by Darren Beyer
Facing the windows, Wu spread his legs slightly, placed his hands behind his back, and gazed out at the view. When Erik made his way upstairs and entered the conference room, Wu’s stance had not changed.
“Mister Wu.”
“Mister Hallerson.” Wu did not turn from the window. “Do you like the view?”
“I find it quite stirring. On the Mongolian Plateau, one can climb to a mountaintop, gaze out to the horizon, and know that there are fewer people in view than there are fingers on one’s hands. One can do the same here. Once away from this beautiful city, it would be unusual if even a single person was within sight range in any direction.” Now Wu turned. If he had any reaction to seeing Erik’s disfigured face, he didn’t show it. “There is something beautiful about desolate places.”
“I did not take you for an aesthete, Mister Wu.”
“I believe that everyone admires beauty—at least beauty as they behold it. Whatever form it takes, it is God’s work.”
“It depends on the god, does it not?”
Wu bowed his head in acknowledgement.
Erik gestured to a chair at the conference room table. “But I’m sure you did not cross trillions of kilometers of space to have a philosophical discussion with an old adversary.”
Wu sat and placed his hands on the table. Erik nodded at what was considered a professional courtesy in their line of work. He returned it in kind.
“I am here at the behest of my government,” Wu said. “My mission is to see to the resumption of the hyperium supply to the Pan Asian Alliance—by any means necessary.”
“I would have thought the information I provided on the location of the Sudak Bay would have made your leadership quite happy. The discovery of the hyperium shipment will allow you to pressure the Coalition to reinstate your supply.”
“‘Giving gifts can open doors.’”
“Proverbs 18.” Erik forced a smile. “I didn’t take you for a religious man either.”
“I am an educated man.” Wu forced a smile in return. “What door do you intend to open? Why go against your own government’s interests?”
“Borders and governments are concepts of a terrestrial world. TSI is an interstellar company.”
“Perhaps a company with designs on becoming more?”
Erik remained silent as he stared into Wu’s eyes.
“Whatever your motives,” Wu said, “interstellar travel is one of our highest national priorities. We require a supply of hyperium.”
“I take it by your presence here that you have little faith in the Coalition fulfilling its treaty obligations.”
“They may deliver; they may not.” Wu paused, seemingly considering his words. “We seek to develop alternatives.”
Erik leaned back in his chair and brought his hand off the table to his chin. “I will have to take one alternative off the table. We cannot give you a direct supply.”
“Then I came all this way for nothing.” Wu stood.
“I said one alternative. There are others.”
Wu’s eyes narrowed.
Again Erik smiled, and he gestured for Wu to sit. “I cannot give you a direct supply, but I am prepared to offer you an uninterrupted source of hyperium.”
“I’m afraid you have me at a loss.” Wu didn’t take his eyes off Erik as he returned to his seat.
“I can provide a source, but it must be off the record, and through, shall we say, channels that are not entirely legal. If any word gets out about this arrangement, it will terminate immediately, and be denied in the strongest possible terms. You will talk to no one outside of the highest levels in your government about this matter. Outwardly, you must continue to act as though nothing has changed with the current situation. In fact, you should escalate it. Publicly you must continue your protestations. Privately you will receive your hyperium.”
“I ask again, what door do you wish to open?” Wu’s voice carried a wary tone.
Erik pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it across the table. When Wu unfolded it, his eyes grew wide.
“Is this a serious request?”
“I would not waste your time with anything else.”
“Plutonium.” Wu coughed. “You want plutonium.”
“Enriched plutonium, to be precise. A lot of it—the amount is written there.”
Wu stared at the paper, then looked Erik in the eyes. “Why should we break one of the most sacred of international laws just to get what we are owed by treaty? Especially when, with the bulk of the Coalition fleet currently here in the Eridani system, we can move on Hyperion and take its mining facility for ourselves?”
“First, because most of the stockpiles on Hyperion are already gone.” With satisfaction, Erik watched Wu’s face show shock. “Second…” Erik paused. “Tell me, what do you know about how the Coalition fleet was able to travel here?”
For a few moments, Wu didn’t answer. Then he said. “We understand that the Coalition has developed the technology to create a wormhole without the use of a jump drive. A Casimir bridge.” Wu pronounced the phrase as if the words were foreign to him. “It allows any ship to be sent through.” The last sentence was as much a question as a statement.
“You have good intelligence.” Erik smiled. “But for one key element.” Wu raised an eyebrow. “The Coalition did not develop the Casimir bridge technology. We did. It was a private endeavor. TSI operates it. I control it.”
Wu narrowed his eyes.
“The technology has two limitations that you might find of interest. When a jump drive within a ship creates a wormhole, the transition from one point in time and space to another is instantaneous; the drive folds space perfectly upon itself. With a Casimir bridge, the fold is imperfect. Instead of a hole in space, it creates more of a tunnel—a bridge that must be crossed. It takes time to travel from one end to the other, which creates a temporal shift on any ship making the crossing. Depending on the quality of the link and the distance, it could take an hour or longer.”
“An hour to cross trillions of kilometers hardly seems like a limitation.”
“That depends on the situation the limitation is applied against.”
Wu acknowledged the argument with a nod. “And the second limitation?”
Erik stood and walked to the same position at the floor-to- ceiling windows that Wu had taken. “Like its terrestrial cousin, a Casimir bridge can support significant mass, provided it is evenly spaced along its length. Care must be taken to separate the ships crossing it accordingly.”
“How much separation?”
“It depends on a number of factors, but typically minutes. So if a fleet desires to maintain integrity, and to be able to form up quickly after crossing, because of the delay…”
“By the time the first ship arrives, much of the rest of the fleet has already entered.”
“Its destination is already set in space and time.”
Wu nodded thoughtfully. “I see.”
“Now consider,” Erik continued. “What if an opposing force knew that destination? What if the private contract ships providing security for that destination withdrew at the precise time that the first ship was due?”
As Wu’s eyes widened, Erik walked behind him.
“A good captain coming through the bridge might identify his predicament and launch an emergency jump pod to warn the origin end of the bridge.”
“But it would do no good,” Wu said.
“That’s right. The last ship would have already entered—a ship that would arrive only to find the ruin of a fleet waiting for it, destroyed one by one as they exited the bridge.”
Wu slowly spun his chair.
Erik walked back over and leaned in close. “Is fundamentally changing the interstellar balance of power worth the price of a little plutonium?” he whispered.
He didn’t need to wait for Wu’s answer—it was etched into his face.
Cha pter 24: Eridani
You need your rest.” Hands on her
hips, Ivey stood over Grae’s bed in the medical ward. Doc took a few cautious steps back.
“Are you this much of a pain to your partner?” Grae said. He tried to smile, but the flash of anger that crossed Ivey’s face told him his attempt at banter had fallen short.
“What happens between my partner and me is none of your business, and what the hell does that have to do with all of this anyway? You almost died. If Doc hadn’t been there when it happened, you would have died. Now, you might not care about what happens to you, but there are more than a hundred people at this base who do—and more are coming. They’re risking their lives, and they’re doing it because we have a military leader they can have faith in. If you don’t get better, you’re letting all of them down.”
Ivey crossed her arms, and Doc leaned against the wall, looking anywhere but at Ivey and Grae.
“Are you finished?” Grae asked.
“I’ve said my piece.”
“Okay then,” said Grae. “First off, you’re right.”
Ivey’s jaw didn’t quite drop, but her eyes betrayed her astonishment. “I know people are counting on me, and I know I need time to recover. But we’re neck deep in a fight, and time is a commodity we don’t have. Second”—Grae gave her his best “I’m the boss” expression—“Whether I need to rest or not, I’m in command, and I decide what I do and when I do it.” He lightened his demeanor. “Now, show me what knocked me out.”
Ivey stared at him for a few moments, then looked to Doc, who still leaned against the wall, diverting his attention.
“Doc.”
“Yes?” He jerked his head up. “Oh, yes, of course.”
Doc hurried to a medical refrigerator and removed a glass vial filled with the same pink fluid Grae had seen at the crash site. Holding it in both hands, he placed it in the holder of a digital microscope, then wheeled a holo screen over to Grae’s bed.
“Just a second,” Doc said, fiddling with the screen. After a moment, he stood straight. “There we go.”
On the screen, what looked like a robotic crab appeared. It had eight legs and two claw- like appendages, and it moved them all in a swimming motion.
Grae glanced over at the glass vial, then looked to Ivey. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a nanobot. It came out of your nose in that nasty pink goo.”
“Nanobots? Like the ones used in A-R-T?”
“Similar,” Doc answered. “Medical bots flow through the body, riding the bloodstream. When they find dead, diseased, or damaged cells, they cut them loose and locally stimulate the body’s healing process to repair those that remain.”
The bot had almost moved out of the scope’s field of view, and Doc turned back to the positioning controls until it was centered on the screen again.
“There we go. Now, where was I? Oh, yes—well, these little bastards, they are more sophisticated. Apparently they can navigate to specific locations in your body—which is like nothing I’ve ever heard of. I can’t even begin to imagine how something this small can do that. Regardless, some of them made their way to two specific places in your body: your circle of Willis, and your cribriform plate.”
“In English, please?”
“One is the worst place you could ever have an aneurism,” Ivey said. “And the other is the barrier that separates your brain from your nose.”
Doc nodded. “It looks like your cribriform plate had been worked on for a while—it was getting perforated—making it weak. That’s probably why you had a runny nose when you got here.”
“You’re not telling me that that thing cut me up…”
“That one? Oh, no.”
Doc turned back to the controls and zoomed out. As the view increased, the nanobot diminished in size. Then another appeared at the edge of the screen, and another. Before long, dozens showed as tiny dots. By the time they shrank out of sight, Grae would have sworn there were hundreds on the screen.
“My estimate is you had thousands of these things working on you. And they didn’t just cut up your cribriform plate, either. They hit you in the middle and posterior cerebral arteries near the circle of Willis, causing, as Ivey said, a major aneurism.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s not the half of it.” The doctor shook his head. “Once your artery was cut, the ones that had been working on your cribriform plate finished their job and broke it loose altogether. Blood from the ruptured arteries mixed with your clear brain fluid.”
“Pink goo,” Ivey interjected.
“And they simply rode it out of your body.”
“My God.”
“God has nothing to do with these little fuckers.” Ivey crossed her arms over her chest.
“I got thousands of these things just from checking on one crash victim?” Grae asked.
Doc shook his head. “I’m sure you picked up some from that contact, but most… well, I found some of that pink goo on your boots and one of your gloves. These things can’t move quickly, but they didn’t have to go far to climb above your boot and past your glove until they found skin. Then they burrowed in. Remember when I said you had what looked like bug bites?”
“You called them midgies or something.”
“Sand flies. I’m pretty sure that’s how they got into your bloodstream. I can’t know for sure, but I’m betting they injected a numbing compound, like a mosquito does, so you didn’t feel them.”
“And that caused the rash.” Grae could do nothing but stare straight ahead, trying to grasp the ramifications. “Am I…”
“You’re clear.”
“What about you?” Grae darted his eyes between Doc and Ivey. “If these things can cut through arteries and bone, they can cut through a hazmat suit.”
“We picked up a few,” Ivey said. Grae looked up at her in alarm.
“Don’t worry. We’re clean.”
“How do you know? Is there a vaccine or something?”
Doc turned off the holo screen and moved back to the scope. “Even if one would work, which it wouldn’t, you don’t need one. Although the symptoms and transmission are very disease-like, they aren’t a virus or bacteria. They can’t reproduce.” He carefully picked up the vial and moved back toward the refrigerator.
“Then how—”
“Cattle prod,” Ivey said. “We found that a fairly harmless electric shock knocks them out.”
“Fairly harmless?” Grae managed a weak smile.
“It’s not so bad. Everyone who came in contact with you took one as a precaution.” As Doc put away the vial, Ivey pulled up a stool and sat next to Grae. “It’s pretty staggering,” she continued. “The whole thing was a setup from the beginning.”
“But why?”
“To kill the leader of the resistance before he could get it organized.”
“I don’t know.” Grae shook his head. “They couldn’t know I’d be the one going in. That would be too random. Besides, why go through all the effort? They could have just put eyes on the wreck and dropped a ten-ton kinetic from orbit once I was inside. And then there’s the question of how they found me at the m-base, and the timing of my little episode at point Lima.” He looked from Ivey to Doc and back again. “There’s something else in play here, and we better find out what.”
“I’ve been going through the communication logs.” Ivey’s attention was locked on her screen. “There’s nothing except the traffic between the Lima camp and here.”
Grae slumped and rubbed his aching head.
“Well, it was just a thought. Why did I get hit right at that moment—right when I turned on the comm unit? I’ll get back to—”
“Hang on. There is one thing that’s a little weird.” Grae moved to look over her shoulder.
“The link cut out and reconnected twice during your session. For about five hundred milliseconds each time.”
“Is that unusual?”
“In itself, no, but during the outages, I don’t see any reconnection attempts. The system should try every hundred
milliseconds, so there should have been four or five attempts. It could just be a software glitch.”
“No.” Suddenly alert, Grae was like a hound on a scent. “Half a second is more than enough time to get a message out.”
“Without leaving a log entry?”
“Run with me on this for a second.” Grae worked through the possibilities. “The comm unit doesn’t have much range on its own. Our network is the only one close enough, so any message would have had to go across it.”
Ivey shook her head. “I know where you’re going with this. I already checked the hardware logs of the Lima network node. There were no external connections.”
“Are there any other nodes in range?”
“I’d have to check, but the comm unit automatically connects to the one with the strongest signal.”
Grae just stared at Ivey until she rolled her eyes and dug back into her holo screen.
“Okay, the Kilo node was in range.” She leaned forward, squinting as she scanned its system logs. “These are all ours, too.”
Grae sighed. “I was sure that the comm unit was the key.”
“Wait. This is odd.” Ivey leaned even closer to the screen. “This isn’t one of ours.”
“Can you get a location?”
She reached into the screen, and a complex 3D network topography diagram appeared. Lines connected to dots, which connected to other dots. At the center of it all was a large grouping. It resembled a star map of a galaxy, with lines connecting uncountable constellations.
“This is the map of our network here on Eridani.” Ivey rotated the diagram until a dot surrounded by a translucent red sphere was front and center. “This is the last node the traffic hit on our network.”
Grae leaned in so he could read the label. “That’s one of our remote comm repeaters. Can you access its logs?”
“Just a sec.”
Ivey was a blur of hands and fingers moving throughout the holographic screen. Within seconds, a long list of data appeared. She attacked it with search routines, then zeroed in on a single section.
