by Alex Deva
“Longer than it used to be,“ said Zi.
“So you’re going through prosperous times. That’s good, no? That means trade is going well. Perhaps we can trade. Gabelle and Burgajet, I don’t think we’ve ever traded before. Might give me exclusive privilege,“ said the alien. Then, turning towards the two humans, he asked: “Got any lithium-8?“
— Remind me what a zeptosecond is, asked Mark.
— Twenty zeros after the comma, answered Zi. That works out to, what? One sextillionth of a second, right? That’s only about a hundred times the life of a Higgs boson.
— You still call it Higgs boson?
— What else would we call it?
— How do you know all this stuff?
— How do you know all the stuff that you know?
Mark smiled inwardly.
— Right good schools they must have in Elbasan.
— Nah, it’s just easy to remember. Zepto sounds like the Albanian word for “seven,“ so it’s a thousand to the power of seven. Erm, minus seven, Zi corrected himself.
— Comes from Latin, contributed Mark. Septem, gave seven in English. I just didn’t connect the dots with the zeptosecond.
Focusing on breathing, walking and making witty secret conversation really doesn’t leave much room to peripheral attention, and so it happened that, while discussing numeral linguistics, they failed to notice the group of four aliens who caught up with them from behind. One of them was humanoid, and the other three looked like alien models from planet Steroid.
The humanoid walked in front of them and stopped. After a short second’s silence, dog-face said:
“Yes, of course that’s them. Do you see anyone else around?“
“That is not what I meant,“ said the humanoid, this time out loud. “Are they the ones that the Mallam were after?“
— One hundred to zero, sent Zi.
“Must be,“ said dog-face. “They look like it.“
“Do they come from Human?“
“This one said he’s from a world called Burgajet. But I’ve never heard of that.“
“I have never heard of either Human or Burgajet.“
“Why?“ managed Mark.
The humanoid looked at him, up and down. “I do not think they are them,“ he said, ignoring Mark.
“Why not?“
“These are slower. Humans are supposed to have about the same LSC that we do.“
“Could be faking,“ shrugged the dog-faced tree branch.
The humanoid made an odd noise, then turned fully towards Mark and Zi. The three bodyguards took position, one at their back, the other two at their sides. On a good day, Mark and Zi might have been able to take them on, with non-zero chances of winning. On a normal day, they might have been able to outrun them. But this was not a good day, and it was not a normal day. This was the mother of all abnormally bad days. Running or fighting was about as likely for Mark and Zi as it was turning into butterflies.
“Have you names?“ tried the humanoid.
“No,“ said Mark, stealing Zi’s chance to further propagate Albanian culture.
“Far as I’m concerned, they don’t need names,“ said dog-face.
“I shall check with the Mallam. They can perform visual recognition.“
“That is why I called you.“
“It will take time.“
Dog-face turned towards him, with what must have been suspicion.
“Why?“
“Because I cannot talk to the Mallam directly, you idiot. My people must get in touch with them, covertly. And then we wait for their response. They will be quick; they live, after all, far faster than us all.“
“It’s not the Mallam I’m worried about,“ said the other.
“You have no cause for concern. Whatever the Mallam pay, you will get your share.“
“I want double share,“ announced dog-face.
The humanoid gestured towards the humans.
“Why? You did nothing. They came to you. You had luck.“
“I need to pay for those three,“ gestured the dog-faced tree branch. “And there’s a risk in being linked to the Mallam these days. And risks cost. I’ll take payment in lithium-8.“
“Lithium-8,“ repeated the humanoid. “That is all you Gabellians care about.“
— Any ideas? sent Mark.
— Got any lithium-8?
— Not on me. Not the seven or nine variety, either. All I know about lithium is a song by Nirvana.
Mark looked carefully to his left, then to his right. The three guards reminded him of the Predator alien. He raised his arm a little and looked at his palm. Slowly, he made a fist.
The odds were not just small, they were ridiculous. They were zepto-odds.
Sort of like making it through Selection.
XXVIII.
Colonel Karl Tiessler disconnected his tab from the conference call and remained still, long after the screen turned itself off. He kept staring at the light grey surface, gently chewing the corners of his moustache, for a full two minutes. Discrete notifications appeared briefly in front of his eyes, but he didn’t read them. His gaze was focused somewhere very far away.
Aboard the EASS Monnet space was at a premium. Even his own quarters were modest, only a few cubic metres. On one of its six walls there was a sleeping bag, attached to the wall. A cylindrical, telescopic, pressure lavatory lay in the closed position, ready to neatly assemble itself when one end was pulled out. On the opposite wall, a magnetic table with electrical jackscrews could be “raised“ up to a metre and a half, and served as conference table. There were, of course, no chairs. The only seats in the cruiser were in the command room, where the crew on duty would strap in during high-G manoeuvres. The rest of the crew would simply strap inside their bags, and let their space suits deal with acceleration forces.
There was a window in one wall, and a door on another. A closet containing personal effects occupied half of the fifth wall, and the sixth was covered with printed diagrams.
His room was, in fact, smaller than crew’s quarters, with the difference that the crew slept four to a room. The Monnet worked in four six-hour shifts, following the UTC timezone. During the Moon War, they had usually been on the losing side. The Americans had bigger cruisers, and more of them. Tiessler himself had nearly died in battle with the USS Kennedy, on that fateful day when Starship Doi appeared out of nowhere, a black, totally non-reflecting torus above the dark side of the Moon.
The Monnet was still recovering after that battle. Nominally there was an armistice between Eurasia and the United States, so the killing had been temporarily put on hold; Five, the antimatter alien, had managed to unite humankind for the first time in a long, long history. The Eurasian cruiser was functional, but only just. Many departments were still working in general failure mode, although, thankfully, not the absolutely indispensable ones. Life support worked fine again, navigation and operations were back on track. Weapons and targeting were offline, and only three of the five main engines could be reliably turned on, and that only because they’d been completely refurbished. The number four engine was being diagnosed for the tenth time; nobody could figure out what was wrong with it. His chief engineer, a doctor in sciences, had begun to more and more seriously entertain the idea that the engine was possessed by the devil. And the number five engine was still more sieve than engine, courtesy of an American rail gun.
And yet, the crew felt that they were in the safest possible place.
Because down on Earth there was chaos. The perpetual night made it really hard to even see the planet surface below the cruiser, save for the light spots that peppered it, the refuges of the Eighters. Tiessler could barely bring himself to look through the window, when it was pointed planet-side. The pain was just… getting in the way of things.
The tab beeped insistently. Tiessler wasn’t wearing his helmet, because in peacetime there were no high-G attitude changes likely to happen without his direct order, so the sound came directly from
the device.
He let it ring for fifteen good seconds before he focused on it. He was tired… So tired. There were too many difficult problems and too few solutions to them. Too many difficult problems the likes of which he had never trained for. Too many problems the likes of which humanity had never seen before. Even formulating an overview of the situation was enough to give him a headache.
Suddenly, he moved. He sighed, and his sigh turned into a deep breath. He reached into a pouch on his suit and pulled out a coffee pouch. Using his teeth, he pulled out the straw and took a gulp; then he breathed out, breathed in again, and took another gulp. He replaced the pouch and finally focused on the ringing tab.
Too many problems.
He answered the call. Predictably, it was the bridge. Azzopardi’s worried face filled the screen.
“Sir,“ she saluted.
“Lieutenant.“
“Message from captain Toma, sir.“
Frowning, Tiessler brought back a list of his missed notifications. A message from Toma was not among them.
“Why didn’t I get it directly?“ he asked.
“I am not sure, sir.“ A soldier who still avoided telling her superior that she didn’t know something. “Would you like me to investigate?“
“No,“ decided Tiessler. “You have enough to do. Forward it to me, lieutenant. Thank you. Dismissed.“
“Jawohl, Herr Oberst.“ Multilingualism was at home on Eurasian cruisers.
The message arrived before he terminated the call. It was a text message. In itself, that was not unusual; Toma often felt that sending voice or video messages would have been inopportune. She was on site; she knew best how to treat miss Doina.
Tiessler looked at the notification without acting on it. Deep down, he resented the little girl. Alone she commanded a huge starship, so far advanced for Earth standards that they would not even know where to begin studying it. She could’ve won them the war using a single finger. The entire might of the American fleet would’ve been nothing to her.
But then, the entire might of all Earth’s fleets together would’ve been nothing to Doi. Tiessler took it as a given that the starship would fight on the Eurasian side. After all, even displaced from their own times, all three of them were Eurasians: two Romanians and one Englishman. So, why not?
Because the girl abhorred killing, that was why not. And Tiessler simply could not fault her for that.
And yet…!
He opened the message.
Sir,
Doina tells me she has an important message and would like to deliver it to you in person.
That was all.
He read it again, trying to detect an undertone, a secret message of some sort.
He had never been invited to the starship. He had only been there once, with Toma and the hapless lieutenant-colonel Jing, of the late Yǒngqì space station, destroyed by Five. Never since had he been invited back. Was there a meaning here?
He pushed himself gently against a corner of the table, and turned slowly towards the window, in the cruiser’s microgravity. He tried to make out the starship on the background of stars, and just when he was about to give up, he saw it: a tiny black disk — it was too far for its torus shape to be visible with naked eye — up in one corner of his field of view, in the Vela constellation.
Feeling helpless and annoyed to be summoned by a twelve-year-old, Tiessler ran his hand over his face, and reached back to the table for his tab.
He called the bridge, and there was lieutenant Azzopardi again.
“Yes, sir.“
“What's docked?“
“Golf, Sierra and Quebec, sir.“
“I need a ride to the starship. Who’s on duty?“
She quickly consulted a roster and read from it.
“Captains Johansson, Le Jeune and the new one, Atanasievich, sir.“
“Which one’s more rested?“
“I suppose Atanasievich, sir, as he’s just arrived yesterday. Should I check with the doc?“
“No, that’s fine. Have him meet me at Sierra.“
“Yes, sir. How long will you be gone, sir?“
Tiessler made a face that translated very clearly as “unpredictable kids running starships.“ Azzopardi pretended not to notice.
“Two hours,“ gambled the German. “That’ll be all,“ he said, and ended the call. The message from Toma replaced it.
He hit reply and sent back three words: “Auf dem Weg.“
On my way.
Captain Gennadiy Atanasievich was twenty-four, and had been a Pinion pilot for three years. Tiessler was thirty-three. Arguably young for a colonel, but such was war. He had also flown Pinions in his twenties, on escort duty for lunar mining robots. He missed the simplicity of it. Taking orders is always so much easier than giving them. Of course, you don’t realise that until it’s too late to go back, he pondered philosophically. The Belarusian pilot flew the spacecraft expertly, and Tiessler had to admit that, without the benefit of practice, he would probably not have been as good. Competent, sure; he could fly anything humans had in space, and he kept current on them all, as befitted his rank and role. But Atanasievich was a natural.
He watched the pilot, trying to anticipate his moves, relishing a half hour in which he had nothing else better to do. The Pinion distanced itself from the Monnet, and Tiessler tried not to look at his cruiser. Instead, he waited for Atanasievich’s announcement, which came in a few seconds.
“Brace for main engine burn in four, free, two, one, burn.“
Acceleration was painful, but Tiessler welcomed it. His suit, sealed with helmet on, reacted perfectly to the g-force, compressing spasmodically in body areas where it sensed blood pooling. The German was used to the sensation and ignored it; the burn ended after only three and a half seconds anyway.
“Point one null null,“ said the pilot, in a carefully neutral voice.
Tiessler smiled. He had seen that Atanasievich had operated on manual engine control. To be able to arrive to a round number in terms of kilometres per second, without the help of computers, was incredibly skilful. The new guy was out to impress his new boss.
“My compliments, captain,“ said Tiessler in the cabin’s closed-circuit comms.
“Thank you, sir.“
The torus was now clearly visible through the main forward viewscreen. The shuttle adjusted course slightly as Tiessler, acting as first officer, engaged the radar and the navigation computer took control. Normally the starship was completely non-reflecting, but now it was shining white as a block of stone under the radar’s microwaves, no doubt as a courtesy to their incoming shuttle.
“Five minutes,“ said the Belarusian. Ein Mann mit wenigen Worten, thought Tiessler. A man of few words. Very good. He unbuckled his straps and pushed himself up until he was clear of the seat, then grabbed one of the textile hooks on the ceiling and pushed himself to the back of the shuttle. Passing the empty pairs of seats, he arrived at the airlock, where large magnetic plates were arranged in a star shape around the hatch. He swivelled and shrunk in a foetal position, with elbows around his knees, and his arms and legs glued themselves to a plate.
“One of one to EVA, ready to decel,“ he said.
“Confirm, sir. Retro burn in ten seconds.“
“Roger.“
He let the deceleration come as a surprise, not watching the timer projected inside his helmet. The electromagnetic connection adjusted automatically and held him in place, but again it lasted only a few seconds.
“Arrived. Matching attitude. Prepare for EVA.“
Tiessler disconnected from the plate and stretched back. He pulled the handle labeled “AL EXTD“ and felt, through it, the gentle hum of the motors that extended the cylinder of the airlock into space. The handle turned yellow.
He waited.
“Ready for EVA. Good luck, sir. I’ll wait here.“
The handle turned green.
“Thank you, captain. See you soon.“
He twisted t
he handle clockwise and pushed it back in. The hatch opened, and he pushed himself into the tiny airlock. When his boots cleared it, he spread them to touch both sides of the base of the airlock, where they locked again magnetically. The hatch closed after him, and air was quickly sucked into tanks. He checked the dashboard inside his helmet: everything was nominal.
“Outer hatch. Open, open, open.“
“Yes, sir. Opening outer hatch.“
A black disc filled with stars replaced the other end of the airlock. Tiessler disconnected his boots and pushed himself out, looking up. He cleared the airlock, which began to retract.
Floating in space had long stopped feeling strange, and anyway, the German had no time for introspection. He felt the attitude controls at the tips of his fingers, inside the space suit gloves, and expertly manoeuvred himself head over heels.
And there, huge as an apartment building, only three metres from him, lay Starship Doi.
Atanasievich had parked the shuttle right above the inner cylinder of the great starship, at the intersection of its three twisted spokes. An opening appeared where there had been only solid, matte black; gentle yellow light beckoned from the starship’s airlock. Tiessler did a tenth second burn to propel himself towards it, and then a number of shorter burns to yaw so that he went in feet first. As soon as he passed the edges of the round opening, he felt the pull of gravity. After more than a week in space, that felt odd.
He landed on his feet and looked up to watch the hatch close. And then, amazingly — just as the first time he’d been there — in less than a second, his helmet guaranteed positive outside pressure and the correct atmospheric gas mixture.
He took off his gloves first, and then his helmet, and finally, he undid his boots. He did the latter only because he noticed Toma’s helmet, gloves and boots neatly stacked on the floor next to the curved wall. He left his in a similar stack, and then stood up, in space suit and socks.
With a quick shiver, he remembered to double check that he’d left his chip gun in the Pinion. It would’ve been a really big mistake to carry it with him in front of Doina. But the chest holster was empty.
