Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  And there was sound. Speech.

  “Time to get up. Time to get up. Time to get up…”

  Whose voice was that? How long had it been speaking? “Yes,” she said, only the word came out as an inarticulate croak.

  “Good, you are awake,” the voice responded. The words had a flatness that belied the sentiment.

  An AI. Marvin, she recalled. What else did she remember? A racking cough vanquished that thought. And did she hear someone else coughing?

  Her eyes, like rusted hinges, resisted opening. Opening them anyway, she glimpsed through tendrils of white mist a frost-speckled clear dome. The dome canted at a steep angle.

  So that I can get out. Laughing at the absurdity of even sitting, the first, sharp intake of breath set her chain-coughing again.

  The spasm finally subsided.

  “Mar…vin,” she rasped.

  “You might want to take it slowly,” the AI said. “My readouts indicate that you may need a minute.”

  I’ll need hours. As glacially as her thoughts churned, she had an insight. “I’m not heavy.”

  “We are decelerating at one-third gee,” it said. “Endeavour is safe.”

  Safe? Safe from what?

  The whole panic/horror/insanity crashed down on her. Along with whom she was. And who was with her. And the billions who were gone, dead, fried.

  “Blake!” The shout tore at Rikki’s throat, set her coughing again.

  “Yea-ugh,” someone sputtered. It might have been him.

  She remembered where his pod was, and turned her head. Even in Mars-like gravity, her neck muscles screamed with the effort. She found Blake looking back at her.

  She said, “You look…” Wheezing preempted the description.

  “Yeah, but we’re alive.” He attempted a smile. “I’ll grant it…doesn’t feel that way.”

  Beyond Blake’s pod, Rikki saw the others stirring. There was Dana, blinking as though to clear her eyes. And Li, groggily turning her head from side to side. At the end of the row, Antonio had managed to sit up. With a hand raised to his face, he was stroking his chin scar. And in the middle—

  “Carlos’s pod is still closed!” Rikki said.

  Marvin said, “His readouts had drifted beyond the desired parameters. I thought Li should make the decision whether to interrupt his cold sleep, and be here to monitor the process.”

  Dana struggled into a sitting position. “Marvin, report,” she whispered hoarsely.

  “We avoided the GRB, and all major shipboard systems continue to operate within acceptable limits. As expected, radiation degraded external sensors as the ship’s speed increased. I kept sensors powered off and shuttered as much as practical to extend their lifetimes. The bridge also sustained radiation damage. I cannot quantify the impairment, beyond severe enough that diagnostic programs fail to run to completion. I believe we have the spare parts to repair everything.”

  “What about life support?” Dana prompted. “Propulsion?”

  “Both systems are operating within acceptable parameters,” Marvin said.

  Rikki sat up and swiveled, dropping her legs over the side of the pod. The change in position made her head spin and she did not dare to stand. Her arms and legs trembled. The taste in her mouth was like old cardboard.

  All from the cold-sleep process?

  Once before, Rikki had been in a pod. She’d been researching the history of the ice industry. Getting miners at one of the oldest still-producing tunnel complexes to agree to meet with her had been a struggle. When the appointed time came, despite having felt queasy for days, she’d gone anyway. The queasiness became abdominal discomfort; having flown halfway around the world, she ignored the feeling as best she could to continue with the interviews.

  But discomfort became soreness became pain. Stomach upset turned to nausea. When the vomiting began, there was no ignoring it.

  Acute appendicitis, the miners’ medical AI had diagnosed. The miners popped her into a cold-sleep pod for transport to the nearest hospital.

  Awakening from that pod in the OR, she had been in agony. But that had been a localized pain. Now she hurt—everywhere. And though she had felt feeble that time, she didn’t remember being so bone-weary, or confused about who and where she was. But that incident had involved only a few hours in the pod.

  Rikki asked, “Marvin, how long have we been in cold sleep?”

  “According to the ship’s clock,” Marvin said, “it has been almost forty-five years.”

  14

  Logic, thermostat readouts, and gushers of warm air from the bridge air vents be damned, Dana was freezing. The sensation was all in her head, surely, but she felt chilled to the marrow of her bones. She gulped from a drink bulb, burning her mouth and throat, but the scalding black coffee could not melt the cold fear.

  Forty-five years? Something had gone horribly wrong.

  She sat in the pilot’s acceleration seat, dying to rub her arms with her hands, and resisting. A captain did not hug herself for warmth.

  No matter how shaken she was.

  She had ordered Blake and Antonio forward to check out the bridge. In the minutes spent strapping Carlos into a stretcher and helping carry him to the infirmary—he limp and delirious, she and the other women lightheaded and wobbly—Blake had already begun repairs. Antonio perched on the outside armrest of the copilot’s seat, scrolling through data on the sensor console, uploading numbers from the ship’s files to the datasheet draped across his lap.

  Blake squirmed, muttering, flat on his back on the sliver of deck between the acceleration couches. His head and both hands were deep inside the nav console. After years flying together, Dana had calibrated his cursing. She interpreted: he had found plenty out of kilter, the ship’s overall integrity was satisfactory, and he trusted his ability to make the necessary repairs.

  She wouldn’t worry until that mumble morphed into something louder.

  “Eighth time’s the charm, maybe.” Blake wriggled out of the console, clutching a scorched electronics module. He set the ruined part with the rejects already littering the deck. “Oh, hi, Dana. How’s Carlos doing?”

  “Stable, is all I can tell you. Still out of it. How are things here?”

  Squeezing past Antonio, Blake settled into the copilot’s seat. He shut the access panel with a shoe tip. “A good question. Marvin, try the main displays again, fore and aft views.”

  The infirmary, where Li and Rikki continued to monitor Carlos’s condition, must be even more crowded. But the women’s voices—when they rose above the drone of the ventilation fans—were calm. The tone struck Dana as positive.

  Unlike what came from the repaired holo projector. Ahead: countless unfamiliar stars. Aft: formless, foreboding darkness.

  So much for her deduction upon hearing they had overslept. That Endeavour’s velocity had peaked early, for reasons unknown. That the ship had crawled, comparatively speaking, making the trek to Alpha Centauri at “only” a few percent of light speed. That if nothing else had gone according to plan, at least they knew where they were and where they were headed.

  Wishful thinking, it seemed.

  “All right, Marvin,” Dana said. “Explain what happened, why you kept us in cold sleep for so long, and where we are.”

  “I cannot say where,” Marvin said. “Somewhere beyond my chart files.”

  Dana frowned. “You must have some idea.”

  “The cloud may be the Coalsack: that is the closest dark nebula to Sol system. If so, still relative to Sol system, we are on the nebula’s far side.”

  “Past the Coalsack?” Blake said. “That’d be more than six hundred light-years!”

  “That’s about right,” Antonio said. “I have bearings on several beacons.”

  Who could have put beacons out here? Dana pinched the bridge of her nose. Behind her eyes, a killer headache waited to pounce. “What are you talking about, beacons?”

  “Natural beacons. Pulsars.” Antonio kept prodding his datashe
et as he spoke. “Some neutron stars emit regular RF…pulses. Each star pulses at a unique rate, related to…its rotation. With bearings on a few known RF sources, it’s just geometry to find our location.” He did something to the datasheet, then handed it to Dana. “Our coordinates.”

  She felt like Marvin: off the charts. The coordinates were mere numbers, meaningless. They might just as well have read, like the periphery of some medieval chart, Beyond this point be monsters. “Why did you bring us here, Marvin?”

  “The cosmic string brought us here,” Marvin said. “I did not have sensors to characterize it. I only know that it pulled us in. It required the DED and the fusion drive to achieve orbit.”

  And what an odd orbit it must have been! Thin as a proton, Antonio had called it. The cosmic string was like a line in space, a line along which they had spiraled to exploit the locally faster light speed. She downed another swig of the hot coffee. It once more refused to warm her.

  “But why remain along the string?” Dana asked. For forty-five years!

  Antonio was only too happy to theorize.

  The stuttering, hesitant torrent of words went over her head, and Dana realized she had let curiosity get the better of her. How they had gotten here, so far from home, no longer mattered. Because home was gone. What mattered was that they were here, escaped from the GRB.

  And that having survived, she had a job to do. They all did.

  She said, “Antonio, excuse me for a moment.” Because lost or not, dangers might lurk nearby. “Marvin, how fast are we traveling?”

  “Relative to the interstellar medium, we have slowed to about one-tenth light speed. That is estimated from measured radiation levels. I waited to wake everyone until you could move about the ship in complete safety.”

  The interstellar medium was as close as the galaxy came to a perfect vacuum. Dana asked, “Other than that, what’s our speed?”

  “Relative to what?”

  A damned good question, for which she had no answer. “What’s nearby?”

  “Nothing is within radar range.”

  Peering into the holos, she saw not a single star with a visible disk. Thermal readings from the hull confirmed that the ship was deep in the interstellar deep freeze.

  “How far to the closest stars?” she asked.

  “I don’t know which stars are closest,” the AI said.

  “So where are we headed? Why are we under acceleration?”

  Marvin said, “We came off the string at near-light speed. We are not so much going somewhere as we are slowing down. I don’t know where to go.”

  And she did? “Antonio? Suggestions?”

  “I’ll look into it.” Antonio straightened on the armrest. “About our flight along the string. I have some thoughts…what may have happened.”

  “Good,” Dana said. “You and Marvin carry on while I check on Carlos.”

  Blake nodded. “I’ll get you caught up later.”

  His recap would be simpler and more succinct than anything she could hear by staying. “Great,” she said.

  A few steps returned her to the infirmary.

  Carlos was lying on the fold-down cot, beneath a thin white sheet. He had sensor patches on his forehead, wrists, and, to judge from wrinkles in the sheet, on his chest. A saline bag hung nearby, the IV tube coiling and swooping to his arm. To Dana’s untutored eye Carlos appeared jaundiced, but on the nearby scanner the EEG/EKG traces were steady and only scattered amber entries interrupted the many readouts in green. He was awake.

  Dana asked, “How are you feeling?”

  Carlos patted the sheet. “This wasn’t how I pictured first getting naked with you women.”

  It was empty bravado, the bluster of a man terrified by a close call—and too macho to admit it. Behind Carlos, Li rolled her eyes.

  Dana let the effrontery pass with, “It’s good that you’re well enough to make jokes.”

  “Jokes?”

  Dana turned to Li. “What can you tell me?”

  Li shrugged. “Not much. Metabolites, neurotransmitters, platelet counts, a hundred proteins and trace-metal concentrations are off-kilter. But so are mine, if not as dramatically. So are Rikki’s. When I test the rest of you, and I will, I expect I’ll find much the same. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever spent this long in cold sleep. The marvel is that we came out of it at all.”

  “I’m loaded with med nanites,” Carlos said. “Top-of-the-line, cutting-edge, full-spectrum health maintenance bots. Why am I the one whose biochemistry is out of whack?”

  Because you’re a jerk? As capable as some nanites were, Dana supposed the tiny bots weren’t that perceptive. “Li, any thoughts on that?”

  “My guess? It’s because of the nanites. I doubt they were programmed for prolonged cold-sleep conditions. Why would they be?

  “With his metabolism slowed way down, bodily functions wouldn’t behave as the nanites expected. His biochemistry being slow to respond to treatment, the nanites would try bigger and bigger dosages. Eventually, at cold sleep’s glacial rate, as his body did react, he’d have way too many nano-synthed meds in circulation. His system would overshoot, and the nanites would have new problems to address—still without proper programming for cold-sleep responses. I’ll have to filter some bots from his blood sample and download the memory files to know for certain.”

  Carlos propped himself up on an elbow. “And until then, Doctor?”

  “You stay here, under observation.”

  With his free hand, Carlos stroked his sheet. “As you wish.”

  Dana guessed he would be discharged as soon as humanly possible. Or that he would get a sedative in his IV.

  Rikki said, “Any word as to where we are? Why we slept so long?”

  “We’re not sure yet,” Dana said. “Blake and Antonio are reviewing the data. In a little while, I’ll check on their progress.”

  “Send the men here for a quick eval,” Li said. “And you, too, when you can spare a minute.”

  Not till Carlos is gone from the infirmary, Dana resolved. “As soon as it’s practical.”

  15

  Dana decompressed with a snack and a fresh bulb of coffee before going to look for Blake. By then he had left the bridge. With Antonio and Marvin still babbling in tongues, she headed for the opposite end of the ship.

  She found Blake in engine room two, frowning at the fuel readout. An access door had been removed, and instrument cables had been clipped to the paraphernalia within. A signal analyzer sat on the deck.

  He followed her gaze. “Half the systems aboard need recalibration. Component properties will drift a lot in forty-five freaking years.”

  “I suppose so.” One more thing that might have killed them.

  “Is Carlos doing any better?”

  “He’s well enough to kid around.” Dana saw no reason to volunteer that the supposed wit encompassed getting naked with Rikki. “How are we doing?”

  “We almost didn’t make it,” Blake said.

  “How’s that?”

  “Our deuterium tanks are about dry.”

  “We were supposed to be flying on the DED this whole while,” Dana said. “And I thought the DED drew enough power, from wherever, to also supply shipboard systems.”

  “That’s the point.” Blake took a deep breath, then exhaled sharply. “You ready to hear what happened to us?”

  “Sure.”

  “If you ask me, the core issue is that no one had ever before seen a cosmic string. From a sufficient distance maybe it’s fair to consider it one-dimensional. Antonio and I made that assumption when we modded the nav program.”

  “I gather that on approach to the string we got within that magic distance. Marvin mentioned needing the fusion drive to achieve orbit.”

  “I wish the problem had only been on approach.” Blake grimaced. “Back to that one-dimensional-line simplification. Time and again Marvin needed both drives to maintain a safe distance.”

  “The line isn’t so simp
le?”

  “Back at the university, did you ever catch astrophysicists telling jokes?” Blake asked.

  Huh? “Not funny?”

  “Funny enough, just odd,” Blake said. “A bunch of their jokes begin something like, ‘Assuming a spherical cow…’”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “When a real calculation would be too complicated, they assume away the complexity. Imagine a galaxy with billions of stars, all of them in motion, within clouds of dust and gas, within an invisible halo of dark matter. You can’t very well calculate the exact mass distribution. So someone interested in, say, how a particular star will move within the galaxy might begin by assuming the stars and clouds form symmetric disks embedded in a symmetric sphere of dark matter. Just as he might consider that a cosmic string is a one-dimensional thread of uniform density.”

  It felt good to laugh. “Got it. So mocking themselves, knowing that they sometimes oversimplify, a cow becomes a perfect sphere.”

  “Right.”

  Dana liberated a sturdy-looking crate from behind cargo netting, set it on the deck, and sat. “How did our cosmic string differ from a uniform line?”

  “How didn’t it differ? Knotted and snarled, maybe. Or the density varies along the string’s length. Or there are overlapping pieces, or a dashed line of pieces, the primordial strings having long ago fragmented.”

  Dana shivered. “They fragment?”

  “They must have, and repeatedly. The very early universe was very much smaller. Any cosmic strings still intact from that era would have become stretched to millions of light-years, maybe longer. They would have dictated the structure of entire galactic clusters.”

  “Okay, then,” she said. “Knotted and snarled and whatever. With none of that complexity in the nav program.”

  “Uh-huh. And if we had crashed into the string…”

  As thin as a proton, Dana remembered. “We’d have been sliced in two?”

  “According to Antonio, each klick of length along the cosmic string has a mass comparable to Earth’s.” Blake paused. “So, yeah. Picture a dandelion puff meeting a chainsaw.”

  After the fact, Dana saw that she had taken a lot on faith. Forty-five years after the fact. Such as trusting Marvin to navigate the ship along a cosmic string. How does one follow something too thin to see?