A Sword Into Darkness (18 page)

His will failed.  All his thoughts wrapped around those central ideas and spun faster and faster, sucked down a dark drain.  An hour later, still awake, he felt numb with self-loathing, and he wished for anything else to dwell upon, even the nightmare-memory of the
Rivero
’s death.

9:  “CATHEDRALS IN AIR”

The
Promise
fulfilled its name with unemotional efficiency.  From the moment of its launch, the probe continually modified and refined the approach, attempting to arrange a meeting with an unknown alien presence traveling toward Earth at nearly one fifth the speed of light.  To a person, this might be a daunting task, dogged by doubt, uncertainty, and trepidation.  To the expert systems of the probe, it was merely a matter of numbers.

The Deltans, at the time of launch, were 1.69 light-years away, traveling at 0.18 c toward Earth, and decelerating at a hundredth of a standard Earth gravity, or approximately 0.01 c per year.  The
Promise
, presumably far smaller and less refined than the approaching alien, was nonetheless capable of greater accelerations.

The probe set out from Earth at a third of a gravity of acceleration, more than thirty times the rate of the Deltans.  Angled down out of the ecliptic, that rough plane in which the planets revolved around the sun, and to one side of the blue spark which defined the approaching alien,
Promise
’s course allowed it to direct its drive corona away from Earth and all the inquisitive amateur astronomers who might ask too many hard questions about the secretive probe.  It also allowed the probe to make an oblique approach upon the alien—covert, ostensibly non-threatening, and as stealthy as one could get while radiating at a high temperature.

Promise
stacked up a list of accomplishments, all unacknowledged.  Only hours from its launch, it surpassed Voyager 1 as the fastest man-made object, despite never going through the complicated rigmarole of planetary gravity assists.  The probe’s enhanced photonic drive allowed it to brute-force itself past the record, to speeds which boggled the imagination.  It rocketed across the orbits of each of the outer planets in turn, skirted by the wide expanse of the Kuiper belt and punched through the heliopause, where the pervasive solar wind was ground to a halt by the all-encompassing gasses of the interstellar medium.  More than a hundred times the distance of Earth from the Sun,
Promise
entered true interstellar space, surpassing all previous probes.

But Gordon, Nathan, and Kris’s modest creation paid little attention.  Its journey had only just begun.

The drive kept up a continuous massless thrust, using unimaginable photon pressure to muscle the probe to nearly relativistic velocities.  At the speeds it traveled, a single grain of dust impacting the probe would be disastrous, so it protected itself by, once more, brute force methods.  A laser continuously scanned the space immediately preceding the probe, lighting up and ionizing any particle massive enough to do
Promise
harm.  The burning, ionized particle was then pushed out of the way by the strong electromagnetic field set up in the bow like a battering ram.  Even with this defense, though, the probe could do nothing to stop the resulting radiation and cosmic rays that inundated it.  For that,
Promise
relied upon thick layers of shielding and redundant, self-repairing electronics.

For twenty months,
Promise
kept up its uninterrupted course.  Then, when it had built up a staggering velocity of nearly half the speed of light, the drive shut down, more than 10,000 astronomical units from Earth, halfway to the inner edge of the Oort Cloud.  It turned, centering the Deltans in its sensors, and re-evaluated its approach.  It made some minor adjustments, turned to point its drive at a nearly right angle to the target, and lit off again.

By starting out its journey driving at an angle to the Deltans, the probe had built up a significant velocity away from both the aliens and the Solar System.  Now, after turnaround, it had to negate both that lateral velocity and the relativistic approach speed it had built up.  The practical upshot was that the drive corona was now pointed away from the Deltans versus directly at them, allowing the probe to close relatively unannounced.  It was wasteful in terms of energy expended, but the chosen route was as much of a defensive measure as the sandwiches of shield material blanketing the probe.

The days continued to add up. 
Promise
reached the Oort Cloud, that diffuse spherical grouping of icy rocks from which Halley’s comet was born, and burned its way through the Cloud’s nearly 30,000 AU expanse.  Two and a half years after its launch, the probe exited the last structure of the Solar System, over three quarters of a light-year from home.  Months later, the probe flew past the arbitrary but significant milestone of one light-year from its origin, but it paid no attention.

At 1.08 light-years distant, the probe was nearly at rest to the Solar System and still accelerating. 
Promise
’s motion reversed and it began to close then, building up speed in the approaching direction in order to match speeds with the Deltans.  The Deltans themselves were no longer just a blur of blue light, but began to take on definition to the diminutive sensor package mounted on the probe.

The processors aboard the
Promise
woke up, commencing the endgame of its journey.  At 1.05 light-years from Earth, at a speed of 0.14 c, the probe turned again and reduced its drive to only a fraction of its earlier intensity, matching the nearby Deltans.  The shielded side panels of the probe came free and the
Promise
blossomed, extending sensors, auxiliary probes, and twin communication dishes—one pointed at the objective, and the larger one pointed back toward Earth.

Promise
scanned and photographed the mysterious alien presence, so long unknown and now revealed.  The probe launched smaller measuring devices in order to increase the scope of its investigation and retransmitted the reams of data it produced back to Earth, though the information would take just over a year to be received.  The Deltans endured this scrutiny without reacting, seemingly inert.

Then
Promise
said hello.

February 18, 2045; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California

Gordon sprawled lazily in his chair, leaning as far back as the soft leather seat would go, his feet propped up on the desk in his home office.  The door stood closed, with Melinda Graciola, his personal assistant, holding all distractions at bay from her place just outside the office.  Gordon was free to lay back and just
think
, something which he rarely had time to do these days despite the dividends such uninterrupted concentration usually paid.

In each hand, Gordon held a glossy print, slowly bringing them together again and again, not really noticing the soft crashing noise he made every time the pictures touched.  In his right hand, he held a picture of all they had worked to achieve—the ship, lying on its side in its floating hangar.  It was a nameless, gunmetal gray monstrosity, a plated hexagonal pyramid covered in hatches, domes, sensors, and cables as workers crawled over it with last-minute labors, readying it for its rapidly approaching launch date.  Nathan would be there now, overseeing the final outfitting, worrying over it like a mother hen.  But that was good.  It was his job to worry over such things.

Gordon Lee had other things to worry about.

In his left hand, he held the mystery—the clearest, most recent processed photo of the Deltans from the SSBA.  For all of the array’s vaunted resolution and capability, though, this picture was little improvement over the one Lydia and Sykes had shown him years before.  The glare from the Deltans’ photon drive simply blocked out all but the grossest of detail, and what was left behind looked like no ship Gordon could imagine.  It was a false-color image of the central drive corona in brilliant blue-white, surrounded by four reddish shadows on the periphery of the drive’s circle.

The spacing of the shadows always seemed to suggest something to Gordon, but he had never put his finger on it.  The three largest shadows formed the vertices of an equilateral triangle around the drive, with the smaller shadow nestled on the perimeter halfway between two of the vertices.  And, as subsequent exposures showed, the four shadows rotated about the drive, always keeping their relative positions to one another, but rotating rigidly around nonetheless.

He softly crashed the pictures into one another again and then arched an eyebrow as a thought occurred to him.  “Lagrange?” he asked to the empty room.

Before he could pursue that line of thought any further, there was a rapid knock upon the door and Melinda opened it without prompting.  She had been a knockout when he hired her thirty years ago, primarily as eye-candy for jaded bureaucrats he tried to sell to, but she had proven to be capable beyond just her looks, a true asset to the company.  In the intervening decades, she had traded gorgeous and voluptuous for glamorous and regal.  Gordon was usually pleased to see her, but not when she interrupted him on the verge of something so big.  “Damn it, Melinda—”

“Gordon, Castelworth’s duty monitor is on the line.  She says she has an encrypted stream for your authorization.”

Gordon scowled.  Castelworth was his Australian telemetry station, tracking and monitoring all the constellations of satellites Windward Tech maintained for both government and corporate clients.  Why the hell would they need him to personally decrypt a transmission?  “Can you ask—”

“Sir, it’s the
Promise
.”

Gordon shut his open mouth and nodded.  He carefully laid his two photos down on his desk, one atop the other.  He squared them precisely and then moved them off to the side, and tried to appear calm.  Calm was not a good descriptor, though.  Now, without anything to occupy his hands, his fingers drummed a rapid, complicated rhythm on the desk, a counterpoint to the numerous disparate trains of thought that tried to traverse his mind at the same time.

He looked up at Melinda and cleared his throat.  Softly, he said.  “Oh.  Well, could you do me a favor and get in touch with Nathan for me.  He should be here when we decrypt it.  And Lydia Russ.  Yeah, Lydia will never let me forget it if I leave her out.  And Kris Muñoz and the Contact Evaluation Team, and the Physics Group, and the Astronomy Group, and, oh, and the
Promise
team, and—”

She smiled at his nervous fumbling.  “How about I just follow your preplanned response?  All those and more are already listed in the contact section.  Remember?  You wrote it before going senile a couple of minutes ago.”

“That would probably be for the best.”  He tried to return her smile, but only got half of a crooked grin out.

Melinda shook her head and came up to the desk, reaching out to put one hand over his in reassurance.  “You did it, Gordon.  That’s what this means.  The
Promise
is a success.”  She squeezed his hand and then left, off to inform the company and the world that first contact had been made.

Shocked, Gordon continued to just sit there.  He looked at his desk as if it might explode.  Accessible within its active electronic surface was everything he had hoped for, prayed for, and feared for the last 22 years.  He was a few keystrokes away from answers to questions that had consumed his life, but now at the critical moment, he was frozen in trepidation.

Besides, he reasoned, he really should wait for the others.  It would mean more, experiencing it all with that highly elite crowd.  That was the right thing to do.

He would not allow himself to be turned into some petulant child the night before Christmas.  There would be no shaking of presents on his watch.

Gordon refused to spoil this.

No way.

Then his half grin broadened and lifted into an uncomfortably feral smile.  “Yeah, right.  Screw ‘em if they can’t handle being second.”

He tapped a capacitive control flush with surface of his desk and an integral keyboard and touchpad swelled out of the desktop, while a large expanse of the black lacquered surface became a wide monitor.  Gordon logged on to Windward’s secure global network and clicked around until he was into Castelworth station’s server.   There he performed a second login, scrolled over to the active and waiting telemetry streams and found a single icon that caused his heart to beat noticeably within his chest:  the
Promise
.

Gordon held a breath for a moment and selected the icon.  Streams of memorized pseudorandom digits tumbled forth from his fingertips and the decryption algorithm began to un-spool the compressed, jumbled data into several channels, all transmitted more than a year before.

One was a telemetry stream, which would help evaluate the health of the probe and the details of its encounter, but which would be completely unintelligible until processed by systems mirroring the probe itself.  Then there was a communications log and a recording of all transmissions sent and received, the robotic equivalent of a cockpit voice recorder.  Gordon hovered his cursor above this stream, anxious to hear what exchange there might have been with the aliens, but he did not select it.  One of the other streams held an even greater allure.