Крис Бекетт - The Turing Test

Dixon switched off the radio.

“I must say,” he said, “I’ve never been able to understand how people can do things they know are wrong and then still get indignant when it causes problems for them and other people. But that’s for another time. Right now, crewmates, I’ve got a simple proposition to make. We have power and provisions enough for one trip. Why not do it anyway?”

“Dixon!” Mehmet gave an incredulous laugh. “This isn’t like you!”

“I’m quite serious,” he said. “How can they stop us?”

“How about by sending an interceptor after us?” I said.

There were interceptors in Earth orbit, a dozen of them at least at any one time, looking out for illegally launched communications satellites and for the killer satellites which big business and organized crime sent up to disrupt the communications of rivals.

“It’ll take them an hour to figure out what we’re doing,” said Dixon, “and an hour after that to decide what to do about it. By then we’ll only be about six hours from the leap point. And it could take six hours at least for one of them to catch up with us. It’s not as if they are going to try and laser us.”

“Yes but…” Mehmet stopped himself and laughed. “Well, okay. This is a very stupid idea. But, yes, I’m up for it if Tommy is.”

I thought about the alternative. Going back to live among daily revelations of my own duplicity. Walking down a street in which every passerby knew what, precisely , I liked to do in bed. And maybe never again coming up to this place – or maybe non-place would be a better word – which was where, more than anywhere else, I actually felt at home.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m in. Even though it’ll mean a court martial when we get back. Who cares?”

“Oh we’ll be okay,” Mehmet said. “The public will love us won’t they? The public will think we’re heroes.”

“It’s the goddam taxpaying public who’ve pulled the plug on us,” I pointed out.

“Yes, I know,” said Mehmet. “But that makes no difference. When they see us defying the bureaucrats they’ll yell at the bureaucrats to leave us alone and get off our backs. They won’t remember that the bureaucrats were acting at their own request. They never do!”

So we were agreed. Contrary to our orders we started charging up the engine.

Angela:

People laughed at me when I put myself forward for secondment to the UN’s ‘space-cop’ service. The British police forces had only been given a quota of four secondees altogether and I was only twenty-five, black and a woman. Plus I was only an ordinary uniformed cop and had no training as a pilot beyond what I’d done with the air cadets at school. But then my mum and dad had always taught me to believe in myself.

Yeah and look at me now, I thought, as our hundred million dollar interceptor passed five thousand miles above India. Who says a black girl from Peckham can’t get on in the world?

This was my third patrol. My captain Mike Tennison and I were looking for Mafia satellites, which we would either tow to destruction points or, if they were very small, simply nudge down into the atmosphere to burn up like meteorites.

Mike was an air force secondee, a former RAF fighter pilot. He was decent, sporty, stiff upper lipped. He was a brave man too. He’d served and won medals in several recent wars. But something was happening to him that neither he nor anyone else could have predicted. He was becoming a cosmophobe. Space was starting to scare him.

“It’s a silly thing,” he’d confided on our previous mission, “I’ve flown in all kinds of dangerous situations and never thought twice about it. I didn’t think twice about this at first either. But now I can’t seem to forget that out here I’m not really flying at all, I’m just constantly falling. Please don’t tell anyone, Angela. I’ll get over it I’m sure.”

But it was getting pretty obvious to me that he wasn’t going to get over it. His face streamed with sweat. He kept wiping his hands so as to be able to grip properly on the controls. And his eyes, his weary frightened eyes, were just unbearable to look at. I was going to have to confront him about it at the end of this mission, I knew. I couldn’t sweep this under the carpet any more. He was putting us both in danger.

But that was for later. Right now we were heading towards a rogue satellite which had been launched a few days ago from Kazakhstan. We were just about to get close enough to actually see the thing when we received an unexpected order from ground base. The intergalactic ship Defiant had been hi-jacked by its own crew and they were taking it out of orbit. We were the nearest interceptor and we were to go after it, grapple it if necessary and prevent it from making a leap.

“Jesus!” I breathed.

Mike gave a kind of groan. I realized that up to that point he’d coping by counting off the minutes until we could drop out of orbit and return to base.

But he was a professional. He put his fear to one side, located the Defiant and calculated a trajectory which would intercept theirs in about three and a half hours. Then off we went, me leaning out of the window to stick a flashing blue light on the roof.

Well, okay, I made that last bit up.

Tommy:

They used to say there were only five people on Earth who really understood how a gravitonic engine worked, and I certainly wasn’t one of them. What I do know is that, for a few seconds at the point of leap, what an engine does is generate an artificial gravitational field that converts the space around it into the equivalent of a black hole. And because an engine works by gravity, it can’t be used too close to any large object with a gravitational field of its own. This would distort the field and would result, at minimum, in the ship emerging in a completely different place from the target area. At maximum it could result in the field failing to properly enclose the ship, so that the ship itself would be damaged or destroyed.

This was why, at the rate of acceleration that the Defiant could achieve with its conventional Euclidean drive, it would be eight hours before we could reach the nearest safe point to make our leap through sub-Euclidean space: the so-called leap point. It would take half that time in any case for the engine to build up a sufficient charge.

It was after we’d been going for about an hour that we became aware that we were being followed.

“It’s gaining on us too,” Mehmet said.

“Shall we talk to them?” Dixon asked.

I thought better not. But the others decided we should call and tell them if they didn’t back off, they might get sucked down into sub-E with us when the time came to make a leap.

We were surprised to hear the voice of a self-assured young Englishwoman in reply.

“We’ll reach you long before you get to your leap point,” she said in response to our threat, “and we are certainly not going to back off.”

Dixon winked at us.

“Listen,” he radioed back, “When you get close to us, we leap, even if we’re four hours short of the leap point. It’s up to you.”

Mehmet looked at me with an expression that said, “He’s bluffing, yeah?”

But he hadn’t seen the gleam in Dixon’s eye, the mad religious gleam as he turned back to watch the power monitor.

The interceptor drew closer. There was no sign of them backing off.

“I meant what I said,” Dixon told the orbit-cops.

“So did I,” said the young woman who we now knew to be Sergeant Angela Young.

Dixon shrugged.

“Okay, then,” he said, “here goes or it’ll be too late! God save us all.”