We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 60: Encounter

Book 5: Chapter 60: Encounter

Icarus

February 2338

Wormhole network

After our failure at the DMZ system, we’d decided to visit another civilization at random while we tried to work out a strategy going forward.

This last one had been especially interesting. The locals had essentially colonized their entire system, from the hot-as-hell Mercury-type planet near their sun to the freezing example of Fimbulwinter at the edge of their Kuiper belt. In addition, every single moon was covered in structures, and every asteroid bigger than about a half kilometer in diameter seemed to have been hollowed out and spun up for gravity.

And all empty.

I was trying very hard to avoid the feeling that I was in some kind of Stephen King horror story, where perhaps a carnivorous clown had eaten everyone. But it was hard.

As we oriented ourselves to the local orbital plane, my external sensors started blaring. “Woo-hoo,” I yelled. “Action at last.”

“Celebration is premature,” Dae retorted. “Let’s make sure we survive first.”

A quick examination of the area via SUDDAR revealed a caravan of huge vessels on a trajectory that had them going between two wormholes. The wormhole they’d apparently exited was a hub connection, but a radial one that led inbound. The destination gate was also a hub, but we’d already determined that it led to the next hub spinwise.

We moved toward the caravan, but not so quickly or directly as to appear threatening. More of a “heading for the same gate” kind of vibe. I sent a gate-query frequency radio beam toward them, more in an act of desperation than anything. And I was rewarded with exactly what I expected: total ignore.

But we were now close enough for a SUDDAR scan. I sent out a full-power pulse and got back, well, very little. Most of the ship was quite visible in SUDDAR, and resembled any random space vessel—engines, maintenance, computer systems, et cetera. No passengers, though. There were spaces that appeared to be accommodations for living beings, but they were empty. So automated transports.

The surprise, though, was the area of the ship that had to be the hold. It was shielded. From SUDDAR. All I got back was a blank rectangular volume.

“I didn’t know that was even possible,” Dae said.

“Not a technology that we have,” I replied. “Cloaking, yes. Shielding? That’s a new one. I wonder what they’re hiding?”

“Assuming they’re hiding something. The shielding might be to protect the environment rather than the contents.”

I frowned at him. “What needs that level of shielding?”

“I don’t know. Ask them,” Dae retorted, waving at the video window.

Shrugging, I sent a plain-language query in Roanokian. And got the same response.

“That’s not really working either,” I said. “How about we follow?”

“Suits me.”

We hurried to get in line behind the caravan. In a few hours, they reached the destination gate and began parading through. Finally, it was our turn, and we followed the last transport vessel.

“Where—?” I exclaimed, perplexed. The caravan had disappeared, except for the vessel we’d been following.

“They’ve split up,” Dae said. Sure enough, the holotank tracking display showed each vessel heading for a different gate.

“None are hub gates. All local.” I rubbed my chin in thought. “Local deliveries?”

“Of what?”

With a sigh, I changed my heading to follow the vessel in front of us as it made a slow, ponderous turn. “Let’s find out.”

*****

We hadn’t been through this particular gate ourselves, so it was a bit of a twofer. The transport ship, for that was almost certainly its purpose, steered a conservative course for what turned out to be the home planet for the local civilization. Or rather, a space station in a geosynchronous orbit.

The in-system trip took about 30 hours, given that the transport didn’t seem to be in any kind of hurry. On arrival, it cozied up to the space station and docked. The station was monster big, easily dwarfing the transport, which was no baby itself. I also noticed a fleet of smaller ships maintaining position around the space station. They seemed to be all of a type, as well.

“Guards?” Dae said.

“Not very intimidating-looking. They have more of a cargo-drone vibe, I think.”

“Ah. Maybe waiting for whatever the big ship is unloading.”

The unloading took about six hours. At the end of it, the transport unlinked and began moving in a stately fashion for the gate. At the same time, the smaller cargo drones began queuing up at different docks. That pretty much confirmed that whatever the transport had unloaded, everyone wanted some.

I decided to try again with the station. I beamed a greeting in Roanokian.

And received a reply.

“Roanokian vessel, this is an interdicted zone. Unsafe for improperly equipped vessels. Please move to a safe distance.”

I replied, “What is the nature of the danger?”

“Roanokian vessel, regulations require a one-thousand-kilometer exclusion zone from antimatter storage facilities for all unauthorized vessels. Please move to a safe distance to avoid impoundment.”

Antimatter? Cripes. I backpedaled furiously, in a SURGE-drive kind of way, until we were at the appropriate distance.

“Hey, Icky, if they just delivered antimatter, you know what that means?”

“What?”

“They have a source of antimatter.”

“You are a master of the obvious, Dae. And why would they need antimatter? Surely they have Casimir power systems. Actually, we know they do. We’ve scanned their vessels.”

“Casimir generators are dependable, long-lasting, and don’t require refueling,” Dae said in lecture mode. “But they don’t have a terrific power-to-mass ratio. The only reason we prefer them is because nuclear-fusion reactors were worse.”

“Whereas antimatter … ” I replied, prompting him.

“Is the densest power-delivery system in the universe. Yeah, you have to refuel every once in a while, but for situations where you need just monstrous levels of power, it’s the way to go.”

“Hmm. Good points. But it would have to be relatively easy to get hold of; otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth it. And creating it in colliders and such is a nonstarter.”

“True. So let’s find out. Assuming the transport ship is heading home for another load, we should follow.”

We pulled up behind the transport vessel, which was making its way in a barge-like manner toward the wormhole gate, and slowed way down. There’s an episode of The Simpsons where Homer is following a turtle during an acid trip, and he gets impatient and kicks it over the horizon. Staring at the back end of the transport, I could sympathize. This thing just was not in a hurry.

The ship went through the local gate, then the two hub gates. The second one, though, which we hadn’t yet investigated, turned out to be a radial line and was about ten thousand light-years closer to galactic center.

“All right!” I crowed. “We may be visiting the core sooner than expected.”

“I wonder if there’s a reason for putting an antimatter factory in the core,” Dae said, frowning.

“If nothing else, the big black heavy thing is a great source of power.”

“Sure, if it doesn’t spaghettify you or reduce you to elementary particles. Should we be heading there?”

“Dae, my guess is if we are going into a dangerous region, we’ll receive a warning. And now that we have a common language, we’ll actually understand that warning.”

“Yippee.”

*****

Two more gates, and we were in the core. I had read that there were more than ten million stars within a parsec of the galactic center, and that the average distance between stars in this region was below a half light-year.

None of these dry factoids came even close to touching the reality of what we faced. The sky was ablaze with stars, with virtually no empty space showing, except possibly straight up and down. Red dominated, as most of the stars in this region were old, red giants. But a period of star formation about a million years ago had also produced a large crop of young, blue-white giants, some of which I could swear showed visible disks.

“Good God in heaven,” Dae breathed.

With a huge effort, I pulled my eyes away from the vista and checked the security monitors. Happily, we were not right on top of a sun. We appeared to be several AU from a small white dwarf. Of course, I thought, the makers of the wormhole network would have picked a relatively stable location to set up. But in this stellar soup, stability was likely transitory. I wondered if you could move a wormhole once opened.

We began to take stock. The transport ship continued on its stately way, and we adjusted course to follow.

I dismissed my VR in favor of a total-surround stellarium view. I floated, seemingly disembodied, in a sea of stars.

“Sagittarius A* is about seven light-years that way,” Dae said, using a laser-pointer metaphor. The red dot circled around a spot on the stellarium surface.

“It’s still just all stars,” I complained. “Let’s tone down the visible spectrum and bring in a radio-frequency layer.”

In the radio spectrum, we could see the jets from the central black hole racing north and south, ballooning into the Fermi bubbles that existed above and below the galactic core. And something else …

“That is … ” Dae said, working his laser pointer.

“Hold on.” I shifted the spectrum being displayed, and the artifact became clearly visible. Close to us—very close on an astronomical scale—something was firing a brilliant plume to galactic north, and glowing brightly. “That,” I said, “is the view at five hundred and eleven KeV.”

“Antimatter annihilation,” Dae breathed.

“Yup. I guess it makes sense that we’d come out near the antimatter source.”

“So this is the legendary antimatter fountain.”

I nodded, struck dumb with awe. In 1997, astronomers had discovered that something near the galactic center was shooting a plume of antimatter particles thousands of light-years to galactic north. And only to the north, which no one had an explanation for. The radiation given off when the antimatter interacted with normal interstellar dust and gas glowed at 511 KeV, the radiation signature of total annihilation.

“Well, now we know,” I said.

“Know what? The empire is getting antimatter from here, but we still have no idea what it is, other than a tremendous source of antimatter.”

“Enough to power an empire. And keep it running, apparently.”

Dae sighed. “Let’s look around. I’d hate to leave without finding out anything more.”

We engaged SURGE and swiftly overtook our escort. I kept my stellarium VR up, and I noted that Dae wasn’t expressing any need to re-corporate.

Sensors indicated we were still about ten AU from the fountainhead when we detected a communication over SCUT. We still hadn’t mastered the empire’s SCUT comm standards, so I cast around until I spotted a likely source for the transmission and sent a greeting via radio in Roanokian.

The source appeared to be a large space station, or possibly a small asteroid. It had all kinds of technological accretions, a cloud of small vehicles in parking orbits around it, and showed every indication of being the administrative center for the region.

A response came back immediately in the same medium. “Roanokian vessels, you have entered an interdicted area. This is the Central Antimatter Works for the Pan Galactic Federation. Unauthorized vessels are prohibited. Stop immediately or face impoundment of your vehicles.”

We stopped immediately and tried to display good intentions by reversing course for a short distance.

“Pan Galactic Federation,” Dae said. “That’s interesting. I wonder how accurate that is.”

“As accurate as our translations of Roanokian, I guess. Double-check the individual words, will you?” Without waiting for a response, I sent a message to the space station. “Can you supply a map of the stellar neighborhood that will keep us out of the interdicted area?”

“Star maps are available via Mapping Protocol, which is supported only through SCUT transmission.”

“Oh, for fuck sake,” Dae muttered.

I replied. “We do not know the standard communication protocols used by the Pan Galactic Federation. Can you give us the specs?”

In reply, the space station sent a series of extremely dense text files in Roanokian. A quick glance indicated that we’d been given not only the Mapping Protocol but also the Identification and Authorization Protocol, the Audio/Video/Other Communications Protocol, and a couple of other less relevant items.

“Finally, someone is being helpful,” I muttered. Then, to the station, “May we enter a parking orbit while we digest this?”

“Affirmative.”

And just like that, we were in business.

*****

“Seven light-years to Sagittarius A*, or to as close to it as we want to get. That’s seven years each way, Icky—so another fourteen years minimum before we report in.” Dae stood glaring at me, his fists literally on his hips in an unconscious parody of Mom when she disapproved of our choices.

“We’ve already been at this for almost thirty years, Dae. Plus the time we spent in normal space before we found the wormholes. We’ve long since disconnected from Bobiverse society. And it’s not like they’re expecting us.”

“Depends, doesn’t it? On whether our SCUT stations get into position and whether anyone’s listening when our radio message gets there. And then, radio silence. I don’t see Bill just shrugging his shoulders and moving on.”

“So how is that a bad thing? It means we’ll have follow-up.”

Dae sighed and looked deflated. “It comes down to what happened to the empire—”

“Federation.”

“Whatever. If it’s something we need to know about, and soon, this delay could be critical.”

“You’re kidding. You think we arrived on schedule to nip the danger in the bud just in the nick of time? C’mon, Dae, we’d switch off a movie if they did that.”

Dae grimaced and looked away. Then he said, “Okay, but once we’ve done this, we head straight back to Roanoke to report in to Bill, right?”

“You got it.” I grinned knowingly at him. He wasn’t fooling anyone. He wanted to go just as much as I did but needed to play the responsible clone.

We’d deciphered the texts from the administrative station, which were essentially identical to internet RFCs. A quick test netted us local star maps. Now we would be able to converse via SCUT when we needed to.

I did another test, asking the station if there were any biological entities on-site we could talk to.

“No.”

Well, that was terse. “How long since any were on-site?”

“That information is not available.”

Sigh. Not surprising, I guess. I gave Dae a lopsided smile, and we fired up the drives.