Lost in Transmission

Chapter twenty-four. Flashfight

That Newhope could be unwilling to receive any further malicious uploads was a possibility, given that she was a highly intelligent and protective entity in her own right. However, she should not have been capable of resistance when presented with Royal Overrides. Perhaps, then, there was a communications problem of some sort, although this is also unlikely in a ship constructed of wellstone and hypercollapsites. Or perhaps Bascal—the singled king of a world and a people—was too busy or distracted to halo himself for another recording. But could he not have duplicated the original transmission, and filled the spaces of Newhope with a thousand holie copies of himself?

In point of fact, he did not. For whatever reason, only one ghost haunted the ship, with one crewmate—Conrad—bearing the brunt of its attentions. Perhaps Bascal felt a twinge of love or pity, or simply couldn't bring himself to send himself off, again and again, to certain doom. There was something wrenching about sending a piece of your soul on a one-way trip to data heaven, never to be heard from again. Conrad had abandoned the practice years ago.

But King Bascal was harder-headed about these things, and it's difficult to imagine he'd've foresworn such an action if it offered some strategic or tactical advantage, or hastened the day when his visions of Eden could be instantiated in the physical universe. Some light might be shed on the subject if the site of his palace could be examined by quantum archaeologists, but failing that, we can simply acknowledge the mystery, and agree that Newhope's habitable spaces were neither as loud nor as chaotic as they might have been.

Nevertheless, her crew—even Eustace—were all pulling long shifts, scheming in their heads and trying to communicate ideas to one another while simultaneously keeping them obscure from the prying ears presumed to surround them. The industrial-grade fax machine—the only one onboard—produced stimulants in abundance to keep them all on their toes, and between that and the lack of sleep, the general stress, and the specific nagging and singing and joking of Bascal's one message, they were all pretty fuzzed out by the time they reached the bottom of their orbit.

“Velocity with respect to Barnard is 615 kps,” Feck announced loudly, over the ninety thousandth refrain of the “Fuck You Song.” “If we have forever to get home, the minimum needed for escape boost is 620, but ideally we'll need something closer to ten thousand. I'll kiss the engines for good luck, ma'am. As for the sails, I am unfurling them . . . now.”

There was a lot more to the boost sequence than just that, but while the sails were unfurling, and before Feck had gotten to the next step on the checklist, red lights began flashing and alarms blaring.

“What's happening?” Xmary demanded.

Conrad, sitting now at the Systems Integration station instead of his own chair, reported, “It's a broken thread alarm. From the bow sheeting, just aft of the ertial shield. Something's evaporating the outer layers of the wellstone there.”

“What kind of something? I need more information.” There was no hint of love in her voice, nor should there be. She was the captain of a vessel under fire. “I didn't expect trouble this early, but it makes sense for them to disrupt us before boost if they can.”

“It's . . . coherent light. Sorry, coherent X rays.”

“Could it be the spalling laser on King's Fist?”

“That would be my first guess,” Conrad agreed. “Although the range must be pretty extreme, or the damage would be much worse. That laser's frequency is tuned specifically to interfere with wellstone's command-and-control signals, and to set up destructive resonance in the fibers. Wait a minute, I'm getting broken threads in the sail as well. The laser's spot diameter is about sixty meters, so according to the computer it's firing from a range of just over three light-seconds.”

Luna was almost exactly 1.29 light-seconds from Earth, and although Conrad would never admit it publicly, after years of intensive training in near-Earth space he still measured it that way in his mind: three light-seconds was nine hundred thousand kilometers, about two and a half Earth-moon distances. Also very close to the Limit of Influence or LOI, where Sol's gravity began to dominate over Earth's, making stable orbits impossible. Not that that mattered here and now, but it was how he'd been trained.

“It's a probing shot,” he speculated. “They don't expect to do any real damage. In fact, they may be using the spalling laser just to light us up, to make it easier to target some other weapon. The spot is shrinking, though. We're closing fast with the source.”

“Find it.”

“Trying to, ma'am, but King's Fist is stealthed. Anyway, all the light and heat are confusing the sensors.”

Indeed, for practical purposes they were inside Barnard at the moment. It was a smaller, cooler star than Sol, but that did not by any means make it a clement environment to pass through. At this depth in the chromosphere, Sol was at least predictable; navigating through it was like flying a kite in a steady gale. But Barnard, with less power output per hectare of surface, was a knotted mess of flailing magnetic fields that spiked and dropped away without warning. The particle flux alone was enough to snow out most of the preprogrammed sensors in Newhope's hull, and for all his programming expertise, Conrad knew almost nothing about sensor design. Stuck with the ship's normal, unmodified arrays, he felt as though he were peering out through the pores of a blindfold.

“Look at the shape of the spot,” Xmary suggested. “The beam is circular, right? But I'll bet you're seeing an oval smear across our bow, and from that you can compute the incidence angle. And from the changes in the spot size you can get the divergence angle, and therefore the range. Trace the beam right back to its source.”

This surprised Conrad. It was an ingenious idea, and certainly nothing his childhood Xmary, the Denver party girl, would have come up with. He loved her as much now as he had back then—or so it seemed, at any rate—but he supposed people did change, slowly, like wax dolls in the warmth of a closed hand. Decade by decade the differences were imperceptible, but across the span of centuries that fiery girl had changed almost beyond recognition. Was the escape from childhood a special case? Would there be changes this large in her future as well?

“Conrad!”

“Tracing,” he acknowledged. Then: “Okay, the error bars are half the size of the data, but . . . we're coming in clockwise around the sun, and it looks like they're orbiting counter. I guess they'd have to, to be able to catch us this early. If these estimates are valid, we're closing with them at twelve hundred kps, with closest approach occurring about fourteen minutes from now.”

“Shit,” she said. “They're already damaging us from the outer limits of their weapons range. Things can only get worse.”

“Surrender now,” Bascal's recording suggested, breaking off from his song for a moment. “It's not too late. I'll be merciful, truly.”

“Dry up,” Xmary told the image. Then, to the holie window where Feck could be seen fussing with his reactor feeds, “Feck, I need you to go live with the engines a minute early, but not at full thrust. Go to seventy-five percent, and then institute a random walk program.”

“Dispersing our downrange?” Feck asked.

“Precisely.”

A kilometer beneath them, the engines began to groan.

“I don't understand,” Conrad said, feeling suddenly ignorant and out of place. He was an experienced naval officer, yes, but these two had worked together for almost two hundred years, facing heaven knew what sort of surprises and freak accidents along the way. They had a whole vocabulary about it, a rapport that went far beyond the merely romantic. This was hardly a time to be jealous, but just the same his heart cringed self-consciously. Here was a rival he could never match.

“Me either!” Eustace chimed in. “Can you explain?”

“We can't vary our course,” Xmary said, her tone bordering on impatience. “Not much, not enough. We can juke to the side, as in a collision-avoidance maneuver, but then we'll have to juke back again or our net velocity will be in the wrong direction. Very slightly, but over six light-years those slight errors become very costly in terms of distance, in terms of fuel. But what we can do is vary our acceleration along the direction of travel. This changes our arrival time without also changing our destination, and it makes our velocity and position harder to predict. It's a stealthing trick for vehicles like this one, which are inherently unstealthy. Comes in handy sometimes when the miners decide to get cute.”

“I can hear every word,” Bascal's image told her. “You are compromised, Captain. Why fight when your opponent knows your every move?”

Grinding her fists, Xmary turned her eyes on the thing. “First of all, the real Bascal Edward is forty-five light-seconds away, with Barnard in between us. You can't communicate with him—not in real time. And if you're relaying this conversation directly to Fist, which I imagine you are, even they have to wait three seconds to get it, and then three more for their beam to get back here to us, by which time we can be kilometers off from where they think we are. Try hitting that.”

“The spot is gone,” Conrad reported as, at the ertially shielded edges of perception, the ship whined and jerked around him. “They've lost track of us.”

“For now,” warned Bascal. “They will find you again, and make you the martyrs you're so determined to become.”

“I see something!” Eustace said, from the Information seat beside Conrad. “On the radar, it's a blip. It's a cloud.”

“Confirmed,” Conrad said, checking his own radar display, which by default was much smaller than Information's. He enlarged it. “They've released a swarm of projectiles in our path.”

“Size and number?” Xmary demanded.

“A few thousand pinheads. It's nothing the nav lasers can't handle,” Feck said, peering into some display of his own. “But why aren't they stealthed? I think these are decoys, Captain. We shoot at these, vaporizing a path, but the real danger is somewhere in front or behind. Pebbles of antimatter, I'll bet, suspended in a jacket of superabsorber. With propulsion modules, so they can stay out of our path, then juke into us at the last moment.”

Xmary thought that one over. “Okay. Okay, something like that, surely. What do we do about it?”

“Good question,” Feck said.

On Conrad's board, the damage alarms lit up again, more insistently this time. This time the broken threads were on the capward edge of the sail, which was still filling out to its full expanse. The spot was smaller—only fifty meters across now—and it wandered fitfully around a square kilometer of sail, but did not leave it.

“The spalling laser is back,” he reported. “They're having trouble keeping it focused, but it's definitely a threat to the sail. Not so much the hull.”

Xmary sighed. “The sail is a one-way mirror, right? Clear on the forward face and superreflective on the aft? Go superreflective on the fore as well.”

“That'll reduce our photon thrust,” Conrad warned.

“Until we pass out of Barnard, yes,” she agreed. “Once the star is behind us, it won't matter.”

“This is where the sail does us the most good,” he pressed. “You're cutting into our net impulse, prolonging the journey.”

“Understood,” she snapped. “But let's get there alive, shall we? Feck, I want you to start a juking program as well. Full lateral thrust at a ten-percent duty cycle. And yes, that's going to waste fuel, making the journey longer still. Do it anyway.”

“Aye, ma'am.”

She fretted for several seconds, while Bascal's image launched back into its “Fuck You Song.” Finally, over the racket, she said, “We can't stay on the defensive like this. We've got to shake them up. Conrad, what kind of beam can you throw their way?”

Conrad spread his hands. “I can generate a laser, ma'am, but they're stealthed, and probably juking as well. And they're a much smaller target than we are. All I can do is aim at my best guess.”

“Without ertial shielding they're limited by fuel,” Xmary said, “and they haven't got nearly the thrust that we do. If they're juking, it's minor. And we have the whole sail to use as a beam generator. Wasting power, yes, but a laser beam ten kilometers wide ought to be rather difficult to avoid. Feck, are you up for that?”

“No, sorry. Ma'am, if we're willing to sacrifice half our thrust, I can deliver you two gigawatts. Unfortunately, spread out over a hundred square kilometers of sail, that's about the power of a desk lamp. They're already fighting off Barnard's heat at sixteen megawatts per square meter, so we want to be at least as big a problem as that. Meaning the beam needs to be, uh, less than eleven meters across.”

“I can't hit them with that,” Conrad warned. “Not bloody likely. I can't see them. They're two seconds lagged, now, but I can't even see where they were then. They're invisible.”

“Shit,” Xmary said, throwing up her hands. And then a tentative expression broke out across her frowning face. “Wait a minute. Feck, they're absorbing all this heat from Barnard, right? And they're dumping it in the opposite direction. Every watt, or they'd be slowly cooking in there.”

“We're doing the same,” Feck said. “Blackbody emissions on the shadowed upward face. The radiator flux is called huela puho, a blaze beam.”

“Yeah, but we're not invisible and they are. Unless they're immediately upsystem from us, we should see a hot spot. Maybe they're hiding the emissions in a narrow frequency, longwave radio or something, but one way or another, all that energy has to go somewhere.”

“I've been scanning for a hot spot,” Conrad complained. “I can't find one, in any frequency. My guess is, they're focusing it in a blaze beam directed away from us.”

“Yes,” she said, lighting up in angry triumph. “And that's how we get them! We just need to redirect all this heat from the sun. The beam of our own waste heat, eh? We reflect it right onto them, as bright as the sun itself. Two suns at once! We don't need to be precise about it, just wave it in their general direction. They can't do the same to us—they don't have enough collection area. But with all this energy hitting both sides of our sail, we can overwhelm their cooling systems. They're probably running at full capacity already.”

“They probably are,” Feck agreed.

And with growing enthusiasm Conrad added, “Even impervium breaks down at thirty megawatts per square meter, ma'am. A fraction of a fraction of that energy slips in between the pseudoatoms, and the heat kicks the electrons right out of their quantum wells. The whole thing reverts to silicon fibers and then vaporizes. It's why you never hear about probes to the center of the sun. Nothing could survive that trip, because there's nowhere to dump the heat.”

“Hooray!” Eustace called out. “We'll get those bastards!”

“Not so fast,” Conrad warned. “We don't want to overwhelm our own systems while we're at it. We'll blow ourselves up if we do. Also, we really do need the push this light is giving us, or we'll be sailing in the dark for a thousand years. Let me check some numbers on this.”

“Do it quickly,” Xmary said, leaning over toward his station. “If I read your displays correctly, the sails won't be holding together much longer.”

This objection was entirely valid. Indeed, despite the side-to-side juking—which really was throwing the ship around in a way the ertial shields couldn't mask—Fist's spalling laser was doing a better and better job of focusing on a smaller and smaller area. In another minute or two, the thread damage would reach critical levels, and the wellstone sheeting, far thinner than a human hair, would start to unravel and lose its charge. And without the exotic electron bundles that held it together—the pseudoatoms which resembled natural atoms in the same way that starships resembled sparrows—the material would quickly disintegrate under the heat and pressure of Barnard's light.

However, this was not a calculation Conrad had ever performed before, or even imagined he might someday need. How much energy could you put through a properly programmed wellstone matrix, and for how long?

“Hurry, please,” she pressed.

Bascal, meanwhile, sang, “Fuck you, and fuck you, and fuck you, and then / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you again. / Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you my friend, / For fucking with me you'll be fucked till the end!” It was an old song, maybe older than the Queendom itself, and this was just the chorus. The stanzas went on and on and on. And on.

Even with hypercomputers at his disposal, Conrad had never been all that brilliant with numbers. He was still less so on the noisy bridge of a heaving starship under full thrust, and under attack by unseen enemies. Still, eventually he got an answer, padded it for safety, and fed it down to Feck for confirmation. “Ma'am, we can illuminate the target for a hundred millisecond window out of every second. That's a safe number that will keep us alive, but if our aim is good, it should pop their cork in less than a minute.”

“All right,” she said. “Do it. Ten-percent duty cycle.”

And although Conrad was a damned talented programmer, easily better than King Bascal himself, this was another challenge which took more than a moment to address. More than two moments. More than six. By the time he was finished, by the time the ship was rocking and stuttering under the intermittent thrust of its newly weaponized sails, the sails themselves had begun to sprout man-sized holes. Damn that spalling laser! On the plus side, though, the invisible antimatter bombs Feck had predicted were flashing into oblivion in the distance, succumbing one by one to the scorching beam of concentrated sunlight.

“It's like burning ants with a magnifier,” Conrad said. But apparently no one else onboard had ever done that, or understood what he meant.

“Three minutes to closest approach,” Feck warned, gripping the sides of his navigation console. “Give or take ten seconds. Conrad, can you increase the power?”

“Not without killing us, no.”

“They appear to be killing us,” Xmary said. “A fine attempt, at any rate. Conrad, boost your duty cycle, please. Can you do fifteen percent?”

“No!” he shouted back. “If I do thirteen percent those sails are going to explode!”

“Do twelve,” she instructed. “Now, please.”

“Aye, ma'am,” he said reluctantly. “Pulse width increased to one hundred twenty milliseconds.”

A few seconds later, they were rewarded with a really big flash of light, easily twenty times brighter than the popcorn explosions of the antimatter mines.

“And there they go,” Xmary said matter-of-factly.

“Canceling program,” Conrad added, hurriedly tuning the system back to its normal propulsive mode.

“Canceling evasion,” said Feck.

The heaving of the bridge subsided, and even Bascal's ghost fell silent, his holographic face falling into an expression of surprise and defeat as the “Fuck You Song” trailed away.

“Goddamn, that was close,” Conrad said to no one in particular. Then, more reflectively, “We just killed Ho and Steve. Our childhood buddies.”

“They were backed up,” Xmary assured him.

“Maybe,” Conrad agreed. “But what about their crew? Twenty people, was it?”

“All volunteers. Probably all mean bastards. We're saving twenty-five thousand here, Conrad.”

There was a great deal more to be said on the subject, but the sails, overtaxed by their ordeal or perhaps struck by some inert but invisible projectile, chose that moment to tear along three separate axes, folding outward and forward like tissue paper in a strong wind. The broken thread monitor shot right off the scale, its alarms blaring madly, and with the full fierce pressure of Barnard's light upon it and its structural integrity gone, the remaining wellstone fabric was ionizing, its captive electrons blasting away into space, into the plasma storms of Barnard's chromosphere.

Not going to make it, Conrad had time to think, though not to say out loud. It's reverting; it can't possibly withstand this heat. And he was right: once ripped and parted, the sail took less than a second to rend itself into dark gray tatters which burned away into vapor and were gone.

Feck and Xmary exchanged a look, and then shared it with Conrad.

“The sail!” Eustace exclaimed.

The sail, yes. Responsible for more than three quarters of the starship's total impulse. Was gone.

“What does it mean?” she asked, although from her tone it was apparent that even she knew the answer. The journey ahead, already longer and more arduous than anything human beings had previously attempted, had just . . . quadrupled.

Bascal's image began to laugh.