Gate Crashers

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  CHAPTER 10

  The twin suns of the Baylisec system gleamed off the silver hull of the small cutter and filled the command cave with light. The system’s primary was an enormous blue Galfor-range star that had already consumed most of its fuel.

  In the timescale of the cosmos, it would soon swell to many times its present size as a prelude to its ultimate destruction in a titanic explosion, vaporizing itself completely. Too big even to leave behind an infinite well.

  The benefactor of this cataclysm would be its neighbor: a relatively small, red Dipier-range star. Unlike its hard-living fraternal twin, this small sun would last for many ages more, and the debris from the larger star’s death would seed its orbit with precious heavy elements. It would be enough mineral wealth to form a system of planets, and with some luck, maybe even a new generation of life.

  The cutter’s pilot looked on, contemplating the future of the system. Each star had a duty to perform—the enormous blue smelting furnace and the tiny red factory. He tried to appreciate the irony of their relationship. The giant sun burned so brightly that its neighbor could barely be seen. It overpowered it in mass, luminosity, heat, pressure, even the range of materials it could produce. But it was merely a flash, a set-builder for a grand play. The glory and adoration would eventually go to its tiny companion, which would still be around to oversee a civilization emerge on one of its future worlds. The inhabitants would worship their meek little sun as a god, without ever knowing of the contributions of its giant blue kin.

  D’armic tried to appreciate the irony, but he hadn’t taken his pills. He continued to look on because without them, he couldn’t grow bored either.

  The slender creature had mottled gray skin and soft features arranged in an outwardly humanoid body. He wore no clothes because unassisted, he didn’t feel shame. He and his ship were of Lividite origin.

  If one were not a student of xenoanthropology, the Lividites would appear to be the most erroneously named species in the long history of arbitrary labels. They were not an angry race. In fact, they were devoid of naturally occurring emotions of any sort.

  They were dependent on artificial mood-altering chemicals to experience any response beyond their baseline stoicism. Emotions could be had in pills, patches, injections, nasal sprays, syrups, slow-release gel tabs, and suppositories for when they needed to feel like someone was a pain in the … well, you know the rest.

  The average Lividite packed a small container with drugs to induce friendliness, annoyance, excitement, frustration, and satisfaction before leaving for work. They planned their day around when to take the drugs so that the emotions would appear at the appropriate times. It was a time-honored prank among schoolchildren to mislabel the drugs of their classmates with hilarious results, so long as everyone had taken their Humoric.

  It’s only with study of Lividite history that the name’s origin comes into focus. Many tens of thousands of years ago, the Lividites were the single most destructive, genocidal, xenophobic, and all around prickly race in known space. They were so irrationally violent that their neighbor races (after a ruinous multigenerational war triggered by a careless embassy valet) staged an intervention for the entire planet and sponsored the population through ten generations of anger management counseling.

  After this episode, Lividite society bred for emotional stability and fair-mindedness. However, after many hundreds of generations, this guided-breeding program had selected the emotions right out of the population.

  Hearing of the situation, an off-world pharmaceutical company specializing in psychoactive drugs recognized the unprecedented business potential and quickly set up R&D centers, retail outlets, and an enormous marketing apparatus to chemically supply the blasé species with all their emotional needs.

  As it happened, this particular Lividite resented his drug dependency mightily, at least while he was taking his Resentitol. The rest of the time, he tried to keep the memory of resentment fresh in his mind. D’armic was part of a small but growing group that extolled the virtues of drug-free living. It wasn’t that they wanted to abandon emotions. Quite the opposite. They wished to experience the full, subtle palette of genuine emotions in real time. Not the delayed, monochromatic effects of ingested chemicals.

  However, the vestiges of natural emotions that remained in the Lividite genome were faint indeed. But they were real, and to D’armic and those like him, quality counted far more than quantity.

  Frontier managers spent tours lasting many years out in wild, undeveloped areas of space, a role for which Lividites were ideally suited. Without specific drugs, they couldn’t grow lonely or homesick. D’armic had picked his career path because the travel central to the job allowed him to pursue experiences that he surmised would have the most emotional impact.

  In his time as a Bureau of Frontier Resources officer, D’armic had gone solar-sailing around the shattered moon of Xemji, rode an untamed four-winged Telerack through the center of a storm vortex on Oerm, and watched the famous Korge of Datron perform his wildly popular stand-up routine in the ten-millennia-old Vilaj Amphitheater, where he made such impolitic observations as, “Why is it illegal to pay someone to rotate your obigon, when it’s perfectly legal to do it for free?” and “Do androids think oxidation is an embarrassing skin condition?”

  His pursuit of the drug-free emotional life is what caused D’armic to detour to the Baylisec system in the first place. He’d estimated the immensity of the blue primary star and the undertones of destruction and creation the pair represented might stir unexplored feelings of awe, inspiration, irony, or even insignificance.

  But the result of this experiment had been no different from the others. No matter how intense the experience, a tiny trickle of feeling was all he could conjure. He just hadn’t found the right levels of danger, absurdity, beauty, or accomplishment to clear a channel for the wellspring of emotions he believed was trapped below the surface.

  D’armic took a moment to soak in the view outside his windows, then turned back to the cutter’s navigational panel. He had spent enough time here already, and his duties called elsewhere.

  An alert popped up in his field of vision. One of the buoys in the Earth network, #4258743-E, to be precise, had thrown an error code and requested maintenance. It wasn’t alone; at least three others had logged errors in the last two cycles. D’armic made a note of it and resolved to bump the health of the buoy network further up his priority list. But for the moment, it would have to wait. There was the trimming of sun-weeds in Okim and the burgeron migration in the Tekis Nebula to worry about.

  There was always more for a frontier manager to do, and many larims to go before he could sleep.

  CHAPTER 11

  After events in the shuttle bay landed three of their shipmates in sick bay, the crews’ feelings toward the artifact were understandably ambiguous. So it should come as no surprise that the first crewman to go through the hatch was assigned through a highly technical process of elimination, guaranteed to select the most qualified candidate.

  A rock-paper-scissors tournament.

  After “winning” six consecutive games, one of Dorsett’s team, Specialist Mitchell, had been picked. He would hold the camera and other sensors as they recorded the proceedings. Chief Billings and his team would analyze these recordings locally, and the AESA experts back on Earth would handle them in turn.

  Mitchell was buttoned up in a bright yellow hazmat suit, along with the extra precautions of oven mitts, pilot’s helmet, and a baseball umpire’s chest pad someone had brought along. Allison supervised the beehive of activity on the deck and conversed with the translucent hologram of her chief engineer. In theory, Billings was still recuperating in his quarters, but couldn’t quite bring himself to stay out of things.

  “So, Steven, what do you think of that Poindexter they have back on Earth, Mr. Fletcher? Does his buoy theory hold water?” asked Allison.

  “Too early to tell,” Billings replied. “It makes sense on som
e levels, but it doesn’t explain everything. Fer instance, if it was s’pposed to just sit in space at three degrees Kelvin, why have such a powerful heat dissipation system on the hull? Makes as much sense as air-conditioning on a snowmobile.”

  “It does seem a bit out of place for the duty,” Allison concurred. “I’ve been thinking, too, if it were a buoy, what’s its job? Marking territory doesn’t make sense, because even a relatively small border, say a sphere a couple of dozen light-years in diameter, would require billions of these things. Even if it were possible to manufacture that many, it seems like an awful waste of resources. An advanced race must have a better way to draw a line in space.”

  “What about a lighthouse, warnin’ us of danger?”

  “I don’t buy that either. Hazards to navigation in space aren’t like sandbars or coral reefs hiding beneath the waves. Black holes, magnetars, and supernovas do a pretty good job of announcing themselves. So what could it be marking?”

  “Don’t know, ma’am. That’s what’s got me worried.”

  “I never pegged you as one to fear the unknown.”

  “A healthy fear of the unknown has kept mankind intact for a very long time. I see no reason to abandon it now.”

  “The unknown is what we’re out here for, Steven. Ah, it looks like Mr. Mitchell is about to take the plunge.”

  Specialist Mitchell was perched atop the improvised gantry ladder that led up to the artifact. He resembled a nervous kid in water wings on a ten-meter diving board as he peered over the threshold festooned in protective equipment.

  “Ma’am?” said the image of Billings.

  “Yes, Steven?”

  “Could you turn my camera so’s I can see what’s happenin’?”

  In an age of holograms, it could be difficult for the subconscious to remember who was actually present and who was a mirage.

  “Oh, right. Sorry.” Allison repositioned the camera that fed images back to the chief’s quarters.

  Fluorescent blue and purple lights from inside the artifact shone off the plastic visor of Mitchell’s helmet. With a deep breath, he committed to the task and eased himself inside. Nelson handed the camera and sensor packet down to him.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Mitchell?” asked Allison.

  “I’m all right, ma’am, but there’s not a lot of crawl space.”

  “What do you see?”

  “It’s bright as Fremont Street in Vegas in here, Cap.” He turned on the camera and its wireless feed.

  The assembled officers, scientists, and technicians turned to the holo-projection that appeared on the deck in front of the artifact’s cradle. Ribbons of light moved in waves through the interior, flowing over and past the organic shapes that formed the artifact’s internal components.

  As they looked down the cylindrical space toward one end, the light pulses swirled around one component in particular. It was iridescent and shaped like a nautilus shell in cross section.

  The chief’s image pointed a finger toward it. “Can I git a better look at that, ma’am?”

  “Mr. Mitchell, would you move in toward that spiral component, please?”

  “No problem, Cap.” Mitchell inched forward and brought the part into better focus. “Is this better?”

  “Yes, that fine. Just hold it steady for a moment.” Allison turned to Billings’s holo-avatar. “What are you thinking, Steven?”

  His brow furrowed in contemplation. “It’s tiny, but it does bear a resemblance to one of our gravity projectors, at least the amplifier.”

  “But what are the odds that alien technology would parallel our own that closely?”

  “Pretty good, actually. Math, physics, and chemistry are universal. Stands to reason that any engineerin’ based on them’s gonna have similarities, no matter who’s tightenin’ the bolts.”

  Allison regarded her chief engineer with approval. It would be easy to hear the drawl and fall into centuries-old assumptions about his mental horsepower. She, however, had learned better over the course of their voyage. Allison would put her redneck up against other people’s whiz kids anytime, anywhere.

  “Look here, ma’am.” Billings’s ghostly finger pointed at the center of the floating image of the part.

  Allison toggled a control in the air and zoomed in on the area. The ripples of light that pulsed through the interior of the artifact converged off-center on the spiral, surrounding an area of discoloration.

  “You think that’s a short circuit?” Allison asked.

  “Seems like an obvious assumption. Them lights are pretty insistent about drawin’ attention to that spot. Probably their way of idiot-proofin’ repairs.”

  “So Mr. Fletcher was right.”

  “It’s gittin’ hard to dispute.” His voice was a mix of disappointment and admiration.

  Mitchell interjected, “Should I continue the survey, Cap?”

  Allison looked at Billings, who gave a small nod. “Yes, go ahead and finish up the initial scan. Once we’ve had a look, we can go back to the areas that interest us the most.”

  “Aye-aye, ma’am.” He pressed on, recording as he went.

  * * *

  Much later that day, Allison sat in one of Magellan’s conference rooms surrounded by the department heads she’d thawed out for this shift.

  Things progressed so rapidly that her small crew began to stumble over one another. She wanted to get them all on the same page, or at least the same book.

  “All right, everyone. Simmer down,” Allison began. “We’re all here now, so I think we can get started. As you’re all aware, we only have another couple of weeks before this shift ends and the next group takes over. We have to get as much done as possible while keeping impeccable records so that they can pick up where we leave off, with as little confusion as possible. The last thing we want is for our replacements to waste time backtracking what we’ve already done.” She waited until she received nods of agreement from around the table. “That being said, let’s go around the room and get a status summary from everybody. We’ll start with you, Nelson. How is your team faring with the internal sensor repairs?”

  “We have good news there, I think. We’re almost certain we’ve identified all of the shorts and blown relays. Now all that’s left is pulling up the deck plates to get at the bad wiring.”

  “Good work. How much more time do you need?” asked Allison.

  “Another shift. Two at the most.”

  “Excellent. Did you hear that, Maggie?”

  “Yes, Captain. I am … glad to hear that.” Magellan had a fairly good understanding of human emotion; however, she had little experience expressing her own. It was the difference between listening to a symphony and playing the cello.

  Truth be told, Allison wasn’t even certain Magellan had genuine feelings or if some quirk of her software merely imitated what she saw in her crew.

  “Thank you, Engineer’s Mate Nelson,” Magellan said.

  “Hear that, Todd?” said Billings’s holo. “Not many of us wrench monkeys get to toil away on machines that actually show their appreciation.” Billings looked at him for a long moment. “Todd?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Oh, sorry. You’re welcome, Maggie.”

  “Much better.”

  Allison nodded. “Wheeler, how goes navigation?”

  “We’re already up to almost 40 percent light speed. Another couple of hours of accel and we’ll be at max. Reactor mass is dropping quick, though. Our margins are going to be thin.”

  “Any signs of pursuit?” asked Gruber.

  “Scopes are clear, except for some localized fuzziness from one of the aft sensors. It came out clean after diagnostics, so I’m pretty sure it’s interference from one of the shorts that Nelson is working on, given the cluster’s proximity to Shuttle Bay Two.”

  Allison’s face scrunched with concern. “Define ‘fuzziness.’”

  “The readings just don’t add up quit
e right,” Ensign Wheeler said. “They aren’t showing anything there—no mass or energy readings, for instance. It’s almost like the sensor is looking at the same chunk of space as all the others, just through smudged glasses.”

  “Sounds like the sort of echo you git with a bit of gravity projector leak,” added Billings.

  “What do you mean?” asked Allison.

  “Well, if the projectors ain’t synchronized exactly right, some gravitons can scatter away from the main projection and cause unfocused echoes. They ain’t near intense enough to form a real gravity well, so they just make the space-time near them look a little weird to most types of sensors.”

  “When was the last time they were tuned?”

  “Oh, I recon about sixty-five years ago when they wus bein’ installed. That’s not usually what wears out on the projectors. The crash might’ve thrown one out of alignment, I s’ppose.”

  “If it is an imbalance, how much will it degrade our drive capacity?”

  “Trivially, like a slow drip off the bottom of a fire hose. Addin’ the mass of the artifact probably had greater effect. That’s one of the reasons the synchros ain’t a real high maintenance priority, the other bein’ that they’re a real pain in the neck to git at.”

  “All right, fair enough. Ensign Wheeler, if it persists after Mr. Nelson is done with his repairs, I’d like to know.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Wheeler.

  “And provided it’s still there, Steven, I’d like you to run whatever tests are needed to confirm your guess once you’re up and about.”

  “Anything fer you, ma’am.”

  “Next, Prescott. Are we making any headway deciphering the artifact’s signals and runes?”

  Prescott leaned forward in her chair. “No, ma’am. We’ve not made any progress on translation. I’m sure now the signal contains multiple distinct layers. It’s probably some kind of data compression, but we’re having a devil of a time isolating them.”