Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 4
“The real questions are: why was it planted? Who wanted it planted?”
I looked meaningfully at the other five people in the room. “And of course… How did they know they needed to plant it?”
4
INTO THE MAELSTROM
Three weeks and two Skip jumps later, we arrived. I sat in my command chair and took in the view. It was something. It was for moments like this that I had become a xenoarchaeologist.
QV Telescopii—QV Tel for short—is also known as HD 167128 and HR 6819. Take your pick. It’s a triple star system in the southern constellation of Telescopium. The system, at 1120 light-years from Earth, was dimly visible to the naked eye from my home world.
As interesting as that may or may not be, you can look all of it up with your vLink. But here’s the thing… your vLink can’t tell you a thing about the awesome wonder and beauty of this particular trinary star system.
Imagine an object forty times the mass of Sol, compressed into a black hole the size of Earth’s moon. Now, add two main-sequence suns orbiting every forty days. Let’s put that forty days into perspective—Mercury takes eighty-eight days to orbit Earth’s sun.
Toss in some powerful x-rays as the black hole slowly consumes the solar winds created by these two orbiting suns. Lastly, watch as those x-rays light up gases ripped from those stars and the planets that still orbit them.
What you ended up with was a deadly but dynamic, in cosmic terms, light show. It was into this maelstrom that we were headed.
I recalled the first few paragraphs of a story written almost fifteen hundred years ago by a man named Edgar Allan Poe—A Descent into the Maelstrom. Such is the curse of a near photographic memory… and, if I’m honest, to the implants that gave one access to a vast ship’s library.
“Not long ago,” said he at length, “and I could have guided you on this route as well as the youngest of my sons; but, about three years past, there happened to me an event such as never happened to mortal man—or at least such as no man ever survived to tell of—and the six hours of deadly terror which I then endured have broken me up body and soul. You suppose me a very old man—but I am not. It took less than a single day to change these hairs from a jetty black to white, to weaken my limbs, and to unstring my nerves, so that I tremble at the least exertion, and am frightened at a shadow.”
Encountering maelstroms, be they in the ocean, in war, or in the depths of space, had the power to change people. I couldn’t help but wonder if I wasn’t about to become the old man in Poe’s story.
“Fitzy, do a sensor sweep,” I ordered the ship’s AI. “Locate and catalog stable LaGrange points. Give me a count.”
“Your wish is my command, Admiral Mom.”
The forward view screen switched to a solar schematic showing the black hole and its two solar companions. Fitzy launched into a verbal description of what we were seeing.
“There are eight classically defined stable LaGrange points designated L4, L4’, L5, L5’, B4, B4’, B5, and B5’. However, because of gravimetric stresses, sheering forces associated with the B LaGrange points limits their effective size to spheres roughly two hundred kilometers in diameter. Conversely, L4 - L5 are nearly one hundred times that, and L4’ – L5’ are closer to one hundred and thirty times larger.”
Uncle Max, who was standing behind my command chair in the Fitz’s crowded bridge, spoke in a stage whisper, “What’s a stable LaGrange point?”
I smiled. LaGrange points were some of the absolute favorite places in the universe for any xenoarchaeologist worth his or her salt.
“Well, Max, think of a water fountain and a bucket. If I put a ball in the bucket, it stays. If I try to float a ball on the top of a fountain, the littlest breeze makes it fall. LaGrange points work the same way.
“Because of the competing pull of gravity between objects in orbit, gravity forms five LaGrange points. Some are fountains and some are buckets. Fun stuff tends to collect in the buckets, L4 and L5… because, well… they’re buckets and not fountains.”
“And you’re thinking we’re going to find Survey One in one of these buckets?”
I nodded. “I’m hoping we find them near one of the L-points and not the B-points—because if they’re near one of the B-points, we’re going to have problems.”
“OK, I bite. What’s a B-point and why don’t I like them?” Max asked.
“The B-Points are the LaGrange points that form with the black hole. The universe gets very strange when you get near a black hole.”
It should be noted that what I wanted and what the universe wanted were often at odds with one another. Our current adventure was no exception.
It took us a couple of days to eliminate all of the viable L-points. The electromagnetic light shows and masses of heavily charged particles swirling around this star system—especially near the La Grange points—made long-distance scans all but impossible. That meant the Fitz had to visit each location and do an eyes-on scan.
Understand, Survey-class ships are the largest things ever built by the hand of man, but in the vastness of space they are tiny. It took us hours to do localized scans to eliminate each target zone. Finally, we were left with only one uncomfortable conclusion. If Survey One was in QV Tel, then it was in one of the B LaGrange points.
Here’s why that was a problem. Time. Time dilation near a massive black hole is proportional to the inverse of the distance to the black hole’s event horizon: that place where gravity is so strong that even light can’t escape. While we were canvasing the L-points, hours translated into days in normal space-time. Once we moved to the B LaGrange points, we would be dealing with a time dilation that would turn hours into months.
Worse than that, we would need to start dealing with the effects of temporal sheering. One side of the ship would be aging faster than the other. It was only a few seconds, but communication would become distorted and electronic systems would begin to malfunction as variable latency interacted with delicate systems.
Now, the geeks reading this might be jumping up and down, saying the reference frame changes with the time and space dilation so a ship wouldn’t experience any actual sheering. Yeah, that would be true if we were only talking about our meat-level view of the multi-dimensional universe, but things are never that simple.
Do you really think that something powerful enough to warp space and time was going to stop at just those dimensions that we can see? Especially when there are so many more to work with?
The bottom line is, things tend to get seriously wonky when you get close to a black hole, and wonkier still when you have an environment like QV Tel.
It seemed the universe wanted to mess with me, and if we were going to find Survey One, we were going to have to embrace the wonk. What really bit the big one was that we might have to embrace the wonk four times, and there was still no guarantee that we wouldn’t come up dry. The simple reality was, at the end of the day, the massive ship might not be here.
* * *
“So, as I understand it,” Max started talking as the entire team met in the galley to explore options for searching the B LaGrange points, “we have four locations to check, and each one is a little island of stability that we can jump into. Time will speed up or slow down or something. Do we care? Or maybe I should be saying, why do we care? What’s the problem?”
Gene tapped the side of his coffee cup.
“Two problems actually,” our engineer answered. “First, the B LaGrange points are tiny, as you said. Only about two hundred kilometers in size. Not only do we need to land this crate…” Gene looked at me. “No offense intended.”
I smiled. Fitz is a big girl. “None taken. Go on.”
“Not only do we need to jump this ‘ship’ onto the head of a pin, but we need to exactly match the LaGrange point’s orbital velocity. If we are off by even a little bit, we’ll blow through that two hundred kilometers like nobody’s business. That’s not something you want to do this close to an event horizon.
“And that’s before we even start talking about all the crap going on with the clocks. Any jump calculations we do will need to take into account that the relationship between Skip Space and real space may be shifting relative to one another.”
I nodded. “Max, the time dilation isn’t so much a problem. That’s just math. The real problem is the temporal shearing—the time gradient, if you will. The distortion of space-time is so great close to a black hole that time will flow noticeably different from one side of the LaGrange point to the other.”
I could see the lack of understanding in my uncle’s eyes.
“Imagine you connected both ends of a rubber band to a brick. No matter how hard or fast you threw the brick, the rubber band would be fine. Both ends of the rubber band are traveling in the same direction and at the same speed. That’s us in normal time and space.
“Now, hold the other end of the rubber band and throw the brick. Everything is still fine if the rubber band is infinitely elastic. The problem is it’s not, and neither is time.”
“And so, the rubber band breaks,” Max finished.
“It’s worse than that,” Gene mumbled. “The rubber band snaps back and whacks your hand.”
Max paused to consider. “What happens then? What happens when it snaps back?”
Janice, who had been quiet up to this point, brightened up. I was curious as to what she was going to say, so I nodded encouragement to her. My mistake.
You have to understand, any time our doctor is in the room, she is very likely to be the smartest person there. That said, she rarely speaks. In the weeks that I had known her, I don’t think I’d heard her string more than four or five words together—unless, of course, the subject was medicine.
“What happens when it snaps back?” The grin on Janice’s face spread from ear to ear. She held her breath for a moment with her eyes twinkling. Finally, she blurted out proudly, “Only time will tell!”
I groaned.
I noticed mine wasn’t the only groan to fill the room. Janice, for her part, spent the next minute fending off flying packets of sugar. I have to admit, it was a side of the good doctor I hadn’t appreciated. She was a closet corny pun queen. Who would have guessed?
“To actually answer your question, Max,” I looked at the doctor with a slight shake of my head and a roll of my eyes, “the real problem will be electrical surges and signal latency… especially those that travel any great length—say from the bridge to engineering. Fiber optics won’t be as badly affected because optical cable is very forgiving when it comes to surges. The same isn’t true for super-conductors.”
The room was dead quiet for a few moments.
“I suppose,” Gene began, as he rubbed the stubble on his chin, “we could yank the main wiring harness and replace it with fiber optics. At least we’d be able to control the ship. I can’t think of how we’d be able to initiate a jump into Skip Space without super-conducting conduits traveling the length of the ship though.”
We continued to bandy a number of ideas back and forth. As fast as they were broached, they were shot down. There was no malice involved. It’s just that it was becoming clear that conventional thinking wasn’t going to solve this problem.
I got up to pour myself another cup of coffee. I held up the pot. “Anybody?” No takers.
As I sat back down, I decided to take the conversation in a different direction. “Conventional techniques aren’t going to get us where we need to go. We may need to think outside the box a little.”
Max looked at me. “You have a crazy ‘no-one-in-their-right-mind-would-do-it’ idea. Don’t you?”
I sipped my coffee and gave him my best “absolutely innocent” look.
DeAndre must have seen it. “Just how far outside of the box were you thinking?”
I smiled. “If you have to ask, you really don’t want to know.”
* * *
With some minor tweaking, and a whole lot of selling on my part, we finally came to a consensus on my plan. That’s not to say people were happy with it. Hell, I wasn’t happy with it. It had the solitary advantage, however, of being the only thing we could think of that might actually get the job done.
Our final approach to exploring the black hole’s four stable LaGrange points involved a minimum of two Skip jumps to each point, with a third jump in the event Survey One was actually located.
“Fitzy, do you have the numbers laid in? Are we good to go?”
“Aye Admiral. I was born ready to go. Well, technically I was compiled, but the general concept is the same. Yes. I’m ready to go.”
“Gene,” I turned to the only other person on the bridge. “Is the package ready to deploy?”
“Fueled up, buttoned up and ready to fly,” the chief confirmed.
The package was a reconnaissance probe. We would drop it in the LaGrange point and come back later to see what it found.
Since space-time within the LaGrange point was going to be seriously dilated, we didn’t want to fully exit Skip Space until we had to. This meant we were going to utilize a very special type of jump. So special that, outside of a science and engineering journal—what can I say? I’m fairly well read—I’d never heard of it. I’d certainly never heard of anybody attempting to do it. Or more to the point, I’d never heard of anyone crazy enough to attempt to do it.
The math was pretty intense, but Fitzy now enjoyed a suite of state-of-the-art upgrades. Her quantum computer core was now one of the best money could buy. She even had one of those fancy phased photonic solid avatars, although I hadn’t seen her use it yet.
My point is, Fitzy was more than up to handling the math. Still, we were going to attempt to do something no one had tried before. Or maybe, in the words of Edgar Allen Poe, such as no man ever survived to tell of.
5
BUMPY ROAD
Imagine trying to skip a stone along the surface of a lake. If you get the angle, speed, and orientation of the stone just right, the stone bounces along the surface. Ultimately, the stone will sink below the surface. But here’s the deal though… the point at which the stone finally sinks is not the same point at which the stone first makes contact with the water.
This was the crux of our crazy idea. And by “our,” I mean mine. We were going to use the Skip drive to repeatedly skip along the brane barrier between our space and Skip Space. Rather than fully emerging from Skip Space during our jump, we were going to emerge only long enough to release a probe and then pulse the drive coils to reenter Skip Space before the jump field could fully collapse.
Sub-orbital space planes, called HyperSoar jets, had been using a similar technique to skip along the outer edge of planetary atmospheres for hundreds of years.
We decided to call this type of jump a “Skippy” jump. DeAndre Papus wanted to call it the Zapuskaty Zhabky maneuver. Apparently, Zapuskaty Zhabky was Ukrainian for “let the frogs out,” which was their name for skipping stones. Really! You can’t make this stuff up. The president got voted down… unanimously… and threatened with a vote of no-confidence if he continued to press the issue.
If our initial Skippy jump worked, we would duplicate the process to retrieve the reconnaissance data. If it didn’t—well—we might be awhile picking up the pieces.
The good news was that the math said it would work. The bad news was that the math is only as good as the variables we supplied. We had no way of knowing if we had accounted for all the variables. Sadly, in my experience, the universe liked to throw me curve balls every now and then.
That said, if the universe was smiling kindly on me, we would locate Survey One in one of the LaGrange points. Then we would need to make a decision as to how desperate we were to go in to get her. I had a plan for that as well. Ok, it wasn’t so much a plan as a vague idea that needed fleshing out. And gin. It needed lots of gin.
“Fitzy, honey, I’m going to need you to do the driving. Timing is too critical for us meat sacks to do the job.”
“I always do the driving. I only let you handle the controls so you have something to do with your hands. Don’t worry about a thing. Fitzy’s got this.”
You know that feeling you got in the pit of your stomach when, as a child, your mom told you you’re having liver and onions for dinner? That’s exactly what I was feeling now. My far too cocky, far too self-assured, far too mouthy AI was going to jump boldly where no one had gone before. What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out, quite a lot.
As the jump engines engaged and we popped into Skip Space, everything seemed fine. And then we skipped… and skipped… and skipped.
I remember skiing as a kid. That was one of the few advantages of a frozen Earth. Plenty of places to ski. One year I was skiing and I ran into some moguls covered with a light ground fog.
I thought my teeth were going to be shaken out of my head. That I managed to get down the hill without wiping out was a testimony to clean living, my relationship with God, or just plain luck. Personally, I’m leaning toward the second and third options.
My point is, that’s what it felt like during our Skippy jump. When we finally exited Skip Space completely, the bridge was a mess. If it wasn’t locked down, it was thrown. I felt something warm against my cheek. When I brought my hand away, I saw it was red with blood. Something had cut my cheek as it flew by. I guess I should be thankful I hadn’t lost an eye.
“Status report?”
For once, Fitzy wasn’t snooty.
“Minor damage to the secondary hull. Several electrical issues. All circuits have been rerouted and repairs are underway. Avoid the commode nearest the galley until I can get a repair bot in there to fix the plumbing and sanitize floor, walls, and ceiling.
“No serious injuries, aside from yourself. You have a mild concussion and facial lacerations resulting from an impact with your coffee cup. Might I suggest paper beverage vessels are your friend?”
