This particular specimen was unrecognizable in part because it was arched into that back-bending inside-out broken wheel position. And partially because the long taper of its body was, well, not utterly smooth, because I could see wounds and stubs along its length, but shorn. Shorn of tendrils, wings, or fins. And shorn as well of the long, symmetrical appendages they used as manipulators.
I couldn’t imagine that a dead Ativahika would ever be considered a good sign. I wish I could say that, staring at that terrible thing, I had a premonition. But if I had had a premonition of what it really portended, I would have thrown my veto and turned that ship around right that very second and gone to find Judiciary. No matter what it cost us. No matter how long it took.
All the evidence would likely have been gone by the time we got back. And that bothers me a little, and it would have bothered the me in the alternate timestream where I made more cautious choices. Given what I eventually learned, I guess it wouldn’t have been the end of it anyway. There would have been another avenue to get to us. And in any case, time is a river that only flows one way.
It feels . . . odd to be telling this story. It’s just me recording in senso, journaling. I’ve kept ayatana logs, like any crew member does. But it’s never been something I thought anybody else might hear, except maybe a review board, and now . . . now I don’t know who I’m talking to.
But my log might turn out to be important: a historical document or evidence in a hearing or even an inquest and trial. So now I’m thinking about, well, who am I talking to? Because I’m not just talking to myself anymore.
I’m talking to a court panel, maybe. A judge and a couple of AIs and some people from various syster species who’ve come up in the service lottery this an. Or maybe I’m talking to the crew of another salvage tug, because I’m dead and what you have left is this voice record, not even an ayatana. Or maybe I’m talking to a historian, some archinformist who’s unearthed this from a forgotten storage crystal.
Or maybe you’re a pirate.
In which case I hope you choke on what I have to say.
? ? ?
“What could cause that?” Connla asked.
You could almost hear Singer shaking the head he didn’t have. “Connla, I do not know. Its trajectory is interesting, however. It seems to be on an elongated orbit around the space-time scar that we came here to investigate.”
“White scars aren’t supposed to have gravity,” Connla said.
“No,” Singer agreed. “They aren’t.”
“How’s the bubble?” I asked.
From somewhere behind me, the scuff of Connla turning. He was no more than a glimpse of shiny black ponytail in the reflective casement at the window’s edge. “Holding.”
“Do you want to investigate?”
Singer did. I admit, I was curious myself. But it seemed like an unnecessary risk, and chasing the corpse down on EM would take time.
And we were here with a job to do.
I pushed back from the window, went to my post, and dipped fingertips into my interface. The unspace around the salvage tug flooded my nervous system with colors, tastes, smells. It tipped and whirled, my sense of balance engaging as well. The white bubble—our own private little artificially generated reality—kept the universal constants in order so our neurons kept firing and our lungs kept lung-ing, and that was a good thing. Once we found the scar and went into it, we wouldn’t be able to see or sense a damned thing beyond it. A border where the laws of physics changed plays hob with the electromagnetic spectrum.
So we crept toward the wormhole scar.
The scar wasn’t exactly visible. It was gravitational, like a slit in the universe with a bit less mass than the areas around it. Galaxies are surrounded—permeated—by a halo of dark gravity. Teflon-coated reality, as it were: stuff we can’t interact with, can’t see, can’t sense . . . except it has mass. Maybe. In any case, it generates gravity. Or curvatures in space-time. Or . . . it amounts to what it amounts to.
So we were swinging our mass detectors around, scanning for a ripple, of sorts, in the heaviness of space. A spot that would appear as if someone had teased a magnet along a pile of iron filings and drawn them all to one side or the other, so they heaped in two ridges and the center became a valley. There was dark gravity here, in the space between the stars, as well as around us, intertwined with the stuff of the Milky Way. The stuff was like spun sugar stretched between sticky fingers, if the galaxy were a snacking toddler.
Although in that analogy the toddler would be mired in an entire gymnasium full of spun sugar, so maybe it’s not the best theoretical model. Especially if you’re the person who has to give that kid a bath.
So there was our gravitational anomaly, which is to say our anomaly in the distribution of mass. A wormhole scar, so-called—the mark left by a particular kind of failed Alcubierre-White transition. If you do one of those right, the dark gravity is supposed to go right back where it started. I mean, given that we still don’t have a really good idea of how gravity works, or where it comes from, and we still haven’t managed to figure out how to generate it despite the fact that it’s been the best part of a millennian since Isaac Newton discovered apples—
Anyway, if your bubble collapses completely, you stop bending space-time around yourself to cheat Newton and Einstein and—if you’re lucky—you pop back out into regular space a few hundred light-ans from anything useful and hope you can repair your drive before you starve or run out of oxy. If you’re unlucky, you come out at an angle to reality where your ship and your biology don’t conform to the local laws of physics, and . . .
. . . oh well.
At least, theoretically. Nobody’s ever come back from an accident like that to comment.
But if your bubble kind of stalls, halfway into the otherworld as it were, neither fish nor fowl, space-time half-bent and half . . . well, normally bendy, because it’s not like there’s such a thing as flat space-time . . .
Then you become my job.
Our job, I mean—mine, and Connla’s, and Singer’s.
It doesn’t happen often—not so often that any given trip through interstellar space is likely to end with the passengers stuck halfway out of space-time. But most ships don’t catch fire, either. Still, enough do that ships have fire suppressant foam, and in a big galaxy with a lot of traffic, there are always a few accidents. Enough to keep a few dozen salvage operators like us in business, anyway.
I waved us forward, and we slid through the hole in the universe as if we were parting the petals on a not-yet-open bud.
Back into white space again.
CHAPTER 2
PROXIMITY KLAXONS SHRILLED UP MY nerves, simulating physical pain. Not incapacitating, but demanding action. Connla had moved toward me. Now he kicked toward the controls, but I knew already what we were hearing. Another vessel’s white bubble had just brushed ours. The interface made the intruding ship a sharp pinch on my skin, an elbow in my ribs.
One brush of its white coils on Singer’s and we were all dead: our chemical processes failing—if not simply our covalent bonds. We were insanely fortunate that it hadn’t unfolded space-time when it was pointed directly at us—or directly at the thing we’d come to salvage, though that might have been safe for now inside its fold in space.
I’m not sure that anybody had ever run the experiment to find out, and I sure didn’t want to be the one to science that.
Space isn’t empty. The Big Sneeze—some people call it the Enemy, but I’ve always been uncomfortable personalizing—is scattered with particles, some with mass and some without. Some of these particles are in the area before a ship in white space: the space that gets folded, compressed, made smaller. They get swept up in the bubble, and accelerated to match the relative velocity of the ship.
When the ship decelerates, and the fold collapses—unfolds, snaps open—the particles don’t decelerate. Or they do, in that they reenter normal space-time, but at relativistic speeds, and with equivalent energy. They’re released in an energetic outburst.
Very energetic indeed.
An Alcubierre-White drive ship reentering normal space, in other words, is a particle cannon, and there is no way to make it not be. We all just try very hard, all the time, to make sure that cannon is aimed in a safe direction when it’s discharged. Because anything in the ship’s line of deceleration will be blasted into oblivion by massively blueshifted high-energy particles and gamma radiation.
A ship coming out of white space is a weapon that fires automatically, without any regard for the target. So its pilots and its shipmind have to provide that regard.
And if the other guy hasn’t filed a flight plan, or isn’t where he was supposed to be . . . well, he’s too dead to care about the fatalities, which are applied to his pilot’s record and licensure, not yours. If the incoming pilot and shipmind made that mistake? They won’t be flying again. Not to mention having to live with the responsibility of having murdered all souls aboard the target craft.