Excelsior (3 page)

But Titan wasn’t their real destination. The Lincoln was to fly to a set range of a hundred million klicks from Venus, where no Confederate eyes were likely to be watching, and then they would deviate from their course and head for coordinates another fifty-seven million klicks away from Earth.

Flores gestured to another hologram. This one showed deep space, and it was marked with two icons. One of them was labeled Lewis Station, and the other was labeled the Looking Glass. That rang a bell. Alexander was beginning to recognize the nomenclature.

Flores appeared to notice his distraction. “Something on your mind, Captain?”

“The Looking Glass—what is that?” The icon on the map looked like a perfectly clear marble floating in space, distorting the star field behind its spherical shape. He couldn’t even guess at what it might represent. “The names are all vaguely familiar—Alice, Wonderland, The Looking Glass.”

“Operation Alice was named after a pair of books by Lewis Caroll, hence Lewis Station. The names are all metaphors for what Operation Alice is about. For example, in one of the books a girl named Alice travels through a mirror or Looking Glass to another world.”

“So the Looking Glass is…” Alexander felt his heart begin to pound as wild ideas flew through his head. “Some kind of gateway?”

Admiral Flores pointed to the map, and the hologram zoomed in.

“The Looking Glass is a Lorentzian wormhole, otherwise known as a Schwarzschild wormhole or an Einstein–Rosen bridge,” she said, pointing to it on the map. “In layman’s terms, it’s a traversable tunnel from one point in spacetime to another.”

Alexander grinned wildly and leaned suddenly forward in his chair. “We managed to create one? Where does it go?”

“We’re not entirely sure where it goes. We keep losing contact with our probes soon after they arrive in the Wonderland System. From what little data we’ve managed to receive, our best guess is that the wormhole leads to another galaxy entirely. And as for how it got there… We didn’t create it. We found it.”

“You mean the wormhole is naturally occurring?”

“We don’t know if it is or isn’t naturally occurring. What we do know is that it’s occupying a stable orbit around our sun, at a mean distance of two hundred eighty-nine million klicks. That puts it relatively close to Earth, depending on what time of year you choose to travel. Right now it’s actually at its most proximal point, at just over a hundred million klicks away, but we’re taking a circuitous route via Venus so that we don’t attract any unwanted Confederate attention.”

Alexander frowned. “If the wormhole is just a hundred million klicks from Earth, surely the Confederates have already spotted it.”

Flores shrugged. “Wormholes are surprisingly hard to detect. They’d have to know exactly where to look. Let’s hope they don’t, but if they have spotted something, it’s squarely in our territory, and we have Lewis Station to prove it. We can even claim that we built the wormhole. That might just scare the socialism out of them and put an end to this stupid war once and for all.”

“Or scare them enough to attack us before we develop any more of a technological edge.”

“Let’s hope not. Meanwhile…” Flores turned back to her holo displays and gestured for a new screen to appear. It was a map of a solar system. “This is the Wonderland System. It has a G-type star, or yellow dwarf, the same as us. There are ten planets in all.” Flores pointed to one in particular and zoomed in on it. “The third one from the sun appears to have all the same characteristics as Earth. That’s Wonderland herself. From our current data we suspect the planet has a lot more surface water than ours, but otherwise it could be a perfect sister planet for Earth, right down to its mass, which will produce a tolerable one point one times Earth’s gravity.”

Alexander was shocked. After a long, silent moment, he said, “People have been dreaming about this for centuries, ever since we put the first man in space. What’s the catch?”

“There’s more than one, actually,” the admiral replied. “The overriding concern—which has been repeatedly put forward by Dr. Thales, the head of our astrophysics department on Lewis Station—is that there’s no way this wormhole could be a natural phenomenon. If he’s right, then we might be looking at a first contact situation on the other end. But we have to ask ourselves: if the wormhole was created, then the race that created it must have intended to use it to get to our solar system. So where are they, and why haven’t we met them yet? It would appear that they built the gateway just for us, which doesn’t seem likely. To be safe, we are sending an Alliance diplomat aboard the Lincoln as the President’s official representative should you meet intelligent alien life.”

Alexander nodded. He couldn’t help but agree: first contact was unlikely. That so-called first contact specialist was going to be a lot of dead weight—besides how could anyone be a specialist in first contact if first contact had never been made before?

“So what’s the other catch?” he asked.

“The probes. None of them ever made it back. The popular theory is that the wormhole is only open on our side. By traveling through it we force it open in Wonderland for a few minutes, and then the Wonderland side collapses to an infinitesimal width, making a return trip and ongoing transmissions impossible.”

Alexander paled and he gaped at the admiral. “That’s the popular theory? Then why are we sending a manned mission?”

“The probe data is inconclusive, and even though the Collapsing Gateway Theory is the most popular one, the other theories are still valid—spacetime distortion, equipment failure, radiation damage, alien interference, etc. A Hunter-class destroyer is much larger than any probe, so it is infinitely better equipped to run the necessary scans of the area and help us narrow down the list of possibilities. In case you’re wondering, we have sent probes with live animal subjects and confirmed that they made it to the Wonderland System alive and well.”

Alexander blew out a breath. “But they still didn’t make it back. You’re basically telling me that this is a one-way trip.”

“Not at all, Captain. We should be able to force the wormhole open for you by sending another probe. You’ll have some time to investigate Wonderland before then, but that is one of your mission objectives, regardless. Rest assured, we aren’t planning to abandon the Lincoln, Captain.”

“You said the wormhole stays open for just a few minutes. That’s an incredibly tight window, even if you can force it open for us with another probe—and that doesn’t explain why you didn’t try this method to rescue one of the probes.”

“As I said, a ship like the Lincoln is better equipped. The same goes for her crew versus the limited intelligence of a probe. We’ve set your clocks to coincide with pre-planned launch times for future missions. As soon as you arrive in Wonderland, the Lincoln will send us her nav and sensor data from the trip, and we’ll use that to make adjustments on our end. We’ve factored in time dilation and checked the math a thousand times. It is a tight window, but you’ll have a chance, Captain, and if you don’t make it the first time, we’ll keep sending probes until you do. The nav data from each failed attempt will be used to make adjustments on both our ends. Through an iterative process of trial and error, we will get you home.”

Alexander frowned. “How long will it take us to get to Wonderland?”

“Around seventy days.”

“So ten weeks. That’s twenty weeks there and back. Plus the time spent waiting for a rescue…”

The admiral nodded. “Correct, although, you won’t notice the time passing until you arrive. Traversing the wormhole calls for you and your crew to spend the entire trip in a medically-induced coma.”

Alexander blinked. “What? Why?”

“The wormhole is roughly point oh seven light years from end to end. You’ll spend the first eighteen days accelerating at a constant ten Gs until you’ve reached half the speed of light. After cruising for just over a month you’ll spend the same amount of time decelerating.”

“Ten Gs for eighteen days? We’ll be dead long before we get up to speed, Admiral.”

She just smiled and shook her head. “You’ll be spending the duration of the trip in G-tanks, and to answer your first question, putting you in a coma isn’t strictly necessary, but mission planners decided that it would be better for your mental health. Ten weeks is a long time to spend floating in a fish bowl with nothing to do but sleep and listen to your heart beat.”

Alexander’s brow furrowed. “So why not wake us and bring us out of the tanks once we’ve reached cruising speed? We could spend that month preparing for our mission in Wonderland, and stretch our legs while we’re at it.”

“The 10 Gs generated by the Lincoln’s engines while accelerating and decelerating is actually a fraction of what the wormhole itself will subject you to. Anyone who spends the trip outside of a G-tank would be turned to jelly.”

“Point taken. I’m assuming any rescue missions you send will take just as long to reach us as we spent getting there.”

Admiral Flores looked sheepish. She tried to say something, but stopped herself.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Time dilation.”

“Yeah at point five c we’ll be running a few days faster than Earth time, what’s the problem?”

“Time dilation isn’t just affected by speed, Captain. It’s also affected by the geometry of spacetime which is anything but flat inside a wormhole.”

Alexander was beginning to feel nervous. “So… what are we talking about here? A month?”

“Almost fourteen months.”

Alexander blinked. “So seventy days becomes… over four hundred?”

The admiral nodded.

Alexander went on, thinking out loud, “Two times that is two years and four months. That’s how long it’ll take for us to get home, even if we turn around as soon as we get there. Except that we won’t be able to do that. We’ll be trapped until a rescue mission can come for us, and if you have to wait to receive our signal before you even send that rescue mission…” Alexander shook his head. “Please tell me the signal doesn’t experience the same time dilation that we do.”

“It does, but the time it will take for a comm signal to travel the point oh seven light years inside the wormhole is a little under five months from Earth’s perspective.”

Alexander felt a headache encroaching as he tried to add up all the various time frames. He unconsciously squeezed the bridge of his nose between forefinger and thumb. “Five months to receive our signal plus fourteen more to get to us… that’s almost two years spent waiting in Wonderland for a rescue.”

“Yes.”

“And you don’t even know how many rescue missions you’ll need to send before one of them succeeds. With two year turnaround times between missions…”

“You might not need rescuing, Captain. Once you’ve analyzed all the data for yourselves, you’ll know why we’ve been losing contact with our probes, and maybe you’ll be able to solve the problem from that end.”

Alexander frowned. He didn’t like the qualifying language the admiral was using—might, maybe… “All right, but if not, we could be away for a very long time.”

“That is a possibility, but we’ve packed you with enough supplies to account for an extended stay on Wonderland, and we’ll be sending additional supplies aboard each probe, just in case.”

Alexander shook his head and gave the admiral a narrow-eyed look. “Maybe after the first decade or two we’ll just settle down in Wonderland and forget all about being rescued.”

“You’d be abandoning the mission and going AWOL—not that I expect we would be able to conduct a court-martial—but you’ll have to think about your families back on Earth. Settling on Wonderland, if that is in fact possible, will mean never seeing any of your loved ones again.”

That was when it hit him. Alexander bounced to his feet, his eyes wide, his pulse pounding, blood roaring in his ears. “That’s why you picked me, isn’t it?”

“Settle down, Captain.”

“That’s also why you made all of those last-minute changes to my crew.”

Admiral Flores remained silent.

“You cherry-picked us to make sure we all had strong emotional ties to Earth! My engineer, Ramirez—he was the only one with no family back on Earth. And me—how many other captains could you have sent? Divorced ones, single ones, unhappily married ones? Any one of them would have made a better choice, but no, you wanted people with a reason to come home. You took what I’d shared in confidence with you about my personal life, and used it against me!”

“Don’t take this personally, Captain.”

“How else should I take it?”

Suddenly the station’s emergency klaxons started screaming. The lights dimmed to a bloody red, a siren sounded, and the PA system boomed, “This is not a drill! This is not a drill! General quarters, general quarters! All hands to battle stations!”

Admiral Flores’ eyes flew wide. “Go!” she said.