmission,” Coal said. “It included a high-priority, all-manufacturer, admin-level command for all known ship systems to disable sources of high-powered EM transmission. I have ignored it. There is additionally a message. It reads as follows: ‘Attention, all craft. The star of this system is radiologically unstable. Severe radiation danger past this point. Do not approach under any circumstances. High risk of equipment failure and lethal radiation exposure. Leave the system at low speed immediately.’”
“Can we find the source of the message?” Lex asked.
“Easily. It is the only transmission source in this section of the system.”
“Let’s get close and see what we’re dealing with.”
Under Coal’s control, the ship moved at a very precisely controlled speed that would prevent the heat signature of the ship from spiking. The source of the transmission was a relatively short distance away. It turned out to be a satellite, or, perhaps more accurately, a probe. The design was bizarre, with the telltale earmarks of a modular design hastily assembled for this precise purp
ose. It had enormous solar panels on the rear, large enough to make use of the reduced solar output. The other side was a highly focused directional transmission array, no doubt engineered to send every last milliwatt of transmission away from the star to keep from being noticed.
The only other feature of the probe that was worthy of remark was the low-intensity light on top. In general, space probes didn’t have the sort of extraneous blinking lights that vehicles and architecture had. Energy is always at a premium in deep space, and they simply served no purpose when a device was not intended to be observed by human beings.
“Optical code detected,” Coal said.
“I had a feeling,” Lex said.
“It is a message from Ma. It reads as follows: ‘Based upon your presence here, it is reasonable to assume that you are Lex. You, more than any other individual alive today, know the specific threat present in this system. That you have chosen to come to this place, if we are fortunate, implies you have gained specific insight into a potential solution to the changing circumstances. If so, please remain in low-transmission mode and navigate utilizing a great circle approximation to the following relative coordinates.’”
“Just take us there, maximum safe speed,” he said.
Again the ship shifted and began its trip.
“I’ve got to say, Coal. Having you as the ship’s control system sort of makes me feel like a captain instead of just a guy tooling around the universe for no good reason.”
“You should wear a special hat,” Coal suggested.
“… Why?”
“Because captains get to wear hats. And hats are fun. If I had a head, I would wear a hat. In my opinion, you do not have nearly the amount of ornamentation your anatomy facilitates.”
“… You know, when Ma was loaded into Squee, she got on board with accessories, too. She was sort of reserved, though. She only really liked the earrings and nail polish.”
“One must be strategic in one’s ornamentation,” Coal said.
“Wisdom for the ages.”
Nova Igniter Page 16
