Felix set down his tablet and leaned back in his chair. He was silent and looked troubled.
“What’s wrong, Felix?”
After a long moment, Felix crossed his arms over his chest. “I’ve been feeling conflicted about everything we’ve learned from the buoy. We haven’t earned any of that knowledge for ourselves; we just stole it.”
“You would prefer humanity just kept stumbling around in the dark?”
“We aren’t exactly stumbling, but … maybe. I don’t know. I guess my concern is if we aren’t mature enough to come up with this technology by ourselves, what’s to say we’re mature enough to use it responsibly?”
“I get you,” said Harris. “But while history may not be your strong suit, I’m studying it intently in my Officer Candidate School course work, and I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. The ability to build something has nothing to do with the ability to use it responsibly. Sometimes the two seem to have almost a negative correlation. The more horrible the weapon, the bigger the temptation to try it out.”
“That really doesn’t speak well for our chances over the long haul,” Felix said sourly.
“I don’t know about that. We’re still here, after all. People just seem wired to like things that go fast or blow up real good. It’s built into our operating system somewhere.”
“Well, if it’s speed you want, that thing is built to deliver.” Felix pointed to the device.
The two men looked at it together, anticipation building.
Felix stood up and walked for the office door. “Shall we?”
* * *
Eugene sat in his office at the Stack, checking his watch nervously like a father with a child in surgery. He’d been pacing, but quit once his knee complained too much. Jeffery watched the seconds tick by in the corner of his data pad display.
“Why haven’t they called?” Eugene blurted out.
“Maybe it’s a ploy to worry you into an early grave,” Jeffery suggested.
“It’s almost six. They were supposed to have made the first run nearly seven hours ago.”
“They were probably just delayed, Professor. Experimental machines never have much respect for schedules. Besides, if a black hole swallowed the Midwest, I’m sure we would have heard about it by now.”
“To hell with it. I’m calling them,” Eugene said. He pulled up the phone feature on his desktop computer, selected Felix’s profile, and dialed.
It went straight to voice mail.
“Damn!”
“Professor, they’re too remote to get coverage,” Jeffery replied.
“Right!” Eugene went back to his phone book and pulled up the secure line to the site itself. He entered an authorization code and dialed the number.
It rang and rang, but no one answered.
“Something’s wrong,” Eugene said. “I can feel it.”
“Not very scientific of you, Professor,” said Jeffery.
Eugene glared at him.
Jeffery relented. “All right. Sorry. Listen, let’s give them one more hour before we start to panic. Who knows? Maybe they’re all blacked out on celebratory champagne.”
* * *
The champagne remained unopened while everyone at the beta site scurried about in a whirl of activity.
“We need more power!”
“We’re already at 105 percent.”
“So go to 110 percent.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one trying to keep a grapefruit-sized star from getting loose!”
Harris watched the scientists and technicians go back and forth without actually going anywhere for several minutes. Meanwhile, Felix sat in a corner, typing away on his tablet. Harris knew the smug look on his face. He’d seen it may times before.
“Hey, nerds!” Harris shouted above the din, then pointed at Felix. “Why don’t you ask the boss what we should do?”
“Why, I’m glad you asked, Thomas,” Felix said, without letting too much sarcasm slip into his voice. “I think we should go outside, get a great big pile of snow, and dump it onto the fusion reactor. That will let us run the reactor as hard as we need until the snow boils off.”
“Won’t the water short it out?” Kendal asked.
“That reactor is a surplus naval design rated for use in subs. If it’s not watertight, I’ll eat my phone,” Felix said with conviction.
“But it’ll only work for a few minutes,” said one of the techs. “Then we’d have to throttle back until we can pile up more snow.”
“We only need a few minutes,” Felix answered. “Look, it’s either this or we sit on our hands until we can get another reactor up here.” A murmur of general agreement made its way through the crowd.
“All right, everyone. Put your coats on and grab a shovel,” Harris boomed.
Harris was impressed. Felix had projected confidence, and the group followed his lead. Harris was fairly sure he’d been the only one in position to notice Felix holding a hand behind his back with two fingers crossed so tightly they bleached white.
* * *
Eugene leaned forward in his chair. “All right. It’s been your bloody hour. I’m calling again.”
* * *
The noise in the giant room would have been unbearable without ear protection. The fusion reactor ran at 140 percent. The snow on top of it boiled into steam at an alarming rate, then promptly rose to the ceiling high above, where it condensed on the rafters and fell back down as rain.
The techs managing the reactor were white as paper. The scientists managing the device fared no better. The hyperspace machine howled like a banshee who’d zipped up his scrotum.
Everyone stood, or more accurately hid, as far from the reactor as the walls would permit. Not that it would matter if something really went wrong.
“Rebalance the feeds! They’re drifting out of the green!” Felix shouted to Kendal.
“What about the leads?”
“No, the feeds!”
The roar of the two machines forced everyone to communicate with hand signals and lipreading.
“Let me!” Felix nudged Kendal away from the control inputs for the device.
He had done his best to lay the controls out intuitively, but in the end, there was nothing intuitive about ripping a hole in the universe.
“How much time?” Felix shouted into his headset.
“The snow’s almost gone!” replied the head reactor tech. “Another minute, at best!”
The truth was that they couldn’t keep doing this forever. Even with the limitless supply of snow provided by the countryside, the reactor could only take so many cycles at this power level before the ablative lining in the plasma containment chamber eroded. Constant exposure to high-energy particles made even the toughest materials brittle eventually. They were just accelerating the process. If they didn’t get it right soon, a loop of one-hundred-million-degree plasma was sure to find its way out.
Felix struggled to balance the geometry between the different emitters, but they wanted to slide out of synch, almost like they were fighting back. He did the math on the fly in his head, trying to keep ahead of the distortions. He felt it all coming apart as the seconds slipped away.
But then, in a moment of clarity known to mystics and drunkards, Felix stopped thinking. He stopped trying to beat the problem down, and just let the current carry him. The distortions diminished and then faded away entirely. A power spike shot through the building, so intense that everyone in the room would later report seeing little flashes like static in their eyes.
Felix looked to the camera feed from inside the vacuum chamber. Inside was a perfect hole that reflected no light. The corners of his smile reached around behind his head and shook hands.
* * *
A moment later, buried deep inside an asteroid orbiting past Mars, an automated sensor platform took notice of the day’s momentous event. It couldn’t remember what to do next, so it consulted its manual.
“Right. Step 1
: call home upon detecting a portal signature.” It warmed up its own transmitter and fired off the relevant data. Feeling it had handled that task admirably, the platform continued.
“Now, then. Step 2: initiate self-destr … Hey! Now wait just a karking rakim…”
If anyone had been looking, they would have seen a bright flash as a very surprised asteroid exploded for no discernible reason.
* * *
The phone rang in Eugene’s office.
“Hello!?”
“Hello, Professor,” Felix said, sounding immensely pleased with himself.
Hours of concern and frustration came pouring out of Eugene. “It’s about bloody time! You’re eight hours late! I called and called, but no one answered.”
“I’m sorry, Mom, but the concert was really loud,” Felix said, grinning like an idiot.
“Oh, really? You two hooligans can just stay up there in the frozen tundra if that’s the way you’re going to be.”
“Forgive the professor,” Jeffery cut in. “He’s been on pins and needles since noon.”
“Well, we have the proverbial good news and bad news,” Felix said.
“What’s the good news?” Eugene asked.
“We managed to create and maintain a stable hyperspace window half a meter across for almost thirty seconds.”
There was a chorus of cheers in the background, followed by the sharp pop of corks exiting bottles.
“And the bad news?”
“Wisconsin remains undamaged.”
“I see. And how long have you been waiting to use that little chestnut?”
“Since he got out of the car, I’d bet,” Harris chimed in.
“What’s our next move?” Jeffery asked.
“We’ve got a load of data to sift through before we start the material tests, but that’s okay because we cooked our fusion reactor anyway. We’ll need a replacement with double the power output,” Felix answered.
“So you’re heading for home, then?” Eugene asked.
“As soon as we polish off the champagne. We can’t have it going flat,” said Harris.
“Waste not, want not, I suppose.”
CHAPTER 18
D’armic reclined in the command cave of his Bureau of Frontier Resources cutter and watched the swarm of black dots approach. They were the legendary burgeron herds, and like so many things in the universe, their small appearance was a matter of perspective.
The mottled gray Lividite pointed two fingers at the view screen and spread them into a V. The image zoomed in on the swarm of tiny specks backlit by the Tekis Nebula’s primary star. From this direction, they appeared as little more than perfect disks, dark as the lava tubes where his ancestors had found shelter from an unsympathetic world. Lividites were the only known example of sentient life to develop at the bottom of the food chain. Quick wits were all that kept them out of the mouths of nearly everything else on the planet, including certain decorative plants. They had an old joke: “On Lividite home world, livestock domesticates you.” No one said it was a good joke.
The herd approached with impressive speed, each dot expanding like a drop of oil across the surface of a pond while the nebula’s clouds of ionized gas glowed in blues and greens behind them. For once, D’armic was not alone. A menagerie of vessels took up position in the space around the burgeron herd. Like him, they’d come to witness a spectacle decades in the making.
There were two other BFR cutters, a wildlife documentary crew, cruise ships filled with tourists, and a Turemok patrol cruiser to ensure no one tried to leave with a trophy. The whole scene felt like one huge, disorganized festival.
D’armic reflected on the crowds. Most of his time on the frontier was spent in isolation. His experiences had been solitary, excluded. Was that part of the problem? Other species held events that brought together thousands, even millions of individuals. Perhaps communal experiences amplified emotions like a resonating chamber. He would know soon, the burgeron were about to arrive.
They were the largest animals ever discovered, so immense they dimmed the star behind them. The herd elders were the size of continents, but most of their vast surface area was no thicker than D’armic’s eyelids. Sunlight both propelled and warmed them as they trawled the space between the twin stars of the Tekis system, feeding off whatever stray bits of organic matter from the nebula they filtered along the way. Pinpricks of light shone through small tears left in their skin from passing meteors.
Not only were they the largest but the fastest life-forms ever found. At the apogee of their circuit between suns, they were moving at many thousands of larims per cenbit, a feat D’armic’s own people didn’t surpass until building gravity-driven vessels. The herd moved as one titanic organism. But even at their colossal speeds, it took many years to make the crossing between the companion stars. Today was a rare event; today was apogee.
As D’armic and the fleet of ships from the half dozen member races of the Assembly of Sentient Species watched, the herd of burgeron distorted their disks in unison. How they achieved such precise synchrony was still a mystery, owed in no small part to the difficulty of collecting and dissecting a specimen several orders of magnitude larger than the ships used to study them.
The slight bending caused the burgeron to somersault through the vacuum. They compressed into ever-shrinking ovals until floating edge-on toward D’armic’s cutter. Then disappeared almost entirely. All that remained were thousands of straight lines, thin as the Lipelum Blades carried by the ancient warrior sect of his people.
The coms were abuzz with six different equivalents of “Oooh, ahhh.” Except for D’armic’s; he was still waiting for the emotional wave to hit.
The burgeron continued their flip, again growing in apparent size. Something was different, however. The side they presented now was not black but metallic. D’armic knew it came from an atom-thin coating of aluminum and chromium harvested from the nebula. It allowed them to achieve their amazing speeds, not to mention slow down again.
The herd completed their flip, and the assembled crowd learned firsthand why burgeron was Nelikish for “wandering galaxy.” Like an ocean filled with mirrors, the herd caught the reflection of the star ahead of them. Thousands of points of light shone brighter than the rest of the Tekis Nebula.
The com channels exploded with the sounds of elation and amazement. The documentary ship swooped in for a closer view. The Turemok patrol cruiser edged in even closer to enforce a minimum distance. Soon, every ship was bustling to get as near to the herd as possible.
Every ship, that is, except for D’armic’s cutter. He possessed a bit of trivia about burgeron that everyone else had overlooked. Although their metabolisms were extremely efficient, burgeron still produced waste. But their microgravity environment and extreme speeds created a unique problem. Dumping waste at the wrong time meant potentially shooting themselves down with their own feces later. Not a great way to go. As a result, the burgeron herd relieved themselves only once per run, at the one time the waste was guaranteed not to catch up with them.
The volume and pitch of the dialogue from the fleet of spectators changed as the emissions from the herd of burgeron struck their ships. The Turemok cruiser, by virtue of being nearest to the source, caught the worst of the foul maelstrom and suffered damage, but its power output was stable and it wasn’t losing atmosphere. The odds were good the only casualty was the Vel’s pride.
D’armic took in the scene, analyzing each element in detail. After a few moments of consideration, he recognized that all the necessary elements for a terrific bit of lowbrow humor were present. Some in vast quantities. He appreciated how funny it should be, but felt nothing. Not even an impatient chuckle struggled for freedom. Even more sobering, he realized with even a low dose of Humoric, he would be laughing too hard to respire.
The Resentitol sitting in his medicine drawer tempted him. Wait, wasn’t temptation an emotion? But then what of longing for food or the urge to breathe? That required conte
mplation. He took a final scan of the burgeron herd. The spectator ships, leery of a repeat performance, gave them a wide berth.
Satisfied they posed little danger to the wildlife, he maneuvered deeper into the nebula. Like the immense herd in his wake, D’armic’s migration was ongoing. He had to move on. The buoy network inspection loomed. He’d neglected it for several cycles in favor of potentially more stimulating assignments. Had he been procrastinating?
Maybe without realizing it, he had been avoiding the buoys for fear of boredom. Was it possible that intense positive experiences had been the wrong tunnel to natural emotions? Suddenly very interested in the answer, D’armic plotted course for the closest buoy and swung his cutter around. Boredom might be his solution, and the buoy network was certain to have tedium by the bucketful. After all, every frontier manager knew nothing remotely interesting ever happened in the Human Wildlife Preserve.
* * *
Vel Noric looked out his crippled patrol cruiser’s view screen, or more accurately, tried to look out the view screen. While the substance covering the external optical sensors (as well as most of the rest of the hull) was unmentionable, it should be mentioned that it was as sticky as it was abundant.
“I don’t believe this karking glot,” he said, covering his eyes with a hand. “Ship’s status?”
The jumpy crewman at the mechanic’s station straightened with a quiver and scrolled through menus and sensor reports. He was still digging when Noric lost patience.
“Well? Out with it!”
“Um, I don’t have a status, Vel. The gl—” The mechanic’s officer caught himself and averted personal catastrophe. On a Turemok ship, obscenity was a privilege of status. Glot only rolled down the ranks. “The debris is interfering with most of our external sensors. I can’t get an accurate measure of the damage.” He seemed to shrink three centimeters when he finished.
“Well, then,” said Noric, “why don’t you start by telling me what is working?”
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