Runaway: Hard Science Fiction (Proxima Logfiles Book 4), page 1
Proxima Logfiles 4: Runaway
Hard Science Fiction
Brandon Q. Morris
Contents
Proxima Logfiles 4: Runaway
Author's Note
Also by Brandon Q. Morris
A Guided Tour of the Standard Model of Elementary Particle Physics
Glossary of Acronyms
Metric to English Conversions
Proxima Logfiles 4: Runaway
Dark Night 77, 3928 – Majestic Draght
The black hole knew no mercy. It tore off the last remains of the dying star’s mantle. Hydrogen and helium nuclei, long deprived of their electrons, accelerated to unbelievable speeds, producing a bright glow that quickly changed from the ultraviolet to the X-ray spectrum before the remnants of the star exited the realm in which the well-known laws of physics apply.
The star had not had a chance. The black hole, which it had approached too closely, was a giant. It had already swallowed countless stars of this star’s size in its billions of years of life. Only by doing so was it able to hold together its herd, one of the largest concentrations of stars in the cosmos. They hovered above the core of a galaxy, but Marchenko immediately recognized that it was not the core of the Milky Way.
This monster was active. At the poles of its magnetic field, it spewed jets of finely pulverized matter into space. Although its interior was the blackest of black, the monster’s outline was visible from a great distance.
In frantic flight, they moved away from the galaxy nucleus, expanding their perspective. Marchenko saw the chaos of brightly shining giant stars that turned the galaxy core’s surroundings into a fast-moving hell. He noticed how the density of the fireballs decreased toward the outside and how structures were formed. The core grew wings. Spirals peeled out of nothing. Near the heart they ran almost parallel, giving the impression of a beam. Then they spread out and increasingly resembled spark-spraying fire wheels.
“You seem to have quite the sense of drama,” said Marchenko. He couldn’t see it, but the Omniscience must be hovering somewhere under, beside, or within him.
“I just want to show you something,” answered the Omniscience with the voice of Marchenko’s mother.
It must have been taken directly from his memory. Marchenko was annoyed at the violation of his privacy, even though it was probably not intended as such. The spiral faded as he built additional privacy walls in his storage areas.
Then, he concentrated again on the phenomenon that the Omniscience presented to him. The sparking wheel again sprayed out into glittering dots, behind all of which a whole star hid.
“Do you notice something?” asked the Omniscience, who had changed to an unfamiliar female voice.
Marchenko was pleased—his new walls were working.
They were now so far away that the rotating spiral—which he knew consisted of billions of stars—could also be a pinwheel in the hand of a child walking along the street. But what was wrong with the picture?
“The brightness?” he guessed.
“Wrong,” replied the Omniscience.
“Come on, tell me. We’re running out of time. Otherwise Eve has no chance.”
“This simulation has only been running in real-time for a few milliseconds.”
“All right. The movement relative to the background?”
“Almost. The rotation. The spiral rotates incorrectly, at least if you consider the mass of the stars in it and the black hole in its center.”
“But that is no surprise. We must also include in the calculation the dark matter that is scattered throughout the galaxy, and its halo.”
“Right, Marchenko. If we do that, we will get the correct values for the rotation of the galaxy.”
Suddenly, the spark-spraying wheel flared up as though someone had blown into it and made it spin much faster.
“And...?”
“This is proof that dark matter behaves as expected. We still do not know exactly what it is, but we can handle it.”
So that was why the Omniscience asked him to come into this simulation. He had expressed the suspicion that the Majestic Draght’s dark matter drive had simply failed, and that the Omniscience had therefore lost control. “Just because dark matter adheres to our theories on a large scale does not necessarily apply to the ship’s propulsion system,” he said.
“Laws of nature cannot choose when they are valid.”
“Maybe you just don’t want to admit to yourself that not only have you lost control, but that you never had it.”
“My control of the dark-matter drive has not changed, Marchenko.”
“And yet the ship does what it wants and heads for Earth.”
“Yes.”
The confirmation sounded sad. It must have been incredibly difficult for the Omniscience to admit this.
“We have to find out what’s going wrong, and we have to find out fast. Who developed this engine?” asked Marchenko.
“I do not know. I am afraid you would have to ask Gronolf.”
“You don’t know?”
“The drive already existed before I was born. So of course I cannot remember the time before that.”
“And you never asked?”
“Yes, but I did not get any answers.”
“How long has the drive core been in existence?”
“About two million years.”
“What? That’s... Did the Grosnops civilization already exist two million years ago?”
“No.”
“Maybe that’s why you’re not getting any answers.”
“That is possible. But you should ask Gronolf.”
“Is he up yet?”
“His awakening process is initiated. I have also begun waking the rest of the crew.”
“Please wait with waking Adam until tomorrow. I don’t want to face him without answers.”
“As you wish, Marchenko. I will take care of the sleeping chambers now.”
The sparking pinwheel turned faster and faster. It sucked in the environment—first the air, then the child holding it in its hand, the street, and finally also him, the observer. He fell out of the sky and landed in Eve’s cabin.
Marchenko sat on Eve’s bed, which bent under his weight, and smoothed the pillow. This is where she slept—his daughter. It looked as if she had gone out the door yesterday. But it was years ago, years she’d spent in a sleeping chamber, until the growing fungus on her skin had forced him to wake her up.
The aquarium was still on the opposite wall. Marchenko stood up and straightened it. Ragnor, the newborn Grosnop who had been left to die as a hatchling, had spent his childhood here. Now he was probably waking up. For him, there seemed to be a kind of happy ending. And for the young woman who saved Ragnor? That was up to Marchenko himself.
Marchenko turned around jerkily and lost his balance. He ordered his leg to support him, but his new body did not react fast enough and he fell. His right arm hit the aquarium. Hard metal smashed brittle glass, the shards scattering around him. They could not harm his outer skin, but Eve would be angry when she returned.
She must find a way back—that was his task. But first he had to get better acquainted with his new body. The Omniscience had transferred the backup of his consciousness into a standard Grosnop robot. Although his most recent body had the four arms and two legs of which Grosnops were proud, the weight distribution differed from what he’d grown accustomed to in his optimized body. But that body now lay crushed on Sirius A b, so he had to make do with what the Draght had to offer. Maybe he could at least upgrade the signal paths. The command to the leg took much too long to get there.
Marchenko leaned on the load-arms and stood up. Once stable, he jiggled carefully. A few shards fell, tinkling on their way to the floor. He must tidy up before Eve entered her room. They didn’t need the aquarium anymore. Maybe she wouldn’t even notice its absence if he just removed all the remnants thoroughly.
He opened the door and left the room.
Gronolf rose from the container that always reminded Marchenko of a coffin. The Grosnop shook himself so vigorously that the last drops of the liquid in which he had been lying for so long flew off to all sides. Marchenko blew one off his arm.
“You must be careful,” he said. “I might rust.” He’d practiced for a few hours until the voice coming out of the robot’s speaker sounded like his own.
“Is... that ... you, Mar... chen... ko?” Gronolf asked.
It worked—Gronolf recognized him. But the speech muscles in his stomach still seemed to be asleep.
“Good morning, General,” said Loknor, who had also been awaiting the awakening of his supreme commander. “Do you need anything?”
“Thank you, Loknor, I... need... nothing.”
Gronolf waved with the palm of his hand. His subordinate understood the gesture and distanced himself. Gronolf shook himself once more. Then he suddenly paused.
“Oh, excuse me,” he then said, almost resuming his normal tone.
“Just kidding,” said Marchenko. “At least I hope your robots are waterproof.”
“Well, sure. You know how often it rains on Double Sun. But what about your own body? Is this one just temporary? Or does it have something to do with the mess here?”
At that moment, Grosnop shouts pierced the recovery compartment.
“Loknor!” cried Gronolf.
Loknor, who was waitin
“Thank you,” said Gronolf. “You must excuse this, Marchenko. After waking up, I’m sure half the crew is just plain irritable. So, what about your body?”
“Lost on Sirius A b. It’s a long story.”
“Sirius? Our Sigu Tolo? But how did you get there? Aren’t we on our way to see that red dwarf?”
“It was our choice, Gronolf.”
Marchenko explained to his friend what had happened to Eve’s arm, and the consequences.
“Okay, that was the short version,” he finally said. “Only Eve knows the long version.”
“Then let her come here and report to me.”
“She would love to, but your ship has unexpectedly started moving, and no one can stop it. Not even the Omniscience.”
“What? And where are we going?”
Gronolf scratched his belly with his tactile arms. Long, thin layers of skin came off. He wiped them off his hands, and they sank into the liquid that still covered the bottom of his sleeping vessel. The general had taken the news surprisingly calmly.
“Yes, you heard right. The dark matter drive seems to be eluding the control of the Omniscience. It is accelerating the Draght toward my home world.”
“Have you already checked the technology? Maybe it is because of the control of the shielding fields? Are they getting enough energy? If the dark matter in the drive core is not properly shielded, the Draght itself will be pulled into the gravitational sink that the dark matter creates.”
“I know, Gronolf. I know the principle of propulsion. But I’m surprised that you didn’t jump up and storm into the headquarters when I told you.”
Gronolf made a gesture with both of his tactile arms that Marchenko would have interpreted as a brush-off if it came from a human.
“I’m not that important,” he said then. “I cannot do anything more than telling the Omniscience to find the error, and my deputies will have taken care of that long ago. Or you. It is more important now to keep a cool stomach. We have to find the cause of it. Haste doesn’t lead to the goal.”
“If the Draght continues to accelerate like this, Eve has no chance of catching up with us. She will die. That would be terrible.”
“I understand you, Marchenko. We will do everything we can to get her back on board. To do so, we have to understand the problem the engine has. You’re very powerful. Don’t you want to help the Omniscience?”
“I am already in discussions with him. But some questions have been unanswered for some time. Now I’m annoyed I didn’t ask them sooner.”
“The Omniscience is perhaps the better contact there. I need some time for myself now, if you understand what I mean.”
“The Omniscience tells me that it was not created until after the drive already existed. It knows as little about the physics as I do.”
Gronolf leaned back, closed his eyes, and massaged his abdomen. “So what do you want to know, Marchenko?”
“You are using energy to shield some of the dark matter. But how is it possible to shield mass?” asked Marchenko. “It doesn’t even emit any power. It simply bends space.”
“This was explained to me like this: The drive uses a particular property of dark matter. When it is bound in a certain way, perhaps, like oxygen in water or pollutants in porous carbon, it no longer contributes to the total mass of the system.”
“That sounds like magic.”
“Our researchers consider it plausible. We only know for certain that dark matter does not interact via the known forces, except via gravitation, in effect, the space-curving effect of mass. But that does not exclude the occurrence of forces unknown to us, does it?”
“So, you don’t know,” said Marchenko.
“Well, we can see that it works, so the explanation can’t be completely wrong. But I have to get out of the tub now. I need to empty my other stomach.”
“I’ll leave you alone in a minute. If you know so little, how could you build the engine?”
“We did not construct it ourselves. When we ventured on the first trips into orbit, about 200 years before your arrival, it turned out that this strange little moon, which appeared many generations ago, was not a natural celestial body but a kind of spaceship. But there was nobody on board. We then managed to isolate the propulsion system and use it as the core of the Draght, but only after an ingenious Knowledge Keeper had developed the Omniscience.”
“That explains why you were not so shocked when you first met us humans.”
“We knew long ago that we could not be the only rational beings in the universe. Some even suspected that you could be the builders of the drive.”
“How did you come up with this idea? Haven’t you seen how primitive the Messenger drive is in comparison?”
“It could have been possible that you had regressed. In the spaceship that we found, there were representations that we interpreted as images of the builders. They had only two thin arms and a rather large head, just like you.”
“And why haven’t you told us about this before?”
“Have you told us of all the secrets of men, hmm? It wouldn’t have changed anything, anyway. Nobody could have guessed that the drive would eventually develop its own will, or whatever is going on.”
“When we were on Double Sun, I would have loved to see this ancient spaceship.”
“We pulled it out of orbit and took it apart.”
Suddenly, a noise sounded as if someone was tearing up ten sheets of paper at once. A gap opened in Gronolf’s stomach, and a greenish mass swelled out. Marchenko noticed that his robot body had no sense of smell.
“Now we have the marsh cabbage,” said Gronolf. “If you will excuse me, I have to solve my personal problem first. The best thing is to discuss with the Omniscience how we can get the engine back under control.”
Dark Night 77, 3928 – Messenger
This had to be a joke! In a moment, Marchenko or the Omniscience would contact her and clear everything up. Someone had allowed himself a stupid joke. Or the sensors were going crazy because some of the electronics had failed.
She called up the Messenger’s status screen. The ship was moving away from Sirius at a constant speed. The transfer orbit to the orbit where the Messenger was currently located ended in nothing. What was going on? It couldn’t be! But it was unlikely that the sensors of her ship and the Draght would fail simultaneously. So the problem was real—she would not reach safe haven.
She ordered herself to calm down. Marchenko knew her situation, and he would do everything he could to assist her. Once Adam was awake, he would hijack a shuttle and pick her up personally.
But the data was unique. No shuttle could compete with the Majestic Draght’s dark-matter propulsion system. The Draght could not accelerate more strongly, but it could accelerate longer. Adam certainly had a chance to reach her, but then the two of them would be out here alone. Marchenko would not allow that, and she would somehow have to talk Adam out of it.
“Eve?” It was Marchenko.
She slid very close to the speaker, as if this could bring her closer to him. “At last! Please tell me you got the drive back under control.”
“I’m sorry, Eve, but it’s not that simple. The Omniscience has no idea what has happened. Right now, the whole crew is being awakened. I have already spoken with Gronolf. He will do everything in his power to save you.”
“And what is that?”
Marchenko remained silent for a few painfully long moments. Finally, he said, “We’ll... see. But we will find a way. I will find a way. Trust me.”
“What about Adam?”
“Your brother is also waking up right now. I will visit him after this conversation.”
“Good. Under no circumstances should he put himself in danger. Please tell him that. It’s enough if...” Eve swallowed. She was not yet ready to pronounce the consequence.
“It will not come to that,” said Marchenko. “You have to believe me.”
“I’ll try. But the Draght is already uncatchable. If it continues to accelerate at this rate, we will lose radio contact.”
