Things Fall Apart: Chapter 33

Zephyr, outbound of Gliese-581

The outbound spiral out to the heliopause proceeded without any real fuss. Singer should have been pleased. Instead, she was antsy. Everything for megaseconds had felt urgent. Even when Bellerophon had fell into routine on its long trip "home" to Gliese-581, the possibility of further mishap or another distress call being picked up had kept the tension fairly high.

Now? They were on a new, state-of-the-art ship. It needed shakedown, but so far it was working as intended—although Singer and her crew were all just superstitious enough not to say so out loud. Until the arboretum was up and running, there would be very little real wood to knock, although if it came to it, there was enough room in her cabin to turn around three times widdershins.

Have I become an adrenaline addict? she thought to herself. She was in the hot seat on the bridge to witness the deployment of the first new relay. She didn't absolutely need to be there—Alexander, Wasserman, Cordé and the boat bay crew knew what they were doing here. But it was the kind of thing the captain paid attention to, and that, as she had to forcibly remind herself, was her.

They had also been scanning the area for whatever might remain of the old one, but the relays were small. If the microfusion reactor inside one blew, any fragments would be long since gone. She supposed some particles that had shot starward might eventually get pushed back outward by solar wind, but it seemed unlikely there would be enough to identify.

She took note of the moment the ship crossed the boundary drawn in the holotank, marking the heliopause. It was a bit arbitrary, of course. It's not like the influence of a star really just stopped dead. But there was a point past which it was no longer significant. For reasons that were still not well understood, none of the techniques humans had developed for submerging into hyperspace could operate inside that boundary. Even time-compressed communications could only begin from outside of that line. Everything inside the boundary was confined to good old boring light-speed.

Perhaps three kiloseconds later, the ship stopped spiraling and started orbiting. For the time being, they were Gliese-581's most distant satellite.

"Captain, we have achieved our first waypoint," Alexander said, with conscious formality.

"Very well, Exec. Proceed with the deployment of the relay," Singer replied, with an equally formal tone.

"Aye, Captain!" came the response. Alexander touched a control, opening a link ze had set up ahead of time. "Boat bay, this is the Exec."

"Boat bay, Espinoza!" It was the younger Espinoza, the midshipman who had pretty much become the boat bay officer aboard Bellerophon from the time they had pulled aboard the Almaty's one surviving escape pod. He was technically still a midshipman, even now. Haraldsdottir had considered "graduating" the whole cadre aboard Bellerophon to commission them ensigns, then decided she'd already overstrained her authority. None of the midshipmen had seemed to find this odd, and had all just gone on doing whatever needed doing.

Alexander asked, "Are we ready?"

"Yes, Commander!"

"The mark is five."

Five seconds later, Zephyr resumed its outward spiral, leaving behind in its former orbit the relay.

From the boat bay came, "Relay is clear."

Now, it was Cordé's show. "Ensign," said Alexander, "relay status?"

"Relay diagnostics show green. Ernestine reports ready and eager to begin receiving traffic. Of course, she's aware that it may be some time before she has much to do."

The AIs that ran relays were designed with hyperfocus in mind. There had been arguments for years whether the relays even really needed AIs to run them—David's Star Republic's network, for example, used software they distinguished as "expert systems", devoid of more than the most rudimentary personality. The Tau Ceti Treaty Org, however, had crafted an AI that loved nothing more than handling message traffic, and never really got bored of it. And they were all, inexplicably, named Ernestine.

For the first time, Singer found herself questioning the ethics of crafting a such a personality.

The next order was Singer's to give. "Ensign, please send our compliments to the commodore via the relay." It wasn't much of a test, them being so close, and the inbound message of course being mundane radio, but it was a necessary start. G-581 was not a large system. The round-trip should only be a few kiloseconds.

Much sooner than that, however, Cordé was heard to say, "Huh."

And then, a moment later. "That's...weird."

All eyes turned to her. Finally, Singer prompted, "Ensign?"

"Ernestine reports receiving protocol traffic, ma'am."

Singer blinked. "From...where?"

"Unknown, Captain. The envelope doesn't have a valid key, and the command is non-standard. Three words: 'Engage Protocol Capel.'"

Singer's mouth went dry.

"Are we receiving the message as well, Ensign?"

"Yes, and also no. We're...not acting as a relay, ma'am. The signal appears to be a broadcast, so we're receiving it in the sense that it's hitting our antennas, but we're ignoring it because it's not really for us."

Cordé looked up and met Singer's eyes. For a moment, they were just two communications officers. In unison, they said, "This is it."

Singer broke eye contact with Cordé to look at Alexander, but ze was looking at Cadotte. Signer could tell they'd reached the same conclusion. It was Cadotte who spoke it out loud in full, "This is the trigger. Somewhere, there's still a TC relay that's broadcasting it."

Wasserman said, "Or there was. Even TC messages take time to get places."

Cordé responded, "True, PO, but much faster than ships take. An order of magnitude faster. Even than this ship, once we get moving. It's the big difference between TC technology and the older Skip and Jump tech. With Skip, you couldn't send energy at all; with Jump, it wasn't enough faster than just sending a ship with the message. That's not the weird part, here."

"What is?"

"If the relay network is destroyed, how is this message even still traveling?"

Cadotte mused, "Someone's figured out how to build a really big, powerful transmitter, and it just keeps sending out the same message. But Ernestine—the current instance we're deploying—isn't vulnerable. That's what the bad template must have done: included the key and the command and its implementation. It wasn't just a security hole. It was a deliberately planted bomb!"

Singer thought this was jumping to conclusions, perhaps, but she didn't object so much as say, "That certainly seems to fit, so far, but we're still hypothesizing."

Cadotte nodded, taking the point. "Sure, and it doesn't explain how it got past all the safeguards. But it does explain how the thing spread in the first place. Ernestine would have been programmed to relay the command first, then go crazy and self-destruct. She would have relayed in turn at the ship-to-ship protocol level. At least," Cadotte said, somewhat sheepishly realizing they were getting ahead of themselves again, "that would be one way to do it."

Singer asked Cordé, "I assume Ernestine is continuing to ignore the message?"

"More than that, Captain. She's firewalled it out. It's spam to her, now."

"Good. Write up what we know, Ensign. Stick to the facts, except in so far as we believe this to have been the trigger for the Incident. Let me see it before we send it, and we'll transmit under the Commodore's public key as part of our last message before we engage our own TC drive and head out to Waypoint Two."

"Aye, Captain!"

Singer turned to Alexander, who was looking thoughtfully at the holotank. The tank was now showing a rippling arc, representing the signal that was continuing to pass through. They had not yet covered enough distance from the relay's location to even begin to triangulate, but it was still interesting data.

"Something, Exec?"

"Why did they forget to switch it off? If they went to all this trouble, they can't have really believed they'd never be found if they left it squawking."

"Bait for something else, you think?"

"I mean, it could just as easily be carelessness. Or maybe the whole thing backfired on them, whoever they are, and they got caught up in it when they expected to survive."

Wasserman opined, "Maybe they were suicidal, and it wasn't an accident."

Singer let herself chew on that for a moment, disliked the taste intensely, and finally said, "You have a gloomy turn of mind, PO."

"It's been noted before."

"And probably will be again. OK, folks! This is important, and interesting, but it doesn't stop the show. How long 'til we should expect a reply from Haraldsdottir, Ensign?"

Cordé checked, and then added the countdown to the main display. "Six hundred seconds."

They waited. Wasserman was busy with his plot, triple-checking the outbound course. He had crammed the necessary theory for plotting a smooth submersion into time compression, and although Alexander had reported his understanding quite satisfactory, he seemed nervous about it.

Singer, considering how far Wasserman had come, made a mental note to research whether she had the authority to bestow a warrant. If not, he'd certainly earned chiefdom, by now.

Precisely as the timer ticked to zero, Cordé put her hand to her earpiece, nodding at Singer. Singer felt her shoulders relax a little. Cordé asked, "Should I put it on speakers, ma'am?"

"Go ahead."

Haraldsdottir's voice sounded proud, pleased, relieved, and weary, all at once. "Zephyr, we are in receipt of Relay Message One from the new system relay, along with the telemetry stream we would expect. We confirm that the relay is deployed and functioning as it should. Please proceed with your mission, and with all our hopes. Borass Station clears Zephyr for departure and acknowledges that Zephyr is no longer our traffic. Be swift, be well, and be safe. Haraldsdottir clear."

Singer allowed a pause for everyone to digest the commodore's well-wishes, then said to Cordé, "Ensign, is your report ready?"

"In your queue, ma'am!"

Singer grabbed a tablet resting on the arm of her chair, opened the draft, read it once, then once again, and found she had nothing to add but her co-signature. "Signed and back in your queue, Ensign. Send it right away. Exec?"

"Yes, Captain?"

"Is the ship ready?"

"Commander Espinoza stresses that we keep this first trip to 500:1, ma'am, according to the shakedown plan. Other than that, we're ready."

"Very well. Mr. Wasserman?"

"Ma'am?"

"Take us to Waypoint Two, at 500:1!"

"With pleasure, ma'am."

The ship began to accelerate in its lazy spiral away from the system, and then, without any physical sense of transition, the scale of the tank changed as they shot away, submerging into hyperspace and on course for their second waypoint.