We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

Book 5: Chapter 8: Wormholes

Book 5: Chapter 8: Wormholes

Icarus

September 2320

Alien System

My drone floated a half kilometer away from the wormhole, watching while a smaller drone drifted toward the object at minimum thrust. The obvious move was to send something through, but that didn’t mean we were going to be standing right there, waiting to get blown up. Dae and I had set up station-keeping a hundred kilometers away from each wormhole. He had a drone watching the other wormhole, to see if my drone came back through in one piece or as a shower of free quarks.

My theory was that the drone would come out of the destination wormhole with the same inertial vector as it went in with on this end. Whether it would acquire the orbital velocity of the destination was an unknown. We’d calculated the exit vector for both cases, and Dae was ready.

Finally, the drone entered the wormhole. From my point of view, it just continued on through, still easily visible against the slightly skewed starfield of the far side.

“Looks like it survived,” I said. “You want to pick it up?”

“Uh, it’s not here, Icky. Nothing came through.”

“What? I can see it clearly. It’s on your side. It’s right—” I stopped abruptly. “Hey, uh, Dae. How about you position your drone in line of sight with mine. We should be able to visually confirm the connection.”

I looked at the image from my drone. Nothing showing there, either. “We’ve made an incorrect assumption, I think.”

“That these wormholes are connected?”

“Yup. I’m going to call back my drone—oh, crap.”

“What?”

I took a moment to shake my head in irritation at my obtuseness. “I just now noticed. No SCUT connection. The drone is in autonomous mode, waiting for orders.”

“So no SCUT through the wormhole?”

“Again, yup. I’m going to send my observation drone through with orders to pick the other one up and drag it back. Stand by.”

The maneuver took only a minute or two, and the drones were back on my side. “Well, this sucks,” I muttered. “Radio doesn’t have the bandwidth for a full sweep.”

“Just send it through with orders to take a full sphere of pictures,” Dae replied, “then fly back. I’ll bet the other end isn’t far away, because the starfield doesn’t change that much.” ?????È?

“Right. Give me a few minutes.”

*****

It took a little longer than that because we wanted some good images from the other end, and I had to reconfigure the drone with better camera equipment. At the same time, I added maser comms, which would allow me to send ad hoc orders to the drone if I needed to.

The actual exercise took maybe an hour, all told, resulting in a full spherical starfield image projected in my VR. Dae popped in, looked around, and dropped into a patio chair. “Got anything yet?”

“Uh-huh.” I slapped my console in triumph and sat back. “It’s a nearby star system. Eleven light-years away, slightly inbound and spinward. We’d have detected microwave radiation from it eventually if we hadn’t already been focused on this system.”

“So they had travel between systems using wormholes. This system and two others. I wonder if they had SURGE drives.”

I frowned, gathering my thoughts. “Dae, I don’t see how you can connect a wormhole between two star systems unless you carry one of the endpoints there first.”

“You mean they flew the other end of this wormhole to the other system the old-fashioned way?”

“That’s my guess. Of course, once there, they would just pop through to come back.”

“Huh.” Dae thought for a moment. “One of us needs to go through and look around.”

“Are you nuts?” I exclaimed. “That’s a completely unwarranted risk!”

“Is it? Worst case, if something goes wrong, you know where I am—”

“When was it decided that you’d be going through?”

“Whichever. We can argue that later. But if I go through and break down, you can fly there the long way in less than twelve years and fix me. And anyway, the drone went through and came back, so I don’t really see a huge problem.”

“Yeah, it went through and back. So why do you need to go?”

“To survey the system on the other side. Look for more wormholes. What if this is a wormhole network of some kind? And also to see if the local civilization settled there. Maybe they’re still around—”

“Unlikely.”

“True, but let’s check. Or maybe there’s a clue about where they went.”

“There’s still the other wormhole we haven’t explored,” I pointed out.

“One thing at a time, Icky. Let’s finish off with this one first.”

“Fine,” I growled.

*****

I watched in nervous anticipation as Dae’s ship floated slowly through the wormhole. When he didn’t disappear in a scatter of elementary particles, I decided I could go back to breathing.

On the other side, he dropped off a buoy, which immediately connected to its partner on my side via maser. Now we had a communications link across the wormhole. Not good enough for VR, but good enough for audio/visual.

Dae popped up in a video window, sitting back in his Star Trek–style captain’s chair. It was one of his persistent affectations, and I’d long since given up ribbing him about it.

“Scanning the area,” he said distractedly as he examined status windows. “I’ve fired off some drones with long-range SCUT. I won’t bother trying to be stealthy. At this point, I think I’d welcome a good old-fashioned belligerent threat.”

“Not wrong,” I replied with a chuckle. “Any worm sign?”

Dae gave me an I see what you did there look but otherwise ignored the bait. “Nope. Just the big one in front of me. So if it’s a network, this is a leaf node. I’m going to have the survey drones report back through the buoy so I don’t have to sit around and wait for them. I want to check out the other wormhole on your side.”

“Uh-uh, buddy. My turn to play Indiana Jones. Same setup, though.”

“Fair enough. You have a couple of buoys ready?”

“Almost done. Another hour, then I’m going through.”

It took longer to fly to the other wormhole than it took to construct the buoys. But soon, I was hovering in front of it. Well, “in front of” made very little sense when any angle presented a disk with a view of a different starfield. And speaking of which …

“The starfield. Have you done a search on it?”

Dae answered immediately. “Yes, and no, I couldn’t find a match. I did spot some landmarks, like the Magellanic Clouds and the Andromeda Galaxy, but the error bars are too large from this side to make any pronouncements. We’ll probably have to use Cepheids and pulsars for the fine work. You let me know when you get to the other side, okay?”

“You got it, buddy.” And with that, I ejected one of my buoys and jetted forward into the wormhole.

There was no feeling of disorientation or weird tumbling through a tunnel, like on Stargate or DS9. I simply passed through the plane of the disk and was somewhere else. My hull sensors did report a brief inward pressure, as if I’d momentarily been in atmosphere, but nothing significant.

I ejected the second buoy, and it connected with its counterpart per the programming. Dae immediately popped up in a video window. “Whatcha got?”

“Give me a minute, Dae. I haven’t even deployed sensors yet.”

“Slacker.”

I chuckled and began the task of examining both my near environment and the starfield. We’d already slapped together an automated script to identify any galactic location by triangulating from a list of identifiable landmarks, including Cepheids, pulsars, and various dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.

The latter survey came back with a calculated position right away. “Holy crap. Dae, I am seventeen hundred light-years away from you. Spinward, slightly farther outward from the core, a little north of the galactic plane. As a method of travel, this has SURGE beat all to hell.”

“Not disagreeing, Icky, but if you have to deposit the wormholes at your destination the old-fashioned way, that means this civilization—”

“Is at least several millennia old. Yeah. So maybe they experienced the Singularity? Maybe that’s the answer to the Fermi paradox?”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So far, all we know is they aren’t around. We could spend years investigating their system and still not—”

“I don’t think we’re going to be doing that,” I said, interrupting him.

“Because?”

“Because I just did a scan for microwave signatures.”

There was a pause. “You’re going to make me ask, aren’t you?”

“Heh. Normally, yes. But I can’t hold this in. Dae, I’m registering literally hundreds of individual signals. This is a major hub. I think we’re going to be a while investigating this one.”