Hakim knows that on some level, of course. He just refuses to believe it: that he and his buddies got outsmarted by something with half his synapse count. The Chimp. The idiot savant, the artificial stupidity. The number-cruncher explicitly designed to be so dim that even with half the lifespan of a universe to play around in, it could never develop its own agenda.
They just can’t believe it beat them in a fair fight.
That’s why they need me. I let them tell each other that it cheated. No way that glorified finger-counter would’ve won if I hadn’t betrayed my own kind.
This is the nature of my betrayal; I stepped in to save their lives. Not that their lives were really in danger, of course, no matter what they say. It was just a strategy. That was predictable too.
I’m sure the Chimp would have turned the air back on before things went too far.
***
Thule’s graduated from world to wall while I wasn’t looking: a dark churning expanse of thunderheads and planet-shredding tornadoes. There’s no sign of Surtr lurking behind, not so much as a faint glow on the horizon. We huddle in the shadow of the lesser giant and it’s almost as though the greater one has simply gone away.
We’re technically in the atmosphere now, a mountain wallowing high above the clouds with its nose to the stars. You could draw a line from the hot hydrogen slush of Thule’s core through the cold small singularity of our own, straight out through the gaping conical maw at our bow. Hakim does just that, in the tac tank. Maybe it makes him feel a little more in control.
Eriophora sticks out her tongue.
You can only see it in X-ray or Hawking, maybe the slightest nimbus of gamma radiation if you tune the sensors just right. A tiny bridge opens at the back of Eri’s mouth: a hole in spacetime reaching back to the hole in our heart. Our center of mass smears a little off-center, seeks some elastic equilibrium between those points. The Chimp nudges the far point farther and our center follows in its wake. The asteroid tugs upward, falling after itself; Thule pulls us back. We hang balanced in the sky while the wormhole’s tip edges past the crust, past that abraded mouth of blue-sanded basalt, out past the forward sensor hoop.
We’ve never stretched ourselves so thin before. Usually there’s no need; with lightyears and epochs to play in, even the slowest fall brings us up to speed in plenty of time. We can’t go past twenty percent lightspeed anyway, not without getting cooked by the blueshift. Usually Eri keeps her tongue in her mouth.
Not this time. This time we’re just another one of Hakim’s holiday ornaments, dangling from a thread in a hurricane. According to the Chimp, that thread should hold. There are error bars, though, and not a lot of empirical observation to hang them on. The database on singularities nested inside asteroids nested inside incinerating ice giants is pretty heavy on the handwaving.
And that’s just the problem within the problem. Atmospheric docking with a world falling at two hundred kilometers a second is downright trivial next to predicting Thule’s course inside the star: the drag inflicted by a millionth of a red-hot gram per cubic centimeter, stellar winds and thermohaline mixing, the deep magnetic torque of fossil helium. It’s tough enough figuring out what “inside” even means when the gradient from vacuum to degenerate matter blurs across three million kilometers. Depending on your definition we might already be in the damn thing.
Hakim turns to me as the Chimp lowers us toward the storm. “Maybe we should wake them up.”
“Who?”
“Sunday. Ishmael. All of them.”
“You know how many thousands of us are stacked up down there?” I know. Hakim might guess but this traitor knows right down to the last soul, without checking.
Not that any of them would pat me on the back for that.
“What for?” I ask.
He shrugs. “It’s all theory. You know that. We could all be dead in a day.”
“You want to bring them back so they can be awake when they die?”
“So they can—I don’t know. Write a poem. Grow a sculpture. Shit, one or two of them might even be willing to make their peace with you before the end.”
“Say we wake them up and we’re not all dead in day. You’ve just pushed our life support three orders of mag past spec.”
He rolls his eyes. “Then we put everyone back down again. So it spikes the CO2. Nothing the forest won’t be able to clear in a few centuries.”
I can barely hear the tremor in his voice.
He’s scared. That’s what this is. He’s scared, and he doesn’t want to die alone. And I don’t count.
I suppose it’s a start.
“Come on. At the very least it’ll be a hell of a solstice party.”
“Ask the Chimp,” I suggest.
His face goes hard. I keep mine blank.
I’m pretty sure he wasn’t serious anyway.
***
The depths of the troposphere. The heart of the storm. Cliffs of water and ammonia billow across our path: airborne oceans shattered down to droplets, to crystals. They crash into our mountain at the speed of sound, freeze solid or cascade into space depending on the mood. Lightning flashes everywhere, stamps my brain stem with half-glimpsed afterimages: demon faces, and great clawed hands with too many fingers.
Somehow the deck stays solid beneath my feet, unmoved even by the death throes of a world. I can’t entirely suppress my own incredulity; even anchored by two million tonnes of basalt and a black hole, it seems impossible that we’re not being tossed around like a mote in a wind tunnel.
I squash the feed and the carnage vanishes, leaving nothing behind but bots and bulkheads and a ribbon of transparent quartz looking down onto the factory floor. I kill some time watching the assembly lines boot up in there, watching maintenance drones gestate in the vacuum past the viewport. Even best-case there’s going to be damage. Cameras blinded by needles of supersonic ice or sheets of boiling acid. The whiskers of long-range antennae, drooping in the heat. Depending on the breaks it could take an army to repair the damage after we complete our passage. I take some comfort from the sight of the Chimp’s troops assembling themselves.
For an instant I think I hear a faint shriek down some far-off corridor: a breach, a decompression? No alarms, though. Probably just one of the roaches skidding around a bend in the corridor, looking for a recharge.
I’m not imagining the beeping in my head, though: Hakim, calling down from the bridge. “You need to be up here,” he says when I open the channel.
“I’m on the other side of the—”
“Please,” he says, and forks me a live feed: one of the bow clusters, pointing at the sky.
A feature has emerged from the featureless overcast: a bright dimple on the dark sky, like a finger poking down through the roof of the world. It’s invisible in visible light, hidden by torrents of ammonia and hydrocarbon hurricanes: but it shimmers in infrared like a rippling ember.
I have no idea what it is.
I draw an imaginary line through the ends of the wormhole. “It’s in line with our displacement vector.”
“No shit it’s in line. I think the wormhole’s—provoking it, somehow.”
It’s radiating at over two thousand Kelvin.
“So we’re inside the star,” I say, and hope Hakim takes it as good news.