Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3) (21 page)

It was a surgical scar. A scar from the groundbreaking surgery that had removed William’s brain, brainstem, and spine in their entirety, to be placed in the first Phase Thirteen body, William’s body, the first full union of man and machine.

Behind his old body’s closed eyelids no eyeballs sat, they had gone with the brain they were attached to. Those eyes were the only part of the real William to be found on the outside of his new frame and even those were also augmented by his improved machine senses, there more because of the complexity of their linking to the brain’s visual cortex than anything else. That and a sense on William’s part that they kept him tied to his humanity and allowed others to see evidence of that humanity in his machine face.

Phase Thirteen, that was William. Hektor was Phase Twelve, a number that would always be his, they had decided, just as Phase Thirteen would always be William’s. Like a prized number on a football team. And what a team they were. A team Ayala even now needed help from.

Ayala:
‘the mission should be simple, i think you will agree, but once again we require subspace silence, and so i wondered if you might be interested. also, it is no more than a two-man job, as you can no doubt see, so i had hoped to see jung further along with his prosthesis. but given that he is still only using the avatar and has not taken the final step, it seems you will need another assistant.’

She did not suggest William, despite the fact that he was hypothetically one of the most capable military machines on Earth. The mind was everything, as Banu had proven so conclusively on several occasions, and William’s talents most certainly did not lie on the battlefield. Hektor hesitated. Her offer implied he would be able to choose whom to take with him. It was a short list of candidates, made all the more problematic by his personal ties to them all.

The life he had been forced to choose, the cost, was the implicit price he might be asking them to pay as well. He was happy with his choice, no doubt about that, but in truth he would not wish this on anyone else. All that said, he had taken each of them on worse missions, far worse. They had faced the chance of death, even the likelihood of it. They could face this if they had to.

Hektor:
‘obviously niels and cara are at the top of the list.’

Ayala:
‘i agree. i would recommend cara. her youth may be of advantage getting in, if stealth alone fails you.’

Hektor knew what she meant. Her ‘youth.’ Cara was an attractive young woman, albeit one who could kill with disturbing alacrity.

Hektor:
‘cara it is. ¿have you contacted her already?’

Ayala:
‘i just did.’

There was a pause. Then …

Ayala:
‘she is getting ready even now. apparently she is quite keen to get back into the thick of things.’

Yes, thought Hektor. That sounds like Cara.

Chapter 17: Satellites

They had always known about it. From the start, the Advanced Team had been informed of the relay’s proposed location and purpose. The Interstellar Subspace Transmitter burrowing its way into the moon of Mars. John had told Neal about it, but without the satellites to transmit information to it, it was frankly an obsolete tool anyway.

With the completion of the first Skalm, they could have dispatched it there. That was possible. But that would have meant sending it away from Earth, something they could not even afford to do in order to go and rescue an ever more distant Dr. Birgit Hauptman.

Years beforehand, back on Mobiliei, John and his co-conspirators had considered the problem of the relay. They had weighed the option of using it to send information covertly between the branches of the conspiracy on Earth and the Armada. But with the wealth of computing eyes that would be on any news coming from Earth, the chances of discovery would have been all but certain.

So they had decided it would probably be best to leave it alone. It was a sentiment Neal had shared when John had told him of the relay’s purpose and location. Even if they could destroy it, then that would arouse just as much suspicion as if it remained functional but was unable to reach the satellites. Both would be attributed in the end to a fault in the system.

There would be talk of foul play but the true cause of the silence would be lost among many scenarios which the distrustful factions of the Mobiliei would bandy with, if such a notion even made the list at all. They would hide their conspiracy behind countless other perceived threats, both imagined and no doubt well founded, that the many leaders aboard the Armada had cause to suspect.

Birgit was aware of all of this. Among the flood of data coming through the link, a link whose delay was growing ever larger the farther they got from home, were data packets containing news updates, both public and more secret.

She did not pay as much attention to them as Rob did. What free time he had was often spent trolling through the reams and reams of written updates, photographs, and audio streams that were being packaged for them by Minnie. Given their remote location, Neal had given Minnie discretion to share any information she thought relevant with them. It was not as if they could be considered an intelligence threat.

And so Rob enjoyed an almost unparalleled access, and he used it, both to feed his appetite for news of his lost home, and to keep track of events on Earth, events which would hold sway, he knew, over whether humanity was ever able to mount some kind of rescue mission for them.

For Birgit, just bearing witness, spectating, was not in her. She could not wait for the world to see if it was going to survive long enough to come and save her. And so her mind blazed pathways of its own. Cutting into the undergrowth, the dense, seemingly impenetrable thick of physical limitations that blocked her path home, seeking a way through, a way back.

As she sought a way to reach over the horizon, she had long ago begun to see that there was only one real way to get there, and it was an alchemist’s dream. They could not propel themselves. They could not even stop themselves. And so she strived for something even more ambitious. A doorway. The doorway.

It was a silly hope, she knew that. A preposterous conceit to think that she should be able to succeed where a whole world had failed. But just as Birgit had been the mother of a new type of life, an artificial type, maybe necessity could be the mother of this.

Birgit:
‘the parsing of data needed to process relative location is too great.’

It had been a rhetorical statement, but Minnie, or the version of her that lived aboard Terminus, replied anyway.

Minnie:

‘Scenario’, thought Birgit.

Birgit:
‘well, one exists, but not one powerful enough.’

They spoke of one of an unpleasantly long list of technological issues they faced before they could even begin to attempt the actual task of opening a travelable wormhole. A task that, in and of itself, begged more questions than they could yet know.

But before that, before they could try to open a door, and before they could try to build a corridor, and a method of travelling that corridor, they needed a door handle. They needed an Accelosphere Generator, and they did not have one on Terminus. Among the many technological marvels they’d had on board at the time of separation, that particular little gem was absent.

Minnie:

Birgit:
‘no, minnie, we won’t. but we are getting ahead of ourselves. we are talking about how to know if we have been successful, when i don’t even know how to do what we are trying to do.’

Minnie:

Birgit smiled in spite of herself. The real Minnie this was not. But sometimes she said something that was so simple, yet so convoluted, that it couldn’t help but remind Birgit of Minnie’s first conversations, when they had talked endlessly about things as simple as air and form and smiling.

Birgit:
‘¿maybe you could let me in on the secret?’

Minnie:

Birgit laughed out loud now. Sometimes it was hard to forgive this Minnie her inadequacies, but not now. Minnie was trying. She just didn’t have the substrate mass, the grey matter. And when it came to conversing with Birgit, the matter mattered.

Birgit:
‘ok, mini-minnie, open the conversation, i want to hear this idea, whatever it is.’

It was not a request, and the response was instantaneous. The stream of consciousness that was a machine conversation lasting days came at her like an open fire hose spraying cold theory into her mind. It was not so much the volume that caused Birgit to start, but the theoretical depth. It was too strong a flavor, too bright a mental beam. Her body tensed as the surge hit her. She was trying to interpret it. Not consciously, this was beyond that. Her whole mind was trying to find the melody, to single out the harmony of truth in the cacophony of possibility that she was receiving.

She caught just a hint of it. It flashed past like a dash on a highway, a point drawn out to a line that was gone as soon as she saw it. She tried to slow the flow, an act of will calling it to a halt. She was being caught up on an explanation that had apparently been coming for days, and it exceeded even the hot flow she had once ‘enjoyed’ with an embryonic Minnie.

Now she rewound. The line, seen in real-time, had seemed short, but now, as she followed the concept backward through the quilted mass of idea, she saw it was a long one. Very long, but rooted in a concept so simple that when she saw it she almost cried.

A point. A point in space. Not an object. A place. Truly still. That place is definable, it is absolute, and it is the easiest thing in the universe to identify. The problem lay in the fact that no object in the universe was anything close to actually still. A person standing in a field is actually moving at a thousand miles an hour around the Earth’s center, which is revolving around the sun at sixty-seven thousand miles per hour, which is revolving around the center of the Milky Way at a pace beggaring belief, which is hurtling outward from the point of origin at speeds faster than any craft we had ever made.

If they hoped to create a wormhole, a wormhole that Terminus could theoretically travel through, or at least use to redirect its trajectory, they would need to be able to do it from Earth, and so would need to be able to transpose that wormhole to another location. It was something that had never even been attempted by the Mobiliei. There had simply been no need. Why create a remote wormhole when that step would only add exponentially to the complexity of the process of managing it.

But in that complexity might lie an answer. Not
the
answer, that was still a long way off. But an answer to the question of how to remotely manage a hole in the fabric of the universe. A gap.

The answer was simple, or so it might seem.

Don’t.

Allow the universe to do it for you. For if you wanted to keep something relatively still, not absolutely still, but held in place relative to the immediate space around you—the sun, the Earth, the moon—then the best way to do it was to link it to them.

Minnie was trying to see if she could use the same gravitational leash that kept the sun’s many satellites in orbit to anchor a remote subspace anomaly. Or rather she was looking to use its absence, not its presence. For a wormhole at the center of a gravitational well would not be much use to anyone, least of all Birgit. She wanted very much to stay out of any planet’s way.

They could, in theory, use a large fusion generator as a beacon, as those engines used a simulacrum of a gravitational field in order to catalyze and contain the reaction. But without one large enough on hand, they could look to use a Lagrange Point, the point where two gravities cancel each other out. There was one between every twinned cosmic body. Between the sun and each of its planets, between the Earth and the moon. One was forming even now between the Earth and Hekaton.

Birgit:
‘beautiful, minnie. just beautiful.’

She allowed her mind to bathe in the concept for a while, and as she did so her own subconscious inevitably started to meddle with the theory, adding her own unique and beautiful genius to it, evolving it as she went.

In a few hours, when Terminus’s return signal reached Earth, Minnie would start to see the changes. For a just a moment she would fret that her idea, embryonic as it still was, had been shown to an ever more desperate Birgit. But then she would begin to see the theory advancing as Birgit took the concept, layered as it was in a trifle of greater complexity. It would not take more than a moment for Minnie to see what Birgit was starting to do with the idea as she gestated it.

Invigorated, Minnie would begin sending back her thoughts in reply. It would take a month before their conversation would be complete. A month before they had a theory that could be tested. But now they had a potential way to anchor, to locate a wormhole.

And so now Minnie needed the method and power to generate it. They already knew, hypothetically, that the distance would be a factor only in terms of scale, as her capacity diminished across the gap. They also knew that Minnie would essentially need to place the subspace actuator in subspace itself, then have it use the gravitational well they chose as a marker to generate another pocket elsewhere.

Oh, and one other minor issue: Birgit would have to get Terminus to a gravitational well, or find herself a spare subspace generator out here in the cosmos. But that was a relatively minor issue, when you were discussing alchemy.

Details ranged in their minds as they contemplated the myriad of issues they still faced, and they loved every second of it. They could not speak to each other, but witnessing the beauty of the theory’s evolution was as close to communing as they’d had in months.

Madeline and Neal began getting requests the next day. They seemed innocent enough, but they were the parts of a machine that would look to play around with another universe. And maybe, just maybe, would allow Minnie’s mother to come home.