Exploration (12 page)

There were some significant limitations to the solution set the AI had developed. As Jason understood it, while it was indeed a function of both the vector and the angle of incidence to supermassive black holes axis of rotation, success was also a function of brute strength. The turbulence would be greatly reduced but not eliminated. Excess energies would be dissipated along a broad spectrum of frequencies across the actual jump interface. If the ship's active hyperfield shielding should fail or be disrupted by the entry into transdimensional space, then the craft in question could be vaporized.    

Jason had wanted to take the
Yorktown
. He had argued that as the fleet's most powerful and experienced ship she was the logical choice. The admiralty board had disagreed. There were too many unknowns. WhimPy-101 had also volunteered. Unlike the crew of the Yorktown the WhimPy's intellect could be backed up prior to the attempt. That way only the physical shell of the WhimPy would be placed at risk. If everything worked as planned, 101 would set a return vector and bring the data back to the GCP.

Jason argued that while they were conducting experiments, Admiral Kimbridge was in the hands of slavers and cut off from any support whatsoever. Only when Admiral McMullen threatened to take away his command did Jason relent and stand down. Before he boarded the shuttle back to the
GCP Yorktown
, Admiral Faragon stopped him in the gangway. He shared a simple observation learned in his childhood and taught in Sunday school to children for hundreds of years.

God, give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,

Courage to change the things which should be changed,

and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.
[1]

The mood in the nexus hub was decidedly somber. A series of four suspended trolley cars had been setup on two separate cable runs across the chasm of the central shaft. Cat had been correct when she characterized her discovery as a cause for concern.

This side of the nexus was indeed in a much better state of repair. As a result they were discovering more about the people who had built this facility. Ben and a team from the
Bluefin
had been able to adapt a Modos generator to feed current into the local power grid. A number of lighting systems and control consoles were beginning to show signs of life.

Wall panels that had appeared to be simple white rectangles unexpectedly turned out to be interactive lighting fixtures and data displays. With a series of tentative flickers the panels began to glow with a gentle broad-spectrum white light. The central nexus was properly lit for the first time in the better part of an eon.

The lighting was a welcome addition. As more and more systems came back online the panels began to change their behavior.  Several of them began to display dynamic status information. Cat couldn't read the text but the graphical map depicting the physical layout of each of the levels was easy enough to follow.  The displays seemed to indicate a number of failed systems on each of the levels.

Cat noted that each of the levels was connected by a series of four glass vertical cylinders. The glass cylinders were pneumatic elevators not dissimilar from those used on the
Bluefin
. Using them as a spatial reference Cat quickly identified other features within the map's display.

Most prominent of these were the various control stations near the central nexus on each level. They seemed to be weapon control consoles. Where exactly the weapons they controlled were was anybody's guess. Ghostly virtual displays with what appeared to be missile bays that seemed to be depleted floated near each of the consoles. The more she explored the map, the more weapon control systems she seemed to find. It rapidly became apparent that the primary function of this are
a—
if not the entire facilit
y—
was tied deeply into the maintenance and operation of weapons systems.

The most startling discovery was the labeling on the control panels. It looked to Cat to be some type of Cyrillic, but in point of fact it was an early Modos alphabet.

This, combined with the hammock seats and the fact that the plant-life on this planet/moon seemed to be directly suitable for Modos and Bearephant consumption, led to an uncomfortable conclusion. This moon was very likely the long-lost Modos home world. This conclusion raised its own questions. What happened to this world and these people? What caused so much time and energy to be spent developing machines of war?       

"A penny for your thoughts?" Running Stream said as he saw Cat staring off into the distance across the chasm of the central nexus.

She smiled wanly at the creature that she was coming to see as a friend. "Do you even know what a penny is?" she asked.

"My understanding is that it is a piece of copper alloy more valuable as a construction material than as an instrument of monetary exchange. As such its value is somewhat limited."

"And this is what you would offer for an insight into my thinking?"

"I'm feeling generous today," he said with a grin.

Cat looked across the chasm with her eyes but in her mind she was looking across the eons that had passed since people had last walked these corridors.  "Your people were here... long ago. They fought. People died. Why is it I have a feeling that an extension of the same war is revisiting this world?"

"We don't know that," Running Stream whispered. "The conflict here could have been something entirely different."

"True
,”
Cat agreed
,“
but if there is one thing I've noticed about the universe, any universe, it is that it loves symmetry."

"Perhaps we should let history tend to itself. Whatever the reason these people fought and died, it is buried in antiquity. For us today, the suffering is real."

Before Cat could respond they were interrupted by the harsh blaring of a klaxon. She immediately toggled her commlink and set it to public mode so Running Stream could hear the conversation as well.

"Ken, we are hearing an alarm of some sort. Any clues?"

The
Yorktown's
First Officer's voice seemed to emanate from the air in front of Cat. "That may be my doing Admiral. Ben and I were working on the power interlinks. We were trying to bring the pneumatics back online."

A soft rush of cooler air coming up from the central core indicated something was stirring. Just as Cat was noticing the minute movement of the air, an electric crackling filled the expansive chamber with a sudden snap that reverberated off the far walls. It was accompanied by the distinctive smell of ozone. The klaxon stopped. Cat could now see a slight shimmer surrounding the chasm. She doubted it would be visible to the unaided ey
e…
be it Modos, Bearephant, or human. Apparently some type of force field had established itself to prevent one from falling into the open chasm of the nexus. To test her theory Cat extended a tentative finger towards the barrier. She felt a proportionate back-pressure. If she pressed with two newto
n’
s of force, the back pressure was exactly two newtons. She smiled. The shield was a very well-designed hyperfield force inverter, not dissimilar to what the GCP used to shield their starships.

When the pressure of her finger exceeded five newtons, or about half a kilogram, a deep thumping sound could be heard. Apparently there was an auditory component to this protective shield. The thumping got Running Stream's attention. Unlike Cat, he could not see the force field.  He watched as Cat continued to push at the field with the tip of her finger. As she pressed harder the volume and frequency of the thumping began to increase. As she reached her limit for a single finger, a force equivalent to about eight hundred kilograms, the auditory alarm switched to a voice and the lights began to strobe.

The voice was most particular. Cat could identify individual components as words but she had no idea what was being said. Nothing in her Heshe encounter unit was familiar with it and it did not seem to be related to the Modos language that her former captors had been using when they first met. She pulled her finger back and looked at Captain Running Stream. To her eyes he appeared catatonic.

"What did it say?"

Running Stream shook his head in disbelief and looked at her as if truly seeing her for the first time. His mouth opened and then closed without saying a word. Finally he lowered his eyes and said in a very soft voice. "The voice said: 'Be careful. This service screen is not designed for prolonged deterrence.'"

"That makes sense," Cat mused to herself. Seeing the continued and mysterious look of shock and awe on the captain's face she continued. "There was something more... wasn't there?"

Running Stream shook his head. "That is all that was said, but not all there was to hear. The voice and language were Suhti
i—
the race you call 'Bearephants.' They barely have a spoken language and are only a little more intelligent than domesticated animals, and yet the speaker was articulate. It did not sound like a symbiote."

"And a symbiote would not explain why the speaker would be using Suhtii rather than a Modos language."

Before they could speculate further the pneumatic tubes began to hum and Cat saw a series of silver elevator cars approach several of the tubes, including the one closest to them.

"It would appear Commander Kirkland has opened
several
additional doors of inquiry," Cat said while walking toward the tube.

***

The
Honey Dipper
sat locked in gravimetric restraints in a spacious shuttle bay on the Modos cruiser the MS Vengeance. The badly damaged craft had been brought directly onboard the larger ship once its captain, Ricky Valen, had explained over a radio link that they no longer had a working airlock and structural integrity was failing. The little ship was now empty. Its meager crew had been cut out with a plasma torch. All seemed quiet. The
Honey Dipper's
powerful resident AI sat dorman
t—
waiting for the right time to act. Secretly it cataloged its surroundings so it would be ready for action when the time came.

Ricky Valen and Honey were handcuffed to each other with magnetic restraints. The room they were in was a medical facility of some sort. The staff members of the facility were in a hushed discussion. It seemed some earlier excitement in the medical bay had caused them to rethink how they were going to approach the two newest passengers on the
MS Vengeance
.

As part of a prearranged 'demonstration,' Honey had allowed herself to be led away from Ricky towards the other side of the medical bay. As the distance between Ricky and Honey increased and it became abundantly clear that the two were being separated, she pretended to frantically resist the effort to move her further from Ricky. Both she and Ricky collapsed when the space between them exceeded ten or so meters. Immediately, out of both confusion and a concern for their health, both were picked up and moved to medical examination tables. Dead slaves didn't sell well at market.

The act of bringing them closer together seemed to revive them. The medical had been at a loss to explain what was happening until a blue-skinned, white-haired Ricky Valen had explained that members of their race, the Aenar, were telepathically linked when betrothed. Separation became a physical impossibility as marriage in their species was for life. Of course, the Modos had no way of knowing that Ricky and Honey only appeared to be a fictitious race called the Aenar because of trillions of sub-dermal nanites that had been programmed by Honey to change the appearance of the two of them from human to something the Modos would be unfamiliar with. This effectively insured they would not be separated, which greatly simplified things.

***

WhimPy-101 closed all the injection ports on his forward facing thrusters. He scanned the area ahead to confirm the absence of even microscopic dust. There were a few scant particles that had drifted in. He scooped them out of the way with a gentle repulsion field. Billions of the hyperfield nodes that dotted the exterior of his asteroid hull were flooded with precisely tuned amounts of energetic exotic matter. A series of overlapping hyperfields were formed, and the giant Heshe platform began the process of falling through time-space.

The super-massive black hole known as SgA sat directly in front of him. His thought processes, tens of thousands of times faster than the best human-built AI, allowed him to linger in appreciation of the beauty of the sight before him. Energies that had not been seen since the Creator had blinked the universes into existence with the Big Bang were now on display around him. The dazzling violets and blues, and reds, and even greens... cascaded across his shields. Billions of times a second he adjusted the dynamics of those shields to ensure these energies, which were as deadly as they were beautiful, remained outside. Should they be allowed to touch the comparatively delicate shell that was his asteroid hull, even for the briefest of a second, his ship would be destroyed before it could emerge in the 'beta-verse.'

The dilation of perceived time was an unusual and unexpected phenomenon. This was in itself exciting. For the Heshe defense platform, very little ever happened that was unexpected. 101 reveled in the experience for several entire milliseconds. Once he was done admiring the novelty of his situation, he proceeded to determine why this dilation was occurring and what impact it might have on the successful outcome of his mission.