An idea for a story can come to me in any number of ways. For this one, I thought about supernovas, and how it might be desirable in a future, spacefaring era, to be able to tell when one is going to go off.
Well, how do you tell when one is about to go off? You have to study them to learn these kinds of things, right?
And when you’re watching all the potential supernovas relatively close to human settlement, and you can’t learn anything more from them until one goes off and potentially causes trouble for people in the neighborhood, you might want to expand the number of stars you’re watching so you can gather more data and make your forecasts more accurate before they’re needed closer to home. And that’s where these folks come in.
Still in progress.
The nanocom signal wasn’t urgent, so Captain Dan Stallman finished his immediate task before addressing it.
The call was from one of the scientists he had ferried across half of the explored galaxy (admittedly a limited pool from which to choose), Dr. Fastolphe. “I’m sorry, Doc. We’re having a hard time getting a handle on the local grav terrain. Are you sure you don’t want to move a few light-years away to look for firmer space?“ The ship—and the research platform it had towed here from Chantria—needed to be as nearly stationary as humanly possible relative to its target, a supergiant star some 100 light-years away, before launching the probe. And the ship’s G-drive couldn’t be active during launch, or for some minutes beforehand. Something about the extremely delicate instruments packed into the probe.
And there were more than 70 of these probes to launch, to targets ranging from 100 to 2,000 light-years away. This was a target-rich environment for Fastolphe and his team. Which probably explained why the gravitational terrain was so screwed up around here.
“I wish we could, Captain,“ replied Fastolphe’s nanocom avatar, a lifelike representation of him standing in Quicksilver’s main control room next to Stallman’s work center. “I understand it’s complicated trying to hold station against a target that far away. It’s only going to get harder as this mission proceeds.“
Stop trying to cheer me up, thought Stallman.
“We’re just wondering,“ continued Fastolphe, “how much longer you think this is going to take.“
“I wish I could tell you it won’t be another three hours, Doc. It looks like you dropped us in the middle of a huge invisible puddle of dark matter or something. Grav anomalies in every direction.“
Fastolphe’s avatar gave a little grimace. He looked—even in person, Stallman knew—more like a sales com-center geek than someone with a Ph.D. in astrophysics and the backing of three major Earthside universities trying to improve supernova prediction algorithms. “Well, we’ve run our calibrations four times already. Maybe we could run some simulations…“
“Don’t wear yourselves out, Doc. The way things are looking I might be able to get you a four-hour window for your first launch, and then God only knows how long it’ll be before we’re ready for the next one.“
Fastolphe sighed. “Understood. Thank you, Captain.“ The avatar faded, and after a second Stallman muttered, “My pleasure.“
“Dark matter?“ jibed Stallman’s second, Sayeesha Pike, who was actually in the room with him.
“Guy’s a scientist,“ replied Stallman. “What did you want me to tell him, gravity gremlins are jerking us around?“
She smirked. “It would’ve been funnier.“
“Take a break, everybody. The captain will signal us when our window opens.“ Fastolphe shrugged apologetically at the younger members of his team, most of whom shrugged in reply and blanked their avatars—their work centers were in other parts of the platform. In fact the only other person in the room with Fastolphe was an older man who sighed and sagged back in his chair.
“Dr. Litovsky…?“
“No, Andy, the captain’s right. We’re so well prepared it should only take a few minutes from ‘go’ to launch.“
Fastolphe turned his chair in his mentor’s direction. “What about the dark matter? Could he be right about that too?“
Litovsky nodded. “I should have anticipated it, this close to a dense cluster of supergiants. You don’t light up candles that big, that abundantly, without something extra in the mix.“ Then he turned a worried face to Fastolphe. “What bothers me is, if this is a dense accumulation of dark matter, could it have an effect on the timing of the supernova detonations? All of our work until now could be made worthless.“
Fastolphe tutted. “What, are you kidding? Knowledge is never worthless, you told me that. This is perfect! If you’re right and dark matter does have something to do with it, isn’t that something we need to know? And here we are! Yet another huge scientific breakthrough by Litovsky and Fastolphe!“
The younger man’s enthusiasm lifted his mentor’s spirits, and Litovsky chuckled. “And maybe no one needs to know I didn’t anticipate it, eh?“
“Right. And meanwhile, all the observations we’ve been working with closer to home, they’re still valid, and nobody will be harmed by the fact we didn’t factor dark matter into those calculations.“
After a moment of basking in Fastolphe’s optimism, though, the older man sobered. “All these centuries since the existence of dark matter was detected, and we still don’t know anything about it except that it affects the gravitational environment.“
“That, my friend and mentor,“ asserted Fastolphe, “is about to change.“
The long-range transport Quicksilver was a compact ship, by the standards of the class, with just enough space onboard for its drive and astrogation equipment, a crew of up to five and their necessities, and a small payload capacity that made it worthwhile in sectors where human settlement was sparse and far between. No mega-transports towing thousand-pod rafts were going to do regular circuits where inhabited systems might boast a hundred residents and be a hundred light-years from their nearest neighbors.
It did, nevertheless, have the ability to tow larger payload, and in this case that was the University of Texas research platform Bastrop, which unbeknownst to the scientists riding aboard it had been nicknamed Bastard by Stallman and his crew. The Bastrop dwarfed the ship and had space and facilities for as many as fifty scientists and technicians, as well as advanced long-range observation equipment and a docking bay for such probes or other remote devices as its mission might require. On this deployment the platform carried eleven scientists (mostly doctoral candidates hoping to build a thesis on their work) and five technicians—and 75 broad-spectrum observer probes designed to orbit within a couple of light-years of a supergiant star and send telemetry back to a receiving station that had already been left safely orbiting a yellow-dwarf star about twenty light-years away.
Stallman had thought the probe launches ought to be easily done from that location, but to save money for the probes themselves the team had obtained a small fleet of tow-drones designed for deep-space work, lacking the systems to deal with the kinds of steep gravity wells one would find within a few light-days of a small star and its planets. Given the anomalies at the site the scientists had preferred, though, Stallman doubted the drones would do much better returning to the Bastard here.
And even if they did manage it, at this rate the first drone would be back before the second was ready to go.
Stallman took a break from studying the grav map he and Pike had been compiling of their immediate vicinity, and glanced out the nearest window at the sky. Other than the fact there were more really bright stars than usual, it wasn’t really possible to tell they were within 100 to 2,000 light-years of a giant-star nursery, a cosmic creche where the heavy elements necessary to create planets and the stuff that grew on them, would come into being with one of these mind-bogglingly powerful explosions the scientists wanted to study. They could be right in among the supergiants, surrounded on all sides by the monsters—many big enough to produce black holes when they died—and the view would be no more interesting. Longtime spacefarers barely bothered to glance at such distant features, being far more interested in things close enough potentially to hit, or be hit by, their ships. Things like planets.
Funny gravitational terrain was nothing new, but rarely worth worrying much about, what with G-drive. Although no one seemed to know why some places out in deep space behaved strangely, the consensus among spacefarers was that they represented a kind of spatial “chop” caused by the movement of lots of really huge stuff. Stallman had read of rogue waves—caused by nothing more than multiple ordinary waves moving at different speeds and in nearly the same direction, briefly coming together and becoming immensely larger and more powerful—sinking ships on the oceans of Earth. He thought the gravitational “chop” theory made sense.
“It’s moving,“ said Pike suddenly, her confoundment seeming to flood the room as she spoke.
Startled, Stallman glanced around at the sensor board. “What’s moving? Where?“
“This feature,“ replied his second, sending an image to his nanocom with a thought. “See that one funny-looking gravitational feature, looks kind of like a cattywampus starfish? It’s not where it used to be.“
Until now the terrain around Quicksilver, while at the far end of Stallman’s experience, had seemed more or less steady. Stallman and Pike had reckoned that holding station relative to the anomalous features on the grav map should be good enough for Fastolphe and his team. “What’s it doing?“
“It was 200 billion klicks away the first time I mapped that area, and now it’s a good three billion klicks closer.“ At her work center, she was scanning the rest of the map and added, “It’s the only thing that’s shifted in the last four hours, Dan.“
“Could be a measurement error,“ Stallman tried, though that much error would threaten their confidence in the accuracy of the entire map. They’d be back where they started with four hours of work wasted.
“I’ve been spot-checking other features and they all match perfectly. This thing is moving toward us.“
“Directly toward us?“
Sayeesha Pike looked at him, frowning at his tone. “Close. If we just stood here and watched it, it would pass within about a thousand klicks of our present position.“
The feature was a small “bump” in the gravitational profile of local space, a spot from which matter would be repelled at an acceleration—all other forces being equal—of about a micron every two hundred years or so. There were more significant anomalies, but none of them were moving. Except for its inexplicable behavior, moving briskly but steadily away from the supergiant cluster, it would hardly be worth noticing.
It was too small to threaten the launch, but he’d never heard of a grav bump, or any other grav anomaly for that matter, moving so noticeably against a background of other such anomalies. “Keep an eye on it, I guess,“ he finally told Pike. “It’s spooky, but just because nobody’s ever seen it happen before doesn’t mean it’s something to worry about.“
“We’ve got all those scientists along for the ride, why not tell them about it? They might find it fascinating.“
“As long as they don’t decide we have to scrub the whole damn mission. We’ve spent six weeks getting here and it’s going to take another six weeks getting back, and I’d kind of like for there to have been something accomplished.“
Pike chuckled tolerantly and signaled Fastolphe’s nanocom with a recap of the moving-anomaly mystery, and Stallman’s assessment that it wasn’t a threat. It was tagged as low-priority so the astrophysicist wouldn’t feel the need to drop whatever he was doing to deal with it.
“I can’t believe we’re actually going to get this thing off so soon,“ observed Fastolphe’s avatar. “You led me to believe it would be several more hours yet.“
“Things started falling into place pretty quick,“ replied Stallman. “We’ll hold the platform steady while you move the probe out into clear space. Everything else is in your hands, Doc.“
“Thank you again, Captain.“ Fastolphe’s avatar faded out and left Stallman and Pike to the task of making sure other anomalies didn’t start moving inexplicably. The one Pike had spotted earlier had sailed right on by as predicted, and was still moving away from Quicksilver while the scientists did their business.
“The equipment bay hatch is opening,“ remarked Pike. “Do we need to worry about reaction to the probe’s leaving the bay?“
“The probe is what matters, once it’s floating free.“
The tow-drone emerged first, a compact G-drive with hypertranslation capability that would carry the drone to its target deployment site, drop it, and return to the Bastrop—a round trip of a couple of hundred light-years, all in the space of about a day and a half. Linked to the drone’s tailcone was the probe, a much less sleek construction bristling with a telemetry array rivaling that of the Quicksilver itself. As the linked pair drifted slowly from the platform’s equipment bay, ripples of modulated gravity pushed and dragged against the platform, causing it and the ship to yaw very slowly. Stallman saw that, if unchecked, Quicksilver and Bastrop would rotate less than 30 degrees by the time the drone returned. Once the probe was away, he’d be able to stop the drift with a minor tweak to the Quicksilver’s G-drive envelope.
At last in the clear, the drone towed its payload away and began initiating hypertranslation. An eerie pale glow began stretching out fore and aft of the tandem craft, lengthening as they accelerated, enveloping them. Next the cocoon of radiation would squeeze the drone and probe to the apparent thickness of monofilament, at which point they would disappear into the darkness, moving away so fast that light itself lagged behind.
“Trouble!“ barked Pike. Suddenly she seemed a mere shadow of herself, her voice thin, distant. Stallman thought to check telemetry but found his nanocom was silent.
“What happened?“ called Stallman across the room, shouting too loud because he was unaccustomed to having to communicate by sound alone.
“Big hyperwave spike just as the probe was translating,“ replied Pike, moving across the room to stand closer, and possibly access a failsafe display. “Too big to be resonance.“
A loud thump startled them both. Stallman lunged to a window and thought he saw debris—pieces of something manmade—drifting past in the glow of the Quicksilver’s running lights. “How big?“ he asked Pike, who noticed his face was paler than usual.
“If we’d been at translight when it hit, it would’ve snuffed us out like a candle.“ A ship moving at translight having no mass, a powerful enough hyperwave pulse could disrupt its signal, jamming it. Destroying it.
It took a lot, but that was what had just happened.
“The probe?“
“I don’t have instruments. If it was still undergoing translation when the burst hit, some of its mass might have reverted.“ She gestured at the window and added, “I hope that’s all that was.“
Stallman craned to look through another window. “Platform looks like it’s still there. See if you can roust Ironwood and get the nano back up—“
At that moment Stallman’s nanocom came back to life, albeit weakly. A text message scrolled across his view:
HYPERWAVE DOWN, NANO HIT BAD. SOME DRIVE AND SENSOR SYSTEMS STILL UP, OTHERS NOT RESPONDING. HYPERWAVE BLAST?—IRONWOOD
Stallman replied in the affirmative and requested a time estimate for the engineer to repair the damage. Ironwood responded that he hoped to have sensors nominal in a few minutes.
CAPTAIN, WHAT JUST HAPPENED?—FASTOLPHE
“It was my fault, Captain,“ said Dr. Litovsky. “I was responsible for knowing the orientation of all the supergiants we planned to study, and I should have known where each one’s axis of rotation was aimed before we chose our launch site.“
Both of the scientists had ventured aboard Quicksilver for this conference, since Ironwood, having fixed the sensors, was concentrating on drive systems before improving on the bare-bones nano functionality he’d already re-established.
“A star’s axis can wobble,“ said Fastolphe in his colleague’s defense. “It can take years of observations to see just how much, and where.“
“We were impatient,“ added Litovsky. “And lucky, that only the probe was lost.“
“I guess we’ve got about fourteen hundred years before the gamma ray burst gets here,“ said Stallman. “We ought to be able to get our work done and be gone before then. And it evens out, right? One less probe, one less star.“
“We’ll need a couple of hours to get a new probe ready to go, and of course we’ve also lost a tow-drone,“ said Fastolphe. “Hopefully this is our quota of major malfunctions for this mission.“ His chuckle fell a little flat when he saw that neither Stallman nor Litovsky were joining in. Stallman noticed that Pike was at his elbow.
“The star that went up,“ she said quietly in the captain’s ear, “was on a direct line with the motion of that grav anomaly.“
Stallman stared at her a moment, at first not grasping why she was offering this bit of information, or even why she had sought it out. “You think it had something to do with the hyperwave pulse?“ he asked out loud.
Seeing that the guests were to be brought into the conversation, Pike shrugged. “It would be a hell of a coincidence otherwise.“
Stallman looked at Fastolphe. “Did you ever get that message we sent you about the moving anomaly?“
The astrophysicist’s expression was Stallman’s answer. “What moving anomaly?
True to his reputation, the Quicksilver’s engineer had all essential systems up and running before the scientists aboard Bastrop were ready for the second launch. Also true to his reputation, he had some thoughts on how to strengthen the ship’s systems against a hypothetical second such hyperwave blast. Stallman asked him to provide specs, since it was unlikely any of the proposed modifications could be done until the ship returned to port. Then Stallman told Pike he was going to take some downtime. “And when I come back, you’re taking some too.“
“No argument from me, Cap’n,“ replied the second. Qualified for captain herself, Pike could handle anything that came up, provided it didn’t trigger any of Stallman’s ‘Call. The. Captain. Now. PERIOD.‘ policies.
There weren’t many of those, but there were a few. And after the last launch attempt the odds of one coming into play were slightly better than normal. Then again, the only way Stallman was going to be able to achieve downtime was with induced sleep.
Knowing how to balance conflicting imperatives went a long way to qualifying Sayeesha Pike for captain in Stallman’s eyes, even if such a talent counted for nothing in the official regs. Pike watched Stallman leave Main Control, then continued running sims on the newly repaired systems. They would all check out, but Ironwood’s much-deserved reputation also counted for nothing in the official regs.
About an hour later, with Bastrop running its early pre-launch countdown, Ironwood appeared in Main Control—so suddenly that if he hadn’t walked right up to Pike and handed her a data chip she would have thought he was on nanocom.
“The specs Cap wanted for those modifications,“ the engineer said before turning to leave.
“Wait,“ barked Pike. “You came all the way up here to hand me specs? Why didn’t you ‘com them?“
Halfway to the door, Ironwood stopped and turned. “I had to include some special diagrams, and my cross-platform protocols aren’t compatible with yours.“ He meant not just Pike’s, but ... well, anybody’s.
Pike sighed, knowing from long experience it was a futile argument. “I realize,“ she said sarcastically, knowing Ironwood could recite the imminent exchange all by himself, just as she could, “that your nanocom is an heirloom handed down from father to son for twelve generations of Ironwoods, but you have a job now. Income. You can buy a new one.“
“I like the security features in this one,“ he replied blandly. “I don’t want anybody hacking my stuff.“
“All nanotech has security features, Ironwood.“
“I like these. After this version they went to all that multi-layered interface, software security mumbo-jumbo. When your ‘tech is compatible with everyone else’s, you’re more vulnerable.“
Pike shook her head and turned away, dismissing the rest of the pageant. She had work to do and so did he.
“There’s integrated, and then there’s integrated,“ he added before leaving—thus sparing her his usual disquisition on the danger of having all your thoughts and memories living on a network instead of inside your own head. You can’t hack wetware was another of his favorite truisms. If his choice of personal nanotech weren’t so outdated that if affected his efficiency at his duties— Except, of course, it didn’t seem to. The thought of him being even more efficient with up-to-date ‘tech was too scary to contemplate.
Fastolphe and Litovsky allowed their younger associates to prepare the probe for launch while they studied the observations made of the even-more-anomalous gravitational anomaly.
“Its motion is steady from the point where its motion was detected until the sensors failed during the launch accident,“ observed Fastolphe. “Miss Pike said when she tried to locate it again after sensors were restored, it had either passed out of range or dissipated.“
Litovsky nodded absently. “How could it have been triggered hours in advance of the supernova, and at such a distance from it?“
“Gravity is still largely a mystery,“ said Fastolphe. “You and I have never really believed it was explained by General Relativity.“
“We’ve never actually seen evidence that it wasn’t.“
“Until now?“
The older scientist scowled. “There’s something wrong about it, Andy.“
“It looks non-causal,“ said Fastolphe, as if that explained everything.
“A lot of things look non-causal—“ said Litovsky impatiently.
“Exactly. But that’s why it looks wrong—it argues that the imminent detonation of a supernova is affecting the environment well in advance of anything we’ve ever detected by studying the stars themselves. Maybe we should have been watching how space around the stars behaves.“
Litovsky looked sharply at his colleague, then laughed. “We don’t have time to reconfigure this probe to do that, but maybe the others?“
“Way ahead of you.“ Fastolphe thought a diagram into Litovsky’s nanocom. “In fact, if we were willing to postpone this launch…?“
“No,“ said Litovsky flatly. With a lopsided half-smile he added, “If Captain Stallman didn’t kill us, some of them,“ he tilted his head toward the rest of the launch prep team, “might.“
As if on cue, one of the doctoral candidates ‘commed in. “Dr. Fastolphe?“
Fastolphe suppressed a flinch. “Yes, Miss Prewitt?“
The astrographer looked embarrassed, and the ‘com channel flashed an encryption glyph, locking out everyone but her and Fastolphe. “Doctor, is it possible there’s an unaccounted-for massive body between here and SG-214 Epsilon? I’ve been trying to lock in coordinates for the tow drone but there’s what looks like a huge gravitational lensing problem. This low-rent astrogational system can’t compensate.“
Without speaking, Fastolphe accessed the interface Prewitt had to use to input the coordinates, and almost couldn’t recognize the picture as being sky at all, let alone the right part of it. “Have you checked the equipment?“
“Four times.“ Using her nanotech she shifted the view slightly away from the target star, and the picture cleared instantly. “There’s obviously something between here and the destination.“
Fastolphe had to agree. “Check with Lawson or Pandrashagan, see if they can get a clear enough look at that piece of sky to figure out what’s going on.“
Prewitt ended the contact, and Fastolphe filled Litovsky in on the newest problem. “If I didn’t know better I’d suspect sabotage. I’m going to have to let Captain Stallman know about this. Maybe he or one of his people can come up with something.“
Litovsky looked troubled. “Superstition is unbecoming in a cosmologist, but…“
“Believe me, I sympathize.“
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