It didn’t look like much, the empty grid of space only a hundred kilometers out. But it was her Bikini Atoll.
She hated that she thought of it that way, that Kaufman had forever tied SD drives and nuclear weapons together in her mind.
But he’d been right about the danger.
So far they’d run eight successful launches, but had only two successful new SD breaches, though preliminary data showed it likely at least three of the others had slipped into the already-verified travel SDs, thrown there when they effectively “bounced” off the subdimensions they were trying to access. Those pods had all been retrievable.
The other three that had failed to breach? Most of their twisted remains were back on Life being disentangled and scrubbed of radioactive elements before they could be studied. One had imploded. Another exploded. The third had slowly, yet systematically, dissolved into a cloud of its base elements.
Thank the stars they’d decided to put off animal testing. Not even bacteria had been allowed aboard.
Each pod contained, besides its drive, an array of sensors and one hundred experiments. The tests looked for new atmospherics, matter state-changes both internally and externally, gravity changes, spontaneous subatomic particle creation, shifting photon behavior, electromagnetic transmission, and a whole host of other differences and data points.
Vanhi had also designed several experiments to carry organics—bacteria, algae, bees, spores, and even dogs. But as with Kaufman’s original SD discovery, they wouldn’t dream of sending anything living until they’d routinely gotten back their inanimate test subjects.
This wasn’t important solely for the safety of the animal subjects, but also for the sanitation of their local star group. If they lost a pod—if it dove and failed to reemerge as directed—it could have been destroyed on the other side . . . or it could have surfaced someplace and sometime that they’d never think to look. It could drift in regular space and come to land on some rock or another, bringing with it an infection. Contamination.
She was determined to make sure that never happened.
Over at the ADCO station, Stone had his gaze fixed intently on his dash, making sure the flight path was steady and everything fell within mission parameters as he guided the pod to the activation point.
He was experienced—just over forty, a little younger than she was—with a sharp jaw and cupid’s-bow lips, now set firmly in concentration. His shaggy black hair had waves that curled at the ends; it fell into his face as he leaned forward over the joystick, and for a moment Vanhi thought he looked more like a kid playing a video game than a professional remote-pilot.
She noticed herself noticing him and quickly looked away. Now was not the time to be pondering the aesthetics of her new crewmates . . . no matter how pleasing those aesthetics might be.
With a blush, she refocused on the pod.
It was twenty-five kilometers out now. She checked in with the technicians monitoring the nonpassive experiments. Everything was still a go.
Observation buoys and communications buoys lined the path out to the quadrant where the pod would officially dive. This made it easy to track, easy to watch even as it grew imperceptible from the EOL on Breath.
“Pod in position,” Mendez Perez said after a time on her loop.
“MID AIM, are we ready to cue up the drive?” Vanhi asked.
“Everything looks green.”
“Good. Dive in three, two, one—now!”
From the outside, the beginnings of an SD bubble looked like warped space, with stars reflecting and shifting over a curved surface. The lensing engulfed the pod, made it look like a shimmer on a pond, until the spot went black, then disappeared altogether.
On all cameras, the pod had vanished.
“Dive appears successful,” Vanhi announced. She clapped her hands and cheers went up, as they had thus far after every nondestructive run. Hopefully, in a few hours the pod would resurface, giving them vital information about a brand-new SD.
The trajectory officer gave Mendez Perez a hearty slap on the back. “Nice going, ace,” Vanhi called to him, tossing a cheeky thumbs-up.
He gave her a shy, endearing smile back.
July 6, 2127 CE
By the thirty-third launch, running the pods started to feel routine. Six had failed to dive, four more had blown their lids, and the majority had bounced into the normal travel SDs. But seven had gone where no one had gone before. The data from those dives was being processed around the clock. And still, Vanhi hoped for more.
Today—on what would have been a lazy Sunday back in Arizona, but was a full-on work day here in the glamorous world of convoy living—Vanhi went to her station with an extra spring in her step.
Mendez Perez—Stone, as he insisted she call him—had offered riveting breakfast conversation. The kind that got her mental wheels turning, and her cheeks flushed with the pumping of creative blood.
The whole table had listened in on their banter, and Vanhi hadn’t been self-conscious about it in the least. Stone’s friends Justice Jax and Eric Price had both wiggled their eyebrows at each other. And afterward, Gabriel had given Vanhi a nudge as they went to drop off their trays at the cleaning station.
“It’s not like that,” she’d insisted.
“Like what?” he asked, feigning perfect innocence.
“I would like to know as well,” said C from the sundial, sounding an awful lot like a child asking how babies were made.
She wasn’t about to let Gabriel rile her, so she’d given him a shake of her head and a friendly smile, and happily hopped on the awaiting shuttle.
Stone hadn’t been far behind. He took up the vacant seat beside her without a word about it, as though it were perfectly natural.
She wanted to hold on to this feeling forever. This was what space travel was all about. Good people, good ideas, experimentation, wonder, discovery. This was what she’d been fighting for, what she’d compromised for. If she could just keep this feeling close, maybe she could use it to scare away the bad days—the times when guilt came back and Kaufman haunted her dreams.
In the EOL, everyone took their positions.
“Give me greens,” she said on each loop. “MID AIM?”
“Go,” said Mini-Drive AI Manager, Pablo de Valdivia.
“CHEM EX?”
“Go,” said Soraya Ebadi, who was in charge of monitoring the chemistry experiments.
“COM EX?”
“Go,” said Anju Gautam, who managed communications.
She ran her checks all the way down the line. Everything was good.
“ADCO?” she asked last.
“Go,” said Stone.
“Then let’s do this.”
A few minutes later, the dragon fruit of a craft hovered in front of the windows momentarily before Stone sent it on its way.
The time ticked by as it always did, dragging out while they waited for the pod to achieve a safe distance. Vanhi watched over the team, making sure everyone looked as they should: relaxed, focused.
“Be advised,” de Valdivia said. “I have telemetry readings in the red . . .” His finger tracked a line on one screen. It jumped where it should have been steady.
“Copy. Where is that instrumentation located? Can you patch me the feed?” Vanhi asked.
“It’s the rear left quadrant,” he said. “Vibrations, there’re—something’s on. Something’s using power, but I can’t—”
“SD MEC, are you reading the same vibrations?” she asked. De Valdivia’s readout popped onto her leftmost screen. There was a distinct tremor, yes, but the AI wasn’t pinpointing its location. She glanced at the visual feeds. Nothing looked amiss on the test area cameras. But the pod was still little more than a shining dot on most of them. She flipped to the flight path monitor.
“Starting to get a lean,” said Stone. “Shouldn’t have to course correct this much.”
“Copy. Can anybody tell me where the aberrant energy is centered?” Vanhi asked, bri
nging up the real-time system log.
“It’s pulling starboard,” Stone said.
“It’s the drive itself,” said de Valdivia. “It’s got to be a malfunction in the AI quantum-reaction regulation. It looks like a compensation, but the main power hasn’t been cued, so there’s nothing to compensate for.”
“Can we reboot the AI?”
“Already initiating shutdown.”
The pod—a blip on her screen—was engulfed in white light.
Everyone gasped.
No, no, no. Damn it. “Did we lose it?” She held her breath, frantically hitting refresh on all of her feeds. “Did we lose it?” she demanded, articulating every syllable.
“No!” It was Stone. “I’m still—it’s fighting me, I can’t—steering’s out, it’s veering back.”
“Talk to me,” Vanhi said, voice even and expression stern while her heart battered itself inside her ribs. Losing a pod wasn’t new. They’d lost plenty, expected to lose the majority of what they had left. But this . . .
The white light flared out, but what was left in its wake wasn’t debris, or a dormant pod. The probe’s hull glimmered with new life. Around it, some sort of field pulsed, fading from petal-pink to tangerine and back again.
And Stone was right—it was sailing toward the convoy.
“Convoy Control—”
“We’ve alerted Captain Tan. He’s standing by to take evasive action.”
“Copy that. ADCO, TRAJ, any way you can reel it in, get it to stop?”
“It’s not responding,” Stone gritted, pounding the holo-keys at his station.
“What happened? What went wrong, MID AIM?”
“I don’t know,” de Valdivia insisted, hands flying over his keyboard, brow furrowed, jaw stiff. “I rebooted. It should have gone dead. Should have—unless . . . Unless the meters were off, and we weren’t detecting . . . No . . . wait, wait . . .”
He didn’t have to elaborate. Vanhi’s internal monologue started to hammer out two words on repeat: Oh shit. Oh shit.
Oh shit.
The AI wasn’t malfunctioning, it was doing its damned job. It was trying to keep the system from engaging. Somehow the SD drive had started to pull power, to dive, and the AI was trying to hold it back.
But then they’d shut it down . . .
“Are we getting any readings from Thirty-Three’s external sensors? Talk to me, people, that’s not an SD bubble like I’ve ever seen.”
“I’m getting unusual readings,” called a woman’s voice with a heavy Danish accent—Esmée Jensen, Mechanical Maintenance Officer. “Power surges.”
“Distance between the pod and the convoy is shrinking, sir,” said Stone.
Vanhi had her head down, frantically looking for a way to remotely bar the pod’s path or even destroy it. They could launch number Thirty-Four. ADCO could pilot it on an intercept course, crash the two pods—
“These are similar to the same kind of surge forces found inside SD drives when they’ve hit main sequence,” Esmée called again.
“Copy,” Vanhi gritted out.
Breath lurched. Captain Tan must have ordered the convoy to move.
“Doctor Kapoor!” Stone shouted.
Her head snapped up. She followed his outstretched hand, pointed like an arrow through the casement.
Thoomp, dooooozsh. Thoomp, dooooozsh.
There was no noise, but the sudden slow-motion leap-frogging of the pod created dramatic sound effects in her mind.
For a moment the pod looked like it was imploding, the pinkish-orangish field shrinking, turning in on itself, until there was nothing, it was gone.
That was the thoomp.
Half a second later, the field and probe appeared again, kilometers closer than before.
The violent, static-encrusted expansion—sparking, widening—engulfed her mind like a deluge of water. Dooooozsh.
The lights in the observation lounge turned purple. Captain Tan’s voice echoed over the comms system. “In order to avoid collision, we are engaging the SD drive—”
Thoomp.
Dooooozsh.
Closer. It kept coming, kept coming.
“Please, everyone, remain calm and secure yourself and any loose belongings that may pose a danger to—”
Thoomp.
Dooooozsh.
Vanhi could see the antennae groups on the pod clearly. It was so close, so—
“Dive!” Tan ordered.
Thoomp.
This time there was sound. Eardrum-bursting, earth-shattering, bone-vibrating ssssshhhhhhcrrrrash.
The pod collided with Breath, below the window deck. A white spark-lined leading edge of sunset orange passed unperturbed through the observation window, through the hull.
Vanhi’s feet left the floor as the gravity was disrupted, or damaged, or whatever was happening. She tried holding on to the desk, to keep herself grounded as chairs and mugs and monitors sailed up and away, with no clear direction, but soon she, too, was floating, aimless.
Until the strange field slammed into her, throwing her sideways, blotting out the purple light and turning it chartreuse. Her eyes snapped closed, and her breath punched its way out of her body.
Her head went light, fuzzy, nothing but . . .
. . . nothing . . .
. . . but . . .
. . . a . . .
. . . haze . . .
Chapter Two
Caznal: In Search of the Lesser Redoubt
Convoy Seven
One Hundred and Seventeen Years since the Inception of Noumenon Infinitum
September 5, 117 Relaunch
5274 CE
. . . Convoy Seven has been assigned a new mission, designated Noumenon Infinitum. Its express purpose is to travel to the variable star LQ Pyxidis and complete construction of the alien megastructure, thought to be a Dyson Sphere and known as “the Web.” Once complete, Convoy Seven is to charge the batteries on the ship designated Zetta, then return to Earth . . .
Confidential addendum to official statement, Convoy Seven crew only:
In addition to the official mission parameters appointed by Earth, Noumenon Infinitum is to investigate the craft known as “the Nest.” Any information garnered from the investigation pertaining to alien involvement with the Web is to be applied . . .
. . . The final clause of the official mission statement can be struck. Convoy Seven need not return to Earth . . .
It started with a map, like all good treasure hunts do. One alien in origin, and not immediately recognizable for what it was. But it had led them here.
Caznal the Fourth gazed out of the shuttle porthole and into the inky night beyond. It wasn’t the total lightlessness of an SD bubble; it was a dark monolith of matter. A planemo—a systemless planetoid—wandering and alone. Starless, moonless. Naught but a black disk against the stars, and it blotted them out one by one as the shuttle shifted.
But Caz didn’t see a flat emptiness. She saw a blank slate. The planemo held nothing but potential.
Light lensed around the edges in a visible halo as they descended, creating a bowed outline of the galaxies and such beyond.
Out the opposite side of the craft, over her apprentice’s shoulder, she could barely make out the twelve ships of the convoy, their illuminated windows only distinguishable from far-off stars because of their orientation and regularity.
No one could have anticipated, all those years ago on Launch Day, that the convoy would have found itself here.
When Noumenon, the original mission, had arrived at LQ Pyx, they’d discovered an alien craft floating near the Web’s most massive component. The craft was damaged, and empty, but clearly belonged to an alien species who had taken up the construction project. The convoy had taken the ship—dubbed the Nest because of the many pipes that circled around it and dangled from its bottom in an arrangement that resembled woven twigs—believing it held answers to the Web.
Now that ship hovered in the belly of Slicer, where the engineers
poked and prodded it like a sick patient with a rare disease.
And it had led them here.
As the shuttle fell into a degrading orbit, Caznal’s apprentice, Ivan Baraka the Fifteenth, grinned at her and bounced in his seat, practically vibrating inside his spacesuit. There were old Earth vids of teenagers his age bearing that same expression as they waited for a rollercoaster to spill over its first hump.
She shared his excitement, as did the other seven scholars aboard. But still, a small discrepancy in their studies nagged at her. After all, when a treasure map’s instructions read “Twenty paces past Skull Rock, one hundred and twenty around Crocodile Cove, and there be the Cave of Wonders,” one expects the cave to be there, not a divot in the ground.
That they’d arrived at a divot—a planemo—and not a cave was troubling.
The Nest had not given up any of its secrets easily. At first, it appeared to have no electrical connections. “It’s like finding a sailboat in orbit,” someone had once said. How could a spaceship function without wires and transistors?
But they’d been looking at it all wrong—all human.
Not only did the Nest have vast reserves of hydrogen that it could compress into a metallic superconducting superfluid to form electrical connections a single atom thick, but the way the Nest relied so heavily on gravitons suggested the aliens that had created it had been able to biologically manipulate gravitons.
If they’d never come to such a realization, not only would the Nest still lie dormant, they never would have recognized the alien maps for what they were.
“Approaching Crater Sixty-four,” the pilot said over the intercom, her voice echoing slightly inside Caz’s helmet. “Spotlights should be illuminating the eastern edge soon. Take note.”
Caz squinted, still unable to make anything out. Eventually the blackness gave way to gray, and the gray to a deep jasper-like green, and then ridges. The side of the crater was terraced—nothing like the smooth sweep of an impact or volcanic caldera, and not nearly as sheer as the walls of a sinkhole.
But that didn’t mean it was unnatural.
Noumenon Infinity Page 8
