Тим Пауэрс - Bugs and Known Problems

“Stand by after hypersail.” Thoreau watched the flickering numerals in the Engineering window of his plot as the cruiser continued to creep forward under her after impellers alone, inserting the foresail gently— gently —into the gravitational vortex.

“Standing by after hypersail,” Glaston said, and Thoreau knew she was watching the same numbers climb on her own displays as the sail moved deeper into the terminus. The rate of increase was slow, given the absurdly low speed of any first-transit through an uncharted terminus, but catching it at the right moment was still—

The numbers stopped flickering. The values kept climbing, but the digital display’s steady glow indicated the foresail was drawing enough power from the grav waves twisting eternally through the terminus to provide movement.

“Rig aftersail,” Thoreau said crisply.

“Rigging aftersail,” Glaston acknowledged, and Pilgrim shivered as her impeller wedge disappeared entirely and her after hypersail blossomed at the far end of her hull.

Chief Clouseau’s hands were calm and steady, but Thoreau’s stomach still twisted itself into a brief knot as the cruiser slid into the terminus’ interface. The queasiness always associated with crossing the hyper wall was substantially more intense in a wormhole transit. It was also briefer, however, and he ignored it, never looking away from his plot. The waterfall display along its right side rose sharply, climbing towards the transit point. It took longer than any wormhole transit Thoreau had ever before made, which wasn’t a good thing where the nausea quotient was concerned. On the other hand, it seemed to be tracking exactly along Dr. Rendova’s projected vector, and he could stand quite a bit of tummy upset as long as—

The universe hiccuped.

No one had ever been able to measure a wormhole transit’s duration, and this one was no different. One instant, PNS Pilgrim was just over five light-hours from the thoroughly useless red dwarf listed solely as J-156-18(L). The next instant she was… somewhere else.

“I have a G4 star at three-niner-point-seven-five light-minutes!” one of Rendova’s assistants sang out.

Thoreau exhaled the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, but he never looked away from his plot as the numbers began spiraling downward once again.

“Prepare to reconfigure to wedge, Commander Glaston,” he said, then glanced at Zagorski. “And while we’re doing that, Astro, why don’t you start your observations. I think we should find out where we are, don’t you?”

The Octagon

City of Nouveau Paris

Haven System

People’s Republic of Haven

December 1882 Post Diaspora

“You’re kidding me, right?” Vice Admiral Amos Parnell said.

“I wish I was.” Admiral Adelaide Laforge grimaced sourly. “Unfortunately, Rousseau ‘s serious, and Harris has signed off on it.” She shrugged. “End of story.”

“But it’s frigging ridiculous!” Parnell scowled. He was due to replace Laforge as Chief of Naval Operations in less than a T-year, and he wondered how much of his irritation stemmed from the fact that when he did, it would be his ineffable joy to deal firsthand with their political masters.

“I didn’t express myself quite that… concisely,” Laforge said dryly. She was his aunt by marriage, as well as his superior officer. As such, she habitually addressed him with a greater degree of frankness than she would have shown others. “Rousseau’s an idiot, but she’s got too much clout for that. I did suggest that any results would be… problematic. But I think she and the rest of her crowd just can’t accept that we can’t find some way to use it, now that we’ve got our very own hyper-bridge.”

Parnell snorted, but stubborn self-honesty made him admit he felt much the same way. No one had ever expected to discover a wormhole terminus barely seventy light-years from the Haven System. In fact, the discovery had come as a distinct shock to the survey crew which detected it literally by accident. Their ship hadn’t even been supposed to visit the unprepossessing, planetless star with which it was associated. Indeed, her skipper had stopped off at the M3 dwarf en route to the far more promising J-193-18(L) system to let his crew train on a star about which everything was already known… only to discover that not quite “everything” had been known after all.

J-156-18(L) was useless as a home for mankind, but there’d been vast excitement in Nouveau Paris when the wormhole was reported. It had been very quiet excitement, however. Wormholes were rare and precious commodities, and the government of Hereditary President Harris had no intention of letting the rest of the galaxy learn about this one until it had decided how best to utilize it. Dr. Rendova, the PRH’s leading hyper-physicist, had been dispatched aboard Pilgrim, under the tightest possible security, within T-months. She’d completed her survey more rapidly than anyone had expected, and Pilgrim had discovered that J-156-18(L) was one terminus of a 653.17-LY hyper-bridge, twenty percent longer even than the fabled Manticore-Beowulf bridge.

And that its other terminus was the KCR-126-04 System.

KCR-126-04.

Parnell’s mouth tightened, because that was one of the bleakest bad jokes in the entire universe. That star system—also known as the Calvin System—lay at the heart of one of the tragedies of pre-Warshawski sail history, and a more useless piece of real estate would have been impossible to imagine.

Parnell had often wondered about the courage—or insanity—required to set out for the stars aboard the original sublight, multi-generation starships. He spent too much time aboard modern starships to contemplate an entire lifetime bounded by a ship’s hull with any sort of equanimity. Calvin’s Hope , though, had set forth on a longer journey than any which had gone before her, and the record made it clear that the colonists had invested not just money but intelligence and imagination in providing against their voyage’s risks.

Unfortunately, no one’s imagination had included a dinosaur killer fit to dwarf the impact which had put a punctuation point to Old Terra’s Cretaceous period. From the available evidence, the monster which hit Calvin III—some experts theorized there might actually have been two of them in a short window, although the second crater (if it existed) had never been found—had struck less than fifty years before the colony ship should have reached its destination.

No one knew if she actually had. What they did know was that even today, thirteen standard centuries later, Calvin III was a bleak, barren place whose shattered ecosystem had scarcely begun to heal. In fact, most climatologists and biologists leaned towards the theory that what they were observing wasn’t a recovery at all, simply the final throes and death rattle of an entire planet’s slow, lingering murder.

In 402 PD, no colony could possibly have survived upon its surface.

No trace had ever been found—in the KCR-126-04 System, or anywhere else—of Calvin’s Hope and her doomed passengers. The “slow-boat” colony ships had been designed for one-way trips, without the endurance and capacity to return to their destinations. The colonists who’d settled the planet Grayson had discovered the downsides of that, and Calvin’s Hope had departed the Sol System almost a century and a half earlier than Austin Grayson and his followers. Her design had been less capable to begin with, and she would have exhausted virtually all her planned endurance just reaching the Calvin System. There was no way she could possibly have taken her passengers home again, and no message had ever been received from her across the two light-centuries between Calvin and Old Terra. Perhaps she’d sent one which had never been detected, but none of her shipboard transmitters had ever been intended to reach across so vast a distance.