Martyn Vaughan - The Cave of Shadows

Jon stared back at his group of comrades, reflecting how they had been flung into an apparently endless maelstrom of danger and trial and how they risen to those challenges with seemingly inexhaustible resources of fortitude.

‘We have entered this planetary system, just as the Protectorate planned, half a millennium ago. But as Shev told us not long ago, the guidance systems are compromised. We should have begun braking about thirty years ago.

‘We did not. We are travelling too fast to be captured by our destination planet. We will describe a hyperbolic arc around this star and then head back out into interstellar space.’

‘Back into interstellar space?’ whispered Jarm, ‘Then it’s all over. We’re finished.’

The looks of the faces of his companions told Jon that the opinion was unanimous.

He turned away from them and stared at the glowing instruments. They held the key to controlling the Fatal Scimitar ; Jon knew that all the technical understanding required to master the vessel was already in his brain – he had just to turn theory into practice and extremely soon.

‘All of you!’ he shouted in a stentorian roar, ‘look at these machines! Find some way of controlling them, operating them! Now!’

For a few moments they just stared at him as if he had suddenly demanded that they learn how to fly but then they realised that he was offering them their only hope of avoiding a slow, cold death between the stars. They all immediately crossed to the machine nearest to them and began examining it; but even in this dreadful emergency Jon kept an eye on the location of Shana36, watching to see if she crossed over ‘his” Shana’s path. He knew it was irrational, a complete dereliction of duty; a perfect example of failing to get his priorities right.

But he couldn’t help it.

It was Shev who found the answer. She pointed at a palm-sized blank pad on the portion of her machine that jutted out to form a kind of shelf or working surface. Tentatively, not daring to hope, she had put her palm on it and a portion of the front of her machine above the working surface had slid upwards and a pair of scalp contacts similar to the Educator pads had slid out.

Jon did the same with his machine with the same result. He pulled the pads out of their recess and stared at them for a few fast-flowing moments. Their resemblance to the Educator pads could not be a coincidence. They must have a similar function, but maybe in reverse – with knowledge flowing from a flesh and blood brain to a machine!

There was a moulded chair in front of every machine and, sitting down, he placed the pads on his scalp.

Instantly a cold mechanical thought that was not his formed in his mind.

Instructions ? it said.

Show me all the command instructions .

A great bank of computer commands appeared in his inner vision, rolling inexorably, endlessly upwards to disappear from his purview.

He slowed the display to a more manageable rate and memorised the ten most important ones. The others he could return to later.

He looked over his shoulder to find that his companions had not copied him but stood in an expectant semicircle around him, waiting for something to happen.

No matter. They could learn later, in the meantime…

Activate breaking rockets he commanded into the heart of the great Command Computer.

Activated.

Fire.

Value?

Maximum .

Immediately, instantly, without any delay that human or transhuman senses could have registered, a great roar echoed through the control room; a roar as if a titanic dinosaurian beast was being flayed alive. Contemporaneously there was a great lurch as if the hurtling vessel had hit an obstruction in its headlong flight; an obstruction which slowed the vessel, clung to it like a colossal cephalopod of space, slowing, pulling – but not halting it.

The Fatal Scimitar shuddered, jerked, twisted, throwing its inhabitants onto the floor. All around were the terrible sounds of metal straining under enormous forces; great echoing booming noises like distant thunder could be heard crashing and reverberating from all directions.

Jorl got to his feet first. ‘The old girl doesn’t like it I guess.’

Jon ignored him and resumed his connection with the Control Computer. He called up data on trajectory and velocity and the rates of change of both.

Finally he turned. ‘We haven’t got a fraction of the power required to establish a stable orbit within this system. We can’t make up for thirty years of uninterrupted interstellar velocity in a few hours, days or weeks – even if we had unlimited fuel. We are still on a hyperbolic path.’

‘As I believe I said,’ Jarm commented, ‘we’re finished.’

‘Possibly not,’ was Jon’s response, ‘we are slowing and there is another way of losing velocity.’

‘Reverse slingshot,’ Shana36 suddenly interjected.

‘Reverse what?’ was Jorls’s comment as he turned to look at her, ‘I must have nodded off in the Educator when they did that one.’

Shana36 ignored him and continued to stare, somewhat unnervingly, at Jon.

‘Slingshots or gravitational assists were used in the early days of space probes by using large rotating masses, usually Jupiter, to transfer momentum. However, it’s possible to transfer momentum the other way by approaching the object counter to its spin.’

‘But the amounts transferred would be minute!,’ Shana12 said, who had not failed to notice who her double was staring at.

‘Indeed they would,’ Jon said, managing not to look directly at either of the women but at a point directly between the Shanas, ‘but there are a number of gas giant planets in this system that we can bleed momentum onto. But you’re right – it will take a while.’

‘Then we’d better get started,’ Jon heard Jorl mutter.

‘There’s a little something we have to do first,’ Jon continued, feeling increasingly light-headed as the enormity of what he was about to say started to dominate his mind, ‘something that will help us a great deal to shed momentum.’

The others did not rise to the theatricality of his performance and merely waited for him to finish.

‘We will pass close to this star on the turning point of our hyperbola and by approaching it correctly we will be able to lose a useful fraction of our momentum,’ he finally said.

Jorl turned to look at Shev and then back to Jon.

‘That’s a rather throwaway remark – “Pass close to the star” – how close?’

‘Within zero point one six of an AU.’

The others burst into a confused cacophony of various types of expostulations.

Finally Shana12 asked, ‘How hot will it get?’

Jon tried and failed to give a reassuring smile. ‘This vessel has a hull designed to withstand half a millennium in interstellar space and the star is cooler than Earth’s sun. The maximum temperature on the hull according to the Control Computer – I haven’t checked it – will be about 880 kelvins.’

‘Hot enough to soften quite a few metals,’ Jarm observed mildly, as if he were reading from a technical journal.

‘And that’s just the heat,’ Jorl snapped, ‘Surprisingly enough I wasn’t asleep during the lecture about hard radiation – Far UV, X-Ray, maybe the occasional gamma ray. Not to mention – but I must – a flood of charged particles shooting through us.’

‘I’m afraid there is no alternative,’ Jon said, desperately trying to control his growing irritation with Jorl, ‘you clearly haven’t realised that we have absolutely no way of avoiding the close passage. It’s the laws of gravity that have made this choice for us – not me. But if we control our path we can use it to our advantage.’