Weir took a deep breath. “Everything I am about to tell you is considered Code Black by the NSA.”
Weir paused, letting the crew have time to look at each other. A Code Black classification was not something a crew like this would hear on a regular basis. Interservice rivalries had not waned since the paranoia of the 1950s, with bureaucratic interchanges turning into nightmares of documents, codes, classifications, protocols, and formats. For USAC to accept a National Security Agency Code Black without apparent comment indicated something very serious, very unpleasant.
Whatever was going on here, it was bigger than USAC. The crew had not known that beforehand. Weir wondered if they would develop an increased respect for him. He doubted it.
Cooper looked back at Weir, then at Miller. From his bunk, Justin said,
“That means top secret, Coop.”
Cooper looked around at Justin. “You don’t need to tell me about Code Black, Baby Bear.” Weir heard the attempt at joviality in Cooper’s voice. The rescue tech simply could not sustain it.
Weir took a deep breath. The crew was finding its own level for this, giving him a chance to go on. He tugged the blanket more tightly around his body, resisting the urge to shiver. “The USAC intercepted a radio transmission from a decaying orbit around Neptune. The source has been identified as the Event Horizon.’”
There was dead silence.
Weir waited. He wished he could hide. This was not his job.
Her eyes flashing as she turned to glare at him, Starck snapped, “That’s impossible!” She looked around the cabin, almost surged forward. “She was lost with all hands, what, seven years ago?”
Justin winced, all playfulness lost. “Yeah, the reactor blew.”
“How can we salvage—” Peters started, turning to Weir, a confused expression on her face. He knew what she had to be thinking: there could be nothing to salvage, aside from a few bits of radioactive debris.
Standing behind Weir, now leaning closer to him, an angry, threatening presence, Smith growled, “Let the dead rest, man.” Weir turned to look at Smith, chills racing up his spine.
Cooper was getting wound up now. Weir turned his attention back to him, hearing him yelling angrily, “… Cancel our leave and send us out on some bullshit mission!” as he waved his fists in the air. He looked as though he was about to slide down from his bunk to stalk furiously around the crew quarters. Weir did not think that Cooper was about to turn violent, but he was no psychologist. He figured that there was no good reason to put theory to the test in this case.
Miller let the racket go on for a few more moments, then stood up, holding his hands in the air as he bellowed, “Everybody shut up!” Silence fell again.
Weir’s ears were ringing. “Let the man speak.”
Miller sat down again.
Weir took another deep breath. He hoped that what he was about to say would change the perspective of this crew enough for them to be of use to him in retrieving his ship.
“What was made public about the Event Horizon,” Weir went on, “that she was a deep-space research vessel, that its reactor went critical, that the ship blew up… none of that is true.” There was silence now, and he had their undivided attention, having introduced them to the idea of cover-up and conspiracy. That was juicy, something for them to fasten on to. “The Event Horizon was the culmination of a secret government project to create a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light flight.”
They were all staring at him again, their expressions shocked. This was not something they had heard about, had not even suspected. It had not been possible to keep the Event Horizon completely secret once the pure development process was over and the construction process began, but it had been possible to keep a lid on the true nature and purpose of the project. There had been a desire for a deep-space research platform after the successes in exploiting the asteroid belt, and the Event Horizon project had played into that, hiding the truth in plain sight. No one had known what might happen.
In the end, no one had known what had happened, out here at Neptune.
Smith, the ominous edge gone from his voice, said, “You can’t do that.”
“The law of relativity prohibits faster-than-light travel,” Starck said, before Weir could answer Smith. These people were still trying to deal with the concepts and ideas illuminated by Einstein; they were unlikely to reach as high as the work of Hawking, or even Gribbin, probably considering quarks to be the noises made by ducks and tachyons as something you used to hang a picture.
Patiently, Weir said, “Relativity, yes.” He paused for a moment, trying to bring things a bit closer to the level of those he had to deal with. “We can’t break the law of relativity, but we can go around it. The ship doesn’t really move faster than light”—he gestured with his hands, his blanket becoming more precarious with his motion—“it creates a dimensional gateway that allows the ship to instantaneously jump from one point in the universe to another, light years away.”
They were all watching intently now, trying to understand him. No matter what, he still felt like an advanced Jungian in a room filled with Freudian novices.
“How?” Starck asked. Her voice had a glassy edge.
Weir shrugged. “Well, it’s difficult to…” He stopped, feeling helpless as the equations glowed across his mind, a pure blend of mathematics and practical physics. One day he had known how to bend space and had then set out to prove it. “It’s all math, you see… but…” He trailed off again, still trying to reduce the concepts. He had cracked the sky. Now he had to explain it to these people. “In layman’s terms, you use a rotating magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons; these in turn fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large and you have a singularity…”
Miller was staring at him, shaking his head. “‘Layman’s terms.’”
Weir closed his eyes momentarily, trying to compose himself.
Cooper was lunging over the side of his bunk again. “Fuck ‘laymen’s terms,’
what about English?”
Weir opened his eyes, sighing. How in the name of hell was he supposed to get these concepts across to people who could barely function without an Ezy-Guide and good fortune? He looked around the cramped crew’s quarters, spotting the edge of something, a poster, on the inside of an open locker door.
“Let’s try this,” he said, reaching out without thinking, and tearing the poster down. The name on the locker door, as it bounced shut, was SMITH. That did not matter now.
“Excuse me…” Smith started, more shocked at Weir’s abrupt action than outraged at his audacity. Weir shot him a look, and the pilot took a step backwards, not saying anything else.
Weir turned back to the other crew members, holding up the poster, making the paper snap in his hands. Doggedly, he said, “Say this paper represents space-time…” He slapped the pinup onto the nearest flat surface then made a half-turn, picking up a pen as he did so. He quickly marked an X on the pinup, putting the letter A at one side. “And you want to get from point A here to point B here.” He scribbled another X, this time marked with a B. “Now. What’s the shortest distance between two points?”
The crew members stared at him as though he had turned into a raving idiot.
What did they expect? There were non-Euclidian geometries involved here, and many human minds could not go around the requisite corners. He knew that his audience resented being thrown back into grade school, but it was the only way he knew how to get even a fraction of the concepts across.
Finally, Justin said, “A straight line.” He had a confused look, as though he was certain something was missing from the answer. The other crew members turned to stare at the engineer, who proceeded to glare back at them, annoyed and embarrassed. “What?”