Wil McCarthy - The Collapsium

Could the neutronium’s enormous mass serve as a heat sink? No, of course not—it had been basking out here in full sunlight for years! Its temperature would have equalized long ago, probably to something uncomfortably warm. Well, at least diamond was a good thermal conductor—it would pull heat from the sunward face, and radiate it away on the opposite side, in the cold shadows. That might help, though just how much…

As the platform continued to turn, its habitable side swung slowly into view, and Bruno could see—to his incalculable relief—that beneath the diamond dome were a handful of loose, soft-looking silver cones, like little tents made of reflective fabric.

“What’s inside those?” he demanded, pointing at them on the display. “Is anyone alive?”

“I’m not able to tell,” Muddy answered gruffly, with no real sign of relief or concern in his voice. This was one of his symptoms—apathy regarding anyone but himself and Bruno, who still was himself in some very meaningful ways. But apathy even about Her Majesty?

Bruno waved impatient hands. “They’re what, sheets of impervium cloth?”

“Bunkerlite, I think, or some near equivalent. Super-reflectors, anyway.”

“They must have gotten their fax machine working,” Deliah said, and at least the relief was evident in her voice.

“So they could be alive,” Bruno dared to say. “ Sabadell-Andorra , please attempt to establish radio contact. Muddy, are we on course to arrive there?”

“Nearly,” Muddy said. “We’ll need a minor adjustment. I’m moving the grapple anchor to Venus…”

“Not the inhabited areas, surely?”

“Uh, checking. No. Not the inhabited areas.”

“Still illegal,” Deliah noted.

The ship bucked around them; if they hadn’t been strapped to their couches, the companions would all have tumbled like tenpins.

“Now we are on course,” Muddy said. “Arrival in twenty minutes. There’s a problem, though—our course intercepts a loose fragment of Ring Collapsiter. What happens if that contacts the ertial shield?”

“Oh, I’m not certain,” Bruno admitted. “And I doubt very much that we want to find out. But we do have to pass this way. For my comfort, let’s miss this thing by at least a kilometer.”

“Aye, Lordship.” Muddy said. Then, “Unfortunately, we appear to be headed directly for it. We’ll miss by meters, if at all.”

“Heavens! Is there anything to hook to for a plane change? North or south, it doesn’t matter; we just need to get some small distance between ourselves and the plane of the Ring Collapsiter.”

“Oh, sir. No. We’ve spent the last sixteen hours pulling ourselves ever more precisely into that plane, and no, there isn’t anything near at hand we can grapple to, to pull us out of it again.”

“The poles of Venus, perhaps?”

Muddy burst into tears. “Alas, no! We have to strike our targets with a nearly perpendicular beam. Venus itself is out of our plane, but not enough out of it. We could attach to its equator, and given enough time… Pointless. We haven’t enough time.”

“Blast. Can we stop?”

“Not quickly enough, sir.” Muddy wiped at his tears—a futile gesture, since the flow of fresh ones hadn’t abated. “Remember, we’re at full deceleration already. Oblivion, what a miserable ass I am. What a perfect servant of Declarant Sykes. I’ve killed you at last, sir, within reach of your goal.”

“Oh, nonsense. Everyone makes mistakes. You’ve my distracted brain to do your thinking with, and that’s a burden I wouldn’t wish on Sykes himself. Time to impact?”

“Urn, seventeen minutes.”

“Enough time to think of something. How about your emergency propulsion system? The compressed oxygen apparatus?”

Muddy brightened. “I’d all but forgotten about that. Yes! What a thought, that something of my design should prove useful.” He hammered a series of calculations into the interfaces before him. “There is enough time, yes. It’s very low thrust, in comparison with our present velocity, but if we activate it immediately, we’ll miss the collapsium by half a kilometer. Is that enough?”

Bruno tried to think of some way to confirm it, and finally—to his deep chagrin—was forced to shrug. “I don’t know, Muddy. I guess it’ll have to be.”

Bruno sweated some as the wayward fragment approached. He pulled up images of it on a gravitational anomaly scanner; a thin loop of collapsium a thousand kilometers long. It should have appeared arrow-straight, just the tiniest slice of a huge circle stretching clear around the sun, but the piece had begun to pull in on itself, to twist, to curl. It seemed to be part of a ring much smaller than the collapsiter itself, one that might fit around the equator of Earth’s moon, or even a medium-sized asteroid. It was kinked in places, too, its structural rigidity slowly failing. In another few weeks it would probably curl enough to double back on itself, with probably calamitous results. Did it have a few weeks? He checked its trajectory and found it was indeed in a rather sedate solar orbit, with perihelion nearly a million kilometers above the chromopause. An orbit that might continue indefinitely, in the absence of disturbing influences.

There were influences, though; the nearby construction platform, for one. And his sensors picked up all sorts of other, indistinct mass concentrations at the edges of his detection range. No doubt there were a thousand other fragments just like this one, caroming about in the limited space inside Mercury’s orbit. Eventually, this fragment would run afoul of one of those others, and its orbit would ratchet upward or downward. Eventually, one of them would surely fall straight in. There could be no doubt of that.

The backup thrusters hummed; hundreds of tiny, temporary channels through the wellstone outer hull, accelerating heavy oxygen ions, one by one, to relativistic speeds. This, too, was probably illegal: an exhaust much deadlier than the typical fusion helium, and deadlier at a much greater range, too. They could probably cook a human from a light-second away.

“Thirty’s-s-seconds to closest approach,” Muddy warned.

“Hmm. Here we go, then.”

“It’s been an honor working with you, sir.”

“Likewise,” Deliah chipped in.

“Oh, nonsense. I couldn’t have done any of this alone. We all have the greatest respect for each other, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Twenty seconds.”

He became acutely aware of his breathing. He wondered if it was loud, if it maybe should be a little slower and quieter.

“Ten seconds. Five. Four, three, two…”

And then, suddenly, there it was in the window above them—a long, slender piece glowing brightly with the familiar Cerenkov blue. The ertial shield hadn’t twitched in the slightest, hadn’t reacted at all. The collapsium itself seemed similarly unaffected, not falling in on itself in their wake or anything. They continued past, seeing more and more of it, the fragment growing longer and dimmer and loopier in the window view. Then the last of it trailed by, and they were in clear space again.

“Backup thrusters off,” Muddy said. The humming stopped.

Deliah let a long breath out. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“No,” Bruno agreed. Not bad at all. Some day, he’d have to work out the theory of it all, the precise interactions between collapsium and hypercollapsite. The weak link was surely the collapsium, it being so much less dense, so much more subject to gravity and inertia and the various other interactions of the zero-point field. His fear had been the crushing of its lattice, and its resulting reversion to a chain of heavy, disconnected, uncontrollable hypermasses capable of all sorts of harm. But perhaps the two could live together in harmony after all. At half a kilometer’s distance, anyway!