Omega к-4

by Джек Макдевитт

  It was true, of course. Everything was fresh and young then. They hadn’t yet learned to take each other for granted. When he was tempted to do so now, he reminded himself that the life he had wouldn’t be forever, and if he couldn’t go back to the Grand Hotel when his romance with Emma was still new, when the entire world was young and all things seemed possible, it was equally true that he’d remember the hedgehog, and how they’d stood on the bridge together, watching it come close, a piece of hardware put together by God knew what, for purposes no one could imagine. A bomb. But it was still a moment that he savored, because he knew that, like the Grand Hotel, he would one day give much to be able to return.

  Sixteenth anniversary. How had it all gone by so quickly?

  “Relativity.” She laughed.

  “Recommend Ajax launch,” said Bill.

  “Okay, Bill. Keep in mind that we want it to snuggle up very gently. Just kiss it, right?”

  “Just a smooch,” said Bill. He appeared beside them, wearing a radiation suit and a hard hat. Protection against explosions. His idea of a joke.

  “Okay,” Sky said. “Launch Ajax.”

  Warning lamps blinked. The usual slight tremor ran through the ship. “Ajax away. Time to intersection: thirty-three minutes.”

  “Okay, Bill. Let’s leave town.”

  THEY ACCELERATED OUT. Sky directed the AI to maintain jump capability, which required firing the main engines throughout the sequence to build and hold sufficient charge in the Hazeltines.

  It was the first time in all these years that he’d been in this kind of situation, not knowing well in advance whether he’d have to jump.

  “Out of curiosity—” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “On the jump, can you override Bill? If you had to?” The jump engines couldn’t be used until they were charged. That usually required twenty-eight minutes off the main engines. Any attempt to do a jump prior to that risked initiating an antimatter explosion, and consequently would be refused by the AI.

  “We could do a manual start if something happened to Bill.”

  “You know,” she said, “I suspect that’s what the hedgehog is loaded with, too.”

  “Antimatter?”

  “Yes. That would explain the magnetic field.”

  “In what way?” asked Sky.

  “Containment envelope. It’s probably what happened to Drafts. He did something that impaired its integrity.”

  Sky shook his head. Who’d have expected anything like that out here?

  EMMA WAS AN astrophysicist. When he’d warned her that marrying someone who took a superluminal out for months at a time might not be a smart move for her, she’d said okay, that she’d really wanted a tall blond guy anyhow, good-bye. And he’d tried to recover ground, said he wasn’t entirely serious, didn’t want to lose her, just wanted to be sure she knew what she was getting into.

  It had taken almost two years to get the joint assignment to the Heffernan, but it had happened, largely because the Academy had a policy of trying to keep its captains happy.

  They were both on the bridge, sharing, after all these years, their first moment of danger. The danger was remote, fortunately, but it added a dash of spice to the experience.

  “Ajax has closed to four klicks,” said Bill. “Contact in eleven minutes.”

  They could see Ajax, which looked like an insect, wings and legs spread, angling toward the spiked surface.

  “Is it going to work?” asked Sky.

  “If it’s what we think it is, Ajax will find the frequency and interfere with the magnetic belt. That should be enough. If it isn’t, it’ll start cutting the thing up with its lasers. One way or another, yes, it should work.”

  Sky listened to the innumerable sounds the ship’s systems routinely make, whispers and sighs and clicks and the ongoing background thrum of the engines, boosting them to ever-higher velocities.

  They talked occasionally about retirement, about her getting a job at home, maybe having the child they’d always promised themselves. Can’t really do that if you’re bottled up inside a container all the time. Virtual beaches are all right for adults, but a kid needs real sand.

  Emma, reading his thoughts, nodded. “Time for something new?” she suggested.

  “I don’t know,” he said uncertainly.

  “There is this, Sky. Where else could we be this useful?”

  Can’t hug her. Not while under acceleration. So he reached over and took her hand.

  “Five minutes,” said Bill. “We are ready to jump on command.”

  One of the screens carried the cloud, its image captured live through the telescopes. Sky thought the omegas possessed an ethereal kind of beauty. Not this one, because it was too dark, there wasn’t enough light hitting it. But when they got lit up by sunlight, they were actually very striking. He grinned at the unintentional pun.

  Emma couldn’t see it. She thought they were the embodiment of pure malevolence. A demonstration that there were devils loose in the universe. Not the supernatural kind, of course. Something far worse, something that really existed, that had left its footprint among the stars, that had designed booby traps and sent them out to kill strangers.

  Sky had grown up with the notion that evil inevitably equated to stupidity. The symbol of that idea was embodied in the fact that superluminals were not armed, that no one (other than fiction writers) had ever thought of mounting a deck gun on an interstellar vessel.

  It was a nice piece of mythology. But mythology was all it was.

  “Two minutes.” Bill loved doing countdowns. There was a picture of him on the auxiliary screen, sitting in an armchair, still safely tucked inside his suit, and with his helmet visor down.

  “Bill, ready to bail if we have to.” There was no way to be sure the energy levels of the hedgehog were all the same.

  “We are QBY,” he said. Ready to go. Bill favored the official terminology. He sometimes admitted to Sky that he regretted that starship life was so peaceful. He talked occasionally, and wistfully, of running missions against alien horrors that were determined to destroy civilization, to overrun Berlin and all it stood for. (Sky could never tell for sure when Bill was kidding.) The AI wished for pirates and renegade corporations, hiding in the dust of giant clouds. Clouds, he added, hundreds of light-years across, clouds that would make the omegas look like puffs of mist on a summer breeze.

  Bill, this Bill, had a poetic streak. Sometimes he went a bit over the top, but he did seem to have a passion for flowers and sunsets and the wind in the trees. All a facade, of course. Bill had never experienced any of that, wasn’t even self-aware if you believed the manual. Furthermore, although the Academy AIs were compatible, and in fact most people thought there was really only one Academy AI, which sometimes simply got out of contact with its various parts, Sky knew that Bill was different on different ships. Sometimes the manifestation was withdrawn and formal, seldom showing up visually, and then usually in dress whites; on other vessels, on the Quagmire, for example (which Sky had piloted on a couple of missions), he’d been young, energetic, always advancing his opinion, usually in a jumpsuit with the ship’s patch on his shoulder. The Heffernan AI was philosophical, sometimes sentimental, inclined to quote Homer and Milton and the Bible. And apparently a fan of melodrama.

  Sky was one of the few Academy captains who believed that a divine force functioned in the universe. He’d heard Hutch say one time that the notion of a God was hard to accept out here because of the sheer dimensions of the cosmos. Richard Feynman had made a comment to that effect. “The stage is just too big.” Why create something so enormous? Why make places so far away that their light will never reach the Earth?

  But that was the reason Sky believed. The stage is immense beyond comprehension. The fallacy in Hutch’s reasoning, he thought, was the assumption that the human race was at the center of things. That we were what it was all about. But Sky suspected the Creator had made everything so large because He simply liked to crea
te. That’s what creators do.

  “Twenty seconds,” said Bill.

  He watched the package move in. The hedgehog was rotating, slowly, once every thirty-seven minutes. The others rotated at different rates. It depended on the gravity fields they’d passed through.

  “Ten.”

  It closed and snuggled in against one of the object’s 240 sides.

  “Contact.”

  “Very good, Bill.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  He looked over at Emma.

  “Bill,” she said, “proceed with Ajax.”

  “Proceeding.” And, a moment later: “Lockdown.” The magnetic couplers took hold. There had been a possibility that might have been enough to detonate the thing, but Emma hadn’t thought so. If it had no more stability than that, it would have gone up long ago. Objects drifting through interstellar space are bathed by particles and gravitons and you name it.

  “You know,” said Emma, “I think I’m going to enjoy blowing this son of a bitch to hell.”

  “There’s nobody in it.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” She looked over at him. Her eyes were green, and they were smoldering. She didn’t share his faith in a benign creator, but she felt that the universe should be a place of pristine beauty and wonder. And most of all it should be neutral, and not loaded against intelligence. We’re the only reason there’s any point to it, she believed. Unless there’s someone smart enough to look at it, and appreciate its grandeur, and do the science, the universe is meaningless.

  “Are we ready to pull the trigger?” Sky asked.

  “Just enjoying the moment,” she said.

  “Fire when ready, babe.”

  She checked the status board. All green. “Bill,” she said.

  “Locked and loaded.”

  “Proceed to degauss.”

  “Activating.” His image vanished. He was all business now.

  Sky watched the time tick off. “Would the reaction be instantaneous?” he asked.

  “Hard to say. But I’d think so.”

  “I do not detect a change in the object’s magnetic signature.”

  “Doesn’t work?” asked Sky.

  “Let’s give it a little more time.”

  The hedgehog was getting smaller as the Heffernan continued to withdraw.

  “Still no change,” said Bill.

  “Maybe it’s not antimatter?”

  “It might be that we don’t have enough energy to shut it down. Or that we haven’t calibrated correctly. Or who knows what else? It’s not exactly my field.” She took a deep breath, “You ready to go to phase two, Sky?”

  “Yes. Do it.”

  “Bill?”

  “Yes, Emma?”

  “Activate the blade.” The laser.

  “Activating blade.”

  “Can you enhance the picture?” Sky asked.

  “Negative. We are at maximum definition now.”

  Emma had told him it would probably take time, but Sky kept thinking about Terry Drafts poking a laser into its shell. The record showed that once you did that, things happened pretty quickly. But some parts of the object might be more vulnerable than others.

  Sky was beginning to amuse himself thinking how the Academy might say okay, it’s obviously not going to work, go back in and retrieve the unit when it went, erupted in a white flash.

  ARCHIVE

  No one denies that the effort to find a way to dispose of the omega clouds is of value. But they do not constitute a clear and present danger. They are in fact so remote a hazard that it remains difficult to understand why so many continue to get exercised over the issue. At a time when millions go hungry, when repairing environmental damage is exhausting vast sums of money, when the world population steams ahead, we can ill afford to waste our resources on a threat that remains so far over the horizon that we cannot even imagine what the planet will look like when it arrives. The Council and the Prime Minister need to set their priorities, and live with them despite the shifting political winds.

  — Moscow International

  April 5

  chapter 14

  Arlington.

  Monday, April 4.

  ASQUITH NEVER REALLY looked happy, except when VIP visitors were present. This morning, which was rainy, gloomy, and somehow tentative, was momentarily devoid of VIPs. The commissioner was making the kinds of faces that suggested he was tired of hearing about problems that didn’t go away. “So we know the hedgehogs—can’t we get a better name for them, Hutch? — are bombs. Tell me about the one that’s going to pass close to us. Tony’s going to be over this afternoon, and I need some answers. What happens if it goes off?”

  Tony was the ultimate VIP: the NAU’s funding liaison with the Academy.

  “You don’t have to worry about it, Michael. It’s as far away as the cloud is. It can’t hurt us.”

  “Then why are we worried about it?”

  “We aren’t worried in the sense that it can do any damage to us. Not at its current range. Maybe in a few centuries.”

  “Then why do we care about it?”

  “Because we don’t know its purpose.”

  “So we’re talking a purely academic issue? Nobody’s at risk?”

  “No.”

  He’d gotten up when she came into the room. Now he eased himself back into his chair. “Thank God for that,” he said. He motioned her to a chair. “Why would anybody be putting bombs out there?”

  “We think they’re triggers.”

  “Triggers. Bombs. We’re arguing terminology.” He rolled his eyes. “What do they trigger?”

  “The clouds.”

  “What’s that? How do you mean? The clouds blow up?”

  “We don’t really know yet, Michael. But I think it’s something like that. I think you get a special kind of explosion.”

  “How many kinds of explosions are there?”

  She sat down and tried to get the conversation onto a level at which she could handle it. “The reason they’re important,” she said, “is that if these things turn out to be what they seem to be, they may give us a way to get rid of the clouds.”

  “By blowing them up.”

  “Yes. Maybe. We don’t know.” She felt good this morning. Had in fact felt pretty good for the last few days. “We need to find out.”

  “So what precisely do you propose?

  “We need to run a test.”

  He nodded. “Do it.”

  “Okay.”

  “But not with the cloud.” The local one.

  “We won’t go near it.”

  “Good.” He took a deep breath. “I’d be grateful if it worked.”

  “As would I, Michael.”

  “I guess you’ve noticed the Goompahs have been getting popular.” His tone suggested that was a problem.

  Of course she’d noticed. Everywhere she looked there were Goompah dolls, Goompah games, Goompah bedding. People loved them. Kids especially loved them. “Why is that bad news?” she asked innocently. But she knew the reason.

  “There’s a growing body of opinion that the government hasn’t done enough to help them.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it.”

  “They’d like to keep the media away. In case things go badly.”

  “They being the president and the Council.”

  He nodded. Who else? “They’re afraid there’ll be graphic pictures of Goompahs getting killed in large numbers.”

  “Too bad they’re not insects.”

  He didn’t pick up the sarcasm. “Anything but these terminally cute rollover critters.”

  “The media say they’ll be there.”

  He made a sound in his throat that resembled a gargle going awry. “I know. But there’s no way to stop them. If our little experiment works out, though, the problem will be solved.” He looked happy. As if the sun had come out in the office. “Make it happen, Hutch.”

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Michael, I think we’ve had a communication breakdown.
Even if it works, we aren’t going to be able to use the technique to help the Goompahs.”

  Shock and dismay. “Why not? I thought that was the whole point.”

  “The whole point is to get control of the clouds. To forge a weapon.” She tried to sound reassuring. “I’m sorry I misled you. But the cloud at Lookout is too close.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “If we get the result we expect, we’re going to learn how to destroy the damned things. But we expect a very big bang. Trigger the cloud at Lookout, and you’d fry them all.”

  “How can you know that before you’ve run the test?”

  “Because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen other clouds explode. I know what kind of energy they put out.”

  And suddenly he understood. “The tewks.”

  “Yes.” She’d put it all in the reports, but it was becoming clear he didn’t read the reports.

  “All right,” he said. He was still disappointed and he let her see it. “Let me know how it turns out.”

  “Okay.” She started to get up, but he waved her back down. Not finished with you yet.

  “Listen, Hutch. I’ve gone along with everything you’ve wanted to do. We sent out Collingdale and his people. We sent out the kite. And we’re sending meals, for God’s sake. We’ll be broke for three years after this. Now you owe me something.

  “We’ve gotten some help from the Council on this. So we need to play ball with them. I’m going to tell Tony we’ll go all out to save the poor bastards. That’s what they want, by the way. Save them. Divert the goddam cloud. If you can’t blow it up, make your kite work. Make it happen.

  “If you don’t, if the cloud hammers them, we’ll all be in the soup.”

  Hutch kept her voice level. “Michael,” she said, “we’ve had thirty years to figure out how to do something about the omegas. The Council felt safe because the danger seemed so far away. It didn’t occur to them that political fallout might come from a different direction. I personally don’t care if they all get voted out. But we are trying to save the Goompahs. We were trying to do it before it became politically popular.”

  She was at the door, on her way out, when he called her back. “You’re right, Hutch,” he said. “I know that. Everybody knows it. Which is why the Academy will look so good if we can pull these fat little guys out of the fire.”