DUALITY: The World of Lies (13 page)

It occurred to him then how narcotized he must
be to be mocking the celestials like that. It also occurred to him
that he had a visitor to his site: a solitary raccoon with golden
flowing hair, one of the few wild creatures bold enough to approach
fire and much larger humans in the hope of salvaging scraps. It
stood on its hindquarters and chirped on at him as though it were
annoyed about something.

Gahre thought about driving it away, but
decided the creature was being civil enough. The outer layer of the
spitted bird was now optimally cooked. He tore off a wing and
tossed a bit of meat at the raccoon, who after initially recoiling,
put on a hilarious display of attempting to pick up the piping hot
scrap, dropping and juggling it every which way like a woodland
jester, then attempting to eat it whole, only to spit it out and
nurse his burned tongue. Gahre laughed a good bit at this. He spent
the next hour picking away at his dinner and tossing bits of it to
his new friend, who turned out to be an excellent listener. Gahre
ranted on about the ills of men and the wonders of the cosmos to
it. He posed lofty philosophical queries, and answered them in the
raccoon’s stead with long soliloquies. Raccoon mainly hung around
for the food, and probably wasn't taking all that much away from
their discourse, but Gahre felt sure the creature would hold this
curious encounter in his tiny brain for the remainder of his
years.

T
hree
hours since the thermal meltdown had begun and so far only Farprobe
41 had reported in, tracking another satellite in the ring at a
safe distance. It was identical to the previous one they had
observed, and there was still no sign of downward
transmission.

Aru watched forlornly as the hull of his
precious ship deformed and melted into an abstract and deviant
mockery of itself. It was a omen of death.

As the highest command authority, he could, in
an instant, order The Kinetic on an exit course, leaving this
entire venture behind. Even then, he was skeptical about their odds
of survival. He didn't trust System's estimates because this was
unknown territory for any vessel. He didn't know if he was more
frightened by the threat of the engine failure, which would leave
them abandoned to a slow fiery demise, or by the more likely
scenario of thermal seepage into the high energy fuel storage
causing an anti-matter containment failure that would obliterate
them instantly, and at this point, was probably the best outcome
they could reasonably hope for.

All he had to do was say the word. Well, that
and silently order the roaming security bots to sedate his first
officer since she would attempt to override that order with her
go-to resort of physical force. It was do or die for Mei on this
one, and he had to respect that.

A part of him felt they had come too far to
turn back. Finding that satellite transmission in this accelerated
time-window was purely a matter of luck now, and the odds were far
from favorable. There were 52 relays in the chain, and only one
would be transmitting at any given time, for a period of several
hours.

No, he would not do it. Like all he did, this
was for her. He had turned his back on the engagement that would
have sealed his seat of power on Calidon, had never put in for the
promotion to commodore, even now that the war had ended and there
was no glory to be won. He had given up all these things and even
agreed to this treasonous venture just to keep this ship and her in
it with him.

So it was decided, and he no longer allowed
his mind to waffle. They were all in despite everything; despite
the odds and despite the ship's direst warnings about the thermals,
which grew grimmer by the hour.

“Farprobe 46 has come online tracking
satellite 13 at radial position 31 degrees on the ring,” System
announced, followed by, “Increase in ionic density within the
ship's magnetosphere has accelerated by 4% in the last hour.
Thermal effects on hull integrity are also...”

“System! Enough! You will only update us on
ship's thermals when requested to from here on out,” Aru barked.
“Display the data for Farprobe 46 on holograph.”

It all came up showing the exact same readings
as 41 had. Still no downward transmission. There was one more, the
probe coming into perihelion with the Black Stone. Farprobe 33 was
due to come online in another 40 minutes. And that was it. They had
those three probes to go on, to find the one satellite in
transmission mode among the entire ring of 52. Well, they still had
their 8 nearprobes and the Kinetic itself scouring the target
orbit, but that was a longshot. In a space this vast with the
resources they had, such a sweep could take days or even weeks to
comprehensively scan the region.

Now it was just sit and wait. He could fill
the time fretting over the damage readings, but what would be the
point? No. He would just ignore them. By the time a ship system
failure went catastrophic, it wouldn't matter anyway.

Mei, he could see, was putting on her best
face, but scared in her own right. She was still plotting and
directing the near probes, refining their trajectories based on the
very limited data of knowing that 2 out of the 52 satellites were
in non-transmission, which at least gave them a very small sense of
where their target was not.

The minutes slowly burned by as if the
governing mechanics of time were different here. He stared silently
into the ship diagnostics display watching one heat sink then
another surreally eject. System was taking the steps of last
resort, and stifling itself from making a report of it, per Aru's
orders. The thermal situation had obviously worsened beyond what
System had earlier predicted. They had dropped 4 heatsinks coming
in through the corona, and they'd need at least twice that to make
it out. There were only 6 left.

Farprobe 33 came online suddenly, showing them
yet another 6-cylindered com satellite, this one receiving
transmission, adding another piece to puzzle, but not the one that
mattered. Farprobe 33's downward transmitter was as inactive as the
others, yet the incoming transcoronal transmission told them that
the Black Stone was broadcasting into the ring in the same manner
as the White. Such a volume of data coming in, yet none going out.
It simply made no sense.

Then System made a surprising announcement
embellished with full visuals on the display.

“Prior to 2 hours 23 minutes ago,
Farprobe 33's log shows the lower axial transmitter active and
transmitting what appears to be the same data as the horizontally
relayed ring transmission, to a location just beyond 140 degrees of
longitude of the target orbit, tracking toward the
141
^st
,
as indicated on display.”

That was it! That was their target!

Mei flew into action. “System, route all
nearprobes to that location at once! And let's drop the Kinetic
down a few thousand kilometers, do a full burn, and curve back up
into this altitude on course to rendezvous with the search
target.”

“Aye, Commander.”

Aru could not decide if it was a blessing or a
curse that their destination was a quarter span of the orbit's
circumference ahead of their position, another 5 hours of flight at
full engine burn and the reverse thrust that would be needed to
synchronize the Kinetic with it at rendezvous both exacerbated
their fuel conservation dilemma, but time was more the essence here
than all else.

Two more hours in and another heat sink
expelled. By now the entire outer shield layer had sloughed away,
and the heat was expanding the shield ring segments which would
soon begin to drop off. The hub was similarly showing signs of
thermal expansion, and worse, it was now even encroaching into the
highly protected material nanocarbonfiberized-glass inner ring of
the ship where they lived and breathed -at least for the time
being.

“Not a word of this, System,” he voicelessly
told the Kinetic over headlink telepathy. “Whatever we decide to
do, you just agree the ship can tolerate it.”

System texted back into Aru's
implant.
“You are expecting me to lie,
Captain?”

“No. I'm ordering you
to!”

“Aye, Captain.”

He tried to remember the last time either of
them had eaten. Ice-cream, he recalled, 2 days ago. Mei had barely
slept over the past 3 days, and he doubted that she had gotten in
anything resembling a proper meal.

“You should eat something,” he told
her.

Mei looked at him, exhausted. She flipped the
halo from her head and walked over to him. She hung her arm gently
off his shoulder, leaned herself against him, and closed her eyes.
Aru reciprocated her gesture by putting his arm around
her.

“I've renamed the nearprobes,” she mumbled,
“1-6 as you'll see them labeled on the holoscanner.”

“Yes, I've noted that already,
dear.”

She opened her eyes and eased away from their
embrace, but remained close beside him. “Nearprobe 2 is coming into
radar range of the target. I've got the visual on the 2D. Could you
clear away the rest of these displays?”

Aru had about 27 holograph displays going
simultaneously, mostly ship's system data. He waved them away so
they could exclusively monitor Nearprobe 2's camera and telemetry
readings without distraction. They gazed at it, waiting,
meditatively silent. As Aru felt his mind relaxing, his heart rate
and respiration also slowed, until no more thoughts of impending
doom screeched and wailed in his head. In light of the extreme
circumstances, this zen state was the best place he could be,
dealing with things as they came and letting go of all the
rest.

A blip on the telemetry cued System into an
announcement. “A localized differential electrical field anomaly
has been detected at the target location. Charge is estimated at 44
times that of the local environment.”

Their surrounding medium, the chromospheric
plasma, was itself a high voltage electric field. So it made sense
that the object would be emitting one since it needed to generate a
force shield in the same way as the Kinetic emitted positive
electric charge and projected a magnetospherical rhombus around
itself for shielding and as their probes similarly did on a smaller
scale. But 44x? That was an extremely positive charge, several
magnitudes of order higher than what they had generated in the
corona. By scale, that might even be more than the star itself
generated!

“That's quite a concentration of energy,” Mei
commented. “What's the field diameter Kinny?”

“The standing data is insufficient to
extrapolate the volume, Commander. We will gather more as Nearprobe
4 approaches. From the telemetry we're receiving now, I would
estimate a field diameter of approximately 250 meters, encompassing
an planar region of 196 square kilometers.”

“By the folly of Mandu!” Mei exclaimed. “Aru,
that force field must encompass...” She stuttered and paused.
Without a halo, and her brainpower depleted by exhaustion, what
would otherwise have been simple calculation failed her.

“8000 cubic kilometers, Commander,” offered
System. “18 times the shield capacity of this ship.”

“And the source?” Aru asked.

“The generation source is as yet undetected
but its presence is inferred by these readings, Captain. The
electron density of the field is millions of times that of the
rarified plasma environment. If I may relay to you a correlation I
find particularly striking, Captain?”

“Sure, let's hear it.”

“The force field is only the first layer of
field. The weak field encompasses an even larger volume, some
120,000 square kilometers. We, the Kinetic, are in fact within it
now, as ship's sensors are confirming.”

“And...?”

“And that weak field serves to divert and
drain radiation moving into it, before those energy streams even
get to the main force field. But I digress, the correlation I refer
to was discovered by one of my lateral inductive reasoning banks,
which noticed by random pattern matching that the measurements of
the target's object's fields, when set to scale, elegantly match
that of Ignis Rubeli itself.”

“Like a smaller scale model of the entire star
and its surrounding heliosphere?”

“Yes, Captain. I don't know what to draw from
that. I just found it highly conspicuous.”

He could see Mei's head buzzing away. “What do
you think, Commander?”

She ignored him silently for a few moments in
thought, until her eyes lit up and she queried System. “Kinny!
Let's assume this is what you say, a scaled down version of The Red
Star. Based on the relative size of the fields we're detecting,
what size would the corresponding small scale solar orb
be?”

“The visible sphere of a star, as demarked by
the surface band of the photosphere, is only the center of its
entire heliosphere; in the case of Ignis Rubeli, for example,
extending half of the distance to Cearulei Azur. So to extrapolate
downwards to the scale of the field we are currently observing, we
would find an orb of roughly 15 meters in radius, with an expected
circumference of approximately 100 meters.”

“Way too large for the cargo hold...” she
muttered to herself.