Probability Sun (7 page)

With the discovery of the graviton in 2052, gravity had finally been fully integrated into human understanding of the forces controlling spacetime. Gravitational fields were encoded into the warpings of the spacetime fabric, as an enormous—but not infinite—number of threads all vibrated in the same “graviton pattern.” The graviton—massless, spin-2, a perfect fit into the equations of both relativity and quantum mechanics—joined the gluon, the photon, and the gauge bosons as a “messenger particle,” a transmitter of a basic force.

What made Tom Capelo look like a lunatic to so many of his fellows was his desire to account for probability amplitudes the same way: through an as-yet-undiscovered messenger “particle,” a new vibrational pattern, which Capelo dubbed the “probon.” Not only was the probon undiscovered experimentally, Capelo could not account for it mathematically except in the most obscure and roundabout way. Nor did he have any sort of coherent model. Capelo’s argument for the existence of the probon depended on equations too difficult for Kaufman to follow, equations ancillary to the existence of the six curled-up spatial dimensions conclusively proven to exist by the great Yeovil. The dimensions were usually called Calabi-Yau spaces, named for a particular class of geometric shapes. These tiny dimensions existed at every single point in spacetime. What Capelo had done so far was use the Sung-Rendell transformation equations to—

“Colonel.” Commander Grafton stood by his side; Kaufman hadn’t even heard him approach. Kaufman couldn’t help smiling inwardly. Did that mean that he himself was capable of the same deep, unconscious-of-surroundings thought as Tom Capelo? Hardly to the same brilliant degree. He looked up at Grafton and saw what he should have noticed instantly.

The Navy commander was taut with excitement. Being a Navy commander, his excitement had none of Gruber’s bluster or Capelo’s inward focus. Grafton stood straight as always, contained and military. But the line of his jaw, the look in his eyes, told Kaufman what must have happened.

My God. They did it.

But all Grafton said was, “Will you come with me, Colonel? There’s a message for you from the flyer.”

“Yes, of course.” Kaufman rose and let himself be led from the observation deck. Capelo still paced, oblivious to everything but whatever rolled through his head. The other three speculated softly among themselves.

In the corridor, Kaufman couldn’t wait. He said to Grafton, “They’ve captured a Faller, haven’t they? It worked. They’ve got one alive.”

“Yes,” Grafton said, “alive,” and something in his tone made Kaufman remember reading Grafton’s personnel file as part of the preparation for this expedition. Grafton had had a brother killed in the battle with the Fallers in Quatorze system.

He followed Grafton to the shielded communication room, where the encoded message from the flyer stationed at the space tunnel would have been received. The flyer itself would take days to catch up to its lightspeed message. But another ship must be enroute to World, carrying the first enemy alien ever captured in this long and inexplicable and unwelcome war.

And then …

“Send for Ms. Grant, please.”

“She’s already on her way,” Grafton said. “There are datacubes for her to look at in the comm room.”

“Good,” Kaufman said, and hoped it was. His breath came faster.

Maybe humanity had a fighting chance after all.

SIX

FALLER SPACE, UNNAMED STAR SYSTEM

N
othing about the plan had been simple. Thus, everyone was astonished when it actually worked. Some, in addition, felt a little ashamed, since the plan depended on the death of a child.

The project team had arranged everything else ahead of time. All sat in readiness until the right child could be found. Two children were found suitable, but their parents refused. More than refused—they recoiled in horror when the plan was explained to them. One of the fathers struck Project Leader Colonel Ethan McChesney in the face, a blow of pure grief and rage. McChesney understood.

Then, two and a half weeks after the
Alan B. Shepard
had flown into Space Tunnel #1 and left the solar system, Katrina Van Rynn fell off her brother’s power scooter in the colony of De Kooy, on New Holland. Katrina should not have been on the scooter. Her brother Michael, thirteen, had been warned that Katrina, four, was too young to ride behind him. She might get scared, and he wasn’t yet experienced enough with the scooter. He took her for a ride anyway, because she begged and because he loved showing it off, even to a little sister. He belted her in securely and they set off over the low purple hills where Dutch settlers were recreating a mode of religious life that had all but vanished on Earth.

Michael flew the scooter too high, and Katrina did get scared. She panicked, unlocked herself (Michael had not realized she knew how to do this), and climbed off. The scooter was thirty feet above the ground. The little girl died three hours later in the De Kooy medcenter.

McChesney was already there. His intelligence network was among the best in the galaxy. Despite their terrible grief, the Van Rynns agreed to McChesney’s plan. They were patriots. They also hoped that the use McChesney would make of Katrina’s body might help Michael. The boy was wild with guilt. The family needed to salvage something, anything, out of what had happened to them all.

Katrina’s body was flown by flyer to Space Tunnel #86, one of several that orbited the New Holland system, at the maximum speed the flyer and the corpse could sustain. Katrina wasn’t frozen. It was important that nothing be done to the body that would change its composition in any way.

Seven tunnels later, the flyer reached Mowbray Base, a brand new military space station beside Tunnel #472. Orbiting beside both of them was another tunnel, #473, that gave onto an obscure Faller colony. Mapping tunnels was an intricate task. A ship that flew through a space tunnel and then eventually went back through the same tunnel would be returned to its place of origin—
if
nothing else had gone through the tunnel in the meantime. If something had, the first ship emerged in the same place the second one had. Much-used tunnels were thus fluid, requiring complex central routing in order to keep them focused on a given system.

Tunnels #470 through #473, however, were not much used. Newly discovered and remote, they had been explored by only one human flyer. It had passed through #473, discovered the small Faller colony on the system’s single planet, and immediately popped back through the tunnel. The colony had not been military. It was possible the Fallers did not yet know that the star system had been discovered or visited by humans. McChesney gambled on that.

Katrina’s body was strapped into a small two-person personal flyer, of the kind that rich people and commercial explorers used. In the pilot seat was strapped the body of a young soldier who had died that same day of a brain virus, one of the virulent strains that demolished entire cerebral centers in hours. The flyer was loaded with provisions, including toys and holos suitable for a four-year-old girl. Except for the usual civilian light arms, the craft was defenseless.

The computer, preset, flew it through Space Tunnel #473, shut down all engines, and let the flyer drift in space.

McChesney and his team waited on the other side of the tunnel. They were effectively blind. No probe could go with the flyer, no signal could be sent back; the Solar Alliance had ample evidence that the Fallers were well able to detect anything electromagnetic. Their detection technology seemed to be equal to humans’. So did their weaponry. And their defenses, since they’d acquired the mysterious beam-disrupter shields, were infinitely superior. A proton beam fired at a Faller skeeter, the equivalent of a human flyer, simply disappeared. No scientists had been able to discover where the beam went, or why the conservation of matter/energy had not been violated. McChesney didn’t concern himself with the physics problems, which he knew he wouldn’t understand.

He didn’t understand nanotechnology, either, but the science advisors told him that might be the one area in which humans were ahead of Fallers. No one knew for sure. No Faller had ever been captured alive, and no skeeter had ever been taken as anything other than a melted hulk unsuitable for reverse engineering. However, neither the charred dead Faller bodies nor the charred dead Faller craft had shown, as far as the science advisors could guess, any signs of nanotech.

“How long?” McChesney said, on the human side of Space Tunnel #473, although of course he knew the answer.

“Forty-seven E-hours,” said his aide.

“Fuck it. We’re going in.”

The aide stared at him. “Supposed to be two more hours, sir.”

“Now.” And then, by way of feeble explanation, “It feels right. Now!”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said, her voice expressive of reservation, and they had gone in.

And hit the goddamned jackpot. Caught the Fallies un-fucking-believably in the act. Actually aboard the human flyer.

Wait forty-nine hours, the intelligence guys had said. We know that Fallers often wait twenty E-hours from the point of detection to the point of action. Their home planet has a twenty-hour day; maybe there’s a hard-wired circadian rhythm that affects social decision making. Maybe not. At any rate, it’s definitely nine hours up to the tunnel from the surface of their colony planet, given the planet’s position when you send the flyer through, and given the speed of their civilian skeeters. We’re assuming they have no military craft in the colony. No telling how long it will take them to notice the drifting flyer. They might even detect our flyer the second you send it through the tunnel, if they have a probe in orbit around the space tunnel.

“Then why didn’t the probe detect our original flyer?” McChesney asked.

“Maybe it did. Or maybe there’s no probe because this is such a small colony and not military. We’re flying blind here, Colonel. Just go in at forty-nine hours and see what you catch. Twenty hours from the time they detect the flyer to decision to go up. Nine hours up. Another twenty hours to contemplate the flyer and probe it with sensors. Then you go in.”

But McChesney had gone in two hours early, and caught the bastards in the act.

The colony skeeter had matched trajectory with the drifting human flyer, five clicks away, when McChesney’s first military flyer erupted from the space tunnel. The skeeter was better armed than humans had expected. It opened fire immediately on the flyer and destroyed it. But McChesney had four other flyers and a warship. He blasted the skeeter before it could annihilate anything else. The skeeter, unequipped with the new Faller shields that could render a particle beam useless, exploded.

The warship carried the most advanced sensors humans could devise. They picked up the two heat signatures inside the drifting flyer, where only two unheated dead bodies should have been. The sensors also registered that the heat signatures were not moving.

McChesney moved faster than safety regulations permitted. In seven minutes he had suited Marines aboard the flyer. The Marines were unnecessary. For once, the science brains had actually understood a military situation.

The Fallers had undoubtedly subjected the drifting human flyer to every sensing device they could before they boarded her. Their sensors told them there were two dead humans aboard, one a child. Maybe the Fallers had been able to tell that the man was damaged in the brain, a father who had abruptly died while taking his child somewhere. Maybe not. Maybe they had been able to tell that Katrina Van Rynn’s body included broken and reset bones. Maybe not. But they had never, to human knowledge, had the chance to examine a human child. Their blitzkrieg approach to attack had not included taking prisoners. They had taken possession of dead adult soldiers before now—but never a child. An alien species would want to know how their enemy developed—wouldn’t they? And they would reason that this probably wasn’t a military craft, not with a child aboard. Surely the Fallers had learned by now that humans did not take their offspring to battle. Katrina Van Rynn in her helpless, utterly threatless flyer, had been good bait.

A single Faller had boarded, accompanied by a robot probe capable of detecting any trap known to Faller technology. It couldn’t, however, detect the unknown. If the boarding Faller had stopped breathing, it would probably have blown up the Faller, the ship, and itself. It would probably have done the same if its master had told it to, or if the Faller’s suit had signified any breach, or if any machinery aboard the flyer had suddenly activated.

None of those things happened. The tiny nanos that the robot probe didn’t know how to detect clung to the bottom of the Faller’s suit as soon as he crossed the threshold. The nanos never punctured the suit. Instead they moved through it, one molecular layer at a time, mindlessly destroying a molecule and then immediately rebuilding it behind them out of the same atoms, as they had been programmed to do. Neither robot nor Faller detected a breach because there never was one. When the nanos reached material giving out the heat signature of living flesh, their program changed.

The nanos entered the Faller body and began to paralyze it slowly. Human biologists had learned enough from the few badly charred Faller bodies they’d salvaged to analyze the genome. It wasn’t DNA-based. Thus, almost anything biological added to it could be fatal. But nanos weren’t biologics; they were tiny machines. Their programming determined easily what gas the Faller breathed inside his sealed suit: the species’ medium for energy transport. Then they began to absorb the supply of it, replicating rapidly at the same time. The Faller, never realizing it, slid easily into the equivalent of oxygen-deprivation (it wasn’t oxygen) and fainted. Or perhaps fell asleep, or whatever the alien equivalent was of reduced conscious activity. The nanos stopped replicating. They kept the Faller unconscious but did not deprive his brain of all energy. The probe did not register anything wrong; every complex species sleeps.

By the time the Marines entered the ship, the probe couldn’t register anything. Other nanos it had never been built to detect had inactivated it, atom by atom.