There was no light. We saw the thin curves of each other’s bodies by radar limned through the curving struts of the tiny hab’s support structure.
“Not dreams.” I replied.
“Then?”
“Images. Impressions.”
“But not dreams?”
“No.”
“Shit.”
The system was dark; almost as dark as space itself.
Its three planets revolved around the barely radiating husk of a brown dwarf: a thing so feeble by stellar standards that it barely even qualified as a star. Its feebleness was also the source of its incredible longevity; its fissionable material was depleted so slowly that there was no entirely reliable way of telling how old it might be. Left unmolested, such a star might continue to burn quietly away for hundreds of billions of years, while the giants of the main sequence ballooned and died around it like Roman candles. Even now, only the faintest of infrared signals gave away anything of its existence to the wider universe.
All of which made it a fairly appealing hiding place.
“What will we call it?”
“What do I care? Let the computer decide.” said Melano.
My fingertips interrupted the ultrasonic control surface woven before them. The computer rifled its existing lexical databases, cross-referenced them with its knowledge of its current user’s cultural and aesthetic preferences, and spewed out a list of half a dozen possible nomenclature tables.
I skimmed through the list with a lazy eye and settled on option four. I tapped my approval.
“Done. As of now, the dwarf star is Gillespie; the outermost planet—the sub-Neptune giant—is Coltrane; the second, Saturn-size giant is Parker and the innermost carbon planet is called Hancock.” I pronounced, with some satisfaction. “Would you like to hear the names of the moons?”
“I’ll pass, thanks.”
It had taken the seed swarm (‘ship’ would have been a somewhat generous term for the dispersed cloud of ion-accelerated nanoware that had ferried its two quantum-compressed passengers through the night) more than twelve hundred years to reach its destination. Subjective. Accounting for time dilation made it over twice that length.
Given the difficulties of decelerating against Gillespie’s practically non-existent solar wind, the swarm had shed the last of its relativistic momentum through a silent gravity braking manoeuvre around Coltrane before crawling back out to the system’s Kuiper belt to begin its final search. It had identified an inconspicuous moonlet from the thousands of likely objects clustered in the gravitational resonance zones beyond the outer planets—a ball of mainly volatile ices barely a dozen kilometres in diameter. The elemental composition of the ball was surprisingly close to that of the average humanoid body.
“Take a look at this, will you.” Melano beckoned me toward the ultrasonic loom where she floated, prodding away at something I couldn’t sense.
“What?”
“I don’t know. There’s something sketchy about the nav log.”
I entered the synaesthetic display and let it wash over my senses. I quickly saw what she meant.
She was viewing an annotated holographic of the nav log. There, clear as day, was our trajectory from the Aurelia system—the vastness of interstellar space truncated by a mint-flavoured logarithm into something approaching comprehensibility. The line became a crinkled velvet as the swarm shed velocity with the last of its ion thrust, aligning itself for its braking manoeuvre around Coltrane. It deepened and roughened further as it entered the gas planet’s gravity well, and then —
“Then what?”
“Exactly. Where’s the fucking data between Coltrane and here? I can’t get any sense out of it. All it’s giving me is probabilities, and even then the margins of error are nuts. The thing can’t even tell me how long we’ve been out for.”
“Strange.” I said. It was. We both knew we were taking a risk when we set out on this journey: failure rate for a jump of that magnitude was around eighteen percent, never mind whatever might lie in wait for us when we arrived. But the nanoware was tough stuff—its distributed processing and storage capacity meant that data loss of the sort we were seeing should have been almost impossible. You tended to either make it in one piece, or not at all.
I regarded the feathery mass of probability lines reaching out from Coltrane. A chill of apprehension washed over me. If the nav data could have been corrupted …
“Well, we’re here now.” I offered. “Aren’t we?”
“So it would appear.”
We slept while the hab/ship kicked off from the icy fragment that had birthed it and began its long fall into Gillespie’s gravity well. Melano had wanted to stay longer, see if she could patch together anything further about the nav log anomaly, but in the end we both decided to cut our losses. With no idea how long we’d been out for, every second counted. We’d come too far to give our quarry any quarter now.
Our incarnations were stilled and cooled to within an atom’s breadth of the ambient chill of space. There were a hundred things that could go wrong during the passage, but the ship was more than qualified to take care of itself—the moment a machine started asking for human guidance, you knew you were really screwed. So we surrendered our minds to the care of the machine that had so recently rekindled them out of the vacuum and slept: not the annihilating sleep of coldtime, and neither yet the sweet sleep of the flesh, but something deeper and more turbulent in turn.
Into sleep, came dreams.
“Come on, you bastards!”
Sweat glistened on Tjssin’s broad brow, dripping down his Romanesque nose toward a huge, white grin. He licked his lips.
I swatted the ball hard toward his smug face. He ducked and let it slam off the back wall, his silvered sweatsuit flashing in the sun. Melano swore he only wore it to dazzle his new opponents. After an hour of this I was inclined to believe her.
Tjssin hit.
The ball zipped past my ear and rattled into the midfield score box, sounding the end game bell.
“Good game.” called Phjolca, tousling her zebra-striped hair as she approached. We shook hands in the middle of the court.
“Keep working on that right.” Tjssin grinned, wringing my hand like a wet towel.
“I just didn’t want to wear myself out before tonight, you know.”
