by Ralph Kern
“This bubble of folded space that’s formed, is it a delicate thing? Is it robust? What?”
“Oh, it’s infinitely strong. Nothing can get through it. It’s both a by-product of the drive itself and necessary. Even a grain of dust would do immense damage to a ship at a half cee. In fact, it would just cease to be,” Frampton responded.
Now we were getting to the bit I was interested in.
“When we look at the scene of a regular shooting, one of the things we look for is the bullet itself, whether it is still in the person or has passed through and stuck in a wall somewhere. What I’m asking, Dexter, is there any way that Magellan would have survived the impact?” I asked.
“Hitting a moon at half the speed of light?” Frampton’s eyes widened. “I never even thought about it. I mean, those sorts of figures and energies…I mean, it didn’t cross my mind…. “
“Dexter, talk to me.”
“Magellan…it could still be out there! Look, the bubble is infinitely strong; it could have just blasted through Io and come out the other side. The majority of the damage to the moon would come from the bow shock as it traveled through the mantle.”
“So where is Magellan now, then?”
“I don’t know, but it could be intact.” Frampton’s eyes went vague. I could tell he was looking up something on his HUD. I gave him a moment. “The energy release when Magellan struck Io was immense. It blinded every sensor looking at the event until they were able to reset. No one would have been able to monitor it as it exited Io.”
“Come on, Dexter, how do we find it? Is it going to be shooting off at half light speed, and we’re never going to catch up with it?”
“No, no. One of the problems with the A-drive, and one of the reasons we can’t go faster than light or in fact faster than about half cee, is that another by-product of the drive is the buildup of temperature within the bubble. The closer to light speed, the hotter it gets. A crewed vessel is limited to roughly a half cee. One of the gate probes can get to about three-quarters since it’s not crewed. Anyway, Magellan’s drive would be designed to cut out automatically to let that heat buildup bleed off.”
“And if it weren’t to cut out? Say if someone reprogrammed Magellan not to?”
Frampton scratched his head, frowning in thought. “I’d guess the heat buildup would reach catastrophic levels. The ship would be destroyed and the bubble would collapse in a completely uncontrolled way. We’d see that wherever it happened. Hell, we’d probably detect something like that if it occurred in Alpha Centauri.”
“Okay, assuming Magellan wasn’t set to do that, when would it cut out? Are we talking minutes, hours, days?”
“It depends. Not more than a week,” Frampton said.
I leaned back in the chair, giving a self-satisfied smile. “Well, that’s easy, then. Let’s just track along Magellan’s last known course. We know where it started; we could just extend a straight line through where Io was, and then we can find the ship itself, take a look at our “bullet.” Maybe that will give some clue.”
“I think you’re underestimating the scale of that problem.” The look on Frampton’s face showed he had come back down to Earth. So to speak. “If it’s been traveling for a week at half light speed, and bear in mind it could have dropped out at any-point before that, then it could be anywhere…” he paused while he worked something out on his HUD, “…along a line that is ninety-one billion kilometers long. That’s well outside the solar system.”
“Oh.”
Vance’s voice piped up from behind me, “I knew you weren’t just a pretty face, Layton.” I turned to look at her. “As soon as we drop out of A-drive, I’ll get in touch with Cheyenne and have the deep space arrays start looking.”
She’d obviously been listening to the whole conversation. Looking around the comfortable room, I saw they all had.
Maybe the doubts I’d expressed to Giselle about being able to add to this jaunt were unfounded.
CHAPTER 12
EREBUS
At first, the image the ship projected for us on the mess bulkhead showed a white vista, which slowly pulsed with different hues: the thin interface of the A-drive bubble and the universe outside. In the blink of an eye, the white disappeared, and the view was replaced with a sea of stars. In the middle was the orange-and-white-banded behemoth of Jupiter.
I moved to the front of the room, linking my implants to the ship’s sensors as I did. A number of viewing menu options blinked into existence on my HUD. My HUD sensed my eye movements and selected show all. I was rewarded by a virtually incomprehensible flood of information occluding Jupiter with a cloud of graphics, texts, and symbols. Clearly, it was a busy place.
I glanced at the options list and started switching them off. I removed the satellites, minor space cities, cloud miners, and ships. That left, in theory, just the really big stuff. It was still densely packed, but at least I could make out individual things.
Everything about this place was big.
Nothing on screen gave a sense of Jupiter’s scale, but from my homework on the Jupiter Alliance, I knew it was massive. The huge gassy world accounted for nearly three-quarters of all the mass in the solar system, minus the sun, of course. Its moons were planet-scaled in their own rights. Ganymede was larger than Mercury. The four major moons—well, three now—could provide the Alliance with everything it could possibly want…as soon as they were in a position to harness them. Now they were heavily dependent on imports from the more developed inner worlds of Earth, Mars, and to a lesser extent, the asteroid belt colonies.
“There’s a lot of traffic out there,” Vance said, standing next to me, accessing her feed. I could see the vector plot of the route Erebus would take into the Jupiter system. Looking like a neon red train track, the path swept low over Jupiter and then curved around toward the huge space station, Concorde.
“That there is,” I murmured.
“You know the Pentagon analysts and AI’s reckon that if economic growth patterns continue on their current trend, the Alliance will be the dominant power in the solar system in around one hundred and fifty years,” she continue introspectively.
I looked over at Vance, trying to gauge her tone. One hundred and fifty years was a long time. In fact, one hundred and fifty years ago America was the dominant nation on the planet. The world, or universe for that matter, didn’t stay still for long these days.
“Yeah, but the JA is primarily filled with a bunch of space hippies wanting to share their innermost thoughts with us. Who says they’ll even be interested in being dominant?”
Vance gave a snort. “You really have a simplistic view of things don’t you?” She gestured at the screen. “There are just over one hundred million people currently in the Alliance. The population of the Sol system is fifteen billion, by far the vast majority on Earth. The only problem is Earth has none of the resources of this place. Earth, all of its nations, all of its population will be reduced to a planetwide favela. The real power will be out here.”
“What are you telling me here, Vance? You long for the glory days when the fine, upstanding citizens of Earth guided the solar system with a gentle and benevolent hand? Last time I checked, those days are still here.”
“But for how much longer? And can Earth stand by and just watch as others take her place as the center of the known universe?” She turned to me, a thoughtful look on her face. “Who knows? Could be another motive. Io’s destruction is going to set the JA back a ways.”
I regarded her carefully. “Are we shooting the shit, Vance, or are you trying to tell me something here?”
A grin spread across her face. “You do have a suspicious mind. No, Layton, I’m just shooting it with you.”
“All hands, prepare for half-g burn. I suggest you take your seats,” Tasker’s sullen voice came over the intercom.
I looked around and watched as one of the chairs in the mess swiveled around, and my name blinked into sight above it on my HUD. I made my w
ay to it and sat as the others did the same. A harness flowed down over me, and the seat turned round again until it faced the same direction as all the other seats.
“Burn commencing,” Tasker said. A pressure built on my chest, like someone was pushing me into the chair. Funny things began to happen in my inner ear. Not only was my sense of balance dealing with the fact that I was in a centrifuge, now it also had to deal with being weighted by acceleration.
And I thought zero-g made me feel queasy.
***
Erebus’s antimatter torch was one hell of an engine. By the time we hit turnaround, the point where we needed to start slowing down, Jupiter was visibly growing in size. Erebus swung around, nose to tail.
I kept the image I was watching facing toward Jupiter. Despite deceleration, we were hurtling arse-backward at Jupiter. It kept growing and fast. I gripped the armrests. But when we got close, the horizon flattened out, and we swept low over Jupiter. It was like we were flying over a vast desert of reds and whites. Occasionally, we whipped by one of the huge floating collections of balloons and pipes—a flash of the cloud miners as we shot over them. That they even registered at all was a testament to their sheer size.
Before long, we started to pull away from Jupiter. The planet slowly rounded out again as we thundered into space toward Ganymede and Concorde.
CHAPTER 13
CONCORDE
The Jupiter Alliance was just that—an alliance. It was made up of a collection of around a dozen or so political entities, but by far the most significant one was the Linked, and the home of the Linked was Concorde.
“They don’t build things by halves out here, that’s for sure,” I said to Cheng as I squinted at the ring station.
Concorde was vast. It made Haven seem like a backwater station. It was a relatively normal torus station, using a rotating habitat ring to provide gravity while in the center was a docking area that remained at zero-g. Where it stopped being normal was the sheer size—and the fact that someone had taken the time to actually make it look good.
The struts between the ring and the center tapered and flared artfully. Through the huge windows on the inner side of the ring, I could see grass, lakes, and parkland. Everything about the place looked serene and gentle.
“It is beautiful,” Cheng said, looking at Concorde intently. “News VRs don’t do it justice.”
“No, they do not,” I said. “What do you think the price of real estate is if I were to come here to retire?”
“If you want to get yourself Linked? Cheap.”
“No thanks.”
“In that case, a hell of a lot more than The Hague pays you.”
I cast my eye over the place once again as we got closer, preparing to heave to. Cheng had a point—I doubted a police officer’s salary would even buy a studio flat in Concorde’s version of the rough end of town…not that the rough end of town was likely to be particularly rough here.
Erebus finally came to a halt relative to Concorde, and the huge dry-dock doors opened in the hub of the torus. The ship began to creep in. Umbilicals snaked out toward us almost organically, clamping on, drawing us into our berth.
***
Like everything in this whole place, the auditorium we had been guided to was something else, all decked with a kind of techno-Roman vibe. The central stage was surrounded by tiers of seats with stone columns thrusting through them to add to the ambience yet not block anyone’s view. The auditorium was in the habitat ring, a vast inward-facing circle of rolling hills and tasteful post-modern architecture. Every building in the place looked like it belonged in the VRs that showed off the luxurious houses of the rich and the famous. The only buildings that looked dated had been imported brick by brick. The Linked had managed to acquire a number of historically significant structures and brought them to Jupiter Space. Some of those buildings were dotted around the Concorde University campus where we now were.
I made my way down the stone steps and along a row of seats to an empty one, apologizing as I nudged by people, stepping on a few toes in the process. The whole room was full of people here because of Io—everyone from military types to scientists and lots in between.
Once everyone had settled, a prim middle-aged lady walked onto stage. Once she had taken her place before the lectern, a hologram of her, which must have measured five meters tall, burst onto the stage.
“Thank you for coming,” her voice boomed out, enunciating every syllable. “I am aware that you have all traveled from around the solar system to assist with relief efforts and the investigation into the Io incident. You must be tired, so I will keep this short. I am Patrice, the Voice of the Linked and the current chair of the Jupiter Alliance.”
I leaned forward, listening to her rich tones that resonated clearly through the hall. I had seen the closest thing the Linked had to a leader many times on VR, especially over recent days, but that didn’t show the self-assured authority that the woman presented. She was clearly used to being listened to and spoke with the confidence of someone who always knew the right answer and what to do. To be fair, that was probably the case. After all, she didn’t just have access to her own knowledge, but to every single one of the Linked who were in range of her own implants. When the Linked needed someone to represent them to the rest of the solar system, it was Voice Patrice who was that person.
“Recovery efforts are nearly complete, and all survivors from Io’s surface have been secured. Due to the nature of the incident, there have been no significant injuries.”
I guess that was her polite way of saying everyone that was affected was either dead or had got away with nothing more than bruising from some seriously high-g maneuvering in their escape from the moon and its wreckage.
“The Jupiter Alliance needs your help.” She paused and looked around the room as if she wanted to meet all of our eyes. “Whether this is a crime or an act of war, we are prepared for neither. Jupiter Alliance Security services are excellent, but as diligent and motivated as they are, they have never had to deal with as much as a murder, let alone something of this magnitude.”
I felt a wry smile twitch onto my face. Sorry, sweetheart, I thought, if you’re thinking of out-sourcing expertise here, no one has dealt with something of this magnitude before.
“We have identified three strands to this operation,” Patrice’s voice called out clearly. “The first is relief and recovery efforts. We have nearly a thousand refugees from Io alone. There are several thousand others onboard stations and ships that have been affected by Magellan’s particle cascade and the energy release from Io. Additionally, many stations in orbit of Jupiter are, even now, forced to take precautions against the debris from the destruction of the moon. This is where we are looking at the heavy-lift capability of the military and freight haulers.” She looked over at the side of the room where the majority of them sat in neatly pressed uniforms.
Other than a very abortive, short-lived attempt by some entrepreneurial souls to take up space piracy as a living, there had never been an armed conflict in space. National and corporate space military assets tended to be heavy lifters to get people into and then back out of orbit and to deliver space-to-surface laser and kinetic strikes. And of course, there were the fighter jocks like Sihota, whose job it used to be to fly up and take out those assets. Now there’s a glamorous career choice, I thought wistfully.
The Voice gave a general outline of what the relief and recovery effort would entail: repairing stations and infrastructure, shipping thousands of people around the Jupiter system to places where they would have air, food, and water, and sharing the load so that no one station would be risking its own life support. This had a second benefit; it kept witnesses and any suspects we might find separated. While Calisto, Europa, or even Concorde could potentially take the lion’s share of the refugees, we wanted them apart.
“The second strand is the investigation into this incident. We have representatives from intelligence and police services systemwide
who will be tasked with finding out who did this and how. They will have our utmost support in tracking down those responsible for this crime. The final strand will be dictated by the first two: how to prevent this from happening ever again.”
CHAPTER 14
CONCORDE
I walked across the grassy campus grounds to the low building that would serve as the investigation team’s operating base. It was strange to see the horizon constantly curving upward. The artificial sun strip hanging above gave everything a radiant glow, obscuring the stars behind it.
I remembered from somewhere that Concorde was the largest single enclosed chamber in space. Sure, the moon, Mars, and even Ganymede had bigger domes, but this was by far the largest enclosed area floating around in space.
The path meandered past a small lake. In the middle of the lake sat a strange, spikey stone building almost organic in appearance. It didn’t look out of place. It was tastefully incorporated into the scene, but it was definitely an old building that had been lifted up here. Curious, I activated my HUD. The building was the Ferdinand Cheval Palace, the Ideal Palace, constructed in the nineteenth century. Lord only knew how much it had cost and what hoops they’d needed to jump through to get hold of it. Shaking my head at the sheer extravagance, I walked on.
I reached the low, glass university building we had taken over as our ops center. The glass doors swept open, and I entered the atrium. It was full of modern art and sculptures representing the research being done here. I resisted the urge to look at the HUD tags on them. I suspected I would spend far more time browsing than I already had.
A pleasant-looking Linked chap gestured over at another door from behind his desk, and I walked into the room.
The people I’d come up with were already there, looking at the blank white walls, gesturing and talking to each other.
