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32




“I have performed a regression analysis of Magellan’s trajectory data. It agrees with the profile we calculated to one standard deviation.”

Traci chewed on a thumbnail as she examined their path through the wormhole, still astonished at the nerve Jack had mustered to venture through it—and that was without a cold-hearted AI threatening to shoot at him. “That’s not a very large bubble of uncertainty.”

“It is not. But given the environment it will be sufficient.”

“Will it?” Of course it will, she told herself. It had worked once before. All they had to do was follow his lead—in a spacecraft massing over a thousand metric tons at a relative velocity north of a hundred thousand kilometers an hour. It was tempting to accelerate all the way through; get in, get out. The less time spent in bizarre non-space, the better. “The wormhole’s integrity depends on negative energy which we still don’t understand. For all we know, one more trip through could unbalance the whole thing.” Leaving us God knows where.

Bob was dispassionate as usual. “The fact that they are able to communicate from the opposite side suggests it will remain stable.”

That felt like small comfort. Radio and light waves compared to Columbus blazing through, leaving a miles-long trail of nuclear plasma? But if matter and energy were constant, in one sense interchangeable, then any disturbance, no matter how slight, should collapse the portal. That it had been transited once without collapsing should be enough to confirm it was stable. She had absorbed all she could of the prevailing theories, a good deal of which had been tested by Magellan’s successful passage.

He’d also warned that her perception of time would be thrown off-kilter. A journey of weeks might feel like minutes. How had he perceived that? How had Daisy, for that matter? She added it to the litany of questions she’d have for him on the other side.

Traci realized she’d already decided this for herself, long ago. The moment she fired up the fusion drive and left Earth orbit put her on an irreversible path. It was time for the last leg of the journey. Time to finish what she’d started.

Her fingers hovered over the master computer, knowing it was waiting for her final command. She took one last look at the revised flight plan, sucked in her breath, and reached for the keypad:

COMMIT.


“We have established line-of-sight communications with the UN vessel. I am on the same command frequency as its control center and have successfully accessed its environmental control logic.”

She eyed the plot of their position and velocity relative to UNSEC-1 and its trailing weapons satellite. Sentinel’s warnings had arrived at an ever-increasing rate as they drew closer, finally leading her to mute the channel. If she were going to thread this needle, she didn’t need the distraction of enemy chatter. “Any chance Sentinel’s on to you?”

“There is always a chance but I suspect not. Trace logs show it is not actively monitoring the coolant subroutines, only overall system stability. Are you ready for me to access the MSEV as well?”

“Batteries are on but they’re down to eighteen volts at six amps. Barely enough to power the guidance platform and thrusters. Safeties are disabled so you’ll have full control authority, but there’s only a bit over six percent left in the maneuvering jets.”

“That will be enough. Are you ready to proceed?”

She watched the event timer, recalibrated to count down for their radically changed maneuver plan. There would be no rendezvous with Magellan’s abandoned excursion vehicle or the UN ship. She sucked in her breath. “Ready as I’ll ever be. Light ’em up.”


Whether occupied by humans or not, a spacecraft’s vital electronics simultaneously generate potentially damaging amounts of heat while being exceptionally vulnerable to it. Deep within UNSEC-1’s environmental control system, a complex network of pumps and valves kept a continuous flow of liquid ammonia moving between its sensitive electronics and the array of radiators mounted along its outer hull.

There were multiple redundancies built into this system, allowing for the malfunction of different components without triggering a cascade of failures that would put the ship in jeopardy. This of course assumed that the remaining pumps, valves, and solenoids would continue functioning within their programmed sequence. Its designers had not considered the possibility of UNSEC-1 receiving commands that would instruct it otherwise. And the ship itself could not distinguish the difference; it was just another software update arriving over the command frequency.

When the first pump went offline, its downstream network of valves and heat pipes diverted coolant flow to a secondary pump. When that shut down as well, the flow went idle and heat began building up throughout the loop. This triggered another diversion of liquid ammonia into an adjacent system, which also began experiencing the same mysterious glitch as its pumps and valves began to trip. It would be several hours until its control team on Earth began to see the cascading failure; until then the ship took action on its own. A preprogrammed set of commands began to shut down its heat-generating electronics, beginning with the less vital external equipment pallets. As more radiators became idle, more important systems were switched off in turn so that heat would not build up to damaging levels.

A flurry of digital chatter erupted between the ship and its mechanized master known as Sentinel, its AI triggered into a scramble to diagnose its companion’s sudden onset of dangerous ailments.

Had UNSEC-1’s control cabin been occupied by humans, they’d have felt the air growing uncomfortably warm as the remaining electronics surrendered their heat to its atmosphere. This was the final remaining barrier. When a pair of outflow valves in its docking node inexplicably opened, the ship’s atmosphere escaped into space, taking its precious thermal conductivity with it. Within minutes the ship’s remaining electronics would become dangerously overheated. Just as human organs begin to progressively fail from heatstroke, UNSEC-1 began shutting off its most vital functions before they were irreparably damaged.

The spacecraft became idle, drifting along its orbit with no control or ability to communicate its peril. Sentinel took notice.


Their interactions with the orbiting weapons platform had become almost laughably routine, were it not for the imminent threat of a megawatt laser pointed at them. “Columbus, you are approaching a United Nations Exclusion Zone. You must remain outside a ten-thousand-kilometer radius of the Anomaly or—”

“We’ll be fired upon,” Traci finished in unison. She’d hoped there might be some telltale distraction in the platform’s synthetic voice, a sign of trouble brewing. She activated her mic. “Columbus copies. We are preparing to alter our trajectory.” Just not in the way you want. “You’ll barely notice us, Sentinel.”

“Your reply has been registered, Columbus. Thank you for your cooperation.” Now it sounded like a garden-variety annoying chatbot of the type ubiquitous to automated phone menus. Perhaps it was programmed that way, or perhaps its attention had been diverted to the foundering UNSEC-1.

“I don’t think it’s going to find us as cooperative as it would like.” She made a quick check of the navigation screen, with one curve continuing on to their original orbit while a second dotted line extended away on a tangent. As they moved toward that intersection, her free hand hovered over the drive controls. “Main engine burn coming up in thirty seconds. Ready for our next move, Bob?”

“Ready on your mark.”

This had better work. She counted down silently to herself, then: “Mark.” There was the familiar press of acceleration as the fusion engines exploded to life, building up to full thrust and aiming them straight at the center of the wormhole.


After years of drifting freely along its orbit, the newly active MSEV turned with a ripple of reaction jets along its waist to point itself at Sentinel. A pair of larger orbital maneuvering rockets in its tail flared with white fire, pushing it inexorably toward the weapons satellite.

Aboard Columbus, Traci was monitoring the universal frequency. “Attention unidentified vehicle. You are presently on a collision course. Alter trajectory immediately or you will be fired upon.”

“For an AI, it’s not very clever,” she noted as their engines pushed them near a full one-g acceleration. Velocity was mounting quickly. “Is it seriously not on to us yet?”

“It will be shortly,” Bob said. “Sentinel, I am the Artificial Intelligence Crew Support System aboard Columbus. My operators call me Bob.”

The weapons satellite’s tone did not change. “If you are in control of the support vehicle, then you must alter its trajectory.”

“I’m afraid that will not be possible, Sentinel. It has expended most of its orbital maneuvering propellant. Reaction control jets do not have enough thrust power to change its orbit.”

She anxiously studied their rapidly changing relative positions on her display. Two minutes until crossing the threshold; the weapon needed about that much time to recharge . . .  “Keep it talking, Bob.”

“Sentinel, we are unable to alter the excursion vehicle’s trajectory. You must alter yours.”

The synthetic voice seemed colder, if that were possible. “That is not acceptable.”

“Then we are at an impasse,” Bob said. There was a final burst from the MSEV’s rockets, draining its last bit of propellant to charge at Sentinel as Bob let loose a guttural electronic cry: “LEEROYY JEENKINNS!

Traci bit her cheek trying not to laugh. “Was that really necessary?”

“No, but it seemed appropriate. I am registering a rapid increase in skin temperature on the—”

Still over a thousand kilometers ahead of them, there was a brilliant flash as Sentinel’s laser burned through the MSEV’s thin hull, igniting its remaining oxygen. “Right on cue. Bob, give me a two-minute count.” She reached up to switch on a small camera and selected the uplink for HOPE Control.



HOPE Control

Grand Cayman


The comm officer shot upright in his seat when the burst transmission arrived, soon after telemetry showed the main engines had just ignited at full throttle. “Video message from Columbus,” he said, turning to Owen in surprise. Those were rare, needing most of their available bandwidth over the Deep Space Network. Over such distances they were saved for significant announcements.

“Put it on the big screen,” Owen said, praying they weren’t about to hear Traci’s last words.

The image was grainy, its fidelity attenuated by the extreme distance. She sat at Columbus’s flight station, her face illuminated in shades of yellow and green from the control screens in front of her. Behind her the empty engineer’s station flashed through its routines, being run by the AI.

“Sorry for the drama but stuff’s happening fast and I don’t have time to type out a message,” she began. “Comm laser’s the only thing that milsat calling itself ‘Sentinel’ can’t jam, so I might as well take advantage of it.”

She glanced up at the camera only occasionally, careful to keep her focus on the controls. “Bob managed to hack into UNSEC-1’s ECLSS and introduce a software glitch that shut down their coolant loop. That sent the ship into safe mode, which got Sentinel’s attention. Then we tried to ram it with Magellan’s MSEV.” A corner of her mouth turned upward. “If you’re reading our voice transcripts, you’ll see Bob had some fun with that. It went about as expected—the MSEV got blasted. But it created an opening.”

Owen turned to Roy and Penny with apprehension. An opening for what?

“The laser on a Qiang-1 milsat has a two-minute recycle time, which is about what we need to pass through its ‘exclusion zone.’” Her voice dripped with derision at that.

Around that time, the plot of Columbus’s orbit on an adjacent screen changed to show its new trajectory. Owen went white with the realization. She’s going through.

“By the time you get this, we’ll have entered the wormhole. I know everybody there is probably having kittens, but Jack’s on the other side so I don’t see the point in staying here. He’s the reason we came, right?

“UNSEC will reboot itself. They can sit there and take all the observations they want, but we’ve got places to be. I’ll keep relaying data but at some point I’m sure it’ll drop just like Magellan’s did. I expect it’ll be a while before you hear from me again.” Ripples began to appear in the video feed. She paused to collect her thoughts. “This is it, folks. We’re about to get a firsthand lesson in relativity. This is the last—”

The screen flashed white with a burst of static, then went dark.


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