Although in that analogy the toddler would be mired in an entire gymnasium full of spun sugar, so maybe it’s not the best theoretical model. Especially if you’re the person who has to give that kid a bath.
So there was our gravitational anomaly, which is to say our anomaly in the distribution of mass. A wormhole scar, so-called—the mark left by a particular kind of failed Alcubierre-White transition. If you do one of those right, the dark gravity is supposed to go right back where it started. I mean, given that we still don’t have a really good idea of how gravity works, or where it comes from, and we still haven’t managed to figure out how to generate it despite the fact that it’s been the best part of a millennian since Isaac Newton discovered apples—
Anyway, if your bubble collapses completely, you stop bending space-time around yourself to cheat Newton and Einstein and—if you’re lucky—you pop back out into regular space a few hundred light-ans from anything useful and hope you can repair your drive before you starve or run out of oxy. If you’re unlucky, you come out at an angle to reality where your ship and your biology don’t conform to the local laws of physics, and…
…oh well.
At least, theoretically. Nobody’s ever come back from an accident like that to comment.
But if your bubble kind of stalls, halfway into the otherworld as it were, neither fish nor fowl, space-time half-bent and half… well, normally bendy, because it’s not like there’s such a thing as flat space-time…
Then you become my job.
Our job, I mean—mine, and Connla’s, and Singer’s.
It doesn’t happen often—not so often that any given trip through interstellar space is likely to end with the passengers stuck halfway out of space-time. But most ships don’t catch fire, either. Still, enough do that ships have fire suppressant foam, and in a big galaxy with a lot of traffic, there are always a few accidents. Enough to keep a few dozen salvage operators like us in business, anyway.
I waved us forward, and we slid through the hole in the universe as if we were parting the petals on a not-yet-open bud.
Back into white space again.
CHAPTER 2
PROXIMITY KLAXONS SHRILLED UP MY nerves, simulating physical pain. Not incapacitating, but demanding action. Connla had moved toward me. Now he kicked toward the controls, but I knew already what we were hearing. Another vessel’s white bubble had just brushed ours. The interface made the intruding ship a sharp pinch on my skin, an elbow in my ribs.
One brush of its white coils on Singer’s and we were all dead: our chemical processes failing—if not simply our covalent bonds. We were insanely fortunate that it hadn’t unfolded space-time when it was pointed directly at us—or directly at the thing we’d come to salvage, though that might have been safe for now inside its fold in space.
I’m not sure that anybody had ever run the experiment to find out, and I sure didn’t want to be the one to science that.
Space isn’t empty. The Big Sneeze—some people call it the Enemy, but I’ve always been uncomfortable personalizing—is scattered with particles, some with mass and some without. Some of these particles are in the area before a ship in white space: the space that gets folded, compressed, made smaller. They get swept up in the bubble, and accelerated to match the relative velocity of the ship.
When the ship decelerates, and the fold collapses—unfolds, snaps open—the particles don’t decelerate. Or they do, in that they reenter normal space-time, but at relativistic speeds, and with equivalent energy. They’re released in an energetic outburst.
Very energetic indeed.
An Alcubierre-White drive ship reentering normal space, in other words, is a particle cannon, and there is no way to make it not be. We all just try very hard, all the time, to make sure that cannon is aimed in a safe direction when it’s discharged. Because anything in the ship’s line of deceleration will be blasted into oblivion by massively blueshifted high-energy particles and gamma radiation.
A ship coming out of white space is a weapon that fires automatically, without any regard for the target. So its pilots and its shipmind have to provide that regard.
And if the other guy hasn’t filed a flight plan, or isn’t where he was supposed to be… well, he’s too dead to care about the fatalities, which are applied to his pilot’s record and licensure, not yours. If the incoming pilot and shipmind made that mistake? They won’t be flying again. Not to mention having to live with the responsibility of having murdered all souls aboard the target craft.
Out here, where you wouldn’t expect to find another vessel and there isn’t likely to be a world or a star or basically anything that will care about a sudden particle bombardment, we sometimes get a little sloppy.
I made myself stop thinking about how it could have been worse, because things were bad enough. Singer flipped our ring ninety degrees, lowering our profile. The other vessel’s bubble brushed past, but through some miracle or skill in the other crew we didn’t make contact. Still, their bit of space and our bit of space were folded in different directions and moving at different speeds, and dragging one through the other didn’t make for comfortable weather.
Our little tug shuddered with proximity, and the relative tinny silence of space continued to be shattered by the alarm. I heard the unmistakable scritching of claws into carpet as the ship’s cats attached themselves to the nearest wall. Bred and born in space, they knew how to manage themselves. I latched down too, wrenching an ankle as my afthands clutched wildly. I swung away from center like a barn door, almost losing my grip and my orientation to become a projectile within the command cabin myself.
“Haimey!” Singer yelped. “A little help please!”
“Reverse?” Connla asked. “Go Newton?”
He meant, let the ship bob back up to the surface of space. I stabilized myself and turned off the pain. I’d fix the ankle later. “Where the hell are they?”
He twisted his head—meaningless, but reflex. “I don’t know! They’re gone! Maybe they went past?”
What the hell are they? And what are they doing here?
We were still in white space, folding the fabric of the universe around us, but we weren’t moving fast. You could stay still. It was possible to throw a little fold of space-time around yourself like a vampire vanishing into his swirl of cloak. But as long as we were behind the scar, we couldn’t see out, and nobody outside could see in.
“Dock,” I said, not believing it even as I felt my own lips moving.
“Dock? With whom?”
“With the salvage target, Singer! Get us next to whatever’s inside that scar! Behind it, by preference, so if anything swings through the bubble from the same direction, it’ll hit them first!”
Give an AI this; our white bubble meshed seamlessly with the dead fold surrounding the hulk, and an instant later we had visual. It was a big one: I gasped out loud. The metal in the hull alone would make the trip worth our while, if we could figure out how to get it home. I was only the third-best pilot on the ship—I had Bushyasta and Mephistopheles beat, at least—but even I could already identify a few technical difficulties.
“Stop gawking,” Singer said, bringing us around under the target. We were coasting within the big ship’s fold now—a little farther out of the line of disaster. But not home with our boots off yet.
Because even with our oversized white coils flipped longitudinally, we were inside the big ship’s ring.