She broke contact, stalked to her purse, and went straight to the door. “You can be such an ignorant ass, Nathaniel Kelley. I know what you want and what you can and can’t afford to do better than you do. Hopefully, you can get a fucking clue before I’m done with you and this project.” She slammed the door behind her as she left.
Nathan was alone. He laid his head back carefully, his skin no longer painful, but still noticing the stretching and tingling of his epidermis. He closed his eyes and tried not to think. He tried to banish all thoughts of the new pressures the project was under, the thief he had injured, the way Gordon had looked, and Kris, Kris, Kris.
His will failed. All his thoughts wrapped around those central ideas and spun faster and faster, sucked down a dark drain. An hour later, still awake, he felt numb with self-loathing, and he wished for anything else to dwell upon, even the nightmare-memory of the Rivero’s death.
9: “CATHEDRALS IN AIR”
The Promise fulfilled its name with unemotional efficiency. From the moment of its launch, the probe continually modified and refined the approach, attempting to arrange a meeting with an unknown alien presence traveling toward Earth at nearly one fifth the speed of light. To a person, this might be a daunting task, dogged by doubt, uncertainty, and trepidation. To the expert systems of the probe, it was merely a matter of numbers.
The Deltans, at the time of launch, were 1.69 light-years away, traveling at 0.18 c toward Earth, and decelerating at a hundredth of a standard Earth gravity, or approximately 0.01 c per year. The Promise, presumably far smaller and less refined than the approaching alien, was nonetheless capable of greater accelerations.
The probe set out from Earth at a third of a gravity of acceleration, more than thirty times the rate of the Deltans. Angled down out of the ecliptic, that rough plane in which the planets revolved around the sun, and to one side of the blue spark which defined the approaching alien, Promise’s course allowed it to direct its drive corona away from Earth and all the inquisitive amateur astronomers who might ask too many hard questions about the secretive probe. It also allowed the probe to make an oblique approach upon the alien—covert, ostensibly non-threatening, and as stealthy as one could get while radiating at a high temperature.
Promise stacked up a list of accomplishments, all unacknowledged. Only hours from its launch, it surpassed Voyager 1 as the fastest man-made object, despite never going through the complicated rigmarole of planetary gravity assists. The probe’s enhanced photonic drive allowed it to brute-force itself past the record, to speeds which boggled the imagination. It rocketed across the orbits of each of the outer planets in turn, skirted by the wide expanse of the Kuiper belt and punched through the heliopause, where the pervasive solar wind was ground to a halt by the all-encompassing gasses of the interstellar medium. More than a hundred times the distance of Earth from the Sun, Promise entered true interstellar space, surpassing all previous probes.
But Gordon, Nathan, and Kris’s modest creation paid little attention. Its journey had only just begun.
The drive kept up a continuous massless thrust, using unimaginable photon pressure to muscle the probe to nearly relativistic velocities. At the speeds it traveled, a single grain of dust impacting the probe would be disastrous, so it protected itself by, once more, brute force methods. A laser continuously scanned the space immediately preceding the probe, lighting up and ionizing any particle massive enough to do Promise harm. The burning, ionized particle was then pushed out of the way by the strong electromagnetic field set up in the bow like a battering ram. Even with this defense, though, the probe could do nothing to stop the resulting radiation and cosmic rays that inundated it. For that, Promise relied upon thick layers of shielding and redundant, self-repairing electronics.
For twenty months, Promise kept up its uninterrupted course. Then, when it had built up a staggering velocity of nearly half the speed of light, the drive shut down, more than 10,000 astronomical units from Earth, halfway to the inner edge of the Oort Cloud. It turned, centering the Deltans in its sensors, and re-evaluated its approach. It made some minor adjustments, turned to point its drive at a nearly right angle to the target, and lit off again.
By starting out its journey driving at an angle to the Deltans, the probe had built up a significant velocity away from both the aliens and the Solar System. Now, after turnaround, it had to negate both that lateral velocity and the relativistic approach speed it had built up. The practical upshot was that the drive corona was now pointed away from the Deltans versus directly at them, allowing the probe to close relatively unannounced. It was wasteful in terms of energy expended, but the chosen route was as much of a defensive measure as the sandwiches of shield material blanketing the probe.
The days continued to add up. Promise reached the Oort Cloud, that diffuse spherical grouping of icy rocks from which Halley’s comet was born, and burned its way through the Cloud’s nearly 30,000 AU expanse. Two and a half years after its launch, the probe exited the last structure of the Solar System, over three quarters of a light-year from home. Months later, the probe flew past the arbitrary but significant milestone of one light-year from its origin, but it paid no attention.
At 1.08 light-years distant, the probe was nearly at rest to the Solar System and still accelerating. Promise’s motion reversed and it began to close then, building up speed in the approaching direction in order to match speeds with the Deltans. The Deltans themselves were no longer just a blur of blue light, but began to take on definition to the diminutive sensor package mounted on the probe.
The processors aboard the Promise woke up, commencing the endgame of its journey. At 1.05 light-years from Earth, at a speed of 0.14 c, the probe turned again and reduced its drive to only a fraction of its earlier intensity, matching the nearby Deltans. The shielded side panels of the probe came free and the Promise blossomed, extending sensors, auxiliary probes, and twin communication dishes—one pointed at the objective, and the larger one pointed back toward Earth.
Promise scanned and photographed the mysterious alien presence, so long unknown and now revealed. The probe launched smaller measuring devices in order to increase the scope of its investigation and retransmitted the reams of data it produced back to Earth, though the information would take just over a year to be received. The Deltans endured this scrutiny without reacting, seemingly inert.
Then Promise said hello.
February 18, 2045; Lee Estate; Santa Cruz, California
Gordon sprawled lazily in his chair, leaning as far back as the soft leather seat would go, his feet propped up on the desk in his home office. The door stood closed, with Melinda Graciola, his personal assistant, holding all distractions at bay from her place just outside the office. Gordon was free to lay back and just think, something which he rarely had time to do these days despite the dividends such uninterrupted concentration usually paid.
In each hand, Gordon held a glossy print, slowly bringing them together again and again, not really noticing the soft crashing noise he made every time the pictures touched. In his right hand, he held a picture of all they had worked to achieve—the ship, lying on its side in its floating hangar. It was a nameless, gunmetal gray monstrosity, a plated hexagonal pyramid covered in hatches, domes, sensors, and cables as workers crawled over it with last-minute labors, readying it for its rapidly approaching launch date. Nathan would be there now, overseeing the final outfitting, worrying over it like a mother hen. But that was good. It was his job to worry over such things.