Singularity

by Bill DeSmedt

  The toroid could not contain the sudden burst of energy. It flared and died, exploded like an apple struck by a bullet.

  Exactly as intended. Unless the magnetic field collapsed the instant Vurdalak entered the ring, the micro-hole would be reaccelerated out the other side like a pip squeezed from an orange. That was emphatically not part of the plan. So, the braking-chain elements had all been deliberately engineered to self-destruct like this. After performing one last service . . .

  The frontline ring survived just long enough to pump its induced electric current into the connecting cables, and from there to its as-yet unpowered siblings up the line. Vurdalak’s velocity, blindingly fast in human terms, was as nothing to the lightspeed jolt of power now flowing up the braking train. A second toroid contributed its delta-vee of deceleration, was overmastered by the rush of power, and, like its predecessor, passed along this gift of energy with its dying gasp. Then another, and another.

  t plus one. Vurdalak’s own motion was now the only thing powering the braking train, and that with megawatts to spare. Courtesy of Galina’s electromagnetic jujitsu.

  Galina could only watch as her little progeny sacrificed themselves, overloading and expiring one by one. But not before their job was done, not before they had each exerted their tiny drag on the hurtling black hole.

  t plus six seconds, t plus seven . . . Four and a half of the braking train’s five kilometers now lay behind Vurdalak. In ruins. In the vampire’s wake, twisted wreckage was strewn across Nadyezhda’s eastern slope like the aftermath of one of Marshal Zhukov’s epic World War II tank battles. Three years’ toil, expended in the blink of an eye. If this did not work, could they ever find the strength, the resolve to begin again?

  But it was working. Vurdalak’s centrifugal force was decreasing as it slowed further and further. Now each successive link in the deceleration chain must exert an increasing percentage of its force upward. Slower, slower . . .

  The mission computer spoke the words Galina had been waiting to hear: “Phase One: Deceleration Sequence, complete. Initiating Armageddon Phase Two: Positional Stabilization.”

  t plus ten. Moving at a crawl, its path virtually horizontal now, Vurdalak entered the containment chamber at the heart of Antipode Station. Alarms shrieked as gravitometers and SQUIDs registered its incursion, tracked it microsecond by microsecond as it approached the center.

  The capture chamber’s arrays of superconducting electromagnets were fully charged and waiting. Compared with the Tokamaks Galina had worked on most of her professional life, Antipode was simplicity itself. No need to provide for plasma containment: there would be no plasma to contain, only Vurdalak. No need to pinch the magnetic field to induce a thermonuclear reaction; this was not a reactor, but a cage. An invisible cage woven of lines of magnetic force.

  A cage whose intangible bars now slid shut.

  As Vurdalak crossed the center of the capture chamber, the giant electromagnets in its ceiling and floor slammed all their available energy into the primordial black hole. The repulsor array pushed against its gargantuan weight from below; the tractor hemisphere pulled on it from above. Secondary installations on the walls fore and aft countered the hole’s residual forward momentum.

  Vurdalak hobbled on the lip of the field, like a basketball in a rim-shot, and . . . ground to a halt.

  Now the geophones took center stage, registering a truly awesome seismic shear as Mount Nadyezhda shifted and settled under the burden of Vurdalak’s weight. Seismometers around the world would jump before the hour was up. The American anti-submarine hydrophone network would register the shock within minutes. The Antipode Project, wrapped in a cloak of silence all these years, would become an open secret in the next few hours.

  But hours were not important now. It was the next few seconds that counted. If Mount Nadyezhda should buckle under the strain . . .

  But the seamount was holding. Holding . . . still holding . . . the tremors dying down . . . yes!

  The generated voice of Rusalka’s main computer announced, “Phase Two: Positional Stabilization, complete.”

  The djinn was trapped in Galina’s magnetic bottle.

  But for how long? The prodigious energies needed to bear a five and a half billion metric tonne load were generated by enormous superconducting toroids. These were “permanent” magnets, but they would stay permanent only so long as they continued to superconduct, and their ability to do so was under constant threat from the disruptive potential of the electromagnetic flux coursing through them.

  To survive as superconductors, Antipode’s levitation arrays had to be kept far, far colder than the ice-water transition temperatures of the little toy boats at last night’s banquet. The colder, the better, for safety’s sake, and Galina had chosen to chill the arrays to within seven degrees of absolute zero.

  But maintaining such a deep freeze against the massive heat-leak of the containment operation ate power at a ungodly rate. The real-time output of Antipode’s nuclear reactor couldn’t satisfy the demand alone. And in forty-five seconds, plus or minus five, the stored power would be exhausted.

  The superconductors would begin to heat up. Their magnetic levitation fields would fail. Unsupported, Vurdalak would fall.

  But not back into its previous orbit. If it broke free again after having been halted in its path, it would fall nearly straight down, grazing the very center of the Earth.

  That must not happen. The same highly-conductive nickel-iron core that gave rise to Earth’s magnetic field would resist Vurdalak’s passage, inducing orbital aberrations. The new trajectory would differ radically from the one they had spent years studying and shaping.

  They might not be able to find the vampire again. And in the meantime, they would have accelerated the timetable for the doom they had hoped to avert.

  No, they could not let go of this tiger they had by the tail. There would be no second chance.

  The mission computer spoke again, a note of what sounded like exhilaration in its synthesized tones: “Thirty seconds to Armageddon Phase Three: Power Stabilization. Initiating fuel feed.”

  At six equidistant points around the circumference of the containment chamber, precision-machined nozzles dilated minutely. Hair-thin pressurized jets of deaerated distilled water rushed in and converged on the captive object.

  Or tried to. Like all submicroscopic black holes, Vurdalak was hot. Bekenstein-Hawking radiation heated it into the billions of degrees. But that was at its microscopically small surface. Further out, say a meter or so, the temperature dropped to a comfortable few thousand degrees Celsius, not much hotter than your average blast furnace. Still hot enough, though, to vaporize the inrushing water and blast the superheated plasma back out again, toward the walls of its cage. Toward the ring of superconducting MHD generators standing ready to turn Vurdalak’s heat energy into electricity via electromagnetic induction.

  A brute-force, inefficient approach, and so what? The thermal energy was free and virtually inexhaustible, courtesy of Vurdalak. The superconducting magnets would, to all intents and purposes, last forever. There were no moving parts to wear out. And the power output was phenomenal.

  Plug that output back into Antipode’s main cryostats, and voila!

  —enough constant, real-time energy to maintain superconducting containment temperature indefinitely. Vurdalak would become its own jailer. Till the end of time, if need be.

  That was the theory, anyway.

  Galina was now sweating through the reality: only fifteen seconds now to power stabilization. She monitored the rising slope of the MHD output as it raced against the depletion of the stored reserves. Adjusted the fuel feed to compensate for unanticipated deviations from modeled ionization rates. Glanced at the countdown: ten seconds until Vurdalak would have to pull its own weight. Balancing, balancing . . . there!

  Galina monitored power flow for a few more seconds before daring to believe. Vurdalak was producing power to spare: enough to maintain its magnetic bo
ttle indefinitely, and—soon now, as soon as the undersea conduits could be laid—free, clean power to help light the world’s cities as well. Until then, the radiators crowning Nadyezhda’s summit would vent the overflow into the inexhaustible heat-sink of the North Atlantic, a bonanza for the energy-starved ecology of the Newfoundland Basin and its extremophile lifeforms.

  “Phase Three: Power Stabilization, complete,” the mission computer announced.

  Galina was shaking with reaction. All the desperate gambles of the past hours and minutes and years had paid off. Now the final phase was complete. Her face felt wet. She realized she was crying, whispering spasibo, spasibo—thank you, thank you—over and over like a prayer. In Russian, of course, it is a prayer, a contraction of Spasi Bog, “May God save you.”

  She rose from her chair, turned, and, still sobbing, hugged a surprised Arkady Grigoriyevich. Spasibo! she told him. A cheer went up from the lab crew. They too were rising from their stations, slapping each other’s backs, embracing, weeping openly, the men as well as the women. Galina had always admired the way Russian men were unafraid to express their deepest emotions.

  Except for that cold fish, Komarov. Out of the corner of her eye Galina could see him still sitting in front of his display like a toad carved from stone, oblivious to the euphoria all around him, still monitoring the configurations of the containment field, or so it appeared from here. Still tapping commands into his keyboard. Why?

  The mission computer’s synthetic voice began speaking again: “Commencing Armageddon Phase Four: Acceleration.”

  If there was more to the announcement, Galina didn’t hear it. She released Grishin, took a step back. Acceleration? Acceleration of what? “What is going on here, Arkady Grigorievich? There is no Phase Four!”

  Receiving no reply, she turned back to her console. There, before her eyes, the field geometries were shifting. The warping of the containment field was subtle. Anyone else might have missed it entirely. But Galina had lived, eaten, slept, dreamed these configurations for the past five years. She knew that slight strengthening at the ninety-degree lateral was wrong.

  She dropped into her chair again, summoned the gravitometric readouts to her display. No doubt about it: Vurdalak was wobbling, as if it were being bombarded somehow by some invisible force. The containment arrays were compensating as they were designed to do, producing the distortion that had caught Galina’s eye. The resulting field-disposition remained meta-stable, but Vurdalak’s spin, already within three percent of the speed of light, was increasing!

  She could see the reason now: the SQUIDs were detecting eight individual streams of heavy ions entering the chamber from emitters not on any of the blueprints she had seen. Moving at relativistic speeds, the atomic nuclei were skimming the black hole’s submicroscopic ergosphere with the precision of a particle accelerator and the momentum of a pile-driver. Each impact was minuscule compared with Vurdalak’s titanic mass, but cumulatively—

  Could that be why the automated announcement had called the mysterious fourth phase “Acceleration” ?

  Where could the beams be coming from? She called up the site-plans on her display, reviewed the familiar 3-D cutaways for the thousandth time: containment sphere, control room with its observation gallery for visiting dignitaries, antechamber and bathyscaphe docking facility—nothing out of the ordinary there. More keystrokes brought up the infrastructure schematics: life-support machinery, heat pipes, transformer bay, cryostats and power-converters, on and on.

  She paused, then paged back to the schematic of the transformer bay. The vast space occupied most of one level. The display showed it sitting empty right now: no need to install the equipment before the cableships had laid the deep-water conduits that would connect Antipode to the global power grid. But was it truly empty? There was room enough in there to accommodate what her instrumentation was detecting: eight radially-mounted linear accelerators.

  As this realization dawned, Galina glimpsed a flicker of movement in the upper righthand corner of her display. She tore her gaze from the station schematics and saw that a small red rectangle had appeared there unbidden. Yellow digits were inscribed in it, ticking off the seconds toward an undefined event still some fifty-three and a half hours in the future.

  A countdown window.

  She jerked at the touch of Arkady Grigoriyevich’s hand on her shoulder. He was saying something.

  “Galina Mikhailovna—Galya, if I may—you are to be congratulated on your success this day.” He took her by the arm, urged her up. “Let us go to my office. It is time we had a talk.”

  As Grishin guided her toward the exit, Galina glanced back at her now-silent coworkers by their ranked workstations. With the sole exception of Komarov, who looked almost . . . exultant? the faces of her colleagues mirrored her own puzzlement. Each of their displays now showed an identical red rectangle. All of them counting down in unison.

  53:36:13

  53:36:12

  53:36:11 . . .

  24 | Night on the North Atlantic

  THE SEA IS calm to-night, the tide is full, the moon lies fair . . .

  The sea was calm tonight, its placid swells unmarred, save by a small floating hemisphere of translucent plastic. A fiber-optic periscope.

  As the helicopter thuddered off into the northwest, two heads broke the surface.

  Marianna pulled the regulator from her face. “About time. These little pony bottles are only good for fifteen minutes tops.” She ditched the miniature airtank along with her weight belt, and inflated her lifevest.

  “That’s another one I owe that bastard Yuri,” she muttered to herself, watching the chopper’s retreating running lights.

  She turned to where Jon was pulling the ripcord on his vest. “That was a good call, Jon. I don’t like to think what might have happened if you hadn’t seen it coming.”

  “I didn’t,” he said. “Just a feeling I had.”

  There it was again, that weird . . . thing he did. “Your ‘feeling’ pretty much saved our skins. All the dive gear in the world wouldn’t have done us any good stashed in our suitcases. You get any more feelings, you let me know.”

  “Speaking of skins, should we lose the street clothes and leave just the diveskins?”

  “No, keep your pants on.” Marianna smiled, but this was serious. “The outer layer of cloth traps a bubble of dead water between the wetsuit and the open sea. Any little bit of insulation helps; the seawater temperature out here can’t be much above sixty degrees.”

  “Okay, got it. What next?”

  “We activate the come-hither.” Marianna fumbled below the waterline, switching on the locator strapped to her waist. Its buoyed antenna floated to the surface.

  “Is it working?” Jon asked after a moment.

  He had every right to sound anxious. It was very dark. Not even the lights of a passing ship on the horizon. Only her small box of battery-powered gear now stood between them and one of several unpleasant deaths.

  She stared down through the dark water, willing the indicator lights to come on and confirm a signal lock.

  “We’re green,” she said finally.

  “And now?”

  “Now we wait. Pete was going to keep a search-and-rescue chopper on standby at Horta just in case we wore out our welcome.” That was the plan, anyway.

  “Has that thing”—he pointed in the direction of the antenna—“got the range to reach the Azores? We’re pretty low on the horizon. Sea level, in fact.”

  “We’re not transmitting to the Azores, or anywhere else on earth,” she said. “Direct uplink to the Telesphere satellite network. Not enough bandwidth or signal strength for voice, unfortunately, but enough to send our GPS location over and over to a predesignated transponder.”

  “How long before we know they’re coming?”

  “Let me think. We were maybe two thirds of the way to Horta when all hell broke loose. That puts us less than an hour out.” She glanced at her wristtop. “It’s 10:53 now.
So, with any luck, home before midnight.”

  Keep it bright and cheery. They weren’t really in trouble. Yet.

  Knox had lost track of how long they’d been in the water. Drifting on the long, slow swells, some distance apart. Not speaking, wrapped in their own thoughts. Trying not to move. Moving would just make them colder, and might attract predators. He’d had enough predators for one night.

  After a while, Marianna broke the silence: “Okay, Jon. I give up. How did you know Grishin was going to have us killed?”

  Knox wasn’t sure he wanted to get into this, but it beat just sitting there, waiting. “C’mon, Marianna. You must’ve suspected something when you saw Yuri was coming along for the ride.”

  “By that time it was way too late. You knew as soon as Sasha told us we were leaving. How?”

  “Well, you must have noticed how nervous he was.”

  “Anybody gets nervous when they’re lying, Jon.”

  Present company excepted, he carefully didn’t say.

  When he made no immediate response, she took a different tack: “Was it how choked up he got toward the end there?”

  “Huh? No. I hardly noticed that. That’s just part of the whole Russian thing.”

  “W-what, then?”

  She really wasn’t going to let go of this, was she? Why had he flashed on the danger? Often as not, the insights seemed to come out of nowhere. Which made sense, considering.

  He sighed. “It was . . . yeah. Do you remember the last thing Sasha said?”

  “Um, something about how g-good it was to talk to you again, like in the old days?”

  “Uh-huh, like we did the night before last, on the bridge. That conversation on the bridge, that was the key, somehow. Not what we were talking about—the fact that Grishin broke it up.”

  “You think Sasha was trying to t-tip you off about Grishin?”

  “Hmm? No, that’s the funny part. I don’t think he knew Grishin was planning anything, anything more than stranding us in the Azores, that is.”