The Sunborn (42 page)

“Look small, but are size of Africa.”

“What’s with the Beings? This might be trouble for them. They apparently live off the turbulence of the shock, but this is a
big
storm. Huge energies.”

“The Eight. Seem okay. Wiseguy reported they are feasting on the bow shock.”

“What about the Six?”

“They seem to be quiet.”

Julia asked, “Lying doggo, you think?”

“Means?”

She smiled, pleased that after all these years he didn’t know every corner of her mind. “Aussie slang, or maybe old Brit. ‘Playing possum,’ I think the Americans say.”

“Yep, that’s right.” Jordin’s voice came on intership comm. “I’m looking at
High Flyer
from the side and wonder if you’ve picked up the magnetic configuration behind you.”

“Behind is where?” Viktor asked. Julia could see antennas rotate at Viktor’s command on her screen display.

“Outward from you, toward the bow shock.”

“Um, yes. Cyclotron emissions, pretty low frequencies…but rising.”

Jordin said, “Yep, checks with my spectrum. Lots of spikes in the hundred-megahertz bands.”

“Odd, magnetic fields building…” Julia turned her head and saw Viktor punching in commands, studying screens.

“Hey, stay focused.” She had lost a few of the lower-frequency antennas, and her view of the storm approaching was degraded in resolution. “Jordin! What’s with the Eight out at the bow shock?”

“Big banquet. Not answering questions.”

Viktor chimed in, “I can see on some of mine. Seems they are maybe singing, too. Very pretty. Here, I send—”

The long, low notes came to them on magnetic waves. They resounded with deep harmonics with high, tinkling overnotes. She remembered listening to the beautiful, long whale songs and wondered what the Beings would think of those. She should ask Earthside for some.

“What is?” Viktor asked.

She had no answer. Sunward, the storm was rising.

As the huge ball of fields and plasma approached, it seemed to be bristling. Tiny, lacy patterns grew. They connected and spread from each new node, and Julia had the sensation of watching something not just swelling but growing. Intricate structures solidified, working into greater webs. Each moment brought it thousands of kilometers nearer.

“I’m getting high fields nearby,” Viktor said.

“Must be this storm,” Jordin sent.

“No, is from behind us,” Viktor said. “Is definitely not inward.”

It struck Pluto, and the planet left a blank hole in the oncoming magnetic filigree. In seconds fiery fibers were creeping into the long, conical gap, illuminating it. A whole world had made only a momentary obstacle to the structure rushing out at them. The traceries laced together, and soon no trace of the dark spot remained.

On it came. The distances that had taken them weeks to cross took the spinning slug of plasma only moments. “Here comes,” Viktor said, and he could not disguise the tight high notes of tension in it.

Nothing. Not the slightest rattle or surge followed the impact. Viktor had swiveled some of their microwave antennas forward, so they saw on-screen the true size of the bright fibers. One sinewy fiber passed between them and
Proserpina,
emitting a darting hiss in the low radio channels. The next nearest was hundreds of kilometers away. Julia had seen thousands of them linking and weaving in the last hour, and only now felt in her bones the size of the plasma island that was passing by. A vast continent, gliding in the night.

This close, they could see the intricate magnetic fibers that coiled and flexed as the structure fled onward and outward, into the far dark where it would dwell.

“Is just the front,” Viktor said. “This magnetic architecture is deep and is passing by us. So fast! Quicker than anything else in nature, this.”

Streamers of magnetic fluff shot past on their screens. Outside, in the narrow band available to the human eye, there was only the solemn black. To the vast interplay of plasma and fields their vision was blind.

Julia felt a lurch. “What’s that?”

Viktor said nothing as his fingers flew over the control board. Julia felt a strumming vibration through the deck. “We’re tilting,” Viktor said. “Something maybe hit us.”

But the pressure seals were fine, and there had been no audible impact. Vibrations in the deck got deep, strong. “What could have happened?” Killings sent on comm.

“We’re getting a shove from side,” Viktor said on general comm. He threw a starfield up on the main screen, the view from the forward ’scope. Slowly the center mark crept toward the right. “Is tipping us.”

The deck began shuddering. A low note sounded.
High Flyer’s
nose was turning faster now, and the starfield slid visibly to the right. But the short, rotating drum of the living quarters fought the change. It was like holding a turning bicycle wheel by its axis and then trying to tilt it, Julia thought. Angular momentum didn’t want to change. At the axis the coupling collar was protesting. Bearings ground against a fluid universal joint and shed vibrations into the whole ship.

“Not built to take this quick tipping,” Viktor muttered as he worked at the board.

Killings said from the status board, “Mechanical linkage is getting stressed. We’re going out of performance range.”

“Whatever’s tipping us, it’s steady.” Viktor’s voice had gotten tight, not a good sign. “Not impact, no. Something else.”

Jordin’s voice came in, flat and calming. “I can see you tumbling. There’s a lot of magnetic field built up on your port side. All that, acting like a pressure on the ship’s metal.”

“So Beings are tipping us over.” Viktor now spoke in his calm, deliberate voice. “Mystery solved. But what to do?”

Killings said, “Step on the gas.”

Nobody said anything. Killings went on, “We fire up the reactor, pulse-start it, get up to high specific impulse. We’ll follow a spiral path, getting larger as we accelerate. A moving target. That’ll make it hard to push against us.”

Elegant. Viktor muttered thanks and got to work. Julia felt the rumble of fluids moving from their aft water tanks. The water was a good, thick absorber, blocking any reactor radiation. It captured the vagrant neutrons that spilled out as the reactor shot up in temperature, ready within less than a minute for fuel. The thumping pumps fed the hot chambers streams of water, and she visualized the gushers bursting into superheated steam, a hundred meters behind them. A pleasantly reassuring push eased her down into her acceleration couch. “Here we go,” Viktor said, running the reactor temperature to a high spike.

They gained velocity slowly at first. The magnetic side pressure kept pace, still rotating their nose to the right, but within minutes this began to work in their favor.

“Y’see,” Killings said eagerly, “the faster we spin, the more our exhaust turns against the pressure that’s pushing us to rotate.”

“Beings behind this, now they get burned,” Viktor said gleefully. He notched up the reactor, and the ship rumbled around them. To Julia it felt like the stirrings of a great beast, roused from slumber.

She felt tremors run through the ship. They were rotating more now, and she felt the local gravity shift. She closed her eyes, but that just made her feel dizzy. She glanced around and saw that others were holding on to their couch arms and gritting teeth. If this kept on, they would soon not even be able to walk.

Abruptly she recalled the harrowing moments—decades ago, but leaping fresh to mind—during the aerobraking of the first Mars expedition. Just like then, her mind stopped thinking about ideas and spoke in declaratives.
That noise! That shaking! I’m going to die!

She clenched her teeth and forced that away. Focused—

Jordin sent, “Seeing some movement in the magnetic pressure zone. Kinda cloudy…”

On-screen he sent a mixed image, ordinary optical plus a radio topo map. The ship was tumbling visibly now, its bright yellow-green plume forking around behind it. Turbulent horsetails of it sliced through the magnetic cloud topo lines. The natural resultant of the force vectors made
High Flyer
into a pinwheel, spinning in ever-larger arcs as it spat hard, hot plasma.

“Getting a big increase of cyclotron emission,” Jordin sent.

Julia could see it in the all-channel summary. Spikes, quick high flurries, broadband rumbles. Silently, in bands no human ear could sense, a great howl arose from the densely packed Six.

F
ORCEFUL CRIED OUT
in pain.

A searing, cutting edge swept through them. The Six were entwined, to exert the maximum leverage on the tiny traveling machine. It had been exciting at first, to work together—a closer merge than any had ever attempted—and then to start the object tumbling, end over end, as Mirk had foreseen it would.

Now the tiny machine spat back. Because the Six were so immersed in each other, they could not quickly flee. Mirk took the first cut, as ions fried down his field lines. The particles soon found his tucked-in recesses, where electrical potentials held lodes of knowledge and skill. These shorted out in ruby, snapping bursts. Mirk felt a sheet of pain shoot through his side, and heard the cries as small parts of himself seared away.

Ring cried.

Ring screamed as currents stung it. Sunless and Dusk jerked away from Ring, knowing they were next. The searing sliced into them as they struggled to free their entwined lines of force.

Cries, angry and fearful, shot through them all. At close range their emissions directly pressed against the bodies of each other, fevering the vacuum with calls.

There came a larger, booming tone, the Summed Voice of the Eight.

Forceful countered, scrambling away from the agony that clawed at it.

A silence. In fact, the Six had thought the Proto, a New One, would be far enough away from the struggle. But now that the machine was slinging plasma at high speed in all directions, nothing was safe.

The call went up from each. All thought of tumbling the machine now fled from them.

Forceful yanked free. Now it could expand its view beyond the constricted focus necessary to press against the tiny machine. All around, for several light-seconds, the sky worked with the snaking strands of the Proto. On its long birthing flight up from the Fount, through the hazards of the planets and the vagaries of the storm, this Proto had left behind the shattered, dying shards of many thousands.

Selection had pruned away all but the robust. First came the simple forms, fields twined together and barely capable of self-organization. During their growth—as the great storms drove them outward, away from the strong trapping fields of the planets, and at last free of the roving turbulences of the Hotness—they competed with each other. Fields curled and died, plasmas fizzed and fought. Most structures died. The better were able to digest the energies and field strengths of the lesser. But as the survivor Protos approached the Cascade, they dimly became aware of its threat. The churning vortices there could break a Proto and splatter it into rivulets. Some slowed, avoiding the whipping violence ahead.

Forceful vaguely recalled doing that, so long ago. Few Protos who shot through the Cascade lived.

And this one now—it brimmed with bristly intelligence, knowing itself for the first time. It reached out with tendrils of coiling flux, felt and heard…and braked. It slowed, gaining the time to assemble itself all the better.

To one side it sensed the brute energies of young plasma. It had not dealt with these virulent eating swarms since its first moments. Then, an enormous solar arch had ripped open at its top and spilled out whorls and cusps of magnetic field. Most of these died within seconds, eaten through by blind gouts of plasma. Many of the young knots screamed in waves of magnetic flux…and fell silent forever.

This Proto remembered that. It began to move sluggishly away from the pinwheel gusher of voracious plasma. But slowly, as it was tired from the long voyage.

Mirk called, though still racked with fevered pains.

But the Six were gnarled and fevered, frayed and damaged. They oozed sluggishly away from the searing torch that played among them. Panicked, they babbled and fled.

All but Chill. Diminished, feeble, it was now a thin disk of spinning fields and chilly plasma. It skated upon the virulent energies now all around it, catching waves and stealing a morsel of momentum where it could. The Six had not brought it to bear upon turning the tiny machine; Chill was far too weak to matter.

It hung spinning in the sky where the plasma arc cut. Slowly it dragged itself up the field lines, trying to maintain its own coherence. Memories flitted through it, dim shadows of a past it could barely recall. Yet it knew the struggle around it mattered, and above all the Proto must survive.

Here came the arc, on another revolution. Again the plume bit and seared away part of Mirk. Again the plasma jutted out toward the Proto beyond—and Chill thrust itself forward. In its webbed lattices valences shorted out. Potentials burned and died.

The snakes of exhaust plasma sparked and ate and in turn died.

Chill had time for one last signal, a simple waveform of ripples that ran out along the stretched field lines of its outer carapace.

I go to the True End. Make my death worthy…

In moments Chill lost structure, decaying by fitful inductance. Fragments spun away. Loops of coherent fields drifted into the tides of flux.

The Proto moved away now, seeking distance from the deadly pin-wheel. It sensed its new world dimly, but enough to know danger and pain.

The pressure of Chill’s destruction flung out shards of memory. Kernels of skills arced away, driven by the energies of dying. Some small, faster motes of this wreckage caught up to the Proto. Knots of magnetic structure sped by, some snagging in the Proto’s diffuse fields, buzzing like flies caught in a web. The Proto reached out with burgeoning strength and spooled them in. Here were age-old recollections, shards of times long past.