by Neal Asher
"Shutting off the plasma tube would be a huge waste of energy," Farley mused. "Especially for the seventh chamber. I mean it does seem to go on forever—and how could you shut off something like that?"
Patricia pulled out her slate and typed, Seventh chamber plasma tube—power supply? Maintenance? Same as other chamber tubes?
The elevator door opened and they entered the large circular cabin. The door closed as Farley pressed a button. They both grasped bars mounted in the walls. At first, the acceleration of the elevator increased their total weight, but as they rose—approaching the axis—the effects canceled out. The elevator reached a steady velocity after traveling about a third of the way up the shaft. Their weight had decreased considerably by then. Shortly after, they began to decelerate, slipping smoothly into near-weightlessness. The door opened and a guard in black and gray greeted them.
The axis compartments surrounding the seventh chamber bore hole had been pressurized and heated, but otherwise they remained much as the Stoners had left them, centuries before. Ribbons of newly wired lighting crisscrossed the cavernous staging area.
"We're going to the singularity monitor," Farley said. The soldier gestured for them to board a cart. They followed the ropes and took their seats, buckling themselves in.
"I have a feeling you're going to show me something else astonishing," Patricia said accusingly. "I'm not even used to the other wonders yet."
"Ancillary wonder," Farley said mysteriously. "A result of the other wonders, if you follow Rimskaya and Takahashi's theories. But you're the space-time expert here."
"I'm not so sure," Patricia said distantly.
"If the corridor is a matrix of bent geodesics, a warped tube of space, what would you expect to find at its center?"
"I wondered about that yesterday afternoon." She paused as the cart neared the end of the staging area. "It's not going to work down the center. There's going to be a region where all the rules fail."
"Precisely."
"A singularity?"
"That's where we're going," Farley said.
The guard pulled the cart alongside an airlock mounted in the rock wall. Farley gripped a guide bar and helped Patricia out of her belt. The guard saluted and said he would wait for them.
They entered the airlock. Farley switched on a light and pulled down two rumply, one-size-fits-all pressure suits from a rack. "You can snug the arm and leg lengths a bit with these straps. Mobility and finesse aren't really needed here, just pressure and temperature and air. This isn't the most visited spot on the Stone."
The rear wall of the airlock was equipped with a broad-runged ladder, ascending to a wheel-opened hatch in the ceiling. Bits and pieces of equipment—some obviously long-abandoned—lay stacked in the corners and under the ladder.
"Just watch your step. Take everything slowly. There's no danger if you're careful. If anything happens to your suit—very unlikely—we can be back in the lock in less than two minutes."
Farley checked Patricia's suit seals and pressed a red button on a panel mounted near the ladder. The air was quietly pumped out of the chamber until Patricia could hear only her own breathing. Farley switched on their suit radios.
"Up the ladder," she said.
"I've never been in a spacesuit before," Patricia said, climbing the rungs after Farley.
"You didn't get spacesick, according to the OTV crew."
"Being weightless is fun."
"Hmm. Took me three days to get used to it."
Farley spun the wheel on the hatch and pushed it open. It glided slowly upward, then stopped until she ascended another rung and gave it a push. It swung out of the way. Compact floodlights had been installed in the bore hole, though the opening to the seventh chamber was only a dozen meters away, and the milky glow of the inner plasma
tube spread faintly throughout.
Patricia turned to look south. The walls of the bore hole—rough and grooved with irregular lines—faded into inky blackness. At the end of the blackness was a circle of light the size of a BB held at arm's length. She looked up as best she could and saw a wide intrusion of dark rock in the asteroidal metal.
"Plasma tube begins anew in each chamber," Farley said. "It butts against the caps, sustained by a very weak bottle. The bottle also acts to keep the atmosphere in—otherwise, it would all have licked out through the bore holes. Leaked, I mean. Leak?"
'"Leaked is fine," Patricia said. "Wouldn't air be kept down in the chambers because of the rotation?"
"Scale height is the key. Without the bottle, the atmospheric pressure at the bore holes would still be about a hundred and eighty millimeters of mercury."
"Um," Patricia said.
"We think there are charged plates inset in the cap material around the circumference of the tube, but we haven't investigated yet. And the corridor tube is quite a different thing from the other tubes. We have even less idea how it works."
They moved along the bore-hole wall using the ubiquitous ropes and stanchions. Near the rim of the hole stood a scaffold about fifty meters high. Running from the bottom to the top of the scaffold was a ladder in a long cylindrical cage.
"You first," Farley said. Patricia entered the cage and pulled herself up hand-over-hand, letting her legs swing unused behind, as she had seen Farley do in the airlock. "When you're above the cage, link your suit ring to a cable, if you somehow manage to float free, I'll come after you with a tether."
At the top of the scaffold, now aligned directly on the Stone's axis, Patricia took hold of the safety cable and pulled herself out of Farley's way. Another cylindrical cage poked five or six meters beyond the rim. Farley gestured, and they climbed out over the sloping walls of the cap.
"The plasma's pretty clear from this angle, as you can see," Farley said. They had an incredible view of the corridor. Without the obvious clues of distorted perspective, the landscape could have been painted on a huge bowl. The details were rendered faintly milky by the plasma robe, which concentrated into a bright circle at the center of the far cap.
"The Russians aren't allowed this far. They're working in the other bore holes, however."
At the end of the second cage was something that gave Patricia's eyes a twinge. Farley motioned for her to approach.
"This is it," she said. "Where everything goes haywire in the corridor."
It resembled a half-meter-wide pipe made of quicksilver, stretching off to its own vanishing point, not in a straight line and not in a curve, not moving and not standing still. If it could be said to reflect at all, it did not behave like a mirror, imaging instead barely recognizable imitations of its surroundings.
Patricia approached the singularity, trying not to look at it directly. Here, the laws of the corridor were twisted into a neat, elongated knot, a kind of spacial umbilicus.
It distorted her face as if with a gleeful malevolence.
"It doesn't look straight, but it is. It resists penetration, of course," Farley said, reaching out with a gloved hand to touch the blunt end. Her hand slid gently to one side. "It seems to produce the force that acts like gravitation in the corridor. The net effect is an inverse-square force which is ineffective within the length of the seventh chamber but goes to work right outside the connection with the corridor. The transition is very smooth. Out in the corridor, the
farther from the singularity you are, the greater the force, until you reach the corridor walls. Makes it seem like the walls are pulling you. Voila!—weight."
"Is there any difference between walls pulling and singularity pushing?"
Farley didn't answer for a moment. "Damned if I know. The singularity stretches down the middle of the corridor within the tube. There's speculation it has something to do with maintaining this plasma but ... honest, we're all ignorant here. You have a wide-open field to explore."
Patricia reached out with her hand. The twisted-mirror surface reached back to her with an out-of-focus something, not a hand. The hand and its opposite met. She felt a ti
ngling resistance and pressed harder.
Her hand was gently pushed down the length until she lifted it away. Patricia—somewhat to her surprise—understood the principle immediately.
"Of course," she said. "It's like touching the square root of space-time. Try to enter the singularity, and you translate yourself through a distance along some spacial coordinate."
"You slide along," Farley said.
"Right."
Patricia maneuvered herself to the rounded beginning—or was it the end?—of the singularity, then reached around the zone with both arms as if to hug it. Her fingers squeezed the twisted surface and she was pulled against the base, then bounced back.
"Touch it," Patricia said, "and it repels the pressure with a force parallel to the axis." She touched it twice
in succession. The ring and cable stopped her reacting twist. "I pinch it at this angle, I'm propelled by the singularity, going north. The opposite angle, south. No torque—unidirectional. Either I'm pushed straight outward, or I'm shunted along the line."
Farley smiled envious through her faceplate. "You catch on fast."
"Glad you think so," Patricia said. She sighed and backed away. "Okay. Let's go back. I'm going to have to think this over."
Farley took hold of her shoulder and directed her back along the cage, down the scaffold and into the airlock. Patricia was already glassy-eyed, musing.
She hardly noticed the elevator ride. At the tent camp, she sat down with the slate and Carrolson's processor. Farley wandered off for a few minutes to eat. When she returned, the linked processor and slate were flashing requests for the next sequence of instructions. Vasquez appeared to be napping. Farley glanced at the slate display.
From the—a future(?) Singularity. Longer—passing through the asteroid wall. Inverse-square repulsion increasing. Where did the Stoners go? Why, down the corridor, of course.
No set curvature near the twisted mirror. Must have the multi-meter to check that out—certainly seems likely, however. If I regard the setup as predesigned technology, technology manipulating geometry, use of spaces and altered geodesics as a tool. A singularity, perhaps infinitely long, beginning here, just before the boundary where chamber and corridor meet.
Energy to maintain the plasma tube in the corridor. Could that be made a function of the separate universe the corridor obviously is? Where did the matter come from—all that dirt, and the atmosphere? Not from the Stone, not all of it; that's obvious.
The warm air coming down the corridor lapped at the tent, brushed the grass near the camp and mingled with the cold air pouring down from the cap, forming dust-devils.
Chang and Wu played chess under the awning.
After a time, Farley took a nap, too.
*7*
Heineman murmured to himself testily. Walking slowly along the Velcro pad surrounding the assembly area, he scrolled through the cargo manifest on the slate. The cargo removed from its cocoon and assembled fit all the specifications the engineering team had made up six months before. That had been a crazy time—trying to design a
device which had ridiculous properties to do a job that none of the engineering team understood. But back then, green badges had been very rare items.
There was no way now for anyone to deny him a green badge. He was the only one who could test the device and teach others how to use it.
It was a beautiful piece of work: a hollow cylinder twenty meters long and six wide, resembling a giant jet engine with all its guts removed. He peered down the middle of the assembly at the sickle-shaped metal pieces that would clamp down on the mysterious something the cylinder would surround. The clamps now rested on plastic inserts, which would be removed when the device was in place.
It was called a tuberider. Sitting next to it—brought up in three cocoons by a subsequent OTV—was a highly modified Boeing-Bell prop-driven vertical/short takeoff and landing aircraft, V/STOL for short, model number NHV-24B.
It was the most peculiar aircraft he had ever seen. Developed initially for the U.S. Air Force, designed for search and rescue missions, it could rotate its two wingtip-mounted engines through 120 degrees. The five broad blades of each prop could be folded back into the engine nacelles. And in the tail, aimed slightly above the centerline, was a kerosene-oxygen rocket engine, no doubt to provide extra thrust—but under what conditions?
Its wings were rakishly forward-swept and were mounted three-quarters back on the fuselage, almost touching the V-tail. It could carry eighteen people and a crew of two, fully loaded, or fewer passengers and a lot of equipment. It was at once airplane and helicopter and rocket.
He loved it just from reading the specs. He had always had a weakness for Rube Goldberg gadgets.
The V/STOL could be fitted to the tuberider in three positions: like an arrow sticking from the side of a log, nose and refueling nozzle inserted mid-cylinder; in the conjunction of its first mission, inserted "up the cylinder's ass" as Heineman thought of it, as its rocket propelled the tuberider down the middle of the plasma tubes and bore holes to the seventh chamber; or clamped to the cylinder along its belly.
He didn't have the slightest idea what it would do once it was in place. From an aeronautical or astronautical perspective it was pure craziness. How would the cylinder be stabilized on its track—whatever that was—while the V/STOL docked? The cylinder had no maneuvering engines. The whole contraption would be just barely stable enough to ride down the axis with the rocket pushing—
'Tis not mine to reason why, he thought, marking the final check on the slate. Despite his initial enthusiasm, no aircraft, Heineman felt, was truly beautiful until he had flown it—and survived.
The cocoon had also contained contraband. Not on the manifest—not the official one, at any rate—were two metal boxes the size and shape of coffins. Heineman had a good idea what they contained—high-speed radar-controlled Gatling guns.
He could also guess where they would be installed, and for what reason. They were Joint Space Command items, and the only man who needed to know about their arrival was Captain Kirchner. They were in direct violation of ISCCOM guidelines for the Stone.
Heineman was used to serving two masters. He knew Kirchner and JSC had their reasons for breaking the rules. He knew Lanier and Hoffman would appreciate those reasons when the time came.
Heineman made sure the crates were delivered to the external security staging areas and then forgot about them.
He floated past the assembly and looked at his watch. Garry was late.
Lanier pulled himself along the ropes to the third dock staging area. The tuberider and V/STOL occupied center stage like grand ladies of the theater awaiting costumers' attentions.
Heineman eyed him unenthusiastically as he approached. "You look exhausted," he commented, handing the slate over for inspection. Lanier handed it back without a glance or comment. "You'll spook people, coming out of the chambers like that."
"Can't be helped," Lanier said.
Heineman shook his head and let out his breath in a dubious low whistle. "What in hell have you got down there?"
"Are they ready?" Lanier asked. Heineman nodded and pulled the box of memory cubes out of his beltsack.
"For now. I'm pushing them down the tube next week. If I get my badge..."
Lanier reached into his inside jacket pocket and produced a green badge, flipping it around to show Heineman. "Yours.
Second level. Go and find out for yourself. You're so eager."
"That's my nature," Heineman said. He clamped the badge to his lapel. "How's the girl doing? She any help?"
"I don't know," Lanier said. "She's resilient." He raised his eyebrows and took a deep breath. "Seems to be a survivor." He seemed anxious to change the subject. "I'll have provisional greens for your flight crew."
"I'm going to fly it into position alone," Heineman said. He was surprised when Lanier simply nodded; he had expected some argument. "Who'll take the first sortie with me?"
"I will, if I
have time," Lanier said.
"You haven't flown in years."
Lanier laughed. "Neither of us has ever done this kind of flying. Besides, it's not a skill you forget. You should know that."
A guard drifted across the staging area toward them. Lanier glanced in her direction, held out his hand and received a sealed envelope. She left without a word being exchanged.
"You expected that," Heineman said.
"I did." He opened the envelope, read the enclosed note, then stuck it in the pocket where Heineman's badge had resided. "My orders Earthside. I'm going to spend another couple of days here, then take the next OTV. Larry, get the tuberider in position, prepare for a flight test, but hold everything until I return."
