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3.1

03 February 2057

I.R.V. Intercession

Extra-Kuiper Space

208 A.U. from Earth


“How’s that engine doing?” Igbal asked.

“Fine,” Sandy said. She was a woman of few words.

“That’s all? Just fine?”

She looked up from her workstation. The two of them were alone on the bridge of the starship Intercession, currently blasting its way out of the solar system. Because they were at the front of the ship, Igbal and Sandy were the absolute farthest from Earth that anyone had ever been, and every second that passed carried them another five thousand kilometers farther out! The six other crew members, down below in the body of the ship, were ten or twenty or thirty meters farther behind in the journey, but Igbal and Sandy—perched at the top of a tower balanced on a beam of gamma rays—were setting record after record.

And at the end of the journey: the Beings. Intelligences of some kind, who had (sort of) made contact with ESL1 Shade Station, back in cislunar space. Calling humanity out for a meeting! How cool was that?

But Sandy Lincoln didn’t look excited by any of that. She looked annoyed.

“I monitor thirty different variables,” she said. “All nominal.”

Igbal knew: she looked annoyed because she’d designed the engine, and supervised its construction, so if she said it was fine, then it was fine. Also because she was a theoretical physicist, and this kind of monitoring task was very clearly beneath her—grad student work at best, or maybe even AI work. Could she ask Ptolemy—the crew concierge module—to do it for her, and report it to Igbal for her? Certainly.

And also because the engine was built around a two-meter sphere of antilithium, and if anything went seriously wrong, the ship and all hands aboard her would be converted to interstellar plasma before the numbers on Sandy’s screen even updated.

“Okay,” he said, not really satisfied, but taking her at her word.

“Ptolemy,” he said then, to the walls, “bring the lights up a notch.”

“Affirmative,” said the walls, in a soft, slow, calmly genderless voice. “Throughout the ship?”

“No, just here on the bridge.”

As requested, the rows of lights running vertically along the port and starboard bulkheads brightened slightly, casting a diffuse yellow-white glow that seemed a bit less like candlelight. It didn’t seem to do much for Sandy’s mood.

Igbal and Sandy had a history, romantically, but that never seemed to bother her. Igbal was the richest human being who had ever lived, anywhere at any time, but that didn’t seem to bother her either. She was kind of a scatterbrained person, and that enormous power imbalance had never really seemed to register for her at all. Hell, the antimatter drive core alone was worth more than the GDP of any country on Earth, and she considered it hers. Which, for practical purposes, it was.

No, what clearly bugged her was being dragged up to the bridge for no reason, to read numbers off a screen that she could have forwarded straight to her glasses from the comfort of the common room. The bridge was, in fact, as far from the engine as it was possible to get, without putting on a spacesuit. And it was cramped in here, and windowless. There weren’t even pretend, video windows, because there was nothing out there to see, and anyway you didn’t steer a starship that way. Really, you didn’t steer it at all.

But this was where the sensors were hardlinked, not just from the engine, but from every point on the ship and shield. From the communications array, the hibernation bay, the life support hub. It was the literal nerve center of the ship, and Igbal insisted that every non-frozen crew member climb the ladder up here once per day to give him a report. If nothing else, it gave them something to do. It gave him something to do. But also, yeah, a sense of how the ship was performing.

“Can I go?” Sandy asked.

“You have somewhere to be?” Igbal said back to her, with some amusement, because it was a small ship, at least on the inside, and there were only eight people awake.

“No,” she said, and turned to study the schematic of the ship on the display screen to her left. In the one-tenth gee of the drive’s acceleration, her hair was somehow fuller and frizzier than it had ever been in freefall.

Her hand traced the stations of the ship: drive nozzle, drive housing, aft particle shield, safety struts, hibernation bay, cargo deck, service deck, crew quarters, bridge, forward particle shield.

This was Igbal’s ship, the first crewed interstellar vehicle ever built. By any sensible measure, the Interstellar Research Vessel (I.R.V.) Intercession was decades or even centuries ahead of its time. Manifesting this had taken the wealth equivalent of millions of human lifetimes, and there was no way a government, or even a publicly traded corporation, was ever going to build a thing like that, for a mission like this. No, for this you needed someone rich enough to fund it out of his own pocket, and bloody-minded enough not to care what else could have been done with those resources.

For this, you needed Igbal Renz. His nation-sized solar collector, his particle accelerator, his Nobel-prize-nominated recipe for flipping matter into antimatter in macroscopic quantities. His absolute unwillingness to be told it couldn’t be done.

“I’m having second thoughts,” Sandy said, with a hesitancy that was wholly uncharacteristic.

“We all are,” he agreed. They were three months into a two-year trip to nowhere, and even though all eight crew members were experienced astronauts who had lived and worked on various space stations, this was . . . different. “But there’s no aborting, is there?”

“No,” she said.

If they turned the ship around right now, it would take another three months to decelerate to zero velocity, and three more to accelerate back toward the Sun, and then three more to stop again in the vicinity of cislunar space, where an ion tug could come and tow them the rest of the way back. So even if they gave up right now, right this very second, they’d still be gone for a whole year, without anything to show for it. Two trillion dollars down the drain, and the Beings still out there waiting.

“Do you need a hug?” he asked, without irony. This was hard. They knew it was going to be hard, but knowing it and living it were two different things. And Sandy was good people.

“No,” she said. Then: “Ptolemy, please display live video from the lip of the engine bell. Aft-facing,”

“Affirmative,” said Ptolemy.

A blank part of the control panel lit up with a rectangular display screen. The image, heavily processed, showed the Sun, with purple-white plasma streaking toward it. The Sun was just a bright star, now, no brighter than Venus on a summer evening in the mountains of West Virginia. The plasma was leakage from the ion thrusters that controlled the engine, and to the naked eye it would have been brighter than a welding arc, lit up by the tiny fraction of the annihilation energy that was released as visible light.

Sandy said, “Ptolemy, please display live video from inside the combustion chamber.”

“Affirmative.”

The order was ambiguous; Ptolemy might have chosen to replace the existing display with the newly requested one, or to place the two of them side by side. For reasons known only to itself, it chose the latter, and a new display appeared on the control panel, showing purple-white hellfire around a sphere of dark gray.

“Now give me audio.”

And here, Ptolemy could have gone a lot of different ways. It could have ignored the order as improperly formatted, and directed at nobody. It could have translated the output of the vibration sensors literally, which would have yielded nothing audible to human ears. It could have compressed the spectrum of vibrations and emitted a deafening scream of white noise. Instead, it chose to step the whole thing down to a low rumble, punctuated by high, quiet pinging noises as the ion emitters released wave after wave of lithium-deuteride plasma at 0.5c, fifty percent of lightspeed. It was an impressive sound.

“The flutter drive is working exactly like the models said it would, down to the third decimal place,” Sandy said. And now, she didn’t sound annoyed. If anything, she sounded tired. “That’s good, right?”

“Yep,” Igbal agreed. And it really was. The flutter drive—the engine around which Intercession was built—had gone from cockamamie hypothesis to working starship in a little under five years, because Igbal was able to find people like Sandy and set them up with basically unlimited resources. That, and because he had five and a half tons of antimatter to throw at the problem. The Manhattan Project was nothing compared to Intercession! Thanks to nanometer-level manufacturing fed by thousands of hours of quantum computing time, the drive apparatus was close to one hundred percent efficient at converting Lambertian gamma rays into a coherent, unidirectional exhaust beam. It was a mirror, basically, made of fast-moving plasma shockwaves. As little bits of antimatter flashed into pure energy (mostly 100 MeV gamma rays), the fluttering plasma kicked it all backward, out the exhaust nozzle, toward the tiny bright dot of the Solar System.

“It’s brilliant, Sandy. Do I not say that enough?”

“You do,” she acknowledged, and then went back to looking at the ship’s schematic.

Man, she was really struggling. Which was weird, because Sandy had lived for years at ESL1 Shade Station, a million miles from Earth, and it never seemed to rattle her. She took shore leave, like, every other year, but she never seemed to particularly need it. Igbal had never seen her like this, and as owner and captain of the ship, he had better think of something he could do about it.

“How’s your angular momentum theory coming along?” he tried. Ever since the Mach-Fearn drive prototype had failed, by spinning instead of accelerating in a straight line, she’d been trying to figure out why. Not in any sort of urgent way, it seemed to him, but in her spare time.

“Badly,” she said. “I underestimated the amount of computing power I was going to need, and we simply don’t have it here on the ship.”

“Hmm.” He scratched his jaw with a thumbnail, feeling the coarse bristles there. Intercession was equipped with computers that would have blown the socks off of anything available twenty years ago. But if Sandy said it wasn’t enough, it wasn’t enough. “Can you write the software here, and download it to the mainframe back at ESL1?”

“No. Our bandwidth is down to twenty-three kilobits per second. That’s fine for writing memos, but it won’t even carry a voice. As far as any kind of serious information processing, we’re marooned.”

“Ah. Shit. Sorry.”

Back in his youth, Igbal had used acoustic coupler modems with a higher bit rate than that. And the bandwidth dropped off with the square of the distance, so that number—bad as it was—was going to get a whole lot worse as they drew farther and farther from Earth. Truthfully, he’d been spending a great deal of his time sending and receiving memos, trying to run his company from afar, but even that was going to get more difficult.

“Not your fault,” Sandy said. “But it’s going to be a long time before I can make any progress, and meanwhile I’m just sipping mojitos in a damn hammock.”

He laughed. “There are worse things.”

“Yeah. I know. Don’t worry, I’ll figure out something I can do.”

“Attagirl. Creativity springs from limitations.”

She glowered at that, clearly unamused.

The problem was, she had a legitimate beef. The plan was for the ship to accelerate for six months in the direction of Alpha Centauri and then flip, decelerate, and stop at a distance of 0.05 light-years from the Sun. And then return along the same trajectory. This mission profile was consistent with fragmentary instructions received from the Beings—not guaranteed to work by any means, but it’s what they’d been able to put together on short notice. Hopefully it was far enough into “the dark between the stars” that the Beings would be able to talk to them.

Intercession carried ninety-two frozen passengers in its hibernation bay—all experts of various kinds—but a few people still had to be awake during the journey, in case something broke. Good, smart, competent people, whose morale tended to flag if there was nothing going on.

Oh, sure, the ship had passed the orbit of Mars on the fifth day of the Summit mission. Days seven through ten they sweated their way through the asteroid belt, fearful of hitting something. On day thirteen they passed the orbit of Jupiter, and then for a while it was a planet every week: Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and then the Kuiper Belt, which took nine whole days to get through, sweating again. Not that they ventured anywhere close to any known objects; the course and timing of their journey were selected to carry them through the emptiest possible corridor of space. But they were already going much faster than any human had ever gone; nearly three percent of the speed of light! There were particle accelerators that couldn’t achieve that kind of speed. And they were adding another 86 KPS—the speed of a really fast comet!—every single day. At that kind of impact speed, even a gram of stray matter could vaporize the ship.

Which was exciting, right?

But they were thirty degrees below the plane of the ecliptic, where matter was scarce, and once the Kuiper Belt was behind them, nothing happened for a long time. A few days ago they had passed the solar bow shock, and then yesterday they crossed the heliopause, entering the so-called interstellar medium. But there was nothing dramatic about that—just a passage from hard vacuum to slightly different hard vacuum, with the Sun already just a bright dot behind them.

So there was really, really nothing going on. Nothing to look at, nothing to do. The Solar System was just too absurdly huge to traverse in any sort of reasonable time. Even at this ludicrous velocity, they were still well short of the Oort cloud, whose inner edge they wouldn’t reach until the tenth month of the journey, when they were ass-forward and decelerating. The outer edge of the Oort cloud was something they wouldn’t reach at all, because that would have required a journey of eighty years, and would have taken them fully seventy percent of the way to Proxima Centauri. That’s how goddamn big the Solar System actually was.

So yes, people were antsy. Igbal himself was antsy—an emotion so unfamiliar to him that he almost didn’t know it when he started feeling it. He’d intended the daily status reports as an antidote for this; a chance for each crew member to brain in on their assigned duties. But the look on Sandy’s face told him everything he needed to know about how that was going. He realized, also, that the skill set of leading a multinational (indeed, multi-planetary) corporation did not automatically translate to being the captain of a starship on the very outer fringes of the solar system. Who knew?

“Well, shit,” he said. “We’re going to need a new plan. Ptolemy, assemble the crew in the wardroom, please.”


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