Erebus (39 page)

Framed in the corner was the quote that had driven
Endeavour’s
first forays into space, the Fermi Paradox:
If aliens exist, where are they?
Except now, he knew the answer—or at least, part of it…

…and wished to God that he didn’t.

“Curt?”

“Sorry, Chad, just thinking.” Paskett snapped to. “Get downstairs and work up some options. It’s about time we start considering downscaling the sats anyway. They’re vestige—”

“Curt? Sorry to disturb you.” A hologram of Kailee Somers, Paskett’s PA, appeared in the center of the room.

“What’s up, Kailee?” Paskett asked.

“There are some people here to see you. They say it’s urgent.”

“Do they, now?” Paskett turned and looked at Chad, raising one eyebrow. Kailee was a formidable woman and took her job of controlling access to him very seriously. If someone uninvited even got her to the stage where she would bother bringing this to his attention, it probably really was urgent. Still, psychology 101 had to be played. “Sit them down. I’m just in with Chad. We’ll be done in thirty minutes.”

“Sorry, they say it has to be now. And they want to see Chad, too,” she said, an apologetic look on her face.

Paskett flicked his piercing, electric-blue augmented eyes back to Kailee’s hologram, and he gave a nod. “Very well.”

“Time to pay the piper?” Chad asked, standing up and straightening his tie.

“I think it may well be. Ready?”

“We knew it would be any time now.”

Paskett nodded. Chad took up a position next to Paskett’s desk as a knock came at the door. Before either man could answer, it opened, and four figures pushed past Kailee. She glanced apprehensively between the visitors and Paskett. He waved his hand for her to close the door, which she did hastily.

Two of the visitors he knew. After all, he’d been briefed who would be coming for them. The other two in uniform he presumed were the muscle.

“Colonel Cheng, Joan Vance?” Paskett nodded at them. “And your friends are?”

“They signed in. Your secretary has their details,” Cheng said as he entered the room and stepped down the two steps into the office proper.

“For God’s sake, don’t let Kailee hear you call her a secretary,” Paskett smiled.

“How about business before banter?” Vance said coldly. “Chad Struber, you are under arrest for conspiracy to murder 168 people in the Io Incident of 2183, which includes personnel on Io, personnel in an unregistered base, and other collateral damage. You’ll also be booked in for felony criminal damage to Concorde and, just for icing on the cake, defrauding Sarin Space Insurance to the tune of one hundred and seventy billion dollars pertaining to the alleged theft of the
Erebus
explorer ship. And those are just the highlights; there are quite a few other matters to deal with, too. I’m sure my friends here,” she gestured at the two officers, “can read you your rights on the way downstairs.”

“Well, best get going, then,” Chad said. The officers exchanged looks. They clearly hadn’t expected this amount of compliance.

“Ms. Kinsella will send one of her legal team down to the station. Would you be so kind as to let Kailee know where you’re going on the way out?” Paskett asked of the officers who were moving to flank Chad.

“That they will,” Vance said as the three people walked out the doors. “But I think we need to have a little chat, too.”

“Of course.” Paskett gestured over to the couches in one corner of the room. “Drinks?”

“Thank you, but no,” Vance said, settling into one of the sofas and crossing her legs. “I presume you know what this is about?”

“Me?” Paskett lowered himself into the opposite seat. “No. Well, not other than what you said you were locking up Chad for.”

“What do you know about the Io Incident, Mr. Paskett?” Vance asked.

“Why don’t you tell me what you think you know about it? And call me Curt.”

“I think Mr. Paskett is just fine.”

“Fair enough.” Paskett leaned back, opening his hands in a supplicating gesture. “So tell me.”

“I know that someone—who, as far as we’ve managed to trace up the ladder, was one Chad Struber from Heavy Helios Industries—activated some kind of off-the-books operation,” Vance began. “He recruited a medically retired veteran of the Siberian War from the U.S. Army, a former special forces soldier from the First Special Forces Operations Detachment—Delta, a.k.a., Delta Force, named Captain Victor Talbot. We knew him throughout the incident as the identity he assumed, Xander Frain.”

“Go on.” Paskett gestured with his hand.

“Struber paid a not inconsiderable sum of money to put Talbot back together again. After Siberia, there wasn’t much left of him after he’d stood a little too close to a grenade. Struber also upgraded Talbot’s already formidable enhancements to the best money could buy—and a few that money couldn’t—then dispatched him to hijack an A-drive liner. He slammed that liner into Io, destroying the moon and an alien artifact. He then boarded
Erebus
, which already had Struber’s handpicked crew aboard, and escaped to Sirius. Somewhere along the way, Struber persuaded his former protégé, who had taken a position as a Red Star senior troubleshooter, to act as a double agent. In the process of their escape, my friend, then Major Cheng, sustained substantial injuries. With me so far?”

“So far. And I’m glad to see you’ve recovered, Colonel.”

“Thank you.” Cheng’s eyes were hard, none of his old twinkle present. “It only took years of grueling therapy…oh, and some rather painful surgery.”

“Wonders of modern medical science,” Paskett nodded. “Sorry, go on.”

“From Sirius, Talbot took
Erebus
to a secret facility on a moon of Akarga. That secret facility, it turns out, was authorized to be created and staffed by…can you guess?”

“Would that be Chad?”

“Bravo. Well, this is where it gets even more interesting because that facility contained another alien artifact, only this one was a fully active FTL stargate. Talbot used it to flee to Sagi, a star system that, as far as we can gather, is sixteen hundred light-years away. It contains a black hole, and Talbot seemed rather intent on destroying a planet there. That’s where things get a little sketchy.
Erebus,
and the people still aboard her, including Talbot, an Interstellar List special forces team—”

“And a friend of mine, Layton Trent,” Cheng interrupted.

“—and Layton Trent were last seen plunging into that black hole,” Vance continued. “Luckily, a good portion of the surviving crew from the
Erebus
returned last year with the
Gagarin
and are quite willing to testify that one Chad Struber authorized everything. There was also a confession sent from
Erebus
before she was lost, from Talbot, implicating Helios. Unfortunately, the last act of rebellion from one of the survivors that
Gagarin
recovered was to detonate a booby trap Talbot had set in the alien gateway facility on Iwa, vaporizing it.”

“A great story.” Paskett reclined back in his seat. “And do you have any idea why Chad would have ordered this…rampage?”

“Not a clue. That’s where you come in. Time to tell us what’s going on.”

Paskett stood and walked back to the Wall of Memory. His eyes glanced over the models of the powersats,
Endeavour,
and other space hardware. He didn’t even linger as he usually did on the picture of the
Endeavour
Twelve, the first men and women to travel to another star. Instead, his gaze came to rest on his quote. The quote.

He knew this day had been coming for a long while. He turned around to face them. “It is indeed time. Time for you to see for yourselves; time to come with me.”

The glass elevator car raced down the side of Helios Tower. Three occupants silently watched the darkening vista of San Diego against a band of pink along the horizon until the car plunged underground, heading deep beneath the surface.

“We may not have enough to arrest your ass yet, but there’s only so much screwing around we’re going to take, Paskett,” Vance said coldly.

“You want your answers, you’ll get them.” Paskett looked at her, his electric-blue eyes boring through her. “But some things have to be seen to be believed.”

The car slowed to a halt and the doors opened. The corridor beyond was industrial, full of pipes and dull metal panels, far away from the cosmopolitan glory of the rest of the superscraper. A hovering spherical drone zipped up to them, menacing prongs pushing out of the surface. As it hummed in place, a laser light swept in a horizontal line down across Paskett’s face.

Satisfied, it turned to the others.

“It will need to take a blood sample. Don’t worry. You’ll just feel a nick,” Paskett reassured them.

“What is this shit?” Vance barked.

“Where we’re going is of the highest security. The air in the vault is laced with nano-dissemblers. Unless your DNA is logged into the system, they will quite literally pull you to pieces. I suggest you let the sentry take a sample.”

“Weaponized nanotech is illegal, Paskett, and not just a little bit. You could go down for a long time for this alone,” Vance said, presenting her forearm to the drone.

“You mean the U.S. government has never used it?”

Vance just scowled.

The drone swiftly jabbed a needle into each of them, turned, and darted away into a nook.

“We can continue,” Paskett said.

“Right,” Vance murmured, rubbing her arm where the sentry had pricked her.

Their footfall echoed along the corridor as they made their way to an imposing solid metal door. It slid open almost soundlessly, belying its heavy appearance.

“Welcome to the vault,” Paskett said as he marched in. “In here is the most valuable substance on the planet.”

The room was small, all metal and pipes save for a view screen taking up the far wall. Before it, lodged in the center of the room with a railing around it, was a single cube of opaque material a meter square, just transparent enough to see a piercing light within.

“And what are we looking at?” Cheng’s eyes were twinkling again, only this time from the light within the cube.

“Project Oracle…the future.”

Cheng rested his hands on the railing surrounding the…thing. “I think you better start talking.”

“Thirty-five years ago, Helios found an application for three pieces of technology: the measurement of eigenstate particles, hypostate materials, and long-burn antimatter torches. All were key to Project Oracle.”

“Sounds fascinating, Paskett. But what does that mean?” Cheng crossed his arms, turned, and leaned up against the rail, looking at Paskett with a fixed stare.

Paskett suppressed a smile. It was the same look Cheng had used when he’d interrogated the people on Hibernia Station. Instead, he went on. “The measurement of eigenstate particles means that we can observe quantum interactions across vast distances. The problem is they are garbled; we can send nothing but static. We call it decoherence. Still, this had its uses. It allowed the gateway network to be established, for example…with suitable engineering behind it, of course.”

“Of course.”

“The second piece of technology,” Paskett continued, “hypostate materials, was only brought about by nanotech. We could create a supersolid-state frame to place our quantum-entangled particles in. This freezes them, if you will, curing the decoherence problem.”

“I may be being a little slow here. Do you mean that you can communicate faster than light?” Vance asked.

“Ha,” Paskett said, reaching out across the rail and caressing the surface of the cube. It was smooth and cold to his touch, despite the glow, and it felt…almost as if it were humming, though it made no sound his augmented ear could pick up. “We thought bigger than that. Even with Helios resources, we could only create one of these. This single cube is valued at over fifteen percent of the net value of Helios. Countries have smaller GDPs than that. No, it couldn’t just be used to chat with one of the colonies. It had to be put to better use.”

“Oh, and what’s that?”

“The third piece of technology was a long-burn antimatter torch,” Paskett continued, ignoring Vance’s question. He would not rush this; it was too important. And he’d failed so many times before. “We could burn an engine at two-g for six months. I’ll do the math for you. That takes us up to light speed. Well, just below anyway.”

“This is all very fascinating, Mr. Paskett, but can you please get to the point?” Vance asked. She looked older than she had in Trent’s file. Maybe it was just the stern look furrowing her face. Or maybe it was the events. God knows all this sometimes made him feel old again. He went on with his script. He’d prepared for this moment for a long time.

“Something at that speed, for instance, a starship, is subject to relativistic effects. Time passes a lot slower for it than for us. Yet something quantum-entangled remains in real-time communication with its bonded particle. Assuming the decoherence problem is solved, we can actually communicate with whoever has the other end of our entangled particle. Move our particle a little to the left, that means one thing, a little to the right, another…”

“And you can transmit to it.” Cheng turned to face the cube again, spreading his hands out as he held the rail.

“Exactly. This cube contains one half of a quantum-entangled pairing. The other half was mounted on a probe and sent on a relativistic loop to return to the solar system. It came…or rather comes home—I struggle with the tense—one thousand years from our perspective in the future. Subjectively, a mere ten years for the Oracle probe.”

“Jesus,” Vance exclaimed. “This thing can see into the future?”

“Yes. The ultimate inside knowledge. The probe, Oracle, had every sensor we could pack into it. We could use it to see what the solar system looked like in a thousand years. We could use that information to invest for what we needed when we needed it to give Helios the edge. That’s why it was such a secret. If anyone else got wind of it, they could do the same. Only what we found, well, do you want to know what it shows?”

“I think,” Cheng said, turning to look at Paskett, “you know we no longer have that choice, do we?”