He spoke on behalf of the board, as one of the co-founders. I landed a plum job: oxidation suppression consultant for the dihydrogen monoxide mass fraction. That’s a fancy way of saying I got to spend decades of slowtime scraping crud from the bottom of the tankage in Module
Alba,
right up behind the wake shield and micrometeoroid defenses. You, my dear, were even luckier: someone had to go out and walk around on the hull, maintaining the mad dendritic tangle of coolant pipes running between the ship’s reactors and the radiator panels, replacing components that had succumbed to secondary activation by cosmic radiation.
It’s all about the radiation, really. Life aboard a deep space craft is a permanent battle against the effects of radiation. At one percent of lightspeed, a cold helium atom in the interstellar medium slams into our wake shield with the energy of an alpha particle. But there’s much worse. Cosmic rays—atomic nuclei traveling at relativistic speed—sleet through the hull every second, unleashing a storm of randomly directed energy. They’d have killed our squishy wet forerunners dead, disrupting their DNA replicators in a matter of months or years. We’re made of tougher stuff, but even so: prolonged exposure to cosmic rays causes secondary activation. And therein lies our predicament.
The nice stable atoms of your hull absorb all this crap and some of those nuclei are destabilized, bouncing up and down the periodic table and in and out of islands of stability. Nice stable Argon-38 splits into annoyingly radioactive Aluminum-26. Or worse, it turns into Carbon-14, which is unstable and eventually farts out an electron, turning into Nitrogen-14 in the process. Bonds break, graphene sheets warp, molecular circuitry shorts out. That’s us: the mechanocytes our brains are assembled from use carbon-based nanoprocessors.
We’re tougher than our pink goo predecessors, but the decades or centuries of flight take their toll. Our ships carry lots of shielding—and lots of carefully purified stable isotopes to keep the feedstock for our mechanocyte assemblers as clean as possible—because nothing wrecks brains like the white-noise onslaught of a high radiation environment.
Year of Our Voyage 416.
We’re all in slowtime, conserving energy and sanity as the stars crawl by at the pace of continental drift. We’re running so slowly that there are only five work-shifts to each year. I’m in the middle of my second shift, adrift in the bottom of a molten water tank, slowly grappling with a polishing tool. It’s hard, cumbersome work; I’m bundled up in a wetsuit to keep my slow secretions from contaminating the contents of the tank, cabled tightly down against the bottom of the tank as I run the polisher over the gray metal surface of the tank. The polisher doesn’t take much supervision, but the water bubbles and buffets around me like a warm breeze, and if its power cable gets tangled around a baffle fin it can stop working in an instant.
I’m not paying much attention to the job; in fact, I’m focused on one of the chat grapevines. Lorus Pinknoise, who splits his time between managing the ship’s selenium micronutrient cycle and staring at the stars ahead with telescope eyes, does a regular annual monologue about what’s going on in the universe outside the ship, and his casual wit takes my mind off what I’m doing while I scrub out the tanks.
“Well, folks. This century sees us crawling ever-closer to our destination, the Wolf 1061 binary star system—which means, ever further from civilized space. Wolf 1061 is a low energy system, the two orange dwarf stars orbiting their common center of mass at a distance of a couple of million kilometers. They’re not flare stars, and while normally this is a good thing, it makes it distinctly difficult to make observations of the atmosphere and surface features of 1061 Able through Mike by reflected light; the primaries are so dim that even though our long baseline interferometer can resolve hundred-kilometer features on the inner planets back in Sol system, we can barely make out the continents on Echo One and Echo Two. Now, those continents are interesting things, even though we’re not going to visit down the gravity well any time soon. We know they’re there, thanks to the fast flyby report, but we won’t be able to start an actual survey with our own eyes until well into the deceleration stage, when I’ll be unpacking the—”
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.”
I looked at you. You looked so still and calm, still frost-rimed with condensed water vapor from when the rescue team pulled you in through the pressure lock. You’d been in shutdown, drifting tethered to a hardpoint on the hull, for over three hours. Your skin is yellowing, the bruised bloom of self-destructing chromatophores shedding their dye payloads into your peripheral circulation. One of our human progenitors (like the pale-skinned, red-haired female you resemble) would be irreversibly dead at this point: but we are made of sterner stuff. I refused to feel despair. “How bad is it?” I asked.
“It could be worse.” Wo shrugged, a ripplingly elegant wave of contraction curling out along all their limbs. “I’m mostly worried about her neural chassis. Did she leave a soul chip inside when she was out on the hull?”
I shook my head. Leaving a backup chip is a common ritual for those who work in high-risk environments, but you spent so long outside that you’d run the risk of diverging from the map of your memories. “She was wearing a chip in each of her sockets. You could try checking for them. Can you do a reload from chip . . . ?”
“Only if I could be absolutely certain it wasn’t corrupted. Otherwise I’d risk scrambling the contents of her head even worse. No, Lilith, leave your sister to me. We’ll do this the slow way, start with a full marrow replacement then progressively rebuild her brain while she’s flatlined. She should be ready to wake up after a month of maintenance downtime. Then we can see if there’s any lasting damage.”
I saw the records, sister. You were on the outside of the hull, on the wrong side of the ship. You were exposed to almost thirty thousand Grays of radiation. The skin on your left flank, toughened to survive vacuum and cosmic radiation, was
roasted.
“She should be all right for a while. I’ll get around to her once I’ve checked on everyone else . . . ”
“What do you mean?” I demanded. “Who else was outside the hull? Isn’t she the most urgent case?”
The doctor’s dismay was visible. “I’m afraid not. You underestimate how many people have sustained radiation damage. You were inside a reaction mass tank, were you not? You may be the least affected person on the entire ship. Everyone’s been coming in with teché damage and odd brain lesions; memory loss, cognitive degradation, all sorts of stuff. Our progenitors didn’t design us to take this kind of damage. I’m still working on a triage list. You’re at the bottom of it; you’re still basically functional. Your sister isn’t in immediate danger of getting any worse, so—”