The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (16 page)

“It does look like TransHuman work,” Jeanine muttered a few minutes later.

“That has been the assumption,” I agreed. “You have proof?”

She moved the part of the map she had been studying onto my screen. “Even though I don’t understand the pattern as a whole, I can identify familiar parts: tubing to move gasses and liquids from one place to another; superconductor strip for power distribution. What I do not see are rooms for people to inhabit and corridors to connect them.”

“What about these?” I asked, indicating apparent passageways that squirmed through the interior like lost intestines.

“Check the scale,” Jeanine said. “They’re even narrower than the corridor on this ship. Too small for humans. And the ones I have been able to trace start and stop without really going anywhere.”

Too small for humans.
One of the nastier rumors about TransHumans is that they have been devoured by their own creations. According to their propaganda, a combination of genetic tinkering and electronic enhancement has pushed them beyond the evolutionary horizon. But some say that the artificial intelligences they created decided years ago that everything would go more smoothly without their biological partners. You may see images of humans transmitted from TransHuman planets, but that is all they are. Or at best, the AIs have maintained a small human population, which they completely control to interface with the human polities like the Dominion. I had always discounted these stories as Dominion propaganda. Now I was not so sure.

The map became stranger yet. Our rovers came across interior voids perhaps explicable as areas where construction was never complete. But then there were elongated gaps between sections, like crevasses or certain cave formations. At first, I thought they had been sheared apart by the explosion that made the crater. The more I studied them, though, the more they seemed intentional. For what purpose I had no idea.

An hour into the exploration, we started losing contact with some of the rovers. The radio frequencies we were using to control the rovers could not penetrate that far through the metal of the station. I pulled some of them back to act as line-of-sight relays, but that only allowed us to proceed another ten levels. We were going to have to do something different.

“Choose one or two most likely approach routes and concentrate on them instead of investigating all avenues at once,” Jeanine suggested. “We should have enough rovers to establish line-of-sight communication across the radius of the station.”

“Two problems,” I said. “How do you determine the ‘most likely’ routes? Even if you can, you are increasing the time to do a full examination of the station by an order of magnitude or more. If Shakeel is right, we don’t have that long.”

“I’m open to better ideas,” she said.

I did not have any, but command did.

“Wu and Kipnis to the bridge.”

Bridge was a grandiose name for a space that was little more than a cockpit. There was barely room for all three of us. Jansons was holding a pocket datascreen in one hand.

“I am about to read you on to ROGUE POSTULATE. ROGUE POSTULATE is a special access, higher than secret program. Unauthorized disclosure of any of the information you are about to learn is
per se
treason and may be considered a capital offense. Do you understand what I have just said?’

We did.

“Do you affirm that you will bear true faith with the Dominion and guard this information with your lives.”

“Yes.” The datascreen recorded our voices as legally unique identifiers.

Jansons cleared her throat. For the first time, I saw through some of the commanding-officer body language to the young woman underneath, a woman who was beginning to realize that she might be out of her depth.

“This is information that our people have gathered from Eternal sources. Their intelligence service has reason to believe that the TransHumans are attempting to engineer the creation of a white hole. This white hole would be a counterpart of the many black holes occurring naturally throughout the galaxy. Theoretically, it could be an infinite energy source. It could also lead to controlling gravity the way we now control electricity.”

“If it has that much potential,” Jeanine said, “why would they build it out here? They must have realized it would be vulnerable to attack. Why not locate it in the heart of their polity, where both construction and protection would be far easier?”

Janson’s smile was grim. “You would put it as far away as practical because infinite energy is difficult to control. Make a mistake, and you may get an explosion which makes a supernova look like a firecracker.”

Which certainly explained why the Eternals thought it worthwhile to send a strike force so far from home.

“The Eternal intelligence service obtained this picture of one of the crucial units necessary to generate the white hole,” Jansons continued. A hologram glowed into existence between us. The image was oddly unimpressive: a light gray, rectangular solid with rounded top edges. There were small projections from the middle of each side of the base but the image was too fuzzy to identify them further. A measuring stick, added to the image during processing, indicated that each side was about a meter long.

“And here are some of the images the two of you provided that triggered a security alert when I fed them into my computer.”

The picture changed and now we were seeing the feed from one of the rovers. It was in one of the rift zones. Scattered over the large, curved surface, looking almost like barnacles, were units identical to the one in the hologram from the Eternals.

“Our techs say that is a field distributor,” Jansons said. “Or a power generator. My guess is they don’t have a clue and won’t get one until they actually get one of those things to examine. Which is just what the two of you are going to do for them.”

In a display case in the Space Force’s school for combat engineers there is a cartoon which goes back to the days before space travel. Two guys are standing in a hole in the ground. Both wear helmets identifying them as combat engineers. It’s raining. Bombs are going off all around them. One guy says to the other, “Quitcher bitchin’ or I’ll send you back to the infantry.”

That is hundreds of years out of date and still the most honest assessment of what it means to be in the combat engineers. Recruiting commercials may show you repairing starships, building orbital stations or constructing space ports. In reality, you are often called upon to do technically complex tasks under the most dangerous and uncomfortable conditions imaginable.

Fifteen minutes after being briefed by Jansons, Jeanine and I were suited up for vacuum in the Specter’s forward compartment, just below the bridge. We checked our communications link and then our Omni-Tools, informally known as Otees. Depending on its setting, an Otee could be used as a signaling device, a knife, or a welding torch, or to put a hole through three inches of steel or twelve inches of human being. That done, I held the launching skeleton, looking like a gleaming coil of wire, above my head. I touched the activation button. The skeleton extended itself down the length of my body and then contracted until it fit snugly. Since I was now unable to move arms or legs, O’Connor had to attach the reaction tanks to the skeleton and slide me into the rail gun tube. He dogged the hatch at my feet.

It was completely dark. Have I mentioned claustrophobia before?

I felt the rail gun’s kick all over my body. Then I was in space with the Specter receding rapidly behind me. The heads-up display on the inside of my helmet showed my position on a line extending from the Specter to the derelict. Numbers showing my distance to the target unreeled in a race to zero.

Jeanine was on my right, just barely within my range of vision. Far below, lightning flashes illuminated the swirling clouds. I seemed to be hanging motionless in space.

There was time to think. One of the things I thought about was why Jeanine and I had to do this instead of a robot. It would have been easy to blame the Dominion’s prejudice against robots and artificial intelligence generally, but in this instance, involving TransHumans, it made some sense. A radio-controlled robot would be vulnerable to hacking. TransHuman technology was acknowledged to be better at that than we were at countermeasures. You might deal with that problem by removing the radio and giving the robot enough intelligence to complete the task. But then you would have no direct control. A robot with sufficient flexibility to surmount unforeseen problems might also have sufficient flexibility to reprogram itself.

“When we get there, I go in first,” Jeanine said.

“Why?” I asked.

“I’m smaller than you,” she said. “If I can’t fit through a passageway, you certainly won’t be able to.”

“Makes sense,” I said, not happy with the decision but with no logical counter.

The one weakness in the Space Force’s analysis was the assumption that humans, like me, might not change their own programming. Not that I was a natural rebel or an agent of either the Eternals or the TransHumans. On the contrary, I was proof that reactionary views are sometimes correct, that if you put men and women in the same unit their concern for each other may outweigh their dedication to the mission. Under most circumstances, this would not matter. If anything went seriously wrong—if, for example, the derelict turned out to be an elaborate trap—we would both likely be dead before we knew what was happening. Yet I knew, without reasoning it out or weighing the alternatives, that if it came to a choice between Jeanine and the mission, I would abandon the mission without a second thought. Call this short timer’s attitude if you like, or call it treason. It was who I was and what I would do.

The derelict was growing perceptibly larger with each second. Suddenly, one side of it seemed to ignite as it swung out of the planet’s shadow. My helmet polarized to make the brilliance bearable. It activated its auditory warning.

“Deceleration commences in three . . . two . . . one.”

No flames erupted from the launching skeleton, but I felt a pressure on my shoulders which quickly grew stronger as reaction mass jetted out in front of me.

The derelict transitioned from “over there” to “down below.” As it turned, the crater came into view, looking like a huge mouth approaching to scoop me up. I fell within it.

Deceleration ended. The launching skeleton spread away from me in pieces. Half a dozen rovers, under O’Connor’s control, swarmed around us as guides. Now the side of the crater was a wall bearing down on me implacably as I fell deeper. I fired a tether from my wrist, hoping the glue on the tip of the dart would work on whatever material it hit. The line went taut and swung me gently to the side. I bounced once and came to rest. A moment later, Jeanine was beside me.

“Our entry is about thirty meters further in,” she said.

I followed her and experienced one of those shifts in perspective which literally make some people sick. As we had been approaching, visual cues made the derelict and the crater in particular seem to be “down.” Now that we were on the side of the crater, however, the rotation of the derelict was providing a constant mild centrifugal force. As a result, we now had to climb “up” to move deeper into the crater. There was no shortage of handholds: sliced cables, shattered pipes, gaps which might have been designed for storage of some kind. Moving carefully, it took ten minutes to find our entry spot.

“Are you certain?” I asked when we reached it. “We passed at least three larger entries.”

“All dead ends,” she assured me.

“I confirm that,” O’Connor said from his work station back on the Specter.

“A rover goes in first,” Jeanine said, “then me, then you. The remaining rovers will trail behind you, establishing line-of-sight communications back to the Specter. Now let’s hook up in case one of us gets stuck.”

We did so, and then I followed her in. The first part wasn’t too bad. My helmet provided enough light for me to see that I was in a featureless tube. The line connecting me to Jeanine stretched out ahead until it was lost in the dimness. I advanced with a microgravity swim, pushing myself forward with my toes, guiding my trajectory with my hands.

“It gets a little narrower here,” Jeanine warned.

Narrower was not the word for it. The tunnel constricted itself into an S curve. I tried to imitate a snake and slither through. At the top of the curve, my shoulders wedged against both sides of the tube. My feet slid off the surface behind me. Trying to move forward on my elbows just wedged me in tighter.

“Jeanine, I’m stuck at the top of the S. I’m going to pull back and try a different angle of attack.”

My feet still could not find any purchase. I imagined being stuck there indefinitely. My suit could recycle air but I would die of thirst.

“Stop trying to move either way,” Jeanine said. “Just stretch your arms out in front of you as far as they will go. Relax. Go limp!”

“And if that doesn’t work?” I asked.

“No problem. We’ll just deflate your suit.”

I did as instructed. There were two sharp tugs. Neither seemed a serious effort to extract me. Rather, she seemed to be testing her own leverage and how tightly I was caught. Then a prolonged pull of steadily increasing pressure. I was just starting to wonder if this could make a bad situation worse when I popped forward like a champagne cork.