by Ellis, Don
“Come see,” he said again, nodding toward the workbench. “It’s the strangest damned thing.”
“You’re the strangest damned thing,” she shouted. She turned and stomped back out into the tunnel, bouncing high and almost hitting her head on the ceiling with the force of her footsteps.
He stepped to the door. “Raedawn . . .”
“Don’t you ‘Raedawn’ me! Go ahead and examine your precious commlink. While you’re at it, why don’t you graft it to your stupid head so you don’t have to waste a hand while you’re talking to people!”
“That’s another weird thing,” he said, trying to explain to her what was so interesting about it. “It did absorb my fingers for a second. If I hadn’t shaken it free, they probably would be grafted together by now.”
“Too bad you lost your opportunity.” She turned to go, but stopped when she got a signal from her commlink. She threw David a dirty look as she thumbed it on and said, “Corona.”
What was that all about? he wondered as he turned back to the lab. He could hear Kuranda’s voice coming over Raedawn’s communicator.
“Mission accomplished, Captain. And I have a little gift for you. State your location.”
“I’m at the lab.”
“Stay put. Were on our way. Out.”
Raedawn looked at David with bewilderment. “We?”
5
David used the minutes it took for Colonel Kuranda to reach the lab to examine the results of his experiment as Raedawn looked on in cold silence. It was just as he’d suspected; the screwdriver and the electronic gadget had blended right down to the molecular level. He vaguely heard the rumble of booted feet far down the tunnel, but he was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t pay any attention until he saw Raedawn snap to attention.
He looked up as Kuranda entered the lab. The colonel’s close-cropped gray beard and balding head had always given him a fatherly look. Now, combined with his wide eyes and flaring nostrils, it made him look wild, out of control. Close behind him were two grunts and between them, David was surprised to see a thin, wiry, dark-haired man wearing the uniform of the Neo-Soviet military.
“We got what we went for,” Kuranda said. He turned to Raedawn. “Plus we found someone I think you’ll find most useful.”
“In what way?” she said, eyeing the stranger suspiciously.
The stranger shuffled his feet and looked about nervously.
Kuranda cleared his throat. “He was working in the comm center when we stormed the place. He speaks pretty good English and requested asylum right away. He seemed convinced I was going to execute him on the spot.”
Raedawn stepped closer to the man and said, “What’s your name and rank?”
The man looked to Kuranda, who gave him a gruff nod. “Lieutenant Boris lvanov, Communications Specialist. I useful. I can break you into Neo-Soviet comm system.”
Raedawn nodded. David knew that so far, she’d had no luck trying to penetrate the enemy system. “There’s just one small problem. How do we know he’s not a spy?”
“I not go back,” Boris said resolutely. “He is crazy man.”
“Who?” Raedawn asked.
“General Leonov. He kill people for smallest reason. I am looking for way out for long time. I go gladly. I am tired of war.”
Raedawn, David, and Kuranda exchanged glances.
“The troubles won’t stop until General Vanivar is dead,” Kuranda stated flatly. Vanivar was the driving force behind the Neo-Soviet Alliance. He had reforged its military might through aggressive expansion, lifting the empire out of its long economic slump. And he had no intention of stopping until the entire world was his. Or until he died trying.
Boris shrugged. “Perhaps he is.”
The red flush drained from Kuranda’s face. Apparently it had only now hit him that the people on Earth weren’t just gone, but were very likely dead.
They all stood in silence for a moment. Kuranda struggled to recover his usual hard exterior. “We still won’t cooperate with you Russkies. Not after all you’ve done to us.” The strange conglomeration of fused metal on the workbench caught Kuranda’s eye.
“What the hell is that, Hutchins?”
David walked over and pointed out the screwdriver fused into the circuitry. “It had a little run-in with an alternate dimension. At least that’s what I think it was.”
“An alternate dimension?” Kuranda asked.
David told him about the fusion generator and the mysterious black fog that had engulfed it when he switched on the containment field. “I think it’s the same stuff that ate Earth,” he said.
“Is not ‘stuff’,” Boris said. “Is monstrous.” His face reflected the horror of what he must have witnessed at the Neo-Soviet comm center.
“I can either go into hysterics or try to understand what happened,” David explained. “Your choice.”
“What do you know about it?” Kuranda demanded.
“It’s got to be some kind of magnetic effect. It happened right after I switched on the containment field.”
He picked up the commlink and held it so they could all see the blended parts. Even the two grunts looked on with fascination. “This transposition effect makes me think it’s knocking a hole through normal space-time. I shoved this screwdriver all the way into the generator when it was running, and a few seconds later my fingers slid right through the surface of the commlink even though they weren’t inside the field at the time. It looks like anything that’s been inside the field loses its definition for a while, and until the effect fades out, more than one thing can occupy the same space at the same time.”
“Could it be some kind of alien transporter technology?” Raedawn asked.
“Possibly. It certainly transported Earth and Luna somewhere. But whoever was responsible didn’t seem to care much what shape it was in when it got there.” He set the communicator back on the bench. “I’m leaning more toward ‘industrial accident’ as an explanation.”
Kuranda snorted. “All of humanity couldn’t muster the energy necessary to warp space to that degree.”
“Maybe it wasn’t humanity’s accident.”
Kuranda merely looked at him. The Neo-Sov glanced from one to the other, no doubt soaking in everything he could learn about the Union chain of command as well as the mysterious black cloud. At this point, no one seemed to care.
David continued brainstorming anyway. He said, “What if someone was crossing through the solar system in a faster-than-light spaceship? We have no idea how to actually travel FTL, but all our theories say you’d have to do it through some kind of subspace where the laws of physics are different. That would probably put a lot of stress on the normal space they were flying through. So suppose someone was doing that, and they came a little too close to Earth. Space is already deformed from the mass of the planet, and the Moon stretches it out even more. Add thousands of fusion reactors—some of them not shielded—and you’ve got a region of space ready to burst at the first disturbance.”
“You think Earth was hit by speeding starship?” Boris asked.
“Maybe. It’s as good a theory as any.”
“What difference does it make?” Kuranda said. “It’s gone. That’s all that matters.”
“Is it?” Before Kuranda could argue, David said, “I don’t know for sure what happened, but I’ve got a pretty good idea how to duplicate the phenomenon on a small scale. The Earth went somewhere. I think it’s possible to go after it.”
“Impossible,” Kuranda said. He snatched the commlink off the workbench and held it in David’s face, the embedded screwdriver sticking out of it like an old-style antenna. “If you tried it, you’d wind up like this.”
“We don’t know that. If I’m not touching anything when I go through, there won’t be anything to merge with.”
“You plan on going through nude?” Kuranda asked. “What about air? When stuff starts mixing together you could get embolisms in the blood, strokes in the brain, wh
o knows what else?”
David was growing exasperated. “Nobody knows,” he said, “but nobody’s going to know unless we do some experimentation. I need to rig up a remote sensor and send it through, see if I can get some data from the other side. See if I can spot Earth, or an alien starship, or something else entirely. If I can bring my probe back in once piece, I’ll send a mouse from the biolab, and if that works, we’ll see about sending a person through.”
“I forbid it,” Kuranda said. “You would jeopardize this entire installation and our precious resources for the sake of curiosity.”
“I’ll do my experimentation in space. I’ll go all the way back to where Earth was if you like. That’s obviously where the effect is strongest anyway.”
“We can’t afford to lose a spacecraft, either.”
“Bullshit,” said Raedawn.
Everyone looked at her in surprise. She’d been unusually quiet up to this point.
“Bullshit,” she repeated. “A chance to rescue Earth is one we cannot afford to lose.”
“That’s true,” David said. “You risked more than a ship today, Colonel, mostly to steal food. One long-range shuttle wouldn’t make any difference in the long run to our base.”
“If you’re determined to die, I can think of better ways to do it,” Kuranda said.
“Nobody’s going to die,” David said. “We’re not going to send anybody through until we know it’s safe.”
“You got that right,” said Kuranda. He squinted at the ruined commlink, then set it back on the workbench. “You really think there’s a ghost of a chance to bring Earth back from wherever it went?”
David shrugged. “If we find out how it got there, maybe, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Like you said, all of humanity working together couldn’t muster the energy to drag a whole planet around. But if we find it, we can at least lead people back from wherever it went. Assuming anybody’s still alive.”
“Giving us more mouths to feed if they are.”
Kuranda paced away from the bench and back, thinking. David knew exactly what was going through his mind. The Union expedition force was hopelessly outnumbered here. With help from home there had been a decent chance for survival, but there weren’t enough of them to colonize an enemy-held world. They would be lucky to survive even without the added drain on their resources. On the other hand, the Neo-Soviets controlled Mars and would dominate it forever if the Union expedition didn’t get reinforcements from somewhere.
It was a long shot, but as David had pointed out, Kuranda had been willing to risk more just to steal supplies.
After three or four circuits, Kuranda stopped pacing. “All right, here’s what we’ll do: You and the Russian and Raedawn can take a shuttle back to Earth space.” The Neo-Sov jerked his head up in surprise.
Raedawn started to protest, but Kuranda cut her off. “He’ll be an asset if you encounter any Neo-Sov ships. Maybe bluff you out of a bad situation. But I want you to be careful. No stupid heroics. I want you both back in one piece. We need you here.”
Kuranda motioned to Boris and said to Raedawn, “I leave him in your custody. If he gives you trouble, shoot him.” Without waiting for a reply, he stalked out of the lab and down the tunnel toward the main colony, with the two grunts close behind.
Raedawn glared at their prisoner. “I still don’t trust you as far as I can throw you,” she said, “but once we’re in space it won’t matter. From that point on, we’re all going to be working for the same thing.”
“Is right,” Boris said. “All working to survive.”
6
A few hours later, David, Raedawn, and the Neo-Sov were in the shuttle tying down the fusion generator.
David wiped sweat from his forehead. Even in Mars’s low gravity, it had been all he and Boris could do to lift the bulky power plant into the cargo hold.
Raedawn was standing in the open cargo airlock among the piles of equipment they had yet to stow. Her black leather jacket once again covered her bare arms and black T-shirt, and she held a gun trained on Boris.
Boris eyed her warily as he cinched tight the wide nylon strap that he had wrapped around the top half of the generator. She eyed him back with equal distrust.
David yanked on his side of the cargo strap. “Let’s stow the rest of this stuff and get moving.”
Kuranda would only allow them to take a month’s rations. He reasoned that they could restock on Earth if they found it, and if they didn’t find it in a month, they should give up and come back. Provided they could, of course. If not, it wouldn’t matter how much food they had.
It was depressing to see how little room a month’s food occupied in the cargo bay. It barely filled one corner. The fusion reactor and a dozen hastily wound superconducting magnets took up another corner, and a magnetometer, rad counter, a half-dozen radar range finders, and a few other instruments took up a third. Weapons filled the fourth; the only pile that David thought was bigger than necessary. However, Kuranda had pointed out that Earth had been headed for global warfare when it slipped away, and that hostilities could still be going on there. If it became necessary to fight their way in—or out—it wouldn’t help if they left their weapons at home. Raedawn had agreed with Kuranda, so David had reluctantly allowed them to load missiles, rail guns, assault rifles, grenades, and who knew what else on board.
Of course none of the weapons would work for Boris. They had all been identity-locked. David or Raedawn would have to enter a password before Boris could fire even the smallest pistol, and the authorization would only last for an hour at a time. David wondered how long it would take the Neo-Sov to crack the code if he wanted to, but he wasn’t that worried about it. The time to worry about Boris was after he’d learned everything he was going to learn about the Union and about the new phenomenon they were going out to investigate. He had a hunch that moment would be a long time coming.
The more data they gathered, the longer it would be. While Boris and Raedawn mounted missile launchers on the hull, David mounted telescopes, radar, lidar, and a gravitometer. The shuttle already had a telescope built into the navigation controls, but David wanted to be able to see in the infrared, ultraviolet, and radio spectra as well. He had no idea what they might find on the other side or how far away Earth might be when they got there, so he wanted to go in with his eyes wide open.
Assuming they could live through the passage in the first place. To test that, he and Boris, who turned out to have a surprising facility with things mechanical, spent a day assembling a crude spy satellite to shove through the anomaly. While they worked, he’d recounted to David some of the reasons he’d defected to the Union. Hearing about the general who so terrorized Boris that he feared for his life made David think that maybe Kuranda wasn’t so bad after all.
At last they were ready to go, and not a minute too soon. The black cloud was shrinking rapidly. The arm that had reached out toward Mars had withdrawn back into the parent mass, and the whole works was swirling tighter and tighter. David had wanted to turn on the fusion generator for a few minutes to see if that would draw it back out, but Kuranda wouldn’t allow it. He was obviously afraid it would work too well, and that Mars would suffer the same fate as Earth.
David, Raedawn, and Boris waited for dark, then climbed into their ship and slipped without fanfare out of the cavern on agravs. Raedawn piloted from the right-hand control chair while David navigated from the left. Boris was belted into a chair in the cargo hold. They’d blindfolded him so he couldn’t recognize the colony’s location through the forward window and also left the dividing door open so they could watch him. David directed Raedawn to fly northwest toward Pavonis, then let her angle the shuttle straight upward and light the drive to send them into space.
There was no artificial gravity on board. The thrust shoved them deep into their seats and forced the breath from their lungs but it let off after a few minutes. The sky turned from pink to violet to black as they rose at a more tolerable one gee into orbit.<
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“All right,” Raedawn said as the red landscape became a curving wall behind them. “Next stop, the planet-eater. Okay, Boris. You can take that blindfold off now.”
“Let’s get the satellite ready,” David said, unbuckling his seat belt and moving back through the open doorway to the cargo bay. Boris moved to help him.
It took a couple of hours to wire four superconducting magnets to the instrument platform and to tie everything down so the intense field wouldn’t yank anything loose. The resulting conglomeration of wires and duct tape looked more like a science fair project than an alternate-universe probe, but David had confidence it would do the job. It was sturdy and simple; the best qualities a remote sensor could have when going into unknown territory.
The plan was equally simple: they would shove the probe out the airlock and activate it from a safe distance. The magnets should provide enough field strength to open the anomaly. Once it had swallowed the probe, they would send a signal to shut down the magnets and power up the instruments. In the event their signal could not penetrate the anomaly, the probe was programmed to perform the same functions if triggered by a loss of signal.
For sixty seconds an onboard camera would do a visual search of wherever it wound up, a wide-band radio would listen for message traffic, and a high-gain transmitter would try to relay the data back through the anomaly to their ship. After sixty seconds, the magnets would switch on again, and the satellite would—they hoped—pop back through the field into normal space.
“What makes you think it’ll do that?” Raedawn asked when David described the plan to her. She’d put the shuttle on autopilot and come back into the cargo bay to watch them assemble the reconnaissance probe. “What’s to keep it from just sitting there?”
David stopped wiring the bulky magnets together. He hadn’t considered that. He had assumed that when you opened a hole in space, whatever was occupying that space at the time would fall through the hole. It had worked that way in his lab, but it didn’t necessarily have to happen that way in reverse, did it?
