The Dream of the Iron Dragon

by Robert Kroese

  Carpenter sat next to him, arms folded, nervously chewing his lower lip. There was nothing more he could do to adjust their course. He’d been experimenting with the aux thrusters to see how finely he could adjust their attitude, but at this point it was better to leave the matter to the nav computer, which would err on the side of caution and could react a million times faster than he. If Carpenter’s calculations were off, they’d find out soon enough.

  The bright dot—which was in reality a massive torus nearly three hundred meters in diameter—grew steadily larger on the display. Andrea Luhman was transmitting its current location to the gate, and the gate had responded by firing its attitude jets to align its aperture with the ship’s approach. The gate could be moved laterally as well, but the mass of the gate made this impractical. Adjusting approach vectors was ordinarily left to the approaching ship. Of course, the approaching ship wasn’t usually traveling at nearly a third of the speed of light.

  The nav display was now rather pessimistically indicating that less than two minutes remained until “impact.” Apparently whoever had programmed the thing had never considered the possibility that someone might be piloting the ship toward an eight-thousand-ton hunk of metal on purpose. Mallick was about to give himself permission to feel relief when another warning flashed, indicating the approach of six nuclear missiles.

  Before Mallick could even react, the display indicated four of the missiles had vanished.

  “Holy shit,” Carpenter gasped.

  “The chaff worked,” Mallick said. “Thank God. But…”

  “Christ,” Carpenter said. “The last two weren’t aimed at us.”

  Two flares entered the forward-facing display, one from the left and one from the right. The two missiles converged toward each other as the gate loomed ahead.

  “Here we go,” said Carpenter.

  Mallick nodded. Whatever happened next was out of their hands. The Cho-ta’an had hedged their bets, sending four missiles at Andrea Luhman and two at the gate. The gate had its own defenses, but they weren’t designed to protect it from nukes traveling at point three light speed.

  The gate grew steadily larger. Mallick had just enough time to noticed how perfectly centered Andrea Luhman was within the ring before a blinding flash filled the display.

  Chapter Seven

  The first thing Mallick was aware of was cold. The second was silence.

  Opening his eyes, he found himself in near complete darkness. Only the dim emergency lights cast a faint glow on the floor. His body was held in the chair only by the restraint straps; there was no gravity. Andrea Luhman was in free fall, floating dead in space. The question was: where?

  “Carpenter,” Mallick said.

  Carpenter, in the seat next to him, let out a low groan. “What happened? Where are we?”

  “That’s what I need you to find out.”

  “It’s cold as hell in here.”

  “Everything seems to be offline. I’m going to revive Reyes and get her working on it. You figure out where we are.”

  “How am I going to…?”

  “I don’t know, look out the damn window.”

  It took nearly three hours for Reyes to get everything back online. A massive electrical surge had fused several circuits. Amazingly, Carpenter managed to figure out roughly where they were in the meantime—by looking out the window.

  “We’re definitely in the Sol system,” he said, as the nav system blinked back to life. “That’s Orion out the port bay.”

  Mallick nodded. He’d never seen Earth constellations before, but children were still taught about the shapes humans had identified in the sky thousands of years earlier.

  “So we made it,” Reyes said. Mallick could see her breath in the still-cold air.

  “We made it,” Carpenter replied. “The question is whether the Cho-ta’an managed to follow us.”

  “Figuring that out is priority two. Number one is slowing us down. The faster we can get back to that gate, the better.”

  “Primary thrusters are still offline,” Carpenter said.

  “Shit,” Mallick replied. “Reyes?”

  “I’ve checked everything I can from here,” Reyes said. “We must have sustained some external damage. Probably got hit by a piece of debris from the gate.”

  “All right. You okay for an EVA?”

  “Yeah, stomach’s settled. I’ll suit up.” She had been fighting post-stasis nausea the whole time she was working on the ship.

  Mallick nodded. “Anything you can do in the meantime, Carpenter?”

  “I can get some thrust out of the auxiliaries,” Carpenter said, “but even at max capacity we’re not going to get much more than a fifth of a gee.”

  “How long will it take to get back to the gate at that rate?”

  “You don’t want to know.”

  While Reyes surveyed the damage to the outside of the ship, Carpenter continued to work on pinpointing their location. Mallick heard him cursing under his breath.

  “What is it?” Mallick asked.

  “Well, I found the Cho-ta’an ship,” Carpenter said.

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, they followed us through. They’re about a million klicks behind us. The good news is that either they’ve sustained some serious damage themselves or they’re out of missiles. We’re in range, but so far they haven’t fired.”

  “Then we’re in the clear. We just need to evade them long enough to get back to the gate.”

  “About that…” Carpenter said uncertainly.

  “What?”

  A pause followed. “I lost the gate.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m not picking up a signal from the gate’s beacon.”

  “Maybe it sustained some damage from debris we brought through.”

  “That’s what I thought. So I did a full scan. I can’t find it.”

  Mallick rubbed his chin. “If the Cho-ta’an ship has maintained its trajectory, it would be directly between us and the gate, right? Could be interfering with the scan.”

  “Yeah.” Carpenter didn’t sound convinced.

  “You think it was destroyed when we came through?”

  “Doubtful. And unless it was completely vaporized, I’d be picking up signs of debris. If it was in pieces, it would actually be easier to find.”

  Mallick thought for a moment. “Okay, this is academic. We know where the gate has to be. Do you have a firm fix on our location?”

  “Not yet. The nav system is giving me gibberish. One of the sensors must be damaged. Going to have to do the calculations manually until I can figure out what’s wrong.”

  “Do it.”

  They sat in silence for some time while Carpenter worked on his calculations. He was chewing on his lip and staring out the porthole when Reyes came in from her EVA.

  “The ionization manifold’s cracked,” she said, walking onto the bridge. “Computer shut the subsystem down. Good thing, too, or we’d all have been vaporized.”

  “That bad, huh?”

  “That bad. We’re not using our primaries until we can get that thing replaced. And in this neighborhood, that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

  “So we’re stuck with aux thrusters. Carpenter?”

  Carpenter was furrowing his brow at his screen. “How long were we out?”

  Mallick frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  “That power surge, whatever it was, when we went through the gate. We both lost consciousness briefly. How long were we out?”

  “I don’t know. Seconds. Maybe a minute or two. Carpenter, I need you to focus. We’re on aux thrusters only. What can you do to get us back to that gate?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” Carpenter snapped irritably. “I need to know how long we were unconscious.”

  Reyes started, “Ship’s clock says—”

  “Forget the clock. I don’t trust it. Everything went down.”

  “Not life support,” Reyes sa
id. “Ventilation went down, but the stasis systems and health monitors kept running. They’ve got triple redundancy.”

  Carpenter rubbed his scalp thoughtfully. “How much time has elapsed since we went through the gate?”

  Reyes navigated to the life support interface at her station. “Four hours, twenty-three minutes, sixteen seconds.”

  Carpenter shook his head. Clearly something wasn’t adding up.

  “That’s ship’s time,” Mallick offered. “We’re traveling at nearly a third of light speed. Temporal dilation is going to—”

  “You don’t have to explain temporal dilation to me, Captain.” There was an edge in his voice. Mallick decided to let it pass. He’d never seen Carpenter like this.

  “It’s not just the gate,” Carpenter said. “I’m not getting any radio signals. From anywhere.”

  “The Sol system is dead,” Mallick said. “There may be a few thousand stragglers still trying to make a go of it on the burned-out husk of Earth, but for all intents and purposes there’s no one here.”

  “You think humanity turned off all the satellites on its way out?” Carpenter asked, a bitter smile playing at the corner of his lips.

  “What are you saying, Carpenter?” Reyes asked. “You’re not picking up any satellites at all?”

  “I’m not picking up anything,” Carpenter said. “Not a single radio signal anywhere in the system. I’ve checked all three antenna arrays. They’re working perfectly. There’s nothing out there.”

  “Okay, calm down,” Mallick said. “I thought you were trying to get our location. Why are you looking for radio signals?”

  Carpenter laughed. “Because I found Earth. Except that it can’t be Earth, because it’s in the wrong place. Everything is in the wrong place. Jupiter, Mars… Hell, Cassiopeia is wrong. A star in Cassiopeia went nova around 1680 AD. Not only are the remnants of that nova missing, but the star is still there.”

  “It’s gotta be a problem with the sensors,” Mallick said.

  Carpenter shook his head. “That’s what I thought. So I checked them all. They’re fine. You know when I said the nav system was giving me gibberish? Turns out it wasn’t gibberish at all. The system just hadn’t been programmed to properly display dates before 1970.”

  Reyes and Mallick exchanged glances. “You’re not making any sense, Carpenter.”

  “It’s a holdover from early operating systems,” Carpenter said. “They had a limited amount of space to store dates, so they used January one, 1970 as a starting point.”

  “The Epoch,” Reyes said. “I’m familiar with it.”

  “Yeah, so the whoever wrote this software assumed that it would never need to deal with dates before 1970. With good reason, obviously. After a jump through Turner space, the nav system has to recalibrate its value for the current time. The sensors look for patterns. Known astronomical objects. The system then deduces a date from the positions of those objects. With a few minutes of gathering data and crunching the results, it can provide a datetime value with accuracy within a millionth of a second. I couldn’t make sense of the output it gave me, so I looked at the raw data. You know what the date is, according to Andrea Luhman’s nav computer?”

  “I couldn’t begin to guess,” Mallick said.

  Carpenter smiled without mirth. “March sixteen, 883 AD.”

  Chapter Eight

  They spent the next hour checking and re-checking Carpenter’s data. Everything—the positions of stars and planets, the missing gate, the lack of radio signals—pointed to a single conclusion: Andrea Luhman had traveled thirteen hundred years back in time.

  “So the gate acted as a sort of time machine?” Mallick asked. “That’s… difficult to accept.”

  Carpenter shrugged. “You’ve seen the data. Is there a better explanation?”

  “We know the gates work by warping spacetime,” Reyes said. “But we’ve never really understood how, despite the IDL spending vast resources to reverse-engineer them.”

  “But if the gates can be used for time travel,” Mallick said, “why haven’t the Cho-ta’an used them that way?”

  “Maybe they have,” Carpenter said, with a smile. “How would we know?”

  Reyes shook her head. “If they could go back in time, they’d already have wiped us out. We assume that the Cho-ta’an understand the gates better than we do, but overall they don’t seem to be more technologically advanced than we are. They’ve never even figured out stasis, for Pete’s sake. What if the discovery of Turner space portals was an accident? What if the Cho-ta’an don’t really know how they work either?”

  Mallick nodded. “We have to assume they don’t know the gates can be used this way. Or didn’t, anyway. Some combination of our high speed and the damage to the gate from the missiles caused a malfunction that warped time as well as space.”

  “So you believe me?” Carpenter said.

  “I don’t see any alternative. We can’t deny the reality in front of us. If the stars tell us it’s 883 AD, we have to assume it’s 883 AD. At least until we can come up with a better hypothesis.”

  “Something that can move stars other than time and momentum?” Carpenter said. “Good luck.”

  “As I said,” Mallick said, “we have to run with it for now. The question is still: how do we get this bomb to the IDL?”

  Reyes frowned. “The IDL won’t even exist for another thirteen hundred years.”

  “Well, that gives us some breathing room, doesn’t it?” Mallick said with a grim smile.

  “Not enough,” Carpenter replied. “The closest jumpgate is the Gliese Gate, and it’s twenty light years away. At max thrust, the aux thrusters will burn through our hydrogen supply in less than a week. That means we’ll top out at about one percent of light speed, so the trip to nearest inhabited world will take around 1500 years. Even if we could survive in stasis that long, we’d arrive two hundred years after the war is over.”

  They were silent for some time.

  “What about the lander?” Reyes said at last.

  Mallick shook his head. Carpenter answered before he could.

  “The lander can manage pretty good acceleration, but it’ll have the same problem. You’d run out of hydrogen before you left the solar system. I can run the math, but I suspect it would take even longer for the lander to get to the Gliese Gate than Andrea Luhman. On top of that, no stasis. The crew would all be dead less than a quarter of the way into the voyage.”

  They were silent again for a moment.

  “Is there any way to repair the manifold?” Mallick asked.

  Carpenter shook his head. “It’s a precisely engineered piece of titanium alloy. Welding it would be just about impossible, and unless you could do it perfectly, it would result in thrust imbalance. It might last a few minutes or a few hours, but eventually it would blow up and take us with it.”

  “What if we just wait in stasis until the Sol Gate is built?” Reyes asked.

  “Stasis isn’t meant to be used for thousand-year stretches,” Mallick said. “Maximum stasis time is ninety days, with nine days in between. By the time the gate is constructed, we’ll all be over a hundred and forty years old. And with the tissue damage from that many stasis periods, we’d be lucky to live to half of that. Hell, our grandchildren will die before the Sol Gate is built. And while I don’t remember the fertility status of everyone on board, let’s just say we’d have to get rather, uh, creative to propagate four generations on board this ship.”

  Carpenter nodded grimly. “And something tells me the third generation of kids raised on this ship aren’t going to have strong feelings about saving humanity. We’ll be lucky if they don’t mutiny and pilot Andrea Luhman into the Sun.”

  “Then we need to cast a new manifold,” Reyes said. “It’s the only way.”

  “How?” Carpenter said. “We don’t have the space, the tools, or the materials.”

  “We have plenty of space,” Reyes replied. “Tools can be manufactured. Materials can be gathe
red and fabricated.”

  Carpenter stared at her. “You must be joking. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to cast a solid titanium structure that size? It’s a difficult task even on an industrialized world with the right equipment.”

  “It’s difficult, sure. But we have the specifications and the expertise. If any group of people can build a manifold from scratch, it’s the crew of this ship. Anything we don’t know, we can look up. We’ve got terabytes of data on this ship. If you have a better idea to save the human race, I’d love to hear it.”

  Carpenter scowled but said nothing.

  “It would take some time, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be done,” Mallick said, rubbing his chin. “It’s just an engineering problem.”

  Reyes nodded.

  “We’d have to send a team down in the lander,” Mallick said.

  “Down where?” Carpenter said.

  “Earth,” Reyes replied. “It could be done elsewhere—Titan, maybe, or Mars—but then we’d have to worry about maintaining a pressurized atmosphere on top of everything else.”

  “Can you get us to Earth, Carpenter?” Mallick asked.

  Carpenter shrugged. “I can get you anywhere with enough time. My hope was to arc around the sun and head back to the gate. Rough calculations indicated it’s possible. With some modification to our trajectory, I could probably swing us past Earth. How long are we expecting this project to take?”

  “Forging a twenty kilogram part out of titanium?” said Reyes. “Honestly, it could take months. Maybe years.”

  “Years?” Mallick asked, taken aback.

  “I’ll have to do some research, but the melting point of titanium is something like sixteen hundred degrees Celsius. You’d have to ask O’Brien about extracting and refining titanium ore, but there’s a reason titanium is expensive. Don’t get me wrong; it can be done. But it’s going to take a lot of work.”