The Power of the Dhin

by John L. Clemmer

  Better safe if that side’s under pressure or the field does something unexpected.

  He reached out and tapped the panel in the same place he had on the aft one. On contact, this panel lit up in the same fashion. He paused, then tapped the same spot again, in the upper left of the oval. The light pulsed slightly greener, then changed back to its original color. He paused for three seconds, gave a mental shrug, then tapped one more time in the same spot.

  A light-green pulse, and then back to the deeper green. Nothing else changed.

  “Control. OK, Chuck. What do I try? Over.”

  “Thys, Chuck here. Try this. Wait ten seconds now. Then tap that triangle three times in succession, then the vertical oval below it once. Then tap the inverted Y shape on the far right. Those don’t quite match up with anything on the prototypes, but maybe it’s close enough. Over.”

  “Roger, Chuck. Over.”

  Thys tapped out the sequence. The display pulsed with each tap. On touching the Y-shaped symbol, Thys jerked as an oval above the one he was tapping lit up. It was the same size and filled the upper area of the space. He resisted the urge to duck. It was a muted blue. A second later, he did duck. All the area around him lit up.

  “Whoa. Control?”

  “Roger, Thys. Hold on. That’s not what I expected. But we’ll take it. Look into the engine room. Lights on? Any change?” said Chuck.

  Thys turned slightly left to increase his view of the room behind the field. It looked no different. The light from his side didn’t add illumination to the room.

  Well.

  “Control. Looks like that field’s not going anywhere yet. And it’s full on. Light from this side’s not making it through.”

  “Roger. Any change on your side regarding sound? No atmosphere pumping in that you can hear? I wouldn’t think so,” said Chuck.

  “No. I guess not, since those holes all likely leave a path to outside. Hence the hard vacuum. Triggering a field at the hull and pumping atmosphere? Not our luck.”

  “Roger” said Jake. “When I was out there, the station looked like Swiss cheese. Too much to hope for here. Chuck’s gesturing that he has a few more things for you to try. Here he is.”

  “Thys, we, ah, have a couple of sequences here. I’m going to read them off to you. ‘Wait’ is a three-second pause. ‘Hold’ is, um, hold till I continue. Confirm. Over.”

  “Roger, Control. Understood. Over.”

  “OK. Lower left inverted rounded triangle, three times, wait, Y-shape twice, hold.”

  Thys tapped out the sequence. The oval above didn’t change; the lower one pulsed, but to no effect.

  “OK. Y-shape three times. Wait.”

  Other than the expected pulses, Thys saw no change.

  “OK. Upper left oval one time, wait . . .”

  Thys continued tapping various sequences. None produced any noticeable result. Not any that Thys could see. After fifteen minutes without progress, Jake broke in.

  “Thys, we got lucky with the lights, it seems. But no change in the shield, if that’s even possible from where you are. We have about the same number of sequences left to try as we’ve done so far, but let’s leave that for later. You’re going to go meet the crew. Proceed now. Over.”

  “Roger, Control.”

  He turned and faced the curving central corridor. The forms still floated where the hall curved up. Thys oriented himself and pushed off from the wall with both feet, applying gentle corrective force to align his path to the bodies.

  “Control, if either of them moves, I’m outta here,” Thys joked.

  “Thys, Chuck here. Make a circuit around them when you get within a couple of meters. Don’t run into them. Let’s take time and see what they look like. Over.”

  “Roger, Chuck.”

  Soon enough Thys was at the proposed distance and tweaked his propellant controls to head off to the right of the pair of bodies. He’d avoided looking closely, and the concept of present alienness bothered him more now that it was imminent.

  Oh, those are weird.

  The two desiccated forms were curled up, touching each other with an appendage. The alien looked like a squid, with the skin of perhaps a Gila monster. Unlike squid, this thing had only four limbs. There were small ridges around the bulbous head. The ridges had something below each of them that might have been an eye, but it had popped, then shriveled. A vertical slit suggested a mouth. The body and limbs seemed deflated, the bumpy skin wrinkled. Desiccated. Its colors seemed to fade from pink to mottled beige.

  “Control, I’m thinking these two died from vacuum exposure. I don’t see any punctures, rips, or anything suggesting a weapon hit them. Thoughts?”

  “Roger, Thys. We don’t know anything about their type of life, but those bodies look intact overall. If those are eyes, they do look like they popped in vacuum. Whatever they are.”

  Thys looked over the bodies carefully, slowly moving back and forth, up and down. The two bodies wore no clothes, but one had a sort of harness or tool belt. Thys leaned in and tilted his head to see what devices it might hold. He saw none. At first.

  “Control, how do we feel now about me moving in on these guys? I think I see something on that harness. It might not be any more use than my trying to use the panel was, but should I go for it? Over.”

  “Thys, we’re thinking we want you out of there. You still have to get home. This is enough. You get home safely, without problem, and we’ll send a salvage team right back out there. You can go with them if you want.”

  Thys sighed. “Well, Control, I understand. This stuff doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. So turn around and head straight back?”

  “Go forward for now, and then we’ll either have you return by this same route or take another. Chuck thinks this route ahead curves back and should be simple. Over.”

  Thys turned away from the dry, silent corpses and lined up his course with the curved passageway. At the top of the curve, the corridor split again. These halls were straighter. Thys now faced aft. One hall went that way, with two others angled off at around forty-five degrees. They were illuminated now with a cool diffuse white light. The light wasn’t dim, but not what a person would consider normal brightness. Stopping himself gracefully, he looked at each option, then nodded to himself. He pushed off, moving down the central passageway.

  This corridor was tubular, rounder than some of the others. There were many ports here. He was at the hull of the ship. The ports at first seemed to be viewing windows. But then, when Thys was well down the hall, he realized what purpose they served. Some of them had something attached outside.

  These are escape pods.

  There were at least twenty total. All but three were gone.

  “Control, you see this? I think I know why nobody else seems to be around. Over.”

  Back in his ship, Thys let out a breath as the pressure gauge reached one atmosphere. He had Chuck’s flight plan loaded in the computer, ready for translation into coding he would set in the Dhin’s navigation interface. The flight path out of the trap would take longer than they’d planned for. He checked his reserve oxygen levels and the function of the processing unit.

  Enough capacity. I won’t run out.

  The conversion unit should last long enough in the worst case, he knew. But that worst case was an estimate. He looked again at waste disposal. His liquid waste filter and water reclamation would work far longer than they expected this to take, which was good in case their calculations were wrong.

  I’m worrying about the unknown. Stop it. Chuck’s the best we have.

  He knew if he ran out of conventional propellant, there was the risk that they wouldn’t send a rescue mission. Thys suspected Jake would insist they try a rescue, though. If Thys got enough distance between himself and this gravity trap.

  All this trust in the Dhin engine.

  They’d become comfortable with technology that was so reliable and seemed invulnerable. Thys snapped out of his woolgathering and continue
d his preparations. He didn’t have much left to do but try it.

  Silently thanking again the overkill of engineers who managed to get conventional maneuvering thrusters into these newer designs, he smiled.

  There are going to be some told-you-so’s happening. For sure.

  “Control, I’m ready. Burn in three, two, one,” he said.

  Even with the Dhin engine at idle, there was no sensation of resistance to acceleration. With the field off, he felt a slight shift in his weight when the maneuvering thrusters began their steady push. The strange bending of physics normally eliminated inertial effects. They’d tried to configure the engine to do that. Inertialess acceleration with the field shut off had been one of Chuck’s team’s biggest challenges. One they hadn’t solved. The short-term solution was the same as for the articulated armor and attempts at weapons platforms: the drive left on, with the field off. This allowed what Thys was doing now.

  It meant he was vulnerable, but not like an astronaut in a spacecraft from a previous era. Because mass wasn’t usually a limitation, these craft were much heavier and more sturdy than any made before the Dhin field arrived.

  That also meant that this burn took a long time. Very slow. With the field off, the inertia the small thrusters had to work against was a factor. Thys tried to settle in and not fixate on the instruments. The initial change in velocity and position would be small. The prolonged burn would provide the acceleration and velocity he needed.

  Slow and steady.

  Thys stared out the front viewport at the blackness dotted with stars. So familiar yet so indifferent to any circumstance. He stared and tried to visualize the powerful gravitational field that dragged on his ship’s alien engine.

  5

  Jake

  “Prime Minister. Respectfully. He wasn’t equipped. It was an initial—a solo mission. Standard exploration. This needs a team. Maybe several teams.”

  “And if that was our only opportunity, Mr. Askew?”

  Jake met the PM’s gaze and squared his shoulders. “We can go back. He’ll make it back. We have the highest confidence now. So the planned return—the salvage teams—they’ll make it back.”

  He saw the waffling in the PM’s gaze and began again. “Prime Minister—”

  “Mr. Askew. If you and Mr. Wiedeman have that confidence, then, well, of course the Coalition trusts your assessment. But that does not guarantee success. It goes without saying,” continued the prime minister.

  Then why did you say it?

  “Normally you have autonomy in these matters. Please relax. Step back for a moment. I’ve clearly put you on the defensive but have not meant to. We have certain concerns at the moment. This opportunity may offset other additional risks. We’ll explain presently.” She sighed. “Your additional security clearance will be processed very shortly.”

  Additional clearance? What? I already have clearance for anything. Isn’t “the Dhin and their tech” at the very top?

  The PM tapped her tablet, then gave Jake something that might have been a sympathetic look and said, “Let’s take a half-hour break, and I’ll get the paperwork pushed through. You know how CoSec is.”

  “Uh, yes, ma’am,” said Jake.

  Jake stood, turned, and walked to the door of the PM’s office, barely preventing himself from shaking his head in bewilderment.

  Jake filed back into the PM’s chambers along with the two cabinet members and the PM’s attaché. All had been there previously, but he noted a new attendee was already seated when he entered the room. Jake went to his chair and stood. It was only a few seconds before the PM entered through the far door.

  “Now then,” said the prime minister, settling into her red leather chair, “I have a few more items to cover here, and then we can discuss the ancillary bullet points.”

  Jake hoped those additional topics would shed some light on the clearance issue. He glanced at the various screens on the walls that showed video clips playing in loops, stills, and enhanced images, annotated and highlighted with graphics overlaid on the image captures. There was nothing new on the wall screens, though. Not yet.

  If something bigger than what had happened on Thys’s latest exploratory mission was now on the table but he did not have clearance for it, he knew it was huge.

  The PM cleared her throat, tapped something into her tablet, and then spoke.

  “Now, Mr. Askew, Wiedeman and the engineering and physics team leads give this current mission a rather lower chance of success than we would expect. Far lower. This is very troubling. Given the discoveries of many spaceships, functional technology, and alien corpses, we would of course like to proceed with additional investigative, search, and salvage actions. But the science teams note the risk of failure. Due to a trap, as they put it here. Why would we send more people and extremely valuable spacecraft into a trap? How can we justify the risk of losing people—some of our best people—not to mention some key strategic assets? Can you and your team make any such recommendation unless and until the pilot out there right now is safely out of danger?

  I miss PM Oliver.

  Jake cleared his throat and said, “Prime Minister, although Thys is not entirely out of danger, he has made enough progress. He has achieved the acceleration and the velocity needed to escape what we’ve called the trap. You’ll see in the appendix. Section C. There are tables and graphs that show the required escape velocity calculated. On one of the graphs there, you can see that he has already attained that velocity.”

  Jake paused as the aide flipped through the document projected on the wall screen.

  “There,” Jake said. “Next slide. Yes. See there? It will take time, as the thrust available is much lower than that provided by the Dhin drive. But we had enough thrust to get him far away enough to escape. The risk relates to the hypothesis, from observation, that the gravity sink doesn’t change shape and extend into an area out where he’s headed.”

  “And what’s that risk like?” countered the PM. “What are your conclusions?”

  Jake gestured at the screen, unsurprised now, given the direction of the conversation, that the PM hadn’t digested the entire report.

  “The motions of the various craft we’ve observed don’t suggest it. They orbit a line. Further on in the document, if you want to see it. Next appendix. There.”

  The screen displayed a simple graph with a long horizontal line and a few dots arranged around it, with numbers and vectors in light-blue next to each dot.

  “Hmm,” noted the prime minister, “I’ll have to trust your team’s calculations.”

  She glanced around the room quickly, looking for any sign of disagreement or contention.

  That’s for sure. Chuck insisted on putting this stuff in here. He’s had enough experience with politicians to know they aren’t usually physics grads.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said Jake.

  “Very well then. Tell us more about these alien corpses. You’re sure they weren’t Dhin?”

  “How the Dhin built things in our space was always an unanswered question.”

  “Yes. And?”

  “One hypothesis was that they had these workers in our space. The idea was that these aliens might be who built the Dhin beachhead station, along with the prototype engines and equipment.”

  “Yes,” the PM nodded, as if to suggest she was entirely familiar with the concept. “These look like squid. Or lizards crossed with cuttlefish. Why does Wiedeman sometimes call them machine elves in some conversation recordings, then?”

  “Inside joke, ma’am.”

  “Never mind, then, Mr. Askew.”

  She gave a barely perceptible frown and spoke again.

  “Your report notes that our pilot found what appeared to be lifeboats, or escape pods, it says in the report, and that they looked something like the prototype craft we originally received from the Dhin. The report notes also that most all of them were gone. The conclusion, based on that limited evidence and the discovery of only two crew o
n a rather large ship, is that most of the crew abandoned the craft.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The PM glanced over at the new attendee of the meeting, who Jake now surmised was the latest CoSec director.

  We weren’t going to have this conversation without them here.

  “And no way, as of yet,” continued the PM, “to determine where they went. As you note in your report earlier. Our pilot had essentially no success in gaining information or records from the ship’s interfaces. All we managed to do was turn on the lights?”

  “That’s right, ma’am. The interface, like the ship design itself, was extremely similar to what we’ve seen and received from the Dhin, but not exactly the same.”

  “I see. Well, we managed before with the Dhin interface.”

  “With the help of AIs.”

  The PM frowned and shifted slightly in her leather chair. She glanced again at the new attendee and then said, “About these holes in the derelict ship. Holes. Damage. Weapons fire? While the holes are reportedly what have caused the ship to be in vacuum, when did that happen? This looks like a weapon to me. Like the effect of a weapon. That’s disturbing.”

  Jake let a frown leak onto his own face. “Yes, it does. And it is a concern. We don’t have any scientific conclusion about what could cause that sort of damage. It doesn’t look like anything we’ve seen before. So we have no context to say why it stopped where it did or what mechanism it used to cause the damage. We’ve suggested it’s what caused the crew to abandon ship, because that seems to follow logically. But it stopped before it damaged the engine enough to shut it down. If that’s even a possible effect of the weapon. Again, assuming it is one.”

  The new attendee spoke up, taking Jake’s pause as an entry to the discussion. “Surely it must be a weapon, Mr. Askew. I’m not clear why you and your team are hedging on that. Does someone on your team expect us to believe a tale where the crew abandoned ship, and later on, the ship became infested with space worms or some such bizarre story? With no evidence other than the holes?”