Icarus
August 2321
Hub Zero
Four ships approached at high speed, then braked at a level of deceleration that left boggled. The ships all but stopped instantly from a speed of several kiloters per second, then hit us with a SUDDAR scan.
“Eep. They are fast,” I said to Dae. “We should probably cross off running away as an option.”
“Uh-huh. Have you gotten a challenge?”
“Not yet. I imagine they’re—oh, wait, here we go.”
I’d just received a low-power radio burst. A quick inspection showed it to be the sa general format as the ID packets with which the gate controllers responded. Which didn’t an the payload would be comprehensible.
I responded with the packet I’d received from the other end of this gate. Not out of so deep strategy but simply because I couldn’t think of anything else to do.
The ship repeated the sa transmission it had sent initially. This ti, I sent the packet from the very first wormhole gate we’d identified. At least it would tell the other ship where we were from.
Again, the ship repeated the transmission. That wasn’t good. It ant I was likely dealing with sothing of AMI-level intelligence—a well-defined function and a limited set of response scripts.
Dae, who’d been watching my performance, said, “This is kind of an impasse. Should we attempt to leave?”
“Let try this.” I quickly queried the gate on this side to get its street-sign information, then sent a series of packets, starting with this gate and ending with the first gate we’d used. Then I veeeeerrry slowly started to drift back toward the gate.
Nope. Not a valid option, apparently. The ships hit us both simultaneously with—well, let just say it—tractor beams. This was certainly sothing new; the Bobs had never even co close to anything like that technology, either in theory or practice. On the one hand, I was overjoyed to discover that it was a thing. On the other hand, we were being dragged away from the wormhole gate to an unknown fate.
The journey only took ten minutes or so, even allowing for the fact that the ships used far lower acceleration when towing us. So there was so regard for our welfare and, presumably, the health of any passengers we might be carrying. Although co to think of it, the SUDDAR scan should have ruled out that possibility.
We were unceremoniously placed in a parking orbit around a small asteroid-slash-space station. By which I an a ten-kiloter-wide asteroid had been used as the foundation for quite a complex base station of so kind. Two of the sentries departed for the space station, leaving the others holding us.
“Maybe we’re going to be boarded?” Dae said.
“Could be. anwhile, what are our options?” I mused. “We can’t outrun them, even if we manage to get loose. Their acceleration capability is just off the charts. A slow retreat didn’t work. What does that leave us?”
“Should we scan them? Do you think they’ll take that badly?”
“Hmm.” I thought about that for a few mils. “Look, this doesn’t appear military. More like border guards. If they were inclined to just blow up interlopers, I think we’d already be an expanding cloud of debris. So it’s more likely that we didn’t give the secret handshake and are being treated like possible illegal immigrants or smugglers.”
“Okay so far. And?”
“So behavior consistent with that will be tolerated without killing us.” With that, and without further discussion, I did a SUDDAR sweep. And waited for the end.
Nothing.
“We’re still here,” I said. “I’m gonna take that as a good sign.”
“On the other hand, they haven’t reacted at all. That feeds into the AMI theory. What do you suppose they’re doing?”
“Waiting for orders?” I hesitated before continuing. “Given that everyone is gone, we could be waiting a while.”
“Yeah, AMIs aren’t the brightest stars in the sky, but they are long on patience.”
“So what now?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.”
Sitting here wasn’t going to get us anywhere. I decided I might as well try sothing. I released an exploratory drone, deliberately doing everything at low speed. I didn’t want to spook our hosts.
The mont it tried to move away, it was hit with the sa tractor beam. Now there were three of us stuck like flies in a web. The drone AMI continued to try to fly in the direction I’d specified, making absolutely zero progress. I ordered it to stand down.
“Well, that sucked,” I said. “We may be here a while.”
“We still have telescopes. Let’s do a survey.”
*****
A telescope-based survey was nowhere near as good as flying around looking at things, but early Bobs had done just exactly this, before SUDDAR got good enough to cover a significant portion of a system at a go. The first thing we noticed, sothing that we’d been too preoccupied to see up until now, was that this system was, well, not a system at all. It appeared to be a patch of empty space, except for an asteroid/space station and two wormholes.
“No sun. No planets. No satellites that I can find.” I paused. “No asteroids, other than the one.”
“Just two wormholes—the one we entered through and another one at, mmm, about a hundred klicks distance,” Dae said. “Remind you of sothing?”
“Yep. A firewall. This is the DMZ,” I replied. “Which makes my earlier comnt about border guards all the more apt. I wonder why the security?”
“There doesn’t have to be a reason, Icky. Just an abundance of caution.”
“Yeah, no. We’ve been breezing through gates up until now. Suddenly we have border security? I bet none of the other jumps from Hub Zero have firewalls.”
“But why just here? We literally went through every wormhole gate at every other hub without seeing this.”
“Center of the empire? They’re protecting their Trantor?”
“Yeah, okay. Wait, no.” Dae’s voice took on an edge. “If this hub is all one single civilization, they’d only have one gate at the hub, and all the local gates would be on the other side of the firewall. No, they’re protecting this specific destination. And they might be protecting other destinations as well that we haven’t found yet. Maybe we just lucked out.”
“Yeah, luck. That’s the word I’d use.”
We sat in silence for several mils, each separately considering our fate and our options. The SUDDAR sweep had shown a bunch of docked sentry ships in the space station, so hitting our captors with a couple of surprise busters wasn’t going to resolve the problem. Or it would, but not in a way that we’d like.
But there was sothing else …
“Look at this.” I pointed to a spot in the holotank, which currently showed the area imdiately around the station. There was a sentry ship hovering near sothing else.
“Another prisoner?” Dae muttered. He pulled up the SUDDAR sweep we’d done and checked the data. “Definitely not the sa construction as the sentries. In fact, closer to us in general design.” He zood in on the scan image. “Oh, hell.”
“What?”
“It’s dead. Looks like fusion-reactor powered. If it was held there long enough, it would have eventually run out of fuel for the reactor. Powered down and inert. How long do you suppose that took?”
“Uh … ” I checked the archives. “Generally speaking, back when we used fusion, we could have kept the lights on for five to ten years on reserves if we were just sitting there.” I leaned forward to examine the image closely. “No indication of living space. So a totally automated ship. Maybe soone’s version of a Von Neumann probe.”
“So I guess that answers the question of what’s going to happen to us.”
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