‘It said I should ask you.’
Samm sighed. ‘Smart of it. OK, son. I guess it’s time you learned a little family history.’ Carrying his data slate he walked off towards the copse at the centre of the dome, chlorophyll green leaves shining under the light of the bourgeoning supernova.
Donn hurried after him. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The engine room.’
The kilometre-long elevator descent along the ship’s spine was slow, frustrating.
Donn knew his way around the control room at the heart of the Miriam’s GUTdrive pod. He had come down here as a kid, to play with his brother, and later as a young man to learn about his mother’s family’s technological legacy. There wasn’t much to see – a couple of seats and couches, a water dispenser, an emergency pressurised locker. The instruments were blank, antique data slates tiling the walls. And, before the Coalition had taken them away, once in this space vast engines had brooded, engines capable of harnessing the energies of cosmic inflation to drive the ship forward.
Even though the engines were gone, Donn somehow expected his father to boot up the control slates. He didn’t. Instead he took the small portable slate he had carried down from the lifedome, and pressed it against a wall. It lit up with a crowded panel of displays. ‘There you go,’ Samm said. ‘Two hundred years old and it fires up like it was brand new.’
‘What does?’
‘This.’ He tapped the slate and showed Donn an external view of the Miriam, seen from below, its lifedome embedded in the rough plane of the Reef, its spine and engine compartment dangling like a lantern. Samm zoomed in on the hull of the engine compartment, where a black slab clung like a parasite.
Donn leaned forward and stared. ‘What is that?’
‘The family secret.’ Samm eyed his son. ‘Look, Donn – you aren’t the first Wyman to have run into the Sink Ambassador. Your grandfather a few times removed—’
Donn’s heart sank as he realised that his father was falling back on the family legend. ‘Joens Wyman.’
‘That’s it. Joens got involved in a kind of intergalactic race with the Ghosts. He was an entrepreneur. And he wanted to get his hands on—’
‘A cache of quagma,’ Donn said. ‘You’ve been telling me about this since I was a little boy.’
‘But it’s the truth, son. Some of it, anyhow. Just listen. The trouble was the quagma cache was somewhere over twelve billion light years away – the figures are uncertain. Too far even for hyperdrive. But Joens Wyman didn’t use hyperdrive. He used an experimental human technology. It was called a Susy drive.’
‘Susy? That’s our flitter’s name.’
‘The flitter, and a secret space drive. It was kind of risky . . . It’s not like hyperdrive. Look, they taught you at school that the universe has more dimensions than the macroscopic, the three spatial and one of time. Most of the extra dimensions are extremely small. When you hyperdrive you sort of twist smoothly through ninety degrees into an extra dimension, and go skimming over the surface of the universe like a pebble over a pond. Simple. Whereas with supersymmetry you’re getting into the real guts of physics . . .’
There were two types of particles: fermions, the building blocks of matter, like quarks and electrons, and force carriers, like photons. The principle of supersymmetry had it that each building block could be translated into a force carrier, and vice versa.
‘The supersymmetric twins, the s-particles, are inherently fascinating, if you’re a physicist, which I’m not,’ said Samm. ‘But the magic comes when you do two supersymmetric transformations – say, electron to selectron and back again. You end up with an electron, of course – but an electron in a different place . . .’
‘And that’s the Susy drive.’
‘Yep. A principle even the Ghosts have never explored, it seems. According to the Sink Ambassador anyhow. Well, Joens Wyman pumped his money into this thing, and got as far as a working prototype. But in those days nobody would invest in human research and development; it was always easier and cheaper to buy alien tech off the shelf. Joens hoped to cut his losses by sending his Susy-drive ship in search of treasure nobody else could get to.’
‘The quagma. What happened?’
‘Joens finished up with nothing but the Susy drive and the clothes he stood up in. He fled his creditors—’
‘And he came here.’
‘Yes. Good place to hide – anyhow, it was then. His son married into your mother’s family, who owned the Miriam.’
‘And he lodged the Susy drive on the hull of the ship.’
‘Yeah. So it’s come down the generations. My father told me about it, and gave me the data on this slate. I think Joens always thought this old monster might be useful as a last resort. Well, he was right.’
Donn stared at his father. This was a side of him Donn hadn’t seen before, this decisive adventurer. But maybe no son saw that in his father. ‘You’re not serious. You’re not planning to fire up this Susy drive, this two-hundred-year-old disaster?’
‘You have a better idea?’
‘When was it last tested?’
‘When do you think? Look, according to these displays the field it generates will envelop the whole of the Reef. We’ll get out of here, all of us. And then you and I will go down to Minda’s Saviour, and drink free Poole’s Blood for the rest of our lives.’
‘If it works. And if it doesn’t work?’
‘Then what have we lost?’ He tapped the screen. It switched to the external image. Panels blew out from the black casing fixed to the base of the pod; a zoomed-in view showed them the jewelled guts of the Susy drive.
Then the data slate chimed an alarm. The Susy-drive display cleared, to reveal an image broadcast from the Coalition monitor drone. An image of an exploding star.
‘Damn,’ said Samm. ‘I didn’t imagine it would be so quick.’
‘Father, look.’ The explosion was strongly asymmetrical, a flower of ugly light splashed across the slate. And there was a denser knot to one side of the supernova.
Samm tapped the screen, overlaying analyses of mass density and velocity vectors. ‘That’s the neutron star. The core of the Boss. It’s been spat out of there like an apple seed – thousands of kilometres a second.’ He brought up a Galactic display. ‘Look at that. It’s been fired straight out of the Association towards the Sagittarius Arm.’
‘The Ghost home range.’ Green asterisks began to appear around the fleeing neutron star. ‘What’s that?’
‘Ghost technology . . . Ghost ships, popping up out of nowhere. Settling into orbit around that neutron star. And, wow, look at that.’ A major green anomaly. ‘It has to have the mass of a planet.’
‘The Ghostworld.’
‘Looks like it. How are they bringing all this to the neutron star?’
Donn said, ‘Just by making it more likely that the planet should be in orbit around the neutron star than wherever it used to be . . .’
‘What?’
‘Never mind. Father, we need to get out of here.’
Samm brought back the Susy display and began to scroll through outputs. ‘Let’s just hope this damn Susy drive does what I tell it to.’