They were far enough away from Pictoris that the only decent illumination on the object was coming from their probe.
“Its magnetic field matches the signature of the other objects,” said Bill.
“Ajax is ready to go,” said Emma.
There was no known entry hatch anywhere, so Drafts would have chosen a spot at random. Which is what the Heffernan would do.
Emma and Sky were looking forward to celebrating their sixteenth anniversary the next day, although they hadn’t been married precisely sixteen years. Participating in experiments with the new hypervelocity sublight thrust engines had alternately speeded them up and slowed them down, or maybe just one or the other. He’d never been able to figure out relativity. He just knew the numbers didn’t come together in any way he could understand. But it didn’t matter. He’d had a lot of time with Emma, and he was smart enough to appreciate it. She’d told him once, when they were still a few months from their wedding, and were eating dinner at the Grand Hotel in Arlington, that he should enjoy the moment because the day would come when they’d give anything to be able to return to that hour and relive that dinner.
It was true, of course. Everything was fresh and young then. They hadn’t yet learned to take each other for granted. When he was tempted to do so now, he reminded himself that the life he had wouldn’t be forever, and if he couldn’t go back to the Grand Hotel when his romance with Emma was still new, when the entire world was young and all things seemed possible, it was equally true that he’d remember the hedgehog, and how they’d stood on the bridge together, watching it come close, a piece of hardware put together by God knew what, for purposes no one could imagine. A bomb. But it was still a moment that he savored, because he knew that, like the Grand Hotel, he would one day give much to be able to return.
Sixteenth anniversary. How had it all gone by so quickly?
“Relativity.” She laughed.
“Recommend Ajax launch,” said Bill.
“Okay, Bill. Keep in mind that we want it to snuggle up very gently. Just kiss it, right?”
“Just a smooch,” said Bill. He appeared beside them, wearing a radiation suit and a hard hat. Protection against explosions. His idea of a joke.
“Okay,” Sky said. “Launch Ajax.”
Warning lamps blinked. The usual slight tremor ran through the ship. “Ajax away. Time to intersection: thirty-three minutes.”
“Okay, Bill. Let’s leave town.”
THEY ACCELERATED OUT. Sky directed the AI to maintain jump capability, which required firing the main engines throughout the sequence to build and hold sufficient charge in the Hazeltines.
It was the first time in all these years that he’d been in this kind of situation, not knowing well in advance whether he’d have to jump.
“Out of curiosity—” she said.
“Yes?”
“On the jump, can you override Bill? If you had to?” The jump engines couldn’t be used until they were charged. That usually required twenty-eight minutes off the main engines. Any attempt to do a jump prior to that risked initiating an antimatter explosion, and consequently would be refused by the AI.
“We could do a manual start if something happened to Bill.”
“You know,” she said, “I suspect that’s what the hedgehog is loaded with, too.”
“Antimatter?”
“Yes. That would explain the magnetic field.”
“In what way?” asked Sky.
“Containment envelope. It’s probably what happened to Drafts. He did something that impaired its integrity.”
Sky shook his head. Who’d have expected anything like that out here?
EMMA WAS AN astrophysicist. When he’d warned her that marrying someone who took a superluminal out for months at a time might not be a smart move for her, she’d said okay, that she’d really wanted a tall blond guy anyhow, good-bye. And he’d tried to recover ground, said he wasn’t entirely serious, didn’t want to lose her, just wanted to be sure she knew what she was getting into.
It had taken almost two years to get the joint assignment to the Heffernan, but it had happened, largely because the Academy had a policy of trying to keep its captains happy.
They were both on the bridge, sharing, after all these years, their first moment of danger. The danger was remote, fortunately, but it added a dash of spice to the experience.
“Ajax has closed to four klicks,” said Bill. “Contact in eleven minutes.”
They could see Ajax, which looked like an insect, wings and legs spread, angling toward the spiked surface.
“Is it going to work?” asked Sky.
“If it’s what we think it is, Ajax will find the frequency and interfere with the magnetic belt. That should be enough. If it isn’t, it’ll start cutting the thing up with its lasers. One way or another, yes, it should work.”
Sky listened to the innumerable sounds the ship’s systems routinely make, whispers and sighs and clicks and the ongoing background thrum of the engines, boosting them to ever-higher velocities.
They talked occasionally about retirement, about her getting a job at home, maybe having the child they’d always promised themselves. Can’t really do that if you’re bottled up inside a container all the time. Virtual beaches are all right for adults, but a kid needs real sand.
Emma, reading his thoughts, nodded. “Time for something new?” she suggested.
“I don’t know,” he said uncertainly.
“There is this, Sky. Where else could we be this useful?”
Can’t hug her. Not while under acceleration. So he reached over and took her hand.
“Five minutes,” said Bill. “We are ready to jump on command.”
One of the screens carried the cloud, its image captured live through the telescopes. Sky thought the omegas possessed an ethereal kind of beauty. Not this one, because it was too dark, there wasn’t enough light hitting it. But when they got lit up by sunlight, they were actually very striking. He grinned at the unintentional pun.
Emma couldn’t see it. She thought they were the embodiment of pure malevolence. A demonstration that there were devils loose in the universe. Not the supernatural kind, of course. Something far worse, something that really existed, that had left its footprint among the stars, that had designed booby traps and sent them out to kill strangers.
Sky had grown up with the notion that evil inevitably equated to stupidity. The symbol of that idea was embodied in the fact that superluminals were not armed, that no one (other than fiction writers) had ever thought of mounting a deck gun on an interstellar vessel.
It was a nice piece of mythology. But mythology was all it was.
“Two minutes.” Bill loved doing countdowns. There was a picture of him on the auxiliary screen, sitting in an armchair, still safely tucked inside his suit, and with his helmet visor down.
“Bill, ready to bail if we have to.” There was no way to be sure the energy levels of the hedgehog were all the same.
“We are QBY,” he said. Ready to go. Bill favored the official terminology. He sometimes admitted to Sky that he regretted that starship life was so peaceful. He talked occasionally, and wistfully, of running missions against alien horrors that were determined to destroy civilization, to overrun Berlin and all it stood for. (Sky could never tell for sure when Bill was kidding.) The AI wished for pirates and renegade corporations, hiding in the dust of giant clouds. Clouds, he added, hundreds of light-years across, clouds that would make the omegas look like puffs of mist on a summer breeze.
Bill, this Bill, had a poetic streak. Sometimes he went a bit over the top, but he did seem to have a passion for flowers and sunsets and the wind in the trees. All a facade, of course. Bill had never experienced any of that, wasn’t even self-aware if you believed the manual. Furthermore, although the Academy AIs were compatible, and in fact most people thought there was really only one Academy AI, which sometimes simply got out of contact with its various parts, Sky knew that Bill was different on different ships. Sometimes the manifestation was withdrawn and formal, seldom showing up visually, and then usually in dress whites; on other vessels, on the Quagmire, for example (which Sky had piloted on a couple of missions), he’d been young, energetic, always advancing his opinion, usually in a jumpsuit with the ship’s patch on his shoulder. The Heffernan AI was philosophical, sometimes sentimental, inclined to quote Homer and Milton and the Bible. And apparently a fan of melodrama.
Sky was one of the few Academy captains who believed that a divine force functioned in the universe. He’d heard Hutch say one time that the notion of a God was hard to accept out here because of the sheer dimensions of the cosmos. Richard Feynman had made a comment to that effect. “The stage is just too big.” Why create something so enormous? Why make places so far away that their light will never reach the Earth?
But that was the reason Sky believed. The stage is immense beyond comprehension. The fallacy in Hutch’s reasoning, he thought, was the assumption that the human race was at the center of things. That we were what it was all about. But Sky suspected the Creator had made everything so large because He simply liked to create. That’s what creators do.
“Twenty seconds,” said Bill.
He watched the package move in. The hedgehog was rotating, slowly, once every thirty-seven minutes. The others rotated at different rates. It depended on the gravity fields they’d passed through.
“Ten.”
It closed and snuggled in against one of the object’s 240 sides.
“Contact.”
“Very good, Bill.”
“Thank you, sir.”
He looked over at Emma.
“Bill,” she said, “proceed with Ajax.”
“Proceeding.” And, a moment later: “Lockdown.” The magnetic couplers took hold. There had been a possibility that might have been enough to detonate the thing, but Emma hadn’t thought so. If it had no more stability than that, it would have gone up long ago. Objects drifting through interstellar space are bathed by particles and gravitons and you name it.
“You know,” said Emma, “I think I’m going to enjoy blowing this son of a bitch to hell.”
“There’s nobody in it.”
“Doesn’t matter.” She looked over at him. Her eyes were green, and they were smoldering. She didn’t share his faith in a benign creator, but she felt that the universe should be a place of pristine beauty and wonder. And most of all it should be neutral, and not loaded against intelligence. We’re the only reason there’s any point to it, she believed. Unless there’s someone smart enough to look at it, and appreciate its grandeur, and do the science, the universe is meaningless.