Erebus
Page 26
Every fiber in my body erupted with a burning agony. My muscles cramped, and my throat opened to scream—but it died there. Just as quickly as it started, the pain was gone, like a switch had been thrown. No gentle gradient, it just stopped. One after another, the external images on the walls blinked back into existence.
Outside, I could see a golden whirlpool in space, a swirling load of burning matter being drawn into the dark center, and out of that center, a piercing beam of light lanced toward the stars. Even with my sketchy knowledge of astrophysics, I knew what it was. We had found ourselves next one of the most voracious eaters of matter in the galaxy—a black hole.
INTERLUDE
The people in the room were not easily shocked. Many were over a hundred years old, yet violence was still new to many of them. But that wasn’t what had given them pause.
“Another FTL gate?” Patrice breathed. “And it is functional?”
“We’ll get to that,” the host said grimly.
“This technology…” Patrice breathed, “…would change everything.”
“That it would,” the host agreed. “But there is a problem.”
“A problem?”
“Perhaps we should continue…”
“Yes, yes,” Patrice said. “We must see more.”
CHAPTER 50
GAGARIN
“We think it’s a black hole called V4641 Sagittarius, also known as Sagi,” Captain Vasily said. “From what we can see of the local stars through all the dust that is swirling about out here, that is. That would put us over one thousand six hundred light-years out from Sol. To say we are a long way from home is an understatement.”
More detail was resolving on the screens and holotank. The source of the golden light was a star orbiting close to the hole, being ripped to shreds. The blazing debris that had been wrenched from its surface had created something the captain had called an accretion disk. In a way, it was beautiful to see, a star being stripped of matter, the gasses swirling into a flat golden whirlpool.
Gagarin had found itself orbiting a grey, meteorite-punished moon that circled a vast gas giant, the biggest we’d yet encountered. It was shrouded in streaks of red and golden clouds, dimly illuminated by the tortured star and silent maelstrom of the black hole.
The moon we were above looked the twin of Earth’s, yet that was not the most interesting thing about this rock. The telescopes revealed the ragged remains of a city on the surface embedded in one of the craters. It reminded me of Arcas City on Calisto, only much bigger and containing oddly shaped structures. The buildings had strange, twisted lines in some places and bulbous protrusions. Just from looking at it, it was obvious they weren’t designed by a human mind. Still, what was similar was that building a city in a crater made sense. Why build walls when half of the work was already done for you?
“Any sign of Erebus?” I asked.
“Yes.” Vasily nodded his head. On the screen, an image of a bright blue-hot flare appeared. “We have an antimatter plume. Eighteen million kilometers out and accelerating at one-g.”
“Christ, he’s not giving up, is he?” I muttered.
“Nyet, he is not.” Vasily’s tone was low and dangerous. The friendly man I met when we embarked had long since disappeared beneath a cold hatred for what Frain had done to his crew and ship. “He’s heading straight toward the black hole or, more accurately, this.”
The screen flashed and showed another dark world barreling through the cloud of the accretion disk. It left a wake that filled with golden matter.
“That’s pretty damn close to the event horizon of the hole,” Frampton said, his attention glued to one of the wall screens that scrolled a bunch of incomprehensible numbers. “Why the hell would he want to go there?”
“That we don’t know yet,” Vasily said, his blue eyes reflecting the multicolored vista of space he stared at.
“What do we know about it?” I asked. To me, it just looked like a black sphere back-dropped by the accretion disk.
“It’s a dwarf planet, barely a thousand kilometers in diameter.” Vasily shrugged helplessly. “It’s skimming the event horizon of Sagi. It’s balanced somewhat precariously. I must say, unless we’ve had the extraordinary luck to happen upon a world about to be devoured, I am somewhat suspicious of it being there.”
“Everything he’s done has led to this place,” I said. “Whatever he wants, it’s on that rock.”
“Then, if for no other reason than for Dana,” Vasily growled, “I want to stop him from getting there. I don’t intend to fuck around. We will drop out of A-drive right on top of them. The cascade as the bubble collapses will atomize them.”
“Captain,” Sihota said calmly, “we have to consider the possibility that we may find ourselves in a first contact situation out here. We know the remains of a city are below us on that moon. If there is any kind of extant intelligence here, it won’t reflect well on humanity if the first thing they see is us slaughtering our kindred.”
Vasily stood up from his seat, the anger sparking in his eyes. His mouth opened and closed a few times.
“There’s another point,” I said, trying to match Sihota’s soothing tone. “We’ve seen no sign of him off-loading Erebus’s crew, not to mention that he might have people from Iwa onboard. Trust me, you don’t want their deaths on your conscience, even if you can live with killing Frain and Drayton.”
“Goddamn it!” He slammed his fist down on the console in front of him, then turned to face us again. “I’m a scientist, an explorer, not a soldier. We were supposed to leave all this shit behind.”
“Captain, I’ve seen the horrible things people do to one another. My job—all our jobs,” I said quietly as I gestured at the remainder of the investigators and Phillips, “is to do something about it. But you, as you say, are an explorer. We’re supposed to keep this kind of thing away from you to keep you doing what you should be doing, making the universe a better place. We’ve failed in that duty. I’m sorry that you, Dana, and the rest of your crew were dragged into this. Yes, we need to stop Frain, but we can’t just take the easy route here. We need to bring him in alive if possible; we can’t just kill everyone on that ship for revenge against one man.”
“Dammit!” Vasily nearly shouted. He went silent for a few moments, squeezing the bridge of his nose. Finally he looked over at the crewman at the navigation station and then said more quietly, “We will do it your way. Prepare a solution to intercept Erebus. Make sure we don’t wipe them out, though.”
“Thank you, Captain,” I said. It would have been so easy to succumb to the desire for revenge. After all, the chain of events Frain had started was responsible for my partner’s death. It would have been easy—but wrong. He needed to have his arse hauled before the tribunal. Only there could justice be meted out for Dev’s family.
“There is another consideration,” Vasily said after a pause. “I need to get you all home, too. I will drop a lander with crew to see if they can get that stargate working again.”
Yes, that would be nice. The torn-up wreckage of this star system was not where I wanted to spend my retirement.
“I’m guessing its operative. The probe Red Star sent through managed to get back home,” Frampton added. “And the servitor robots attached to the probe were only uploaded with the specifications of the Io artifact. That suggests it should be the same command and control system.”
“It will be a miracle if anything is easy on this damn mission,” Vance muttered.
CHAPTER 51
GAGARIN
I had learned lots of things when I’d downloaded the idiot’s guide to A-drives into my implants. One of those was that it only had a limited ability to match speeds. At the velocities we had been playing around with, even those of planetary bodies, it wasn’t an issue. However, Erebus had been accelerating hard for the last two days.
Our plan was to speed up enough for the A-drive to be able to match our velocities. I understood the general principle. The A-
drive stretched out space behind us and contracted it in front. By controlling how much we relaxed that stretch, we would control our velocity when we came out of the Alcubierre bubble. The problem was that if we tried to exit at too high a speed in comparison to how fast we entered, we would be torn in two by the space-time stress. I was really beginning to long for the days of just running after thieves and shoplifters down Islington Upper Street. Instead, here I was in a starship, racing toward the most destructive force in the universe at full burn, chasing down a cybernetically enhanced killing machine while worrying about whether the laws of physics would rip me to shreds.
So now we were accelerating even harder after Erebus. We were up to one-and-a-half-g, and that made moving around extremely tiring. Oddly, Erebus wasn’t accelerating as hard as she could. I was thankful for that, but it did puzzle us.
“Could the antimatter Frain siphoned off for the bomb account for Erebus’s loss of acceleration?” Sihota asked.
“She has around a kilogram’s worth aboard.” Frampton squinted with effort. I could sympathize; I was getting a neck ache trying to hold my head up and maintain eye contact during any kind of conversation. “If he’s cut his acceleration by that much, he would have had to draw a lot more than the gram or so he used for the bomb.”
“How does that limit his acceleration?” Vance asked.
“It doesn’t necessarily,” Frampton shrugged. “But if he’s drawn a substantial amount of it for other purposes, then he’s only got a limited amount left for fuel, and he’ll need to be as efficient as possible with it.”
“Let’s quit mincing words. You think he’s made a shitload more antimatter bombs, don’t you?” I asked.
“Well, that’s definitely one possibility,” Frampton replied.
Great. Add a load of some of the most lethal weapons that humans could possibly devise to our long list of troubles.
“That will make things…interesting.” Sihota was, at times, the master of understatement.
“The question is, what will he do with them?” I asked, not really even wanting to think about the possibilities.
“My money is on his having loaded them into the tips of a bunch of kinetic impactors to vaporize us with,” Phillips said. She wasn’t even bothered by the g-force she was being subjected to. She was still wandering around while the rest of us had resigned ourselves to sitting at every opportunity in the mess, now reconfigured for high-g burn with the seats moved to the former wall.
“I don’t think so,” Sihota said.
“Oh?” she raised an eyebrow.
“A kinetic impactor will destroy—or at least heavily damage—the ship whether it’s loaded with antimatter or cotton wool,” Sihota said. “No, if he’s weaponized his antimatter stocks, he’s done it for another reason.”
I grunted. “I’ll just add it to our long list of questions to ask him.”
“I would just rather those questions weren’t answered by an antimatter KI,” Phillips replied.
***
“Have you realized that every one of them has been around a gas giant?”
I was lying back at a forty-five degree angle in my chair, trying to catch some rest. We had another day before we matched speed with Erebus, but Frampton evidently wasn’t interested in sleep, and this wasn’t the first question he’d tossed my way. Lifting one heavy eyelid, I gave up trying to doze and looked at Frampton. While he sometimes left me behind, this time I kept up. “You’re referring to the alien gateways.”
“Yeah. Io is…was in close orbit around Jupiter, Iwa orbited Akarga, and this gateway circles…whatever we’re going to call it. There must be some kind of link.”
I yawned and stretched my leaden arms. “It would make sense that it is somehow important…hold on.” I struggled up straight as a thought occurred to me—something I had seen. Where was it now? In all the confusion and events of the last few weeks, things were blurring into one big mess.
“I was thinking that they powered the gateway the same way that the Jupiter Alliance was using Io for power generation, by tapping into the flux lines. But then the Akarga-Iwa relationship is different—no flux lines.”
“Uh huh,” I murmured. I had given up trying to remember and was now rewinding my HUD on superfast. I saw us going backward through the alien gateway with a flash of light, back into orbit of Iwa. From there, I retreated into the shuttlepod and landed on the rocky surface. I escaped back into the station and streaked through the corridors of the old station. Finally I found myself in the control gallery on Iwa. There it was—the image of Akarga with a blinking light at the center that had appeared only after I’d activated the gateway.
“Here, does this mean anything to you?” I linked the image over to Frampton.
“Hmmm,” Frampton hummed to himself, processing what he was seeing. “It suggests that when the Iwa machine activated, some kind of activity occurred inside Akarga.”
“Okay, but what kind of activity?” The g-force was so heavy that it was even hard to talk, and I was slurring my words.
Frampton tried to shrug, giving an odd jerky motion. “I don’t know. Without going to look, who can say?”
“You said Red Star had only found half the components a gateway needed to actually work in the Io artifact. Maybe the rest is sunk deep inside Jupiter.”
“That is a ridiculous…” Frampton started to reply. “But, maybe you have something there. Something’s obviously going on in the bowels of the gas giants—something that seems to be connected to the FTL gate.”
“Does that give you any clue as to what makes the FTL gate work?” Sihota called from across the room where he was keeping as comfortable as possible while we were under thrust.
“No, but whatever it is must solve the decoherence problem. After all, FTL per se—”
“Isn’t the issue,” Sihota interrupted, finishing for him. “Making sense of the information at the other end of the gateway is.”
“Exactly.” Frampton gave a smile. “Whatever the aliens’ means of rectification are, it can either make sense of the scrambled information on receipt of it or send it already rectified.”
“The fact that the activity is at the sending end”—I knew I was making up my own terms here, but hopefully they made sense to these two highly intelligent people—“suggests that they’re rectifying it at source.”
“Good point,” Frampton nodded. “I think when we get home, somehow someone’s going to have to go down into Jupiter to take a look.”
“Sign me on as a volunteer for that one,” Sihota’s deep voice responded.
“It’d be a hell of a mission,” Frampton smiled. “Crushing pressures, horrendous weather conditions. Count me in, too.”
I rolled my eyes. And here I was thinking I’d grown as a person. Frampton had gone from being a timid geek to an intrepid explorer of an environment that would make Io seem like a holiday resort. The two of them chatted away about their hypothetical mission into the heart of Jupiter. I closed my eyes and reclined again. For now, I just wanted to try and get some rest before we had to face our nemesis.
CHAPTER 52
GAGARIN
“All hands, standby to go to A-drive,” Captain Vasily called out over the com, his voice hungry with anticipation. This was it. We were shooting after Erebus at a ridiculous velocity. The gap was still growing—she had been accelerating for longer than us after all—but now we were close enough to her speed to be able to match it when we dropped out of A-drive.
Our course gave me an uneasy feeling in my stomach; Gagarin was pointed directly at the black spot at the heart of the golden accretion disk. We would always have the ability to turn around and go to A-drive, but if Erebus, with her damaged A-drive, didn’t slow down soon, she would be committed to slamming into the event horizon of the black hole—and from that, there was no coming back. Whatever the hell Frain was up to, I suspected it would be revealed soon.
“Are you okay, Layton?” Phillips asked on a private link.
“Sure.” I looked up the bay toward the back of her seat, smiling to myself. I felt the same anticipation as when I was a young police officer enjoying the thrill of the chase. “Never been better.”
“You don’t have to come. We’ll be moving fast and hard. This won’t be like Concorde. If any of my guys get to Frain, we’re going to take him down.”
“I know, Ava.” I believed her. These troops were a different breed than Cheng. Sure, from what I had seen of him, he was lethal, but then his enhancements were mostly about intelligence gathering and self-defense. These men and women were soldiers. Their bodies had been stripped down and rebuilt with one purpose: to fight and win. “There’s a lot more to this than we know. I want the chance to talk Frain, and Drayton, too, down, or at least to figure out why he’s smashed through everything in his way to get here.”
“I’ll try to give you that chance, Layton, but I’m not going to mess around, and I’m not going to risk my soldiers. If we get the chance to take him out, we will.”
“And if I get the chance to stop anyone else getting hurt? I will, too,” I said.
“Ha.” Phillips gave a low chuckle. “You bleeding-heart liberals.”
“You know me; I’m very right on.” I began to feel somewhat ballsy, the anticipation of combat causing adrenaline and testosterone to flood my system. “You know, if you don’t have anyone back home…”
“Layton, don’t go there. I would destroy you. Go find yourself a nice girl, one that couldn’t crush you when she’s having a bad day.”
Well, that told me.
“We are go. Brace for hard maneuvering,” Vasily’s voice cut through.