“I only want a closer look,” I said into my comm. I hoped the alien AI was listening. “I’m not going to touch anything. If you want me to stop, just say so.”
Close up, the device didn’t look much different. The only new detail I was able to make out was that a series of small, fine wires, like the ones on the bots that had built the printer, filled the inside edge of the loop. Despite the vacuum, the wires moved like they were alive. They were spaced about a centimeter apart, each one ten or twelve centimeters long. They waved randomly, but never touched, as if each one had some sort of independent electric field that repelled the others.
I looked at the hole the swarms had burrowed into the rock as well, but the only thing I noticed there was that the inside of the tunnel was as smooth as polished marble. The cable the last swarm had laid was visible down the tunnel in a few pockets of light between asteroids, but beyond that the tunnel collapsed in darkness.
By the time the swarms returned, extruding something new behind them, I was safely back among the asteroids. They emerged from a second tunnel close beside the first, moving more slowly than before, possibly because the pipe they were laying behind them was more than just a pipe. But I could only see the outside, which was made from the same dark material as the device in the middle of the hull. The conduit was the same width as the tunnel behind it, and fit snugly. I assumed the thing was some kind of super conductor that extended all the way back to the engines, channeling power directly to the device. Opening an interstellar gate probably required every gigawatt the ship’s engines could produce.
I was sure it was a gate. That was what I’d thought from the beginning. Everything that had happened since had made me more certain. The device looked like every gate in every vid I’d ever seen. A circular frame with nothing visible in the middle. An opening into space, lifeless for the moment, with the stars beckoning on the other side.
I quivered in anticipation of what might happen next.
FTL travel isn’t possible. Everyone knows that. The old movies that featured spaceships rocketing across the galaxy are laughed at today. Even if FTL were possible, you’d need something bigger than a fighter jet to get from Tatooine to Endor. Gates were the answer. Gates that punched through the fabric of spacetime in the wink of an eye.
The trouble with gates, though, was building them in new places. It might take a few years, but you can easily fill a solar system with gates, once you have the tech. Gates on Mars and Titan, Eris and the Moon—all you have to do is send ships out to build them, wherever you want to go.
Getting to other stars is a lot harder. Even at ten percent of lightspeed, the nearest system to Earth is forty years away. And the only thing there is hard rock and radiation. To get to the nearest habitable planet would take nearly four hundred years. The only way to go that far, for that long, is to send an AI.
Even I’d go crazy on a ship for four hundred years.
The swarm connected the pipe to the base of the gate. The field came on. One moment I could see through the loop to the stars beyond, the next I couldn’t. The cilia stopped waving and went rigid as high-tension wire. The blackness between them was complete, like the blackness at the mouth of a cave. Only this was no cave. Pass through that opening and you might end up on the other side of the galaxy.
I waited expectantly, but nothing came through. Nothing arrived. The nanobots waited too, condensed into a single long swarm below the gate. Nothing erupted from the center. Nothing emerged. The blackness neither stretched nor irised, but simply remained at it was. At rest.
Maybe it took a while for the connection to be made. Or maybe the connection was quick, but it took a while for a suitable party to be assembled on the other side. Whoever sent the probe had no idea what they were going to find when they opened their gate. Caution was probably justified.
I was eager to meet them, even if they came through with lasers blazing. But somehow I didn’t believe it was going to be like that. Why come all this way just to kill people? Whoever had built this gate was probably looking for friends, not enemies.
I waited an hour. Nothing happened. I waited another hour. Still nothing. My stomach growled, and I really needed to pee, but there was no way I was leaving now. The last thing I wanted was to be snatching a quick sandwich when the aliens arrived.
I wondered. What if the gate wasn’t set for someone to come through from the other side? What if they were waiting for someone to come to them?
“Are they on their way or not?” I asked the alien AI.
The ship’s AI responded. “It won’t say.”
“Are they waiting for me to go to them?”
“I can’t answer that, either. The alien AI has powered down. It has done nothing since the device was switched on.”
“Can we use the comm?”
“Communications remains offline.”
I decided it was worth the risk. Unhooking a spanner from my suit’s toolbelt, I tossed it gently toward the center of the gate.
Nothing happened. The towbots didn’t shoot their lasers at it. The nanobots didn’t swarm. The spanner tumbled lazily through the vacuum. My aim was slightly off, and it wasn’t headed for the center of the field. Would that cause a problem?
It didn’t. The tool struck the field handle first and slowed. Everything slowed. The movement of the stars. The beating of my heart.
The spanner sank slowly into the blackness and disappeared.
Time returned. The spanner was gone.
My whole body tingled. Partly from excitement, and partly from the touch of the field when activated by the spanner.
“Still no response from the alien AI?”
“Nothing.” the ship’s AI answered.
Pushing off the asteroid I’d been sitting on, I followed the spanner.
The gate loomed in front of me, black as the world’s largest bullseye. I stretched my arms forward as far as I could, and dove slowly across the hold. The stars disappeared behind the rim of darkness.
My gloves touched the field—the very tips of the fingers—and the world slowed again. Much longer this time, as if my progress required every second between the beginning and ending of the world. And all other worlds as well, before, beyond, and between. My hands were absorbed, and my entire body thrilled. My elbows disappeared, and I almost cried with joy. My head was swallowed, and with it the last grasp of time.
* * *
Two weeks later, a Chinese scoutship found me on the other side of the gate. Literally. I was floating weightlessly in the hold half a meter beyond the back of the gate, still in the mineship, and right beside the spanner. For the four hundred and twenty-first time, I’d failed to make it anywhere else. I’d have tried another four hundred and twenty-one times if the Chinese hadn’t shown up and stopped me. And more, too, though it was pretty clear by then I was never going to make it anywhere else. But it felt so good when I went through, when time stopped, and reality seemed on the verge of some awesome catastrophe. The trip itself was almost worth the disappointment. As long as there was the slightest chance I might finally end up somewhere else, a dozen, or a million light years away, I was going to keep on diving through.
At least until the Chinese stopped me. Once they arrived, if anyone was going through the gate, it was them. But they didn’t get anywhere either. Then their scientists showed up, and no one tried at all, not even after they confirmed the gate was working at this end.
“The problem is,” one of the scientists declared, “the field is set to receive. Not send.”
“Then why aren’t the people who built it here?” asked another.
The first scientist shrugged. “Why aren’t the dinosaurs here?”
Tears blurred my eyes. Weeping in a pressure suit is hard. As thrilling as all my trips to nowhere had been, they hadn’t come close to the thrill of almost getting somewhere. The thrill of rising right up and out of the world. Beyond the planets. Beyond the Sun.
I turned off my suit’s comm so the scie
ntists’ discussion wouldn’t make me even more depressed, and clomped toward the bow. Behind me, techs bottled sleeping nanobots for future examination and swarmed around the gate. It might take a while, but eventually they’d figure out how the thing worked. There’d be gates all over the system, from Mercury to Taonoui. Mineships would be a relic of the past, like clipper ships and prairie schooners.
My boots clanked softly against the hull. Outside my helmet, the airless ship was silent. Reaching the open bow, I stopped and looked out at the old, black sky. Nothing moved, at least nothing I could see without instruments more sensitive than my eyes.
Leaning forward into the empty darkness, I looked harder. Somewhere, sometime, there had to be another probe.
Maybe the aliens who built that one would still be alive.
THE HUNT
Gail Z. Martin & Larry N. Martin
“I wish Falken would quit sending us out to look for agents that vanished,” Mitch Storm grumbled.
“Maybe he’s hoping we’ll be the next ones to disappear,” Jacob Drangosavich replied. He shifted his tall frame to get more comfortable in his seat as the rail car swayed. “If you hadn’t let Kesterson get away, Falken wouldn’t have had a reason to send us to the godforsaken far north.”
“I had a sighting inside the building, and the dynamite brought the roof down. That should have stopped him cold. How was I supposed to know he’d gotten into the storm drain?”
Mitch Storm was average height, with a trim, muscular build. He had dark hair, dark eyes, and a five o’clock shadow that started at three. Mitch was exactly what a penny-dreadful novelist would imagine a government secret agent and former army sharpshooter would look like.
Jacob, on the other hand, was tall and lanky, with a thin face, blond hair, and blue eyes that spoke of his Eastern European heritage. He and Mitch had been agents for the Department of Supernatural Investigations since they had returned east after the rancher wars.
The click-clack of iron wheels on the rails confirmed that they were making good time. Outside, the Adirondack Mountains were covered with snow. “How long do you think Falken will keep us on probation?” Jacob asked.
Mitch shrugged. “It was four months the last time, two the time before that. So I wager we’re up to six months.”
“Why did you use dynamite?” Jacob asked, in an off-handed tone.
Mitch rolled his eyes. “I was improvising.”
“Might it be possible to improvise a little less…enthusiastically next time? Sooner or later, Falken will give up on suspending us and just convene a firing squad.”
“The Department doesn’t use those anymore,” Mitch replied. “I checked.”
Jacob thought of a dozen arguments, but he knew Mitch was unlikely to heed them. He dropped back against his seat. “At least we got a sleeper train, and a private cabin. Where do you think Kesterson will go next?”
Mitch turned away. “Not really our concern, is it? Falken made that pretty clear.” He was quiet for a moment. “But Kesterson had some family in New England. Since we’re all the way up here in the New York hinterland, I figured we might poke around a little after we finish our assignment—strictly off the record.”
“Uh huh,” Jacob replied, unconvinced. “You can’t leave well enough alone, can you?”
Mitch flashed a grin. “Never.”
“Speaking of the assignment. How in the hell do two teams of agents and a dirigible, as well as a perfectly functional werkman just vanish?”
“If we knew that, Falken wouldn’t have had an excuse to banish us up here,” Mitch answered.
Jacob glanced toward the door to their cabin. Two unorthodox companions accompanied them: Hans, a man with brass and gear prosthetics, and Oscar, a mechanical man cleverly constructed by Tesla-Westinghouse Corporation’s wunderkind, Adam Farber. Oscar—and much of Mitch and Jacob’s equipment—was experimental. Several items were one-of-a-kind, prototype pieces Mitch was “testing” for Farber. Those items were in a large crate in one of the boxcars. Oscar and Hans took turns standing guard or sleeping in one of the servants’ berths.
“So what are we going to do differently that lets us live to tell the tale?” Jacob asked.
“Damned if I know. I make these things up as I go.”
* * *
The Mohawk and Malone rail line ended in Tupper Lake. A coach was waiting to take them and their gear to the Altamont Hotel. By wilderness standards, it was very comfortable.
“I’m not impressed,” Mitch said as he put down his carpet bag and looked around his accommodations. Hans and Oscar were downstairs, stowing the rest of their gear.
“You will be, once we head into the woods and you compare this to our tent. I sure hope you brought enough of that mosquito repellent. I hear the bugs up here are the size of eagles.”
Mitch snorted. “We’ll be laughing stocks, walking around doused with witch hazel and rubbing alcohol. They’ll have a good chuckle at the ‘city boys.’”
Jacob raised an eyebrow. “This city boy intends to go home with most of his blood. That means dodging bullets—and mosquitoes.”
Mitch cleared off the desk and began unrolling their topographical maps. A few minutes later, Mitch had maps, drawings, and related communiqués pinned up on the walls, ignoring Jacob’s protests about damaging the wallpaper. Sighing in defeat, Jacob hung a “do not disturb” sign on the doorknob and returned to find Mitch studying the maps like a general planning a campaign.
“Crawford and Mason left word that they were approaching an anomaly along these headings,” Mitch said, adding red pins. “HQ lost radio contact here.” He marked a point in pencil.
“Donohoe and Irwin’s last message was that they were going in on a heading that would have put them about here,” Mitch continued, plugging in more pins. “And they lost contact with them here.” He made another mark.
“HQ got its last message from Invictus somewhere in this area,” Mitch said, circling a small area of the map in pencil to indicate where the airship went missing. He pulled out a drawing compass and jabbed the pin into the wall hard enough to make Jacob cringe.
“So this is the approximate area of the irregularity,” Mitch said, making another pencil circle on the map.
Jacob frowned, staring at the marked-up map. “Even by Adirondack standards, it’s a remote area. No rail lines through there, and no roads. It’s high ground, so most of the trappers and hunters might choose a different path around it.” He paused. “I wonder what the locals think of having part of the forest go ‘missing?’”
“We’re supposed to meet our guide in the bar in about half an hour. We’ll have a chance to ask.”
“They’ll know we’re not from here.” Jacob and Mitch were dressed like rustic gentlemen, complete with jackets, boots, and canvas trousers.
“Tupper Lake is full of resort guests,” Mitch replied confidently. “No one will notice us.”
Jacob was sure the year-round residents knew the guests from the regulars, regardless of what Mitch said. Oscar stayed with their equipment, and Hans followed at a discreet distance when they headed out.
Weir’s Saloon catered to locals, with pine-paneled walls, a smudged mirror behind the bar, and a dozen scarred tables with battered chairs. It was a stark contrast to the bar in the Altamont Hotel, which was full of polished brass and mahogany trim.
“In to do some hunting?” the bartender asked as Mitch ordered drinks.
“I hear it’s good this time of year,” Mitch replied.
The bartender shrugged. “So I’m told. Have you arranged for a guide? They’re in short supply, if you haven’t.”
“We’ve already hired Peter Astin,” Jacob said.
The barkeeper’s gaze slid away, and he turned back to his bottles. “That’ll do, I imagine.”
“You know him?”
“It’s a small town. Spend enough time here, and you know everyone.”
“We thought about heading north of Pitchfork Pond,” Jacob said.
The bartender paled, then collected himself. “I don’t much tell people what to do,” he said. “But I think you’ll find better places.”
“That’s why we wanted a local guide,” Mitch said, as if he had not noticed the barkeeper’s reaction. “They say these woods are wild enough people still go missing, if they don’t know their way around.”
The barkeeper turned around and began to straighten the bottles behind the bar. “City folks hear ‘forever wild’ and they think it’s some kind of pretty park. It’s real wilderness out there, and hunters that aren’t careful don’t come back.”
One of the men at the bar had been listening. “For once, ol’ Yankton isn’t being dramatic,” the man said. He thrust out his hand in greeting. “I’m Ben Saunders. I take fine gentlemen like yourselves out fishing.” Mitch and Jacob shook hands with Ben, who ordered a round of drinks for all of them.
“You’re right about people going missing,” Ben said. “Kids wander off, hunters fall off cliffs, guys drown in the lake. But this year, been more than a few.”
“Shut up, Ben,” Yankton the barkeeper said, without turning around.
“It’s the truth, Yankton. Even if the mayor doesn’t want it said out loud. That area north of Pitchfork Pond, I’d avoid it if I were you. There’s better hunting elsewhere.”
Mitch leaned on the bar and took a sip of his drink. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were trying to warn us off.”
Ben regarded the liquor in his glass for a moment before replying. Jacob was aware of Yankton’s stare, as if the barkeeper were willing Ben to keep his peace. “I wouldn’t go near the place,” Ben said after a long, tense pause. “No one with a lick of sense would, not after the last few fellows that headed that direction never came back.”
Mitch managed his most charming smile. “Surely enough people come and go here—or hike on to other places—that it’s not unusual for folks to move on.”
Alien Artifacts Page 10
