Lorus’s voice breaks up in a stuttering hash of dropouts. And the lights and the polisher stop working.
The Lansford Hastings is a starship, one of the fastest mecha ever constructed by the bastard children of posthumanity. From one angle, it may take us centuries to crawl between stars; but there’s another perspective that sees us screaming across the cosmos at three thousand kilometers per second. On a planetary scale, we’d cross Sol system from Earth orbit to Pluto in less than two weeks. Earth to Luna in under five minutes. So one of the truisms of interstellar travel is that if something goes wrong, it goes wrong in a split instant, too fast to respond to.
Except when it doesn’t, of course.
When the power went down, I do what anyone in my position would do: I panic and ramp straight from slowtime up to my fastest quicktime setting. The water around me congeals into a gelid, viscous impediment; the plugs and anti-leak gaskets I wear abruptly harden, gripping my joints and openings and fighting my every movement. I panic some more, and begin retracing my movements across the inner surface of the tank towards the door. It isn’t completely dark in the tank. A very dim blue glow comes from the far side, around the curve of the toroid, bleeding past the baffles. It’s not a sight one can easily forget: Cerenkov radiation, the glow of photons emitted by relativistic particles tunneling through water, slowing. I crank up the sensitivity of my eyes, call on skinsense for additional visuals, as panic recedes, replaced by chilly fear. All the regular shipboard comms channels have fallen silent: almost a minute has passed. “Can anybody hear me?” I call in quicktime over the widecast channel Lorus was so recently using. “What’s happening? I’m in the Alba mass fraction tankage—”
“Help!” It’s an answering voice. “Who’s there? I’m in the gyro maintenance compartment in Brunei. What’s going on? I’ve got a total power loss but everything’s glowing—”
A growing chorus of frightened voices threatens to overload the channel; everyone who’s answering seems to be at this end of the ship, up close behind the wake shield, and ramped up to quicktime. (At least, I hear no replies from persons in the cargo modules or down near the drive cluster or radiators. Anyone still in slowtime won’t be beginning to reply for minutes yet.) The menacing blue glow fades as I swim towards the fore inspection hatch. Then, in a soundless pulse of light, the backup lamps power up and a shudder passes through the ship as some arcane emergency maneuvering system cuts in and starts the cumbersome job of turning the ship, minutes too late to save us from disaster.
“Hello peeps,” drones Lorus Pinknoise, our astrophysics philosopher. He’s still coming up to speed; he sounds shaken. “Well, that was something I never expected to see up close and personal!”
I pause, an arm’s length below the hatch. Something odd flickers in a corner of my eye, laser-sharp. Again, in my other eye. And my mandibular tentacle—my tongue—stings briefly. Odd, I think, floating there in the water. I look down into the depths of the tank, but the emergency lights have washed out the Cerenkov glow, if indeed it’s still there. And there’s another of those odd flickers, this time right across my vision, as if someone’s flickered a laser beam across the surface of my optical sensor.
More chatter, then Lorus again: “We just weathered a big radiation spike, folks. I’m waiting for the wide-angle spectrophotometer to come back online; it overloaded. In fact, the spike was so sharp it generated an EM pulse that tripped every power bus on this side of the hull. Here we come . . . We took lots of soft gamma radiation, and a bunch of other stuff.” While he’s speaking, the tank circulation pumps start up. Around me, the ship shakes itself and slowly comes back to life in the wake of its minutes-long seizure. A chatter of low-level comms start up in the back of my head, easy to screen out. “I don’t believe anybody’s ever seen anything like that before, folks. Not seen it and lived to tell, anyway. It looks like—I’m reviewing the telemetry now—it looks like we just got whacked by a gamma ray burster. Er. I think we lucked out. We’re still alive. I’m triangulating now. There’s a candidate in the right direction, about nine thousand light years away, astern and about fifteen degrees off-axis, and—oh yes. I just looked at it folks, there’s an optically visible star there, about twenty magnitudes brighter than the catalog says it should be. Wow, this is the astronomical find of the century—”
I have an itchy feeling in my skull. I shut out Lorus’s prattle, turn inwards to examine my introsense, and shudder. A startling number of my mechanocytes are damaged; I need teché maintenance! My feet are particularly affected, and my right arm, where I reached for the hatch. I do a double-take. I’m floating in semi-darkness, inside a huge tank of water—one of the best radiation blockers there is. If I’ve taken a radiation pulse strong enough to cause tissue damage, what about everyone else? I look at the hatch and think of you, crawling around on the outside of the hull, and my circulatory system runs cold.
Over the next hour, things return to a temporary semblance of normality. Everyone who isn’t completely shut down zips up to quicktime: corridors are filled with buzzing purposeful people and their autonomous peripherals, inspecting and inventorying and looking for signs of damage. Of which there are many. I download my own checklists and force myself to keep calm and carry on, monitoring pumps and countercurrent heat transfer systems. Flight Operations—the team of systems analysts who keep track of the state of the ship—issue periodic updates, bulletins reminding us of changed circumstances. And what a change there’s been.
We have been supremely unlucky. I’ll let Lorus explain:
“One of the rarest types of stellar remnant out there is what we call a magnetar—a rapidly-spinning neutron star with an incredibly powerful magnetic field. Did I say powerful? You’ll never see one with your naked photosensor—they’re about ten kilometers across, but before you got within ten thousand kilometers of one it would wipe your cranial circuitry. Get within one thousand kilometers and the magnetic field will rip your body apart—water molecules are diamagnetic, so are the metal structures in your marrow techné. Close up, the field’s so intense that atoms are stretched into long, narrow cylinders and the vacuum of spacetime itself becomes birefringent.
Active magnetars are extremely rare, and most of the time they just sit where they are. But once in a while a starquake, a realignment in their crust, causes their magnetic field to realign. And the result is an amazingly powerful burst of gamma rays, usually erupting from both poles. And when the gamma ray jets slam into the expanding shell of gas left by the supernova that birthed the magnetar, you get a pulse of insanely high energy charged particles. One of which we flew through. Oops.”
To be flying along a corridor aligned with the polar jet of a magnetar is so unlikely as to be vanishingly implausible. A local supernova, now that I could understand; when your voyages are measured in centuries or millennia it’s only a matter of time before one of your ships falls victim. But a magnetar nearly ten thousand lights years away—that’s the universe refusing to play fair!
I touched your shoulder. “Can you hear me, Lamashtu?”
“She can’t.” Doctor-Mechanic Wo gently pushed my arm away with one of their free tentacles. “Look at her.”