Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  “Oh, it does.”

  “So?”

  “So…,” Sixten Bergman’s voice crackled over the general channel, his deep voice carrying just a hint of Swedish heritage, “your body evolved in standard gravity and it uses that downward pressure to tell you when your bladder’s roughly three-quarters filled. In micro-g, you don’t get that warning and just piss all over yourself. On a non-urine-related note, we’re about ready down here. You guys all set?”

  When Fazion didn’t respond, JoJo turned to look at him. His face had gone blank, his mouth agape, and he was pushing the sip-tube away from his face like it was on fire. You’d have thought someone had just pointed a gun at his face, she thought, trying not to laugh. Still, she couldn’t help feeling a little sorry for him and opened the proximity channel.

  “He’s just messing with you, Fazion. Didn’t you hook up your suit catheter?” The kid shook his head quickly at her, eyes wide with the fear of terminal embarrassment.

  “I forgot,” he said. “So he was just kidding?”

  “Oh, no,” she said smiling, “he’s a hundred percent correct about how that works. Should I explain to you what women have to attach—”

  “No!” Fazion yelled, eyes bugging out.

  Another voice chimed into the general channel: the science team’s computer whiz, Ichabod Finn.

  “Okay, Path crew, we’re ready to initiate the aperture down here which will open the terminus up there at the same instant.”

  JoJo knew he was monologuing for the mission recorders, but it still came across as tedious. Every person on or above Erebos knew this stuff by heart.

  “This will be a five-meter aperture and we’ll close it as soon as the test object comes through. The minimum safe distance for this iteration will be twenty-one meters. If you don’t want to be spaghettified and turned into high-energy radiation, you should be further away than that from zero-zero-zero.”

  “The coordinate is just called ‘Z3’ and we’re fifty meters away. Just make sure you put the damned thing where it’s supposed to be,” JoJo said, trying and failing to keep an annoyed edge from her tone. Mission recorder or not, she didn’t like being treated like a rank newbie.

  If Ichabod took any umbrage with her tone, he didn’t let on. “No sweat, Path crew,” he replied, still hamming it up for the archive. “After the last software upgrade, we have the fine emitter control down to the center of a cubic meter anywhere out to seventy-five thousand klicks. Coordinates locked and Erebos Base is ready, Command.”

  “Test chamber clear, Command,” JoJo heard someone yell. She turned to look at the point in space Ichabod had sent them, sensing Fazion turning the pod to look as well…over-correcting, of course. At least he had remembered to get the manipulator arms ready to catch the test object, a twenty-five centimeter sphere of solid lead weighing just shy of nine kilograms. She was ready to fly after it if he missed the catch. Or, she smiled, if he doesn’t take the velocity and weight into account and it smashes into him and bounces away.

  “Generators spooled up and ready, Command,” said yet another voice. It sounded like Alessio Ricci, her security team’s fusion specialist. He would be down in the bowels of Erebos Base, working with the science team’s Konrad Stevenson on the generators and hardware that made what they were about to do possible.

  “We are green across the board, Doctor Bescond,” said Sixten. “Ready to initiate on your mark.”

  Doctor Bescond’s furry French accent slid through the connection. “Gentlemen and lady…”

  Ooo, she remembered me, JoJo thought sardonically. She hadn’t gotten along well with the older woman. Nothing JoJo could quite put her finger on. They just rubbed each other the wrong way.

  “Let’s remember all the hard work,” Bescond continued, “all the sacrifice that got us to this point. We look to the past, back to Commander Harmon-Sykes and the first human transit through a wormhole that was completely beyond our control. We look to the present, where the Saint Clair-Galarza Corporation has tamed the most powerful forces in the universe, allowing humanity to look to control those elemental forces. To reach out to the stars, not by crossing the vast gulfs in slow, clunky starships, but instantly, and with a simple step forward. Initiate!”

  A pinprick of purple-blue light appeared exactly where JoJo and Fazion were looking. At first, the wormhole was just another hard point of light against the unblinking starfield, but in less than a second it spun out, blossoming into a fully-formed vortex spinning around a five-meter-wide circle looking into the test chamber. It was as if there was a perfectly clear piece of glass hanging in space, surrounded by swirling energy. For an instant, she saw Prem Mitra and Harrison Lee, wearing spacesuits, standing on the gantry high in the test chamber. According to Fazion, a secondary manipulation of the exotic matter within the wormhole’s internal structure allowed them to keep control of the pressure differences between the Earth-standard atmosphere of the test chamber and the naked space on the other end. Otherwise, it would be no different than standing on a ship and opening an airlock. Explosive decompression, the eternal bane of spacers.

  Prem held something in both hands and let go, dropping the test object down from his point of view, but horizontally to JoJo and Fazion. The object hit the aperture, the open end of the wormhole, and a brilliant flash of white light heralded its instantaneous transportation through the wormhole’s throat and into orbit, traveling almost fifty thousand kilometers without transiting the space in between. The purple-blue terminus folded back in on itself and blinked out of existence. The test object was easily visible on infrared as a rapidly cooling smudge, tumbling end over end at them.

  Wait, she thought, confused. How does a sphere tumble?

  The test object showed as a small blip on her suit’s radar, heading right toward them, but the mass was all wrong. Her instincts kicked in and she pulsed her thrusters enough to put herself between Fazion’s pod and the incoming lead sphere.

  Except it wasn’t a sphere.

  Flipping end over end into JoJo’s waiting hands was a small present, giftwrapped in bright orange and green foil, complete with a white lace bow on top. Her Trojan clan’s colors. She caught the box gently with her gauntleted hands, absorbing its velocity, which spun her around slowly toward Fazion. The damned kid was grinning furiously and she realized the fat bastard was in on it. She winked thanks at him, earning an even wider smile.

  “Well…open it!” Sixten’s disembodied voice crackled in her ear.

  JoJo tried to call him an asshole, but her suddenly-tightened throat turned it into something between a chuckle and a sob. A chorus of ridiculously jubilant male voices shouted happy birthday over the radio as she pulled off the ribbon and opened the box. Inside, cradled within a crystal-clear cube of polymer, sat a New York Yankees baseball covered with signatures. She instantly recognized most of the names as members of the current active roster.

  “But…” she stammered, unable to grasp the enormity of what she held.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news first?” Sixten asked.

  “Oh,” she said, feeling moisture collect at the edges of her eyes, “you know I like to end things on a high note, skipper.”

  “Okay,” he said, “then first the bad news. Our friends on the science team have concluded that it’s statistically impossible for the Yankees to win a pennant this year. Havana’s pitching staff is just too damned tough. The good news is that we’ll get back to Sol just in time for next year’s season opener. Happy birthday, kiddo.”

  JoJo squinted hard, trying to override her body’s treasonous production of tears. Any Trojan could tell you that loose water inside a spacesuit helmet was hazardous.

  ***

  Sixten “Six” Bergman closed the channel and smiled, celebratory shouts and laughter filling the chamber. Sure, he had quite possibly helped push humanity into the next great age of technology, but more importantly, one of his people knew just how much he and the other operators cared about her a
nd valued her place on the team.

  He popped the seals on his spacesuit and placed the helmet on the deck next to his chair. All around the control center, others were doing likewise. The science team insisted there was no danger and the test chamber could withstand the pressure expected from a typical airlock, but Six hadn’t survived twenty years of UEF military service and then ten years of “hot” corporate espionage by assuming people he barely knew were right about something so potentially lethal. Citing the possibility of unknown-unknowns and catastrophic failure, he had convinced Bescond to have her people suited up as well. Now, the scientists were taking off their suits completely, stripping down to their coveralls. Six noted with pride that his people would only go as far as shrugging out of the arms and torso, letting the suits hang on the backs of their chairs. He hadn’t given the all-clear yet, so they stayed primed for action.

  On the day they met, Fazion Sedaris had called him a “suave Santa,” and Six chuckled at the memory. He had been going for an intimidating first impression, and it had worked on all the scientists except the painfully green kid-genius. With Six’s tall, muscular body and snow white curly hair and beard, he got the joke, but had still tried to salvage the situation, asking Fazion how many people he thought Santa had killed with his bare hands. Fazion hadn’t repeated the nickname.

  From the first moment of the mission, he could pick out the scientists from the security operators, just by length of hair alone. Each of the eggheads had long, shaggy hair of one style or another, and all but Prem Mitra had full beards, the latter opting for a well-trimmed goatee. Six’s own men kept their faces shaved and their hair short due to the demands of spacesuit work.

  In the two months since they’d undocked No Logical Path from San Juan’s orbital tower, the teams hadn’t mixed much. The academicians seemed uneasy around the operators, and in turn, the operators assumed the scientists always looked down their noses at them. Six spotted the anxiety right away and kept his people too busy to worry about it, but the tension had been thick enough to ‘choke a buffalo,’ as Dao Van Khan, their cyberneticist and medic, had eloquently put it during the first month on Erebos. With the successful first test of the wormhole hardware, that tension had apparently evaporated and the two groups now mixed down on the command center floor, slapping backs, gesturing enthusiastically with bulbs of champagne that Garza Komal, their quartermaster, had provided. Six was absolutely positive that those hadn’t been on any freight manifests he’d signed before they left Earth. Taking another sip of the excellent champagne, he decided that he really didn’t much care.

  He leaned back from his console, putting his feet up on the countertop, wondering for the thousandth time how hard doing so would be if the artificial gravity failed. Erebos’ natural four-times-standard gravity was the first thing he thought about when he woke up in the morning, and it was the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep every night. He looked up at the ceiling, eyes idly following a tiny maintenance bot crawling along a stretch of cable suspended from the ceiling.

  The Erebos Base control center was a long rectangular chamber forty meters long, rounded at both ends like a capsule of medicine. Semi-circular control stations and holo-projectors took up half the length, separated from the barren test chamber by a wall of thick, clear windows that their infrastructure generalist, Robert Upton, had proudly constructed entirely from local materials. Both rooms had high, curving ceilings, bored out of the rock and ice by their two heavy-duty construction bots. Every wall, floor and ceiling had the same off-white stucco appearance, the result of a spray-on insulation polymer that kept life-support in while keeping the near absolute zero cold and vacuum out. Being brand new, everything still carried the too-clean tang of new materials.

  The science team had front row seats for the test chamber, with their three stations right up against the thick transparent wall. Six put his team’s two stations, one for facility oversight and one for robotics, directly behind the eggheads. His own command console sat up on a raised dais overlooking all the other stations.

  Aadesh 49, their resident artificial intelligence, chimed on a private channel in Six’s ear. “Commander, Doctor Bescond is approaching the control center. She appears quite upset about the last minute change in test object. Shall I code-lock the hatch?”

  He could have easily located Doctor Bescond’s location through the base datanet, but he knew exactly how long it took to walk up the stairs from engineering, located nearly two levels below. Subtracting twenty seconds from that time for the quicker pace of someone pissed off and “forest crazy,” as his pappa used to say, it should be any second now…

  “No, Addy,” he said, “I’ll take my lumps.”

  “Interesting choice of words, Commander. I’m not able to detect if she has a weapon on her person, but she appears angry enough to use it if she does. I advise caution.”

  Down on the main floor and off to his right, the hatch leading to the lower levels slid open.

  “BERGMAN!”

  Doctor Stephane Rose Bescond sidestepped her thin figure through before the hatch was half open, and stormed around the perimeter of the chamber. She hurried up the steps toward the command dais, swearing colorfully in French the entire way. In his periphery, Six noticed that her three scientists suddenly became very interested in the holodisplays at their respective stations.

  Standing a half head taller than the typical French woman’s meter and a half, Stephane had short, raven-black hair, with a button nose and a corresponding small mouth that, Six knew, could produce a bright, friendly smile, though he had seen few enough of those since the mission kicked off. While Six had given serious consideration to retiring after this op, Stephane’s entire career and future with SG’s research division was on the line. He understood the pressure she was under, and had hoped mixing things up a bit would loosen her usually stoic demeanor.

  “Hi, doc!” he said, putting honest enthusiasm into it, hoping she didn’t take it as sarcasm. She did. Barreling right up to his chair, she shoved his spacesuit-booted feet off the countertop.

  “Bordel de merde, do you have any idea how big a fool I feel right now?”

  Three biting replies came to mind instantly, but Six held his tongue.

  “Not only did you screw up the huge number of models that we had ready for the correct test object, not only did you make me look like a putain d’idiot while the recorders were going, but you co-opted my team in the process and got them to do your dirty work!”

  “Relax, doc. A birthday gift is a far more poetic image for the ages to remember than a ball of lead.”

  “That’s not the point! Our models are built on the known properties of that ball of lead, not the unknown, unaccounted-for materials and mass in a birthday present!”

  Six stood, set down his drink, and leaned toward her, putting their noses just centimeters apart.

  “So fire the wormhole back up and throw your little metal ball through.” Six looked down to Ichabod. “Icky, the damned thing is still on standby, right?”

  Not wanting to put himself between the two team leads, Ichabod raised his thick eyebrows and nodded, his scraggly shoulder-length brown hair bouncing. “Sure, Six. We can go again right away.”

  Six looked back at Stephane with a see? expression. Her jaw clenched and unclenched, then she squeezed her eyes shut for a long moment before exhaling. Sitting on the edge of the station’s countertop, she undid the seals on her spacesuit and yelled down at her team on the control room floor.

  “Harrison and Prem, get the correct test object ready to drop from the test chamber gantry. Ichabod, please reset the aperture and terminus to run the planned first test.” She leaned over and keyed a switch on the console, buzzing the intercom down in engineering where she had left Konrad Stevenson and Alessio Ricci. “Konrad?”

  “We’re completely in the green down here, mum,” Konrad answered. “The gift was significantly less mass than our lead sphere, but even so, the power levels need
ed to send it through were lower than expected. I’d like to test the focusing equipment next, though. We need to move the aperture and terminus around to see how the resonance emitters handle remote-casting different wormhole sizes.”

  “We walk before we run. How are the initiation generators?”

  “Also green across the board. Looks like Fazion’s tweaks to the equations were correct. Far less power to maintain an open throat once the Visser structures have aligned themselves into the necessary matrix.”

  “Okay. We’ll go ahead and start in a moment. Please stand by.”

  Stephane opened her suit to the waist, giving her access to the coveralls she wore underneath. She fished out a pack of cigarettes and offered the small box to Six, who smiled and took one, hit the self-lighting end, and sat back down.

  “Truce accepted,” he said, retrieving his drink. Stephane took a long drag, smiled humorlessly, and blew the smoke in his face.

  “You know,” she said, “when Caleb Tirado visited my Sphere Ship research facility last year and suggested this little excursion, I first thought I was the butt of some complicated practical joke. Transversable wormholes have always been the holy grail, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Ever since the Olympia went through that first one near Luna and got stuck on the other side,” Six agreed.

  “Oui, but when SG’s CEO stood in front of me and said that my data from the Sphere Ship, combined with another megacorp’s research that had been acquired through less…scientific means—”

  Six grinned again and raised his champagne bulb in a toast. His team had pulled off the heist that netted SG those datacores.

  “—I knew we had a real shot at something new. Something bigger than just another way to build fusion generators for spacecraft.”

  “A paradigm shift,” Six said. “That’s how Caleb Tirado described it to me.”

  “And it will be,” she said, excitement edging into her voice. “People have been messing around with this sort of thing for a long, long time now, but nobody has ever been able to do it on a practical, macro-sized scale.” She took another long drag, looking up at the ceiling.