by K S Augustin
But that wasn’t the only danger. Although the Space Fleet vessels were the most technologically advanced in Republic space, there was still a slight chance the Differential could be damaged or disappear while entering or leaving hyperspace. That’s why the preparations for travel were so long and careful. That’s why it had taken so long to start the journey, lulling Moon into a shallow feeling of security.
Although the Republic used hyperspace extensively to oversee its vastness, its scientists still didn’t fully understand it. There were folds that could take a ship precisely from Point A to Point B almost instantaneously, while others provided exits light-years away from the desired destinations. While hyperspace could be entered anywhere, it appeared that the exits were at more or less predetermined points, like hitting and following a crease in an extra-dimensional coverlet.
As the Republic expanded from its human origins on the planet of Sol III, a rising number of explorers eagerly threw themselves and their primitive ships into the abyss to map the exits. They were more than willing to risk everything for riches. Where they successfully found an inhabited or compatible planet, soldiers followed, to either invade or colonise their discovery. In this way, like a game of random hopscotch, a significant fraction of the galaxy was subdued and placed under Republic rule. So it had been for the past three centuries.
The Suzuki Mass was near the edge of a Republic boundary. It took several hyperjumps to get there. There were a few systems near the end of the journey, but they were backward places, neglected by the Republic due to their isolation and lack of strategic importance. Beyond the Mass was the vacuum of the Fodox Stellar Barrens, an interstellar desert nobody had yet traversed in its entirety. For the first real-space experiment in stellar re-ignition, the Republic had chosen one of the least conspicuous sectors of the galaxy, where there were few inhabitants and no viable creases.
Moon could figure out some of the reasons for their choice of destination, but not all of it. She understood that the Republic might want some privacy while she tinkered with experimental stellar mechanics. But she wanted a bigger audience, a cadre of peers to analyse and offer criticism of her results. What she was trying to do had ramifications throughout the known galaxy and she was frustrated by the obviously high level of secrecy surrounding her experiments. Another nebula could have been chosen, one closer to the usual transport routes but, instead, the far-flung Mass was the cloud of choice.
And it was a barely eligible phenomenon at that. As Moon had told Srin, her type of stellar mechanics research involved re-ignition rather than stellar creation, and the Suzuki Mass was mostly composed of space dust, which made it a more likely candidate for accretion. But, near its core, it contained a small group of dead stars—an ancient Pleiades—and that was the Differential’s ultimate, disappointing, destination.
Stuck in the middle of space with few moments to herself, reconstructing the effort of years in a few short weeks and nursing a dose of self-pity, there seemed no place to which she could turn. And nobody she could turn to. So she spent every spare moment concentrating on her work, pushing away thoughts of the life she used to lead and the woman she used to be. The problem was, it didn’t really work. Not for long.
Three years ago, she had never guessed to ever be in the desperate situation that Kad had described in his calm, unhurried voice. Moving away from the panel after switching it off, she paced her cabin aimlessly, remembering words she may have been better off not recalling at all.
If you ever get to that stage, Moon, when you feel like the only choice left is to either jump off a cliff or be lasered, give me a call.
Never, not when she was first detained, not when her friends began dropping away from her with depressing speed, did she betray those last words Kad had gifted her. Not that she thought it meant anything, really.
But now, speeding her way to the Mass and possible notoriety she was finally beginning to understand the motivations that had driven Kad. Having come so close to permanent detention herself, she could appreciate his dangerous and principled stand, even if it was against the very body that had fed him, nurtured him and funded his ambition and research.
Give me a call.
Her mind skipped over the past three years, from start to end. Eventually, the Republic had grudgingly accepted what she told them. She had no idea Kad was a terrorist and she didn’t know where he had gone. In fact, she was still in awe that he even managed to escape the Phyllis Centre, with the trained wolves of the Security Force baying at his heels.
But just because she told them the truth about her ignorance of her research partner’s plans, that didn’t mean she was ignorant of a way open to contact him. In all honesty, she hadn’t even known about it herself until she was released, a little more than ten months ago, to restart her aborted research under their strict supervision.
Alone now in her cabin, reassured by Drue’s words that she was not being monitored, Moon walked to a cupboard, pulled out her satchel and rifled through its depths. Finally, after long frustrating minutes, her fingers closed on a small sliver of something. Silently, she drew it out, sat at the cabin’s small desk and laid it on the table in front of her.
It was a small badge or token of some sort, square in shape and slightly convex on both sides. She looked at it for a moment, then picked it up again, holding it delicately between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand and giving it a careless flick with her right fingernail. The token spun a couple times then stopped, caught by the friction of her fingers.
The Security Force soldiers had overlooked the small item each of the several times they rampaged through her lab, turning its contents upside down. Confronted by the secured carnage that kept her working area a frozen time capsule for years, Moon herself had been tempted to just throw everything out and begin again. Even silent, cold and untouched, her equipment and infobanks still seemed to retain some of the brutal stench of her interrogators.
It was the scientist in her—and the memory of a miserly, money-grubbing young researcher at the start of her postgraduate studies—who had stopped her from discarding everything wholesale, forcing her to spend weeks sifting through the detritus for anything she could salvage. She ploughed her way through discarded side-panels from equipment that remained offline since the day Kad fled, cracked clearboards that crunched underfoot and discarded documents that littered the floor. Methodically, like an archaeologist, she worked her way from one corner of the lab to the other, hesitating only when an out-of-place glint by the upturned legs of one of her worktables caught her attention.
At first she thought the small object was something one of Kad’s undergraduate students had dropped. But she knew the Centre’s cleaning bots were efficient and fastidious. If it had been dropped by a student, chances were it would have been cleaned up during the nightly run before that last day. And, according to the Security Force officers themselves, nobody—besides them—had entered the lab since the day they came to arrest Kad and drag him away.
Could it be Kad’s? It was unlike him to hold on to such a piece of triviality.
She idly held the square object up to the light and squinted. To her surprise, Moon could make out embedded circuitry, faintly visible as a geometric pattern through the red and green surfaces of each side. The straight and angled lines were difficult to distinguish from the hard-gel layers that sandwiched them.
Moon had been tempted to throw the bauble away, discarding it along with the broken pads and clearboards. But the novelty of finding such a colorful item in a place of hard research had stopped her.
And just as well. Although it had taken weeks, Moon divined the token’s purpose. Each side bore abstract-looking patterns of small and large coloured spheres. At first she struggled to see meaning in the pastel shapes that stood out against the primary color backgrounds. Then it came to her: these were molecular symbols. A basic chemistry reference table told her what they represented—the symbol for Potassium on one side, and Calcium Iodide on th
e other.
Potassium. Calcium Iodide.
It took time to think through to the next step. She remembered her fingers trembling when it finally fell into place.
K CaI2…CaII…Call…Call K.
Call Kad.
And with that thought, the rest of the solution clicked into place. The trinket was a camouflaged comms chip. It was one of several sorts that would function with the ubiquitous public communications terminals found on all Republic worlds. Somehow, despite his double life and the threat of constant exposure, Kad Minslok had found the time and cunning to fashion a way of contacting him. It was a risk. Moon wondered that he had enough confidence in her to leave open a channel of communication and trust her not to betray him to the Republic.
Her fingers closed over the small square in much the same way as it did when she first deciphered the code. She squeezed until the small rounded corners bit into her palm.
Call Kad.
She wondered if the situation would ever arise when she needed to use it.
She hoped not.
It was a relief to get back to research, to the point of the Differential’s mission in the first place.
Stellar re-ignition.
Despite the mountain of problems still in the way, Moon was happy to lose herself in the mire of complex equations and multi-dimensioned suppositions, even as she drove herself into collapsing straight into the arms of exhausted oblivion each night.
She threw a quick glance up at Hen Savic’s imposing figure at the other end of the lab. He was obviously sharing a joke with Srin about something because his laughter boomed through the high-ceilinged space. It was morning of the third day. And Moon steeled herself for what to expect, taking a deep breath as she surreptitiously watched the two men.
It was ironic how she had worried about adjusting to the standard Space Fleet twenty-four hour cycle when she was now obsessed with one that lasted two days. One day to get acquainted and begin working together. Another to begin a deeper friendship. One night to destroy it all and send both of them back to the beginning.
She looked down again, blinking a few times and concentrating on inanities to stop herself from watching how Srin moved and talked. Even when he wasn’t looking at her, he captivated her. More so, in fact. When she didn’t hold his attention, she could observe more closely how he acted—the easy smile that often creased his face, the strength and calm of his expression, the graceful way he moved that belied the taut lines of muscle she had felt under her fingers when he kissed her. It pained her to watch him because it was a taunt, akin to telling her that she couldn’t have him because he was a man outside time, unable to even provide the foundation of a relationship on which to build.
I shouldn’t be thinking of this, of him, she told herself. I should be concentrating on work.
Plasma is ionised gas. Plasma is electrically conductive. The centre of a star is high in both temperature and electron density.
“Dr. Thadin.”
When she first heard it, she thought Savic’s voice was like the rumble of thunder over rolling hills. Now, it seemed to ring with hollow hypocrisy.
“I’d like to introduce you to someone you’ll be working with quite closely. His name is Srin Flerovs.”
How could Savic keep his voice so even, time after time? How could he disguise his duplicity so well for two decades? Moon didn’t want to meet Srin’s gaze, to see the friendly curiosity in his eyes, followed closely by a spark of masculine appreciation, but she had no choice.
Slowly she rose to her feet and offered her hand. “Nice to meet you.”
“Dr. Thadin,” he returned, squeezing her hand gently. “Hen tells me you’re working on stellar-forming.”
“Yes.” The word came out weak and wobbly and she cleared her throat. “Specifically, the re-ignition of dead stars.”
He smiled, and his eyes lit up. Moon held herself rigid to stop from wincing.
“Why the emphasis on re-ignition?”
How many times in the past few weeks had she heard that question from those lips?
“It’s more efficient,” she replied tersely, moving to the heavy-water simulation tank, then stopped. It was petty taking out her frustrations on Srin when the person she really disliked was standing next to him. Maybe the quicker she showed she was able to have a constructive dialogue with Srin, the quicker Savic would leave.
She took a deep breath and smiled. “Because I feel it’s more efficient igniting a dead star. That way, you may already have a planetary system in place, with worlds ripe for terraforming or colonisation. If I try to create a new star through aggregation of space dust and energy, it’s still useless without any habitable planets.”
“Only if the goal is to create new planets for people to live on,” Srin commented.
Moon frowned. Why did everyone seem to jump to that one point? Even Drue brought it up. “What other goal could I have?”
It was Srin’s brief look at Hen Savic that told her more than words and sparked her curiosity. This was day one of Srin’s cycle, but the glance at his minder indicated that there was something coursing through Srin’s head that seemed to indicate conclusions quickly reached. Or perhaps a retained memory?
Moon’s eyes widened at the conjecture, but she stifled the brief leap of hope. Even if Srin did remember something now, there was nothing stopping Savic increasing the dose until Srin would be lucky to remember his own name, much less the preceding day. Any hint of rebellious thought on Srin’s part, she knew, would be treated ruthlessly and eradicated.
“No other goal,” he said easily. “I just like thinking.” His expression was candid. “Your project sounds very ambitious, and I’m glad you think I can be of some help. I’m ready to start whenever you are.”
She nodded and moved to one of several large clearboards installed in the lab’s open space, punching up her initial work—saved in the board’s memory rather than in the library meta-unit—in preparation for explaining her equations to Srin. By now, having repeated it several times, Moon was getting more slick and economical with her words. But her mind wasn’t on the task. Instead she was replaying that one furtive look he directed to his handler. Despite the decades of drugging, was it possible that Srin had retained some buried sense of continuity? That he could see beneath Savic’s jocularity to the sinister purpose beneath?
As she had hoped, once Savic saw them hard at work, he silently disappeared. Moon would have missed the slight sag of Srin’s shoulders if she hadn’t been looking at him directly. Was she correct in assuming the movement was a sign of relief? But work intruded before she could think on it again. She and Srin worked through plasma equilibrium equations, gravity wave computations and two simulation exercises, taking the results to the heavy-water tank for verification. It was an intense and long day.
It was Moon’s aim to introduce a super-dense packet of highly fissionable material into the core of the target star, with the hope that it would begin a chain reaction that would then morph into self-sustaining fusion and bring the body once more to life. Sister to the equipment in her lab was an entire gleaming setup in the cargo bay next to the Engineering section. If Moon could get all the maths worked out in the lab, and as much of the basic physics as possible verified in the tank, then she’d get permission to set up her fission packet in the cargo bay and prepare it for delivery.
She didn’t have as much time as she would have liked. The Differential was a handful of weeks from the Suzuki Mass and she had only transferred her equations to the tank twice, failing to get the results she expected both times. Time was running out, which meant a lot of exhausting days still ahead for her and Srin. But if they succeeded…
The process of death to new life—if successful—should not take more than a few days, she thought. In the scale of astronomy, where the lifespan of galaxies was measured in billions of years, it was the stellar equivalent of instant gratification. She always had to grin to herself when she thought of it.
But
between her aspirations and a blazing new star capable of sustaining life again were a bewildering number of complications. She badly needed Srin to help her navigate her way through them. It was unbelievable the way she could throw a problem at him—the magnitude of quantum fluctuations, given a certain, sharp degree of thermal change, for example—and have him come back with the answer almost instantaneously. She could see how seductive it was to any theoretical scientist to have such a wonder at their beck and call, a precise and effortless scalpel cutting through to the heart of a problem. By comparison, the latest model Quantaflex was like a stone chisel.
But does that justify what they did to him?
Moon shook off the thought and didn’t get back to it again until they took a welcome break for lunch. She found herself watching him as he ate, aware that she had never taken such interest in someone else’s eating before. His bites of food were quick yet complete, like his glances. She noticed the way his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed and wondered about the feel of his strong throat against her lips. She imagined its roughened texture against her mouth, warming her with its heat. His strong length of neck disappeared into the high vee of his soft shirt, but Moon couldn’t help but run her gaze over the well-built figure the material concealed but could not completely hide. Regardless of what Savic had done to him, he was obviously keeping up some kind of exercise regime.
Her lips twisted cynically and she hid the expression by chewing on some food. Of course Savic would take an interest in Srin’s general level of fitness. He had to make sure his prime specimen was in tip-top condition, after all. Exercise was probably as much part of Srin’s regime as his regular dose of drugs. Idly, she wondered how the chemical was imparted. Was it breathed in or injected or—she gave the lunch platter a startled look—ingested? Suddenly bereft of her sense of hunger, she dropped the piece of bread she was eating onto her plate. If Savic had been drugging Srin for decades, there was nothing stopping him from doing it to anyone else. In fact, a twisted scientifically minded brain might even consider it a necessary move, in order to set up a comparative study.
