Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

Hall smiled a tight, grim smile, just a glimpse of the wolf beneath. He said: then it wouldn’t be greed. Greed never knows what it wants .

That was the exact measure of Hall’s friendship, to say that to Zia. But then Zia knew what he wanted: out .

As he drifted awake, he realized that, decades past, the ship would have collected data on the Sun’s own heliopause on their way out. If he could access that data, maybe he could learn whether the hydrogen wall was a real thing. What effect it might—

There was a loud bang. The monitor and the cabin went dark. His mind reached into the outer darkness and it sensed something long and loose and broken trailing behind them.

What light there was came back on. The computer rebooted. The monitor displayed readings for the magsail over the past hour: current ramping up, then oscillating to compensate for varying densities in the medium, then a sharp spike. And then zero. Quenched.

Hydrogen wall? He didn’t know. The magsail was fried. He tried for an hour more to get it to accept current. No luck. He remembered with some distaste the EVA suit. He didn’t want to go outside, to tempt that darkness, but he might have to, so he walked forward to check it out.

The suit wasn’t in its cubby. Zia turned and walked up the corridor, glancing at his torpid crewmates. The last slab was empty.

Sergei was gone. The suit was gone. You would assume they’d gone together, but that wasn’t in the logs. I may be some time . Sergei didn’t strike him as the type to take a last walk in the dark. And for that he wouldn’t have needed the suit. Still. You can’t guess what anyone might do.

So that was final—no EVA: the magsail couldn’t be fixed. From the console, he cut it loose.

They were going far too fast. Twice what they’d planned. Now they had only the nuclear plasma rocket for deceleration, and one fuel tank was empty, somehow. Even though the fuel remaining outmassed the ship, it wasn’t enough. If they couldn’t slow below the escape velocity of the system, they’d shoot right through and out the other side.

The ship had been gathering data for months and had good orbital elements for the entire system. Around A were four planets, none in a position to assist with flybys. Even if they were, their masses would be little help. Only the two stars were usable.

If he brought them in a lot closer around B—how close could they get? one fiftieth AU? one hundredth?—and if the heat shield held—it should withstand 2500° Celsius for a few hours—the ship could be slowed more with the same amount of fuel. The B star was closest: it was the less luminous of the pair, cooler, allowing them to get in closer, shed more speed. Then repeat the maneuver at A.

There was a further problem. Twelve years ago, as per the original plan, Alpha A and B were at their closest to one another: 11 AU. The stars were now twenty AU apart and widening. So the trip from B to A would take twice as long. And systems were failing. They were out on the rising edge of the bathtub curve.

Power continued erratic. The computer crashed again and again as he worked out the trajectories. He took to writing down intermediate results on paper in case he lost a session, cursing as he did so. Materials. We stole our tech from the most corrupt forces on Earth. Dude, you want an extended warranty with that? He examined the Stirling engine, saw that the power surge had compromised it. He switched the pile over to backup thermocouples. That took hours to do and it was less efficient, but it kept the computer running. It was still frustrating. The computer was designed to be redundant, hardened, hence slow. Minimal graphics, no 3D holobox. He had to think through his starting parameters carefully before he wasted processor time running a simulation.

Finally he had a new trajectory, swinging in perilously close to B, then A. It might work. Next he calculated that, when he did what he was about to do, seventy kilometers of magsail cable wouldn’t catch them up and foul them. Then he fired the maneuvering thrusters.

What sold him, finally, was a handful of photons .

This is highly classified, said Roger. He held a manila file folder containing paper. Any computer file was permeable, hackable. Paper was serious .

The data were gathered by an orbiting telescope. It wasn’t a photograph. It was a blurred, noisy image that looked like rings intersecting in a pond a few seconds after some pebbles had been thrown .

It’s a deconvolved cross-correlation map of a signal gathered by a chopped pair of Bracewell baselines. You know how that works?

He didn’t. Roger explained. Any habitable planet around Alpha Centauri A or B would appear a small fraction of an arc-second away from the stars, and would be at least twenty-two magnitudes fainter. At that separation, the most sensitive camera made, with the best dynamic range, couldn’t hope to find the planet in the stars’ glare. But put several cameras together in a particular phase relation and the stars’ light could be nulled out. What remained, if anything, would be light from another source. A planet, perhaps .

Also this, in visible light .

An elliptical iris of grainy red, black at its center, where an occulter had physically blocked the stars’ disks .

Coronagraph, said Roger. Here’s the detail .

A speck, a single pixel, slightly brighter than the enveloping noise.

What do you think?

Could be anything. Dust, hot pixel, cosmic ray….

It shows up repeatedly. And it moves .

Roger, for all I know you photoshopped it in .

He looked honestly shocked. Do you really think I’d….

I’m kidding. But where did you get these? Can you trust the source?

Why would anyone fake such a thing?

The question hung and around it gathered, like sepsis, the suspicion of some agency setting them up, of some agenda beyond their knowing. After the Kepler exoplanet finder went dark, subsequent exoplanet data—like all other government-sponsored scientific work—were classified. Roger’s clearance was pretty high, but even he couldn’t be sure of his sources .

You’re not convinced, are you .

But somehow Zia was. The orbiting telescope had an aperture of, he forgot the final number, it had been scaled down several times owing to budget cuts. A couple of meters, maybe. That meant light from this far-off dim planet fell on it at a rate of just a few photons per second. It made him unutterably lonely to think of those photons traveling so far. It also made him believe in the planet .

Well, okay, Roger Fry was mad. Zia knew that. But he would throw in with Roger because all humanity was mad. Perhaps always had been. Certainly for the past century-plus, with the monoculture madness called modernity. Roger at least was mad in a different way, perhaps Zia’s way .

He wrote the details into the log, reduced the orbital mechanics to a cookbook formula. Another steward would have to be awakened when they reached the B star; that would be in five years; his calculations weren’t good enough to automate the burn time, which would depend on the ship’s precise momentum and distance from the star as it rounded. It wasn’t enough just to slow down; their exit trajectory from B needed to point them exactly to where A would be a year later. That wouldn’t be easy; he took a couple of days to write an app to make it easier, but with large blocks of memory failing in the computer, Sophie’s idea of a handwritten logbook no longer looked so dumb.

As he copied it all out, he imagined the world they’d left so far behind: the billions in their innocence or willed ignorance or complicity, the elites he’d despised for their lack of imagination, their surfeit of hubris, working together in a horrible folie à deux . He saw the bombs raining down, atomizing history and memory and accomplishment, working methodically backwards from the cities to the cradles of civilization to the birthplaces of the species—the Fertile Crescent, the Horn of Africa, the Great Rift Valley—in a crescendo of destruction and denial of everything humanity had ever been—its failures, its cruelties, its grandeurs, its aspirations—all extirpated to the root, in a fury of self-loathing that fed on what it destroyed.