Octavia Gone

by Jack McDevitt

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  For Robbi Jo McDevitt

  PROLOG

  1424: RIMWAY CALENDAR.

  The Larry Corbin was barely fifteen minutes out of Ventnor Station, still charging its hyperdrive unit. Both moons were visible, one in the rear, the other off to port. Adarryl Perry had just gotten out of his seat, intending to go back to the cabin to talk with his passengers, when Thwanna, the AI, lit up. “Captain,” she said, “message from the station.” She put it on display:

  Adarryl, we just got word that Rimway has lost contact with Octavia station. It’s the research unit orbiting the black hole KBX44. They’d been receiving daily transmissions, but the transmissions have stopped. Their orbit takes them behind the black hole periodically, which cuts everything off for thirty-one hours. That just happened two days ago. But they’ve been clear for almost twenty hours, and there’s nothing from them. You’re closest. Please divert. Be informed they also have a shuttle. Report back as soon as you see what’s happening. I’ll let you know if we hear anything more. Brentway.

  “Thwanna,” he said, “how long will we need to get there?”

  “Just a couple of hours. Riding around in the system trying to find the station, though, will probably take some serious time.”

  “Give me a minute.” He switched back to cruise, got up, and went into the passenger cabin. All four of his passengers were there. A romantic comedy, Love on a Wing, had just started. It’s a clever show in which the goddess Athena shows up in a Greek theater to enjoy a play that features her as a principal character. Perry had seen and enjoyed the film several times. The lead actor, of course, falls in love with the goddess. He watched for a few moments and then stopped it. “Betsy,” he said, “gentlemen, we’ve run into a problem. There’s a possible emergency. Communications from a research station orbiting a black hole have broken off and they want us to go take a look. Sorry, but we don’t have any options. I can take you back to Ventnor Station if you want, and they’ll set up another ship for you. But it could take a while. Or if you prefer, stay here and go with me. Your call. Better if you stay on board, just in case there’s a problem out there and they need help. Either way, you’ll be compensated.”

  Mark Friedman was Betsy’s husband. “Sounds good,” he said. “Did you say they were orbiting a black hole? That doesn’t sound very smart.”

  “They’re doing research. Been there more than a year.”

  “Interesting,” said Mark. He was not the sort of person Perry would have taken for a retired hangball coach, except that he was extremely tall. He didn’t have the polished moves of a onetime athlete. But he looked like a leader. Perry had needed only a quick glance to realize he was a guy to whom people would pay serious attention. He had black hair and a face that might have belonged to the leading man in Love on a Wing. “Those are kind of dangerous, aren’t they? Black holes?”

  “Of course they are, love,” said his wife. Betsy was slender and attractive, also with black hair and a mischievous gleam that never left her eyes.

  They were headed for a new home on the recently established Kolmar colony. Perry couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to move out to a place so removed from the rest of the Confederacy. “They just want us to take a look and make sure everything’s okay,” he said.

  The other two passengers, Aaron Prentiss and Virgil Henderson, exchanged glances. They both shrugged. “Let’s do it,” said Aaron. “We have plenty of time before we’re due at the Omicron. And we’ll get a chance to add a black hole to the act. That sounds golden.” They were a comedy team who’d been making appearances for the opening of their new movie. Perry didn’t recall the title. Aaron was a small, thin guy who played the dunce.

  Virgil was probably twice his size, the excitable part of the team who usually wound up paying the price for Aaron’s stupidity. A growing look of concern was shadowing his features, much as it often did during a movie. “Captain, the black hole isn’t anywhere near Kolmar, is it?” That was where they were headed.

  “No. No need to worry. But you guys should stay belted down. We’ll be making our jump in a few minutes.”

  Aaron wasted no time checking his seat belt.

  “You say they’ve been out here a year?” asked Betsy.

  Perry nodded and started toward the bridge. “I’ll be back. We have to get moving.”

  As he left the passenger cabin, Virgil was saying that, whatever kind of research it was, he couldn’t imagine how it could be any use to anyone. “It’s just asking for trouble.” He was managing to sound scared.

  Perry took his seat on the bridge. “Thwanna,” he said, “inform Ventnor we’re on our way.” He locked in his own seat belt and glanced at the green lights that told him his passengers were secure. Then he warned them they would begin to accelerate in a moment. He heard the movie come back on. “Okay, Thwanna, let’s get moving again.”

  They adjusted course, turning in the direction of the black hole, and began to accelerate. “Thwanna, Adam said they were blocked off from communicating for thirty-one hours. Is that really because of the black hole?”

  “Yes, Captain. It disrupts any transmissions, radio or hypercomm, that pass close to it. There is one period of approximately thirty hours during each orbit in which the station is cut off from all contacts.”

  “That’s when they lost touch with it.”

  “That seems like an odd coincidence.” Ten minutes later she told him they were ready to go under.

  “Do it,” he said.

  The smaller moon, Dura, was visible outside his starboard window. He watched it disappear as they slipped into hyperspace.

  • • •

  Life was routine over the next two hours. They watched the rest of the Athena movie, and then Perry made a light lunch available. Mark and Betsy showed signs of being disappointed that Aaron and Virgil were different from the characters they played in the comedies. Perry had met them on an earlier flight. Away from a performance, they were ordinary people. They’d all been interested in visiting the bridge during the early minutes after the launch. Now of course if they looked out the windows there was nothing to be seen except occasional mist and unbroken darkness.

  Mark fell asleep in his seat. The others simply sat and talked until Thwanna informed them they should secure their harnesses while the Corbin prepared to return to normal space. It did, and as far as Perry could tell, they were all disappointed when they looked out the windows and were still greeted by little other than black space and a sprinkling of stars.

  He gave Thwanna a few minutes to check their position. Then: “How’d we do?”

  “Still working on it, Captain. It’ll be another minute.”

  “Take your time.” He sat
back and closed his eyes.

  Thwanna came back: “We’re close. Maybe twenty billion kilometers. Ready to accelerate and recharge the Korba.” The Korba was, of course, the star drive. “We’ll need to go down one more time to get within range.”

  He directed his passengers to belt down again. Then Thwanna made a moderate course change, after which they started to add velocity. And the Korba began recharging.

  Perry had been out here before, bringing supplies to the station, but he felt his own energy level rising. He’d never been involved in a rescue mission before. Betsy and Mark had seemed happy enough. They’d get a reduction in their travel costs as compensation and be able to talk about the black hole at every party they attended for the rest of their lives. And Aaron and Virgil might get some publicity.

  So much for the good side of this. But he wondered what could have happened to the guys on Octavia? Hell, they were probably okay. What could possibly go wrong screwing around with a black hole?

  They submerged again and after a minute or two came back up. “We’ll need a couple of days to get the rest of the way in,” said Thwanna.

  “Good enough.” Perry notified the passengers they could leave their seats and wander around as they liked. Then: “Thwanna, do we know who’s currently on board Octavia?”

  “Yes, Captain. The tech guy is Rick Harding. And there are three scientists from DPSAR, Delmar Housman, Archie Womack, and Charlotte Hill.”

  “What’s Dipsar?” asked Betsy. Perry was surprised. She’d opened the door from the passenger cabin and was standing directly behind him.

  “Hi, Betsy,” he said. “It’s the Department of Planetary Survey and Astronomical Research. It’s headquartered on Rimway.”

  Harding was a pilot and an engineer. Perry had met him a couple of times, had even shared a mission with him when they’d both taken visitors to Toxicon. He’d never heard of Womack. Housman was apparently pretty well known. And he’d seen Charlotte Hill, who’d stopped at Ventnor Station on her way to Octavia a year or so ago. She was a knockout. Hard to forget.

  “Why are you smiling, Captain?” asked Thwanna.

  Caught in the act. “Octavia,” he said. “They put some of the smartest people in the Confederacy out here and they get lost.”

  • • •

  Betsy returned to the passenger cabin and Perry followed. Aaron asked if the captain had ever seen a black hole.

  “Technically,” he said, “nobody ever sees a black hole. But yes, I’ve been out here before.”

  Mark looked up. “If you can’t see the black hole, Captain, how can you find it? I mean, how do you know where to take us?”

  “We knew the general direction from where we started. And we know what the angles to several stars are from the position of the black hole. So all we have to do is get to the intersection of those angles and we will have arrived.”

  “Which stars?” asked Betsy.

  “There are six of them. Castor, Procyon, Pollux. I don’t recall the others. But there’s no problem. We’ve got it locked into our course. If you look out the port-side window you can see Pollux. It’s the brightest star in the sky.”

  “That is beautiful,” said Betsy. “Bright red.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good,” Mark said. “We wouldn’t want to run into the black hole.”

  “Don’t worry. No way that’s going to happen.”

  The conversation attracted Virgil’s interest. “What kind of research were they doing with the black hole, Captain? You have any idea?”

  “I’d be guessing. Why don’t we ask Thwanna?”

  “Who’s Thwanna?”

  “Oh, she’s the artificial intelligence who helps out.” Years before, on his first flight as a captain he’d joked about how the AI was present to keep him from wrecking the ship. He still remembered the expressions he’d seen on the faces of his passengers. He’d never said anything like that again. “Thwanna,” he said, “why don’t you introduce yourself?”

  “Hello,” she said. “Betsy and Mark, I’m glad to meet you. And, Aaron and Virgil, we’ve met before. You might recall I’m a longtime fan.”

  They all looked around, trying to decide where the voice was coming from. The speaker was directly over the door that led onto the bridge. Mark and Betsy said they were glad to meet her. Aaron said how he could never forget a beautiful woman and Virgil told him she was an AI so she couldn’t really be beautiful. That led to an argument between the comics that could have come right out of one of their movies. When they’d finished the routine, Mark repeated his question about the black hole.

  Thwanna took a few seconds. Then: “They’re doing general research, Mark, but it looks as if the specific purpose of the project is that they hope to demonstrate there really are wormholes. Which they’ve done.”

  Mark looked at Perry. “What’s a wormhole?”

  Betsy stepped in: “I’m not sure. But I think they’re more or less tunnels, right? Through space. To another place. Sort of like traveling through what they call hyperspace.”

  Perry let her see that she had it right.

  “That,” said Thwanna, “is probably as good a hypothesis as any. Though some physicists think a wormhole can take you across the universe in a half hour. Or even to other universes. If there really are other universes.”

  “But what does that have to do with black holes?” asked Virgil.

  “Theoretically,” Thwanna continued, “wormholes are created by a black hole. Don’t ask me about the science. Nobody really understands it. Anyhow, they’ve been looking for one for a long time. But apparently the research is seriously expensive. They have to build a giant cannon that fires pods or something. The black hole creates space-time distortions in the area. The distortions form the tunnel, or the wormhole. The analysts can tell everything is working properly if they can find the pods after they’ve been fired. The cannon is huge, hundreds of kilometers long. That makes it expensive. It’s too big to be moved so it has to be built on the spot. Theorists always claimed the theory should be valid, and it turns out it apparently is.”

  “So they did find one?” Mark asked. “A wormhole?”

  “Yes.”

  He grinned. “What do you do with it? With a wormhole?”

  “That’s always been the issue,” said Thwanna. “It has no practical use. Maybe you can cross over to another universe.”

  Mark shrugged. “But what’s the value in that? This one has more real estate than we’re ever going to be able to use.” He started to get up, apparently headed for the washroom. “Back in a minute.” But he was too tall for the cabin. Almost bumped his head.

  Betsy laughed. “Talk about crossing to another universe. Some of us have trouble getting to the bathroom.”

  • • •

  Perry took advantage of the time to get more details on Octavia. Everybody was interested, so he stayed with them in the passenger cabin while Thwanna showed pictures of the station and explained its analytical capabilities. Physics was not his strength and most of it went over his head. His mind was adrift somewhere about a beautiful young woman he was trying to get involved with back at Ventnor Station when Thwanna started talking about the cannon.

  She put up a picture of what appeared to be a thin protracted gun barrel. “It’s more than six hundred kilometers long, mounted on a frame that has thrusters. Octavia uses them to control its position. Its purpose is to accelerate pea-sized probes up to about half light speed and eject them into the area where they think the wormhole is forming. I don’t know how they make that determination. It has something to do with quantum activity. The tunnel forms inside the space-time continuum. There is nothing complicated about the probes. Activate them and they beep an ID code until they exhaust their power.”

  “I still don’t get it,” said Betsy. “Why does it prove anything simply because we activate them?”

  “Oh. We don’t activate them. They do analysis of their surroundings. If they meet the parameters o
f a wormhole, they start signaling. They activate themselves.”

  Mark jumped in: “Sounds good.”

  “Brilliant.” Betsy looked genuinely impressed. “Did they ever find any of the pods?”

  “They did,” said Thwanna. “They claim they’ve established the existence of a wormhole.”

  “Where’s the cannon?” asked Aaron. “Is it close to the station?”

  “It’s only fifty or sixty kilometers away from it.”

  Perry had thought about applying for the tech job on Octavia. The money was good, but it would have meant settling in for a twenty-month assignment in unknown country. He was concerned at first that Marinda Barnicle, his boss, had been unhappy when he showed no interest. It left him wondering if she was trying to get rid of him. The truth was that he was enjoying his life on Chippewa too much to take on that kind of assignment. He’d have liked the extra money, but his mom had always told him that money wasn’t everything. Wasn’t even very much in a society when the essentials were guaranteed. He didn’t want wealth; what he wanted was time, hanging out with friends, partying, living the good life. And maybe, now and then, taking on a goofy assignment that didn’t create problems.

  • • •

  Pollux was brighter out here than it was from Chippewa. He also picked out Castor and Procyon. But it was Pollux that dominated the sky. It was nine times the size of Earth’s sun. (Perry was originally from Earth.) “Where is it?” asked Mark. “The black hole?”

  Perry had done some catching up on what they could expect. “We’re still pretty far out,” he said. “We can’t really see anything yet. In fact, we won’t be able to see it at all, but we’ll get some of the effects it causes. It’ll take a couple more days to get there.”

  They watched more movies, did some electronic jigsaw puzzles, played bridge while Perry watched. And eventually a dark portion of the sky emerged, surrounded by moving lights. The sky itself grew twisted and distorted. They’d all seen images of black holes before in documentaries and movies. It was even possible to create virtual images to occupy a living room and scare the kids. Still, knowing this one was for real did have a disquieting effect. Even though he’d been here before, Perry was affected by it. “Thwanna, let’s see if we’re close enough to talk to them. Go to broadcast.”