Gregory Benford - A Worm in the Well

Illustration by Bob Eggleton

She was about to get baked, and all because she wouldn’t freeze a man.

“Optical,” Claire called. Erma obliged.

The Sun spread around them, a bubbling plain. She had notched the air conditioning cooler but it didn’t help much.

Geysers burst in gaudy reds and actinic violets from the yellow-white froth. The solar coronal arch was just peeking over the horizon, like a wedding ring stuck halfway into boiling white mud. A monster, over two thousand kilometers long, sleek and slender and angry crimson.

She turned down the cabin lights. Somewhere she had read that people felt cooler in the dark. The temperature in here was normal but she had started sweating.

Tuning the yellows and reds dimmer on the big screen before her made the white-hot storms look more blue. Maybe that would trick her subconscious, too.

Claire swung her mirror to see the solar coronal arch. Its image was refracted around the rim of the Sun, so she was getting a preview. Her orbit was on the descending slope of a long ellipse, its lowest point calculated to be just at the peak of the arch. So far, the overlay orbit trajectory was exactly on target.

Software didn’t bother with the heat, of course; gravitation was cool, serene. Heat was for engineers. And she was just a pilot.

In her immersion-work environment, the touch controls gave her an abstract distance from the real physical surroundings—the plumes of virulent gas, the hammer of photons. She wasn’t handling the mirror, of course, but it felt that way. A light, feathery brush, at a crisp, bracing room temperature.

The imaging assembly hung on its pivot high above her ship. It was far enough out from their thermal shield to feel the full glare, so it was heating up fast. Pretty soon it would melt, despite its cooling system.

Let it. She wouldn’t need it then. She’d be out there in the sunlight herself.

She swiveled the mirror by reaching out and grabbing it, tugging it round. All virtual images had a glossy sheen to them that even Erma, her simcomputer, couldn’t erase. They looked too good. The mirror was already pitted, you could see it on the picture of the arch itself, but the sim kept showing the device as pristine.

“Color is a temperature indicator, right?” Claire asked.

RED DENOTES A LEVEL OF 7 MILLION DEGREES KELVIN.

Good ol’ coquettish Erma, Claire thought. Never a direct answer unless you coax. “Close-up the top of the arch.”

In both her eyes the tortured sun-scape shot by. The coronal loop was a shimmering, braided family of magnetic flux tubes, as intricately woven as a Victorian doily. Its feet were anchored in the photosphere below held by thick, sluggish plasma. Claire zoomed in on the arch. The hottest reachable place in the entire Solar System, and her prey had to end up there.

TARGET ACQUIRED AND RESOLVED BY SOL-WATCH SATELLITE. IT IS AT THE VERY PEAK OF THE ARCH. ALSO, VERY DARK.

“Sure, dummy, it’s a hole.”

I AM ACCESSING MY ASTROPHYSICAL CONTEXT PROGRAM NOW.

Perfect Erma; primly change the subject. “Show me, with color coding.”

Claire peered at the round black splotch. Like a fly caught in a spider web. Well, at least it didn’t squirm or have legs. Magnetic strands played and rippled like wheat blown by a summer’s breeze. The flux tubes were blue in this coding, and they looked eerie. But they were really just ordinary magnetic fields, the sort she worked with every day. The dark sphere they held was the strangeness here. And the blue strands had snared the black fly in a firm grip.

Good luck, that. Otherwise, Sol-Watch would never have seen it. In deep space there was nothing harder to find than that ebony splotch. Which was why nobody ever had, until now.

OUR ORBIT NOW RISES ABOVE THE DENSE PLASMA LAYER. I CAN IMPROVE RESOLUTION BY GOING TO X-RAY. SHOULD I?

“Do.”

The splotch swelled. Claire squinted at the magnetic flux tubes in this ocher light. In the x-ray they looked sharp and spindly. But near the splotch the field lines blurred. Maybe they were tangled there, but more likely it was the splotch, warping the image.

“Coy, aren’t we?” She close-upped the x-ray picture. Hard radiation was the best probe of the hottest structures.

The splotch. Light there was crushed, curdled, stirred with a spoon.

A fly caught in a spider’s web, then grilled over a campfire. And she had to lean in, singe her hair, snap its picture. All because she wouldn’t freeze a man.

She had been ambling along a corridor three hundred meters below Mercury’s slag plains, gazing down on the frothy water fountains in the foyer of her apartment complex. Paying no attention to much except the clear scent of the splashing. The water was the very best, fresh from the poles, not the recycled stuff she endured on her flights. She breathed in the spray. That was when the man collared her.

“Claire Ambrase, I present formal secure-lock.”

He stuck his third knuckle into Claire’s elbow port and she felt a cold, brittle thunk. Her systems froze. Before she could move, whole command linkages went dead in her inboards.

It was like having fingers amputated. Financial fingers.

In her shock she could only stare at him—mousy, the sort who blended into the background. Perfect for the job. A nobody out of nowhere, complete surprise.

He stepped back. “Sorry. Isataku Incorporated ordered me to do it fast.” Claire resisted the impulse to deck him. He looked Lunar, thin and pale. Maybe with more kilos than she carried, but a fair match. And it would feel good.

“I can pay them as soon as—”

“They want it now, they said.” He shrugged apologetically, his jaw set. He was used to this all the time. She vaguely recognized him, from some bar near the Apex. There weren’t more than a thousand people on Mercury, mostly like her, in mining.

“Isataku didn’t have to cut off my credit.” She rubbed her elbow. Injected programs shouldn’t hurt, but they always did. Something to do with the neuro-muscular intersection. “That’ll make it hard to even fly the Silver Metal Lugger back.”

“Oh, they’ll give you pass credit for ship’s supplies. And, of course, for the ore load advance. But nothing big.”

“Nothing big enough to help me dig my way out of my debt hole.”

“ ’Fraid not.”

“Mighty decent.”

He let her sarcasm pass. “They want the ship Lunaside.”

“Where they’ll confiscate it.”

She began walking toward her apartment. She had known it was coming but in the rush to get ore consignments lined up for delivery, she had gotten careless. Agents like this Luny usually nailed their prey at home, not in a hallway. She kept a stunner in the apartment, right beside the door, convenient.

Distract him. “I want to file a protest.”

“Take it to Isataku.” Clipped, efficient, probably had a dozen other slices of bad news to deliver today. Busy man.

“No, with your employer.”

“Mine?” That got to him. His rocksteady jaw gaped in surprise.

“For—” she sharply turned the corner to her apartment, using the time to reach for some mumbo-jumbo “—felonious interrogation of in-boards.”

“Hey, I didn’t touch your—”

“I felt it. Slimy little groups—yeccch!” Might as well ham it up a little, have some fun.

He looked offended. “I’m triple bonded. I’d never do a readout on a contract customer. You can ask—”

“Can it.” She hurried toward her apartment portal and popped it by an inboard command. As she stepped through she felt him, three steps behind.