Heretics (3 page)

“Let's just do some laps to warm up,” she told it.

“What environment?”

“Styx, my standard route.”

The view out her visor shifted to a field covered in soot-colored snow. She stood on a muddy track that pointed toward some small domed buildings in the distance. Beyond, a volcanic mountain range shrugged gray, steaming shoulders toward an overcast sky. She felt the pull as the machine pushed down on her, providing the extra gravity the station couldn't provide, and the cycling air dropped down toward freezing.

Toni smiled.
Ugly as hell, but it's home.

She bent forward and to the side a few times, pulling the large muscles in her legs. The machine easily accommodated her stretching routine. Then she started running.

After the first few strides, her body was convinced she was running down an access road outside New Perdition. Her feet felt the sucking of the mud, and she could almost feel snowflakes on her cheek. She ran five virtual kilometers to the edge of the domed encampment.

“Change environment. Jokul, the Tosev range.”

Obediently, the display made a fifty- light-year shift, and the sky turned from dusty gray to a searing blue dominated by the stark white point of a sun. The machine increased the downward pressure representing a thirty- five-percent increase in gravity, and she could feel the atmosphere recyclers lowering the pressure and oxygen content. She turned and faced the Tosev. It was stubby by Stygian standards, but it was sheer, and she had to carry an extra thirty kilos up the face.

However, after 265 days with exercise as her only source of recreation, she topped the offered cliff without significantly raising her heart rate.

Colonel Xander was the reason for her current situation. The man was an ass who not only ignored regulations about fraternizing with junior officers, but who took rejection very poorly.

Toni could have filed a complaint. She
should
have. The problem was, of course, what happened afterward. She might get the colonel reprimanded, maybe even discharged. However, officers responsible for the censuring of their superiors did not find new commanders to be very supportive. It tended to be a career-ending move, a career that, at the time, Toni hadn't been willing to toss away.

Somewhere around day sixty of her solo assignment, her thoughts on the matter had begun to change. Trading her career for the chance to manually remove parts of Colonel Xander's anatomy had begun to look like a fair trade.

After her face-climbing, she took out her aggression on a series of hand-to-hand combat simulations. She had just bested a pair of squat-boned Occisis Marines in a nasty knife fight when the station alarm sounded.

“Kill program,” she shouted, just as marine number three was about to jump her. The helmet went transparent again, and she was staring at the floor of the gym. The only sounds now were the pulsing alarm and her own breathing.

She pulled the release and the machine slid apart, spilling her on the ground. She grabbed the towel and ran through to the control room in her bare feet and underwear, wiping off sweat as she ran.

There was a short list of alarms that the automated systems were programmed for. The really insistent ones were the station environmental alarms, the ones that warned you if you only had a few seconds to live. This, fortunately, was not one of those. This was one of the proximity alarms, and one that she had only ever heard in training.

She squeaked into the plastic seat in front of the traffic control station and looked at the monitors, convinced that there was some sort of glitch. What she was hearing was an alarm for outbound traffic from the wormhole—and not just random space debris. This was the klaxon for something the computers thought was a spacecraft.

For all the training Toni had gone through about this assignment, for all the history of the wormhole network, the idea of ghosts never sank in. Like many other ramifications of the quantum universe, it was too far removed from common sense for her to actually believe in the idea.

But she felt her pulse quicken when the holo in front of her resolved the imaging data into something that was clearly not a lump of rock. She was looking at a small scout craft, the same type that was currently docked on the underside of this station. It floated there, clearing the spherical distortion of space that was the wormhole, one engine trailing a wisp of vapor that crystallized in the vacuum.

She was seeing a ghost.

 

When humanity first reached for the stars, it was in lumbering vessels that barely came close to a significant fraction of light speed. That reach sparked the first, and so far only, interstellar war with another species. During that war with the enigmatic Race, mankind figured out how to create manufactured wormholes.

After the Terran Council—humanity's first attempt at an interstellar government—defeated the Race, it began linking nearby star systems with the new wormholes. From the point of view of the person traveling through the wormhole, passage between systems was nearly instantaneous. It also had a rather big catch.

It wasn't really faster-than-light travel; ten light-years was still at least ten years standard worth of time. And because the wormhole connected two points in space
and
time, persons traveling in one direction would emerge in a universe ten years older than the one they left. But anyone going in the
other
way would emerge in a universe ten years
younger
.

Thus causality went the same way as simultaneity. Add to that the fact that a person emerging into that ten-year-earlier universe, from the wrong end of the wormhole, was emerging in a universe distinct from the one he left. A universe distinguished by the fact this person emerged from the wormhole ten years before leaving.

These visitors from alternate futures were known as “ghosts.” And, in terms of the physics, were examples of the wormhole bleeding excess mass. In terms of the philosophy, ghosts were much more problematic.

At first, the solution was simple. The old Terran Council, draconic institution that it was, was content to blow away anything that came out the wrong end of a wormhole. It made good sense, since the old Terran Council used the wormholes to dispose of criminals, dissidents, refugees, and eventually, any excess population the Terran bureaucracy could get away with.

One-way wormholes served the Terran Council's purposes perfectly. So much so that, when the first tach-drive was invented, the Terran Council collapsed within a decade.

Even so, automated defense platforms guarded the “entrances” to the now obsolete wormhole network throughout the life of the Confederacy, the Terran Council's successor. It wasn't until the collapse of the Confederacy's control over interstellar relations that new policies about ghosts began to emerge.

 

The sirens were still sounding. Toni slapped the mute control and stared at the scout ship floating away from the wormhole. It was drifting without power, vapor trail coming from damaged engines.

From the control panel, Toni readied the station's scout craft. Once the display showed her own craft fueling and powering up, she got up and ran down a corridor toward the docking ring. Her heart pounded, and for the first time since the klaxon sounded, she actually felt excitement.

For the first time during this tour she was actually going to do the job she had been stationed here for.

 

The priorities in the Confederacy, and before it, the Terran Council, had always been to maintain the status quo. There was a long list of developments that ran counter to that priority—at the top of the list was the trio of banned technologies: artificial intelligence, self- replicating nanotechnology, and macroscopic genetic engineering. But any sort of time travel, however limited, was up there too.

However, the Confederacy broke down, and one unified human government fragmented into five, then six, then eight. As the Confederacy withdrew from the core human systems—home to the old wormhole network—old planetary, racial, ethnic, and religious rivalries began a long resurrection, and those who remained in power began to see the value of anyone from the future. Even a future that wasn't quite going to happen.

Toni didn't know of anyone yet going as far as flouting the ancient taboos against the big three—but as far as she knew, every intelligence service in the core systems made a point of extensively debriefing any ghosts that made an appearance. Information gathered fed projections, as well as profiles each agency kept on the intentions of every other interstellar power.

Just knowing what was possible, what
could
happen, was almost as valuable as knowing what
was
happening.

 

There were three wormholes in the Sigma Draconis system, Toni's being one of two outgoing ones. Its destination was the Loki colony, about twenty-two light-years away, orbiting Xi Boötis. The ghost she saw would have come from a similar station platform orbiting the other end of the wormhole.

Toni piloted the scout toward its brother, the distorted sphere of the wormhole growing in her viewscreen. She approached carefully, though it seemed unlikely that the scout presented a danger. Any pilot that took the dive into a wormhole, especially in one of the Centauri Alliance's own scouts, knew what SOP was on the other side.

Of course, that was a two-edged sword. If the pilot did intend something more aggressive than abandoning his home universe, he knew exactly what to expect from Toni. More importantly, he'd know that it was probably going to be at least twenty-four hours before a transport from Styx came in response to Toni's alert. All of which meant that Toni approached with caution, her ship's weapons trained on the visitor.

She hailed the craft several times, and was only able to get the response of a failing transponder and a distress beacon. She noted the signal in her logs before the significance sank in. When it did, her arms broke out in gooseflesh, and her breath caught in her throat.

Of course, the transponder identified it as a short- range Alliance scout. Also, like all spacecraft in the Alliance, it broadcast a unique call sign.

SC8765490
, the same call sign as the ship Toni piloted now.

“That can't be right . . .”

She double-checked the transponder transmission, her own scout's call sign, and even—illegal in peacetime—switched off her own transponder so she could be sure she wasn't receiving some weird echo from the wormhole.

No such luck.

She was looking at the same ship she was piloting—twenty-two years removed. The distress beacon was suddenly ominous.

It didn't make sense to her. If this ship came from the Loki wormhole, it had managed to get over twenty light-years away from Sigma Draconis—that was nearly ten times the range of the scout's rudimentary tach-drive.

The scout didn't have to get there in one jump. Or maybe someone upgraded the tach-drive. Any number of ways it could have gotten to the other end of the wormhole—

No, that couldn't happen. Even if she—if
anyone
—dove into the wormhole and immediately came back through, there'd be a time lag. The ship would have to come back
after
it left—it
had
to.

Toni was scanning her ship's doppelganger with every sensor she had. Severed hoses were still venting fuel into a vacuum. The cloud of gas had initially hidden the extent of the damage, but the outgassing fuel must be nearly gone now. The cloud of vapor around the rear of the ship was thinning to reveal the engines to the back of the craft.

The trio of engines were all sheared off. There were no control nozzles left, and the top thruster was missing all the way back to the fuel injectors. The bottom two were as bad off, both showing her half the reaction chamber, like an exploded model in one of her flight training classes. At first, Toni had thought that the ship might have been damaged in transit. It was possible to hit the wormhole too shallowly and throw a craft some nasty tidal stresses.

What she saw had nothing to do with tidal stress. There was no twisted metal, no debris beyond leaking gases, no sign of any violence at all. If anything, it looked as if the scout had gone into space half assembled. The parts hadn't been torn away; they were simply
missing
.

There was no possible way the thing could move under its own power.
Well,
Toni thought,
there was one way . . .

Somehow, the idea that the damaged scout might have engaged its tach-drive made the ghost's sudden appearance on the wrong end of a wormhole even more disturbing.

If anyone had ever investigated the possibility, it was in some rarified technical paper that was not in the Stygian officer training curriculum—including the briefings for wormhole duty.

Toni's sensors dutifully told her the ship posed no threat. Not only was the craft dead in the water, but an EM frequency scan of the power plant showed no output at all. What weapons it did have appeared to be spent. The thing was surviving on reserve batteries, and those were barely maintaining the emergency beacon and the transponder.

Her picture of the ghost became more detailed as she pulled her own craft alongside it. A matter density scan gave her computers a detailed map of the ship. As layers peeled away on her display, what she saw confirmed her first good view of the damage.