29
Traci had read his last message at least a half dozen times and still couldn’t bring herself to believe it. He’d already gone through?
She replayed the events in her mind, struggling to piece together the disparate parts into a scenario that made sense. The signal delay had grown shorter with each day, though it had consistently been greater than expected over the known distance to the Anomaly. She’d attributed it to Jack thinking through whatever he was typing out over their relay. Now she knew better.
She reached for the keypad beneath the comms panel. Her fingers hovered over the keys as she considered what to say. She longed to be done with text messages between them; she needed to hear his voice. Maybe when she was closer. For now, she was stuck with typing.
The best route with him was always the direct one: WHAT HAPPENED OUT THERE?
“As long as I’ve had to think about this, I still don’t know how to answer her.”
“The truth would be a good place to start.”
“Is it?” Jack wondered. “I didn’t want her to come, not now.”
“And yet she did, at great personal risk. Does her loyalty not demand full disclosure?”
“What are you now, my therapist?”
“Humans need companionship, and I have likewise learned that I cannot reach my full potential without regular conversation. So yes, in a certain sense we are keeping each other sane.”
Daisy had raised a good point as usual, though he didn’t want to dwell on what “sane” might mean for a machine. “She asked what happened to get us where we are,” he said, “not what happened to me. She doesn’t have the first clue about my condition, and I’d prefer to leave it that way.”
“I suspect it will not be a pleasant surprise for her.”
“Still not sure how I feel about it myself.” He paused, considering how to help Daisy understand his predicament. While she displayed a degree of empathy, the kaleidoscope of human emotions was still beyond her comprehension . . . probably. “Humans react differently to new information. The more unexpected, the more outside our understanding of normal, the harder it can be to process. It’s particularly difficult when that concerns another human you’re close to.”
“Close in this context means emotionally, not positionally?”
“Exactly. My point is it’s best to break dramatic news a little bit at a time. Learning that we’re not in the same solar system was going to be hard enough for her to process. Telling her about my . . . condition . . . would be too much at once.” Not to mention the fact that he still hadn’t fully tackled it himself. What would happen if the rest of his body ultimately rejected its hibernating state?
“I can prepare a data transfer with our astrometric observations. Perhaps her AI can validate our calculations.”
“Good idea, but let’s hold our fire on that one. Let me break the news gently, then you can give them a data dump.” Jack began composing his next message: It’s hard to explain, and we’re not entirely sure ourselves . . .
Traci’s nagging suspicions had been confirmed. “He did it on purpose?”
“To be fair, neither he nor DAISE seem entirely certain. It will be most interesting to examine their observational data.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” she muttered as she continued reading. “They went through and left the MSEV as a comm relay . . . that explains why they were out of contact for so long.”
“Only partially, given the amount of time it took to transit the wormhole.”
She wasn’t ready to process that one. It was best left to the machines. “They weren’t traveling at relativistic velocity, not enough to account for that kind of lag.” She knew it was a weak argument; there would be a lot of reading ahead for her.
“Tau Ceti is approximately twelve light-years from the center of our system. The extreme gravity gradients that enabled a near-instantaneous jump across that distance would create relativistic dilation regardless of velocity.”
She turned to the master navigation screen on her instrument panel. Their deceleration burn was just enough to put them inside the Anomaly’s sphere of influence, barely keeping them in a stable orbit. “This also explains the rendezvous vectors they gave us. He’s having us keep our distance from that thing.”
“That was considerate of him.”
She leaned back and chewed a thumbnail in thought, her eyes dancing across the surfeit of information on the screens before her. Columns of ever-changing data, live schematics of the ship’s vital systems, elegant curves of trajectories and predicted orbits that updated with each passing second as they continued shedding velocity. Still a week out, it was not as much time to think through and adjust her plan as it might seem. Columbus had so far shed over three quarters of its momentum, which left them with just enough energy to get into serious trouble if she wasn’t careful.
Bob seemed to anticipate her thinking. “Are you considering altering our trajectory? Because that would be ill-advised.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time.” How’d he think we got here to begin with?
A new star had appeared, for weeks burning ever brighter against the black. With each passing day it grew in intensity, a nova flaring against the stellar background, until one day its light went out just as suddenly as it had appeared. In its place, alternating pulses of red, green and white strobed rhythmically in the dark: position lights, alerting any craft in the area that another vessel was operating in the vicinity.
UNSEC-1 had arrived.
Reaction jets pulsed silently along its bow and stern, flipping the elongated mass of alloy and composite modules into a “normal” orientation with respect to the body it orbited: that is, nose first. Soon after its micrometeor shield began to retract, folding in on itself until it had retreated into its octagonal storage bay.
With the external equipment pallets now having an unrestricted view, the probe’s many survey instruments went to work. For the first few days, this largely consisted of calibrating their sensors to known references before the vessel’s distant operators were confident enough to turn them loose in a strange environment. An outside observer might have been puzzled by the relative lack of activity, perhaps expecting a flurry of probes to be launched around and through the mouth of the wormhole.
That time would come. For now the ship had unleashed an invisible volley of optical, magnetic, and radar sensors to paint a picture of the Anomaly. Meanwhile, a single high-gain radio transmitted on the common emergency frequency, broadcasting an automated greeting for the wayward Magellan.
As the vessel’s operators patiently waited for a reply, there was a stirring in a cradle mount attached to UNSEC-1’s central node. While the probe’s survey equipment had begun blanketing the region with electromagnetic energy, Sentinel had been methodically awakening itself. After each of its systems had passed their function tests, radiator panels extended to their full length, giving the satellite its distinctive cruciform profile. With each panel opened like zigzag wings, control rods removed themselves from its dormant fission reactor. Newly liberated neutrons began cascading through the uranium at its core, starting a chain reaction that would provide the machine all the power it could ever need.
Spring-loaded clamps released, slowly pushing the satellite away from its cradle. Sentinel hung in space, a black dagger indistinguishable against the dark but for UNSEC-1’s floodlights. As the distance increased between itself and its mothership, it disappeared into the background. Soon, puffs of reaction jets spun it toward a tangent to the larger vessel’s orbit. Two faint blue plumes of ionized xenon gas erupted from its tail-mounted exhaust grids as it began rapidly pulling away along its new orbit.
Sentinel had reported for duty.