Theoretically, they could order us to desist with lightspeed coms first. But if they did that, we had legal recourse, and the odds of the Synarche coming back to us with a cease order or even a stall were pretty slim. Singer was a pretty good lawyer, and the nice thing about AIs is that they’re tireless when it comes to filing motions.
Connla looked up from his calculations finally and said, “Well, if we go in after it, we’ll have a hell of a story to tell. In about two thousand ans.”
I zipped across the cabin to him with a kick-and-catch, grabbing a rail with my afthands and hanging beside him. Peering over his shoulder at his math, to be honest.
“Is time dilation going to affect us?” I asked. “The ship is in a white bubble. We’ll be in a bubble too. We don’t have to worry about relativistic effects in white space because we’re not actually moving very fast.”
“Normally true,” Singer said. “And that’s how we physics-lawyer our way into an interstellar community at all. But you’re reckoning without the profound slope of space-time into the Well. I mean, theoretically you could fly an AWD ship right into a black hole and out again, as long as you didn’t let the field collapse. But there’s a lot of stuff in an accretion disk, and your white bubble is going to fold, spindle, mutilate, and accelerate that stuff as it passes through that region of space. So there’s the problem of the photon ramrod effect. You could solve that with graduated buffer folds, which is a procedure we already use for busy areas of space. But it would take a lot of energy to set up that many buffers.”
“This doesn’t tell me how we fall prey to time dilation.”
“Even with the white drive, we’re moving through regions of space that are themselves dilated because of relativistic effects. The stuff falling into the Well is moving so fast that time has to slow down, essentially, because otherwise it would exceed c. It’s not us, in other words—it’s what we’d be folding.”
“And that’s why the Koregoi artifact feels slow. Despite being in a bubble.”
“Got it,” Connla said.
“Maybe we should have stuck with the business model of leading wreck-diving tours of black hole regions,” I mused.
Singer didn’t contradict me.
Connla said, “We could sell it as an antisenescence treatment, too. Look twenty ans younger than your agemates when you go home for your crèche reunion!”
I covered my face with my hand.
“How confident are we that it’s actually a Koregoi artifact?” Connla asked.
“If it’s ancient alien superscience, it’s pretty much by definition Koregoi,” I answered. “And it’s parked inside a black hole, did you notice?”
Singer said, “Another option is using your contact with the artifact to nudge it—white bubble and all—out of a parked orbit and into a location where it would get kicked out by one of the Well’s relativistic jets. Because the Saga-star is so big, and because it imparts so much energy to what it’s sucking in, the angular momentum that stuff gains is enormous, and for any of it to fall in at all, a lot of it has to be ejected to remove momentum for the system. We could use that to push the artifact out of the Well, like a little cartoon fish on a cartoon whale’s blow spout.”
“That sounds really cool,” Connla said. “But if we do that then we have to go catch the damned thing. And it’ll be moving pretty fast, and we probably don’t have the acceleration to do that in normal space.”
“That’s sort of sad,” I said.
“It is. If we don’t have another option, though, it might be worth trying.”
“I have another option,” I said.
Connla looked at me, and I imagined I felt Singer’s attention shift to focus on me more completely, though of course that was projection. But I could also feel the sleepy presence of the Koregoi ship, and I thought that as long as I was doing impossible things I could probably control it remotely.
“What we can do,” I said, “is add energy to the system.”
“Raise its orbit,” Connla said.
“Change the orientation of the A-WD field, and increase the density of the folding and stretching at its edges, and bring it out—boom—like an air bubble rising through water under gravity. It’ll come out STL, even—then all we have to do is stop it, and retrieve it normally.”
“Huh,” Connla said. He moved some data around on his interface. “We’d have to make sure nothing important is in front of it when it pops up, because when you take the white drive down, it’ll make one hell of a particle cannon.”
“Can you take the white drive down remotely?”
“I don’t see why not,” I said. Then I cleared my throat. “I mean, assuming I can get control of the vessel at all.”
? ? ?
I didn’t get control of the vessel.
Control might be a questionable word here anyway.
I got access, though—or a connection. I wasn’t managing to communicate with it, exactly, or offer it commands, though my Koregoi senso seemed to auto-tune to it and give me at least that much connection. It wasn’t responsive, though. I could just feel it waiting out there, big and passive, like somebody breathing but not talking on the other end of a com connection.
A little creepy, really.
Singer tried using some of the stuff he’d learned about talking to—or at least tuning into the signals from—my Koregoi senso. He didn’t seem to be making much headway either. And—we were assuming the thing was a ship, but it could have been just about anything in there. At least it was something and we hadn’t come all this way for an empty wrinkle in space-time.
Maybe we should go wreck-diving. Hell, the Synarche might be gone in two thousand ans. Then we wouldn’t have to worry about selective service.
Resupply, on the other hand—sure, that might be a problem.
The next step seemed to be trial and error. On my part, and on Singer’s. He piggybacked on my signal, poking around in there, and when I tried to ask him what he was actually doing I got a string of programming jargon that was so far beyond me it might as well have been one of those twelve-tone semi-ultrasonic methane-breather languages that shatter ice crystals and sound like a glass harmonica having a bad dia at work.
We were having some effect, though, or I was fooling myself into believing we were, because it felt like the contact was deepening and clarifying. The result, subconsciously, was like somebody looking at you while waiting for you to finish saying something really dumbass. Or maybe I was just feeling self-conscious by then.
I still wasn’t managing to communicate, though—and I didn’t feel like anything was changing in a hurry. In fact, I was about to suggest to Singer that he carry on, piggybacked on my senso, while I got a sandwich and took a nap.
Just as I was formulating the offer, the alien object—inside its white bubble—smoothly and incrementally began to move.
Toward us.
“Whoa,” I said, my pulse accelerating. “Singer, did you do that?”
“I was just about to ask you the same thing. What did you do?”
“I don’t know!”
“Well, keep doing it! It’s working!”
The object rose out of the Well like a freight elevator, its bubble a little itch or snag in my Koregoi awareness. It was slow, to start. Painfully slow, on a scale where even Singer’s actuarial expectancy of conscious existence might not be enough to let him see its journey ended.
For a while, I wondered if it would have the capability—or the fuel—to fold space-time fast and hard enough to pull itself out of something like the Well. As far as I knew, this was a thing that had never been attempted. When we had access to a real library, I should check out if anybody had probed these depths with remote drones, or if we were making scientific history here.
I’d anchored myself by my afthands to a rail and was watching with tight breath, hunger and tiredness forgotten—or tuned out by Singer, which was nearly the same. The anomaly accelerated, hoving toward us, not actually moving itself because the space inside its white bubble was stationary. But the space around the white bubble was scrunching up before and unscrunching behind like an inchworm on amphetamines.
Pretty soon, it was coming so fast I could barely believe it. I tried not to think too hard about the fact that the Koregoi senso was apparently letting me feel what was happening light-minutes away at an instantaneous rate of return. These ancestor-systers could manipulate space-time in such a way as to create localized, artificial gravity. What was a little spooky action at a distance to them?
The black hole time dilation kept being obvious, and that made me re-realize just how fast the anomaly had to be moving, because . . . well, it was way down in the Well, and from its perspective, we were living very fast indeed right now in our perch on the rim.
Singer eventually kicked me out of my own senso and forced me to eat something and have a nap. He kept working on trying to communicate with the ship. Apparently he didn’t need me awake for that, so I stayed out of his way.
Space is big, and even at ludicrous rates of speed, crossing chunks of it takes a long time.