This Old Rock (8 page)

Prepare for immediate lift off as soon as I get in the
hatch,
she told the shuttle. Without David’s weight, she reached the
shuttle as the debris curtain spread overhead. The trick would be to get
between that and the blast wave.

The ladder hung out of the hatch. David got up, at last, and
tried to run toward her.

“Hurry!” she screamed.

He tripped over a small rock and fell. He picked himself up.
A second lost. “I’m going to be the martyr here, Liz. Get lost!”

A strange orange light flooded the horizon. She turned. Ah,
yes. This was it. She sent what she saw streaming into the net. Roiling clouds
zoomed toward the zenith as if in a time-lapse video of normal weather. It
glowed. Everything glowed. She felt like she was in an oven.

Air slammed into her and sent her skyward, the shuttle and
David tumbling nearby. She felt surreal.

Hot—very, very hot. Her visor melted, bowed in, a blowtorch
played on her face. Everything went dark. She took a last breath, a breath of
pure fire. She willed herself to take it deep, so as not to prolong the pain.
So
I pass into legend.

THE BLACK HOLE
PROJECT

by G. David Nordley
and C. Sanford Lowe

available
in
Kindle
ebook
and
print

at Amazon.com

Continue reading for a sample chapter of

TO CLIMB A FLAT MOUNTAIN

by G. David Nordley

Jacques Song opened his eyes and saw a huge fish floating
above the canopy of his cold sleep unit and staring at him. He shut them
immediately; it must be a bad dream. People often had dreams as cold sleep
evolved into normal sleep and wakefulness.

Last night, 21 June 2345, he and the rest of the corps had
listened to some inspirational nonsense from Earth Empress Marie, lifted a
glass of rum spiked with cold sleep preparation drugs, and dutifully lain down
on their hotel beds at Sheffield Station in Earth orbit.

In deep sleep, they’d been transferred to Cold Sleep Units
and loaded onto starships bound for 36 Ophiuchi. The process would be reversed
twenty-three years later when the invasion force had established itself,
hopefully undetected, at a base in the Kuiper belt around 36 Ophiuchi A and B.
Their mission was to liberate a colony gone horrifically wrong.

But that colony was not under a sea filled with staring
fish.

The colony leaders didn’t believe in using robots–labor
cleansed the soul. Slavery in all but name had evolved in a decade. Polygamy,
child marriage, gladiatorial executions and inherited subordinate status became
the rule. They’d bungled relations with primitive aliens on another of 36
Ophiuchi A’s planets, raising concerns about humanity’s status in the galaxy.

But those aliens did not, as he remembered, look like fish.

Dissenters had fled to the hills and risked everything to
call for help–which would take half a century at best to get there. Before 36
Ophiuchi, the consensus had been that the distance between stars made
interstellar warfare impossible. The colony leaders had counted on it.

But faced with a cry for help, Earth considered the impossible.
There’d been a mammoth debate informed by massive simulations showing that,
absent outside influence, the theocracy might persist indefinitely. The
decision had been made, volunteers recruited, and robots instructed to prepare
a fleet. Jacques, divorced and looking for distance, had signed up.

Jacques opened his eyes again, and the fish was still there,
all too real. Maybe two meters long, it boasted a huge parrot-like beak, but
otherwise looked something like a shark. He was wide awake now. He was
obviously not on the conveyor ship,
Resolution
, so something
else
had gone horrifically wrong.

He tried to touch the net, but the lack of response didn’t
surprise him. The CSU seemed inert, but he was breathing, so it must be
functioning to some extent. The things were designed to keep you viable in a
suspended state for a couple of centuries without external power–they warmed
you up to a coma every few months for DNA repair.

“CSU, what’s your energy level?” he asked. As soon as he
moved, the parrot-beaked shark tried to bite through the canopy, but didn’t
have much success against the flexidiamond.

A heads-up display flashed in front of him, superposing
itself over the curious–or hungry–fish. It showed he had about two hours left
at present consumption levels, which were at emergency minimum. The display
flashed off again. The CSU may as well have said, “I’ve done what I can. It’s
your problem now.”

Jacques raised himself on his elbows. The water–assuming it
was water–around him was not all that clear and the light level must be very
low. From what he could see, his CSU seemed to be resting on nearly level sand,
with a few huge dark boulder-like objects here and there. The surface seemed
far above him.

He would probably have to try to reach it.

But when? Conventional wisdom would have him wait as long as
he could for rescue. The CSU, he realized, had maximized that time. Rescue
wasn’t coming.

First things first. He needed to inventory his assets. He
reached into a cubbyhole to his left for his personal effects,  his wrist comp
and a couple of backup data disks–what he’d left on his hotel night table for
the
Resolution’s
robots to take with him. The objects seemed very
light–low gravity?

The wrist comp was dead, powerless. He shivered. Just how
long had it been? He suppressed the urge to ask immediately–if he were going to
get out of this situation alive, he would need to use what was left of the
CSU’s power very efficiently.

Another cubbyhole held an emergency kit in a sealable bag,
which he emptied and inventoried. It struck him as an eclectic jumble of stuff
someone assembled to fill a regulatory square, never expected to be used. There
was another wrist comp, its memory filled, no doubt, with all sorts of survival
information. It was powerless. There was a survival tent, nicely folded down to
the size of an envelope. There were a few pieces of primitive, non-electronic
gear including a dozen nutrition bars, a compass, a magnifying lens, needle and
thread, a ten-centimeter long multitool, a pair of fabric canteens, a
photovoltaic power supply, binoculars, space blankets, etc. Finally, occupying
most of the volume of the kit, there was a shipsuit.

Even in the low gravity, struggling into the last was not
easy in the coffin-like space in the CSU, but once he got his legs in, his body
heat began to power the smart fabric up and it relaxed to make the rest of the
job easier. It molded itself around his body like a second skin, except for the
hood. The latter had a transparent section that could seal up for vacuum use.
Hopefully, it would work as well underwater.

It also had an emergency life support pack. For a moment,
Jacques smiled. It could make oxygen; he could wait several hours more to try
his escape, using that to breathe. Then he found it was powerless as well. He
sighed; many of the suit’s functions could be powered by his own body heat and
movements, but not that.

That was all he had. He imagined that, should he survive and
return to Earth some centuries hence, some of these objects might be displayed
in a museum as quaint relics of bygone pioneers.

Okay, it was time to find out where he was, what it was like
outside, and what had happened. He told the CSU to power up. The first thing he
got was text telling him that video was down for power conservation.

To the first question, the CSU told him they were at an
unsurveyed red dwarf, IRO 031010.36485, on a planet with a breathable
atmosphere that the
Resolution
had found 628 light years from Earth! On
the Earth calendar, it was Tuesday, the 23rd of March in the year 3521.

That was almost 1000 years from when they had departed. He
made himself cope with that as an objective fact; he would deal with the
emotional reality later. Humanity was still in the very early stages of
biological immortality. Had been, he corrected himself. They’d probably worked
things out by now. Some friends might still be alive, active, even looking for
him. But the gap in time would be as large as the gap between Marie’s
ceremonial monarchy and Charlemagne. He could deal with it later, he repeated
to himself. For now, he had to survive.

So the
Resolution
had not decelerated at 36
Ophiuchi–the beamrider’s nightmare. Starships were pushed to relativistic
velocities riding on a beam of microscopic pellets from their departure system,
which they ionized and reflected with magnetic fields. To decelerate, they
normally relied on a prepositioned pellet stream. Somehow, this hadn’t
happened.

For the invasion, the first units into the system had
carried enough mass to decelerate on their own. These passed by the system and
decelerated on the far side, their bulk shielding their exhaust from
observation. Once in 36 Ophiuchi’s Kuiper belt, they’d made deceleration trails
for the rest of the fleet. The whole process had taken an agonizing half century.

The CSU told him the lasers used to guide the nanopellets to
the starship had been replaced with a dummy load. Almost all of the pellets
passed by the starship without slowing it down. Who or what had done that, and
when, was unknown.

There were contingency plans for failure to decelerate. The
starship had coasted until it found a habitable planet it could reach and then
implemented an emergency deceleration protocol, deploying a superconducting
loop several kilometers across to drag against the interstellar medium until it
had reached a hundredth of lightspeed or so, and then going into rocket mode,
using its auxiliary nuclear power units while sacrificing its water, redundant
structure, invasion stores, and lithium hydride shielding, for fuel. It almost
made it; but ended up 103 kilometers per second short, and had to try
aerocapture.

Starships were tough, but not designed to function in a
planetary atmosphere. Its breakup would have absorbed the worst of the reentry
forces, perhaps controlled well enough to spill its cargo of CSUs into a
shallow body of water. There were three atmospheric shuttles. They weren’t
designed for that much aerobraking. But if one or two survived on autopilot,
Jacques thought, that could make all the difference in survival. The odds
weren’t good for the CSU occupants either, but with a layer of ice, maybe. That
was the best the ship could do.

The CSU went silent and Jacques reflected. Interstellar
warfare was “impossible” until the horror of what was happening in the 36
Ophiuchi system made Earth try it anyway. Perhaps they’d been right in the
first place.

The parrot-beaked shark, making no concession to human
biological immortality, had not gone away. It was, he decided, definitely
hungry. So was he–his cells needed to repair the radiation damage since his
last CSU cycle, and that took energy. Cosmic rays could be dealt with by
shielding, but carbon 14 was part of you. He ate four of the dozen nutrition
bars, knowing that he might regret the binge later, but thinking it was a good thing
to do while he was momentarily safe and secure. As he ate he eyed the
parrot-beaked shark, thinking filet. This eating thing works both ways, fella,
he thought with a grin.

He would have to flood the CSU, he realized, to equalize
pressure and get the canopy off. That would likely render his last link with
technological civilization inoperable. There was irony in that; his expertise
was in dealing with artificial intelligences and subsentient systems.

“Can you still record?” he asked it.

[Yes]
appeared in the heads-up display.

In a few short sentences, he explained who he was and how
he’d gotten there, and left notes for any of his fellow passengers in the
unlikely event they might find his CSU.

“Make as many copies of that as you have room for.”

[Done]

Jacques stuck the emergency kit bag on a geckro patch on his
suit. He was ready as he could get; there was no reason to delay longer. His
heart pounding, he chanted to make himself relax and use less oxygen. After a
couple of minutes, he felt at peace and ready. If his life were to end now, so
be it.

“Release the fasteners on both sides of the canopy. Give me
pure oxygen–exhaust what you’ve stored. Then flood the unit.” He took more deep
breaths as cold water rose rapidly on either side of him. The pressure
equalized with his face not ten centimeters between him and the fish’s beak. It
lunged repeatedly, its blows booming on the canopy.

He sealed his hood without trapping a lot of water in with
him, then pushed the canopy off and, grasping it by both edges, stood up. If
the fish had sense enough to swim around it, he was done for, but it just kept
trying to push through what it couldn’t see–a stalemate that would end as soon
as he ran out of breath, because the canopy was too heavy to carry to the
surface.

He looked down at the empty CSU and smiled to himself. It
was easy enough to flip the canopy around between fish attacks and then stand
on the edge of the CSU and lean so that the fish was below him. With a
now-or-never shove, he pushed the canopy down onto the CSU with parrot-beak
still trying to swim through it. With it trapped inside, he swam for the
surface.

Judging crudely from the change in volume of air in the CSU,
the pressure was something like eight atmospheres at the bottom, the equivalent
of eighty meters deep on Earth. But the surface proved much farther away than
that. Despite starting with several liters of oxygen in his hood, he was groggy
by the time he broke the surface of the water. He pulled off the hood and took
a gasping first breath.

He felt almost instantly restored as he bobbed up and down
in steep waves; it took remarkably little effort to keep his body high out of
the water. At the crest of a wave, he got a view of his surroundings. He’d
emerged from a freshwater lake, not a sea, but it was a large one, with distant
hills just barely sticking up over the horizon. Hills surrounded the lake
without a discernible gap–a caldera, from the steepness of the walls next to
him. He saw no vegetation.

Remembering that the parrot-beaked shark might have
relatives, he swam for the nearest shore at about a stroke per second.
Strangely, he didn’t tire and even increased his pace a bit.

The shore proved rocky, and the rocks looked volcanic and
sharp, ‘
a-
‘
a
lava, he thought. The waves were impressively high.
Still, he felt very strong, much stronger than he should after coming out of
cold sleep.

Bobbing along in the waves, parallel to the shore, he
eventually found a beach that was more gravel than rock and approached it
slowly, feet dangling beneath him. His feet touched briefly, then he was swept
back again. He rode the next wave in and got enough purchase with hands and
feet to hold on through the backwash. Then he scrambled forward ahead of the
next wave.

He stood on the shore breathing easily–not panting despite
what should have been heavy exercise. He was fit; all expedition personnel had
gotten many hours of hypergravity training, but his lack of distress still
surprised him. Gravity was clearly much lower than on Earth here, even less
than on Mars, he guessed. The sky was high and gray, there had to be a sun
somewhere, but it wasn’t immediately apparent where it was. It was decidedly
warm and humid.