Sunborn

by Jeffrey Carver

“The small n-space disrupters might be more useful than you think,” Jeaves said. “But we’re not a warship. Mostly what we have is our intelligence, a certain ability to manipulate n-space, and Deep and Dark.”

  “Mm.” Bandicut looked around to see where Napoleon had brought him. They were in a small compartment, the right-hand wall lined with storage units, the left wall blank. In front of him was a round portal with a window in its center. He stepped up to peer through it. He could just make out the interior of a narrow tube, large enough for something about the size of a grapefruit to pass. He couldn’t see very far into it. “What are we learning from that second probe?”

  Napoleon raised a mechanical hand and touched a flat, metallic surface on the left wall. “Let’s see if we can pick up the transmission.” A moving picture appeared. It was a fish-eye-lens image from the probe. Strange-looking structures on all sides swelled and distorted as the probe moved through the interior of the Mindaru vessel. “There’s not much I can interpret from that.”

  “Can’t you get any—?”

  “Wait!” Napoleon pointed. “Look!”

  Bandicut was looking, but it took a few moments before he could make out what Napoleon was pointing at. Just coming into view, past a lot of jumbled, shadowy shapes and structures, was a faint horizontal halo of light, like the first light of dawn hazing up over a line of buildings. “What is it?”

  “Unknown, Cap’n.”

  “Well, can you get a—”

  Before he could finish his question, the image swung dizzyingly, then broke up and went blank. The voice of Copernicus informed them, “We have lost contact with the second probe.”

  “Any sign of what the trouble was?”

  “None, Captain. No prior indication of trouble.”

  Bandicut swore. He felt a knot in his stomach. /The probes are failing. Does that mean we should go in, or that we’d be crazy to go in?/

  /// I hate to say it, but...///

  /Yah./ He tipped his head back and called to Copernicus, “Do you have any clues? Because Napoleon and I are getting ready to go in.”

  “Unfortunately not,” Copernicus answered. “The signal weakened rather abruptly, and then went out. I’m afraid I can offer no advice on the possible risk to you. Captain, I think you should consider letting Napoleon go alone, at least to begin with.”

  “Negative, Coppy. We don’t know when that star could blow, and the probes aren’t getting the information we need. I’ll look out for Nappy and he’ll look out for me. Right, Napoleon?”

  “Unfortunately, I cannot argue,” Napoleon said. “But I do plan to improve our chances of maintaining contact, by dropping small transmitter-relays along the way.”

  “Good,” Bandicut said. “Besides, I’ll be protected by...come to think of it, I don’t see any spacesuits here. Jeaves?”

  “If you look to your right...”

  Bandicut turned, and saw stuck to the wall a set of sand-dollar-sized, pewter-colored objects. “These?” He tugged at one and it pulled easily off the wall. Turning it in his hand, he said, “Don’t tell me—”

  “That’s it. Stick it to your belt, or wherever it’ll fit.”

  Bandicut pressed it to his belt, and it stuck like a magnet. “Okay, I—” A flash of silver suddenly bloomed up around him and quivered into place, enveloping him in a billowing transparent bubble.

  “Now press—ah, you did already,” said Jeaves.

  “Yes. But how am I supposed to do anything from inside this bubble?”

  Jeaves hesitated a moment. “I’m not sure. Stand by...”

  While he was waiting, Bandicut squinted through the airlock window, and saw that the tube to the Mindaru vessel was visibly expanding. It was already almost large enough for him to float through. He took a slow, deliberate breath.

  /// Chin up. I’m with you. ///

  /Right. Thanks./ And to Napoleon, he said, “Are you ready?” He extended a hand, and the force-field bubble billowed silver.

  “Yes. Could you touch that little plate on the right-hand side of the portal, please?”

  As Bandicut’s finger touched the plate, the force-field around him suddenly contracted and coated him like quicksilver. He held up his gleaming hand and turned it one way and another, examining it. “Hello. Was that supposed to happen?”

  Jeaves answered, “I think so, yes. John, if you look in a small compartment next to the suits, you’ll find several packs of n-space disrupter units.”

  “Grenades, I think you called them,” Bandicut said, picking up what looked like a wide-but-too-short belt with three slender egg-shaped devices stuck to one side of it. “How do I—never mind.” He had tried, experimentally, pressing the belt section to his waist, and it was instantly attached. “Okay.” He picked up a second belt and offered it to Napoleon. The robot took it, but instead of attaching the belt to himself, he simply pulled the eggs off and stowed them out of sight on or in his metal body.

  “Okay, we’re armed. Let’s go.” Bandicut straightened up and was surprised to see that the airlock portal had vanished, replaced by an open tunnel. It looked just large enough for him to pass through headfirst.

  Li-Jared’s voice filled the airlock. “Bandie John, can you hear me?”

  “Loud and clear. I’ll do a comm check as soon as we’re over.”

  “Cap’n,” said Napoleon, moving toward the opening. “I shall go first. I am the more expendable.”

  “Mm, okay.”

  “You’ll be right behind me, though, yes?”

  “Yes. Now move it before I run you over.”

  Napoleon strode forward into the tunnel. Bandicut followed, with an oof! as he went unexpectedly weightless. He bounced off the tunnel walls, his force-field suit glimmering as he ricocheted gently from one side to the other. Of course; why would a self-contained, robotic AI module a third of a meter in diameter need artificial gravity? Keep moving.

  Napoleon had made it out the far end of the tube and was hovering just inside the Mindaru vessel, eyes turning this way and that, sensors obviously working at top capacity. Bandicut squeezed out of the tunnel behind him and floated motionless while Napoleon did his scans. He seemed to be in a wide, low cave, with very little headroom. If there had been gravity, he would have been crouching. “Li-Jared, can you hear me?”

  There was a moment of silence. Then: “We’re getting both voice and images. Can you ask Napoleon to hold at least one of his cameras still? He’s making me dizzy, swinging back and forth like that.” No sooner had he spoken than two of Napoleon’s eyes abruptly stopped moving. “That’s better. What are we looking at?”

  “We are at the edge of a low, cavernlike space that extends farther than I can see into the distance,” said Napoleon. “I suspect this interior may have the capacity to open wider, as needed. The question is whether it will close behind us as we progress deeper into the structure.”

  Bandicut had a sudden vision of dark storm clouds crowding in around him—he imagined a sharp flash of lightning, and the familiar farm image, harvesting machines towering, bearing down on him. He felt his knees buckle, and for a moment was unsure whether it was his real knees or his dream knees. Charli rushed to intercept, suppressing the power of the image.

  /// John, that’s a memory surging up.

  But that’s not what’s here in this place. ///

  He blinked back to reality with a gasp. /Right. But...was I on the verge of silence-fugue just then?/

  /// I think so, yes.

  It has a powerful hold on you.

  There must be some reason why it keeps

  coming back like that. ///

  Bandicut drew a deep breath. /Well, until we figure it out, do what you can to keep me wired to reality, okay?/ He glanced around, and had the sudden weird feeling that he was diving through a congested, underwater factory space. Most of what he saw looked like very strange machinery, some of it squared-off and angular, and some melted-looking. It all felt threatening.

  Napoleon was continu
ing his verbal report. “Since this compartment is crafted out of n-space, our original size in normal-space terms might be irrelevant. Possibly all that we see here might appear larger, if translated back to normal-space. As to why there’s room to move around, I speculate it’s for maintenance, and also for cooling, with the helium atmosphere.”

  Bandicut cleared his throat. He supposed that might make sense. But he still worried that they were swimming into a trap. “Let’s get moving, all right?” Napoleon kicked off to float forward. “What’s that?” Bandicut snapped as a spark dropped away from Napoleon and floated back past him.

  “Transmitter-relay, Cap’n. Remember?”

  Bread crumbs. Good. He followed Napoleon as the robot moved deeper into the gloomy realm. He was reminded of the star-spanner factory back on Shipworld. This machinery was quite different, but he could almost smell the ozone and oil and strange chemical compositions of the semiconductors and superconductors and quantum-conductors and whatever other damn things might be here. He wished they had the shadow-people with them.

  “You were wondering about maintenance units?” Jeaves said, causing Bandicut to rotate in place, looking for him. “No, I’m speaking from the ship. But I’m getting a good feed from Napoleon. Take a look ahead, and to your left. Do you see that thing crawling along the wall?”

  Bandicut squinted, and finally saw what Jeaves was talking about. A discus with numerous insectoid legs was scuttling along a low wall, tiny sparks of light coming from beneath it as it moved. He tensed, wondering if the thing had detected their presence. Should they try to disable it, before it noticed them?

  /// I think that might sound the alarm,

  if you tried to harm it. ///

  /But surely something is going to notice us here./

  As if reading Bandicut’s thoughts, Napoleon said, “I recommend we leave mech units like that undisturbed. I think Copernicus did a pretty good job of thinking like the Mindaru when he hacked the entry system. I see no indication that we have been noticed as an intruder.”

  “Let’s keep going, then.”

  Napoleon pushed off again, and Bandicut hastened to follow. “We seem to be on the edge of a fairly intensive operation here,” Napoleon said. As they passed over some dark walls—Napoleon dropping another relay-spark—the space ahead seemed to open out to reveal a wider area. Light flickered as though from distant welding torches. And then the glowing halo appeared, the light they had seen from the probe. “I think we’re moving in the right direction.”

  They floated among massive, curved structures that might have been transformers or capacitors or n-space field generators, or for all he knew, cubicle walls for mechs. As they drew nearer to the glow, the jumble of machinery that passed for a floor opened up, and Bandicut saw the source of the light. They had just come over a rise, and now were looking down into a kind of river valley. A long river valley. And flowing in that valley was a river of ghostly, sapphire light, a glowing plasma.

  Bandicut could not help shivering with awe, even though he thought he knew what it was.

  /// The flow of dark matter.

  This must be one of the streams we saw

  feeding into the star.

  Or maybe all of them, combined.

  Why is it channeled through here? ///

  /That’s what I’m wondering./ Bandicut instinctively reached out to find something to hold on to, for fear of falling into that ghostly place. His hand touched something moving, and he jumped when sparks shot from his hand. Rotating to look, he saw that his silver-coated hand had come down on the back of a robo-mech similar to the one they’d seen before. And his hand was stuck, as though held by a magnet. “Napoleon!” he cried, trying to yank his hand free.

  /// John, don’t pull away!

  I think the stones are getting information

  from it. ///

  /From a maintenance mech?/

  /// Yes. Give them a little longer. ///

  He felt a wave of dizziness. Napoleon came up on the other side, and he steadied himself with his right hand on the robot. “Thanks,” he gasped.

  “Are you injured?” Napoleon asked. “What has happened?”

  The force holding him to the robo-mech suddenly let go with another shower of sparks. The maintenance unit backed away. Bandicut shuddered and let out a long breath. “We had a momentary link, I think. I’m okay.” /Am I? Are the stones?/

  /// They’re fine, but...busy processing.

  I think they’re trying to crack the code

  of the language. ///

  /Infection?/

  /// I don’t think so.

  It seemed like a limited intelligence. ///

  “We should keep moving. I’m getting a lot of EM and quantum activity in this area,” Napoleon said, gripping Bandicut as he kicked off.

  “Yeah,” Bandicut said, taking a deep breath. He squinted toward the river of light. “I’ll bet there’s a lot of n-vector shit going on down there.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Napoleon said. “But we are certainly seeing n-spatial manipulation on a large scale. That is no doubt one of the channels feeding mass to the star.”

  /// Did you make that up, just now?

  N-vector shit? ///

  /I honestly don’t know./ Bandicut leaned closer to Napoleon. “So that is dark matter, that river of light?”

  “I can’t identify everything in it, but that plasma is primarily tiny-mass neutrinos, moderate-mass neutralinos, axions, and a lot of heavy particles that stump me,” Napoleon said. “That sounds like exotic dark matter to me. Doesn’t it to you?”

  “I don’t know. Why isn’t it dark?”

  “It’s concentrated, and in a high-energy state, compared to its usual free-floating condition. So it’s emitting light.” With a long metal arm, Napoleon pointed down the river to the left. “It’s flowing in that direction.”

  Way off to the left, the river disappeared into a kind of luminous haze. Napoleon began moving in that direction, flicking out another transmitter bread crumb as he went. “Li-Jared, are you still with us?” Bandicut called, following the robot. He took a moment to report.

  “Affirmative. Any sign of the probes?” Li-Jared asked, his voice a little fuzzy with static.

  “I see one of them ahead of us now,” Napoleon said. He slowed and hovered near a small, drifting, ovoid object, which looked just as alien to Bandicut as anything else they’d found here. After a moment, the probe suddenly began moving, and scooted off to the right, paralleling the river in an upstream direction. “It’s fine,” Napoleon said. “It became disoriented and lost its position and signal-lock. It was confused by the recurring convolutions in the shape of n-space here. I’ve sent it scouting in the other direction.”

  “Convolutions in the shape of n-space?” Bandicut murmured. “We’ll be very careful not to become disoriented by that, won’t we?”

  “Indeed,” said Napoleon. He pushed off and glided along the upper ridge of the river valley. Bandicut kept pace, eyeing the flow of dark matter to his right and “below” them. As they floated parallel to the stream, the hazy view ahead slowly began to resolve. It became clear that the plasma stream was flowing into a tunnel that led out of the cavern.

  “Nappy, can you tell where that tunnel leads?”

  Napoleon dropped another bread crumb. “At first I thought it connected this cavern to another farther on. Now I’m not so sure.” His sensors were twitching and blinking. “I’m thinking it goes a lot farther.” He slowed as they approached a low wall; they paused and peered over it like a parapet.

  The river of plasma entered the cavern wall through a round opening. It lit the inside of the tunnel, which looked like an extremely long, straight tube that stretched off to infinity. At the vanishing point, Bandicut thought he saw a diamondlike glint. “Collimated n-space channel,” Napoleon muttered.

  Bandicut squinted and bit off a sarcastic reply. “Naturally. Can you tell where it goes?”

  N
apoleon ticked, like an engine cooling. He shifted position, trying to align a sensor on the end of a telescoping arm. A dazzling light flared through a lens on the sensor, and Napoleon jerked back. “Bright. Sorry. I think this channel leads straight from this star into the heart of the next star. Into *Nick*.”

  Bandicut tried to think how to respond to that and finally, very softly, just cleared his throat.

  Chapter 29

  Departure

  The walls of the message-recording booth felt like a cell around Julie Stone as she sat silent, frozen, unable to think what she had intended to say in any of her messages. Captain Iacuzio’s last words still echoed in her ears: Surely there must be another way. And the translator’s answer: Perhaps. We will speak again shortly. And her stones, as she’d stood there watching the translator go silent: Are you willing to do what must be done?

  Yes. I’m willing. You knew that before you asked. But it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

  She sighed, staring at the wall of the booth, clearly visible through the star-vista incompletely rendered by the VR equipment. You don’t have much time. Let’s get this done. She clicked on the icon to begin a recording to send to Earth. When the tiny red light came on, she drew a breath and began, “Dakota, this is Julie Stone. I’ve never really managed to say the things I’ve wanted to say. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you on my return to Earth. But our meeting might have to be delayed...”

  She couldn’t really tell Dakota why, of course, just as she couldn’t tell her parents and brother. But she could let them know she was thinking of them. And perhaps set their minds at ease that she hadn’t lost her marbles. Besides, there was always the chance that she’d make it back if things went well. A chance.

  Now she was hurrying to finish; she’d spent too much time already. Clicking to send the holos, she rose and exited the recording booth. And bumped into Arlene, who was waiting outside. “Ah! Hi!” Julie said, her voice half an octave too high.

  Arlene managed a wan smile. “I guess we had the same thought,” she said awkwardly. “I feel like I need to say hi to my mom, or something. Keeping quiet about all this—that’s going to be hard.”