Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

“And then there was Beta.” Her face was like iron, her eyes full of ghosts and horror. “It was a deep-water strike, deep enough there was a lot less sea bottom involved, so it contributed less rock and sulfur to the mess. But it still sent tsunamis clear around the planet—at least three separate waves—and vaporized over two hundred thousand cubic kilometers of saltwater. That helped scrub some of the precipitates out of the atmosphere, but they came out in salt rains that poisoned everything they hit. We’re ten-plus years into the event now, and it’s still getting worse, not better.

“I knew from our orbital observations what it was going to be like down there, but it was only an intellectual awareness. It wasn’t real to me. I’d seen it through our telescopes. Now I’ve actually walked through it. For the first time in my life, I’ve stood on a real planet… and I wish to hell I never had.

“We’ve all seen the HDs of Earth—the sequoias, the savannas, the rain forests and plains. Well, there’s none of that on Calvin III. Not anymore. Oh, there are tiny pockets, but only tiny pockets, and with the entire atmosphere still in flux, God only knows if any of them can go on surviving. There’s evidence of high tectonic instability, too. We can’t be sure without longer to observe, but it seems to be increasing steadily, and it looks like the meteor strikes may have activated an area of volcanism bigger—and more destructive—than Earth’s Deccan Traps. In the end, that may release as much atmospheric contamination as both Hammers combined. It’ll be over a longer period of time, but that only means it will prolong the agony, delay any possible recovery time for hundreds— thousands —of years. We don’t have the data or the right software to model this with any degree of reliability, but the computers say that something like eighty percent of the planet’s animal life died within the first six or seven local months, and the process is still underway. The best models we can build suggest that nothing bigger than an Earth raccoon is likely to survive down there, and it probably won’t reach bottom and begin rebounding—if it ever does rebound — for a long, long time. This is a geological event, the kind of thing that takes millions of years to work through, and we don’t have millions of years.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head for a moment, then opened them again and faced the logistics manager squarely.

“It’s still getting worse, Cho Mee,” she repeated softly. “We’re past the catastrophic impact stage. Now we’re in the long, dragged out dying stage. I don’t see any way we could possibly build a settlement or a habitat down on the surface with a chance in hell of long-term survival.”

“But in that case… ?”

Seong’s voice trailed off, and Anderson looked at her.

“In that case we have to find another option. And if we can’t find one, then we’ll damned well make one. We didn’t come two hundred light-years just to give up at the end of the trip, by God!” His gaze circled the table, his eyes hard. “We’ve got those seventy-five years Shirley mentioned,” he reminded them. “That’s not long enough for us to make Beowulf, or even any of our original alternative destinations like Bryant, even assuming the ship systems had that much endurance left. But we’ve got time to think and plenty of time to re-tank from the gas giants, once we get the atmospheric distillation plant deployed. So we’re not going to run out of air or power tomorrow, and the last damned thing we’re going to do is to panic or let anyone else in Calvin’s Hope panic. Is that clear?”

The others glanced at one another, then looked back at him, and nodded. They were hesitant, almost timorous, those nods. But they grew stronger, more determined—even confident—and he nodded sharply back to them.

Now if he could only feel as confident as those nods.

PNS Pilgrim

J-156-18(L) System

September 1882 Post Diaspora

“Ready to proceed, Sir.”

“Very good.”

Captain Thoreau acknowledged Engineering’s report, sat back in his command chair, and gazed around his light cruiser’s orderly bridge. It was just as neat, its personnel just as intent and focused, as always, yet he could almost taste the suppressed excitement humming about him, and he hid a smile of his own. It wasn’t often that someone with no Legislaturalist connections landed a plum like this one.

“Dr. Rendova?” he said.

“Ready whenever you are, Captain,” Dr. Danielle Rendova replied.

The brown-haired hyper-physicist sat surrounded by the additional instrumentation which had been installed on Pilgrim ’s bridge. The light cruiser’s sensor suite had already been excellent—the Pathfinder -class had been designed from the keel out for survey work—but it had been beefed up for her current mission, and those additional sensors reported to Rendova’s consoles.

She’d done quite a lot of that beefing herself. Well, she and her graduate-student assistants. It was unfortunately true that the Peoples Navy wasn’t oversupplied with hyper-physicists. For that matter the People’s Republic as a whole wasn’t oversupplied with any sort of trained scientists. Its educational system didn’t produce a lot of those. Rendova—thank God—was the exception that proved the rule, and she knew it. She came from a powerful Legislaturalist family, but her frustration with the schools which had produced her almost despite themselves was apparent.

“You heard the Doctor, Lieutenant Zagorski,” Thoreau told his astrogator. “Are the transit vectors locked in?”

“Yes, Sir.”

“In that case,” Thoreau waggled his fingers at the maneuvering plot, “I believe we might want to get a move on.”

“Yes, Sir!” the lieutenant said with a huge smile and turned to his helmsman.

“Eight gravities, Chief.”

“Eight gravities on Astro’s programmed heading, aye, Sir,” Chief Coxswain Clouseau acknowledged, and Thoreau looked at the quadrant of his com display dedicated to Engineering.

“Prepare to rig foresail for transit on my mark, Ms. Glaston.”

“Standing by, Sir,” Commander Sarah Glaston replied formally.

“Threshold in one-five seconds,” Zagorski reported.

“On your toes, Chief,” Thoreau said quietly.

“Yes, Sir.”

Clouseau never took her eyes from her own displays as Pilgrim slid gently across the threshold of the unexplored hyper terminus. The survey ship tracked directly down the path Zagorski had programmed, based on Rendova’s painstaking survey of the torrent of gravitic energy cascading through the wormhole. If everything went as planned, Clouseau should have nothing to do until Pilgrim emerged on the far side of the terminus… wherever that might be. If things didn’t go as planned, she was about to find herself extraordinarily busy.

Briefly, at least.

“Threshold!” Zagorski’s tone was calm but more than a little crisper than usual.

“Rig foresail for transit,” Thoreau said.

“Rigging foresail,” Glaston responded instantly, and half Pilgrim ’s impeller wedge vanished as her forward Beta nodes shut down. Her forward Alpha nodes reconfigured in the same instant, dropping their own share of the cruiser’s impeller wedge to project a Warshawski sail—a circular disk of focused gravitational energy, three hundred kilometers in diameter—instead.