Icarus
September 2320
Alien System
My drone floated a half kiloter away from the wormhole, watching while a smaller drone drifted toward the object at minimum thrust. The obvious move was to send sothing through, but that didn’t an we were going to be standing right there, waiting to get blown up. Dae and I had set up station-keeping a hundred kiloters away from each wormhole. He had a drone watching the other wormhole, to see if my drone ca back through in one piece or as a shower of free quarks.
My theory was that the drone would co out of the destination wormhole with the sa inertial vector as it went in with on this end. Whether it would acquire the orbital velocity of the destination was an unknown. We’d calculated the exit vector for both cases, and Dae was ready.
Finally, the drone entered the wormhole. From my point of view, it just continued on through, still easily visible against the slightly skewed starfield of the far side.
“Looks like it survived,” I said. “You want to pick it up?”
“Uh, it’s not here, Icky. Nothing ca through.”
“What? I can see it clearly. It’s on your side. It’s right—” I stopped abruptly. “Hey, uh, Dae. How about you position your drone in line of sight with mine. We should be able to visually confirm the connection.”
“One mont … Done. Nothing there, Icky. I don’t see yours.”
I looked at the image from my drone. Nothing showing there, either. “We’ve made an incorrect assumption, I think.”
“That these wormholes are connected?”
“Yup. I’m going to call back my drone—oh, crap.”
“What?”
I took a mont to shake my head in irritation at my obtuseness. “I just now noticed. No SCUT connection. The drone is in autonomous mode, waiting for orders.”
“So no SCUT through the wormhole?”
“Again, yup. I’m going to send my observation drone through with orders to pick the other one up and drag it back. Stand by.”
The maneuver took only a minute or two, and the drones were back on my side. “Well, this sucks,” I muttered. “Radio doesn’t have the bandwidth for a full sweep.”
“Just send it through with orders to take a full sphere of pictures,” Dae replied, “then fly back. I’ll bet the other end isn’t far away, because the starfield doesn’t change that much.” 𝘙𝘼ɴỒʙÈ𝓢
“Right. Give a few minutes.”
*****
It took a little longer than that because we wanted so good images from the other end, and I had to reconfigure the drone with better cara equipnt. At the sa ti, I added maser comms, which would allow to send ad hoc orders to the drone if I needed to.
The actual exercise took maybe an hour, all told, resulting in a full spherical starfield image projected in my VR. Dae popped in, looked around, and dropped into a patio chair. “Got anything yet?”
“Uh-huh.” I slapped my console in triumph and sat back. “It’s a nearby star system. Eleven light-years away, slightly inbound and spinward. We’d have detected microwave radiation from it eventually if we hadn’t already been focused on this system.”
“So they had travel between systems using wormholes. This system and two others. I wonder if they had SURGE drives.”
I frowned, gathering my thoughts. “Dae, I don’t see how you can connect a wormhole between two star systems unless you carry one of the endpoints there first.”
“You an they flew the other end of this wormhole to the other system the old-fashioned way?”
“That’s my guess. Of course, once there, they would just pop through to co back.”
“Huh.” Dae thought for a mont. “One of us needs to go through and look around.”
“Are you nuts?” I exclaid. “That’s a completely unwarranted risk!”
“Is it? Worst case, if sothing goes wrong, you know where I am—”
“When was it decided that you’d be going through?”
“Whichever. We can argue that later. But if I go through and break down, you can fly there the long way in less than twelve years and fix . And anyway, the drone went through and ca back, so I don’t really see a huge problem.”
“Yeah, it went through and back. So why do you need to go?”
“To survey the system on the other side. Look for more wormholes. What if this is a wormhole network of so kind? And also to see if the local civilization settled there. Maybe they’re still around—”
“Unlikely.”
“True, but let’s check. Or maybe there’s a clue about where they went.”
“There’s still the other wormhole we haven’t explored,” I pointed out.
“One thing at a ti, Icky. Let’s finish off with this one first.”
“Fine,” I growled.
*****
I watched in nervous anticipation as Dae’s ship floated slowly through the wormhole. When he didn’t disappear in a scatter of elentary particles, I decided I could go back to breathing.
On the other side, he dropped off a buoy, which imdiately connected to its partner on my side via maser. Now we had a communications link across the wormhole. Not good enough for VR, but good enough for audio/visual.
Dae popped up in a video window, sitting back in his Star Trek–style captain’s chair. It was one of his persistent affectations, and I’d long since given up ribbing him about it.
“Scanning the area,” he said distractedly as he examined status windows. “I’ve fired off so drones with long-range SCUT. I won’t bother trying to be stealthy. At this point, I think I’d welco a good old-fashioned belligerent threat.”
“Not wrong,” I replied with a chuckle. “Any worm sign?”
Dae gave an I see what you did there look but otherwise ignored the bait. “Nope. Just the big one in front of . So if it’s a network, this is a leaf node. I’m going to have the survey drones report back through the buoy so I don’t have to sit around and wait for them. I want to check out the other wormhole on your side.”
“Uh-uh, buddy. My turn to play Indiana Jones. Sa setup, though.”
“Fair enough. You have a couple of buoys ready?”
“Almost done. Another hour, then I’m going through.”
It took longer to fly to the other wormhole than it took to construct the buoys. But soon, I was hovering in front of it. Well, “in front of” made very little sense when any angle presented a disk with a view of a different starfield. And speaking of which …
“The starfield. Have you done a search on it?”
Dae answered imdiately. “Yes, and no, I couldn’t find a match. I did spot so landmarks, like the Magellanic Clouds and the Androda Galaxy, but the error bars are too large from this side to make any pronouncents. We’ll probably have to use Cepheids and pulsars for the fine work. You let know when you get to the other side, okay?”
“You got it, buddy.” And with that, I ejected one of my buoys and jetted forward into the wormhole.
There was no feeling of disorientation or weird tumbling through a tunnel, like on Stargate or DS9. I simply passed through the plane of the disk and was sowhere else. My hull sensors did report a brief inward pressure, as if I’d montarily been in atmosphere, but nothing significant.
I ejected the second buoy, and it connected with its counterpart per the programming. Dae imdiately popped up in a video window. “Whatcha got?”
“Give a minute, Dae. I haven’t even deployed sensors yet.”
“Slacker.”
I chuckled and began the task of examining both my near environnt and the starfield. We’d already slapped together an automated script to identify any galactic location by triangulating from a list of identifiable landmarks, including Cepheids, pulsars, and various dwarf galaxies that orbit the Milky Way.
The latter survey ca back with a calculated position right away. “Holy crap. Dae, I am seventeen hundred light-years away from you. Spinward, slightly farther outward from the core, a little north of the galactic plane. As a thod of travel, this has SURGE beat all to hell.”
“Not disagreeing, Icky, but if you have to deposit the wormholes at your destination the old-fashioned way, that ans this civilization—”
“Is at least several millennia old. Yeah. So maybe they experienced the Singularity? Maybe that’s the answer to the Fermi paradox?”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. So far, all we know is they aren’t around. We could spend years investigating their system and still not—”
“I don’t think we’re going to be doing that,” I said, interrupting him.
“Because?”
“Because I just did a scan for microwave signatures.”
There was a pause. “You’re going to make ask, aren’t you?”
“Heh. Normally, yes. But I can’t hold this in. Dae, I’m registering literally hundreds of individual signals. This is a major hub. I think we’re going to be a while investigating this one.”
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