Thirty-three
Neutrinos and the slow ghosts remained, but only in the corner of the eye and the mind. The central duty in Pamir’s life was to carve a simple hole, following the shattered vein wherever it led, and with the years that seemingly straightforward task evolved into what might have been the deepest, most demanding excavation in human history.
Nothing remained of the original access tunnel. A series of sharp shaped explosions had obliterated the hyperfiber walls, and worse, they had pumped fantastic amounts of heat into the surrounding rock and iron. A column of red-hot magma led down into the ship’s depths. Reconstructing the tunnel wasn’t impossible, but it was nearly so. What was simpler was to extract the magma like stubborn cream through a wide straw, then slather the surrounding walls with better and better grades of hyperfiber, creating a vertical shaft more than a full kilometer wide.
Thirty years of digging, and three captains stood at a point as deep as the fuel tank’s deepest reaches.
In another fifty years, they were clawing their way through a wilderness of iron.
Pamir was always present. But the other captains changed faces and names every eight or ten years. Duty in the “big hole” was by no means an honor. After the first century of work and several catastrophic collapses, the Master and most of her staff had lost hope in the project. The camouflaged hatchway had been nothing but a clever distraction. The access tunnel had been destroyed by someone, yes. But throwing antimatter bomblets down a tiny hole would be easy enough. Among the tiny circle of AIs and captains who knew about the digging, none could believe there was anything worth finding down there.
Even Pamir found his imagination failing him.
In his dreams, when he saw himself digging fast with a handheld shovel, he couldn’t picture finding anything but another gout of hard black iron.
Yet the hole was Pamir’s duty, and it was a grand, consuming obsession. When he wasn’t choreographing the digging, he was badgering distant factories for improved grades of hyperfiber. When he wasn’t overseeing the pouring of a thick new stretch of wall, he was personally examining the finished stretches, from bottom to top. searching for any flaw, any inadequate seam, where the brutal pressures of the great ship threatened to buckle all of his wasted work.
Those rare moments when he climbed out of the hole and into the fuel tank felt like vacations. His aerogel island still floated on the placid hydrogen sea. Alone, he would repair the neutrino detectors and comb the last year or two of data, searching for traces of that soft signal, trying to decide if it truly came from below.
After decades of growing subtly stronger, the signal was weakening now.
There were years when it seemed to vanish altogether.
The Master and her loyal AIs, privy to the same data, came to the same rigorous solution. “It’s vanishing because it never was,” they claimed. “Anomalies have that wicked habit.”
Pamir asked permission to build new detectors, increasing his sensitivity, and he was curtly refused. When he mentioned that a second array floating inside an adjacent fuel tank would let him identify every ghost particle’s birthplace, he found agreement based upon solid technical reasoning.
“But there’s more to this issue,” the Master warned. “It’s a question of resources and general discomfort.”
“Discomfort?” he inquired.
“My discomfort,” she replied, her holo-image feigning a grimace. “Floating on the hydrogen like they do, your toys are hazards. We don’t dare pump out important amounts of fuel, since that might disturb them. And worse, what if they clog a line?”
Half a dozen easy solutions occurred to Pamir.
But before he offered any, the Master added, “That’s why I want your array disassembled. And soon, please. We’ve got a major burn coming in a little more than eighteen months—a burn and subsequent flybys—and I need my hydrogen. Free of aerogel and detectors, and all the rest of it.”
“In eighteen months,” Pamir echoed.
“No,” she said, her patience worn into the thinnest of veneers. “Sooner than that. If you need, take a leave of absence from your hole. Is that understood?”
He nodded, bristled in secret, and decided what to do.
With the help of mining drones, Pamir dismantled exactly half of the array, packing up the sensors, then on his authority, sent them up to Port Alpha. He followed the fancy crates, and in a cramped assembly point beneath the outer hull, he met an ancient Remora who owed him more than one good favor.
Orleans had a splendid and ugly new face. Wide amber eyes rode on the ends of white worms, pressed flush against the lifesuit’s faceplate, and something that might have been a mouth smiled. Or grimaced. Or it changed shape for no other reason than it could.
A sloppy voice asked, “Where?”
Pamir gave the coordinates, then with his own easy smile added, “This is only for us to know”
Orleans stared through the diamond wall of a packing crate, regarding its contents with his mutated senses. Perhaps no one appreciated a good machine more than a Remora, married as they were to their own bulky suits. “You’re on a hunt for neutrinos,” he remarked. Then he added, “I don’t believe in neutrinos.”
“No?” said Pamir. “Why’s that?”
“They pass through me, but they don’t touch me.” The nearly molten face managed to nod. “I don’t believe in things that mysterious.”
Both men laughed, each for his own reason.
“Okay,” said Pamir, “but will you do this for me?”
“What about the Master below us?”
“She doesn’t need to know.”
Orleans was smiling. The expression was sudden and obvious, and with the wormy green eyes staring at the captain, his smiling voice said, “Good. I like keeping secrets from that old bitch.”
Half of the original array was deployed out on the ship’s hull, thousands of kilometers higher and some ninety degrees removed from the remaining half, tucked into the vastness between a pair of towering rocket nozzles.
Calibrations and synchronization took time. Even when there was reasonable data, it proved stubbornly uncom-pelling. The universe was awash with neutrinos, and the ship’s hyperfiber hull and bracings distorted that mayhem into a pernicious fog. Removing every source of particles took time and a narrow genius. AIs did the tedious work. When they were finished, Pamir was left staring at a vague, possibly fictitious stream. Not corning from a point, no. It was a diffuse source aligned around the ship’s core: a soft white sheen of particles rising from a region even deeper than the deep hole.
Pamir found excuses to leave the detectors in place, reasoning that he could acquire more data over the next months and years. But the neutrino stream stubbornly continued to weaken, as if it were willingly and maliciously working to make him appear foolish.
The Master lost her last shreds of patience.
“I see that half of your toys are gone,” she mentioned. “To where, I haven’t been told. But the point is that we have potential hazards drifting inside a fuel tank. Still. Against my better judgment.”
“Yes, madam.”
“It’s a little more than thirty days to the burn, Pamir.” The Master’s projection approached him, glowering. “I want the freedom to use my hydrogen. And without even the remote prospect of getting your playthings caught in my throat.”
“Yes, madam. I’ll see to it immediately.”
She wheeled in a graceful circle, then said, “Pamir.”
“Yes, madam.”
She stared at him, admitting, “I think it’s time to quit digging. Or at least leave that work with the mining drones. They know the tricks as well as you do, don’t they?”